Bettyville Page 6
There seemed to be some kind of rule that my father could never have anything he wanted. He lived for us.
. . .
On the morning of the fishing trip, I located a glass jar with a top and dragged the snow shovel out of the garage. Digging tentatively into the earth, I left a fairly shallow impression and collapsed on the ground as Toto eyed me skeptically. Already I found life exhausting, and it seemed to have the same opinion of me, but eventually I did find a couple of worms and managed, with a kitchen fork, to get them into a jar. “Two will be plenty,” I said to Toto. “We won’t be staying long.” I had a plan.
Big George looked woebegone when he arrived home with a pole and more nasty worms in a small box. Work, hard work; this was the Baker family religion, but my father was the good-time sinner man who never quite got the faith. My uncle Harry, who supervised the running of all four of the family’s lumberyards, had a way of suggesting, as he peered over his accountant’s half-glasses, that no one else could ever do quite right. My father tended to ignore him when it was possible; he was as easygoing and personable as Harry was shrewd and financially adept.
We headed to Moberly, to Rothwell Park where there was a pond or lake or something. Daddy took along a six-pack of Budweiser. I was determined that whatever happened, I would not touch a fish. I left the jar with the worms I had found, dead by this point, on the kitchen table for my mother to find with a sign that said, ENJOY YOUR LUNCH!
My father did what he always did when we traveled together alone. “I want you to have a happy childhood,” he told me before asking about school, my life, my friends. Sliding as far as possible toward the car door, I never knew quite what to say to please him. I wanted him to believe that all was well, but could not really make the case.
“I’m not right,” I blurted out to him once.
“No one is,” he answered. “They just think they are. Too many people think they’ve got it all figured out. But they don’t.”
This idea was going to come as quite a shock to many people I knew.
“No one?”
“Look inside a person and everyone has problems. I work in a damn lumberyard. My father was a lawyer. He was number one in his class.”
All the way to Moberly, my father sang, as he always did in the car. From his old single man’s life as a salesman, he kept, in a rarely opened cabinet in the family room, the records of Benny Goodman, Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Billy Eckstine, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Paul Whiteman, Tommy Dorsey and his Orchestra, Lionel Hampton, the Mills Brothers, Woody Herman, and Nat King Cole.
“Mona Lisa, men have named you,” he sang as he dried off after a shower, always folding his towel carefully and hitting every inch of flesh. I thought the method was something he had picked up in the army.
At Rothwell Park, after my father finally succeeded in assembling the pole and baiting it, he retired to the grassy bank to drink beer. There I stood for fifteen minutes or so, holding the pole, hoping that the fish were elsewhere, preferably in some far-off bay. My father checked the sky for rain with some frequency and chugged on a Bud.
About every five minutes, I shot him a look that said, “Isn’t this enough?”
“Fish, dammit,” he said. “Fish.” In return, I made a face, turned back around, and threw the fishing pole into the lake. Already I was a believer in the power of the grand gesture.
“Damn, George,” my father yelled as I plopped down beside him.
“Daddy,” I said, “you know and I know that this is just a shit waste of time.”
“Don’t talk like that,” he said. “Your mother is going to blame me for this. I am never going to hear the end of it. Some boys would be damn grateful for a fishing pole like that.”
Then he gave me a sip of beer.
. . .
After the fishing ordeal, my father and I wound up eating hamburgers at the country club bar where my father’s cronies wandered through the bar in their golf shoes. “I guess you wouldn’t want to learn golf,” my father began. But I was reluctant. I did not care for the shoes.
“Am I a brat?” I asked.
“Borderline,” he responded.
Soon, another thought occurred. Funny Girl was playing in Columbia. I did not know Barbra Streisand, but anyone who tripped on her pants leg at the Oscars was my kind of woman. I had read the reviews of the movie, knew the songs from the record, and had memorized the number to call for showtimes. My father shrugged, threw down the last of his drink, gave in. We saw the movie. When Barbra declared, “I’m a bagel on a plateful of onion rolls,” I wanted to cheer.
When it was over, my father remarked, “That Jewish girl can sing.” Afterward, we dined at Rice Bowl Shan-grila restaurant, which I considered the height of sophistication. All the way home, I talked about Barbra until my father turned from the wheel and said, “Please, George, hush. You’ve got to straighten out and fly right.”
For days, I spoke in Brooklynese 24/7. I narrowly escaped injury when, standing on a bar stool in my bathrobe, lip-synching to “Don’t Rain on My Parade,” I fell to the floor after what I considered a particularly devastating climax. Betty came rushing, kneeling down to check for fractures as I rubbed my head, thinking, “Oy!”
. . .
A city kid who grew up in St. Louis as the son of a successful attorney, my father—who snoozed over the stacks of sale tickets he brought home nights—was from a family of huggers, eaters, drinkers, people who dragged us, way past my bedtime, to suppers at fancy restaurants with waiters in tuxes, appetizers, tanks of lobsters with snapping claws.
Granny was one of five sisters, all with waves of platinum hair, whose parents, or grandparents, or someone, had come to a town near St. Louis called Pacific from Vienna, for reasons I cannot say. Maybe they thought things worked out for the Gabors.
Granny wore black dresses, strands of pearls, loved to entertain, stuffed bills into the hands of ragged men on the streets. “God love him,” she always said when she passed those without. Her sister Sade Sizer was smoky-voiced, with the tendency to scatter burning ash. She turned the air around her blue with curses. When she descended on St. Louis from Chicago with her husband—an ice magnate—my father watched his aunt, face circled by cigarette fumes, holding court like a bawdy empress while Granny trailed her, checking the carpet for anything smoldering. He savored a character, loved things a little wild and crazy.
Sade, though, frightened my mother. Granny’s sister was the sort discomfited by a younger woman whose beauty bested the kind she herself acquired at the Marshall Field cosmetics counter.
“Have another drink, kiddo,” Sade told Betty. “Don’t ya wanna get a little peppy?”
My father’s family always gathered by the piano to sing, watched by Betty and me, along with Granny’s friend Bertha Cox, whose blond wig (necessitated by sparse, filament-like hair) was purchased in a room at the Chase Hotel “from a traveling salesman,” Granny always emphasized, “a Chinaman!”
Like my dad, Granny loved Nat King Cole.
“Rambling rose, rambling rose, why you ramble, no one knows.”
Betty watched how Granny served, did everything. She dressed up for them all, wanted never to disgrace herself.
“Relax,” Daddy said, pulling her head to his shoulder but never getting it to stay.
When Granny sang, I saw my father’s face in hers; I saw him in everything she did, definitely in her eyes, which, when turned on me, revealed what felt like suspicion. I loved her, but sometimes a look from her could poke like a pin. Already I knew that she was an enforcer of what I sometimes violated: the rules for boys and the rules for girls. Once she saw me gesturing along with the Supremes on television and her glance said it all.
My mother believed in the rules. My father had some rebellion in him, but the others could always jerk him back easily into enemy territory. Sometimes, though, we could find a s
ecret space.
Sade told tales of nightclubs, gangsters, and strange phone calls arriving for her maid, who claimed to be Castro’s daughter. She often arrived with lavish gifts, once outdoing herself with two shiny silver cranes with long beaks and thin elegant legs. One bent down as if to feed, the other stretched its long neck toward the sky. Granny put them on the dining table and I sat looking at them reflecting the light, these exquisite birds from Sade’s enticing world. When I told Granny they were the most beautiful things I had seen, she looked back at me quizzically. Throwing me off guard, though, rescue arrived in a husky voice.
“Toots, we gotta get you to Boca,” Sade told me. “I think you’re kind of a fish out of water.”
She was sitting at the dining table and I went to stand beside her and did not move for the longest time. Maybe this was someone who could be on my side.
. . .
Betty was in awe of the city, loved it when Granny treated us to club sandwiches, held together with colored toothpicks, at the tearoom in Stix, a world of women and the tap of high-heeled shoes. Models moved past the tables. I was always the only boy brought along; I loved the models and began to pose for class photos with head thrown back and eyebrows raised in a way I considered suitable for print work.
While Betty and Granny shopped, I bypassed the toys and went upstairs to the furniture floor, to the model rooms, complete in every detail. I sat in them one at a time—living rooms, dens, family rooms, dining rooms, master bedroom suites, rooms for babies, little girls, teenage girls, and boys. When I sat down, tentatively, in the boys’ room, complete with bed with wheels meant to resemble a racing car, sports souvenirs, soldiers marching on the walls, baseball bat lamps, I realized I did not feel at home.
It wasn’t that I wanted to reside in the girls’ rooms, it was simply that no place fit me right. I liked a mock-up of a basement hideaway featuring an armoire with what I considered an ingenious secret—a Murphy bed—and some framed movie posters, including one from Casablanca.
After the clerks got tired of me lying on the beds and pretending to wait for room service, I rode the escalator down to the basement snack bar where I waited on a bar stool, watching the hot dogs turn on the rotisserie and listening to the big black girls talk and talk. “You wanna dog, sugar?” they’d ask. “You wanna big hot pretzel? Baby, you hongreee? You look like you like to put down the groceries.”
Things My Parents Told Me When I Was Very Young:
1. “Don’t stand that way; you’re posing.”
2. “That book is for girls.”
3. “Your hair is too long. It looks effeminate.”
4. “Why would you want to wear that?”
5. “You’ve been hanging around with the girls again. I can hear it in the way you talk.”
One year, I purchased a yellow scarf for my dad for Christmas, as a kind of commemoration of what he had seen during the war. I pictured him wearing it with his herringbone “Going to the City” winter coat. There was no doubt in my mind that he would get the connection with the Japanese pilot; I guess I was a kid with strange ideas of what might make a father smile. As Big George opened the box, I prepared for a moment of glory, but he wound up giving the scarf to Preach Burton, the minister of what was then known as the colored church, along with a polka-dotted costume vest he purchased one year for a New Year’s Eve barbershop quartet. Daddy said that yellow was an effeminate color, but I didn’t think so.
. . .
In our backyard there is a bent-over clothesline and the wrought-iron chairs on the patio are rusty, in need of paint. No one has sat upon them for a decade. We never use the backyard, once filled with the trees my father planted and tended—willow, oak, crape myrtle, maple, hawthorn, flowering crab—some now bare with spindly limbs, the victims of this or that. My mother just shakes her head at the lost ones—when she actually lets herself look. When most people die, she says it is a “blessing.” But the trees are a different story. Even my mother grieves openly for my father’s trees.
Now a hired man, who talks way too much, waters and cares for the yard, which Big George gradually expanded year after year, mowing farther until it stretched almost all the way down to the forest.
“You can always tell me anything.” That is what my father often said to me when I was a kid. But I never did.
6
GEORGE: “That casserole I made Saturday is much better today.”
BETTY: “Maybe I’ll try some more around Friday.”
The late-morning sunlight filters through the old carnival glass vases and heavy tinted bowls on the sill of the bay window in the living room. The objects from auctions that adorn this room are, to my mother, worth only their value and represent her shrewdness, her skill at acquisition. When she holds them up to inspect them, she does not imagine, as I do, the others who once picked them up, though she handles anything that belonged to my grandmothers with extreme care. She has some fine and costly things, but it is a pair of small Chinese figurines, two children, boy and girl, meant to sit on a shelf dangling their legs, that are her favorites. “Don’t ever break these,” she has told me. Only recently have I discovered that my father bought them in Chicago for twenty dollars. It is these little slips that pass so quickly, almost unnoticed, that occasionally show her feelings, that make them seem as fragile as the figurines. Her emotions are her most delicate possessions, rarely taken out, even for company. When a hint of them breaks through, I want to coax them forth, but she is just too reticent.
“I love them too,” I said to her yesterday, glancing at the Chinese children.
“Oh, they’re nothing,” she said, changing her tone of voice and posture. “They’re worthless.”
I am pleased she never purchased antique dolls. Few things irk me more than an antique doll, publicly displayed. Particularly off-putting are those perched in small rockers in bonnets.
I wager that down the street, Edna Mae Johnson, still uncomfortable in her new teeth, is bent over her embroidery in her crazy, messed-up house, squinting at her tiny stitches as she stands back to admire the small flowers that blossom over the cloth.
Betty will not get out of bed. When I ask if she is thirsty, she just shakes her head. She is agitated, and when she gets this way I can’t focus on much else. Her state of mind affects everything in the house, me especially. I take it in and pace around the house. I want to do a good job here; it is important to me. I want to do right by her.
. . .
When I set the trash out earlier, a neighbor informed me that the game warden has released bobcats in the forests nearby to help control deer. He saw a bobcat a few nights back in the parking lot of the high school’s vocational agriculture center. The building was, until fifteen years or so ago, a garment factory where the women workers on break gathered outside the door, smoke from their cigarettes rising around them.
Where do the women work now, after their divorces, or when their husbands die, or when bad luck strikes, or the harvest is squat? Not here. They drive to Columbia or other towns nearby to work in hospitals or clean the houses of doctors from India and Pakistan. The country roads are full of headlights at night as they often work odd hours.
. . .
“Buck Johnson is getting married again,” Earleen says. “It’s his fourth. You’d think by now he’d a either figured it out or quit.” She is ironing in the kitchen. On the nearby couch, I try to close my eyes. She is not the most diligent housekeeper in America. She runs a rag over a counter so fast, it barely has time to collect a crumb. The vacuum control is always shifted to the lightest setting so it won’t be hard to push. But she’s game for just about anything. At Christmastime, during a somewhat madcap decorating spree, Betty had Earleen and me searching for ornaments that I broke before puberty. Earleen, trying her damnedest, kept pretending to look until finally confiding to me, “George, I don’t know where this shit is.
“How do
you think your mama is doing?” she asks me now, setting down the iron and coming to stand by the couch as if there is the possibility that I might not hear her.
I wish my mother would appear at the door of the kitchen and say, “Hey, let’s head to the Junction for a catfish sandwich.”
“I would do anything for your mama,” Earleen says, going on and on. “She’s the same age mine would be if she had lived, you know.
“Gettin’ old is for the birds, but your mama’s a doll. I tell you, when you’re not here, I’m on the case. I’ll spring like a jackrabbit if I need to.
“My mama was a Indian. She was beautiful,” Earleen has often remarked. “I look just like her.
“Was you gonna take a nap?” she asks now, returning to the ironing board. “I never can sleep of a day. I got too much on my mind.”
She continues; her only enemy is silence. “I’ve cleaned for Betty since my boys were kids.” Her oldest son, Ethan, is a mechanic. Jackie Roy is a nurse at a VA down in the section of the state we call the Boot Heel. A few years back, he cared for a boy back from the army with a hole in his head the size of a quarter. Earleen worried about the soldier as if she had given birth to him.
I wish my mother would appear at the doorway of the kitchen and suggest, “Say, I’m going down to the Dollar Store to buy a birthday card.”
. . .
Last night my cousin Lucinda, who tries to appeal to my interests, invited Betty and me to a benefit for the Missouri Review. Throughout the dinner I fretted, knowing there was a reading to come. Glancing now and then at Betty, I wished for brevity. I hoped that our entertainment would not be a poet. But no: A poet it was. Despite the weather, she was wearing a jacket of a sort of faux zebra, trimmed in leatherette with tassels on the buttons. Her name was Jude Nutter.
“Where,” my mother asked, quite loudly, “did that jacket come from?” I cringed, as Betty glared at me with an expression with which I am very familiar. It seems to suggest that I am personally responsible for every particle of bullshit loose in the world.