Authors: Mary Karr
Which way I flie is Hell; my self am Hell
.
—John Milton,
Paradise Lost
T
hat night I’m driving back to Mother’s condo not having prayed, which seems no accident from this juncture. Cleaning out the childhood home that day had been heavy duty. Plus, it’s a dark time in terms of the Exercises—the season of Lent, atonement—when you daily pray to be shown your own sinfulness in all its ugliness. Over bayous my rental car goes low-flying like a steel-coated bat. Since I didn’t quite believe that spiritual forces for good and evil tug us to and fro, I fancied that failing to pray was understandable, an accident, for I’d risen at four to catch a plane down to Houston.
In the rental car, I fly over foggy blacktop alone, with the sciatic kink in my lower back keeping me edged toward the phosphorescent dash. But swelling in my chest is—what unknown sense—pride? I’ve been able to help Mother for once with more than a check in the mail. My sister hasn’t borne the burden alone. And the company of my Leechfield brothers has left me feeling all shiny inside.
Sister Margaret had warned me that praying to know your own sins may prompt an arid season, with no consolations. Which makes you—in her scary parlance—a juicy morsel for the Adversary. Okay, I said, if a guy in a red suit with horns and a long scaly tail appears,
I’ll shake a crucifix at him. Margaret told me, He might appear as future pleasure, or he’ll appeal to your intellectual vanity. Asked what I should do to prevent these dark assaults, she said, During Lent, don’t miss a single minute of prayer, no matter what comes up. Err on the side of overkill, even if you feel yourself only going through the motions.
That night driving from the homestead, the black sky sliding off my windows, I don’t consider sending up any hosanna of thanks, nor do Margaret’s warnings echo through me. I feel exhausted, sure, but contrarily swell about myself, like the best daughter. Sin? What sin? The hours spent cleaning out the house have left me in weary ease—proud of the good works I’ve done. The fog holds me in the car’s hull, and I drive suspended in time.
Reaching Mother’s condo about eleven, I climb the stairs swinging a light garment bag, expecting to find her asleep. But she’s ensconced in her mushroom-colored recliner, a giant magnifying lamp burning like a halo alongside her. An old movie with the sound muted unrolls across the screen. I ready myself for the praise and approbation she’ll heap on me for squiring her into this luxury.
She says, Did you have fun?
I see from the set of her jaw she’s fired up and ask her what’s wrong.
Nothing’s wrong. How could anything be wrong? I’m here in the little white hole you and your sister have buried me in. You’ve stripped me of all my possessions, robbed me of anything I held dear.
Mother, what are you talking about?
I’ve been sitting here wondering whether it would make you happy to come in and find me with my brains blown out. That’s what would really make your day.
It’s an ambush I never saw coming, and where I’d been sizzling with tired satisfaction before, I’ve suddenly got a kink between my shoulder blades. I say, I’m exhausted, Mother. Don’t start this shit now.
(Maybe normal people don’t have to beseech God at such junc
tures to stay level, but I do. But it’s as if I’ve never prayed. No space exists in me for any perspective.)
In a flash, the fishy crab taste sours my breath, and I bend to rummage my bag for a toothbrush. Instead, I get a glowing vision of my toiletries bag, forgotten in the old house. I ask Mother if she has a fresh toothbrush or some mouthwash.
I have nothing, she says. She’s sobbing. I have nothing.
To escape the image of her pitched forward, her back heaving, I shut the bathroom door. I wash the grit off my face and neck. Spying a frayed toothbrush upside down in a glass, I squeeze paste on it and start to scrub my mouth out when I taste bleach—and do I detect the odor of shit on its bristles? It’s been used to scrub the toilet. I spit and rinse my mouth and spit, holding back the urge to vomit.
And, in that instant, my mouth scalded with bleach and shit, I feel the entire fabric of the world began to undergo a profound shift. I cease to be myself, or rather, my adult self. Time arcs back, carrying me in it.
On the ends of my arms, I feel the length of my fingers dwindle. Though standing upright, I sense the floor escalating closer as my legs get shorter. My arms shrink in their sockets. My eyes no longer sit flush to the front of my face; they’ve retreated far back into my head, as if my true self is crouched in terror in the back of my skull, staring out at Mother from far off.
And, into each strand of my mother’s white hair, fiery color floods back. Her shoulders square, and she’s tall and slim again, facing me with the enraged pout of her former drunker self. In an eyeblink, our old forms devour us.
When you’ve been hurt enough as a kid (maybe at any age), it’s like you have a trick knee. Most of your life, you can function like an adult, but add in the right portions of sleeplessness and stress and grief, and the hurt, defeated self can bloom into place.
Standing before Mother that night, I hear her spewing the kind of bile I listened to for most of the worst evenings of my life, and God no
longer exists, nor any road for me other than to let land whatever barbs Mother might pitch. She’s God then, or my fear is God. Her face warps into the old mask as she shrieks, You raped me, you and your sister raped me.
I inhale her fury as I might fumes from glue tubes squeezed into a paper bag. The adrenaline that flushes through me inflates me again into a fire-breathing rage. What I shout is more messy and furious than these lines, but the general gist goes:
You could talk to me like that when I was little and I didn’t have any way out.
But I spent all day throwing out all the canvases you never had the balls to paint on. Every shit-sucking day of my whole life, you blamed me and Daddy and Lecia for you not painting. The truth is: You never had the balls to paint, Mother. You were too fucking scared to reveal your ugly self to the world. So you stayed home, and you vomited all that pent-up poison on all of us. And having made not a single plan for your old age, you sit in the house we paid for, trying to screech me back into submission.
I don’t fucking think so, Mother. You don’t like it here? Get in your fucking car and go. And Lecia and I will sell this place and enjoy the first vacation either of us has had in years, you selfish fucking bitch
.
I think is what I said.
When I stop speaking, I see my terrified eighty-year-old Mother, small and white-haired. She’s collapsed on a recliner, using a magnifying glass to read the labels of pill bottles, sobbing. She’s looking for her nitroglycerin tablets.
Which I retrieve for her.
And that’s how I find my sinfulness in all its ugliness—not in prayer but in its absence. Without God, any discomfort makes me capable of attacking with piety the defenseless—including a frail, confused old lady who’s lost her home of fifty years. And it’s for this type of realization that God—in His infinite wisdom—created mirrors. I
put Mother to bed and catch a glimpse of us as I pull the covers up to her chin. I’m saying I’m so sorry, and she’s claiming to understand.
In the next room at the side of the unfamiliar bed, I get on my knees and try to pray, but my pinballing consciousness slams side to side against my curved rib cage, blasts up to the top of my skull and down against my pelvic cavity, and keeps slamming around that way in vectors I can’t follow. I kneel there for fifteen minutes or so, then climb into bed and implode into sleep as if smashed up inside with a ballpeen hammer.
Fitful, this rest is. At one point I dream I’m picking up a child’s stuffed animal—a Beanie Baby of the type Dev collected as a kid. In my dream hand, I look down, and the stuffed toy has morphed into a pit viper. With its triangular head, it lunges at my face. I scream myself awake and sit up and see—with eyes wide, a night terror—snakes lunging from the bed’s tufted headboard.
Sweaty, heart rattling against my ribs, I look at the digital clock—just after three in the morning I’d gone to bed about two. I pull on running shorts, then tie on a pair of sneakers, thinking that a few miles of road will bang the ugly out of me.
Instead, I lie facedown on the carpet, repeating the prayer about God taking my will. Speaking it, I feel the words sucked from my mouth into a vacuum where God is not. My head’s a hurricane, and to pray at all is like screaming into a gale.
Lying there, I remember the Scriptures I’ve forgotten for days. Margaret specifically gave me two passages, saying, While I was praying this week, these pieces came to me. I’m very strongly guided to give them to you. How touched I’d been when she handed them over, but I hadn’t picked them up.
I find in Mother’s still-boxed books a Bible, floppy and old, its binding cracked and peeling like a batwing. Opening it, I see Mother’s name carefully inscribed:
For Charlie Marie Moore, from her loving Mother Mary, Christmas 1927
.
I flip through the onionskin pages to my first assignment, verses seven through twelve of Psalm fifty-one. What I see makes the skin of my scalp prickle, for the lines are marked in pale blue chalk. A child’s hand has drawn a wavy line in the margin—not across the whole psalm, only alongside the lines I’ve been steered to—verses seven to twelve, which very deliberately traverse two sections of verse from the middle of one to the other. Kneeling, I sit back on my feet and feel the flesh on my scalp creep. I read the words. (Later, I’ll learn this is
the hanging psalm
read to English prisoners as they approached the gallows.)
II
How odd, I think, for I never thought of Mother as particularly devout in childhood—she wasn’t. But it seems vaguely significant still.
Only when I flip to my second assignment—St. Paul’s letter to James—does my breath catch, for as I turn page after page after page, there are no other blue marks in the Bible, not one, until I reach the New Testament, where Margaret has assigned a passage about temptation, James one through thirteen. Mother’s childhood hand has marked one through twelve, using the same blue chalk as the other passage.
Blessed is the man who perseveres in temptation, for when he has been proved he will receive the crown of life that he promised to those who love him. No one experiencing temptation should say, “I am being tempted by God” for God is not subject to temptation to evil, and He Himself tempts no one. Rather each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire conceives and brings forth sin, and when sin reaches maturity, it gives birth to death.
This is not the parting of the Red Sea. This is not a dead friend arisen from his gauze windings and peering out of the stone tomb or stilling the waves about to upend my boat. This is not the healing of a leper, nor a bullet hole entering the front of my helmet and exiting out the rear without touching the head that wore it.
As miracles go, it may not even seem like one. But it feels as if God once guided my mother’s small hand, circa 1920-something, to make two notes I’d very much need to find seventy years later—a message that I could be made new, that I am—have always been—loved.
I see the small blonde my mother had been, on the cusp of running like a shithouse rat into her own torments. And I know how specifically designed we are for each other. I feel in a bone-deep way the degree to which I’m watched over—how everyone is. And how my stone heart is moment by moment softening as I embrace that.
Maybe all any of us wants is to feel singled out for some long, sweet, quenching draft of love, some open-throated guzzling of it—like what a baby gets at the breast. The mystery of the Bible passages, marked just for me, does that.
I stay on my knees a long time, and sometime near dawn, my cell phone trills, and I ask my sister the math genius what are the odds—in terms of probability—that those two passages would’ve been marked of all the verses possible. And she says, Very slender.
Seeing the marked Bible, Mother’s not in the least flabbergasted,
saying, I knew we were born to be together a long time ago. Maybe you do now, too.
Mock that experience as random chance if you like, but from then on, I start to arrive in the instant as never before, standing up in it as if pushed from behind like a wave, for it feels as if I was made—from all the possible shapes a human might take—not to prove myself worthy but to refine the worth I’m formed from, acknowledge it, own it, spend it on others.
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.