Bettyville

by George Hodgman

  Then, a loud exhalation and a comment that seems to be nearly shouted: “Why in the world would anyone make a movie like this?” Our neighbors in the theater turn to my mother, who begins to rummage loudly through what she calls her “pocketbook.” I lean toward her, whisper, “Blizzard.” She settles, but I no longer can pay any attention to the movie.

  . . .

  High on Blizzard, Betty is alert as we head toward home. I switch on the radio. It is Bartók night on KBIA. Betty, whose last favored tune was the love theme from The Titanic, flicks off the switch militantly. The miles pass. She leans over to check my speed about every fifteen minutes.

  At some point, she fixes me in her gaze.

  “Rachel Maddow,” she announces, “is a lesbian. I read it in an article. And I’ll tell you something else. I think Ingrid Wilbur is a lesbian too.” Something in her tone suggests that I am the executor of a Watergate-style conspiracy designed solely to bar her from this revelation. Ingrid, the assistant to my mother’s physician, stands five feet tall, wears cargo pants, and is topped by a head that bears a near-perfect shave.

  “Ingrid Wilbur,” I say, “was there when they invented it.”

  Although it is far from chilly, Betty turns on her heated seat, as usual. She encourages me to do the same. When I resist, she reaches over and flicks mine on. My ass soon feels like the site of a barbecue. “If you don’t turn off my seat,” I tell her, “I am going to burst into flame.” She stares at me, but does not make a move to ease my pain. “These seats are the best thing about the car.

  And then it happens: Whenever we go out at night, my mother, with her uncanny sense of speed and, despite her failing eyesight, sonarlike skills of detection, is always on the lookout for deer, the curse of drivers in these parts. She is always petrified we will hit one of the apparently suicidal animals and can repeat a list of people she knows who have had this experience over the last few years. We use Route T when we go back and forth to Columbia because a friend of ours, a judge, whom she respects as an authority on every topic, says he has never seen a deer on Route T.

  But tonight, there is a deer on T. I barely see it as it leaps across the road, into my path. I am driving too fast, with my mind on other things. Its eyes glare at me as it stands, immobilized, just before the point of collision. Then I hear a huge thump and see the deer, at least part of it, flying through the air. I envision my lonely-dog-related karma hissing out of those antlers.

  I get out. A large part of the deer, most of it in fact, including the head and antlers, is still in the highway. What is the proper etiquette in such a situation? Is one expected to move the deer off the road? Is there some authority to be called? A game warden? A wildlife emergency team? I don’t want to move the deer. If I had a gun, I supposed I would have to shoot it to put it out of its misery. But I don’t. Maybe I should choke it?

  “I have to go to the bathroom,” Betty shouts from the car as I eye the deer, oozing dark blood, feeling horrible. Its head seems larger than is fitting for display in a studio apartment.

  I consider trying to move it, but I tell myself that I could easily contract some sort of germ or infection that could kill me, and Betty, before basically destroying the universe. The thing will have to stay in the road. I am sorry, oh creature of the forest. I meant no harm and have no gun to send you heavenward. I hope you don’t have children. I just wanted the Arts and Leisure section and a taco. I am a peaceful man.

  No way I can move this thing. It will have to stay. Maybe a highway patrolman will come along. Or perhaps someone burly and hairy will arrive, someone adept at the removal of large carcasses on the way to an NRA confab. “I have to go to the bathroom,” Betty yells again.

  I check out the car. There is the smell of burning antifreeze. The front is somewhat mangled, with the grille badly dented in. This, I realize, will not go over well with my passenger.

  “I knew that was going to happen,” my mother says. “It was just a matter of time.”

  Screw the deer; I wave good-bye as I peel out. “You never should have dragged me to that movie,” Betty says. “But the deer was not your fault. I was watching out and didn’t notice it. I didn’t notice it. It just came out of nowhere.”

  “It was deranged. It hated its life,” I say. I am collateral damage.

  Betty is animated but calm, ready to take on at least part of the responsibility. It was her watch. This is a woman who can treat the transmission of a common cold as a tragic twist of fate, but crash into a creature whom you fear is Bambi’s papa and you will encounter a soldier prepared to storm the beaches of Normandy.

  “How’s the car?” she asks.

  “Kinda banged up.” I imagine an estimate from our mechanic that will send her into cardiac arrest as he jabbers on about tanks or belts or vaporizers. Or whatever. My mother loves this car because, I suspect, she knows it will be the final automobile she will ever purchase, her last ride. It gets us back home, though something loose on the front scrapes the road all the way and the smell of smoke does not fade. I fear I may have snagged a smoldering piece of deer flesh. Maybe I should throw it in the Crock-Pot.

  Inside, I fall into a state of near breakdown. I have spilled innocent blood and am contemplating the arrival of vengeful animal spirits.

  The next morning, I find Betty staring out the garage door at the car. I call the insurance agent, deal with the paperwork. I do the kind of thing that I normally put off until crisis threatens. Miraculously, I pull it off. The insurance man is nice and helpful. The check will arrive without delay and the Infiniti is destined to fly once more, in search of other prey. My mother seems rather astonished by my crisp, businesslike efficiency, and I am too.

  “I thought we were going to have to get a new car,” she says. I feel, suddenly, competent. I have braved antlers, paperwork, possible renal failure, and emerged triumphant. Maybe, if I can keep it together, I can save the ranch. Betty says, “The next time you see a movie, go by yourself. I have better things to do with my money.”

  17

  In Fire Island, where I went for seven summers in the 1990s, one of my housemates planted flowers in wooden barrels on the deck of our place on Sky Boulevard every season. I watched him smoothing the dirt with his fingers, wishing I knew how to make things grow like my grandmother, who until almost her dying day squinted at plants as if they were children in need of care.

  In the early mornings, home after a night of drugs and dancing at the Pavilion, I stretched out exhausted on the deck in a recliner and those blossoms would glower at me, blaring colors and chastening. They made me feel lost. This morning, the survival of our roses in the midst of the heat makes me feel better, like maybe I am doing okay here.

  . . .

  The lonely dog is being released today and, except for errands, I will have little reason to get out of the house so often. I am already picturing his empty pen. As I try to get Betty’s bed changed, she watches closely. The old spread and her thin yellow sheets have been washed too many times. “They’ll last me out,” she says when I suggest replacements. My back is giving me trouble and, in the mornings, wake with hands gone numb. Lately I have been obsessed over getting old, though there are gay nursing homes now. I see myself amid a group of old, tattooed codgers comparing waist sizes at Villa Fabulosa while I—wild-eyed in the Liza Minnelli Wing—grouse over the late delivery of my laxatives.

  My barber on West Twenty-third Street in Manhattan and I have been together for fifteen years. Sometimes I think he is my most significant relationship. He is Russian, a remarkable fashion presence. During my last visit to the city, I stopped in for a haircut and found him in a bright red shirt with button cuffs. The buttons were covered with matching material. The yoke of his shirt had little cutouts that revealed swirls of coal-black hair. He looked like the best man at the wedding of Satan.

  After all these years, our relationship has evolved into a very similar routi
ne. He always greets me in the same way: “How you feel?”

  Whatever I reply, he always says the same thing: “No way to be!”

  Then he takes me through the changing group of photos of movie stars and rock stars taped to his mirror. Their coifs represent his current range of hairstyle options. Over the years, I have been through a range of celebrities, culminating in George Clooney. On the day of my last visit, he was offering Anderson Cooper, Justin Timberlake, and Adam Levine. Taking in this gallery, I felt that I had perhaps aged beyond his area of specialty. I wanted to say, “Adam. Please, I wanted to be Adam.” But I dared not. I am middle aged, not a tattoo to my name. Suddenly I was sad. What to do?

  I tried to level with him about a recent problem that has really been bothering me and that I hoped he could help camouflage. When speaking to him I tend to fall into that blend of broken English and demanding assertion that characterize his speech.

  “I have fat face. How to hide?”

  “What you mean?”

  “Fat face. Head huge. Elton John. Help!”

  He scanned the photos on the wall, finally fixing on one that seemed to have been there for decades. It has been adhered to the wall and is in tatters. I glanced. I was afraid, but there was nothing really scary. It was a picture of a clean-cut middle-aged man, a stockbroker type. It appeared to have been plucked from a Sears catalog. I had not even noticed it.

  “I do this for you,” he said.

  I felt ancient, but just nodded. Whatever. I just wanted a clean neck and nothing puffy.

  He inspected my head. “You don’t come anymore. Who do this to hair? Bum.”

  “My mother is sick. I have been away.”

  “Turrible.”

  In a few minutes, he was finished. “You want product?” he asked, hand sliding toward an endless row of hair fixitives, including some lugubrious-seeming gels. He is a man who loves mousse.

  “No product,” I said. “You know I hate stuff in my hair.”

  “You need.”

  “Stop.”

  He looked at me “Why you frown. No way to be!”

  “I want to be rock star.”

  . . .

  “The governor’s father, you know, my friend, the old Jay, has written a book,” Betty begins. This comes out of nowhere and at first I am only half listening.

  “Jay says,” she tells me, “right in the book, that I was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. When I was young. He says that, right in the book. That I was beautiful. When he knew me.” She isn’t bragging. She is surprised and a bit reluctant to mention it.

  “What kind of book?” She replies: “I don’t know. Bob Thompson read it. He got it in the mail. He called yesterday when you were with that darn dog.”

  “The father’s name was Jay, right, like the governor’s?”

  “Yes. You remember Bob, don’t you?”

  Bob Thompson is a retired lawyer in Shelbina, a town that burned almost completely a few years back. His home is a local landmark, one of the houses where my mother used to imagine living. Betty always wanted to find herself in one of the mansions with columns, mostly haunted-looking and decaying now, that dot river towns such as Hannibal, Louisiana, Boonville, and of course St. Louis. In the city, Granny took us to walk by the huge old houses once owned by river merchants on the old gated streets—Portland and Westminster places. “Aren’t they grand?” Granny would ask my mother and me as we walked past the enormous mansions, under the oldest, greenest trees I will ever see.

  . . .

  “Who would anyone publish Jay Nixon’s book?” I ask in a little while. “I don’t think anyone would publish a book even by the governor himself.”

  “Jay Nixon was the mayor of De Soto!” Betty is emphatic. “He had three children. One is the governor. One is a game warden, and one, Bob told me,” she says, her voice becoming almost a whisper, “is obese. Bob read the book. He read every word.”

  Jay Nixon Sr., the father of the governor of Missouri, was my mother’s boyfriend before my father. This was revealed years back, after my dad’s death, when Betty—very excited—handed me an envelope that she would keep on the coffee table for a year, a blue invitation to the son’s inaugural in Jefferson City. Pressed for a reason why she was invited, she confessed, “I almost married the governor’s father.”

  I tried to take this in, but she refused to elaborate. She did not wind up going to the inauguration, or the ball, though for weeks she considered and reconsidered it. I offered to fly home to take her, but she wouldn’t let me and didn’t have a ride. It was January and freezing. She didn’t complain, said it was hard to go out at night anymore, that she would be afraid to fall, that she couldn’t see well, that it was silly to even think of going. But when we spoke on the phone I could hear the hangers scratching on the pole as she looked through the dresses in her closet. She kept bringing it up and up and up. Every time I called she continued, though she kept saying she was not going and that was it.

  “It’s crazy to think about it,” she claimed. “I’m an old woman. I’m not going unless there’s a radical change.”

  “In what?” I asked.

  “My hair for one thing,” she said.

  The summer after the inauguration, when Betty could still walk easily, we were in St. Louis, staying at the Chase, and Betty asked me to take her somewhere. She had found the address of the governor’s father and wanted to see the apartment building where he lived on Lindell Boulevard, just across the street from the hotel. It was an exquisite old building and we looked in the glass of the front door, which was locked. The walls of the entry were marble or granite, and at the top there were scenes carved out of the stone, tableaux of what looked like Greek gods rising from what I took to be the Mississippi River. Inside, in the main lobby, coach lights flickered softly. It reminded me of New York, of places where I had hoped to live before my life became a disaster area.

  “He wound up in a nice place, didn’t he?” she said.

  . . .

  “Mother,” I say this morning as I finish up the bed, “I wish you would have let me come take you to the inauguration. You could have seen him.”

  “I didn’t want him to see how I look. I look like something the cat dragged in.”

  “He said you were beautiful. Maybe he hoped you would read the book and know he remembers you. Fondly. You know. It was a little message. Would you like to see him?”

  “I gave to the son’s campaign,” she says. “I sent a check. I guess I should have gone. In a way, I’d paid for the dinner, but I thought I’d be cold. My feet get cold even with my boots, and I couldn’t wear my boots to the ball. My feet look big enough anyway.”

  “Why didn’t you marry the governor’s father?”

  No response.

  “What is the capital of Portugal?” she asks.

  My cousin Mimi and her husband, before leaving for a vacation in Portugal, purchased a condominium in Scottsdale. Betty is trying to keep track of it all, but forgets where Mimi is traveling as well as the location of her new home. So she drills herself:

  “What is the capital of Portugal?” she asks again.

  “Lisbon,” she says in a minute or two, answering her own question. “You ask now.”

  “What is that place where Mimi goes in the winter?”

  “Scottsdale.”

  “We went there one Christmas.”

  “I told your father I thought it was overrated.”

  . . .

  This is what my mother does now, night after night: Walking past the living room on her way to bed, she says, “I have to stop in here a minute,” and pauses at the piano, picks up the hymnal. Sitting at the edge of the bench as I wait for her to slip off, she studies the pages for a while. After brushing her teeth or putting in her curlers, she returns to the hymnal, turning more pages. Sometimes after she is in bed, after I h
ave turned off the light, she will get up—once, twice, sometimes three times—and go back to the piano, then return to her room to jot things down on the back of the envelope she keeps by her bedside.

  Time and time again, I ask, “What are you doing?” Time and time again, she will not say. Finally she concedes, “I am trying to remember the names of the hymns. I cannot remember the names of the hymns anymore.”

  Under her bedside table a conglomeration of things—empty eyedrop bottles, used Kleenexes, coupons, and tiny notes she has scrawled on index cards—are piled in a crazy heap, which I call the bird’s nest. “That is my spot. You are not supposed to look there,” she tells me if I refer to it. “Sometimes you make me feel so embarrassed.”

  She doesn’t want me to see the papers that fall from the end table by her bed, the lists she keeps of words that will no longer come that she is trying to keep track of.

  On one I found she has written, “eggnog, eggnog, eggnog, eggnog.”

  Sometimes I turn to the hymns whose numbers she writes down; I read the lyrics, wonder if they are clues to what is on her mind, but they don’t reveal anything to me. Sitting at the piano bench, I take in the paintings she commissioned from an artist in Moberly for our new living room when we moved to Paris. They are little oil renderings of pink roses.

  . . .

  The lonely dog just stares at me, as if he knows I am sending him away with a stranger. I look at him, wave a little, but do not leave the car. I am not budging until Marci arrives to take him. I always liked Marci; in high school I made posters for her bid to become homecoming queen. She lost, but was gracious. I was not; it was as if the tiara had been ripped from my own head.

  After she arrives, the pound man frees the dog, who rushes out—a few flashes of fur and madly wagging tail—to shake himself. If that dog who has consumed more than a hundred dollars’ worth of my food bounds up to this woman who couldn’t even win a queen contest before he licks me, I am going to give the orange jumpsuit to a church auction.