Bettyville

  She told the doctor, begrudgingly, that she had been experiencing pain for a while.

  “What?” I asked.

  “It wasn’t that bad,” she said.

  “It’s cancer,” I asked the ER doctor, “isn’t it?”

  “It’s a very odd thing,” says the doctor, “family members always have a premonition. They’re usually right.”

  . . .

  “Are you her health care proxy?” asked one of the faces floating past me that afternoon.

  “My mother makes her own decisions,” I replied.

  “Does she have a signed copy of a living will?”

  “Isn’t it a little soon for that?” I asked.

  “It’s standard procedure.”

  “I’ll bring it tomorrow,” I told her, but decided not to.

  . . .

  I sat by her bedside for a few hours, feeding her orange sherbet from the pantry.

  “People can live without both kidneys,” I told her.

  “Veda Berry had just one kidney,” she said. “She drank water all the time. I thought she was going to burst.”

  “Your hands are so cold,” I told her.

  “Cold hands, dirty feet, no sweetheart,” she said, laughing a bit.

  It wasn’t until she finally lost consciousness that I looked out the window, noticed it was dark, and realized the day was gone. I hated to leave her, but our new puppy, Raj, was waiting in the car. He needed food, water, attention. I hadn’t left him in his crate because I thought we might not get back that night.

  I thought she might not get back at all.

  I thought I would return to an empty house where those sandals by the bed would make me sadder than I had ever been.

  When I opened the car door, Raj jumped into my arms, and I sat holding him because I did not want to return to the hospital and because he is scared of strange places. I was scared of watching her die. I hoped she would be carried off quickly without suffering after seeing something of spring, a few jonquils. I would drive her through town where the rosebud trees were blossoming.

  . . .

  Betty once threw a shoe at a tramp who dared intrude when she was alone in the sanctuary of the church in Madison practicing the organ. I think she went there to get away from me and my dad. Not long after this, on the way home from school on an extraordinary day, I caught her in a rare mood, relaxed and sitting on the front steps of the church with her sheet music, eating some sherbet from a plastic cup.

  “Missouri in the springtime is pretty hard to beat, little boy,” she told me as she reached to take my hand.

  . . .

  Everything revolved around Raj in the months before her illness. Maybe I wanted to make her jealous. All through fall, I cruised the humane societies of north-central Missouri, holding puppies, almost committing, but never quite committing. Then, just before Christmas, I saw Raj, pictured on the Web site with a plaintive look on his face. He had spent half of his eight months on the planet in confinement. No one wants black dogs, and he was also “extremely submissive and shy,” not the type to make a Christmas present. At the shelter, he would not approach me for the longest time.

  When I told Betty about him, she threw a fit that dissipated as I described his troubles and long wait to be adopted. “He’s been abused,” I said, revving up the story a bit. Finally, she nodded. I told her that he reminded me of John’s dog, Bob. “You loved Bob,” I said.

  “Did not.”

  “You look like you have a lot of love to give,” the woman at the shelter told me.

  “Are you saying that because I’m fat?” I asked.

  For two nights, I had pored over a booklet called Super Puppy, which detailed hundreds of confusing instructions for puppy parenthood. The booklet advised potential masters to establish themselves immediately as pack leader. It sounded a little like the Cub Scouts. I hated the Cub Scouts.

  Driving across town after we left the shelter, I kept one hand on Raj’s scrawny back as he adjusted to the car. He yelped. So did I. In the parking lot at PetSmart, where I had scheduled a bath and nail clipping before his introduction to Betty, Raj tentatively descended from the car. At the desk, the woman asked, “Do you want his anal glands expressed?” I was astonished. “I don’t know,” I answered. “Do they have something to say?”

  . . .

  On Sunday, the morning after Betty was admitted, I arrived at the hospital at 5 a.m. with Raj riding along again. He looked woebegone when I left him, but I plied him with treats. “My mother is very sick,” I said. “Don’t be a dick.”

  Betty was groggy from a pill. My cousin Lucinda was there. In an hour there would be a procedure to explore Betty’s kidney blockage.

  As they wheeled her out the door, Betty waved a tissue she had balled up in her palm. The nurses were too cheerful, as if she were being taken off to join a big parade.

  All her fears were in that tissue. Watching as the procession headed off, I saw it fall to the floor.

  . . .

  On Raj’s first night in Paris, Betty eyed him. “He has a long tail. Is it too late to cut it off?”

  I moved his rug near my bed, stroking his head. I watched him turn around in a circle three times before committing to a sleeping position. I listened as he snored through the night, occasionally kicking a bit.

  The next morning, I took him out, despite his strong resistance, but stumbled. A stick cracked under my foot as, off balance, I loosened my grip on the leash, and Raj reared up, tore the thing from my hand, and bolted.

  It wasn’t light yet; he was just gone. I hadn’t taken in how scared he was. I just hadn’t paid enough attention. I whistled and whistled, drove around, looking for his orange collar. I went down to the woods, searched as best I could, emerging with my glasses broken but nothing else.

  “The thing about dogs,” Betty said, “is they always break your heart.”

  Early the next morning, I heard a single, solitary “woof.” Out back, our neighbor held Raj in his arms, the leash still dragging from his collar. All day, we celebrated. A friend from Vermont confessed that her father had been a dog trainer and that she grew up eating dog biscuits.

  Carol confided that Betty had instructed her to find another dog, another Lab, to appear on Christmas. This just didn’t seem like my mother. Later, coming back from the bathroom, I heard Betty, alone in the room, talking to Raj.

  “You are a bad dog,” she said. “You upset my boy. Now don’t wet on me.”

  . . .

  After the kidney procedure, my mother’s urologist was a kind voice on the phone in the white hallway filled with light. The cancer floor, recently redone, was plush. I expected to see Jennifer Lopez outside drinking a Cuba Libre by a swimming pool.

  The urologist told me that Betty had no tumor or stone. Her kidney was being cut off by some sort of growth, but they had saved the organ with a stent.

  Betty came back to the room gray, the gray of the ocean in South Carolina, the gray of my father’s face during his last days. “Where’s the dog?” she asked groggily. “Is the dog here? Who is tending to the dog?”

  “There’s a big black nose sticking up here,” Betty always says when Raj turns up begging at the table. “Mister, I’ll skin you alive.”

  All morning the room was gray, like Betty, as if invaded by fog, and now and again my mother rose up out of the haze to say she was thirsty. I brought in more sherbet she liked, grateful for the color, the only bright thing in the room. Lying there, Betty reminded me of her aunt Bess, a little woman. It seemed my mother’s body had dwindled overnight.

  . . .

  Betty was tall; Bess was small. When walking together on sunny days, they cast shadows suggesting mother and child or partners in comedy from some silent movie. Bess’s waves of hair never lay quite right. As she lingered at store windows, Betty stood behind her, smoothing her hair
down with the kind of care she usually had no time for.

  “I will take care of Bess,” Betty told Mammy and my uncles when they wanted Bess to go to a nursing home. “Just don’t you worry about it.”

  I told myself I would take care of Betty. Over and over, I told myself I would see her through.

  I would make it go just right. I would take her home, sit on the edge of the bed, and tell her funny stories about people we loathe.

  I would be her soldier.

  “You can do this,” said a friend on the phone.

  “I know.”

  That afternoon, on my way to purchase an extremely large cinnamon roll, I spotted a large woman from church in the hall. Betty glared at me. “Did you tell her I was in here?”

  “No.”

  “Well, you talk to her. I’m going to shut my eyes. Tell her I died.”

  I hid in the men’s room and ate my cinnamon roll.

  . . .

  The doctors began to speak of lymphoma. That night, the pain pills nauseated Betty’s empty stomach. I watched the lights on I-70 from her window and worried about Raj. “You’ve been so good to me,” Betty said to Cinda, who answered, “Well, George is the one who got you here.”

  Betty said nothing. I pretended not to notice.

  That night at home, quite late, I made spareribs with barbecue sauce, Betty’s favorites, as Raj watched, hoping for a treat. He has food addiction issues.

  I had somehow convinced myself that we would have a little party after Betty’s tests, when she could eat. I saw myself arriving, her savior with Tupperware, sauce still on my fingers. When I went to my mother’s room to search for a fresh bottle of eyedrops to take to the hospital, I found the program from my father’s funeral under her pillow along with all her lists of all the words.

  At 2 a.m., I found myself in the yard, angry at Raj and screaming, “Poop, dammit, poop. Doesn’t anyone have any consideration for me?” All night long I sat in my father’s old recliner with an armful of warm, sleeping dog.

  Each morning of my mother’s hospitalization, I drove in the early morning across the lightening plains to arrive in time for the doctor’s morning rounds. I traveled on roads and highways I have known all my life. From these mornings driving to see Betty, I will remember the lights going on in the little white houses; the tall display horse rising from the dark at Hobby Horse in Centralia; Raj waiting behind the steering wheel, gazing at me from the window as I came from Casey’s with doughnuts. (Betty didn’t always get hers.)

  . . .

  The faces on the elevator to the oncology floor became familiar. We nodded at one another and were so courteous. On the elevators, we were so determined to let others exit first that the doors practically closed before any of us got out.

  Before Betty’s biopsy, the radiologist started talking about nodes in Betty’s spleen and abdomen. “No more parts,” I wanted to cry out. “You cannot add any more parts.”

  Sitting outside the room where she had been taken for the test, I heard her scream. The anesthetic was administered through a needle in her spine. No more of this, I vowed. I would take her home and lift her into bed and wait with her for all the pain to end. But I didn’t really want that. I was ready for anything, but I still didn’t want her to die.

  The morning after the tests, before she told us we had to leave the hospital, our doctor mentioned lymphoma again. All night long, Betty’s stomach had been in an uproar. She was sicker that day than any other. But we had to leave the hospital. The tests were over. There was nothing else they could do and she had to go.

  As we were getting her ready, a caseworker appeared to question us about who would care for her at home or whether she would be going to some sort of facility, as they strongly recommended.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Who cares what you recommend? You send her out of here when she is terribly sick and then you come in here and pretend you care what is going to happen to her?”

  Sensing the possibility of battle, Betty perked up.

  “That’s not really the situation,” the caseworker said.

  “Well, then what is the situation?” I asked, before the woman made her exit.

  As I wheeled my mother down, she looked at me and said, “You’ve taken good care of me.”

  . . .

  All the way home, Betty lay in the backseat with her head on her hand. Raj sat with me up front. “We’re almost home,” I said when we hit Centralia, then again when we turned on C, then on T, then finally, over and over, as we headed east on 15.

  The next day we waited and waited for the doctor to call with the test results. At 5:30, the phone rang and the doctor, munching what sounded like an apple, confirmed the lymphoma diagnosis.

  Betty vomited all night. I did not sleep and found myself throwing the ribs I had made for her homecoming into the trash as the sun came up. It was a shame. I had finally cooked them right.

  . . .

  That morning, before we left for the oncologist’s, I found Raj by Betty’s bed. Though he is never supposed to enter her room, he is fond of her Kleenexes, winter boots, and house slippers. Oddly enough, he will not touch the one thing I would love to see destroyed—the sandals we have warred over for so long. Labradors apparently prefer pumps.

  I let Betty wear the sandals to the oncologist’s, edging her tender feet into them.

  “Is this dog neutered?” Betty asked me on the drive over.

  I nodded. “I guess you’re not going to get to be a grandmother,” I told her.

  “I never wanted to be a grandmother,” she replied. I could think of several reasons why she might have said this. One is that it is the truth. One is that she wanted to keep me from feeling bad about not having children. I told myself it was the latter, but I think it was both. My mother hates to be called “ma’am.” I don’t see her loving “Grandma.”

  . . .

  In the office of Dr. Tennan, the oncologist, I waited, in a chair that smelled like it was sick, for Betty to be called. I watched my mother, her last looks before learning she was dying.

  But I was wrong. It turned out I was wrong about it all.

  Dr. Tennan, a very good-looking man, flirted a little with my mother, told her she didn’t look her age, said nothing about dying. He recommended treatment: two weeks of daily radiation (painless he assured us) and several more weeks of IV infusions. It wasn’t chemo; a different drug is more effective with lymphoma. It wouldn’t make her sick or cause her to lose her hair or suffer in any way. He said there was no reason not to go forward with it.

  I thought she would say no, but she spoke up. “I want the radiation,” she said. At ninety-one years old, my mother chose life, chose to fight to keep it. She wanted to live. For herself. She spoke right up. I also had to make a choice for myself. I had to think about finding my own life again. She had spoken up so quickly for hers. Maybe this was a trick I could learn.

  Betty smiled at that doctor as if she were still young, ready to line up for the Miss Legs contest at the university.

  . . .

  All the way home, I thought of places I plan to go when my job here is finished. I want to go all across the world, just as Mammy imagined me doing. I want to learn to take photographs, to write, to maybe try to write a book of my own.

  “Did you get to death’s door and decide maybe it didn’t look so good?” I asked Betty, still surprised that she agreed to treatment.

  “Dr. Tennan is a good-looking man,” she said.

  I took a risk. “Dr. Tennan is a sex machine. Let’s have him over for dinner.” Betty was still chuckling a little when we pulled in our driveway. We had been through something and there was an opening, a crack of light that seemed, surprisingly, to delight her. If I had a photo of her that night, I would put it in a special frame, though I have wondered since if I saw more in her face than was really there.

&nb
sp; . . .

  The next day, we began radiation. They put stickers with black arrows on both sides of her chest and stomach.

  I decided that the good thing about cancer is that wherever patients gather there are snacks. Unfortunately, they are often healthy. On the first day, however, I almost stole a bag of Doritos from a bald woman. I wasn’t going to eat them. It was only to save her.

  At the place where my mother goes to get radiation, there is a huge, unfinished jigsaw puzzle on the table in the room where people wait to go in. Every day, there is the same old farmer man, bent over the puzzle that has, like, nine hundred million pieces. He goes in for his treatment after my mom. His wife is dead. He walks on a plain, cheap cane, but he has driven himself to Columbia from High Hill every day for thirty-seven days for his treatments.

  I asked him about the radiation. “It don’t hurt more’n a sunburn I’d get out on the tractor,” he told me. He goes to Country Kitchen for biscuits and gravy every night before he heads home. “You get a good plateful,” he said.

  “How much longer do you have to come?” I asked him yesterday. “Long enough to finish this damn puzzle,” he told me.

  He is a Missouri man. So am I.

  It is something to witness, all of them trying, keeping on.

  Lesbian waiting for her treatment at Missouri Cancer Institute: “Gay women do better than straight women with chemo. We already have the baseball caps.”

  . . .

  Coming home from one treatment, Betty said she wanted to go to St. Louis to get her hair done. “I mean someone who can do it right,” she said, “who can make it look halfway decent. You could use a haircut yourself. You look like a ragamuffin.”

  “Mother,” I said, “I want you to shut up about your hair.”

  I feel better. I have steered my mother through this crisis, taken charge.

  . . .

  “I am pack leader,” I tell Raj. “I am pack leader. I am fucking Arnold Schwarzenegger.” I was so damn butch, I scared myself, but he paid no attention. Sometimes I think Raj believes I am merely an oddly shaped refrigerator. I smell like dog all the time now, but later, when he is lying on top of me with his head over my shoulder napping, I hear his breathing in my ear and try to forget that he has eaten half the couch.