Bettyville (25 page)

But the thing is, if I am suddenly, in Betty's head, my father, what happened to the person who was me? Am I lost to her? Where did I go?

. . .

For a long time now, it has been hard to get my mother excited about anything, even going to the city. A few years back, when I took Betty into St. Louis for the periodontist, we stopped at Saks where I wanted to buy her a new outfit. It was there I noticed the depression that had settled into her, her lethargy. She looked tired and was unable to summon the energy to shop for new clothes. Later, when I went to visit another store in the mall, she waited in a chair by the Saks fitting room, the color drained from her face.

When we drove past Granny's old apartment, as she once liked to do, I told her how I always thought of Daddy when we were in St. Louis. “Well, I think this is where he would be,” she said. “He probably should have stayed here. He might have been happier.”

She glanced at me for a second. I couldn't put my finger on exactly what she was thinking, maybe of things she could never give him. Sometimes I think she mourns over her failings. But I think she was wrong about my father, where he would wind up if the choice was his. I still remember the picture he drew of her, our Betty, the one no one else saw, the girl on the streetcar, waiting for him to come sit down beside her, but moving away when he approached. For both of us, I think, she was always a little hard to get close to and neither one of us ever knew the reason why.

S
ometimes I still dream I am a kid running through the rows of the fields behind our house in Madison, a little scared. Very often in the mornings, I wake up in fear of the future, of finding myself alone here on the planet. “I think,” said my counselor in rehab, “that every patient I've had is scared like that.”

“Don't worry, it's prescription butter,” I told Betty when she eyed what I was slathering on my toast.

She said nothing; she has been irritable, mad at me, but won't explain. She just falls into it sometimes. The air-conditioning had chilled this house. Wearing my parka, I pulled the hood up over my head right there at the table. I didn't know if she was fretting over something new or returning to some festering resentment. I think she still has a little chunk of anger logged into her account book under my name, but is either reconciled to it or ashamed of its presence. It's a little island floating between us and she doesn't want to live there, doesn't want to acknowledge it exists at all, but occasionally, there she is, sitting on the sand, far off, with a look not hard to decipher.

I didn't turn out like she planned. Maybe a lot of things didn't quite, either, and almost all of the story has been revealed. We can't go back.

. . .

One morning, almost two years ago, the head of the publishing house where I worked called me in when no one else was around. Red-faced, he blurted out the news, said the department was restructuring. I was leaving. He labeled the severance “generous” and passed me a white form I was to sign. “You'll want to do that as soon as possible,” he told me. “If you want to get the severance.”

Back in my office, I reviewed the form calling for everything but organ harvest and the renunciation of God and country. It was lengthy. I got a little emotional. I felt like Jane Fonda in
They Shoot Horses, Don't They?
When I tried to call my authors to tell them what had happened, I froze. Within moments, the publisher was back at my door.

“Have you signed the form yet?”

I didn't respond. My head was full of voices; I went outside to try to get it together. As I passed the publisher's office, the question came again:

“Have you signed the form yet?'

I stayed in bed for days, listening to the voices fling curses. I hadn't worked hard enough. I hadn't gotten it right. Work was all. I am nothing, nothing without work. No one is. Not without work. Harry worked hard; Bill worked hard; Mammy worked hard; Betty worked hard. Shut up.

I considered possible options (migrant opportunities, Bedouin lifestyle, armed retaliation, drug mule). When I told my mother about the “restructuring,” she kept using the term “firing” and it stung. “I wasn't fired,” I kept saying. “I was restructured. I now have an atrium lobby.”

I went to the Miracle Room and screamed at a few street people. I didn't use drugs, though I wanted to. After all the years, I still wanted to escape. Work was what I had, who I had always been. It was where I was most comfortable. It was gone.

. . .

This morning, trying to fit all the dirty dishes into the dishwasher, I listen to Betty on the phone with Betsy, a close friend whose calls perk my mother up like nothing else. Betsy is seventy or so; to Betty she is practically a teenager. She gets invited to lots of parties. My mother is flattered by the attentiveness of one so young and popular. And wealthy. Betsy has money, land.

Betty has been scared that Betsy and her husband will move to Florida where they have a condo, but now my mother is laughing, suddenly very pleased. Betsy, diagnosed last spring with breast cancer, has completed treatment, and overhearing Betty's responses, I sense happy news.

“I love you too, Betsy,” says my mother. “I love you too.”

It is strange to hear her say these words out loud. It stops me for a minute because my mother is so open and sounds so cheerful.

Betsy's eldest daughter was once considered the prettiest girl around, but she got involved with a man—“from
Joplin
,” Betty says, if that explained everything—interested in her parents' money. There were ugly scenes, gossip, my kind of relationship. Finally the couple divorced and Betsy's daughter has never remarried. Betty calls this is a tragedy. People forced to live by conventions are always the first to enforce them. I think this applies to my mother. A practical investor, she bought stock in the usual choices because they ordinarily pay off without risk or pain. She never imagined they could betray her or that anyone close would break them.

Never a practical investor, I have always gone for the crazy horse.

I am alone. I don't have a regular job now. Betty believes I am a bit of a tragedy, like Betsy's daughter and this makes my mother angry. She would never admit it, even to herself, and she would never hurt me, but I feel her disappointment sometimes. I've done my time with it, this sense of letting her down.

“Did you hear Betsy's news?” Betty asks. “She's going to be okay.”

“I guess she and Ed can go ahead and move now.”

My mother's face falls. I have lobbed a little bomb. I have to do something to change my mood—something you don't purchase by the gram or liter.

After scanning the Internet, I head to a recovery meeting in Hannibal, on the Mississippi, a hilly place where, in the minds of schoolchildren, Huck and Tom will always wander. River towns seem to always draw drunks and druggers, and this one hosts an especially large number of group homes for addicts, alcoholics, and the mentally ill. At the meeting, a woman is standing at the bottom of the steps of the church, wearing old black tennis shoes with black socks. Her hair, a tumbling tower, is strewn with little butterfly barrettes to hold it up. Her name, she says, is Mary. She is seven years off alcohol. When I tell her I am from New York, she says, “Jesus. That far.”

When I say I am staying with my mom, Mary responds, “Gotcha . . . Here?”

“In Paris.”

Mary says that for a while she cleaned for a woman a few streets away from us. “A well-known bitch,” she claims.

Mary may clean for money, but this group is her real vocation. She has clearly made herself the leader, and if she has to swat a few drunks or some addicts' asses to keep them straight, she will.

In the church basement, there are six or eight people, including a guy who looks like a construction worker; a clean-cut middle-aged man who is perhaps a salesman; a housewife type, going at her gum; a tattooed boy slender enough to pack and fold. I fix on a tough-looking young woman with a bad complexion and short shorts who has just been released from a women's shelter. Her drug is meth. I understand the attraction. Anything that took me up was good. Back in the old days, I never wanted to be down, or sleep, or even nap.

When the woman heads off to the bathroom, Mary whispers, “Float-through. Comes and goes, gets a day or two, then meets some new asshole and it's off to the races.”

Still, when the girl comes back, Mary grabs her hand and rests it in her own lap, where its sweat leaves a few fingers.

The young woman is named Brittany, as about a quarter of the women in this state seem to be. She has a pack of Camels rolled in her T-shirt sleeve and taps her foot in the air. Her face is slick, drenched with sweat; this room is hot, closed, and still, and she is detoxing. Recovery hurts. Every feeling you escaped comes to slap you in the face.

. . .

Seven years or so after my first recovery, I relapsed. I never told anyone why or how because the truth sounded like such an excuse, something to let me off the hook. But what happened was this: I had a book to edit, a book about the James family that was eight hundred pages long. My company had paid way too much for us to earn our money back unless it was . . . perfect. I had a week to do the job and it had complicated problems. I wanted it to be perfect, so I took speed and stayed up for days and the work was actually good. Never had Henry James flown through life with such exuberance. Alice? What a charmer. But I lost it. I couldn't stop using. It all accelerated very fast. I did what I had never done: I lied and lied, stopped talking to sober people, missed work, fell asleep at meetings, did things I have a hard time claiming, though the voices in my head have never forgotten.

A few months later, I found myself sitting on the steps in front of my apartment building with a suitcase and a trash bag full of unmated socks. I was on my way to rehab in Pennsylvania, waiting for a friend to pick me up. My suitcase was full of dirty clothes, the only kind I had. The socks were in the bag because I had at first forgotten to pack them and didn't want to open my suitcase again. I was tired, coming down: It seemed too much to try to open that suitcase one more time.

A few days before, I had overheard one of the executives at work, a decent woman, holding nothing back, talking about me. I have never been suicidal, don't believe in it, but I might have gone out the window if I had been able to unlatch it. At home, I got higher than ever, and as I was bare and empty, the voices hit full attack mode. I lay facedown on my pillow, almost disappeared for good. I did not want to breathe.

I think people who have always felt okay in the world will never understand those of us who haven't.

. . .

Mary asks Brittany, the newcomer, if she wants to talk, but the young woman shakes her head. “Y'all know my story,” she says. “I ain't never going to get this right, and I might as well just keep going. The center made me come. I don't want to be here.”

Mary reaches out, encircles Brittany with her arm, and pulls her head down onto her shoulder. I think Mary's hair is going to fall down for sure, but it does not. Sometimes a few decades of Final Net are all an honest woman can count on in this life. When tattoo boy gives Brittany a nasty sort of once-over, Mary shoots him a look that could burn the rest of the crops.

. . .

In the car to the rehab in Pennsylvania, I thought of the many great Americans who have made such a pilgrimage: Truman, Liza, Elizabeth Taylor, maybe an Allman brother. At a truck stop on the highway, we stopped for coffee, and as I paid I noticed that for some reason I was holding my trash bag full of socks.

At the rehab, they put me first into an infirmary to detox and it was freezing. A man who looked a little like Jesus said the last time he was in the infirmary, a woman had tried to eat her coins and keys.

It was October in Pennsylvania and on the first morning the ground was frosted. As I walked to breakfast, some guy yelled out, “Thirteen inches in the Poconos.”

“Is that a porn film?” I asked.

On the morning of the second day, I left bed, reluctantly, for a bowl of cereal; there were hundreds of boxes in the kitchen—brands I thought had been discontinued. Trust an addict to love a Fruit Loop.

Sitting at the table was a woman who had floated by during registration: Beth. In front of her was a bowl of Rice Krispies and, next to it, a small unopened container of milk. She stared into space, looked down at the cereal, then at me, and said, “I don't want to be a fucked-up mother.”

“Me neither,” I said, spacey, but managing somehow to pour the milk into the Rice Crispies for her. “Snap, crackle, pop,” I said to her. “Am I going to have to clean the toilets?”

. . .

“Do you want to stop taking drugs?” they asked in rehab.

“I want to stop humiliating myself,” I answered. “Or just go away.”

. . .

Sitting at the meeting in the heat that will not break, I watch Mary guard Brittany. A man with a toothpick in his teeth tells his story without it ever falling out. His daddy was an alcoholic; his granddaddy was too. “And it goes like that,” he says. “I come to this natural and I give it up only because of no money. My kids had signed off on me. My wife signed off on me. I was living in my car. I got a house and a job now. My kids don't call, but my wife brought over a cake for my birthday and we sat and ate it.”

At rehab, I talked, hour after hour, to Beth, who had a smoky voice. Her addiction began when she was in junior high. She started trying to get sober when she was nineteen, but it never clicked for long. Her kids had seen her strung out. Together, we sorted through our sloppy days.

It wasn't the first time Beth was forced to leave her family—a husband and two little boys—to stay in treatment. One Sunday, I met her kids. Watching them climb up the hill to their mother's waiting arms, the thing I noticed was their clothes. Both had on T-shirts and shorts of blazing white. They looked ready for the Laundry Olympics. Taking in those boys, Beth looked like she wanted to crawl off and die: Someone else had gotten her kids cleaner than she ever could.

. . .

“Beth is so ashamed,” I told a counselor.

“You spot it, you got it.”

“Did you make that up just now?” I asked.

I knew that before I left that place I was going to find myself talking to chairs.

“Why are you ashamed of yourself?” they kept on asking me. “You put yourself down every time you open your mouth, You have obfuscatory tendencies.”

“Do I need a vaccination?”

“Why do you do that, the joking?”

“Because if I say what you want, I sound so damn pathetic.”

I could not think at all, could not connect to what they said, stopped talking in group.

“You're withholding,” said a nosy chatterbox who grew up amid the Pennsylvania Dutch. I will always picture her in wooden shoes.

“You're withholding,” she kept saying. I found her intrusive.

“Bitch, do you think you work here?” I said to her. “What makes you think you've got everyone pegged so right?”

“You're withholding.”

“You're withholding.”

“You're withholding.”

“Why do you feel ashamed?”

“Why do you feel ashamed?”

“Why do you feel ashamed?”

“Because I'm fucking bad,” I screamed out one day. “Because I'm wrong.”