Bettyville

by George Hodgman

  I know it now.

  “Do you think you have trouble with intimacy?” they asked at rehab.

  “Only when I try to get close to someone.”

  To fall in love you have to think you’re okay, stop watching for clues you’ve done something wrong.

  . . .

  At school, I imitated teachers: an ancient southern belle with hair gone slightly green; the study hall monitor whose hair resembled the helmet of a Roman charioteer; the kids I was actually most drawn to: the different ones. I wanted no part of them and often aimed my harshest comments in their direction. I learned to make people laugh—and I always could. I had to, and when in conversations the topic strayed too close to things I did not want to talk about—sex, or girls, or whatever, whatever could trip me up—I learned to steer the talk away, subtly, without anyone ever realizing. Even me. It was an animal thing—camouflage. It has taken me so long to see it all.

  Sometimes, on bad days, it would happen again. It did not stop. Walking down the hall, I would see Kevin coming in my direction: “Fuck you, fucking faggot.” I tried to stay in my body and not to disappear. If I felt hurt, I cut it off fast as I could manage. I mean, what I was feeling? I could never ask anyone for help because what he said was true and all I wanted was for everyone to ignore it.

  On TV, I hear them saying these things that they say about people like me, not caring if we have to listen. They don’t care if the things they say leave their mark. They are so brave they can make kids feel terrible, these perfect family folk, so certain their lives are all so fine. They stand and say it is their right to say things that injure children who have learned to hate themselves.

  Kids even have to hear things from their own families.

  We grow up hearing everything.

  “Shame is inventive.” It can do so much and you never know.

  . . .

  A guy named Freddy often strolled alone through the crowds in my high school, and that first year, I tried to attract his attention, because he seemed to be on his own too. In class, he turned bright red at the slightest thing and had a kind of funny walk—from a back injury, I later learned. He didn’t seem to quite belong with anyone. I sensed something familiar. I thought he did too, even from way across a room. I scared him, I knew, because I was different, just what he did not want to be. But I wanted to try to reach him if I could.

  Sometimes he spoke or nodded when he saw me, but he kept his distance, even when people began to like me and almost everyone said hello. Though he certainly did not remember, we had seen each other before, years back, when we were kids. Granny was visiting from St. Louis and she, my mother, and I had come to Paris to the Home Market where Betty liked to shop for meat. It was a very nice store for a small town, like somewhere you would find in a bigger place. They gave out samples of cheeses, sausages, and new sorts of snacks. I loved Chicken in a Biscuit.

  While Betty waited for the butcher, Granny and I pushed the cart. As we turned one corner, we encountered an enraged woman yelling at her little boy, whose fair hair—almost clear enough to see through—was slicked back with oil and combed so neatly that he looked like a mannequin in a store. His skin was very white, the sort that burned and never tanned. As his mother’s anger, unexplainable to us, terrifying to me, built up, the boy looked like all he wanted was to fade away, to back into the shelves among the cans and disappear. Even then I knew she saw something in him she despised.

  When the mother slapped the boy hard, as if she could just slap him away, my grandmother blanched, staring at the woman’s face. I thought Granny was going to call the police or go over herself to try to help. We saw the red streaks from his mother’s fingers come up on the boy’s white cheeks. Granny stopped the cart and eyed the woman as the boy ran down the aisle, tears running down his face. Back in the car, my grandmother kept bringing up what she had seen. “That woman,” she said, “that woman looked at that boy with hate. With hate. She looked at her own child with hate in her eyes. I have never seen anything like it.”

  I knew somehow that the woman was ashamed of her son; he was small and delicate. I just knew. In the car on the way back to Madison as Granny began to settle down, I watched Betty carefully, looking for signs that I might be in trouble too. I felt like I was in terrible trouble too. Like that boy.

  “Aren’t you glad,” Granny asked, “that you are surrounded by people who love you?” For reasons I did not understand, this made me feel terrible; bad feelings flooded through me that day in that backseat.

  Freddy was that boy in the grocery store. It was that pure white skin that made me remember. He had grown up to be good-looking—a cute guy, as they say in high school—but because of his back, which was often painful, he had not gone out for football. When he and his older brother, Earl, both started working at the IGA, Freddy was quickly fired. Because of his injury, he couldn’t lift the heavy boxes. Every day, his brother gave him the twenty-five cents for lunch in the cafeteria.

  In mixed chorus, Freddy was a tenor, like me. Sometimes we shared the same piece of music and he laughed at my jokes. We became friends. He never mentioned his mother, Wanda, who was known for her spotless house and her ire. How that woman could flame up, swearing, grabbing at those boys, seizing a collar or an arm wherever they were, even after they were older. Wanda would scream at those boys; the neighbors talked about it. Every night it went on. In the summer, people heard her while they worked in their gardens.

  One afternoon after school, near the end of freshman year, Freddy rode his bicycle past my house where I was sitting on the step. Maybe because it was one of the first warm days, because it was spring, and we felt unburdened, just a little freer, he stopped to talk and I took him inside. Betty had fried chicken and it was cooling on a rack on the kitchen table for supper. I offered him a piece, and before I realized, he had eaten the whole chicken. For the rest of that year, he came over after school every day, always eating supper with us and never leaving until it was time for me to go to bed, something he never seemed to do. He roamed the streets till late, even when it was cold.

  If a day went by without him visiting, I was lost. I needed him and wanted to touch him. So many times I had to stop my hands from forgetting what was acceptable. They knew what they wanted; I knew what they could not have. Even regular boys slapped each other on the back, roughhoused, and reached out occasionally to pat each other’s shoulders. Yet if I came too near, Freddy moved away; he had a kind of radar, a sixth sense for when to take off, flee. If I sat on the bed in my room, he sat on the floor. If I came up behind him, reached out to tap him to get his attention, he moved. When my father cupped Freddy’s head with his hands one day to steer him toward the table, Freddy looked shocked, and for a moment I thought he might hit my father, who was so surprised. He looked at me as if to say, “What can we do?”

  I loved Freddy. He loved me. There was this feeling when we were together; it was so strong that, reaching out, I almost expected to feel something in the air between us.

  Wanda slapped Freddy because she was ashamed of him. I didn’t want anyone to be ashamed of me. All of this was a long time ago. Maybe people don’t understand it now.

  In a school play, Freddy and I were cast, fittingly, as best friends, two gentlemen arriving to call on some pretty women on the Riviera. It was a musical, The Boyfriend. During rehearsals, Freddy was, as usual, reticent, standing far away as he said his lines to me. Like almost halfway across the stage. Like almost in Cleveland. It was like he was doing Hello, Dolly! in another county. But on the night of the actual performance, there we were, in front of everyone. Something was going to happen. I watched the coach’s face in the audience and the expressions of some of the other boys as Freddy threw his arms across my shoulders and kept them there, hanging on, drawing me closer to him and not letting go. It was just too much; there, in front of everyone, we were more than chums about to fetch some ladies for an airing on the
plage. This was something else. Who were we now, so suddenly? I was suddenly very uncomfortable. My cheeks went hot, just like at football. Embarrassed, I tried to move, but his hand stayed around my shoulders. At that moment, something passed between us. I knew it. The people watching seemed to be aware of it. The other boys felt it. I thought the world sensed it. There was talk, I think. Later. For a while, I guess.

  After that night, Freddy never visited our home again, barely spoke to me, moved farther down the hall when I approached. We were no longer close. By that time, I had many other friends; I was popular, a funny guy, a little bit beloved by some, part of things. At last. But I could not understand why there had been this rupture, and I felt ashamed, as if I had done something terrible. For years I was ashamed to think of it.

  . . .

  I ask Betty, who is just sitting with her cards in her lap, if maybe when it cools down she would want to go sit on the deck for a while. To get some fresh air. She shakes her head. She says nothing. There is much we have said nothing about, and, yes, it is too late now. I kept silent. I didn’t tell them who I was. They didn’t ask. We didn’t know what to do about me. She would have helped me, if she had known how. She just didn’t know. I didn’t know what to ask for. I was scared. So was she. We never broke open. It was too frightening and we have all paid the price. My father never knew all of who I was. I never gave him the chance.

  Betty never says anything, really—about me or herself. She has never told me about anything that ever happened to her. If I could ask her anything, it would be this: “What was it, Mother, that just shut you up, so tight and quiet?”

  I hope there was nothing, that this was just her way from the beginning. I hope there was nothing that hurt her, back there someplace.

  10

  My mother is standing with her purse open, clutching one strap and staring at a framed watercolor of a field of flowers as if it were a window, as if it were her window. She looks as if she were home, surveying the yard and the roses, monitoring Alice’s comings and goings, worrying that my aunt has been invited someplace she has not.

  But this is not her window. This is just a picture in a frame; the flowers are not pink, not her roses, and this is not her home. This is something else to her; this place for old people to come to is giving up, whatever words I use. This is the stop where everything she knows is left behind and she won’t go quietly. She won’t let go of home. It is her most sentimental quality, one we share, our attachment to our place. She has not lost this longing: Her mind has not altered radically or broken in two; it’s more that the surface, the coating, has been rubbed away a bit. You can see more of what is there, the hard and soft, but she is still my mother and she still does not surrender. Or maybe this is how I need to think about her—unconquerable.

  I rush up to retrieve her purse, which is full of dirty Kleenexes, loose charge cards, and an old Vuitton billfold I bought her in the city when she came to see The Lion King and I left the tickets in a suit I spilled syrup all over and sent to the dry cleaners. We have argued for hours about this trip to Tiger Place, which I have characterized—to her and myself—as simply an outing for information’s sake.

  As she sits on the couch outside the administrator’s office, she glares at me as if being sold into white slavery, gearing up for a battle I don’t have in me. She knows that if she fusses enough, I will fold and give up this whole idea.

  Waiting for our tour, Betty rummages in her purse, pretending to disregard the passersby, little ladies in groups, little birds in running shoes, who squint at her, assessing the new recruit. Betty just stares down at her old sandals, slowly pulls her feet back under the chair.

  Last evening, Betty was on an upswing. Studying a newspaper column, she yelled, “You’re too old” at the page, then looked at me. “She’s seventy,” she says, referring to a letter in an advice column. “Says intercourse is too painful. Fix me another gin and tonic.”

  “Please be quiet, Judy Garland.”

  I think she believed a hint of daring would change my mind about today’s mission. She doesn’t need to leave her home, not this cantankerous party girl. She looked at me expectantly. “I see through you,” I almost told her, but instead let her carry on until it was time to sleep and she realized I wasn’t giving up, that we would have to make this trip. All through the night, I got up, and up, and up again, finally heading up to visit the lonely dog who lay completely stretched out on the concrete floor of the pen, doing his best to cool himself. His yellow eyes shone in the dark as I splashed him with water from a pail I had brought for this purpose.

  At the convenience store where I stopped for powdered sugar doughnuts to spruce up Betty’s breakfast, I watched a man hand over a five and a one for cigarettes and a tiny Bic lighter. “I need thirty-two more cents,” the cashier said.

  “Well, you’re gonna have to git it from somebody who likes you more than me,” the man responded.

  “Oh, quiet down. I’m trying to do three things at once here. . . . Do you like my new eyebrows?”

  He just stared.

  “They’re tattoos.”

  . . .

  Everyone thinks Tiger Place is Betty’s best option. At the very least, even if she remains at home for a while longer or even permanently, we need a safety net, a plan in case she is suddenly beyond my care. The good places have waiting lists and she needs to be on one, to be prepared. She has always dreaded the idea of winding up at Monroe Manor, the senior citizens’ home in Paris where Mammy lived before her death.

  Run by the University of Missouri, Tiger Place is a cutting-edge facility that attracts retired professors or the parents of professors. For my mother, who does not see how lucky she would be to get admitted here, this cast is not a selling point. When Jackie, our guide, mentions the lectures by visiting scholars on fascinating contemporary subjects, Betty looks pained, bored in advance. She is not the type to sit and listen. At church, a few ministers back, she developed the habit of holding up her wristwatch when the old man got long-winded. A stimulating roundtable on The Vagina Monologues with a women’s studies professor is probably not going to make her day.

  “What is that?” she asks as I gaze at the lecture schedule. When I explain she asks if she will be able to get a gin and tonic.

  She may not even be accepted for admission. Residents must show that they are able to care for themselves and become part of the community. There is a list of criteria that people admitted here must meet. Betty, inclined to fall inside herself, to just not register the goings-on around her, to refuse to do what she is asked, may be beyond assisted living here. But I don’t want her to fail further and wind up somewhere dismal. Dementia or Alzheimer’s facilities would be the end of her. Without the stimulation of active people, she would fall fast and fade. But I can’t say these things to her and she won’t see that I am just trying to take care, to be the strong one now. For her.

  Last night, I heard her at the piano, when I thought she finally was in bed. The hymn she was playing was “Take My Life and Let It Be.”

  “Don’t play that,” I yelled out.

  “Well, what do you want me to play?”

  “Something cheerful.”

  “Wait for Christmas.”

  At Tiger Place, there are chairs upholstered in cheerful shades that make Betty grimace and carpet that, unlike our own, shows no spills. The residents are mostly younger and in better shape than my mother. Would she mix well, I wonder, try to socialize or hide in her room? Would she dress in the morning or just stay in her robe, as she does if I do not force the issue? Would the ladies, gathered in cliques, understand or shun her because of her eccentricities? I just don’t want to see her hurt.

  Dragging her feet down the hall, Betty looks a little sad like the kind of old lady she has never let herself become, but steels herself, trying to get through this day, to cooperate a little. My cousin Lucinda has joined us to
help out and Betty is more docile with her on hand.

  . . .

  No matter how I try to position Tiger Place as a fun-filled new lifestyle, as a relaxing relief from burdens, Betty will not participate in these fictions. She will not speak or comment as we are shown the studio, one-bedroom, and two-bedroom units that, empty for display, are okay but not especially inviting. “These rooms are empty,” she tells Jackie, who says that of course she would bring her furniture from home. “I would never bring my furniture here,” Betty exclaims. She doesn’t want to break up the house. Maybe because there is no place for most of her things to go.

  Our basement is piled with stuff. Late at night, I inspect everything as I listen for Betty to call out. I see what is ahead, picture the furniture lined up in the yard, all for sale—the antiques, chests with marble tops and tables, the candleholders, cups and saucers, the cloisonné, the brass tea set, the row of Japanese ladies from the top of the piano.

  “Remember,” Betty always says, “those are hand-painted.”

  I see the silver butter basket, the love seat my father refinished, the pie safe, Granny’s kneeling Buddha, the shiny cranes that Sade gave Granny, the kitchen things: the canisters and plates, the silverware, crocks and pots, cookie jars. Everything is for sale. Off to others. Someday soon. All the old things that witnessed everything, all the days and nights of our lives. I don’t have a place for them; this is a regret I have. The life that I’ve carved out is not equipped with extra rooms or empty cabinets. If Betty moves to Tiger Place, we may have to sell the house for financial reasons, depending on how long she lives.

  . . .

  I glance at Cinda, who has been the major reason for my maintaining a hint of sanity in the last few months. She looks at Betty and then at me as if to say, “What were you expecting?”