The Liars' Club: A Memoir by Karr Mary

Author:Karr, Mary [Karr, Mary]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781101650738
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 2013-03-23T16:00:00+00:00

I always loved that last part, about the best lacking all conviction, which phrase made me think of Mother. And the worst being full of passionate intensity always put me in mind of Grandma, who was nothing if not intense.

Of course, at that time, Mother was still hanging on to the shreds of what she thought right, a grip she would lose entirely after Grandma died.

One morning, while Mother was plaiting my hair, the old woman got all pumped up about some project she had read about once in a magazine. She only took about two bites from a bowl of buttered grits before she hauled herself off to Kitty’s Hobby Shop. She didn’t even strap on her leg or bother with the wheelchair. Mother set her in the car seat, and she just drove off to town, then sat behind the steering wheel till Kitty came out to the parking lot and said could she help. We also heard later that she stopped by the hardware store for a three-foot length of industrial rubber tubing. Grandma came home with this stuff in paper bags and locked the door to her room for the better part of the day. When she finally rolled into the living room at dusk, she was waving a tasseled horse quirt over her head like Annie Oakley. She had braided long leather strips in brown and beige and tan around the rubber tubing, which instrument she wanted Mother to use for whipping us.

It was the only time I ever saw Mother defy her head-on, and Grandma was batshit about it: “These children are being ruined! You think you have trouble now, you just wait.” Mother started crying but shook her head about using the quirt. She wouldn’t meet Grandma’s eyes, but she stood in one spot with her arms folded and shook her head no. She was studying her own feet the whole time.

Then the old woman went on to waggle her quirt tassels at Lecia and call her Belinda, just like she’d done in the hospital. “I hope Belinda does to you what all you’ve done to me,” Grandma said, staring hard at Mother and waggling the horse quirt at Lecia the whole time. Again I got that dim stab of fear that this lady who bossed our mother’s soul didn’t even know our right names.

Lecia tried to make peace by saying that she wouldn’t mind so much getting whipped with a horse quirt. It was no worse than Daddy’s belt or the limber chinaberry switches Mae Brown had been known to cut from the backyard. I said that I wasn’t some old barnyard mule and didn’t want to get whipped like one. Grandma pointed out to Mother how I thought I was in charge of my punishments. This seemed to her undeniable evidence that I needed my butt blistered. I aggravated her worse by saying that all the baths and whippings I’d got since Grandma came were “warping my character.” That’s a direct quote, according to Mother, who started to laugh and shake her head.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.