Free Lit by Mary Karr Page A

distant German dirt.
    Afterward, Walt and I didn’t say much, just walked through the parking lot exhaling steam with the crowd, everybody’s eyes glancing in opposing vectors, brushing off each other but meeting, too, with that soft recognition you have after being drenched awhile by the same orderly chaos. We were like swimmers walking out of the sea. Every ten paces or so, headlights flipping on would turn shadow figures into full-fledged human units. Unlocking the car, Walt brought up my half-assed experiment again, saying, How’re you sure you know which poem’s best?
    I slid inside, saying, I just do.
    Which—ignorant though I knew I was—the ladies had proved to me in some way. And the next day, at Walt’s urging, I sent away for that graduate application.

5
Never Mind
    You wear a mask, and your face grows to fit it.
    —George Orwell, “Shooting an Elephant”
    M y first therapist’s name was—I shit you not—Tom Sawyer. What are the odds. A grad student Shirley Mink supervised, Tom must’ve been cudgeled into seeing me for the measly five bucks a pop I paid months late, if at all. With his runner’s lanky form, he was usually clad in jeans and hiking boots. His fox-red beard was tamed into the same shape as Freud’s—the color so at odds with his streaky blond pageboy that I wondered if it hooked over his ears.
    Twice per week, when I deigned to show up—three times if I’d broken up with some beau or been drunked up enough days in a row to wonder was I finally going insane—I whined to Tom about who to date or whether to go back to school or why nobody published my (infantile, unintelligible) poems.
    Let’s go back to your mother, he said for the hundredth time.
    Lord, don’t be so Freudian. Soon I’ll find you in a tweed vest and bow tie, those little wire rims.
    Your complicated mother. Your absent father.
    We’ve been over all that, I said. She’s not like that anymore. I mean, she drinks and takes pills more than we’d like. There are the benders still.
    Tell it again.
    In language more glib and jokey than I’m capable of now, I crankily told Tom the story for the umpteenth time. How Mother doused our every toy with gas and tossed on a match. Much of the night’s a blur but for her standing over us with a carving knife.
    Tom said, You still have nightmares you’ve murdered her.
    Usually, my daddy does that with a cleaver—wouldn’t old Sigmund eat that up, so to speak. There’s a Bill Knott poem, I’ve recently killed my father and will soon marry my mother. My problem is, should his side of the family be invited to the wedding…
    You joke a lot, but you’re carrying around some very powerful feelings.
    Oh, I feel bad enough, awful even, just not about Mother and Daddy.
    Let me ask you something. Whose fault was that night?
    We’ve gone over this. I don’t know. Probably mine, like I said. I was a pain in the ass. My sister’s to blame maybe a little, but she was older and way less trouble.
    For a mother to be expected to show up sane and reliable is the least any kid deserves.
    I heated up to defend her. And there, infuriatingly, the scene in the therapist’s office and with my mother just cut out, went blank, like undeveloped pictures accidentally slid through an X-ray.
    Which kept happening—therapis interruptus. Whenever Tom probed toward my folks at length, I suffered these dramatic erasures and snapped awake, zombielike, leaving the office for the bus stop, wet face stinging. What had I been blubbering about? Not a shred of the session stayed with me, the same person who found long stretches of movie dialogue or yards of doggerel running through her head.
    Once when Walt met me for lunch, I asked if these nonalcoholic blackouts were definite proof I was crazy. Just tell me straight, I said, upending the sugar canister into my coffee. Don’t hold back.
    The brain sometimes has a hard time incorporating certain memories, he said.
    I liked that he talked about it in