Bettyville

  Betty’s gentle touch at the piano, the soft way she rests her fingers on the keys and makes the music flow, remains. There is such sweet feeling when she touches the keys. The piano is where she hides a certain part of herself that must be kept covered up and safe.

  I don’t want her to have to stop playing in church. I don’t want her to stop trying. I don’t want to lose the part of her I feel when she makes music, that softness. Betty has always been a little tough on me; to her that is a mother’s job. When I notice who she becomes at the piano or, on occasion, with other people, I find myself a little envious.

  . . .

  Every year after my father died, I came back in late August to check on things. About ten years ago, I arrived in the midst of a summer blooming everywhere, blessed by rain enough to fill the rivers and please the farmers. On the way home from the airport, I could do nothing but stare out the window. In the early mornings, the branches of my father’s trees looked to be floating in hazy green clouds.

  For weeks, I had gotten surprising reports from my cousins. Betty had a beau. I was the last to be told. Maybe she had always wished I would confide in her and this was her response to my silence. Maybe she thought the subject of love was off-limits, since I have never shared anything. Maybe she had been hurt by this.

  Perhaps she believed I would think her disloyal to my father, but I didn’t. I loved seeing her this way: happy, purely happy, and not just for a moment as a wave of enthusiasm passed across her face.

  Her boyfriend was a former postman and recent widower named John Hickey. His wife, Charlotte, always wore a fishing hat, decorated with tackles, to church and sat on the side where we do when Betty doesn’t play. She was formidable and, like Betty, was gifted at the piano. John was briefly adrift after Charlotte died before falling into the arms of another strong woman: Betty. More than eighty years old, he remained the little boy lost, dependent on a woman to handle what he couldn’t or didn’t want to. So Betty took control. She ran the show, as she often had with my dad. From what I could see, my mother had taken over John’s life, helping him with everything that Charlotte took charge of. Betty and John stepped right back into what they’d had before with others, the unspoken arrangement of things that couples come to. Maybe I was jealous.

  “You could let him make the occasional decision,” I told her.

  “I make what he wants to eat.”

  “He’s sluggish. He goes to sleep. Last night I looked over and thought he was dead.”

  “He’s not dead. He carried the mail.”

  “Can’t you find someone a little more lively?”

  “It’s not so easy,” she said, laughing a little, “after eighty.” After she started seeing John, Betty began going to St. Louis to get her hair done. Out of her crazy, messy drawers came a foggy bottle of L’Air du Temps. Spritzed onto her wrist and neck, it scented her room, and sometimes I stuck my head in to smell the fragrance that settled comfortably into everything. Granny’s bedroom also smelled of perfume. I remembered the old days back in St. Louis when, escaping from the others, my mother and I sat in front of my grandmother’s vanity with its silver combs and brushes. I studied my mother’s face in the mirror as she shyly reached out to try a bit of Granny’s perfume, which she dabbed on her wrist and held out for me to inhale. “Don’t,” I told her, when she sprayed a little on my skin. “Granny will see.”

  That summer when John arrived in our lives, a coating of pink polish mysteriously appeared on my mother’s fingernails. The weather seemed to inspire our sense of a world working out as it should, at its best. Betty called me out to the deck to see the mother deer and her fawn who emerged every night from the woods behind the house around the time the sun set. She was so warm that summer, my mother. She touched everything gently, including me.

  John had a catfish pond, and sometimes we drove down there in his golf cart, my mother beside him, me sitting on the back and usually falling off. Betty laughed as I ran to catch up, and all was well. She and John had gone on one date in high school, which he had forgotten, though Betty remembered. I suspected that she had been hurt when he hadn’t called again. It was clear that she had always been attracted to him, but I had never heard her as much as mention his name.

  “I guess I wasn’t pretty enough for him to ask out a second time,” she said to me as John listened.

  “Maybe you was too bossy,” he said. Now and then he rose to the occasion. He had been a great baseball player and, he claimed, almost made the Cardinals.

  When he spoke of his prowess on the field, I rolled my eyes at Betty. “Shut up,” she mouthed silently.

  . . .

  John had a dog called Bob he had found as a puppy by the side of the road. I thought Bob was just some kind of bird dog, but John swore he was a genuine German shorthair and vowed there were “papers on him somewhere” as Betty looked slightly dubious. Bob had purplish spots—liver spots, I think they are called—and a head that reminded me of a jockey in a cap, his long ears falling straight down like flaps. He was an impressive creature, so alert he seemed to zip in a straight line to his destination like an arrow in flight. When he ran through the yard, one could see how perfect was the curve of his chest.

  Betty adored Bob, maybe even more than John. I have rarely seen her so taken with any living creature. He ran toward her, jumped up to greet her every time she came around. Betty knelt to pet him, to stroke his soft ears, to contradict whatever John told him. She laughed when he approached, and saved him scraps from the table. “Don’t touch that,” Betty would say if I tried to throw something away. “That’s for Bob.”

  Not long before my trip home, Bob had gotten sick and was hacking away, spitting up. Worried, they took him in the Cadillac to Monroe City to the vet. He sat up front, wiggling and squirming, with my mother in back trying to calm him down. “Here we were,” Betty told me, “these two old people trying to get this crazy dog who wouldn’t sit still, who was just all over everything, who I was just waiting to see spit up all over that Cadillac, to Monroe City to the doctor’s. It was like a little adventure. I like to think we saved him.”

  Bob came along when John took Betty and me for rides through the country in his Cadillac. Because he had carried the mail, he knew all the back roads, the way to the covered bridge and to places by the Salt River where the breeze was cool. Betty loved sitting up in the front seat and waving at the other widows who got together at each other’s houses. “They play dominoes,” she remarked.

  We went to Hannibal to gaze over the Mississippi. We went to prime rib night at the Junction. John helped my mother plant rows of daylilies along the side of our driveway. Watching him trying to stoop over to plant bulbs, I found myself liking him more than I ever had before.

  “Are you going to marry him?” I asked her.

  “Are you kidding? I get enough of him.”

  “He doesn’t want to?”

  “I don’t know. Not exactly. He’s too cheap. He’s afraid I’d spend all his money.”

  “Is he rich?”

  “If he was rich, we’d be married . . . That was a good one. I made you laugh.” She looked surprised. “I made you laugh.”

  . . .

  Betty is pretending to be mad because it distracts her from thinking about how nervous she is to perform at a church where people have heard her play the piano for twenty-five years.

  “How do I look?” she asks before I take her to church.

  “You look lovely, younger than you have any right to.” I put my hand on her shoulder. I try to touch her gently as I am sometimes awkward.

  “Can I please help you?” I ask.

  “No one can help me . . . the forgetting,” she says, conceding, breaking the silence for the first time. Her hands are shaking; she assesses them as if they were trapped inside a pair of ugly gloves. I don’t know if she can play the piano. I don’t want her to break down in fro
nt of everyone.

  Suddenly, she looks exhausted; I go to hunt some makeup. When I return, she is glaring at a commercial for a new burger from Hardee’s. Called the Jim Beam Thickburger, it is made with whiskey and appears to be larger than the head of the average construction worker.

  “Look at that man eat that hamburger,” Betty says. I want to kick the television because it is so unfair that everything she has is being taken away.

  13

  After I have Betty tucked away at church with the hymns marked in her book, I start my errands and ask God, if he is listening, to help my mom. Please. At the convenience store, the boy who mows our lawn bends over the sharp rocks around the bushes, hunting something. His jeans are too long and baggy. He wears his gray parka with the hood up, even as the heat builds. It is hard to see his face; it’s just a pale blur. Paying for my gas, I see that he is holding a Band-Aid box and ask the man at the counter, “What is that kid doing?”

  Looking for cigarette butts, the man tells me. “He does it all the time.”

  “Do you know him?” I ask. “He’s from around the lake,” I am told. “What lake?”

  “I don’t know,” the man says. “One of them.”

  At Hickman’s IGA, Earl Davis—Freddy’s brother—loads groceries, as he has for decades. I think he is wearing the same clothes he wore in high school. The last time I saw Freddy, he was standing in the parking lot behind an insurance office that he cleaned on weekends. I was in college then, lucky enough to have parents who could afford to buy me a little freedom. That summer, I had interned in D.C., where I met someone who meant something to me. Of course I would never have admitted that to anyone, him especially, though in my mind he had become my boyfriend.

  . . .

  “Is it wrong?” Eric asked as he reached for my hand. “No,” I said. “It’s okay. I like it.”

  Eric loosened my tie and draped it over the back of the chair. He made me feel taken care of, an unfamiliar thing.

  I was working with one of our senators as part of a program for college kids. Twenty years old, I was a little drunk. Eric, who helped supervise our group, was from Cape Cod and looked like a Kennedy. Assessing me, he said I should buy a dark suit. Mine was baby blue; he said I looked ready for the Easter Parade.

  I said I was not taking wardrobe advice from anyone in shorts with spouting whales. After deciding I came off as too earnest, I was trying for some edge. He laughed, touched me for just a moment. In his hand, I felt everything waiting.

  I had amused him; I saw that, in his opinion, this counted for something. We were suddenly complicit; I wanted to make him laugh again and reach out to me. I always want more of anything good. Immediately, I found myself craving his approval. There was something a little wicked about him. He had a bemused way of looking at people. Like me.

  “You’re from Missouri,” he said. “Show me.”

  It was a fun game, this exchange, but he was straight. His girlfriend, Binky, from North Carolina, changed the bands of her wristwatch—yellow, blue, pink, and green—to match her outfits. One evening, she led a delegation of southerners in a rendition of “I Like Calling North Carolina Home.”

  At a cocktail hour at the Watergate, Eric hovered, brought me a drink, refills. When he touched my arm to guide me through the crowd, I wanted him to leave his hand there. Later, my friends and I went for dinner and to the bars. Eric tagged along. At every new place, I hoped that I would find him by my side. “Sit by me,” I kept thinking to myself. He did. At every stop.

  Binky was gone for the weekend. Since the debacle with the doctor, I had avoided dating, studying nonstop. Huddled over textbooks, I thought of myself as an intellectual, madly highlighting pages in yellow. Sitting in an uncomfortable chair at my first Introduction to Poetry class, I had experienced an epiphany when the professor entered the room and began, with no preamble, to recite a poem by Ezra Pound about a Chinese widow who lost her love. The story begins with the two as shy children pulling flowers, sharing blue plums, “two small people, without dislike or suspicion.” As the years pass, they are drawn together, into an arranged marriage that becomes much more.

  At fourteen I married My Lord you.

  I never laughed, being bashful.

  Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.

  Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.

  When he departs on a fishing boat, she is filled with sorrow, an emotion that grows year after year when he does not return and her silent mourning increases as the mosses grow over the sidewalk. Finally, an old woman now, still waiting, watching the currents of the river from a widow’s walk, she offers a quiet invitation:

  If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,

  Please let me know beforehand,

  And I will come out to meet you,

  As far as Cho-fu-Sa.

  It was the holding back, the longing I recognized. Something in me connected to the widow, her sadness, to what had been lost. That day, in that class, I learned words, what happens when they are said out loud, how feelings became real when set against the silence of a clean white page. Something in me broke open, a crack.

  I was a journalism major, a would-be reporter who could not bear the thought of calling up grieving widows with questions. As soon as the bell rang, I went off to see my adviser and explore a double major that would allow me to take literature classes.

  . . .

  Eric took me to his friend’s empty dorm room. “I like you,” he said as, tentatively, I laid my head on his chest, just where it had wanted to be all night. His smooth, soft neck smelled aftershavey and seemed, when he opened his collar, the most private of places.

  He was gentler than I expected, big brothery, and I was surprised by who he turned out to be. He kissed my hands. Lowering my head, I looked at the wall, like the widow in the poem. Suddenly there were too many feelings. I was overwhelmed and wanted to run.

  As the hours passed, we became more emotional and connected as we cared for each other. After we finished, we lay there in the hot summer night. When he walked to the closet, I was scared he was about to kick me out, but he made no move. When I had to go to the bathroom, I put on his shorts and took off. His clothes felt good. I ran down the hall excited, jumping up to swat a light fixture; this just seemed like something that needed doing. It seemed like things might turn out okay.

  “What’s up with Miss North Carolina?” I asked him.

  “Just kicking the can,” he said. “You know.”

  Actually, I didn’t.

  “My parents wouldn’t get the gay thing,” he said, continuing. “They aren’t softies.”

  I realized that in my haste to make him my protector, I had failed to acknowledge that he wasn’t much older than I was. I laid my head on his chest again as we started to fall asleep, but in the morning, I woke up alone. We had moved the beds together, but Eric had scooted his away in the night. The space between them didn’t look crossable, but I decided it was okay to hold out my hand. He did not take hold and I started to prepare myself. I knew how it was going to be.

  By the time I was out of the shower, he was dialing Binky on the hall phone. I should have known it was coming. Looking for love in the gay world of the late 1970s meant dealing with two things: (a) You are a little fucked up. (b) So is everyone else.

  “Sooner or later,” he said, “I will have to get married.”

  “It’s okay,” I said that morning before we separated. “Don’t worry about it.”

  Later I learned that Eric had a rep for sleeping with many women and men. When I saw him around the dorm, he looked and turned away. Our connection scared him, the chemistry. What we had was intense and I wanted more. Intensity was my first addiction. It’s like a drug; it takes you out of normal life. I miss the rush of it.

  In the days that followed, I showed nothing, barely acknowledged him. On
e night, he came to stand by me at a gathering where “Miss You” by the Rolling Stones was playing. Mary, a wild girl from Milwaukee, and I sang along every time the line about the Puerto Rican girls “just dyin’ to meet ya” came on. I thought I couldn’t get any cooler, and then Eric—whom I had been doing this whole performance for—was right beside me. “You know Eric, don’t you?” I asked Mary. “He dates that girl with the watchbands.”

  He looked a little wounded, but grinned. Later, when we were leaving, he swatted me on my rear, but he ignored me the rest of the month. I hated it. He was someone who kind of got me.

  . . .

  At the end of my summer, my father picked me up at the airport and hugged me as if I had spent the summer in Arabia. His love was so big and open, but he made me feel guilty and uncomfortable. I didn’t want to be back there. When he hugged me, I felt myself going stiff.

  On the way home, apparently desperate for tales of pretty girls, he tried to pry me open. I fished for something, but he seemed less interested than me in Binky’s watchbands or Jamey—a rich girl from Beverly Hills—and her dazzling array of Diane von Fürstenberg wrap dresses.

  “You’ll find someone,” he said. “You’ll get a girlfriend.” He was doing that thing, those lines. Of course he would; this was how it was with fathers and sons, but I didn’t want to hear it. I didn’t want to hear anymore about girlfriends. He had to know it wasn’t true. But he didn’t. It hit me that we were always going to miss out on each other.

  He would be disappointed when he discovered that there would be no grandchildren and bereft over what I was giving up. “Having children,” he always said, “is the best part of life.

  He wanted me to have all the good things. He would be sad to think I was missing out. I would just be one more thing that had not gone quite right for him.

  For the rest of the summer, I worked every day with my father at the lumberyard. Until it was time for me to return to school, he seemed to try to reach out when we were alone, but couldn’t wrap his fingers around someone so elusive. He tried to find some different way for us to be with each other, but I couldn’t go in that direction.