Bettyville (9 page)

“I'm not hard-sell,” Barbara says. “I just want to help you make some decisions. Important decisions.”

I look at her with terrible seriousness. “I don't care what you say,” I tell her. “I am keeping my baby.”

The line is a risk, but I am desperate for attention and figure we might as well test this relationship. When she laughs, I know that I have found someone and reach down to a shelf under the toaster shelf. “Would you like an Oatmeal Creme?” I ask. They are made by Little Debbie and are, for me, a crack equivalent. “I've been moderate today. I've only eaten about eleven.”

“I don't think so,” she says. “I'm kinda semi-dieting.”

Barbara looks at me in a kind of hopeful way, asks about New York, says she had always wanted to take her stepson for a visit. “He is artistic,” she says. “You know, like that.” I get the signal. Who wouldn't? But I want no heart-to-hearts today. I want to have fun. Laugh. It's so nice to have someone here.

When she begins to talk about the policies, I can tell she is as bored as I am. She is originally from Minneapolis and misses sushi: yellowtail, spider rolls. I say I like tekka maki, but am disgusted by roe.

“Why did you come to Paris?” I whisper to Barbara. She says she married someone here, someone I knew in high school. Then she blurts out that her stepson is gay.

The boy, a year out of high school, lives in Jeff City, where he waits tables and acts in some kind of theater troupe. He never comes home. “I was the one who had to tell him that I knew,” she says. “He didn't come out to us. I wanted him to know he could trust me.”

I like this woman. She helped the kid out. “His father,” she says, “doesn't want anyone to know. He's ashamed. Worried about what other people will think.”

I hate Barbara's story. I hate how I fear it is going to end, with everyone losing and distant and wondering. She looks like she knows too, like maybe she doesn't believe that the boy and his father are ever going to get things right. “I love him like he was my son,” she tells me. “It's harder for my husband. Sometimes it's not so easy to be stuck in the middle.”

“Are you eyeing my Oatmeal Creme?” I ask before I begin to natter on, saying a lot of boring stuff about how not everyone can make the leap into someone else's kind of life. I like to think my father would have made the leap, but sometimes I think my mother has hesitated, waiting at the boundary of ever really trying. I think probably because I was scared to lead her, scared of not being perfect.

Barbara asks me if it was hard for me, growing up here. When I cannot think of a joke to make, I tell her that it was maybe a little tough to be alone with it all.

“But I survived,” I say quickly. She looks at me as if uncertain this is the case. Then she pops the big question, the one I hate most: “Do you have”—she eases into it tentatively—“a significant other?”

I tell her that I do better with insignificant others, but say I think I may be getting a dog, before picking up a paper and choosing the least expensive insurance plan; it covers an hour in a free clinic and a couple of cold sores. I am ready for Barbara to go now, but she has more of the form to fill out and begins to ask me more questions that get under my skin.

“Do you see a psychiatrist?”

“Yes.”

“For how long?”

“Since 1983.”

She looks troubled. I add, “He's grown dependent. I can't get rid of him.”

“Do you,” Barbara ask, “take any pharmacological medications?”

“Are you kidding? I was used for testing.”

When she completes her questionnaire, I am certain that I will be denied coverage, but she is optimistic. “I have seen them,” she says, “give it to people with cancer.”

. . .

When I decide to take a nap, Betty, disgruntled over my indulging myself, slams doors loudly and stomps down the hall, raising every bit of racket she can to keep me awake. Unsurprisingly, I fail to doze. I imagine Mr. Dog in my room, tearing out strands of the carpet, stretched out beside me on the bed. I look for my pal outside, but our neighbor, who has seen us earlier, tells me that the police have taken the puppy to “Doggy Jail.” I eye her suspiciously “It wasn't me,” she says. “I swear. I didn't call them.”

. . .

“I want to believe you,” I say.

The city office says the dog will have to stay in custody for eight days, in case he has an owner looking to claim him. Opening my computer, I get on Facebook to type a plea for someone to adopt this dog. In a show of utter selflessness, I will give up my love to save him, like a biblical martyr or the baroness in
The Sound of Music
.

Betty asks, “What were you and Barbara talking about so quietly?”

“Her stepson is gay.”

“Oh my,” Betty says. “Oh my.” She isn't negative, just goes quiet. Or say more. Or ask more. I don't know why I think she is going to this time. With us, the silences have always won.

I think I need another Oatmeal Creme.

My parents removed to Missouri in the early 'thirties; I do not remember just when, for I was not born. . . . The home was made in the wee village of Florida, in Monroe County, and I was born there in 1835. The village contained a hundred people and I increased the population by 1 per cent. It is more than many of the best men in history could have done for a town.

—Mark Twain's
Autobiography

I
n the Paris post office, a mural,
The Arrival of the Clemens Family in Florida,
hangs, scrutinized occasionally by old schoolteachers in line for a book of stamps, gazing through their cataracts as they count out their change. Who else would stop to scan the nameplate? No tourists here, just hunters or fishermen passing through on weekends. Younger people have no inkling of the Clemens boy who became Mark Twain, or his birthplace, down the road, which no longer exists. Leveled when I was in high school, the place the Clemens family came to is underwater, the victim of huge road graders clearing the land for a lake project that did not, as it turned out, do much to boost the local economy. Stoutsville, Evie Cullers's hometown, is down there too. Maybe, buried in mud, is a fork or spoon, a cup or saucer or pair of glasses worn by someone she knew.

In winter, I drive out to see the vapor rising from the ice over the water, a sight that almost makes the season worth trying to get through. This summer, the lake bottom is all but utterly dry with bare, spindly trees, vapor-thin themselves, rising out of the cracked earth. All a fisherman can catch near Twain's old town is a near-fatal sunburn.

When I was a kid, I wanted to enter the annual fence-painting contest held annually during Tom Sawyer Days in Hannibal, where I went once with Bill and June. We ate Kentucky Fried Chicken by the Mississippi, accompanied by a friend of June's who had terminal cancer. I watched the slender woman milling through the crowds on a cane decorated with what she said were bull's testicles, a decoration she was extremely proud of.

Glancing at the small dried objects, Bill eyed me mischievously and asked, “What do you think about that, Sport?”—a nickname no one had ever thought to call me. I knew I was no Sport. Still, it was good, this little clue that he had not realized what was true: I did not fit the nicknames other boys belonged to so easily they could pass them back and forth.

. . .

The lonely dog has been imprisoned two days. Worried about his surviving the heat, I take food and treats. My Facebook pleas on his behalf emphasize his most attractive features, minimizing his outdoorsy fragrance and yodel-like howls. In the picture I posted, he looks insane, curled up in a yellow bandana I arranged around his neck. I worked for seven years a few floors below
Vogue
magazine. I understand the impact of an accessory item.

The kid from the grocery store parking lot is mowing our lawn this morning, or what is left of it. Apparently he is part of our yardman's crew. Bare-chested, lawn-mower boy wears tennis shoes with no socks and a pair of filthy shorts his waist barely holds up. A few curls trail down from his belly button. He's twentysomething, but looks a teenager; his skin is clearly troubled. Nothing soothing has touched it lately. On his cheeks and shoulders are dozens of eruptions.

Boyd, the man he works for, apologizes for him, says he's trying to give him a break, help him kick drugs, a bit of info that snags my interest. “He's lost a lot,” Boyd says. “That don't mean he can get away without wearing any pants.” Meth, I guess, is the story, though Carol's son reports that people in Columbia are snorting bath salts. Maybe tonight I will throw down some Mr. Bubble, or a guest soap.

A woman I went to high school with, not long out of prison, is thin, about to crumble, and does not have Jenny Craig to thank. She is one of the women known at the grocery store as “Medicated Marys.” Her eyes look ready to crack. Darting about the store as if on fire, she nabs this or that, mostly sweets, hand flying out like a bird's beak to snatch a worm. Before my arrival, because Betty was once a friend of her mother's, she got into the habit of stopping by to borrow money, explaining her emergencies in the half-assed way addicts do, throwing out whatever excuses will make someone want to get rid of them and dig into a pocket. I know the landscape. I never had to beg, but lost a few things I might have liked to keep. And people. People I liked a lot.

“No problem,” I assure Boyd after his apology over the kid's clothes. In the course of ten years, my existence has gone from
Looking for Mr. Goodbar
to
Driving Miss Daisy
. A little skin is no tragedy. I have been away from New York a long time and am tempted to make love to a hanging basket. Recently, the discovery of the Big Wang Chinese restaurant at the Lake of the Ozarks has sparked my fantasy life.

This week Congress demolished bills to provide financial aid to veterans and farmers. This does not bode well for government subsidies for displaced gay book publishers whose personal trainers consume six to twelve small meals a day. I am not actually certain I qualify as homosexual anymore. A conversation about kidney outputs with Betty's physician's assistant, Ingrid Wilbur, a butch lesbian, is as close as I have come to intimacy in months.

Gradually, I have drifted out of the action.

I find myself holding out a Coke for the kid, who looks surprised and shuts down the mower. He says nothing, just reaches for the drink. “Are you from here?” I ask. He shakes his head as, trying a different gambit, I offer, “So what about those Cardinals?” He responds, “What about them?”

I falter. “Well, I guess they are winning or losing.” He looks puzzled. No one gets me here, a problem as I tend to speak in one-liners. I try too hard, but as I tell my friends, it's better than not enough.

After making short work of the Coke, the boy runs a sliver of ice across his forehead and sets the plastic go cup carefully on the step as if it were something from Tiffany he has felt privileged to use.

. . .

An inside source (a friend of my mother's) has told me of a row at Monday bridge, where Betty was once an ardent, rarely defeated competitor. My mother, after consuming the entire bowl of mini-Snickers at her table, has apparently accused the hostess of a chintzy attitude toward snacks. Then, refusing to keep score, she slammed her cards down in a shocking manner that seems to have sent a woman named Maxie into a tizzy. “And Maxie has rheumatoid,” the friend confided of the injured party.

“Do Snickers help with that?” I asked myself.

My mother's skirmishes, her irritability, threaten her social life. People don't get that she can't control these outbursts; a new aggression flares up in her at times.

Betty Hodgman, Big Muscle of the mini-Snickers circuit, is in the family room, staring down at her hymnal, frowning and looking confused.

“The oven's on. The oven's on,” she keeps repeating. She won't take in the fact that I am trying to preheat it. I am busy strewing cinnamon around the kitchen, attempting to make the muffins she likes. “That looks nasty,” she says when I pour the batter into the little paper cups, as if she had never seen anything similar before.

“Well, hang on.”

“You have the oven on.” She says it again. “I feel it heating up.”

“I'm making muffins.”

“Go ahead. Burn the house down.”

. . .

If my mother is exiled from bridge, we are lost; the driver's license was a blow. This will be worse. She won't have anything. Mandy Winkler, just about her last remaining close friend, is concerned about being able to take her out to lunch anymore, at least on her own. Getting Betty in and out of the car is too much of a struggle; Mandy has a hip problem herself. Betty counts the days until she gets to see her, but she lingers less each time she visits. “She is so busy,” Betty says.

Mandy's voice on the phone last week was grave. “You know, Betty isn't herself anymore.” She advises, “George, I think you are going to have to consider assisted living.” I wanted to respond, “Oh goodness. That has never crossed my mind.” People mean well; they just aren't here enough to get what we are dealing with or what home means to my mother. Everyone thinks they know what should be done, and their suggestions make me suspect they must consider me an idiot who doesn't comprehend the situation. Actually, I don't, but never mind.

I get what makes sense; I just can't bear to do it. I cannot imagine the sorrow of dragging her out of this house.

Hours and hours I've spent on the Internet, considering and agonizing over assisted living and senior-care situations. One, particularly, Tiger Place, has many advantages, including sensors that can detect bathroom falls, a full calendar of social events, cocktail hours, movies with popcorn, a gourmet cook. Maybe I can convince her she's on a long cruise. We are to visit there at the end of the week, a feat it has taken months to arrange. I don't know if I can actually get her to make the trip. “Several women I know have died there,” she said when we last discussed Tiger Place.

“It's for old people,” I said. “Old people die sometimes.”

“You just want to get rid of me.”

“No.”

“Someday something will get me.”

“Probably your bladder.”

. . .

Betty is determined to stay put. Do we literally, I wonder, carry her out of her own house? Will it come to that? Who gets to say? Me?
Me?
Betty, a woman who has lived her life in conventional clothes, possesses a will as strong as any man's. She has always seen herself as a bit above most women, silly ones prone to marital turmoil and cosmetic overdose, women easily taken in who mooned over their husbands.

One summer before we moved to Paris, the marriage of the Bucks, who lived just up the street in the late Blanche Mitchell's big old southern-style house, was a topic of discussion all over Madison. Willie Buck, a cattle buyer whose job kept him traveling, was having an affair with the receptionist of Arthur Fleming, a pediatrician. Arthur's wife, Evelyn, was my mother's best friend.

Betty and Evelyn conferred often. I eavesdropped. Evelyn said the receptionist had no shame. “She just parades it,” Evelyn declared. “I know,” Betty replied. She was not a woman to gossip, but did comment that Blanche Mitchell had to be turning over in her grave.

“She never should have sold them that house,” Betty commented. “But who knew?” Evelyn assured Betty that “in situations like this,” she was always “for the marriage.”

Betty said she was for Lena Buck getting a lawyer and taking Willie for every cent she could locate along with every Hereford in that pasture. Lena, Betty pointed out, was raising four children practically on her own while Willie shorted her on money for the house and kids.

Something in me loved Lena. Perpetually tanned, she came from the Mississippi Delta and reminded me of the dark-haired queen who gifted Columbus with the
Pinta,
the
Niña,
and the
Santa Maria
. As a little boy, I spent long hours at the Bucks' house on rainy days, ordering their son Bobby around. At the slightest hint of precipitation, I would throw on my cowboy hat and pull on my red galoshes and head up there.

“When I look out and see you coming in that hat and those boots, I always have to take a nerve pill,” Lena told me once.

When Bobby Kennedy was assassinated, I was playing with Bobby. “They killed another of the Kennedys,” Lena announced to us. “Shot him dead. Now I'd like to know what they expect of you kids.”

Lena was a fan of country music, especially Elvis. I did not care for the King, but Lena's soft sing-alongs to “Kentucky Rain” were an education in the realities of winter afternoons in a drafty old house bent over a sink of soap bubbles. I did my best to advise her on the matter of her wardrobe, a thankless task for even a zealous fashion adviser.

“Don't mix plaids,” I told her. “My mother says.” But Lena was stubborn—and no Twiggy.

“She lays it on with a trowel,” my mother said to Evelyn.

Mother told me to keep my nose out of the affair business, but often we would wake to find Lena on our patio, trying to avoid her husband and seeking companionship. Or advice. There she would be, lying flat on her back on the top of the table, arm flung over her forehead in a gesture of romantic tragedy. I am not sure what my mother said to Lena on those mornings, but, watching from the kitchen window, I would see Lena listening and nodding her head. Sometimes I ran from the house with a warm honey bun for our visitor as Betty glared. “Get back in that house,” my mother would say.

I would go to the window to spy, watching my mother patting Lena's hand or occasionally touching her shoulder. I had no idea that Betty knew what to do with a broken heart, but she was gentle with Lena and sometimes looked a little sad herself. So this was how my mother looked when she talked about love.

My mother never talks about love. What has always drawn her interest is money: Growing up without much extra has left her with the taste for seeing her name attached to significant amounts. She is careful with money and remains a firm advocate of the early bird special. I am afraid to ask about her funeral preferences, fearful she will demand a salad bar.

Betty likes to hear people talk about cash—who has it, had it, got it, lost it; how it might be acquired. She could have been a great deal maker; in another era, she would have ruled.

When her father died, a few years before I was born, Betty inherited, with my grandmother and her brothers, the four Baker Lumber yards—in Madison, Paris, Mexico, and Moberly. Sometimes on Sunday afternoons, in my grandmother's bare dining room, with its ringed but sturdy mahogany table, Mammy and her children circled to talk things out about the business, bent over paperwork. My father was never invited; he was not an official partner, but an employee, not in on significant decision making. Around the time I entered eighth grade, the Madison yard, which my father managed, started losing money. Mammy, always expecting financial cataclysm, looked agonized if it was mentioned; they all tried to hide what she would envision as the start of the family's inevitable journey to the poorhouse.