Lit: a memoir by Mary Karr

Author:Mary Karr [Mary Karr]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biographie
ISBN: 9780060596996
Published: 2010-06-29T07:00:00+00:00

22

Mass Eye

Each spectral port,

each human eye

is shot through with a hole, and everything we know

goes in there, where it feeds a blaze. In a flash

the baby’s old…

—Heather McHugh, “The Size of Spokane”

Down in Texas, a botched cataract surgery has nearly blinded Mother, and I suggest she have the corneal transplant to repair it in Boston. Since Mr. Whitbread serves on New York Hospital’s board and likes to flex that helping muscle, Warren urges me to write him to find a doctor. I suspect (is this true?) Warren really fancies Mother’s presence will let him vanish further into work and daddy-hood. Still, I’m grateful when Mr. Whitbread right off cops for Mother an appointment with the pope’s own eye surgeon, who bumps Mother way up on the transplant list. That spring she comes to live in our dining room, waiting on a tissue match.

I’ll help with my grandson, she says. I’ll look after him while you grade or write in your study.

You’re blind, Mother.

Not entirely. I mean, too blind to drive, but I can keep him away from sharp stuff.

The first day she does babysit, but the second, Dev scampers into my study with Mother right behind, and do I want to go to the park? By the third day, Mother makes the most infuriating announcement: I don’t do kids.

I sputter, You had four of them, Mother.

Nobody helped me with mine.

Bullshit. Daddy took me everywhere.

She rolls her milky eyes toward the light fixture, saying, Here you go with that my sainted daddy shit. Your sister and I both wonder why he got a big pass for doing nothing whatsoever.

Daddy never left us at the movies and didn’t pick us up.

He never did anything whatsoever.

He paid every bill.

We lived in absolute squalor.

He worked at an oil refinery, Mother. Did you fail to notice that?

Ragging on Daddy is Mother’s de facto response to any complaint about our upbringing. She deftly pawns off her own failings on the desolation of her marriage.

So she bitches that Daddy had been offered promotions but wouldn’t leave the union. And I counter that she’d been a Marxist when they married, and we dwindle into those niggling definitions until my fury boils over, and I lunge with the biggest weapon in my verbal sheath. I remind her that Daddy had never stood over me with a butcher knife.

I say it with a forceful little puff of air so the fact lands in her like a curare dart. All talk exits the room. We face each other in this vacuumed-out bubble, and part of me knows it’s a pathetic fact that not trying to murder me was all he had to do to win the better-parent prize.

Mother sucks her teeth and sits down on the low-lying futon we moved into the dining room for her. But she doesn’t collapse in operatic weeping like she’s done in the past. Which is strange. She seems very still as she pats the side of the futon. She says, Sit down next to me.

I’m not in the mood to cuddle and say so.

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