Kristin Hersh - Rat Girl

The library at our school is a castle on a cliff overlooking the sea and its bathroom is a large, black and white tiled room with an antique claw-foot tub. When we have a study date, I lie in the tub, she sits on the toilet, and we read and talk. The doorknob gets jiggled every fifteen minutes or so by students needing to pee, but Betty just yells, “Occupied!” and they go away. This is our favorite way to kill an afternoon.

“ No, no, no, it couldn’t be true… that anyone else could love you like I do ,” Betty sings when we get upstairs and lock ourselves in. She’s hunched over her notebook, scribbling in it, a textbook perched on the radiator next to her. “Singing on the toilet! If Mr. DeMille could see me now!” She hums the same song for a minute, then sticks her pencil behind her ear and turns to look at me. “Krissy, did you declare a major?”

I keep reading. “No. Why would I do that?”

“Because you have to? Remember how they told you you have to?” she sounds exasperated. “You know why they said that?”

I look up at her. “Why?”

“Because you have to!”

“No, I don’t.” I go back to my reading. “I wanna learn everything, not one thing.”

“Just pick something. It’s easy. What are you studying right now?”

“Uh… metaphysical anthropology,” I answer. “Or maybe anthropological metaphysics. I forget.”

She stares at me. “You have to prepare for your future or you won’t have one,” she says in a singsongy voice that echoes off the walls prettily. This makes her start humming again.

“What’re you, my guidance counselor?”

She stops humming. “Did you apply to McGill?” It’s hard to read with Betty around; she hardly ever stops talking and singing. I don’t get much studying done on these “study dates.”

“They said I could go if I want to,” I mumble.

Betty freezes. “That’s a great opportunity, Krissy,” she says quietly.

I look up from my book again. “You know where Montreal turns out to be? Canada! That’s a hell of a commute.”

She giggles, then exhales theatrically. “Oh, thank you, Jesus. I’m sorry, Krissy. You should prepare for the future; I just… don’t know what I’d do if you left.”

I try to read again. “The future doesn’t exist.”

“Well, not yet, bonehead!” I smile up at her, but she’s looking off, humming again, so I go back to my reading. Suddenly, she stops. “Krissy, have you ever been on a trapeze?” Betty is the queen of non sequiturs.

I shake my head and continue reading. “Mm-mm.”

“It’d do you good. I took trapeze lessons for The Greatest Show on Earth so they’d hire me instead of a trapeze artist who couldn’t act,” she says. “It’s not that hard… it’s like flying. Scary flying.”

Wow. Circus Betty. “Scary flying sounds cool. And scary.” I finish what I’m reading and look up into her huge eyes. “Why was it the greatest show on earth?”

“Well, it wasn’t,” she answers thoughtfully. “It was just called that.”

“Oh.”

Betty smiles her reminiscing smile. “It was great, though. It was great fun, swinging around. And Cecil B. DeMille was a great man. Who said I had great feet!”

“Great!” I laugh. Betty takes her pencil out from behind her ear and goes back to her notebook, humming.

Soon, she’s singing again, “ No, no, no, it couldn’t— ” then, suddenly dark, says, “I can’t write this.”

I look up. “The Jung paper? Why not?”

“I can’t write about personality types because I don’t have a personality. I was a commodity, not a person,” she says bitterly.

I’m disappointed; I really wanted to read that paper. Betty can be very entertaining when it comes to psychology. She calls Freud “that motherfucker” ’cause she thinks he’s the only guy who ever wanted to sleep with his own mother. I’m sure she’s right about this. Her other problem with Freud is “Talking? Gimme a break! Talking’s not a cure! Nobody ever solved a problem by whining about it!”

That’s probably true, too, at least for her. Betty’s had to bust her ass in order to quit drinking and taking pills and she’s not a whiner. She has a strong, guileless way about her that makes a huge impression. I always assumed it was her “personality.” And she thinks she doesn’t have one? Of course, it’s that same old Hollywood story again. I’m not sure exactly what happened to her there, but Hollywood haunts Betty. Both the loss of the pink, sparkly life she lived and the hatred of its dark underbelly. “What do you mean you don’t have a personality?” I ask her.

Her fluttery girliness is gone. “I’m not a real person, only the shell of one. I started working on my outside when I was fifteen and showbiz never let me stop.”

“But you’re a psychology major…” I venture carefully. “Maybe you could write about other people’s personalities?”

“How? I wouldn’t know what I was talking about.” Slowly, she walks to the sink, shoulders hunched, and stares at her reflection in the mirror. “There’s no me in here.” She looks into her own eyes. “I only sang for my mother’s sake.”

“Sparkle?” One of Betty’s cautionary tales is about a little tap-dancing windup monkey girl, a child star with a relentlessly driven stage mother. Whenever the daughter performed, the mother would tell her to “sparkle!” which I thought was so hilarious, I started saying it all the time. Now it seems sad.

“Sort of. I just wanted to help.” She looks very tired and, for the first time since I met her, old. I check her cheek for wetness. Betty cries at the drop of a hat—ladylike movie star tears, sweetly showy—but this afternoon, she actually looks too sad to cry. “And now I’m old. Who the hell am I?” she asks her mirror image angrily. “Maybe I don’t give a shit.”

Jesus Christ. “Betty…”

“You aren’t supposed to have feelings in Hollywood,” she spits. “The product must go on and Betty Hutton was the product.” Her skin seems to vibrate with feeling, but the dullness in her eyes is more terrifying.

I put my book down and kneel in the bathtub, watching her curved back and the half of her face I can see in the mirror. She looks so sad. “A minute ago, you were enjoying your memories,” I say. “Why’d they turn on you?”

“I have very mixed feelings about my memories.”

“But Betty, you can’t be empty; humans don’t have that option. Maybe your outside is sparkly, but you aren’t hollow on the inside. And the outside isn’t as fake as you think.” Her eyes glitter and she twists her mouth up in the mirror, trying not to cry. I can’t bear this; I start babbling. “And it’s so cool! You’re a Catholic boy-girl with lipstick and big muscles. I love your singing and your hair—”

“This isn’t my hair, sweetheart! It’s a wig! I wear wigs because I can’t let anyone see the real me!” She sounds desperate.

“But it is the real you! More than keratin pushing out of your follicles is. You chose it, so it’s you. I’m not a natural blue, you know.” She just keeps staring into the mirror. “I can honestly say you’re the most ‘you’ of any human I’ve ever met. In fact, you’re so much , you make other people seem like zombie… dolls.”

“Zombie dolls?” She turns to look at me kneeling in the tub and smiles sadly.

“Personality-free.”

Betty shakes her head. “ Zombie dolls. Just don’t be easy to control, Krissy. They’re going to want to wake you up and put you to sleep, and they’ll do it with drugs.”