Bettyville Page 9

  He is young and full of life—attributes I am not normally crazy about—but there is a tenderness, a vulnerability, especially when his ears fall back. I find myself once more scooping him up in my arms, feeling his paws on my shoulder, his moist nose on my ear. Love hits me. I don’t like it. I don’t want it. This flirtation cannot go anywhere. I am a flight risk.

  When I tell him to get along on his way, he scrunches down again as if I have hit him. I turn away, head back to the house, but, turning for a parting glance, I see that he is lying on his back, paws nabbing at air. “Get along, little doggy,” I say. “Get along.” But I whisper it and hope he does not hear me.

  After lunch, my mother is silent for a while, then makes her much-repeated pilgrimage to the laundry room. She washes more clothes than Prissy in Gone With the Wind. I am convinced she is taking in laundry from other neighborhoods. We are both spillers. During a brief snack time, I can turn a white button-down into a Jackson Pollock. She covertly launders her personal items. If I approach from behind as she tosses a pair of panties into our Speed Queen, she peers over her shoulder as if I have caught her disposing of a murder implement. “Do you have to follow me around all the time?” she demands. “I have some personal business in here.”

  On the way to the washer, Betty pauses at the mirror in the dining room. “My hair looks awful. How did it ever get to looking like this? That girl who did this ought to be shot.” My mother’s hair life has always been complex. It isn’t just vanity; that hair is everything she can’t quite control. In the 1970s, she went to bed for days after getting a bad “frost job.” Said my father, “Well, I guess you’ll have to shave it off.” She screamed back, “You just don’t know what it’s like!”

  My cell buzzes. I anticipate no good news. The Nazi hunter has been raving about a conspiracy against him at the Simon Wiesenthal Center. But no, it is American Express. In recent months, our relationship, never blissful, has entered a period of all but open warfare. They like to be paid promptly. I see the company more as a long-term financial partner. Our conversation makes me feel small in every way except size. If I save my money, I will be able to retire in Penn Station.

  Yesterday I spent hours on the phone, sorting through Betty’s insurance policies, attempting to assess what would be covered if she entered an assisted living facility. I dialed cities across the plains—Omaha, Wichita, Tulsa. “Slow down,” I told them as they rattled off their explanations. “I have special needs.” There is more paperwork to sort through. Stuff that I would normally procrastinate about for decades needs doing right now. My to-do list begins with chores already done so I can cross off things right away.

  . . .

  Every day after lunch, Betty and I walk—down Sherwood Road to Hickory, then right on Cleveland, and then another right on McMurry, passing burned lawns and trees whose leaves are turning prematurely brown. Betty never wants to go, but once we’ve begun, she sets forth the best she can. “Just try to keep going,” I tell her. “Well what choice do I have?” she asks. “I’m not just going to lie down out here.”

  Today, as we head out, I look fondly at a tree in our front yard, a big leafy oak that my father planted when we moved to this house almost forty years ago. It is dying. From its branches hang small brown balls, harbingers of a disease that, according to the yardman, is taking even the oldest, strongest oaks all over Missouri. This tree, I love. I can see my father, with his hair frizzed up, watering it with the hose during its nascent stages before giving it a good dousing with a few tossed-off shakes of Budweiser. I blame its disease on global warming.

  I steer Betty out of the driveway. Looking small under the spreading branches, she stares up with a quizzical look as if she knows the tree is sick, but says nothing. Her balance is shakier and shakier, but she tries to forge ahead with no help, emitting the little grunts and groans that have become normal during these expeditions. A wad of Kleenex is stuffed into her hand. Less than halfway home, her nose always begins, inexplicably, to run. “I have to blow my nose,” she yells out. We must halt completely. Walking is hard enough without another task to handle simultaneously.

  By the time we pass the house of our minister, she wants to turn back and her face has lost all color. “She’s on a cruise,” she says of the reverend. “Nobody at church can figure out where she gets the money.” Her look suggests I am involved in this.

  Suddenly the dog reappears, dancing his dance, licking my hand, and moving to Betty to give her a good sniff and slurp. She grimaces, eyes him cautiously.

  “Who are you?” she says. “Get out of my way. What are you doing?” Mr. Dog backs off. “Is that dog going to the toilet?” Betty demands to know. “I don’t want to see any dog going to the toilet . . . Who was that dog we had?”

  “Toto.”

  “What an animal!”

  By the time we are heading back up our driveway, Betty is leaning on my side, tentatively, as if someone might catch her doing it and criticize. Before we reach the door she is gripping me desperately.

  . . .

  A woman named Barbara who is friendly with my mother sells health insurance, and when she arrives at our house to try to interest me in a policy, I get anxious. I don’t do policies. I don’t do forms. But I like Barbara. We bond over our appreciation of the festive charm that our neighbor’s still-lit Christmas snowman brings to the summer nights. Betty, on the couch, coughs. She wants to hear everything we say, but I talk softly, to get her goat, and Barbara follows my lead. Betty frowns.

  “I’m not hard-sell,” Barbara says. “I just want to help you make some decisions. Important decisions.”

  I look at her with terrible seriousness. “I don’t care what you say,” I tell her. “I am keeping my baby.”

  The line is a risk, but I am desperate for attention and figure we might as well test this relationship. When she laughs, I know that I have found someone and reach down to a shelf under the toaster shelf. “Would you like an Oatmeal Creme?” I ask. They are made by Little Debbie and are, for me, a crack equivalent. “I’ve been moderate today. I’ve only eaten about eleven.”

  “I don’t think so,” she says. “I’m kinda semi-dieting.”

  Barbara looks at me in a kind of hopeful way, asks about New York, says she had always wanted to take her stepson for a visit. “He is artistic,” she says. “You know, like that.” I get the signal. Who wouldn’t? But I want no heart-to-hearts today. I want to have fun. Laugh. It’s so nice to have someone here.

  When she begins to talk about the policies, I can tell she is as bored as I am. She is originally from Minneapolis and misses sushi: yellowtail, spider rolls. I say I like tekka maki, but am disgusted by roe.

  “Why did you come to Paris?” I whisper to Barbara. She says she married someone here, someone I knew in high school. Then she blurts out that her stepson is gay.

  The boy, a year out of high school, lives in Jeff City, where he waits tables and acts in some kind of theater troupe. He never comes home. “I was the one who had to tell him that I knew,” she says. “He didn’t come out to us. I wanted him to know he could trust me.”

  I like this woman. She helped the kid out. “His father,” she says, “doesn’t want anyone to know. He’s ashamed. Worried about what other people will think.”

  I hate Barbara’s story. I hate how I fear it is going to end, with everyone losing and distant and wondering. She looks like she knows too, like maybe she doesn’t believe that the boy and his father are ever going to get things right. “I love him like he was my son,” she tells me. “It’s harder for my husband. Sometimes it’s not so easy to be stuck in the middle.”

  “Are you eyeing my Oatmeal Creme?” I ask before I begin to natter on, saying a lot of boring stuff about how not everyone can make the leap into someone else’s kind of life. I like to think my father would have made the leap, but sometimes I think my mother has hesitated, waiting at the boundary of ev
er really trying. I think probably because I was scared to lead her, scared of not being perfect.

  Barbara asks me if it was hard for me, growing up here. When I cannot think of a joke to make, I tell her that it was maybe a little tough to be alone with it all.

  “But I survived,” I say quickly. She looks at me as if uncertain this is the case. Then she pops the big question, the one I hate most: “Do you have”—she eases into it tentatively—“a significant other?”

  I tell her that I do better with insignificant others, but say I think I may be getting a dog, before picking up a paper and choosing the least expensive insurance plan; it covers an hour in a free clinic and a couple of cold sores. I am ready for Barbara to go now, but she has more of the form to fill out and begins to ask me more questions that get under my skin.

  “Do you see a psychiatrist?”

  “Yes.”

  “For how long?”

  “Since 1983.”

  She looks troubled. I add, “He’s grown dependent. I can’t get rid of him.”

  “Do you,” Barbara ask, “take any pharmacological medications?”

  “Are you kidding? I was used for testing.”

  When she completes her questionnaire, I am certain that I will be denied coverage, but she is optimistic. “I have seen them,” she says, “give it to people with cancer.”

  . . .

  When I decide to take a nap, Betty, disgruntled over my indulging myself, slams doors loudly and stomps down the hall, raising every bit of racket she can to keep me awake. Unsurprisingly, I fail to doze. I imagine Mr. Dog in my room, tearing out strands of the carpet, stretched out beside me on the bed. I look for my pal outside, but our neighbor, who has seen us earlier, tells me that the police have taken the puppy to “Doggy Jail.” I eye her suspiciously “It wasn’t me,” she says. “I swear. I didn’t call them.”

  . . .

  “I want to believe you,” I say.

  The city office says the dog will have to stay in custody for eight days, in case he has an owner looking to claim him. Opening my computer, I get on Facebook to type a plea for someone to adopt this dog. In a show of utter selflessness, I will give up my love to save him, like a biblical martyr or the baroness in The Sound of Music.

  Betty asks, “What were you and Barbara talking about so quietly?”

  “Her stepson is gay.”

  “Oh my,” Betty says. “Oh my.” She isn’t negative, just goes quiet. Or say more. Or ask more. I don’t know why I think she is going to this time. With us, the silences have always won.

  I think I need another Oatmeal Creme.

  8

  My parents removed to Missouri in the early ’thirties; I do not remember just when, for I was not born. . . . The home was made in the wee village of Florida, in Monroe County, and I was born there in 1835. The village contained a hundred people and I increased the population by 1 per cent. It is more than many of the best men in history could have done for a town.

  —Mark Twain’s Autobiography

  In the Paris post office, a mural, The Arrival of the Clemens Family in Florida, hangs, scrutinized occasionally by old schoolteachers in line for a book of stamps, gazing through their cataracts as they count out their change. Who else would stop to scan the nameplate? No tourists here, just hunters or fishermen passing through on weekends. Younger people have no inkling of the Clemens boy who became Mark Twain, or his birthplace, down the road, which no longer exists. Leveled when I was in high school, the place the Clemens family came to is underwater, the victim of huge road graders clearing the land for a lake project that did not, as it turned out, do much to boost the local economy. Stoutsville, Evie Cullers’s hometown, is down there too. Maybe, buried in mud, is a fork or spoon, a cup or saucer or pair of glasses worn by someone she knew.

  In winter, I drive out to see the vapor rising from the ice over the water, a sight that almost makes the season worth trying to get through. This summer, the lake bottom is all but utterly dry with bare, spindly trees, vapor-thin themselves, rising out of the cracked earth. All a fisherman can catch near Twain’s old town is a near-fatal sunburn.

  When I was a kid, I wanted to enter the annual fence-painting contest held annually during Tom Sawyer Days in Hannibal, where I went once with Bill and June. We ate Kentucky Fried Chicken by the Mississippi, accompanied by a friend of June’s who had terminal cancer. I watched the slender woman milling through the crowds on a cane decorated with what she said were bull’s testicles, a decoration she was extremely proud of.

  Glancing at the small dried objects, Bill eyed me mischievously and asked, “What do you think about that, Sport?”—a nickname no one had ever thought to call me. I knew I was no Sport. Still, it was good, this little clue that he had not realized what was true: I did not fit the nicknames other boys belonged to so easily they could pass them back and forth.

  . . .

  The lonely dog has been imprisoned two days. Worried about his surviving the heat, I take food and treats. My Facebook pleas on his behalf emphasize his most attractive features, minimizing his outdoorsy fragrance and yodel-like howls. In the picture I posted, he looks insane, curled up in a yellow bandana I arranged around his neck. I worked for seven years a few floors below Vogue magazine. I understand the impact of an accessory item.

  The kid from the grocery store parking lot is mowing our lawn this morning, or what is left of it. Apparently he is part of our yardman’s crew. Bare-chested, lawn-mower boy wears tennis shoes with no socks and a pair of filthy shorts his waist barely holds up. A few curls trail down from his belly button. He’s twentysomething, but looks a teenager; his skin is clearly troubled. Nothing soothing has touched it lately. On his cheeks and shoulders are dozens of eruptions.

  Boyd, the man he works for, apologizes for him, says he’s trying to give him a break, help him kick drugs, a bit of info that snags my interest. “He’s lost a lot,” Boyd says. “That don’t mean he can get away without wearing any pants.” Meth, I guess, is the story, though Carol’s son reports that people in Columbia are snorting bath salts. Maybe tonight I will throw down some Mr. Bubble, or a guest soap.

  A woman I went to high school with, not long out of prison, is thin, about to crumble, and does not have Jenny Craig to thank. She is one of the women known at the grocery store as “Medicated Marys.” Her eyes look ready to crack. Darting about the store as if on fire, she nabs this or that, mostly sweets, hand flying out like a bird’s beak to snatch a worm. Before my arrival, because Betty was once a friend of her mother’s, she got into the habit of stopping by to borrow money, explaining her emergencies in the half-assed way addicts do, throwing out whatever excuses will make someone want to get rid of them and dig into a pocket. I know the landscape. I never had to beg, but lost a few things I might have liked to keep. And people. People I liked a lot.

  “No problem,” I assure Boyd after his apology over the kid’s clothes. In the course of ten years, my existence has gone from Looking for Mr. Goodbar to Driving Miss Daisy. A little skin is no tragedy. I have been away from New York a long time and am tempted to make love to a hanging basket. Recently, the discovery of the Big Wang Chinese restaurant at the Lake of the Ozarks has sparked my fantasy life.

  This week Congress demolished bills to provide financial aid to veterans and farmers. This does not bode well for government subsidies for displaced gay book publishers whose personal trainers consume six to twelve small meals a day. I am not actually certain I qualify as homosexual anymore. A conversation about kidney outputs with Betty’s physician’s assistant, Ingrid Wilbur, a butch lesbian, is as close as I have come to intimacy in months.

  Gradually, I have drifted out of the action.

  I find myself holding out a Coke for the kid, who looks surprised and shuts down the mower. He says nothing, just reaches for the drink. “Are you from here?” I ask. He shakes his head as, trying a different gambit, I
offer, “So what about those Cardinals?” He responds, “What about them?”

  I falter. “Well, I guess they are winning or losing.” He looks puzzled. No one gets me here, a problem as I tend to speak in one-liners. I try too hard, but as I tell my friends, it’s better than not enough.

  After making short work of the Coke, the boy runs a sliver of ice across his forehead and sets the plastic go cup carefully on the step as if it were something from Tiffany he has felt privileged to use.

  . . .

  An inside source (a friend of my mother’s) has told me of a row at Monday bridge, where Betty was once an ardent, rarely defeated competitor. My mother, after consuming the entire bowl of mini-Snickers at her table, has apparently accused the hostess of a chintzy attitude toward snacks. Then, refusing to keep score, she slammed her cards down in a shocking manner that seems to have sent a woman named Maxie into a tizzy. “And Maxie has rheumatoid,” the friend confided of the injured party.

  “Do Snickers help with that?” I asked myself.

  My mother’s skirmishes, her irritability, threaten her social life. People don’t get that she can’t control these outbursts; a new aggression flares up in her at times.

  Betty Hodgman, Big Muscle of the mini-Snickers circuit, is in the family room, staring down at her hymnal, frowning and looking confused.

  “The oven’s on. The oven’s on,” she keeps repeating. She won’t take in the fact that I am trying to preheat it. I am busy strewing cinnamon around the kitchen, attempting to make the muffins she likes. “That looks nasty,” she says when I pour the batter into the little paper cups, as if she had never seen anything similar before.