Betty- a travel journal as story

[Steven Hunley]

Betty
by
Steven Hunley

“Betty?” he licked his lips and grimaced as if he’d found a bad taste in his mouth.

“I can tell you plenty about Betty, and none of it’s good.”

We were in the car heading south on the five to San Diego, just left Long Beach. Steven was moving back to the old homestead, and his junk and clothes filled up the trunk and back seat. We were listening to the radio when the oldie Mother in Law came on, and I asked him how he’d got along with his, though she’d been dead these many years.

“Let me tell you about the first time I met Betty. I was the new boyfriend and Deb was knocked up. Her parents decide to meet me, and take us out to dinner in Mission Valley. So we’re heading down Texas street hill, me and Deb in the back, Mike driving and Betty riding shot gun.

You never met her. Thank your lucky stars. If anyone was born to ride shotgun it was Betty.

Deb says to her dad, “Hey Dad, tell Steven about the class you’re taking.”

Now what I don’t know about Betty is that she’s uneducated and for some reasons holds the entire educational system in contempt. When I was taking those night classes at SDSU for instance, to finish my credential, she was trying to convince Deb I was out with the boys or having an affair or something. Added to that was the fact Mike had developed the habit of not coming home directly after work and having to deal with her. He’d go to bars and take classes instead, and she resented it.

“Aw,” said Mike, shy-like, “It’s not very much, just a class in electronics.”

Then Betty, who’d been looking out the window turned and rasped, you know, when she wanted to she could make her voice lizard-like,

“Yeah, Mike, who do you think you are? Goddam Einstein or somethin’?”

“That was Betty, a regular viper. I should have learned my lesson from Mike, which was to do my best to avoid her. I didn’t know her well enough yet to take cover. But how could I? I just got her daughter pregnant. Oh Jeez, I was in for the main event.”

By now we were out of Long Beach and going past Disneyland, you could see a miniature Matterhorn from the 5 freeway. I noticed all the orange groves had disappeared. Soon we'd be in Irvine.

"Did I tell you what she said to Jack?"

Jack, I knew was Debbie's first old man, the one she escaped to when she ran away from home. He knew Betty too; his ego had been punctured from her sharp tongue plenty of times.

"No, what?"

“Well I wasn’t there for this one, but Jack is a storyteller, and has some outrageous stories, and the best thing about them is that as outrageous as they are, you find out that nothing is exaggerated, not one tiny detail. Credence, credibility, makes for a good story.

So Deb and Jack just had Melissa, and Deb was getting her figure back. It was September and hot in Kensington, in the whole southland for that matter, and she was wearing her Daisy-Dukes and a tank top. Betty rolled over in her Buick, unannounced. It’s only fair to say Jack and Deb smoked a doob and were in a sensitive mood.

She started to criticize Deb on what she was wearing and hinting she should change clothes, but Deb was having none of it, ignoring her. She sat there with a blank look on her face and crossed her legs.

"It's not womanly to sit like that," fumed Betty.

"There's nothing showing," Deb said flatly.

Betty got annoyed, and her temperature started to rise. She rose up out of her chair and strutted to the center of the living room.

Folding her arms, standing with her feet firmly planted, she announced, “I have been married to your father for thirty-two years and never once stood before him naked,” and threw her chin in the air like Mussolini.

“You’re kidding!”

“No, seriously, and Jack said the strangest thing was that Betty said it proudly, as if Mike deserved the Gentleman’s Good Conduct Metal or somethin’. Then she took a big breath and paraded out in triumph.”

I smiled and shook my head. “And she was your mother-in-law.”

“Yeah, when it came to mothers in laws, I really got the breaks.”

We passed by Eucalyptuses filled with black birds, and huge parking lots stuffed with shiny new cars reflecting sunlight off the windows. Cumulus clouds poked their tops over the San Bernardino Mountains like gigantic heads of cauliflower. They do it every summer.

“Did I tell you what happened at Thanksgiving?”

“Never.”



http://youtu.be/dcFkUHvlf5A Mother in Law

[Sherri Lu]

You really paint a vivid picture of the often reviled mother-in-law. It would be a lot funnier if it weren't true. I would have love to see her face off with my mom. Sparks would've flown!

[Buh4Bee]

A good read-- Betty is quite a character. She probably should have gotten some kind of education.

[Steven Hunley]

“Never.”

“Well, you know how holidays with relatives are supposed to be a warm and fuzzy and close and all, but some people point out they often have a darker side? I didn’t believe it. Betty showed me how wrong I was. She came over for Thanksgiving. No Mike, I think he was busy taking a well-deserved powder or something. We ate, and had pumpkin pie for desert. That’s what started it.

The kids were outside playing, and for some reason the women-folk waved me off and were doing the dishes. I went upstairs to read Tanar of Pellucidar by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Then after a while I notice Betty’s voice getting ugly. She’s upset. Not because the turkey or whatever was lousy, in fact just the opposite. Turns out Betty made the exact same pie yesterday. It was one of those frozen Sarah Lee jobs, pumpkin custard, and you had to bake it for almost an hour. She didn’t have the patience and took hers out too early and ruined it. It put her in a nasty mood.

So now she was doing what some mothers do, taking it out on her daughter in true Joan Crawford style, brow-beating her ***.”

“You can’t brow-beat an ***,” I replied. “Only a brow.”

He respected my opinion, after all we took more than one English class together and I’m more precise.

“You didn’t know Betty. She was getting louder and louder, revving up like a 747. After forty-five minutes I had a full head of steam myself and stomped down the stairs to retaliate in true-cave man-boyfriend fashion.

“Hold on there,” I bellowed.

I don’t remember everything I said, only the best line, which was, “Betty, the dog loves Debbie more than you do, so shut the-you-know-what up!”

Then she shouted a bunch of stuff back and I finished with, “Get out of my house.”

“It isn’t your house,” she countered. “Show me the deed!”

I couldn’t. She knew we were renting, the crab-apple. But then she left.

After that I explained my behavior to Deb, how I’d heard every word upstairs.

“But you didn’t hear anything from me, did you?”

“I guess not.”

“I just ignore her. That’s what I do when she goes off like that, I ignore her.”

“Oh.”

I felt like I’d just had the air let out of my tires, as if I’d over reacted. If there was a gold-medal out there for ignoring, Deb would have taken it.

“Deb was damaged, from taking too many hits,” I said, and looked over.

“Both of us were damaged, in one way or another. That’s why we got loaded. We were good at applying chemical bandages, but then we got too close and bled into each other’s wounds.”
I set my mouth, tilted my head and put my eyes back on Interstate 5. Steven looked off towards the coast at unchanging waves.

Laguna Beach went by on the right and soon we were on the land reserved for the Marine base, Camp Pendleton. The marines were doing some kind of exercise on the beach, you could see them from the freeway. There were a few landing crafts off shore, probably re-enacting Omaha beach or something. On the left you could see cars slowing down to cross the Border Patrol check point, on the five north. We’d be in San Diego in less than an hour
.
“So then came Christmas. She dropped presents off on Christmas Eve for Mellissa and Michelle. Mellissa was Jack’s daughter and four years older, and Elle was mine.

“Michelle, the pretty one?”

“Her, Nichole, Mellissa, are all good looking. Deb made good-looking children. It was the Greek in her. Anyway, Christmas comes and Mellissa opens hers first. It’s Barbies. I find a present with Michelle’s name on it, it’s not Barbies. It shaped like a cylinder and heavy. I figure it must be something valuable, since it’s heavy.

“You’re an idiot.”

“Don’t I know it?”

She takes off the ribbon and tears off the paper. It’s a can of sweet peas. Generic sweet peas, Springfield sweet peas. Not Green Giant sweet peas. Elle is only four and she gives me a look like, ‘What?’

At first we assumed Betty was having a ‘senior moment’ and accidently wrapped them. That didn’t make sense, but revenge did, it was pure Betty, pure unadulterated Edmund Dantes Betty.”

“Unadulterated Dumas, and you ought to know, you got the picture of yourself in Chateaux D’if.”

“It was a souvenir, like the one of me when I was nine in the Tucson jail.”

“You have that old black and white with you in a convict in a striped suit with the striped pill-box hat, next to John Pasto in third grade. It was Halloween and you were parading around like an idiot. Then in your late twenties you get busted and really do time, nine months, wasn’t it?”

“It was seven-twenty, seven months, twenty days. See, for each day you work and don’t make trouble they take a day off your sentence, so seven-twenty.”

I passed a car towing a trailer full of furniture and a fridge. Carlsbad was coming up and was stacked with car dealerships on both sides.

“I think you have a theme going on. What do you suppose it is?”

“That I’m a fricken animal that needs to be caged,” he said, and laughed like it was going out of style. Then I did too.

“We got a great zoo in San Diego, we’re ready for ya.”

It’s good to have someone you’ve known for a while. You can give them the business and they’ll still be your friend. Some people are just friendly. And some people are… Betty.

[Sherri Lu]

Very nice way of telling the saga..a car trip. Betty was really something!

[Steven Hunley]

We were approaching Solana beach, and I knew we only had about twenty-five miles to go. It reminded me of that song 25 Miles to Go by Edwin Star. Steven hadn’t said more than two words in the last ten miles. Something was going on inside his noggin. When you know a person over 50 years, you may not know exactly what they’re thinking, but you can tell when they’re having it out with their grey matter.

“Did I tell you about the Glass Bottles Incident?” Steve asked me.

“Not yet.”

“Mike collected glass bottles, all sizes, shapes and colors. He’d line them up along the highest beam of the patio so the sun would shine through the various tints. They gave him the only esthetic appreciation he could garner from Betty’s sterile house. Not a magazine anywhere, no pictures on the wall, no open books, the couch still covered in plastic, an esthetic wasteland only T. S. could enjoy.

Then one afternoon when Mike was drinking in Point Loma across from the Naval Training Center, she ordered Deb, “Get out the yellow pages and phone every bar within five miles.”


The task proved impossible and Betty lost her patience. She went out to the patio and grabbed a chair and a broom. She climbed up and knocked every one of the bottles down; crashing on the cement, including a pair of antique door-knobs turned purple by sitting them in the Mojave, a souvenir of their honeymoon in Tucson, Arizona.”

The Del Mar racetrack and fair grounds were off to the right. The county fair was over on the fourth of July so the parking lots were empty. You could see breaking waves making white foaming lines in the turbulent blue water just beyond. In Mexico near Caliente they exercise the horses in the sand if that’s got anything to do with anything.

“Towards the end Mike had a heart attack and was trying to recover in a wheel chair. About a month before he’d bought Betty a white shag rug; so long they combed it with a special rake. She wouldn’t allow him to cross the living room, since the wheel chair made tracks. She forbade him access, like the Colossus of Rhodes with its legs crossed.

When Mike passed away a few months later, Betty was silent all through the funeral, until the very end, just when everyone thought the curtain was going down. It wasn’t. Betty suddenly threw herself over the casket, like Sarah Bernhardt, real dramatically, and sobbed like Nefertiti over her son. If I’d been a member of the Academy I would have given her my vote.”

“I guess she was the most evil woman you ever met.”

“I don’t think she was evil, exactly,” he said. “But she was bitter, extremely bitter. You know we were cleaning out the garage and I found some old pictures of Deb’s. Mike and Betty were in some black and whites. She was still skinny, and he was young and fresh-faced, you know that’s how they used to describe F. Scott Fitzgerald, fresh faced, and was wearing a sailor suit. He was in the navy and I even found a commendation for service to his country signed by President Reagan. They were a couple, a romantic item back then.

“She didn’t look mean?”

“Naw, in fact she looked happy. But I think I got her figured out. Betty’s given name was Olga, and she came from a small town in the Ukraine. She was uneducated and most likely superstitious. She had her own view of how the world turned.

So she immigrates, ends up near Rochester, New York. That’s where Deb was adopted. And that’s one of the keys, adoption.

While really young she marries some guy before Mike. He works for the railroad and when he drops dead a year later, she inherits his pension or something. She’s in the pocket. She meets Mike, young and fresh-faced o’Catholic, o’ curly-haired manly Mike.

She marries him but after a while they find out they can’t have children. Betty is sterile, as sterile as her living room thirty years later. They adopt Deb. But Betty, turns out, isn’t mother material. She only wants a kid for social status, to look like and feel equal to “all the other girls”.

When Deb doesn’t cooperate she gets beat with a traditional wire hanger or stylish high-heel. Mike is aware of it, but for some reason never confronts Betty. It’s his tragic flaw, and affects his relationship with Betty and Deb too. The poison seeps from the offending vein into the precious tissues of both heart and lungs.

They both drink and both smoke. They deceive. Deb sees it while she’s growing up and copies the style with drinks and smokes and takes medicinal powders of her own. Then she runs away from home and eventually meets what she calls later, “A skinny arrogant dope dealer”, just what she needed. The cycle continues with another generation, only the substances change. The tragedy just doesn’t live on, it thrives.

I remember Deb telling me that one time Betty was giving so much cash to St. Didicus church that the priest came by and returned the money, said they couldn’t take it.”

“Really?” My eyes grew as big as the saucers in Earth vs. Flying Saucers.

“Serious. She knew at that point what she’d done, and was attempting to buy a stairway to heaven. Alienating the two people closest to you was getting to her. But it didn’t stop there. It went on until the day she died.”

Off to the right was Torrey Pines State Beach, overseen by stately sandstone cliffs topped with weathered pine trees bend to angles sculpted by the wind. La Jolla would be next. We’d be at the end of our journey soon but Steven was nowhere near finished.

“I don’t think Betty was happy in this life and she won’t be in the next. Bitterness poisoned her well. I used to think what made her worst of all was the fact her daughter was pretty. Did I tell you that?”

“You’re kidding. Most women want pretty daughters.”

“There was a point when Deb was growing up when Betty would associate with other women. She lived in Tierra Santa and was a social climber. You know how women talk and compare shoes, dresses, diets, make-up, and their children? Well, it was obvious that however pretty Deb was, she wasn’t Betty’s biological daughter. Everybody in Betty’s social group suspected it. Deb was Greek. Betty was Ukrainian. The colors didn’t match; the facial structure was different. Betty convinced Mike to purchase Deb like a Cadillac just for show. I’ve seen the adoption papers.

It was something else that really bittered her up. I figured this out after reading Thomas Hardy. Betty was of the opinion that nature or god or even random circumstances were against her. She saw no recourse to her pattern of life. Sterility, death, bitterness, alienation of affection, followed by bitterness in the extreme. She couldn’t seem to bail her way out of it in church by buying penance, a dispensation, or confessing. The only thing left was sentencing by the microbial guillotine, and nature let the microbes do it.

She passed away of sepsis. So, evil? Not exactly evil, but maybe the next worst thing.”

We rushed down the gentle slope past Mission Beach and Sea World Drive. In Old Town, Presidio Park with it's look-alike Spanish mission museum was on the hill to the left. The real mission was down Mission Valley a couple of miles. People that don't know San Diego think the Presidio is it.

Natives know better. I was a native, and Steve was too. He just finished Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy about a month ago. Back as a senior in high school he convinced the entire English class to read it. At the time he had the mistaken idea it was a Maugham-like story, though he’d never read Maugham. Thought the setting was an island in the South China Sea. You know, natives huga-buga, huga-buga.

It was Hardy, an example of a tough-read Hardy. He still schleps the guilt of how his classmates suffered through it. An entire class suffering because of one dude’s impulsiveness and enthusiasm.

But since then he re-read it, along with two bios of Hardy, then Tess, Mayor of Casterbridge, Far from the Madding Crowd, Wessex Tales, and Jude the Obscure. Said if he read the masters his own writing was bound to improve. “Doing Hardy,” he called it.

We turned off the freeway and headed to my home in North Park. It was the same house where he’d put the candy dish my parents got in Venice on his head when he was twelve right before it fell down and crashed. It was the same house we squirted Seven-up in bottles at each other after school, and he’d come home an hour late, all sticky, and catch hell from his mother, who had been a master sergeant in the WACS and knew how to give hell in a tender loving way. It was neither an unfamiliar nor uncomfortable place, furnished with two immense Springer Spaniels as friendly as old shoe leather.

As we were unloading in the garage I noticed his stacks of manuscripts. I asked the good fellow, “How much of what you write is personal stuff, and how much is fiction?”

“Why, all of it,” he answered without hesitation. “The world is my pen fodder.”

©Steven Hunley 2013