102
" Sitting in my room the next night, after Warren’s brief, distracted visit, I feed the baby out of some gleaming core inside. It’s you and me, Dev, I say, which solitude is—in some ways—familiar. At least now I have a small sack of infant to cuddle with, a boy molded from silk and cream whose howling cares vanish soon as I take him in my arms. For seven days, I stay catheterized in the hospital. In seven days, the Bible tells us, God made the world, but I fail to release my pent-up urine. "
― Mary Karr , Lit
105
" Let me keep him tonight, she says. Please. I’ll keep him down with me in the dining room. The thought of uninterrupted sleep glows in my head, and while my better instincts say she’s inclined to all manner of caprice, I make her swear she’ll wake me if there’s any need or he won’t quiet. Then I sail off into a sleep that unrolls in my head endless bolts of black velvet. My boobs wake me up, leaking breast milk. I lie in the damp they’d made. Across my legs is a fresh river of sun. In the elm trees off our balcony, loud black crows caw. I right myself and get my bearings in the sunny room. I hear noise downstairs and feel my way to the stair landing where I can hear the baby’s morning squeaks. I tiptoe down the carpeted stairs, then peek in to see Mother cradling Dev, saying, Old Blue Eyes, that’s what Grandma Charlie’s gonna call you. And when you get ready, you come down. You ain’t never had no fun till you get to my house…. "
― Mary Karr , Lit
113
" Then social mores had intervened. A distinct scene from junior high flushes vividly back. Girls sitting out of rotation volleyball in gym class stared at me all gap-mouthed when—of a rainy spring day—I spouted e. e. cummings. Through open green gym doors, sheets of rain erased the parking lot we normally stood staring at as if it were a refrigerator about to manifest food. The poem started: in Just-: spring when the world is mud- luscious… As I went on, Kitty Stanley sat cross-legged in black gym shorts and white blouse, peeling fuchsia polish off her thumbnail with a watchmaker’s precision. She was a mouth breather, Kitty, whose blond bouffant hairdo featured above her bangs a yarn bow the color of a kumquat. That it? Beverly said. Her black-lined gaze looked like an old-timey bandit mask. Indeed, I said. (This was my assholish T. S. Eliot stage circa ninth grade, when I peppered my speech with words I thought sounded British like indeed.) Is that a word, muddy delicious? Kitty said. Mud-luscious, I said. Not no real word, Beverly said, leaning back on both hands, legs crossed. I studied a volleyball arcing white across the gym ceiling and willed it to smash into Beverly’s freakishly round head. It’s squashing together luscious and lush and delicious, and all of it applied to spring mud. It’s poetic license, I said. I think it’s real smart how you learn every word so they come out any time you please, Kitty said. Beverly snorted. I get mud all over Bobby’s truck flaps, and believe you me, delicious don’t figure in. As insults go, it was weak, but Beverly’s facial expression—like she was smelling something—told me to put poetry right back where I’d drug it out from. "
― Mary Karr , Lit
114
" Since there’s no liquor in the house, I concoct for myself a backache, filching a few of the blue valiums Warren rarely takes for his—truly bad—back. They’re for sleep, I tell myself. (My creative skill reaches its zenith at prescription interpretation, i.e., the codeine cough syrup bottle seems to read: Take one or two swigs when you feel like it. I take three.) In February I decide I’m under too much stress to quit booze cold turkey. Full sobriety as a concept recedes with the holidays. I’ll cut down, I think. But all the control schemes that reined me in during past years are now unfathomably failing. Only drink beer. Only drink wine. Only drink weekends. Only drink after five. At home. With others. When I only drink with meals, I cobble together increasingly baroque dinners, always uncorking some medium-shitty vintage at about three in the afternoon while Dev plays on the kitchen floor. The occasional swig is culinary duty, right? Some nights I’m into my second bottle before Warren comes in with frost on his glasses and a book bag a mule should’ve toted. Maybe he doesn’t notice, since I’m a champion at holding my liquor. Nonetheless, by the end of March, I have to unbutton my waistbands. "
― Mary Karr , Lit
117
" Not one thing on the planet operates as I would have it, and only here can I plot my counterattacks. Problem one: The fevers my year-old son gets every few weeks can spike to 105°, which means waking the husband, a frantic trip to Children’s Hospital, a sleepless night in the waiting room. No reason for this, nothing wrong with his immune system or growth. They’ll give him the cherry-flavored goop that makes him shit his brains out, and the cough will ease, but his stomach will cramp, and on the nights he ingests that medicine, he’ll draw his stumpy legs to his chest in agony and ball up tight, then arch his back and scream, and though no one suggests this is my fault, my inability to stop it is my chief failure in the world. Problem two: If he’s sick, I’ll have to cancel classes so maybe the real professors who just hired me on a friend’s recommendation—despite my being too muttonheaded to sport a very relevant diploma—will fail to renew me next semester. I’ve published one slim volume of verse and some essays, but so has every other semiliterate writer in Cambridge. "
― Mary Karr , Lit
118
" He drove on, head-banging to the backbeat of Ozzy Osborne’s Paranoid. On a steep hill, he downshifted and said, Mary, do you believe you live by what you earn? I said sure, stunned less by the question than by the breath he’d exhaled—real snake-shit breath. He shouted, Some live by what their own hands take. Others feed like buzzards on the carcass’s leftovers. That’s right, I said, wondering what he was getting at. Maybe he wanted me to sell Tupperware or cosmetics door-to-door. Some of the want ads I’d answered offered that. He said, Samson after his haircut could not break his chains, and the stones of the temple rained down. I nodded at the King James Bible cadence he’d slid into, his accent no longer evoking Grandpappy on the porch with a slab of pie, but a preacher whose fire and brimstone maybe came from a guilty conscience about underage choristers. I tried to adopt the big-eyed face of a church girl with a well-armed brother. A crumb of fear. He drew a snuff can out from under his seat and tucked a pinch in his jaw, saying around it, You dip? No, sir, I said. "
― Mary Karr , Lit
119
" The more I drink, the more weekends I split off, leaving Warren to care for Dev solo while I take naps. Also, evenings Warren comes home early enough, I hide in my study drinking as he and Dev play at making the bed, which involves Dev bouncing as Warren floats the sheet over his head, occasionally wrestling the little ghost form down. Through the wall, I can’t make out words, only Dev’s staccato whoops and giggles, followed by Warren’s deep-throated purr, which sounds like hubbidee hubadub hubbadee…hum sally bum bum. The timbre’s barely tolerable, for when Warren speaks to me, the airspace is sandpapered and abraded, spiked as a bondage collar. I can’t look at him without hearing some muffled verdict pounded out by my own heartbeat—guilty guilty guilty. "
― Mary Karr , Lit
120
" But even as I giggle and suck down beers, I know Warren’s headlights are gonna swipe the house silent again. Sure enough, he comes in the back door and stops in the living room to shake hands before excusing himself. About eleven, he calls from upstairs, and I find him on the landing, shirtless in boxers. He whispers, I can’t sleep from the noise. If you don’t ask them to leave, I’ll have to. I hiss at him, You’re such a control freak. He says, You knew I was like this when you married me. The righteous cry of married men everywhere, for it’s a cliché that every woman signs up thinking her husband will change, while every husband signs up believing his wife won’t: both dead wrong. "
― Mary Karr , Lit
