The Liars' Club by Mary Karr

Author:Mary Karr
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2015-10-13T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8

After they took Mother Away, I sank into a fierce lonesomeness for her that I couldn’t paddle out of into other things. Nor did anyone come into it looking for me. By this I mean that Daddy never mentioned the night of the fire. Nor did he say when Mother might come home, other than pretty soon. Maybe our own silence on the subject—Lecia’s and mine, for we didn’t bring it up either—was meant to protect him somehow, so as not to worry him overmuch. If we failed him by not telling him all about it, he sure as shit failed us by not knowing how to ask.

At school, I cleaned up my act. There wasn’t cussing or fighting, and I won not a single exile to Frank Doleman’s office for chess. My final report card for second grade shows my getting “Satisfactory +” in both Conduct and Citizenship. Which was for me a first. No doubt, I was operating under the notion that being completely good in the eyes of all authorities might urge Mother back.

At home, I also picked up my side of our bedroom, and grudgingly helped Lecia make our bed with military tucks on the sheet corners. There my housekeeping stopped, though she pulled off a whirlwind scrubbing of the whole house every Saturday, down to the insides of the toilets. She wrought particular hell on Daddy’s ashtrays. He couldn’t thump the ash off a Camel without her swooping down to wash and dry the ashtray before he got his hand drawn back good.

Without real data on Mother’s psychic health (or lack thereof) Lecia and I cooked up some fairly worrisome scenarios about her. On TV one night, we watched a movie called The Snake Pit. It starred Olivia de Havilland as this fairly nice if somewhat highstrung lady who wore over-baroque brooches and belted dresses when vacuuming her house, but who, nevertheless, had a twitchy mouth early in the movie that foreshadowed her hellacious, capital-B Breakdown later. The film’s title captures how the mental ward got portrayed. There was an icy bathtub in which one maniac got dunked under wet canvas, and a description of shock treatment that went something like this: “Then the electrodes are fixed to the temples and ZZZZZZT—thousands of volts course through the brain!” Finally, poor Ms. de Havilland got locked in a padded room and belted into one of those long-armed straitjackets that forced you to hug yourself all day and besides which looked really hot. All the while she was hallucinating snakes crawling all over. That was the picture of mental-ward life for the full-blown Nervous that Lecia and I promptly settled on. It was all we had.

The neighbor kids gave little comfort. Like us, they ran short on real data about psych wards, but they were very long on mean-assed idiom. To this day, it’s a peculiar trait of Leechfield citizenry that your greatest weakness will get picked at in the crudest local parlance. In fact, the worse an event is for you, the more brutally clear will be the talk about it.

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