I still hear the sound of the clothes falling in the dryer on the other side of my bedroom wall in our old house. On hot nights I lay with my head at the end of my bed to catch the breeze from the humming fan. Out my window, I could see the field, planted with soybeans. All summer long, Bobby Buck and I ran between the rows of beans all afternoon; at night after supper; and then after dark, when it felt dangerous to go barefoot, as we always were. A curled-up snake might be waiting underfoot. Some animal might spring up. I closed my eyes and took off.
Across the street lived the Masons—J.C. and Maggie and their kids, Kevin and Missy. J.C., who drove a big gravel truck, or Maggie took us all to grade school in their sea-green Chrysler, its ashtrays overflowing with cigarette butts. “Your love,” the radio played, “is like a itchin’ in my heart,” or “Come on, come on boy, see about me.” Early morning in Missouri: fog billowing around the grain elevators, streets slick with ice, blue windows, big women in aprons behind the diner counter beating the hell out of egg yolks.
“Tell me a joke,” Missy cried, her small face streaked with a bit of breakfast, swimming in the hood of a parka circled with dirty fluff. “Say a joke. Say a joke. Say a joke.” I was always trying to be funny. I remember Missy, maybe four years old, in winter, with skinned knees in a torn pair of shorts and a pair of her mother’s battered high heels, making her way across the highway, hair full of flakes of snow.
Most kids lived on farms. Some of the country kids brought the same lunches every day: one strip of bologna on a slice of bread folded around with a dot of mustard. One girl had skin so dry from walking in the cold to feed that no one would touch her when we played games.
I read books and worried. Sometimes when company came I hid in the front closet, among the coats, with their just dry-cleaned smell and blue plastic wrappings. In summer I hung around the house, filling the captain’s decanters with Dr. Pepper, which I drank from my parents’ wineglasses. I watched TV, mostly soap operas: As the World Turns, Love Is a Many Splendored Thing, and The Edge of Night. When something remarkable happened, I called my aunt June, long-distance, to discuss these events. June—married to my mother’s younger brother, Bill, was a former beauty operator whose home was decorated with furniture from her parents’ funeral parlor in Kansas. She always thought she knew who had done the murders. “I can tell,” she said, as if gifted with special insight into homicide, a special benefit, she implied, of being raised in the funeral home business.
In the afternoons I peeped into the tavern to see who was drunk or rode my bike to Mammy’s where a handful of old ladies—Winnie Baker, Betty’s aunt; her sister Maude Eubank; Ruth Holder; and Bess Swartz—often played canasta. Mammy kept score with a pencil she sharpened with a kitchen knife and stuck in her pinned-up braids. She reminded the women, when they excused themselves, not to put paper in the toilet, which was temperamental. I sat on the front porch, listening and reading Ladies’ Home Journal, particularly absorbed by the monthly column “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” though I somehow knew I would never be kissing the bride.
I sometimes walked with Mammy to Mildred’s Beauty Shop, where I read Photoplay and Modern Screen as the blue-haired ladies lined up, waiting for the dryers in their bibs and wave clips, their new hair colors dripping in rivulets down the sides of their heads. Mammy didn’t go to Mildred’s that often. When it was possible, she washed her hair in rainwater, collected in a flat tin pan, kept on the top of the well, amid the pink roses covered in coffee grounds and eggshells, their branches held together with nylon stockings.
. . .
Before bed, I check Facebook where Jamie Callis has written, “Why can’t we go back in time? Joyful family and love.” I hear my mother talking to herself as she does when it gets late and she seems particularly anxious and confused. “What’s wrong with you?” she asks herself over and over. “What’s wrong with you?” For a minute, I think she is talking to me. But she would only be so ferocious with herself.
“Are you okay, Betty?” I ask. “Are you okay?” Standing in the doorway of her room, I see her wagging her finger at someone who is not there. “I’m fine,” she says. She is yelling at me all of a sudden. “I’m fine.”
She is so frustrated, ashamed of herself. I want to go to her, give her a hug, but she would just draw back.
“You’re my buddy,” I tell her.
“Am I?” she asks. “You know I wouldn’t want just another damn sweet old lady,” I say.
Later when I look in, she is dozing with the covers kicked off and her purse in bed beside her, making the odd, sweet noises old people make when they sleep. When she opens her eyes, I put an old soft towel in the dryer to warm up and then spread it around her feet, which she complains get cold at night.
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