Lit: A Memoir. Mary Karr
27 The Untuned Instrument
29 Ceremony (Nonbelievers, Read at Your Own Risk: Prayer and God Ahead)
IV BEING WHO YOU ARE IS NOT A DISORDER
31 A Short History of My Stupidity
37 The Death of Date-o-Rama or the Romance of the Prose
40 Dysfunctional Family Sweepstakes
43 The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius
45 My Sinfulness in All Its Ugliness
Prologue: Open Letter to My Son
Any way I tell this story is a lie, so I ask you to disconnect the device in your head that repeats at intervals how ancient and addled I am. It’s true that—at fifty to your twenty—my brain is dimmer. Your engine of recall is way superior, as you’ve often pointed out.
How many times have you stopped me throwing sofa cushions over my shoulder in search of my glasses by telling me they’re tipped atop my own knobby head? The cake we had on that birthday had twelve candles on it, not ten; and it wasn’t London but Venice where I’d blindly bought and boiled and served to our guests a pasta I mistakenly believed was formed into the boot of Italy.
And should I balk at your recall, you may bring out the video camera you’ve had strapped to your face since you were big enough to push the red Record button. You’ll zoom in on the 1998 bowl of pasta to reveal—not the Italian boot—but tiny replicas of penis and testicles. Cock and balls. That’s why the guys who sold it to me laughed so maniacally, why the au pair blanched to the color of table linen.
Through that fishbowl lens, you’ve been looking for the truth most of your life. Recently, that wide eye has come to settle on me, and I’ve felt like Odysseus, albeit with less guile and fewer escape routes, the lens itself embodying the one-eyed cyclops. You’re not the monster; my face reflected back in the lens is. Or replay is. Or I am.
Still, I want to show that single eye the whole tale as I know it, scary as that strikes me from this juncture.
However long I’ve been granted sobriety, however many hours I logged in therapists’ offices and the confessional, I’ve still managed to hurt you, and not just with the divorce when you were five, with its attendant shouting matches and slammed doors.
Just as my mother vanished from my young life into a madhouse, so did I vanish when you were a toddler. Having spent much of my life trying to plumb her psychic mysteries, I now find myself occupying her chair as plumbee. Believe me. It’s a discomfiting sensation.
Last week specifically: a gas leak in your apartment drove you to my place, where I was packing for a trip. So I let go my cat sitter and left you prowling old video footage like a scholar deciphering ancient manuscripts. How much pleasure your concentration gave me. From the raw detritus of the past, you’re shaping your own story, which will, in your own particular telling of it, shape you into a man.
Days later, when my taxi pulled up, you came down to help haul bags. At six-two, you’re athletic like your father, with his same courtly manner—an offhanded chivalry that calls little attention to itself. While manhandling my mammoth suitcase through two security doors, you managed to hold each one open for me with your foot. The next instant I registered—peeking from the top of your saggy jeans—the orange boxers spattered with cartoon fish from Dr. Seuss’s One Fish, Two Fish that I read you as a kid.
Inside, loading books into your messenger bag, you mentioned watching for the first time a video of Mother and me, filmed years ago by your camera (borrowed) in the crackerbox house of my kidhood. Mother was recounting her psychotic episode—the seminal event that burned off whatever innocence a kid in backwater Texas has coming.
You know the story in broad outline and have steered clear of my writing about it—a healthy fence blocking my public life from your private one. But the old video stirred something in you.
It was kind of crazy, you said.
You were wrapping up wires for one of your cameras.
I thought you meant Mother’s story of taking a carving knife to kill my sister and me when we were little. How she hallucinated she’d butchered us and called the doctor, who called the law, who took her away for a spell.
Not that, you said. Your blue eyes fixed me where I stood.
This curiosity about my family past has a new gravity to it, countered by your T-shirt, which reads, Don’t Give Me Drugs.
You told me all that, you said. The way Grandma told it was strange, like it happened to somebody else. Crazy. She said, You were just so precious, I thought I’d kill you before they all got to hurt you.
Then your girlfriend called from the next room, and the instant was over.
I’d all but forgotten the tape. So after you’d gone, I played it—maybe for the first time all the way through.
It’s a summer afternoon in a yellow kitchen we’ve yet to remodel. A few tiles still bear bullet holes from Mother’s pistol-wagging arguments with my daddy and two subsequent romances. The florid robe she’s wearing