The Liars' Club

With their new stepfather around, Karr and her sister get into the habit of staying out of the cabin. Hector and their mother are given to heavy drinking and lengthy hangovers, and they seldom wake up before noon. Karr and her sister find some consolation and company at the local stable, where the stable owner Mr. McBride takes them under his wing.

On Father’s Day, Karr and her sister attempt to get in touch with their father. They have heard little from him since he left, apart from a jokey postcard: “In all fairness to him, divorced men back then just surrendered their kids to the mom and forgot about it. Like a bad litter of puppies you’d tie in a potato sack and fling from a speeding Ford off the Orange Bridge, kids just got loose” (205). Leica tries and fails to reach him at his work from a phone booth, and Karr becomes obsessed with buying him a Father’s Day present. She collects Green Stamps from the supermarket: stamps that come with store purchases and that can be put together toward an item from a redemption center. She even goes so far as to steal these stamps out of people’s garbage: “The few doctors and business people from Colorado Springs who kept weekend places up there didn’t mess with stamps at all. I hit their small, neat garbage cans first” (207).

Karr’s eventual trip to the redemption center is a disappointment. She can find no suitable gifts for her father, and the gifts are confusingly organized in the vast warehouse. She finally chooses a ceramic statue of a monk, carrying a fishing pole and with a bottle of beer at his feet. Her mother, who has driven her to the center, picks a fight with the attendant at the center before Karr tells her to wait for her at a nearby bar.

Karr’s mother one day announces to Karr and her sister that she herself has bought a bar, in another town higher up and farther west. They will be moving to this town, where Karr and her sister will be going to school. They head out with Hector, their mother in a talkative, jaunty mood and the rest of the family stewing and silent. In the back of the car, Karr registers her older sister’s wary, resolute expression: “Seeing her profile go all chinless in the car, I felt a whole flood of dark fill me up, cold as creek water” (212).

Antelope, the town to which Karr’s mother has moved her family, is a failed gold-mining town on the way to Telluride. Although it is surrounded by a beautiful mountainous landscape, it is a bleak, paltry town. Karr’s mother rents a large, lavish old house for the family, with a chandelier and a long dining table and separate bedrooms for the two girls. Karr and her sister play at being grand ladies in the house but are unable to feel at home there.

Karr and her sister are enrolled at the local school, where Karr is nonplused by the jaded, hardened look of the other students, compared to Texas kids: “You could smell the hair oil and peroxide ten feet away […] these Colorado kids seemed older somehow” (218). The school is a nontraditional school in which teachers do very little actual teaching; students are instead given worksheets to complete on their own, supervised only by monitors. Karr is so bored that she finishes several worksheets in a short period of time, and it is eventually recommended that she skip a grade. Her mother visits the principal, along with Gordon—a regular at her bar and one of her flunkies—and Karr is embarrassed by her deteriorating appearance: “She’d become the picture of somebody nuts” (225).

One day during recess, an older student named Bertha, who is jealous of Karr’s academic success, beats her up. Recuperating that afternoon at her mother’s bar, she is suddenly homesick for her father, to the point where she can feel his ghostly presence. She wipes off the makeup that her mother has dusted over her black eye and imagines the fighting advice that her father would give if he were to see it: “‘And lead with your left. Then she can’t reach that eye. Lemme see that.’ His thumb pad pressed around the bruise, testing it for tenderness. ‘Hell, you’ll be all right’” (224).

Karr’s mother buys two bridle saddles off of a bar customer one night and sends the girls with Gordon and Joey—another one of her regular flunkies—to reclaim their old horses, Big Enough and Sure Enough. Karr is excited to see her horse, but soon understands that Big Enough is looking at her with apprehension and dread. She also realizes that Gordon and Joey know nothing about horses and will be hopeless at trapping them. She and Leica retreat to their car, while the two men try to catch the horses and eventually give up.

Karr’s mother goes on diet pills, which makes her behavior erratic in a different way than before. She seldom seems to sleep, and she is quick to lose her temper; the pills also raise her tolerance for alcohol. She spends a great deal of time reading dark existentialist philosophy and lectures Karr and her sister about these books: “She would gaze up from the page and say that for some folks killing yourself was the sanest thing to do” (232). Her behavior makes Karr retreat to superstition and magical thinking.

Karr’s mother and Hector twice go to Mexico City, each time depositing Karr and her sister with a different relative of Hector’s. The first time they stay with Purty, a young cousin of Hector’s, and her two small children. In the middle of the night, Purty’s abusive ex-husband visits, and Karr and Lecia must hide under the bed, along with the two toddlers. The ex-husband eventually departs but bashes Purty’s face into the glass front door before he leaves. The next time that Karr’s mother and Hector leave for Mexico City—their mother has vague plans to start an artists’ colony there—the girls stay with Hector’s sister Alicia and witness another scene of domestic discord. Alicia and her husband, Ralph, get into a fight about car insurance, which culminates in Alicia hitting Ralph’s forehead with an iron skillet.

One night Karr cannot sleep, and her mother gives her a glass of wine mixed with 7-Up. While Karr has tasted alcohol before, this is the first drink that she enjoys: “The wine and sparkly soda set my mouth tingling […] Whole galaxies could have been taking shape in there, for the taste was vast and particular at once” (239).

Karr’s mother and Hector have increasingly violent and dramatic fights. One night, while the four of them are driving home, their mother lets herself out of the passenger seat with the car running and falls into a snowbank: “She was okay, it turned out” (241). One afternoon Karr is sick with a fever and is tended to by a neighborhood acquaintance, a man who first befriends and then sexually molests her. She tells no one about the incident.

After their mother threatens to shoot Hector—and comes close to accidentally shooting Karr and Lecia—Lecia calls their father and asks him for a plane ticket back to Texas. They do not leave immediately for Texas, and Karr remembers little of their last days in Colorado with their mother: “Mother must have squawked about our leaving […] I recall no such scene” (259).

Their return to Texas is typically turbulent and complicated. They are accompanied by Joey, who first gets drunk at the airport and then vomits on the plane. He then puts himself and the girls on the wrong connecting flight, so that they end up in Mexico City. Karr suspects this mix-up might have been intentional on his part and that he might have wished to move there. The girls and Joey part ways at the Mexico City airport, where authorities have detained him. A variety of kindly airport personnel escorts the girls to Texas and to their waiting father: “Pilots, baggage handlers, stews and off-duty janitors washed and fed us” (263).

The girls have an emotional reunion with their father, who drives them home from the airport and then cooks them a big supper. The three of them share a bed that night, and Karr hears her father crying in the middle of the night: “It’s a fine trait of Texas working men that they cry” (265). He asks the girls to pray together for their mother to return home to Texas as well.

She does so, but in a cruel way. She arrives with Hector to collect the clothes that she has left behind at the house. While Karr has been angry with her mother, the sight of her impels her to hug her. With the neighbors looking on, Karr’s mother goes in and out of the house, collecting various elegant outfits. The neighbors’ gawking makes Karr despise them for their conventionality and feel a backhanded pride in the weirdness of her own family: “For the first time, I felt the power my family’s strangeness gave us over the neighbors” (269).

Karr’s father has largely been staying out of the way during their mother’s visit. However, when he hears Hector speaking to their mother in a disrespectful way, he suddenly jumps on Hector and violently beats him up, dragging him out of his fancy rented car. Karr has never before witnessed her father kicking a man even when he is down, as he does Hector. Their mother eventually drives Hector to a hospital and returns to Karr’s father that evening. A sheriff stops by to inquire about the fight that afternoon, and their mother tells him that it was just a “domestic disturbance” (273).