Bettyville Read online

  I think about leaving, but cannot seem to make it to the plane. My fingers will not dial the American Airlines number and I realize that my place in New York would feel very empty if I returned. I miss the company of people from work. I’d miss Betty too. Turns out I am a person who needs people. I hate that.

  “Don’t leave me,” Betty says, if I go to bed before she is ready also. “Are you going to leave me?” If I start to move my work to my father’s desk in the back of the house, forsaking the card table near the couch that is her center of command, she begs me to stay. She sits beside me all day, always wants me near, a real change from the woman who was always shooing me away, off to camp or college, or the next phase, off to be independent. If I allow someone else to take her to the doctor—the foot doctor, say, not an emergency situation—she is angry for a day or two. This is how it is now.

  My mother is scared. I cannot believe it. But she will not speak of her fears. She is locked up tight. She keeps her secrets. I keep mine. That is our way. We have always struggled with words.

  I am never certain quite what I will wake up to. Recently, as she was preparing for our daily walk, I discovered her trying to put her sock on over her shoe. This interlude, I know, cannot last. My life, such as it is, is on hold. I am worried by how we are living now, scared of drifting, losing footing on my own ground. Soon she will need more than I can provide, but she is not ready to give up. Despite her vision, her fading hearing, her stomach problems, and the rest, she tries to hold on in this place that is so familiar, her home.

  It is the smallest things that trouble my mother most—the glass broken, the roast she cannot bake right, the can opener she cannot command to do its work, the TV remote control she cannot operate. Tell her the house is on fire and she will go on with the newspaper. Tell her you cannot find her address book and she will almost fold. Yet she has always been a determined woman, a force. She has been my rock and I am convinced that, at some level, she has survived to give me—a gay man whose life she has never understood—a place to call home.

  In her wake now, a path of open cabinets, dirty Kleenexes and crumbs, cantaloupe seeds on the couch and the floor, bills she intends to pay, food left out to spoil. I polish the silver, fix her meals, buy her new bracelets, leave Peppermint Patties under her pillow, drive her to her battalion of doctors. I buy mountains of fresh fruit, still—like ice cream—a luxury for a woman raised in the country during the Depression. Even after decades of relative prosperity, a bowl of fresh strawberries remains a thing of beauty to her, a wonderful surprise. She spies them with the delight of an excited girl.

  I try to imagine anything that will make her a little happier. If only, just once in a while, she could look a little happier. I know that her days are numbered in this house, built by my father, where deer run in the backyard and Sara Dawson down the street watches for Betty’s light in the mornings, in the kitchen window where so many times I have seen my mother’s face watching out for me as I turned into the driveway. For both of us, finally, I know, these are our final days of home. I am a loner, but I hate to lose people. I can only imagine how scary it is to know that the person one is losing is oneself.

  2

  In Missouri in springtime, the rivers rise and the rolling fields stretching acres and acres, miles and miles, gradually go green as the farmers fret over the wet ground, wondering when it will be dry enough to disc and get the crops out. In the mornings, old women wander through wet grass, bending with dirty hands over jonquils or bursts of peonies, rising to inspect children walking to school or hang summer clothes to air in the breeze.

  In April and May, torrents of rain come, lightning chars the tree trunks, and the branches fall, and the thunderclaps crash. Creeks and rivers flood the river bottoms and roads. Betty hit the gas and drove through the water, never acknowledging anything unusual.

  More twisters touch down here than ever now. A few years back, the town of Joplin, a few hundred miles away, was nearly destroyed by a funnel cloud that gathered force as it made its way across the plains. Many people died. The world took note.

  Betty had little to report. These things happen. That is life. One year, near Paris, a farmer was taken up in the winds. Betty did not register the event, just marched on. She is from determined stock.

  According to a family story, my mother’s grandmother Anna Callison began a journey one spring morning at the age of eighty-five, departing from Union Station in St. Louis. She traveled alone by train halfway across the country, to Virginia, where as a girl during the Civil War she fetched a drink of water for Traveller, the horse of General Robert E. Lee. She headed back to catch a glimpse of Traveller’s bones, which had been recently excavated, to remember the morning when she saw the general, the war, the days when she was a girl. No one could stop her. Not Mammy, or Nona, or Uncle Oscar.

  “That old woman was crazy,” Betty says.

  . . .

  Spring is long gone now; it is August and the heat has been record breaking. No rain since June. Even the river bottom looks like desert and the corn in the fields is burning on the stalks.

  On the television news at 6 p.m., I learn that members of the Missouri legislature, some of whom carry guns into sessions, are considering a bill to ban the imposition of sharia law. There is a controversy over a resolution forbidding teenagers access to tanning beds without parental permission. Betty scrutinizes the television.

  “They are going to start arresting teenagers for illegal tanning,” I tell her.

  “You’re not as funny as you think you are,” she replies. My humor makes her look as pained as she did at parties when my father, a tenor, and never bashful, belted out barroom ditties as the other husbands strained to mutter a word. I am irony. She is no nonsense. Our lives have been lived on different planes.

  I like staying up all night, hunched over a manuscript, playing with the words and sentences. I like setting out for somewhere early in the morning when no one is stirring. When I scan my existence, I can recognize no recognizable pattern. At home in New York, I listen to music, read books, fish old photographs from trash cans on the street. I like the unconventional, the city and its stories, castoffs and characters of dubious reputation. My mother has sometimes lived her life for the neighbors. I have never been able to remember the neighbors’ names.

  . . .

  “Who is that?” Betty demands to know as a kid roars by in his pickup as we back out of our driveway into the early evening. “Now where is he going?” On the corner, where the city is excavating and there is a pile of dirt, she demands, “What are they doing? It looks like they’ve dug a big hole. You better watch out.”

  She is wearing the jeans she will never take off and a blouse with wrinkles she cannot see. For many days this pairing has been her choice. I have given up trying to control her clothes. God grant me the serenity to accept the clothes I cannot change.

  We are thirty minutes late for a dinner so I hit the gas, and in moments we are turning onto 24, heading out of town. We pass a church, not so well kept up, where the sign that usually displays Bible verses beckons with a request: PRAY FOR RAIN. Prayers are frequent around here, especially this summer. Angels are hoped for. A woman nearly killed in a car crash on I-70 claims to have seen an angel crossing the road before her car veered out of control.

  We pass the place where, some years back, Major’s Drive-In Theater blew down in a bad spring storm. We pass shiny black cows. Mammy always talked about how pretty she thought black cows looked against green grass. But the grass is not green this summer and Mammy is a long time gone.

  Betty sighs as she surveys the fields. “It’s a good thing we don’t have to try to sell lumber to the farmers this year,” she said. “Lotsa luck.” She hugs her purse, a bag of flowered cloth I purchased for her birthday and she declared too youthful. “I thought you didn’t like that purse,” I commented. “It’s bought and paid for,” she says. “I’m not
going to turn my nose up at it.”

  This is the real country, not a place for rich weekenders. Tractors putt along highways where vapor rises and tar melts. We go by one of the lumberyards our family used to own, closed decades now, where a meth lab was discovered in an outbuilding. Betty turns her head rather than see the place. Some man keeps a collection of boa constrictors on the premises now. Recently one escaped to slither down Rock Road toward the home of my high school typing teacher, an excitable woman, unprepared for a morning of snake wrestling. To my way of thinking, the only proper place for a boa is around Cher’s neck at the Golden Globes.

  Dinner is at the home of Jane Blades, my old friend. We are late because Betty has demanded her gin and tonic, her five o’clock ritual. When Betty asks whom Jane is married to, I say, “No one you know.” She says she hopes Jane does not have to support him. “Whoever he is.” Betty never thinks anyone has married the right person. Some speak of love and romance. This is not my mother. A ring on the finger is not, in her opinion, a ticket to high heaven, but she is usually curious about the quality of the diamond.

  . . .

  “I shouldn’t even be going,” Betty says. “I’m an ugly old woman. I’m an old battle-ax.”

  “How do you think I feel?” I ask her. “I don’t have a pair of decent pants I can button over my stomach.”

  “You could take off a few pounds.”

  “Did you fix your hair that way intentionally?”

  “Just be quiet. Don’t say a word.”

  “I’m probably headed for a gastric bypass.”

  “Stop,” she says. “Don’t talk. . . . Al Roker had one.”

  “What?”

  “A gastric bypass. He had it on The Today Show.”

  “During the weather report?”

  “Everyone could see it. I thought Earleen would never shut up about it.”

  . . .

  Betty peers at the huge metal barbecue on Jane’s patio. “What is that?” she asks. “I don’t know,” I say. “A school bus?”

  When Jane comes out, we hug, but Betty draws back. Her family, the Bakers, did not hug socially, and she is not a woman who cares much for such. Nor is she often sentimental. Inside a silver locket she has worn for years, a gift from my father, are the stock photographs of strangers it came with. When she speaks of dying, I tell her how sad I will be. She waves my words away. “The world goes on,” she says.

  Jane’s house is nice, but a little bare compared to ours, cluttered with antiques laden with hat-pin holders, candy dishes, decanters, ashtrays, and figurines. Many of our things are dusty, but Betty can’t see well enough to recognize this. One could safely say that she considers the absence of bric-a-brac a social problem roughly comparable to malnutrition.

  My father, the unofficial architect of the lumberyards once owned by my mother’s family, supervised the remodeling of Jane’s house decades ago. He gave my friend his greatest compliment. She did not, as he always put it, dillydally over everything. When I bring this up, Jane says my dad made her laugh, Betty says nothing. She never mentions my father, dead since 1997. She is always silent about loss.

  “Oh God, what a character,” Jane says of Big George.

  My mother stares at me.

  Inside is Evie Cullers, a colorful soul whose light blue sweatshirt says COUNTRY KWWR, MISSOURI’S SUPERSTATION; it looks clean enough for a baby. A former floral designer, now in her sixties, Evie sometimes bemoans the poor quality of current funerals and warns of the pitfalls of cremation. “They burn everybody on the same tray and there is a potential for getting one person’s ashes mixed up with another’s.

  “If I’m gonna be livin’ in a urn,” she declared, “I’m not crazy about the idea of having a roommate.”

  I love Evie because she is a character; Betty is sympathetic to her as both have vision problems. “I was over to Wal-Mart,” Evie tells me. “I was searching for something in the drug section and asked some kid for help, said I was visually impaired. He said he’d get someone. Five minutes later, I hear over the loudspeaker, ‘Blind woman needs help in drugs.’ I mean, what else do they say on the loudspeaker at Wal-Mart? ‘We got a bitch in toys’?”

  Betty’s eye difficulties, not quite as serious as Evie’s now—thanks to a legion of doctors and treatments—began when I was in grade school when her retina detached during a surgery for a condition called latticed retinas that Mammy had as well. There have been eight or ten surgeries since then, culminating in transplanted corneas. It has been decades since she has seen clearly, but no complaints have been uttered. She has played the hand she was dealt, bluffing her way at night or on cloudy days. Just like Evie.

  . . .

  We stand around the kitchen island. Betty accepts a glass of wine, but I decline because I have to. I’m nervous, but can’t drink; I can’t take anything that isn’t prescribed. I have a history. Twenty years ago, I was snorting lines of speed before I went to work. When I crashed I never told Betty what had happened. I knew she would try to help, but I knew what she would think of me.

  I listen as everyone talks about their children. Betty, not one to fuss over wee ones or beg to hold a baby, pays little attention to the pictures being passed. She is quiet, as she is in public these days. She seems to have declared herself beyond participation. Sometimes she seems to fade away. By the time she goes to bed, when things get bad, she will have fewer pieces left in place.

  Camilla, Jane’s sister, who has worked construction all over the world, including in Iraq, talks about Baghdad. The city, she says, barely exists now.

  “Just like here,” remarks Evie. “Stoutsville is just gone. We had banks, stores, a restaurant, even a movie theater. And the trains. Every time I heard the whistle, I’d run down to the tracks to wave at the engineer. In summer, the gypsies would come and steal everything. They wore bright colors and drove old cars. Mama would tell us to get under the bed when they were around. People said they liked to run off with children.

  “There’s not a kid here anybody’d take now.”

  “In ten years,” says Camilla, “we could be sitting around this table and there could be no Paris at all.”

  . . .

  Places like Paris are vanishing. Main Streets in all the towns around are boarded up. Gone are Lillibelle’s Dress Shop, Mrs. Bailey’s department store, Nevin’s Florist, the barbershop where old farmers emerged after a cut and card game to take a pinch of chewing tobacco from the pockets of their overalls. We are decades past the last picture show. Wal-Mart, staffed by those known as Wal-martians, has taken its toll. There is a bail bondsman, and on television, a place called Family Pawn advertises relentlessly. “I’ve never pawned anything,” Betty has confessed to me. “Have you?”

  I read histories of the place I am from—the Civil War battles, the characters, the traveling Chautauquas, the old houses that lined the shady streets when Paris was the heart of “Little Dixie,” a bastion of Southern sympathy. Long ago, there was an opera house; a grand hotel; a woolen mill that produced yarns, flannel, and blankets. There was a pottery works; a flour mill; plow, wagon, and shoe factories; tobacco warehouses; a feed store; a livery stable; a factory where cigars (Queen of Paris) were made and a wooden Indian stood out front. At Murphy and Bodine’s Clothing Store, a huge stuffed bear in the window displayed men’s coats and hats.

  Things are different now. A book I read said three things changed rural America: the breakup of the family farm; Wal-Mart; meth.

  . . .

  After dinner, Jamie Callis, who graduated a year before me, arrives. The immediate center of attention, she is bawdier than I remembered and I am miffed; I want the spotlight. In the kitchen, Jane whispers that this is Jamie’s first time out since her husband, a veteran, committed suicide. A few days ago when Earleen told Betty all about this, my mother interrupted: “Stop, stop. I can’t hear that. I can’t hear it.”

 
Betty shyly edges her hand toward Jamie’s; she wants to offer something, but cannot reach her without calling attention to herself, and when she sees that I am looking, she withdraws.

  . . .

  Driving home, we pass Jamie’s big old house, which was her parents’, and Betty notices a flower bed at the edge of her driveway. “I hope her flowers make it,” Betty says. “Hers more than anyone’s. Look at that woman. A lot of people would fold. She’s carrying on. I like her.”

  Later, Betty and I are watching the news. She looks up, unhappy. “I’m ignorant, aren’t I?” she asks. “Jane’s sister’s gone everywhere. I’ve never been anywhere much. I never went far.”

  Ignorance has always been one of my mother’s greatest fears—for herself and for me. Growing up, she emphasized that I would be going to college. She planned for me to become a lawyer, like my father’s father, in St. Louis. I didn’t see it.

  When I was a kid, I had no notion of what could happen to me. I knew that, somehow, I did not fit exactly; but this was my home. I loved my home.

  I still hear the sound of the clothes falling in the dryer on the other side of my bedroom wall in our old house. On hot nights I lay with my head at the end of my bed to catch the breeze from the humming fan. Out my window, I could see the field, planted with soybeans. All summer long, Bobby Buck and I ran between the rows of beans all afternoon; at night after supper; and then after dark, when it felt dangerous to go barefoot, as we always were. A curled-up snake might be waiting underfoot. Some animal might spring up. I closed my eyes and took off.

  Across the street lived the Masons—J.C. and Maggie and their kids, Kevin and Missy. J.C., who drove a big gravel truck, or Maggie took us all to grade school in their sea-green Chrysler, its ashtrays overflowing with cigarette butts. “Your love,” the radio played, “is like a itchin’ in my heart,” or “Come on, come on boy, see about me.” Early morning in Missouri: fog billowing around the grain elevators, streets slick with ice, blue windows, big women in aprons behind the diner counter beating the hell out of egg yolks.