Bettyville (28 page)

As we were getting her ready, a caseworker appeared to question us about who would care for her at home or whether she would be going to some sort of facility, as they strongly recommended.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Who cares what you recommend? You send her out of here when she is terribly sick and then you come in here and pretend you care what is going to happen to her?”

Sensing the possibility of battle, Betty perked up.

“That's not really the situation,” the caseworker said.

“Well, then what is the situation?” I asked, before the woman made her exit.

As I wheeled my mother down, she looked at me and said, “You've taken good care of me.”

. . .

All the way home, Betty lay in the backseat with her head on her hand. Raj sat with me up front. “We're almost home,” I said when we hit Centralia, then again when we turned on C, then on T, then finally, over and over, as we headed east on 15.

The next day we waited and waited for the doctor to call with the test results. At 5:30, the phone rang and the doctor, munching what sounded like an apple, confirmed the lymphoma diagnosis.

Betty vomited all night. I did not sleep and found myself throwing the ribs I had made for her homecoming into the trash as the sun came up. It was a shame. I had finally cooked them right.

. . .

That morning, before we left for the oncologist's, I found Raj by Betty's bed. Though he is never supposed to enter her room, he is fond of her Kleenexes, winter boots, and house slippers. Oddly enough, he will not touch the one thing I would love to see destroyed—the sandals we have warred over for so long. Labradors apparently prefer pumps.

I let Betty wear the sandals to the oncologist's, edging her tender feet into them.

“Is this dog neutered?” Betty asked me on the drive over.

I nodded. “I guess you're not going to get to be a grandmother,” I told her.

“I never wanted to be a grandmother,” she replied. I could think of several reasons why she might have said this. One is that it is the truth. One is that she wanted to keep me from feeling bad about not having children. I told myself it was the latter, but I think it was both. My mother hates to be called “ma'am.” I don't see her loving “Grandma.”

. . .

In the office of Dr. Tennan, the oncologist, I waited, in a chair that smelled like it was sick, for Betty to be called. I watched my mother, her last looks before learning she was dying.

But I was wrong. It turned out I was wrong about it all.

Dr. Tennan, a very good-looking man, flirted a little with my mother, told her she didn't look her age, said nothing about dying. He recommended treatment: two weeks of daily radiation (painless he assured us) and several more weeks of IV infusions. It wasn't chemo; a different drug is more effective with lymphoma. It wouldn't make her sick or cause her to lose her hair or suffer in any way. He said there was no reason not to go forward with it.

I thought she would say no, but she spoke up. “I want the radiation,” she said. At ninety-one years old, my mother chose life, chose to fight to keep it. She wanted to live. For herself. She spoke right up. I also had to make a choice for myself. I had to think about finding my own life again. She had spoken up so quickly for hers. Maybe this was a trick I could learn.

Betty smiled at that doctor as if she were still young, ready to line up for the Miss Legs contest at the university.

. . .

All the way home, I thought of places I plan to go when my job here is finished. I want to go all across the world, just as Mammy imagined me doing. I want to learn to take photographs, to write, to maybe try to write a book of my own.

“Did you get to death's door and decide maybe it didn't look so good?” I asked Betty, still surprised that she agreed to treatment.

“Dr. Tennan is a good-looking man,” she said.

I took a risk. “Dr. Tennan is a sex machine. Let's have him over for dinner.” Betty was still chuckling a little when we pulled in our driveway. We had been through something and there was an opening, a crack of light that seemed, surprisingly, to delight her. If I had a photo of her that night, I would put it in a special frame, though I have wondered since if I saw more in her face than was really there.

. . .

The next day, we began radiation. They put stickers with black arrows on both sides of her chest and stomach.

I decided that the good thing about cancer is that wherever patients gather there are snacks. Unfortunately, they are often healthy. On the first day, however, I almost stole a bag of Doritos from a bald woman. I wasn't going to eat them. It was only to save her.

At the place where my mother goes to get radiation, there is a huge, unfinished jigsaw puzzle on the table in the room where people wait to go in. Every day, there is the same old farmer man, bent over the puzzle that has, like, nine hundred million pieces. He goes in for his treatment after my mom. His wife is dead. He walks on a plain, cheap cane, but he has driven himself to Columbia from High Hill every day for thirty-seven days for his treatments.

I asked him about the radiation. “It don't hurt more'n a sunburn I'd get out on the tractor,” he told me. He goes to Country Kitchen for biscuits and gravy every night before he heads home. “You get a good plateful,” he said.

“How much longer do you have to come?” I asked him yesterday. “Long enough to finish this damn puzzle,” he told me.

He is a Missouri man. So am I.

It is something to witness, all of them trying, keeping on.

Lesbian waiting for her treatment at Missouri Cancer Institute: “Gay women do better than straight women with chemo. We already have the baseball caps.”

. . .

Coming home from one treatment, Betty said she wanted to go to St. Louis to get her hair done. “I mean someone who can do it right,” she said, “who can make it look halfway decent. You could use a haircut yourself. You look like a ragamuffin.”

“Mother,” I said, “I want you to shut up about your hair.”

I feel better. I have steered my mother through this crisis, taken charge.

. . .

“I am pack leader,” I tell Raj. “I am pack leader. I am fucking Arnold Schwarzenegger.” I was so damn butch, I scared myself, but he paid no attention. Sometimes I think Raj believes I am merely an oddly shaped refrigerator. I smell like dog all the time now, but later, when he is lying on top of me with his head over my shoulder napping, I hear his breathing in my ear and try to forget that he has eaten half the couch.

It is interesting, gratifying even, to watch this almost human let down his guard, warm up, grow less frightened. I have watched him transform from a pup reluctant to leave his mat or crate to a daring household forager who considers it his God-given right to poop copiously in the middle of the living room. “Get some OdoBan,” a neighbor advises when I share our housebreaking problems.

“How much,” I ask, “do I take?”

. . .

On Betty's journey, I have learned something I had not known: I am very strong, strong enough to stay, strong enough to go when the time comes. I am staying not to cling on, but because sometime, at least once, everyone should see someone through. All the way home.

When Betty got an infection, we went back to the hospital and I returned to my early drives across the dark countryside and my mind turned often to High Hill and the old farmer making his way to his truck on his cane in the cold wind. I have kept going too. Through all the years. Maybe it is time to give myself a little credit.

Sometimes it is okay to be broken open, even if it is sadness that finally connects you to everything you are feeling.

. . .

If I scream at Raj after he has an accident in the house, Betty glares at me harshly. “Now is that any way to talk to him?” she asks.

“Be still,” I say. I am tempted to greet him in the mornings as my father once did Toto: “Hello, you old tail-wagging sonuvabitch.”

I tell Raj I love him, dozens of times a day. I want him to feel okay—safe, at home in the world. Betty doesn't hear me when I bend to whisper to him. She seems to have become a little more deaf since her cancer and her memory has declined along with her ability to walk unassisted. Something in Betty's head is surrendering. It is harder and harder for her to keep her balance when walking. After the ten o'clock news, on the way to her bedroom, she stops every two or three steps and looks around, uncertain and shaky, as if on a long trek. She no longer pauses to check the hymns.

Night after night, I follow behind her with my hands on her hips to keep her steady until we reach the bedroom where she puts on her gown, a nightly challenge as it is hard for her to raise her arms. She is always relieved when the gown, soft on her shoulders and my cheek when I hug her, is finally on.

I have ice cream when she is sleeping. I keep an old-fashioned long-handled teaspoon hidden in a cabinet and use it to ferret out pieces of chocolate and caramel from the bottom of the carton before anyone else can get to them. I call it my digging spoon. Betty is outraged when she discovers that the chocolate nuggets or bits of candy bar are missing. “This is supposed to have Heath Bar in it,” she cries out.

“Toffee causes tumors,” I tell her.

. . .

In another life, the gods may send me someone powerful or glamorous to share my existence on this earthly plane. But in this one, for now, Betty and Raj are fine enough. Already they are conspiring against me; I expect to be out of the will in about fifteen minutes. I ponder the question of whether there is an organization designed to rescue humans from rescue animals.

“Do you not understand that he doesn't know what you are saying?” my cousin asks when she hears my endless conversations with my dog. “He's not human!” I say, “I know he's not human, but I think I may be a Labrador.”

I will move on. This won't last forever. For now, the sound of Raj's paws clicking on the floor as he prances makes me almost as happy as Betty's occasional smiles. If I go to the store, she insists on looking out for Raj; she hates to see him have to go into his crate. When I return, I find them on the couch together. He is our loving friend, our little black dog.

Since he arrived and she became more engrossed in his activities, she makes her sounds much less. He is the noisy one now. I know this home is just for now, but I treasure our days. I feel different than when I arrived. Nothing magical or radical, just a little more comfortable with myself. A few more pieces have shifted into place. In my head there is a kind of early-morning quiet. Because I have come through for her. It has taken me so long to feel okay in my own skin, but I feel better, more at home in the world. Most days.

. . .

“What,” Betty asked suddenly one afternoon, “will you do in the future, after I'm gone?”

“Marry Dr. Tennan,” I said. It just flew out of my mouth.

“You could do worse,” she said.

. . .

Sometimes I think of how it will be when I am old. I am lying in my bed in the Liza Minnelli ward at Villa Fabulosa. I can hear the old queens singing songs from
Evita
in the Madonna Conference Room. Madonna is gone, but her cone bras and bones are on display at the Smithsonian Institution.

Someone comes into the room, tucks the sheet under your legs, asks if you are feeling like you can sleep tonight. He may or may not really be there at all; maybe you just need someone to listen, to answer. But you think he is there, a real person to break the night.

He is a kind man, and in the end, kindness is everything. The night is suddenly lonely. You cannot get your bearings. You have no idea where you are, so you ask questions, to try and keep from forgetting everything, who you are, where you have come, the people you loved the most:

“Where am I from?”

“Missouri,” says the man. “You have told me about it, the rivers and flowers and trees.”

“That town I remember with the foreign name?”

“Paris. It is gone now, I am sorry to say. There were floods, but the people you
knew were gone before.”

“The roses are gone?”

The roses were beauty, faith, sharing, work, perseverance, memory,
consolation. The roses were care.

You picture pink petals floating on still water.

“What is the capital of Portugal?” you find yourself asking.

“Lisbon.”

“Who am I from? Who were my people?”

“Betty and George?”

“She almost married the governor. My father would not have liked it. He loved her.”

“What is that stuff you drink at Christmas?”

“Eggnog.”

“Where is the place I said was pretty?”

“The green yard behind your old house.”

“Who am I from?”

“Betty and George . . .”

“Where will I go when this is over?”

“To see them.”

The young man leaves the room and you begin to say your prayers. You remember the days she said them with you, her hand on your shoulder, gentle and almost frightened, as if she was scared to break you, as if she was scared the world would. She knew you would have to be strong.

I always wanted to try to write a book and it has taken a lot of people to get me to the final page. I must thank my agent, Betsy Lerner, my buddy who possesses many rare attributes, including the gift of real friendship and that rare thing, the kind of generosity that actually desires great things for her friends. My editor, Carole DeSanti, has taught me—I wish I had learned this years back—that the best editing is done with a whisper. She has offered a rock-solid foundation of advice, edits, and encouragement, along with the time to do one more draft.

The writing of this book has been a relay, and every time I fell and lost hope there was someone to pick me up and carry me to the next day's work. The bane of writing is self-doubt; the gift is friends, real friends, who save you. Kathryn Shevelow and Sara Switzer, both fabulous and wise critics, have been there for me every second since page one. So has Ann Patty. I have felt them strongly in my corner; what a gift, lasting and true. Lauren Lowenthal, a brilliant woman, demanding in the best and most helpful ways, showed up just in time to get me to the end, kicking and screaming. Jennifer Barth, well . . . thank you, Jennifer, for so many things, including your readings and endless aid to the cause, my cause. I am grateful to you and for you. Nancy Collins: Thank you for your considered comments, your love and humor, and, most of all, for the title, which I recognized immediately when you uttered it.

There are so many more to thank: Adrienne Brodeur, Betsy Cornwall, Walter Owen, Beth Kseniak, Johnathan Wilber, Rux Martin (who edited the first draft), Deanne Urmy, Edward Shain and Laura Popper, William Middleton, Debbie Engel, Rob McQuilken, Casey Schwartz, Marie Brenner, and Steve Weinberg. Amanda Urban has been a great booster for years. Vanessa Mobley, Terri Karten, Jonathan Burnham, and Helen Atsma also helped provide the confidence to get to Bettyville and back.

Anthony Shadid continues to inspire me every day; I so wish I could thank him in person. Lucinda Baker has been my partner in tough times and a wonderful cousin. Carol Crigler has given endless support to my mother and to me. For decades now, Paul Giorgianni has put up with my complete looniness and tendency to forget appointments. Lastly, Raj Hodgman has been a great partner in the labor, despite a weak bladder and the tendency to howl.

Thank you, Viking, all of you, for buying this little book and rising to support it. I appreciate the work of Chris Russell, Roland Ottewell, Paul Buckley, Hal Fessenden, Nancy Sheppard, Gina Anderson, Carolyn Coleburn, Paul Slovak, Clare Ferraro, and everyone who helped me bring these pages home.