Wilma & Betty: Episode IV
Wilma & Betty IV: Betty and Yesterday
By
Jason Mott
On the table between them, a half-empty glass of wine filled the space.
“God!” Betty exclaimed, smiling. “I just can’t believe how long it’s been.”
It had been decades since Betty last saw the woman now sitting across from her at the small, circular table in the window of Black Jurassic Java & Spirits. When Betty last saw the woman, she was not a woman at all. She was a girl, a dark-skinned Cro-Magnon girl—young and brown and glib.
“I’ve been living in New Pebble Beach,” the woman said. “I still love the sun.”
“It shows,” Betty replied.
The woman extended a thick, sienna hand and raised the glass of wine to her lips. She drank it slowly, in timid sips, as though each would be her last.
“And what have you been up to?” the woman asked. “That little gray stone on your finger tells me that, somewhere out there lost in a storm of mail, there’s an invitation with my name on it.”
Betty laughed. It was a light, sparkling laugh. It arched her back.
“I didn’t know how to get in touch with you. You disappeared after that summer, remember? It was your parents, right? They picked up and moved to Morocco. That’s what my mother told me anyhow.”
“It was something like that,” the woman replied, fondling the stem of her wine glass with a warm, dark finger. She glanced out the window at a pair starlings building a nest.
Across the table, Betty thought to herself how much warmth seemed to be infused in Cro-Magnon skin. When she was a very, very young girl—lifetimes ago—Betty imagined Cro-Magnon children birthed from birch trees. She imagined amber’s gold flowing through their veins in place of blood. The men, she imagined, were a race that had sprouted out of the threads of some languishing sunset. The women, she imagined, cloistered stars—warm, gentle, glowing fires—beneath the pillows of their breasts.
“We had to move,” the woman told Betty flatly.
“My husband’s name is Barney,” Betty said, clinging to her smile. “He works at the rock quarry. He’s a great man. Tall. Dark. Handsome. A lover like you can’t believe. A man and a half really.”
“We moved a lot of times,” the woman across the table said. “Every time we got settled somewhere I’d make friends and…and then something would happen and my parents would find out…everyone would find out. And, my parents, they just kept moving. Kept trying to get away from it.”
“I’ve got a son,” Betty said. “His name’s Bam-Bam. And what a little man he is! Just like his father. A dynamo! Strong like you wouldn’t believe. A little lady-killer too. Can hardly even walk and he’s already got a girlfriend, a little girl named Pebbles—my neighbor’s daughter. Wilma, that’s my neighbor’s name. She’s a doll.”
The woman sipped again from her wine.
“Finally,” she began. “Finally I just left home. I figured it would be easier if I moved instead of making my parents move.” She sipped her wine again. The last of it shivered in the corner of the glass. “You’re still beautiful,” the woman said and claimed the last of the wine.
The woman sitting across from Betty Rubble did not speak again after telling Betty that she was beautiful. She sat, patiently quiet, and listened as Betty spoke of her husband, her family, her still, stable domesticity. She listened, hoping to hear Betty speak of the past, but nothing about yesterday was spoken.
Some time later, the woman bid Betty goodbye (with only a nod. There were no words given) and then she receded into the noise and tumult of a Bedrock afternoon that was quickly growing dark with clouds.
When she had gone, the moment the city claimed her silhouette, Betty Rubble, sitting alone now in the window of Black Jurassic Java & Spirits, extended a pale, regretful hand and claimed the wine glass that lay empty and alone on the far side of the table.
She raised it to her lips and tasted the warmth of the Cro-Magnon woman still lingering on the rim.
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