Bettyville

by George Hodgman

  When she is especially agitated over something that has happened (a broken anything, an unexpected change in plans) or is about to (a small obligation that seems a terrible challenge, an upcoming doctor’s appointment, taxes), my mother’s noises filter through the day until I have to escape, leave the house, take the risk. Mostly I go outside, sit on the steps or walk down into the woods.

  There is a bottle of Xanax in the cabinet above the stove. I have to get out of this kitchen. Now.

  Standing on our back deck, I hear the whistles blowing over at the high school at summer football practice. Every day, I see the boys tramping to the field in the heat. Freshman year in high school, Betty made me go out for football; she insisted. She set her mind to it. I had never played or watched the sport on television. When my father tried to interest me in the Tiger games, I begged off. I didn’t care, though I liked the marching bands.

  Betty did not see as an obstacle the fact that I had no idea of the rules. She was on a mission: to make me all right, to make me fit. I was an adolescent: She smelled sex in the house and wanted someone to pound it out of me before anything took root.

  On the first day of practice at my new high school in Paris, I noticed that one of the boys was carrying a Bible in his helmet. This did not seem an option for me. Then there were the uniforms: They gave us strange long underwear things to wear under the pants and over our underwear with pockets for pads that protected body parts I did not seem to have. I couldn’t get the pads to fit in right, so I just threw them down the pants. Every time I ran, a pad fell out one of the legs.

  I told the coach on the first day that I had ruptured myself. I needed a specialist, X-rays.

  He grunted, unsympathetic. On the second day, I said I thought I was having a heatstroke. I could not believe how hot it was in my special underwear, even though most of my padding was strewn across the field. No response.

  “I have chafing,” I whispered as he eyed me. His name was Quigley, a name that seemed right for a rabbit.

  I could not believe the shit they were putting us through. It couldn’t be legal. Large people were crashing into me—farm boys, strong from hauling hay. There were yells and curses. I had no friends. Not even the Bible carrier.

  After the second practice, I was exhausted. I told Betty I had leukemia. She was skeptical. I told her I dreaded waking up in the morning. I fell into despair, tried to break my own arm on the side of the tub and knocked the shower door off its tracks.

  On the third day, when my father came to pick me up, he arrived early and watched. “Damn,” he said when we got in the car, “you are really terrible.” I answered, “I know. I am the worst player in the history of Paris R-II High. Can I go to boarding school?”

  He said, “Maybe your mother would let you off if we could think of some other sport you could play.”

  I asked, “How about bridge?”

  One of the older boys was named Kevin, a junior or senior. He drove a noisy old car and taunted me. I imagined this automobile exploding, dismembering my most immediate nemeses and sending the Bible carrier flying toward the loving arms of his Lord Jesus. Every day after practice, as I waited for my father, Kevin drove by, and as he passed me, there on the steps, wondering if I was developing calcium deposits, he always screamed, “Fuck you, you fucking faggot. Fuck you. Fuck you.” I braced myself for it every day, listening for his car to come around the curve, the crack of gravel under the tires.

  I knew it was true. What could I do? It was the pure hatred that shocked me, the rage, the bitter face in the driver’s seat. He began to do it more often. He did it every time we crossed paths on the field. He did it in the shower room. Some days, the heat was over a hundred degrees. One morning, on the field, sweat was running down my face and I felt the salt from it in my eyes. I had dropped balls, misunderstood plays, and been yelled at by everyone. Quigley was twitching. Kevin seemed to be everywhere with his usual greeting and I was tired, stripped bare; there was no pad in the world to protect the place where I was about to get slammed.

  Kevin passed, kicked me hard, and yelled, “Fuck you, you fucking faggot,” as I fell on the ground in front of what seemed like half of America. Picking myself up, I couldn’t breathe. His words hung in the hot air and everyone turned toward me as, finally, it all became clear. I froze, could not move or speak.

  I disappeared, just went away and returned in a moment, different. For a long time, for years, this scene came back and back again in my head—the air, my red-hot cheeks, his voice—in instant replay, like some champion’s great moment.

  On the football field, I thought I was going to cry, but I told myself that whatever came, whatever happened, I could not do that. Not there. I didn’t. I swallowed my tears; I pulled them in. And they never came back. I cannot cry. Not since that day. Not ever. Not when Mammy died. Not when my father died. I joined my mother among the permanently dry-eyed. We have that in common. We do not cry. I think somewhere inside me my allotted tears are waiting. Maybe they will come when Betty goes. Maybe when it happens I will somehow be transported back to Kevin at practice, or keel over like Mama Cass eating that ham sandwich in her hotel room, waiting for her muumuus to come back from housekeeping.

  Where do the hidden things go? Not away. Nothing goes away.

  I think something happened at that moment on the field: Something shut down; something went into hiding, split off. Although it did not become clear for years, I suspect that from the minute I had that little break from myself, some part of me went inside and I began to watch myself, making certain to give nothing away. Nothing inside me showed. When people get sober they are told that they have to make their insides match their outsides. It sounded to me like something you would want in a Chevrolet.

  I don’t think a coming together will happen to me in this lifetime. I am not sure I will ever again connect up—the watcher and the other unfiltered part of me—in the way other people do. There has been a rupture, and here, in this house, on these days when the sounds my mother makes seem especially loud, I feel it, see the cost of long-lasting silences.

  There are, I have learned, so many ways that gay kids try to cover up themselves. I can see I have on many occasions tried too hard to get a laugh.

  “You’re too clever by half,” someone told me once.

  “I know,” I said. “It would be better to just be twice as stupid. Right?”

  A joke, you see, can earn a place for anyone. People want to laugh, and when I realized I could do it sometimes, I tried to do it every minute. I became a performer, an artist skilled at distraction, control: “Look at me, but don’t see. Watch, but not too closely.” What I said to myself had nothing to do with what I told anyone. I went on the lookout for every word or gesture that might betray me.

  A few years ago, a publisher read a draft of a book I was working on, something I was proud of. He eyed me, looked uncomfortable. “It’s so internal,” he said, as if naming some spectacular offense. Of course, he was a straight man. He never had to go inside. He was comfortable just where he was.

  The thing about being a watcher is this: You are never really a part of things, especially if the person you must watch is yourself, always, just to make sure no one ever really sees you.

  . . .

  Earleen is raving about the dentist who screwed up her upper plate because he wanted to go play golf. The teeth cost $750. They have hurt Earleen’s mouth for a year and she is going to take the dentist to a review board in Jefferson City. “We’re gonna clean that jaybird’s clock,” she says as we watch my mother, hovering close as it seems her balance is off today.

  Betty goes to the refrigerator to take out a bowl of pineapple that she drops on the floor and breaks. She yells out as if there has been a gunshot. I clean the sticky juice off the linoleum and wipe the front of her gown as she fidgets, then looks away. Finally, I settle her, distracting her with a pile of postcards from
Europe from the end table as Earleen starts the vacuum in the back of the house.

  “Where are these from?” she asks. “Who wrote these?” I tell her that she wrote them, note her handwriting, as it was, so familiar. She wrinkles her brow, as if trying to remember. “I never could write a pretty hand like that,” she says. “Not now.” It’s true. Her letters look like shaky forgeries.

  The cards were written on my parents’ trip to Europe; it was a grand occasion, the only time they ever went there together. I was in New York by then; they didn’t take that many trips, but came every Christmas to go to Radio City while I worked. They loved that Christmas show. They were so delighted by it. I never went with them. When they came to visit, I always took breaks from them. Partially because I had to; there were always deadlines. Partially because I could not bear to let our talk stray too far from what I was comfortable saying about my life.

  When I let my mind wander back that far, what I see is how hard we tried to be our best for one another.

  In Europe, my parents took some cruise on a river that streamed through many countries, the Danube or the Rhine. For months in advance they spoke of this trip as if they were teenagers. Europe: across the big wavy sea where luxury liners crossed, carrying queens with hats and heroes with medals. Europe: where the wars had been: Europe: where the mountains and landscapes were beautiful, and the food was rich and unforgettable and available, on the barge on which they traveled, twenty-four hours daily, in unlimited quantities.

  “I’ll just bet it’s going to be very nice,” my mother said before they left. She was so eager. “June loves to go on a barge. I hope your father will have a good time. He deserves a chance to relax after all these years.”

  . . .

  “We flew into somewhere in Germany,” Betty says, holding a card the sun streaks through, but she doesn’t remember much else. “What is a beautiful city in Czechoslovakia?” she asks.

  “Prague,” I suggest.

  “Yes, that’s it.”

  And then, “What is a beautiful city in Germany?”

  I suggest, “Berlin, maybe. I don’t know how pretty it is, really.”

  She says, “No, no.”

  I suggest, “Munich.”

  She says, “No, no. That’s where they blew up the Olympics. That nearly killed your father. They blew up the Jews!”

  I say, “Hamburg.” She looks a little excited, but even more, relieved. “Yes, that’s it. That’s where we flew in. I used my passport and your father kept looking up everything about the war . . . I didn’t care about the war. I didn’t care if they blew up the Olympics, to tell you the truth.” She looks at me. “They go on forever,” she adds.

  “I wanted to buy a new sweater or a dress and see some of the countryside. It rained a lot . . . I’m trying to think of another city, another place in Germany. Oh yes, it was Berlin. That’s what it was. But his knee was hurting him and we didn’t get to do much. The time changed, you know, and I never could sleep much. The time changed on us. The time changed. I think just once. It could have been more than that.”

  She looks good today; the new moisturizer from Saks is doing wonders for her face, though I am often surprised to find myself licking Estée Lauder products off my fingers. Her cheeks are pinkish, their skin softer, and it seems that the wrinkled places under her eyes have almost been smoothed away. Sometimes she even smiles back. She wants to give me a pleasant afternoon, but fears she has little to offer, so she hands me the cards, one after the other, and looks hopeful. She wants us to have fun, to share the experience, but she can’t remember it. “The cities,” she says. “They were nice and green.”

  . . .

  Before the trip, my father took their passports to Kinko’s and had the pages with the photos Xeroxed and enlarged. He taped them—not with Scotch tape, but with something used to hold heavier things together—to the inside of the suitcase top. There they were, George and Betty in black and white, ready to meet the world, ready to splurge a little after working, like everyone they knew, hard all their lives and doing their best to be good and do good. They were older now, but they still had innocent faces, faces that somehow suggested their times and America, their home.

  . . .

  “I remember a river,” Betty says, “but there wasn’t enough water. It was very dry. It looked a little bit like here.”

  “Do you remember the name of the river?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Was it the Rhine?”

  “It might have been. What I remember is that it rained and I thought the water was finally going to fill up the riverbeds and when the next people got here it would probably be prettier.” She goes quiet, then asks, “Can I help you anymore, George?” as if we were studying for a test and she was drilling me, like she used to with long division.

  “Can I help you, George?”

  “No,” I want to say. “It is not you. It is everything that has happened. It is this sense that I have missed my chance and here I am.” Maybe everyone feels like that.

  “To tell you the truth,” my mother confides, “I liked those Christmas shows in New York better than anything on that barge. I think your father did too. We always wanted you to come along.”

  “I’m just not a Rockette person, Mama.”

  . . .

  I carried that suitcase with my parents’ pictures for twenty years or more everywhere I went: to college, home, and back so many times, to Barbados, London, Paris, Miami, San Francisco, Los Angeles, to Morocco, where I stayed at a house in the Old City where every night we were awakened by the call to prayer and I searched for a gift for Betty in the souk.

  People said I should buy something new, something bigger with wheels, something in leather. But I kept carrying that suitcase until the strap broke and one of the pictures inside got torn off. I carried them with me everywhere. I still have it. I keep special things there, stuff I want to save as long as I live. One day I imagine these postcards that are preoccupying my mother will find their way there, the postcards from their trip to Europe.

  “What are you doing, George? What are you doing to your arm?”

  “I’m scratching it, Mother.”

  “Why are you doing that?”

  “I guess because I itch.”

  “I don’t like it when you do that,” she says. “It looks like it hurts to do that.” And to her, it does. It would be enough to almost make her cry if she did that, ever.

  “Is there anything I can do for you, George?” she asks again.

  “You could try to remember the name of that river.”

  “I’ve tried,” she says. “I can’t remember, and why does it matter? I told you it rained and I couldn’t sleep and I had to lay awake and listen to your father snore and I thought, here I came all the way to Europe to float down a river and listen to an old man snore.

  “What can I do for you?” she asks again.

  “What can I do for you?”

  Neither one of us knows.

  . . .

  In the end my parents were just George and Betty, who always tried their best. That was enough. They weren’t New York. They didn’t have to be all the world or on television. I was different: Just me was never enough. Just me was something less than okay. So I tried to make up something a little better, too clever by half, I guess. I think I tried too hard. There were voices in my head, saying: “You have to do better.” Then I fell down.

  “Is there anything I can do for you, George?” Betty asks one more time, because perhaps she knows that the time when she can do anything for anyone is growing short.

  “See me,” I start to say. I don’t know where the words have come from, and I stop before I utter them because I know it is too late anyway, too late for her to know all of me. I didn’t discuss my sexuality with her until I was forty. She didn’t ask. My father hadn’t asked. We were all afraid. None
of us knew how not to hurt one another. I made us all feel imperfect. I felt I was wrong. They felt they had caused it. No one said anything. They went to Radio City, said they missed me being with them. “Next year,” I always said before heading off to the magazine.

  . . .

  I didn’t feel comfortable when I was a kid. I didn’t feel comfortable in my body. I didn’t feel comfortable anywhere. I hated to have to walk across a room if people were watching; this was just a fear I had, something I did not quite know what to do about. In New York, all this made things hard.

  “I never would have guessed you felt that way,” a rare confidante told me once. “But I see it now.”

  . . .

  Betty couldn’t have known all the things I was feeling, back when I was a kid. She couldn’t have known what to do. I didn’t know what to do. I just knew that I loved them and didn’t want them hurt by the fact that I wasn’t right. That was what the world told me, what I always heard, that people like me weren’t right. Gay kids hear everything. Because they are hidden in disguise or listening in silence. No one holds back. People will say anything about gay people. It still goes on. Pick up a newspaper. We hear so many terrible things about ourselves. People think it is their right. They just don’t get what being different feels like, on the inside, for a kid and they don’t care.

  When I was not chosen for the football team, I was relieved, but there I was, at a new school; I was on my own. Before the first bell, I stood by the door of the algebra room waiting and watching. In Madison, I had friends, but in Paris there was no one at the start, and so I stayed in my head, imagining myself someone who lived in the city, the son of rich people, an actor on Broadway or in the movies. I made up lives and fell into them when I was alone. I just got lost, imagining myself as other people. You can make up a world and live there for a while, float down a river to someplace secret.

  As time went on, I found another way: From movies and television, I stole lines and jokes, this and that, tried to stitch together an act that passed. Did I know what I was doing?