Free The Liars' Club: A Memoir by Mary Karr

headed, it must be better than Leechfield. I was a seventh-generation Texan by way of Tennessee and before that Ireland. So I was descended from what the writer Harry Crews once called the great “If you git work, write” tradition. For generations my ancestors had been strapping skillets onto their oxen and walking west. It turned out to be impossible for me to “run away” in the sense other American teenagers did. Any movement at all was taken for progress in my family.
    Sometimes, when my parents were raging at each other in the kitchen, Lecia and I would talk about finding a shack on the beach to live in. We’d sit cross-legged under the blue cotton quilt with a flashlight, doing parodies of their fights. “Reel Six, Tape Fifty-one. Let her roll,” Lecia would say. She would clap her arms together like a gator jaw as if what we were listening to was only one more take in a long movie we were shooting. She had a way of shining the flashlight under her chin and sucking in her cheeks, so her eyes became hooded and her cheekbones got as sharp as Mother’s. She also had a knack for Mother’s sometime Yankee accent, which only came out under stress or chemical influence. Think of a young Katharine Hepburn somehow infected with the syntax and inflections of an evangelist:
I wish that whatever God there might be had struck my car with lightning before I crossed the bridge into this Goddamned East Texas Shithole.
Sometimes she’d just cry, and Lecia’s imitation of that was cruelest:
There’s no hope, there’s no hope
, she’d say with a Gloria Swanson melodrama, her wrist flung back to her forehead like it had been stapled there.
    I always did Daddy’s part, which didn’t require much in the way of thought, since he was either silent or his voice was too quiet to hear. The only thing he ever shouted clearly was
You kiss my ass!
He sometimes turned this invective into a line of advice aimed at whomever Mother found to rage about:
Tell them to kiss your ass
, he’d say. “They” could be the IRS or a pack of Bible-thumpers knocking on our door to convert us.
Tell them to kiss your ass
was what you could expect him to suggest. (To this dayI have some chute in my head from which “kiss my ass” tumbles. It’s truly amazing the number of times it seems applicable.)
    Sometimes we’d hear a crash or the sound of a body hitting the linoleum, and then we’d go streaking in there in our pajamas to see who’d thrown what or who’d passed out. If they were still halfway conscious, they’d scare us back to bed. “Git back to bed. This ain’t nothing to do with you,” Daddy would say, or Mother would point at us and say, “Don’t talk to me like that in front of these kids!” Once I heard Daddy roar up out of sleep when Mother had apparently dumped a glass of vodka on him, after which she broke and ran for the back door. We got into the kitchen in time to see him dragging her back to the kitchen sink, where he systematically filled three glasses of water and emptied them on her head. That was one of the rare nights that ended with them laughing. In fact, it put them in such a good mood that they took us out to the drive-in to see
The Night of the Iguana
while they nuzzled in the front seat.
    When I stepped out the front door into sunlight after a night of their fighting, the activities of the neighbors who looked up from their trash cans or lawn mowers always seemed impossibly innocent. How could people fill their days with those kinds of chores? Sometimes I felt our house divided like Lee and Annie’s. Or I felt like the neighbors’ stares had bored so many imaginary holes in our walls that the whole house was rotten as wormy wood. I never quite got over thinking that folks looked at us funny on mornings after Mother and Daddy had fought. Whether this was prescient or paranoid on my part, I don’t know. If one of the ladies bumped into our grocery cart at the store, she might ask Mother over for coffee,