Bettyville (16 page)

“I would like to go to your wedding someday,” June said to me that evening. I knew it was coming. “I am truly grateful to have had love in my life. I hope you have love in your life.” She meant it all with caring, but I couldn't take it. I hoped that no one would ever, ever again make me take them to a wedding. “Don't make me uncomfortable,” I wanted to say. June was never one to pick up cues, not surprising. I am often subtle.

The architect who married the guy with the Mohawk, the guy I was crazy about at this time, was on my mind. He had designed a farmhouse near a town on the Hudson for a friend of mine, a fashion writer. I had told her how talented he was, introduced them, essentially convinced her of his talent and got him the commission. I wanted to see the house. I want to see his work, maybe let myself imagine how it would be to live in a place he built, up by the river. I hinted. But he never invited me. After that, my search for companionship just stopped. I shut down without ever realizing it had happened.

For a little moment, I wanted to tell June about this man, wanted to let her know that I had tried to find someone though I really never wanted to be married. That night at the wedding, because I knew the wishes she had for me made her sad, I wanted her to understand that for some of us there is nothing bad in having a less conventional life. I wanted to tell her things I wish I had said to my father. But all I could say was that Hazel wanted her to take home one of the centerpieces.

All around that night at the wedding were people I had grown up with—friends of my parents, our lawyer and accountant, a judge or two, the bridge club ladies, people we had always known from church, those who used to run things around here. All my childhood was gathered around me. This was not just a collection of the elders of Paris, Missouri; it was more to me. It was Bettyville, my mother's home, her place, with most of its surviving souls, those who had known her as a girl and who had been kind to me and watched me grow. They were older suddenly, much older, my people—men in white shoes fit for a bandbox, striped suits from other decades; women in outfits that looked to have been stored away and worn only occasionally—and all I wanted, all of a sudden, was to stay with them forever. I love my town; I love my home. I went from table to table to hug them as the younger guests spilled out of the banquet room into the summer night to dance on the patio. I thought of asking my mother to dance, but did not. My father would definitely have been dancing. But probably not with her. He had given up on things like that many years before. Betty was not a dancing girl.

That night at the wedding where Betty was young again, the bride and groom headed out into the world. Hazel cried, big tears falling on her big, bountiful corsage. “She'll have a hard time letting that one go,” remarked June.

“That's the way it is,” Betty said. “We're old ladies now.”

Overall, the evening seemed a kind of farewell to two women I loved who were leaving nights like this behind. Betty sat beside me, a row of silver bracelets on her wrist, surveying the scene, holding court as people came to greet her. She let some kiss her on the cheek as, behind their backs, she rolled her eyes at me and wrinkled her nose.

On the way home, June praised the festivities, said Hazel had always been the type to “do it up.”

“Didn't you see their faces?” June asked my mother. “I know that look,” she said as I noticed in the rearview mirror, as the headlights passed, Betty looking amused but fondly at her sister-in-law.

“What do I know?” Betty asked. “I was an old maid.”

“But you were so pretty,” I reminded her. “Lots of men must have asked you out.”

“I didn't fall into all of that so easily,” she said.

When we pulled into June's driveway, Bill's face was in the window, waiting, on guard for the arrival of his wife, eager to help her out of the car and usher her safely back into their home. Bill didn't like to let June out of his sight after it got harder for her to get around.

“You okay, my dear?” he asked as he opened the passenger door, looking at me as if I could barely be trusted to get anyone back from a wedding without broken bones.

. . .

Bill Baker, when discharged from the navy, was unwilling to pay for train or bus fare. He hitchhiked from San Francisco to Missouri with the mumps. My picture of Bill is a young man, sick and running a fever, sticking his thumb up by the side of the road in some unfamiliar place.

Bill Baker was never satisfied that he had properly appeased his lord, the God of Hard Labor.

In March or April, ten years or so ago, one of the first warm days: Bill was clearing away things at an old building he owned. June, a few blocks away at home, was cooking his lunch when, without Bill's noticing, the fire from the trash hit something flammable. A blaze began, spreading rapidly. Bill started to choke in the smoke; he couldn't see clearly or get out. During his attempts to escape, his hands and arms were badly burned. The fire even singed his face, and as he lost his balance and fell, he suffered a heart attack and died. I went to the funeral for June's sake. Bill and I had barely spoken during the previous few years. He had stopped addressing me at family gatherings, wouldn't look me in the eye. On the phone, when I tried to engage him, he said almost nothing. Once he told me explicitly, “You don't have to come to my funeral.”

I didn't, in the moment when he said that, feel anything. I was a master at monitoring reactions, not having them. I wished he hadn't said it, but I knew why he did. When I was driving June home from somewhere, she pointed out the home of friends, people who had done business with Bill for years. “Their son died of AIDS. Bill wouldn't go to the funeral,” June said, “but I did.”

In his casket, Bill was outfitted in white gloves to camouflage the burns on his hands. After his funeral in Mexico, we went to Madison, where he was to be interred, and all the cars on the other side of the highway turned on their headlights to salute the hearse, something that is always done here. It was a rainy day and there was more than the usual traffic and it seemed to me that the trail of passing headlights went on for a mile or more as we drove past the fields, too wet and muddy for the farmers to get in and plant yet. In Madison, as June stepped out of the hearse, a man who had worked for my uncle for years at Mexico Equipment told her he thought he would never hear tell of Bill Baker riding in back of a black Cadillac with white gloves on.

I carried in the centerpiece for June, that night after the wedding. She had grown attached to it, as if it were the bride's bouquet and she had been the one to catch it. All I could think of that night was what would become of my mother and aunt. That the time was coming. It was my turn to step up. I told myself that whatever happened, I would do this one thing right, better than I had ever tried to do anything. Because even though my life was different, I wanted a place in the tribe. I still do.

. . .

Across the street from our church is the undertaker's. As I wait for the end of the service to go into the sanctuary and help my mother gather up her music, I realize that the boy who was murdered in Mammy's house may be lying inside. In the house on Olive Street where the shots were fired and the young man died, Mammy and her kids played cards in the kitchen and ate popcorn. They loved a game called rook. According to Miss Virginia, Betty had a fit if she didn't win. “No one could tell Betty Baker what to do. She'd fly out and slam the door hard enough to be heard all over the neighborhood. Then came Harry, running out to chase her with Bill running behind him. Then came Marge. All four of them would be chasing each other around the house and I'd think, ‘Well, I guess Betty didn't win the card game.'”

. . .

A few years ago, it became apparent that my mother's boyfriend, John, a diabetic, couldn't really take care of himself and Betty couldn't see to everything. He moved to Monroe Manor, and although I took them out for steaks when I came home, Betty knew that their time was over. Last winter he had a stroke and died about a week later. My mother said his death was a blessing, a mercy. Bob, his dog, the beautiful German shorthair that my mother had fallen in love with, had gone to live with some people on a farm on the highway outside town. Betty worried about him, out there on the highway. Dogs that live by roads don't fare so well here where the cars and trucks whoosh by without paying much attention to animals in their way.

Betty took him bones and scraps, even on bad winter days, and never complained when he jumped up to greet her with his dirty paws. Then one night, after John was gone, in the midst of a terrible winter, my mother called to tell me that Bob had died. He had gotten loose from his pen and wandered into the woods and somehow frozen to death. There we were, my mother and I on the phone, not crying, but knowing that if we were people who cried, we would be doing it at that moment.

“They say that freezing is the easiest way to go,” I told her.

“Maybe,” she said, “I will just lie down in the snow.”

. . .

After John died, Betty told everyone she was okay, but she could not seem to rouse herself. Maybe he was more to her than I realized or than she could ever admit. Gradually, she went to the couch, stopped getting dressed, lost heart. In public and at family dinners, she had nothing to say. She was simply not herself. When I saw her begin to change, to leave us, I started coming home on visits that became more and more extended.

. . .

After waiting for a few minutes, I see people coming down the church steps and I go in to gather up Betty's music and help her to the car. On the way back to the house, I ask how it went, and she shakes her head. “Fine,” she says. That is all she will reveal. “Fine.” But she is subdued and I can't tell whether it's because of how she played or whether she is still upset about our battle over the newspaper clipping the day before.

I apologize again to her. “Do you want me to just treat you like some old lady who no one can hold responsible for anything or get mad at?” I ask. “Is that what you want? You have your struggles, but you have to realize there are other people. I'm here too, you know.”

Her eyes widen as she takes this in. “No,” she said, “I have to be held to account, I guess. You're right to hold me to account.”

I am still not convinced she didn't throw away the clipping on purpose. I know she hates me sometimes. How could she not? I am the guard at the prison she will never get out of. Sometimes I am just as pent-up and angry. I loathe her too. Just a typical American family, torn between love and homicide, but united in our way.

“I'll bet you did fine,” I tell her. “I'll bet you sounded great.”

But I cannot be certain if she did okay and I don't want to hear if she has had trouble or hit a lot of wrong notes. I don't want to lose the part of my mother I hear when she is playing the piano, her soft touch, the sweet music. I think that when she pulls the cover over the keys for the last time, all of this will be very hard to find.

H
eaded to the dog pound—a small, fenced-in area with a couple of cubbyholes for shelter and room for a few animals—I pass the spot where the city pool was, near the place where they hold the county fair, complete with livestock shows. I groomed no cattle, but was a lifeguard at the pool, which twenty or so years back was filled in because of filter problems. I ruled from my elevated chair, watching the boys and sending girls to the penalty box if I disliked their swimwear.
“Do not come near me, young missy, in that little poncho with happy faces.”

For the lonely dog, I have brought a stewlike concoction, but they have mended the hole in the fence and I can't slide food or pie plates under the wire. The animals are not actually supposed to be fed; people poison them sometimes. I throw turkey dogs over the fence. Next the Milk-Bones go flying.

My car has become a canine supply station. In the event of disaster, I could feed and nurture a pack of huskies. At PetSmart, I couldn't resist a winter coat for dogs made from bright orange fabric that glows in the dark. It reminds me of an ensemble worn annually at Christmas by one of my high school teachers.

In the backseat of our old Infiniti, sacks of rawhide chews are stowed alongside shopping bags overflowing with balls and treats, a huge sack of grain-free puppy mix, and a bunny toy that reminds me of Wesley Brown, who used to help Mammy in her garden. A strange man with a speech impediment, Wesley lived in a shack with an overgrown yard and kept hundreds of rabbits in battered hutches. Some of the creatures were older, big, and menacing. But my stuffed fellow does not look threatening and I may keep him. He doesn't deserve to be chewed.

The dog is dancing, making his yodeling noises, madly scurrying about. As he vomits up large chunks of turkey dog, I tell him things are looking up. Marci Bennett, who I have known forever, wants to take him. I am relieved, but resentful. I love this pup and he should be mine. Before Marci popped up, I could keep my fantasy. But it had to end. We would never work. I can't commit. Not the way my life is now. He knows that I am about to desert him, barks and barks, eyes me suspiciously, particularly after the turkey dogs. Or perhaps it is the fact that I am clutching my bunny.

My friend Lauren says that people who are emotionally reserved—frigid and icy, I believe she is implying—often lavish their feelings on dogs. She cites the English, well-known canine enthusiasts, and points out my English heritage. I feel like Camilla Parker-Bowles.
“Charles, don't worry about making it back tonight. Mummy's having gin fizzes with the corgis.”

I want to hug my dog, but suddenly I am angry, so mad at him, and want to get out of here. Nothing upsets me more than feeling myself lacking. “Shut up,” I yell. “Shut up, shut up, shut up.” As he looks at me, astonished, I stomp back to the car with my bags of animal products and my bunny. I do not say good-bye. I cannot keep a dog.

As far as relationships go, I have a small, checkered past that began in college when I tried and failed to do what people do: come together in harmony and then learn gradually to ignore each other.

. . .

Senior year in college, I moved into a small apartment with my first real boyfriend, Steven, who trimmed his beard meticulously each morning, listening to the
Evita
sound track and pretending to address the people of Argentina from a balcony. He cooked all the time, fed me like a mother. Sourdough bread was his specialty. He gave loaves to everyone. He was so giving. It made me sick sometimes. “Enough with the bread,” I thought. It embarrassed me. Nobody else seemed to care, though Betty winced at his neatly wrapped loaves, handled them as if they might explode. She always thanked him politely, but there was a hint of something else. “It's sour dough, you say?”

“It's one word, Mother.”

Steven seemed oblivious. He never bowed down to win over my mother. He never appeared to care so much what others thought.

“Try some of this,” the person doling out samples at the supermarket asked Steven, innocently holding out a plate of something, sausages or couscous. Whatever.

“George would never eat that. George is finicky,” Steven would respond as, a few feet away, I braced myself for what was coming.

“Who's George?”

“George is my LOVERRRRRRRR!”

They could have heard him in Cleveland.

. . .

But no. That wasn't really how it was. He was warm; he was friendly. He was proud to be with me. And no one looked up, or noticed, or really cared what we were doing together. It just felt like that to me. Because when you have a secret, you think the world is watching your every move, trying to discover it, and that changes everything—the way you think, and look at people, the things you are willing to do, the places you can go, the reactions you expect. You aren't quite there. Hiding the secret is what is always on your mind, somewhere. You feel better alone.

I felt better alone, but I was with him, and that made everything complicated. There was too much going on inside for me to really be with anyone. Always something ticking, ticking, ticking inside me, almost drowning out everything else.

The little stuffed bunny, perched on the dashboard of my car, has turned malevolent, like a toy in a
Twilight Zone
episode. It eyes me. “Take the fucking dog,” he seems to say as I roar away from the pound in a cloud of dust.

. . .

I wasn't ready to be so public. Steven was. Approximately twenty thousand hearings of a double-disc soundtrack featuring Patti LuPone does not lead to diffidence. It seemed to me that he told everyone everything. The mailman knew if we were fighting. The landlord got an earful. Thinking himself in store for a pleasant morning of toilet repair, the unsuspecting man was showered with details of our meeting, our backgrounds, the fact that we were both Aquarians.

And then he got a loaf.

Every time my mother came, I fell into a state of anxiety, just waiting for him to blurt out something to Betty. Probably about my troubles with sex. I was nervous. I was messy. If I managed to successfully uncap a tube of lubricant, the entire household was ready for penetration in about five minutes.

Steven was concerned that I wasn't out to my parents. It was an affront to him, to truth and honesty, to “the movement.”

“Shut up about the movement,” I told him. “Be still. Listen to
Evita
. Argentina is crying.”

He was loving and sweet, giving and generous, but it always felt like he was pressing against me, too close. He wanted me to tell him I loved him; every day he needed it, sometimes more than once or even twice. I saw the statement as more of a specialty item to be bestowed a few times yearly, perhaps at birthday time or during the excited unpacking of a Christmas stocking.

I felt bad most of the time, cold and heartless. What I really wanted, I told myself, was out of the relationship. But I knew that word he made me say, the one that began with
L
and ended with me feeling hemmed in and embarrassed, was not just something I was dredging up to please him.

During part of my time with Steven, I was employed on campus at the career counseling center, where my boss, Mary (aka Pinky), was completing a doctorate in psychology. “Do you have an issue with this?” she kept asking me. “Do you have an issue with that?” Narrow-shouldered and small-breasted, Pinky tried so hard to get next to me. “I just want to feel you out on this,” she would say. “I just want to feel you out!” I often felt violated.

The center was staffed by psych majors and other kinds of counselors who wanted us to learn to communicate effectively with the clients and one another. At retreats, we talked things out with empty chairs as our colleagues listened. Even my chair wanted more from me than I could give. Folding chairs: They had some nerve. I could have taken criticism better from a recliner, even an ottoman.

It was a touchy-feely place, but I was only touchy. I failed to mention to Pinky that I was gay, though of course she knew. It wasn't that I thought her unsympathetic. I just didn't want to talk about it. Our absence of meaningful communication was working beautifully until the day Steven bounded through the doors, looking for a résumé critique. He spotted me, gave me a hug.

Pinky's head, small in size to fit with the rest of her upper body, popped up as if from a burrow. She spotted Steven. Like Evita and Juan or Masters and Johnson, they came together as I saw the future and cringed.

Pinky said she found their chat “illuminating.” Steve began to ask about how I felt about everything. “What does everyone expect of me?” I asked over and over. Finally, I just asked Steve, “Why do you care about me? What do I give you?”

“You always make me laugh,” he said. “You even make the bed funny. I come home and see the way you've tried to push the sheets up under the mattress and, I don't know, I want to hug you.”

Wait, I thought, until you see the ironing.

. . .

He was so good. I was so hard. I vowed to try. I talked to Pinky and to almost all her office furniture. The couch and I got down to brass tacks.

But Steve began sleeping around. Monogamy was for heteros. It was 1980. The gays in San Francisco were getting it on in supermarkets. Steve wasn't going to be left out. I knew that I was. People approached Steven; men were drawn to him. I was harder to approach and wasn't good at instigating a pickup.

Pinky called me into her office one day and closed the door. I thought I was being fired. “Are we going to do the chair thing?” I asked. “No,” she said. “Honey, I want to go personal.” She reached out and put her hand over mine. “I think,” she said, “that you have some self-esteem issues. I don't think you like yourself so much.” From here on out, through decades, from the lips of many well-intentioned others, these words would come back and back and back.

“I didn't know I was supposed to like me. Isn't that like being arrogant?”

She stared at me.

“I'm sorry,” I told her.

. . .

I have worked myself into a state about the dog. I need a brownie. Last night I made a panful, but they are all gone. Every one. Betty has given them to Earleen, she tells me with a glint in her eye. She is afraid I'm getting fat. The brownies have joined the ranks of The Disappeared. It started with the clipping. What will come next?

I retaliate. When Betty goes to the bathroom, I grab a spoon and last night's chocolate pie from the refrigerator, go into my room, shut the door, and lock it. She may magically materialize. Sometimes I think she can walk through walls.

I eat the pie like someone is going to yank it away, straight from the dish, wiping the last bits of chocolate from the dish with my fingers. She has eaten the lion's share already, but my taking the rest will be seen as a serious offense. All her life, Betty was a fashionably slender woman. For decades she held back, didn't touch a dessert or a slice of bread. Now she eats ravenously, especially sweets, which she craves like an addict.

Midmornings, I catch her standing at the window in front of the sink, gobbling up whatever she can find. If someone mentions food, she wants some. If I get something from the refrigerator, she wants some too. “What are you eating?” she asks repeatedly. “What did you have to eat?” She must know. We are ravenous here.

I am gaining weight. This morning I awoke with a bee in my bonnet over the bare torso selfies the gays post on Facebook. In my opinion, if you post more than three photos a week of your naked chest, you had better be part of some emergency rash-alert squad.

My new girth angers Betty. It reminds her of my father, who got heavy. I've started drinking some powdered greenish stuff that you mix in water, which Carol sells. Called moringa oleifera, it is supposed to suppress appetite and provide super-duper nutrition. African villages apparently swear by it. Today, so far, I have had four packets and six cups of coffee. I am in the mood to build some huts, or perhaps shoot a wildebeest. Later I may barbecue a missionary or two for the tribal elders.

I can't stop thinking about the dog. I am tired of having nothing.

. . .

Against my better judgment, I once brought Steven home for the weekend. He had demanded it, wanted to get to know my parents.

Before dinner, I smoked a joint in the basement while he, ignoring my amorous inclinations, perused everything stored there. Earlier he had complimented Betty on her antiques, on her upholstery, on the chairs in our living room that, thank God, said nothing to anyone.

From anyone else, she would have liked the attention.

Him she just ignored.

At the supper table, Steven and my father talked beard maintenance. Daddy had recently grown a beard, which Betty hated, a fact that pleased him. During this chat, Betty banged pots and pans like a drunk in a truck-stop kitchen. “Steven made this bread,” she said as she plunked a platter of it—not sliced but yanked apart—on the table. I worried that she had connected the dots about Steven and me. How could she have missed it? But they seemed to know and not know, accept and reject. I tried to find some tiny place between honesty and comfort where I could just be peaceful.

“It's sour dough,” my mother said of the bread, breaking, as I recall, the word into two, like always.

“It's one damn word,” I mouthed to her silently, but she was off and running.

“You know, Steven,” she said, “I never eat bread and neither should my husband. I have to watch what he eats. He has a heart problem. It is extremely serious”

“It's just undiagnosed,” I explained to Steven. Whatever her apparent diffidence, my mother had long been the protector of my father's vulnerable heart.

That registered.

“Later,” my mother mouthed silently across the table. We have always had our best chats like this.

My father grabbed hunks of the bread, one after another. He wouldn't stop eating the bread. As my mother stared, he stared right back, savoring every bite.