Betsy Begins

Betsy begins by investing her allowance in a fifteen-foot phone extension.

It uncoils from the jack in the study, trails around the hall corner, and disappears under the sealed bedroom door, where Michael Stipe’s oversized poster head throbs with the bass reverb from the C.D. player: Betsy’s variant of a no trespassing sign.

On good days, Elaine thinks of the outstretched wire as Ariadne’s thread. She imagines the door to Betsy’s room opening and herself falling into her daughter’s arms, reunited at long last by the faithful rope. She yearns for the entwined embrace with which the four-year-old Betsy used to greet her after the eternal hours in daycare. She recalls the welcome weight of the small child wrapped around her waist as she staggered to her feet. She remembers the sweet scent of her daughter’s golden braids.

On bad days, when Betsy whips her shaggy blackened head and bolts from whatever room in which her mother is speaking, Elaine considers the phone wire an umbilical cord, tensioned to the point of rupture, tautened to snap free of the womb’s maw and jettison Betsy into the black space of orphaned freedom like a savage slingshot made from bone and muscle.

Elaine’s bone.

Elaine’s muscle.

Elaine thinks the phone extension might not be the true beginning. That could have been her realization, the groggy grasp of a wakened sleepwalker, that she had not seen her daughter’s unclothed body in months, when the slow retreat from bath bubbles and hair-brushing and bedtime stories had moved them into a demilitarized zone where a ragged peace is violated now almost daily. The beginning might have been even earlier, after Elaine had time to regret her suggestion, intended to engender the proper social conscience of the entitled, that she and Betsy take the bassinet of stuffed animals to the Goodwill.

One afternoon she had come home from the clinic to find four Hefty bags lined against the carport wall. Curious, she unwound the twist tie off the first and out popped Babar’s flattened face, his trunk long ago deflated by the insistent grasp of Betsy’s little hands. The King of Elephants seemed to be pleading for one last clemency from her, the nominal head of household. That night, after teriyaki chicken and fresh peaches—this before Betsy turned herself (and, de facto, her mother) vegetarian—Elaine had spoken in Babar’s defense.

“Bets,” she said, spooning sliced peaches into Tupperware. “I’m proud of you, that you packed up the stuffies for the Goodwill.”

Betsy was silent, her head bent over her algebra problem at the kitchen table.

“Do you want to keep just one, Pooter?” Elaine snapped the Tupperware corners shut. “Maybe Babar—you remember how I told you he sat in the bassinet waiting for you to be born? Aunt Vicki and I—”

“No,” said Betsy.

“Just Babar? You could keep him on the pillows—”

“No,” Betsy said, erasing. So maybe that was the beginning. And then Betsy stopped riding her teal Schwinn, and her bedroom ceiling got painted black, and she returned a brand-new Esprit shirt, still tagged, to Elaine: Didn’t Elaine know Betsy didn’t wear pink anymore? It is hard for Elaine, who wears the pink shirt herself, to determine the precise onset of Betsy’s detachment.

Elaine meets Wanda for coffee on Friday afternoon. Wanda still smokes, so they carry their tray of decaf espressos and ice waters to the little brick patio behind the bakery, where the sun dappling through the redwood lattice casts them in chiaroscuro. Wanda leans forward to light a Marlboro; she leans back and her face, except for the white reflection of her glasses lenses, darkens. Elaine tries to tell her about Betsy and the phone cord. Wanda has two sons who are grown but not gone. She doesn’t want to understand.

“Remember Anna Freud?” Wanda asks, crushing her cigarette in an oval ceramic ashtray whose blue-green pastel recalls Betsy’s second-grade pinch pots and coil bowls. “She said—listen up, Elaine—she said that the definition of a mother is someone to be left.” Wanda sips at her ice water, lights a second cigarette.

She exhales. “I should be so lucky. Did I tell you that Teddy’s girlfriend has been living in his bedroom for three weeks? I have a live-in daughter-in-law and my son isn’t even married.” Wanda’s chin sags; wattles enfold her jaw line. “She makes the coffee in the morning, for God’s sake.”

Elaine tries again. “When, exactly when, did you stop tucking Teddy in at night?” Wanda slides her dark glasses down her nose.

“Not soon enough, obviously, or he wouldn’t have little miss aspiring Betty Crocker living with us now.”

Elaine feels as if she may cry.

Wanda cocks her head, strokes the skin on her neck. “Look, Elaine. Is Bets doing drugs?”

Elaine shakes her head.

“Has she asked you for birth control?”

“She’s fifteen, Wanda.”

“Famous last words…you’re sure…”

“I’m sure! We’re talking about Betsy, my Betsy.” Wanda raises her hands, wide-fingered.

“Standard survey here, nothing implied…grades?”

Elaine tips her espresso and watches the dregs slide across the bottom of the white cup. “Grades are good…she’s serious about her studies…Honors English and A.P. Science and all that…the overloaded carrying capacity of the earth breaks her heart.” Elaine sets the cup flat. “Do they have to teach Apocalypse to tenth-graders?”

Wanda is brisk. “So you’ve got a kid on honors track who isn’t doing drugs, has yet to become sexually active, and grieves for global causes.” Wanda squints. “I can’t see the problem, sweetie. I really can’t.”

“It’s not a problem. It’s our daily lives. Some days I feel as if I’m living with a stranger. And most days she doesn’t say more than a syllable to me.” Elaine tips her forehead into her hand and massages her temples. “She’s so private. I don’t know her any more, Wan.”

Wanda drains her coffee. “Count your blessings, my child.” She stands from the table. “I’ve got to pick up some skinned chicken breasts at Podesta’s on the way home. The au pair’s request.”

She rests a hand on Elaine’s shoulder. “This too shall pass,” she says, stentorian, and bends to whisper in Elaine’s ear. The words drift through a pasty fug of cigarette smoke and Turkish grounds. “She’s growing up. You need to, yourself, Elaine.”

Wanda rustles off. Elaine considers herself as grown up as they come. When she looks at her sleep-matted face in the morning mirror, she counts crows’ feet, grey hairs, and—new this week—hooded eyelids which are resilient against the cold water rinses that could, a decade earlier, splash away the enveloped folds. Wanda couldn’t possibly be suggesting Elaine adopt the careless parenting maneuvers that have made Wanda famous in every master bedroom in the neighborhood, that somehow disregarding her child’s welfare with impunity could qualify as maturity. It wasn’t so long ago that Teddy was apprehended urinating into the ice machine at the 7-Eleven next to the freeway. “Piss-cicles,” Wanda had quoted Teddy at dinner party after dinner party, laughing so hard that mascara teared down her cheeks and left permanent Rorschach blots on Temmy Nichols’ creamy linen napkins.

It is true that Wanda’s sons haven’t left the house, but Elaine thinks the economy may be more responsible for that than Wanda’s laissez-faire mothering. Boomerang boys, Wanda calls them, chuckling with what Elaine suspects is secret pride.

Elaine remembers reading, in some remaindered self-help book which leapt into her palm in Barnes and Noble, that it’s difficult to leave a home one’s never had. Boundaries set children free, the text intoned in heavy-handed prose; from infancy to high school graduation children need limits, consequences. Do your job well, the checklist in the appendix promised, and you’ll turn out fine specimens of responsible, independent adulthood. Elaine wonders: it might be too late to shove the book at Wanda.

And Betsy? Since the age of twelve Betsy has kept her own calendar, neat square print labeling piano lessons, overnights, even the due dates for her library books. She doesn’t lose things, hasn’t since preschool, when she insisted that Elaine label her jackets and her nap blankie and her Miss Piggy lunchbox with a sharp-tipped indelible pen. She is the one who keeps the running grocery list in the kitchen, plotted so efficiently that when one jar of Skippy’s runs out, a second appears miraculously from the pantry to replace it. Without adult guidance, she learned to save her babysitting money, first in a wooden Maduro Cigar box and now in a savings account. When Elaine offered to explain what, to Elaine, were the complicated ins and outs of financial accounting, Betsy said, with dismay and a trace of solicitude, that she was, after all, taking algebra. Then, as an afterthought, “But thanks, Mom.”

No, Betsy shows all the signs of a child headed full-bore into responsible adulthood. Betsy, Elaine has said for years and years with what she sees now as misplaced vanity come home to roost, is a child who is entirely capable of raising herself.

Elaine busses the tray inside to the bakery counter. “Are they gingerbread?” she asks the salesgirl, pointing through the immaculate glass of the display case to a tray of baked men frosted in red, white, and blue.

“Not gingerbread. Too wintery for summer, we thought. They’re sugar cookies, with sour cream glaze.”

“I’ll take four.” Elaine shuffles inside her purse and finds two dollars and loose change in the bottom of her bag where gum wrappers and lipsticked Kleenex and movie stubs have sifted to the bottom like riverbed silt. After she unlocks the Toyota’s door, she sets the waxy sack of sugar cookies on the passenger seat, coiling the seatbelt around the sack in the loose curl of a spent lasso.

In the cool cave of her living room, Elaine unshoulders her bag. At the scrabbling of Froggie’s feet against the wooden floor, she sets the cookies on the piano bench. She lifts the poodle who, done in by old age, Betsy had observed in rare unguarded loquacity one evening last week, now appropriately croaks instead of barking.

“Croak, Froggie, croak!” Betsy had teased, wrestling with the tiny dog on the living room couch.

“Raaat…raaat…raaat” croaked Froggie. “Raat…raaat…raaat.”

Elaine held her breath until she could bear Froggie’s coarse coughs no longer. “Stop it now, Betsy!”

“He likes it, Mom.”

“Raaat…raaat…raaat.”

“Now! You’re going to give him heart failure. Stop it now!”

Betsy stood up, sliding Froggie to the arm of the couch. She lifted the blanket of thick hair from her face and moved toward the hallway, where she turned and said in a cool voice, “It doesn’t hurt him to play. He likes it, Mom. You’re the one who doesn’t.” And the little dog, as if chastened but bound to tell the truth, followed Betsy down the hall to her room, the happy ticking of his claws silenced by the faint latch of Betsy’s door.

Elaine cradles Froggie against her breast with one hand and fans the mail across the table with the other: a brochure for Crystal Springs In-Home Drinking Water, the electric bill, Newsweek, a letter from San Diego. She settles onto the couch and nestles Frog in her lap, studying her mother’s stern hand on the envelope, the too-perfect loops of the schoolmarm’s vowels, the strangely frivolous tails on the terminal consonants. No abbreviated street or state, the longhand determined to spell through to the end, all mystery dispelled with completion.

Her mother’s letter is the same, perfectly framed paragraphs, one topic to each block, concluding sentences in final position. Once, when Elaine had left the weekly letter unfurled right side up on the kitchen counter next to the bottle of Chablis Wanda was to open, Wanda had set down the corkscrew and crowed at its metered proportions: “It’s a bona fide five-paragraph essay, Elaine!”

Elaine smiles and reads, counting. Paragraph one: salutations; paragraph two: review and summation of bridge party; paragraph three: new goings on in the AAUW; paragraph four: death of elderly neighbor Elaine is sure to remember; paragraph five: inquiries after Betsy and closing.

Elaine rereads the letter, as always, to see if she has missed something, some false start all but crossed out, a suggestive phrase uncharacteristic of her mother, a flare signaling some long-subdued reservoir of feeling. As always, she finds nothing. She balls up the letter and tosses it against the fire screen, where it rebounds onto the hearth and will lie until Betsy picks it up and flattens the creases and asks Elaine why she never relays Grandma’s tidings.

With Froggie nested against her breast like a newborn, Elaine shuts her eyes. She waits for the sadness to filter through her heart, the postpartum longing that accompanies receipt of a letter from her mother. It is as if the pages of her mother’s letter—the very ink of the determined, no-nonsense script—contaminates her with a hungry sorrow so indefinite, so vague, that it remains airborne: a weighty winged creature with nowhere to light, doomed to an eternal landing pattern. If she could only capture the nature of this sadness, Elaine feels, she would live her entire life differently.

Of this, she has spoken only to Betsy. Never to Astrid, her college roommate for four years when the weekly letters drove her, sobbing, under the covers of her institutional twin bed. Never to Josh, Betsy’s father until a younger version of Elaine captured his heart. (“He said that to you?” Wanda had asked, incredulous at this midlife male tactlessness even she could recognize as being too cruel for levity.) Never Wanda, who would have identified the hollowness as a food craving and hauled Elaine, protesting, out for dim sum at Yen Du’s.

Only to Betsy did she try to describe the yearning whose aura was sort of like hunger, only deeper, and coming from the marrow of her bones instead of the gastrointestinal system. And when she had—Elaine remembers the conversation clearly: early morning, coming down the Coast Highway into Carmel, Betsy just awakened from a second sleep—Betsy had said, yawning but with perfect comprehension, sure, she knew what Elaine was trying to describe. It was the smell of Grandma’s house, the way the air never stirred, even when you blew at it with both lungs. The Pacific was a sheet of blue in her peripheral vision, Betsy’s voice muffled from the Cabbage Patch pillow on which she lay. But Betsy knew just what it was that Elaine was trying to describe, and from then on the sadness—which still came, but less often—was the air in Grandma’s house.

“Mom? Mom?” Betsy’s voice pulls her upright from the couch, Froggie spilling in a surprise upset to the floor.

“Betsy?” For the length of her daughter’s name, for the span of the two syllables floating, questioning, in the air, Elaine perceives nothing except her motherhood of the child hovering overhead. Like Froggie’s pads scrabbling for traction against the wood floors, the gears of her mind, ambushed in the barbiturate of afternoon sleep, will not engage. Only Betsy’s face—her almond eyes and her perfect, poreless skin, her sweet child’s breath—anchor Elaine to identity.

“Mom?”

“Sweet pea?”

“Mom, are you awake?”

“I’m awake…sort of…What did you need, Dolly?”

“Carrie and I are going to Lyon’s…is it okay?”

Elaine’s vision clears. Driving to Lyon’s involves one freeway on-ramp, one freeway exit. “Isn’t Lyon’s where they had the drive-by shooting last week?”

“No, Mom. That was Denny’s…that was miles away.”

“How long has Carrie been driving? Does her mom let her drive on the freeways? She doesn’t drink, does she?”

“Mom, we’re going to Lyon’s for coffee! We don’t even need to get on the freeway!” Betsy turns to the offstage shadow lurking in the hall behind the piano. “Carrie, tell her how you drive! Tell her—” a baleful look for Elaine, a look whose resentful menace only heightens the inapproachable beauty of her child’s face, “—tell her it’s been at least two hours since we last shot up.”

Later, before Elaine begins to watch the clock, before the overcooked angel hair pasta removed to the back burner has turned its water a thin and milky blue, Elaine chides herself.

It’s not as if Betsy has ever given her grounds for suspicion, not like Teddy who began by burning the Hoerners’ vacant lot when he was eleven or her cousin’s stepdaughter who came home from a runaway weekend in San Francisco with a butterfly tattooed on her collarbone or the little boy across the street and down one who had, his visiting grandfather confessed too loudly, drowned his calico kitten in the washing machine.

No, Elaine chides herself for allowing love to take on the trappings of oppression, for insisting on an intimacy that invites its own breach. “Maybe she doesn’t recognize you, either,” Wanda accused in response to what Elaine thought to be an objective observation of Betsy’s evolving persona. Maybe Betsy doesn’t know how to deal with you. Softer, more kindly: it happens to the best of us, kiddo.

Elaine pours the sodden pasta into the sink, where it settles into a gluey mass. She stands in front of the open fridge. The mushrooms in the vegetable bin are looking faintly mossy. Fungus growing mold, Elaine thinks, and pitches them into the garbage. She spoons the stiff remnants of a raspberry Jell-O into a bowl and eats it standing, watching soundless Jim Lehrer on the miniature television mounted beneath the soffit. Froggie snuffles into the kitchen and sits beside his empty dish. Elaine scrapes the last can of Friskies special diet into his bowl, picks up her own, and watches him eat.

At eight-thirty, Elaine pulls her blouse over her head and balls it up. On her way to the bathroom, she lifts the sack of sugar men and swipes the blouse across the piano bench, catching fallen dust motes. As the bath runs, she stands in front of the mirror. She is wearing a green checkered bra, one she bought for Betsy without consultation. It looks like a fifties two-piece top, Elaine thinks, turning from side to side, pressing her breasts up with both hands to give the illusion of Renaissance cleavage. No wonder Betsy put it back in Elaine’s drawer. We have a minimalist language, Elaine thinks, lowering herself into the bath water. A sign system built on clothing discards.

At nine-fifteen, she dials Lyon’s. “I’m trying to find my daughter…she has…black hair…thick hair? She’s with a short blonde girl? Nobody…?”

At nine-thirty, she forces herself to sit on the couch with the sack of sugar cookies. She breaks the head of a red man and eats it, sucking the sugar spreckels from her fingers one by one. Froggie sits at her feet, begging with his dark eyes. Elaine breaks the sugared legs and feeds them each to Froggie, who licks his chops and stands, his paws digging at her nightgown.

“More, Frog?” Elaine begins to cry. She breaks a blue man in half and watches Froggie swallow the torso.

“Don’t you chew at all anymore, Froggie?” Elaine reaches into her purse for a threadbare Kleenex, blows her nose. She looks in the bakery sack: a white man and a red man left.

“Those are for Betsy, Frogs. For Betsy!” Froggie quivers: Where is Betsy?

Where is Betsy? Elaine thinks of contorted steel and flashing red lights, Betsy’s thick black hair spread across pavement, a still-frame of loss she knows she can’t survive but whose image she has not for one day in fifteen years been capable of censoring. Froggie dares himself into Elaine’s lap and licks her tears. Elaine sobs into his curly coat. What kind of a mother scripts her only daughter’s tragic end? Why can’t she have five-paragraph interactions that even Wanda would approve? Why, even in the dead of summer, does hysterical wind blow into her house, hers and Betsy’s?

Froggie inches his nose toward the cookie sack. Into the sack. He pulls the red man out and watches Elaine with wide eyes. A key slides into the lock of the kitchen door. The door opens. Outside, a car shifts into gear and reverses down the driveway. Elaine’s heart catches, trapping with one sharp intake of breath the emptiness that has finally landed: a fragile incubus that will always be with her every time Betsy goes down the freeway or stops for coffee or has a date or leaves for college or bears a child or…

“Mom? Mom?”

Elaine covers her weeping with her hands.

“Mom! Why did you let Froggie eat sugar! Mom, it’ll kill him! Mom!”

Elaine opens her eyes, reaches out her hands. Her mouth is twisted, too flushed and too crippled, she knows, for her to speak.

“Mom? Mommy? Mommy?”

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