“Came in here one day and said she could get fresher produce at an antique store,” said the man at the IGA.
I can’t take her place. When I pull up to the bank window, the cashiers look askance, knowing my habit of getting my card stuck in the cash machine. At the grocery store, the checkout girls grow anxious upon my arrival, well aware of my tendency to trip and topple displays.
As I come out of the store, I see Betty’s face through the windshield, the very image of stubbornness. I wish I were on drugs. Yesterday at the meat counter when they asked what I needed, I whispered to myself, “Xanax. And a little crack on a bagel.”
My friends worry that I am falling into a hole here, that this time away is really giving up, running away. Since I lost my job, I don’t know quite who it is I am now. Suddenly I feel older. In New York, my closet is full of clothes that still smell a little like youth. I cannot bring myself to get rid of them. Betty and I are both crossing bridges we would rather avoid. Luckily to distract us there is Wheel of Fortune, a show we despise so avidly we cannot ever miss it.
I have always been my work. And now here I am, suddenly, after all these years, home. I am not exactly the black sheep of my family, but it is not like I am grazing in pastels.
Getting back into the car, I hit my head on the door frame and yell out. Betty asks, “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” I say. “It’s just something that will kill me later.”
All the way to Columbia, Betty complains about my driving; she is less daring these days where speed is concerned. As we are passing through Hallsville, she asks the question again.
“What is that stuff you drink at Christmas?”
“Eggnog.”
. . .
Finally, we make it to Waikiki Coiffures, where I always expect to find the operators in leis: “Aloha, Missy Betty. Welcome to our island kingdom!”
We are a bit late, but they take her, though I get dirty looks. “Betty, you need some new shoes,” Bliss says, glancing at my mother’s feet and then at me as if to say, “How can you let her out of the house in these?”
I get a coffee at Lakota and stroll past Jock’s Nitch. Columbia is the home of the University of Missouri, my alma mater, and the store sells T-shirts and jackets with the Tigers’ logo. I buy Betty a fleece-lined jacket for fall and a long-sleeved T-shirt in gold, one of the team’s colors. Both are emblazoned with large tiger heads, ferocious and ready to spring off the fabric. Betty went to school at the university, but couldn’t afford to join a sorority. At football games with my dad, she never glanced at the field, only at the Tri-Delts and their outfits.
After her appointment, Betty lowers the visor over the dash to inspect her hair in the mirror. Not one of Waikiki’s most successful endeavors, it is a lacquered bubble, blown back in a way that suggests shock.
“This is the worst yet,” Betty says, downcast. My mother has not had what she considers a successful hair appointment since around 1945.
I present her with her new clothes, and she wears her Tiger jacket all the way home, despite the temperature hovering just under a hundred degrees. “Do you think it’s too warm for the heated seats?” she asks. They are her favorite of our car’s features.
I say I think so, but she flicks hers on anyway. I wait for smoke to rise from her rear end. She is quiet for a while, then asks, “That girl from dinner. Her husband killed himself . . . She drives the school bus.”
“Jamie, you mean.”
“She must feel low. I have some things I want to give to someone. Would that insult her?”
“I don’t know, Mama.”
“She’s working herself ragged and her husband served this country.”
As we drive, Betty remarks on the sky, light blue with a few thin lines of color. Before the sun starts to fall, the light illuminates the flat land that extends on and on, miles and miles and miles, with nothing to obstruct our view until, finally, it merges with the horizon. The clouds go back and back in rows, each hanging slightly lower than the one before it, one visible after the next and trailing tatters of white.
The sky is our sea here, our object of contemplation in all its moods and shades. My father taught me to observe it. As I watched him gaze at it as a kid, or a bored teenager, or on early-morning trips back to the university, or later, on the way to the airport in St. Louis, I began to see what he did. I watched for my favorite effect—the way the clouds, in morning and at sunset, jutted out into the blues and pinks like islands in a huge bay of light, gradually thinning as they stretched out into what seemed like the waters of the ocean.