. . .
“Buck 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.
“How 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.”
“I 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.
“Gettin’ 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.
“My mama was a Indian. She was beautiful,” Earleen has often remarked. “I look just like her.
“Was 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 zebra, trimmed in leatherette with tassels on the buttons. Her name was Jude Nutter.
“Where,” my mother asked, quite loudly, “did that jacket come from?” I cringed, as Betty glared at me with an expression with which I am very familiar. It seems to suggest that I am personally responsible for every particle of bullshit loose in the world.
“What was her name?” my mother asked loudly, after the introduction.
“Nutter,” I said. “Jude Nutter.”
“What?” my mother, incredulous, asked.
“Jude Nutter,” I repeated. “Her name is Jude Nutter.”
“Nutter,” my mother said again, even more audibly than before. “N-U-T-T-E-R?”
“Yes,” I repeated again. “Nutter. N-U-T-T-E-R.”
My cousin looked slightly uncomfortable as Jude nodded at our table, sensing some disturbance. Betty smiled back, gave a bit of a wave, as if to acknowledge the attention. I knew things were going to get worse when Jude confided that she had grown up in a house on a lot adjacent to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
She continued, telling us about her special kinship with insects, which she likes to feel on her body. This is sensual and pleasing for her. I waited, but Betty, intent on her brownie, made no remark. I began to breathe more regularly. Then Jude started to recite her first poem, a work that opened with an image of flies on the bloody eye of a dead lamb. Again, Betty shot me the look. It is always me. I am always responsible.
“How,” Betty pondered loudly, “did we get involved with this?” She threw her half-consumed brownie down on the plate as if it were a horseshoe. Jude Nutter mourned the lamb.
The second poem began. Jude Nutter read to us of finding the dentures of her deceased mother in a small container in the bathroom. Soon, there were Germans. Then there were the teeth. Then the insects. Then the teeth again, the haunting melancholy of the mother’s gaping oral cavity. Finally, the poem built to a dramatic conclusion: Jude kissed the teeth and threw them into a river.