The Liars' Club: A Memoir Read Online Free PDF Page A

light, I usually expected to get plowed down by a Red Ball truck flying out of nowhere (unlikely, given the lack of traffic). I became both a flincher and a fighter. I was quick to burst into tears in the middle of a sandlot baseball game and equally quick to whack someone in the head without much provocation. Neighborhood myth has it that I once coldcocked a five-year-old playmate with an army trench shovel, then calmly went back to digging. Some of this explosiveness just came from a naturally bad temperament, of course. But some stems from that night, when my mind simply erased everything up until Dr. Boudreaux began inviting me to show him marks that I now know weren’t even there.
    The missing story really starts before I was born, when my mother and father met and, for reasons I still don’t get, quickly married.
    My mother had just arrived in Leechfield. She’d driven down from New York with an Italian sea captain named Paolo. He was fifty to her thirty, and her fourth husband. My mother didn’t date, she married. At least that’s what we said when I finally found out about all her marriages before Daddy. She racked up seven weddings in all, two to my father. My mother tended to blame the early marriages on her own mother’s strict Methodist values, which didn’t allow for premarital fooling around, of which she was fond. She and Paolo had barely finished the honeymoon and set up housekeeping in Leechfield, where he was fixing to ship out, than they began fighting.
    So it was on a wet winter evening in 1950 that she threw herdresses, books, and hatboxes in the back of an old Ford and laid rubber out of Leechfield, intending never to return. She was heading for her mother’s cotton farm about five hundred miles west. Just outside of Leechfield, where Highway 73 yields up its jagged refinery skyline to bayous and rice fields, she blew a tire. She was about twenty yards from the truck stop where Daddy happened to be working. He had a union job as an apprentice stillman at Gulf Oil, but he was filling in at the station that night for his friend Cooter, who’d called him in desperation from a crap game in Baton Rouge where he was allegedly on a roll.
    All Mother’s marriages, once I uncovered them in my twenties, got presented to me as accidents. Her meeting Daddy was maybe the most unlikely. Had Cooter not gotten lucky with the dice in a Baton Rouge honky-tonk, and had Paolo not perturbed Mother in the process of unpacking crates, and had the tire on the Ford not been worn from a recent cross-country jaunt (Paolo’s mother lived in Seattle, and they’d traveled there from New York, then down to Texas, where divorce laws permitted Mother to quickly get rid of husband number three before signing up with number four).… All these events conspired to strand my mother quite literally at my father’s feet on Highway 73 that night.
    He said there was a General Electric moon shining the first time he saw her, so bright it was like a spotlight on her. She refused his help jacking up the car and proceeded to cuss like a sailor when she couldn’t get the lug nuts loose. My mother claims that she had only recently learned to cuss, from Paolo. Daddy said her string of practiced invectives, which seemed unlikely given her fancy clothes (she had on a beige silk suit) and New York license plates, impressed him no end. He’d never heard a woman cuss like that before.
    She changed the tire and must have made some note of his raw good looks. He was some part Indian—we never figured out which tribe—black-haired and sharp-featured. His jug-eared grin reminded her of Clark Gable’s. Since she fancied herself a sort of Bohemian Scarlett O’Hara, the attraction was deep and sudden. I should also note that Mother was prone to conversion experiencesof various kinds, and had entered a fervent Marxist stage. She toted
Das Kapital
around in her purse for years. Daddy was active in the Oil Chemical and Atomic Workers Union.