Mary Karr - Lit: A Memoir

Open Letter to My Son

Now

Then

Escape from the Tropic of Squalor

Lost in the Golden State

The Mother of Invention

Lackluster College Coed

Theres No Biz Like Po-Biz

Never Mind

Flashdance

Inheritance Tax Summer

The Constant Lovers

Temporary Help

There Went the Bride

Bound

In Search of Incompetence

Bent Bender

Homesick

The Inconceivable Meets the Conceivable

Journey of the Magi

Postal Partum

No Mom Is an Island

Self Help

Ivy Beleaguered

The Mokus Squirreliness of the Unmet Mind

My Concept of Commitment

The Grinning Skull

Mass Eye

Lather, Rinse, Repeat

Affliction

Reprieve

The Reluctantly Baptized

The Untuned Instrument

Halfway Home

Ceremony (Nonbelievers, Read at Your Own Risk: Prayer and God Ahead)

Hour of Lead

Being Who You Are Is Not a Disorder

A Short History of My Stupidity

The Nervous Hospital

Waking in the Blue

The Sweet Hereafter

I Accept a Position

Lake-Effect Humor

The Death of Date-o-Rama or the Romance of the Prose

Lord of the Flies

God Shopping

Dysfunctional Family Sweepstakes

It Makes a Body Wonder

On the Road

The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius

The Bog Queen

My Sinfulness in All Its Ugliness

NOW

A ny way I tell this story is a lie, so I ask you to disconnect the device in your head that repeats at intervals how ancient and addled I am. Its true thatat fifty to your twentymy brain is dimmer. Your engine of recall is way superior, as youve often pointed out.

How many times have you stopped me throwing sofa cushions over my shoulder in search of my glasses by telling me theyre tipped atop my own knobby head? The cake we had on that birthday had twelve candles on it, not ten; and it wasnt London but Venice where Id blindly bought and boiled and served to our guests a pasta I mistakenly believed was formed into the boot of Italy.

And should I balk at your recall, you may bring out the video camera youve had strapped to your face since you were big enough to push the red Record button. Youll zoom in on the 1998 bowl of pasta to revealnot the Italian bootbut tiny replicas of penis and testicles. Cock and balls. Thats why the guys who sold it to me laughed so maniacally, why the au pair blanched to the color of table linen.

Through that fishbowl lens, youve been looking for the truth most of your life. Recently, that wide eye has come to settle on me, and Ive felt like Odysseus, albeit with less guile and fewer escape routes, the lens itself embodying the one-eyed cyclops. Youre not the monster; my face reflected back in the lens is. Or replay is. Or I am.

Still, I want to show that single eye the whole tale as I know it, scary as that strikes me from this juncture.

However long Ive been granted sobriety, however many hours I logged in therapists offices and the confessional, Ive still managed to hurt you, and not just with the divorce when you were five, with its attendant shouting matches and slammed doors.

Just as my mother vanished from my young life into a madhouse, so did I vanish when you were a toddler. Having spent much of my life trying to plumb her psychic mysteries, I now find myself occupying her chair as plumbee. Believe me. Its a discomfiting sensation.

Last week specifically: a gas leak in your apartment drove you to my place, where I was packing for a trip. So I let go my cat sitter and left you prowling old video footage like a scholar deciphering ancient manuscripts. How much pleasure your concentration gave me. From the raw detritus of the past, youre shaping your own story, which will, in your own particular telling of it, shape you into a man.

Days later, when my taxi pulled up, you came down to help haul bags. At six-two, youre athletic like your father, with his same courtly manneran offhanded chivalry that calls little attention to itself. While manhandling my mammoth suitcase through two security doors, you managed to hold each one open for me with your foot. The next instant I registeredpeeking from the top of your saggy jeansthe orange boxers spattered with cartoon fish from Dr. Seusss One Fish, Two Fish that I read you as a kid.

Inside, loading books into your messenger bag, you mentioned watching for the first time a video of Mother and me, filmed years ago by your camera (borrowed) in the crackerbox house of my kidhood. Mother was recounting her psychotic episodethe seminal event that burned off whatever innocence a kid in backwater Texas has coming.

You know the story in broad outline and have steered clear of my writing about ita healthy fence blocking my public life from your private one. But the old video stirred something in you.

It was kind of crazy, you said.

You were wrapping up wires for one of your cameras.

I thought you meant Mothers story of taking a carving knife to kill my sister and me when we were little. How she hallucinated shed butchered us and called the doctor, who called the law, who took her away for a spell.

Not that, you said. Your blue eyes fixed me where I stood.

This curiosity about my family past has a new gravity to it, countered by your T-shirt, which reads, Dont Give Me Drugs .

You told me all that, you said. The way Grandma told it was strange, like it happened to somebody else. Crazy. She said, You were just so precious, I thought Id kill you before they all got to hurt you .

Then your girlfriend called from the next room, and the instant was over.

Id all but forgotten the tape. So after youd gone, I played itmaybe for the first time all the way through.

Its a summer afternoon in a yellow kitchen weve yet to remodel. A few tiles still bear bullet holes from Mothers pistol-wagging arguments with my daddy and two subsequent romances. The florid robe shes wearing would suit a Wiccan priestess. Ditto her short, ashwhite hair, and her pale as marble skin, which still looks dewy.

She reads some gnostic texts about goddesses and gods and the Christ within each of us. She pauses every now and then to say, Isnt that wild? or to relight her long cigarillo.

Next to her is a giant plastic sunflower my nephew gave her for Mothers Day. She flips a switch on it, and it blinks to life, singing, You are my sunshine, my only sunshine a song my daddy used to sing to me on the way to fishing.

Dont you love that? she says. Its silly, but I love it.

I ask what she was thinking on the night in question, and she says, I just couldnt imagine bringing two girls up in a world where they do such awful things to women. So I decided to kill you both, to spare you.

How long had you been drinking?

Oh I wasnt drunk, Mother says. Maybe Id had a few drinks.

This completely counters her earlier version, in which shed claimed to have been shitfaced. But I dont press it. She shrugs at me, adding, Sheesh .

Id never think to go over this footage myself but for you, Dev. Youre showing my life to me through a new windownot just the video, either. Your birth altered my whole posture on the planet, not to mention my role vis--vis Mother.

For I partly see her through your vantage. You never knew the knife-wielding goddess of death. Shes your gray-haired grandmother, the one I was always trying to protect you from, even though she was sober when you knew her. Her rages had dissipated, but her childrearing judgment never improved.