Free Bettyville by George Hodgman Page B

still uncomfortable in her new teeth, is bent over her embroidery in her crazy, messed-up house, squinting at her tiny stitches as she stands back to admire the small flowers that blossom over the cloth.
    Betty will not get out of bed. When I ask if she is thirsty, she just shakes her head. She is agitated, and when she gets this way I can’t focus on much else. Her state of mind affects everything in the house, me especially. I take it in and pace around the house. I want to do a good job here; it is important to me. I want to do right by her.
    . . .
    When I set the trash out earlier, a neighbor informed me that the game warden has released bobcats in the forests nearby to help control deer. He saw a bobcat a few nights back in the parking lot of the high school’s vocational agriculture center. The building was, until fifteen years or so ago, a garment factory where the women workers on break gathered outside the door, smoke from their cigarettes rising around them.
    Where do the women work now, after their divorces, or when their husbands die, or when bad luck strikes, or the harvest is squat? Not here. They drive to Columbia or other towns nearby to work in hospitals or clean the houses of doctors from India and Pakistan. The country roads are full of headlights at night as they often work odd hours.
    . . .
    â€œBuck Johnson is getting married again,” Earleen says. “It’s his fourth. You’d think by now he’d a either figured it out or quit.” She is ironing in the kitchen. On the nearby couch, I try to close my eyes. She is not the most diligent housekeeper in America. She runs a rag over a counter so fast, it barely has time to collect a crumb. The vacuum control is always shifted to the lightest setting so it won’t be hard to push. But she’s game for just about anything. At Christmastime, during a somewhat madcap decorating spree, Betty had Earleen and me searching for ornaments that I broke before puberty. Earleen, trying her damnedest, kept pretending to look until finally confiding to me, “George, I don’t know where this shit is.
    â€œHow do you think your mama is doing?” she asks me now, setting down the iron and coming to stand by the couch as if there is the possibility that I might not hear her.
    I wish my mother would appear at the door of the kitchen and say, “Hey, let’s head to the Junction for a catfish sandwich.”
    â€œI would do anything for your mama,” Earleen says, going on and on. “She’s the same age mine would be if she had lived, you know.
    â€œGettin’ old is for the birds, but your mama’s a doll. I tell you, when you’re not here, I’m on the case. I’ll spring like a jackrabbit if I need to.
    â€œMy mama was a Indian. She was beautiful,” Earleen has often remarked. “I look just like her.
    â€œWas you gonna take a nap?” she asks now, returning to the ironing board. “I never can sleep of a day. I got too much on my mind.”
    She continues; her only enemy is silence. “I’ve cleaned for Betty since my boys were kids.” Her oldest son, Ethan, is a mechanic. Jackie Roy is a nurse at a VA down in the section of the state we call the Boot Heel. A few years back, he cared for a boy back from the army with a hole in his head the size of a quarter. Earleen worried about the soldier as if she had given birth to him.
    I wish my mother would appear at the doorway of the kitchen and suggest, “Say, I’m going down to the Dollar Store to buy a birthday card.”
    . . .
    Last night my cousin Lucinda, who tries to appeal to my interests, invited Betty and me to a benefit for the
Missouri Review.
Throughout the dinner I fretted, knowing there was a reading to come. Glancing now and then at Betty, I wished for brevity. I hoped that our entertainment would not be a poet. But no: A poet it was. Despite the weather, she was wearing a jacket of a sort of faux