Bettyville

  What to wear? I sensed this a crucial, possibly life-altering decision. What did I have that was sexy? Nothing. Unbuttoning the top of my shirt, a white Lacoste chosen to show off what was left of my summer tan, I studied myself in the mirror before going to gargle again and brush my teeth more thoroughly. I had taken to smoking unfiltered Pall Malls after reading that they were the brand of my favorite writer, despite the fact that my lips stuck to the paper and any loose strands of tobacco. During my first month at the university my teeth appeared to be sprouting hairs.

  . . .

  Give or take Wray Chowning, the only gay people I had seen were a group of men in tiny swimsuits at the Chase Park Plaza pool in St. Louis where, a few summers before, I had gone with Betty and George for the weekend to go to the Municipal Opera, a huge open-air theater in Forest Park. Like a spy, I observed these men, but they ignored me, slathering tanning lotion over their already dark bodies and reading After Dark magazine as I struggled with a tube of Bain de Soleil, a product I considered luxurious and sensual that I had purchased at the hotel gift shop.

  I couldn’t stop looking at the men; I couldn’t stop staring at their bodies, the sun pressing my skin as the children raced around screaming and I rubbed the lotion into my chest. I can remember its smell. Betty wore sunglasses. No one would ever know what she saw, though it was unlikely that she could have imagined the scenes floating through my head as I leaned back on my sun chair and closed my eyes.

  That night, at The Music Man, Big George hummed loudly along with every number as if those gathered under the stars had come to hear him and not Eddie Albert. It was one of the moments when his desire for attention felt uncomfortably close to desperation. Betty, bored immediately by Marian the Librarian, mostly ignored the show, focusing on my father and whispering to me. “If he as much as sings one note,” she began.

  “Maybe he’ll get discovered.”

  “Do you think we could leave at intermission? You could tell him you have sunburn.”

  “He likes the barbershop numbers . . .”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of. He’ll give a concert.”

  “I’m hoping Marian gets murdered.”

  “She’s not that pretty.”

  “She’s bookish.”

  I didn’t care whether we stayed or left. I was still back at the pool, lying in the hot sun, fantasizing about rubbing someone’s smooth bare back with Bain de Soleil.

  . . .

  On the night of the meeting of the Gay People’s Alliance, reeking of antiperspirant, I sneaked out of the dorm, nervous but able to find the Ecumenical Center in about four minutes. I sat down on a bench near some tennis courts. It was after 4 p.m. Hours to spare. I am never, ever late. Scoping out the parking lot, I checked for familiar cars, feeling under surveillance somehow. Evelyn Fleming, visiting Jack at the Theta House, might feel drawn to a discussion of nonviolence. I kept my eyes on the door of the center, trying to see who entered. I wanted to be touched; I had waited and waited. I wanted to be with someone.

  Finally, I went in, suddenly tense, trembling on the inside. Scanning the room, I got more and more upset, so anxious I could barely move toward a chair. I did not think I could speak. If no one tried to talk to me, it would be a mercy.

  I left my body; this had never happened. I felt about to break open. Part of me fled and I fell into a full-fledged panic. I had been so looking forward to this night, but it looked like none of this was going to work, and if it didn’t I didn’t know what I would do.

  Larry, a bearded, thirtyish professor, appeared to be the head of it all. His haircut suggested an affiliation with the medieval period.

  “Are you out to your parents?” he asked, and when I shook my head, he added, “Knowing parents are rare animals.”

  I was still panicked and could barely listen. I felt as though I had disappeared. This wasn’t going to work.

  A man in a wheelchair in a jaunty black beret gave me a look meant to be kind, but I was almost sick. When another man, Gene, held out his hand, it was impossible for me to accept it. I was frozen, felt bad, guilty to be thought unfriendly, but I just could not reach back.

  It was hard to breathe.

  I could not look at the faces. I could not look up at all. I was sorry I had come. It was just all wrong. It wasn’t going to work. It was harder here than anywhere; I felt worse than ever.

  Staring at the tabletop, I noticed my sweaty handprints on the table as, humiliated and ashamed of myself, I tried to listen to Larry talk about some Supreme Court decision.

  The trip back to the dorm seemed to last for hours, but I didn’t notice anything I passed. I was not there. I knew only that some part of my self went away, left me alone, ripped open in front of everyone. I had never heard anyone describe such a reaction to anything and was terrified that this would happen every time I went in public as gay. In my room, I sat down on the bed. I had soaked my shirt clear through and it hung on my body, so wet, as if someone had pushed me into the deep end of a pool.

  . . .

  A few months after my debut, I returned to the meeting. I felt I had to; I had to get a life. I needed help to get my bearings in this life.

  A man named Michael, a medical resident, seemed to be sizing me up at the meeting as I tried to listen to the dialog. Feeling his eyes on me, I turned to see if he was looking at someone behind me, but there was no one. We looked a little bit alike and somehow I knew that this had attracted him.

  Several months later, at a fish restaurant where Michael took me, my first date, it happened again, the bad thing. I started shaking again, leaving my body. I thought that Michael had plans for me for later on. I wanted this and didn’t. Again, so tense, I broke into a sweat. He talked and talked about San Francisco, where he said everything was happening, but I could not speak. I was embarrassed. But it didn’t matter. He took me to his apartment where there were textbooks and a pile of porno magazines. I felt so far away from home. I knew this man was going to give me nothing. I knew he wasn’t going to help me out.

  That night: a bizarre physical encounter, bargain-basement love, no kisses or hugs. Quickly after, Michael announced he was taking me home. It was maybe 2 a.m. I seemed to have misplaced several articles of clothing. Where my new pair of flesh-toned bikini underwear had lodged themselves seemed a mystery I was too exhausted to contemplate. Moving on to check out Michael’s desk, I found a pad of paper and a pen. I wrote, “You’re an asshole” on one page and moved quickly away from the desk when he returned.

  Back at the dorm where he dropped me off, I realized that I was missing my card key. I walked back to the bench by the tennis courts and sat down, waiting for morning. A block away was the Phi Delta Theta house where Jack Fleming was probably prodding the new guys with a red-hot poker or forcing them to clean the basement in their underwear. What would Evelyn make of my night with Michael? I could not imagine she would approve. I figured that in the years ahead a lot of people would stop speaking to me.

  On the day I went to the Ecumenical Center, as I started into the building, I thought of what my parents would think as I stood at the door I was trying to figure out how to open. I felt that if I stepped through that door I would be leaving them behind. I felt like I was losing something that connected us, something good. I felt like I was leaving behind the way I was taught to live.

  . . .

  A few years before I arrived at the University of Missouri, the gay organization that I attended later, at the Ecumenical Center, had sued the university for the right to meet within the official borders of the campus. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which ultimately ruled in favor of the gays. On the night that the group made its first entrance into the Student Union, I was standing on the sidelines, not ready to march through the streets in front of my friends or have Jack Fleming pelt me with a beer can. I could not quite take in what I was seeing: Dozens of frat boys were
throwing rocks, rotten food, and water balloons at the marchers. I watched in disbelief. Where were the police? A woman with a guitar led the gay procession, which was far outnumbered by the crowd who had gathered to disrespect and disparage them. The marchers were not the type I had glimpsed in photographs from Greenwich Village or the Castro. They were, with a few exceptions, neither beautiful, nor well dressed, nor those who might have easily blended into the world of their persecutors. It seemed that at this time, in this place, it was only the loneliest, the most alienated who craved acceptance or affirmation desperately enough to risk a public stoning.

  Mary Maune, head of the Association of Women Students, had a tape recorder. A journalism student, she was covering the event for radio station KBIA. She looked astonished when she—a student leader, a well-groomed, achievement-oriented sorority member—was hit and bloodied with something sharp by a beefy frat boy in chinos from Mr. Guy.

  The man in the wheelchair from the meeting, moving the most slowly, was an especially vulnerable target. The jaunty black beret atop his disbelieving, shattered face did not fare well. I noticed egg yolks dripping from his wheels. The boys on the sidelines were screaming something like, “Faggots die. Faggots die. Off this campus. Off this campus.”

  I was shaking, but I had to help him. Together with one of the other onlookers, we carried the man in the wheelchair up the stairs and into the union. I was afraid I would drop my wheel. He recognized me, put his hand on my arm, but I ran.

  . . .

  Although my mother has been consistent when it comes to discussing, or actually not discussing, my life, other people have surprised me sometimes. As it happened, Evelyn Fleming was my friend as long as she lived. After my father died, when I was back in the city, she called me up to find out how I was doing. Everyone else asked after my mother. She asked about me, took the trouble to find my far-off number. There is kindness, people who never fail you. There are others who do.

  A few years back, Betty and I stopped by the Flemings’ house when they were packing up to go to a senior community near Kansas City. Jack, who had married a born-again Christian from Oklahoma, would not as much as look in my direction. I tried not to feel I had been slapped in the face.

  I don’t get many unfriendly or judgmental vibes here in Paris, though a woman from church never, ever responds when I say hello. Every time someone doesn’t speak or looks at me with an expression I cannot fathom, I think it is because of who I am. It has been this way forever; this kind of reaction feels to be bred in the bone, especially in territory where I feel isolated.

  . . .

  All through this afternoon, Betty coughs and coughs. When she dozes on the couch in the living room, glimpses of other women, her grandmother Anna, whose face I have seen in old photos; Bess; Nona; and perhaps others I never knew, drift across her face. The women she is from are there, in her chin, cheekbones, and slender nose. Mammy, though, is the one I see the most. Mammy is in her eyes. When my mother plays “His Eye Is on the Sparrow,” on the piano, she always reminds me that this was my grandmother’s favorite. “She couldn’t sing, but she liked it enough to listen when she heard it.” I see Mammy in her hat with one side dented in, that same old hat, sitting in a hot summer church, cooling herself with a paper fan with the image of Jesus rising on one side and the name Thompson-Mackler, the local funeral parlor, on the back. Clearing her throat—my mother’s family has waged a decades-long battle with phlegm—she looks about to doze.

  . . .

  Mammy’s family were farm people. Sometimes it is simple to imagine them, those who lived here once, all the good people, crossing the river, coming in from the country for church on Sunday mornings with clean, coerced hair and their best clothes. Think of wrinkled faces, mischievous eyes, hands in immaculate white gloves, wistfulness, innocence, worry over money, or crops, or sickness.

  Think of the men, itchy to get back to work; mayors and merchants in their hard-pressed white shirts, tight collars, and stiff coats; lacy girls in ribbons; stoic boys, uncomfortable in their finery, confined in rarely worn shiny shoes; big-boned farm women with ample bosoms in dime-store brooches; old, milky-eyed codgers, freshly shaved with a few hairs still peeking out of their ears and noses; mothers with careful glances, pulling their kids away from puddles, holding their hands, smoothing their hair, and wiping their cheeks.

  I picture them all moving across the land, the days, through time, crossing Main Street, clutching their crosses and Bibles, trying to stay pretty, trying to look pious, walking together, traveling in their snorting, hard-to-start cars, or heading toward town in their buggies or on horseback to bow their heads and pray together to Jesus, who, in the stories I read, stood for love, charity, and kindness offered every day to others, even those unlike ourselves. Kindness may be the most difficult of virtues, but when I have encountered it, it has meant everything to me.

  12

  Sunday is frying eggs and trying not to break the yolks; getting Betty off to church; Parade magazine; big men streaking down Main Street on Harleys with their hair blowing from their helmets; the long, silent afternoon. August is beginning to wane. I don’t want to get up; it’s barely 6 a.m., but I hear my mother in the living room, playing the piano.

  Last night, strange news: A young man whose family sold tractors in Madison—a jolly-looking kid with a belly and bushy beard—was shot and killed, apparently by homeless people staying with him. The murderer or murderers are still at large. Taking all this in, I saw that a friend of the dead man had posted photos on Facebook, including one of the scene of the crime. “We had real good parties here,” the caption said. “RIP.”

  I knew the place. It was Mammy’s house on Olive Street, remodeled now, with a wishing well where her garden was. Apparently not long ago a meth lab in the kitchen where my grandmother rolled flour for bread blew a hole through the roof.

  I chased lightning bugs across Mammy’s yard on nights in the summer as, across the street, the old ladies in the neighborhood—my grandmother, Bassett, Dolly, Mary Virginia, and Virgie—chatted away on Dolly’s porch in their nightgowns, taking in the cool air.

  Betty said nothing when I told her of the murder. We’d had a bad scene and she wasn’t speaking to me. For days I had searched for an old clipping—a story about Ella Ewing, the giantess circus performer whose shoes hang at the state capitol. I thought maybe I could try to write something about her, and the article was loaned to me by the historical society. But nothing ever stays put here, and finally Betty admitted to throwing it away. She wouldn’t say why. It wasn’t the first time something like this had happened. What is mine is hers.

  “Dammit,” I yelled. “You won’t throw away your Kleenexes. But the one thing I need, you throw away. It wasn’t mine. Couldn’t you have asked? It was in a Ziploc bag. Didn’t it occur to you that someone was saving it?”

  Betty, who never yells, looked back in disbelief, so upset, rising shakily from her chair, not able to cope with this. She began to make her sounds, as if trying to maintain some sort of equilibrium. Clutching the sides of her gown, she fled the kitchen as if attacked, making her way down the hall as fast as she could to her room where she closed the door. I thought I had made her cry and lay down on the couch shaking, knowing I had gone too far. On the rare occasions when my anger comes out, it’s a river that can’t be easily dammed up. I pressed my lips together hard, hoping my mouth would not fly open again.

  I found Betty in her room, sitting—as she always does—at the far edge of her high bed, about to slide off, her hand cradling the side of her head. I tried to apologize, but couldn’t make it right.

  “It’s the first time you’ve ever sworn at me.” That’s all she could say. She looked shocked, as if someone had died, passed away from her. I didn’t know whether she was angry at herself or mourning the son who never raised his voice to her. She would accept no apologies and now it is Sunday and I still feel terrible.

&
nbsp; . . .

  I can’t seem to get out of bed, though I need to make breakfast. “What’s wrong with you, Betty? What’s wrong with you? Why did you do that?” Betty is upset, talking to herself at the piano. She has played the wrong note. Later she is to accompany the choir at church and, scared of embarrassing herself, has gotten up early to practice. She still drives herself when she is scheduled to perform. The music stops; she coughs. I hope she won’t make more mistakes. A fragile bundle in pink flannel, she is sitting at the piano in the living room as the sun begins to fall through the lace curtains she says will crumble if washed once more.

  “It’s imported,” she says of the fabric. “Switzerland. Somewhere.”

  Betty is making her way slowly through “Take the Time to Be Holy.” Not as sure or certain at the keyboard as she was, she hits a few clunkers. Each one hurts us both, tearing into our pictures of the woman we remember, shoulders held stiffly erect as she played, never hitting a wrong note. “Hold up your shoulders,” Mammy always told her. “Hold up your shoulders.” If her posture sagged, her father walked up behind her and struck her between the shoulder blades.

  “Why did you play that?” my mother asks herself. “You know better than that.” I get angry along with her when she makes a mistake. I get mad when she is less than she was.

  Every time she plays, it’s more of a trial. She will no longer allow me to accompany her to church. She does not want me to hear her.

  The piano has been my mother’s instrument since she was a girl taking lessons from Miss Elizabeth Richmond in Madison. Trudging through the street with her music books, she probably dawdled a bit, stopping to look at the windows of Chowning’s Dry Goods, run by Wray’s father, Scott, or stopping at the Rexall if she had the money for a stick of candy or an orange slice. “We weren’t poor poor,” Mammy always said. “But we were poor.”