At a fish joint famous for not letting the beach-weary use its facilities, I rushed past counter traffic to the bathroom. Soon as I locked the door, I hunched over the sink, washing my unstable limbs with brown paper towels and pink soap as if they belonged to some patient I was paid to tend. The shaking receded like a tide.

Sometime after that-maybe even the next day-I stopped smoking pot, stopped going to the beach. Sam had spooked from me the notion that the hippies I'd once revered were benevolent characters identifiable by roach clips and tie dye. Plus, the crash pad my friends and I had rented had gotten too raggedy for any girl to stand. The sink stayed piled with scabby dishes from when I'd cooked everybody spaghetti a month before. When you hit the light switch at night, the roaches didn't even run anymore. Yet night after night the guys lazed around puffing weed and telling d.i.c.k jokes. When they headed to the beach, I'd lose myself down the valley of a book or scribble longhand on loose pages that I stashed under my sleeping bag.

College was the thing. I'd scammed my way into that small midwestern school too good for me, but then I'd put it on hold as too square. Now it looked like an escape from flagging down another satanic hobo, or it was suddenly an excuse to read nonstop. I longed for its library walled with books, a desk with gooseneck lamp, a bulletin board.

Taking my collect call, Mother agreed-her life's goal being college for perpetuity. She phoned the school's financial officer, who promised as much in work and loans as I needed. I was sweltering inside the open accordion door of a phone booth.

You've tried it your daddy's way, Mother said.

How is this Daddy's way? Daddy wants me to stay home and hone my pool game.

Yeah, but the T-shirt factory job, the whole working-cla.s.s-hero pose. Who knows, maybe you'll meet some suave intellectual....

I told her the phone was making my face sweat, but she'd already relaunched into her plan to auction off my unemployable a.s.s to some husband as if I were chattel. She sketched for me an artsy, wire-rimmed guy with a wardrobe of turtlenecks, a shiny car unmarred by the blurring circle of the sanding machine. Which hunk of whimsy failed to account for the fact that I'd bolt like a startled cheetah before such a man-a beast of an unknown phylum.

On my last day, dropping an armload of ratty cutoffs and salt-crusted bikinis into the apartment complex's garbage cans, I spied a thrown-out notebook and nicked it for my disheveled pages-for some reason, all unlined typing paper. I used a pen to poke holes into every margin, which seemed to take a long time, hole by hole. It was dusk when the sheets slid b.u.mpily together and the notebook's silver claws snapped shut. There was sweat on my upper lip.

I stepped out the sliding door into the dusty odor of eucalyptus, a light wind. Over the valley of orange tile roofs, you could catch just a gray strip of sea from there. I set out walking the hills for the last time. With my ponytailed hair and the sweater tied around my neck like a sitcom coed, I looked into any undraped picture window at the families around lamplit tables, pretending they'd celebrate my homecoming at term break.

2.

The Mother of Invention If Jesus had said to her before she was born, "There's only two places available to you. You can either be a n.i.g.g.e.r or you can be white-trash," what would she have said? "Please. Jesus, please," she would've said, "just let me wait until there's another place available."-Flannery O'Connor, "A Good Man Is Hard to Find"

Mother's yellow station wagon slid like a Monopoly icon along the gray road that cut between fields of Iowa corn, which was chlorophyll green and punctuated in the distance by gargantuan silver silos and gleaming, unrusted tractors glazed cinnamon red. Mother told me how the wealth of these farmers differed from the plight of the West Texas dirt farmers of her Dust Bowl youth, who doled out mortgaged seed from croker sacks.

But because I was seventeen and had bitten my cuticles raw facing the prospect of fitting in at the private college we'd reach that night-which had accepted me through some mixture of pity and oversight-and because I was split-headed with the hangover Mother and I had incurred the night before, sucking down screwdrivers in the unaptly named Holiday Inn in Kansas City, I told Mother something like, Enough already about your s.h.i.tty youth. You've told me about eight million times since we pulled out of the garage.

She asked me if we had any more of the peaches we'd bought in Arkansas.

We got peaches galore, I said.

The car was fragrant with the bushels of fruit we'd been wolfing for two days while our bowels grumbled. I picked through the soft bottom peaches for an unbruised one to hand her. I asked, Wasn't that the name of some famous stripper, Peaches Galore?

p.u.s.s.y Galore, I believe, Mother said. She bit the peach with a zeal that made me cringe, as did her cavalier use of the word p.u.s.s.y p.u.s.s.y, though I myself used it with alacrity.

To look at her behind the wheel, with the mess she could make of a peach, appalled me. She was so primordial. She had to wipe the juice off her chin with the back of her hand.

Out the window, legions of neat corn about to ta.s.sel announced a severe order I longed to enter into, one that would shut out the sprawling chaos of Mother.

She tapped her cup of watery ice, saying, I could use a little dollop of vodka in there. The cup was in its sandbagged holder on the b.u.mp in the car floor next to her streamlined legs in exercise sandals. And if, as Samuel Johnson said, everyone has the face they deserve at fifty, Mother must have paid some demon off, for despite her wretched habits, her face looked amazing at her half century-with her shock of salt-and-pepper hair, pale skin, and fine features.

She said, Don't look at me that way. We got up at five. It's c.o.c.ktail hour by our schedule. We got any more ice?

I fixed her drink, then lowered myself on the spider's silk of my attention back into One Hundred Years of Solitude One Hundred Years of Solitude and the adventures of the Buendia family. The prodigal Jose Arcadio, once stolen by the gypsies, returned wearing copper bracelets and with his iron body covered in cryptic tattoos to devour roast suckling pigs and astonish the village wh.o.r.es with his appet.i.tes. The scene where he hoisted his adopted sister by her waist into his hammock and, in my translation, and the adventures of the Buendia family. The prodigal Jose Arcadio, once stolen by the gypsies, returned wearing copper bracelets and with his iron body covered in cryptic tattoos to devour roast suckling pigs and astonish the village wh.o.r.es with his appet.i.tes. The scene where he hoisted his adopted sister by her waist into his hammock and, in my translation, quartered her like a little bird quartered her like a little bird made my face hot. I bent down the page, whose small triangle still marks the instant. made my face hot. I bent down the page, whose small triangle still marks the instant.

Touching that triangle of yellowed paper today is like sliding my hand into the glove of my seventeen-year-old hand. Through magic, there are the Iowa fields slipping by with all the wholesome prosperity they represent. And there is my mother, not yet born into the ziplock baggie of ash my sister sent me years ago with the frank message Mom Mom , written in laundry pen, since no one in our family ever stood on ceremony.

It was sometime on that ride that Mother asked me what was I reading. So lucid is the memory that I feel the power of resurrection. I can hear her voice made harsh by cigarettes asking, What's in your book?

This was a hairpin turn in our life together-the pivotal instant when I'd start furnishing her with reading instead of the other way round.

Her hazel eyes glanced sideways at me from her face, pale as paper.

I said, A family.

She said, Like ours?

Even then I knew to say, What family is like ours?

Meaning: as divided as ours. We pa.s.sed some Jersey cows staring at us like they expected us to stop. I said, I wish Daddy had come with us.

Oh, h.e.l.l, Mary, she said, upending her drink, rattling the ice in the cup's bottom. Read me some.

I tried to explain how little sense the book would make starting from there, and how I was too engrossed to go back. But she was bored and headachey from the drive and said, Well, catch me up.

It was an old game for us. Tell me a story, she liked to say, meaning charm me-my life in this Texas suckhole is duller than a rubber knife. Amaze me. If I ever wonder what made me a writer-if I tug the thread of that urgent need I have to put marks on paper, it invariably leads me back to Mother, sprawled in bed with a luminous hangover, and how some book of rhymes I've done in crayon and stapled together could puncture the soap bubble of her misery.

On the road that day, I did the same, only with better material, and-no doubt skimming past the s.e.x stuff-I let those elegant sentences issue from my mouth like mystery from a well rubbed magic lamp. She was rapt. She gasped. She asked me to read parts over. By the time we pulled in to the Minneapolis Holiday Inn, my voice was a croak.

In the room, I got puking drunk for the third night in a row. Hair of the dog, Mother said. The first screwdriver had smoothed me right out. However expert I was at drugs, I remained an amateur imbiber, yet drink was all I had that night to blind me to the presence growing slurry in the next bed.

Maybe any seventeen-year-old girl recoils a little at the sight of her mother, but mine held captive in her body so many ghost mothers to be blotted out. If my eyelids closed, I could see the drunk platinum-blond Mother in a mohair sweater who'd divorced Daddy for a few months and fled with us to Colorado to buy a bar. Or the more ancient Mother in pedal pushers might rise up to shake the last drops from the gasoline can over a pile of our toys before a thrown match made flames go whump whump, and as the dolls' faces imploded so the wires showed through, the very air molecules would shift with the smoke-blackened sky, so the world I occupied would never again be fully safe.

I had to sit up and breathe deep and make my stinging eyes wide so all the shimmery-edged versions dispersed, and she once again lay in filmy underpants and a huge T-shirt with jagged writing on it announcing HERE COMES TROUBLE HERE COMES TROUBLE.

She said, You can't go now. I'm not done with you yet. Sob sob sob Sob sob sob. She had on one of the derby hats she'd bought each of us in Houston the day we left-pimp hats, they were, trailing long peac.o.c.k feathers in their brims.

Later, Mother patted my back as I threw up into the toilet. I remember the smell of Jergen's lotion from her hands, and how the tenderness of her gesture repelled me even as part of me hungered for it. I pa.s.sed out sending prayers up at machine-gun speed, like a soldier in a foxhole to a G.o.d not believed in, Don't let me be her, don't let me be her Don't let me be her, don't let me be her. For however she'd pulled herself together for this trip, she could blow at any second.

In the morning when I stirred, my eyes lasered on to her supine form in the next bed. She was nearly done with Hundred Years of Solitude Hundred Years of Solitude. She still had her hat on, pushed back on her head to give her the wondering expression of Charlie Chaplin. My hat had a hole in it, which I didn't remember incurring. My first blackout.

When I pulled up to the green lawn of my college where dogs caught Frisbees in their chops, I decided to reinvent myself for that leafy place.

I'd probably gotten in by wheedling a reference from the only professor back home I'd known well enough to bother. A lumbering drinking pal of Mother's from the technical university where she'd gotten her teaching degree, he sported a meager russet beard with a skunk stripe and a French accent I later learned was fake. He'd first materialized on our sofa one morning, shoeless, his coat draped across him. The conventioneer's name tag pasted to the breast pocket-apparently printed by the wife I never met-read, DON'T BRING HIM HOME HE'S GOT THE CAR DON'T BRING HIM HOME HE'S GOT THE CAR!!!

I liked the sentences he could spin out in midair, with commas and clauses and subclauses woven through. I liked how he oohed at the poetry I'd been encouraged to press on him since about age eleven. It was tricky to find the right moment-after I'd faked interest in Ming porcelain but before he got too lubricated to talk right.

Having not seen him since I was in grade school, I felt pushy showing up in his office brandishing recommendation forms. But he'd said on the phone I could come, so I leaned in his open door slot to ask was he busy.

He sat behind a desk sprawled with papers, hands interleaved before him as if by a mortician. He closed the door behind me, then steered me to a chair facing his desk. I figured he'd decided against recommending me, having found the poems and essays I'd sent him in advance dim-witted. I felt oafish before him. No sooner did he sit down than he bobbed back to his feet like he'd forgotten something. He walked to my side and-with a kind of slow ceremony I did nothing to stop-lifted my T-shirt till I was staring down at my own braless chest. With his trembling and sweaty hand, he cupped first one breast, then the other, saying, By G.o.d, they're real! By G.o.d, they're real!

Such was the interview that landed me in a school far beyond my meager qualifications.

For years I stayed grateful that the whole deal had been fast-a small price to pay for getting out of Leechfield. Though it was smaller than more violent a.s.saults that had happened as a kid, which I paid for longer, it touched the same sore place-did I draw these guys somehow? But for ten years or more, when I was spent or hurt and totting up unnecessary gloom, his bearded face would float to mind, and I'd conjure a deep fry pot big enough to lower the pasty b.a.s.t.a.r.d into. Later, I pitied him more, for he was no doubt writhing in his own private h.e.l.l. Which point is moot, since by now the worms have eaten him, and slowly.

What's a typical journey to college? I couldn't tell you. I hope my son, Dev, had one last summer. His dad was staring owlishly into the computer screen, trying to download music, while I slipped folded shirts into fiberboard drawers and ran extension cords. Before I left, Dev heard a series of moist-eyed plat.i.tudes till he said, Mom, don't Polonius me with this nagging. Still, he hugged me-his huge form ripe with shaving lotion-hugged me right in front of his backward-ballcap-wearing roomies. Dev's parting words: Love you. Don't forget to mail those CDs.

My pa.s.sage involved three blue-ribbon hangovers and the genial loneliness of a South American novel and an image of Mother charging out of a liquor store in blinding sun holding a gallon of vodka aloft like a trophy.

On the morning Mother's yellow station wagon deposited me at a dorm and pulled away from the curb, I was seventeen, thin and malleable as coat hanger wire, and Mother was the silky shadow st.i.tched to my feet that I nonetheless believed I could outrun. I didn't cry when she pulled away, for there were cute hippie boys playing guitar cross-legged on the lawn, but my throat had a cold stone lodged in it. I was thirsty.

3.

Lackl.u.s.ter College Coed ...I had a friend who thought the secretwas turning a turntable backwards.One pill made you stronger, one pilland you could fly. I had a friendwho crashed us through a cornfieldand all the husks could do was sing,but that was all right, it was singingthat mattered to us, had weight,occupied s.p.a.ce, in motion tendedto stay in motion, in rest rest.You start with a darkness to move throughbut sometimes the darkness moves through you.-Dean Young, "Bright Window"

When 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 bulls.h.i.t, 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 hobn.o.bbing 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 a.s.signed 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 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 carca.s.s could be disa.s.sembled 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 cla.s.s?-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 Hee Haw.

But I missed him enough to write a letter swearing fealty to the very self I was smothering: Dear Daddy:Thanks for the five-spot. You didn't have to do that, since I have actual jobs making money. The food service feeds me like the little oinker I am. You'd just put your head under the milk spout and guzzle. I know you would. Thanks to all this chow, I'm weighing over a hundred again, so I'm less of a gimlet a.s.s.There's a really nice art history teacher named Armajani (he's from Iran) who takes kids fishing on weekends at his cabin. He claims the ba.s.s are big as my arm. I told him in Texas we'd throw those little fellers back. I sure wish you were here to yank a few out of the water with me. I miss you more than black eyed peas, more than oysters. Your baby, Mary 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 cla.s.s 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 consciousness was code for was code for drugs drugs-the sole subject in which I had a leg up. Early on, he spotted me pulling bobby socks on my hands after cla.s.s. 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 spa.r.s.e snow on the ground, sc.r.a.ped 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 cla.s.s, being too ill read not to shame myself. At a freshman mixer early on, I heard kids hurling around like fastb.a.l.l.s 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 l.u.s.ter I'd given off in grade school had gone to mist starting my sungla.s.sed 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 ba.s.s.

Instead, I'd signed up for cla.s.ses related to linguistic philosophy, for which I had even less talent. In Walt's own seminar, we were reading neo-Kantian Ernst Ca.s.sirer-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 pa.s.s 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 Ca.s.sirer's broke through. The sentence that had so addled me suddenly made sense (in the paperback of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms I still own, the phrase has rockets and fireworks scribbled alongside it): I still own, the phrase has rockets and fireworks scribbled alongside it): The same function which the image of G.o.d performs, the same tendency to permanent existence, may be ascribed to the uttered sounds of language.

He meant that words shaped our realities, our perceptions, giving them an authority G.o.d had for other generations. The indecipherable sentence had been circ.u.mnavigating 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.