The Liars' Club: A Memoir (35 page)

Also, my parents’ drinking was bound up in my head with their screaming cuss-fights. Many were the nights in Leechfield when—with the two of them raging behind their bolted bedroom door—I sneaked into the kitchen and gathered up their bottles (whiskey for him, vodka or scotch for her, single malt when she could afford it). Dumping those bottles down the sink drain, I always craned my face away. Keep in mind that I was surrounded by poisonous stuff that didn’t bother me the least. From my front porch, you could see an iron refinery tower flaming black smoke into the air. With eyes closed in a moving car, I could tell by smell alone whether the stink was from the rubber company, or the open waste pits of the chemical plant, or the clean-earth odor of heated crude from the refinery. None of those made me pinch
my nose. But that brown liquor seemed dangerous, even a breathful.

My first sip from Mother’s bone-china cup changed all that. I’d heard her tell a hundred times how the monk who discovered champagne had likened it to drinking stars. Suddenly, that made sense. The wine and sparkly soda set my mouth tingling. I thought right off,
Drinking stars.
Whole galaxies could have been taking shape in there, for the taste was vast and particular at once. I’d taken too little a sip, though, and had to have another to see if the same small explosion happened. It did. I drank down some more. Besides its tasting good, the wine seemed to go down deep in me, not burning like it had before, but with a slow warmth. A few more sips set that warmth loose and rolling down my limbs. I actually felt a light in my arms and legs where the alcohol was spreading. Something like a big sunflower was opening at the very center of my being, which image I must have read in a poem somewhere, for it came to me whole that way.

When the cup was empty, I set it down in its saucer with a chimelike clink that told me the world had changed. I looked down at my bare feet dangling out of my nightgown. They seemed far off and pale as a marble statue’s, elegant almost. I looked up at Mother. The pin curls with her hair spronging out didn’t look goofy anymore, or scary like Medusa’s snakes. In fact, the close cap of pinned-down hair seemed elegant. The bones of her face suddenly held all their old beauty. Her forehead was smooth and high, her cheekbones winged out. Her green eyes and pale skin were actually glowing, held in a dim halo. This, it dawned on me, was what people drank liquor for, even though it could make them puke and slur their words, could bring a man to throw a punch at somebody bound to whip his ass, or cause an otherwise clear-thinking woman to drive fast into a concrete wall. Alcohol could actually make life better, if only by making your head better. I thought of all the fairy stories that talked about magic potions, of Shakespeare’s witches from
Macbeth
with their cauldron bubbling.

Later, I lay in bed a long time feeling woozy. If I closed my eyes, I felt the the mattress tip sideways like a raft at sea. Only staring steady at something could chase off those whirlies, or at least soften the incline that I felt myself sliding up and down in the waves I was dreaming under myself. I fixed on a small portrait on the far wall. It was Mother’s last painting, a guy she called “Mack the Knife.” She’d toted it all the way from Texas. That puzzled me, since it wasn’t even of somebody we knew, being a black-haired Frenchman with almond-shaped eyes. Actually, maybe he wasn’t French. But to me, he was the spitting image of the nauseated fellow on the Sartre book jacket, the one Mother had told me wanted to puke just from being alive. Mack the Knife wasn’t exactly handsome in the technical sense, being sallow-complected and puny. But it was a good painting. His eyes rested on me easy, and the light coming in sideways from the street gave him a sad, knowing look. Plus, he took the whirlies away, merely by being constant in the great roiling of that room.

When I said my prayers that night, which I did only after I was sure Mother was back in the parlor out of hearing range, I directed them as much to that sorry-looking fellow with his sallow cheeks and black turtleneck suspended in a sea of red and black swirls as to any father who might have been installed in heaven.
Dear Mack, please keep me from horking on these covers. And keep Mother from finding her car keys in the ivy pot. Amen.

Other nights were occupied with Mother and Hector fighting. The litany of his innate low-lifedness got seared into my skull during this time. Hector was a pussy, was her main gripe. Also, he lacked gainful employment, which meant Mother accused him of sponging off her all the time. But if, of a hung-over morning, he lamely started scanning the want ads for bartending jobs, she’d coo up next to him don’t bother, because if he was working they couldn’t make love in the afternoons.

Hector was also the planet’s sloppiest drunk. He staggered and slurred and forgot stuff. He fell down and threw up. One morning, I overheard her screaming that for Christ’s sake, he’d wet the bed again. Another time with Gordon and Joey standing in the
kitchen, she’d hollered that Hector couldn’t even “get it up right.” She rapped the wooden countertop with her knuckles. “Pete’s dick was always as hard as this. Always.” I didn’t know how to take this news, but watched Hector sink down under the weight of it, staring the whole time at the bottom of his lowball glass like it was a crystal ball.

For some reason, Mother was just springloaded on pissed-off, which made her want to harm herself. Once, for instance, when our car was winding home from a particularly nasty dinner in town, Mother just threw open the car door and pitched herself out on the road. Suddenly, the black night was rushing in across the place where Mother had been sitting a few seconds before in a sullen drunk’s quiet. The Impala’s dome light had flown on. The heavy door bumped and scraped against the snowbank piled on the road’s shoulder with a noise like breaking Styrofoam. After a few swerving yards, Hector finally pulled over and threw the car in park. We watched him stagger away from us along the icy road in his unbuttoned peacoat, disappearing in the dark beyond the red taillight. In a few minutes, he staggered back into view with Mother on his arm. She was wearing a white cashmere coat that night, and the flared bottom was splattered with mud.

She was okay, it turned out. She’d just hit a snowbank and rolled. In fact, they both piled in the car laughing like hell. But I noticed that a scary calm had fallen over Lecia’s features. It was a look I’d seen in
Life
snapshots of old soldiers heading back into battle, while the young ones still wore their fear openly, with sweetness. Then the starless night went back to sliding off the car windows again.

More nights scrolled past, and days so gray and grainy that not one stands unblurred from any other, till I get sick one day and the grown man who allegedly comes to care for me winds up putting his dick in my eight-year-old mouth. In fact, the whole blank winter sort of gathers around that incident like a storm cloud getting dense and heavy.

It’s early afternoon. I’ve stayed home from school, really sick with a fever. I’ve been sleeping, and now my forehead is sweaty
and cool. There’s a headache way back in it. Whoever’s supposed to be peeking in on me has left a bowl of Campbell’s chicken noodle soup, all peppery the way I like it, on a wicker bed tray. That soup is way cold. I can tell by the globules of oil at the edges.

I’m sitting in a shaft of sunlight on the Oriental rug in my room reading
Charlotte’s Web
for the hundredth time. It’s the part after the spider Charlotte dies, which happens from her having woven an egg sac and then filled it full of baby-spider eggs. Making those eggs took her last ounce of strength. She knew it would kill her, but she did it anyway. Mother has explained to me how that makes her Noble, according to Mr. Camus. Charlotte left the sac in the care of her pal Wilbur, himself a pig. In the weeks since Charlotte last lifted her spiny leg to Wilbur in good-bye salute, he has been laying in the mud bawling. He’s still bawling when all of a sudden the eggs get ripe enough to hatch. Baby spiders start crawling out of the sack, I mean by the zillions. They’re eensy as punctuation marks and scramble out right in front of his blurry eyes.

The fact of them being actually alive makes Wilbur feel better, the way—it occurs to me in that shaft of afternoon sun—people talking about the cycles of nature get to feeling better; the way Baptists talking about the Lord’s Mysterious Plan feel better. But no sooner have those spiders said hey to Wilbur to cheer him up than they begin flying away from him on silky little parachutes. They scatter across the sky over the barnyard like so many seeds. They’re going to make their webs somewheres else, so you think for a minute that Wilbur’s gonna sink back into his porcine misery all over again. Then three of the baby spiders pipe up from the high corner of the open doorway over the pen that they’ve decided to stay with Wilbur. They want to make their webs right over him, just like their mother did.

The story more or less ends there, though the writer—Mr. E. B. White—lets you know that when those three spiders grow up, they’re gonna lay some eggs too. And you know that this sad-eyed pig will have a steady stream of spider pals, each with the
vocabulary of a college professor, to edify himself. Sure, they’ll die after they lay their eggs, too, the girl spiders, just like Charlotte did. But the point at the end of the book is that Wilbur will never have to be lonely.

I can spend the better part of a day moving between the sad part of this book, where Charlotte dies, then paging ahead to read about the three baby spiders wanting to stay with Wilbur. I cry a little, then cheer myself up. (Later, I’ll learn that’s the structure of an elegy: lament, consolation; bad news, followed by good news.) The sun feels so warm on my bangs all straight and shiny across my forehead, and the thought of those three baby spiders spinning out the first silk threads to make new webs over the grinning Wilbur laying supine in his muddy wallow fills me with such light that I want to tell somebody about it. I shout downstairs through the open door for my sitter to come up a minute and get a load of this.

When he stands next to me in that circle of sun, I tell him about it with my whole heart. About Charlotte and the babies and Wilbur. I remember so much that I think Daddy would be proud of my telling. My sitter nods all slow and serious. At the end, he says how being special friends with somebody keeps you ever from being lonesome. And do I want to be his special friend?

That sets me scampering around the room in search of my Big Chief tablet, the one with the vampire club rituals in it. My bare legs are prickly cold under my gown, but somebody willing to be a vampire club member is a rare thing.

I find the tablet and plop back down in my spot of sun to start explaining the initiations. But when I look up from the sloping page, to see if he’s buying it so far, the whole mood of the room has shifted. The zipper of his chinos is level with my eyes. And inside that zipper his pecker is making that bulge, the bad words for which zoom through my head—Hard-on, Boner, Stiffie. I think it is testament to my badness that I even know such words.

Once I spent the night with the principal’s daughter, and when I asked her if she knew what “fuck” meant, she said no. When I explained it to her as nice as I could, she broke out crying, though
I hadn’t even used a single cuss word, sticking instead to those words you find in the encyclopedia under A for Anatomy, with the sheer glassy pages of muscle and vein and bone assembling into a man body and a woman body side by side in TV-family clothes. Still, the minute I got to the end of telling the principal’s daughter about the baby being born, her face just collapsed in on itself in a big pucker. She screamed that her parents would never do something that nasty, even trying to have kids. “Then where do you think you came from, dumbass,” I said. She ran caterwauling out of the room at that point. A heartbeat later, her mother popped in all grim-faced. She led me by the hand into their dusty foyer, where she zipped up her parka right over her bathrobe and stepped barefoot into her galoshes. She hoisted me up still in my pajamas with my coat thrown across me and walked through the cold night back across the street to our house. That was the end of spending the night with the principal’s daughter.

Maybe grown-ups know I know words like Hard-on from looking at me. “You got a smart mouth, little girl,” Mrs. Dillard back in Leechfield always said, narrowing her eyes at that pronouncement. And I said that a smart mouth was better than a dumb one anyday. Still, sometimes I think being smart just makes certain words go scooting through your head, leaving some bad-word vapor that a mean man can pick up on. In fact, maybe this man, now, who’s dragging down his zipper in slow motion, the little brass teeth unlocking before my eyes like the fangs of some sea monster, can hear that word Hard-on bouncing around inside my head. It invites him almost, draws him to me, actually draws on his dick like magnetism and makes it swell up inside the cloth of his pants.

I think of how the vampire couldn’t cross into the girl’s window unless she herself took the crucifix off that window and opened it to him, saying come on in. And still people did it, even when they didn’t mean to. They hung up those garlic ropes at bedtime. They looped the rosary around the window handles. They full well meant to shoo that evil away when it came flapping all liquid at the glass. But by the time the vampire actually floated
there in the creamy moonlight, the girl in the gauzy nightdress was so awestruck by his hunger—the sheer largeness of it—that she’d unloop all the stuff she’d fixed up to stave him off. The garlic ropes slipped from the brass handles, and the windows swung wide so the curtains billowed over them as he gathered her slender self up into his cape.

This whole scene is rushing through my head when my babysitter’s zipper hits bottom. His hand fishes into that zipper and farther, into the shadow of his shorts. The seriousness of that reaching keeps me even from breathing regular. I’m also afraid to make him mad somehow, and even more afraid that any move I make or any word I speak will seem like welcome. So I sit still and pretend not to be home inside myself. I worry worry worry though about what’s about to happen.