Bettyville

VIKING

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First published by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 2015

Copyright © 2015 by George Hodgman

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Hodgman, George.

Bettyville : a memoir / George Hodgman.

pages cm

ISBN 978-0-698-15845-0

1. Hodgman, George. 2. Adult children of aging parents—United States—Biography. 3. Caregivers—United States—Biography. 4. Aging parents—Care—United States. 5. Mothers and sons—United States. 6. Sons—Family relationships—United States. 7. Gay men—Family relationships—United States. I. Title.

HQ1063.6.H63 2015

306.874—dc23

2014038536

Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author's alone.

This book is dedicated, first and foremost, to my best friends, my parents: George A. and Betty Baker Hodgman. Every word about them is written with love.

It is also for my grandmothers, Margaret Callison Baker and Virginia Rachel Hodgman; my great-aunt Bess Baker; my aunt June Baker; and Alice Mayhew, always loyal, ever generous. Finally, it is for Madison and Paris,where so many I care about have walked. I will always remember you, good people.

If only one knew what to remember or pretend to remember. Make a decision and what you want from the lost things will present itself. You can take it down like a can from a shelf.

—Elizabeth Hardwick,
Sleepless Nights

M
issouri is a state of stolen names, bestowed to bring the world a little closer: Versailles, Rome, Cairo, New London, Athens, Carthage, Alexandria, Lebanon, Cuba, Japan, Santa Fe, Cleveland, Canton, California, Caledonia, New Caledonia, Mexico, Louisiana. Paris, our home.

Then there are the funny-named places. Licking is a favorite, along with Fair Play, Strain, Elmo, Peculiar, Shook, Lone Jack, Butts, Lupus, Moody, Clover, Polo, Shake Rag, and the T towns that always end my list—Turtle, Tightwad, Tulip, and Tea.

When I cannot sleep, I try to see how many I can still name, an old game played with my parents when I was a kid looking out the car window at the rolling brown waters of the Mississippi.

. . .

Something has awakened me, though inside there is only the sound of the air conditioner and outside it is pitch black and quiet, but for the trains. The clock says 2:30, give or take. I won't go back to sleep. Where am I? Not in my apartment; there are no sirens, horns, or streaks of neon shining through the blinds. This is not Manhattan, not Chelsea, not West Twenty-third Street. I am home, in Paris, Missouri, population 1,246 and falling. Living here, I say to myself, for just a few more days or weeks. For now. Until Carol, the good-hearted farm woman who helps watch out for Betty, recovers from surgery on her rotator cuff. Or until my mother can be admitted to an assisted living facility. Until there is rain, or Betty's spirits mend, or I get a regular job again. Until something happens here on Sherwood Road, and my mother is gone, and I must close up shop.

I hear Betty's voice from the hall: “Who turned up the air-conditioning so high? He's trying to freeze me out.”

And here she is, all ninety years of her, curlers in disarray, chuckling a bit to herself for no reason, peeking into our guest room where I have been mostly not sleeping. It is the last place in America with shag carpet. In it, I have discovered what I believe to be a toenail from high school.

On the spare bed, there is a quilt with stars and crescent moons, figures of girls and boys joining hands along the borders, and the embroidered signatures of long-gone farm women, including my great-aunt Mabel's. I am installed here, along with the Christmas wrappings, the desk of Betty's uncle Oscar, and the bed I slept in with my grandmother as a boy, listening to Mammy's snores and the sound of the furnace startled into service. My grandmother's home in the village of Madison, ten or so miles west of us, where my mother grew up, was nicknamed the House of Many Chimneys. In the garden by the back door there were pink roses, which my grandmother, half blind and old, fretted over constantly, nicking her fingers on the thorns.

The hallway light is on. Betty has been in the kitchen, cadging a snack as she does in the middle of the night after being awakened by the need for the bathroom or dreams that make her cry out. Something—her dreams, her thoughts, her memories—hounds my mother at night. A light sleeper, she toddles around in her thick white socks, clearing her throat loudly, veering slightly from side to side, turning on the coffee, which will be cold by morning, checking to see if everything is in her own odd idea of order. After she has gone to bed, I try to light the path she takes to the kitchen in the dark, leaving on the lamp in my father's office, along with one in the foyer, to provide a trail to guide her through the hall.

“Are you awake?” my mother asks.

“I am now,” I say.

Betty, who I recently discovered sorting through the contents of my suitcase, turns on the overhead light in my room, wrinkles her brow, and peers in like a camp counselor on an inspection tour, as if she suspects I might be entertaining someone who has paddled in from across the lake. She must keep an eye out. I am a schemer. There are things going on behind her back, plans afoot, she fears. She has no intention of cooperating with any of them. When the phone rings, she listens to every word, not sure if she can trust me with her independence. I don't blame her. I am an unlikely guardian. A month ago I thought the Medicare doughnut hole was a breakfast special for seniors. I am a care inflictor.

She's not easy to corral. Her will remains at blast-force strength. “It's a hot day, but I'm going to that sale,” she murmured last week in her sleep as outside the temperature soared past a hundred and, in her dream, she jabbed her finger up to place a bid. She is testier with me than anyone, sometimes slapping the air if I come too close. There are days I cannot please her. Carol, who has worked in nursing homes, says that old people who are failing get the angriest with those they are most attached to, the people who make them realize they are no longer themselves. But Betty's crankiness is an act, I think, a way to conceal her embarrassment at having to ask anything of anyone. When I do something for her, she looks away. Accustomed to fending for herself, she hates all this.

. . .

“I was worried,” Betty says. “You said last night you couldn't sleep. I was worried you wouldn't sleep tonight.” She stares at me.

“No, I'm sleeping. I'm asleep. Right now I'm talking in my sleep.”

“You're in bed in your clothes again.”

“I dozed off reading.”

(Actually, I go to bed in clothes because I am waiting to be called into action, anticipating a fall, or stroke, or shout out. She seems so frail when I tuck her in. I keep the ambulance number, along with the one for the emergency room, on my bedside table.)

“It isn't a good thing for people to go to bed in their clothes . . . The
Appeal
didn't come today,” she complains.

Our little town's newspaper, which reports civic events, charitable campaigns, and church news—including the “Movement of the Spirit” at the Full Gospel Church—has appeared erratically recently, possibly because of the increasingly short-staffed post office. This is the kind of lag that can throw my mother into crisis mode. She wants what she wants when she wants it.

“Did someone call today? From the church? I can't find my other shoe, the Mephisto.”

I say we will look in the morning, and my mother, somewhat satisfied, almost smiles. For a second, there is the old Betty, who does not often appear now, my old friend.

In St. Louis, when we turn off Skinker onto Delmar, not far from the University City gates, Betty always points out the place where, as a young woman, working as a secretary at Union Electric, she waited for the streetcar. She seldom mentions the past, but loves to return to that old streetcar stop. Back in the 1940s, after the war, she was a pretty girl with wavy light brown hair, fresh from the “Miss Legs” contest at the university. Listening to her memories, I see her in a cast-off coat, not long after the war, looking down the tracks toward Webster Groves where she stayed with her aunt, called Nona. There is innocence in her expression, excitement at her new city life as she stands by other women in expensive dresses, the sort that Mammy never allowed her to buy. Sometimes I wonder whether she wishes she had gotten on that streetcar and ridden it to some other life.

By the time my mother realized that she was smart or saw she had the kind of looks that open doors, she had already closed too many to go back. “I just wanted a house with a few nice things,” she told me once. “That was my little dream.”

. . .

Betty—actually Elizabeth, or, on her best stationery, Elizabeth Baker Hodgman—doesn't see well at all. Certain corners of the world are blurred. Her hearing sometimes fails her, but it is often difficult to determine whether she is missing something or simply choosing not to respond. Also, she is suffering from dementia or maybe worse.

Some days she is just about fine, barking orders at Earleen, our cleaning lady, sharp enough to play bridge with her longtime partners. Other times, though, she is a lost girl with sad eyes. I am scared I am going to break her. I am new at all this.

We have hunts for liquid tears, or checks, or hearing aids, or the blouse Earleen was supposed to have ironed for church. The mind of my mother has often drifted away from peripheral matters. She has always been busy on the inside, a little far away.

Now more than ever, she is in and out, more likely to drift off into her own world for a minute or two. Or sit staring for long spells with a vacant look. Or forget the name of someone she knew, back then, before she had to worry about not remembering. In the afternoons, her whimpers and moans, her little chats with herself are all I hear in the house. The nights, especially just before bed, are the worst. She knows something is happening to her, but would never say so. We circle around her sadness, but she will not let me share it. Acknowledging anything would make it real. These, I fear, are her last days as herself.

. . .

My mother always drove fast, never stayed home. In the old days, we sped across the plains in our blue Impala, radio blaring DJ Johnny Rabbitt's all-American voice on KXOK St. Louis. She took me to the county line where I waited for the bus to kindergarten. My mother—“too damn high strung,” my father said—stayed in the bathroom fussing with her hair and smoking Kent cigarettes until the very last minute. “I look like something the cat drug in,” she told herself, frowning into the mirror.

When she finally came out, I'd be sitting on the hood of the car, my Batman lunch box already empty except for wads of foil and a few hastily scraped carrots.

“I'm a nervous wreck,” I'd cry out. I was an only child, raised mostly among adults. I repeated what I heard and didn't get half of what I was saying.

“Why are you just sitting there?” she'd yell as if I were the one delaying things.

Those mornings, heading to school, I learned to love pop music, a lifelong fixation. My mother and I sang along to “This Diamond Ring” by Gary Lewis and the Playboys, “You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling” by the Righteous Brothers, and Petula Clark's “Downtown.” Betty took her shoe off the foot she used for the gas pedal and almost floored it.

I like fast things, and the highway between Madison and Moberly will always be one of the places where I will see my mother, hair wrapped in rollers under a scarf, wearing a pair of sunglasses, taking me off into the big wide world.

“What are you looking at, little demon?” she would ask.

“Don't bug me,” I'd say. “Mind your own business.”

“You are my business.”

“Betty,” my father often said, “no one would mistake that kid for anyone's but yours.”

I was Betty's boy.

This year, Betty had to give up her driver's license after backing into a ditch. Now she must sit home, awaiting invitations. “They won't even let me go to the grocery store,” she says. Her eyes are wistful and her fingers, with their chipped pink polish, are itchy for the feel of the car keys.

. . .

Suddenly, Betty yells out. “Oh God,” I think as I run to her, trip on a hair curler and barely escape ankle injury. “What is it?” I ask as I approach her door. “What is it?”

“Say,” she begins, “you didn't get toilet paper.”

We go through enough toilet paper for an army. I think she is involved in some sort of art project. A kind of Christo thing.

“I'll get some tomorrow,” I say.

“That suits me,” she answers, pausing before asking, “Did you make me a hair appointment?”

“I told them it was an emergency.”

It is 3 a.m. I steal a cigarette from my mother's old, hidden cache and sit out on the step in front of our house in the dark. The mailbox made by my father is falling apart now. I would fix it, but am not handy. Nor do I assemble. A trip to Ikea is enough to unhinge me. I would prefer a spinal tap to putting together a coffee table.

I am running out of meals I know how to prepare. Tonight, feeling nostalgic, I rolled out tuna casserole made with Campbell's Mushroom Soup and crushed potato chips.

“I didn't know anyone still made this,” she said.

“I was trying to think outside the box . . . Mushrooms are vegetables. Or are they a fungus?”

“Be still.”

Mushrooms, I realized,
are
a fungus. I had served my mother a fungus casserole. With barbecue potato chips.

. . .

“There is no such thing as a perfect parent.” Betty always said that. But to me she was perfect. Especially when she thought she was not. In grade school, on holidays, the mothers brought refreshments. Popcorn balls—crunchy white confections with the popped kernels held together with sorghum—were my favorites. When it was her turn to bring treats, Betty asked what I wanted. I said, “Popcorn balls.” She said, “Oh brother,” and lit a cigarette.

The kitchen was not her natural habitat. Her tendency to never turn things off led to exploding percolators and smoky puffs from toasters. A few days after my popcorn-ball request, I found Betty in front of the oven in her hair rollers, which were held in place with pink picks that tended to turn up all around the house. The kitchen, never a page from
Good Housekeeping,
was strewn with bowls and baking sheets. Sticky lumps of popcorn and fallen curlers were everywhere. On a tray there was a strange grouping of misshapen popcorn balls.

When I said they were supposed to be all the same size, Betty appeared exasperated, harassed, so forlorn and disappointed. She had failed. Nothing was right. She thought she had to be some kind of model mother.

I reached for a ball and took a bite. “I think these are the best I've had,” I told her as I stuck some of the picks from her curlers into the balls so they would look a little snazzy.

“Why are you doing that?” she said. “Go outside and throw something.”

. . .

My mother should not live alone now, but vetoes all conventional alternatives. I try to pretend I am in control. It is my time to play the grown-up and I don't want the part. “Don't put me in a place with a lot of old people,” she says.

“Fine,” I say to myself. “I'll go.”