Bettyville Read online

  “Tell me a joke,” Missy cried, her small face streaked with a bit of breakfast, swimming in the hood of a parka circled with dirty fluff. “Say a joke. Say a joke. Say a joke.” I was always trying to be funny. I remember Missy, maybe four years old, in winter, with skinned knees in a torn pair of shorts and a pair of her mother’s battered high heels, making her way across the highway, hair full of flakes of snow.

  Most kids lived on farms. Some of the country kids brought the same lunches every day: one strip of bologna on a slice of bread folded around with a dot of mustard. One girl had skin so dry from walking in the cold to feed that no one would touch her when we played games.

  I read books and worried. Sometimes when company came I hid in the front closet, among the coats, with their just dry-cleaned smell and blue plastic wrappings. In summer I hung around the house, filling the captain’s decanters with Dr. Pepper, which I drank from my parents’ wineglasses. I watched TV, mostly soap operas: As the World Turns, Love Is a Many Splendored Thing, and The Edge of Night. When something remarkable happened, I called my aunt June, long-distance, to discuss these events. June—married to my mother’s younger brother, Bill, was a former beauty operator whose home was decorated with furniture from her parents’ funeral parlor in Kansas. She always thought she knew who had done the murders. “I can tell,” she said, as if gifted with special insight into homicide, a special benefit, she implied, of being raised in the funeral home business.

  In the afternoons I peeped into the tavern to see who was drunk or rode my bike to Mammy’s where a handful of old ladies—Winnie Baker, Betty’s aunt; her sister Maude Eubank; Ruth Holder; and Bess Swartz—often played canasta. Mammy kept score with a pencil she sharpened with a kitchen knife and stuck in her pinned-up braids. She reminded the women, when they excused themselves, not to put paper in the toilet, which was temperamental. I sat on the front porch, listening and reading Ladies’ Home Journal, particularly absorbed by the monthly column “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” though I somehow knew I would never be kissing the bride.

  I sometimes walked with Mammy to Mildred’s Beauty Shop, where I read Photoplay and Modern Screen as the blue-haired ladies lined up, waiting for the dryers in their bibs and wave clips, their new hair colors dripping in rivulets down the sides of their heads. Mammy didn’t go to Mildred’s that often. When it was possible, she washed her hair in rainwater, collected in a flat tin pan, kept on the top of the well, amid the pink roses covered in coffee grounds and eggshells, their branches held together with nylon stockings.

  . . .

  Before bed, I check Facebook where Jamie Callis has written, “Why can’t we go back in time? Joyful family and love.” I hear my mother talking to herself as she does when it gets late and she seems particularly anxious and confused. “What’s wrong with you?” she asks herself over and over. “What’s wrong with you?” For a minute, I think she is talking to me. But she would only be so ferocious with herself.

  “Are you okay, Betty?” I ask. “Are you okay?” Standing in the doorway of her room, I see her wagging her finger at someone who is not there. “I’m fine,” she says. She is yelling at me all of a sudden. “I’m fine.”

  She is so frustrated, ashamed of herself. I want to go to her, give her a hug, but she would just draw back.

  “You’re my buddy,” I tell her.

  “Am I?” she asks. “You know I wouldn’t want just another damn sweet old lady,” I say.

  Later when I look in, she is dozing with the covers kicked off and her purse in bed beside her, making the odd, sweet noises old people make when they sleep. When she opens her eyes, I put an old soft towel in the dryer to warm up and then spread it around her feet, which she complains get cold at night.

  3

  Here in Paris, too anxious to linger after the alarm, I get up early to edit in the quiet. A freelance book editor I am struggling to balance Betty, manuscripts with snarled sentences—and my checkbook. Last night, I was up late on the phone with one of my clients, a loon from Los Angeles who believes he has dug up an unprosecuted Nazi still stomping around Germany. Instead of actually acting on my edits, he has e-mailed hundred of documents to be summarized for entry into the text. I have had very little sleep. My sympathies are veering toward the Reich.

  Mornings in New York, I could be found editing books through the night, at the Malibu Diner on West Twenty-third Street. I sipped my coffee, watched the street and the people, scrutinizing the cops mingling with ancient ladies with drop earrings, streaks of red on their faces, and blaring lipstick—old showgirl types, their often-tinted hair in dry curlicues, who come out early to order rye toast and soft-boiled eggs.

  I have always lived alone. My life as an editor of books and magazines has been spent lingering in the white spaces between lines of copy, trying to get the work perfect. I was raised to get it right. I was raised to work. These were some of the things my mother taught me by example.

  . . .

  Betty started playing the piano when she was a girl. She has a way with the instrument, but it was my father’s voice that people really noticed. Big George was known for singing. The possessor of a voice that could boost celebrants and move even casual mourners, he performed at weddings and special occasions in Madison and Paris. Betty accompanied him. One night, I remember her practicing the “The Lord’s Prayer” over and over so many times I got a headache.

  “Stop playing ‘The Lord’s Prayer,’” I screamed out from my bedroom.

  “Don’t bug me,” Betty yelled back. “I’m in a mood.”

  When my father came home, later than usual, I threw my arms around him as my mother asked where he had been. She said they had to practice for a funeral the next day. We hadn’t had much dinner. Betty never really ate, just pushed her food around on her plate. She wanted to stay thin.

  “Thy kingdom come,” my father sang, “thy will be done.” His voice filled the house. They went through the song over and over as I slept on the couch. The warmth of my father’s hand on my back brought me back. When I got up, he stood me in front of him with his hands on my shoulders and my feet on his work boots. He walked me all the way to my room like this as Betty kept on at the piano.

  Betty kept practicing just to make sure she got it right, got it perfect. I had listened to my mother so many nights, playing the church songs over and over; I could sleep through it. But my father, a man with a temper, never could. Big George got up, furious.

  “Dammit, Betty. Dammit,” he said, his voice loud and angry, “leave that alone and come to bed. I am worn the hell out.”

  “No one,” my mother yelled back, “wants to hear the pianist hit a clunker when they’re about to go into the ground.”

  . . .

  All through school, I worked as hard as I could, tried to win approval. From anyone. I was so hungry for something. My quest to be perfect never really stopped. I tried at work, on every project, at all the jobs I held. For a long time, as I moved from job to job, I was always praised and got promoted, over and over. But I never got it quite right.

  I am not sure my mother believes she ever got it right either. I don’t think she believes that either one of us have ever really hit the mark. I struggle with my moods. They come in big waves, erratic and intense, though I hide them. I have had to fight at times to stay upright. But here my mother keeps me going. I just get up. I crack the eggs, pick the pieces of shell out of the bowl, and flick them across the room with my fingertips.

  This morning, as usual, there was coffee, ready and waiting. Every night Betty changes the filter and puts the water, some of which she always manages to spill, into our old, huffy-puffy machine. During her night missions she turns it on for when I come in. She is very conscientious about this; it almost is the last task, aside from the laundry, that she is able to complete successfully. Although she can still play the piano occasionally for church, she cannot cook, or clean, or do anything that
requires organizational ability or thinking ahead. She makes the coffee too weak, but if I try to intercede before she gets to it, she looks hurt. It is her job. And she thinks I use too much Folgers. “Coffee’s high,” she says. “Coffee’s high-priced.”

  Procrastinating, trying to avoid the Nazi hunter’s last crazed draft, I snag this and that from the kitchen. A day that begins with four coffees, two cinnamon rolls, and several trips to the refrigerator for caramel praline ice cream is likely to lead a person into risky emotional territory. If that doorbell rings it had better not be a Jehovah’s Witness.

  . . .

  “What is that stuff you drink at Christmas?” Betty asks when she gets up. “What is the name of that stuff you drink at Christmas? I lay awake half last night trying to remember the name of it.”

  “Eggnog,” I say.

  We are to drive to Columbia to the hairdresser later. If we don’t leave by noon, we’ll be late and Bliss, Betty’s hairdresser at Waikiki Coiffures, will throw a fit or, as she has threatened, cancel my mother’s appointment. I hate Bliss. She stares at my mother’s clothes on the bad days when we don’t get things quite right. Betty pretends not to notice, but I see how it hurts her feelings. There is a lot she pretends not to notice these days. She doesn’t even seem to take in the weather.

  This is the third month of the drought. There may be hope for beans, but not for the corn; the farmers are cutting it down for silage. I have never known exactly what silage is, but I wonder if it would enhance a dinner salad.

  Our flowers, miraculously, have survived, mostly. I am trying my best to keep them alive. In the mornings my mother stands at the window in the dining room, where the silver is tarnished now, in front of a wicker stand where she once kept geraniums, gazing out at the roses for as long as she can bear to stand up. Her face in the pane is like streaks of a watercolor. Even though she is old, I think she is more beautiful than ever, softer. You would never guess her age until she speaks. I do my best to make sure that when she looks in the mirror, there is someone who is familiar though sometimes nothing else is. When dealing with older women, a trip to a hairdresser and two Bloody Marys goes further than any prescription drug.

  . . .

  The pink rosebushes came from my grandmother’s garden in Madison. My uncle Bill, adept at an astonishing range of skills, moved them here for Betty after my grandmother gave up her house. “I am grateful to Bill for that,” she says. As if there is not much else she gives him credit for. “It was a hard job. He worked and worked. He worked hard.”

  When I lie awake worrying about what will come next, I wonder if my mother is contemplating, as she stands at that window, what will become of her mother’s roses—transplanted by her brother’s old rough hands, pruned by my father, watered and tended by the family through decades of harsh summer sun—after she is gone. Caring for things—flowers or people—has never been my strong point. I worry about doing right by my mother. She deserves someone who can help her better, someone who can change a flat or stuff a turkey. My life has been unconventional. I have walked the streets of New York City, lived in studio apartments, eaten tons of takeout. I have made only desultory attempts at personal arrangements. In fact, I have no personal arrangements.

  Maybe it is impossible to come home again and not to wonder how it is that things turned out quite this way, why I am here, how it came to this, how it is that I cannot quite find the appropriate term for my “lifestyle,” why it is that my mother simply shakes her head when I share details of my existence, why she cannot bring herself to speak of my life.

  . . .

  My mother has never tried to be anyone but herself. “At least I’m out and out with my meanness,” she says. “I’m not a sneak. I hate a sneak.” When I was growing up, we tussled a lot, but never really fought. Yes, Betty had her blowups, her bad days, her little tempests, but there was also the sly way she winked when I came home in the midst of one of her bridge games; the way she rolled her eyes at Mrs. Corn in church just for me to see. I was her conspirator and she made me laugh or want to reach out, sometimes, to protect the part of her that rarely showed, her secret soft spot. At the country club, where she could turn a game of golf into a disaster movie, her face took on a wistful look as she watched her ball plunk down a few feet from the tee. Once on Ladies’ Day, Doris Rixsey took the golf club from her hand and said, “Honey, let’s just go have a highball.”

  If Betty turned against you, she would take you on, but if she loved someone, they would never stand alone. She has a force, a strength that make her gentle moments especially tender. During my first year of school, my friend Alan Million’s mother died in childbirth. I was home, pretending to be sick. When Betty broke the news, she pulled me to her knee. I was an only child; the deaths of parents terrified me; I lived in fear that mine would be taken from me. Betty knew how upset all this would make me.

  When I got up in the dark that night to get in bed with my father, Betty was missing and I was scared, but I found her sitting on the couch in the living room. She looked bereft, and when she saw me, held out her arms. “Who will take care of Alan?” I asked. “His father,” she said, “and everyone in town will keep an eye out for him. People will help him. He won’t be lonely.”

  I lay on the couch with my head in her lap for the rest of the night; she did not shoo me or run me away. After my father got up, Betty made cinnamon rolls, the kind she always managed to tear apart trying to get out of the container, the kind that came with icing that made her scream out when it squirted suddenly from the tube.

  . . .

  Lunch today is clam chowder from a can. Betty sticks the dirty spoon in the pocket of her robe. Something is clearly worrying my mother, and therefore I am worried too. Our moods fold into each other’s more and more as the days pass. “What is that stuff you drink at Christmas?” she asks once more. “What is that stuff called?”

  “Eggnog,” I say. “Eggnog.”

  She gets obsessed.

  . . .

  Betty is cross, moored to the couch. She frets, but will not move or get ready to leave for the hairdresser’s. She fumbles her way to the refrigerator, refuses to put on her clothes, and remains in her nightgown and robe. “I’ll get dressed in a minute,” she promises, as usual. “I will in a minute.”

  I ask again, “Please, go get your clothes on, please, please, please.” She looks away, does not respond, shifts into a position that suggests even greater fixedness. As I leave to take my shower, she picks up her book, oblivious to my concerns, to the demands of the world. Something in her has just let go of all that.

  . . .

  When I was eleven or so, my parents were going out and I was trying to get my mother moving, for my father, who was waiting in the car, as always. Betty was standing at the mirror in her bathroom, struggling with makeup from tubes and jars, nervous, fitful, irritated. Her hands shook as she struggled to apply mascara, not a task at which she excelled. The other mothers were jealous of Betty’s appearance. But my mother wasn’t sure enough, inside, to believe what everyone else saw.

  “Go,” I wanted to scream. “Go.” I knew what it was like to always be kept waiting. I always had to wait for Betty too. At school, everywhere, our Chevy was always last to round the corner.

  Mammy was putting something into the oven. I was sitting on the bed in the midst of a pile of dresses, selected and rejected, tossed off. On Betty’s dresser, her cigarette had burned down to the very end. I took a puff before stubbing it out; it was glamorous, but a fire hazard. Mammy, who was to stay with me that night, was always there, never said she couldn’t come. Whatever she was doing she put it aside for Betty and me. She knew my mother needed to get out, that she got blue and just went to bed when she didn’t.

  In the garage, my father gunned the engine of the Impala. I heard him yell, “What the hell is the matter, Betty? Quit your dillydallying.” My mother turned from the mirror, muttering, “Ug
h . . . ugh, ugh, ugh,” then stuck her tongue out at me and grabbed her purse. Finally.

  “Your father,” she said, “thinks I’m hard to put up with.” She loved to give him a little trouble.”

  It wasn’t a rare thing for my father to get angry; once, the bookkeeper at the yard and I watched as, red-faced, he slammed his fist down on his desk, changing my notion of what a person might be capable of on a day of hard trials. But he rarely exploded at me. Suspicions of some reserve of rage lurking inside my father’s powerful frame would probably be unfounded. He carried what was probably the normal amount of anger. Stored up, though, it was released in sudden storms that left him red-faced and almost tearful.

  . . .

  Determined to get my mother out the door, I am back in the family room, showered and shaved with still-wet hair. Betty brings her book closer to her eyes, hides her face. I lose it. When my mother refuses to act like herself, I get angry, because it scares me.

  “Mother, get ready, now,” I demand. “We should have left at twelve.” With every word, my voice grows firmer.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I told you again and again.” Then I lose patience completely and raise my voice. You might say I almost yell. You might say I almost give up.

  Shocked and hurt, she seems disbelieving. Slowly, she manages to lift herself off the couch, but falls back. She tries again and again. Her face is red, ashamed. When I go to her room to check on her, I find her lying on her back in bed, legs lifted as high as she can manage, trying to get her pants on as best she can.

  When Betty is finally dressed, I take her hand and lead her toward the car where she rebels against her seat belt. When she demands water for the trip, I stop at Abel’s convenience store, where early in the mornings whiskery men in old boots gather in groups to smoke and cuss out Obama. “He should just head back to the asshole factory where he came from.”