Betty
When I was seven we moved again, to a tiny wooden cottage on the Saint Marys River, upstream from Sault Sainte Marie. We were only renting the cottage for the summer, but for the time being it was our house, since we had no other. It was dim and mousy-smelling and very cramped, stuffed with all the things from the place before that were not in storage. My sister and I preferred to spend most of our time outside it.
There was a short beach, behind which the cottages, with their contrasting trim – green against white, maroon against robin’s-egg blue, brown against yellow – were lined up like little shoe-boxes, each with its matching outhouse at an unsanitary distance behind. But we were forbidden to swim in the water, because of the strong current. There were stories of children who had been swept away, down toward the rapids and the locks and the Algoma Steel fires of the Soo which we could sometimes see from our bedroom window on overcast nights, glowing dull red against the clouds. We were allowed to wade though, no further than the knee, and we would stand in the water, strands of loose weed tangling against our ankles, and wave at the lake freighters as they slid past, so close we could see not only the flags and sea gulls at their sterns but the hands of the sailors and the ovals of their faces as they waved back to us. Then the waves would come, washing over our thighs up to the waists of our bloomered and skirted seersucker bathing suits, and we would scream with delight.
Our mother, who was usually on the shore, reading or talking to someone but not quite watching us, would sometimes mistake the screams for drowning. Or she would say later, “You’ve been in over your knees,” but my sister would explain that it was only the boat waves. My mother would look at me to see if this was the truth. Unlike my sister, I was a clumsy liar.
The freighters were huge, cumbersome, with rust staining the holes for their anchor chains and enormous chimneys from which the smoke spurted in grey burps. When they blew their horns, as they always did when approaching the locks, the windows in our cottage rattled. For us, they were magical. Sometimes things would drop or be thrown from them, and we would watch these floating objects eagerly, running along the beach to be there when they landed, wading out to fish them in. Usually these treasures turned out to be only empty cardboard boxes or punctured oil cans, oozing dark brown grease and good for nothing. Several times we got orange crates, which we used as cupboards or stools in our hide-outs.
We liked the cottage partly because we had places to make these hide-outs. There had never been room before, since we had always lived in cities. Just before this it was Ottawa, the ground floor of an old three-tiered red-brick apartment building. On the floor above us lived a newly married couple, the wife English and Protestant, the husband French and Catholic. He was in the air force, and was away a lot, but when he came back on leave he used to beat up his wife. It was always about eleven o’clock at night. She would flee downstairs to my mother for protection, and they would sit in the kitchen with cups of tea. The wife would cry, though quietly, so as not to wake us – my mother insisted on that, being a believer in twelve hours of sleep for children – display her bruised eye or cheek, and whisper about his drinking. After an hour or so there would be a discreet knock on the door, and the airman, in full uniform, would ask my mother politely if he could have his wife back upstairs where she belonged. It was a religious dispute, he would say. Besides, he’d given her fifteen dollars to spend on food and she had served him fried Kam. After being away a month, a man expected a good roast, pork or beef, didn’t my mother agree? “I kept my mouth shut and my eyes open,” my mother would say. He never seemed that drunk to her, but with the polite kind you couldn’t tell what they would do.
I wasn’t supposed to know about any of this. I was considered either too young or too good; but my sister, who was four years older, was given hints, which she passed along to me with whatever she thought fit to add. I saw the wife a number of times, going up or down the stairs outside our door, and once she did have a black eye. I never saw the man, but by the time we left Ottawa I was convinced he was a murderer.
This might have explained my father’s warning when my mother told him she had met the young couple who lived in the right-hand cottage. “Don’t get too involved,” he said. “I don’t want her running over here at all hours of the night.” He had little patience with my mother’s talents as a sympathetic listener, even when she teased him by saying, “But I listen to you, dear.” She attracted people he called “sponges.”
He didn’t seem to have anything to worry about. This couple was very different from the other one. Fred and Betty insisted on being called Fred and Betty, right away. My sister and I, who had been drilled to call people Mr. and Mrs., had to call them Fred and Betty also, and we could go over to their house whenever we wanted to. “I don’t want you to take that at face value,” our mother said. Times were hard but our mother had been properly brought up, and we were going to be, too. Nevertheless, at first we went to Fred and Betty’s as often as we could.
Their cottage was exactly the same size as ours, but since there was less furniture in it it seemed bigger. Ours had Ten-Test walls between the rooms, painted lime green, with lighter squares on the paint where other people had once hung pictures. Betty had replaced her walls with real plywood and painted the inside bright yellow, and she’d made yellow-and-white curtains for the kitchen, a print of chickens coming out of eggshells. She’d sewed herself a matching apron from the left-over material. They owned their cottage rather than renting it; as my mother said, you didn’t mind doing the work then. Betty called the tiny kitchen a kitchenette. There was a round ironwork table tucked into one corner, with two scrolled ironwork chairs, painted white, one for Betty and one for Fred. Betty called this corner the breakfast nook.
There was more to do at Fred and Betty’s than at our house. They had a bird made of hollow coloured glass that perched on the edge of a tumbler of water, teetering back and forth until it would finally dip its head into the water and take a drink. They had a front-door knocker in the shape of a woodpecker: you pulled a string, and the woodpecker pecked at the door. They also had a whistle in the shape of a bird that you could fill with water and blow into and it would warble, “like a canary,” Betty said. And they took the Saturday coloured funnies. Our parents didn’t, and they didn’t like us reading trash, as they called it. But Fred and Betty were so friendly and kind to us, what, as my mother said, could they do?
Beyond all these attractions there was Fred. We both fell in love with Fred. My sister would climb into his lap and announce that he was her boyfriend and she was going to marry him when she grew up. She would then make him read the funnies to her and tease him by trying to take the pipe out of his mouth or by tying his shoelaces together. I felt the same way, but I knew it was no good saying so. My sister had staked her claim: when she said she was going to do a thing she usually did it. And she hated my being what she called a copy-cat. So I would sit in the breakfast nook on one of the scrolled ironwork chairs while Betty made coffee, watching my sister and Fred on the living-room couch.
There was something about Fred that attracted people. My mother, who was not a flirtatious woman – she went in for wisdom, instead – was livelier when he was around. Even my father liked him, and would sometimes have a beer with him when he got back from the city. They would sit on the porch of Fred’s cottage in Betty’s yellow wicker chairs, swatting at the sand flies and discussing baseball scores. They seldom mentioned their jobs. I’m not sure what Fred did, but it was in an office. My father was “in wallpaper,” my mother said, but I was never very clear about what that meant. It was more exciting when they talked about the war. My father’s bad back had kept him out of it, much to his disgust, but Fred had been in the navy. He never said too much about it, though my father was always prompting him; but we knew from Betty that they were engaged just before Fred left and married right after he came back. Betty had written letters to him every single night and mailed them once a week. She did not say how often Fred had written to her. My father didn’t like many people, but he said that Fred wasn’t a fool.
Fred didn’t seem to make any efforts to be nice to people. I don’t think he was even especially handsome. The difficulty is that though I can remember Betty down to the last hair and freckle, I can’t remember what Fred looked like. He had dark hair and a pipe, and he used to sing to us if we pestered him enough. “Sioux City Sue,” he would sing, “Your hair is red, your eyes are blue, I’d swap my horse and dog for you …” Or he would sing “Beautiful Brown Eyes” to my sister, whose eyes were brown as compared with my own watery blue. This hurt my feelings, as the song contained the line, “I’ll never love blue eyes again.” It seemed so final, a whole lifetime of being unloved by Fred. Once I cried, which was made worse by the fact that I couldn’t explain to anyone what was wrong; and I had to undergo the humiliation of Fred’s jocular concern and my sister’s scorn, and the worse humiliation of being comforted by Betty in the kitchenette. It was a humiliation because it was obvious even to me that Betty didn’t grasp things very well. “Don’t pay any attention to him,” she said, having guessed that my tears had something to do with Fred. But that was the one piece of advice I couldn’t take.
Fred, like a cat, wouldn’t go two steps out of his way for you really, as my mother said later. So it was unfair that everyone was in love with Fred, but no one, despite her kindness, was in love with Betty. It was Betty who always greeted us at the door, asked us in, and talked to us while Fred slouched on the couch reading the paper. She fed us cookies and milk-shakes and let us lick out the bowls when she was baking. Betty was such a nice person; everyone said so, but no one would have called Fred exactly that. Fred, for instance, did not laugh much, and he only smiled when he was making rude remarks, mostly to my sister. “Stuffing your face again?” he would say. “Hey, baggy-pants.” Whereas Betty never said things like that, and she was always either smiling or laughing.
She laughed a lot when Fred called her Betty Grable, which he did at least once a day. I couldn’t see why she laughed. It was supposed to be a compliment, I thought. Betty Grable was a famous movie star; there was a picture of her thumbtacked to the wall in Fred and Betty’s outhouse. Both my sister and I preferred Fred and Betty’s outhouse to our own. Theirs had curtains on the window, unlike ours, and it had a little wooden box and a matching wooden scoop for the lye. We only had a cardboard box and an old trowel.
Betty didn’t really look like Betty Grable, who was blonde and not as plump as our Betty. Still, they were both beautiful, I thought. I didn’t realize until much later that the remark was cruel; for Betty Grable was renowned for her legs, whereas our Betty had legs that started at her waist and continued downwards without a curve or a pause until they reached her feet. At the time they seemed like ordinary legs. Sitting in the kitchenette, I saw a lot of Betty’s legs, for she wore halter tops and shorts, with her yellow apron over them. Somehow Betty could never get her legs to tan despite the hours she spent crocheting in her wicker chair, the top part of her in the shade of the porch but her legs sticking out into the sun.
My father said that Betty had no sense of humour. I couldn’t understand this at all. If you told her a joke she would always laugh, even if you got it mixed up, and she told jokes of her own, too. She would print the word “BED,” making the E smaller and thicker than the B and the D. “What’s this?” she would say. “It’s the little dark E in BED.” I didn’t get this joke the first time she told it and she had to explain it to me. “Little darkie,” she said, her slightly protruding teeth shining with good humour. We had never been to the United States, even though we could see it across the river, a strip of green trees that faded west into the blue of Lake Superior, and the only black people I had seen were the characters in the comics. There was L’il 8-Ball, and the Africans in Tarzan, and Lothar in Mandrake the Magician, who wore a lion skin. I couldn’t see what any of them had to do with the word bed.
My father also said that Betty had no sex appeal. This didn’t seem to bother my mother in the least. “She’s a very nice girl,” she would answer complacently, or, “She has very nice colouring.” My mother and Betty were soon collaborating on a scheme for making the preserving easier. Most people still had Victory gardens, though the war was over, and the months of July and August were supposed to be spent putting up as many jars of fruit and vegetables as you could. My mother’s garden was half-hearted, like most of her housekeeping efforts. It was a small patch beside the outhouse where squash vines rambled over a thicket of overgrown tomato plants and a few uneven lines of dwarfed carrots and beets. My mother’s talent, we had heard her say, was for people. Betty and Fred didn’t have a garden at all. Fred wouldn’t have worked in it, and when I think of Betty now I realize that a garden would have been too uncontained for her. But she had Fred buy dozens of six-quart baskets of strawberries, peaches, beans, tomatoes, and Concord grapes, on his trips into the city; and she persuaded my mother to give up on her own garden and join her in her mammoth canning sessions.
My mother’s wood stove was unbearably hot for such an operation, and Betty’s little electric range was too small; so Betty got “the boys,” as she called Fred and my father, to set up the derelict wood stove that until then had been rusting behind Betty’s outhouse. They put it in our back yard, and my mother and Betty would sit at our kitchen table, which had been carried outside, peeling, slicing, and talking, Betty with her round pin-cushion cheeks flushed redder than usual by the heat and my mother with an old bandanna wrapped around her head, making her look like a gipsy. Behind them the canning kettles bubbled and steamed, and on one side of the table the growing ranks of Crown jars, inverted on layers of newspapers, cooled and sometimes leaked or cracked. My sister and I hung around the edges, not wanting to be obvious enough to be put to work, but coveting the empty six-quart baskets. We could use them in our hide-out, we felt; we were never sure what for, but they fitted neatly into the orange crates.
I learned a lot about Fred during Betty’s canning sessions: how he liked his eggs, what size socks he took (Betty was a knitter), how well he was doing at the office, what he refused to eat for dinner. Fred was a picky eater, Betty said joyfully. Betty had almost nothing else to talk about, and even my mother, veteran of many confidences, began to talk less and smoke more than usual when Betty was around. It was easier to listen to disasters than to Betty’s inexhaustible and trivial cheer. I began to think that I might not want to be married to Fred after all. He unrolled from Betty’s mouth like a long ribbon of soggy newspaper printed from end to end with nothing but the weather. Neither my sister nor I was interested in sock sizes, and Betty’s random, unexciting details diminished Fred in our eyes. We began to spend less of our playtime at Fred and Betty’s and more in our hide-out, which was in a patch of scrubby oak on a vacant lot along the shore. There we played complicated games of Mandrake the Magician and his faithful servant Lothar, with our dolls as easily hypnotized villains. My sister was always Mandrake. When we tired of this, we would put on our bathing suits and go wading along the shore, watching for freighters and throwing acorns into the river to see how quickly they would be carried away by the current.
It was on one of these wading expeditions that we met Nan. She lived ten lots down, in a white cottage with red trim. Unlike many of the other cottages, Nan’s had a real dock, built out into the river and anchored around the posts with piles of rocks. She was sitting on this dock when we first saw her, chewing gum and flipping through a stack of airplane cards from Wings cigarettes. Everyone knew that only boys collected these. Her hair and her face were light brown, and she had a sleek plump sheen, like caramel pudding.
“What’re you doing with those?” were my sister’s first words. Nan only smiled.
That same afternoon Nan was allowed into our hide-out, and after a cursory game of Mandrake, during which I was demoted to the lowly position of Narda, the two of them sat on our orange crates and exchanged what seemed to me to be languid and pointless comments.
“You ever go to the store?” Nan asked. We never did. Nan smiled some more. She was twelve; my sister was only eleven and three-quarters.
“There’s cute boys at the store,” Nan said. She was wearing a peasant blouse with a frill and an elastic top that she could slide down over her shoulders if she wanted to. She stuck her airplane cards into her shorts pocket and we went to ask my mother if we could walk to the store. After that, my sister and Nan went there almost every afternoon.
The store was a mile and a half from our cottage, a hot walk along the shore past the fronts of other cottages where fat mothers basked in the sun and other, possibly hostile children paddled in the water; past rowboats hauled up on the sand, along cement breakwaters, through patches of beach grass that cut your ankles if you ran through it and beach peas that were hard and bitter-tasting. In some places we could smell the outhouses. Just before the store, there was an open space with poison ivy, which we had to wade around.
The store had no name. It was just “the store,” the only store for the cottagers since it was the only one they could walk to. I was allowed to go with my sister and Nan, or rather, my mother insisted that I go. Although I hadn’t said anything to her about it, she could sense my misery. It wasn’t so much my sister’s desertion that hurt, but her blithe unconsciousness of it. She was quite willing to play with me when Nan wasn’t around.
Sometimes, when the sight of my sister and Nan conspiring twenty paces ahead of me made me too unhappy, I would double back and go to Fred and Betty’s. There I would sit facing backwards on one of Betty’s kitchen chairs, my two hands rigid in the air, holding a skein of sky-blue wool while Betty wound it into balls. Or, under Betty’s direction, I crocheted sweaty, uneven little pink and yellow dolls’ dresses for the dolls my sister was, suddenly, too old to play with.
On better days I would make it as far as the store. It was not beautiful or even clean, but we were so used to wartime drabness and grime that we didn’t notice. It was a two-storey building of unpainted wood which had weathered grey. Parts of it were patched with tar paper, and it had coloured metal signs nailed around the front screen door and windows: Coca-Cola, 7-Up, Salada Tea. Inside, it had the sugary, mournful smell of old general stores, a mixture of the cones for the ice-cream cones, the packages of Oreo cookies, the open boxes of jawbreakers and licorice whips that lined the counter, and that other smell, musky and sharp, part dry-rot and part sweat. The bottles of pop were kept in a metal cooler with a heavy lid, filled with cold water and chunks of ice melted to the smoothness of the sand-scoured pieces of glass we sometimes found on the beach.
The owner of the store and his wife lived on the second floor, but we almost never saw them. The store was run by their two daughters, who took turns behind the counter. They were both dark and they both wore shorts and polka-dot halter tops, but one was friendly and the other one, the thinner, younger one, was not. She would take our pennies and ring them into the cash register without saying a word, staring over our heads out the front window with its dangling raisin-covered fly-papers as if she was completely detached from the activity her hands were performing. She didn’t dislike us; she just didn’t see us. She wore her hair long and done in a sort of roll at the front, and her lipstick was purplish.
The first time we went to the store we found out why Nan collected airplane cards. There were two boys there, sitting on the grey, splintery front steps, their arms crossed over their knees. I had been told by my sister that the right thing to do with boys was to ignore them; otherwise they would pester you. But these boys knew Nan, and they spoke to her, not with the usual taunts, but with respect.
“You got anything new?” one of them said.
Nan smiled, brushed back her hair and wiggled her shoulders a little inside her peasant blouse. Then she slid her airplane cards slowly out of her shorts pocket and began riffling through them.
“You got any?” the other boy said to my sister. For once she was humbled. After that, she got my mother to switch brands and built up her own pack. I saw her in front of the mirror about a week later, practising that tantalizing slide, the cards coming out of her pocket like a magician’s snake.
When I went to the store I always had to bring back a loaf of wax-papered bread for my mother, and sometimes a package of “Jiffy” Pie Crust, if they had any. My sister never had to: she had already discovered the advantages of being unreliable. As payment, and, I’m sure, as compensation for my unhappiness, my mother gave me a penny a trip, and when I had saved five of these pennies I bought my first Popsicle. Our mother had always refused to buy them for us, although she permitted ice-cream cones. She said there was something in Popsicles that was bad for you, and as I sat on the front steps of the store, licking down to the wooden stick, I kept looking for this thing. I visualized it as a sort of core, like the white fingernail-shaped part in a kernel of corn, but I couldn’t find anything.
My sister and Nan were sitting beside me on the front steps. There were no boys at the store that day, so they had nothing else to do. It was even hotter than usual, and airless; there was a shimmer over the river, and the freighters wavered as they passed through it. My Popsicle was melting almost before I could eat it. I had given my sister half of it, which she had taken without the gratitude I had hoped for. She was sharing it with Nan.
Fred came around the corner of the building and headed towards the front door. This was no surprise, as we had seen him at the store several times before.
“Hi, beautiful,” he said to my sister. We moved our rumps along the step to let him in the door.
After quite a long time he came out, carrying a loaf of bread. He asked us if we wanted a lift with him in his car: he was just coming back from the city, he said. Of course we said yes. There was nothing unusual about any of this, except that the daughter, the thinner, purple one, stepped outside the door and stood on the steps as we were driving off. She folded her arms across her chest in that slump-shouldered pose of women idling in doorways. She wasn’t smiling. I thought she had come out to watch the Canada Steamship Lines freighter that was going past, but then I saw that she was staring at Fred. She looked as if she wanted to kill him.
Fred didn’t seem to notice. He sang all the way home. “Katy, oh beautiful Katy,” he sang, winking at my sister, whom he sometimes called Katy since her name was Catherine. He had the windows open, and dust from the rutted gravel road poured over us, whitening our eyebrows and turning Fred’s hair grey. At every jolt my sister and Nan screamed gleefully, and after a while I forgot my feelings of exclusion and screamed too.
It seemed as if we had lived in the cottage for a long time, though it was only one summer. By August I could hardly remember the apartment in Ottawa and the man who used to beat up his wife. That had happened in a remote life; and, despite the sunshine, the water, the open space, a happier one. Before, our frequent moves and the insecurities of new schools had forced my sister to value me: I was four years younger, but I was loyal and always there. Now those years were a canyon between us, an empty stretch like a beach along which I could see her disappearing ahead of me. I longed to be just like her, but I could no longer tell what she was like.
In the third week of August the leaves started to turn, not all at once, just a single red one here and there, like a warning. That meant it would soon be time for school and another move. We didn’t even know where we would be moving to this time, and when Nan asked us what school we went to, we were evasive.
“I’ve been to eight different schools,” my sister said proudly. Because I was so much younger, I had only been to two. Nan, who had been to the same one all her life, slipped the edge of her peasant blouse over her shoulders and down to her elbows to show us that her breasts were growing. The rings around her nipples had softened and started to puff out; otherwise she was as flat as my sister.
“So what,” said my sister, rolling up her jersey. This was a competition I couldn’t be part of. It was about change, and, increasingly, change frightened me. I walked back along the beach to Betty’s house, where my latest piece of grubby crocheting was waiting for me and where everything was always the same.
I knocked on the screen door and opened it. I meant to say, “Can I come in?” the way we always did, but I didn’t say it. Betty was sitting by herself at the iron table of the breakfast nook. She had on her shorts and a striped sailor top, navy blue and white with a little anchor pin, and the apron with the yellow chickens coming out of their eggs. For once she wasn’t doing anything, and there was no cup of coffee in front of her. Her face was white and uncomprehending, as if someone had just hit her for no reason.
She saw me, but she didn’t smile or ask me in. “What am I going to do?” she said.
I looked around the kitchen. Everything was in its place: the percolator gleamed from the stove, the glass bird was teetering slowly down, there were no broken dishes, no water on the floor. What had happened?
“Are you sick?” I said.
“There’s nothing I can do,” Betty said.
She looked so strange that I was frightened. I ran out of the kitchen and across the hillocky grass to get my mother, who always knew what should be done.
“There’s something wrong with Betty,” I said.
My mother was mixing something in a bowl. She rubbed her hands together to get the dough off, then wiped them on her apron. She didn’t look surprised or ask me what it was. “You stay here,” she said. She picked up her package of cigarettes and went out the door.
That evening we had to go to bed early because my mother wanted to talk to my father. We listened, of course; it was easy through the Ten-Test walls.
“I saw it coming,” my mother said. “A mile away.”
“Who is it?” my father said.
“She doesn’t know,” said my mother. “Some girl from town.”
“Betty’s a fool,” my father said. “She always was.” Later, when husbands and wives leaving each other became more common, he often said this, but no matter which one had left it was always the woman he called the fool. His highest compliment to my mother was that she was no fool.
“That may be,” said my mother. “But you’d never want to meet a nicer girl. He was her whole life.”
My sister and I whispered together. My sister’s theory was that Fred had run away from Betty with another woman. I couldn’t believe this: I had never heard of such a thing happening. I was so upset I couldn’t sleep, and for a long time after that I was anxious whenever my father was away overnight, as he frequently was. What if he never came back?
We didn’t see Betty after that. We knew she was in her cottage, because every day my mother carried over samples of her tough and lumpy baking, almost as if someone had died. But we were given strict orders to stay away, and not to go peering in the windows as our mother must have known we longed to do. “She’s having a nervous breakdown,” our mother said, which for me called up an image of Betty lying disjointed on the floor like a car at the garage.
We didn’t even see her on the day we got into my father’s second-hand Studebaker, the back seat packed to the windowtops with only a little oblong space for me to crouch in, and drove out to the main highway to begin the six-hundred-mile journey south to Toronto. My father had changed jobs again; he was now in building materials, and he was sure, since the country was having a boom, that this was finally the right change. We spent September and part of October in a motel while my father looked for a house. I had my eighth birthday and my sister turned twelve. Then there was another new school, and I almost forgot about Betty.
But a month after I had turned twelve myself, Betty was suddenly there one night for dinner. We had people for dinner a lot more than we used to, and sometimes the dinners were so important that my sister and I ate first. My sister didn’t care, as she had boyfriends by that time. I was still in public school and had to wear lisle stockings instead of the seamed nylons my sister was permitted. Also, I had braces. My sister had had braces at that age too, but she had somehow managed to make them seem rakish and daring, so that I had longed for a mouthful of flashing silver teeth like hers. But she no longer had them, and my own mouth in its shackles felt clumsy and muffled.
“You remember Betty,” my mother said.
“Elizabeth,” Betty said.
“Oh yes, of course,” said my mother.
Betty had changed a lot. Before, she had been a little plump; now she was buxom. Her cheeks were as round and florid as two tomatoes, and I thought she was using too much rouge until I saw that the red was caused by masses of tiny veins under her skin. She was wearing a long black pleated skirt, a white short-sleeved angora sweater with a string of black beads, and open-toed black velvet pumps with high heels. She smelled strongly of Lily of the Valley. She had a job, my mother told my father later, a very good job. She was an executive secretary, and now called herself Miss instead of Mrs.
“She’s doing very well,” my mother said, “considering what happened. She’s pulled herself together.”
“I hope you don’t start inviting her to dinner all the time,” said my father, who still found Betty irritating in spite of her new look. She laughed more than ever now, and crossed her legs frequently.
“I feel I’m the only real friend she has,” said my mother. She didn’t say Betty was the only real friend she had, though when my father said “your friend” everyone knew who he meant. My mother had a lot of friends, and her talent for wise listening was now a business asset for my father.
“She says she’ll never marry again,” said my mother.
“She’s a fool,” my father said.
“If I ever saw anyone cut out for marriage, it was her,” said my mother. This remark increased my anxiety about my own future. If all Betty’s accomplishments had not been enough for Fred, what hope was there for me? I did not have my sister’s natural flair, but I had thought there would be some tricks I could learn, dutifully, painstakingly. We were taking Home Economics at school and the teacher kept saying that the way to a man’s heart was through his stomach. I knew this wasn’t true – my mother was still a slapdash cook, and when she gave the best dinners she had a woman in to help – but I laboured over my blancmange and Harvard beets as if I believed it.
My mother started inviting Betty to dinner with men who were not married. Betty smiled and laughed and several of the men seemed interested, but nothing came of it.
“After the way she was hurt, I’m not surprised,” my mother said. I was now old enough to be told things, and besides, my sister was never around. “I heard it was a secretary at his company he ran off with. They even got married, after the divorce.” There was something else about Betty, she told me, although I must never mention it as Betty found it very distressing. Fred’s brother, who was a dentist, had killed his wife because he got involved – my mother said “involved” richly, as if it was a kind of dessert – with his dental technician. He had put his wife into the car and run a tube in from the exhaust pipe, and then tried to pretend it was suicide. The police had found out though, and he was in jail.
This made Betty much more interesting in my eyes. It was in Fred’s blood, then, this tendency towards involvement. In fact it could just as easily have been Betty herself who had been murdered. I now came to see Betty’s laugh as the mask of a stricken and martyred woman. She was not just a wife who had been deserted. Even I could see that this was not a tragic position, it was a ridiculous and humiliating one. She was much more than that: she was a woman who had narrowly escaped death. That Betty herself saw it this way I soon had no doubt. There was something smug and even pious about the way she kept mother’s single men at a polite distance, something faintly nun-like. A lurid aura of sacrificial blood surrounded her. Betty had been there, she had passed through it, she had come out alive, and now she was dedicating herself to, well, to something else.
But it was hard for me to sustain this version of Betty for long. My mother soon ran out of single men and Betty, when she came to dinner, came alone. She talked as incessantly about the details surrounding the other women at her office as she had about Fred. We soon knew how they all took their coffee, which ones lived with their mothers, where they had their hair done, and what their apartments looked like. Betty herself had a darling apartment on Avenue Road, and she had re-done it all herself and even made the slipcovers. Betty was as devoted to her boss as she had once been to Fred. She did all his Christmas shopping, and each year we heard what he had given to his employees, what to his wife and children, and what each item had cost. Betty seemed, in a way, quite happy.
We saw a lot of Betty around Christmas; my mother said she felt sorry for her because she had no family. Betty was in the habit of giving us Christmas presents that made it obvious she thought we were younger than we were. She favoured Parcheesi sets and angora mittens a size too small. I lost interest in her. Even her unending cheerfulness came to seem like a perversion, or a defect almost like idiocy. I was fifteen now and in the throes of adolescent depression. My sister was away at Queen’s; sometimes she gave me clothes she no longer wanted. She was not exactly beautiful – both her eyes and her mouth were too large – but everyone called her vivacious. They called me nice. My braces had come off, but it didn’t seem to make any difference. What right had Betty to be cheerful? When she came to dinner, I excused myself early and went to my room.
One afternoon, in the spring of grade eleven, I came home from school to find my mother sitting at the dining-room table. She was crying, which was so rare that my immediate fear was that something had happened to my father. I didn’t think he had left her; that particular anxiety was past. But perhaps he had been killed in a car crash.
“Mum, what is it?” I said.
“Bring me a glass of water,” she said. She drank some of it and pushed back her hair. “I’m all right now,” she said. “I just had a call from Betty. It was very upsetting; she said horrible things to me.”
“Why?” I said. “What did you do?”
“She accused me of … horrible things.” My mother swabbed at her eyes. “She was screaming. I’ve never heard Betty scream in my life before. After all that time I spent with her. She said she never wanted to speak to me again. Where would she get such an idea?”
“What idea?” I said. I was just as mystified as my mother was. My mother was a bad cook, but she was a good woman. I could not imagine her doing anything that would make anyone want to scream at her.
My mother held back slightly. “Things about Fred,” she said. “She must be crazy. I hadn’t seen her for a couple of months, and then suddenly, just like that.”
“There must be something wrong with her,” my father said at dinner that night. Of course he was right. Betty had an undetected brain tumour, which was discovered when her strange behaviour was noticed at the office. She died in the hospital two months later, but my mother didn’t hear about it till afterwards. She was contrite; she felt she should have visited her friend in the hospital, despite the abusive phone call.
“I ought to have known it was something like that,” she said. “Personality change, that’s one of the clues.” In the course of her listening, my mother had picked up a great deal of information about terminal illnesses.
But for me, this explanation wasn’t good enough. For years after that, Betty followed me around, waiting for me to finish her off in some way more satisfactory to both of us. When I first heard about her death I felt doomed. This, then, was the punishment for being devoted and obliging, this was what happened to girls such as (I felt) myself. When I opened the high-school yearbook and my own face, in pageboy haircut and tentative, appeasing smile, stared back at me, it was Betty’s eyes I superimposed on mine. She had been kind to me when I was a child, and with the callousness of children towards those who are kind but not enchanting, I had preferred Fred. In my future I saw myself being abandoned by a succession of Freds who were running down the beach after a crowd of vivacious girls, all of whom looked remarkably like my sister. As for Betty’s final screams of hatred and rage, they were screams of protest against the unfairness of life. That anger, I knew, was my own, the dark side of that terrible and deforming niceness that had marked Betty like the aftermath of some crippling disease.
People change, though, especially after they are dead. As I passed beyond the age of melodrama I came to see that if I did not want to be Betty, I would have to be someone else. Furthermore, I was already quite different from Betty. In a way, she had absolved me from making the demanded choices by having made them so thoroughly herself. People stopped calling me a nice girl and started calling me a clever one, and after a while I enjoyed this. Betty herself, baking oatmeal cookies in the ephemeral sunlight of fifteen years before, slid back into three dimensions. She was an ordinary woman who had died too young of an incurable disease. Was that it, was that all?
From time to time I would like to have Betty back, if only for an hour’s conversation. I would like her to forgive me for my rejection of her angora mittens, for my secret betrayals of her, for my adolescent contempt. I would like to show her this story I have told about her and ask her if any of it is true. But I can think of nothing I want to ask her that I could phrase in a way that she would care to understand. She would only laugh in her accepting, uncomprehending way and offer me something, a chocolate brownie, a ball of wool.
Fred, on the other hand, no longer intrigues me. The Freds of this world make themselves explicit by what they do and choose. It is the Bettys who are mysterious.