Bettyville

by George Hodgman

  “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.

  Eavesdropping as was my habit, I heard them make the decision to close the yard, and though they saw that times were bad for all businesses in the area, they blamed my dad, at least a bit. Bill assessed my father’s performance with a jeweler’s eye for flaw, said Daddy wasted too much time laughing with customers. Levity on the job was to him tantamount to embezzlement. Years before, during a painful, days-long session of labor, Bill, lying on his back on the top of a scaffolding platform, painted the tin ceiling of our hardware store, a grueling feat that damaged his back for life. Up at all hours, he never stopped; he basked in misery.

  My mother, listening with a stony expression, looked furious at everyone, those in the room and, I was certain, one who was not.

  . . .

  After the yard closed in Madison in 1973, my father labored at the Paris yard with Uncle Harry, where I was forced to work too that summer. We were still living in Madison—our new home in Paris was still being built. Big George and I left the house every morning at 6 a.m. for the
twelve-mile drive to Paris. “Time to make the doughnuts,” my father said to me when he dragged me, reluctant and surly, out of bed for a Pop-Tart as he picked bits of Grape Nuts out of his teeth nervously. When we arrived at the lumberyard, he slammed the car door and headed in with his pocket full of pencils and a tape measure clipped to his belt. He never said much on our way to work those mornings; he seemed like a soldier heading into battle. He was different, disappointed.

  In Madison, my father had whistled down Main Street in his dusty work boots, swatting the town’s working women, all lipsticked and beehived, on their big, cheeky butts with his clipboard full of paint orders. I can see him standing in streaks of sun, slightly wobbly from a few beers and completely sweat-soaked with a hand-lettered sandwich board, accosting passing motorists whom he berated to buy chicken at the annual Lions Club Memorial Day barbecue.

  Across town, in her darkened bedroom, my mother, who had long before ceased her efforts to control his antics, attempted to sleep away her embarrassment as he transformed the greater part of the Lions membership into a brazen mob of drunken boys who danced to a portable radio with bosomy, rouged-up women way into the night, in the parking lot of Del Miles’s old gas station where they set up their grills.

  “Oh lay me down, in your big brass bed,” my father would sing on these party nights. “Oh lay me down, in your big brass bed.” Hearing this favorite, I sensed scandal but didn’t get the words: “I’m going to Chicago to get my hambone boiled. Cause the women in St. Louie done let my hambone spoil.”

  One day it dawned on me what this all meant.

  “That is a dirty song, Daddy,” I said.

  “Don’t go blabbing to your mother.”

  The only secrets I didn’t tell were my own.

  Betty avoided the Lions events. “Is it over yet?” she would ask me wearily when she rose from her bed to confront me.

  . . .

  At the lumberyard, I pitched in as best I could. A special patience, I discovered, is required to dust a pile of nails. I did learn to use the paint mixer successfully, spending more time than some considered necessary experimenting with color combinations. Most I managed seemed suitable for the Caribbean. Within moments, I found myself streaked with more color than a Masai tribesman. When my father saw how much paint I was going through, he looked stricken. “That cost hundreds of dollars,” he said, hoping my uncle was in his office, hunched over his papers.

  “Don’t you wish you had just sent me to summer camp?”

  I accompanied some of the other workers on deliveries of lumber, paneling, whatever, though I was quickly exiled from the transport of windows and other glass products. I sipped Mountain Dews in the cab or rode on the back of the ancient, snorting flatbed truck as we shook and rattled our way down the freshly tarred roads with the wind blowing my sweaty hair. The drives through the countryside made me see, for the first time, the place I am from. It was not a dry summer. Everywhere, there was green, shade after shade after shade of it. According to the Appeal, Monroe County “boasts more rivers and streams than any other place in Missouri.” Closest at hand, the thick Salt River runs slowly, drearily past the edge of town, flooding the banks when the spring rains come. Here, in the murky waters that mirror ancient overhanging branches, daring children, balanced precariously on fallen trees, are sometimes swept to their deaths, while farther upstream, blacks and Baptists held baptisms and sang hymns, their voices carried by occasional breezes drifting through the steamy mornings. Fifty miles east is Hannibal, where the passing Mississippi brings huge barges loaded with factory products and grain, stopping on their way from Des Moines before heading on to St. Louis and New Orleans.

  . . .

  On the day we moved from Madison, I was not there when the big trucks came to our house. Knowing my temperament, my mother stationed me at Mammy’s where I lay on her bristly couch. My grandmother shut off the light and let me mourn. At noontime, as the fire whistle announced midday, Mammy, maneuvering now on a walker with an embroidered pouch stitched up by June, brought me warm homemade bread spread with some of her preserves and a 7-Up, the things she made me when I was ill. She sat beside me. She didn’t want us to go, really. Paris was only a dozen miles away, but Mammy wanted Betty close, and not long after would come with us to stay most of the time, leaving the House of Many Chimneys where the summer kitchen had become a dumping ground for things left from the dead: Uncle Oscar’s Smith Corona and boxes of photos and papers that belonged to Wray Chowning. He had died a drunken mess with only the loosest grip on anything resembling reality. Betty had been left to take care of his house. One day, I discovered a paper Wray had written at the university on Shakespeare’s Henry IV; the title was “Harry in the Night.” When driving downtown in St. Louis now, passing the old hotels that were once Wray’s haunts, I tend to imagine him getting drunk enough to entertain the strangers passing through for brief transactions.

  The day of the move, Aunt Winnie appeared with a chocolate pie for us to eat that night. She stood at the doorway where I lay and came to brush my hair off my face. “Things gotta change, kiddo,” she said, “things gotta change. One day I’ll be saying good-bye to Madison too, going off to live at Nahncee’s when I can’t keep up the house.” But Winnie never had to say good-bye to Madison. She succumbed to a heart attack after a hearty meal at a function for Christian ladies. She had apparently been stricken suddenly, soon after arriving home, as she was discovered still in her Sunday clothes and best church hat, waiting—eyes wide open—for the savior she had been blessed to expect only briefly.

  . . .

  A few nights after my encounter with the lawn-mower boy, in the very early morning, I notice him, not in his usual place on the car at the parking lot, but standing in the middle of the lane at the empty car wash where I presume it is a little cooler. With him is the skinny woman I went to high school with, the addict who was after Betty’s money. They look like they are dancing.

  “Don’t do it,” I want to yell. “Watch out.” But I think the damage is done. He isn’t sober, and when Boyd finds out, he’ll be out of a job.

  I do not get a wink of sleep that night, no good at all because I have so much work to do. My laptop is screwy and I am certain I am under some form of cyber attack. Earlier, after reviewing her marked-up manuscript, my new editing client, a South American economist, has claimed I am not getting her sense of “humous.” But what really keeps my eyes open and my head unable to shut down at all is our upcoming visit to Tiger Place. It is ridiculous to be a fiftyish man who cannot handle a ninety-year-old with narrow feet. For her sake, my mother should not stay here. I should not stay here, all bound up with my mother. I am not making decisions that are right for her. She needs to go somewhere where she can be properly looked after and fed. The only cuisine I have ever mastered was seasonal drugs. But I cannot leave. I will step up. In the morning, before the fog burns off, I will water the roses. I will get them through this summer. They will not wither on my watch.

  9

  This morning, Betty got up at 4 a.m. after looking at the clock wrong. I looked up from my work and there she was, confused, disoriented.

  “Why is it still dark?” she asked. To calm her a little, I asked if she would let me comb the hair on the back of her head, which gets tangled when she lies with her head on her pillow.

  Who says there are no advantages to giving birth to a homosexual?

  I combed carefully, separating the strands with my fingers where her hair is matted.

  “Don’t pull it,” she said. “Last time you did.”

  “I didn’t mean to.”

  “My head is tender.”

  “I’m watching out.”

  “Are you going to make me wear those shitty shoes today?”

  Her days are filled with little hurts. When I try to pat my mother’s back, she says, “No, no.” Her arms are as tender and reluctant: She gets angry if I take ho
ld too tightly. When I make my most careful effort to rub some cream into her face, she winces, shakes her head, as if the tread of fingertips brings agony.

  “No. No. No.”

  “Let me rub this into your forehead,” I say. “It’s amazing how few wrinkles you have on your forehead for a woman your age. It’s smooth.”

  “Don’t get it in my hair. Last night you got it in my hair.”

  “Pretend it’s mousse.”

  She bruises easily now. On the underside of one arm, there is a trail of purple tracks. Across her cheekbones and forearms, the skin is nearly transparent. Fearing I am about to tear or leave a cut, she stares at me, steeling herself. I must be gentle, attentive. A prick is a stab that makes her jump. A careless touch is sharp as a prick. Everything is an invasion.

  “No. No. No.”

  There is nothing that doesn’t press too hard, or seem too tight, or feel uncomfortable. She is so sensitive. The tightening around her arm during the testing of her blood pressure is much too much to bear. She yells out, kicks her feet.

  “No, no, no, no.”

  The space around her is all she owns, and if I come too close, she seems almost frightened, as if she fears what I might do. Yet on bad days, when things are rough inside her head, she wants me always in plain sight and follows me around, watching my every move. In the family room, there she is. “Where are you going?” If I go lie on my bed, she is right behind me, clearing her throat loudly in the doorway. “Where are you going?” If I walk into the living room to read, she is there, watching me. Even in my thoughts, where I retreat sometimes to escape, she appears, standing there with her purse in my mind’s eye, waiting and demanding: “Where are you going?”

  She does not believe I will not leave her, does not fully accept that I am not about to take flight, even though I tell her over and over. “No, no, no, I will not go. I’ll just be out a few minutes. I have to refill your prescriptions.” Maybe she forgets. Or knows by now how likely people are to change their minds.