Entries tagged with betty

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My Happy Place

By the time I was in my teens, my vision of paradise was The Perfect English Village. I had an image of this in my mind long before I actually saw one. I spent most of the summer I turned 14 reading Agatha Christie, and the images of Miss Marple’s Saint Mary Mead were at least as compelling as the murder plots. I could see the cottages made of Cotswold stone, which as J.B. Priestly said, “...has no color that can be described. Even when the sun is obscured and the light is cold, these walls are still faintly warm and luminous, as if they knew the trick of keeping the lost sunlight of centuries glimmering about them.” All these cottages were adorned with carefully tended flowers, and commerce was limited to small shops: bakeries, butchers, places to buy wool for knitting.

And then there were the “virtues, values, and customs” of village life, so perfectly depicted by Christie: People dropping in to visit and gossip, tea or sherry served, rations stretched, garden produce exchanged, the occasional black market item hidden [she mostly wrote about the years before and after World War II], and, of course churchgoing. And these virtues, values, and customs existed against a backdrop of leisure, seemingly for people of all classes, “unless you were a doctor, a vicar, or a servant.”*

These were also the virtues and values that I saw in Brooklyn Heights growing up. It was, in essence, a small, walkable village, with only one commercial street, and that lined with small shops. The pace of life was slow, partly because of the large number of stay-at-home mothers, quasi-bohemians living (albeit elegantly) from hand to mouth, and single women employed in low-stress secretarial or editorial jobs. Neighbors were neighborly.

My mother, despite her “modernism” (alluded to in earlier writings^†) embodied these “village virtues”. She visited the sick, brought needed items to the poor, invited lonely people to dinner. She made a point of knowing all her neighbors.

Now, over 60 years later, I think and speak of myself as having grown up in “New York”, but Brooklyn Heights was really quite different. Subway stations were at the periphery, and the Heights was spared the hustle and bustle ensuing from people pushing and shoving their way back and forth to work.

Perhaps my bond with English villages grew out of happy childhood memories.

At the age of 34, after scrimping and saving from my meager Editorial Assistant’s salary for about two years, I managed to amass $2000 (not an insignificant sum in 1984 and enough for a nice vacation) and decided to take my partner Betty to England for her 50^th birthday. I did not do this to be generous, and in fact when people praised me, I felt uncomfortable. I did it because I had yearned to go to England since I was young and I didn’t want to go alone. I was working and she wasn’t, so she paid in labor for at least some of her airfare and bed and board by looking through the mountain of catalogues we had picked up at the British Tourist Authority, as well as through the book on English villages that we had bought, and coming up with some ideas for our trip.

There were so many choices of tours, and so many were associated with beloved authors! James Herriot’s Yorkshire; Beatrix Potter’s Lake District; Bronte Country; Bath, where Jane Austen’s heroines spent a “season”. And of course Scotland with its magnificent lochs and highlands. As we had to budget sparingly we had to narrow things down. Eventually we decided on an informal tour of “Constable Country” (with a car and driver) and a three day coach tour of the Scottish Highlands. We could bracket our trip with a few days in London at each end. And then, spontaneously, we added one more gem. Betty mentioned the fact that as I would be spending vacation days and vacation money on this trip, we wouldn’t be going to the seaside anywhere that year. So she found a wonderful little seaside town in Norfolk called Cromer so that we could have a bit of seaside in England! We could travel there on the train after our Constable tour on our way to Scotland. The 10 day vacation plan was now complete.

As soon as we got onto a coach at Heathrow Airport, making our way to our hotel, I saw that everything was every bit as wonderful as I had dreamed it would be! I don’t remember that much about our time in London but the two things that stand out were seeing the Dickens museum and eating in the tea shop on the ground floor of the Victoria Thistle, our hotel. Probably if I could take one hour of my life and save it forever it would be our time having lunch in that tea shop. Everything was dusty rose or Wedgwood blue; the curtains were heavy and the walls were wainscoted. The menu was totally Miss Marple: tiny sandwiches with the crusts cut off, served on Spode. For the hour we were there, stress of all kinds just evaporated. There was no work, no money worries (which we did have plenty of on that trip; I was too poor to have a credit card – banks were much fussier then about whom they would give them to – and so I was eking out Travelers Checks), no housework. We just sat there, nicely dressed in slacks, tailored shirts, and blazers, sipping tea and looking out the windows, chatting about what we had seen and what we looked forward to seeing, like two characters in a pre-1960s English novel.

Our tour of Constable Country was a feast for the eyes. We saw all of the places he had painted: Willy Lott’s cottage, the River Stour, with boats moored; Dedham Village; Lavenham; Kersey, where people gave the right of way to ducks; Long Melford. And they had hardly changed at all in the ensuing century! I don’t remember where we stayed overnight but it might have been The Swan in Lavenham.

Cromer was the biggest surprise. Not just the seaside, with buildings of a kind of stone I’d never seen anywhere before or since, but the large rectory turned B&B where we slept (it was freezing) where we met a number of other paying guests. Here we met a young couple (at the time Betty was 50, I was 34; this couple was in their late 20s) who would remain friends and traveling companions of ours for several decades. The woman, Rhona, looked like she had stepped out of the pages of an Agatha Christie novel set in the 1940s. She had on a skirt and heels, even for a walk at the seaside, which, having spent most of my social life since the late 60s with a slovenly casual crowd, I found quite charming. She worked for a jeweler but dreamed of being the “manageress” at a store (which she eventually became). Kevin, the man, looked like Paul McCartney and loved cameras. In the most natural way in the world (and remember, this was before New York City even had a gay rights bill!) we split up as regular married couples might have, with Betty talking to Kevin about cameras and maps and me talking to Rhona about hairstyles and makeup.

One afternoon they took us for a drive throughout Norfolk and we stopped at King’s Lynn, a seaside town where they eventually moved. (We visited them there a few years later.) As we were driving Rhona confided to us that she was so happy we had all met. She said that most of the guests at the B&B (where they had been for about a week when we arrived) were old, reactionary, and stuffy. She said she was thrilled to meet people with whom they could have fun.

Then it was on to Scotland. Betty and I took a train to Edinburgh, stayed for a night in the North British Hotel (which had the largest bathtub either of us had ever seen), went to some museums the following morning, and then caught the train to Inverness where we would meet our coach tour. I will have to say that the Scottish Highlands are the most magnificent bit of “nature” that I have ever seen. Mountains that are one minute green, the next purple, and the next dark and cratered like shots of the moon. You can drive for miles and miles in the highlands and see nothing but the tiniest crofters’ cottage and sheep. No people to speak of. We saw the deepest lakes, including Loch Ness. Shops near Loch Ness had turned “Nessie” (the imaginary monster who was said to live at the bottom of the Loch) into an entire industry. There were Nessie tea towels, stuffed toys, and of course T shirts. We saw the battlefields at Culloden and felt our hearts leap into our mouths as we crossed the swinging rope bridge (on foot) at Fort William. The tour ended at the magnificent Inverewe Gardens, after which we turned around, went back to Edinburgh, hopped on a train, and spent one last night in London.

We went back to England several more times after that. The last new village we stayed in was Clovelly in Devon. The streets were cobblestone and to get to the water you had to walk down a steep incline. This was in 2004 and by that time Betty was not mobile enough for the trek so she stayed in the coach while I explored the town. That is the last time to date that I have been out of the country.

Since I left my last full time job in 2009 I have not had the money to travel and Betty is now bedbound (see some of my earlier writings about Betty^‡), but we still vicariously enjoy time in an English village, most recently by watching the great British actress Penelope Keith’s program “Hidden Villages”. We watch an episode and then snuggle and reminisce about our happy times.

[*From Marion Shaw and Sabine Vanacker, in their book Reflecting on Miss Marple.

†See “A Modern Child in the 1950s https://babydramatic-1950.dreamwidth.org/2099.html

‡See “Inkling” https://babydramatic-1950.dreamwidth.org/4478.html]

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LJ Idol Week 17: Salad Days

When I met Betty, she had been actively involved in a Lesbian video group. This was in the mid-1970s and to the group’s knowledge, up to that time there had not been one. Video in those days meant carrying huge cameras to your location and shooting film that would later be played for viewing on old reel-to-reel devices. Those videos represented the pinnacle of Betty’s creative achievement, but were never in her possession. When the group broke up and the work was discontinued (and many of the women had stopped speaking to each other), Betty feared that the person who had possession of these fragile tapes had not stored them properly, a topic that she would refer to intermittently over the years, sometimes angrily, and sometimes sadly. Then miraculously, sometime in the early Millennium, the tapes were rescued and a few remaining members of the group began the arduous task of converting them to a digital format. They now reside somewhere on a Web page accessible through, among other portals, Facebook. Of course Betty did not know about any of this because she has never been computer literate. And I did not know about it because I was never personally friendly with those people.

A few years ago, two old friends of Betty’s from the group contacted me out of the blue (I think they had heard through the grapevine of Betty’s decline) and asked me if they could come visit Betty and show her the newly converted videos on a laptop that they would bring with them. They also wanted to interview her and record it. Of course I said yes. If nothing else, I knew that she would welcome the company. During my conversation with these two women, they gave me the link for viewing the old videos on my laptop at home.

Although I was not in any of the videos (I had gotten involved with the Lesbian Pride movement a few years later) viewing them elicited an enormous wave of nostalgia.

Mostly, I was struck by the youth and innocence of it all. There was a fairy tale quality to this life, which I think is what drew me in all those decades ago. Of course in the immediate sense, what drew me in was Betty, but quite aside from the transformation of self that occurs when one is in love, I was fascinated by this world that seemed to exist totally apart from “reality” as I knew it: office jobs, nuclear families, middle class “homemaking”, traditional rules of dress, and most of all, contact with one’s parents.

Here was a group of women, I see now mostly white and middle-class born, and mostly under 45 (Betty was one of the oldest) who had found a way to live, like Peter Pan and the Lost Boys, in a never-never land. I don't think I had ever quite envisioned anything of this kind. Several years earlier, when I had initially discovered my own Lesbianism, my hero[ine] had been Elinor Eastlake from The Group (too smart and glamorous to bother with men, and snapped up like arm candy by a rich cross-dressing baroness, but nonetheless moving in conventional society) and most of the Lesbians I knew in real life, although often frequenting gay bars, or socializing with each other in places like Provincetown, otherwise pretty much existed alongside of everyone else, working in ordinary jobs and attending family functions.

In many ways, these Lesbian-Feminist-Separatists reminded me not only of Peter Pan and his Lost Boys, but also of all the orphan children in novels by Dickens and the Bronte sisters who had fascinated me throughout my adolescence. These putatively adult women were like girl-boy children who seemed not to have grown up and who managed to live a life quite apart from "adults". Most of them were on strained terms with their own parents if they communicated with their parents at all, which many did not, mostly because their parents disapproved of their “lifestyle”. My mother, on the other hand, did not particularly care if I was a Lesbian, but I found her to be so soul-crushingly overbearing and suffocating that my new life seemed as good an excuse as any to “divorce” her, at least for the moment.

The world I now inhabited had its own choruses, printing presses, art schools, coffee houses, food coops, movers, painters, exterminators, and others. We had our own holiday celebrations (including a "solstice party" in late December, to avoid mention of "patriarchal" holidays). We had our own doctors and lawyers, too, but these were the "bridge" figures: they were of us but also of the world.

And there was our "Wendy". Not me. I was a token "pretty girl" but most of my clothes still came from thrift shops and I was not a successful professional nor did I have a middle class home. "Wendy" was a pretty, blonde schoolteacher, a "bar femme" from the era when Lesbians were sexy, not political. (She had once been hauled off to jail with her butch lover, wearing a red baby doll nightie). She adored butches of all sorts and in exchange for their flirting outrageously with her she allowed them to sponge off of her. (I remember one of them musing once “I wonder if Wendy will buy me a sweater this winter.”)

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Of course it was not all a sweet fairy tale to remember with fondness. As I have often recalled with bitterness, it was these very women who discouraged me from trying to seriously pursue an opera career (if I would even have been able to at the late age of 26 with no music degree and poor health habits, but who knows; with different influences and a true "champion", maybe I could have). They told me not to "invest myself in a patriarchal art form like opera." They made me so phobic about straight men that I was unable to act the roles I should have been singing. (Actually I was not afraid of straight men; I was afraid of these women’s disapproval.)

How different things are now! Upwardly mobile professional Lesbians of subsequent generations are all marrying, finding high tech ways to procreate (don't ask!), and being house proud. They are less angry, and on the whole much mentally healthier that the "Lost Boys." Maybe because the world of the trans continuum has siphoned off most of the would-have-been butches, and possibly some of the women who swore that they would never take a job, even a dream job, where they would have to wear a skirt, most of the Lesbians I meet now appear to be indistinguishable at first glance from most of the straight women I meet, comfortable wearing dresses and socializing with straight men (I see this at the Lutheran church where I sing for example.)

But I miss Never-Never Land. Eventually it vanished, and I was left as a middle aged woman who had never really grown up, scrambling to make something of myself in the economically ruthless world of the twenty-first century.

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LJ Idol Write-off: Open Topic: Why I Am Not Married (Musings on US v. Windsor)

At 25, clueless after awakening from the drug, alcohol, and apathy-induced fog of what people refer to as the “Sixties” (which actually ended in the mid-1970s), I fell in love. Betty was 15 years older than I and probably hadn’t had a real job in 7 or 8 years. Her apartment was full of broken furniture, outmoded business attire, and antique china from old, discarded selves. She dined on tinned soup but always had money for a theater ticket. Knew all the places you could get free clothes. Was a perennial guest at other people’s holiday parties.

As madly in love as I was, the idea of marriage never crossed my mind. As a girl I had read Jane Austen and knew that one of the main reasons for a woman to marry was to “better herself”. When I was growing up, 150 years later, friends used to joke “Marry a nice Jewish dokta”.

There were people you married and people you didn’t. Other girls may have wanted children and a house. I wanted an earth-shattering romance, excitement, danger (not too much, of course), and surprise.

“An army of lovers cannot fail”. That was the mantra that kept us Amazon Dyke Warriors going throughout the 1970s. There was even a T shirt. Our army was fighting for anti-discrimination laws, staging sit-ins, boycotting Florida orange juice when Anita Bryant was the spokeswoman (for those too young to remember her, Anita Bryant, a pop singer from the 1960s, ran the "Save our Children" campaign in 1977 to repeal a local ordinance in Dade County Florida that prohibited discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation). Laughing when we were offered orange juice in a restaurant and saying “only if it comes from California. We don’t drink Florida orange juice, sorry.” Wearing a button saying “Boycott Florida Orange Juice” and giggling at our big secret.

“An army of wives” doesn’t quite sound the same really.

As the decades went by I became a suit. Not one trapped in a closet, but a suit nonetheless. If I hadn’t been so obviously the “girl,” I suppose I would have been the traditional working husband to Betty's stay-at-home perpetually unemployed something, but I didn’t want to think about that. True, some of my heterosexual friends, stuck with older bohemian husbands they had acquired in another life, were in a similar position, going to work every day year after year while their husbands lounged about drunk or depressed (or thought that they were too “artistic” to pull up their socks and go to work), but in my situation it was harder to keep things clear. So the less Betty worked, the more skirts and dresses I wore. Breadwinner or no, I couldn’t bear anyone to think that I “wore the pants in the family.”

In 1993, after 17 years of couplehood, we had an informal ceremony, where I got to be a bride in a dress, complete with a bouquet, which I tossed toward the prettiest-looking femme in the room. Betty and I exchanged vows: for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health.

Another decade went by and the army of lovers was gone. Many married (it was beginning to be legal in several states), birthed or adopted children, and bought houses. For us, nights at women’s dances and weekends spent at consciousness-raising workshops were replaced by calls to social workers about how to help Betty apply for various benefits. The bohemian of yesterday had become the supplicant of today.

If you and your loved one are poor, (on paper) it’s better to be single. If you’re middle income, and your loved one is older and poorer, (on paper) it’s better to be single. It’s really only better to be married if you have children or own property and we had neither—or if the richer partner is older and is likely to die first. While so many of my friends were jubilant about US v. Windsor, the case that in essence legalized same-sex marriage nationally, I felt that as it was first and foremost about a six figure tax payment, required because the two women were deemed legally single, it was really not about people like me or Betty. We already had wills, power of attorney forms, and healthcare proxy forms. What Edie Windsor had to pay in taxes was close to twice my and Betty's net worth combined. And as far as my self-esteem was concerned, I realized that if I had married charming, funny, sweet, work-averse Betty, I would have had to admit that I had “married down,” whereas as things were, I could relish the warm glow that one feels giving selflessly to someone who has less.

As a legally single person, she was able to do a Medicaid spend-down. She now has 24 hour home care and everything she needs. Barring a twist of fate, she will die first, and I can grieve with my meager savings intact.

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LJ Idol Week 16: Inkling

“Do you think Buub is losing her marbles?” my mother asked over a Thanksgiving dinner at Fiorello’s (her favorite restaurant) where my partner Betty and I had gone with her. “Buub” was my mother’s nickname for Betty, who had just walked out in a snit because she thought my mother had “interrupted” her when she was telling a story. Yes, my mother was rude, but I had learned over the decades (was this a New York thing?) that if someone is rude, or says something you don’t like, you talk them down, you “override” them with speech, or, as many First Amendment advocates say “The best answer to speech you don’t like is more speech”. Betty, on the other hand, came from the South. Also a therapist had once told her “if you don’t like something someone says or does, walk away”. Was that supposed to include a holiday meal with a family member? I didn’t think so.

This was about 15 years ago.

Yes, I did think that Betty was “losing her marbles”. I remembered her mentioning to me how her mother, who to me had seemed just plain nasty, would get little bouts of sudden irritability that began increasing in frequency when she was the age Betty had been at that Thanksgiving meal: around 70. When Betty had asked her mother’s doctor about it, he had told Betty that her mother had “multi-infarct dementia”, which is caused by mini-strokes.

About two years after that Thanksgiving meal, Betty was hospitalized for dizziness and was told that she had a-fib. She was given a blood thinner to prevent a stroke. So I decided that her ever-increasing irritability must be caused by the same multi-infarct dementia that her mother had had.

By that point her irritability had become so unbearable that once I saw her settled at home after her hospitalization and on a regimen with a blood thinner, I decided I had had enough. Betty had been making my life miserable for the past two years. I was working at a demanding job and didn’t have a lot of patience. She hadn’t worked in years, didn’t do anything around the house, had lost her romantic charm, and was just plain unpleasant to be with. Also, a few years earlier I had begun singing again and had a whole new life and a whole new sense of myself. So after 30 years together, we split up.

The breakup didn’t last long. About a year later, Betty had a hip replacement and needed help during her recovery period. Although I did not want to get reinvolved with her full time, I decided it would be inhumane not to do something so I spent Saturdays doing a few chores for her, mostly laundry and shopping. If she wanted cleaning done she could pay a cleaning woman, which she did, although considering the mountains of detritus in her apartment, having a biweekly cleaning woman was like, to quote a friend, “trying to move a mountain with a teaspoon.”

Interestingly, despite my going with Betty to doctors’ appointments from time to time (these included a cardiologist, a pulmonologist, and an orthopedist), the word “dementia” was never mentioned. So I had a private consult with a social worker who specialized in gerontology. She agreed with me about the “multi-infarct dementia” and told me that the solution at my end was to tell Betty less about my personal business and choices so that we would quarrel less. To set boundaries. And she assured me that one day, as Betty’s dementia progressed, she would stop being irritable and would simply be confused and docile.

By the time my mother died in 2010 things had gotten really bad with Betty. In the interim since 2007 she had had one bout of pneumonia, which led to her spending several weeks at an acute cardiopulmonary rehab facility (after which she was noticeably better for quite some time), a bad fall, and two operations to remove nasal polyps, the second of which caused her to hemorrhage from her nose after having been discharged, sending her to the emergency room.

I mention my mother’s death as a turning point because after my having sat with her during her last 48 hours on earth, watching her body being removed from her apartment, and the next day identifying her body at the funeral parlor, not to mention starting to deal with a variety of legal matters and paperwork, Betty, instead of being supportive, decided to have a raging temper tantrum because her name was not mentioned in my mother’s obituary. I explained to her that the obituary was something that my mother had written herself, probably during the year that Betty and I were split up, and that I had simply forwarded it to the newspaper verbatim, but this did not seem to appease her. Yes, anger and hurt (or a feeling of having been overlooked) are things we all experience, but surely a sane person would understand what was and was not appropriate for a particular time and place?

After that things went downhill quickly. Sometime in 2011, after Betty had spent several weeks dragging herself around the apartment moaning “ow, ow, ow” and not really doing anything except staring at the tv or leafing through catalogs (she only seemed to eat if I was there or if a friend came and fetched her to eat out), a mutual friend suggested that we try to get her into an assisted living facility. There would be financial details to work out, but it seemed like a good solution. We looked at a lovely place where each resident had their own apartment, small pets were allowed, and there was a restaurant with a gourmet chef and numerous activities for the residents. The facility even allowed people to spend down and roll over onto Medicaid (we were counting on a possible large payout from Betty’s landlord if she vacated her rent controlled apartment) but in the end Betty said no. The deal breaker (which I understood) was that she would not be allowed to have an overnight guest. Our friend was furious. She had put a lot of effort into trying to figure out this move, including going with us for a free consultation to a lawyer. Yet when I said the word “dementia” to her in connection with Betty she just blew me off and laughed. “No” she said. Betty did not have dementia.

After that there were two or three more emergency room visits: for falls (no bones broken, thankfully) and for unexplained dizziness. There were visits to gerontologists for primary care physicals. Yet nobody mentioned dementia. Betty now was eating almost nothing and had lost 30 pounds, was semi-incontinent, and could not do even the simplest things for herself, yet all people said was that she was “lazy,” “willfull”, “depressed”, or “deconditioned”. She and I still went out occasionally, but things got harder and harder. It would take me close to an hour to help her get dressed, then we would have to get a cab (she paid), and then we would finally get to wherever we were going (usually a museum and usually barely an hour before closing) where she would first want the bathroom, then want coffee, and then want to sit down. If I was lucky I had a half hour to look at an exhibit.

Shopping with her was worse. I remember spending two hours in Old Navy until I thought I was going to keel over (from fatigue or boredom). She came home with two pairs of pants that did not fit and spent again what they had cost to have them tailored. I think she wore one pair once.

Then there was the time she wanted exactly the right kind of coffee thermos to keep by the bed. We spent over an hour in a housewares store and I watched as she became more and more confused. She came home with something, I’m not sure what, but it was not ideal for putting coffee in and I don’t think she ever used it.

Somewhere during that period we did manage to take a vacation to Oguquit, Maine. It was my treat for her 80^th birthday. She spent most of the time in the room.

Our last outing in the city was to the ballet. We saw “Jewels”. Betty could hardly sit up in the chair and had to be escorted out during intermission and helped into a cab. This was not quite ten years after her hospitalization for a-fib and it was the last time Betty ever left the apartment other than on a gurney to go to the hospital or to a doctor. After bringing her home from the ballet I stayed with her for a while and then went about my business. About a week later a nurse came to visit her for an assessment (perhaps ordered by a social service agency I had gotten in touch with?) and found her lying in bed in a wet pamper. She had not eaten for 24 hours because she said she had twisted her ankle and could not walk.

She was taken to the emergency room. Her diagnoses included a urinary tract infection, aspiration pneumonia (my fault for having bought her a pumpkin spice latte which she drank too fast), and, finally, after ten long years: dementia.

Things have not been easy since then (this was a little more than two years ago), but seeing my inkling become a word on a piece of paper meant everything. It meant she could get the care she needed. It meant that I would stop being angry that she couldn’t take care of herself.

For the past two plus years Betty has been completely bedridden. She qualified under Medicaid for 24 hour care because she not only can’t walk, she can’t use her cell phone to call for help. She needs help sitting up if she wants a drink of water. A primary care doctor comes to the house to visit her. The first time he came he told me that the reason that Betty refused to learn to walk with a physical therapist when she came home from the nursing home was that she has dementia, not that she is “deconditioned” and not that she is lazy. And yes, she has become docile. Sometimes she doesn’t know where she is, but every time she hears my voice and every time she sees me she says “I love you”.

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LJ Idol Week 14: Firebreak

“She’s going home on the 29^th.”

“No, please!” (a whisper).

“Other people need the beds more. People starting rehab. She’s done with rehab. Or else we need them for people who can’t be at home because they might hurt themselves or someone else; or wander.”

“But she will be alone…”

“No. That’s what we are going to talk about at the meeting on the 15^th.”

“Meeting?” (a squeak).

“Discharge meeting. With me, to represent social work, the physical therapist, the lawyer I found you…”

“Lawyer??? Who can afford-“

“That’s what we’re going to talk about. The spend-down. Whatever she has…”

“About $30,000.”

“Half of it will have to go. So there’s the Medicaid eligibility lawyer – and then the clean out.”

I thought I was going to choke.

“A real clean out. A several thousand dollar clean out. Not ‘you move stuff around and hide it because the landlord is sending the fire inspector.’ (You told me about that incident!) I’m talking about professionals. See you on the 15^th.”

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“Before anyone says anything I want people to know that I don’t want Betty to go home. I’ve been so happy with her here. It’s clean and there are always people around if she needs something.”

“Do you want to go home Betty?” Judy, the social worker, asked.

“I don’t know.”

“When she’s home she doesn’t eat and doesn’t change her Depends, and screams if I try to throw anything out; even an envelope.”

“This is going to be a whole new ball game. This is Shelly.” (Judy gestured to the woman sitting next to her.) “She’s an attorney who specializes in Medicaid eligibility.”

“We’re filing an application today.” Shelly smiled at me. “Here’s my business card. I wrote the fee on it. It’s a flat fee for everything needed to get Betty on Medicaid with 24 hour home care—and beyond, if you need anything after that from time to time. Like the annual recertification. You have power of attorney so you can write a check on Betty’s checkbook.”

“No!!!!” Betty let out a howl.

“You don’t have a choice,” Judy smiled. “These are your conditions of discharge. Apply for Medicaid with a spend-down. If there’s any money left it will go to pay a 24 hour home health aide until you’re approved for care through Medicaid. And the apartment has to be cleaned out. I saw the pictures your partner showed me…”

“You rat!!” Betty screamed at me.

“Or she could stay here…” I proffered.

“Yes, but you’d still have to shovel all that junk out of the apartment, anyhow, right?” Judy pointed out. “Better to do it with a pleasant goal in mind. Betty coming home. You have two weeks. Here’s a business card from the cleaning service. They usually charge about $800 a day for two men and a van.”

Betty started screaming.

“If I have to supervise this I am going to pay myself $100 a day” I told Judy.

“Good for you!” she said. “That’s part of taking care of yourself.”

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When the two men from “Home Sweet Home” showed up I knew they meant business. No more friends begrudgingly going through stacks of newspapers and junk mail, begrudgingly yet with reverence, because Betty would start crying and screaming if they started to toss something she thought she might want to read – someday. No more fights over whether or not she needed to keep an appeal from Yale, where she had been a student more than six decades ago (or from anyplace else.) No more paying a cleaning woman thinking she could work miracles and at the end of the day what you had were clean sheets and a clean sink and all the junk was still there, waiting to be negotiated over. No, these men would be ruthless.

A fire hazard. That was what the apartment had always been. Sometimes it looked a little better, sometimes it looked a lot worse. There were themes: unneeded furniture that she couldn’t bear to throw out, chairs stacked on top of chairs. Shelving. Brackets. Bags of soil bought for fantasies of window boxes (how old were these? 15 years or more?) Clothing that she had not worn in several decades and that did not fit. Old books. Piles of newspapers. Broken appliances that maybe someone could fix someday.

Of course there were precious mementos too. Things not to throw out. I found albums of photographs she had taken when she was in her 20s: photographs of LBJ’s inauguration and of freedom schools in the South. Portraits of her friends, many of whom I had met. Pictures of us on vacation. Pictures of Betty as a little girl. Letters from her mother and father. Bits of sweetness to make the mentally backbreaking job less hateful. Soon, instead of resenting this mission, I realized how privileged I was to be reviewing the fragments of more than eight decades of a life.

And even when I thought I was angry, I wasn’t really. Because this would be the last time. Oh I had “helped” at least eight times, the last being over two weeks of annual leave that I took because the landlord had threatened her with eviction over the “Collyer* type situation.” That had been around 2002. I said “never again”. Oh, and it hadn’t just been me. Friends had tried. There had been paid help. Getting Betty to relinquish anything was as exhausting as the scenes between Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke in The Miracle Worker.

Five days later ten van loads of shelving, unwanted chairs, broken appliances, and piles of magazines and worn out books had been removed. Sixty bags of shredded papers had been taken to the basement. Five bags of clothes went to Goodwill. The remaining bookshelves were organized prettily (one of the cleanup men was an artist and had a strong sense of aesthetics) showcasing Betty’s photographs and knickknacks. The kitchen countertop had a surface large enough to cut vegetables on. The dining table had nothing on it but a phone and a pad. And the floor! The dining room floor, yes, it was old and battered, but what a beautiful expanse of space! A paper- and wood-free oasis to run through from the bedroom on the way to the front fire escape if there was ever a fire and no one could get out the front door.

The living room became the aides’ room. Betty came home with a hospital bed, so the aides got her old captain’s bed. The living room closet was now empty, so they could hang up their own clothes. There were still books, and albums of Betty’s photographs from the 1960s (the very old memorabilia went, carefully preserved and much loved, in boxes in the hall closet) but these were neatly put on top of an end table, next to the aides’ bed, available for me to show people. I showed them to Betty when she came home. She had forgotten about them.

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After the fact, Betty was not angry that I had had her apartment cleaned out. She does not know that where she came back to from the nursing home is the apartment she has lived in since the 1960s. She thinks I brought her back somewhere new. Except to go out the front door on a gurney to a doctor’s visit (or to the emergency room) she does not leave the bedroom because she cannot walk and is afraid of the wheelchair. She does not know she has a dining table that people can sit at, or that her photographs have pride of place (although occasionally I have brought them in to show her, and one or two were later put in stand-alone frames so that they could sit on the bookcase that faces her bed now).

When they are not doing things for Betty, the aides lie on the large captain’s bed watching tv or talking to their families, in the now-spacious living room with the large windows looking out on a tree-lined residential Manhattan street. Betty’s pictures adorn their walls. Some mornings I sit at Betty’s dining table and handle her “business,” pleased to now have a sane and serene place to do that, flanked by huge photographs of her parents and grandmother.

Sometimes I put my head down on the table and weep for the new, beautiful home that Betty will never know she has.

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[*The Collyer Brothers were two American brothers who became infamous for their bizarre natures and compulsive hoarding. For decades, the two lived in seclusion in their Harlem Brownstone at 2078 Fifth Avenue at the corner of 128th Street where they obsessively collected books, furniture, musical instruments, and myriad other items, with booby traps set up in corridors and doorways to crush intruders. In March 1947, both were found dead in their home surrounded by over 140 tons of collected items that they had amassed over several decades.]

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LJ Idol Week 13: Enjoy Every Sandwich

I remember the exact moment when I stopped enjoying food. I was 12, and had had the flu for two weeks. After two weeks with a raging fever—tossing, turning, sweating, and not eating—I woke up 15 pounds thinner. The five foot three, 125 pound girl who looked back in the mirror was someone I had never seen. (I had been in the 90^th weight percentile for my age since I was 5, and when I went to bed with the flu I weighed 140.) Now this was not the moment when I first noticed my weight. That had happened five years earlier when I was about 7. I was probably not as fat as I thought I was; I was simply not ectomorphic. Yes, I weighed 20 pounds more than most of my female classmates, but I was also quite a lot taller. The reason I knew I was fat was that people commented on it, not just as an aesthetic handicap, but as a moral failing. Like when our second grade teacher passed around a box of chocolates to a group of (maybe 15) of us, saying “take one”. There were several layers of chocolates in the box, probably 40 in all. So I took two. Who ever heard of anyone taking one chocolate the size of your thumbnail? Even tv commercials tell you that. (“Betcha can’t eat just one.”) Anyhow, I was roundly excoriated by the teacher for being greedy, and my size was mentioned in the process. Then there was the time I was eating a sandwich in the lunchroom next to a skinny athletic boy (we were about 9) and I said “I love mustard” only to be smarmily chastised by this boy who said “You’re not supposed to love food [insert critical parent type sneer]; you’re only supposed to love people.” I wanted to say that you could love both, that it really wasn’t the same kind of love, but could not get myself to speak up. Even then, I knew that children didn’t appreciate nuance. But despite all this, and despite my sometimes going for weeks at a time without eating dessert or any type of sugary snack (I was able to discipline myself to do this by telling myself that eating sweets was “childish”), I never got any thinner and I couldn’t stop enjoying food.

Until I saw what I looked like waking up from the flu. So the challenge became: if I could be that thin sick, could I be that thin well? I mean “thin” is relative. My idol, Beth the Ballerina, was the same height I was and weighed 90 pounds. Even if I was no longer overweight (no longer overweight for an adult if I had been one, anyhow), I still had chunky thighs, and was still bursting out of a bra size 34B. I did not look like a ballerina or like the sort of “classic” 12-year-old who might be the heroine of a children’s novel. So I set out not just to maintain the weight that I had become, but to achieve “Beth-hood”. My mother found me a private ballet teacher. I made her take me to a fancy brassiere shop to buy a minimizer bra. I let my hair grow. I tried to live on 500 calories a day. I grew another inch and lost another 10 pounds. I had a nervous breakdown and ended up sitting in a psychiatrist’s office.

About six months later I gained back all the weight but—thanks to the ballet lessons, the fact that I was now five foot six, and the redistribution of weight that happens when you grow up—I had permanently lost my chubby awkwardness. I now looked like Kim Novak. I dyed my hair blonde. I looked like Jayne Mansfield. I was popular with boys. But I still longed for sveltitude (it was the era of Twiggy and Mia Farrow). I was no longer reprimanded for being greedy, but was told that I looked trashy. Girls from my social class didn’t have big boobs when they were 13 or 14. So I made friends with blue collar girls instead. Once my father died I was no longer an upper middle class girl anyhow.

I lost and re-gained 25 pounds again. I started smoking to spoil my appetite. A music teacher friend of my mother’s told me that I had an exceptional singing voice (I had spent my young childhood imitating Julie Andrews) but it was more important to me to smoke and be thin(ner).

Whatever I weighed that week, during those years I certainly never enjoyed food. I often ate nothing all day so that I could eat one of the nightly four course dinners my mother was famous for. Or I made my own meals (meat and veggies, no starch or sugar) and sulked over dinner (I was not allowed to go to my room.) Then, after a few weeks, not being able to stand it anymore, I went to the local candy shop and bought a pound of fudge. Or I went to a coffee shop and treated myself to a club sandwich with bacon and turkey. Did I enjoy it? Not particularly.

When I was 19 I discovered diet pills, which I washed down with copious amounts of alcohol.

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At 25 I got sober. I was down to 125 pounds again. As was the case post-flu so many years earlier, I decided that if I could be that thin drunk, I could be that thin sober. This time I actually managed it for a few years. I was away from my mother and her cooking, I had rooms full of peers in recovery to emote to when I felt hunger pangs (I learned that drama was as successful an appetite suppressant as amphetamines), and I had just met Betty and we were madly in love.

Gradually my weight crept up. I stopped smoking (penalty: 15 pounds). So I was no longer at my thinnest, but not as heavy as I had been as a teenager. Also, the benchmarks had changed. As a 12-year-old I had been conspicuously heavy. As a 30-year-old (the age at which I had my last cigarette) I was about average. But I still didn’t enjoy food. Betty and I fought about what foods were “allowed” in the house. We fought about what time meals could be eaten. She had been extremely thin all her life. She didn’t get it.

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I don’t remember when I began to enjoy food again. I was probably in my mid-forties. I was now in a senior management position and could no longer afford to spend large swaths of the day too hungry to think clearly. I still ate mindfully and ate sweets sparingly, but I noticed that I felt better if I ate six times a day and not three. I gained about five more pounds but not more. Now that I was no longer hungry all the time I was no longer obsessed with food, and the fear that I would keep eating and not be able to stop gradually dissipated. I had been away from my mother’s enormous dinners for several decades. Betty and I usually ate dinner in bed in front of the tv. We served ourselves a modest amount (she often left half of hers) and didn’t go back for “seconds”.

I discovered that in social settings as an adult, it was ok to talk about enjoying food. People said things like “I love mustard”. No one called them greedy or piggy. People talked about restaurants they liked. I joined in the conversation.

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I am now almost 70 and Betty is 84. She is bedridden and has dementia. I believe that the progression of her medical conditions was hastened by her picky eating habits. The last time she was in the hospital one of her diagnoses was “severe malnutrition.” She weighs 90 pounds. She fights constantly with the home attendants (and me) about not wanting to eat this, that, or the other. I see that extreme thinness resulting from picky eating habits does not age well. My mother was four foot ten and weighed 180 pounds and she was fit and active until she was about 93. I still weigh 145 but am now only five foot two. So I am now overweight again. Tough tomatoes. I suppose I enjoy food, although I enjoy many other things more. I am still mindful of what I eat. I don’t eat sandwiches very often, certainly not at home because I don’t keep bread in the house. But there is a little French grocery store near where Betty lives that makes wonderful sandwiches on pumpernickel ciabattas. My favorite is Swiss cheese with lettuce and tomato – and mustard. And yes, when I have one I enjoy it very much!

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LJ Idol Write-off: Fatherless (Open Topic)

At 14, I suddenly became fatherless (my father died of a heart attack on the street). There was a large, secular funeral. We had very little family, but my parents had a large circle of friends, and as a tenured university professor, my father had a coterie of adoring adjuncts and students. Nonetheless, we had no prescribed rituals. One friend of my father’s, an atheistic secular Jew, said that “these times are hard for people like us”, meaning that no religious tradition told us what the next steps should be. In fact, on the morning we were told that my father had died, I was not even sure whether or not I was supposed to go to school.

My father’s death was traumatic, but it hardly left me feeling “orphan-like” or “Dickensian,” a prototype very much in my thoughts because by the time my father died I had read almost all of Dickens, fallen in love with his works, and been intrigued by the large number of orphans, or at least children without mothers, who seemed to have lives of freedom that I could only dream of. So our family was deprived of an upper-middle-class income and a stern patriarch, but, counterintuitively, “parenting” increased exponentially as my mother fearfully micromanaged everything I did, much more than she had previously, particularly as one of my father’s interventions had been “leave her alone!” not to mention that he wanted at least some of her attention on him, not me. And there were even more mountains of food than had been supplied by the lavish dinners my mother had served every night to welcome my father home, dinners which, from hors d’oeuvres to dessert, contained more than a day’s caloric requirement for a 14-year-old desperate to get her BMI below 25. Thanks to the endless hordes of friends and neighbors trying to be helpful and sympathetic, there was now a round-the-clock feast, and a house filled with round-the-clock guests. Fifty years later, I realized that by endlessly eating and socializing, my mother was dealing with grief, but certainly neither she nor I were “pining” which, as a euphemism for weight loss, was the prevailing stereotype of grieving.

I did not have a good relationship with my father during the last two years of his life. Only a few months before he died we had had a knock-down, screaming, physical fight over my anger that a classmate, Hannah (not her real name)—skinny, quasi-orphaned (her divorced mother had lost her job and had dispersed her four daughters to stay with various friends and relatives), bitchy, and oh, so Dickensian—had been living with us. My father told me to feel sorry for her. I called her a bitch (not to her face, but in a loud voice within her earshot, in a family argument) because not only had she taunted me for being fat, she had also cajoled and wheedled my mother into making a Laura Ashley type shift dress for her like the one she had made me, and then had preened around telling me how much better she looked in it than I did. In any event, my no-holds-barred rage at Hannah led my father to beat me (something he had only done once before, when, while on a crash diet, I had had a screaming tantrum—about nothing—fueled by low blood sugar) all the while telling me how fortunate I was compared with Hannah. In retrospect I realize that what hurt me more than the beating was the fact that he “just didn’t get it”. I did not feel more fortunate than Hannah. She was everything I wanted to be: thin (despite eating whatever she felt like), independent (even when she was living “at home” with her mother she mostly supported herself with babysitting money), self-confident, and skilled at squeezing sympathy and admiration out of other people. She might have elicited some sympathy from me if she had had any of the cultural markers of poverty that I had been taught to be aware of—poor speech, ignorance of books and of the arts, clothes of inferior make—but she did not. Really the only two things that set her apart from other girls our age whom I might have invited for a sleepover were her crooked teeth, and the fact that she did not own a pair of pajamas, but instead slept in frayed dungaree shorts and a t shirt.

It took me years to realize that the most critical sequela of my father’s death was not a reprieve from future beatings or my mother’s endless dinner parties mostly peopled by catty gay men and sexually exploratory girls in their twenties (not the best role models for a teenage daughter), but our permanent fall from the “professional middle class”. At first I did not notice it because the only things that ended were things I hated anyhow. I no longer went to a private school, and we stopped going away for extended periods during the summer. I was thrilled to be out of the private school where I was at the mercy of two girl cliques: the rich Jewish girls who showed off their clothes and social precocity, and the thin WASP-y girls who showed off their forever pre-pubescent thinness. And I couldn’t have cared less if we didn’t go away much. Who at 14 wants to take a vacation with her parents? Excursions out of town did still occur, but they were fewer and farther between. By that point, I hated them, even the summer weekends, because at the height of my obsession with my weight (whatever I weighed that particular month) I loathed and feared summer clothes and usually kept on a knee-length skirt and stayed away from the beach (and of course it was impossible to stick to any kind of diet if I was either someone’s guest or staying in a hotel). And even worse, my mother, with her misguided generosity, once or twice took Hannah on one of these trips, which for me was sheer Hell. My mother seemed to adore Hannah (this adoration took the form of a combination of pity and admiration), and the bitter irony of it all was that what my mother adored about Hannah was her feistiness, spunk, and independence, traits that my mother’s style of “helicopter parenting” made it impossible for me to develop.

Years later, a mentor of mine referred to women like Hannah as “killer waifs”, And reader, I ended up with one as a life partner, albeit one whose saving grace was that she adored me, thought I was gorgeous at any weight, made me feel like a princess, and was extremely generous with money when she had any.

Combining a casual elegance (she was of course very thin and ectomorphically built, and rarely ate anything substantial) with a chaotic lifestyle (her apartment was filled with junk and completely disorganized and she was always on the edge of financial disaster) she reminded me of the eccentric waifs all ages, genders, and persuasions who graced my mother’s dinner table after my father died. After she and I became an “item”, I felt that I was in a dream come true: in the midst of a whirlwind romance, living the sort of improvisational quasi-foodless lifestyle that I had longed for as a teenager immersed in Dickens.

Now almost 70, as a legally single woman in a studio apartment (I still have the same life partner but we do not live together) living on a very modest income, without any family, I suppose I am a kind of waif and orphan myself (when my partner dies I will have no one with whom to spend Thanksgiving, for example). But sadly, I am now much too old to be anyone’s Hannah.

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Second Chance Idol: Shade

[Every summer between 1987 and 1999, my sweetheart Betty and I went to Ogunquit, Maine for a week in the summer. After that we went sporadically.]

It is 1988 and we now know the territory. A vacation in Ogunquit means a daily trip to Ogunquit Beach. Unlike other beach towns—for example, Provincetown, where a lot of our friends go—Ogunquit has a trolley that can take us from our little Mayfair Studio to the beach with our gear, hence our choice of it for a beach vacation. Gear (sigh). Just to get to Ogunquit means a long trip involving a train, a bus, and two taxis, one at either end. And that with two pocketbooks, two tote bags, three suitcases, and a very large beach umbrella. For myself I would never have taken the umbrella, because to me the whole point of the beach (where I am never really comfortable if I want to be honest with myself) was, in addition to smelling the sea air and feeling a breeze on my face, to try to coax my pale ivory skin into becoming one shade darker. For Betty, on the other hand, the beach meant not just the smell of the sea air and the breeze on her face, but also fears of getting skin cancer like her father.

So once we were installed in our Studio, getting out for an afternoon at the beach meant packing a large bag with a towel, books, sunscreen, and maybe some drinks in a cooler. Not to mention the umbrella, which was not only awkward to carry (and annoying to people sitting near us on the trolley) but also very difficult for two small, physically unfit women who sat in offices all day (I was in my late 30s and Betty was in her early 50s) to hoist aloft and tamp down vigorously into the sand so that it didn’t fall over.

And it had to be at the proper angle to allow both for shade and a little bit of “beach experience,” so, needless to say, by the time we were exhausted and breathless from screwing it into the sand so that it didn’t fall over not to mention angling it and positioning it properly, Betty had no more energy for a beach outing and wanted to go back to our Studio. In any event, I doubt if we stayed at the beach for more than an hour each day before both of us were bored, sticky, hot, tired, and cranky, and wanted to go somewhere to wash ourselves off (which was not close by and required breaking camp and hauling the umbrella with us yet again), as we would not have been allowed to board the trolley covered with sand, which we invariably were, even staying on the blanket.

A few years later, we miraculously discovered that we could rent an umbrella for the day at one of the stores near the beach.

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By 1995 or thereabouts we had given up the idea of spending an hour on the beach, because Betty had discovered the area covered by the striped awning where people (mostly the over-50s whose children and grandchildren were playing on the beach) could sit and read and look at the beach. She was 61, so she fit right in, and needed to make no apologies.

I was now 45 and had given up buying or wearing bathing suits. (And needed to make no apologies.) If I wanted a little color I could get some on my arms (all that the public ever saw anyhow) and enjoy a barefoot walk on the beach in jeans and a t shirt. I could decline sunscreen and wander and take pictures. (This was before smart phones, or even cell phones, so in addition to a book I had to remember to bring my camera. Drinks could be bought at one of the stores near the beach if we were thirsty.) So Betty could read the paper and enjoy a protected view of the beach, a reminder that we were not in New York, and I could walk and look. I wasn’t going to spend my precious beach vacation afternoon sitting under an awning, but it was liberating not to have to worry about my unfashionably chunky legs or my unfashionably pale skin tone.

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In 2009 we went back to Ogunquit after not having been there for a while. Some things had changed. I was now 59 and Betty was 74, so we accepted that a surcharge for our journey was plying our cab driver and various red caps with ten dollar bills so that they would carry our gear from the taxi to the platform at Penn Station and from the platform at South Station in Boston to the bus station (which was now, blessedly, in South Station). And we now only had to make the entire journey going, not coming, because friend from Boston offered to drive us back to South Station if we let her stay with us in Ogunquit for a few days (we also treated her to dinner).

That year we went to the beach less often, and Betty stayed in our room more. She was tired. I was still working in an office and wanted a “vacation” (staying in a room was not one) so I often took the trolley to the beach and walked along the beach by myself, later sitting under the awning and reading for a while. We now had cell phones (the old fashioned flip kind) so I could call Betty every now and then to let her know that I was still alive and had not been swallowed up by a wave. When we did go to the beach together Betty asked me not to walk along the beach for more than 15 minutes because she was scared to be by herself; that I should come back and check up on her. And we rarely sat, even under the awning, for more than an hour, because after that Betty needed to go back to the room and lie down.

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In 2014 we went to Ogunquit for the last time together. It was Betty’s 80^th birthday so it was my treat. As for me, I had left my last full time job in the Fall of 2009 and really couldn’t afford vacations any more although on the other hand I didn’t need them because I was freelancing at home and could take a day off whenever I felt like it. But this was worth taking some money out of my savings. I knew somewhere that it would be our last trip together.

Betty was now too frail to walk down the hill to the trolley stop. Once the taxi driver deposited us in our room she just wanted to stay there. But the following day we needed lunch. (We had had cereal in our room for breakfast.) So I helped her slowly make her way to the trolley stop and board the trolley so that we could sit under the awnings near the beach and then go eat lunch at the coffee shop right next to it. It was there that we discovered the Beach Cabby.

The driver gave us a business card and told us that when we wanted to go to or from the beach we just had to call her and she would come pick us up at our door (no need to walk down or back up the hill) and take us where we wanted to go for $5. When we wanted to go back to our room we could call her again, allowing at least 30 minutes. So we got to go to the beach, or to a restaurant, at least once a day. And we asked our friend from Boston to come a day early so that we could spend time together and she could drive us out to a restaurant or even for an afternoon of sight-seeing.

I also took a long trolley ride by myself, at least once. I didn’t bother to get off at the beach, I just took the trolley from one end of Ogunquit and back again so that I could see the town, which hadn’t changed much since 1987 except that there was now no place on the trolley route to buy the kinds of groceries that you could use to assemble a home cooked meal in your room. Anyhow, it was a cheap sight-seeing trip ($1.50).

But all in all, Betty spent most of that, her last vacation, in the room and I spent most of it sitting in the beautiful Japanese garden downstairs.

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Three years later Betty stopped walking. She now has dementia and spends her life in bed.

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In 202x (or 203x, as the story has not yet been written), I make the trip to Ogunquit with one pocketbook, one tote bag, and one small suitcase—and Betty’s ashes. I do not go alone. I am not sure how I get there, but I know that I will have paid for a companion, either by the hour or by the day, or just by paying her train fare and buying her meals. Maybe my friend from Boston will meet us in South Station and take us where we are going. She has promised to help me scatter Betty’s ashes over the Marginal Way, maybe legally, maybe not (I will have done the research). We will go out at dawn. There will be no need to provide shade because I know I will never again feel the sun.