Bettyville (27 page)

I
t is Labor Day, late morning. The neighbors have left for the Lake of the Ozarks or Table Rock to fish and ski. They have gone to cook out and laugh with family and friends. We have nowhere special to go. My mother is standing at her window, watching the sky. Quietly she announces, after a few minutes, that it is raining. The Midwest's worst drought since the 1930s has finally broken. The weatherman has gotten it right. He has predicted rain all over the state and now it is here.

I come to stand with her by the window. She seems relieved, as if the fate of all the world depended on this rain falling from the sky, as if this was just her rain, something sent to bring her peace.

. . .

Yesterday, I found myself at our church, the First Christian Church, Disciples of Christ. I believed it would be open; there is a prayer room, a refuge for people. I thought of all those I have known in this church, in this town, who might have come here in times of trouble. All the people who have come to ask for help and gone.

The church was not open. Everything was locked up, so I sat on the step by the side door and said, out loud, to whoever was listening, “Help Betty, please help Betty. Please give her health, and happiness, and peace. Daddy, John Hickey, get your asses in gear.”

As I sat on the step, so many things came rushing back to me, so many days, and words, and scenes. Through the years of watching my mother there are a few things I have come to understand.

All Betty will ever say of my infancy is this: “You cried and cried and cried. Every time I picked you up, you cried more.” When she says this—and she does not admit it often—she looks ashamed, as if she should have known how to quiet me. She tells me how she would give me to my father, who would rest me on his big warm stomach and cradle me in his hands. “Your father could always calm you down. Or I'd give you to Mammy. Mammy could always calm you down. I never could. I could never make you stop crying.” She doesn't believe she ever got it right.

Several years ago, my mother, my aunt Alice, and I went to Springfield, Illinois, where my parents lived when they were first married. We went by the apartment house where they started out, and I asked if she had been sorry to leave, to go back to Madison, where my father began working at the lumberyard. “Mammy needed us,” she said. “My father was dead. She needed help. Harry needed help, though he wouldn't admit it. I liked Springfield. We had made some friends. I was young and kind of pretty. There were places to go there, a group of nice young couples, a pretty lake.”

After our drive, we went to visit our cousin Dick, who lives in a nearby suburb and whose daughter, Kim, a midwife, was visiting from California. Kim has a child, Macao, maybe a year or so old then, young enough that he was still likely to stumble a bit when he walked. Macao had long, shiny black hair, and sweet fat legs, and chubby hands. He was, as they say, a beautiful child. When Kim, holding him, offered him to Mother—the woman who always avoids babies—she said, “He doesn't want me. I'm not so good at that.”

I picked up Macao, held him up in the air, waved his hand at Betty, and danced him around. My mother looked wary. “Don't break him,” my mother said. “Don't break the baby.”

I said, “I don't think you can really break a baby. Here, you take him. I think he wants to come to you.”

Betty said, “Watch out. You would never forgive yourself if something happened to that child.”

“You cried and cried and cried. Every time I picked you up, you cried more.”
She was scared
,
nervous, frightened she would do something wrong, and I have come to believe that I, just a baby, sensed her fear and cried out when I felt it go through me. She never quite believed she could or would get it right with a baby, with her baby. She was not the type who could care for a child correctly. She was not good enough and then he turned out broken and, after all, someone had to be blamed. Someone had to have made her boy turn out wrong. She thinks she was the one. My sense of this is so strong, though I would do anything to make it not so.

Later, Macao was walking around and kept looking at my mother. Again and again he walked over to her and gazed up at her face. Shyly, she reached out for his hand and took it, very gently, in her own, his little fat hand. In a few minutes she stood up, trying so hard not to scare him as he waited to see what she would do. She walked with the baby so carefully, reaching down to hold his hand and guide him. They went outside where she told him the names of flowers, pointed out this and that.

After lunch was over, she even picked him up, took him outside again. It was as if she wanted to be alone with him, on her own, away from anyone who might spy her making a mistake. She held him as if he were a piece of delicate china, too fine to ever take down from its cabinet. Her fingers seemed wary, so full of caution. From the window, I could see her lips moving, whispering to him, but I could not make out what she had to say.

When she came back in with the baby, she grinned a little and announced, “He likes me, I think. I think he might like
me
.”

. . .

Betty thinks she is the one to blame for who I am. She was the one who got it wrong. There has never been anyone to tell her differently, because she never spoke of her fears. My father said nothing to reassure her. They didn't talk.

For years and years, Betty tried her best to do everything right, to make me okay, to be good enough. When I was a child, as far back as I can remember, my mother read to me:
The Story About Ping, Scuppers the Sailor Dog, The Happy Hollisters,
poems from
A Child's Garden of Verses.

Night after night, year after year, after she finished the dishes or the wash and smoked a secret cigarette in the bathroom, she sat on the edge of my bed, in the light from the lamp, reading until her voice got tired or until I slept. Sometimes she added her own commentary:

“Let the crocodile have him. I'm sick of him,”
or
“That was kind of silly.”

She thought it important for me not to be ignorant, to read. My mother gave me words, though she has rarely been inclined to use them herself.

She made me fish, play football. She took me to endless lessons, dentists for braces, the dermatologist for antiacne pills, St. Louis for clothes. She made certain I ate the proper foods. For years and years, if I was leaving to go back to the city on an early-morning flight, she always got up at 4 or 5 a.m. to prepare steak and eggs, cinnamon toast, to stuff my suitcases with special treats, the things I liked best that only home could offer. She did everything, everything she believed she was supposed to do. Now she can do none of that. This clearly grieves her, I see. When I leave for a plane now, she says, “I feel so terrible. I cannot offer you anything to take. I should have made you something nice.” She worries that after she dies, I—a man alone—will go untended.

I have tried my best to show her I am okay. I have done everything I know to show her she did all right with me. I have told her. I have reminded her of all the things she did, said time and again that whatever happens, I will never forget the things she has done for me. But it has never quite seemed to sink in.

For years I have tried to tell her that she has been just the mother I wanted, that I am the one who made my own mistakes, that I am not broken at all, that I am just human. But I don't think she has ever believed it. This is why, I think, she cannot speak of my life, because she somehow got it all wrong from the beginning. Or so she believes. This is why she has stayed, why she has waited, watching out the window, always looking out for the moment when I will turn into the driveway, always trying to look her best for when I come in the door. She has struggled to keep on, trying not to fall. To try to help me. She has not wanted to leave me alone. She has always wanted to be here for me, to do what she could.

. . .

We stand at the window. We see the rain falling on the yards, gardens, and flowers. I imagine it coming down on the beans that may bloom now on their twisted vines, on the burned corn, and highways, and back roads, and little white houses. It is raining on the trees and on the graves where, years after my father died, Betty and John struggled, summer after summer, to make the grass grow.

. . .

Last night, after I returned from my time on the church step, the evening began softly, but changed. Although her face was a battle of frustration and confusion, Betty sat, without agitation or sound, poring over her stack of bills again. I asked to help; she shook her head. When she reached the end of the stack, she started again. This happened over and over. I watched her go through this process until I began to get nervous and interrupted. “Let's see if there's a movie,” I said. “Surely there is something on all those channels.” My mother does not much like television, except for the news, but she agreed. On one of the HBO channels, a Richard Gere film was just starting.

“Who is that actor?” she asked.

“Richard Gere.”

After an hour or so, time she spent staring, seemingly not quite comprehending, at the screen, she asked again, “Who is that actor?”

“Richard Gere.”

In an hour, the same question: “Who is that actor?”

“Richard Gere.”

I dozed off in front of the television as she crinkled the newspaper. Richard Gere was running down a city street, pursued by someone. When I looked up, she asked again, “Who is that actor in that movie?”

. . .

I see the rain falling on the deserted church in Perry, and on Madison's once-lively Main Street. It is coming down in Holiday, and Middle Grove, and Duncans Bridge, Clarence, Monroe City, Mexico, Moberly, Macon, Boonville, De Soto, Washington, Bonne Femme, Brunswick, Santa Fe, Granville, Huntsville, Salisbury, LaPlata, Keytesville, and Higbee. I see the old farmers with wrinkled faces, looking up at the sky.

. . .

Last night she was fitful, pacing around her bed, shaking her head, and getting after herself for something, or so it seemed. She was mad at herself for something. She was angry and so agitated that I knew she would never get to sleep, but I succeeded, finally, in getting her into bed. I fluffed her pillows, and arranged the blanket, and asked if she was too warm or not warm enough. I took her hand to feel if it was cold, then pulled the sheet up to her waist as she stared at the ceiling, shaking, half crying, half laughing, half herself, half gone, half knowing, half not.

As I turned to leave the room, she glanced at me and I saw that she was smiling at me, not the smile of recent days, the smile that seems connected to nothing, but the smile of the real Betty, the one who has not quite left forever.

When I left the room, she would not let me turn out the light. I noticed the card by the bedside table. On it, she had written:

Eggnog

Richard Greer

Anne Wallin

Lisbon

Richard Greer

Eggnog: something she served on holidays when she gathered the family together.

Richard Greer: a stranger running with purpose through her night's confusing streets.

Anne Wallin, called Nona, was the aunt she lived with in St. Louis during her days as a secretary who rode the streetcar home.

Lisbon, I think, is all the places she wanted to go.

. . .

We stand at the window for the longest time and do not move. I see the rain falling on the dry shores of the Mississippi and the Missouri. I see my mother's face in the glass with the rain coming down. We are both standing there, behind the glass that separates us from the world. The fragments of our faces are there in the glass, partly there, partly not. There have been so many Bettys. But I think I like this one best, this old lady in the flannel gown and slippers. She tries so hard.

. . .

You tell yourself that something has to happen. You tell yourself that somehow, someone is planning some sort of rescue. You say this cannot be true, that this is not happening to her. You say she is just an old woman whose time has come, who has lived a good life, who is departing, but cannot go and is so frightened of what will come if she must stay. You tell yourself that so many others have suffered more, lost more, lived less. You say that it is just her time, your time to bear sadness and farewells.

. . .

Many times in my life I have felt adrift and worried, screwed up, lost. When these moments start to shake me up, I remember coming home from St. Louis in our old green station wagon, lying in the back watching the lights on the highway signs, surrounded by bags of dresses with my fingers blackened from the hard licorice drops my father procured on every visit to Stix, Baer & Fuller where they once had a candy counter stocked with everything. Sometimes I rode in the front seat, between my parents, and would wake up after what seemed only moments of travel to find us driving into the driveway of the house in Madison.

. . .

“Mind your own business.”

“You are my business.”

. . .

It is raining on our old house, on my grandmother's house, on the corner where the ladies used to gather, on the place where the lumberyard was, on the sidewalks where we walked, on Mammy's house with the many chimneys, in our backyard, on my father's thirsty trees. We watch the rain fall: her silences, my secrets; my secrets, her silences.

I watch the rain overflow the gutters and fall in cascades into the overflowing hanging baskets. Because of the holiday, I have bought her all the things she likes, special treats of the kind to please a little girl.

“The winter is coming,” she says.

“I know, but we will stay warm inside our house.”

As I draw closer beside her, she allows me a rare liberty: I stretch my arm across her shoulder. But she stands with her arms held stiffly at her sides. She does not touch back. We say nothing at all.

T
he night before our first visit to the oncologist, I sat in my father's office, looking over his seashells and waiting as Betty brushed her teeth and prepared to lie down. Most nights, when she falls back, she doesn't hit the middle of the mattress, only the edge. I am always terrified she will fall off in the night. Now, before she sleeps, as she protests, I put my arms around her shoulders and under her knees to lift and position her in a safer spot. She hates it, cannot stand relinquishing her body to someone else's control.

After turning out the light that night, I put my hand across her forehead, hoping to quiet her distress. Panic showed in her eyes. “You're okay,” I said. “Now try to sleep. I will get you through this. You're my partner.”

I thought that the doctor would say she was dying. I was prepared to let her go, to spare her pain, if that was what she chose. My father died months shy of my parents' fiftieth anniversary. “Fifty years,” he said to my mother the Christmas before he died. “Fifty years! That's too damn long.” And then he laughed and slapped my mother on the rear end.

“Too damn long”: This is what my mother thinks about her life. She seems to believe she is taking someone else's time. This is part of what it is to be very old. Part of her is ashamed to stay here longer; she doesn't feel entitled to more.

That is what I was thinking about that night, about her deciding to leave, about having to allow her to go. By her bed I noticed her sandals, her poor old sandals, waiting for another morning in the world.

. . .

The summer of the drought was followed by an autumn where the leaves left unburned changed color quickly and were gone. All winter, the house was chilly in the mornings. We found out that Betty is not eligible for Tiger Place; they felt she needed too much special attention.

“I thought that was the point,” I said.

On the first Wednesday of March, Betty awakened, complaining of pain in her side, worried about her heart. When the ache spread to her side, I took her to Columbia to the emergency room. She sat in the examining room in her pink Mizzou T-shirt, saying nothing; but when the doctor pressed her abdomen, she screamed out and I knew. She was very ill.

Betty demanded to go home so loudly that I could barely hear the doctor describe, after the CAT scan, the blockage in the tube leading from my mother's kidney, probably a tumor. There was also a mass in her spleen, but the kidney was the immediate concern. She would probably lose it and was admitted to the hospital and given painkillers and an IV.

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.