I looked around the kitchen. Everything was in its place: the percolator gleamed from the stove, the glass bird was teetering slowly down, there were no broken dishes, no water on the floor. What had happened?
“Are you sick?” I said.
“There’s nothing l can do,” Betty said.
She looked so strange that I was frightened. I ran out of the kitchen and across the hillocky grass to get to my mother, who always knew what should be done.
“There’s something wrong with Betty,” I said.
My mother was mixing something in a bowl. She rubbed her hands together to get the dough off, then wiped them on her apron. She didn’t look surprised or ask me what it was. “You stay here,” she said. She picked up her package of cigarettes and went out the door.
That evening we had to go to bed early because my mother wanted to talk to my father. We listened, of course; it was easy through the Ten-Test walls.
“I saw it coming,” my mother said. “A mile away.”
“Who is it?” my father said.
“She doesn’t know,” said my mother. “Some girl from town.”
“Betty’s a fool,” my father said. “She always was.” Later, when husbands and wives leaving each other became more common, he often said this, but no matter which one had left it was always the woman he called the fool. His highest compliment to my mother was that she was no fool.
“That may be,” said my mother. “But you’d never want to meet a nicer girl. He was her whole life,”
My sister and I whispered together. My sister’s theory was that Fred had run away from Betty with another woman. I couldn’t believe this: I had never heard of such a thing happening. I was so upset I couldn’t sleep, and for a long time after that I was anxious whenever my father was away overnight, as he frequently was. What if he never came back?
We didn’t see Betty after that. We knew she was in her cottage, because every day my mother carried over samples of her tough and lumpy baking, almost as if someone had died. But we were given strict orders to stay away, and not to go peering in the windows as our mother must have known we longed to do. “She’s having a nervous breakdown,” our mother said, which for me called up an image of Betty lying disjointed on the floor like a car at the garage.
We didn’t even see her on the day we got into my father’s second-hand Studebaker, the back seat packed to the window-tops with only a little oblong space for me to crouch in, and drove out to the main highway to begin the six hundred-mile journey south to Toronto. My father had changed jobs again; he was now in building materials, and he was sure, since the country was having a boom, that this was finally the right change. We spent September and part of October in a motel while my father looked for a house. I had my eighth birthday and my sister turned twelve. Then there was another new school, and I almost forgot about Betty.
But a month after I had turned twelve myself Betty was suddenly there one night for dinner. We had people for dinner a lot more than we used to, and sometimes the dinners were so important that my sister and I ate first. My sister didn’t care, as she had boyfriends by that time. I was still in public school and had to wear lisle stockings instead of the seamed nylons my sister was permitted. Also, I had braces. My sister had had braces at that age too, but she had somehow managed to make them seem rakish and daring, so that I had longed for a mouthful of flashing silver teeth like hers. But she no longer had them, and my own mouth in its shackles felt clumsy and muffled.
“You remember Betty,” my mother said.
“Elizabeth,” Betty said.
“Oh yes, of course,” said my mother.
Betty had changed a lot. Before, she had been a little plump; now she was buxom. Her cheeks were as round and florid as two tomatoes, and I thought she was using too much rouge until I saw that the red was caused by masses of tiny veins under her skin. She was wearing a long black pleated skirt, a white short-sleeved angora sweater with a string of black beads, and open-toed black velvet pumps with high heels. She smelled strong of Lily of the Valley. She had a job, my mother told my father later; a very good job. She was an executive secretary, and now called herself Miss instead of Mrs.
“She’s doing very well,” my mother said, “considering what happened. She’s pulled herself together.”
“I hope you don’t start inviting her to dinner all the time,” said my father, who still found Betty irritating in spite of her new look. She laughed more than ever now, and crossed her legs frequently.
“I feel I’m the only real friend she has,” said my mother. She didn’t say Betty was the only real friend she had, though when my father said “your friend” everyone knew who he meant My mother had a lot of friends, and her talent for wise listening was now a business asset for my father.
“She says she’ll never marry again,” said my mother.
“She’s a fool,” my father said.
“If I ever saw anyone cut out for marriage, it was her,” said my mother. This remark increased my anxiety about any own future. If all Betty’s accomplishments had not been enough for Fred, what hope was there for me? I did not have my sister’s natural flair, but I had thought there would be some tricks I could learn, dutifully, painstakingly. We were taking Home Economics at school and the teacher kept saying that the way to a man’s heart was through his stomach. I knew this wasn’t true – my mother was still a slapdash cook, and when she gave the best dinners she had a woman in to help – but I laboured over my blancmange and Harvard beets as if I believed it.
My mother started inviting Betty to dinner with men who were not married. Betty smiled and laughed and several of the men seemed interested, but nothing came of it.
“After the way she was hurt, I’m not surprised,” my mother said. I was now old enough to be told things, and besides, my sister was never around. “I heard it was a secretary at his company he ran off with. They even got married, after the divorce.” There was something else about Betty, she told me, although I must never mention it as Betty found it very distressing. Fred’s brother, who was a dentist, had killed his wife because he got involved – my mother said “involved” richly, as if it was a kind of dessert – with his dental technician. He had put his wife into the car and run a tube in from the exhaust pipe, and then tried to pretend it was suicide. The police had found out though, and he was in jail.
This made Betty much more interesting in my eyes. It was in Fred’s blood, then, the tendency towards involvement. In fact it could just as easily have been Betty herself who had been murdered. I now came to see Betty’s laugh as the mask of a stricken and martyred woman. She was not just a wife who had been deserted. Even I could see that this was not a tragic position, it was a ridiculous and humiliating one. She was much more than that: she was a woman who had narrowly escaped death. That Betty herself saw it this way I soon had no doubt. There was something smug and even pious about the way she kept Mother’s single men at a polite distance, something faintly nunlike. A lurid aura of sacrificial blood surrounded her. Betty had been there, she had passed through it, she had come out alive, and now she was dedicating herself to, well, to something else.
But it was hard for me to sustain this version of Betty for long. My mother soon ran out of single men and Betty, when she came to dinner, came alone. She talked as incessantly about the details surrounding the other women at her office as she had about Fred. We soon knew how they all took their coffee, which ones lived with their mothers, where they had their hair done, and what their apartments looked like. Betty herself had a darling apartment on Avenue Road, and she had redone it all herself and even made the slipcovers. Betty was as devoted to her boss as she had once been to Fred. She did all his Christmas shopping, and each year we heard what he had given to his employees, what to his wife and children, and what each item had cost. Betty seemed, in a way, quite happy.
We saw a lot of Betty around Christmas; my mother said she felt sorry for her because she had no family. Betty was in the habit of
giving us Christmas presents that made it obvious she thought we were younger than we were. She favoured Parcheesi sets and angora mittens a size too small. I lost interest in her. Even her unending cheerfulness came to seem like a perversion, or a defect almost like idiocy. I was fifteen now and in the throes of adolescent depression. My sister was away at Queen’s; sometimes she gave me clothes she no longer wanted. She was not exactly beautiful – both her eyes and her mouth were too large – but everyone called her vivacious. They called me nice. My braces had come off, but it didn’t seem to make any difference. What right had Betty to be cheerful? When she came to dinner, I excused myself early and went to my room.
One afternoon, in the spring of Grade Eleven, I came home from school to find my mother sitting at the dining-room table. She was crying, which was so rare that my immediate fear was that something had happened to my father. I didn’t think he had left her, that particular anxiety was past. But perhaps he had been killed in a car crash.
“Mum, what is it?” I said.
“Bring me a glass of water,” she said. She drank some of it and pushed back her hair. “I’m all right now,” she said. “I just had a call from Betty. It was very upsetting; she said horrible things to me.”
“Why?” I said. “What did you do?”
“She accused me of… horrible things.” My mother swabbed at her eyes. “She was screaming. I’ve never heard Betty scream in my life before. After all that time I spent with her. She said she never wanted to speak to me again. Where would she get such an idea?”
“What idea?” I said. I was just as mystified as my mother was. My mother was a bad cook, but she was a good woman. I could not imagine her doing anything that would make anyone want to scream at her.
My mother held back slightly. “Things about Fred,” she said. “She must be crazy. I hadn’t seen her for a couple of months, and then suddenly, just like that.”
“There must be something wrong with her,” my father said at dinner that night. Of course he was right. Betty had an undetected brain tumour, which was discovered when her strange behaviour was noticed at the office. She died in the hospital two months later, but my mother didn’t hear about it till afterwards. She was contrite; she felt she should have visited her friend in the hospital, despite the abusive phone call.
“I ought to have known it was something like that,” she said. “Personality change, that’s one of the clues.” In the course of her listening, my mother had picked up a great deal of information about terminal illnesses.
But for me, this explanation wasn’t good enough. For years after that, Betty followed me around, waiting for me to finish her off in some way more satisfactory to both of us. When I first heard about her death I felt doomed. This, then, was the punishment for being devoted and obliging, this was what happened to girls such as (I felt) myself. When I opened the high-school yearbook and my own face, in pageboy haircut and tentative, appeasing smile, stared back at me, it was Betty’s eyes I superimposed on mine. She had been kind to me when I was a child, and with the callousness of children towards those who are kind but not enchanting, I had preferred Fred. In my future I saw myself being abandoned by a succession of Freds who were running down the beach after a crowd of vivacious girls, all of whom looked remarkably like my sister. As for Betty’s final screams of hatred and rage, they were screams of protest against the unfairness of life. That anger, I knew, was my own, the dark side of that terrible and deforming niceness that had marked Betty like the aftermath of some crippling disease.
People change, though, especially after they are dead. As I passed beyond the age of melodrama I came to see that if I did not want to be Betty, I would have to be someone else. Furthermore, I was already quite different from Betty. In a way, she had absolved me from making the demanded choices by having made them so thoroughly herself. People stopped calling me a nice girl and started calling me a clever one, and after a while I enjoyed this. Betty herself, baking oatmeal cookies in the ephemeral sunlight of fifteen years before, slid back into three dimensions. She was an ordinary woman who had died too young of an incurable disease. Was that it, was that all?
From time to time I would like to have Betty back, if only for an hour’s conversation. I would like her to forgive me for my rejection of her angora mittens, for my secret betrayals of her, for my adolescent contempt. I would like to show her this story I have told about her and ask her if any of it is true. But I can think of nothing I want to ask her that I could phrase in a way that she would care to understand. She would only laugh in her accepting, uncomprehending way and offer me something, a chocolate brownie, a ball of wool.
Fred, on the other hand, no longer intrigues me. The Freds of this world make themselves explicit by what they do and choose. It is the Bettys who are mysterious.
A World of Her Own
Penelope Lively
Penelope Lively (b. 1933) is a critically acclaimed British author of fiction for both children and adults. She won the Carnegie Medal for children’s fiction in 1973, for The Ghost of Thomas Kempe, and also the Man Booker Prize for her 1987 novel, Moon Tiger. Lively was made Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in the 2012 New Year Honours list.
My sister Lisa is an artist: she is not like other people.
Lisa is two years younger than I am, and we knew quite early on that she was artistic, partly because she could always draw so nicely, but also because of the way she behaved. She lives in a world of her own, our mother used to say. She was always the difficult one, always haying tempers and tantrums and getting upset about one thing and another, but once mother realised about her being artistic she made allowances. We all did. She’s got real talent, the art master at school said, you’ll have to take care of that, Mrs Harris, she’s going to need all the help she can get. And mother was thrilled to bits, she’s always admired creative people, she’d have loved to be able to write or paint herself but having Lisa turn out that way was the next best thing, or better; even, perhaps. When Lisa was fifteen mother went to work at Luigi’s, behind the counter, to save up so there’d be a bit extra in hand for Lisa, when she went to art school. Father had died three years before. It worried me rather, mother going out to work like that; she’s had asthma on and off for years now, and besides she felt awkward, serving in a shop. But the trouble is, she’s not qualified at anything, and in any case, as she said, a delicatessen isn’t quite like an ordinary grocer or a supermarket.
I was at college, by then, doing my teaching diploma. Lisa went to one of the London art schools, and came back at the end of her first term looking as weird as anything, you’d hardly have known her, her hair dyed red and wearing black clothes with pop art cut-outs stuck on and I don’t know what. It was just as well mother had saved up, because it all turned out much more expensive than we’d thought, even with Lisa’s grant. There was so much she had to do, like going to plays and things, and of course she needed smarter clothes, down there, and more of them, and then the next year she had to travel on the continent all the summer, to see great paintings and architecture. She was away for months, we hardly saw anything of her, and when she came back she’d changed completely all over again – her hair was blonde and frizzed out, and she was wearing a lot of leather things, very expensive, boots up to her thighs and long suede coats. She came home for Christmas and sometimes she was gay and chatty and made everybody laugh and other times she was bad-tempered and moody, but as mother said, she’d always been like that, from a little girl, and of course you had to expect it, with her temperament.
Mother had left Luigi’s by then, some time before, because of her leg (she got this trouble with her veins, which meant she mustn’t stand much) but she started doing a bit of work at home, for pin-money, making cushions and curtains for people: she’s always been good at needlework, she sometimes says she wonders if possibly that’s where Lisa’s creativity came from, if maybe there’s something in the family…
It missed me out, if there is.
Still, I got my diploma (I did rather well, as it happens, one of the best in my year) and started teaching and not long after that I married Jim, whom I’d known at college, and we had the children quite soon, because I thought I’d go back to work later, when they were at school.
Lisa finished at her art college, and got whatever it is they get, and then she couldn’t find a job. At least she didn’t want any of the jobs she could have got, like window-dressing or jobs on magazines or for publishers or that kind of thing. And can you blame her, said mother, I mean, what a waste of her talents, it’s ridiculous, all that time she’s spent developing herself, and then they expect her to be tied down to some nine-to-five job like anyone else!
Lisa was fed up. She had to come and live at home. Mother turned out of her bedroom and had the builders put a skylight in and made it into a studio for Lisa, really very nice, with a bare polished floor and a big new easel mother got by selling that silver tea-set that was a wedding present (she says she never really liked it anyway). But then it turned out Lisa didn’t do that kind of painting, but funny things to do with bits of material all sort of glued together, and coloured paper cut out and stuck on to other sheets of paper. And when she did paint or draw it would be squatting on the floor, or lying on her stomach on the sofa.
I can’t make head nor tail of the kind of art Lisa does. I mean, I just don’t know if it’s any good or not. But then, I wouldn’t, would I? Nor Jim, nor mother, nor any of us. We’re not experienced in things like that; it’s not up to us to say.
Lisa mooched about at home for months. She said she wouldn’t have minded a job designing materials for some good firm – Liberty’s or something like that – provided there was just her doing it because she’s got this very individual style and it wouldn’t mix with other people’s, or may be she might arrange the exhibitions at the Victoria and Albert or the Tate or somewhere. She never seemed to get jobs like that, though, and anyway mother felt it would be unwise for her to commit herself because what she really ought to be doing was her own work, that’s all any artist should do, it’s as simple as that.
The Story: Love, Loss and the Lives of Women: 100 Great Short Stories Page 94