Bettyville (26 page)

They clapped. It was just like
Ordinary People
.

“Oh, screw you all,” I said. I didn't think I had hit some sort of jackpot in terms of progress. I just gave up and said what they wanted. I just wanted to eat some Fruit Loops.

“When was it that you first felt your emotions shut down?”

“I'm not sure they were ever opened up.”

“Try to connect.”

“I can't do this. Everything you say makes me want to be ironic.”

. . .

When I left New York to go to rehab, I told Betty that I had gone to Pennsylvania for work. She would have done her best with all this, tried to help, but I could not tell her what had happened, could not find the words. I am not sure I will ever develop the knack of letting her know just who I am, and had to put her on a shelf with all the things I could not think about then. I read recovery manuals, spiritual books, memoirs of addiction and alcoholism by rock stars and minor Kennedy wives.

I didn't think I could trust my mother not to fall apart. I never trusted them to be able to take in anything about me that seemed even slightly out of sync.

“Maybe you misjudged them,” said Miss Withholding.

“Aren't they ever going to fucking send you home?”

“Why couldn't you talk to them about your sexuality?”

“Because I thought they didn't want to know.”

“I think your mother would have liked for you to have opened up to her.”

“Did they give you a job here?”

“Your mother sounds pretty strong.”

“I thought I had to protect them.”

“From what?” a counselor asked.

“From me, I guess.”

“Who said you were bad?”

“Are you, like, new to this culture?”

“Do you wish your parents had said more, made you talk to them?”

“I wanted someone to help me . . . It was a long time back. It wasn't like now. We didn't know what we were doing.”

. . .

After the meeting, Mary takes Brittany for a bottle of water and I walk with them. Brittany is shy, and when she finds out I am from New York, she gets quieter. I figure she maybe finished high school. Her skin is pockmarked and clearly prone to sunburn. She does not have money for water. I have a car that doesn't look about to fall apart and a shirt with a man on a horse playing some game she has never heard of. I had parents who cared, who were there or tried to be. I can't imagine she has ever had anyone.

“Honey,” I say to her, “believe me, I know how it feels to screw up.”

She asks, “Do ya?”

I do. It takes so long to feel better.

. . .

“What can we do for you?” asked one of the counselors at rehab.

“Keep me here forever. Give me a condo where I can see a Pocono.”

One night, during the hour allotted for phone calls, I got Betty. She had been to her cornea specialist and, for once, admitted she was worried. She had lost some vision. Transplanted corneas have a shelf life. She was afraid hers were wearing out and confessed that she didn't want to go through more operations. As I tried to count on my fingers how many surgeries she had gone through, I said that if she had to have another, I would come home, but before I could get through the offer, she was saying, “No, no, no. I'll be fine.”

She never mentions not seeing well, but that night was not herself. I asked what she intended to do, whether she was willing to have more surgery. “I'll do what I have to do,” she said. “I am not going to be blind. I'll do what I have to do.”

I decided I would too. But it was hard. Every time I tried to joke, the rehab shut me up.

“You're running from your feelings.”

“I know. I hope they're fat and slow and can't keep up.”

At night, I could not sleep. My mind would not click off and I thought and thought, just hung out in my head for hours and hours: I had made myself up and it had not worked. Someone else kept poking through my little act, tripping me up. One night, very late, a man from Connecticut trying to make the break from painkillers came to our room in the middle of the night to ask if anyone wanted to play golf. I said maybe later. The next night, I was awakened again—by one of the counselors who was there to search my things. Someone thought I seemed a little too energetic. “They always do that,” Beth told me. “These people are all ex-addicts. They need drama.”

. . .

“Babe, fuckup might as well be my middle name,” Mary tells the girl from the women's shelter whose face looks even whiter in the sunlight. “I got two kids in Memphis and not even a Christmas card and they never gonna forget what a tramp I was and you just learn how to live with the shit.”

I tell her, “You just close your eyes and say over and over, ‘I'm okay.'”

What I don't say is that this doesn't exactly work. Shame takes forever to go away. Actually, it never does. You scrub a little every day. The thing, I think, is to know, to realize it is there, waiting to trip you up.

At rehab, there was a priest—Bruce, an alcoholic, a repeat offender, from New Jersey. One day, he was informed that his congregation had decided to take him back after his relapse. I wondered if the world would take me back. This is what Bruce said to me one night after a session where I was told, once more, that I had disconnected somehow from my feelings: “You must always, always tell the truth. If you are mad, say so. If someone asks you anything, try to find the exact words to describe what you have to say. If you try to tell the exact truth, always, you will ground yourself, become yourself. The truth connects you. It hooks you back up.”

I didn't joke. I took it in. I believe the truth does hook you to yourself, but it takes so long to get in the habit of saying it out loud. I like a bit of camouflage to spruce things up a bit.

Words are my business, but I had only mastered them on paper. I will always struggle with the problem of avoiding uncomfortable words.

“Do you always tell the truth?” I asked Bruce.

“Not so much,” he said.

. . .

I stayed in rehab for a month. Near the end, they gave us our evaluations. They wanted Beth to stay for another long-term treatment and she cried all night. The next morning, the tears . . . She could not stop crying. Later, she said she could not leave her boys again, that they would never forgive her.

At mine, a counselor asked me if I blamed my parents for my addiction. “Of course not,” I said. “Of course not. We all got hurt in a way because we didn't talk. They just went by the rules they were taught.”

“What about your mother?” asked the counselor.

“Maybe,” I replied, “she was a little overdemonstrative.”

The people in the interview knew I had tried hard. They laughed a little bit, let me have one.

“I am also available for weddings and bar mitzvahs.”

“You do know, don't you,” asked my counselor, “that you are not a joke?”

The counselor said my addiction was a trickster and that I was a secret keeper. I was told I should not go back to the city, that I would be unable to resist falling into the same patterns, but I had to keep my job. I left early on a Thursday morning. A man in a van was to take me to catch a train. On the way out, I took a last look at the line of people who were too anxious or depressed to function and who waited at this time of day for their rations of prescribed medicines. I wandered over to the place where I was to pick up the things they confiscated when I arrived. Bruce motioned me into his room and, in the dim light, blessed me, hugged me, and gave me his phone number.

“I want to stay in rehab forever,” I told Beth, who looked at me and said, “Well, it looks like I'm going to.”

. . .

On the first morning I was to return to the publishing house where I worked, I left my apartment at 7:30, but had to pause at three different Starbucks to collect myself before I could walk in the door. I arrived a little after nine. At the end of the day, a woman I liked came to my door, sat down with me, asked me if I was okay. She came in each day for a while. Her kindness made me feel okay.

Since then, I have not picked up again. I have attended hundreds and hundreds of all kinds of recovery meetings. I have chanted, meditated, stood up in front of people to tell my story. I have tried to reconnect. When I lost my job, I thought I was going to just fall down. “I feel ashamed and scared,” I said. I told the truth. It was the strangest thing to not try to cover it up.

You can spend your whole life revealing very little to anyone. You can stay smoke and mirrors and, if you give them a laugh or two, no one will say or ask much. I never really wanted anyone to know that much about me, but I didn't even realize that. I didn't know what I was doing.

I can never be a person who has not made mistakes. But I can be someone honest who has lived through them: one of those who look you square in the eye and say, “This is how it has been, and it is okay.” It has been a long, long struggle to hold my head up. I think I have survived because of Betty, more than anyone. I will never stop remembering my mother's strength, her struggle to remember words, to hang on to the world. I will always hear her at the piano, an old woman practicing, still trying to get it right, to find the right notes. I will see her walking, haltingly, in the dark, doing her best to find her way. We have sometimes struggled with words, but I am Betty's boy. There are so many things I will carry when I leave Bettyville with my old suitcase.

. . .

At home I just slip in quietly and go to my room to read. For weeks, I have been trying to start
A Gate at the Stairs
by Lorrie Moore, but I cannot get beyond the review quotes in front. There are, like, ninety. I have been fixated on them. “Reverberates with quiet lingering power that leaves the reader pondering the randomness of life and death and the wisdom and futility of love,” says the
Sacramento Book Review.
This seems too much for a Tuesday afternoon.

“Where have you been?” Betty asks when she sees me.

I say I went to take some pictures.

“Of what?”

“The scenery.”

My mother is still in her gown. For her birthday, I got her three new ones and a robe, but she won't wear them, says they were too expensive.

“I want to call that girl, you know,” Betty says. “You know her name.”

“Who?”

“The one from the dinner, the dinner at Jane's. You know her name. Her husband . . . She had to find him.”

“I know.” Betty has been obsessed with Jamie for weeks. She wants so much to think of some way to help her.

“I don't think a person can ever get over that,” Betty says. “I want to try to help some people before I die.”

There are things that everyone carries. I don't really know the things inside my mother, but I know she feels so much more than she says.

I never wanted a child for myself, but I would have liked to have seen them all, all my family, once again in someone. I would like to have kept parts of them in the world. But that was not my life. I want my mother to know that I may not be what she expected, but I am someone who tries to be good. I cannot give my mother the kids we might have liked with Mammy's eyes or Aunt Bess's crazy, gentle ways. I cannot bring her the child who sings with my father's voice. But I can wait with her through these strange days for whatever is going to happen. I can sit on a chair by her bed when she is too flustered to lay her head down on her pillow and stay with her until she can close her eyes.

.

Things My Mother Does Not Do

1. Complain.

2. Dispose of almost anything, including years-old margarine tubs possibly hoarded for the dispersal of emergency rations.

3. Ignore a coupon.

4. Put anything away.

5. Allow me to talk “long distance” for more than three minutes without yelling in the background.

6. Give up without a fight.

O
ne night late last week, not long after 10 p.m., Betty screamed very loudly. I bounded into her room, certain that this was it. The end. When I got in there, she was perched on the side of her bed, looking sheepish.

“What on earth?” I cried out, reaching for the phone. “Are you all right? Do you need an ambulance?”

Betty just looked at me.

“Why did you scream?” I asked.

“Why do you need an explanation?”

“Because you screamed.”

Some moments passed.

“I thought I felt a bedbug run across my leg,” she confessed.

For several days, been reading about a bedbug infestation in Columbia in the
Tribune
. On the night of the scream she had read the most recent story aloud to me. She seemed to expect me to fumigate immediately.

“The bedbugs are in Columbia,” I said. “It's fifty miles away.”

“They travel.”

“But they don't drive,” I said.

“Do you need a Xanax?” I ask a few minutes later.

“I'd rather have a gin and tonic.”

The next day we were in the office of Dr. C., one of Betty's eye doctors, a cornea specialist. In Columbia. As I took her into the examining room, she said to the assistant: “I read you have a lot of bedbugs over here.”

“I don't know,” said the young woman, “but I got scabies from a patient once.”

My side hurt. I wondered if it was gallbladder. My mother says everyone in our family gets gallbladder sooner or later. Her much repeated advice over many years, her admonition for after she is gone: “One of these days your stomach is going to feel it is about to explode. Remember I told you. Gallbladder. You are going to feel awful.”

I thought the whole thing was stress. I didn't want to see Dr. C. I never do. He has hated me for twenty years—since I tripped on my untied shoelace and collided with an extremely delicate and apparently expensive piece of diagnostic equipment that was waiting in his hall to be installed.

He eyed me coolly.

“So you're still around?” he asked.

“I think I have gallbladder,” I said, but Betty interrupted before I could list my symptoms.

“How many grandchildren do you have now, Dr. C.?” Betty asked.

“Forty-one.”

“Good God,” I cried out. I couldn't help it. I blurted.

Doctor C. eyed me as if he planned to detach my retina.

“I love children,” I said.

. . .

Our weekend was okay, except for a major snafu at the farmers' market. The woman who makes the cinnamon rolls was late. If you cannot count on the Amish to be punctual, where are we? How long does it take to throw on a bonnet?

On Monday, Betty is normal and energetic. She moves around the house, semispringy, even speaking of making chicken salad. Any sign of her taking part in something is enough to almost make my day. By Tuesday, though, she is a gray ghost, hunched over, so small now, and does not seem to want to move at all. She moans; she groans; she whines; she emits tiny whimpers, chuckles without mirth, mutters to herself, bubbles up with small utterances. It is as if she is trembling verbally and repeating the same phrases again and again: “Let's go. Let's go. Let's go.”

Nowhere in the house, it seems, is there a place her noises cannot penetrate.

“Well, you've got it upside down,” she says to herself. “This is upside down.
What? What? What?” It is as if these repetitions give her some control. Every word is like a brick in the wall guarding her against some intruder she cannot name or get a glimpse of. The phantom is frightening; sometimes it seems she is on the verge of tears. Betty. On the verge of tears. Sometimes she talks to herself, half sentences, little cries out as she shakes her hands or fists. It is like there is someone else inside her, the real Betty, anguished and panicked, and she cannot get out. She is trapped inside.

I e-mail a friend who cared for her mother, who suffered from dementia before her death. “Did she make sounds?” I ask. “No,” she responds, “but demented people are like snowflakes. They are all different.” I cannot see this. Snowflakes drift so peacefully, but Betty has no calm, quiet ground to stop her fall or rest on.

By Wednesday, I cannot take it. Everywhere I look in the house, there is a mess. Everything is falling apart. “Where's my lunch?” she asks. It is 2:30. I have forgotten there is such a thing as food. I take things from the refrigerator, but stop: Suddenly I do not know how to make a sandwich. I cannot remember, cannot complete the act.

I drive her to the Junction in Perry where she can have a catfish sandwich. It is our haunt. In the glass case in the adjoining gas station, there is a large selection of skull rings and a ZZ Top poster.

On the road, Betty is quiet, almost normal again, though she still shakes her hands, fingers outstretched, as if they are wet and she hopes the air will dry them. There is something about riding in the car. She seems quiet and calm, but then I hear her whisper, “Lisbon. Portugal. Scottsdale.”

As we sit down at the booth at the restaurant, she says, “You look so sad today. Is there any way I can help you? Is there anything I can do? You look so sad.”

Later, back at home, she goes off to my aunt's to play bridge; Anita, a woman from our church, picks her up. I have no idea which Betty will show up at the bridge table, or exactly what she will do. When she returns, I ask how it went. “A lotta old women and bad cards,” she replies, before going back to her room to change into her gown, which, as she has her pants to take off and a pullover to get over her head, is tough. In an hour or so, she comes back into the family room in her jeans, not in her gown. I don't know what she is thinking.

I am lying on the couch, curved on my side with my rear to the back of it. Betty plops down in the middle, so that she is sitting right in front of me. Something new has passed through her: a wave of playfulness or perhaps happiness. She pokes my nose and stomach with her finger and smiles. She pushes my hair off my forehead affectionately. “What did you do tonight?” she asks. “Are you drunk?” Then she pokes my stomach again.

“You are,” I tell her, “so going to Monroe Manor.”

. . .

By 9:15 or so, I am exhausted and have to go to bed. “Where are you going?” she asks. “To bed,” I say. “I just told you.”

“You're not staying?” she asks.

“I cannot keep my eyes open.” I have been so worried today. I just need to close my eyes and rest, but it takes me a bit to settle down. After maybe an hour, I hear her shout and then there is a big thump. She has hit the floor. “I've fallen,” she cries out. “I've fallen.” There are tears in her voice.

I run toward the family room where she is sprawled on the floor. She cannot get up. She is wearing her jeans and I know exactly what has happened. When my mother sits down on the couch, she will often undo her pants at the waist, making herself more comfortable. Then, pants falling down to her hips, she will get up and try to walk to the kitchen. Or wherever. Always scared she will trip on her pant legs, I have cautioned her again and again about trying not to walk with her pants falling down. But as usual, as with everything, she has ignored me.

My mother is scared now, on the floor, trying to sit up, and I am too. I am not sure if I should move her. What if she is injured? Will I make it worse? But, watching her, I see that she is moving well enough. I try to lift her up from behind, with my arms under her arms, but this is not successful. We make it to the point where she is kneeling before me. “Do you want me to get the walker?” I ask.

“No,” she answers with force, with determination. “Get me a chair.” I do, and, making use of it, she hauls herself up. I hold her, steady her. She seems okay. “I was just lucky,” she says. “I was just lucky.”

“Shouldn't we go into the hospital to make sure? What if you wake up in pain?”

“No, I want to finish my book,” she says. “I'm fine. I'm fine. Be still.” She must make everything all right again as fast as she can. She must return to normalcy as soon as possible. I say again that I want to call the paramedics, but she says, over and over, “I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm fine,” slamming the door closed on my concern. I am worried about her tailbone, which she bruised during her last confrontation with the floor, in the middle of the night in her room before I came to stay.

“I am all right,” she declares, plunking down in the recliner. “I have to finish this book,” she repeats. “I don't just want to lie in there awake.” She does seem to have emerged unscathed. I watch her trying to read, struggling to make out the print, trying to pretend all is normal, that nothing has happened here.

I wonder about going back to bed. When I leave the room, she says again, “You're going to leave me. Are you going to leave me?”

I go back to the bedroom, bring pillows and a blanket to spread on the couch next to where she is sitting. I carry in Mabel's quilt with the names of all the women stitched around the edges to wrap around her legs. I study the names (Mildred, Lucille, Amy, Cody, LaDonna), note one I like especially, sewed on with a flourish: Evalena. It sounds like a mountain to climb.

Time after time, I open my eyes, checking, checking again, but she reads on. “You can walk?” I ask again and again. “You can walk?”

“Be still,” she says, “be still,” but she says it quietly this time, as if I am a baby she is trying to get to sleep.

I want Betty to go to sleep now, just get a little rest, a little calm, a quiet hour or so, but at 1 a.m., I hear her moving. I have fallen asleep and she, apparently, has finished her book. I walk her into her bedroom and make sure she is okay. I rub moisturizer onto her face and Lubriderm onto her legs, which flake with dryness. She makes her whimpering noises, mutters to herself. It seems as though to her I am not there at all. I am touching her, but she does not notice. She is alone.

“Don't fall,” she says to herself. “Don't fall. Don't fall. Don't fall.” She is more upset now than before. The scrim has been torn away. She is unable to summon the part of her that covers all her fear. I stay until she is still. I sit in the corner after bringing her an extra half of Xanax, which she takes. But she still ignores me. She does not see me. No one is here but her. Suddenly she yells out, “Someone has to make the coffee. I forgot.”

. . .

Heading back to the kitchen to make the coffee, I pass my old room, which my father made into an office after he retired. On the shelves above his desk there are hundreds and hundreds of seashells, polished, but a little dusty now. In the corner there is my old stereo, bought with birthday money.

There is a scene I remember that always sums up my last moments of living with my parents in the house my father built. During my last year in high school, my last months truly at home, there was a song on the radio called “Second Avenue,” a ballad I liked. I wanted the album and asked Betty to find it on a day she was going into St. Louis to take Mammy to the eye doctor's. It was ten o'clock or so before my mother got home. She looked exhausted, worried about Mammy, sitting at the kitchen table in front of something cold.

I adjourned to my room to listen to the music with my headphones on. I played the record over and over, even after my parents went to bed. That night, for some reason, I found myself singing along to “Second Avenue.” I did not imagine anyone listening and couldn't hear myself because of the headphones, but my parents, next door, were apparently still awake.

An hour or so after they turned in, they opened my door and stood together, looking in, smiling, looking happy, amused. “We heard the sweetest voice,” said my mother, hair in some disarray, despite the use of her satinlike Beauty Sleep pillow. “You're probably going to be a rock star,” my father added, his bare chest just beginning to show the contours of an older man, “but tonight you have to get to bed. Go to sleep now. Go to sleep.”

That night I loved them so much.