Bettyville

I don’t know. The Golden Girls?

  “Is she a craftsperson?” Jackie asks, but Betty, who rolls her eyes at this, does not knit or embroider. She does not tat or sew and is not the type to linger over the creation of a lap robe. She cannot see well enough, nor does she have the patience. She is irritable, and now sometimes a challenge. Though she tries her best, she cannot always remember names. How can she make friends if she cannot call their names out? Who will come and sit by her? She has no hobbies; she once had friends instead. But now the country club in Moberly, where the couples of her generation once gathered for dinners, is gone, torn down. Moberly is no longer a place where many people can afford a country club. My mother grieved for months.

  I try to smile at Betty, but she looks away. I try to walk with her, but she won’t let me be The Son. “Please let me do for you,” I want to say. “Please let me help you. Maybe I can surprise you, make this all a little easier.” But she has to do everything on her own or it is cheating, breaking a rule.

  She suddenly looks tired and whispers to me that she just wants to go home, but Cinda and I guide her toward the exercise area. She looks dispirited and a fraction of her former height. Unwrapping a tiny Snickers square, I hold it out as Betty eyes an exercise bicycle as if it were a guillotine. Staring at me, perturbed, she shakes her head. Nor does the prospect of yoga in a chair arouse her enthusiasm. “What kind of thing is that to do?” she asks.

  “I want to go home,” she whispers to Cinda. “I want to go home.” So do I, but we can’t. We have to forge ahead. I have to lead; it’s my responsibility.

  She stumbles on a stair. She is wearing the terrible sandals, a concession I have allowed today. Braving her resistance to public endearment, I kiss her head, but she pulls it away. “You won’t let him leave me here, will you?” she asks Cinda. I realize that she believes I have brought her here to abandon her. This is actually what she thinks. She believes I want to run away and leave her. Clearly I am, in her mind, the Joan Crawford of elder care.

  “Tonight,” I tell her, “we’ll buy peaches; we’ll go to the Junction for prime rib. We’ll do whatever you want.” But she will not listen. Perhaps because she feels I hold power over her, I am the enemy. When I turn to face her, she still refuses to look at me at all. She smiles at Cinda, her new ally, the one she considers persuadable, as I resist the urge to fold into the yoga chair and begin a round of chanting.

  “Are you aware of the concept of being mindful?” Jackie asks my mother. Spotting a nearby men’s room, I wonder if can work in a quick autoasphyxiation.

  We see the library, a movie theater where popcorn is served, a beauty parlor. The main room for gatherings is dominated by a huge flat-screen television tuned to a game show. “I hate Wheel of Fortune,” Betty says to Jackie. “Is that Wheel of Fortune? Every time I turn my back, someone puts on Wheel of Fortune.”

  Watching Betty at Tiger Place, Cinda looks at me and seems for the most part amused. Again and again, she saves us: She knows the right questions to ask, makes a note or two as Jackie explains the walking tests administered each month, the bus for church pickups and shopping trips, the stages of care: Stage One, Stage Two. There are four stages. I think I may be a Seven.

  When I manage to come up with an inquiry that actually seems on point—“Is there anyone to make sure she takes all her pills in the morning?”—Betty interjects, “I can take my own medicine.” But she doesn’t, and every time I hold them out she asks the same question: “What are these? Who said I had to take so many?” She acts like taking pills is some sort of hard labor.

  Jackie introduces my mother to a woman with a fancy blouse passing by. “Do you play bridge?” Betty asks. When the woman, who looks a little startled, shakes her head, Betty turns away from her, stares at me coldly. I have promised cards. I want to ask the woman if she likes Wheel of Fortune, but Betty would tell me I am not as funny as I think I am.

  “Older people eat small meals,” says Jackie as we head into the dining room for lunch. “They don’t get hungry like we do.” Cinda is a little taken aback, as am I. My mother eats enough for a camp of lumberjacks in the Maine woods. Betty asks of the lunch, “Are they going to charge us for this?” Jackie overhears and assures us that the meal is complimentary. “Well,” Betty says moments later, staring down at what seems only the suggestion of a hamburger, “it better be.

  “Don’t you offer to pay,” she whispers to me.

  After lunch, we sit for a while in a courtyard filled with flowers. Betty, dejected, reaches out to snap a deadhead off a geranium. I like the courtyard and preparations are under way for a party that evening. It is someone’s birthday. Jackie tells us that she is so devoted to the residents here that she got married in the courtyard.

  I would have chosen Chipotle. “Where did you honeymoon?” I want to ask.

  . . .

  The Tiger Place courtyard is a lovely place and some of the apartments have screened-in porches that look out onto this area. Sitting by the flowers, Betty rests, focusing on the blossoms. For years she has taken flowers to people from church who are sick and alone. Hour after hour, I have watched her standing by the kitchen table, arranging the stems.

  “Who tends to these?” she asks Jackie. “It looks like they do a pretty good job.” It is her one concession.

  The trek through these halls has worn her down and lunch has certainly not satisfied. “Did you get a look at that hamburger?” she asks me. I say nothing. “No bigger than a half dollar,” she adds.

  Maybe I should just give up and let her be, I think, stay in Paris, see her through for as long as it takes. Then I tell myself I am an idiot for always going soft. That is not what the real Betty, who would have run me back to New York with a pitchfork, would have wanted me to do. She would have ordered me to live my life. Of all the changes that have transpired in my mother, it is this new belief that I should give everything up to stay with her that is the most surprising. This tells me just how worried she is, how much she cannot bear to leave her home.

  “I know where everything is here,” Betty said the other day, making her way down the hall at home. “I don’t have to think about it. I just know. Even at night. I don’t even have to see.”

  . . .

  In my mind, I line them up for the auctioneer: the stubby pencils that say BAKER LUMBER, my mother’s coats and scarves, Mammy’s pins, Oscar’s Smith Corona, Wray Chowning’s family photographs, Granny’s china, a jar from Aunt Winnie’s porch. What will not make it? What, meaningful only to me, will be lost or burned? The years of photos, the family letters, touched by many, that said love or mourned a passing, the greetings from the war, the cards from many distant travels—the girls from Hawaii doing hula, the greetings sent from the Muehlebach in Kansas City during the lumbermen’s convention, the vistas of the faraway Pacific that Mammy sent Betty, just married. What will become of these things? I feel like I should have made a place for all this. For generations—my father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and before and before—there have been George Hodgmans, and one day there will be none and it is a bit hard not to feel disappointed that I am the one to close the book on all of us.

  . . .

  Betty looks so woebegone when I explain to Jackie that I want us to go on the waiting list that I cannot look back at her. It is just a backup—I keep repeating this, trying to make myself believe this, to make Betty understand, but she just shakes her head as Cinda and I follow Jackie into the office to get the form to fill out and write a check. We have to do this. We have to make sure she has a pleasant place if she must leave home.

  Betty will be number eight on the list; she can waive entry three times before she is taken off the list. Before she actually enters, she will have to undergo an assessment designed to test her level of self-sufficiency and “cognitive functioning.” The application fee is a nonrefundable thousand dollars, which I do not tell my mother about.

  As
I turn the corner to do the paperwork, I catch sight of Betty. When she thinks no one is looking, she reaches out for another flower and yanks the brown top off with force. The sun makes her wrinkles stand out. When I return to her side, she says again, “I want to go home.” She rests her hand on mine just for a second. “Please, George,” she says. “Please.”

  “Mother, you’ve been so lucky,” I tell her.

  “Oh, you think so?” she asks, her tone implying that there are things I will never know, things she did for me that I cannot fathom.

  I think Betty will never live at Tiger Place. She is falling too fast. Soon, I am afraid, she will be beyond movies with popcorn or exercise bicycles, though maybe she will remember flowers. Maybe she will find herself, on some future morning, running her finger along the glass of a painting in a hall she does not recognize, recalling in some corner of her mind the fat buds of her mother’s roses growing in her old front yard. On Facebook, a lady wrote that the days she gets to be with those she loves are “gold-star days.” I often tell Betty that these are our gold-star days. I have tried to make them special so she can carry pieces of these times in her memory. I am trying to pack her bag with things that might draw her back to herself someday.

  I wonder if she will remember the cinnamon toast I make on Friday mornings. I wonder if she will recall Mammy washing her hair in rainwater from an old tin pan.

  . . .

  All the way home from Columbia, I break the speed limit. I want to check on the dog. I want to put an end to this day. My mother is mostly silent. She can no longer deny what is happening and she is plotting, planning her attack. As we travel, Betty’s mood shifts. Suddenly, she is nice, so nice, too nice. Butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. She asks me if I need money. I turn the radio up. It is Reverend Lucius Love’s gospel hour. I need some lifting up.

  When I was in high school, a man named Harold Long preached at the AME church, across the tracks from the white part of town, even then. One of his sisters, whose first name I wish I could remember, was in my mixed chorus class. She was big; her feet bulged out below the straps of her shoes. Stepping up on the bleachers winded her. But I always listened for her. There were all our voices singing together, and there was her voice, full of church, and the people she had come from, and feeling. Her emotion changed the face of an ordinary day and I was drawn by it. Now there are only two black students at Paris High School, both mixed race. The others attend a school called Faith Walk run by one of the African American churches. “I don’t know if it’s segregation,” says a friend, “or if it’s more a matter of the black parents not wanting their kids around the shit the white kids are pulling.”

  If there was ever a time when I was convinced there was a God in the universe holding out his hand to me, it was when the Long sisters performed “I Believe.”

  “If you stayed in Paris, you could keep that dog,” Betty declares suddenly, eyes glinting as if she has just been dealt a winning hand at the bridge table. She is playing for freedom. I have always enjoyed watching my mother in action. There is love and there is survival. At the moment, the latter can be her only concern. She will do whatever is necessary. Her independence is at stake. Her everything. Home.

  I don’t want to take away her home.

  “Can’t we just go on the way we are, just a little while longer?” she asks. “It won’t be forever.”

  “You look pretty healthy.”

  “I could die tomorrow.”

  “I told you to get a flu shot.”

  The ensuing moments do not fly by.

  “Mother, can’t you see that I am trying to do everything I can to make you happy? Trust me, please. I’ll take care of you. I will do right by you.”

  “I know,” she says. “I know.” And I think she actually believes it, that I can do it, that I can make it, somehow, okay. Outside it is so hot that steam is rising from the highway. When I was in high school, I brought Mammy, very old then and not far from her death, home from the doctor in Columbia on an old country road. Her eyes never left the window; it seemed as though she was watching something, though she could barely see. Whatever it was, it pleased her. Finally, outside Centralia, she spoke. “Look at all those pretty cows,” said my grandmother, the old woman who still remembered the farm. The blades of the windmills still turned slowly in the breeze off the fields in her mind’s eye.

  “Look at those little calves,” she said, directing my attention to the window. But the pastures we were passing were empty. There was nothing there but the strip of highway running toward Paris and the room at Monroe Manor where she lived by then.

  11

  On the table by my bed, I keep a picture of Mammy as a young woman in her hat with the side dented in, a heavy suit with a long skirt, a white blouse with ruffles, carefully ironed. Beside her, a suitcase; behind her, a railroad track and a boxcar with an open door. In the far distance, a long expanse of flat American land, a line of bare trees with thin branches dwarfed by the wide-open sky clear of clouds.

  “Where were you going?” I want to ask her, but I’ll never know.

  I see her, decades later, reaching up to hang laundry on the line, clean clothes slapping in the wind.

  The woman who will become my grandmother is alone in the photograph by my bedside and does not appear happy or eager to travel. She is a farm girl from a big family with a reasonable number of acres on the outskirts of a town called Clarence. Maybe she is leaving home, perhaps departing for the women’s college—Hardin, in Mexico, Missouri—where she learned Latin. Maybe she is off to teach in another place. Her eyes are closed, perhaps because of the sun, or the fact that she is reluctant to be photographed, or because she is in tears.

  A few years after the picture was taken, she would marry Joe Baker, back in Missouri after a few years in Alabama—Tuscaloosa, it said in his obituary—working in a John Deere factory. In photographs, my grandfather has shadows around his deep-set eyes. I never knew him; years before I was born, he sat down at the lunch table and died after a heart attack. During my lifetime he was never spoken of. None of them, not Mammy or Betty or Bill or Harry, ever told us anything about him. All Betty will say when asked about him is that he was “a very nice man.”

  The picture of my grandmother was taken almost a century ago, when hundreds and hundreds of small farms dotted this area and it was rare for anyone to leave home, especially a young woman. Today, most of the land around the county is owned by a half a dozen or so families who pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for huge implements, large operations stitched together from dozens of the sort of little farms where Bill Baker once stopped on Sundays to deliver parts while June waited in the car, doing crewel embroidery.

  “How cruel is it?” I asked her once, thinking myself extremely witty.

  “It’s a bitch,” she said.

  . . .

  I did not leave home on a train. My father drove me in our blue Oldsmobile, and, riding in the front seat, Betty kept turning around to look at me. I thought she was giving me fond parting glances, but soon she offered a comment: “I cannot believe you did not get a haircut before you left.”

  When we got to the dorm room, she glanced at me, looking tender and a little lost, but left quickly. My mother and I hate good-byes.

  The previous spring, the fraternities at the university had begun to host prerush parties for potential members. At an event at the Phi Delta Theta house where I had been invited by Jack Fleming—the son of Betty’s best friend, Evelyn—I ducked out early. While others bonded over a trailer-sized keg, I was downtown watching Barbra Streisand in A Star Is Born for the fourth time. I just wanted Kris Kristofferson to go ahead and kill himself so Barbra could sing the closer. I believe she had the same idea.

  At home, late that night after my drive back to Paris, I confessed ditching the Phi Delts to my devastated mother, who wrung her hands like a peasant woman told her village is burning
. I expected a seizure. Glancing away, I saw my father down the hall, heading toward the kitchen. Taking a look at our expressions, he hotfooted it back to bed after mimicking my mother’s scolding finger and making a face at me. I flipped him the bird.

  “What,” she asked, “am I supposed to say to Evelyn? This will kill Evelyn. She went out of her way.”

  I hate it when someone goes out of their way for me. It makes me feel guilty. “Please no,” I say if someone wants to do me a favor. I pictured Mrs. Fleming, waxlike and stiffened laid out at the Theta house for viewing, dressed in an ensemble from the Tall Girl’s Shop. I had known her since I was a child; now she would hate me. Proprieties were important to her. She was an elegant woman who, if I was eating at her table, always came up behind me to rest her hands on my shoulders. I liked it, but didn’t want it to happen very often.

  I wanted to please Evelyn, but I wouldn’t change my mind about the fraternity. Despite Betty’s repeated pleas, I refused to pledge, put my foot down for the first time. My mother attempted to stare me into submission, but found someone looking right back as determined as she was. I held firm; for me it was an emergency. No way could I be in that place; those guys would make my life miserable.

  Freshman year, 1977, at the University in Columbia: guys throwing footballs in the dorm halls, running around naked, snapping towels. In my dorm room, I hung a giant poster of Monet’s Water Lilies. Acquired on a high school trip to St. Louis, my masterwork had not drawn the praise I expected. A boy from Hornersville, Missouri, asked, “What exactly is that supposed to represent?”

  “Floating flowers,” I said.

  “God Almighty,” he replied.

  The first week of school, the student newspaper, the Maneater, published a notice about a Gay People’s Alliance meeting at the Ecumenical Center off campus on Tuesdays at 7 p.m. I figured I should try to go. I had to. I was desperate. I had to get my life going, somehow. By 2 p.m. on Tuesday, I was stepping into the shower, cleansing thoroughly before Right Guarding myself so generously that I did not anticipate perspiring again until at least my midthirties.