Boyd, the man he works for, apologizes for him, says he’s trying to give him a break, help him kick drugs, a bit of info that snags my interest. “He’s lost a lot,” Boyd says. “That don’t mean he can get away without wearing any pants.” Meth, I guess, is the story, though Carol’s son reports that people in Columbia are snorting bath salts. Maybe tonight I will throw down some Mr. Bubble, or a guest soap.
A woman I went to high school with, not long out of prison, is thin, about to crumble, and does not have Jenny Craig to thank. She is one of the women known at the grocery store as “Medicated Marys.” Her eyes look ready to crack. Darting about the store as if on fire, she nabs this or that, mostly sweets, hand flying out like a bird’s beak to snatch a worm. Before my arrival, because Betty was once a friend of her mother’s, she got into the habit of stopping by to borrow money, explaining her emergencies in the half-assed way addicts do, throwing out whatever excuses will make someone want to get rid of them and dig into a pocket. I know the landscape. I never had to beg, but lost a few things I might have liked to keep. And people. People I liked a lot.
“No problem,” I assure Boyd after his apology over the kid’s clothes. In the course of ten years, my existence has gone from Looking for Mr. Goodbar to Driving Miss Daisy. A little skin is no tragedy. I have been away from New York a long time and am tempted to make love to a hanging basket. Recently, the discovery of the Big Wang Chinese restaurant at the Lake of the Ozarks has sparked my fantasy life.
This week Congress demolished bills to provide financial aid to veterans and farmers. This does not bode well for government subsidies for displaced gay book publishers whose personal trainers consume six to twelve small meals a day. I am not actually certain I qualify as homosexual anymore. A conversation about kidney outputs with Betty’s physician’s assistant, Ingrid Wilbur, a butch lesbian, is as close as I have come to intimacy in months.
Gradually, I have drifted out of the action.
I find myself holding out a Coke for the kid, who looks surprised and shuts down the mower. He says nothing, just reaches for the drink. “Are you from here?” I ask. He shakes his head as, trying a different gambit, I offer, “So what about those Cardinals?” He responds, “What about them?”
I falter. “Well, I guess they are winning or losing.” He looks puzzled. No one gets me here, a problem as I tend to speak in one-liners. I try too hard, but as I tell my friends, it’s better than not enough.
After making short work of the Coke, the boy runs a sliver of ice across his forehead and sets the plastic go cup carefully on the step as if it were something from Tiffany he has felt privileged to use.
. . .
An inside source (a friend of my mother’s) has told me of a row at Monday bridge, where Betty was once an ardent, rarely defeated competitor. My mother, after consuming the entire bowl of mini-Snickers at her table, has apparently accused the hostess of a chintzy attitude toward snacks. Then, refusing to keep score, she slammed her cards down in a shocking manner that seems to have sent a woman named Maxie into a tizzy. “And Maxie has rheumatoid,” the friend confided of the injured party.
“Do Snickers help with that?” I asked myself.
My mother’s skirmishes, her irritability, threaten her social life. People don’t get that she can’t control these outbursts; a new aggression flares up in her at times.
Betty Hodgman, Big Muscle of the mini-Snickers circuit, is in the family room, staring down at her hymnal, frowning and looking confused.
“The oven’s on. The oven’s on,” she keeps repeating. She won’t take in the fact that I am trying to preheat it. I am busy strewing cinnamon around the kitchen, attempting to make the muffins she likes. “That looks nasty,” she says when I pour the batter into the little paper cups, as if she had never seen anything similar before.
“Well, hang on.”
“You have the oven on.” She says it again. “I feel it heating up.”
“I’m making muffins.”
“Go ahead. Burn the house down.”
. . .
If my mother is exiled from bridge, we are lost; the driver’s license was a blow. This will be worse. She won’t have anything. Mandy Winkler, just about her last remaining close friend, is concerned about being able to take her out to lunch anymore, at least on her own. Getting Betty in and out of the car is too much of a struggle; Mandy has a hip problem herself. Betty counts the days until she gets to see her, but she lingers less each time she visits. “She is so busy,” Betty says.
Mandy’s voice on the phone last week was grave. “You know, Betty isn’t herself anymore.” She advises, “George, I think you are going to have to consider assisted living.” I wanted to respond, “Oh goodness. That has never crossed my mind.” People mean well; they just aren’t here enough to get what we are dealing with or what home means to my mother. Everyone thinks they know what should be done, and their suggestions make me suspect they must consider me an idiot who doesn’t comprehend the situation. Actually, I don’t, but never mind.