Bettyville (10 page)

Eavesdropping as was my habit, I heard them make the decision to close the yard, and though they saw that times were bad for all businesses in the area, they blamed my dad, at least a bit. Bill assessed my father's performance with a jeweler's eye for flaw, said Daddy wasted too much time laughing with customers. Levity on the job was to him tantamount to embezzlement. Years before, during a painful, days-long session of labor, Bill, lying on his back on the top of a scaffolding platform, painted the tin ceiling of our hardware store, a grueling feat that damaged his back for life. Up at all hours, he never stopped; he basked in misery.

My mother, listening with a stony expression, looked furious at everyone, those in the room and, I was certain, one who was not.

. . .

After the yard closed in Madison in 1973, my father labored at the Paris yard with Uncle Harry, where I was forced to work too that summer. We were still living in Madison—our new home in Paris was still being built. Big George and I left the house every morning at 6 a.m. for the twelve-mile drive to Paris. “Time to make the doughnuts,” my father said to me when he dragged me, reluctant and surly, out of bed for a Pop-Tart as he picked bits of Grape Nuts out of his teeth nervously. When we arrived at the lumberyard, he slammed the car door and headed in with his pocket full of pencils and a tape measure clipped to his belt. He never said much on our way to work those mornings; he seemed like a soldier heading into battle. He was different, disappointed.

In Madison, my father had whistled down Main Street in his dusty work boots, swatting the town's working women, all lipsticked and beehived, on their big, cheeky butts with his clipboard full of paint orders. I can see him standing in streaks of sun, slightly wobbly from a few beers and completely sweat-soaked with a hand-lettered sandwich board, accosting passing motorists whom he berated to buy chicken at the annual Lions Club Memorial Day barbecue.

Across town, in her darkened bedroom, my mother, who had long before ceased her efforts to control his antics, attempted to sleep away her embarrassment as he transformed the greater part of the Lions membership into a brazen mob of drunken boys who danced to a portable radio with bosomy, rouged-up women way into the night, in the parking lot of Del Miles's old gas station where they set up their grills.

“
Oh lay me down, in your big brass bed,
” my father would sing on these party nights. “
Oh lay me down, in your big brass bed.
” Hearing this favorite, I sensed scandal but didn't get the words: “
I'm going to Chicago to get my hambone boiled. Cause the women in St. Louie done let my hambone spoil.
”

One day it dawned on me what this all meant.

“That is a dirty song, Daddy,” I said.

“Don't go blabbing to your mother.”

The only secrets I didn't tell were my own.

Betty avoided the Lions events. “Is it over yet?” she would ask me wearily when she rose from her bed to confront me.

. . .

At the lumberyard, I pitched in as best I could. A special patience, I discovered, is required to dust a pile of nails. I did learn to use the paint mixer successfully, spending more time than some considered necessary experimenting with color combinations. Most I managed seemed suitable for the Caribbean. Within moments, I found myself streaked with more color than a Masai tribesman. When my father saw how much paint I was going through, he looked stricken. “That cost hundreds of dollars,” he said, hoping my uncle was in his office, hunched over his papers.

“Don't you wish you had just sent me to summer camp?”

I accompanied some of the other workers on deliveries of lumber, paneling, whatever, though I was quickly exiled from the transport of windows and other glass products. I sipped Mountain Dews in the cab or rode on the back of the ancient, snorting flatbed truck as we shook and rattled our way down the freshly tarred roads with the wind blowing my sweaty hair. The drives through the countryside made me see, for the first time, the place I am from. It was not a dry summer. Everywhere, there was green, shade after shade after shade of it. According to the
Appeal,
Monroe County “boasts more rivers and streams than any other place in Missouri.” Closest at hand, the thick Salt River runs slowly, drearily past the edge of town, flooding the banks when the spring rains come. Here, in the murky waters that mirror ancient overhanging branches, daring children, balanced precariously on fallen trees, are sometimes swept to their deaths, while farther upstream, blacks and Baptists held baptisms and sang hymns, their voices carried by occasional breezes drifting through the steamy mornings. Fifty miles east is Hannibal, where the passing Mississippi brings huge barges loaded with factory products and grain, stopping on their way from Des Moines before heading on to St. Louis and New Orleans.

. . .

On the day we moved from Madison, I was not there when the big trucks came to our house. Knowing my temperament, my mother stationed me at Mammy's where I lay on her bristly couch. My grandmother shut off the light and let me mourn. At noontime, as the fire whistle announced midday, Mammy, maneuvering now on a walker with an embroidered pouch stitched up by June, brought me warm homemade bread spread with some of her preserves and a 7-Up, the things she made me when I was ill. She sat beside me. She didn't want us to go, really. Paris was only a dozen miles away, but Mammy wanted Betty close, and not long after would come with us to stay most of the time, leaving the House of Many Chimneys where the summer kitchen had become a dumping ground for things left from the dead: Uncle Oscar's Smith Corona and boxes of photos and papers that belonged to Wray Chowning. He had died a drunken mess with only the loosest grip on anything resembling reality. Betty had been left to take care of his house. One day, I discovered a paper Wray had written at the university on Shakespeare's
Henry IV;
the title was “Harry in the Night.” When driving downtown in St. Louis now, passing the old hotels that were once Wray's haunts, I tend to imagine him getting drunk enough to entertain the strangers passing through for brief transactions.

The day of the move, Aunt Winnie appeared with a chocolate pie for us to eat that night. She stood at the doorway where I lay and came to brush my hair off my face. “Things gotta change, kiddo,” she said, “things gotta change. One day I'll be saying good-bye to Madison too, going off to live at Nahncee's when I can't keep up the house.” But Winnie never had to say good-bye to Madison. She succumbed to a heart attack after a hearty meal at a function for Christian ladies. She had apparently been stricken suddenly, soon after arriving home, as she was discovered still in her Sunday clothes and best church hat, waiting—eyes wide open—for the savior she had been blessed to expect only briefly.

. . .

A few nights after my encounter with the lawn-mower boy, in the very early morning, I notice him, not in his usual place on the car at the parking lot, but standing in the middle of the lane at the empty car wash where I presume it is a little cooler. With him is the skinny woman I went to high school with, the addict who was after Betty's money. They look like they are dancing.

“Don't do it,” I want to yell. “Watch out.” But I think the damage is done. He isn't sober, and when Boyd finds out, he'll be out of a job.

I do not get a wink of sleep that night, no good at all because I have so much work to do. My laptop is screwy and I am certain I am under some form of cyber attack. Earlier, after reviewing her marked-up manuscript, my new editing client, a South American economist, has claimed I am not getting her sense of “humous.” But what really keeps my eyes open and my head unable to shut down at all is our upcoming visit to Tiger Place. It is ridiculous to be a fiftyish man who cannot handle a ninety-year-old with narrow feet. For her sake, my mother should not stay here. I should not stay here, all bound up with my mother. I am not making decisions that are right for her. She needs to go somewhere where she can be properly looked after and fed. The only cuisine I have ever mastered was seasonal drugs. But I cannot leave. I will step up. In the morning, before the fog burns off, I will water the roses. I will get them through this summer. They will not wither on my watch.

T
his morning, Betty got up at 4 a.m. after looking at the clock wrong. I looked up from my work and there she was, confused, disoriented.

“Why is it still dark?” she asked. To calm her a little, I asked if she would let me comb the hair on the back of her head, which gets tangled when she lies with her head on her pillow.

Who says there are no advantages to giving birth to a homosexual?

I combed carefully, separating the strands with my fingers where her hair is matted.

“Don't pull it,” she said. “Last time you did.”

“I didn't mean to.”

“My head is tender.”

“I'm watching out.”

“Are you going to make me wear those shitty shoes today?”

Her days are filled with little hurts. When I try to pat my mother's back, she says, “No, no.” Her arms are as tender and reluctant: She gets angry if I take hold too tightly. When I make my most careful effort to rub some cream into her face, she winces, shakes her head, as if the tread of fingertips brings agony.

“No. No. No.”

“Let me rub this into your forehead,” I say. “It's amazing how few wrinkles you have on your forehead for a woman your age. It's smooth.”

“Don't get it in my hair. Last night you got it in my hair.”

“Pretend it's mousse.”

She bruises easily now. On the underside of one arm, there is a trail of purple tracks. Across her cheekbones and forearms, the skin is nearly transparent. Fearing I am about to tear or leave a cut, she stares at me, steeling herself. I must be gentle, attentive. A prick is a stab that makes her jump. A careless touch is sharp as a prick. Everything is an invasion.

“No. No. No.”

There is nothing that doesn't press too hard, or seem too tight, or feel uncomfortable. She is so sensitive. The tightening around her arm during the testing of her blood pressure is much too much to bear. She yells out, kicks her feet.

“No, no, no, no.”

The space around her is all she owns, and if I come too close, she seems almost frightened, as if she fears what I might do. Yet on bad days, when things are rough inside her head, she wants me always in plain sight and follows me around, watching my every move. In the family room, there she is. “Where are you going?” If I go lie on my bed, she is right behind me, clearing her throat loudly in the doorway. “Where are you going?” If I walk into the living room to read, she is there, watching me. Even in my thoughts, where I retreat sometimes to escape, she appears, standing there with her purse in my mind's eye, waiting and demanding: “Where are you going?”

She does not believe I will not leave her, does not fully accept that I am not about to take flight, even though I tell her over and over. “No, no, no, I will not go. I'll just be out a few minutes. I have to refill your prescriptions.” Maybe she forgets. Or knows by now how likely people are to change their minds.

When she is especially agitated over something that has happened (a broken anything, an unexpected change in plans) or is about to (a small obligation that seems a terrible challenge, an upcoming doctor's appointment, taxes), my mother's noises filter through the day until I have to escape, leave the house, take the risk. Mostly I go outside, sit on the steps or walk down into the woods.

There is a bottle of Xanax in the cabinet above the stove. I have to get out of this kitchen. Now.

Standing on our back deck, I hear the whistles blowing over at the high school at summer football practice. Every day, I see the boys tramping to the field in the heat. Freshman year in high school, Betty made me go out for football; she insisted. She set her mind to it. I had never played or watched the sport on television. When my father tried to interest me in the Tiger games, I begged off. I didn't care, though I liked the marching bands.

Betty did not see as an obstacle the fact that I had no idea of the rules. She was on a mission: to make me all right, to make me fit. I was an adolescent: She smelled sex in the house and wanted someone to pound it out of me before anything took root.

On the first day of practice at my new high school in Paris, I noticed that one of the boys was carrying a Bible in his helmet. This did not seem an option for me. Then there were the uniforms: They gave us strange long underwear things to wear under the pants and over our underwear with pockets for pads that protected body parts I did not seem to have. I couldn't get the pads to fit in right, so I just threw them down the pants. Every time I ran, a pad fell out one of the legs.

I told the coach on the first day that I had ruptured myself. I needed a specialist, X-rays.

He grunted, unsympathetic. On the second day, I said I thought I was having a heatstroke. I could not believe how hot it was in my special underwear, even though most of my padding was strewn across the field. No response.

“I have chafing,” I whispered as he eyed me. His name was Quigley, a name that seemed right for a rabbit.

I could not believe the shit they were putting us through. It couldn't be legal. Large people were crashing into me—farm boys, strong from hauling hay. There were yells and curses. I had no friends. Not even the Bible carrier.

After the second practice, I was exhausted. I told Betty I had leukemia. She was skeptical. I told her I dreaded waking up in the morning. I fell into despair, tried to break my own arm on the side of the tub and knocked the shower door off its tracks.

On the third day, when my father came to pick me up, he arrived early and watched. “Damn,” he said when we got in the car, “you are really terrible.” I answered, “I know. I am the worst player in the history of Paris R-II High. Can I go to boarding school?”

He said, “Maybe your mother would let you off if we could think of some other sport you could play.”

I asked, “How about bridge?”

One of the older boys was named Kevin, a junior or senior. He drove a noisy old car and taunted me. I imagined this automobile exploding, dismembering my most immediate nemeses and sending the Bible carrier flying toward the loving arms of his Lord Jesus. Every day after practice, as I waited for my father, Kevin drove by, and as he passed me, there on the steps, wondering if I was developing calcium deposits, he always screamed, “Fuck you, you fucking faggot. Fuck you. Fuck you.” I braced myself for it every day, listening for his car to come around the curve, the crack of gravel under the tires.

I knew it was true. What could I do? It was the pure hatred that shocked me, the rage, the bitter face in the driver's seat. He began to do it more often. He did it every time we crossed paths on the field. He did it in the shower room. Some days, the heat was over a hundred degrees. One morning, on the field, sweat was running down my face and I felt the salt from it in my eyes. I had dropped balls, misunderstood plays, and been yelled at by everyone. Quigley was twitching. Kevin seemed to be everywhere with his usual greeting and I was tired, stripped bare; there was no pad in the world to protect the place where I was about to get slammed.

Kevin passed, kicked me hard, and yelled, “Fuck you, you fucking faggot,” as I fell on the ground in front of what seemed like half of America. Picking myself up, I couldn't breathe. His words hung in the hot air and everyone turned toward me as, finally, it all became clear. I froze, could not move or speak.

I disappeared, just went away and returned in a moment, different. For a long time, for years, this scene came back and back again in my head—the air, my red-hot cheeks, his voice—in instant replay, like some champion's great moment.

On the football field, I thought I was going to cry, but I told myself that whatever came, whatever happened, I could not do that. Not there. I didn't. I swallowed my tears; I pulled them in. And they never came back. I cannot cry. Not since that day. Not ever. Not when Mammy died. Not when my father died. I joined my mother among the permanently dry-eyed. We have that in common. We do not cry. I think somewhere inside me my allotted tears are waiting. Maybe they will come when Betty goes. Maybe when it happens I will somehow be transported back to Kevin at practice, or keel over like Mama Cass eating that ham sandwich in her hotel room, waiting for her muumuus to come back from housekeeping.

Where do the hidden things go? Not away. Nothing goes away.

I think something happened at that moment on the field: Something shut down; something went into hiding, split off. Although it did not become clear for years, I suspect that from the minute I had that little break from myself, some part of me went inside and I began to watch myself, making certain to give nothing away. Nothing inside me showed. When people get sober they are told that they have to make their insides match their outsides. It sounded to me like something you would want in a Chevrolet.

I don't think a coming together will happen to me in this lifetime. I am not sure I will ever again connect up—the watcher and the other unfiltered part of me—in the way other people do. There has been a rupture, and here, in this house, on these days when the sounds my mother makes seem especially loud, I feel it, see the cost of long-lasting silences.

There are, I have learned, so many ways that gay kids try to cover up themselves. I can see I have on many occasions tried too hard to get a laugh.

“You're too clever by half,” someone told me once.

“I know,” I said. “It would be better to just be twice as stupid. Right?”

A joke, you see, can earn a place for anyone. People want to laugh, and when I realized I could do it sometimes, I tried to do it every minute. I became a performer, an artist skilled at distraction, control:
“Look at me, but don't see
.
Watch, but not too closely.”
What I said to myself had nothing to do with what I told anyone. I went on the lookout for every word or gesture that might betray me.

A few years ago, a publisher read a draft of a book I was working on, something I was proud of. He eyed me, looked uncomfortable. “It's so
internal
,” he said, as if naming some spectacular offense. Of course, he was a straight man. He never had to go inside. He was comfortable just where he was.

The thing about being a watcher is this: You are never really a part of things, especially if the person you must watch is yourself, always, just to make sure no one ever really sees you.

. . .

Earleen is raving about the dentist who screwed up her upper plate because he wanted to go play golf. The teeth cost $750. They have hurt Earleen's mouth for a year and she is going to take the dentist to a review board in Jefferson City. “We're gonna clean that jaybird's clock,” she says as we watch my mother, hovering close as it seems her balance is off today.

Betty goes to the refrigerator to take out a bowl of pineapple that she drops on the floor and breaks. She yells out as if there has been a gunshot. I clean the sticky juice off the linoleum and wipe the front of her gown as she fidgets, then looks away. Finally, I settle her, distracting her with a pile of postcards from Europe from the end table as Earleen starts the vacuum in the back of the house.

“Where are these from?” she asks. “Who wrote these?” I tell her that she wrote them, note her handwriting, as it was, so familiar. She wrinkles her brow, as if trying to remember. “I never could write a pretty hand like that,” she says. “Not now.” It's true. Her letters look like shaky forgeries.

The cards were written on my parents' trip to Europe; it was a grand occasion, the only time they ever went there together. I was in New York by then; they didn't take that many trips, but came every Christmas to go to Radio City while I worked. They loved that Christmas show. They were so delighted by it. I never went with them. When they came to visit, I always took breaks from them. Partially because I had to; there were always deadlines. Partially because I could not bear to let our talk stray too far from what I was comfortable saying about my life.

When I let my mind wander back that far, what I see is how hard we tried to be our best for one another.

In Europe, my parents took some cruise on a river that streamed through many countries, the Danube or the Rhine. For months in advance they spoke of this trip as if they were teenagers. Europe: across the big wavy sea where luxury liners crossed, carrying queens with hats and heroes with medals. Europe: where the wars had been: Europe: where the mountains and landscapes were beautiful, and the food was rich and unforgettable and available, on the barge on which they traveled, twenty-four hours daily, in unlimited quantities.

“I'll just bet it's going to be very nice,” my mother said before they left. She was so eager. “June loves to go on a barge. I hope your father will have a good time. He deserves a chance to relax after all these years.”

. . .

“We flew into somewhere in Germany,” Betty says, holding a card the sun streaks through, but she doesn't remember much else. “What is a beautiful city in Czechoslovakia?” she asks.

“Prague,” I suggest.

“Yes, that's it.”

And then, “What is a beautiful city in Germany?”

I suggest, “Berlin, maybe. I don't know how pretty it is, really.”

She says, “No, no.”

I suggest, “Munich.”

She says, “No, no. That's where they blew up the Olympics. That nearly killed your father. They blew up the Jews!”

I say, “Hamburg.” She looks a little excited, but even more, relieved. “Yes, that's it. That's where we flew in. I used my passport and your father kept looking up everything about the war . . . I didn't care about the war. I didn't care if they blew up the Olympics, to tell you the truth.” She looks at me. “They go on
forever,”
she adds.

“I wanted to buy a new sweater or a dress and see some of the countryside. It rained a lot . . . I'm trying to think of another city, another place in Germany. Oh yes, it was Berlin. That's what it was. But his knee was hurting him and we didn't get to do much. The time changed, you know, and I never could sleep much. The time changed on us. The time changed. I think just once. It could have been more than that.”