Free Lit by Mary Karr Page B

physiological terms, to make it feel less like me, more like a car we were staring into the engine of.
    So it’s not me—just my brain?
    Are you your brain?
    Don’t try to trick me into learning something, I said.
    Your level of functioning contraindicates serious mental illness.
    Only intermittently. I keep setting fire to my life.
    Interesting image, he said, knowing my incendiary backstory. Maybe if your mother comes in with you for a session the way Tom’s suggested, you’ll get new data about her hospitalization.
    He’s theorized that she’s manic-depressive.
    Will she come if you call?
    She’d go to a dogfight to get out of Leechfield.
    Which was true enough—not that I prewarned her by phone that her florid psychosis was our upcoming topic. Actually, I dreaded her coming, since she might freak out and threaten to hurt herself, as she tended to when pressed toward her walled-off past. She’d been a big one to lock herself in the bathroom with a firearm.
    But Mother never showed for the session, and—here’s the kicker—neither did I. Our excuse? We forgot, both of us, two sessions plus a rescheduled third. Just slipped our minds, the event she’d expensively flown up for. Papa Freud would’ve said, There are no accidents.
    After she’d gone back, I sat across from Tom Sawyer in a tub chair swiveling side to side, and he was—in a quiet, stiffly midwestern way—pissed. Unless I’d commit to getting better, he wouldn’t treat me, he said. I had to fly down to Texas and make her talk to me.
    She’s not gonna kill herself, he said, seeming impatient. You can call me if she starts making those noises. He scribbled out his home number on a card.
    Standing, I slung my purse over my shoulder, then I spat out acurse I hadn’t heard since seventh grade: You, Sparky, can take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut. Then I stalked out.
    Only looking back, after decades of shrinkdom, do I realize how radical to the point of bizarre his position was. He was either the genius Shirley Mink thought him to be, or a little wobbly sending me down into the lion’s den to confront Mother.
    (In case you haven’t read my early version of the passel of lies my family was built on—yours for a pittance—the broad outline of it needs going over. If you have read it, skip over this part.)
    After a conciliatory session with Tom Sawyer—who was blasé about the rolling-doughnut comment—I flew to Texas on cheap standby, in a cargo plane whose pilot wore a World War I flying cap with flaps like Snoopy wore.
    At my folks’ house, digging around in the attic, I routed out four wedding rings from a trunk. After days of my relentless nagging, plus a pitcher of margaritas, Mother owned up to having married a few times before Daddy, like maybe about four.
    She doesn’t date, she marries , her mother had said of her. Age eighteen—not even knocked up before she’d wed at seventeen—she’d given birth to my brother, Tex, followed a few years by his sister, Virginia. Mother’s engineer husband could afford a nice place in New York, where she pissed him off by taking classes at the Art Students League. Her bohemian streak didn’t suit him. His mother moved up to help with the kids, and one evening Mother came home to find the house cleared to its baseboards, the babies gone. It took her years to track them down in New Mexico, where they were happily in school and calling another woman Mommy. Single, broke, scared, Mother had—on the spot torn up the custody papers she’d brought along.
    Then came her marrying spree, as she looked for a husband who’d help her get those kids back. By the time she got to Daddy—who was willing to take them in—they were grown, Tex training for a stint in Southeast Asia.
    So my sister and I had reignited that preexisting loss. That waswhy Mother had gone nuts, not because I kept asking her to make grilled cheese or give me fifteen cents for the Weekly Reader . An old spark had already been