Bettyville (21 page)

. . .

At home, I check Facebook where a woman I know has written: “I don't need to be home alone all day with nothing but my little Havanese and my ferret to keep me company only to be subjected to someone's being a prick when he gets home.” I like the ring of the line. The dog, I imagine, is really missing me.

“You remember Bob Thompson, don't you?” Betty asks me after a little while. She seems to have forgotten our earlier conversation. “I thought Bob was dead,” she goes on, “he thought I was too. I told him we both ought to be. He says Jay Nixon's father, who was my boyfriend when I was trying to finish up college, has written a book. He says, right in the book, that I was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.”

“Why didn't you marry him? Why won't you tell me?”

She pays absolutely no attention, begins to sort through the bills on the coffee table, and then, when I think I am going to learn nothing, she begins and I am taken aback.

“We were just out of college. He was going to law school. I would have had to support him and Mammy said no woman should do that.

‘Men,” she assures me, “always leave women who get them through school. That's what Mammy thought. And I, well, I wanted to do what she said. She had worked so hard to get me through college. She worked all the time and had a lot to do already. She said she wanted me to see the world.

“I went to William Woods that first semester, but I had to come home. We didn't have the money. But Mammy got busy and got me into the university. I went stop and start, when we could afford it, but she was determined. She got me through, eventually. She didn't want me to be ignorant.”

“How did she make the money?”

“She sold milk.”

“You had a cow?”

“I guess so. I know she sold milk and vegetables from the garden and in the summer she wouldn't let up. She grew what we needed and she grew stuff to sell. She really worked. I had to do what she wanted.

“She said he'd just leave me, and then what would I have?”

“Did she not like him?”

“She never met him.”

“Never?”

“I never brought him home. She never laid eyes on him. It wouldn't have mattered.”

“So she had no way of knowing if he was nice?”

“I told you,” she says. “I never brought him home.”

“Why?”

“I was ashamed.”

“Why? Why were you ashamed to have your boyfriend come home with you?” I ask my mother.

“I was ashamed,” she says, her eyes falling to her lap.

For a while we do not speak, and then I brave it, I go in: “What were you ashamed of?”

She does not speak, just keeps eyeing the bill on her lap. She has scrawled words on the back of it: Lisbon, Portugal, Scottsdale. Finally, she admits it.

“We didn't have an indoor toilet. We had an outhouse. I didn't want him to know.”

“You didn't have indoor plumbing?”

“My father was so careful. We didn't have a spare nickel. He hated to spend money. We were some of the last people in the city limits of Madison to have an indoor toilet. When we got one, Mammy wouldn't let anybody put paper in. She thought it would break. Winnie put paper in the toilet once and it overflowed.”

“Did you want to marry him?”

She says nothing until, moments later, “What is the capital of Portugal?”

“Lisbon.”

“I would like to get away one last time,” she adds, “but it's too late. I know. My walking's not that good. After I'm gone you can travel.”

“Probably to Mayos.” I like the name of this hospital. It sounds like a destination in the Caribbean.
“Two tickets for Turks and Mayos, please, and do not stick me by an emergency door.”

“What is the capital of Portugal?” she begins again, determined now not to let the words slip away.

“Lesbian.”

Mammy sold milk to get Betty through college. I have never before taken in that they had so little to spare when they were growing up. As a very old lady, Mammy wandered our house, turning off the lights to save on the electric bill even if I was reading or my father was working with his house plans.

“Turn off the light!”

This is my mother's stern command every night when, after the dishwasher is loaded, I come into the family room.
“
Turn off the light!” she cries out all the time. Just like Mammy.

“Just go,” my grandmother told me on the day I left Paris as Betty and George waited in our Delta 88 to take me away to college. “Just try to act right,” she told me. She could barely see, never looked quite at me anymore, but only in my direction. I wondered how much of me she could really take in by that point. With her mind as it was, with her sight as it was, I never knew who she was seeing anymore.

When I first went away from home, Mammy wrote me often, her handwriting revealing, more and more, her descent into confusion and blindness. Words left her, and in her notes she would scratch out the ones she feared were spelled wrong. Her letters were full of black marks. She couldn't trust herself, though she had been an excellent speller and a prizewinning student of Latin.

When visiting at my grandmother's as a boy, I slept with Mammy in a huge wooden bed she won after discovering a prize ticket in a Quaker Oats box. Her foot always stuck out from under the blanket, too stubborn to be covered up. Since birth, her little toe, surprisingly long, was bent over the others, as if to keep them in place.

Mammy snored loudly, but that is not what awakened me on the night of what I considered our greatest adventure. My nose was stuffed up; allergic to everything, I could not breathe and my nose drops were at home. I watched the snow fall over the houses of the neighbors, wondering if Bassett Humphrey, an elderly friend, was awake across the street. During storms with thunder and lightning, she always came to Mammy's, bringing her own pillow.

In the middle of the night of the falling snow, I woke Mammy to tell her that I could not sleep, that my nose drops were at our house, that I was sure to suffocate. She squinted her eyes at me, dubious, but put her winter coat on over her nightgown, along with her shoes and the plastic galoshes she pulled over them. From the closet she plucked the dented-in hat she wore to funerals. Her braids hung over her shoulders; she didn't bother to put them up.

Outside, as the snow came down, Mammy—expressly forbidden to drive—carefully negotiated the porch step with me helping all I could. The trip to the garage, where Bill kept one of his old cars, a yellow-topped Chevy with sharp fins, was a major expedition. The two of us drove slowly down Olive Street in the quiet of a town at rest under snow. Mammy could make out little, but she kept driving. Though it was less than half a mile, the trip seemed to take us far from our known world. It was freezing; the world was white, and when the car swerved, Mammy, confused, slammed the brake and we slid, almost off the road. But I had faith. Mammy would get us home. She was a pioneer and we were making our way across the plains.

When I visited my grandmother not long before she died, she was holding her head, too heavy to lift up by then. She was tiny, faded, a scrap of thin cloth. “Take care of my little girl,” she said.

I am trying.

Mammy rarely left home. She went to Moberly, to Mexico, to St. Louis to see Nona or the eye doctor. Once, though, with Nona and Wally on a car trip to California, Mammy saw the swallows at San Juan Capistrano, some big ships bound for all the world. She saw Grauman's Chinese Theater, the Farmers Market, the Pacific Ocean. I have her postcards.

The ocean, which she had never seen before, was her favorite.

“It was quite the sight.”

She took her shoes off and waded in.

“Nona kept her eye on me. She thought the waves would sweep me all the way to Hawaii.”

She always said she hoped she would get to see the Atlantic too, but she never made it.

I did. I lived by the ocean for a while. It began in 1990 on Fire Island and I had never felt so free.

. . .

I was working at Simon & Schuster, where I started off as a copywriter. The place was a gallery of characters. Sandra Soliman, an editor perpetually in search of glamour, brought her hairdresser in mornings for a quick office shampoo. She stalked the halls in the wee hours with her hair in towels and kept pink bulbs in her lamps to soften her look. At a dinner with an important author, I watched Dick Snyder, the CEO of the company, charm everyone and ventured one comment that no one seemed to listen to.

“Don't say shit in front of the talent,” Dick told me afterward.

As the years passed at Simon, I was promoted from nonentity to senior editor. I lived in the office, worked hard, rode the service elevator up at 5 a.m. I believed that if I worked and worked, I would have something to offer my parents to make up for not having children. At a party on the Upper East Side, I was introduced to Lauren Bacall, who put her finger in my cleft and said, “Where'd you get that chin?”

When I called Betty to tell her, she said she was going to go to the nursing home to tell Mammy right that minute because my grandmother always vowed I had her chin.

. . .

An acquaintance at Simon asked me to join the house in Fire Island. I didn't have much social life. I thought it was time to try again to enter the world of gay men. Tom said you could hear the ocean waves crashing in the morning when you awakened.

. . .

This is how you traveled: You packed an old white carpenter's bag you got from the lumberyard when it closed. You left from Penn Station, changed at Jamaica, got off at Sayville, rode on a bus to the ferry, which crossed the water to the island, the Pines.

You stopped working every weekend, and for one, two, maybe three years, the island was your favorite place, the best place you had ever been, the happiest time.

Then, gradually, things changed. You began to lose your way, knowing you were suddenly in trouble, but just going on, figuring that later you could get it together again if you did not get arrested on the Long Island Railroad for passing a vial of cocaine among you and your friends.

. . .

It was our first summer in Fire Island, late in the season, late at night. We were walking from our house to board the ferry in the harbor of the Pines to go to a big party at the Ice Palace in Cherry Grove. The night was known as the Invasion and had been talked about for weeks. At the party, I was chemically enhanced; we took ecstasy, mescaline, bumps of this and that. I danced, bounced around. The air was filled with sparkles. Men in boots, shorts, and jeweled cross necklaces floated by me. Leather henchmen stalked about in chaps. In a corner, a fierce black queen in a turban, sunglasses, and long rhinestone earrings read everyone to filth.

David Geffen stood by the door, checking out every man who came through it. He had redone Calvin Klein's house that summer and was everywhere. Madonna and her brother came in on the seaplane for lunch one day.

“Vogue, Vogue, strike a pose.”
I tried to. I stood in the mirror before every party. My face was okay, but my body wasn't marketable. The impressionable gays of New York go through phases when certain things are desirable. I am not cut out for chaps. Nor am I a piercing type. There was the long decade of the muscleman when the great beasts, bulgy-veined and orangeish from their steroids, lumbered down the avenues. There was the period of lean, the summers of sculpted, the days when dating participation required the complete absence of body hair. Black men were for a while the favorite. Then Latinos. At no time, in my memory, have Midwest Protestants been the flavor du jour. A year or so ago, when someone on a dating site asked me to Skype naked, I decided I would do better at Christian Mingle.

At the party at the Ice Palace, I was wearing a pair of five-hundred-dollar sunglasses. I had splurged. I didn't want anyone to get a look at my eyes, to see how messed up I was.

. . .

For hours and hours, we danced that night in Cherry Grove. When I looked down at my feet, they seemed to be miles away. The night seemed to go on and on. “Do we live here?” I asked someone, barely able to speak.

My housemates were gathered in a pile on a banquette, holding one another and talking. They reminded me of wanderers gathered in a forest around a campfire in a strange, dark forest. The dance floor was the shifting, changing mating place, the ritual. Our comrades were home bases. We went out to seek and then returned to fall back into the arms of our own people. The music played and the hours flashed by and it seemed we had stepped out of time into some safe, warm place where no one was dying or ever alone.

We walked back to the Pines after the Invasion party by the ocean, all together, taking our shoes off, trekking through the shallow waves as, under our feet, the sand and tiny shells sparkled and changed colors. We were so high.

I was happy, but scared too. I was going out too far; I knew this, but it was worth it. I needed these people to feel close to. I was tired of being on my own.

Back at our place, sitting around, laughing with everyone, I just closed my eyes and did another little hit of something when I looked at the flowers on the deck.

“Doesn't it feel a long way from home?” my friend Leo asked me one morning after everyone else had gone to bed.

. . .

In her last years, when Mammy was living at Monroe Manor, my mother brought her food several times a day, and in the summer took her rosebuds from her bushes wrapped in damp newspapers. I was in Fire Island when I heard that my grandmother had had a massive stroke. She was ninety-six. On the day of the funeral, as we were getting ready to leave, I went to check on Mother and there she was, sitting on the edge of the bed. She had already turned the lights off in her room. She was just sitting on the edge of her bed, still, with her eyes closed.

. . .

“What is the capital of Portugal?” Betty asks over and over all day long.