Bettyville (6 page)

“Have another drink, kiddo,” Sade told Betty. “Don't ya wanna get a little peppy?”

My father's family always gathered by the piano to sing, watched by Betty and me, along with Granny's friend Bertha Cox, whose blond wig (necessitated by sparse, filament-like hair) was purchased in a room at the Chase Hotel “from a traveling salesman,” Granny always emphasized, “a Chinaman!”

Like my dad, Granny loved Nat King Cole.

“Rambling rose, rambling rose, why you ramble, no one knows.”

Betty watched how Granny served, did everything. She dressed up for them all, wanted never to disgrace herself.

“Relax,” Daddy said, pulling her head to his shoulder but never getting it to stay.

When Granny sang, I saw my father's face in hers; I saw him in everything she did, definitely in her eyes, which, when turned on me, revealed what felt like suspicion. I loved her, but sometimes a look from her could poke like a pin. Already I knew that she was an enforcer of what I sometimes violated: the rules for boys and the rules for girls. Once she saw me gesturing along with the Supremes on television and her glance said it all.

My mother believed in the rules. My father had some rebellion in him, but the others could always jerk him back easily into enemy territory. Sometimes, though, we could find a secret space.

Sade told tales of nightclubs, gangsters, and strange phone calls arriving for her maid, who claimed to be Castro's daughter. She often arrived with lavish gifts, once outdoing herself with two shiny silver cranes with long beaks and thin elegant legs. One bent down as if to feed, the other stretched its long neck toward the sky. Granny put them on the dining table and I sat looking at them reflecting the light, these exquisite birds from Sade's enticing world. When I told Granny they were the most beautiful things I had seen, she looked back at me quizzically. Throwing me off guard, though, rescue arrived in a husky voice.

“Toots, we gotta get you to Boca,” Sade told me. “I think you're kind of a fish out of water.”

She was sitting at the dining table and I went to stand beside her and did not move for the longest time. Maybe this was someone who could be on my side.

. . .

Betty was in awe of the city, loved it when Granny treated us to club sandwiches, held together with colored toothpicks, at the tearoom in Stix, a world of women and the tap of high-heeled shoes. Models moved past the tables. I was always the only boy brought along; I loved the models and began to pose for class photos with head thrown back and eyebrows raised in a way I considered suitable for print work.

While Betty and Granny shopped, I bypassed the toys and went upstairs to the furniture floor, to the model rooms, complete in every detail. I sat in them one at a time—living rooms, dens, family rooms, dining rooms, master bedroom suites, rooms for babies, little girls, teenage girls, and boys. When I sat down, tentatively, in the boys' room, complete with bed with wheels meant to resemble a racing car, sports souvenirs, soldiers marching on the walls, baseball bat lamps, I realized I did not feel at home.

It wasn't that I wanted to reside in the girls' rooms, it was simply that no place fit me right. I liked a mock-up of a basement hideaway featuring an armoire with what I considered an ingenious secret—a Murphy bed—and some framed movie posters, including one from
Casablanca
.

After the clerks got tired of me lying on the beds and pretending to wait for room service, I rode the escalator down to the basement snack bar where I waited on a bar stool, watching the hot dogs turn on the rotisserie and listening to the big black girls talk and talk. “You wanna dog, sugar?” they'd ask. “You wanna big hot pretzel? Baby, you hongreee? You look like you like to put down the groceries.”

Things My Parents Told Me When I Was Very Young:

1. “Don't stand that way; you're posing.”

2. “That book is for girls.”

3. “Your hair is too long. It looks effeminate.”

4. “Why would you want to wear that?”

5. “You've been hanging around with the girls again. I can hear it in the way you talk.”

One year, I purchased a yellow scarf for my dad for Christmas, as a kind of commemoration of what he had seen during the war. I pictured him wearing it with his herringbone “Going to the City” winter coat. There was no doubt in my mind that he would get the connection with the Japanese pilot; I guess I was a kid with strange ideas of what might make a father smile. As Big George opened the box, I prepared for a moment of glory, but he wound up giving the scarf to Preach Burton, the minister of what was then known as the colored church, along with a polka-dotted costume vest he purchased one year for a New Year's Eve barbershop quartet. Daddy said that yellow was an effeminate color, but I didn't think so.

. . .

In our backyard there is a bent-over clothesline and the wrought-iron chairs on the patio are rusty, in need of paint. No one has sat upon them for a decade. We never use the backyard, once filled with the trees my father planted and tended—willow, oak, crape myrtle, maple, hawthorn, flowering crab—some now bare with spindly limbs, the victims of this or that. My mother just shakes her head at the lost ones—when she actually lets herself look. When most people die, she says it is a “blessing.” But the trees are a different story. Even my mother grieves openly for my father's trees.

Now a hired man, who talks way too much, waters and cares for the yard, which Big George gradually expanded year after year, mowing farther until it stretched almost all the way down to the forest.

“You can always tell me anything.” That is what my father often said to me when I was a kid. But I never did.

GEORGE
:
“That casserole I made Saturday is much better today.”

BETTY
:
“Maybe I'll try some more around Friday.”

T
he late-morning sunlight filters through the old carnival glass vases and heavy tinted bowls on the sill of the bay window in the living room. The objects from auctions that adorn this room are, to my mother, worth only their value and represent her shrewdness, her skill at acquisition. When she holds them up to inspect them, she does not imagine, as I do, the others who once picked them up, though she handles anything that belonged to my grandmothers with extreme care. She has some fine and costly things, but it is a pair of small Chinese figurines, two children, boy and girl, meant to sit on a shelf dangling their legs, that are her favorites. “Don't ever break these,” she has told me. Only recently have I discovered that my father bought them in Chicago for twenty dollars. It is these little slips that pass so quickly, almost unnoticed, that occasionally show her feelings, that make them seem as fragile as the figurines. Her emotions are her most delicate possessions, rarely taken out, even for company. When a hint of them breaks through, I want to coax them forth, but she is just too reticent.

“I love them too,” I said to her yesterday, glancing at the Chinese children.

“Oh, they're nothing,” she said, changing her tone of voice and posture. “They're worthless.”

I am pleased she never purchased antique dolls. Few things irk me more than an antique doll, publicly displayed. Particularly off-putting are those perched in small rockers in bonnets.

I wager that down the street, Edna Mae Johnson, still uncomfortable in her new teeth, is bent over her embroidery in her crazy, messed-up house, squinting at her tiny stitches as she stands back to admire the small flowers that blossom over the cloth.

Betty will not get out of bed. When I ask if she is thirsty, she just shakes her head. She is agitated, and when she gets this way I can't focus on much else. Her state of mind affects everything in the house, me especially. I take it in and pace around the house. I want to do a good job here; it is important to me. I want to do right by her.

. . .

When I set the trash out earlier, a neighbor informed me that the game warden has released bobcats in the forests nearby to help control deer. He saw a bobcat a few nights back in the parking lot of the high school's vocational agriculture center. The building was, until fifteen years or so ago, a garment factory where the women workers on break gathered outside the door, smoke from their cigarettes rising around them.

Where do the women work now, after their divorces, or when their husbands die, or when bad luck strikes, or the harvest is squat? Not here. They drive to Columbia or other towns nearby to work in hospitals or clean the houses of doctors from India and Pakistan. The country roads are full of headlights at night as they often work odd hours.

. . .

“Buck Johnson is getting married again,” Earleen says. “It's his fourth. You'd think by now he'd a either figured it out or quit.” She is ironing in the kitchen. On the nearby couch, I try to close my eyes. She is not the most diligent housekeeper in America. She runs a rag over a counter so fast, it barely has time to collect a crumb. The vacuum control is always shifted to the lightest setting so it won't be hard to push. But she's game for just about anything. At Christmastime, during a somewhat madcap decorating spree, Betty had Earleen and me searching for ornaments that I broke before puberty. Earleen, trying her damnedest, kept pretending to look until finally confiding to me, “George, I don't know where this shit is.

“How do you think your mama is doing?” she asks me now, setting down the iron and coming to stand by the couch as if there is the possibility that I might not hear her.

I wish my mother would appear at the door of the kitchen and say, “Hey, let's head to the Junction for a catfish sandwich.”

“I would do anything for your mama,” Earleen says, going on and on. “She's the same age mine would be if she had lived, you know.

“Gettin' old is for the birds, but your mama's a doll. I tell you, when you're not here, I'm on the case. I'll spring like a jackrabbit if I need to.

“My mama was a Indian. She was beautiful,” Earleen has often remarked. “I look just like her.

“Was you gonna take a nap?” she asks now, returning to the ironing board. “I never can sleep of a day. I got too much on my mind.”

She continues; her only enemy is silence. “I've cleaned for Betty since my boys were kids.” Her oldest son, Ethan, is a mechanic. Jackie Roy is a nurse at a VA down in the section of the state we call the Boot Heel. A few years back, he cared for a boy back from the army with a hole in his head the size of a quarter. Earleen worried about the soldier as if she had given birth to him.

I wish my mother would appear at the doorway of the kitchen and suggest, “Say, I'm going down to the Dollar Store to buy a birthday card.”

. . .

Last night my cousin Lucinda, who tries to appeal to my interests, invited Betty and me to a benefit for the
Missouri Review.
Throughout the dinner I fretted, knowing there was a reading to come. Glancing now and then at Betty, I wished for brevity. I hoped that our entertainment would not be a poet. But no: A poet it was. Despite the weather, she was wearing a jacket of a sort of faux zebra, trimmed in leatherette with tassels on the buttons. Her name was Jude Nutter.

“Where,” my mother asked, quite loudly, “did that jacket come from?” I cringed, as Betty glared at me with an expression with which I am very familiar. It seems to suggest that I am personally responsible for every particle of bullshit loose in the world.

“What was her name?” my mother asked loudly, after the introduction.

“Nutter,” I said. “Jude Nutter.”

“What?” my mother, incredulous, asked.

“Jude Nutter,” I repeated. “Her name is Jude Nutter.”

“Nutter,” my mother said again, even more audibly than before. “N-U-T-T-E-R?”

“Yes,” I repeated again. “Nutter. N-U-T-T-E-R.”

My cousin looked slightly uncomfortable as Jude nodded at our table, sensing some disturbance. Betty smiled back, gave a bit of a wave, as if to acknowledge the attention. I knew things were going to get worse when Jude confided that she had grown up in a house on a lot adjacent to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

She continued, telling us about her special kinship with insects, which she likes to feel on her body. This is sensual and pleasing for her. I waited, but Betty, intent on her brownie, made no remark. I began to breathe more regularly. Then Jude started to recite her first poem, a work that opened with an image of flies on the bloody eye of a dead lamb. Again, Betty shot me the look. It is always me. I am
always
responsible.

“How,” Betty pondered loudly, “did we get involved with this?” She threw her half-consumed brownie down on the plate as if it were a horseshoe. Jude Nutter mourned the lamb.

The second poem began. Jude Nutter read to us of finding the dentures of her deceased mother in a small container in the bathroom. Soon, there were Germans. Then there were the teeth. Then the insects. Then the teeth again, the haunting melancholy of the mother's gaping oral cavity. Finally, the poem built to a dramatic conclusion: Jude kissed the teeth and threw them into a river.

“She's going to have a hard time topping that,” said Betty.

At times, my mother maintains her capacity to see much and often surprise. Especially in public, with others. But after the reading, she wavered, wandering into confusing territory. It is astounding to me how quickly Betty can fade from her normal self into the disorientation that upsets her, leaves her wringing her hands. If she is engrossed in something—a meal, a book, a poetic experience involving insects—she is okay, but without something to focus on, she gets a little crazy in the hours before bed. Dementia patients suffer from a phenomenon called sundowner's syndrome, which worsens their symptoms at night.

In the car going home from the reading, Betty's defenses fell; the act failed. “Stop, stop, stop,” she yelled out at every sign, slamming her right foot down as if hitting the brakes. “Slow down, slow down, slow down,” she commanded, though I was well within the speed limit. Her noises—the mutterings and whimpers, the troubled utterances—signaled the approach of high anxiety. “Are you okay?” I asked.

“I'm fine,” she said, as if she could will it so. “I'm fine.”

At home, panic crossed her face in tiny waves. A dropped pill led her to cry out, as if something sharp had stabbed her. When a toothpaste tube fell into the sink, she seemed to lose all hope but giggled as her face crumbled. Arriving in her room, I found her seated at the edge of her bed in her nightgown with her shoes still on and her good black pants fallen around her ankles. “Let's get the shoes off,” I said, taking over and managing to get her ready to sleep. The sight of her bare feet was enough to suggest that life is just too tough, but they are survivors, these old codgers, and beautiful in their human way.

Finally she closed her eyes, but cried out several times as her mind, unwilling to rest, continued to fret. Early in the morning, I woke to go to the bathroom and found her in the family room, going over the bills she stacks and restacks. I lay down, though this made her angry. “I have things to do here,” she told me. “Things to do.
Things to do!
” She was mad at me for standing guard. That is what it is; I am the guard to her, the one who has taken over her castle. When I woke up at 5 a.m., she was gone, back in her bed, but not sleeping: There were the sounds, her little cries out.

. . .

Today, I am crazed. My head is full of voices: Everyone up there is talking, yelling. No one thinks I am dealing with Betty correctly. I hear the voice of a writer in Washington, D.C., telling me that my relationship with Betty is “codependent.” Friends in Manhattan yammer in the corners of my brain about me destroying my career by staying in Missouri. My relatives plead for Betty's entry into assisted living. My father and Mammy join in the fray. In my head, the dead are pushy, opinionated, and easily offended. At Starbucks, they scream into my cerebellum about the price of venti lattes and the calorie content of chocolate graham crackers.

Suddenly, a voice I believe to be my mother's joins the committee of commenters. She draws out every word, articulates seemingly every letter with extreme care. Wait a minute, this is not Betty. The God of Brain Waves has made an error. This is
Meet the Press,
I am almost certain. I am hearing Peggy Noonan. And she is concerned, very concerned. Shut up, Peggy. Shut up, shut up
.

I am doing my best here. I will make it back to New York, but frankly, to spend some time in Paris, Missouri, is to come to question the city, where it is normal to work 24/7, tapping away on your BlackBerry for someone who will fire you in an instant, but crazy to pause to help someone you love when they are falling.

If I have a deadline to meet, I stay awake, working all night. Around 2:30 or 3:00, I take a break to get a bit of breeze, hit the twenty-four-hour convenience store for coffee and doughnuts, drive the loop around Paris, which takes me to the top of a hill, near the cemetery. From the four-way stop where I pause—aside from the occasional semi whooshing by, there is little other traffic at this hour—I look out at the town: the courthouse dome, Main Street, the loose scattering of lights, blue and yellow, twinkling around the hills that hold the houses on their shoulders. I like the feeling of being the only one awake for miles and miles.

. . .

“We're the new Mississippi,” says Jane Blades, who works in social services. Rural America is going ghetto. Because the high school no longer offers a foreign language, the kids who attend Paris R-II High do not qualify for admission to any of the state universities. In the doctor's office, an old classmate tells me that there are no longer cheerleaders at the school. “Now how can you build spirit without cheerleaders?” she asks me, crestfallen.

“It's the never knowing,”
goes a song I like that plays on the radio here,
“that keeps us going.”
In Paris, religion is the great comfort. The most popular verb here is “pray.” People gather together to lift their requests for the survival of sick children, the vanquishing of tumors, the securing of loans. At church recently, I have heard a special prayer for a dying child, offered up by his father, a tenderhearted rodeo clown.
WE
PRAY
WITH
OUR
BOOTS
ON
, says a sign advertising the Cowboy Church on the side of a pickup. Global Prayer Warriors are called forth on the Internet in times of trouble.

When I look at our town from the top of the hill at night, I think of all the people waking up, facing the day, their problems, imagine their voices, their prayers for themselves, their children, the neighbors and friends they have known for years rising up with hope into the lightening sky.

There is far too much illness in this county, including a large incidence of cancer, blamed on pesticides used during the 1950s and '60s. Illnesses are a constant topic and housewives chat in the aisles of the grocery store about the merits of various chemo procedures. Gossip about the state of the neighbor's marriage has been replaced by intense discussion of his vital organs. A law firm called Tolbert, Beadle, and Musgrave advertises on TV constantly, courting victims of mesothelioma on Channels 8 and 13. Cancers wipe out whole families or parts of them.

A friend of mine who grew up near Middle Grove can list all the people who lived near his family's farm who have battled the disease. His father died of it. His sister died of it. He has fought it himself for almost twenty years. “A good day,” his mother told me, “is when everyone is alive.”