Excerpt: Betha Goes To Town

Betha Colttman said ‘please’ a lot. It wasn’t that she was overly polite, it was more that she used it as a form of prayer: “Please don’t let that truck pull out in front of me doing 5 miles per hour while I’m going 60.” “Please don’t let me have a heart attack while I’m driving, like Ramos Von Winkelstein, mayor of Rancho Consuela, when he hit me two years ago.” “Please make that car stop backing up while I’m walking into the store.” “Please make sure the pilot of the plane Evan is on hasn’t been drinking so the plane lands safely.”

Most of her ‘pleases’ revolved around transportation, Betha noticed. She always imagined the worst when she was behind the wheel. Or when Evan was behind the wheel. Or when she was walking down the stairs (“Please don’t let me twist my ankle as I’m walking down to the kitchen.”). Or just walking next door to visit Toby and Evelyn, their next-door neighbors (“Please don’t let our drunkard neighbor miss the curve of the road and hit me in front of my own home. Or if he’s going to hit me, make sure it’s today, when I’m wearing clean underwear”).

There seemed to be an equal number of ‘pleases’ in the kitchen (“Please don’t let this exceedingly sharp and pointy knife slice my thumb off, like it almost did in 2003”) as in the bathroom (“Please help me keep my balance and not slip in the shower so I fall over, crashing the glass, knocking my head on the very hard tile, and lie here unconscious until the next time Evan comes in here, which will be a very long time, since he’s away on another business trip until Thursday, and no one except Evelyn has the house key, but she wouldn’t even wonder where I was, much less decide to come over and check on me, since we can go days before we see each other, and anyway they’ve gone down to Los Angeles to visit her cousin, the travel agent, and by the way, please make sure they travel down there without being hit by a big tractor trailer while they’re driving the Grapevine”). Well, there was that transportation thing again after all.

Betha wondered if anyone else worried as much as she did about so many things. Transportation worries she could understand. Any time you moved from hither to thither, you put yourself in jeopardy – stubbed toe, three thousand pounds of metal, light rail trains, green buses, non-so-green buses – everything was fraught with peril. (Betha liked that phrase, “fraught with peril,” as it sort of ruled her world.) Even when you weren’t doing the transport thing, though, she still maintained a constant litany of ‘pleases.’ “Please help me make sure the front of the sweater I’m knitting matches the back.” “Please keep Evan from choking on his hot dog.” “Please don’t let the storm cause a blackout.” “Please don’t let the lightening cause a power surge so that our computers blow up.” “Please don’t knock over the candles I’ve had to light because we lost power after all.”

The ‘pleases’ may have sounded like manners and politeness, but Betha knew better. It had come upon her slowly, creeping up when she wasn’t looking, when she thought she was getting older and happier in her years with Evan. She had managed to grow a massive case of fear over the past couple of years of her life.

“When did I get so frightened of everything?” Betha wondered. Mom used to be the worrier in the family. Her worries were a fully complete set and very eclectic, from “A” (worrying about whether the Northern Spy apples from the tree in the backyard would have worms in them again this year) to “K” (the eventual extinction of kangaroos she had read about in National Geographic magazine) to “Z” (whether or not the zabaglione at the fancy restaurant where they were celebrating Betha’s junior college graduation had curdled and they would all come down with trichinosis or beriberi or whatever you came down with when the zabaglione in your yogurt curdled). Her mom hadn’t been as weird as that sounded, but she did feel that the more she worried, the less the rest of the world had to. After retiring, worrying became her job. Besides Betha, it was mom’s best contribution to the universe. (In Betha’s opinion, her sister didn’t even make the top ten list of mom’s better contributions. Mom being able to iron the sharpest jeans crease on the block ranked higher. That was Betha’s opinion; Carolyn, Betha’s sister, no doubt, had a different opinion. Yes, there was a little bad blood between Betha and her sister.)

As she entered the freeway on her way to meet Evan for dinner, Betha was barely aware of all the ‘pleases’ in her head: “Please let there be no traffic in the slow lane when I merge onto the roadway.” “Please let that great big truck see that me and my little car are over here.” “Please let there not be an accident at the freeway flyover again.” The one ‘please’ that jolted into her awareness, though, was “Please let Evan get that job in Chattanooga.”