Betty (Another Visit)

Nickel's Wheat Bread, Musselman's Cinnamon Applesauce, and Honey Graham's Honey Graham Crackers: I'm starting to remember her brands.

 

We walk up to the Sara Lee cold cuts and Betty picks out a small box of sliced turkey.

I am pushing her in a wheelchair with a small basket for groceries attached. Walmart is too big for Betty to take with her orthopedic shoes and walker. Her bones ache too persistently. I lean down every once in a while, speaking into her ear in a loud whisper. Her hearing aids pick this up.

Two other people rode the grocery van with us this week: Art and Myrtle. They are walking around Walmart on their own.

Art is eighty-something and legally blind. Gray film glazes his pale blue eyes. His voice and his body shiver constantly, as if constantly chilled to the bone. As he walks, he holds out his white and red segmented cane, feeling out the space between the blurs.

Art always insists we students do not take him around the store. He makes his way to the Customer Service Desk, where they reserve a Walmart employee to walk with him.

I've tried to tell him that I don't mind going with him. "They know where the stuff is anyway, and you don't," he told me once, voice shaking.

All Art buys is tupperware, soil, and plant food. I'd discovered why a year ago as I stepped into his living room with full plastic bags. Not a piece of furniture was in sight. Tall aluminum shelves neatly lined his living room, rows curling with the crisp, young vines of hundreds of tropical plants. Even though the room temperature spiked at 80 degrees, he never stopped shivering. He grooms these plants as if they are part of his large family, all basking in this hothouse together.

Betty can't stand Art. She rolls her eyes at me when he talks about the new African violet he's aquired or how to properly feed a plant.

Betty doesn't seem to like Myrtle very much either, even though this is only the second time she's gone to the grocery store with us. Myrtle is a sweet, wrinkle-faced woman with thin brown hair. Her knees act up in the winter, so she totes a small cane, favoring her right leg.

"I can walk the store myself," Myrtle tells us. "It's just these roads I'm afraid of. After I rolled my car three times, you know, I won't drive in bad weather."

"Did you hear her?" Betty hissed to me later. "She doesn't need help." She shakes her head, sadness flickering through the disdain in her eyes.

Later, I am putting away Betty's groceries. "Where does the bread go, Betty?" I hold up the wheat loaf, showing it to her. Sometimes I don't know if she hears me. Often I see her reading my lips, moving her own after mine, chasing the remnants of my sentences.

"Oh, in the freezer. I have to finish the white bread first." She wrinkles her nose as she says this. "You don't have to put my groceries away," she tells me. I look at her, but she is avoiding my eyes.

"It's okay Betty. That's what friends do for each other. You know?" I smile at her as I line cups of diced peaches next to the applesauce. The fruit juice swishes to the bottoms of the containers as I set them on top of one another, aluminum coverings kissing. I don't know if Betty's body would let her put the groceries away.

She smiles back at me, and then half apologizes. "I'm not very pleasant today," she admits.

"That's okay, Betty," I say. "The good thing about being friends is you can be grumpy sometimes and it's alright." I wink at her and stand, stuffing the plastic bags into their sunflower holder.

She smiles, and a little light sparks in her eyes. I tell her it's time for me to go.

"Okay hon," she responds,"you have a good day." She shuffles her walker to the door, her shoulders hunching. I follow her.

"Goodbye, Betty." I kiss her on the cheek, and her smile widens. I do this every time I say goodbye. "I'll see you next week. You take care, okay?"

She giggles in her way. "Okay. Goodbye." She smiles and waves as I step out into the hallway. I close the door, and she deadbolts it behind me. I sweep my hair behind my ear with one hand and button my camel pea coat, stepping into the elevator.

Billie Holiday

The first time I heard Billie Holiday's voice, I was sitting in a high school history class. That year, I'd taken three elective history classes, but this one was my favorite. We were studying the history of the U.S. from 1945 to present day.

We'd been given an assignment: bring in a song that reflected what was going on in the world during the song's time.

"I know this is from before the fourties," our teacher said, "but I'd like you to watch it."

 

There is a children's book in Eva K. Bowlby library called Becoming Billie Holiday. It is a biography of Billie Holiday's life written all in poems.

 

I found a poignant one on the ninety-fourth page:

 

      "I Got It Bad (And That Ain't Good)"

      While my heart healed, I

      pinned gardenias in my hair

      to hide the bruises.

 

I met with a friend in a small coffee shop last Tuesday. We sat on stools by the coat rack, talking poems. He told me he saw the beauty in my poems, but he wanted them to bite.

 

In one of my poems, I wrote about baby birds chirping in winter time.

 

"I want to see the baby birds dying," he said to me earnestly, laughing a little.

 

I understand what he means. In so many of Bille Holiday's songs, you have the beauty of an soulful voice tied up with pain. These are not things that can be separated and still be counted as real and truthful. Together they bring a texture they cannot provide solo.

 

Krispy Kreme

Cushy red stools line the counter at the front of the store. Those sitting there can look out the wide panes of glass into the snow-lined parking lot of a Wal-Mart. The cold wind taps at the window, edging into the cozy chain establishment. 

It isn't a quirky, "original" coffee shop. There is a coffee shop in Morgantown that has vibrant moose sponge-painted outside their bathrooms. Pictures and statues of these antlered creatures line the walls and the "specials" board.

I usually like those sorts of places best, the places with lots of "things". My fiance and I play this game every time we go into a new restaurant. It's called "Three Favorite Things in the Room." You can probably guess how to play. We ate at Red Robin last night. My three (from best to "eh"):

1. Photograph with a teapot building
2. Full-sized carousel horses
3. Red Robin canoe hanging from the ceiling

The Krispy Kreme doesn't have anything like that. It's the scent of sugary glaze over hot, fried doughnuts filling the room mixed with the ambiance of the two silent widescreens and the empty pleather couches.

I remember, as a little girl, my father swallowing doughnuts three or four at a time. He climbed beach houses with a bucket and soap for a living, cleansing the glass-lined mansions from sea salt. Those winters washing windows in the brittle wind cracked the skin on his hands, and, even now, with a desk job, his hands get chapped in winter.

As a child, I remember begging my mother to make us doughnuts. She did once, filling a wok with oil on a heated stove and pouring the batter through a funnel. I was disappointed. Where were the filling and icing and sprinkles? Who wants plain doughnuts? (Well, Dad wasn't picky.)

Visiting Betty

        We stand outside the automatic door marked with a handicapped symbol. The ladies in the upholstered living room wave their automatic wands and the door clicks, drifting open toward us. The University students visit the assisted living home a few times a week to play Wii Bowling and take a few of the residents grocery shopping. My last visit was a few months before.

            “Betty, you remember Julia,” Steven says to the wrinkled woman, who at ninety-three looks young for her age. She grips her walker with shaky hands and peers through her rimless glasses at me. Her steady blue eyes gaze at me without recognition. She purses her mouth and briefly reaches up to touch her short silver hair, signaling to mine.

            “Yes, that changed,” I say, smiling. I had dyed my light blonde hair a dark auburn. It’d turned a brassy strawberry when I’d tried to dye it back, the red deposits seeping into the follicles of my hair.

            “Oh yes, I remember,” Betty mumbles. She moves her walker around me, avoiding my eyes.

    

        She used to do this at the grocery store every Friday. A woman, usually the daughter of someone from church, or someone Betty babysat since they were knee-high, would come up to her, gushing, “Betty! How are you?” The woman would go on to talk about her mother or what her little brother had been up to these days. Betty would nod and smile, plastic glazing her eyes. She would turn to me as soon as the woman gave her best wishes and headed to the next aisle.

            She’d tug at my arm and I would lean down to listen. “I have no idea who that was,” she’d whisper into my ear, shaking her head.

            I visited Betty every Wednesday for a year, knocking on her door around one o’clock. She’d lean back in her recliner, using a remote to move up the leg rest and carefully lift her legs up, one at a time. I would sit on the couch perpendicular to the window. Out the window you could see the whole town.

            “Do you see that brown one there? That was the house I grew up in. You know I was born in Wheeling though. And that white house one block away—I moved into it after I got married,” She had said to me, holding onto the window sill with unsteady arms, one with a purple blotch. She’d fallen a week earlier and the doctor had told her there was nothing he could really do.

            “I’m just an old woman,” Betty had said, explaining. She said this to explain a lot of things, mostly when I asked for stories. I had once asked her what it was like living during the Great Depression.

            “It wasn’t like anything,” she scoffed at me. “We just lived. I don’t remember anyway. I’m just an old woman.”

            She had a book of old photographs we looked through sometimes, page by page. There was a picture of Betty as a child, maybe two years old, standing in the grass with some daisies. It would have been 1921. There were also some of her in the sixties—the Coke-bottle glasses and the high-waisted mom-jeans.

            There was one picture with her first husband in it. I don’t recall if she ever told me his name. “He didn’t work, so I had to get a job up at the A&P. Do you know, on High Street?” It’s where the Belko Foods is now. He didn’t look like a bad man. He looked stern with dark, thick eyebrows, a sharp chin, and a mouth with scowl lines.

            Betty was beautiful—full lips, hourglass figure, and unblemished skin. Wide-eyed Betty held her daughter in her arms. This was Rita.

            Betty told me about Rita every Wednesday I visited, pointing her wrinkled fingers at the picture next to her VCR. Rita had committed suicide when she was in her fifties, and Betty talked about her like she was Amelia Earhart, lost in the sky or the ocean. It was as if Rita had been on a journey and never come home, like she was wandering through a forest after forty years, picking berries and burning a fire every night.

            Eventually Betty got tired of Wednesday visits. She looked at me like a wilted flower and said, “Don’t come back anymore. It’s too much for me. I am too old. I am just an old woman.” So I stopped visiting, filling my after-lunch hour with other things.

            One day, before she had asked me to stop coming, I put her groceries away alone. She walked me to the door and I opened it. Her mouth trembled, and she looked into my eyes, tearful.

            “Don’t forget me,” she said. “Tell your friends about me, and your boyfriend. Tell your family.”

            It is so strange to be the keeper of this set of memories. Somewhere in her mind I lost my existence, and I don’t know if that changes me or if it changes her. It is like two people packed a suitcase to go on a journey but one of them forgot they were leaving town at all.