Literary Ruralism (Part XXI): The Liars Club by Mary Karr

Mary Karr's memoir, The Liars' Club (1995), documents her childhood in east Texas in the 1970s, mostly in a place called Leechfield.  Like so many best-selling memoirs, this one features a mother struggling with mental illness.  In this scene, Karr's mother has just received an inheritance, and it has "liberated" her to start a bonfire of household possessions, including her children's furniture and toys.  Mary is watching the bonfire, pondering how she and her sister might be rescued.  She concludes that none of the neighbors will come to her rescue, writing:

So I know with calm how cut off we are from any help. No fire truck will arrive. None of the neighbors will phone Daddy or the sheriff.

I picture old Mrs. Heinz standing next door at her sink behind the window she cleaned down to the squeak every Saturday with a bucket of ammonia water into which she squeezed a lemon. She can see us out there. I feel her eyes on me. She’s wiping off the last plate from the drainboard and watching us and wondering should she come out. But she thinks better of it. Mother’s flinging things into the fire like one of those witches out of the Shakespeare play, and old Mrs. Heinz probably peers out from behind the ruffled Priscilla curtains that she copied herself on her sewing machine using dimestore gingham to look like the ones in the Sears catalogue. She probably takes one long gander at that hill of flaming toys and furniture and the picture frames of living fire and Mother stirring it all with a long pole and thinks to herself, Ain’t a bit of my business. The she lets the pink-checked curtain go so it fell across us. The other neighbors have done the same. I feel them all releasing us into the deep drop of whatever is about to happen. Each curtain falls. Each screen door is pulled tight, and every door hook clicks into its own tight eye, and even big heavy doors get heaved closed in the heat, and all the bolts are thrown. I can almost hear it happening all over the neighborhood. TVs get turned louder to shut out the racket of us. Anyone might have phoned Daddy and said, Pete, looky here. This ain’t none of my bi’ness, but…