Bettyville (11 page)

She looks good today; the new moisturizer from Saks is doing wonders for her face, though I am often surprised to find myself licking Estée Lauder products off my fingers. Her cheeks are pinkish, their skin softer, and it seems that the wrinkled places under her eyes have almost been smoothed away. Sometimes she even smiles back. She wants to give me a pleasant afternoon, but fears she has little to offer, so she hands me the cards, one after the other, and looks hopeful. She wants us to have fun, to share the experience, but she can't remember it. “The cities,” she says. “They were nice and green.”

. . .

Before the trip, my father took their passports to Kinko's and had the pages with the photos Xeroxed and enlarged. He taped them—not with Scotch tape, but with something used to hold heavier things together—to the inside of the suitcase top. There they were, George and Betty in black and white, ready to meet the world, ready to splurge a little after working, like everyone they knew, hard all their lives and doing their best to be good and do good. They were older now, but they still had innocent faces, faces that somehow suggested their times and America, their home.

. . .

“I remember a river,” Betty says, “but there wasn't enough water. It was very dry. It looked a little bit like here.”

“Do you remember the name of the river?”

“No, I don't.”

“Was it the Rhine?”

“It might have been. What I remember is that it rained and I thought the water was finally going to fill up the riverbeds and when the next people got here it would probably be prettier.” She goes quiet, then asks, “Can I help you anymore, George?” as if we were studying for a test and she was drilling me, like she used to with long division.

“Can I help you, George?”

“No,” I want to say. “It is not you. It is everything that has happened. It is this sense that I have missed my chance and here I am.” Maybe everyone feels like that.

“To tell you the truth,” my mother confides, “I liked those Christmas shows in New York better than anything on that barge. I think your father did too. We always wanted you to come along.”

“I'm just not a Rockette person, Mama.”

. . .

I carried that suitcase with my parents' pictures for twenty years or more everywhere I went: to college, home, and back so many times, to Barbados, London, Paris, Miami, San Francisco, Los Angeles, to Morocco, where I stayed at a house in the Old City where every night we were awakened by the call to prayer and I searched for a gift for Betty in the souk.

People said I should buy something new, something bigger with wheels, something in leather. But I kept carrying that suitcase until the strap broke and one of the pictures inside got torn off. I carried them with me everywhere. I still have it. I keep special things there, stuff I want to save as long as I live. One day I imagine these postcards that are preoccupying my mother will find their way there, the postcards from their trip to Europe.

“What are you doing, George? What are you doing to your arm?”

“I'm scratching it, Mother.”

“Why are you doing that?”

“I guess because I itch.”

“I don't like it when you do that,” she says. “It looks like it hurts to do that.” And to her, it does. It would be enough to almost make her cry if she did that, ever.

“Is there anything I can do for you, George?” she asks again.

“You could try to remember the name of that river.”

“I've tried,” she says. “I can't remember, and why does it matter? I told you it rained and I couldn't sleep and I had to lay awake and listen to your father snore and I thought, here I came all the way to Europe to float down a river and listen to an old man snore.

“What can I do for you?” she asks again.

“What can I do for you?”

Neither one of us knows.

. . .

In the end my parents were just George and Betty, who always tried their best. That was enough. They weren't New York. They didn't have to be all the world or on television. I was different: Just me was never enough. Just me was something less than okay. So I tried to make up something a little better, too clever by half, I guess. I think I tried too hard. There were voices in my head, saying: “You have to do better.” Then I fell down.

“Is there anything I can do for you, George?” Betty asks one more time, because perhaps she knows that the time when she can do anything for anyone is growing short.

“See me,” I start to say. I don't know where the words have come from, and I stop before I utter them because I know it is too late anyway, too late for her to know all of me. I didn't discuss my sexuality with her until I was forty. She didn't ask. My father hadn't asked. We were all afraid. None of us knew how not to hurt one another. I made us all feel imperfect. I felt I was wrong. They felt they had caused it. No one said anything. They went to Radio City, said they missed me being with them. “Next year,” I always said before heading off to the magazine.

. . .

I didn't feel comfortable when I was a kid. I didn't feel comfortable in my body. I didn't feel comfortable anywhere. I hated to have to walk across a room if people were watching; this was just a fear I had, something I did not quite know what to do about. In New York, all this made things hard.

“I never would have guessed you felt that way,” a rare confidante told me once. “But I see it now.”

. . .

Betty couldn't have known all the things I was feeling, back when I was a kid. She couldn't have known what to do. I didn't know what to do. I just knew that I loved them and didn't want them hurt by the fact that I wasn't right. That was what the world told me, what I always heard, that people like me weren't right. Gay kids hear everything. Because they are hidden in disguise or listening in silence. No one holds back. People will say anything about gay people. It still goes on. Pick up a newspaper. We hear so many terrible things about ourselves. People think it is their right. They just don't get what being different feels like, on the inside, for a kid and they don't care.

When I was not chosen for the football team, I was relieved, but there I was, at a new school; I was on my own. Before the first bell, I stood by the door of the algebra room waiting and watching. In Madison, I had friends, but in Paris there was no one at the start, and so I stayed in my head, imagining myself someone who lived in the city, the son of rich people, an actor on Broadway or in the movies. I made up lives and fell into them when I was alone. I just got lost, imagining myself as other people. You can make up a world and live there for a while, float down a river to someplace secret.

As time went on, I found another way: From movies and television, I stole lines and jokes, this and that, tried to stitch together an act that passed. Did I know what I was doing?

I know it now.

“Do you think you have trouble with intimacy?” they asked at rehab.

“Only when I try to get close to someone.”

To fall in love you have to think you're okay, stop watching for clues you've done something wrong.

. . .

At school, I imitated teachers: an ancient southern belle with hair gone slightly green; the study hall monitor whose hair resembled the helmet of a Roman charioteer; the kids I was actually most drawn to: the different ones. I wanted no part of them and often aimed my harshest comments in their direction. I learned to make people laugh—and I always could. I had to, and when in conversations the topic strayed too close to things I did not want to talk about—sex, or girls, or whatever, whatever could trip me up—I learned to steer the talk away, subtly, without anyone ever realizing. Even me. It was an animal thing—camouflage. It has taken me so long to see it all.

Sometimes, on bad days, it would happen again. It did not stop. Walking down the hall, I would see Kevin coming in my direction: “Fuck you, fucking faggot.” I tried to stay in my body and not to disappear. If I felt hurt, I cut it off fast as I could manage. I mean, what I was feeling? I could never ask anyone for help because what he said was true and all I wanted was for everyone to ignore it.

On TV, I hear them saying these things that they say about people like me, not caring if we have to listen. They don't care if the things they say leave their mark. They are so brave they can make kids feel terrible, these perfect family folk, so certain their lives are all so fine. They stand and say it is their right to say things that injure children who have learned to hate themselves.

Kids even have to hear things from their own families.

We grow up hearing everything.

“Shame is inventive.” It can do so much and you never know.

. . .

A guy named Freddy often strolled alone through the crowds in my high school, and that first year, I tried to attract his attention, because he seemed to be on his own too. In class, he turned bright red at the slightest thing and had a kind of funny walk—from a back injury, I later learned. He didn't seem to quite belong with anyone. I sensed something familiar. I thought he did too, even from way across a room. I scared him, I knew, because I was different, just what he did not want to be. But I wanted to try to reach him if I could.

Sometimes he spoke or nodded when he saw me, but he kept his distance, even when people began to like me and almost everyone said hello. Though he certainly did not remember, we had seen each other before, years back, when we were kids. Granny was visiting from St. Louis and she, my mother, and I had come to Paris to the Home Market where Betty liked to shop for meat. It was a very nice store for a small town, like somewhere you would find in a bigger place. They gave out samples of cheeses, sausages, and new sorts of snacks. I loved Chicken in a Biscuit.

While Betty waited for the butcher, Granny and I pushed the cart. As we turned one corner, we encountered an enraged woman yelling at her little boy, whose fair hair—almost clear enough to see through—was slicked back with oil and combed so neatly that he looked like a mannequin in a store. His skin was very white, the sort that burned and never tanned. As his mother's anger, unexplainable to us, terrifying to me, built up, the boy looked like all he wanted was to fade away, to back into the shelves among the cans and disappear. Even then I knew she saw something in him she despised.

When the mother slapped the boy hard, as if she could just slap him away, my grandmother blanched, staring at the woman's face. I thought Granny was going to call the police or go over herself to try to help. We saw the red streaks from his mother's fingers come up on the boy's white cheeks. Granny stopped the cart and eyed the woman as the boy ran down the aisle, tears running down his face. Back in the car, my grandmother kept bringing up what she had seen. “That woman,” she said, “that woman looked at that boy with hate.
With hate
. She looked at her own child with hate in her eyes. I have never seen anything like it.”

I knew somehow that the woman was ashamed of her son; he was small and delicate. I just knew. In the car on the way back to Madison as Granny began to settle down, I watched Betty carefully, looking for signs that I might be in trouble too. I felt like I was in terrible trouble too. Like that boy.

“Aren't you glad,” Granny asked, “that you are surrounded by people who love you?” For reasons I did not understand, this made me feel terrible; bad feelings flooded through me that day in that backseat.

Freddy was that boy in the grocery store. It was that pure white skin that made me remember. He had grown up to be good-looking—a cute guy, as they say in high school—but because of his back, which was often painful, he had not gone out for football. When he and his older brother, Earl, both started working at the IGA, Freddy was quickly fired. Because of his injury, he couldn't lift the heavy boxes. Every day, his brother gave him the twenty-five cents for lunch in the cafeteria.

In mixed chorus, Freddy was a tenor, like me. Sometimes we shared the same piece of music and he laughed at my jokes. We became friends. He never mentioned his mother, Wanda, who was known for her spotless house and her ire. How that woman could flame up, swearing, grabbing at those boys, seizing a collar or an arm wherever they were, even after they were older. Wanda would scream at those boys; the neighbors talked about it. Every night it went on. In the summer, people heard her while they worked in their gardens.

One afternoon after school, near the end of freshman year, Freddy rode his bicycle past my house where I was sitting on the step. Maybe because it was one of the first warm days, because it was spring, and we felt unburdened, just a little freer, he stopped to talk and I took him inside. Betty had fried chicken and it was cooling on a rack on the kitchen table for supper. I offered him a piece, and before I realized, he had eaten the whole chicken. For the rest of that year, he came over after school every day, always eating supper with us and never leaving until it was time for me to go to bed, something he never seemed to do. He roamed the streets till late, even when it was cold.

If a day went by without him visiting, I was lost. I needed him and wanted to touch him. So many times I had to stop my hands from forgetting what was acceptable. They knew what they wanted; I knew what they could not have. Even regular boys slapped each other on the back, roughhoused, and reached out occasionally to pat each other's shoulders. Yet if I came too near, Freddy moved away; he had a kind of radar, a sixth sense for when to take off, flee. If I sat on the bed in my room, he sat on the floor. If I came up behind him, reached out to tap him to get his attention, he moved. When my father cupped Freddy's head with his hands one day to steer him toward the table, Freddy looked shocked, and for a moment I thought he might hit my father, who was so surprised. He looked at me as if to say, “What can we do?”

I loved Freddy. He loved me. There was this feeling when we were together; it was so strong that, reaching out, I almost expected to feel something in the air between us.