Bettyville Page 5

  Accounts of my mother’s first year on earth describe the most extreme temperatures ever recorded, all around the globe. In Missouri, so oppressive was the heat that citizens in St. Louis slept in Forest Park under the stars, cooling themselves in breezes drifting in from the Mississippi. I envision Mammy, up with the babies through the hot nights, walking through fireflies to pick white grapes from the arbor or sitting on the back step, under the walnut tree, brushing her hair out in the dark, as she did before sleeping. She would soothe the little ones with washcloths moistened with well water as her husband—a light sleeper with shadows about his eyes—lay awake, worried over the day to come and the state of his business.

  During 1922, one hundred and forty-four biscuits were served each morning at the Poor Farm in Monroe County, where residents included the insolvent, imbeciles, and the insane. According to one account, some of those confined “uttered nary a word for days on end while others chattered to themselves of imaginary trips to destinations as far flung as Mississippi and Alabama.” For suppers, the matron of the institution, Mrs. J. P. McGee, served two hundred and seven chickens in 1922, all raised by herself with the help of an inmate known as Stick Horse John. Between 1924 and 1928, one hundred and eighty-seven property owners in Monroe County were forced to sell their homes or properties at trustees’ or sheriff’s sales.

  Children died often and early of the influenza virus. In an old diary of my mother’s there are only two kinds of entries: the noting of piano recitals and the names of classmates lost to flu. Most of the pages, though, are blank. Today Betty remains closemouthed about what was.

  In Paris now, there is almost no one she knows. Gone are the abattoir, the jeweler; the fountain at the courthouse goes without its goldfish. Gone are the fine old families who lived in the big houses on Locust and Cooper streets and wintered in Biloxi. Gone are the women who served weak coffee, labeled “troubled water” by my grandmother, in demitasse cups. No more are the old friends who arrived unexpectedly with embroidered baby clothes, canned peaches, or jars of pale green gooseberry jelly. My mother’s family name brings little recognition. Once more, the weather is the most frequent topic of conversation. The lakes are down, their beds cracked and dry like parched mouths. From the stately houses in the river towns—Boonville, Louisiana—one sees banks, vulnerable to fire, above the currents of the waters that eddy in slow, languid circles.

  Betty asks for food made from her mother’s recipes: pimento cheese, lemon pies, burned sugar cakes, oysters, peppered fiercely and baked with crumbled saltines. She craves fresh peaches, sorts through old baby announcements and birthday cards, worrying slyly over whom she will likely offend as she changes her mind, over and over, about which of my cousins will inherit her gravy boats, gold bracelets, and silver salvers. Like most who live now in the place where she is from, she does not care to contemplate the past or to consider the future. Here and now is trouble enough.

  . . .

  The clock says it is after four. Betty says she will never make the meeting, beats her hand on the table. They will think she is too old. They will say she shouldn’t even be on the committee, that she can no longer keep track of the expenditures. “They will say I forget,” she keeps repeating. Her hand beats the table again and again and again. “Why did you leave? Where did you go? Why today? Why don’t you ever pay attention?”

  My mother yells for her shoes. Only the sandals will do. I give up immediately, all vows rescinded. The war has been brief, but filled with shock and awe. I get the worn sandals from the closet, and when she sees them, when it is confirmed beyond denial that I have hidden them, a new wave of hurt and anger emerges as she sits down at the kitchen table and tries, unsuccessfully, to put them on her feet, a task that she cannot manage because she is so enraged at me, at her feet, at the people at the church, at herself, the way she is.

  “Calm down,” I say, taking her hand, which she pulls away, slapping me away. “Please, Mama,” I beg her. “Please, please, Mama. It is all right. It is okay. You’re all right. You’re okay.”

  “Am I?” she asks. “Am I? I don’t think so. I don’t think so.”

  For the meeting, she has put on her good black pants that we found at J. Jill. Mean tattletales, they keep record of every day’s spills, every crumb or bit of lint, everything she has brushed against, every speck. Tight at her bulging waist, baggy over her narrow legs, they hang down over her feet. Sometimes, because of her vision, she cannot make out how much of her life has accumulated on her outfits and just doesn’t realize how badly they need to be cleaned. How unforgiving the eyes of the world can be, even over small things: She knows that now. A trip to bridge has sometimes become a lesson in humility.

  Bending down , face-to-face with the sandals, I salute my victorious adversaries and brush off the legs of Betty’s trousers with my hands. Her fingers, resting tentatively on my shoulder for one fleeting second, when it seems that she has almost lost her balance, are trembling. Her shoes, her good old shoes: She thought I had just walked off and left her.

  From the sink, I bring a damp cloth to erase a dusty streak on the trousers. Her gaze meets mine, but quickly she looks away from whatever my eyes show.

  She is under siege, from scary thoughts, from new shoes, from a son who does not understand, from a world that cannot comprehend the confusion and pain of the secret battle she does not acknowledge to anyone, maybe not even herself—the struggle to stay, to hold on, to maintain. She stares up at me, her elbow on the kitchen table, her hand gripping her forehead as if it is too heavy to hold up. Her eyes, where clouds have settled in, which seem to grow larger, more liquid every day, are full of fear, her expression anguished. How hard she is trying here. No one knows. Age is taking everything away. Now I, the one who she counted to be on her side, have taken her shoes, the only ones that still soothe her tired, sore feet that carry her load. She is so hurt.

  This is what I see in her face: the wandering one, the one who is letting go, and the anguished one, the one who remains, but who knows she is losing, barely holding on. They coexist, alternating, the one gradually ceding to the other. As the surrender progresses, she becomes more and more anxious, sometimes even terrified.

  “Betty’s okay,” I whisper. “Betty’s fine. Betty’s home. Betty’s okay. Betty’s fine. Betty’s home.” When I finally get her in the car, she looks at me as if she has lost the only person in the world she trusts. I get her to church, hold open the car door, help her in and down the basement stairs, a flight of concrete steps that terrify her always. Reluctantly, she grabs my arm and holds on tight. In the meeting room, gathered around the table, the other members of the committee are waiting and not everyone looks like they have maintained their patience. As she starts into the room, she rallies; she straightens her shoulders. She heads into the fray, reaching for my arm as I leave to say that she is sorry. When my mother walks into the meeting, I think of all the people quietly doing so many things that are hard.

  . . .

  There was a day once, a few years back, before I realized how bad her eyes had gotten, when I had left her at the church to practice. Detained at the lawyer’s office, I was late to pick her up. When I returned, I saw no other cars in the parking lot and glimpsed Betty, walking close by the side of the church, keeping both hands on the wall of the building, moving tentatively toward the side yard to wait by the steps for me. There was no sun; it was a cloudy day. She moved very slowly, as if just ahead there might be something waiting, something that might take an old woman down forever.

  My mother speaks of the night when Mammy fell and broke her hip as the moment when her mother stopped being herself. Betty is petrified of falling. It is what she fears above all. Already she has gone down twice, once bruising her tailbone. She will not admit—even to herself—that this ever occurred. Yet in the hall at night, I hear her: “I can’t fall. Don’t fall. Don’t fall. Don’t fall.”

  My parents were at a
party the night my grandmother’s accident occurred. After they left the house, after I was forced to watch Lawrence Welk, after I was asleep, my grandmother tumbled down some steps and broke her hip. I slept on, not hearing her cries. My parents found her when they returned and I woke to the voices of the ambulance men. For the rest of her life—and she lived to be a very old woman—my grandmother used a cane, and then later a walker, which she called her horse, to get around.

  I woke up, very late, to find my mother sitting on the edge of my bed, gently patting my back.

  “Ssshhh,” she said. “Sssshhhh.” Maybe she was crying; I couldn’t tell for sure. We hadn’t said our prayers together as we always did. It seemed now especially that we should not miss. “Do you want to say our prayers?” I asked.

  My mother said nothing, just kept patting my back. I do not know if Betty’s sorrow stemmed from her mother’s loss of independence or her own. Mammy would need care. There would be another person depending on my mother, a situation to make a woman like her feel more hemmed in. That wouldn’t be easy for anyone. Mammy felt terrible for falling.

  . . .

  After we return from church and Betty calms down, I shower and nervously attempt a shave. I realize my face is bleeding from razor cuts, which I attempt to stop with the application of tiny shreds of toilet paper. They cling to my face. Of course, this would be the moment I decide to go out. I don’t think I can bear to sit in the house one more night. After freshening my toilet paper, I clean my glasses—butter sucks on bifocals—then mix pineapple with cottage cheese, bake a piece of salmon, and give Betty an early supper. I hesitate to leave her, but when I say I am going, she nods.

  In the Columbia paper, I have read about a program at the synagogue called “Coming to America,” featuring elderly Jews telling the stories of where they are from and how they came to this country. I decide, as I have time, to take the route through the country past a little store run by the Amish where I take Betty to buy pies. By the time I reach the area where the Amish reside, the sun is setting. I watch the men and women in their heavy dark clothes, in which they must be baking, gathered on porches or walking in from the fields. By the side of the road, a group of little girls in aprons marches together toward the store, carrying dishes covered in white cloths. One girl lags behind. Her bonnet is untied and the strings hang down her chest. Her cheeks are dirty and her boots appear to be unlaced. She stomps angrily down the path, oblivious to the rest. She looks angry; I sense rebellion. I can almost hear her screaming: “Enough with the churning!” This one may just be heading off the reservation. I imagine Betty as a girl like this, inclined toward irritable moments and headstrong, determined to go her own way. I like a girl like that.

  5

  Always open—late nights and early mornings—Rexall Drugs was run by Lennos Bryant, a pharmacist and longtime mayor of Madison known for his annual ascension of the water tower to put up Christmas lights visible for miles. Also in attendance at the store was his wife, Nadine, a registered nurse with an eye for fashion. From her closet came turbans, stoles, aged fur pieces with heads and wandering eyes, sarongs, dresses draped with huge cloth flowers or glittering jewel-like objects. She attracted praise for her attentiveness to the sick for whom she served as doctor, as the town had none. But she specialized as well in unpredictable acts—leaving poison out for dogs that congregated in the business district—that made her less popular. On certain Sundays, her Chevrolet could be seen on the highway, swerving back and forth across the lanes as she supervised the driving instruction of her four-year-old grandson.

  The Rexall was adorned with a black cat clock whose swinging tail marked the hours. My father parked us at the counter as Nadine—her wet hair shaded slightly blue—gave herself shampoos in the soda fountain. My father loved her, egged her on to further feats of eccentricity. On this particular day, however, he finished his cherry Coke before I did and looked shocked when Nadine picked up his drained glass and began crunching on the ice.

  “Nadine!” exclaimed Lennos.

  “He doesn’t have any germs,” replied Nadine. “Look at him.”

  My father laughed until he remembered why we were there. Then he looked at me gravely and said, “I gotta tell you. Your mother has a plan.”

  . . .

  Every few years, when the rains come right, it is impossible not to notice that the place where we live is blessed with picture-book beauty. Maybe it was the pastoral greenery or the glory of nature that led Betty—a woman petrified of the water and not inclined to feast on its products—to wake one morning and imagine her husband and son standing at the edge of a sludgy current, fishing poles in hand, joined in appreciation of each other and the wonder of it all.

  It was 1969 or so, and not long after my father sat me down at Rexall, the two of us found ourselves preparing to go. Fishing.

  “Good lord,” said Big George, “I guess tomorrow is the day.” We were watching the movie on Channel 7, as we did Friday nights. My father was drinking beer. Betty was gone, and as he was inclined to ignore her preferences when the two of us were on our own we had let our dog, Toto, whom Betty detested, into the house. Both of us were sneezing as I powdered our irascible animal.

  “Sonuvabitch,” my father yelled out as Toto scratched himself lewdly. “We gotta do something about that damn dog.” Our breathing became even more difficult.

  “Sonuvabitch,” I screamed in imitation. I loved a cussword uttered with abandon.

  “Don’t talk like that,” he said.

  “I like that word,” I answered.

  “I know,” he agreed. “It is a good one.”

  Sometimes on nights like this, my father went on about World War II, when he was stationed in Saipan at an oxygen plant. Some people associate war with death and suffering, but Big George spoke of his years in the South Pacific as if they were the most golden days he could remember, which made me feel a little bit hurt. He often told me about the day when his base was bombed and he almost died. The planes flew so close that he was able to spot a Japanese pilot’s long yellow scarf blowing in the wind. He never spoke of the thousands of American boys who died on Saipan. My parents never mentioned bad things at all.

  Once a year, he went off to St. Louis for a reunion of his army buddies on the Hill, the Italian section of the city on the South Side. He didn’t have that many male friends in Madison. I don’t think I could have named one. I didn’t have that many either. It was fairly difficult to gather a band of boys to stage a re-creation of the Academy Awards with me as the favored nominee for everything.

  “Good lord,” my father said, anticipating the fishing expedition. “Of all the damn things . . .”

  “Of all the damn things . . .” I repeated. “Of all the damn things . . .”

  “I guess I’m supposed to get a damn pole,” my father said. “I guess we’ll have to buy some damn worms.”

  “Where,” I asked, “do you buy the damn worms?” I was no Huck Finn, though I thought the hat was interesting.

  “Hell if I know,” he said, “but someone will know. I don’t think we’ll have to put an ad in the paper.”

  I continued to powder Toto—a loyal but randy terrier who pursued every bitch in Monroe County. Domestic life did not come as second nature to him. Asked to perform even the most rudimentary trick, he yawned and sauntered off to lick his well-used private parts. He seemed to like my father, who had found him on the street and took care of him mostly. Me, he had reservations about. Each day when Big George arrived home, Toto swaggered over to his station wagon, looking aggrieved and obligated to report that the boy-dog bonding thing just wasn’t working out.

  . . .

  Until 1972, when I was thirteen and we packed up to head a dozen miles down Highway 24 to Paris, my parents and I lived in Madison, a town of 528 people, where Betty grew up and her father built the family’s first lumberyard. Big George ran the place. When we
pass through Madison now, I see my father standing in front, crying out something a little shocking at passersby, or raising his hand as my mother and I drove by.

  “What is he up to?” Betty would ask. “No good.”

  Rolling down the car window, she would yell at my dad, “Get to work.

  “What am I going to do with him?” my mother always asked.

  “Hit the road, Betty,” he cried back.

  Big George fancied himself a little bohemian. In the late 1960s, when the hippie signs proclaimed FLOWER POWER, he painted the refrigerator in the family room completely black with one big blooming white flower. He could draw anything, and, wishing I could too, I sat watching him for hours as he sketched a caribou from the World Book Encyclopedia, the profile of John F. Kennedy, a sleeping dog, my mother’s face from a photo taken when she was in college. In the picture she looked shy and innocent; in the sketch, through my father’s eyes, even more so. He worked on that portrait night after night, but she didn’t like it. It was the same old problem; in person or on paper, she never thought she looked right, even when captured by loving hands.

  My father’s big hands were rough from work, but gentle too. When laboring in the yard, he touched the leaves and shrubbery with kindness. Standing behind my mother, latching a necklace or strand of pearls, he brushed the hair away with delicacy, always kissing her neck when he finished his task. I came to see my mother through my father’s eyes, which took in what few others recognized, her sweetness, vulnerability, and the sadness that sometimes came over her silently.

  Betty and I were nervous characters, and when we were on the downswing, the house was still except for the sound of my father making jokes, trying to wash our cares away. When we would return to the world, we would find him, sitting in a chair on the patio with a beer, stroking the ears of Toto, who had grown accustomed to my capricious affections and my mother’s tendency to send things into a bit of a whirlspin.