Lit (28 page)

I
ll advised though it is, I start trolling for a beau—forget the semaphores Patti flaps in warning before my face. Reading St. Augustine’s memoir, I come across his seminal line:
Give me chastity, Lord. But not yet
.

Which is my battle cry by the time David of halfway-house fame shows up. He leaves Boston to rent a boxy monk’s cell spitting distance from my house. Ponytailed David with his gangster Timberland boots and red bandana holding his head together. Not yet thirty, with the habit of referring to his less than bright local bed partners in meetings as the Bimbo Brigade, David must’ve seen me—a single mom in academia—as some final doorway toward a cleaned-up act.

He’d looked like an old friend when he’d first rolled in that summer with a pal. Both were shopping for a cheap place to hole up while finishing freelance writing projects they’d taken advances for. (A prodigy like David did Harvard philosophy as a mere detour.) Over cheap Chinese, we all sat for hours reordering green tea and bowls of
deep-fried whatnot till fortune-cookie slips confettied the linoleum booth top.

Back in Boston, we’d always talked books—nobody had read more than David. When I’d whined in early meetings about not writing, from across the room, he’d shoot a conspiratorial grimace. He edited Joan’s dissertation before it was published, and a year later, he and I even swapped and slashed up each other’s first, sober work. But he’d seemed like a stray and forlorn undergrad on Easter when Warren and I had invited him over.

In Syracuse, I must bat my eyes at him or fluff my hair like some cartoon seductress
(What a ma-yan!)
, for right after, David starts packing my mailbox with bulging envelopes. Logorrheic, he calls himself. Words just pour from his pen. His yards-long letters come hand-printed in weensy, meticulous mouse type, painstakingly footnoted. Soon he’s pleading his troth, signing his missives Young Werther (after a tragic swain in book and opera, with a crush on an older woman).

David is the only guy rash enough ever to get my name tattooed on his bicep—in a heart with a banner. Even before we’ve kissed on the lips, he does this. Watching those flesh-colored band-aids peel off in a phalanx to show an arm scarred and bloodied, a thinking woman would’ve hied for the hills. My response is more pitiful. I think,
Wow, he might really like me
—a thought nobody past grade five gets to have about anything bigger than a hamster. I plant a big wet Texas mouth on his.

It’s a sad testament to my virtue that an inked-up arm is all it really takes to bed me. (As one friend said later,
You gotta love a date willing to do stuff he’ll regret
.) Proof of David’s undying conviction, I take it as, though Lecia points out cynically that any Mary tattoo need only
Blessed Virgin
carved above it for reason to remount its throne. That and David’s move to my block prove, in my moronic head, some divine power’s orchestrating our future together.

For a week or so, it’s bliss. Any night I don’t have Dev, David and
I smoke cigars in my tree fort or read Russian short stories aloud till dawn. We watch movies where stuff blows up exclusively. Within the month, he phones Mother to announce, Mrs. Karr, I plan to marry your daughter. Mother’s heartless comeback:
Didn’t you just get out of some place?

Then one day, almost like a switch is thrown in us both, reality sets in, turning the whole deal inside out. I’m raking leaves, waiting to borrow David’s car for after-school pickup, but he slides alongside the curb, rolls down his window, and announces he’s going to the gym instead.

Can’t I drop you at the gym and then get Dev? I want to know.

David prefers to pick up Dev himself, then work out.

But I’m trying to shelter Dev from David’s presence in my life, which David resents. He wants to plug into the husband slot right away. Words get sharp. I throw down the rake and stalk inside. He follows.

The ensuing fight rocks the rafters—a worse tussle than Warren and I ever dragged through. And soon our every day is a rage, the whole romantic endeavor flip-flopping from cuss fight to smoochy-faced makeup—the reversals coming too fast to get down in a diary. When Dev’s home, I won’t let David sleep over, which pisses him off no end, as does my leaving early from a research trip he takes me on. I’m mad he doesn’t fit into the slot marked
reliable
.

(Of course, his temper fits are as vivid to me now as my own are invisible. No doubt he was richly provoked, for I’m nothing if not sharp-tongued in a fight, and however young he was, neither was I in shape to partner anybody.)

If David enters the mind-set he calls
a black-eyed red-out
, he’s inclined to hurl all manner of object—book and backpack not least. And as a verbal opponent, he’s a colossus, once driving me to that lowest of schoolyard attacks—personal appearance:
At least I’m not a four-eyed, broke-nosed fop
was one of many sentences I had to apologize for.

Not that anything I utter warrants his pitching my coffee table at me, my sole piece of intact furniture splintering on the wall. After, I ring a lawyer girlfriend to send him a bill for it. He fires off a check with a note arguing that since he’s paid for the table, isn’t it his? I shoot back that the table’s still mine, but he will own its brokenness for perpetuity.

(Years later, we’ll accept each other’s longhand apologies for the whole debacle and resume the correspondence that held the better angels of our natures.)

Disaster, my teacher Bob explained to me once, can translate as
something wrong with the stars
. Our stars—David’s and mine—badly misalign, yet we can’t escape each other’s orbits. He climbs on my balcony and bangs on the bedroom window. I slip heartfelt notes under his windshield wiper. Coming across each other at a meeting, we wind up making out in the parking lot.

By Thanksgiving, we’ve both changed our phone numbers to escape each other’s stalkeresque calls, and we’re burnt out enough to let go, though we’ll reconnect for a few sloppy goodbyes before he moves away that spring.

By December when telephone poles sparkle with red lights and green bells, I’m sunk in the grief for my marriage that I’d been running from all along. This time I vow to embrace my loneliness till some spiritual presence takes up residence in my rib cage.

But I face the holiday like my own private gallows. Dev and I shape clay elf ornaments to bake in the oven, but at night, while I’m grading papers, they take on a ghoulish, leering quality I didn’t figure on. Walking to school under the gray sky, I envision my solo Christmas hunched over a hot plate boiling packaged noodles. (Forget that I don’t own a hot plate.)

Patti invites me over on Christmas Day, contingent on my volunteering at the local soup kitchen—a duty I resent like hell. She says, Whatever you want emotionally, you have to start giving away. Want to find company? Open up to other people.

That’s how I land behind the steam table of a homeless shelter on Christmas, hair wadded into a black net. One hand wields a long-handled spoon, the other an ice cream scoop for potatoes. Patti predicted I’d bond cheerily with my fellow volunteers. But to me, they’re that most grisly of Christmas specters: a happy family. Uniformed in matching Buffalo Bills football jerseys, they nonstop grin like beauty contestants who’ve vaselined their teeth. The father says,
Our lives are so abundant, this is just our way of giving back
.

Maybe they don’t smile at my newly divorced ass like I’ve got cooties, but that’s what I feel, since part of my illness is a proclivity for lopping myself off from others while simultaneously blaming them for how lonely I feel.

Pretty soon I find myself staring at the blackened teeth of a crack-head, thinking, This is the bottom.

But as I hand over the tray in baby-blue plastic with its boxy compartments, a flash goes off inside. It hits me that had I kept drinking awhile, I could’ve ended up gumming my turkey like this woman does. And for an instant, I actually look at her. Reaching for the tray is a big-knuckled farm girl’s hand shaped surprisingly like my own in the plastic glove. It’s one of those head-trippy instants when my innate suspicion inverts. For a second our matching hands simultaneously hold opposing sides of the steaming item. How manufactured we both are—it briefly strikes me—things shaped and formed, as the tray is, or the long-handled spoon with its flat rivet. I guide the spoon to dive into the stuffing, thinking, I didn’t grow this hand myself. It was drawn forth without my willing it into flesh.

I’d like to say I didn’t have a revelation on Christmas Eve in a homeless shelter. If it seems predictable and unlikely, try it before you’re snide about it. I’d ditto like to say I fell Buddha-like to the floor and began to serve mankind selflessly ever after. But the blush of compassion lasts just a millisecond, diluting soon as I start struggling to name it. Meanwhile, my thumb on the ice cream scoop mechanically pushes out a load of mashed potatoes; I ladle up cranberry.

The family in their Buffalo Bills shirts don’t seem like such chowderheads for an instant, and how alive I suddenly am. Even the ache in my feet is a measure of that.

Here comes the next guy in the line, who’s made a yellow turban from police crime-scene tape.

Like your hat, I say.

I did it my own self.

I can see that.

You can make yourself one. There’s a whole bunch of this ribbon up on Crouse.

He gestures with the sweeping open palm of an emperor.

There’s an unbidden clap of gratitude in my rib cage again. This must be what the people in meetings have been gushing about. (I once thought saying you were grateful was a nice lie, like saying
Glad to see you
.) He’s passed me by and is now stuffing dinner rolls down the front of his grease-streaked parka.

After cleanup, I stand at the pay phone regaling Patti with my trite everyone-is-everyone-else revelation. She says, Oh, that, as if she expected nothing else.

But my memory for joy is still uncultivated. Right before New Year’s, my head’s badgering voice announces what a loser I am without a New Year’s date. But Dev comes home early from Warren’s, and the next day we invite over anybody with nowhere to go—foreign students, a few neighbors, a sober ex-con—for red beans and rice with greens and corn bread.

Not long after, James Laughlin sends me an acceptance letter for the book of poems, along with a check for a whopping seven hundred and fifty bucks—about a third of my credit card debt and maybe the most I’ve earned aggregate on poetry in the previous fifteen years.

And that’s how hard that was.

O
ne winter afternoon, waiting for Dev to come home through the snow, I hear a thrash of banging against the storm door. Running out from the kitchen, I see him fumbling with the outside handle as snowballs splatter around him. I yank open the door, and the kids scatter like mice.

Dev’s cheeks are sopping and crimson, which only makes his black-lashed blue eyes brighter. They’re fixed in outrage, staring past me. When I ask how many kids there are and he tells me five, I have to stop myself from busting out the door to chase the little bastards down.

Over cups of cocoa, we sit in the tiny kitchen, and he says,
Why is this happening to me?
in a voice so wholly exhausted, he might have been sixty. With his spoon, he’s fishing the sodden marshmallow off his cocoa.

Because, I say, children are childish. You’re new to school, relatively. They’ve all grown up together. You’re the obvious choice.

He stuffs the marshmallow in his mouth and ponders this before asking, Why would God let this happen?

The question—the same I’d dwelled on in the past—maybe shows the effects of our nightly prayers.

Because, I say, when you grow up, you’re gonna be so smart and good-looking that if something bad didn’t happen to you now, you’d be a jerk then—one of those snotty kids who thinks he’s all that.

Like Dan.

I’m thinking specifically of Dan, I say (I barely know who Dan is).

Dev picks at the foam atop his cocoa, saying, Dan knows karate. He only invited the cool kids to his birthday.

He studies the cocoa as if it were tea leaves foretelling the soggiest future. I get up and place a skillet on the stove for another supper of scrambled eggs. After a while he says, There are so many of them. I mean, the snowballs just kept coming.

Isn’t there a teacher or grown-up you can appeal to at school?

They act like they’re my friends in school. Then they start chasing me.

I offer to start picking him up again, and he pins me with a tired look.

I’m not a baby, he says. All the other kids walk home.

I know, I know. Okay.

We sit there listening to the wind make the windowpanes shudder. You know, I say, some people think when somebody slaps you, you should turn the other cheek.

He says, face still chapped scarlet, I only have two cheeks.

That night, tucking him in, I tell him how I’d been the littlest kid in my neighborhood, and because I skipped a grade and had a propensity to mouth off, they beat me up all the time. I say, You know your grandpa Pete always told me to bite them.

This strikes Dev as hilarious. He says, He wanted you to bite them?

Yeah, if he wasn’t around to help and they were bigger. He’d say,
Lay the ivory to ’em, Pokey
.

That’s funny, Dev says.

I kiss his shampooed head, and later, standing in the doorway as I click off the light, I briefly pray for a car that I might track down and smash the little bastards like the toads they are. I tell him I’m gonna call some of the kids’ parents, the ones I know.

Don’t get them in trouble, he says. That’ll just make it worse.

Downstairs, I call around but get no answers, and when finally I reach one mom I barely know, she harumphs into the phone, saying, Why do you think they’re picking on him? You think he’s innocent, I guess.

My face gets hot. I say, I have no doubt that Dev is as savage as any grade school boy, but this is five against one. This is Lord of the Flies.

Well, he must be doing something, she says.

Out of the blue, I say, I’m from the state of Texas.

What’s that supposed to mean?

I know my son is gonna survive these ass-whippings no matter how many of them there are. But when it’s five against one and there’s not a grown-up to intervene, I’m gonna instruct Dev to pick up a rock or a stick and leave a mark on somebody. Let’s hope it’s not your kid.

My uncle’s a lawyer, she says.

My daddy’s Pete Karr, I say, and hang up.

Over breakfast the next day, I tell Dev the strategy’s this: if he’s away from school, and there are that many of them, he should turn and fight. Throw down his book bag and just accept the fact that he’s gonna take an ass-whipping.

Slipping his backpack on, he looks completely defeated.

One ass-whipping hurts once, I says. Running home afraid every day hurts every day.

Why would they ever stop? he says.

Because you’re gonna pick out one of them—the closest one you can get to—and you’re gonna leave a mark. Bite the dog dookey out of him.
Lay the ivory to ’em
.

He tries to grin, but a cloud passes over his face as he pulls his royal blue watchman’s cap on.

What? I say. What’s the matter?

Dan does know karate, Dev says.

Do you know, I say, what would happen to Dan if you hit him full-on?

What? Dev says.

He’d topple like a pine. He’s a pipsqueak of a thing. You’ve got a leg as big as Dan.

Dev grins all over his face. He says, Really?

Absolutely. Karate or no karate. You’re twice his size.

He’s out the door when he turns and hollers back, You swear I won’t get in trouble?

If you hit first, you’ve lost TV for a month.

That afternoon he comes in shucking off his backpack. He’d run for about a block before turning to face the pack. Dan had said he was gonna karate Dev’s block off, and Dev had said, You go ahead and hit me first, adding, When I hit you, you’re gonna topple like a pine.

End of discussion.

Come March, after I’ve been praying for a solution to our transportation woes, a professor I’ve met once or twice through mutual friends approaches me in the quad. She’s going to Italy and heard I needed a car. Maybe I could keep hers through the summer; she’d consider it a favor.

And that’s how hard that was. Such unearned gifts feed the growing faith that some mystery is carrying me.

The snow’s just melting when I take out the fourth credit card I can’t pay—one with a five-hundred-dollar limit and a fat percentage interest rate. That same week the university flies the creative writing profs to New York for a program fund-raiser.

Once the dinner’s over, the writers cross the street to the Pierre Hotel to hang out. With its checkerboard floor and ornate armchairs,
it’s like entering a Fred Astaire movie. That night Toby and his pals sing in loud harmony the old seventies hit “Helpless,” swaying side to side like a grade-school choir.

I’m just finishing my Coke when who should come kneel at my seat but Toby’s agent from almost a year back. Where, she says with both charm and entitlement, is my damn memoir?

I’m shocked she remembered me and even more shocked when I hear myself tell her the truth: I’m in the middle of a divorce and haven’t done that much—less than ten pages.

She says, Send me a proposal. Maybe we can get you an advance.

Here’s where grace comes in. Had I been drinking, I would’ve pretended to know what a proposal was, then lived in crouched fear, maybe trying to find out or not—being too afraid in my drinking form to fail at a proposal. Instead, I hear my mouth spill another truth: I don’t know the first thing about writing a proposal.

She waves her hand like it’s the easiest thing in the world, saying, Maybe a hundred pages. Three or four chapters.

In a poet’s mind, a hundred pages sounds like two thousand. I haven’t published a hundred pages in twenty years.

How long do you think, she asks, before I can get those chapters?

My head’s scrambling. I figure when Dev goes to stay with his dad mid-June, I’ll have a month to work, so I say, Mid-July.

Great, she says. Then just add a letter saying what else you might put in the book.

I must have a stunned look on my face.

I’ll call you Monday, she says, and walk you through it.

To write the stuff down is no cakewalk, since memories from that time can ravage me. But after I get home, I start getting up mornings at four or five, praying to set down words before Dev comes down. When Dev’s with Warren, I unplug the phone and apply my ass to a desk chair. Some days, I actually hear my daddy telling me stories, almost like he’s risen up to ride through the pages with Mother and our whole wacky herd.

Come June, I send the agent pages on a Thursday, and she signs me the following Saturday, has an auction that week, and a few days later—while I’m chopping basil for supper—I hear the overnight envelope with payment hit my porch.

In the steamy kitchen, I draw the check out and sit studying it before I even throw pasta in the bubbly water. It’s in no way a massive check, but it’s the biggest I’ve ever seen, and it’s fallen from the sky just in time to get us through the summer, plus making a down payment on a used Toyota.

Saying thanks to the invisible forces that brought it, I sit looking at the check. On the table before me, there’s a giant pickle jar Dev’s filled with torn grass and crickets. The bent-legged bugs are whirring to fill the room, one or two trying to climb up the curved glass. Dev bursts in, saying, Mom, let’s set the crickets free tonight. And I tell him that’s just what I was thinking.