Bettyville Read online

  “How’s your mama?” asks Destiny, who rings up my gas. Everywhere I go, people inquire after Betty. They want to stop in, bring food, help. They miss seeing her.

  “Came in here one day and said she could get fresher produce at an antique store,” said the man at the IGA.

  I can’t take her place. When I pull up to the bank window, the cashiers look askance, knowing my habit of getting my card stuck in the cash machine. At the grocery store, the checkout girls grow anxious upon my arrival, well aware of my tendency to trip and topple displays.

  As I come out of the store, I see Betty’s face through the windshield, the very image of stubbornness. I wish I were on drugs. Yesterday at the meat counter when they asked what I needed, I whispered to myself, “Xanax. And a little crack on a bagel.”

  My friends worry that I am falling into a hole here, that this time away is really giving up, running away. Since I lost my job, I don’t know quite who it is I am now. Suddenly I feel older. In New York, my closet is full of clothes that still smell a little like youth. I cannot bring myself to get rid of them. Betty and I are both crossing bridges we would rather avoid. Luckily to distract us there is Wheel of Fortune, a show we despise so avidly we cannot ever miss it.

  I have always been my work. And now here I am, suddenly, after all these years, home. I am not exactly the black sheep of my family, but it is not like I am grazing in pastels.

  Getting back into the car, I hit my head on the door frame and yell out. Betty asks, “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” I say. “It’s just something that will kill me later.”

  All the way to Columbia, Betty complains about my driving; she is less daring these days where speed is concerned. As we are passing through Hallsville, she asks the question again.

  “What is that stuff you drink at Christmas?”

  “Eggnog.”

  . . .

  Finally, we make it to Waikiki Coiffures, where I always expect to find the operators in leis: “Aloha, Missy Betty. Welcome to our island kingdom!”

  We are a bit late, but they take her, though I get dirty looks. “Betty, you need some new shoes,” Bliss says, glancing at my mother’s feet and then at me as if to say, “How can you let her out of the house in these?”

  I get a coffee at Lakota and stroll past Jock’s Nitch. Columbia is the home of the University of Missouri, my alma mater, and the store sells T-shirts and jackets with the Tigers’ logo. I buy Betty a fleece-lined jacket for fall and a long-sleeved T-shirt in gold, one of the team’s colors. Both are emblazoned with large tiger heads, ferocious and ready to spring off the fabric. Betty went to school at the university, but couldn’t afford to join a sorority. At football games with my dad, she never glanced at the field, only at the Tri-Delts and their outfits.

  After her appointment, Betty lowers the visor over the dash to inspect her hair in the mirror. Not one of Waikiki’s most successful endeavors, it is a lacquered bubble, blown back in a way that suggests shock.

  “This is the worst yet,” Betty says, downcast. My mother has not had what she considers a successful hair appointment since around 1945.

  I present her with her new clothes, and she wears her Tiger jacket all the way home, despite the temperature hovering just under a hundred degrees. “Do you think it’s too warm for the heated seats?” she asks. They are her favorite of our car’s features.

  I say I think so, but she flicks hers on anyway. I wait for smoke to rise from her rear end. She is quiet for a while, then asks, “That girl from dinner. Her husband killed himself . . . She drives the school bus.”

  “Jamie, you mean.”

  “She must feel low. I have some things I want to give to someone. Would that insult her?”

  “I don’t know, Mama.”

  “She’s working herself ragged and her husband served this country.”

  As we drive, Betty remarks on the sky, light blue with a few thin lines of color. Before the sun starts to fall, the light illuminates the flat land that extends on and on, miles and miles and miles, with nothing to obstruct our view until, finally, it merges with the horizon. The clouds go back and back in rows, each hanging slightly lower than the one before it, one visible after the next and trailing tatters of white.

  The sky is our sea here, our object of contemplation in all its moods and shades. My father taught me to observe it. As I watched him gaze at it as a kid, or a bored teenager, or on early-morning trips back to the university, or later, on the way to the airport in St. Louis, I began to see what he did. I watched for my favorite effect—the way the clouds, in morning and at sunset, jutted out into the blues and pinks like islands in a huge bay of light, gradually thinning as they stretched out into what seemed like the waters of the ocean.

  Often he would pull over, take his camera from the glove compartment, and snap some shots while I wondered if we would ever reach our destination. My father loved to watch, in autumn, the long scarves of lonely birds, flying, finally together, toward home.

  “It’s all going to be okay, Betty,” I say later, back in Paris, when she gets her nighttime worried look and starts to make her sounds: “Hmmm, hmmm, hmmm.” And for one long moment, I let myself slip into denial and believe it.

  Betty asks again about the eggnog, as I write a note to my friend Stephen, an artist, who has lung cancer and is probably dying. “What’s up, Florence Nightingale? Are you ready with my enema?” he asked me a few weeks ago on the phone.

  For a while, Stephen and I met at the Starbucks on Greenwich and Bank at 7 a.m. daily for lattes and old-fashioned doughnuts. His mother still lives in Texas, and whenever there is a storm warning, she wakes him at odd hours of the night to proclaim, “The storm is coming. It’s heading this way. It’s heading this way.”

  He imitated her expertly, and we laughed, and about once a week I asked him to retell me my favorite story, a tale he excelled at repeating: There was a time in his life when Stephen kept very late hours, and one night, in the Village, at a twenty-four-hour convenience store not far from the river, he encountered a fine black sister of the self-created feminine persuasion whose deportment suggested that her business might possibly involve certain amorous transactions.

  She had a bit of glitter on her face, a pile of errant hair, and a derriere of some considerable dimension tucked into some snug-fitting denim shorts. On top, she had on some kind of loose-fitting garment. Her eyes—large and saucerlike—gave the impression that she had recently ingested some mood-enhancing chemicals. When Stephen encountered her, she was in the back of the store, trying to stuff a large canned ham under her top. Then, proudly, she marched through the checkout, protecting herself with a purchase of maybe a Butterfinger or something.

  But perhaps because of her state, she suddenly lost it and did a kind of swoon thing or whatever and the ham dropped out from underneath her top with a large thud. The cashier looked at her. She looked at the cashier, then at the ham, and announced, “I can’t be coming to this store no more. People be throwing hams at me.”

  . . .

  I love the citizens of the city night. For many years, I was one of them. I had adventures. My life has been an odd hotel with strangers drifting through and friends sometimes growing concerned. At times I was known to show up at work seven days a week, logging in at odd hours and setting off complicated alarm systems. For years, always feeling a little resentful, I walked past town houses where lamps revealed marble fireplaces and beautifully organized bookshelves. Like the assortment of strange relics in our basement, I have some cracks, broken chips, missing pieces. I have spent my life trailed by voices in my head saying, “You’re no good. This isn’t right. You’re not right.” My skin is sometimes the most uncomfortable garment of all. I have wandering eyes that do not easily meet the glances of others. When shaking hands with new acquaintances, I still wonder if my grip is right. Is it manly enough? I tell too many jo
kes. In a city of arrogant wristwatches, I have rarely been able to keep a Timex running right.

  As a child, I kept broken things from around the house or taken from the trash in the bottom drawer of the bureau in my room. When I was finally grown, when it seemed that life would be inhospitable here, I fled—to Washington, Boston, New York. I will never forget my father’s face—his sad, lonesome look—when I left the house to go east.

  I give last-minute gifts, haphazardly wrapped, travel on fantasies and imagined furloughs, late-night planes, booked too tardily for discount rates. I have no condo, summer home, or good investments, or family of my own. I have no husband, or domestic partner, or even beloved pet. Betty would never guess quite how things have been. If pressed to do so, she could not really imagine how I have lived. I never wanted a house with a few nice things. Or did I?

  . . .

  I am exhausted. Before I go to bed, I look in on her, as always. There is a pungent smell coming from her room.

  “I’m here to check on you and your hair,” I say.

  “I sprayed it,” she says. “I don’t know if it will work.”

  “You’re a mean old woman, you’re not a bit good,” I tell her.

  “I can’t believe you’re not in the penitentiary.”

  . . .

  In the middle of the night, I hear her in the utility room, washing, banging down the lid of the washer, whispering to herself, turning on the dryer. Although she always seems to turn up in clothes with stains, she washes the same stuff over and over and over, usually at odd hours. Night after night, she washes and washes and I listen as she talks out loud, cries out. It is Friday and I do not know what Saturday will decide to do with us here on Sherwood Road and I cannot let myself jump ahead to imagine next week, or next month, or next year.

  Before sleep, I go outside to check the stars, so much more visible here than in New York. They calm me after seeing Betty under siege. I turn on the coach light by the driveway; I leave it burning all night every night. We are expecting no guests but it says that we are still alive, not ready yet to disappear into the dark.

  4

  A few days later: When I get home from town, the garage door is up and Betty stands at the door to the empty space, wearing no shoes. After fifty years, I can read her; at this moment, anyone could. She conceals her deepest affections, but registers dissatisfaction without hesitation. Her emotions are heightened; this is part of her condition. Her face is angry; her body is angry. When I get to her, she is nearly frantic.

  “Where have you been? Where were you? I have to get to the church. You have to take me to the church. How could you forget me? You knew this was the day. You knew this was the day. You were there when they called this morning. You heard. You heard them say there was a meeting.”

  In fact, I have not remembered that I was supposed to drive her to the Memorial Committee meeting at four. I try to apologize, but no. Her anger has been building since who knows quite when. Although she is mostly dressed—this time, of course, she has made a real effort to be on time—she is trembling. But there is something behind her panic, besides the fact that I have forgotten her. She cannot find her shoes.

  “What,” she asks me, in desperation, “have you done with my shoes? Why do you treat me like this? Where have you put my shoes?” I tense up and run toward her, afraid that she will trip on the rug in front of the door.

  This morning began with the long stretch of sky hinting at pink. In the baked backyard, I spotted a young deer straining its neck to feed from the low-hanging branch of one of the trees my father planted years ago. Staring, the deer tilted his head to the side and assessed me quizzically. At Abel’s Quick Store, the girl behind the counter, wearing a badge saying TRAINEE, stared at me in much the same way. I have become an object of puzzlement to all species. I have no rear or hips and a fat tummy. It’s like what used to be my ass has somehow shifted to the front of my body. There is no pair of pants made on the planet that does not fall down when I wear them.

  At home, Betty ignored me, something brewing. Soon the phone began to ring, a rarity, one call after another. First came the tidings of one of my mother’s old friends. Her daughter has had a baby. She feared it has an oddly shaped head. Next, someone from the bridge club: She has a bladder infection. So prevalent are references to bladders in my mother’s circle that I have come to think of them fondly, like a quirky, hard-to-control family who might soon be arriving for dinner.

  Next it was the church about the meeting later, then a recorded message announcing Betty’s upcoming appointment with her GP. Refusing to answer the telephone herself, my mother balked at even being called to the receiver. On the line, she oozed the frustration of a mob boss dissatisfied with the morning tallies from Vegas. By the third or fourth summons, she was greeting her callers with, “Speak!”

  Then came Waikiki Coiffures. When I started to put Betty on, the shop’s owner stopped me, asked, “Are you her son?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Is there a problem?” Apparently Betty almost fell on her last visit; the owner cannot risk a lawsuit if Betty tumbles down next week. I say we are not litigious types; we are peaceful folk, despite occasional fits of rage after a comb-out. I beg her understanding. But no: From here on, my mother will have to be accompanied by someone who will wait while she gets her hair done.

  I watched Betty, who eyed me gravely, her sixth sense for trouble in high gear. Yes, she is sometimes shaky on her feet, I told the caller. But the biggest problem, I argued, is her shoes. The woman agreed. She said the soles on Betty’s sandals are worn down enough to make her trip.

  After hanging up, I explained the situation to Betty, who slammed her book down on the couch. “I’m ninety years old and everybody in town is telling me what to do!” When she clicked the TV remote control device, I swore she was pointing it at me. “Be still,” she yelled. “Just be still.”

  . . .

  Betty complains constantly about her feet. New shoes, she claims, cause her agony. (She has always taken pride in the fact that she wears a narrow size. Now she insists on the same size, though her feet have swollen.) During fittings, she cries out. Fellow shoppers stare at me, fearful she is being attacked. I point at the clerks, mouth, “Shoe people,” in a shocked stage whisper.

  In my mother’s mind, no pair is right; nothing feels good. Her feet are tender, and when I attempt to guide them carefully into her Mephistos, she behaves as if she is being tortured. She can no longer bear even the slightest discomfort of any variety. For several years, despite our efforts at malls across the region, we have found no footwear that does not cause her pain. At Saks in St. Louis, a clerk pulled out a pair of flats by Jimmy Choo. “Listen,” I begged her. “We are not talking Sex in the City here.” She glanced at me as if I had blasphemed. I bowed my head, chastened.

  A pile of rejects grows higher by the couch. Betty refuses to put them on or try to break them in, relying instead—even in winter—on the beat-up sandals and her ancient Mephisto “runners.” This morning, after the call from Waikiki, she brought the newspaper up over her face and stuck her feet under the coffee table when I reached for a pair of the new shoes. As I withdrew, I caught her peeping out from behind the paper quite satisfied with her obstruction. I wondered if my 12-step group might pass some sort of humanitarian injunction allowing me to ingest one tiny Xanax on an emergency basis.

  . . .

  This was the beginning of the War of Shoes. Since man first staggered across the earth, wars have been waged over God, land, money, freedom. This will be a battle for control over one small territory that remains my mother’s own: her feet, a dry landscape below the region of swollen ankles, a terrain coursed by rivers of fragrant lotion, of callused patches, broken veins, errant toes. On this field of battle I have vowed to lay my body down. Withdrawing to my bed, I planned future maneuvers. My hostages, I decided, would be stowed in the crowded confines of my bedroom cl
oset.

  If I were starting a Betty Museum, I would make an exhibit out of the sandals with their worn, thin straps and soles indented with my mother’s dark footprints. These shoes are relics; they sum up our last years here on this planet. I treat them kindly; they have served us well, through weather in all forms and days of challenges, through so many moods and ups and downs. In my bedroom, I tucked them into the closet on a high shelf. There would be repercussions. But this was war.

  . . .

  At the city office, located in the old elementary school, where I had gone to pay a bill, I made a quick detour into the historical society, located in this same building, to reread a few of my favorite items, including the tale of Ella Ewing, an eight-foot-four-and-a-half-inch “giantess,” who traveled with P. T. Barnum, sharing the bill with a twenty-three-inch-tall Russian dwarf called Peter the Small. Her shoes are displayed at the state capitol. Bending the rules a bit, the woman behind the desk allowed me to borrow a clipping about Ella’s life.

  My family, our friends, all our days reside on these shelves. For several months now, I have tried to piece together my mother’s life, the past she will never mention.

  According to my grandfather’s obituary, Joseph William Baker, whom I never knew and who was rarely discussed by his children, disposed of his first business, a hardware store, in order to enter World War I. The fighting ended before he could report for duty and he started over from scratch, opening the lumberyard in Madison and working hours that extended from before sunup to long beyond the fading of daylight. He took a wife, Margaret, often called Marge or, later, Mammy. Photographs reveal a young woman with a wistful face and thick, pinned-up braids who taught at country schools to which she rode on horseback, even in the rain, through the trees and bean fields.

  The first child of Margaret and J.W., a son named Harry Clay, was born in Madison in 1921. On August 4, 1922, my mother—Betty Baker—arrived. A few years later, there was another son, my uncle Bill.