Betty sighs as she surveys the fields. “It’s a good thing we don’t have to try to sell lumber to the farmers this year,” she said. “Lotsa luck.” She hugs her purse, a bag of flowered cloth I purchased for her birthday and she declared too youthful. “I thought you didn’t like that purse,” I commented. “It’s bought and paid for,” she says. “I’m not going to turn my nose up at it.”
This is the real country, not a place for rich weekenders. Tractors putt along highways where vapor rises and tar melts. We go by one of the lumberyards our family used to own, closed decades now, where a meth lab was discovered in an outbuilding. Betty turns her head rather than see the place. Some man keeps a collection of boa constrictors on the premises now. Recently one escaped to slither down Rock Road toward the home of my high school typing teacher, an excitable woman, unprepared for a morning of snake wrestling. To my way of thinking, the only proper place for a boa is around Cher’s neck at the Golden Globes.
Dinner is at the home of Jane Blades, my old friend. We are late because Betty has demanded her gin and tonic, her five o’clock ritual. When Betty asks whom Jane is married to, I say, “No one you know.” She says she hopes Jane does not have to support him. “Whoever he is.” Betty never thinks anyone has married the right person. Some speak of love and romance. This is not my mother. A ring on the finger is not, in her opinion, a ticket to high heaven, but she is usually curious about the quality of the diamond.
. . .
“I shouldn’t even be going,” Betty says. “I’m an ugly old woman. I’m an old battle-ax.”
“How do you think I feel?” I ask her. “I don’t have a pair of decent pants I can button over my stomach.”
“You could take off a few pounds.”
“Did you fix your hair that way intentionally?”
“Just be quiet. Don’t say a word.”
“I’m probably headed for a gastric bypass.”
“Stop,” she says. “Don’t talk. . . . Al Roker had one.”
“What?”
“A gastric bypass. He had it on The Today Show.”
“During the weather report?”
“Everyone could see it. I thought Earleen would never shut up about it.”
. . .
Betty peers at the huge metal barbecue on Jane’s patio. “What is that?” she asks. “I don’t know,” I say. “A school bus?”
When Jane comes out, we hug, but Betty draws back. Her family, the Bakers, did not hug socially, and she is not a woman who cares much for such. Nor is she often sentimental. Inside a silver locket she has worn for years, a gift from my father, are the stock photographs of strangers it came with. When she speaks of dying, I tell her how sad I will be. She waves my words away. “The world goes on,” she says.
Jane’s house is nice, but a little bare compared to ours, cluttered with antiques laden with hat-pin holders, candy dishes, decanters, ashtrays, and figurines. Many of our things are dusty, but Betty can’t see well enough to recognize this. One could safely say that she considers the absence of bric-a-brac a social problem roughly comparable to malnutrition.
My father, the unofficial architect of the lumberyards once owned by my mother’s family, supervised the remodeling of Jane’s house decades ago. He gave my friend his greatest compliment. She did not, as he always put it, dillydally over everything. When I bring this up, Jane says my dad made her laugh, Betty says nothing. She never mentions my father, dead since 1997. She is always silent about loss.
“Oh God, what a character,” Jane says of Big George.
My mother stares at me.
Inside is Evie Cullers, a colorful soul whose light blue sweatshirt says COUNTRY KWWR, MISSOURI’S SUPERSTATION; it looks clean enough for a baby. A former floral designer, now in her sixties, Evie sometimes bemoans the poor quality of current funerals and warns of the pitfalls of cremation. “They burn everybody on the same tray and there is a potential for getting one person’s ashes mixed up with another’s.
“If I’m gonna be livin’ in a urn,” she declared, “I’m not crazy about the idea of having a roommate.”
I love Evie because she is a character; Betty is sympathetic to her as both have vision problems. “I was over to Wal-Mart,” Evie tells me. “I was searching for something in the drug section and asked some kid for help, said I was visually impaired. He said he’d get someone. Five minutes later, I hear over the loudspeaker, ‘Blind woman needs help in drugs.’ I mean, what else do they say on the loudspeaker at Wal-Mart? ‘We got a bitch in toys’?”
Betty’s eye difficulties, not quite as serious as Evie’s now—thanks to a legion of doctors and treatments—began when I was in grade school when her retina detached during a surgery for a condition called latticed retinas that Mammy had as well. There have been eight or ten surgeries since then, culminating in transplanted corneas. It has been decades since she has seen clearly, but no complaints have been uttered. She has played the hand she was dealt, bluffing her way at night or on cloudy days. Just like Evie.