Authors: Francine Prose
“Excuse me?” says Vera.
“What’d you
want
it for? What’s wrong with you?” Vera’s trying on an array of possible symptoms when the old woman says, “Wait. I can usually tell.” She looks Vera up and down, then clamps her lips around the diagnosis as if it’s something tasty she’s just eaten. “Lower-back pain.”
“That’s right,” lies Vera. “Amazing.”
“Thought so,” says the woman. “You’re the type. Care to come in for some coffee?”
Vera hangs back, wondering if all the pilgrims who come knocking on the Greens’ door are offered the same hospitality. Probably not; probably most of them are in so much real pain that no low hiss or beckoning finger can turn them in their course. Yet all are sent away, while Vera’s gone in and witnessed whatever went on with the cops…How could this woman not be curious?
“I’m Betty Anne,” she’s saying. “Betty Anne Apple.” The horror-story teller. Now, as Vera looks harder at Betty Anne, she sees the face of a woman who eats horror stories, sucks them for what nourishment she requires. The face of a
This Week
reader, she thinks. My audience. My public.
“I’m Vera Perl,” she says before it occurs to her not to. Now Betty Anne wheels on her, eyes glittering in a snaky way that goes along with the hissing. “My, my,” she says. “You’re the girl wrote that story in the paper.” On this end of the block, Vera’s something of a celebrity—hated by some, admired by others, instant recognition everywhere. My, my.
Betty Anne Apple’s house is a monument to misplaced energy and hours spent home alone. Everywhere are afghans, appliquéd pillows, needlepoint seat covers, decoupage waste baskets, corn-husk wreaths, stenciled wall plaques. Entering the living room is like leafing through forty years of back issues of women’s magazines, faded by time and the repeated turnings of some dedicated homemaker with more enthusiasm than talent: forty years of directions read slightly wrong. All the afghans are in painful shades of puce and dayglo orange, the cut-out felt flowers have a slightly wilted tilt, the decoupage is yellow and buckled like newspapers left in the rain. Hobo clowns leer down from their plaques with the stoned, loopy grins of real bums and psycho killers.
Betty Anne sees Vera take it all in and interprets her attention as a compliment. “I hate to just watch TV,” she says.
Unyielding is a euphemism for the couch Vera’s shown to; it’s aggressive in its lumpiness. She scoots back, not that it’s any more comfortable, but to avoid calling attention to her discomfort by balancing on the edge, and finds herself surrounded on both sides by giant pillows appliquéd with fuzzy black monkeys. She thinks of Shaefer’s knickknacks, of Gandhi, but mostly of the Rue Morgue.
FLATBUSH FEARS MORE MONKEY MURDERS
. There’s no escaping it. Wedged between two chimpanzees, Vera feels as if she should put both hands over her mouth.
“Coffee?” says Betty Anne. “I’m off it myself. I read this article where scientists fed these baby rats nothing but instant coffee and water; every one of them critters got cancer of the bladder. But you’re certainly welcome to some. It’s instant, no trouble at all.”
“No, thank you,” says Vera.
“Smart girl,” says Betty Anne. Sighing with relief, she settles into an equally unaccommodating chair, then slides forward as if she’s imitating Vera in reverse. “I’ve always wanted to meet one of you people.” You people? Her tone might refer to Jews or nymphomaniac single mothers, but no, she means writers for
This Week
. Vera knows what’s coming next: How much of what you people write is true? But that’s not what Betty Anne wants to know. Instead, she waves in the Greens’ direction, sucks on her gums a minute, then says, “How did you get wind of
that
?”
“I didn’t,” says Vera, then tells her story in almost the exact same words she’s just used at the Greens’. Explaining it twice in less than an hour makes it seem boring beyond measure. Vera wishes she had a tape of it she could run; for all the emotion or connection she feels, she and Betty Anne might both be sitting there listening. It reminds her of how, when she and Lowell split up, she’d tell
anyone
—the guy at the newsstand, supermarket checkout girls, strangers on the subway. All that distinguished her from a screamer was a softer voice and the pretense of finding someone specific to talk to. She’d hoped that repetition would trivialize her unhappiness, make it seem stale, banal, less painful. She’d called it boredom therapy, and it worked. The only problem was when it quit working: alone in her bed in the dark.
As Vera drones on, Betty Anne leans forward till her chin’s nearly resting on her bony little knees. It’s not really like listening to a tape, nor even like talking to the Greens. Something’s crackling in the air, some wholly new electricity and it’s not long before Vera identifies it: Betty Anne believes her. She’s not looking for explanations, facts Vera might have overlooked or forgotten. Betty Anne
wants
to believe her. What a difference, telling your story to someone who thinks it’s the truth! Vera hears her voice lose its robot edge; she’s positively trilling. How charming she is, how expansive, barely controlling the urge to share her whole weekend with Betty Anne. She’s recreating, making new, inventing and embroidering as if she’s never told anyone before.
Finally Vera says, “That’s it.”
“Well, isn’t that the darndest thing,” says Betty Anne, and exhales with such reverence and resignation you’d think she was at church. “God moves in mysterious ways,” she says. “We just always seem to know things we couldn’t possibly know. It’s like years ago, my brother’s first wife. Out to here.” She circles her arms in front of her, wide enough to accommodate a full-term pregnancy and a couple of basketballs; try as she might, Vera can’t imagine Betty Anne’s stingy body ever swelling to such roundness. “She kept saying it wasn’t a baby in there. The doc kept saying it was. They all thought she’d gone a little off her nut, like women do when they’re that way. But after ten months and no baby’s come, they cut her open and guess what they found?”
A forty-pound tumor, thinks Vera, and that’s just what Betty Anne says. “Poor woman. It’s funny, what we know. One summer me and Art God bless him rented a little cabin up near Yankee Lakes. These people next door to us, the husband buys a little motorboat, and all night we can hear the wife screaming, ‘Don’t buy it, something terrible’s going to happen.’ And sure enough, they’d hardly got the thing in the water, their only daughter, the prettiest little girl you ever saw, ten years old, swims into the propellor, chops her head off clean as a whistle.”
Now Vera does have her hands over her ears. Hear no evil, anyway. Not one more word. In the silence, she imagines the husband bringing the boat in, tying it up at the dock. Or did they just let it float away? She’s infinitely depressed, not just by the stories but also by the fact that Betty Anne is the only one who believes
hers
. To Betty Anne, she’s simply another freak; it makes sense that Betty Anne’s spectrum of possibility should be so much broader than the norm. In her world, life’s secrets reveal themselves as juicier and more horrendous than anyone could have predicted. If you can believe that a woman’s body could host a forty-pound tumor, you can believe anything.
“Even so,” says Betty Anne, “what throws me for a loop is how you knew it works.”
“Knew what works?” says Vera.
“The water,” says Betty Anne. “Listen. Two weeks ago, poor Mrs. DiPaolo had fluid on her chest, her knees swole up so bad you could push your finger in and leave a dent for twenty minutes, couldn’t get her breath, couldn’t move for seeing spots and this awful sinking feeling; it’d break your heart to see her walking down the street. Take a step, stop. Another step, stop…” Vera feels like she’s hearing Betty Anne read aloud from some hellish
Merck Manual
or one of Dr. Green’s less optimistic charts… “And now she’s fit as a fiddle. Looks healthier than I do. Than
you
do, don’t mind my saying…”
“From the water?” Vera’s voice sounds strangely effervescent. She wishes she’d remembered to eat lunch. Would food help? She feels as if Betty Anne’s taking her nerves and crocheting them into some craftsy dayglo snarl.
“She got better that very day.” Again Betty Anne makes that turtlelike snap of the lips.
That dizzy, tangled sensation seems to be getting worse, perhaps because Vera keeps digging through the original fountain-of-youth story, examining every word. “Neighbors began to
claim
…” “Word spread that the wonder drink was curing…” Innocent, Your Honor. Nowhere in the article does my client say it
works
…
“I don’t know what else it could have been,” is Betty Anne’s conclusion. “She was telling everyone there’d been a miracle. So naturally Mrs. Grossman thinks to try some on her husband. Cancer of the sophagus, poor guy. Takes the poor fella all morning to get the water down drop by drop, and that night they drive to some Jewish-Hungarian place in the city and the guy eats a pound-and-a-half skirt steak.”
“Have these people been to doctors?” asks Vera.
“Sure have.” Betty Anne jerks her thumb toward the Greens. “Even that one there.”
Now Vera’s thinking back over her visit with the Greens. Why didn’t they mention this? You’d think a doctor would be overjoyed by the discovery of a true panacea—until all his training reminded him it was impossible. Vera reviews Martin’s behavior, trying to reinterpret it as that of a man who’s just had his whole sense of reality challenged, not just the everyday acting out of Napoleon Bonaparte, M.D. Clues must have been dropping everywhere, hers to follow if only she’d known to look.
“That’s not all,” promises Betty Anne, and it isn’t, not by a long shot. Who’d have thought that death would have nearly undone so many? And all in one neighborhood. All pulled back at the very last minute from the slippery edge of the grave! Not merely have the sick been healed. Broken hearts have been seamlessly mended, troubled waters calmed, crumbling marriages shored up. Water from the Greens has smoothed wrinkles, turned white hair black, or at least gray.
“I’d try it myself ’cept I don’t need it.” Betty Anne knocks on wood. “I’m saving it for when it counts. Anyhow, who knows if they’d give me any. Specially now that I’ve talked to you.”
Betty Anne’s fudging. In truth, she doesn’t want her youth and beauty restored. She doesn’t even want her teeth to fit. Still she goes on, listing the marvels with such obvious satisfaction, you’d think she’d worked all those miracles herself.
When really, it’s Vera who should take credit. If not for her, they’d never have known the stuff was there.
What in the world is she thinking? What Betty Anne’s just told her is the strangest news of all, and yet she’s less upset than she was Friday afternoon in Shaefer’s office. It’s all begun to seem completely routine. Completely acausal. Completely Kafkaesque. Unless, of course, there
is
an order and a plan. Why would God create the fountain of youth unless He wanted it divined? Is a miracle a miracle if there’s no one around to behold it? There’s something else here, something about faith and belief and the body’s ability to heal itself: Lourdes, Saint Anne de Beaupré, immunology and the placebo effect…Vera puts these considerations off till later. All the quilting and kapok in Betty Anne’s living room would blunt the fine points of anyone’s metaphysic.
“There’s a story for you,” Betty Anne’s saying, “
HOLY WATER WORKS
! Write that one for your paper.”
And so the most depressing fact of all, the worst saved once again for last: Betty Anne thinks in
This Week
headlines, too. Their minds are perfectly in tune. So much so that when Betty Anne smiles triumphantly, Vera knows she’s the kind of woman for whom triumph is always mixed with spite, knows they’re both thinking the same thing: a story like that would
really
fix the Greens’ wagon…
“Are you sure you want that?” she says. “If we ran a story like that, the whole neighborhood would be crawling with reporters…” Vera imagines photographers crouched in parked cars, beneath rhododendrons, leaping out at Meggy and fat little Josh. And suddenly it hits her: If that happened, the Greens would be news, public figures, their story right smack in the midst of the public domain. Stephanie might just as well be Jackie Kennedy! Invasion of privacy? They’d no longer have any privacy to invade, nor any chance of suing
This Week
for libel or anything else! For once, for probably the first time in its publishing career,
This Week
would have the truth on its side.
“The truth will out,” Betty Anne’s saying. “No way you or me’s going to stop it.”
“There might even be an investigation,” says Vera, testing her now. “Would you be willing to swear to all this in court?”
“Sure would,” says Betty Anne. “And so would Mrs. DiPaolo and Mrs. Grossman and her husband.
They’d
be the ones you’d want.”
Vera imagines a procession inching forward, would-be witnesses pushing their own wheelchairs, carrying their crutches and bottles of pills to lay at the Greens’ front door. Here’s Betty Anne Apple guiding teams of researchers and newsmen on tour of this reliquary—Mrs. DiPaolo’s oxygen tank, Mr. Grossman’s bedpan—and all those ladies like Betty Anne, those tireless raconteurs of repulsion. Now, for the first time, it occurs to Vera that maybe they’re not telling their stories to wallow and suffer and make their listeners suffer, too. Perhaps their secret hope is that someone will contradict them. Such things don’t happen, life isn’t so cruel, there’s still hope. Cucumbers will cure your arthritis; water from some Brooklyn cardiologist’s kitchen faucet will save you, mend your broken heart, fix everything that ails you. And even if they’re just telling these stories to reassure themselves that this time pain’s chosen someone else—the person on the phone at the Greens—and passed over them—well, that’s not so bad, either. Because it’s just crossed Vera’s mind that the voices narrating these tragedies aren’t merely the voices of hopelessness, death, and gloom, but also the thin, twisted, terrified, and unsilenceable voice of life itself.
“I’ll see you,” says Vera, so cheered by this that seeing Betty Anne again almost seems like a welcome prospect.