Betty

by Tiffany McDaniel

  She looked as tired as I’d ever seen her. Her hair no longer smelled of the honeysuckle shampoo from the salon in Sweet Temper, nor were her clothes shiny and new. It was back to cutoff shorts and tattered T-shirts. Things she wore when she believed she would one day be rich enough to wear something finer. Now she was simply poor Flossie again.

  “Mommy,” Nova called for her again before turning his attention to the screeching hawk flying overhead. He blew a raspberry as he reached both arms toward the bird.

  “I’m goin’ to untie him,” I said as I pushed past her.

  I didn’t get far before my knees were kicked out and I fell facefirst onto the ground.

  “I’ll do whatever it takes to be a star,” Flossie said as she flipped me over onto my back.

  She quickly straddled me and took a lighter out of her pocket. When she clicked the lighter open, the flame shot up between us.

  “Let me go, Flossie.” I punched her square in the nose. As blood dripped down over her lips, she delivered a hard blow back.

  Having kept a tight grip on the lighter the whole time, she re-lit it and said, “If you try to save him, Betty, I’ll have no choice but to start your hair on fire.” She held the lighter close to my head. “I burned a church, remember? I can burn you, too. Have you ever seen fire burn hair, Betty? It gets so hot, it sizzles and melts into your scalp.”

  She grabbed my hair and jerked it closer to the flame.

  “Why are you doin’ this, Flossie?”

  “Mom promised me I was gonna be a star if I stayed. She said Breathed’s a sky without any stars. She—” A loud blare of the approaching train’s horn interrupted her.

  “If you don’t get off me right now,” I screamed at her, “and let me get Nova off them tracks then I’ll tell the whole goddamn world how you killed your little boy.”

  Not listening to me, she said, “I’m takin’ off to Hollywood.” She turned her eyes to Nova. “I’m a good mother. I told him he’d be a star today and I made him one. Best of all is that he’ll die a star and never know what it’s like to be anything less.”

  “You’re crazy.” I grabbed a handful of loose dirt and threw it into her face.

  “You bitch.” She dropped the lighter to paw at her eyes.

  I was able to shove her off. When I turned, I could see the train was much closer. I quickly climbed to my feet and ran toward Nova, but Flossie jumped on my back, sending us both crashing to the ground.

  We wrestled for several seconds before she pinned me, facedown, against the ground.

  “You know, Betty,” she said, “I used to think it was the house that cursed us. If not that, then our very name. Truth is, we were cursed the moment we were born girls. Cursed by our own sex, and sex itself.”

  The train was getting closer. I could see the front of the engine.

  “Choo-choo,” Nova sang out as he excitedly pointed at the train. “Choo-choo. Train’s comin’, Mommy. The choo-choo is comin’.” Nova smiled so wide it pushed his little round cheeks up.

  The train horn started to blare repeatedly. I hoped the driver had seen the glitter of Nova’s costume reflecting the engine’s headlights. I fought my sister with everything I had as the train’s brakes squealed.

  Nova, realizing the train was headed toward him, turned and held his arms out toward Flossie.

  “Mommy.” He cried, reaching for her. “Help me.”

  She looked at the train, then at him, begging for her to get him.

  “Little stars make big stars,” I quickly told her. “He’s your little star. Save him to save yourself.”

  “Mommy’s comin’.” She threw herself up and ran toward him, her arms outstretched as the train blasted its horn.

  I could hear my sister’s heavy breathing as she hurried to get to her son fast enough.

  “I got you.” Flossie wrapped her arms around Nova, but she couldn’t lift him up. His shoelace was still tied to the track. Flossie struggled in vain to get his foot out of the shoe. Nova looked past her at me, tears slipping down his face.

  “Betty, help.” He reached for me.

  I smiled at him because it was the last good thing I could give him.

  As the train barreled toward them, Flossie screamed.

  Unable to bear witness to the death of my sister and nephew, I closed my eyes and covered my ears against the screeching of the brakes.

  “No, no, please, God, no.” I squeezed my eyes shut so tight, I saw little stars.

  “Betty?”

  I opened my eyes and saw Flossie standing there shaking, her hair flying up from the wind generated by the train still slowing down. In her arms was Nova. He had his face buried into her.

  “You didn’t think I’d actually let a train run over him, did you, Betty?” Flossie’s voice shook as she bopped Nova on her hip. “We best get out of here before the conductor can make us. Betty, c’mon.” She yanked me up by the arm.

  As the train came to a stop, the three of us disappeared into the woods, the child crying the whole way.

  42

  Set thy nest among the stars.

  —OBADIAH 1:4

  Flossie let Nova wear the star costume for the entire week. He liked being a star. He wasn’t so different from his mother after all.

  He was wearing the star the day he fell off the bed. He’d been jumping up and down on the mattress while Flossie put on her waitress uniform. Up and down while she brushed her hair. Up and down while she put on her lipstick. Up and down, then only down. When his head hit the concrete floor, Flossie would later say it sounded like a melon breaking apart.

  “Get up,” she said to Nova. “I’m gonna be late for work.”

  She saw how the point of the star was bent back from him landing on it.

  “You broke your star,” she said just as there was a knock on the front door. It was Flossie’s mother-in-law, who had come to babysit Nova while Flossie went to work.

  “Of all the Silkworms,” Flossie had once told me, “Cutlass’ mother is the best of the bunch.”

  As Mrs. Silkworm walked through the messy house and around the piles of dirty clothes, Flossie tried to apologize for not being better at laundry.

  “Where’s Nova?” Mrs. Silkworm asked.

  “He’s playin’ dead,” Flossie said.

  When Mrs. Silkworm saw Nova, she gasped and immeditately scooped the child up in her arms.

  “You ignorant girl,” she said to Flossie as she shoved past her.

  Mrs. Silkworm drove Nova to the hospital in Sweet Temper. On his first night there, I dreamed I saw the glitter of his star costume shooting across the sky.

  Flossie left while he was still in the hospital. The last time I saw her in person, she was lying on the same concrete floor Nova had fallen on. She was pushing cocaine from lines into piles because she said the lines reminded her of Dad’s cigarettes too much.

  I would later learn she had first done cocaine with Cutlass.

  “I try to see through the swirls,” she said. “They’re like a river cussing. Sweet and swollen, go to hells and goddamns.”

  A little more snow for her to breathe in and everything’s fractured.

  “Like gems tossin’ and explodin’,” she spoke rapidly. “I think I’m underwater with glimmerin’ starfish and bathin’ lovers. God exists here, Betty. Demons, too. I told ya God would wait to punish us for burnin’ His house.”

  She looked toward me but it took a while before she found me with her roaming eyes.

  “Dad ever tell ya about the Star Catchers?” she asked. “Stars ain’t supposed to fall to the ground. That’s why I couldn’t save Nova after he fell. It’s why I’ll never be able to touch him again. He’s a fallen star. Only one of the Restless Star Catchers can touch him now. Mrs. Silkworm is a Restless Star Catcher. Did you know that, Betty? I didn�
�t until I saw her pick Nova up. My son is Mrs. Silkworm’s now. A fallen star can’t belong to anyone except for a Restless Star Catcher.”

  Not long after, Flossie packed her bag. Months later we got a card in the mail from California with her zigzagging signature.

  Everything’s so sunny and funny, she wrote. Wish you were here.

  She never made mention of Nova or asked how he was. If she had, I would have told her that after he was released from the hospital, Mrs. Silkworm took him back with her to her house. Nova’s brain had swollen, which would slow his mental development. The doctors at the hospital said he would be confined either to a chair or a bed for the rest of his life. And at first, he was.

  But Mrs. Silkworm worked tirelessly with him. She hired private nurses to help. His steps shuffled, but it was progress. Over time, he improved as best he could and would continue to defy the expectations placed upon him. He came to call Mrs. Silkworm “Mom.” For Nova, she was the nurturing figure he needed to teach him the things everyone said would be useless. Nova proved that just because a star falls doesn’t mean it can never again rise.

  Dad and Mom would visit Nova. Mrs. Silkworm said they were welcome anytime. Both Mom and Dad understood they wouldn’t have the money to care for Nova the way the Silkworms could. But Dad still didn’t want Nova to forget about Flossie.

  “Remember her shine,” Dad would say to Nova, who always looked around as if he was searching for his mother. “You both sparkle like the stars. You get that from her. Never forget.”

  With Flossie gone, I was the only one of the Three Sisters still at home. I carved my sisters’ names in A Faraway Place, if only so the stage itself wouldn’t forget them. Then I wrote. Out of my writing came tanglements and chasings. There were claws and talons and soft things, too. I wrote about water pouring down walls, drifting smoke. These untouchable, touchable things that tied each of us up into knots no extraordinary beginning could ever fix. My poems were as wide as my arms were not. They were as loud as I was silent. They were a hot whisper saying sometimes love is a punishment.

  The months following Flossie leaving, I labored in the rural respite that country life offered. I tilled fields, baled hay, straddled tractors like intimate things. I was working beside boys who looked at me as if I didn’t belong there with them. As if I was building sharp corners into their reliable circles. But it felt good to labor hard.

  While walking home from a farm one day, I passed Ruthis driving by in her shiny red convertible. She stopped and said I had grass in my hair. I kept walking. She got out of the car and followed me.

  “You smell like shit.” She held her nose. “Were you shovelin’ manure?” She walked backward so she could face me. “You sure don’t sunburn, do ya?” She laughed. “But the flies sure do love you.”

  I stopped to face her.

  With all the kindness inside of me, I said, “You’re beautiful, Ruthis.”

  “And you’re ugly.”

  “You’ve got beautiful hair.”

  “And yours is stringy.” She crossed her arms.

  “You’ve got a beautiful smile and beautiful eyes.” I meant every word.

  “I already know I’m beautiful,” she said. “Like you know you’re not.”

  I grabbed her into a hug. She kept her arms folded, too surprised to move.

  “I forgive you, Ruthis,” I said. “I forgive you for makin’ school hell for me. And for callin’ me ugly and a loser. I forgive you. Because one of these days, you’re gonna feel really bad about it and you’re gonna wish I was around so you could apologize. But I’ll be so far away from you, you’ll have to get on a rocket ship to find me. And they don’t let just anybody go to the stars. I’ll forgive you now, so that later, when you realize your life is horrible and that we could have been friends all along, you’ll know that at least I survived you.”

  I pulled back out of the hug and tucked her hair behind her ear. I left her standing there with her mouth open, at a loss for words.

  I smiled to myself all the way home.

  Slipping my feet out of my boots, I left them by the front door. When I got upstairs, I stopped in Mom’s doorway and watched her apply makeup. She was off to Papa Juniper’s to get some groceries.

  She cursed as she applied black eyeliner.

  “My eyes are not what they used to be,” she said.

  “You see fine, Mom.”

  “I don’t mean whether I can see or not. I mean how my eyes look. So many wrinkles now.” She pulled her eyelids up. “You think I need one of them face-lifts?”

  “No.”

  “You can’t lie to me, Betty. I have become an old ‘ma’am’ at fifty-one. Not as old as your father. The good thing about marryin’ an older man is that you’re always younger. It’s strange. I never thought your father would get old. I thought he’d always have his black hair and that damn funny run of his. Now even his wrinkles have wrinkles. Are you afraid of wrinkles, Betty? I know where you’ll get them.”

  She stood and walked toward me. With the eyeliner still in her hand, she began to draw on my face.

  “You’ll get some wrinkles right here between your brows because you frown too goddamn much,” she said. “And you’ll get some here across your forehead because all of the women on my side of the family do. Here on the corners of your eyes, you’ll get your father’s folds. And though we don’t smile, you’ll have wrinkles that said ya did.” She drew lines on either side of my mouth.

  Once she finished, I stepped over to the mirror to see what I looked like. She’d coarsely drawn the black lines as if she meant them to be vulgar.

  “Are you afraid of wrinkles now?” she asked.

  “Not now that I’ve seen them,” I said. “Now I know what to expect.”

  “Then you are a braver girl than I thought.”

  She returned to the vanity to finish her makeup while I sat on the edge of her bed.

  “I wonder if Flossie is happy in California,” I said as I looked toward the window, remembering how my sister would come up the drive twirling and dancing.

  “Ha.” Mom laughed. “I’m sure she’s happy.”

  “She’s gone to Hollywood.” I frowned because Mom’s laughter made me feel silly.

  “Do you know why I told her to marry Cutlass and have his child?” She turned to face me. “You think it’s because I’m wicked. But I did it for her own damn good. She’ll go out there to Hollywood and realize she’s no Bette Davis. But not until they take everything from her. You’ve seen Flossie put on her little shows. She’s missin’ that one thing that makes for a good actress. Talent. Even if she were talented, things come back around. Flossie abandoned her child. She’s already dead in this world.”

  Turned out my mother would be right about Flossie’s career in the movies. She would only get one studio acting role. It was as a waitress. Her single line was “Ice?” To which the men slapped her on the behind and laughed as she walked away from their table. Before she took the final step off the screen, she glanced over her shoulder one last time. She peered directly into the camera as if she were looking for someone. Maybe for herself.

  That movie would be the last time I would ever see my sister alive again. We would, from time to time, talk on the phone. Her voice aging each new year. Rambling about this and that, hard-to-understand conversation.

  “I taught a rat how to chew gum,” she said the last time I ever spoke to her. “He sits on my countertop and does it all…There are sores in my armpits…won’t heal. Be…Betty? What do I do? I ask the rat…the rat…but he just chews his damn gum. I feel like I’m over…what’s the word when you…over…over what, Betty? Overturned. Yes. I feel like I’m over…turned…my legs up in the air…a beetle on its back.”

  “Flossie.” I said her name to remind her who she was. “Is anyone there with you?”

  “I’m alone. I
sn’t that al…always…a woman in the…end?” Her speech slurred even worse. “I used to…parties…my favorite things. So cool in fishnets. Heroin…on the bread. It’s okay, Betty. Dad will nev…know. All my shirts…long sleeved. You can borrow one and we can be sisters…again.” Her voice rose and fell with each time she swayed away from the phone and nodded off. “Betty? Do you remember…I ran to save him…my son. That should count…shouldn’t it? Bet…? It’s because we burn…the church. God’s…gettin’ us back. You can’t bur…a man’s hou…and expect to…away with it. Betty? Why don’t ya ever say a damn thing? The curse…ain’t it?”

  My sister did every drug imaginable. By the time the 1980s ended, she was dead on a dirty mattress, a needle in her arm and enough heroin to forget everything. When they found her body, she was naked except for the necklace Dad had made her. Still around her neck, still something she held on to. I know from seeing the police photos that the bean pod was stretched on its chain and was lying in a puddle of her vomit. The paint was chipped from the bean pod in a way that would make me realize she had chipped it off herself over the years by chewing it, perhaps only trying to find out what lay beneath the color Dad had sworn to her was the very color of her soul.

  I wonder if in those final years my sister ever thought of the yellow and blue flowers in the meadow we’d often run through together back in Breathed when everything was still nice and we were stupid enough to believe anything was possible.

  I don’t think my mother was right about Flossie having no talent. When I look back on it now, I think her whole life was an act. Did I really know my sister? Or was I only seeing the girl she was pretending to be? The flirt. The slut. The wife. The mother. Maybe being Flossie Carpenter was her greatest performance. So good, we all thought it was her.

  THE BREATHANIAN

  Local Men Band Together to Find Shooter

  Five able-bodied men have decided to form a group to search for the gunman.

  “It still feels threatening after all these years,” the group’s elder commented. “Someone going around with a gun. Shooting at all hours of the night. One of these stray bullets could kill someone.”