 Thank you, Stan. OK, with Mary Carr's The Liars Club, we're going to round out our discussion of female child boards, which is going to bring back the theme of family, humanities, family relationships, and particularly those relationships between mothers and daughters, because those seem to have an intense connection to how female identity gets formed. Glenn Chamberlain, who teaches writing at Montana State University, and is the author of her own short story collection, Conjugations of the Bird to Be, will be from Carr's No More. I left it on for a minute. Two bad things jumpstarted my parents into an evil stretch. Drinking and fighting. I suspect if daddy had ever talked about such things, he might have said, mother's drinking and mulligrummen drove him out of the house. Mother said that daddy just bailed out during grandma's cancer, and after the funeral, which absent said her to drink. I don't know who were what to blame. Nor can I figure what exactly led to mother's near-fable attack of nervous. Maybe drinking caused her to go crazy, or maybe the craziness was just sort of standing in line to happen, and the drinking actually staked it off for a while. All I know is that first mother was drinking, then she and daddy were fighting worse than ever, and finally they were hauling her away in leather four-point restraints. Drinking was not a totally new hobby in our house. Daddy always drank, but with few ill effects. Every now and then it come home lurching around like a train conductor, and I remember a few times dancing around the kitchen in my nightgown with my bare feet on the steel-toed boots, over the sliding around in the yummy plot of whiskey he was drinking. That is it, really. Mother was a good story. She'd sat down at her end when grandma came home to die, out of necessity, I guess, and she picked it up the night she got back from the funeral while we were all rubbing on it. She'd said, could I fetch her some gala wine and summon up from under the China cabinet? A combination she liked in a sparkling burgundy. And I said, sure, then I walked as slow and miserably as any mule through any cotton row in order to assemble that drink. At some point after that, the wine made her hang her for alcohol with a high test variety. Then she dialed up the liquor store to order vodka by the case, and she reached down the biggest jelly glass she could find and recovered. There was no me for ice or a shot glass or even her mood for those weird baby Dunions people would play at Gibson's make such a fuss about. The vodka was sloshed out in five-figured units. Oddly enough, she hated the taste so much that she literally had to hold her nose to swallow the first one like a kid taking medicine. But after that, she'd down in the way people in hell must down ice water. The big game for me once she'd started drinking was to watch her engage which way her mood was running. My sister, Lisha, didn't have a stomach for watching her that close, so she put herself in charge of counting mother's drinks. She kept a long running table above the number of drinks poured and the approximate number of ounces consumed. And she did all the siphon in her head minus pen and paper. Somehow, having exact numbers reassured Lisha no end. Even so, she just never knew what would happen once mother un-forked that bottle. The difference between two drinks and 10 might not even show. So on my technical-minded sister counted, I myself zeroed in on the lines of mother's face and the timber of her voice in hopes of dividing the degree of nervous she might get to. One big top off, one big tip off to her mood came from my record she popped on the turntable. If she's feeling high-minded, for example, she'd play opera. The opera had a big downside, though. It could lead mother straight into the worst sort of crime chain. Some Italians, a grand, would start catarwelling how she lived for art and some tubercular female would rasp out. In Italian, of course, come to Paris and be my brother to her own boyfriend. And mother would go beepy. Her face would settle into a series of faint lines you normally didn't see on her. Then she'd ball like a sick cat, hanging her head in her hand, blowing her nose on toilet paper saying that we didn't understand and that it wasn't our fault she was crying. And we cared who's fault it was instead of just wanting it to stop. Those were the opera nights. The jazz nights were a little worse. And worst of all, the nights when daddy was home and mother put on the blues. My birthday was such a night. I should have known I was coming. But mother was making it meal is on you which smell I love better than bread itself. I was also waiting for daddy. I've been sitting on the back step the better part of the afternoon holding back the floodgated talk just for him. When he finally showed, I started to prattle about how I'd gone with mother and Lisa that morning to buy my birthday dress. It was black crave, the first black dress I'd own. Just sitting in the movie and he'd feel like a movie star, I told him. We'd had to hell finding the kid's dress in black. But mother had driven us all over the county. We'd had last seven on an A-line dress that had a big white clown color hanging all loose and drapey with three bonafide rhinestone buttons down the front. Lisa took one look and said, where's the funeral? But when I spun around in a mother fight, I looked like the ballet dancer in my Japanese music box. Even though cost $63, she rolled her eyes and said, what the hell when she ended the sales lady or charge plate? Not 10 minutes later, she'd also bought Lisa a chemistry set from the toy department. On the way home, we'd stopped for a shimper and a lot of Al's seafood, where mother made the quick work of two God-comartinis to celebrate. When I finished telling him, daddy said the dress looked pretty while he wiped his feet. He wasn't even looking my way. Then he slipped into the house. Suddenly a dog on me that I wasn't a tell daddy would charge all that stuff on mother's plates. Nobody said it was secret, but he wasn't drawing any pay, a fact he harped on more or less constantly. All he talked about was how both oil was trying to chicken shit the working man out of a decent meal. Didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that what mother and Lisa and I had done that, they was crossed someone's open mind between good times and bad day here. I also knew that the black dress crossed another line between an outfit and a get up. Later, after I chained out of the thing and was back in my blue jeans, I was on the road and dressing Barbie for the umpteen time when my parents' man voices floated back. Lisa was next to me, trying to pin her Barbie straw colored hair into a French twist with a bobby pin. I couldn't make out the words, but it just was plain. Mother roared and slammed kitchen covers. The screen banging signal daddy's walking out and his boots scuffed down the steps. The screen bang began and I heard the glass lasagna and casserole shattered on the patio after him. It's her birthday, you son of a bitch, mother yell. Lisa just wound that French twist into a tight coil and said, take 10, reel 1,000, happy God day and birthday. Out in the kitchen, mother stood at the sink, holding both her wrists under running water. You could see a big splotch of bread under her sharp cheekbone, like somebody a dad mad on her face with a paintbrush. She wants some aspirin, she said to me and I said, no thanks. Mother tossed a handful in her mouth then dipped her head under the faucet to wash them down. She took the German chocolate cake from the top of the fridge. You can have this for supper, she said. I told mother that she could take the dress back. It was no big deal. No I can't, she said. And she started planting candles in the muddy top of the cave. Forget about the dress for Christ's sake, she said. I went outside making me wear on the glass and spluttered lasagna and into the garage where I could at first see the ruby end of daddy's cigarette and nothing else. Then I could make out his white t-shirt and a lint of the bottle and lift it to his lips. Daddy, I said, just go in the house, go in the house, pokey. Then he said, almost like an afterthought, why don't you go on in and ask your mother if she wants to head over to Beard City for some barbecue crabs. I don't remember our family driving across the Orange Bridge to get to the Bridge City Cafe that evening. Nor do I remember eating the barbecue crabs. I don't remember how much mother drank in that Bayou Cafe where you could walk to the end of the dock and toss your leftover hushpuppies to hungry alligators. My memory comes back into focus when we're drawing close to the Orange Bridge on the way home. From my spot in the backseat, I can see a sliver of daddy's profile, his hot, big nose and square jaw. I wanna see mother's face to see which way her mother's here feet. But I'm staring at the back of her head in this short, wild tango of all green curls. All at once the car rears back away, of course it does underneath you if it shies away from a small, skittery animal and we're climbing the bridge. The steel webbing of the road sets the tires humming. The night streams over the car and fans away like black water. They can almost feel a long wake of jarred drag doubt behind us. Lisa rolls down the window. Her hair is frowning loose from its French twist. The wind's about to suck me out the window and over the bridge rail. I muster all my courage to look out at the long drop-down that makes my stomach blurge. The steel girders jerk by in fasticato in the distance I can see two flaming refinery towers. They make a weird, oz-like glow that bleeds at the whole bottom part of the sky. Out beyond the river are marshes and bodies, a black, large barge moves slow under the bridge. Mother is shouting, shouting she whist herself dead before she'd ever married dad. She wished she'd been struck by lightning on this very bridge before she crossed over into that goddamn bog. Leedsfield is the asshole of the universe that break nowhere and daddy is a great nothing. I feel over for Lisa's hand and it's as cold then it's a cold fist not as shut. Then out of the darkness I see mother's white hands rising like they were powered and lit from inside. Like all the light in the world has been poured out to shape those hands. See, she's reaching over for the steering wheel, walking on to it with her knuckles tight. The car jumps to the side and skips up onto the sidewalk. She's trying to take us over the edge. There's no doubt this time. I mash my eyes closed and Lisa heaves herself over on top of me and I can't see anything but I can feel the car squirt while mother and daddy wrestle for the wheel. Then there's a loud noise in the front seat like a branch cracking after which the car goes steady again. I can almost feel the tires click back in between the yellow lines. When Lisa and I praying from the back seat we see that amazingly enough the car is off the bridge and back on the road, safe. Mother's line slaps out against her window where daddy has softer to get control of her. When she wakes up we'll be pulling into our driveway. She'll rake her fingernails all the way down daddy's cheek drawing deep blood so he looks for days like something Lumpard's fault has gone out. The kids playing night tag will stop their game together and watch us spill out of the car. The mother's still trying to claw daddy, daddy holding a wrist in his iron hands. At some point Joe Dillard will sidle over to ask me what they're fighting about and his brother Jr. and his wise-ass voice will crack hollow fighting over a bottle. Then mother breaks loose from daddy to stand for a foot at the group of kids and they scatter like buckshot into their own dark backwards. And that's it. That's what I remember about my birthday.