Bettyville (14 page)

Mary Maune, head of the Association of Women Students, had a tape recorder. A journalism student, she was covering the event for radio station KBIA. She looked astonished when she—a student leader, a well-groomed, achievement-oriented sorority member—was hit and bloodied with something sharp by a beefy frat boy in chinos from Mr. Guy.

The man in the wheelchair from the meeting, moving the most slowly, was an especially vulnerable target. The jaunty black beret atop his disbelieving, shattered face did not fare well. I noticed egg yolks dripping from his wheels. The boys on the sidelines were screaming something like, “Faggots die. Faggots die. Off this campus. Off this campus.”

I was shaking, but I had to help him. Together with one of the other onlookers, we carried the man in the wheelchair up the stairs and into the union. I was afraid I would drop my wheel. He recognized me, put his hand on my arm, but I ran.

. . .

Although my mother has been consistent when it comes to discussing, or actually not discussing, my life, other people have surprised me sometimes. As it happened, Evelyn Fleming was my friend as long as she lived. After my father died, when I was back in the city, she called me up to find out how I was doing. Everyone else asked after my mother. She asked about me, took the trouble to find my far-off number. There is kindness, people who never fail you. There are others who do.

A few years back, Betty and I stopped by the Flemings' house when they were packing up to go to a senior community near Kansas City. Jack, who had married a born-again Christian from Oklahoma, would not as much as look in my direction. I tried not to feel I had been slapped in the face.

I don't get many unfriendly or judgmental vibes here in Paris, though a woman from church never, ever responds when I say hello. Every time someone doesn't speak or looks at me with an expression I cannot fathom, I think it is because of who I am. It has been this way forever; this kind of reaction feels to be bred in the bone, especially in territory where I feel isolated.

. . .

All through this afternoon, Betty coughs and coughs. When she dozes on the couch in the living room, glimpses of other women, her grandmother Anna, whose face I have seen in old photos; Bess; Nona; and perhaps others I never knew, drift across her face. The women she is from are there, in her chin, cheekbones, and slender nose. Mammy, though, is the one I see the most. Mammy is in her eyes. When my mother plays “His Eye Is on the Sparrow,” on the piano, she always reminds me that this was my grandmother's favorite. “She couldn't sing, but she liked it enough to listen when she heard it.” I see Mammy in her hat with one side dented in, that same old hat, sitting in a hot summer church, cooling herself with a paper fan with the image of Jesus rising on one side and the name Thompson-Mackler, the local funeral parlor, on the back. Clearing her throat—my mother's family has waged a decades-long battle with phlegm—she looks about to doze.

. . .

Mammy's family were farm people. Sometimes it is simple to imagine them, those who lived here once, all the good people, crossing the river, coming in from the country for church on Sunday mornings with clean, coerced hair and their best clothes. Think of wrinkled faces, mischievous eyes, hands in immaculate white gloves, wistfulness, innocence, worry over money, or crops, or sickness.

Think of the men, itchy to get back to work; mayors and merchants in their hard-pressed white shirts, tight collars, and stiff coats; lacy girls in ribbons; stoic boys, uncomfortable in their finery, confined in rarely worn shiny shoes; big-boned farm women with ample bosoms in dime-store brooches; old, milky-eyed codgers, freshly shaved with a few hairs still peeking out of their ears and noses; mothers with careful glances, pulling their kids away from puddles, holding their hands, smoothing their hair, and wiping their cheeks.

I picture them all moving across the land, the days, through time, crossing Main Street, clutching their crosses and Bibles, trying to stay pretty, trying to look pious, walking together, traveling in their snorting, hard-to-start cars, or heading toward town in their buggies or on horseback to bow their heads and pray together to Jesus, who, in the stories I read, stood for love, charity, and kindness offered every day to others, even those unlike ourselves. Kindness may be the most difficult of virtues, but when I have encountered it, it has meant everything to me.

S
unday is frying eggs and trying not to break the yolks; getting Betty off to church;
Parade
magazine; big men streaking down Main Street on Harleys with their hair blowing from their helmets; the long, silent afternoon. August is beginning to wane. I don't want to get up; it's barely 6 a.m., but I hear my mother in the living room, playing the piano.

Last night, strange news: A young man whose family sold tractors in Madison—a jolly-looking kid with a belly and bushy beard—was shot and killed, apparently by homeless people staying with him. The murderer or murderers are still at large. Taking all this in, I saw that a friend of the dead man had posted photos on Facebook, including one of the scene of the crime. “We had real good parties here,” the caption said. “RIP.”

I knew the place. It was Mammy's house on Olive Street, remodeled now, with a wishing well where her garden was. Apparently not long ago a meth lab in the kitchen where my grandmother rolled flour for bread blew a hole through the roof.

I chased lightning bugs across Mammy's yard on nights in the summer as, across the street, the old ladies in the neighborhood—my grandmother, Bassett, Dolly, Mary Virginia, and Virgie—chatted away on Dolly's porch in their nightgowns, taking in the cool air.

Betty said nothing when I told her of the murder. We'd had a bad scene and she wasn't speaking to me. For days I had searched for an old clipping—a story about Ella Ewing, the giantess circus performer whose shoes hang at the state capitol. I thought maybe I could try to write something about her, and the article was loaned to me by the historical society. But nothing ever stays put here, and finally Betty admitted to throwing it away. She wouldn't say why. It wasn't the first time something like this had happened. What is mine is hers.

“Dammit,” I yelled. “You won't throw away your Kleenexes. But the one thing I need, you throw away. It wasn't mine. Couldn't you have asked? It was in a Ziploc bag. Didn't it occur to you that someone was saving it?”

Betty, who never yells, looked back in disbelief, so upset, rising shakily from her chair, not able to cope with this. She began to make her sounds, as if trying to maintain some sort of equilibrium. Clutching the sides of her gown, she fled the kitchen as if attacked, making her way down the hall as fast as she could to her room where she closed the door. I thought I had made her cry and lay down on the couch shaking, knowing I had gone too far. On the rare occasions when my anger comes out, it's a river that can't be easily dammed up. I pressed my lips together hard, hoping my mouth would not fly open again.

I found Betty in her room, sitting—as she always does—at the far edge of her high bed, about to slide off, her hand cradling the side of her head. I tried to apologize, but couldn't make it right.

“It's the first time you've ever sworn at me.” That's all she could say. She looked shocked, as if someone had died, passed away from her. I didn't know whether she was angry at herself or mourning the son who never raised his voice to her. She would accept no apologies and now it is Sunday and I still feel terrible.

. . .

I can't seem to get out of bed, though I need to make breakfast. “What's wrong with you, Betty? What's wrong with you? Why did you do
that
?” Betty is upset, talking to herself at the piano. She has played the wrong note. Later she is to accompany the choir at church and, scared of embarrassing herself, has gotten up early to practice. She still drives herself when she is scheduled to perform. The music stops; she coughs. I hope she won't make more mistakes. A fragile bundle in pink flannel, she is sitting at the piano in the living room as the sun begins to fall through the lace curtains she says will crumble if washed once more.

“It's imported,” she says of the fabric. “Switzerland. Somewhere.”

Betty is making her way slowly through “Take the Time to Be Holy.” Not as sure or certain at the keyboard as she was, she hits a few clunkers. Each one hurts us both, tearing into our pictures of the woman we remember, shoulders held stiffly erect as she played, never hitting a wrong note. “Hold up your shoulders,” Mammy always told her. “Hold up your shoulders.” If her posture sagged, her father walked up behind her and struck her between the shoulder blades.

“Why did you play that?” my mother asks herself. “You know better than that.” I get angry along with her when she makes a mistake. I get mad when she is less than she was.

Every time she plays, it's more of a trial. She will no longer allow me to accompany her to church. She does not want me to hear her.

The piano has been my mother's instrument since she was a girl taking lessons from Miss Elizabeth Richmond in Madison. Trudging through the street with her music books, she probably dawdled a bit, stopping to look at the windows of Chowning's Dry Goods, run by Wray's father, Scott, or stopping at the Rexall if she had the money for a stick of candy or an orange slice. “We weren't poor poor,” Mammy always said. “But we were poor.”

Betty's gentle touch at the piano, the soft way she rests her fingers on the keys and makes the music flow, remains. There is such sweet feeling when she touches the keys. The piano is where she hides a certain part of herself that must be kept covered up and safe.

I don't want her to have to stop playing in church. I don't want her to stop trying. I don't want to lose the part of her I feel when she makes music, that softness. Betty has always been a little tough on me; to her that is a mother's job. When I notice who she becomes at the piano or, on occasion, with other people, I find myself a little envious.

. . .

Every year after my father died, I came back in late August to check on things. About ten years ago, I arrived in the midst of a summer blooming everywhere, blessed by rain enough to fill the rivers and please the farmers. On the way home from the airport, I could do nothing but stare out the window. In the early mornings, the branches of my father's trees looked to be floating in hazy green clouds.

For weeks, I had gotten surprising reports from my cousins. Betty had a beau. I was the last to be told. Maybe she had always wished I would confide in her and this was her response to my silence. Maybe she thought the subject of love was off-limits, since I have never shared anything. Maybe she had been hurt by this.

Perhaps she believed I would think her disloyal to my father, but I didn't. I loved seeing her this way: happy, purely happy, and not just for a moment as a wave of enthusiasm passed across her face.

Her boyfriend was a former postman and recent widower named John Hickey. His wife, Charlotte, always wore a fishing hat, decorated with tackles, to church and sat on the side where we do when Betty doesn't play. She was formidable and, like Betty, was gifted at the piano. John was briefly adrift after Charlotte died before falling into the arms of another strong woman: Betty. More than eighty years old, he remained the little boy lost, dependent on a woman to handle what he couldn't or didn't want to. So Betty took control. She ran the show, as she often had with my dad. From what I could see, my mother had taken over John's life, helping him with everything that Charlotte took charge of. Betty and John stepped right back into what they'd had before with others, the unspoken arrangement of things that couples come to. Maybe I was jealous.

“You could let him make the occasional decision,” I told her.

“I make what he wants to eat.”

“He's sluggish. He goes to sleep. Last night I looked over and thought he was dead.”

“He's not dead. He carried the mail.”

“Can't you find someone a little more lively?”

“It's not so easy,” she said, laughing a little, “after eighty.” After she started seeing John, Betty began going to St. Louis to get her hair done. Out of her crazy, messy drawers came a foggy bottle of L'Air du Temps
.
Spritzed onto her wrist and neck, it scented her room, and sometimes I stuck my head in to smell the fragrance that settled comfortably into everything. Granny's bedroom also smelled of perfume. I remembered the old days back in St. Louis when, escaping from the others, my mother and I sat in front of my grandmother's vanity with its silver combs and brushes. I studied my mother's face in the mirror as she shyly reached out to try a bit of Granny's perfume, which she dabbed on her wrist and held out for me to inhale. “Don't,” I told her, when she sprayed a little on my skin. “Granny will see.”

That summer when John arrived in our lives, a coating of pink polish mysteriously appeared on my mother's fingernails. The weather seemed to inspire our sense of a world working out as it should, at its best. Betty called me out to the deck to see the mother deer and her fawn who emerged every night from the woods behind the house around the time the sun set. She was so warm that summer, my mother. She touched everything gently, including me.

John had a catfish pond, and sometimes we drove down there in his golf cart, my mother beside him, me sitting on the back and usually falling off. Betty laughed as I ran to catch up, and all was well. She and John had gone on one date in high school, which he had forgotten, though Betty remembered. I suspected that she had been hurt when he hadn't called again. It was clear that she had always been attracted to him, but I had never heard her as much as mention his name.

“I guess I wasn't pretty enough for him to ask out a second time,” she said to me as John listened.

“Maybe you was too bossy,” he said. Now and then he rose to the occasion. He had been a great baseball player and, he claimed, almost made the Cardinals.

When he spoke of his prowess on the field, I rolled my eyes at Betty. “Shut up,” she mouthed silently.

. . .

John had a dog called Bob he had found as a puppy by the side of the road. I thought Bob was just some kind of bird dog, but John swore he was a genuine German shorthair and vowed there were “papers on him somewhere” as Betty looked slightly dubious. Bob had purplish spots—liver spots, I think they are called—and a head that reminded me of a jockey in a cap, his long ears falling straight down like flaps. He was an impressive creature, so alert he seemed to zip in a straight line to his destination like an arrow in flight. When he ran through the yard, one could see how perfect was the curve of his chest.

Betty adored Bob, maybe even more than John. I have rarely seen her so taken with any living creature. He ran toward her, jumped up to greet her every time she came around. Betty knelt to pet him, to stroke his soft ears, to contradict whatever John told him. She laughed when he approached, and saved him scraps from the table. “Don't touch that,” Betty would say if I tried to throw something away. “That's for Bob.”

Not long before my trip home, Bob had gotten sick and was hacking away, spitting up. Worried, they took him in the Cadillac to Monroe City to the vet. He sat up front, wiggling and squirming, with my mother in back trying to calm him down. “Here we were,” Betty told me, “these two old people trying to get this crazy dog who wouldn't sit still, who was just all over everything, who I was just waiting to see spit up all over that Cadillac, to Monroe City to the doctor's. It was like a little adventure. I like to think we saved him.”

Bob came along when John took Betty and me for rides through the country in his Cadillac. Because he had carried the mail, he knew all the back roads, the way to the covered bridge and to places by the Salt River where the breeze was cool. Betty loved sitting up in the front seat and waving at the other widows who got together at each other's houses. “They play dominoes,” she remarked.

We went to Hannibal to gaze over the Mississippi. We went to prime rib night at the Junction. John helped my mother plant rows of daylilies along the side of our driveway. Watching him trying to stoop over to plant bulbs, I found myself liking him more than I ever had before.

“Are you going to marry him?” I asked her.

“Are you kidding? I get enough of him.”

“He doesn't want to?”

“I don't know. Not exactly. He's too cheap. He's afraid I'd spend all his money.”

“Is he rich?”

“If he was rich, we'd be married . . . That was a good one. I made you laugh.” She looked surprised. “I made
you
laugh.”

. . .

Betty is pretending to be mad because it distracts her from thinking about how nervous she is to perform at a church where people have heard her play the piano for twenty-five years.

“How do I look?” she asks before I take her to church.

“You look lovely, younger than you have any right to.” I put my hand on her shoulder. I try to touch her gently as I am sometimes awkward.

“Can I please help you?” I ask.

“No one can help me . . . the forgetting,” she says, conceding, breaking the silence for the first time. Her hands are shaking; she assesses them as if they were trapped inside a pair of ugly gloves. I don't know if she can play the piano. I don't want her to break down in front of everyone.

Suddenly, she looks exhausted; I go to hunt some makeup. When I return, she is glaring at a commercial for a new burger from Hardee's. Called the Jim Beam Thickburger, it is made with whiskey and appears to be larger than the head of the average construction worker.

“Look at that man eat that hamburger,” Betty says. I want to kick the television because it is so unfair that everything she has is being taken away.