Easter, I visit Father Kane, recently ensconced in the home for retired priests, to make my confession. I sit weeping across from him, fully aware of the ingratitude I’ve occasionally nurtured and fertilized like a garden of black vines. Which posture rankles him. Oh, get up, Mary, he said, you know damn well God loves you.
And I do. I (mostly) always do.
I’d like to say I never waver from that place, but on a crowded subway, I still pine for a firearm some days.
Though by the time Mother died, any of the old anger had been siphoned out of me like poison from a snakebite. Major organ system failure, the young doctors said. Old age, said the older ones.
I’m sick of this shit, she said. She’d set her jaw to die fast, I think. To lodge one last cry of outrage against Daddy’s lingering five years’ death, she let go in as many days.
I hate that you’re leaving, I said to her. I just got used to you.
Well, I’m not doing it on purpose, she said with vigor. How old was she? She’d lied so much, nobody knew—eightyish, we’re guessing.
Your husband’s outside, Miz Karr, the nurse said when one of her suitors showed up, hat in hand.
He must look like hell. He’s been dead two decades.
If Daddy lived his final years in a haze, Mother’s hazel eyes—when they were open those last days—stared at you sharp as a pair of ice picks.
Who’s the president? the doctor said, to determine if she was cogent enough to say no to life support.
Bill Clinton, she said.
Who was the president before Clinton?
That asshole George Bush, she said, and before him, that asshole Ronald Reagan.
She opened her eyes once to find Lecia powdering her nose while I caked on another load of mascara. What are y’all getting fixed up for? she said.
The handsome cardio dude’s coming to examine you, I said.
Oh my God, she said, pooching her lips out—Put my lipstick on.
Ten years, she’s dead, and I still find myself some mornings reaching for the phone to call her. She could no more be gone than gravity or the moon.
Sometimes when I walk the New York streets, I find in the occasional pedestrian’s face my long-dead parents. An Indian garment worker in overalls ferries a bin of Chinese silk—the bright rolls at different heights like pipes in some candy-colored organ. Beneath his baseball cap, his eyes glance off mine, and it’s Daddy for an instant. Or gliding off a shopwindow, I see Mother’s winged cheekbones and marble complexion that halt me in my tracks. But it’s only my face impersonating hers, and if ever I miss her broad, sharecropper’s hands, I have only to look at my own, growing from the ends of my own arms, which are replicas of hers. Good days, I see myself in others, and I know—in my bone marrow—nothing we truly love is ever lost, no matter what form it assumes. There are days when through fear and egoism I shake my fist at the sky, afterward feeling silly and worn out as a toddler post–temper tantrum.
Every now and then we enter the presence of the numinous and deduce for an instant how we’re formed, in what detail the force that infuses every petal might specifically run through us, wishing only to lure us into our full potential. Usually, the closest we get is when we love, or when some beloved beams back, which can galvanize you like steel and make resilient what had heretofore only been soft flesh. (Dev, you gave me that.) It can start you singing as the lion pads over to you, its jaws hinging open, its hot breath on you. Even unto death.
Mary Karr 2009 Pax Christi
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
From conception to forward, Courtney Hodell practiced her extraordinary midwifery, birthing this book from my obstreperous psyche. Without her and Jennifer Barth of HarperCollins and my agent, Amanda Urban, I’d no doubt still be writhing on the delivery table.
My sister, Lecia Scaglione, and her husband, Tom, helped me through innumerable hard stretches; so did Rodney Crowell, Don DeLillo, Dan Halpern, Robert Hass, Brooks Haxton, Terrance Hayes, Brenda Hillman, Ed Hirsch, Patti Macmillan, Mark and Lili Reinisch, George Saunders, Case Scaglione, J. W. Schenck, Mark Scher, Kent Scott, and Donna Zeiser. My consigliore and champion, rabbi and homeboy, was and is Michael Meyer.
Readers vetting pages to keep me honest include my ever-patient family plus Joan Alway, Mark Costello, Doonie, Deborah Greenwald, John Holohan, Deb Larson, Thomas Lux, Patti Macmillan, and Tobias Wolff. Special thanks to Elizabeth Auchincloss and Patricia Allen. Spiritual guidance came from most of the above as well as Uwen Akpan, S.J.; Father Joseph Kane; Sister Marisse May; and Matthew Roche, S.J.
Writers granting the right to excerpt their lit’rary works gratis include Don DeLillo, Nick Flynn, Louise Glück, Robert Hass, Brooks Haxton, Terrance Hayes, Sebastian Matthews, Heather McHugh, George Saunders, Charles Simic, Chris Smither, Franz Wright, and Dean Young. Other permissions were valiantly rustled up by Chris Robinson and Jason Sack.
About the Author
MARY KARR’s first memoir, The Liars’ Club, kick-started a memoir revolution and won nonfiction prizes from PEN and the Texas Institute of Letters. Also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, it rode high on the New York Times bestseller list for over a year, becoming an annual “best book” there and for The New Yorker, People, and Time. Recently Entertainment Weekly rated it number four in the top one hundred books of the past twenty-five years. Her second memoir, Cherry, which was excerpted in The New Yorker, also hit bestseller and “notable book” lists at the New York Times and dozens of other papers nationwide. A Guggenheim Fellow in poetry, Karr has won Pushcart Prizes for both verse and essays. Other grants include the Whiting Award and Radcliffe’s Bunting Fellowship. She is the Peck Professor of Literature at Syracuse University.
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Also by Mary Karr
Poetry
Sinners Welcome
Viper Rum
Devil’s Tour
Abacus
Nonfiction
Cherry
The Liars’ Club
Credits
Jacket photograph © 2006 by Marion Ettlinger
Jacket design by Archie Ferguson
Copyright
LIT. Copyright © 2009 by Mary Karr. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint from previously published material:
Isaac Babel, “The Church in Novgorod” from Complete Works of Isaac Babel, edited by Nathalie Babel, translated by Peter Constantine. Copyright © 2002 by Peter Constantine. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Don DeLillo, excerpt from Falling Man. Reprinted by permission of the author.
Alan Dugan, excerpt from “Love Song: I and Thou” from Poems Seven: New and Complete Poetry. Copyright © 2001 by Alan Dugan. Reprinted with the permission of Seven Stories Press, www.sevenstories.com.
Nick Flynn, excerpt from “Emptying Town” from Some Ether. Copyright © 2000 by Nick Flynn. Reprinted with the permission of Graywolf Press, Saint Paul, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org.
Louise Glück, “The Gift” from Vita Nova. Reprinted by permission of the author.
Robert Hass, excerpt from “Against Botticelli” from Praise. Reprinted by permission of the author.
Brooks Haxton, excerpt from “If I May” from They Lift Their Wings To Cry: Poems. Copyright © 2008 by Brooks Haxton. Used by
permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.
Terrance Hayes, excerpt from “The Blue Terrance” from Wind in a Box. Reprinted by permission of the author.
Weldon Kees, “The Smiles of the Bathers” from The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees, edited by Donald Justice, by permission of the Univ. of Nebraska. Copyright © 1962, 1975 by the Univ. of Nebraska.
William Matthews, excerpts from “Mingus at the Showplace” and “Self Help” from Time and Money. Reprinted by permission of Sebastian Matthews.
Heather McHugh, excerpt from “The Size of Spokane” from Hinge & Sign: Poems, 1968–1993. Reprinted by permission of the author.
George Saunders, excerpt from “The Falls” from Pastoralia. Reprinted by permission of the author.
Charles Simic, excerpt from “St. Thomas Aquinas” from The Voice at 3:00 A.M.: Selected Late & New Poems. Reprinted by permission of the author.
Chris Smither, excerpt from “No Love Today” from Drive You Home Today. Reprinted by permission of the author.
Franz Wright, excerpt from “Alcohol” from Ill Lit: Selected and New Poems. Reprinted by permission of the author.
Franz Wright, excerpt from “Pediatric Suicide.” Reprinted by permission of the author.
Dean Young, excerpts from “Bright Window” and “Side Effects” from Skid. Reprinted by permission of the author.
Adobe Digital Edition September 2009 ISBN 978-0-06-195968-4
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Mary Karr, Lit
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