December 31, 1990
Betsy sat cross-legged on the spot of the warped, sloping floor nearest the radiator. Everyone else in the apartment, the ten other stragglers who chose to ring in 1991 downing cheap whiskey in the railroad apartment of Gavin’s high school friend Ari on 3rd Street and Avenue B, were complaining about the heat. The harsh, dusty warmth blasting from the paint-encrusted tangle of pipes felt just fine to Betsy. Even a few inches away from it she was shivering, and tempted to dig her coat out of the pile on Ari’s bed to wear indoors. Only the fear of being mocked by Ari’s friends, all fellow NYU students who were, collectively, quick-witted and cynical in a way that Betsy found incredibly intimidating, kept her from doing it. She was afraid to open her mouth, to utter anything at all that might reveal that she was the hick they all assumed she was, and would rather lose a toe or two to frostbite than admit she was freezing in that airless tomb of a room. She’d first noticed she was cold in South Carolina, the day before yesterday. Or was it yesterday? She couldn’t remember. They stopped at a gas station so she could use the pay phone and she hadn’t been warm since.
Betsy was outside of Charleston before she worked up the nerve to call her mom to announce that she and Gavin were moving to New York. She had rehearsed her short speech across the eastern edge of Georgia and for a few excruciating minutes her mom listened to it in silence. It wasn’t until Betsy got to the part about calling with an address when she got settled that she was interrupted.
“You don’t even have a warm coat,” Kathy said. “Where in God’s name are you going to live?”
“Gavin’s got a friend in the East Village,” she said. “We’ll stay with her until we can find a place. Once I get a job.”
Betsy pictured her scowling in the silence on the other end of the line.
“I got that leopard coat at the shop, you know with the big collar,” she said, wondering why she was talking to her mom about lapels on a pay phone in the parking lot of a Waffle House off of the highway. “I can buy another one. Some gloves, you know, the usual.”
“You know that I can’t help you right now,” said Kathy, sounding smaller, more distant than the five hundred miles between them. “If you’re stuck, you’re stuck. I won’t be able to bail you out.”
Betsy couldn’t remember the last time she’d asked her mother for help, or even the last time she had told her the truth. She knew she would judge her. She knew she would use the exact tone that was vibrating through the receiver. Betsy pictured her mom standing in the tiny Venice kitchen, a kettle taking forever to boil on the electric stovetop, that low wall of 1980s-era glass blocks behind her that distorted anything you saw through it. She had never been able to talk to her mom about the ugly stuff, the complicated, gritty side of her life that would have made her look like a failure. The fact that Betsy was moving to New York to live with her boyfriend was not information Kathy would share with pride.
“I know,” she said. “I can take care of myself.”
“You’re too scared to go back to Gainesville, but you’ll move to New York on a dare? With a boy you barely know? That’s taking care of yourself? Betsy, I just don’t understand you.”
“He’s an adult, Mom, not a boy. I’m twenty-one years old. How old were you when you got married, anyway? Twenty-two? You can’t call the shots for me anymore,” she said, shaking with nerves and rage. New York seemed less terrifying because there was enough noise and plenty of distractions to drown out whatever was in her head, like New Orleans. Maybe there were killers there, but Betsy was convinced it would be easier to spot them or to hide from them. There were other threats back home that her mother wouldn’t understand, and Betsy couldn’t explain.
Their plan had been hatched after Thanksgiving. Betsy floated the idea in one of her letters, and had been shocked when Gavin asked to hear more about her fantasy life “up north.” In the long, rambling letters they’d exchanged during the months she’d spent in Venice, they’d constructed the Big Plan, though all it really amounted to was a rough departure date, a AAA TripTik with driving directions from Jacksonville to Manhattan, and a forced invitation to sleep on someone’s lumpy pullout sofa. There was a part of Betsy that never imagined either of them had the guts to pull the trigger.
By mid-December, she had mailed her final papers, stored a couple of boxes with her belongings in the back of her closet, stashed her warmest clothes in a duffel bag, and boarded a bus to Jacksonville. She told her mom that she was spending Christmas vacation with Gavin’s family and then she’d decide what was next after that. Kathy stood in the parking lot of the bus station with her arms folded, certain her daughter was making a mistake of some kind but unable to pinpoint exactly why.