Bettyville (24 page)

Every magazine or paper I pick up seems to have an article on dementia, which seems to trouble almost all of those from her generation who survive. It is a plague. I have considered going from room to room with a pad of yellow squares, writing down the names of things, labeling every item.

Sometimes I think of all the people who have traveled on their own across the world, people who have gone far from home, from villages to sprawling cities where nothing and no one is familiar. My mother has also traveled—across time for more than nine decades, from one era to the next, from a world she knew to another where much she was taught does not apply. Things are changing so fast; there is no period of adjustment now for anyone. My mother tries to keep up, but it is such a complicated trip. The faces that time taught her to trust are all missing. She lives in a foreign land where it is up to me to try to make her feel at home. She has walked so far, through time.

I never wanted to hurt my parents. That has always been my excuse for not making more of an effort to force them into a reality where they could really know me, where we could have shared a little more about our lives. When the subject of my sexuality, of who I really was, finally came up, after so many silent years, I was almost forty years old. My father was gone, someplace where he could not hear my words.

Betty and I were riding through the countryside on the way home from the stockbroker's. She was talking about how my failing father, dead just days, had nearly killed them both a few months back, driving too fast near that spot, by an old one-room schoolhouse a little way past Curryville. He had been trying to get her home from an eye doctor's appointment before bad weather set in.

At some point, she asked me about my old friend David. “He never married?” I shook my head.

“Is he homosexual?” she asked.

“I am not sure,” I said. “I never see him anymore. But you know I am. Surely. After all this time. You must understand this.”

The passing headlights threw streaks across her face. She looked pained. It would be awhile before we would return to a safe stretch of highway. “I had thought it would pass,” she said, before telling me that my father could never accept it, could not speak of it, would not speak of it. After watching the TV movie
An Early Frost,
he had commented of the father of the gay man in the film, “‘He hated it, but he loved his son.' That is all he ever said about it.” That is what she told me.

“You never talked about it?” I asked. “With him? The two of you? Not at all? I just can't imagine it. Never? You said nothing about me?”

She shook her head.

. . .

There is almost no truth better not known. The harder ones are tolerated more comfortably when shared. They couldn't even talk about me to each other. I was an issue they avoided. Because of the way they had been raised to think about people like me. They did not speak of me, of who I was, even when they were alone, in the privacy of their own house.

Betty turned to me in the car and said, “Well, I guess you'll go your way and I'll go mine.” After that, she stopped talking.

The radio murmured, mostly static as the miles passed, and there was nothing but the sound of strong wind. I said nothing. I wasn't sure what she meant, if we were divided now. There are words you never expect to hear. And then you hear them and it is like the news of death or disaster, they just stop you and you cannot go on for a while.

She said he loved me, my father, he loved me, but not who I turned out to be. That was the essence of it. He loved me, as so many have loved the children who turned out to be so different, “in spite of.” I didn't want “in spite of.” I had been afraid of “in spite of.” I didn't want to hear or know that this was how it was with my dad. I just kept reminding myself that he left me his hand.

Maybe I wasn't afraid of hurting them. Maybe I just knew, always, how it would be, despite their love and best intentions. Maybe I was scared of being hurt myself and knew that finally, through no fault of their own, they could say nothing that could conceal the fact that there was part of me they could never approve of. I wasn't angry; I was just sad at this separation that would never quite be bridged, this place where, despite what we shared, we parted ways, all of us hurt. It was just a set of circumstances inflicted that we could not avoid, the legacy of our place and time—and all that they had been brought up to believe by the world and the churches that told them I was something wrong. I had grown up with the story of Jesus taking all the little children to his knee. I had thought of churches as places of kindness, but if you are on the outside looking in, if only part of you is accepted, so much is different.

No one can dispute that God or whatever force there is created the world as a changing place. I like to think that it was progress that the father or mother of us had in mind, a greater love, a growing rather than diminishing acceptance of one another, of other kinds of people, as time moves forward, but so much of what I see now does not support my notion of this design.

. . .

After my mother and I had our talk, February just went on. The days were white and empty. Night after night, I dreamed about using drugs. In the mornings, I thought of just leaving, driving to the airport and flying back to New York to hide. Just escape.

Winter is a bleak time in the country, lonely, so I stayed with Betty for several weeks after the funeral to try to help, so she would not feel alone in the house where they had lived together so long. There was low-lying fog, snow melting, lavender streaks in the fields. For days, she stared out from her window at the long blank lawn, the bare suggestions of trees. The house was quiet. Betty said almost nothing; she was papers shuffling, a voice on the phone in another room. When she opened the safe-deposit box, she took the engagement ring that her aunt Mabel, whose middle name she gave me, had left for whomever I would marry. The next time I came home I discovered she had sent it to be reset. She had made it hers. It didn't matter. It was just something I noticed.

I put dishes into the washer. I shoveled snow. I went through papers and stock certificates, dozens of extra keys to doors and cars. I sat in my father's chair, but didn't stay because, though he never had intended it, I was hurt.

My mother did not grieve outwardly, at least when I was looking, but when she sat down on the couch, it was always my dad's sweater or coat she reached for to throw over herself. When I offered to help dispose of his clothes, she put one finger to her lips to say I should not speak of this. She set the plates down for lunch, returned again and again to her window, watched the snow drop from the branches. She stirred soups, opened cans, kept all the time filled with what had to be done. She never mentioned my father, or our conversation about me, except to say one more time that they never spoke of who I was.

. . .

This is how it finally thawed with Betty: On the morning I went back to New York after my father's death, she rode with me to Lambert Field, where we were driven by the man who now took her places far from home. Her eyes were not good enough to drive outside town much anymore, and by now the highway made her nervous rather than excited. At a hotel near the airport, where we once went on hot weekends to swim, I climbed the steps onto the shuttle bus. In parting, Betty offered few words, a nod, a bunch of wrapped sandwiches, and a bundle of cookies with gumdrops, a kind difficult to bake that were once my favorite.

I thought I had seen the last of her for a while. We would, as she said, go our own ways, and I watched her every step back to the car where the driver hunched over the wheel just like my father had. But as I was waiting for the bus to pull out, there she was again, ascending the stairs of the bus, careful of every step and holding a cup of coffee, its steam rising up to her face. Walking to my seat, she offered the cup, gripping it tightly to avoid a spill, though it was very hot, and not letting go until I had wrapped my fingers around it. When she passed it to me, our hands touched lightly. She patted me on the shoulder, wavered a bit when the engine of the bus started to fire up. This is how we left it.

Gradually, we came to a truce, negotiated by distance, time apart, loyalties, and love. Silence was a condition, unnamed but ever present, or maybe just an inevitable result. There would be no intrusions, no questions, no inquiries about circumstances, details, people I might have cherished, or been hurt by, or loved. I would never miss a Christmas or summer vacation at home after my father died. I went back whenever it was possible, and there was no doubt of the love between us, but there was part of me that never went home again, at least not for a long time. I no longer felt on solid ground there. I think I am still hoping she will look up from her newspaper and ask me how my life has really been.

I don't blame my parents for any hurts. I blame myself more than anyone, my silence, but everything in the world where I was raised told me I was bad and wrong and I took it in. I didn't want to inflict it on them. I am trying to forgive myself for not getting us all through this in a better way, but lately, being here, remembering, has helped me see what I carried. Everything I heard, from every corner, when I was young told me I was bad. Nothing said the world had open arms. When I came home to help my mother and walked into the room where when I was younger I lay awake worrying about the future, I remembered all that fear and trying to put it away and sleep a night through.

What would I have done with a diamond ring? It made her think of things she thought I was missing. She made it into something that would suit the situation better.

Yesterday, on television, I heard the story of a Georgia legislator who is trying to bar gay children from attending public schools. I threw my shoe at the television and yelled out, “Fuck you, bastard.”

He would take us all back to that same place. I hate that man and everyone like him. What has become of kindness?

Every week or so, a gay kid somewhere jumps off a bridge or slashes his wrists. I am told that a boy near here hanged himself because his father could not accept who he was. On television, I listen to the things they say, the right-wingers, and fundamentalists, and all the people who consolidate their power by hurting other people. I want to cover up the ears of kids and say, “Do not take it in.” I took it in. I really did. I heard everything that people in the world around me said about who I was. It hurt me, but I thought I had no right to say anything because I was wrong. I didn't know what silence would cost, how it would change my life. It takes a long time to outrun the things that the world drills into you.

Our struggle for words was just a tiny battle in a small place that is disappearing. No one will remember it but me.

. . .

After my father died and I went back to work, Tessa Hadley—a woman highly attuned to issues of aging and appearance—told me I looked older. She said that the death of a parent can often bring on early menopause. Or “low T.”

I didn't think I had early menopause. “Low T?” I asked.

“Testosterone.”

“I don't think I ever had that much.”

Tessa assured me that everything changes when parents die, when the generation ahead is gone and we are the next to go.

“The body grieves,” she told me, shaking her head and raising a finger to her lips. “The body grieves.”

“Be still,” I told her.

I didn't look young anymore. After years of wearing contact lenses, I went back to my glasses. I just didn't care so much how I looked, if at all.

I just tried not to use drugs. I was scared to go home, to be alone, to pick up. At treatment centers, I listened to stories: the ghetto mother who gave up crack, got her children back, and rose every morning at 3 a.m. to pack lunches, iron clothes, and navigate a long bus journey to work; people who had lost people; stockbrokers who flamed out on coke, got divorced from their trophy wives, braved the wrath of their children as they kept on, trying to get clean. I heard old men and women who had weathered decades of cancer, financial hardship, loneliness, without drinking or drugging.

These stories helped me through. I wrapped these tales around me. When, unable to rise from bed or certain I would not make it through the day, I called for the help of these strangers who spoke, they came or called to talk until my crises passed. It was the stories that saved me; words rushed in to draw me back to life.

When I looked into the mirror, I did appear older; I looked more and more like my father. In the years that have followed, it has seemed to me that my dad has taken me over, seeped into me. Sometimes I think I have become my father. My body is more like his, a fact that Betty, who is already anticipating the blockage of one or more of my heart valves, is quick to point out.

In rain, my hair, a different consistency now, frizzes up like my dad's did as he strolled on the beach in Florida. I remind myself of him so often; the expressions that pass over my face feel familiar even though I can't see them.

In traffic, I lose patience, start yelling, “Damn boobs!” at drivers during rush hour. Here with Betty, I feel even more like Big George. Gradually I have slipped into his role and reactions. She seems most angry at me when I remind her of him. We relive all the old scenes.

If I have been working all night and Betty finds me taking a nap in the middle of the day, she is not amused. She hated to see my father idle. He was never allowed to relax. She hates to see me idle. I am not allowed to relax. I fall into my role. Throwing my hands into the air, I get the ladder from the garage and head out to clean what seem like decades of dry leaves out of the gutters. I get angry and manage to dislodge the drainpipe that runs from the gutter to the ground. I mutter swearwords to myself. Like he did. If Betty comes out, I say them louder. Like he did. If Betty comes out when the neighbors are around, I fling them about with abandon, as loud as I can go without actually yelling. Like he did.