Bettyville

  . . .

  When my mother shopped in St. Louis, at Stix or Famous-Barr, or Montaldo’s, or Saks, Mammy was in her mind as she searched for hours, hunting out the bargains, looking for outfits. Time and again, Betty brought home clothes from the city, unwrapped and carefully unfolded them, tried them on in front of the mirror, frowned at herself, walked through the halls in them, looking kind of guilty.

  Mammy would always look up and say something like, “What did you pay for that?” or “How are you going to get any wear out of that?”

  The dresses and shoes and blouses and skirts would wait in their boxes, unworn, until my mother’s next trip to St. Louis, where she returned them, ready to begin the whole process again. Every trip to St. Louis began with the returns. It still does.

  . . .

  When my father and I were ready to leave Saks, Betty said, “Go, I’ll get a taxi home.” She wanted to stay, I think, to be there alone and wander the aisles and see the people and imagine, as I did in such stores, buying the best things and taking them home to a fancy place. She wanted to be on her own in the city for a little bit, to hail her own taxi, to see what it would be like if life had led her somewhere far different than her home. When she returned to the hotel, she was especially cheerful, as if she had pulled off something extraordinary. She had fallen into conversation with a woman in the shoe department. A woman from New Jersey. Betty said she was nice, but she would never go to New Jersey for a haircut. “It did like this in back,” she said of the woman’s style, waving her hand and rolling her eyes.

  . . .

  The next day, I took them to Barneys, where the movie stars shopped. Just inside the door, before we could decide on a place or time to meet, Betty disappeared into the crowds, as she always did when the three of us went shopping together at someplace nice. “Wham,” my father said, “and she’s off.”

  He looked around a bit but quickly stationed himself near what for him was the highlight of the store: a large tank of large tropical fish shimmering magically under a special light in brilliant colors—red and black, blue and yellow. They were exquisite, these fish, and my father’s eyes followed them as they darted and undulated. I had read somewhere that the collection had cost more than seventy thousand dollars. It was a stunning assortment, and I stood with him in front of the tank, looking at our reflections in the glass tank as he tapped occasionally to draw the attention of the extraordinary creatures. He was transfixed; they would not let him turn away, but moments later as he surveyed the rest of the floor, he looked sour, put off by most of what surrounded him. He looked at me and said, “Except for these fish, this place is all bullshit. Strictly swindle. I hope you won’t fall in with a lot of phonies.”

  After an hour or more, my mother suddenly appeared, looking upset, like someone had slapped her or hurt her feelings badly.

  “I’ve looked and looked for you,” she said. “I couldn’t find you. I was standing there by the scarves and someone took my purse. A woman next to me tried to help and I talked to someone in security who let the police know, but the man behind the counter was rude. He made me feel like an idiot.” She was broken, so crestfallen. She took us back to the counter where it had all happened, and the clerk—a sexy Puerto Rican queen in eye makeup—kept saying over and over that it was all her fault, that she should have watched her bag. “We have women with ten-thousand-dollar purses here. This place is crawling with thieves. You can’t just set something down.”

  My father did not seem at all surprised or taken aback by what had happened. It was just the sort of thing he expected to occur in New York.

  “That son of a bitch looked like a fool in that getup,” my father said of the salesman.

  “God, he was good-looking,” I said. “They’ll probably fire him when he gets older and doesn’t look so good.” What I actually was wondering was if he could keep working in this fancy store if he got sick and could not put on his eye makeup, or go to the gym, or mousse his hair to perfection.

  My mother’s face was red, a shade it rarely showed, redder than when she was moved or furious. Embarrassment brings its own regretful shade. My father looked uncomfortable too, especially after hearing me refer to the haughty man’s handsomeness, but said nothing. As I stood with Betty, who was shaking Big George returned for a last look at the fish. We were eager to go, but he was bound and determined to get another look at those fish. They were the only thing on the trip he really enjoyed, and he wasn’t going to let anything spoil it. He returned to say that some had come from as far away as Brazil. Someone had told him. Those fish had come all the way from South America and Japan. My father appreciated genuine beauty. I think one of the things he loved most about my mother was that she was never anyone but who she was.

  Betty said nothing on the walk back to the hotel; the store windows she had assessed so eagerly no longer seemed to hold much appeal. Her black coat hangs now in the front hall closet, next to Charlotte Hickey’s old mink, in a clear plastic garment bag, like a museum piece, a reminder of the injunction she was raised with: “Don’t ever think you are anything special.”

  That was never her message to me. She was prepared to lose me if my success took me away from her. She would have gladly taken any hurt if it could put me forward.

  “Go on,” she always said. “Get out of here. Live your life. Don’t worry about us.”

  On the Monday morning my parents left New York, I called in to work, said I was sick, and I was; I was almost nauseous, thinking about them leaving, thinking about what might happen to us. I rode with them in a taxi to the airport and stayed with them until their flight was called and they boarded, despite my mother saying I should go on to the office, that my boss was going to be angry. I wanted them to remember me staying, waiting with them until the last minute. I cannot remember how I got back home, but for the rest of the day I was in bed, willing myself to feel nothing, trying to hold back the feelings. My room was dim and I lay there even after it was dark outside and I heard my roommates home from work, not realizing I was there.

  In articles now about AIDS, there are always the photos of the crowds, the men in combat boots and T-shirts that say SILENCE EQUALS DEATH. I believed it. I believed in every act of protest, taking action, every instance of someone standing up, speaking out, and venting their rage. Yet for me those years were not about the silence of repression or cowardice, but other silences: the stillness of the room where I found myself, hiding, hearing Italian words filter through the walls; the quiet of neighborhoods in the Village; the faces of men in the windows of clubs that were often empty; the rooms of apartments hurriedly cleared out, their contents left on the street because no one could quite bear to sort through them. Silence did equal death to me, but not in the way that the protesters meant it. To me it was the silence of empty, the silence that arrives when there are simply no words to cover the situation, the silence of retreat. I wasn’t trying to figure out how to live anymore; I was trying to figure out if I would die and how that would work. The silence I heard was what surrounded what could not be expressed, the sound of shutting down because there was only so much we could take in.

  We were young and I wish I could have been one of the ones who went to the barricades, but instead I went to work very early in the mornings and stayed late at night and tried to avoid all the sadness, to push it away, because it was so unfathomable. Other people screamed in rage. I got quieter and quieter, and when it came time, as it always did, to talk about those who were sick, I excused myself because I had to, and if someone’s parents were mentioned, if there was some story of so-and-so’s mother or father flying in, or not coming, or leaving with ashes, or maybe staying until the moment when it was over for their son, I went out the door and back to my room, that bed, that silence. I excused myself, as my mother would have, in the face of this. For me, AIDS, those years, was that room where I read books and felt scared. At Easter, that first year it all started
, when the Italians came down the street with their crèche in its long glass case, I mistook the celebration of resurrection for a funeral for someone who had grown up in this neighborhood that was really so much like the village I might never return to.

  . . .

  When the AIDS tests came out, a friend and I went to take our place in line. Contemplating the signing of a living will, I moved slowly through the three-week wait time after they drew my blood, but registered negative when we got the results. My friend was negative too, but because the test’s effectiveness was uncertain, he was not relieved. He had been with a lot of men and could not shake the belief that he had AIDS, whatever the test showed. For years, he dissolved with the discovery of every mark or pimple. It turned out that he had also written his parents a letter, and when he found out I had too, he gave me his to hold on to, just in case. It already had a stamp and I wondered why I had not thought of that. It was a city of letters waiting.

  . . .

  We are getting on a bus to go to the AIDS march in Washington. I remember the trip. Almost everyone I knew from New York was going. It seemed for many a necessity, a last chance to have all their friends gathered around them before they got really sick.

  Thanks to Steven, I rode on a bus with the Gay Men’s Chorus, which he and the doctor had joined. All the way they sang. When I looked at Steven and made a face, he looked offended, but I didn’t care. It was too early in the morning for anything from Sweeney Todd.

  From a friend, I had learned that Eric was back in D.C., working for a senator. From directory assistance I got his number and called him up. He agreed to see the AIDS quilt on the Mall with me on the afternoon before the march. I didn’t know what to expect, but after I had settled in at the hotel I made my way to Dupont Circle, where Eric had an apartment. When he came to the door, he looked skinnier than I remembered and I thought he was about to tell me something terrible, but he said nothing about being ill and I assumed I was just paranoid. I thought everyone was sick. Of course, everyone was.

  Things were a little awkward. When it came down to it, I did not know Eric well, despite the full and interesting life we had led together in my imagination. Unable to hide my curiosity, I asked if he still had girlfriends. He replied that he was a “full-time homosexual” now, as if it were a difficult job he has accepted somewhat reluctantly.

  “Great timing, huh?” he said.

  I thought he might come to me now. Afraid of dying, men suddenly wanted to be in relationships. He was friendly, but distant, melancholy, like everyone. What was missing was his enticing spark of mischief. It was harder to make him laugh and I tried too hard. Now and again he was gracious enough to smile.

  Outside, as we walked to the Mall, we said little to each other. I wanted to fill the space between us, but could not and got more and more anxious. I had felt so good with him before, but not this time. This time it was harder.

  At the quilt, there were names and names and names, patches that signified lost lives with trinkets and photos of faces sewn on. I watched a woman who looked to be from out of town gazing at the quilt, as if she could not tear herself away. She took off her scarf and pinned it on. She became my picture of our lives at this time. She became my mother.

  I did not want to go to the Missouri section—I didn’t want to see for sure who was there—but Eric navigated us toward the Massachusetts panels, where he cried, and on to D.C., where he cried again. I did not look but heard him, surprised that he was so emotional. I wanted to cry along with everyone, but could not, so I pretended until I realized that no one was thinking about me.

  “If you had died, would your parents be here?” I asked Eric. He said nothing, but looked back at me, as if to pose the same question. I shook my head.

  “It just isn’t something they would know to do. They wouldn’t have anyone around to tell them to come.”

  Later, when my mother finally spoke of AIDS, she asked if I knew anyone who had it. I nodded, said nothing more. I didn’t tell her about Steven’s HIV status. It would have terrified her. My father never said anything about it. He was retired now. After the trip to New York, he purchased an aquarium, and though his fish were much smaller than the ones at Barneys, they were colorful and looked good under the light of the cylinder that shone over them as they darted through the water to ride in the waves of grass. He kept it all immaculately, and recently I found the tank neatly packed in the box it came in under his desk with a book on tropical fish inside it. He had circled the photos of the most glorious creatures. His fingerprints were still on the tank. When his health first worsened, he gave the fish to a neighbor boy whose parents were getting divorced.

  . . .

  As we left the quilt that day, a fat woman standing by the entrance with a lot of Christian literature had looked at Eric and said, “I will pray for you.” He said, “Pray for yourself.”

  I had never seen him angry before. As it turned out, I shared that feeling, but it took awhile to know. I never knew what was going on inside me or how it might surface. It took a long time for me to lose my habit of disappearing at important times. Eric was special to me because with him I was able to be present. It was mysterious; I never knew why he made me feel comfortable when no one else could. With him I could be there, not just watching for my own mistakes.

  We did not come together that day, even though I wanted to. It was not that kind of day. I left him standing alone by a window in his apartment.

  . . .

  As it happened, I saw my parents again, rather soon after they came to New York. Not long after my trip to Washington, I found myself arriving at a hotel in Sarasota, Florida, to meet George and Betty for a long weekend. They had torn down the old lumberyard building in Madison and it had been a draining few months for the whole family. Betty had said that on Main Street it looked like someone had ripped out a big tooth. It was the building her dad had built after he came back from the war. My parents wanted to get away from businesses closing and stores shutting their doors. They were old now. The funerals where my father sang were for friends.

  When I arrived at the hotel in Florida, my dad was standing alone on the curb in the golden sunlight, bending over to touch a colorful, exotic flower. He was waiting for me, my arrival, and when he saw me there, all there, unchanged, safe, he wiped his eyes with his sleeve and rushed toward me to take me into his big arms.

  16

  Today was supposed to be my day off. I was going to drive fifty miles to Columbia to see the movie The Master.

  The plan was to go buy the Sunday New York Times, read it at Lakota Coffee Company, see the movie, and go to Taco Bell (secret, disgusting vice) for dinner. But when Betty finds out about this, she decides she has to go. I guess she has been longing for art house fare. She will not take no for an answer, is raring to take off. I sense looming disaster, but she is actually ready to leave by my scheduled departure time. She has put on her new blouse, a little snug, a little formfitting now.

  “I look so buxom,” she says as she glances in the mirror on her way out, as she always does.

  “Betty,” I say, “you’re ninety years old. If you got it, flaunt it. Now would be the time.” She looks at me quizzically, pulls her shoulders back, and heads out the door.

  My mother and I rarely go to movies together, a situation stemming from the fact that forty years ago I somehow manipulated my parents into taking me to see Jane Fonda in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?—which was “Suggested for Mature Audiences”—one Easter Sunday. (The sacredness of the date was emphasized for decades as an essential part of the horror of it all, when the story was told.) Unfortunately, the movie, which dealt with a group of doomed participants in a 1930s dance marathon, turned out to be the most depressing film ever made.

  My father, who seemed to be expecting something spicier, registered disappointment as we walked to the car afterward. Betty, significantly more aroused, was appalled by the fac
t that the movie was ever shown in America. Or anywhere. She couldn’t believe I had lured her into such an experience. Jane Fonda, previously a “reprobate,” a “Communist reprobate,” or “an unmarried, topless reprobate,” became simply the woman “in that movie, that movie you dragged us to on Easter Sunday.” Some years later, when Gig Young, who won an Oscar for his role in the movie, committed suicide, my mother read it in the paper and flung the article across the table at me.

  So, The Master: I know she doesn’t even want to see the movie. She has another motive altogether. My mother, reluctantly and rebelliously, takes her prescription medications—morning, noon, and night. But she is kept alive—and this is an absolute fact—by regular Dairy Queen Blizzards, which she acquires at the Columbia DQ. Her entire interest in the trip is the Blizzard. My plan is to get the tickets to the film, go get her the Blizzard, and then come back to see the movie, where, I hope, she will doze.

  But when I buy the tickets, I realize that the film goes on a half hour before I thought. The Blizzard has to be postponed. Not happy, but a good sport, Betty allows herself to be temporarily placated with popcorn. But the Ragtag Cinema in Columbia, too hip and healthy for its own good, does not have butter for popcorn. They have olive oil. Starting on the popcorn, Betty eyes it suspiciously after a few bites, then glances at me ferociously. “What is on this popcorn?” I answer, “Olive oil.” She is furious. “What right,” she inquires, “do they have to do that? Are they Italian?”

  Finally, the movie begins. I know, in about four seconds—certainly by the time Joaquin Phoenix drinks his first glass of turpentine—that I am going to hate it. Worse, I know that she is going to really hate it. I sense a potential They Shoot Horses situation in the making. I pray for sleep to wrap its gentle arms around her. But no. She is wide awake, rustling and squirming, sighing dramatically about every ten minutes. At one point, there is a scene where all the women in the room are suddenly nude. My mother sits up. “Good night,” she says. (Both my parents talked louder in movie theaters than anyone I have ever encountered.) “This is terrible.” I whisper in her ear, “Stop talking or no Blizzard.” Immediate silence. This continues for a half hour.