. . .
We stand around the kitchen island. Betty accepts a glass of wine, but I decline because I have to. I’m nervous, but can’t drink; I can’t take anything that isn’t prescribed. I have a history. Twenty years ago, I was snorting lines of speed before I went to work. When I crashed I never told Betty what had happened. I knew she would try to help, but I knew what she would think of me.
I listen as everyone talks about their children. Betty, not one to fuss over wee ones or beg to hold a baby, pays little attention to the pictures being passed. She is quiet, as she is in public these days. She seems to have declared herself beyond participation. Sometimes she seems to fade away. By the time she goes to bed, when things get bad, she will have fewer pieces left in place.
Camilla, Jane’s sister, who has worked construction all over the world, including in Iraq, talks about Baghdad. The city, she says, barely exists now.
“Just like here,” remarks Evie. “Stoutsville is just gone. We had banks, stores, a restaurant, even a movie theater. And the trains. Every time I heard the whistle, I’d run down to the tracks to wave at the engineer. In summer, the gypsies would come and steal everything. They wore bright colors and drove old cars. Mama would tell us to get under the bed when they were around. People said they liked to run off with children.
“There’s not a kid here anybody’d take now.”
“In ten years,” says Camilla, “we could be sitting around this table and there could be no Paris at all.”
. . .
Places like Paris are vanishing. Main Streets in all the towns around are boarded up. Gone are Lillibelle’s Dress Shop, Mrs. Bailey’s department store, Nevin’s Florist, the barbershop where old farmers emerged after a cut and card game to take a pinch of chewing tobacco from the pockets of their overalls. We are decades past the last picture show. Wal-Mart, staffed by those known as Wal-martians, has taken its toll. There is a bail bondsman, and on television, a place called Family Pawn advertises relentlessly. “I’ve never pawned anything,” Betty has confessed to me. “Have you?”
I read histories of the place I am from—the Civil War battles, the characters, the traveling Chautauquas, the old houses that lined the shady streets when Paris was the heart of “Little Dixie,” a bastion of Southern sympathy. Long ago, there was an opera house; a grand hotel; a woolen mill that produced yarns, flannel, and blankets. There was a pottery works; a flour mill; plow, wagon, and shoe factories; tobacco warehouses; a feed store; a livery stable; a factory where cigars (Queen of Paris) were made and a wooden Indian stood out front. At Murphy and Bodine’s Clothing Store, a huge stuffed bear in the window displayed men’s coats and hats.
Things are different now. A book I read said three things changed rural America: the breakup of the family farm; Wal-Mart; meth.
. . .
After dinner, Jamie Callis, who graduated a year before me, arrives. The immediate center of attention, she is bawdier than I remembered and I am miffed; I want the spotlight. In the kitchen, Jane whispers that this is Jamie’s first time out since her husband, a veteran, committed suicide. A few days ago when Earleen told Betty all about this, my mother interrupted: “Stop, stop. I can’t hear that. I can’t hear it.”
Betty shyly edges her hand toward Jamie’s; she wants to offer something, but cannot reach her without calling attention to herself, and when she sees that I am looking, she withdraws.
. . .
Driving home, we pass Jamie’s big old house, which was her parents’, and Betty notices a flower bed at the edge of her driveway. “I hope her flowers make it,” Betty says. “Hers more than anyone’s. Look at that woman. A lot of people would fold. She’s carrying on. I like her.”
Later, Betty and I are watching the news. She looks up, unhappy. “I’m ignorant, aren’t I?” she asks. “Jane’s sister’s gone everywhere. I’ve never been anywhere much. I never went far.”
Ignorance has always been one of my mother’s greatest fears—for herself and for me. Growing up, she emphasized that I would be going to college. She planned for me to become a lawyer, like my father’s father, in St. Louis. I didn’t see it.
When I was a kid, I had no notion of what could happen to me. I knew that, somehow, I did not fit exactly; but this was my home. I loved my home.