The Liars' Club: A Memoir (30 page)

I thought back to the morning he’d unzipped me from his duffel bag, how I later ran after the truck that carried him off. I was dead certain that I’d die without Daddy around. But I hadn’t died, of course. Oh, I hadn’t started calling Hector “Daddy” like he’d asked me to. (“That’ll be a cold day in hell,” I’d said.) But neither had I written Daddy a letter every day, like I’d promised. I’d fired off five or six letters the first few weeks. But all I got back was a postcard of the Spindletop oil gusher. Daddy had scratched out some lame joke about how rich he was getting by being “in oil.” He’d put “Ha Ha!” after it, which seemed pitiful to me. And he’d closed off with “Love from your best Daddy.” That made my eyes tear up, the best Daddy part, like a whole slew of others were lined up to daddy in my direction.

Plus another thing niggled at me: I wasn’t entirely sure Daddy knew about Hector. It had gotten harder to write stuff without mentioning him. Maybe we were supposed to fake in letters that Mother was moping around lonesome like one of those countrysong divorcées. I had the good sense, of course, not to write about
old bowlegged Ray rubbing on Mother’s nude back. But between not mentioning Hector and not knowing whether to sound cheerful or like I was suffering without Daddy, writing him got harder. I spent a lot of time staring around the Christian Science Reading Room. Or I’d try to chew my tooth pattern into the yellow paint of my pencil so the marks lay exactly even all the way down. Sometimes a whole morning slid out from under me in that musty room with not a “t” crossed nor an “i” dotted on my Big Chief tablet.

That Father’s Day Lecia and I crossed from the stable to the pay phone booth at the Esso, which was hot as blue blazes from taking in early sun. Unfolding the glass door let loose a blast of hot air like an oven. The silver floor was crusty, littered with wasps and moths that must have just dropped mid-flight from heat and lack of oxygen. I stood in the doorway so as not to smush them on my shoe bottoms. But Lecia just crunched right over them to the coin slot and dropped in her dime. The black receiver got held an inch or so off her cheek, to keep from scalding her, I guess. She told the operator to dial a collect call to Woodlawn 2-2800. After it rang about a zillion times with no answer, the operator broke the connection. On her next try, the switchboard lady at the Gulf wouldn’t accept charges or put her through to Daddy’s unit. Lecia said in her most quavery voice that it was a medical emergency, then she called the woman a nasty-assed bitch and slammed the phone down so hard it bounced right out of its little silver catch and spun from the cable, whapping the phonebooth glass.

Lecia busted into tears after that. She buckled up like something broke inside her, sliding to the bottom of the phone booth without even checking the coin return for change.

We wound up making two Father’s Day cards from blue construction paper. We put “Dad” in cursive on front of both using sky-blue glitter and Elmer’s glue. I went with a flag motif on mine, adding red stripes in crayon. The silver stars I drew went a dull, gunmetal gray instead of looking sparkly like the Crayola
itself did. Staring at the end product rankled me. No matter how swell some drawing looked in your head, it always got cobbled up into a ratty kid-thing by the time you were through.

Mother set both cards on the mantel to dry. Lecia’s at least was clean. Mine had glue scabs all over. Plus she was hell on coloring inside the lines, which I was a long way from at that time. Still, old Hector swayed in front of both like they were the Holy Fucking Grail. He had this bleary, dog-faced look that I now realize was as much myopia as drunkenness. He slurred out a sentence about how he hoped someday we’d make him something for Father’s Day, to which Lecia said, “Don’t hold your breath.” That made me feel sorry enough to hug him before bed. My arms squeezed quick around his middle, which was wishy inside the slippery nylon of his shirt.

The next morning Mother dragged out of bed first thing to hit the post office for stamps enough to mail Daddy our cards. Motoring around before her blood alcohol level got adjusted was no small act of will. She’d brought a Bloody Mary in a tumbler with a lid on it like a baby would sip out of. She sat heavy behind the wheel in front of the P.O., rifling through her brown Coach bag for her wallet. Her hands shook. She finally plopped the whole thing in Lecia’s lap, saying just take it.

Left alone in the car with Mother, I saw for the first time how drinking had worn away at her looks. She’d bleached her hair platinum for some ungodly reason. She also wore dark sunglasses in daylight. Something about the vast difference between those colors—the hair like scalded grass and the shiny black of the glasses—yellowed her complexion. She had also draped a white chiffon scarf around her head and neck like some bandage too loose and sheer to do any good. Her big square hands trembled even when she did something definite with them, like dumping the ashtray out the window. I was silently scrambling for something to say. But no sooner did a possible sentence scuttle through my head than I could picture the tired scorn Mother would meet it with. She liked to say her bullshit meter went off pretty easy in those days. I only knew I bored her. I watched her sprinkling
salt in the sippy hole of that tumbler using a Morton’s picnic shaker she kept in the car. I finally told her maybe she needed a whole block of salt like what we put out in the horse pasture. She pinched her mouth into a stiff little asterisk at that.

Mother’s bleach job put me in mind of an obituary picture I’d seen of Jayne Mansfield, who apparently got her head cut slap off in a car wreck. I was prone to grisly images at that time so it was no strain at all to picture Jayne Mansfield’s head—still wearing cat’s-eye sunglasses with rhinestones all around the edges—all lopped off at the neck and sailing up across the blue air like a fly ball. The image vaporized when Lecia shoved out the glass door into the sunlight. That big Coach bag over her shoulder bumped at her like a soldier’s duffel.

For a week or so after mailing off the Father’s Day cards, Lecia and I stopped at the P.O. morning and evening looking for a letter back. She drew the mailbox key from the string around her neck to open the tiny brass door, whose actual number is nothing but a smudge in my memory. Daddy wasn’t much of a correspondent. It always sat empty as a little coffin.

In all fairness to him, divorced men back then just surrendered their kids to the moms and forgot about it. Like a bad litter of puppies you’d tie in a potato sack and fling from your speeding Ford off the Orange Bridge, kids just got let loose. I wouldn’t have thought such a vanishing possible, not where Daddy was concerned. We’d shot too much pool together. We’d caught too many fish and eaten too many good gumbos. He always spouted stoical-sounding promises about his loyalty. At the first hint of lonesomeness for him, those promises could start zooming through my head like bad reverb: “I’m not a rich man, darling. But I can still walk. And when I walk, I walk heavy. And I swear to God, anybody messes with you, I’ll walk just as far and just as heavy as I ever did for the U.S. Army. I guarangoddamntee you that.”

Sometime that summer, Lecia lost the mailbox key riding. Then it just seemed too much trouble for us to stand in line at the counter and ask for the mail twice a day.

My final campaign to woo Daddy back that summer relied on the Green Stamps we’d never bothered to save before. Stores used to dole out these stamps according to the amount of money you’d just spent. Say you got twenty stamps for every dollar you paid for groceries, something like that. You then pasted the stamps in trading books, and took those books to a Green Stamp center to swap them for “free” stuff.

The stamp product catalogue was thin, like the circular a hardware store might send out for its President’s Day sale. But it lacked order. Kid stuff got scattered in with flashlights; housewares, with fire extinguishers. For ten books of stamps you could get an off-brand of the Chatty Cathy Doll, one that would stop talking after a week of tugging on its string and just gibber a kind of high-pitched monkey language. A hundred books might get you camping gear or a croquet game that fit on a little wheely wooden cart. Thousands of books would buy something as big as a clothes dryer, or a La-Z-Boy recliner. Back in the Leechfield grocery, the lady shoppers had fallen like vultures on the long ribbons of stamps Mother held up at the end of the checkourt lane. “Anybody want these?” she’d holler, waving them in the ai. The carts would converge four deep where she stood, all those ladies. grabbing across their chicken parts and lettuces and fat babies in the riding seat with their stubby legs jammed through the square metal holes like so many rolled roasts. Mother didn’t believe in Green Stamps or coupons. They were a trick to keep women hunched over their kitchen tables after their kids were asleep, not unlike darning and embroidery—things Mother excelled at but refused to do. Nor would she drive a block out of her way to get gas for two cents cheaper. Mother had transcended thrift, even before she got Grandma’s money.

Still, when I started stuffing those stamps in the tin metal coffee canister with a rooster painted on it, Mother didn’t utter a word to mock it, which must have taken some big-league restraint. I spent my evenings at the kitchen table licking stamps and then smoothing the sticky sheets into savings books. When my spit ran out, I took up the sour-smelling blue sponge from
the sink. On the pages of those books lay neat grids spelled out in menthol-green lines. I worked sloppy most of the time, but it pleased me no end when I did manage to line up a strip of stamps exactly within those borders. Lecia asked me on a nightly basis if I’d gone slap-dab crazy. But there wasn’t much venom in her voice.

Days, I hung out at the grocery store in town, just inside the magic doors. People sometimes pulled their stamps out of the paper sacks to hand over to me before shoving their carts onto the black rubber runner that ticked open those doors with a hum.

Garbage day was my best haul. People tended to stuff grocery sacks in those armored-looking metal cans. Often as not, the brown sacks came in a neatly folded pile on top of all the yucky stuff. Only a few times did I have to dig past coffee grounds and melon rinds to get at them. And in those sack bottoms, you could sometimes find Green Stamps by the yard that somebody’s husband or teenager forgot to draw out. The few doctors and business people from Colorado Springs who kept weekend places up there didn’t mess with stamps at all. I hit their small, neat garbage cans first.

At the end of all this foraging and licking and counting, I had dozens of full stamp books stacked in a vodka box. Lecia had to help me scoot it over the pine needles and gravel in the driveway to the car. Mother then heaved it in the trunk. She drove me clear to Colorado Springs, to what the Green Stamp marketing wizards had named the Redemption Center.

The Indian woman behind the counter wore a polished turquoise stone on a fine silver chain inside the deep shadow of her serious cleavage. That cleavage stays with me because I stood eye-level with it a long time. Finding something I’d X’ed in the catalogue actually on the shelves turned out to be a problem. There was no new rod and reel looking just like a Zippo. There were no gold cufflinks shaped like horseshoes with diamond chips for nailheads. The lady offered to send to Ohio, which would take six to eight weeks. But my daddy didn’t raise me a fool. Just as I knew not to buy on credit, I damn sure knew not to pay for
something I couldn’t lay my hands on, not unless it was from Sears.

The lady was nice about looking through her inventory book, though. We spent the better part of her shift at it. I’d read off the product number from my dog-eared catalogue, and she’d check for it in her three-ring binder. The notebook was tethered to the counter with twisted cable, and had a dusty blue cloth cover like the ones high school kids carried. As time wore on, the inventory book came to hold all the power of a sorcerer’s spell book. It had Daddy’s gift somewhere inside it, and locating that gift on its onionskin pages was the last leg of a long journey that had started back when I’d chased after Daddy down the mountain. Whenever the lady stopped flipping past the staggered dividers and started running her fingernail down a single page, I’d cross the fingers on both hands for luck.

All this time Mother stood chain-smoking back by the glass door. I could hear her stamp out each cigarette butt. The toe on her high heel wiggled and made a raspy noise against the concrete floor. No sooner had one been stamped out than another got lit. I’d hear that lighter flip open, then the rough click of the flint sending out a spark. A few seconds later a double lungful of Salem exhaust would drift up to us. She also sighed out heavy smoke every time the clerk shook her head no.

Not a single thing I’d picked was in stock. That shocked me. I’d lain in bed night after night picturing Daddy stepping down from his truck after the long drive to Colorado, how he’d scoop me up in his arms while Lecia stood tapping her foot. Behind him on the truck seat would sit the box in which the new fishing reel (or tie tack, or ebony domino set) had been shipped. Luring Daddy back had—in my mind—edged over the line from being a wish into being a fact. I even fooled myself that
not
having everything in stock augured well. Fate itself would pick Daddy’s present, rather than running the risk that I’d get something half-assed.

Mother headed up the aisle toward us. I heard the measured click of her heels, which told me she had the red-ass over this
whole undertaking. She announced to the counter lady that the catalogue didn’t say word one about them not shipping stuff till Kennedy was out of office. She said her baby (meaning me) had worked like a field hand getting all those stamps stuck in books. I tugged the elbow of her beige cashmere jacket to slow her down, but she jerked away. It was a rant I’d heard—the Goddamn Lying, Republican Bastards who’d ever thought up the miserable, niggardly business of stamp-licking. The lady misheard the “niggardly” part and herself got steamed, saying she wasn’t colored, she was an Indian, to which Mother replied, “I don’t give a great steaming pile of dogshit what you are—”