One of our housemates holds a brown and white guinea pig in his hands for me to pet. “Don’t be afraid. The guinea pig is the gentlest of all creatures,” he says kindly. “All he wants is peace.”
The guinea pig looks at me suspiciously and makes strange, underwater sounds.
“Humans enslave each other and fight wars,” he continues, pushing his long brown hair behind his ears. “Guinea pigs want nothing to do with governments or violence. They’re our brothers in peace. Go ahead, you can pet him.”
I reach out to touch the guinea pig’s twitching nose with my finger. It bites me.
Dude introduced me to Betty one afternoon outside his office, as college students who looked like college students chatted in the hallway, balancing books, backpacks and cans of Coke. “Kristin Hersh? Betty Hutton,” he giggled. “Betty Hutton? Kristin Hersh.”
Betty had white hair that day, which curved in around her jawline, framing her pink lipstick. She wore blue cowboy boots and sunglasses, which she removed to reveal enormous drag queen eyelashes. Dude cried gleefully, “It’s perfect! Kristin, you’re too young to make any friends here and Betty, you’re too old!” Betty and I both cringed.
“I’m sorry,” I said, putting out my hand. “He’s not a tactful man.” Betty shook her head and then roared with laughter, pulling me into a bear hug. Over her shoulder, I saw Dude beaming. Then Betty pushed me out in front of her and growled, “Nobody can fuck with us, right, Krissy?”
“I guess not,” I said, and she hugged me again. “Wow!” I mouthed to Dude. He just stood there, smiling.
Now Betty says we need each other. That the two of us have to stick together because we’re “boy-girls,” independent and gender-free. I think she means “humans,” but I’ll take it. Betty is a shiny beast, a warm heart in a cold world, and I’m lucky to know her. She also has a great life story: she says she spent a fatherless, poverty-stricken childhood in Detroit, dancing and singing for drunks in her mother’s speakeasy, and then became a rich, famous movie star in Hollywood.
I’ve never heard of her, but it doesn’t matter. I love the story too much to question it; I don’t care if it’s true or not. I honor it as the pink, sparkly Hollywood tale with the dark Hollywood underbelly that we all need to hear at least once. I hear it all the time because Betty can talk and I really can’t. Like most quiet people though, I’m an excellent listener.
This is a Catholic university, so there’re a bunch of nuns around, though most of them disguise themselves as regular women, so it’s hard to tell who’s a nun and who isn’t. Betty and I actually have a favorite nun, a baffling sister who takes her marital vows to Jesus very seriously—she and Jesus actually sleep together. “And we don’t just sleep,” she revealed in a lecture, after which she was granted an immediate, possibly permanent, vacation.
I saw her in the locker room at the Y soon after this. She wore a huge, puffy shower cap and a bright rainbow-striped towel, and held a shower brush the size of a tennis racket in her hand. I was naked, about to step into the shower. I probably stared at her outfit a minute too long while I waited for the water to warm up, ’cause she caught my eye from across the room, waved her shower brush in greeting and whistled at me! What a nun.
Our favorite nun name, however, is: Assumpta Tang.
Suddenly, Betty appears from behind an enormous old tree, walking carefully over the dirt in prim heels. She waves maniacally, like people do in old home movies, and I wave back tiny. Everything about Betty is huge, bigger than life. I’m smaller than life—so unremarkable that I’m practically invisible. We make an odd couple.
“Mahnin!” I call to her.
“Sweetheart!” she says breathlessly, juggling textbooks and pressing her pantsuit into place. “I overslept! Did you do your workout?”
I make a face. “I don’t call it a workout.”
“Well, I do! Did you do your workout?” she asks again, piling her books up neatly on her arm.
I laugh. “Yeah.”
“Oh good,” she says. “So you’ll be able to sit still for a little while.”
We walk up the stairs together, Betty chattering loudly, ignoring glares from people who’re trying to study. Because she’s loud and I’m shy, Betty and I both love the library bathroom. In the bathroom, she can talk as loud as she wants and sing and guffaw without librarians giving her any shit, and I know I don’t have to see anyone but Betty ’cause the door’s locked.
The library at our school is a castle on a cliff overlooking the sea and its bathroom is a large, black and white tiled room with an antique claw-foot tub. When we have a study date, I lie in the tub, she sits on the toilet, and we read and talk. The doorknob gets jiggled every fifteen minutes or so by students needing to pee, but Betty just yells, “Occupied!” and they go away. This is our favorite way to kill an afternoon.
“No, no, no, it couldn’t be true . . . that anyone else could love you like I do,” Betty sings when we get upstairs and lock ourselves in. She’s hunched over her notebook, scribbling in it, a textbook perched on the radiator next to her. “Singing on the toilet! If Mr. DeMille could see me now!” She hums the same song for a minute, then sticks her pencil behind her ear and turns to look at me. “Krissy, did you declare a major?”
I keep reading. “No. Why would I do that?”
“Because you have to? Remember how they told you you have to?” she sounds exasperated. “You know why they said that?”
I look up at her. “Why?”
“Because you have to!”
“No, I don’t.” I go back to my reading. “I wanna learn everything, not one thing.”
“Just pick something. It’s easy. What are you studying right now?”
“Uh . . . metaphysical anthropology,” I answer. “Or maybe anthropological metaphysics. I forget.”
She stares at me. “You have to prepare for your future or you won’t have one,” she says in a singsongy voice that echoes off the walls prettily. This makes her start humming again.
“What’re you, my guidance counselor?”
She stops humming. “Did you apply to McGill?” It’s hard to read with Betty around; she hardly ever stops talking and singing. I don’t get much studying done on these “study dates.”
“They said I could go if I want to,” I mumble.
Betty freezes. “That’s a great opportunity, Krissy,” she says quietly.
I look up from my book again. “You know where Montreal turns out to be? Canada! That’s a hell of a commute.”
She giggles, then exhales theatrically. “Oh, thank you, Jesus. I’m sorry, Krissy. You should prepare for the future; I just . . . don’t know what I’d do if you left.”
I try to read again. “The future doesn’t exist.”
“Well, not yet, bonehead!” I smile up at her, but she’s looking off, humming again, so I go back to my reading. Suddenly, she stops. “Krissy, have you ever been on a trapeze?” Betty is the queen of non sequiturs.
I shake my head and continue reading. “Mm-mm.”
“It’d do you good. I took trapeze lessons for The Greatest Show on Earth so they’d hire me instead of a trapeze artist who couldn’t act,” she says. “It’s not that hard . . . it’s like flying. Scary flying.”
Wow. Circus Betty. “Scary flying sounds cool. And scary.” I finish what I’m reading and look up into her huge eyes. “Why was it the greatest show on earth?”
“Well, it wasn’t,” she answers thoughtfully. “It was just called that.”
“Oh.”
Betty smiles her reminiscing smile. “It was great, though. It was great fun, swinging around. And Cecil B. DeMille was a great man. Who said I had great feet!”
“Great!” I laugh. Betty takes her pencil out from behind her ear and goes back to her notebook, humming.
Soon, she’s singing again, “No, no, no, it couldn’t—” then, suddenly dark, says, “I can’t write this.”
I look up. “The Jung paper? Why not?”
“I can’t write about personality types because I don’t have a personality. I was a commodity, not a person,” she says bitterly.
I’m disappointed; I really wanted to read that paper. Betty can be very entertaining when it comes to psychology. She calls Freud “that motherfucker” ’cause she thinks he’s the only guy who ever wanted to sleep with his own mother. I’m sure she’s right about this. Her other problem with Freud is “Talking? Gimme a break! Talking’s not a cure! Nobody ever solved a problem by whining about it!”
That’s probably true, too, at least for her. Betty’s had to bust her ass in order to quit drinking and taking pills and she’s not a whiner. She has a strong, guileless way about her that makes a huge impression. I always assumed it was her “personality.” And she thinks she doesn’t have one? Of course, it’s that same old Hollywood story again. I’m not sure exactly what happened to her there, but Hollywood haunts Betty. Both the loss of the pink, sparkly life she lived and the hatred of its dark underbelly. “What do you mean you don’t have a personality?” I ask her.
Her fluttery girliness is gone. “I’m not a real person, only the shell of one. I started working on my outside when I was fifteen and showbiz never let me stop.”
“But you’re a psychology major . . .” I venture carefully. “Maybe you could write about other people’s personalities?”
“How? I wouldn’t know what I was talking about.” Slowly, she walks to the sink, shoulders hunched, and stares at her reflection in the mirror. “There’s no me in here.” She looks into her own eyes. “I only sang for my mother’s sake.”
“Sparkle?” One of Betty’s cautionary tales is about a little tap-dancing windup monkey girl, a child star with a relentlessly driven stage mother. Whenever the daughter performed, the mother would tell her to “sparkle!” which I thought was so hilarious, I started saying it all the time. Now it seems sad.
“Sort of. I just wanted to help.” She looks very tired and, for the first time since I met her, old. I check her cheek for wetness. Betty cries at the drop of a hat—ladylike movie star tears, sweetly showy—but this afternoon, she actually looks too sad to cry. “And now I’m old. Who the hell am I?” she asks her mirror image angrily. “Maybe I don’t give a shit.”
Jesus Christ. “Betty . . .”
“You aren’t supposed to have feelings in Hollywood,” she spits. “The product must go on and Betty Hutton was the product.” Her skin seems to vibrate with feeling, but the dullness in her eyes is more terrifying.
I put my book down and kneel in the bathtub, watching her curved back and the half of her face I can see in the mirror. She looks so sad. “A minute ago, you were enjoying your memories,” I say. “Why’d they turn on you?”
“I have very mixed feelings about my memories.”
“But Betty, you can’t be empty; humans don’t have that option. Maybe your outside is sparkly, but you aren’t hollow on the inside. And the outside isn’t as fake as you think.” Her eyes glitter and she twists her mouth up in the mirror, trying not to cry. I can’t bear this; I start babbling. “And it’s so cool! You’re a Catholic boy-girl with lipstick and big muscles. I love your singing and your hair—”
“This isn’t my hair, sweetheart! It’s a wig! I wear wigs because I can’t let anyone see the real me!” She sounds desperate.
“But it is the real you! More than keratin pushing out of your follicles is. You chose it, so it’s you. I’m not a natural blue, you know.” She just keeps staring into the mirror. “I can honestly say you’re the most ‘you’ of any human I’ve ever met. In fact, you’re so much, you make other people seem like zombie . . . dolls.”
“Zombie dolls?” She turns to look at me kneeling in the tub and smiles sadly.
“Personality-free.”
Betty shakes her head. “Zombie dolls. Just don’t be easy to control, Krissy. They’re going to want to wake you up and put you to sleep, and they’ll do it with drugs.”
We have this conversation frequently. Betty’s afraid some cigarchomping studio mogul’s gonna stuff me full of pills just because I’m in a band. Whether or not she was actually a movie star, it often seems like she just stepped out of an old movie; she’s a walking anachronism. “Who’s ‘they’?”
“Listen, this is important. Judy Garland and I had a long talk about this once, in Vegas—”
Geez, sometimes she just seems nuts. “Really Judy Garland? From The Wizard of Oz?”
“Listen. You’ll end up dead, like her. Nobody’ll care about you once they can’t make any more money off you; they’ll just go get another girl—”
“But I’m not a girl. I don’t think they do that anymore, anyway.”
Betty stares at me for a few seconds, then turns back to the mirror. “Look at my ugly mug,” she presses her hands to her cheeks, pushing them up into her temples. I feel so bad for her. Betty sees herself as a young, beautiful starlet. Then she looks in the mirror and an old lady looks back.
I thought getting old meant getting wise. Or at least secure. I don’t know why I thought that; I don’t know any wise, secure old people. Maybe I inferred it from after-school specials. And I’d like to think that by the time you die, you’ve figured something out. That you aren’t lying there wondering what the hell just happened.
Betty’s old and she isn’t at all together. In fact, she often seems to be falling apart. Time is like a hurricane to her—a big, fast mess, sweeping her away. What a scary vision of the future. I’d have liked to see time as my friend; Betty makes it look like a black hole.
The doorknob jiggles and someone knocks. Betty shrieks, “Occupied!” at her own reflection and the knocking stops. Wearily, she sits back down on her toilet. “Promise me you’ll stay you, Krissy. No one should have to sparkle.”
“Don’t worry. I can’t sparkle and I’m not scared of them,” I say. “I’m not scared of anything.”
She turns slowly and gazes out the window at the ocean. “Maybe you should be.” The silence that follows this grim prediction is so long and uncomfortable that I interrupt her gazing.
“So you were in Vegas with Dorothy, huh?”
She narrows her eyes at me. “Don’t make fun.”
“Sorry . . . it’s interesting.”
“I was lucky she talked to me at all. I stole the role of a lifetime out from under her.” Sometimes Betty says things that are so foreign to me, I don’t know how to respond. I can’t even pretend to know what she’s talking about. If it’s craziness, it’s certainly fascinating craziness. If it’s real, well . . . it’s still weird. “Don’t try to meet your heroes,” she says sadly. “You’ll only be disappointed.”
“You just say that ’cause other people say it. People who have assholes for heroes.”
She looks at me pointedly. “This is important, Krissy. The entertainment industry got Judy hooked on drugs that killed her, my addictions almost killed me and I don’t want the same thing to happen to you. Christ’s love saved me, but you’re never going to let that happen.”
Betty says she converted to Catholicism “as an alternative to freaking out.” I think it’s her new drug, but in a good way. She gets all hopped up on Jesus and good works and heaven within and starts telling people that His love is out there for the taking and she means it. She can see them looking at her funny, but she knows too much about how a light heart can replace an old, used-up, heavy one to care. I don’t necessarily love Catholicism, but I love her Catholicism.
“Oh, I don’t know,” I answer. “I might go get religion someday.” She says nothing, just looks at me. I grope for a change of subject. “Do you . . . do you miss it?” I ask. “Drinking, I mean?”
She thinks about this. “No. Alcohol was heavy. I miss pills. Pills made me great.”
“Really?”
She nods emphatically, eyes big.
“You aren’t supposed to say that, you know, Betty. In the movie of your life, you’ll find out they were placebos.”
She smirks at me.
“I really do worry about you.”
“I know you do, but I’m invisible, I’m nobody. I’m not in the entertainment industry, so no one cares enough to drug me up.” It occurs to me, not for the first time, that Betty talks to me as if I were her younger self. Poor thing can’t find a better younger self to talk to than me—I have no ambition, no sparkle.
“But you will be in the entertainment industry, Krissy. I’m trying to prepare you for what’s to come.”
She doesn’t get it. “Why will I be in the entertainment industry?” I ask her. “I’m not entertaining.”
“I’m talking about your dreams,” she says gently.
“My ‘dream’ is to live in a van.”
Her eyes widen. They’re enormous. “Your dream is to live in a van?” she asks, appalled.
“Yeah, that’s the plan. See the country, play every night. We just can’t afford a van yet.” Betty looks sick. I think she just realized I’m not Little Betty. “Does that not sound good to you?” She shakes her head. It’s confusing that she’s in so much pain. I much prefer the superhero Betty, kicking ass and making noise.
“You told me music was your religion,” she says quietly.
“Music. Not the music business. Nobody’s ever gonna let us into the music business.”
She sighs, “Maybe you should declare a major,” then turns back to the window.
“Hey, quit looking at the ocean,” I say. “It’s making you sad.”
“Is it?” she looks genuinely surprised, then sits bolt upright. “I do this, don’t I? I fall into holes.” She looks around the room as if it’s different now, like the light shifted. “Holes I dig myself, trying to be deep—yuck!”
Phew, she’s back.
“You’re a nice girl, Krissy,” she says enigmatically. “I hope you stay nice.”
I check my watch. So much for studying. “I have sound check in Providence at four, gotta load gear by two, but I could squeeze in a student lounge lunch . . . ?”
Rat Girl: A Memoir Page 3