Lit (4 page)

W
hen Mother and I had taken off for college, Daddy had stood on the back porch under the clothesline with the white cat slung over his shoulder like a baby he was burping, and he swore he’d come visit his first vacation. He said, Come Halloween, Pokey, at the latest. Old Pete’ll come walking up the road, making the rocks fly high. So stop that snubbing, you and your momma both. Make me wanna hork.

He spoke these words out of his own wet face, wiped with the back of his rawboned hand, but it was all bullshit, his promise. I knew, and he knew I knew. Between us stood the tacit contract that come vacation time, old Red would need Daddy’s help nailing asbestos siding up at his camp, or our backyard fence would require mending, or so-and-so would be laid up and Daddy could use the overtime. He’d never set foot on this campus. His drinking schedule had become too inviolable. Plus, these college folks with whom I was hobnobbing wouldn’t know how to speak to a man who’d graduated grade six and spent days off cleaning his squirrel gun.

In our household, I’d been assigned Daddy’s sidekick. Starting as a toddler, I’d kept a place standing beside him in his truck, and for the rest of his days, his lanky arm still reflexively extended itself at stop signs, as if to stop a smaller me from pitching through the windshield. But all through my drug-misty high school years, Daddy had floated through the house with an increasingly vacant stare, leaving a wake of Camel smoke.

Over time, I followed the books Mother set down like so many bread crumbs to her side, and soon she was leaning in my doorway to hear Otis Redding or the sardonic Frank Zappa squawk. Once, she’d coiled my hair into a pinned twist that matched her own and we’d sat in an opera house half floodlit as a mournful soprano pined:
Vissi d’arte, vissi d’amore
—I lived for life, I lived for love. That was Mother’s altar. Forget our scattered Sunday sorties into yoga and Christian Science. The theology Mother pored over—Buddhism mostly—was more theory than pursuit, and Lord knows why they baptized my sister, Lecia, Methodist. But I saw the shine in Mother’s eyes as that opera washed over her.

Which music Daddy cared diddly for. The volumes that towered around Mother’s bed were partly stacked up to block him out. For his part, a book was a squatty form of two-by-four—useful, say, for propping open a window with a broken sash.

Yet at college, I never stopped expecting to find Daddy reborn
beside me, showing me how to tie a slipknot, or run a hunting blade under a rabbit’s hide so the blue carcass could be disassembled and peppered and dredged in flour. And crossing the campus as leaves scratched along the sidewalks, I could sense whatever thinly stretched rubber bands on my back that once tethered me to Daddy had already snapped.

How he’d taught me to talk—
Y’all fixing to go to class?
—busted up the average midwesterner. Even his voice on the dorm phone could draw a crowd. Kids who answered tended to ape the drawl I’d started to lose, mimicking Daddy, they sounded like cornpone hillbillies from
Hee Haw
.

But I missed him enough to write a letter swearing fealty to the very self I was smothering:

Without Daddy, the wide plain of Minnesota was a vast and empty canvas, me a flealike pin dot scurrying across.

So I sought the favor of my all male professors, becoming the kind of puppyish suckup I’d hated in high school. Getting to class early, I shot my hand in the air.

The white-haired psychology prof, Walt Mink, was a tall, barrel-chested man whose foreshortened leg, damaged from a drunk driver’s head-on, gave him a slightly heaving walk he never slowed down for. No doubt, a knack for tending the troubled—including the occasional too-many-mushrooms psychosis—kept him moving at that clip. Specializing in brain physiology, he kept labs full of pigeons and rats to teach conditioning theory in intro psych. In a sleep lab he sometimes ran, he wired kids up to a high-tech EEG.

I’d signed up for his freshman seminar, Paradigms of Consciousness, under the delusion that
consciousness
was code for
drugs
—the sole subject in which I had a leg up. Early on, he spotted me pulling bobby socks on my hands after class. Having lost the leather mittens Daddy had bought me at GI surplus—stiff leather with Korean script on the inside tag—I’d taken to wearing footwear.

He said, This another fashion trend I’ve let slide by?

Chronic mitten loser, I told him.

My department collects strays, he said. Stop by my office tonight. We’ll see what we can find.

But during the day, the prospect slid back and forth in my skull like a BB. Why did he want to see me at night?

Leaving my library job, I faced sparse snow on the ground, scraped at by winds like straight razors. It was cold, you betcha. So I loped over to the science building, where the gleaming labs with black counters and curvy gas jets creeped me out.

There was a warm amber light spilling from Walt’s doorway. I craned around the door, and he waved me through. In a green towel on his lap, he held a white lab rat, stretched on her side, taking sips of air while her fidgeting, thimble-sized offspring—pink as young rosebuds—were nursing. She’d given birth earlier, he said, and seemed to have some kind of infection. Can you hold her so I can maneuver this eyedropper? he said.

I sat down in a side chair, and he eased the wriggling small weightlessness onto my lap.

It was puzzling to me, his tenderness for that rat, since where I grew up, rats were target practice—nutria rats big as terriers with their bright orange enamel fangs. You went to the dump with a .22 or a pistol to pick them off. Doonie had given me a nutria rat skull one Valentine’s Day.

She just had a rough time delivering today, Walt said. I was at home and kept thinking about her. Wondering how the babies were doing….

He fixed the eyedropper between her teeth and eased out a half drop, dabbing off her whiskers with a tissue. Then he idly ran his thumb along her muzzle.

Watching that, I couldn’t live another instant without unloading into his care my whirling insides. My every woe came spilling out. No money to go home. No place to stay over Thanksgiving. A boy I liked, then didn’t, then did. Plus the four jobs I held down were eating me alive. Walt handed me one pink flounce of tissue after another.

Worst of all, the only reason I’d come there was to write, but I’d refused to sign up for a lit class, being too ill read not to shame myself. At a freshman mixer early on, I heard kids hurling around like fastballs opinions about Russian novels it had taken me a week to figure out the characters in—I had to make a chart in back. They were talking Dostoyevsky’s blah-blah and the objective correlative of the doodad. They’d studied in Paris and Switzerland. The closest I’d come to speaking French was ordering boudain sausage from the take-out window of Boudreaux’s Fat Boy.

What small whiz-kid luster I’d given off in grade school had gone to mist starting my sunglassed junior year. I knew some Shakespeare plays, and I’d read a couple great books till their spines split. But I’d never had to form an opinion about any of that. I’d just blink at it like a bass.

Instead, I’d signed up for classes related to linguistic philosophy, for which I had even less talent. In Walt’s own seminar, we were reading neo-Kantian Ernst Cassirer—a brick I broke my brain on.

Walt would help me with all that, he said, adding, Come in to talk if you’re feeling bad.

From bawling so hard, my eyes were squinty as a boxer’s, and my salty face felt drawn up as by too-tight pigtails. But the deep calm Walt gave off had stilled me inside. I stared down at the mice, each small enough to fit into a sugar spoon.

Finally, I said, I thought you were here to put stuff in our heads.

Unless we deal with what’s already in there, he said, I can’t accomplish that.

In the hallway, Walt reached into a cardboard box of lost clothes and fished around till he raised up a pair of gray suede gloves. Sliding my hand in one, I felt the silky warmth of rabbit fur. I’d have felt too greedy taking them myself, but he nudged me on.

I was in the hall when he called me back to him, saying, One more thing…

I stopped. The unheated hall was shadowy, and watching him heave toward me, I felt a sick fear bubble up. If he makes a pass at me, I thought, I’ll run.

He said, Mind if I ask you something personal?

I stared past him into the lab behind him, where silver faucets—curved like swans’ necks—glinted in the dim light. His blue-eyed face was dominated by a hawk’s-beak nose. He said, Are you sleeping okay? Gained or lost any weight?

Actually, I’d used a food service knife to poke an extra hole in my belt already, and for weeks on end, no matter how tired, I’d wake at three or four in the morning, sometimes hollering at some shadowy figure over me.

He pulled a pen from his pocket and limped over to the wall to write down a phone number on a card, saying his wife ran a neighborhood clinic if I’d like to try some therapy.

No way could I afford anything like that.

Oh, I’m pretty sure she could work something out, he said. She’s
good that way. And you should come over to the house to meet her and the kids. My daughter writes poetry, and you might be able to help her with it. We’d pay you of course….

Walt helped me figure out that if I dropped the murderous physics, my grades might score scholarship money, maybe soon as second term. He’d hire me to clean rat and pigeon cages, which would free me from the food service’s vile hairnet.

(As he had for who knows how many others, Walt had decided to lift me up. The therapy—when I showed up—involved sitting in a cozy office, trying to look sane enough not to be kicked out. But every now and then I’d blubber about being lonesome for home or scared to fail, and I mostly left breathing deeper.)

Buoyed up after talking to Walt, I set out for my dorm. The cold had polished and clarified the sky into onyx. The stars seemed close enough to scoop up. Crossing the quad, I felt some wormhole into my skull finally get bored. There was an internal click as an actual idea of Cassirer’s broke through. The sentence that had so addled me suddenly made sense (in the paperback of
The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms
I still own, the phrase has rockets and fireworks scribbled alongside it):

He meant that words shaped our realities, our perceptions, giving them an authority God had for other generations. The indecipherable sentence had been circumnavigating my insides like a bluebottle fly for a week, and at last I got hold of it: words would define me, govern and determine me. Words warranted my devotion—not drugs, not boys. That’s why I clung to the myth that poetry could somehow magically still my scrambled innards.

I moved through the lung-scalding air, no longer a misplaced
cracker but a by-God symbolic animal who’d puzzled out—over a week’s time—the meaning of a hard sentence.

But checking my P.O. in the student union the next day, brushed past by the sons and daughters of the professional class—my down-jacketed (alleged) peers—I sensed a dashed line around me where invisible scissors would soon clip me away. Fair-minded, straight-toothed, impossibly clear-skinned, these kids were nothing if not democratically inclined vis-à-vis the likes of me. They blew pot smoke from their joints into my pursed lips and paid my way to Dylan and the Grateful Dead. They gave me rides in paid-for cars. Their parents steered me under restaurant awnings and through doors where the maître d’s looked at my soaking tennis shoes long and hard. They passed menus featuring appetizers that cost more than the whole chicken-fried steak dinners Daddy bought us on paycheck night. They invited me home for Thanksgiving and Easter. They seemed to trust my scrappy climb out of the lower class would allow me to handle on first sight all manner of eating utensil by imitating, chimpanzeelike, their movements.

Their bottomless cool—their cynical postures grown from privilege they were ungrateful for—could make me hate them. Born on third base, my daddy always said of the well off, and think they hit a home run.

But by God, I could outdrink the little suckers, and when the dashed lines around my body felt sharp enough to be visible, I might take up a held-out bottle.

Faced with a boy I had a crush on—a bow-legged Missouri cowboy with the face and form of young Marlon Brando—I eagerly took the tequila his friend handed me. Forgoing lime and salt, I tucked my hair behind my ears and tossed back a shot. As that one went down like bleach, I was holding up my glass for another.

Whoa, Brando said, looks like you’ve done this before.

Absolutely, I said.

She’s from Texas, a kid from my physics class said.

Texas girl? Brando said over his shoulder, before turning back to
the two girls who’d presented themselves to him like dinner mints. I threw back another shot, which scalded a little channel through me. The boys cheered. By the third shot, the tequila seemed less poisonous. By the fourth, I felt a cool blue moon rising in my chest.

Though I’d vowed not to drink that week (I had an anthro paper to finish), I’d spied Brando doing shots with his pals and wedged into the group. He cut me a smile before squatting down to unlatch his guitar case, and as he started to strap on the instrument, I saw in the case’s blue velvet bottom a weathered copy of Joyce’s
Portrait of the Artist,
which felt like a further sign that we were carved from the same wood. That novel was one I innately knew to be unreservedly great, and whose first paragraph somebody started slurrily to recite: