Free Bettyville by George Hodgman

loved things a little wild and crazy.
    Sade, though, frightened my mother. Granny’s sister was the sort discomfited by a younger woman whose beauty bested the kind she herself acquired at the Marshall Field cosmetics counter.
    â€œHave another drink, kiddo,” Sade told Betty. “Don’t ya wanna get a little peppy?”
    My father’s family always gathered by the piano to sing, watched by Betty and me, along with Granny’s friend Bertha Cox, whose blond wig (necessitated by sparse, filament-like hair) was purchased in a room at the Chase Hotel “from a traveling salesman,” Granny always emphasized, “a Chinaman!”
    Like my dad, Granny loved Nat King Cole.
    â€œRambling rose, rambling rose, why you ramble, no one knows.”
    Betty watched how Granny served, did everything. She dressed up for them all, wanted never to disgrace herself.
    â€œRelax,” Daddy said, pulling her head to his shoulder but never getting it to stay.
    When Granny sang, I saw my father’s face in hers; I saw him in everything she did, definitely in her eyes, which, when turned on me, revealed what felt like suspicion. I loved her, but sometimes a look from her could poke like a pin. Already I knew that she was an enforcer of what I sometimes violated: the rules for boys and the rules for girls. Once she saw me gesturing along with the Supremes on television and her glance said it all.
    My mother believed in the rules. My father had some rebellion in him, but the others could always jerk him back easily into enemy territory. Sometimes, though, we could find a secret space.
    Sade told tales of nightclubs, gangsters, and strange phone calls arriving for her maid, who claimed to be Castro’s daughter. She often arrived with lavish gifts, once outdoing herself with two shiny silver cranes with long beaks and thin elegant legs. One bent down as if to feed, the other stretched its long neck toward the sky. Granny put them on the dining table and I sat looking at them reflecting the light, these exquisite birds from Sade’s enticing world. When I told Granny they were the most beautiful things I had seen, she looked back at me quizzically. Throwing me off guard, though, rescue arrived in a husky voice.
    â€œToots, we gotta get you to Boca,” Sade told me. “I think you’re kind of a fish out of water.”
    She was sitting at the dining table and I went to stand beside her and did not move for the longest time. Maybe this was someone who could be on my side.
    . . .
    Betty was in awe of the city, loved it when Granny treated us to club sandwiches, held together with colored toothpicks, at the tearoom in Stix, a world of women and the tap of high-heeled shoes. Models moved past the tables. I was always the only boy brought along; I loved the models and began to pose for class photos with head thrown back and eyebrows raised in a way I considered suitable for print work.
    While Betty and Granny shopped, I bypassed the toys and went upstairs to the furniture floor, to the model rooms, complete in every detail. I sat in them one at a time—living rooms, dens, family rooms, dining rooms, master bedroom suites, rooms for babies, little girls, teenage girls, and boys. When I sat down, tentatively, in the boys’ room, complete with bed with wheels meant to resemble a racing car, sports souvenirs, soldiers marching on the walls, baseball bat lamps, I realized I did not feel at home.
    It wasn’t that I wanted to reside in the girls’ rooms, it was simply that no place fit me right. I liked a mock-up of a basement hideaway featuring an armoire with what I considered an ingenious secret—a Murphy bed—and some framed movie posters, including one from
Casablanca
.
    After the clerks got tired of me lying on the beds and pretending to wait for room service, I rode the escalator down to the basement snack bar where I waited on a bar stool, watching the hot dogs turn on the