82
" Then he asks when my poetry book will be out, and it’s like he’s bringing up a wart or goiter I’ve secretly had taken off, since the book came out two years ago, with grossly underwhelming response. Even I barely noticed, being stuck in the muddy trench of Dev’s sleepless infancy when the box hit the porch. Tearing it open, I’d lifted a copy, thumbed it, and tried to tell myself it was some worthy stone added to poetry’s great mountain. But I hid it out of eyeshot in my study—the sight of it made me sick. First books rarely get the attention they deserve, the other poet says with a kind look. I explain that virtually all copies sold were, I’m guessing, bought by my sister, who gave twenty or thirty for Christmas that year. He tells me the story of a writer who—on finding his own first book remaindered in a used bookstore—opened to the flyleaf only to discover his own signature above the note To Mum and Dad…. "
― Mary Karr , Lit
83
" She turns to Warren, Do you think she’s an alcoholic? How insulting, I think, and brace myself for Warren’s assessment, already dredging up a defense: I’ve never been five minutes late to pick up Dev. I’m a room parent, for God’s sake. I lead toddlers around the aquarium on a rope. No, he says. (How my love for him doth bloom, the drinking mind thinks.) She likes a drink. (Or nine, the scolding, sober part of me thinks.) But who doesn’t? he concludes. (Those WASPs down so much sauce—the sober mind observes—that Warren wouldn’t know a dipsomaniac if one hit him with a polo mallet.) That’s the kind of courtroom convened in my skull, prosecution and defense. "
― Mary Karr , Lit
84
" I keep getting drunk. There’s no more interesting way to say it. Only drunk does the volume crank down. Liquor no longer lets me bullshit myself that I’m taller, faster, funnier. Instead, it shrinks me to a plodding zombie state in which one day smudges into every other—it blurs time. Swaying on the back landing in the small hours, I stare at the boxy garage and ghostly replicas of it multiplying along either side, like playing cards spread against the slate sky. Though this plural perspective is standard, I’m surprised by my own shitfaced state. The walkman sends punk rock banging across the tiny bones of my ears. And with the phonebook-sized stack of papers on my lap still unmarked, I—once more, with feeling—take the pledge to quit drinking. Cross my heart. Pinky swear to myself. This is it, I say, the last night I sit here. Okay, I say in my head. I give. You’re right. (Who am I talking to? Fighting with?) By the next afternoon, while I’m lugging the third armload of groceries up the back stairs, Dev, who’s bolted ahead to the living room, shrieks like he’s been stabbed, and I drop the sack on the kitchen floor, hearing as it hits what must be a jar of tomato sauce detonating. In the living room, I find Dev has leaped—illicitly, for the nine hundredth time—off the sofa back, trying to land in the clothes basket like a circus diver into a bucket of water. He’s whapped his noggin on the coffee table corner. Now dead center on his pale, formerly smooth forehead, there’s a blue knot like a horn trying to break through. I gather him up and rush to the kitchen, aiming to grab a soothing bag of frozen peas. But I step on a shard of tomato sauce jar, gash my instep, slide as on a banana peel, barely hanging on to Dev till we skid to a stop. I tiptoe across the linoleum, dragging a snail of blood till I can plop him in a kitchen chair, instructing him to hold the peas to his head and not move an inch while I bunny-hop upstairs to bandage my foot. Coming back, I find he’s dragged the formerly white laundry into the kitchen to mop up the tomato sauce. I’m helping, he says, albeit surrounded by gleaming daggers of glass while on his forehead the blue Bambi horn seems to throb. Minutes later, my hand twists off a beer cap as I tell myself that a beer isn’t really a drink after all. So I have another after that to speed preparing the pot roast, and maybe even a third. Before we head to the park, I tuck two more beer bottles in my coat pocket, plus one in my purse alongside a juice box. "
― Mary Karr , Lit
92
" She asked me if we had any more of the peaches we’d bought in Arkansas. We got peaches galore, I said. The car was fragrant with the bushels of fruit we’d been wolfing for two days while our bowels grumbled. I picked through the soft bottom peaches for an unbruised one to hand her. I asked, Wasn’t that the name of some famous stripper, Peaches Galore? Pussy Galore, I believe, Mother said. She bit the peach with a zeal that made me cringe, as did her cavalier use of the word pussy, though I myself used it with alacrity. To look at her behind the wheel, with the mess she could make of a peach, appalled me. She was so primordial. She had to wipe the juice off her chin with the back of her hand. "
― Mary Karr , Lit
