Bettyville (13 page)

“I know where everything is here,” Betty said the other day, making her way down the hall at home. “I don't have to think about it. I just know. Even at night. I don't even have to see.”

. . .

In my mind, I line them up for the auctioneer: the stubby pencils that say
BAKER
LUMBER
, my mother's coats and scarves, Mammy's pins, Oscar's Smith Corona, Wray Chowning's family photographs, Granny's china, a jar from Aunt Winnie's porch. What will not make it? What, meaningful only to me, will be lost or burned? The years of photos, the family letters, touched by many, that said love or mourned a passing, the greetings from the war, the cards from many distant travels—the girls from Hawaii doing hula, the greetings sent from the Muehlebach in Kansas City during the lumbermen's convention, the vistas of the faraway Pacific that Mammy sent Betty, just married. What will become of these things? I feel like I should have made a place for all this. For generations—my father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and before and before—there have been George Hodgmans, and one day there will be none and it is a bit hard not to feel disappointed that I am the one to close the book on all of us.

. . .

Betty looks so woebegone when I explain to Jackie that I want us to go on the waiting list that I cannot look back at her. It is just a backup—I keep repeating this, trying to make myself believe this, to make Betty understand, but she just shakes her head as Cinda and I follow Jackie into the office to get the form to fill out and write a check. We have to do this. We have to make sure she has a pleasant place if she must leave home.

Betty will be number eight on the list; she can waive entry three times before she is taken off the list. Before she actually enters, she will have to undergo an assessment designed to test her level of self-sufficiency and “cognitive functioning.” The application fee is a nonrefundable thousand dollars, which I do not tell my mother about.

As I turn the corner to do the paperwork, I catch sight of Betty. When she thinks no one is looking, she reaches out for another flower and yanks the brown top off with force. The sun makes her wrinkles stand out. When I return to her side, she says again, “I want to go home.” She rests her hand on mine just for a second. “Please, George,” she says. “Please.”

“Mother, you've been so lucky,” I tell her.

“Oh, you think so?” she asks, her tone implying that there are things I will never know, things she did for me that I cannot fathom.

I think Betty will never live at Tiger Place. She is falling too fast. Soon, I am afraid, she will be beyond movies with popcorn or exercise bicycles, though maybe she will remember flowers. Maybe she will find herself, on some future morning, running her finger along the glass of a painting in a hall she does not recognize, recalling in some corner of her mind the fat buds of her mother's roses growing in her old front yard. On Facebook, a lady wrote that the days she gets to be with those she loves are “gold-star days.” I often tell Betty that these are our gold-star days. I have tried to make them special so she can carry pieces of these times in her memory. I am trying to pack her bag with things that might draw her back to herself someday.

I wonder if she will remember the cinnamon toast I make on Friday mornings. I wonder if she will recall Mammy washing her hair in rainwater from an old tin pan.

. . .

All the way home from Columbia, I break the speed limit. I want to check on the dog. I want to put an end to this day. My mother is mostly silent. She can no longer deny what is happening and she is plotting, planning her attack. As we travel, Betty's mood shifts. Suddenly, she is nice, so nice, too nice. Butter wouldn't melt in her mouth. She asks me if I need money. I turn the radio up. It is Reverend Lucius Love's gospel hour. I need some lifting up.

When I was in high school, a man named Harold Long preached at the AME church, across the tracks from the white part of town, even then. One of his sisters, whose first name I wish I could remember, was in my mixed chorus class. She was big; her feet bulged out below the straps of her shoes. Stepping up on the bleachers winded her. But I always listened for her. There were all our voices singing together, and there was her voice, full of church, and the people she had come from, and feeling. Her emotion changed the face of an ordinary day and I was drawn by it. Now there are only two black students at Paris High School, both mixed race. The others attend a school called Faith Walk run by one of the African American churches. “I don't know if it's segregation,” says a friend, “or if it's more a matter of the black parents not wanting their kids around the shit the white kids are pulling.”

If there was ever a time when I was convinced there was a God in the universe holding out his hand to me, it was when the Long sisters performed “I Believe.”

“If you stayed in Paris, you could keep that dog,” Betty declares suddenly, eyes glinting as if she has just been dealt a winning hand at the bridge table. She is playing for freedom. I have always enjoyed watching my mother in action. There is love and there is survival. At the moment, the latter can be her only concern. She will do whatever is necessary. Her independence is at stake. Her everything. Home.

I don't want to take away her home.

“Can't we just go on the way we are, just a little while longer?” she asks. “It won't be forever.”

“You look pretty healthy.”

“I could die tomorrow.”

“I told you to get a flu shot.”

The ensuing moments do not fly by.

“Mother, can't you see that I am trying to do everything I can to make you happy? Trust me, please. I'll take care of you. I will do right by you.”

“I know,” she says. “I know.” And I think she actually believes it, that I can do it, that I can make it, somehow, okay. Outside it is so hot that steam is rising from the highway. When I was in high school, I brought Mammy, very old then and not far from her death, home from the doctor in Columbia on an old country road. Her eyes never left the window; it seemed as though she was watching something, though she could barely see. Whatever it was, it pleased her. Finally, outside Centralia, she spoke. “Look at all those pretty cows,” said my grandmother, the old woman who still remembered the farm. The blades of the windmills still turned slowly in the breeze off the fields in her mind's eye.

“Look at those little calves,” she said, directing my attention to the window. But the pastures we were passing were empty. There was nothing there but the strip of highway running toward Paris and the room at Monroe Manor where she lived by then.

O
n the table by my bed, I keep a picture of Mammy as a young woman in her hat with the side dented in, a heavy suit with a long skirt, a white blouse with ruffles, carefully ironed. Beside her, a suitcase; behind her, a railroad track and a boxcar with an open door. In the far distance, a long expanse of flat American land, a line of bare trees with thin branches dwarfed by the wide-open sky clear of clouds.

“Where were you going?” I want to ask her, but I'll never know.

I see her, decades later, reaching up to hang laundry on the line, clean clothes slapping in the wind.

The woman who will become my grandmother is alone in the photograph by my bedside and does not appear happy or eager to travel. She is a farm girl from a big family with a reasonable number of acres on the outskirts of a town called Clarence. Maybe she is leaving home, perhaps departing for the women's college—Hardin, in Mexico, Missouri—where she learned Latin. Maybe she is off to teach in another place. Her eyes are closed, perhaps because of the sun, or the fact that she is reluctant to be photographed, or because she is in tears.

A few years after the picture was taken, she would marry Joe Baker, back in Missouri after a few years in Alabama—Tuscaloosa, it said in his obituary—working in a John Deere factory. In photographs, my grandfather has shadows around his deep-set eyes. I never knew him; years before I was born, he sat down at the lunch table and died after a heart attack. During my lifetime he was never spoken of. None of them, not Mammy or Betty or Bill or Harry, ever told us anything about him. All Betty will say when asked about him is that he was “a very nice man.”

The picture of my grandmother was taken almost a century ago, when hundreds and hundreds of small farms dotted this area and it was rare for anyone to leave home, especially a young woman. Today, most of the land around the county is owned by a half a dozen or so families who pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for huge implements, large operations stitched together from dozens of the sort of little farms where Bill Baker once stopped on Sundays to deliver parts while June waited in the car, doing crewel embroidery.

“How cruel is it?” I asked her once, thinking myself extremely witty.

“It's a bitch,” she said.

. . .

I did not leave home on a train. My father drove me in our blue Oldsmobile, and, riding in the front seat, Betty kept turning around to look at me. I thought she was giving me fond parting glances, but soon she offered a comment: “I cannot believe you did not get a haircut before you left.”

When we got to the dorm room, she glanced at me, looking tender and a little lost, but left quickly. My mother and I hate good-byes.

The previous spring, the fraternities at the university had begun to host prerush parties for potential members. At an event at the Phi Delta Theta house where I had been invited by Jack Fleming—the son of Betty's best friend, Evelyn—I ducked out early. While others bonded over a trailer-sized keg, I was downtown watching Barbra Streisand in
A Star Is Born
for the fourth time. I just wanted Kris Kristofferson to go ahead and kill himself so Barbra could sing the closer. I believe she had the same idea.

At home, late that night after my drive back to Paris, I confessed ditching the Phi Delts to my devastated mother, who wrung her hands like a peasant woman told her village is burning. I expected a seizure. Glancing away, I saw my father down the hall, heading toward the kitchen. Taking a look at our expressions, he hotfooted it back to bed after mimicking my mother's scolding finger and making a face at me. I flipped him the bird.

“What,” she asked, “am I supposed to say to Evelyn? This will kill Evelyn. She went out of her way.”

I hate it when someone goes out of their way for me. It makes me feel guilty. “Please no,” I say if someone wants to do me a favor. I pictured Mrs. Fleming, waxlike and stiffened laid out at the Theta house for viewing, dressed in an ensemble from the Tall Girl's Shop. I had known her since I was a child; now she would hate me. Proprieties were important to her. She was an elegant woman who, if I was eating at her table, always came up behind me to rest her hands on my shoulders. I liked it, but didn't want it to happen very often.

I wanted to please Evelyn, but I wouldn't change my mind about the fraternity. Despite Betty's repeated pleas, I refused to pledge, put my foot down for the first time. My mother attempted to stare me into submission, but found someone looking right back as determined as she was. I held firm; for me it was an emergency. No way could I be in that place; those guys would make my life miserable.

Freshman year, 1977, at the University in Columbia: guys throwing footballs in the dorm halls, running around naked, snapping towels. In my dorm room, I hung a giant poster of Monet's
Water Lilies
. Acquired on a high school trip to St. Louis, my masterwork had not drawn the praise I expected. A boy from Hornersville, Missouri, asked, “What exactly is that supposed to represent?”

“Floating flowers,” I said.

“God Almighty,” he replied.

The first week of school, the student newspaper, the
Maneater,
published a notice about a Gay People's Alliance meeting at the Ecumenical Center off campus on Tuesdays at 7 p.m. I figured I should try to go. I had to. I was desperate. I had to get my life going, somehow. By 2 p.m. on Tuesday, I was stepping into the shower, cleansing thoroughly before Right Guarding myself so generously that I did not anticipate perspiring again until at least my midthirties.

What to wear? I sensed this a crucial, possibly life-altering decision. What did I have that was sexy? Nothing. Unbuttoning the top of my shirt, a white Lacoste chosen to show off what was left of my summer tan, I studied myself in the mirror before going to gargle again and brush my teeth more thoroughly. I had taken to smoking unfiltered Pall Malls after reading that they were the brand of my favorite writer, despite the fact that my lips stuck to the paper and any loose strands of tobacco. During my first month at the university my teeth appeared to be sprouting hairs.

. . .

Give or take Wray Chowning, the only gay people I had seen were a group of men in tiny swimsuits at the Chase Park Plaza pool in St. Louis where, a few summers before, I had gone with Betty and George for the weekend to go to the Municipal Opera, a huge open-air theater in Forest Park. Like a spy, I observed these men, but they ignored me, slathering tanning lotion over their already dark bodies and reading
After Dark
magazine as I struggled with a tube of Bain de Soleil,
a product I considered luxurious and sensual that I had purchased at the hotel gift shop.

I couldn't stop looking at the men; I couldn't stop staring at their bodies, the sun pressing my skin as the children raced around screaming and I rubbed the lotion into my chest. I can remember its smell. Betty wore sunglasses. No one would ever know what she saw, though it was unlikely that she could have imagined the scenes floating through my head as I leaned back on my sun chair and closed my eyes.

That night, at
The Music Man,
Big George hummed loudly along with every number as if those gathered under the stars had come to hear him and not Eddie Albert. It was one of the moments when his desire for attention felt uncomfortably close to desperation. Betty, bored immediately by Marian the Librarian, mostly ignored the show, focusing on my father and whispering to me. “If he as much as sings one note,” she began.

“Maybe he'll get discovered.”

“Do you think we could leave at intermission? You could tell him you have sunburn.”

“He likes the barbershop numbers . . .”

“That's what I'm afraid of. He'll give a concert.”

“I'm hoping Marian gets murdered.”

“She's not that pretty.”

“She's bookish.”

I didn't care whether we stayed or left. I was still back at the pool, lying in the hot sun, fantasizing about rubbing someone's smooth bare back with Bain de Soleil
.

. . .

On the night of the meeting of the Gay People's Alliance, reeking of antiperspirant, I sneaked out of the dorm, nervous but able to find the Ecumenical Center in about four minutes. I sat down on a bench near some tennis courts. It was after 4 p.m. Hours to spare. I am never, ever late. Scoping out the parking lot, I checked for familiar cars, feeling under surveillance somehow. Evelyn Fleming, visiting Jack at the Theta House, might feel drawn to a discussion of nonviolence. I kept my eyes on the door of the center, trying to see who entered. I wanted to be touched; I had waited and waited. I wanted to be with someone.

Finally, I went in, suddenly tense, trembling on the inside. Scanning the room, I got more and more upset, so anxious I could barely move toward a chair. I did not think I could speak. If no one tried to talk to me, it would be a mercy.

I left my body; this had never happened. I felt about to break open. Part of me fled and I fell into a full-fledged panic. I had been so looking forward to this night, but it looked like none of this was going to work, and if it didn't I didn't know what I would do.

Larry, a bearded, thirtyish professor, appeared to be the head of it all. His haircut suggested an affiliation with the medieval period.

“Are you out to your parents?” he asked, and when I shook my head, he added, “Knowing parents are rare animals.”

I was still panicked and could barely listen. I felt as though I had disappeared. This wasn't going to work.

A man in a wheelchair in a jaunty black beret gave me a look meant to be kind, but I was almost sick. When another man, Gene, held out his hand, it was impossible for me to accept it. I was frozen, felt bad, guilty to be thought unfriendly, but I just could not reach back.

It was hard to breathe.

I could not look at the faces. I could not look up at all. I was sorry I had come. It was just all wrong. It wasn't going to work. It was harder here than anywhere; I felt worse than ever.

Staring at the tabletop, I noticed my sweaty handprints on the table as, humiliated and ashamed of myself, I tried to listen to Larry talk about some Supreme Court decision.

The trip back to the dorm seemed to last for hours, but I didn't notice anything I passed. I was not there. I knew only that some part of my self went away, left me alone, ripped open in front of everyone. I had never heard anyone describe such a reaction to anything and was terrified that this would happen every time I went in public as gay. In my room, I sat down on the bed. I had soaked my shirt clear through and it hung on my body, so wet, as if someone had pushed me into the deep end of a pool.

. . .

A few months after my debut, I returned to the meeting. I felt I had to; I had to get a life. I needed help to get my bearings in this life.

A man named Michael, a medical resident, seemed to be sizing me up at the meeting as I tried to listen to the dialog. Feeling his eyes on me, I turned to see if he was looking at someone behind me, but there was no one. We looked a little bit alike and somehow I knew that this had attracted him.

Several months later, at a fish restaurant where Michael took me, my first date, it happened again, the bad thing. I started shaking again, leaving my body. I thought that Michael had plans for me for later on. I wanted this and didn't. Again, so tense, I broke into a sweat. He talked and talked about San Francisco, where he said everything was happening, but I could not speak. I was embarrassed. But it didn't matter. He took me to his apartment where there were textbooks and a pile of porno magazines. I felt so far away from home. I knew this man was going to give me nothing. I knew he wasn't going to help me out.

That night: a bizarre physical encounter, bargain-basement love, no kisses or hugs. Quickly after, Michael announced he was taking me home. It was maybe 2 a.m. I seemed to have misplaced several articles of clothing. Where my new pair of flesh-toned bikini underwear had lodged themselves seemed a mystery I was too exhausted to contemplate. Moving on to check out Michael's desk, I found a pad of paper and a pen. I wrote, “You're an asshole” on one page and moved quickly away from the desk when he returned.

Back at the dorm where he dropped me off, I realized that I was missing my card key. I walked back to the bench by the tennis courts and sat down, waiting for morning. A block away was the Phi Delta Theta house where Jack Fleming was probably prodding the new guys with a red-hot poker or forcing them to clean the basement in their underwear. What would Evelyn make of my night with Michael? I could not imagine she would approve. I figured that in the years ahead a lot of people would stop speaking to me.

On the day I went to the Ecumenical Center, as I started into the building, I thought of what my parents would think as I stood at the door I was trying to figure out how to open. I felt that if I stepped through that door I would be leaving them behind. I felt like I was losing something that connected us, something good. I felt like I was leaving behind the way I was taught to live.

. . .

A few years before I arrived at the University of Missouri, the gay organization that I attended later, at the Ecumenical Center, had sued the university for the right to meet within the official borders of the campus. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which ultimately ruled in favor of the gays. On the night that the group made its first entrance into the Student Union, I was standing on the sidelines, not ready to march through the streets in front of my friends or have Jack Fleming pelt me with a beer can. I could not quite take in what I was seeing: Dozens of frat boys were throwing rocks, rotten food, and water balloons at the marchers. I watched in disbelief. Where were the police? A woman with a guitar led the gay procession, which was far outnumbered by the crowd who had gathered to disrespect and disparage them. The marchers were not the type I had glimpsed in photographs from Greenwich Village or the Castro. They were, with a few exceptions, neither beautiful, nor well dressed, nor those who might have easily blended into the world of their persecutors. It seemed that at this time, in this place, it was only the loneliest, the most alienated who craved acceptance or affirmation desperately enough to risk a public stoning.