Bettyville (15 page)

A
fter I have Betty tucked away at church with the hymns marked in her book, I start my errands and ask God, if he is listening, to help my mom. Please. At the convenience store, the boy who mows our lawn bends over the sharp rocks around the bushes, hunting something. His jeans are too long and baggy. He wears his gray parka with the hood up, even as the heat builds. It is hard to see his face; it's just a pale blur. Paying for my gas, I see that he is holding a Band-Aid box and ask the man at the counter, “What is that kid doing?”

Looking for cigarette butts, the man tells me. “He does it all the time.”

“Do you know him?” I ask. “He's from around the lake,” I am told. “What lake?”

“I don't know,” the man says. “One of them.”

At Hickman's IGA, Earl Davis—Freddy's brother—loads groceries, as he has for decades. I think he is wearing the same clothes he wore in high school. The last time I saw Freddy, he was standing in the parking lot behind an insurance office that he cleaned on weekends. I was in college then, lucky enough to have parents who could afford to buy me a little freedom. That summer, I had interned in D.C., where I met someone who meant something to me. Of course I would never have admitted that to anyone, him especially, though in my mind he had become my boyfriend.

. . .

“Is it wrong?” Eric asked as he reached for my hand. “No,” I said. “It's okay. I like it.”

Eric loosened my tie and draped it over the back of the chair. He made me feel taken care of, an unfamiliar thing.

I was working with one of our senators as part of a program for college kids. Twenty years old, I was a little drunk. Eric, who helped supervise our group, was from Cape Cod and looked like a Kennedy. Assessing me, he said I should buy a dark suit. Mine was baby blue; he said I looked ready for the Easter Parade.

I said I was not taking wardrobe advice from anyone in shorts with spouting whales. After deciding I came off as too earnest, I was trying for some edge. He laughed, touched me for just a moment. In his hand, I felt everything waiting.

I had amused him; I saw that, in his opinion, this counted for something. We were suddenly complicit; I wanted to make him laugh again and reach out to me. I always want more of anything good. Immediately, I found myself craving his approval. There was something a little wicked about him. He had a bemused way of looking at people. Like me.

“You're from Missouri,” he said. “Show me.”

It was a fun game, this exchange, but he was straight. His girlfriend, Binky, from North Carolina, changed the bands of her wristwatch—yellow, blue, pink, and green—to match her outfits. One evening, she led a delegation of southerners in a rendition of “I Like Calling North Carolina Home.”

At a cocktail hour at the Watergate, Eric hovered, brought me a drink, refills. When he touched my arm to guide me through the crowd, I wanted him to leave his hand there. Later, my friends and I went for dinner and to the bars. Eric tagged along. At every new place, I hoped that I would find him by my side. “Sit by me,” I kept thinking to myself. He did. At every stop.

Binky was gone for the weekend. Since the debacle with the doctor, I had avoided dating, studying nonstop. Huddled over textbooks, I thought of myself as an intellectual, madly highlighting pages in yellow. Sitting in an uncomfortable chair at my first Introduction to Poetry class, I had experienced an epiphany when the professor entered the room and began, with no preamble, to recite a poem by Ezra Pound about a Chinese widow who lost her love. The story begins with the two as shy children pulling flowers, sharing blue plums, “two small people, without dislike or suspicion.” As the years pass, they are drawn together, into an arranged marriage that becomes much more.

At fourteen I married My Lord you.

I never laughed, being bashful.

Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.

Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.

When he departs on a fishing boat, she is filled with sorrow, an emotion that grows year after year when he does not return and her silent mourning increases as the mosses grow over the sidewalk. Finally, an old woman now, still waiting, watching the currents of the river from a widow's walk, she offers a quiet invitation:

If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,

Please let me know beforehand,

And I will come out to meet you,

As far as Cho-fu-Sa.

It was the holding back, the longing I recognized. Something in me connected to the widow, her sadness, to what had been lost. That day, in that class, I learned words, what happens when they are said out loud, how feelings became real when set against the silence of a clean white page. Something in me broke open, a crack.

I was a journalism major, a would-be reporter who could not bear the thought of calling up grieving widows with questions. As soon as the bell rang, I went off to see my adviser and explore a double major that would allow me to take literature classes.

. . .

Eric took me to his friend's empty dorm room. “I like you,” he said as, tentatively, I laid my head on his chest, just where it had wanted to be all night. His smooth, soft neck smelled aftershavey and seemed, when he opened his collar, the most private of places.

He was gentler than I expected, big brothery, and I was surprised by who he turned out to be. He kissed my hands. Lowering my head, I looked at the wall, like the widow in the poem. Suddenly there were too many feelings. I was overwhelmed and wanted to run.

As the hours passed, we became more emotional and connected as we cared for each other. After we finished, we lay there in the hot summer night. When he walked to the closet, I was scared he was about to kick me out, but he made no move. When I had to go to the bathroom, I put on his shorts and took off. His clothes felt good. I ran down the hall excited, jumping up to swat a light fixture; this just seemed like something that needed doing. It seemed like things might turn out okay.

“What's up with Miss North Carolina?” I asked him.

“Just kicking the can,” he said. “You know.”

Actually, I didn't.

“My parents wouldn't get the gay thing,” he said, continuing. “They aren't softies.”

I realized that in my haste to make him my protector, I had failed to acknowledge that he wasn't much older than I was. I laid my head on his chest again as we started to fall asleep, but in the morning, I woke up alone. We had moved the beds together, but Eric had scooted his away in the night. The space between them didn't look crossable, but I decided it was okay to hold out my hand. He did not take hold and I started to prepare myself. I knew how it was going to be.

By the time I was out of the shower, he was dialing Binky on the hall phone. I should have known it was coming. Looking for love in the gay world of the late 1970s meant dealing with two things: (a) You are a little fucked up. (b) So is everyone else.

“Sooner or later,” he said, “I will have to get married.”

“It's okay,” I said that morning before we separated. “Don't worry about it.”

Later I learned that Eric had a rep for sleeping with many women
and
men. When I saw him around the dorm, he looked and turned away. Our connection scared him, the chemistry. What we had was intense and I wanted more. Intensity was my first addiction. It's like a drug; it takes you out of normal life. I miss the rush of it.

In the days that followed, I showed nothing, barely acknowledged him. One night, he came to stand by me at a gathering where “Miss You” by the Rolling Stones was playing. Mary, a wild girl from Milwaukee, and I sang along every time the line about the Puerto Rican girls
“just dyin' to meet ya”
came on. I thought I couldn't get any cooler, and then Eric—whom I had been doing this whole performance for—was right beside me. “You know Eric, don't you?” I asked Mary. “He dates that girl with the watchbands.”

He looked a little wounded, but grinned. Later, when we were leaving, he swatted me on my rear, but he ignored me the rest of the month. I hated it. He was someone who kind of got me.

. . .

At the end of my summer, my father picked me up at the airport and hugged me as if I had spent the summer in Arabia. His love was so big and open, but he made me feel guilty and uncomfortable. I didn't want to be back there. When he hugged me, I felt myself going stiff.

On the way home, apparently desperate for tales of pretty girls, he tried to pry me open. I fished for something, but he seemed less interested than me in Binky's watchbands or Jamey—a rich girl from Beverly Hills—and her dazzling array of Diane von Fürstenberg wrap dresses.

“You'll find someone,” he said. “You'll get a girlfriend.” He was doing that thing, those lines. Of course he would; this was how it was with fathers and sons, but I didn't want to hear it. I didn't want to hear anymore about girlfriends. He had to know it wasn't true. But he didn't. It hit me that we were always going to miss out on each other.

He would be disappointed when he discovered that there would be no grandchildren and bereft over what I was giving up. “Having children,” he always said, “is the best part of life.

He wanted me to have all the good things. He would be sad to think I was missing out. I would just be one more thing that had not gone quite right for him.

For the rest of the summer, I worked every day with my father at the lumberyard. Until it was time for me to return to school, he seemed to try to reach out when we were alone, but couldn't wrap his fingers around someone so elusive. He tried to find some different way for us to be with each other, but I couldn't go in that direction.

One afternoon, Big George—in a confiding mood—told me that before he met Betty, after he returned from the army, he had been in love with another girl named Betty whom he had planned to marry. She was “a beaut,” he said, like in a guy in a movie from another time.

But she broke it off. And then he met his Betty, our Betty, the one he drew the sketch of, that young and lovely girl, tentative and uncertain. For years I have searched for that drawing he did as I watched, but it has long been missing. I think she may have found it and disposed of it or tucked it away in some secret place.

On their first date, they went to the old Busch's Grove in St Louis. He knew that night that he would marry her, he said. He made it into a sentimental story where everything turned out just as it should. “There was something,” he said, “a sweetness.” She ordered the cheapest thing on the menu. She was nervous. He was glad he had found the right Betty.

My parents married on a scorching St. Louis day in August 1948. A small gathering with a cake from the Lake Forest Bakery. Bill Baker brought Mammy to St. Louis for the wedding in one of his crazy old cars, which broke down around St. Charles. Mammy said she was so hot waiting for Bill to fix that car she thought she was going to “upchuck,” a term I have never known used outside my family. Betty was twenty-six, too old, she said, for too fancy a dress or too lavish a ceremony.

Afterward, they went to Chicago for the weekend. Sade Sizer took them to a restaurant with phones on the tables: the Pump Room. Betty called up Mammy and told her she was just about to eat a lobster.

. . .

I am standing in front of the church, hoping my mother is doing all right at the piano, that she won't wind up hurt, that she will come out of that church looking like she did when she was younger. At a wedding of a daughter of one of Betty's friends ten or fifteen years or so ago, my mother was maybe seventy-five or a bit older, but looked sixty or less. Big George was gone by then, and Betty, who no longer drove at night, refused to go “in a carload of old widows,” so I came home to be her escort. I was having a good streak, making lots of money at a publishing house where my books were hitting big.

So I got on a plane, though I don't much like weddings, which make me feel out of place, especially single.

I told Betty that she looked better, more beautiful than she ever had, but she could not accept this, could not take it in. At the entrance to the cool, candlelit church, she reached out to touch the fresh flowers, in awe at the perfection of the preparations. “Hazel has outdone herself,” she said, “spared no expense.”

My friend Lauren, who thinks she is Margaret Mead, says that weddings and funerals stir all kinds of things up in us because they are tribal occasions. I am not sure I have a tribe, though I think I have always longed for one.

That night at the wedding, my beautiful mother wore a suit the color of key lime pie, her favorite. She actually seemed to want to have a good time. At the reception, after a few glasses of champagne, she took off her shoes and wandered through the crowd in her stocking feet, greeting old friends. She was swaying, but just barely, when no one was looking, almost dancing to the music. She touched my elbow once to steady herself. “Have you had some champagne?” I asked. “Mind your own business,” she said.

“You are my business,” I said, as she had always said to me, all my life, in similar exchanges. I wanted her to feel as I did when I heard those words: protected, aligned with someone, connected.

I want her to feel this way now.

. . .

Betty always says she misses my aunt June more than almost anyone. I miss her too, and can picture her standing up at her table at that wedding reception, rearranging some flowers in a centerpiece knocked askew, tucking little sacks of rice into her purse. She couldn't walk well anymore, but pushed herself to come, wanting to be part of the occasion, more lavish than most held around here now. Bill had stayed home and June had on a diamond-encrusted brooch in the shape of a large turtle along with her other major gems, the jewelry that Bill rarely allowed her to wear in public.

I wondered if June was imagining what Mary Ann, the daughter she lost, might have looked like as a bride. She looked left out, a little sad. I sometimes avoided my aunt, as she was the type to make reference on such occasions to my unmarried status. Or say something mortifying. I have always hated direct references to my way of being. Betty takes the easy way. Betty asks nothing. I prefer the easy way too, the approach that allows one to ignore every feeling until you are strapped in the back of an ambulance, screaming all the way to Silver Hill.