Bettyville (20 page)

I
n Fire Island, where I went for seven summers in the 1990s, one of my housemates planted flowers in wooden barrels on the deck of our place on Sky Boulevard every season. I watched him smoothing the dirt with his fingers, wishing I knew how to make things grow like my grandmother, who until almost her dying day squinted at plants as if they were children in need of care.

In the early mornings, home after a night of drugs and dancing at the Pavilion, I stretched out exhausted on the deck in a recliner and those blossoms would glower at me, blaring colors and chastening. They made me feel lost. This morning, the survival of our roses in the midst of the heat makes me feel better, like maybe I am doing okay here.

. . .

The lonely dog is being released today and, except for errands, I will have little reason to get out of the house so often. I am already picturing his empty pen. As I try to get Betty's bed changed, she watches closely. The old spread and her thin yellow sheets have been washed too many times. “They'll last me out,” she says when I suggest replacements. My back is giving me trouble and, in the mornings, wake with hands gone numb. Lately I have been obsessed over getting old, though there are gay nursing homes now. I see myself amid a group of old, tattooed codgers comparing waist sizes at Villa Fabulosa while I—wild-eyed in the Liza Minnelli Wing—grouse over the late delivery of my laxatives.

My barber on West Twenty-third Street in Manhattan and I have been together for fifteen years. Sometimes I think he is my most significant relationship. He is Russian, a remarkable fashion presence. During my last visit to the city, I stopped in for a haircut and found him in a bright red shirt with button cuffs. The buttons were covered with matching material. The yoke of his shirt had little cutouts that revealed swirls of coal-black hair. He looked like the best man at the wedding of Satan.

After all these years, our relationship has evolved into a very similar routine. He always greets me in the same way: “How you feel?”

Whatever I reply, he always says the same thing: “No way to be!”

Then he takes me through the changing group of photos of movie stars and rock stars taped to his mirror. Their coifs represent his current range of hairstyle options. Over the years, I have been through a range of celebrities, culminating in George Clooney. On the day of my last visit, he was offering Anderson Cooper, Justin Timberlake, and Adam Levine. Taking in this gallery, I felt that I had perhaps aged beyond his area of specialty. I wanted to say, “Adam. Please, I wanted to be Adam.” But I dared not. I am middle aged, not a tattoo to my name. Suddenly I was sad. What to do?

I tried to level with him about a recent problem that has really been bothering me and that I hoped he could help camouflage. When speaking to him I tend to fall into that blend of broken English and demanding assertion that characterize his speech.

“I have fat face. How to hide?”

“What you mean?”

“Fat face. Head huge. Elton John. Help!”

He scanned the photos on the wall, finally fixing on one that seemed to have been there for decades. It has been adhered to the wall and is in tatters. I glanced. I was afraid, but there was nothing really scary. It was a picture of a clean-cut middle-aged man, a stockbroker type. It appeared to have been plucked from a Sears catalog. I had not even noticed it.

“I do this for you,” he said.

I felt ancient, but just nodded. Whatever. I just wanted a clean neck and nothing puffy.

He inspected my head. “You don't come anymore. Who do this to hair? Bum.”

“My mother is sick. I have been away.”

“Turrible.”

In a few minutes, he was finished. “You want product?” he asked, hand sliding toward an endless row of hair fixitives, including some lugubrious-seeming gels. He is a man who loves mousse.

“No product,” I said. “You know I hate stuff in my hair.”

“You need.”

“Stop.”

He looked at me “Why you frown. No way to be!”

“I want to be rock star.”

. . .

“The governor's father, you know, my friend, the old Jay, has written a book,” Betty begins. This comes out of nowhere and at first I am only half listening.

“Jay says,” she tells me, “right in the book, that I was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. When I was young. He says that,
right in the book
. That I was beautiful. When he knew me.” She isn't bragging. She is surprised and a bit reluctant to mention it.

“What kind of book?” She replies: “I don't know. Bob Thompson read it. He got it in the mail. He called yesterday when you were with that darn dog.”

“The father's name was Jay, right, like the governor's?”

“Yes. You remember Bob, don't you?”

Bob Thompson is a retired lawyer in Shelbina, a town that burned almost completely a few years back. His home is a local landmark, one of the houses where my mother used to imagine living. Betty always wanted to find herself in one of the mansions with columns, mostly haunted-looking and decaying now, that dot river towns such as Hannibal, Louisiana, Boonville, and of course St. Louis. In the city, Granny took us to walk by the huge old houses once owned by river merchants on the old gated streets—Portland and Westminster places. “Aren't they grand?” Granny would ask my mother and me as we walked past the enormous mansions, under the oldest, greenest trees I will ever see.

. . .

“Who would anyone publish Jay Nixon's book?” I ask in a little while. “I don't think anyone would publish a book even by the governor himself.”

“Jay Nixon was the mayor of De Soto!” Betty is emphatic. “He had three children. One is the governor. One is a game warden, and one, Bob told me,” she says, her voice becoming almost a whisper, “is obese. Bob read the book. He read every word.”

Jay Nixon Sr., the father of the governor of Missouri, was my mother's boyfriend before my father. This was revealed years back, after my dad's death, when Betty—very excited—handed me an envelope that she would keep on the coffee table for a year, a blue invitation to the son's inaugural in Jefferson City. Pressed for a reason why she was invited, she confessed, “I almost married the governor's father.”

I tried to take this in, but she refused to elaborate. She did not wind up going to the inauguration, or the ball, though for weeks she considered and reconsidered it. I offered to fly home to take her, but she wouldn't let me and didn't have a ride. It was January and freezing. She didn't complain, said it was hard to go out at night anymore, that she would be afraid to fall, that she couldn't see well, that it was silly to even think of going. But when we spoke on the phone I could hear the hangers scratching on the pole as she looked through the dresses in her closet. She kept bringing it up and up and up. Every time I called she continued, though she kept saying she was not going and that was it.

“It's crazy to think about it,” she claimed. “I'm an old woman. I'm not going unless there's a radical change.”

“In what?” I asked.

“My hair for one thing,” she said.

The summer after the inauguration, when Betty could still walk easily, we were in St. Louis, staying at the Chase, and Betty asked me to take her somewhere. She had found the address of the governor's father and wanted to see the apartment building where he lived on Lindell Boulevard, just across the street from the hotel. It was an exquisite old building and we looked in the glass of the front door, which was locked. The walls of the entry were marble or granite, and at the top there were scenes carved out of the stone, tableaux of what looked like Greek gods rising from what I took to be the Mississippi River. Inside, in the main lobby, coach lights flickered softly. It reminded me of New York, of places where I had hoped to live before my life became a disaster area.

“He wound up in a nice place, didn't he?” she said.

. . .

“Mother,” I say this morning as I finish up the bed, “I wish you would have let me come take you to the inauguration. You could have seen him.”

“I didn't want him to see how I look. I look like something the cat dragged in.”

“He said you were beautiful. Maybe he hoped you would read the book and know he remembers you. Fondly. You know. It was a little message. Would you like to see him?”

“I gave to the son's campaign,” she says. “I sent a check. I guess I should have gone. In a way, I'd paid for the dinner, but I thought I'd be cold. My feet get cold even with my boots, and I couldn't wear my boots to the ball. My feet look big enough anyway.”

“Why didn't you marry the governor's father?”

No response.

“What is the capital of Portugal?” she asks.

My cousin Mimi and her husband, before leaving for a vacation in Portugal, purchased a condominium in Scottsdale. Betty is trying to keep track of it all, but forgets where Mimi is traveling as well as the location of her new home. So she drills herself:

“What is the capital of Portugal?” she asks again.

“Lisbon,” she says in a minute or two, answering her own question. “You ask now.”

“What is that place where Mimi goes in the winter?”

“Scottsdale.”

“We went there one Christmas.”

“I told your father I thought it was overrated.”

. . .

This is what my mother does now, night after night: Walking past the living room on her way to bed, she says, “I have to stop in here a minute,” and pauses at the piano, picks up the hymnal. Sitting at the edge of the bench as I wait for her to slip off, she studies the pages for a while. After brushing her teeth or putting in her curlers, she returns to the hymnal, turning more pages. Sometimes after she is in bed, after I have turned off the light, she will get up—once, twice, sometimes three times—and go back to the piano, then return to her room to jot things down on the back of the envelope she keeps by her bedside.

Time and time again, I ask, “What are you doing?” Time and time again, she will not say. Finally she concedes, “I am trying to remember the names of the hymns. I cannot remember the names of the hymns anymore.”

Under her bedside table a conglomeration of things—empty eyedrop bottles, used Kleenexes, coupons, and tiny notes she has scrawled on index cards—are piled in a crazy heap, which I call the bird's nest. “That is my spot. You are not supposed to look there,” she tells me if I refer to it. “Sometimes you make me feel so embarrassed.”

She doesn't want me to see the papers that fall from the end table by her bed, the lists she keeps of words that will no longer come that she is trying to keep track of.

On one I found she has written, “eggnog, eggnog, eggnog, eggnog.”

Sometimes I turn to the hymns whose numbers she writes down; I read the lyrics, wonder if they are clues to what is on her mind, but they don't reveal anything to me. Sitting at the piano bench, I take in the paintings she commissioned from an artist in Moberly for our new living room when we moved to Paris. They are little oil renderings of pink roses.

. . .

The lonely dog just stares at me, as if he knows I am sending him away with a stranger. I look at him, wave a little, but do not leave the car. I am not budging until Marci arrives to take him. I always liked Marci; in high school I made posters for her bid to become homecoming queen. She lost, but was gracious. I was not; it was as if the tiara had been ripped from my own head.

After she arrives, the pound man frees the dog, who rushes out—a few flashes of fur and madly wagging tail—to shake himself. If that dog who has consumed more than a hundred dollars' worth of my food bounds up to this woman who couldn't even win a queen contest before he licks me, I am going to give the orange jumpsuit to a church auction.

Marci waits expectantly—entirely inappropriately, I believe—for the dog to come to her. I hold my breath.

Love is a battlefield.

But there is a surprise. He runs to me. Whatever happens, he is really my dog. I pick him up as he thrashes around, licking my face. Marci takes pictures of us with my iPhone. The dog looks rabid and I am no ad for Slimfast, but they will do. Marci tells me what her grandsons have decided to call him, a horrible name that I immediately repress. In my fantasies, I have named him Nicky, which suits his warm nature, but which can be shortened to Nick if he gambles or is drawn toward organized crime.

In the trunk of my car there is the crate I have purchased and lined with lots of my old clothes. I want him to breathe my scent and mourn the man who got away. I ask Marci if the dog can ride with me to her house. She agrees; transferring the crate to her car would be a pain anyway. Nicky bounds into the front seat of the Infiniti, sniffs indiscriminately as he surveys everything, his nose poking over the dashboard and his ears fallen back. It is exactly as I had imagined. He drools on the seat, as I do often.

“Don't be a stranger,” I tell him as I back away toward the car, before I can change my mind. As he zips off toward another part of the yard, he whips his head around to look back at me and half his body turns. It is maybe my favorite thing he does.

On the way home, I keep my eyes peeled for the lawn-mower boy. Sometimes I spot him walking by the side of the road on Cleveland Street, carrying a white trash bag. He doesn't cut our grass anymore and I worry he has been fired. I always wave. He does not.

Lonely dogs roam empty streets everywhere now, even in this town where all of us once had a home—a husband, a wife, a father, a mother, a place. This boy who hides his face under a hood: No one will take him in or stop to ask how things are going. Never before did kids like this, young ones with no connections, show up on these streets where, this summer, flowers burn in the sun. On sidewalks everywhere, small brown petals are scattered.

In Madison, in the oldest part of the cemetery where my father and all the Bakers are buried, the names on the tombstones are impossible to distinguish. Mammy always took flowers to a boy who died very young who was buried there. He was either an orphan or his parents passed quickly after he did. I think he was taken by diphtheria, or whatever was in the air, or maybe in an accident, far out in the fields, where no doctor could come in time. Mammy knew the family. She never let the place where he was buried go unadorned. Bill knew the place too. He and June always took flowers after Mammy died.