Free The Liars' Club: A Memoir by Mary Karr Page B

grandmother’s red Ford wagon parked in front of our house. Our car always arrived from even the shortest trip strewn with candy wrappers and soda bottles and a coffee can sloshing with pee. But when I peeked into the Ford’s window, it looked like the old woman had driven clear across the state of Texas with nothing more than a box of pink tissues. Mother was holding the screen door open and shading her eyes as I climbed up onto the concrete porch. Her cheekbones winged out, and her eyes were the flawed green of cracked marbles. She told me that Grandma had cancer and had come to stay with us for a while, but that I shouldn’t let on I knew.
    Maybe it’s wrong to blame the arrival of Grandma Moore for much of the worst hurt in my family, but she was such a ring-tailed bitch that I do. She sat like some dissipated empress inMother’s huge art deco chair (mint-green vinyl with square black arms), which she turned to face right out of our front picture window like she was about to start issuing proclamations any minute.
    All day, she doled out criticisms that set my mother to scurrying around with her face set so tight her mouth was a hyphen. The drapes were awful; let’s make some new. When was the last time we’d cleaned our windows? (Never.) Had Mother put on weight? She seemed pudged up. I looked plumb like a wetback I was so dark. (Lecia had managed to come out blond like her people, but Grandma never got over my looking vaguely Indian like Daddy.) And I was
pore-looking
, a term she reserved for underfed farm animals and the hookworm-ridden Cajun kids we saw trying to catch crawfish on summer afternoons on the edge of Taylor’s Bayou. (Marvalene Seesacque once described her incentive for crawdadding all day: “You don’t catch, you don’t eat.”)
    In a house where I often opened a can of tamales for breakfast and ate them cold (I remember sucking the cuminy tomato sauce off the paper each one was wrapped in) Grandma cut out a
Reader’s Digest
story on the four major food groups and taped it to the refrigerator. Suddenly our family dinners involved dishes you saw on TV, like meatloaf—stuff you had to light the oven to make, which Mother normally didn’t even bother doing for Thanksgiving.
    Our family’s habit of eating meals in the middle of my parents’ bed also broke overnight. Mother had made the bed extra big by stitching two mattresses together and using coat hangers to hook up their frames. She’d said that she needed some spread-out space because of the humidity, a word Lecia and I misheard for a long time as
stupidity.
(Hence, our tendency to say,
It ain’t the heat, it’s the stupidity.)
It was the biggest bed I ever saw, and filled their whole bedroom wall-to-wall. She had to stitch up special sheets for it, and even the chest of drawers had to be put out in the hall. The only pieces of furniture that still fit next to the bed were a standing brass ashtray shaped like a Viking ship on Daddy’sside and a tall black reading lamp next to a wobbly tower of hardback books on Mother’s.
    Anyway, the four of us tended to eat our family meals sitting cross-legged on the edges of that bed. We faced opposite walls, our backs together, looking like some four-headed totem, our plates balanced on the spot of quilt between our legs. Mother called it picnic-style, but since I’ve been grown, I recall it as just plain odd. I’ve often longed to take out an ad in a major metropolitan paper and ask whether anybody else’s family ate back-to-back in the parents’ bed, and what such a habit might signify.
    With Grandma there, we used not just the table but table linens. Mother hired a black woman named Mae Brown to wash and iron the tablecloth and napkins when they got greased up. And we couldn’t just come in out of the heat at midday and pull off our clothes anymore with Grandma there. We’d had this habit of stripping down to underwear or putting on pajamas in the house, no matter what the time. In the