“Andrea, over here,” says my mother, and the men scatter. An embrace, and I refuse to let her go, even though my current of rage extends to her. But I used to see her every Saturday and now I’ve seen her only once since she moved to New Hampshire. I’ve missed her. As per usual, I am having a hundred feelings at once.
I ask about David and Greta. “What do you want to know?” she asks. “I don’t know,” I say. I have a pretty good sense of what’s going on with them, but I could be surprised. “Are they happy at all, ever?” “No,” my mother says. “I don’t know if they’ll survive this.” “That’s terrible,” I say. “It’s a difficult situation, obviously. And I know you don’t know this yet, but marriage all by itself is hard anyway,” she says and examines a lock of my hair with concern. Can you believe this woman? She just says shit like that casually, with no regard, and then pretends my hair is the problem.
“Mom, just because I don’t care about being married myself doesn’t mean I don’t understand how it works for other people.”
“You’re still young, you should care,” she says. She studies the ends of my hair again. “But not so young that you don’t have to take vitamins,” she says, and then the memorial service begins.
There is a preamble from a niece. She loved Betsy. Betsy and her at the museums. Betsy taking her to her first protest. Betsy knitting her sweaters every year to keep her warm. Betsy as a nurturer, always lingering nearby, except when she wasn’t, when she was traveling the world, which she was allowed to do, of course. Because Betsy was nobody’s mother. “She went to China just last year,” my mother tells me. “With a socialist tour group. She loved it.”
Next: A tightly wrought man with the intensity of a squirrel, hands coiled, ponytailed, wearing a denim jacket and a neatly buttoned up shirt tucked into khaki pants. He clutches a stack of papers in his fist.
“Oh brother,” says my mother. “Who is that?” I say. “Corbin. Betsy’s first husband,” she says.
A speech follows regarding the CIA, conspiracies, corruption, assassinations, various presidents, the contemporary state of activism, spy technology, Facebook, and Betsy’s grit and determination to help this speaker reveal the truth, which is still being revealed, will always be being revealed, look around now, keep your eyes open, wake up and stay awake. Corbin concludes with: “And they’ll never make another Betsy.”
“Riveting,” I say to my mother. “He was always a lunatic,” she says. “I mean he’s right about all that happening with the CIA, but still he was insane.”
Across the room, in the front pew, a man in a wrinkled, oversized linen suit is staring at me, an older man with a tight goatee and a ponytail the color of rotting lemons. He’s one of my mother’s friends from before, when she had her parties. He’s a bad man, I think. That’s all I can remember. Bad man.
Betsy’s second ex-husband, Morty, takes the stage. He openly weeps throughout his speech. “Too soon, too soon,” he begins, and the crowd murmurs. She was there for him, like no one else. The tragedy of his life was losing her as his wife; the blessing of his life was that she remained his friend. Good start, I think. Then Morty goes on to detail three separate battles with cancer, near death twice, full recovery each time, the loss of his father, the loss of his mother, financial woes that fortunately turned to triumphs, but still, there was struggle there, and all that time, there was Betsy, supporting him. “Thank God for Betsy,” he says, and then he’s finished.
“He screwed half his cancer nurses is the thing he doesn’t mention,” says my mother. “Why was he even allowed to speak, then?” I ask her. “Who do you think paid her bills all those years while she was marching and volunteering?” my mother says. “He wrote big checks to whatever cause she wanted.” I look up at Morty, who stumbles a bit as he leaves the podium. Several men in the front row rise to help keep him erect. “Morty is a terrible man,” says my mother. “But Morty has paid.”
The man in the front pew is still staring at me. God, he’s got to be seventy by now, or maybe eighty? What was his name. Philip, Frederick, Foster, Felix. Felix, that’s it. I will fuck you up, Felix.
Now taking the podium is Betsy’s third ex, a woman named Deborah, gray-haired, bespectacled, wearing a witchy black dress with a smattering of black sequins, a delicious bosom, you just want to crawl up inside of it already. “She’s very active in her temple and is furious this isn’t being held there right now,” whispers my mother. “But Betsy loved this church. And they weren’t together for so long anyway. She has no rights here.” Deborah says the Kaddish. Gentle tears wind down her face. Deborah holds the room. I cry too.
Betsy was solid. She always came to help clean up the day after the parties, even though she never actually attended them. “Ech, I’d rather stay in,” Betsy used to say. “Maybe the first hour of a party is interesting. Everything after that is just repetitive.” After both my high school and college graduations she handed me a nice check. I was welcome at her house for Thanksgiving for life. She was seemingly always baking something, then dropping off a tin of it at our house. Her hair in two gray braids, her belly a comfort to be held up against, her scent of weed and sandalwood and sweet, crusted sugar.
And now it’s finally time for my mother to speak. Blue-eyed, cropped salt-and-pepper hair, trim, wise, sexy, my mother cuts a fine figure. “Let me tell you about Betsy,” she begins. She was just her friend, nothing more than that, not blood, not a spouse. “But we knew each other forty years, and we ran deep.” She talks about how Betsy helped her through her own losses, and those of others, too, although she manages to do this without discussing a single specific event. She says Betsy was a role model, yes. She worried about other people more than herself. She worried endlessly about social justice and the state of the world and she acted on those concerns. But she also was a good time. She was funny, says my mother. She had a dry wit. She was the person you’d want standing next to you at a party. My mother quotes Alice Roosevelt Longworth: “If you can’t say something good about someone, sit right here by me.” My mother pauses, and then lands the punch line: “I wish Betsy were here right now, sitting next to me, because she’d have something to say about all of you.” Everyone laughs. “She loved a lot—three marriages, oy vey!—and I believe she loved each person deeply.” She stops and makes eye contact with the three ex-spouses. “She showed up in your lives when you needed her most.” My mother nearly says something else, and then, disappointingly, doesn’t. “But she was also happy on her own. She was happy in her own skin. And that was what I learned the most from her. How to live with myself.”