Bettyville Page 7

  “What was her name?” my mother asked loudly, after the introduction.

  “Nutter,” I said. “Jude Nutter.”

  “What?” my mother, incredulous, asked.

  “Jude Nutter,” I repeated. “Her name is Jude Nutter.”

  “Nutter,” my mother said again, even more audibly than before. “N-U-T-T-E-R?”

  “Yes,” I repeated again. “Nutter. N-U-T-T-E-R.”

  My cousin looked slightly uncomfortable as Jude nodded at our table, sensing some disturbance. Betty smiled back, gave a bit of a wave, as if to acknowledge the attention. I knew things were going to get worse when Jude confided that she had grown up in a house on a lot adjacent to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

  She continued, telling us about her special kinship with insects, which she likes to feel on her body. This is sensual and pleasing for her. I waited, but Betty, intent on her brownie, made no remark. I began to breathe more regularly. Then Jude started to recite her first poem, a work that opened with an image of flies on the bloody eye of a dead lamb. Again, Betty shot me the look. It is always me. I am always responsible.

  “How,” Betty pondered loudly, “did we get involved with this?” She threw her half-consumed brownie down on the plate as if it were a horseshoe. Jude Nutter mourned the lamb.

  The second poem began. Jude Nutter read to us of finding the dentures of her deceased mother in a small container in the bathroom. Soon, there were Germans. Then there were the teeth. Then the insects. Then the teeth again, the haunting melancholy of the mother’s gaping oral cavity. Finally, the poem built to a dramatic conclusion: Jude kissed the teeth and threw them into a river.

  “She’s going to have a hard time topping that,” said Betty.

  At times, my mother maintains her capacity to see much and often surprise. Especially in public, with others. But after the reading, she wavered, wandering into confusing territory. It is astounding to me how quickly Betty can fade from her normal self into the disorientation that upsets her, leaves her wringing her hands. If she is engrossed in something—a meal, a book, a poetic experience involving insects—she is okay, but without something to focus on, she gets a little crazy in the hours before bed. Dementia patients suffer from a phenomenon called sundowner’s syndrome, which worsens their symptoms at night.

  In the car going home from the reading, Betty’s defenses fell; the act failed. “Stop, stop, stop,” she yelled out at every sign, slamming her right foot down as if hitting the brakes. “Slow down, slow down, slow down,” she commanded, though I was well within the speed limit. Her noises—the mutterings and whimpers, the troubled utterances—signaled the approach of high anxiety. “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “I’m fine,” she said, as if she could will it so. “I’m fine.”

  At home, panic crossed her face in tiny waves. A dropped pill led her to cry out, as if something sharp had stabbed her. When a toothpaste tube fell into the sink, she seemed to lose all hope but giggled as her face crumbled. Arriving in her room, I found her seated at the edge of her bed in her nightgown with her shoes still on and her good black pants fallen around her ankles. “Let’s get the shoes off,” I said, taking over and managing to get her ready to sleep. The sight of her bare feet was enough to suggest that life is just too tough, but they are survivors, these old codgers, and beautiful in their human way.

  Finally she closed her eyes, but cried out several times as her mind, unwilling to rest, continued to fret. Early in the morning, I woke to go to the bathroom and found her in the family room, going over the bills she stacks and restacks. I lay down, though this made her angry. “I have things to do here,” she told me. “Things to do. Things to do!” She was mad at me for standing guard. That is what it is; I am the guard to her, the one who has taken over her castle. When I woke up at 5 a.m., she was gone, back in her bed, but not sleeping: There were the sounds, her little cries out.

  . . .

  Today, I am crazed. My head is full of voices: Everyone up there is talking, yelling. No one thinks I am dealing with Betty correctly. I hear the voice of a writer in Washington, D.C., telling me that my relationship with Betty is “codependent.” Friends in Manhattan yammer in the corners of my brain about me destroying my career by staying in Missouri. My relatives plead for Betty’s entry into assisted living. My father and Mammy join in the fray. In my head, the dead are pushy, opinionated, and easily offended. At Starbucks, they scream into my cerebellum about the price of venti lattes and the calorie content of chocolate graham crackers.

  Suddenly, a voice I believe to be my mother’s joins the committee of commenters. She draws out every word, articulates seemingly every letter with extreme care. Wait a minute, this is not Betty. The God of Brain Waves has made an error. This is Meet the Press, I am almost certain. I am hearing Peggy Noonan. And she is concerned, very concerned. Shut up, Peggy. Shut up, shut up.

  I am doing my best here. I will make it back to New York, but frankly, to spend some time in Paris, Missouri, is to come to question the city, where it is normal to work 24/7, tapping away on your BlackBerry for someone who will fire you in an instant, but crazy to pause to help someone you love when they are falling.

  If I have a deadline to meet, I stay awake, working all night. Around 2:30 or 3:00, I take a break to get a bit of breeze, hit the twenty-four-hour convenience store for coffee and doughnuts, drive the loop around Paris, which takes me to the top of a hill, near the cemetery. From the four-way stop where I pause—aside from the occasional semi whooshing by, there is little other traffic at this hour—I look out at the town: the courthouse dome, Main Street, the loose scattering of lights, blue and yellow, twinkling around the hills that hold the houses on their shoulders. I like the feeling of being the only one awake for miles and miles.

  . . .

  “We’re the new Mississippi,” says Jane Blades, who works in social services. Rural America is going ghetto. Because the high school no longer offers a foreign language, the kids who attend Paris R-II High do not qualify for admission to any of the state universities. In the doctor’s office, an old classmate tells me that there are no longer cheerleaders at the school. “Now how can you build spirit without cheerleaders?” she asks me, crestfallen.

  “It’s the never knowing,” goes a song I like that plays on the radio here, “that keeps us going.” In Paris, religion is the great comfort. The most popular verb here is “pray.” People gather together to lift their requests for the survival of sick children, the vanquishing of tumors, the securing of loans. At church recently, I have heard a special prayer for a dying child, offered up by his father, a tenderhearted rodeo clown. WE PRAY WITH OUR BOOTS ON, says a sign advertising the Cowboy Church on the side of a pickup. Global Prayer Warriors are called forth on the Internet in times of trouble.

  When I look at our town from the top of the hill at night, I think of all the people waking up, facing the day, their problems, imagine their voices, their prayers for themselves, their children, the neighbors and friends they have known for years rising up with hope into the lightening sky.

  There is far too much illness in this county, including a large incidence of cancer, blamed on pesticides used during the 1950s and ’60s. Illnesses are a constant topic and housewives chat in the aisles of the grocery store about the merits of various chemo procedures. Gossip about the state of the neighbor’s marriage has been replaced by intense discussion of his vital organs. A law firm called Tolbert, Beadle, and Musgrave advertises on TV constantly, courting victims of mesothelioma on Channels 8 and 13. Cancers wipe out whole families or parts of them.

  A friend of mine who grew up near Middle Grove can list all the people who lived near his family’s farm who have battled the disease. His father died of it. His sister died of it. He has fought it himself for almost twenty years. “A good day,” his mother told me, “is when everyone is alive.”

  On streets in towns around h
ere, old houses tumble, drawing meth cookers who start fires at night. Helicopters filled with state police look for dealers who hide in trailer homes and campers in the woods. In Columbia, where the elderly, including Betty, go to the doctor or for tests at the med center, MS-13—a deadly gang that drifted north after Katrina—is being held responsible for a series of “senseless shootings” and is said to be involved in drug trafficking, robbery, murder, prostitution, and arms trafficking. On the streets of this once peaceful university town, it is possible to acquire military-style ammunition that can pierce a policeman’s protective vest. There are rumors of young women inducted into white slavery against their will. The husband of my mother’s friend Betsy was approached by a youthful prostitute in the parking lot of Red Lobster. “We were there for Crabfest,” Betsy said.

  “That brings them out,” I replied.

  There is frequent mention of depression and bipolar conditions. “It used to be hysterectomies and then there was mastectomies,” Evie Cullers says. “Now it is always something up in the head.”

  This is not a locale whose residents are waiting desperately for the latest version of the iPhone. This is a place where the Second Coming would be much preferred to tomorrow’s sunrise, the world of the Dollar Store, the Big Cup, the carbohydrate, and the cinnamon roll—a region of old families, now faded, living in trailer homes, divorcing and having illegitimate children. But there is also kindness, such kindness, the casserole on the doorstep from someone who does not expect to be acknowledged, the wet morning flowers in the mailbox.

  And then there is my mother, one of the last truly fashionable women in Monroe County, even now. She fusses over the catalogs, always determined to find the perfect blouse. People still remark to me on her outfits, her style. Our friend Linda Lechliter says that when her mother died, she could find no one in Paris who would even take her dresses, which didn’t fit Linda herself. You can’t get the women here into anything but jeans, Linda claimed. “And these were nice dresses,” Linda said, “beautiful dresses. And not a soul in this town to wear them.”

  . . .

  At the parking lot of Hickman’s IGA, our grocery store, I notice, on one of my late-night rides, the sunburned kid who mows our lawn sitting on the hood of his car, all alone, hugging his knees, waiting in the dark, watching the occasional car go by. I have also seen him sitting around at the car wash or chasing squirrels down the street in the evenings in his dirty clothes. Aside from a few old people and little kids, there are few pedestrians in Paris; everyone drives and practically lives in what they call their “vehicles.” I don’t know this kid’s name, or his family, or if he has one at all. He looks like he might belong to one of the wanderers—sham ministers who found churches and make off with the dough; women on the dole, unmarried or divorced, who drift in, rent old houses for next to nothing, and disappear, leaving a kid or two old enough to kick off the gravy train. You see these young ones, not even out of their teens, walking on the sides of the highway in the early mornings and wonder what they have been up to.

  It is always the wandering ones, the underdogs, the eccentrics, the castoffs who tell me their stories. Leslie, who I met in graduate school, had a distant relationship with truth. From her I learned never to trust anyone who ever lived in Los Angeles. Then there was Esther, an old woman who pushed her stuffed cart along Perry Street. We met at a laundry called the Stinky Sock. Cookie, the black drag queen, wore enormous bejeweled crosses and earrings with healing crystals, small Statues of Liberty, and large glittery crescent moons. Jason was a homeless Puerto Rican street kid I took in. At night he wrapped his head in towels to try to silence the voices he heard when he tried to sleep. In my apartment he left a stocking cap I keep on a vase as a small tribute and a leaky plastic jar with colorful floating fish that he bought at a discount store for my birthday.

  . . .

  The first of these characters arrived in my life early on; he was a family friend who drifted through our lives. Wray Chowning resided in Madison, in his parents’ old house, a place so covered with vines that the brick barely showed. Preach Burton mowed the lawn, which received no other attention. It lay flat and half brown, like an old carpet. In the front hallway stood a huge grandfather clock coveted by Betty and a desk of cherrywood with thin elegant legs that slightly curved. My mother said the desk was of the Queen Anne style and that it wasn’t really right for a man’s house. Who knew these rules could attach themselves to even a piece of furniture? Though I told no one, I felt united with Wray. I understood, somehow, that we had a bond. I was a kid trapped between feeling something and knowing nothing.

  Mammy often asked my mother to drive by to see if Wray’s car was in the driveway. It bothered her if it was not. It worried her if it was. I could see that Mammy wanted to reach out to him. She took pies and cakes, but sometimes, even when his car was parked out front, he didn’t come to the door when we knocked. “I’ll bet he’s just sleeping,” Mammy always said. “Maybe he’s just sleeping.” Betty tended just to shake her head. She and Mammy both knew Wray was drinking. Even I had picked up that this was his problem. Mammy, whose brother had also been a drinker, seemed to understand what came of a life trapped inside a bottle of disappointment.

  Wray was unmarried and lived alone after the death of his father and the closing of their family’s dry goods store downtown. He did not work. Though his clothes suggested some involvement in large concerns, he seemed to have none. For holidays or special dinners, he came to our house or to Mammy’s, never sitting in the living room with the men, but always drifting toward the kitchen. His face went red when my father or Harry or Bill laughed in the other room, and he did not join in the talk at the table, just listened, fingers shaking so that Betty’s aunt Bess would reach out for the dishes to spear him some meat or ladle out the gravy. My father said his name in a way that was both too nice and not nice at all. Wray. Wray. Daddy added a kind of flourish that somehow diminished his greetings and their recipient and left me anguished. It seemed like my father had sided with the enemy.

  Usually when Wray came to our house, he was invited with the ladies, the widows—Mrs. Bloom who ran the silver shop in Moberly; Betty Riley, a doctor’s widow who went to Mississippi every winter to ride horses. My father plied him with cocktails. Everyone else tried to get Wray not to drink, but my father always kept asking, again and again, if he needed a refill. On holidays, Big George always got him drunk and my mother’s brother Bill Baker would catch my father’s glance and roll his eyes or chuckle when Wray stumbled or slurred his words. Big George was nice to everyone, but somehow Wray was okay to laugh at, even when he was present, just sitting there, bothering no one. My father served his cocktails with a twist of contempt that I could taste too when he held out the glass. Maybe it was just for entertainment for my uncles. Maybe it was because it was a relief for my father to have someone farther outside the circle than he was. No one kicks you harder than a pal on the bench who sees his chance to join the team.

  The Chownings were among Madison’s fine old families, a circle with the Bakers on the periphery that included the Thompsons, who knew Harry Truman and wrote to him if someone in Madison changed their party alliance. There were also the Threlkelds, and the Atterburys, whose son, Newton, dead for years by this point, had been Wray’s great friend when they were young. When people spoke of Wray, they always brought up Newton too. Newton had married and left for Jefferson City. Wray, it was implied, was lost without him and began to drink, more and more.

  Wray had hair of pure silver; any tarnished part was carefully combed over. He wore cuff links, suits tailored in St. Louis, shirts so fiercely pressed that life dared not intrude. He smoked extralong Salems lit by a shiny gold lighter meant to resemble a fountain pen. He was always the first to leave the gatherings. In the pocket of his vest there was a shiny watch, produced just after meals when he took it out to suggest he had some other pressing engagement. Sitting beside him at the table, you
could hear it, ticking out the minutes until he could safely get away.

  There was something about him that scared me. Bill called him a “mama’s boy.” From early on, I had a sense for secrets, for the places where people were hiding things, the spaces where words went unsaid, the moments when someone at the table shifted the subject away from something or someone. Mostly, I shied away from Wray. I didn’t like the way they treated him, the way my father said his name. Wray, Wray, Wray. I can still hear the way he said it. My father’s rendition of the name made too fancy by its extra letter was almost enough to make me cry. This was my father, the one who I believed would always be loyal. Who said I could tell him anything.

  . . .

  My parents were gone for the weekend. Maybe a lumbermen’s convention. I was staying with Mammy, who was walking by then on a cane left over from someone. Constantly she asked me to check the thermostat to make sure we weren’t using too much power.

  One of the most intriguing aspects of a visit to Mammy’s was the gun kept under her pillow—a pistol, metal, cold, and surprisingly heavy for its size—given to her by my uncle Bill for protection. Betty said she would like to use it to shoot Bill.

  During one of my stays at my grandmother’s, Mammy realized that she was supposed to play bridge, and a neighbor named Edith came to the rescue. She tried to get me to sleep in Mammy’s bed so she could watch Love of Life. This seemed unfair. After Edith left the room, I grabbed the gun. As a joke, I took it into the living room and pointed it at Edith. “Lordamighty!” she screamed, throwing her hands up. “Lordamighty!”

  I gave up the gun with no discharge, but this was not the end of it. Edith told Mammy, who told Betty. “Edith will tell this all over town,” Betty remarked to my grandmother.

  “Well, he didn’t shoot her,” Mammy said.