Bettyville

by George Hodgman

  I want to hug my dog, but suddenly I am angry, so mad at him, and want to get out of here. Nothing upsets me more than feeling myself lacking. “Shut up,” I yell. “Shut up, shut up, shut up.” As he looks at me, astonished, I stomp back to the car with my bags of animal products and my bunny. I do not say good-bye. I cannot keep a dog.

  As far as relationships go, I have a small, checkered past that began in college when I tried and failed to do what people do: come together in harmony and then learn gradually to ignore each other.

  . . .

  Senior year in college, I moved into a small apartment with my first real boyfriend, Steven, who trimmed his beard meticulously each morning, listening to the Evita sound track and pretending to address the people of Argentina from a balcony. He cooked all the time, fed me like a mother. Sourdough bread was his specialty. He gave loaves to everyone. He was so giving. It made me sick sometimes. “Enough with the bread,” I thought. It embarrassed me. Nobody else seemed to care, though Betty winced at his neatly wrapped loaves, handled them as if they might explode. She always thanked him politely, but there was a hint of something else. “It’s sour dough, you say?”

  “It’s one word, Mother.”

  Steven seemed oblivious. He never bowed down to win over my mother. He never appeared to care so much what others thought.

  “Try some of this,” the person doling out samples at the supermarket asked Steven, innocently holding out a plate of something, sausages or couscous. Whatever.

  “George would never eat that. George is finicky,” Steven would respond as, a few feet away, I braced myself for what was coming.

  “Who’s George?”

  “George is my LOVERRRRRRRR!”

  They could have heard him in Cleveland.

  . . .

  But no. That wasn’t really how it was. He was warm; he was friendly. He was proud to be with me. And no one looked up, or noticed, or really cared what we were doing together. It just felt like that to me. Because when you have a secret, you think the world is watching your every move, trying to discover it, and that changes everything—the way you think, and look at people, the things you are willing to do, the places you can go, the reactions you expect. You aren’t quite there. Hiding the secret is what is always on your mind, somewhere. You feel better alone.

  I felt better alone, but I was with him, and that made everything complicated. There was too much going on inside for me to really be with anyone. Always something ticking, ticking, ticking inside me, almost drowning out everything else.

  The little stuffed bunny, perched on the dashboard of my car, has turned malevolent, like a toy in a Twilight Zone episode. It eyes me. “Take the fucking dog,” he seems to say as I roar away from the pound in a cloud of dust.

  . . .

  I wasn’t ready to be so public. Steven was. Approximately twenty thousand hearings of a double-disc soundtrack featuring Patti LuPone does not lead to diffidence. It seemed to me that he told everyone everything. The mailman knew if we were fighting. The landlord got an earful. Thinking himself in store for a pleasant morning of toilet repair, the unsuspecting man was showered with details of our meeting, our backgrounds, the fact that we were both Aquarians.

  And then he got a loaf.

  Every time my mother came, I fell into a state of anxiety, just waiting for him to blurt out something to Betty. Probably about my troubles with sex. I was nervous. I was messy. If I managed to successfully uncap a tube of lubricant, the entire household was ready for penetration in about five minutes.

  Steven was concerned that I wasn’t out to my parents. It was an affront to him, to truth and honesty, to “the movement.”

  “Shut up about the movement,” I told him. “Be still. Listen to Evita. Argentina is crying.”

  He was loving and sweet, giving and generous, but it always felt like he was pressing against me, too close. He wanted me to tell him I loved him; every day he needed it, sometimes more than once or even twice. I saw the statement as more of a specialty item to be bestowed a few times yearly, perhaps at birthday time or during the excited unpacking of a Christmas stocking.

  I felt bad most of the time, cold and heartless. What I really wanted, I told myself, was out of the relationship. But I knew that word he made me say, the one that began with L and ended with me feeling hemmed in and embarrassed, was not just something I was dredging up to please him.

  During part of my time with Steven, I was employed on campus at the career counseling center, where my boss, Mary (aka Pinky), was completing a doctorate in psychology. “Do you have an issue with this?” she kept asking me. “Do you have an issue with that?” Narrow-shouldered and small-breasted, Pinky tried so hard to get next to me. “I just want to feel you out on this,” she would say. “I just want to feel you out!” I often felt violated.

  The center was staffed by psych majors and other kinds of counselors who wanted us to learn to communicate effectively with the clients and one another. At retreats, we talked things out with empty chairs as our colleagues listened. Even my chair wanted more from me than I could give. Folding chairs: They had some nerve. I could have taken criticism better from a recliner, even an ottoman.

  It was a touchy-feely place, but I was only touchy. I failed to mention to Pinky that I was gay, though of course she knew. It wasn’t that I thought her unsympathetic. I just didn’t want to talk about it. Our absence of meaningful communication was working beautifully until the day Steven bounded through the doors, looking for a résumé critique. He spotted me, gave me a hug.

  Pinky’s head, small in size to fit with the rest of her upper body, popped up as if from a burrow. She spotted Steven. Like Evita and Juan or Masters and Johnson, they came together as I saw the future and cringed.

  Pinky said she found their chat “illuminating.” Steve began to ask about how I felt about everything. “What does everyone expect of me?” I asked over and over. Finally, I just asked Steve, “Why do you care about me? What do I give you?”

  “You always make me laugh,” he said. “You even make the bed funny. I come home and see the way you’ve tried to push the sheets up under the mattress and, I don’t know, I want to hug you.”

  Wait, I thought, until you see the ironing.

  . . .

  He was so good. I was so hard. I vowed to try. I talked to Pinky and to almost all her office furniture. The couch and I got down to brass tacks.

  But Steve began sleeping around. Monogamy was for heteros. It was 1980. The gays in San Francisco were getting it on in supermarkets. Steve wasn’t going to be left out. I knew that I was. People approached Steven; men were drawn to him. I was harder to approach and wasn’t good at instigating a pickup.

  Pinky called me into her office one day and closed the door. I thought I was being fired. “Are we going to do the chair thing?” I asked. “No,” she said. “Honey, I want to go personal.” She reached out and put her hand over mine. “I think,” she said, “that you have some self-esteem issues. I don’t think you like yourself so much.” From here on out, through decades, from the lips of many well-intentioned others, these words would come back and back and back.

  “I didn’t know I was supposed to like me. Isn’t that like being arrogant?”

  She stared at me.

  “I’m sorry,” I told her.

  . . .

  I have worked myself into a state about the dog. I need a brownie. Last night I made a panful, but they are all gone. Every one. Betty has given them to Earleen, she tells me with a glint in her eye. She is afraid I’m getting fat. The brownies have joined the ranks of The Disappeared. It started with the clipping. What will come next?

  I retaliate. When Betty goes to the bathroom, I grab a spoon and last night’s chocolate pie from the refrigerator, go into my room, shut the door, and lock it. She may magically materialize. Sometimes I think she can walk through walls.

&n
bsp; I eat the pie like someone is going to yank it away, straight from the dish, wiping the last bits of chocolate from the dish with my fingers. She has eaten the lion’s share already, but my taking the rest will be seen as a serious offense. All her life, Betty was a fashionably slender woman. For decades she held back, didn’t touch a dessert or a slice of bread. Now she eats ravenously, especially sweets, which she craves like an addict.

  Midmornings, I catch her standing at the window in front of the sink, gobbling up whatever she can find. If someone mentions food, she wants some. If I get something from the refrigerator, she wants some too. “What are you eating?” she asks repeatedly. “What did you have to eat?” She must know. We are ravenous here.

  I am gaining weight. This morning I awoke with a bee in my bonnet over the bare torso selfies the gays post on Facebook. In my opinion, if you post more than three photos a week of your naked chest, you had better be part of some emergency rash-alert squad.

  My new girth angers Betty. It reminds her of my father, who got heavy. I’ve started drinking some powdered greenish stuff that you mix in water, which Carol sells. Called moringa oleifera, it is supposed to suppress appetite and provide super-duper nutrition. African villages apparently swear by it. Today, so far, I have had four packets and six cups of coffee. I am in the mood to build some huts, or perhaps shoot a wildebeest. Later I may barbecue a missionary or two for the tribal elders.

  I can’t stop thinking about the dog. I am tired of having nothing.

  . . .

  Against my better judgment, I once brought Steven home for the weekend. He had demanded it, wanted to get to know my parents.

  Before dinner, I smoked a joint in the basement while he, ignoring my amorous inclinations, perused everything stored there. Earlier he had complimented Betty on her antiques, on her upholstery, on the chairs in our living room that, thank God, said nothing to anyone.

  From anyone else, she would have liked the attention.

  Him she just ignored.

  At the supper table, Steven and my father talked beard maintenance. Daddy had recently grown a beard, which Betty hated, a fact that pleased him. During this chat, Betty banged pots and pans like a drunk in a truck-stop kitchen. “Steven made this bread,” she said as she plunked a platter of it—not sliced but yanked apart—on the table. I worried that she had connected the dots about Steven and me. How could she have missed it? But they seemed to know and not know, accept and reject. I tried to find some tiny place between honesty and comfort where I could just be peaceful.

  “It’s sour dough,” my mother said of the bread, breaking, as I recall, the word into two, like always.

  “It’s one damn word,” I mouthed to her silently, but she was off and running.

  “You know, Steven,” she said, “I never eat bread and neither should my husband. I have to watch what he eats. He has a heart problem. It is extremely serious”

  “It’s just undiagnosed,” I explained to Steven. Whatever her apparent diffidence, my mother had long been the protector of my father’s vulnerable heart.

  That registered.

  “Later,” my mother mouthed silently across the table. We have always had our best chats like this.

  My father grabbed hunks of the bread, one after another. He wouldn’t stop eating the bread. As my mother stared, he stared right back, savoring every bite.

  After dinner, we adjourned to the guest room where Steven was to sleep on one of my mother’s most uncomfortable antiques—a creaky bed with a wafer-thin mattress dating back to the Civil War. I was embarrassed. Late that night, my father, in his underwear and demonstrating my family’s continuing tendency to appear out of nowhere at the worst possible moments, caught us making out on the couch in the family room. Adopting our usual stance toward anything out of the ordinary, he had said nothing as I waited, anticipating the cardiac event that Betty had predicted.

  At breakfast the next morning, after he saw Steven and me together, Daddy was quiet, not especially upset or especially friendly.

  He was just blank, as if a lightning strike had left him . . . absent.

  . . .

  A few months later, all four of us were together again, on the afternoon of our graduation, drinking champagne at the apartment Steven and I shared. Before we left for commencement, my father kept getting up to look around the apartment. He lingered in both bedrooms, the one crammed with stuff with its double bed and the other with the tiny, narrow bed where, I hoped they believed, Steven slept.

  My mother was calm that day, almost sentimental as she brushed crumbs off the shoulders of my suit and looked at me as if she could not fathom the speed at which I was traveling away. She smiled at me tentatively, as if expecting some sort of rejection, as if she were about to discover that I had somehow moved beyond her. She always believed that people who lived in other places or traveled more were bound to reflect her. That fall I would go to Boston, to graduate school. When I had told my mother about this, she was quiet, just shook her head. “Well then,” she said. “Good. You need to get out of here. I can send you a check now and then.”

  That afternoon, after commencement, my father just could not stay in his chair. He seemed interested in every detail in our place, determined to uncover any clue he could find to the life of his son. When I walked into the bathroom, Big George was there, spraying a bit of Steven’s Royal Copenhagen cologne on his fingers. Rubbing them together, as if he were wary of actually taking a sniff, he caught a glance of me behind him in the mirror over the sink. My face reddened as our eyes met in the mirror that Steven always kept so clean.

  That night we had dinner with some of my friends and their parents. There was the feel of a festive evening, though I was nervous and just wanted to get it over with. We arrived at the restaurant, the best in town, before anyone else, and my father went to the bar. As my mother headed toward the bathroom, he began the process of slamming down four gin and tonics one after the other. He drank quickly, downing each in an instant.

  At dinner, my mother sat up in her chair, growing stiffer and stiffer, her hand occasionally wandering to her head to secure an errant lock. The restaurant was filled with laughter, the cheerful noises of special occasions. In the corner of the room, a young man played cocktail piano. Not songs, just riffs. Before the dinner was over, my father, less gregarious than usual, got up, red-faced, and threw off his jacket. Then, moving to the side of the piano, he began, to the astonishment of his unwitting accompanist, to sing his song: “Old Man River.”

  He sang as if the restaurant were his. He sang as if all the guests at Jack’s Coronado Steak House had bought tickets for this occasion. He sang emotionally, his waves of feeling flowing through us all. The river rolled on and on, like time and change and all we might hold back if it were possible.

  My emotion built with his every word and breath. The song, it seemed, lasted forever, my father’s voice growing louder as he held out his hand, I believe, to me. Betty looked down at her unfinished food. When he finished, the room exploded with applause. That evening, my father was the star. Steven stood up to clap and my mother kicked him—hard.

  It was a mysterious performance. I didn’t know whether to consider it a blessing, a resentful usurping of the prominence of others that evening, or a crying out as the river’s waters swept me from his world, his extended hand, the place where it was possible for him to try to save me.

  15

  When you think about your mother, what do you remember?” my therapist asked. “Do you think you disappointed her? Do you ever feel guilty?” I told him this story.

  When I was a kid, before I went to sleep, before she turned off the light, Betty reached for my book and closed it, took my glasses off, folded them, laid them on the table, and took my hand.

  Then, closing our eyes, we said the “Now I Lay Me” prayer out loud, adding a list of blessings for those who needed them. Together, we n
amed the names, always beginning with Mammy, Granny, Aunt Bess, and Aunt Winnie. We turned it into a sort of game: Making our way through Madison, from one street to the next, we asked for help for those suffering in this place or that, for people who were poor or who had lost someone, or those who had found themselves in trouble. We traveled through town, saying name after name.

  “Just think of all of us together, all over town, asking help for each other,” Betty said. “Try to think of the people who have no one else to remember them.”

  “Does it work?” I asked.

  “It is something we can do for each other. Bow your head now, bow your head. Maybe there is nothing else, but we can do this for people. We can remember them when they are sick and remember them when they go. We have to understand we are all together here. We have to try and help people.”

  If there was a time when I heard my mother say what it was she believed in, what she stood for, it was at these moments. Betty always wanted to try to rescue people who were sick or alone, to do whatever she could for those who had no one. She called and checked on those she barely knew when they came out of the hospital or if they were ill. She worried about people who were out there on their own. The worst thing she could imagine was being sick and alone.

  One night, I decided it was time that I said my prayers without my mother. It was after one of her eye surgeries and I was scared she was going blind. I wanted to ask God to look out for her and it seemed she should not be present. I didn’t want to make her think of what might happen to her. The idea of praying for her in her presence was embarrassing to me.

  When I told Betty that I needed to say my prayers on my own, her face changed. She dropped my glasses on the table and looked down at her lap before pulling away. I wanted to take it back, but it was too late, she was gone. She left so fast. She didn’t bring it up, but the next night she did not come to my room. Never again would we have our special time. She would not risk being sent away again. I grew up to be just like her. Like my mother, I flee at the slightest suggestion I am unwanted.