Happy about dinette sets.
SUMMER 1985
Betty stands in front of the main doors to the O’Hare building, holding a jar of brown liquid up to my face. “We’re gonna drink this under the fairy tree,” she says. Students stream in and out of the building around her as she grins at me through the glass jar.
I stare into it. The liquid inside looks like pond scum. “We’re gonna drink it? What is it?”
“Bieler’s Broth. Dr. Bieler invented it.” Betty’s wearing a white pantsuit with a turquoise scarf around her neck; a shiny white vinyl purse swings from her shoulder. Licking her shell-pink lips, she coos, “It’s amazing stuff.”
So we walk to the fairy tree in the sunshine to drink a jar of pond scum. It’s one of those super windy summer days before the air slows down; clouds are tearing by overhead. Cool breezes and warm sun make dogs goofy and they seem to do the same thing to Betty. When we get to the fairy tree, she lifts a branch up for me as if she’s holding a door. “Madam . . .” she says in a snooty voice.
I crawl under the branch. “When you were rich, did you have a butler?” I ask over my shoulder, peering at her through the leaves.
“Probably,” she answers noncommittally, following me in and dropping the branch door behind her.
The fairy tree is an enormous, ancient, crawling thing, old as Jesus or something. It’s like a fort. You climb in on your hands and knees and then let the branches snap shut behind you. Lots of students hang out under here, so it’s not a private fort—more like a gazebo. A way to be outside without the elements shining or falling on you. Plus, it’s cool and middle-earthy.
Betty pushes her jar, purse and textbooks in and then crawls in herself, absentmindedly brushing the dirt off her knees. She leans against the gnarled trunk next to me with a sweet half-smile on her face. Carefully lifting her jar of pond scum, I turn it from side to side and stare into it; little orange and green specks float by. “Betty?” I say. “This looks like sea monkeys.”
“You know, it does.” She grabs the jar, opens it and takes a swig. When the sea monkeys drip down her chin, she wipes her mouth on her clean white sleeve. “Want some?” she asks, holding it out.
“I don’t think so.”
“Trust me.”
Squinting into the jar, I watch the specks circle. “I trust you. I just never ate sea monkeys before.”
Betty takes another sip. “It’s vegetables.”
“Is this a new diet?” I ask her. Betty doesn’t diet to lose weight; she just reads a lot of books about not getting old. She did a goat milk diet and a seaweed one. Sometimes she makes me do them with her. “You’re gonna live forever,” I tell her. “I hope you’re ready for that.”
She drinks some more monkeys. “I’m fasting a day and then drinking this magical broth, and then fasting the next day and then I drink the broth again. And it tastes good.”
I look at her. “That’s ’cause you’re starving. You fasted yesterday? All day? Dirt’d taste good today.”
“That’s true. And Bieler’s Broth tastes better than dirt.” She takes another sip and closes her eyes blissfully. She does make it look good, but cows make grass look good, too.
I don’t think I’ll do this diet with her. “I miss the goat milk one.”
She nods, her eyes still shut. “That was fun. And our skin looked pretty.”
I pick up the jar but can’t bring myself to try any, now that I know she’s starving. Also, it still looks like sea monkeys, so I just stare into it, swirling the specks around. “I think we just imagined that.”
“Maybe,” Betty says. “And goat milk’s . . . goat-y.”
“It is. Why isn’t cow’s milk cow-y?”
She thinks. “It probably is, but we’re used to it.”
We sit against the lumpy bark, thinking about milk. “Milk’s weird,” I say.
“Milk is weird.” She nods, wide-eyed. “We shouldn’t drink another animal’s milk. It’s like something ants would do.”
“I think ants do do something like that. And ants are weird, too.”
“Mm-hm.” She takes another sip. “They have war.”
“And slavery.” I study her. She’s like a thoroughbred, but an uncomfortable one. You get the feeling that she shouldn’t have been domesticated. “How long’re you gonna do this diet?”
“Just for the summer.”
My jaw drops. “The whole summer? You aren’t gonna eat for the whole summer?”
“I’ll eat Bieler’s Broth.”
“How about just, you know . . . food?” I ask her. “Why don’t you eat that?”
“Eat food?” She thinks. “But I want to be lovely.”
Oh, no, not again. “Betty, you’re the fairest of them all.”
She picks up her purse and fishes around in it, then pulls out her wallet. “I never stopped wanting to be pretty,” she says. “Is that silly?”
“No, I don’t think so. You want people to like you.” I pick up a stick and draw some lines in the dirt with it, tracing a circle of light that’s shining through the branches. “But pretty’s a weird club; the rules are always changing.” I try to draw Betty’s face in the light circle and make it pretty. “And then if you get in, they say you’re stupid.”
Betty slumps against the tree, flipping through the pictures in her wallet. “You’re right about that. But you can’t get a foot in the door without being pretty in our business. It’d be stupid not to look pretty.” She holds the wallet out and shows me a picture of herself a million years ago: the young Betty, with a big American smile, standing by a desk with a clock and some books on it. Same lady, but the face is unlined, with a different expression. Less worried, more nervous, if that makes any sense . . . a desire to please?
I put my stick down and take the wallet from her in order to see the young Betty up close. “I never thought about it that way.” Something about the smiling face is not happy. I can’t put my finger on it for a minute, then I realize it’s desperation. A desperate desire to please. And she thinks these are desperate times. Handing the wallet back, I point to her dirt portrait. “Look,” I say, “same face.”
She smiles. “That’s me?” Studying my drawing, she reaches for the stick. “I’ll draw you. I’ll make you look as good as you made me look.”
I watch as she draws. “I don’t get wanting to look good; it seems rude. Just makes other people feel bad, doesn’t it? Trying to look better than them?” Betty’s ignoring me. “How can you say one person is nicer to look at than another, anyway? I mean, if you gotta try and look like something, how about kind?”
She smiles and keeps drawing. “Oooh . . . I like where this is going, sweetheart. But I think it’s sex appeal we’re after. We all wanna go to bed with somebody. Or just know that we could.”
Oh, geez. “Ew. You think so?” She’s drawing a very nice picture of me in the dirt. “But no one wants to sleep with looks,” I insist. “They want to sleep with a person.”
She looks up from her drawing, stunned. “That is such a lovely thought! But entirely untrue.” She giggles and glances at her old picture before stuffing the wallet back into her shiny purse. “They want to sleep with a person . . . who’s hot.”
“But people who think they’re hot have that ‘I think I’m hot’ expression and that’s ugly.”
“Yeah. But we all want to be loved. It makes us feel lovable.”
“Betty, sleeping with hot people isn’t love. It’s just sleeping with hot people.” Maybe it’s a generational thing.
“True . . .” She brushes some powdery dirt away from her sketch. “We want to be valued. And that makes us feel valuable.” Pointing at my dirt face, she says, “That’s you.”
“Wow, I’m pretty dirt.”
“Yep,” she agrees, admiring her work. “You’re pretty dirt.” Leaning back against the fairy tree, she sighs. “You know what runs the world, Krissy? Fucking. It’s about time you learned that. Fucking runs the whole fucking world.”
/> I stare at her. “It does?”
“Pretty much, yeah.” She wraps her sea monkey-stained arms around her mud-stained knees. “You’ll miss fucking when it’s gone, you know.”
Jesus. “Can you call it something else, please?”
She rolls her eyes. “You’ll miss ‘making love’ when nobody wants to sleep with you anymore because you stopped being pretty.”
Poor Betty. It bugs me that she wants to be pretty. She’s better than that. And I’m sure she was better than that a million years ago when she was unlined and desperate. “In that picture, you looked like yourself, right? Like a real person?”
“No makeup,” she says proudly, “just crushed walnut shells.”
“Yeah, see? You weren’t trying to look better than anyone else. You were a feminist.” I catch her eye. “Wait, what? Walnut shells? On your face?”
“That’s right,” she answers proudly. “I was pretty dirt. But they didn’t say ‘feminist’ back then, Krissy.”
“What’d they say?”
She looks thoughtful. “I don’t know; they didn’t really talk about it.”
“Suffragette?”
She winces. “I’m not that old.”
Change the subject. “So you had a butler? Probably? What was that like?”
The branches around us brush the ground. It’s such a windy day that we’re even getting breezes under the fairy tree. This makes me miss the speedy clouds and I start to feel claustrophobic, so I crawl to the edge of the fairy tree and lift a branch to look out. The grass is a humming, clashing chartreuse, the underside of each wildly dancing blade a rich, pine green. “Wowee, Betty, look at this.” I turn around, grinning at her, and point at the crazy grass.
“I had a hundred people on the payroll,” she says absently, ducking her head to see under the branch. “I’m not sure what they all did, but whatever it was, it cost me ten million dollars.”
My grin fades. “Ten million dollars?”
“Yeah.” She smiles at me. “It’s just money—numbers and paper. It was time to leave Hollywood anyway.” Our dirt faces blow around in the breeze, disappearing. Betty pulls her books to her and presses them against her chest. I always assumed she’d been a chorus girl or an extra or something; a bit-part actress with Hollywood dreams that never quite came true. I thought blending these dreams with reality to create her pink sparkly/dark underbelly mythology was a good idea. But ten million dollars? How did she work that in? “Whadda you mean it was time to leave? Didn’t you like Hollywood?”
She leans her head back against the fairy tree. “I liked how it smelled,” she says dreamily to the branches above her. She liked how L.A. smelled. Nobody ever says the stuff Betty says.
“What about show business?”
“I liked the show,” she says emphatically, “not the business.”
“Amen, sister.”
Then she drains the Bieler’s Broth and screws the lid back on, shoving the jar into her purse violently. “Maybe it’s fame that people want to look pretty for.”
“Fame’s for dorks,” I say offhandedly. “Only idiots wanna be in that club.”
Her mouth drops open. “I had my own TV show! I was on the cover of Time magazine!”
Oops. I gather my books and crouch by the branch door. Ummm . . . “You didn’t buy your own hype, did you?”
She freezes, then cracks up. “You’re right,” she says, laughing, “fame’s for dorks.”
We have a problem with people “buying their own hype.” Not just famous people, but everybody. We accuse lots of people of doing this. We love to accuse people of buying their own hype. “Fame’s for dorks,” she chuckles again, crawling toward the branch door. When she gets there, the knees of her pantsuit black with mud, she looks up at me. “If my wig blows off on the way to class, you’ll catch it for me, right?”
I step outside and lift the branch for her. “I’m not your butler.”
“Old bones,” she mutters, straightening.
“I think you’re pretty fucking spry, Aunt B., scramblin’ around on your hands and knees like that.”
Betty grips her books and purse in one hand and puts her other arm around me, squinting into the sun and wind. “I am pretty fucking spry!”
My uncle brings his new boyfriend, True, over for dinner. True is wonderful-—as gentle and funny as my beloved uncle. Now I have two uncles!
After dinner, we all watch Masterpiece Theater. It’s disturbing: jailed suffragettes are fed by tubes to end a hunger strike.
In bed, I can’t shake the image of the poor, suffering women. What if someone force-feeds my mother and hurts her throat with tubes? I can’t fall asleep; I cry and cry, imagining Crane as a suffering suffragette.
True appears in my bedroom doorway and asks me what’s wrong. When I tell him, he sits on my bed and holds me, rocking gently. As I fall asleep, he repeats over and over again, “Your mother’s not a suffragette, your mother’s not a suffragette, your mother’s not a suffragette . . .”
The class Betty and I are taking this afternoon is Native American Mythology. Dude is our professor. When we walk into the classroom, he crosses his eyes, pushes his lips out, and puffs up his cheeks at us. Betty rolls her eyes. “That guy is so immature,” she sighs, dropping her books on a desk.
“Just ignore him,” I say out of the side of my mouth. Betty worships Dude.
When the other students have taken their seats and the class is settled, Dude walks to the window and leans against the sill. His eyes are so blue they look white, like holes in his head, the light from the window shining through them. As sun and shadows race across his face, he tells us that we’re all going to try deep relaxation.
Oh, god, I can’t do that. Sitting in a chair is hard enough. I raise my hand. “I’m not a strong meditator, sir.”
“I know you aren’t a strong meditator.” He addresses the class. “When Kristin was four years old, we were living in the woods—” I shake my head wildly and he stops midsentence, looking confused. Betty glares at me.
If Dude hadn’t made me take his courses, I would never have known that he uses stories from my childhood in his lectures—mostly embarrassing ones. In my opinion, this is an invasion of privacy. Dude disagrees. “You’re my kid,” he said when I objected. “I own you and I own all my stories about you. They’re mine to tell.” This is bullshit, of course; I own me and I’m in the stories. I have to keep a close eye on him.
Betty thinks it’s “wonderful” that Dude puts me in his lectures. I keep telling her it’s not, but she won’t listen; she likes to hear stories from my childhood, says they’re sweet. “You’re lucky to have a father,” she scolds.
I don’t think it really counts as a “story” if my childhood was just a minute ago—it’s just something that happened—but you can’t argue with Betty. She thinks being old makes her right about everything, and when she can’t pull that off, she becomes conveniently deaf.
“. . . uh, so anyway,” continues Dude, wisely skipping the trip down memory lane and into the commune, “deep relaxation is merely the first stage of Active Imagination, which is a Jungian meditation technique wherein one’s perception is opened to the unconscious, allowing images free rein. There are many ways to reach both the personal and the collective unconscious, of course—most of them not cool in public—but hopefully, in this relaxed state, images will begin to communicate with your conscious minds, uncensored. We’re trying to reach the you that is without ego, without boundaries, without worldly concerns: the waking dreamer.
“This can be a lonely place and that’s okay,” he continues. “I’m hoping to give you a taste of psychological isolation and, paradoxically, psychological freedom. Please, no freaking out, though; that gets messy and gross.” Students are beginning to shift in their seats. They exchange uncomfortable glances.
“Because I can’t throw all of you into holes in the woods,” he says over nervous giggling and chatter, “we’re going to try and reach your inner vo
ices and images by quieting your conscious minds. I think you all can handle it.” Jocks crammed into sweatshirts and young women in pressed blouses look at each other nervously. “If your tribes were here to help you begin the journey into adulthood—”
“Ha!” guffaws Betty. She’s proud of being old.
Dude smirks at her. “—then you would be prepared to go hungry, to be stalked by animals, to face your deepest fears: loneliness, mortality, no TV. But you’d still have to be careful: as you know, a power vision describes what is essentially you, at this moment, and this is often a hidden reality. If this truth is something you aren’t ready to handle, it could be unsettling, to say the least. A telegram from your psyche doesn’t necessarily tell you what you want to know. It tells you what you need to know.
“It may speak in images that are outside of your comfort zone, in voices that you can’t un-hear. In other words, be very afraid,” he says ominously. The class chuckles but no one looks happy. “I don’t imagine you will have power visions per se, but hopefully, as your mind’s chatter dies down, your unconscious will be given the floor. And speaking of the floor, I’d like you all to lie down on it.”
“The floor?” asks Betty, looking at me fearfully.
“You’re spry, remember?” I whisper. I can’t believe Dude can make so many people afraid of lying down—myself included.
Dude tells Betty she can opt out if she wants. “But you’ll need a note from your doctor and it’s too late for that,” he says. “Sorry, it’s out of my hands. Mostly because I think your unconscious is itching to get a word in edgewise and I, for one, would like to hear what it has to say.”
All the students lie on the floor, even Betty—eventually—who lies extra close to me. “Okay, waking dreamers,” says Dude. “Go!”
“Why is it hard for you to lie down?” I whisper to Betty.
Rat Girl: A Memoir Page 12
