The Liars' Club: A Memoir Read Online Free PDF

Whenever they renegotiated a contract—every two years—he was known as an able picket-line brawler. He was, in short, a Texas working man, with a smattering of Indian blood and with personality traits that she had begun to consider heroic.
    Out in Lubbock, Grandma was rolling a cobbler crust for Mother’s homecoming dinner when the call came that she had been detained in Leechfield. Grandma had prayed for her to make up with Paolo. She’d started auctioning Mother off to various husbands when she was only fifteen. Like some prize cow, Mother liked to say, fattened for the highest bidder. With a paid-for Ford and a ship waiting for him in the Gulf, Paolo had what Grandma thought of as the Ability to Provide. Plus he had dragged Mother out of New York, where God knew what-all went on, and relocated her in Texas. Grandma subsequently viewed my father as some slick-talking hick who had buffaloed her only child into settling for a two-bedroom tract house when she deserved a big ranch. In fact, Paolo was the only husband of Mother’s whose existence Grandma would acknowledge—other than Daddy, of course, and him she couldn’t very well ignore. She felt that Paolo’s story would teach me a lesson, the punch line of which was something like divorcing a salary man for somebody who punches a clock was bad manners. At least Grandma told me a few stories about Paolo. Pressing Mother for details of her past always led to eye-rolling and aspirin-taking and long afternoon naps.
    To Paolo’s credit, he didn’t give Mother up as easily as the others had. He chased her—so the saying goes—like a duck would a june bug. He sent yellow roses to her hotel room every week, and Daddy finally took to setting the boxes of chocolatecovered cherries that kept arriving for her in the common parlor of his boarding house, where his roommates ate them by the fistful. Paolo finally got up enough courage or desperation to appear there for a final showdown. For some reason, I picture Daddy stretched out on a narrow bed in a string T-shirt and boxer shorts,his eyes narrowing like a snake’s when Paolo, whom I imagine in the seersucker suit he wore for his wedding snapshot, ducked into the room with slanty ceilings. Mother was there to watch all this. At some point the talk got heated, and Paolo called Mother a strumpet, for which Daddy was said to have stomped a serious mudhole in Paolo’s ass. It was the first time Mother saw Daddy fight. (In fact, there wasn’t ever much fighting to it, at least that I ever saw. Daddy hit people, and then they fell down. End of fight.) After that, I picture Paolo more or less crawling down the stairs. He shipped out to Saudi Arabia, never to be seen again until his picture cropped up in a box some decades later and I asked Mom who the hell that was.
    At my parents’ wedding in the Leechfield Town Hall, Daddy concluded the ceremony by toasting Mother with the silver flask she’d bought him for a present. “Thank you for marrying poor old me,” he said. He was used to carhops and cowgirls, and said Mother represented a new and higher order of creature altogether.
    The truth seems to be that Mother married Daddy at least in part because she’d gotten scared. As much as she liked to brag about being an art student in Greenwich Village during the war—and believe me, in Leechfield she stood out—she had racked up a frightening number of husbands, so frightening that she did her best to keep them secret. And her economic decline had been steady: over fifteen years she’d gone from a country house in Connecticut to a trailer park in Leechfield. Somehow all her wildness just didn’t wash in the anesthetized fifties. She’d lost some things along the way, and losing things scared her. Daddy was handsome enough and the proper blend of outlaw and citizen. And he didn’t bow much to the mannerisms she’d picked up to impress her coldblooded Yankee husbands. The only Marx he knew was Groucho, the only dance the