. . .
“What is that stuff you drink at Christmas?” Betty asks when she gets up. “What is the name of that stuff you drink at Christmas? I lay awake half last night trying to remember the name of it.”
“Eggnog,” I say.
We are to drive to Columbia to the hairdresser later. If we don’t leave by noon, we’ll be late and Bliss, Betty’s hairdresser at Waikiki Coiffures, will throw a fit or, as she has threatened, cancel my mother’s appointment. I hate Bliss. She stares at my mother’s clothes on the bad days when we don’t get things quite right. Betty pretends not to notice, but I see how it hurts her feelings. There is a lot she pretends not to notice these days. She doesn’t even seem to take in the weather.
This is the third month of the drought. There may be hope for beans, but not for the corn; the farmers are cutting it down for silage. I have never known exactly what silage is, but I wonder if it would enhance a dinner salad.
Our flowers, miraculously, have survived, mostly. I am trying my best to keep them alive. In the mornings my mother stands at the window in the dining room, where the silver is tarnished now, in front of a wicker stand where she once kept geraniums, gazing out at the roses for as long as she can bear to stand up. Her face in the pane is like streaks of a watercolor. Even though she is old, I think she is more beautiful than ever, softer. You would never guess her age until she speaks. I do my best to make sure that when she looks in the mirror, there is someone who is familiar though sometimes nothing else is. When dealing with older women, a trip to a hairdresser and two Bloody Marys goes further than any prescription drug.
. . .
The pink rosebushes came from my grandmother’s garden in Madison. My uncle Bill, adept at an astonishing range of skills, moved them here for Betty after my grandmother gave up her house. “I am grateful to Bill for that,” she says. As if there is not much else she gives him credit for. “It was a hard job. He worked and worked. He worked hard.”
When I lie awake worrying about what will come next, I wonder if my mother is contemplating, as she stands at that window, what will become of her mother’s roses—transplanted by her brother’s old rough hands, pruned by my father, watered and tended by the family through decades of harsh summer sun—after she is gone. Caring for things—flowers or people—has never been my strong point. I worry about doing right by my mother. She deserves someone who can help her better, someone who can change a flat or stuff a turkey. My life has been unconventional. I have walked the streets of New York City, lived in studio apartments, eaten tons of takeout. I have made only desultory attempts at personal arrangements. In fact, I have no personal arrangements.
Maybe it is impossible to come home again and not to wonder how it is that things turned out quite this way, why I am here, how it came to this, how it is that I cannot quite find the appropriate term for my “lifestyle,” why it is that my mother simply shakes her head when I share details of my existence, why she cannot bring herself to speak of my life.
. . .
My mother has never tried to be anyone but herself. “At least I’m out and out with my meanness,” she says. “I’m not a sneak. I hate a sneak.” When I was growing up, we tussled a lot, but never really fought. Yes, Betty had her blowups, her bad days, her little tempests, but there was also the sly way she winked when I came home in the midst of one of her bridge games; the way she rolled her eyes at Mrs. Corn in church just for me to see. I was her conspirator and she made me laugh or want to reach out, sometimes, to protect the part of her that rarely showed, her secret soft spot. At the country club, where she could turn a game of golf into a disaster movie, her face took on a wistful look as she watched her ball plunk down a few feet from the tee. Once on Ladies’ Day, Doris Rixsey took the golf club from her hand and said, “Honey, let’s just go have a highball.”
If Betty turned against you, she would take you on, but if she loved someone, they would never stand alone. She has a force, a strength that make her gentle moments especially tender. During my first year of school, my friend Alan Million’s mother died in childbirth. I was home, pretending to be sick. When Betty broke the news, she pulled me to her knee. I was an only child; the deaths of parents terrified me; I lived in fear that mine would be taken from me. Betty knew how upset all this would make me.