Bettyville (8 page)

Outside it was getting dark, but Wray still did not move. When Bill and June left, I kept watch at the window. Mammy came over sometimes to stand behind me and try to make out what was going on. Gradually, the car disappeared into the dark. In the morning, Wray was gone.

“It's just a sickness,” said Mammy of Wray's affliction, “that's all.” But it wasn't. He was more than sick. He was loathed by many, it seemed. He was the kind of man whom our town seemed to hate, though he himself seemed to be the only one he had ever injured. Elsie Van Sickle talked about Wray's “toots,” his trips to St. Louis on the train, and his stays at hotels downtown where, her voice implied, nothing good went on.

Mammy called Wray every few days. Once he did not pick up the phone for a whole weekend and Mammy sent me to take him a skillet full of eggs and bacon. “Just open the door if it's unlocked and leave it. Don't go in unless it seems like he needs help. I can't do it. He could be in there naked.”

Miss Virginia, Mammy's neighbor, drove me to Wray's in the red Chevrolet that she acquired after she retired. Like Bertha Cox, she wore wigs and kept a row of them on Styrofoam heads on the top of the piano in her living room. Her favorite resembled a thatched roof in an African village. In emergency mode, she did not even put one on, but added a loaf of bread and a can of Vienna sausages to my deliveries. Upon arrival at Wray's, I found myself more and more nervous. I balanced everything as I walked up the sidewalk to Wray's new apartment in the Senior Housing Complex. Tentatively, I opened the aluminum screen door. It was unlocked, as was the main door with the little knocker.

Wray was on the couch in a robe and nothing else, sick and queasy with eyes so glazed over that they could barely be distinguished from his gray face. The robe was untied and I tried not to glance below his pale chest with its swirls of hair. But I did; I could not stop myself. I left the food on a table near the door and picked up Wray's glasses from the floor. As I had worn glasses for so long and was nearly blind without them, I was especially sympathetic. I had inherited the Bakers' weak eyes.

When Wray glanced at me, a flood of blood was set loose under the skin of his face. It spread. His hands were shaking too bad for him to eat.

Back in the car, I told Miss Virginia what had happened as a small tear made its way down her rouged cheek.

. . .

As the years passed, I learned more about Wray, and whenever his name was mentioned, I got worried. The secrets around him were frightening to me. Often, Betty and I traveled to Moberly to visit her uncle Oscar at the Maple Lawn Lodge for elders. To Oscar we had delivered jelly rolls, prune juice, cottage cheese containers filled with ambrosia, and jars of ink in which he soaked his used typewriter ribbons. He kept a typewritten journal of his bowel movements (June 24: COMPLETE EVACUATION), which I pored over when Oscar and Betty left the room.

After we left Oscar, while Betty shopped for groceries, I always went to the library, where it seemed there was something I felt driven to find hidden in the books. There were three floors, thousands of books. On a shelf, in a pile, in a newspaper or magazine: I had to be there somewhere. There had to be someone whose inside felt like mine. “What are you looking for?” a librarian asked me one day. “You always look like you are looking for something. Can I help you?”

“I don't know exactly. I don't know.”

Hiding back, far into the shelves, I read the
New York Times
Arts and Leisure section, books about movie stars, and occasionally, when there was nothing else to riffle through, stories about the war, where I hoped to find some mention of Saipan. I loved the name of that place where my father had been stationed, out there somewhere by the ocean:
Saipan, Saipan, Saipan
. Often in one of my scariest dreams I saw the Japanese pilot flying in the plane, his yellow scarf blowing in the wind, my father running on the beach for his life.

In one volume of photographs, there was a shot of a naked soldier working in the tropical heat, taken from the back. I looked it up again and again. When a librarian approached, I slammed the book closed, but the picture was imprinted in my brain.

Something had told me, from the first time I heard the word “homosexual,” that it applied to me. Absolutely unknowing about anything concerning the subject, I located a book called
The Gay Mystique
at the Moberly library that I camouflaged by placing it inside another, larger volume. Turning the pages, I scanned the room, more seriously on guard than ever before. I thought of stealing the book. No one else within hundreds of miles would want to read it; no one would care if it went missing. Finally, in what I considered a show of courage, I ripped out the back pages, the “Resource Guide.” Included was the address of a gay newspaper,
The Advocate
.

Because I was truly desperate for
something,
and as it was summer and I could be at home to intercept the mail, I sent five dollars to San Francisco, asking to be mailed as many issues as that might buy. I waited, checking the mailbox every day. When they finally appeared, just as I was about to give up, the papers were a confusing revelation. Taking them in, I was filled with many questions. I read one sex ad with shaking hands, then quickly rolled up the papers in a rubber band and hid them.

Five minutes later, I was dragging them out again to look at another ad. Then I put them back and then I got them out again. Then I put them back again and then I got them out again. A few days later, my mother, who has a homing device for anything below board or off-kilter, discovered them under my mattress.

All during the day she found the newspapers, my mother turned her face away when I approached. She looked stricken. I would try never to inflict this hurt again. In an instant, a thousand choices were made. This was the beginning of many silences to follow, our struggle with words. At the time, I thought the silences, the secrets, did not matter. As it happened, they did. This is what I have learned. To build a life on secrets is to risk falling through the cracks. “Shame is inventive.” I read this in a book somewhere awhile back and it has haunted me for years. Shame can make a joke. It can reach for a bottle. It can trip you up when you don't even know it is there. It can seep into everything without you ever knowing.

O
n Saturday morning, I stop for cinnamon rolls at the small farmers' market held in front of the courthouse by bespectacled Amish matrons in bonnets and farm women outfitted in shirts with flowered yokes. This indulgence is needed by neither of us at 701 Sherwood. I envision my future as that of a person who will have to be cut out of a couch.

Already, it is steamy, well into the nineties. Today is the All Town Yard Sale and tables in garages across town are loaded with old clothes, housewares, figurines of Jesus and cartoon characters, scenic landscapes framed without glass, lamps without shades, children's watches and battered toys, pill organizers I am tempted to lick for crumbs. Vans with baby shoes dangling from the rearview mirrors circle yards. On the back gate of a pickup, a hand-lettered sign is taped below a tractor decal:
IN
MEMORY
OF
BOBBY
T
.
I keep my eyes peeled for an elderly gentleman whose favored mode of conveyance is a rusty aqua-colored golf cart festooned with American flags. Skinny little black girls in colored barrettes dance around their large, determined-looking mothers in their pastel stretch shorts who search for school outfits and near-fit shoes.

. . .

“Thank you for taking care of me.” That is what Betty said last night, apropos of nothing, really. I was looking at places in the kitchen where the linoleum is coming up and wondering if I could glue it down without permanently adhering myself. Admitting she had, in her mind, run up a debt clearly troubled her, even though it was just to me. She was grateful, though she never seems to really take in what staying here is costing me—my life, really. Probably because she cannot bear to consider it.

“What kind of man would do that, come home and live with his mother?” There are a lot of things I couldn't care less about people saying, but I don't want to be thought tragic, because I'm not. I may not have a life partner or a bunch of kids. But I have had loves you can't quite put a label on, though now I am reconciled to being on my own. Discussions of gay marriage make me feel spinsterish. Yes, my brothers and sisters should be allowed to wed. In my experience, it is gay dating that should be outlawed.

A long time ago, in New York, a man I wanted to maybe settle down with, an architect not much for sharing confidences—my kind of person—told me that I didn't meet well. “I met you, didn't I?” I asked. He just stared back. I could not make him understand that I cannot summon myself when I most want to, when there is someone I need to please. When I care for someone I find it a difficult thing to admit. I even find it difficult to say that I find it difficult. I have been called emotionally unavailable. I prefer to think of myself as temporarily out of stock.

The architect didn't pan out. “You're high maintenance,” he said. He was right. I take a village.

He is currently in Brooklyn somewhere, married to an artist with a multicolored Mohawk. I imagine they are living happily now in a beautifully refurbished loft space or perhaps a teepee. Maybe they have adopted a child from that little country in Africa where Madonna goes.

. . .

In our house we keep to a regular schedule. Betty's in the family room by nine, eagerly awaiting her breakfast. Frying up bacon, I assess her mood and condition, pour out her pills—Aricept, Namenda, estradiol, Celexa, and Enablex—and check to see if any need to be refilled. This morning, waiting for her, I hear a few yelps and a dog's low growl, a funny kind of barking that suggests a halfhearted attempt to sound ferocious. Someone has dumped a stray, as they do here in the country. You see them, often past their prime, padding along the shoulders of the highway, looking hot and bedraggled. Outside, I see a reddish-brown creature, medium-sized but barely more than a puppy, bounding out of our garage with a bit of what looks like potting soil sticking to his nose. I am tentative at first, having no interest in emotional entanglement. He looks needy. I am wary. I am needy too, and all I can handle. But before too much time has passed, I reconsider, tentatively.

“Hey you,” I say, hunching down. The little dog—a bit of many breeds, it seems—circles me, sneezing. He has yellow half circles above his eyes, like eyebrows. When I ease myself toward him, he lurches, then pulls back. He growls a bit but plops down in front of me, looking curious. I feel slightly offended. He is unsure, which is fine. I am not accustomed to creatures won over easily.

When I get close enough to flick the soil from his nose, the pup bounds up, tail seemingly wagging his entire body, licking me sloppily while he dances. How happy! What do you know? Lost and hungry but hardly down and out. I throw my arms around him, lose my balance and fall back, banging my rear on the concrete as he eyes me and lets out another loud sneeze. When I give him a chaste peck on his ample snout, he pulls back shyly, as if unprepared for such advances.

I bring ice water for the pup, hoping that he will drink and be on his way. Actually, I want him to stay. It strikes me that this is something that could happen. I could have a dog. Why not? Even I could have a dog. Yet I command myself not to encourage him. A drink in this weather is a necessity, the obligation of any humane person, but to go further is not fair and I am no teaser. This is not going to happen. I am not here forever. I cannot take him on. I don't want a commitment. When I head back into the house, he woofs. I start to turn back, but will not let myself.

Today, Betty is not peppy; her tongue is dry and her speech is slightly slurred. “You're just an old sleepyhead,” I say. “Did you rest last night? Did you do okay?”

“I did okay,” she says, as I pour water and get her one of the bendable straws she favors. “I dreamed your father bought three thousand dollars' worth of cats.” Cats are our least favorite animal. In the old days, driving to kindergarten, I always thought my mother sped up if she saw one crossing the road.

As I cook, I tell Betty of the warnings on the news of a “Porkalypse” or “Bacongeddon” because of the drought. “No corn, no pigs,” she says. “I'll eat an Eggo when that time comes. Suits me.”

After breakfast, Betty hunkers down in her gown on the couch in the midst of a pile of newspapers and books by Nicholas Sparks and Anna Quindlen, anything we can get in large print. When she finds a book she likes, she reads it again and again, but will never admit she has actually enjoyed it. “It was all right,” she says. “Better than most of that stuff you get. Better than that Rachel Maddow. She goes on television looking like she is about to play baseball.”

Sometimes, out of nowhere, I can see the little girl my mother once was in her eyes. She is funny and sweet, bossy and mischievous. “Tell that woman,” she says when Carol leaves the room, “that I don't want Brussels sprouts and that I want strawberries on my ice cream every time.” She bangs her fork down on the table. She fusses if she does not want to do something: “Stop bugging me about everything,” she commands when I hold out her medicine capsules. “I am too busy,” she adds, peeking around her book to see what I am going to do. “Don't boss me, mister,” she exclaims, as she pitches
Pride and Prejudice,
which I have recommended, across the couch. “This is like what some old schoolmarm would give out.” She does not like television. “I pay for hundreds of channels and it's all trash,” she declares. “There is a channel where all they do is sell knives!”

The morning passes—with the occasional growl or yelp from outside. Our moods rise and fall, though at different times. Betty and I are conflicting lines of music, but sometimes come together in a moving or explosive way. I am, if the truth were known, more volatile. Monitored by graph, my emotions would resemble a chart of a frenetic third world economy.

On the phone, a friend, Benjamin, whose novel I am working on, tells me that his mother's name is actually Betty, but at age fifty she changed it to Daphne. My Betty does not seem to get the humor. “Be still,” she says and turns away.

Outside, I hear the occasional whining noise: already—tears, emotional manipulation, guilt. I can't take it. I have enough problems. I need a Global Prayer Warrior. When I go out with some leftover breakfast sausage for the dog—a bad move, I know—my friend is tearing around one of the neighbors' yards, that maniacal tail still making its fast, swooshing loops. I whistle and his ears shoot up. He rushes toward me, almost walking on his hind legs before he falls forward. Leaping up on my chest, he devours the sausage with a single chomp, and starts to lick my face as if I am a leftover he cannot quite identify. In seconds he is attempting to drag a bag of antidepressants out of my pocket. My kind of pooch.

He is young and full of life—attributes I am not normally crazy about—but there is a tenderness, a vulnerability, especially when his ears fall back. I find myself once more scooping him up in my arms, feeling his paws on my shoulder, his moist nose on my ear. Love hits me. I don't like it. I don't want it. This flirtation cannot go anywhere. I am a flight risk.

When I tell him to get along on his way, he scrunches down again as if I have hit him. I turn away, head back to the house, but, turning for a parting glance, I see that he is lying on his back, paws nabbing at air. “Get along, little doggy,” I say. “Get along.” But I whisper it and hope he does not hear me.

After lunch, my mother is silent for a while, then makes her much-repeated pilgrimage to the laundry room. She washes more clothes than Prissy in
Gone
W
ith the Wind
. I am convinced she is taking in laundry from other neighborhoods. We are both spillers. During a brief snack time, I can turn a white button-down into a Jackson Pollock. She covertly launders her personal items. If I approach from behind as she tosses a pair of panties into our Speed Queen, she peers over her shoulder as if I have caught her disposing of a murder implement. “Do you have to follow me around all the time?” she demands. “I have some personal business in here.”

On the way to the washer, Betty pauses at the mirror in the dining room. “My hair looks awful. How did it ever get to looking like this? That girl who did this ought to be shot.” My mother's hair life has always been complex. It isn't just vanity; that hair is everything she can't quite control. In the 1970s, she went to bed for days after getting a bad “frost job.” Said my father, “Well, I guess you'll have to shave it off.” She screamed back, “You just don't know what it's like!”

My cell buzzes. I anticipate no good news. The Nazi hunter has been raving about a conspiracy against him at the Simon Wiesenthal Center. But no, it is American Express. In recent months, our relationship, never blissful, has entered a period of all but open warfare. They like to be paid promptly. I see the company more as a long-term financial partner. Our conversation makes me feel small in every way except size. If I save my money, I will be able to retire in Penn Station.

Yesterday I spent hours on the phone, sorting through Betty's insurance policies, attempting to assess what would be covered if she entered an assisted living facility. I dialed cities across the plains—Omaha, Wichita, Tulsa. “Slow down,” I told them as they rattled off their explanations. “I have special needs.” There is more paperwork to sort through. Stuff that I would normally procrastinate about for decades needs doing right now. My to-do list begins with chores already done so I can cross off things right away.

. . .

Every day after lunch, Betty and I walk—down Sherwood Road to Hickory, then right on Cleveland, and then another right on McMurry, passing burned lawns and trees whose leaves are turning prematurely brown. Betty never wants to go, but once we've begun, she sets forth the best she can. “Just try to keep going,” I tell her. “Well what choice do I have?” she asks. “I'm not just going to lie down out here.”

Today, as we head out, I look fondly at a tree in our front yard, a big leafy oak that my father planted when we moved to this house almost forty years ago. It is dying. From its branches hang small brown balls, harbingers of a disease that, according to the yardman, is taking even the oldest, strongest oaks all over Missouri. This tree, I love. I can see my father, with his hair frizzed up, watering it with the hose during its nascent stages before giving it a good dousing with a few tossed-off shakes of Budweiser. I blame its disease on global warming.

I steer Betty out of the driveway. Looking small under the spreading branches, she stares up with a quizzical look as if she knows the tree is sick, but says nothing. Her balance is shakier and shakier, but she tries to forge ahead with no help, emitting the little grunts and groans that have become normal during these expeditions. A wad of Kleenex is stuffed into her hand. Less than halfway home, her nose always begins, inexplicably, to run. “I have to blow my nose,” she yells out. We must halt completely. Walking is hard enough without another task to handle simultaneously.

By the time we pass the house of our minister, she wants to turn back and her face has lost all color. “She's on a cruise,” she says of the reverend. “Nobody at church can figure out where she gets the money.” Her look suggests I am involved in this.

Suddenly the dog reappears, dancing his dance, licking my hand, and moving to Betty to give her a good sniff and slurp. She grimaces, eyes him cautiously.

“Who are you?” she says. “Get out of my way. What are you doing?” Mr. Dog backs off. “Is that dog going to the toilet?” Betty demands to know. “I don't want to see any dog going to the toilet . . . Who was that dog we had?”

“Toto.”

“What an animal!”

By the time we are heading back up our driveway, Betty is leaning on my side, tentatively, as if someone might catch her doing it and criticize. Before we reach the door she is gripping me desperately.

. . .

A woman named Barbara who is friendly with my mother sells health insurance, and when she arrives at our house to try to interest me in a policy, I get anxious. I don't do policies. I don't do forms. But I like Barbara. We bond over our appreciation of the festive charm that our neighbor's still-lit Christmas snowman brings to the summer nights. Betty, on the couch, coughs. She wants to hear everything we say, but I talk softly, to get her goat, and Barbara follows my lead. Betty frowns.