Thursday, February 05, 2004
Backdoor Bette
Freud said it all comes back to your mother, but he never met my aunt. Aunt Bette is mom’s sister, though you wouldn’t know it to look at them. Mom is a dozen years older, but that isn’t it. Mom just seems so tired, conventional, rocked-back on her heels and waiting to be completely overwhelmed. She married young, bred young, and stopped caring soon thereafter.
Bette, on the other hand, is everything mom isn’t. If anything, she’s too sure of herself, though she has good reason to be - brilliant, athletic, congenial when it suits her purposes and a viscious adversary when that works better for her. She moved out on her own when she was in her teens and I never got to know her much till a few months ago when she breezed back into town, moving into a small trailer park and riding around on her big heavy motorcycle. Plus, she looked like a young Betty Page, which was both enticingly coincidental and very distracting - glossy black hair tumbling over her forehead in dense bangs and piling thickly on her broad shoulders, and her beestung lips seemingly permanently frozen in an expression of delighted surprise.
That’s the exact expression she had as I hauled myself through the front door, sweating heavily from my run. When I’d left half an hour before, the house had been empty. I hadn’t noticed Bette’s bike, hadn’t expected her, so I had already pulled my sweatshirt over my head and was fumbling with the drawstring to my shorts when she coughed demurely from the sofa.
“Well hel-LO there, I hope I didn’t startle you,” she gushed, standing up in the tv room. “I didn’t think that anyone would be home and I had a little laundry emergency - so I just popped in for a quickie!” She gave me an exaggerated wink, slowly; her lips glistened in the low light of the murky room. She was only 8 years older than me and I suddenly realized that we’d never been alone together since she’d moved back to town.
“Umm… your bike’s not outside...” I mumbled, too distracted by her unexpected presence to remember that I was half-naked already.
“I pulled it around back so I could just scoot right into the laundry room. I was riding near here and a goddamn bird crapped on me - it landed right between my jacket and my shirt. I couldn’t go around with a big stain on my chest, so I came here to rinse it out and toss it in the dryer.” It wasn’t till then that I noticed that she was wearing her leather jacket, zipped up all the way to her throat.
“So, your shirt’s in the dryer.”
“Yup.”
“So, what’s under the jacket?”
“Darling, you know better than to ask me a question like that,” she said, walking toward me with a smile. “Unless you really want to find out the answer.” She placed the palm of one of her hands on my chest; with her other hand she took my hand and placed it on the zipper that glinted gold just below her throat. My pulse was like a cannon in my ears. I saw she was speaking but I couldn’t hear her, so I shook the awe from my eyes and tried to concentrate for a moment.
“...your dad is here,” she was saying, a wide grin on her impossibly lovely face. I could hear him now, on the path and nearly to the front door, where he’d surely see me in circumstances from which I would rather shield him. I ran down the hall toward my bedroom. Behind me, Bette’s laughter was like silver bubbles that shattered in the air.
