Lit_ A Memoir Part 4

Alongside her squeezed other women, whose heads seemed small as dolls'. Under narrow shoulders, their bodies went mountainously soft. And they were mushroom-pale, as if they'd been grown underground. It's a shocking thing to face all at once so many kecked-up, genetically disadvantaged humans. In a country that values power and ease and symmetry, velocity and cunning, kinks in their genetic code had robbed them of currency.

Somebody touched my foot. Looking down, I found a sandy-haired woman tugging on my boot buckle. Katie Butke, she introduced herself as. Katie was solid as a fireplug and clean as a boiled peanut, affable but unimpressed by the likes of me. Looking at her, I felt smart all of a sudden, also lucky. You could talk these women out of their bus tokens. Still, glad I'd dodged the bullet they'd caught almost implicated me in their handicap. (At the time I saw only their difficulties. Now I also marvel that they could with verve hug an individual they'd just gotten off the bus with, and that total strangers shampooed Katie's red hair and rubbed lotion on her freckled arms.) I started off with Pablo Neruda and a thinly disguised Neruda imitator. Good poem vs. cliche. The staff people had warned me the ladies could get distracted and bored, but the Neruda snapped them to attention. Walking Around Walking Around begins, begins, It so happens I am sick of being a man...I am sick of my hair and my eyes and my teeth and my shadows It so happens I am sick of being a man...I am sick of my hair and my eyes and my teeth and my shadows...At one point he says, Still it would be marvelousto terrify a law clerk with a cut lily,or kill a nun with a blow on the ear.

Kill a nun! Katie Butke called out-whether in outrage or enthusiasm, I couldn't tell. The poem ends with wash on the line Katie Butke called out-whether in outrage or enthusiasm, I couldn't tell. The poem ends with wash on the line from which slow dirty tears are falling from which slow dirty tears are falling.

Once I stopped, there was a collective sigh, like the pneumatic sound of an engine giving up. A big silence held us. Then applause broke out. Feet were stomped. A few ladies got up to hug each other again. If there'd been pillows, they'd have all started whacking each other.

What did the guy feel who wrote it? I asked. Every hand shot up, but Katie Butke slapped the side of my boot. I pointed to her.

Happy? she said. A few ladies agreed. But a forest of white hands kept flapping.

The recalcitrant Marion Pinski crossed her short white arms across her front, but I called on her anyway.

The s.h.i.+rts, she said in a murmur. The s.h.i.+rts are crying. Sad. The s.h.i.+rts are dirty. The s.h.i.+rts didn't get washed right. The s.h.i.+rts are crying. The man doesn't want Monday.

We broke into small groups, and as I copied down their words, they marveled at my pen's pa.s.sage across the lines. That's me? a lady named Dawn asked, touching the letters. That's my name?

I kept a copy of the poem Katie Butke wrote that day. It's called Monkey Face Monkey Face. Every poem Katie wrote was called Monkey Face Monkey Face-a phrase no doubt imprinted on her in ways I hate to think about.

Far away St. PaulPeople like robotsWash their tablesScrub the floorBored thingsWashrags on the windowPut it away nowLook at your legTie your shoe. LookAt yourself. A monkey.

One line of Marion Pinski's still p.r.i.c.ks me with fresh envy: I get to dance with the deep boys and the day boys I get to dance with the deep boys and the day boys. (A Buddhist friend would later tell me that Marion was a bodhisattva sent to show me how comical my artistic pretentions were.) When I gave a local poetry reading-in addition to the Minks and a few local writers-the women came on a bus, and Katie Butke leaped up, shouting with a gospel singer's conviction, You a monkey face You a monkey face. (To date, my truest review.) They clapped wildly after every poem. Katie Butke even stood up a few times, taking an operatic from-the-hip bow.

The unchecked emotion they embodied was exactly what Etheridge was trying to drag out of me for my poser's pages. It drove him crazy how I'd stick in fancy names and references I thought sounded clever.

Etheridge used a pen to poke the fedora back on his head. Looking at me with bloodshot eyes, he asked with frank curiosity, Now, why is a little girl from b.u.mf.u.c.k, Texas, dragging Friedrich Nietzsche-kicking and screaming-into this poem? Like you're gonna preach. You ain't no preacher, Mary Karr. You're a singer.

When I bristled that I'd been a philosophy major in college, he said, And that's all you're telling anybody. What you took in college. You're pointing right back at your own head, telling everybody how smart it is. Write what you know.

But according to you, I don't know squat.

Your heart, Mary Karr, he'd say. His pen touched my sternum, and it felt for all the world like the point of a dull spear as he said, Your heart knows what your head don't. Or won't.

He wanted me to picture a woman climbing five flights in a Harlem apartment building in summer heat, then having to go back down with armloads of garbage. He said, If you're standing on the corner of 116th Street poeticizing, what could you possibly say to help her climb back up?

This prospect of actual readers flattered me less than it scared me. He kept pus.h.i.+ng me to go back to school. Also, long before seeing shrinks helped me to reconcile my warring insides, Etheridge fought to import Daddy onto my page. In one poem, he picked out some feeble old guy whose hands shook as he tried to bait a hook and said, Your old man's knocking on your door, and you won't let him in.

Etheridge spoke to the pool-shooting, catfish-gutting, crawfish-sucking homegirl I was trying to squelch.

Such an unlikely savior. Etheridge sometimes banged on my apartment door at three a.m., trying to mooch money for dope. Mary once caught him in the bathroom-with his kids in the next room-a hypodermic in his jugular.

He talked to me about this new kind of graduate writers' program in Vermont-low-residency, they called it. You show up a few weeks at a pop, twice per year, for lectures, readings, workshops, intense tutoring. A poet tailors a curriculum with you, and for six months you mail ma.n.u.scripts and papers he or she works over. What did I think? It was either bogus, or I'd never get in.

Meanwhile, I cobbled up an experiment with the ladies to see whether the poems I brought had sunk in at all, for the scene was part spelling bee, part revival meeting. Each week, I'd pit two poems against each other, a great poem and a crummy one. With an accuracy that rocked me back, they'd boo the c.r.a.p stuff, then hallelujah the Yeats. Walt talked me into keeping a running tally to see how consistent they were, which I did on an index card taped to my closet door. Over two years, some 80 percent of their choices were as good as most book critics'. Even hard pieces by Stevens and Apollinaire, they'd go crazy for. The sole exceptions? If both poems were average or okay, or if one poem was plain speech and one ornate-in those cases, no predicting what they'd go for.

At the symphony one night when s.h.i.+rley couldn't go, Walt pressed on flaws in my method, asking, Any way you're swaying them?

You mean I'm unintentionally signaling them somehow? I said. Maybe intoning the gorgeous ones in some hyper-approving way?

The violins were tuning up, the different bows trying to find the same note. It was that instant before a concert when I always wanted to bolt, because what if I didn't like Beethoven, which I'd never heard? Maybe I should beg off and say I'm feeling sick. At home, I could make a hoagie and turn on the tube, rather than stay captive in an overheated hall in a seat that made your legs sweaty with a stranger on one side hogging your armrest.

Walt's face had that expectant air, though, he maybe knew the music was so magnificent that even a plebe like me could hear it. He said, Let's say the women do have some innate taste, despite lacking any a.n.a.lytical tools they could articulate. What's that mean, you think?

I can't remember how I said it-and we both knew I cared too much about the outcome for my little test to pa.s.s as science. I told him I wanted to believe in quality the way I had as a kid, when a great poem could flood me with certainty that there was something good in the world. Or somebody out there knew who I was even if we'd never met-or never would meet. Which made poetry one of the sole spiritual acts in our mostly G.o.dless household. Just because the ladies never went to school didn't mean they couldn't tell the difference between Beethoven and The Hokey-Pokey The Hokey-Pokey. Awe was okay with them, possibly their natural state. No really c.r.a.p teachers had ruined their native taste by preaching what they were supposed to like.

Such a small, pure object a poem could be, made of nothing but air, a tiny string of letters, maybe small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. But it could blow everybody's head off.

Which was what the symphony did that night for the first time, me sitting alongside Walt while the soft timpani mallets with the dandelion-puff heads banged loud enough for the dead, deaf composer to rouse from the distant German dirt.

Afterward, Walt and I didn't say much, just walked through the parking lot exhaling steam with the crowd, everybody's eyes glancing in opposing vectors, brus.h.i.+ng off each other but meeting, too, with that soft recognition you have after being drenched awhile by the same orderly chaos. We were like swimmers walking out of the sea. Every ten paces or so, headlights flipping on would turn shadow figures into full-fledged human units. Unlocking the car, Walt brought up my half-a.s.sed experiment again, saying, How're you sure you know which poem's best?

I slid inside, saying, I just do.

Which-ignorant though I knew I was-the ladies had proved to me in some way. And the next day, at Walt's urging, I sent away for that graduate application.

5.

Never Mind You wear a mask, and your face grows to fit it.-George Orwell, "Shooting an Elephant"

My first therapist's name was-I s.h.i.+t you not-Tom Sawyer. What are the odds. A grad student s.h.i.+rley Mink supervised, Tom must've been cudgeled into seeing me for the measly five bucks a pop I paid months late, if at all. With his runner's lanky form, he was usually clad in jeans and hiking boots. His fox-red beard was tamed into the same shape as Freud's-the color so at odds with his streaky blond pageboy that I wondered if it hooked over his ears.

Twice per week, when I deigned to show up-three times if I'd broken up with some beau or been drunked up enough days in a row to wonder was I finally going insane-I whined to Tom about who to date or whether to go back to school or why n.o.body published my (infantile, unintelligible) poems.

Let's go back to your mother, he said for the hundredth time.

Lord, don't be so Freudian. Soon I'll find you in a tweed vest and bow tie, those little wire rims.

Your complicated mother. Your absent father.

We've been over all that, I said. She's not like that anymore. I mean, she drinks and takes pills more than we'd like. There are the benders still.

Tell it again.

In language more glib and jokey than I'm capable of now, I crankily told Tom the story for the umpteenth time. How Mother doused our every toy with gas and tossed on a match. Much of the night's a blur but for her standing over us with a carving knife.

Tom said, You still have nightmares you've murdered her.

Usually, my daddy does that with a cleaver-wouldn't old Sigmund eat that up, so to speak. There's a Bill Knott poem, I've recently killed my father and will soon marry my mother. My problem is, should his side of the family be invited to the wedding... I've recently killed my father and will soon marry my mother. My problem is, should his side of the family be invited to the wedding...

You joke a lot, but you're carrying around some very powerful feelings.

Oh, I feel bad enough, awful even, just not about Mother and Daddy.

Let me ask you something. Whose fault was that night?

We've gone over this. I don't know. Probably mine, like I said. I was a pain in the a.s.s. My sister's to blame maybe a little, but she was older and way less trouble.

For a mother to be expected to show up sane and reliable is the least any kid deserves.

I heated up to defend her. And there, infuriatingly, the scene in the therapist's office and with my mother just cut out, went blank, like undeveloped pictures accidentally slid through an X-ray.

Which kept happening-therapis interruptus. Whenever Tom probed toward my folks at length, I suffered these dramatic erasures and snapped awake, zombielike, leaving the office for the bus stop, wet face stinging. What had I been blubbering about? Not a shred of the session stayed with me, the same person who found long stretches of movie dialogue or yards of doggerel running through her head.

Once when Walt met me for lunch, I asked if these nonalcoholic blackouts were definite proof I was crazy. Just tell me straight, I said, upending the sugar canister into my coffee. Don't hold back.

The brain sometimes has a hard time incorporating certain memories, he said.

I liked that he talked about it in physiological terms, to make it feel less like me, more like a car we were staring into the engine of.

So it's not me-just my brain?

Are you your brain?

Don't try to trick me into learning something, I said.

Your level of functioning contraindicates serious mental illness.

Only intermittently. I keep setting fire to my life.

Interesting image, he said, knowing my incendiary backstory. Maybe if your mother comes in with you for a session the way Tom's suggested, you'll get new data about her hospitalization.

He's theorized that she's manic-depressive.

Will she come if you call?

She'd go to a dogfight to get out of Leechfield.

Which was true enough-not that I prewarned her by phone that her florid psychosis was our upcoming topic. Actually, I dreaded her coming, since she might freak out and threaten to hurt herself, as she tended to when pressed toward her walled-off past. She'd been a big one to lock herself in the bathroom with a firearm.

But Mother never showed for the session, and-here's the kicker-neither did I. Our excuse? We forgot, both of us, two sessions plus a rescheduled third. Just slipped our minds, the event she'd expensively flown up for. Papa Freud would've said, There are no accidents.

After she'd gone back, I sat across from Tom Sawyer in a tub chair swiveling side to side, and he was-in a quiet, stiffly midwestern way-p.i.s.sed. Unless I'd commit to getting better, he wouldn't treat me, he said. I had to fly down to Texas and make her talk to me.

She's not gonna kill herself, he said, seeming impatient. You can call me if she starts making those noises. He scribbled out his home number on a card.

Standing, I slung my purse over my shoulder, then I spat out a curse I hadn't heard since seventh grade: You, Sparky, can take a flying f.u.c.k at a rolling doughnut. Then I stalked out.

Only looking back, after decades of shrinkdom, do I realize how radical to the point of bizarre his position was. He was either the genius s.h.i.+rley Mink thought him to be, or a little wobbly sending me down into the lion's den to confront Mother.

(In case you haven't read my early version of the pa.s.sel of lies my family was built on-yours for a pittance-the broad outline of it needs going over. If you have read it, skip over this part.) After a conciliatory session with Tom Sawyer-who was blase about the rolling-doughnut comment-I flew to Texas on cheap standby, in a cargo plane whose pilot wore a World War I flying cap with flaps like Snoopy wore.

At my folks' house, digging around in the attic, I routed out four wedding rings from a trunk. After days of my relentless nagging, plus a pitcher of margaritas, Mother owned up to having married a few times before Daddy, like maybe about four.

She doesn't date, she marries, her mother had said of her. Age eighteen-not even knocked up before she'd wed at seventeen-she'd given birth to my brother, Tex, followed a few years by his sister, Virginia. Mother's engineer husband could afford a nice place in New York, where she p.i.s.sed him off by taking cla.s.ses at the Art Students League. Her bohemian streak didn't suit him. His mother moved up to help with the kids, and one evening Mother came home to find the house cleared to its baseboards, the babies gone. It took her years to track them down in New Mexico, where they were happily in school and calling another woman Mommy. Single, broke, scared, Mother had-on the spot torn up the custody papers she'd brought along.

Then came her marrying spree, as she looked for a husband who'd help her get those kids back. By the time she got to Daddy-who was willing to take them in-they were grown, Tex training for a stint in Southeast Asia.

So my sister and I had reignited that preexisting loss. That was why Mother had gone nuts, not because I kept asking her to make grilled cheese or give me fifteen cents for the Weekly Reader Weekly Reader. An old spark had already been burning down the fuse toward her explosion.

After her breakdown, we'd bobbed on unsteadily till I was in grade school, when she inherited a bundle of cotton and banking money from her supposedly middle-cla.s.s mother, and she divorced Daddy, this time bringing Lecia and me to Colorado. She'd married a Mexican bartender, husband six, buying a bar to boot. Less than a year into that, having spent what may have been a million bucks, Mother had gone back to Daddy, who became the only husband to sign up twice-husband five and seven.

During a handful of stable years, she'd reenrolled in school and wound up teaching art in junior high. But her lost kids never stopped haunting her, she said. Her own mother-my now-dead grandmother-had blamed her.

Once the secret had poured out-the rough patches were gone over-Mother got to wondering about those children. So Lecia hired a Pinkerton detective to track down Tex and Virginia.

My half sister turned out to be a blowsy L.A. blonde with such a taste for pills that I'd bust her eating Daddy's back-pain meds straight from his bedside drawer. I bought her a bus ticket back to San Diego then, and I never saw her again, though she and Mother talked sometimes by phone.

But I took to my easygoing brother, Tex, right off. He was slim and wiry with hair dark as mine. Finding Mother explained to him the artist streak his engineer father had s.h.i.+pped him off to military school to get rid of. After the service, Tex had gone on a tear with drugs and alcohol, but he'd been in active recovery some decades. It tantalized me to think his sobriety might spill over onto Mother, especially when he decided to relocate his photography business to Texas.

Daddy greeted Tex like a lost army buddy, but he'd grown tired of the story long ago, so-after a few hours sitting around the living room catching up-Daddy drifted off to watch some game.

In movie versions of traumatic secrets, the family walks arm in arm into a field of poppies while the sun paints them gold, which scenario I had faith in. With Tex there, a lot of infection drained off pretty fast. Into the night, Mother sat in the rocking chair in her studio, poking at the wood fire, reviewing the tale for some s.h.i.+fting configuration of Lecia and Tex and me. With each version, a new detail emerged-the snow in her hair as she came into the cleared house; the photo of Tex in a sailor suit she'd h.o.a.rded; how thick the custody papers were as she tore them-her hands were sore for days.

For decades we'd watched her portraits start with fluid ocher streaks, marveling as each layer of paint drew from the violent slashes a particular shrimp boat, say, down to its last bolt. So for a week or so, with every retelling, Mother herself got more real. Before I left after ten days or so, she'd moved way closer to the front of her face.

Back in the Midwest, I bounced into Tom Sawyer's office like somebody who'd thrown down her crutches to start tap-dancing. He'd been so right. It wasn't my fault, Mother's madness. Cured, I declared myself.

Not long after, the low-residency grad school in Vermont I hadn't believed existed took me on probation, no doubt due to puffed-up references from Walt and Etheridge. I kept living in Minneapolis, teaching there. But twice per year I went to Vermont for a few weeks-poetry camp, I called it.

Age twenty-three, I walked into a decrepit mansion on a campus approaching bankruptcy. (The college would officially fold the year I graduated.) The chintz sofas were faded. The French-pleat drapes were missing a few hooks. The white wine came from a gallon jug and left the taste of pennies in your mouth.

To get there, I'd drawn from a grubstake I'd cobbled together trucking crawfish from Louisiana for my sister's newly acquired farmer husband-the Rice Baron, I called him.

Back then n.o.body had heard of the teachers whose red ink so bloodied the poems and essays I turned in. Bob still worked construction in the summer to feed his four kids. My thesis advisor, Louise, baked ornate pastries at home, then sold them in local shops or restaurants. Heather had one slender volume and was better known for her wicked pool moves. Frank played jazz piano in a Boston bar on weekends. Ray had almost won a big prize for the dog-eared paperback of stories I'd been hauling around, but he still crashed in a sleeping bag on my floor when he was in Minneapolis. Two brothers, Toby and Geoffrey, hadn't published their memoirs yet. A poet named Ellen Byant Voigt had gathered up this crew about five years before they started dragging Pulitzers and presidential awards and genius grants in their wake.

Easily the least prepared person to study with this august-if not yet anointed-company, I drank like a fish during residencies. Cla.s.ses ran all day. Parties went till dawn, and I got to hear storytellers of the first order practice their craft. Ray described how the bankruptcy lawyer he'd stiffed of a fee had taken him to small claims court to try to get custody of Ray's dog. The outraged judge had said, You're gonna take this man's dog? You're gonna take this man's dog?

Back in Minneapolis, the only way to shovel through the heaps of work was to stay sober, which meant living like a nun. Going nowhere booze was served, I slid as if on a greased track between apartment and library and whatever teaching I could sc.r.a.pe up. No more bartending-the temptation to drink would've kept me blotto-no more pogoing to punk bands. The one art opening I slipped into for a glance around turned into a three-day binge.

After a few years' work, I'd reached the final meeting with my thesis supervisor-the Resident Genius, I called her-in a chic French restaurant I'd saved up to take her to. She was an elegant woman with a ballerina's slim poise and the ability to run a demita.s.se spoon around a china cup without looking callow. I felt like a charwoman but tried to play it off as if we were equals, telling her all I needed was the right publisher. (How did I dare? I now think.) I swear, I said, it's like the magazines installed a machine at my post office that recognizes my address, yanks the poems out, then stuffs them in the return envelope.

Count yourself lucky, she said. You're still promising until your first book's out.

It was dawning on me how uphill a poet's path was, and I confessed to her that if I had to be the choice between being happy or being a poet, I'd choose to be happy.

Setting her spoon down, she said, Don't worry, she said, You don't have that choice Don't worry, she said, You don't have that choice-which either knighted or blighted me, I'll never know which.

PART II.