Betty and the Prince of Lies

By Wendy Hammond

Betty Bennett was proud to be Mormon, and she was especially proud of her compassionate Mormon heart—she loved all her neighbors as Jesus commanded—but lately she was having trouble loving Rachel, a young nurse’s aide at the Sunset Senior Living Facility in Sandy, Utah.

Rachel’s singing had started the problem. Betty was a resident at the assisted living facility, and since Thanksgiving she’d been forced to listen to Rosa sing Christmas carols every day after lunch. Specifically, Betty did not approve of Rachel’s aggressive alto on “Silent Night.” Shouldn’t the Lord’s birth be celebrated with a soft, angelic soprano? Betty also couldn’t stand the way the tiny young woman over-acted the songs, widening her black eyes with awe—obviously fake—crinkling her face with mirth—Betty didn’t believe mirth for a minute—and waving her arms dramatically on “shepherds quake at the sight.” Even harder to watch was the bright pink of the young aide’s scrubs, which clashed with her olive-brown skin. “Ethnics ought to wear yellow or orange,” Betty often pointed out. But what Betty found absolutely unendurable about Rachel’s performances was the way the twenty or so residents, the ones who could get themselves out of bed and into the Beehive Recreation Hall, gazed up at Rosa while she sang, as if the little singing nurse’s aide were the second coming of Christ.

Rosa was not Christlike, not to Betty, not in the least. In fact, sometimes Betty actually saw, briefly, in a flash, the devil—a tall, horned man with fire-engine-red skin—superimposed on the little nurse’s aide while she sang. Betty wondered if this vision was a message about Rachel’s true nature or if it was just Betty’s imagination playing tricks.

Betty confessed this one day to Helen and Gladys, her best friend group at the Sunset Senior Living Facility. Helen and Gladys accompanied Betty to movie nights, church meetings, and the Mormon scripture study group on Wednesdays after breakfast, all held in the Beehive Recreation Hall. The three elderly women had gravitated toward each other soon after they’d become residents because none of them had children who visited them. Helen’s son and daughter lived out of the country, Gladys had never married, and Betty insisted she and her husband, Earl, had been content without children.

Actually, Betty had lied to her friends about not having children, but Betty didn’t think this was an important lie, more a white lie, one for which Jesus would certainly forgive her. The truth was that Betty and Earl had once had a daughter. The girl had died at fourteen, a complicated story, but that was a very long time ago now, and Betty saw no point in dredging up difficulties she could do nothing about. Keep the past in the past, Betty liked to say. Still, just after Betty spoke the words “content without children,” she choked—a common Parkinson’s symptom—which led to a coughing fit. Gladys needed to run and get Nurse Nedra, who helped Betty tilt forward and clear her lungs.

“Do you think Rosa has a religion?” Betty asked her two best friends at lunch one day. Betty had parked her electric wheelchair in between Helen and Gladys at a dining table in the back of the Beehive Recreation Hall. The dining tables were actually card tables covered with green and red plastic for the Christmas season. Gold angels, created by residents with Styrofoam and spray paint, served as table decorations, and they teetered uncannily whenever the card tables wobbled, which was often.

“Probably Catholic,” Gladys said through a mouthful of meat loaf. Gladys loved all the food served at Sunset Senior Living, especially the meat loaf. She didn’t care if it was leftovers from the night before. “She’s from the Philippines.”

“She could be Mormon.” Helen pressed her fork into her stewed potatoes, making a design. Helen didn’t like the Sunset Senior Living stewed potatoes. “Our missionaries are converting Filipino families like all get-out.”

“She’s not from the Philippines.” Betty scooped up a spoonful of peas, but her hand trembled badly, and some of the peas tumbled onto her lap. “I used to hire Filipinas as my cleaning help,” Betty said, “and let me tell you, their skin was light compared to Rachel’s.”

Gladys swallowed hard. “She says she’s from Manila, the Smokey Mountain area.”

“I don’t care what she says. I can see she’s African.” Betty swept the peas off her Christmas green pants. No one would see peas, she decided, against the speckled linoleum floor. “Part African at least.”

Gladys lifted her chin defiantly. “And what if she is part African? What’s wrong with that?”

“There are Mormon Africans now,” Helen chimed in.

“She’s telling falsehoods, that’s what’s wrong. Falsehoods come from Satan. They call him the Prince of Lies for a reason.”

Gladys put her hand on Betty’s arm, her eyebrows scrunched up in that irritating, concerned way of hers. “You talk about the devil a lot lately. Is something bothering you?”

Betty didn’t know what to answer. Had she been talking about the devil more than usual? She supposed so. She didn’t want to think about it anymore. She picked up her milk cup, and though she concentrated fiercely on steadying her arm, the milk suddenly slurped out and splashed over her Christmas tree sweater.

Helen picked up a napkin and dabbed the milk off Betty’s sweater and face. “Would you like some help with your eating?”

“I’m not a baby, Helen. I can feed myself.”

“Of course you’re not a baby.” Helen patted her. “You’re a grown woman with Parkinson’s. There’s no shame in needing a little assistance.”

Betty raised her chin defiantly, then grabbed her spoon, scooped up a mound of meat loaf, and got it all into her mouth without incident. Chewing came easily, but not swallowing—another Parkinson’s symptom—which made the meat loaf swell into her cheeks. As discreetly as possible, she spit it into her napkin. “Why are we talking about Rosa anyway? Rosa is not a pleasant subject.” She felt lightheaded and closed her eyes against it.

When she opened her eyes, the dizziness was gone, but now a man was sitting directly across from her in the fourth place at the card table. He was tall, very tall, and except for the gray horns protruding from his bald head, he was completely fire-engine red.

It wasn’t his clothes that were red. He didn’t seem to be wearing any. His skin, his eyes, his eyebrows, his lips, and his long, sharp fingernails were all red. The man folded his bony red arms across his bare red chest, and he grinned at her, his teeth especially white in contrast to all that fire-engine-red skin. “Hello, Betty.”

His ears were huge and pointed, and for a moment, Betty thought he could be a Christmas elf come to cheer her up. He almost matched the Christmas red in the plastic tablecloth. But his grin didn’t look cheerful at all. It looked menacing.

If he wasn’t a Christmas elf, he must be…

No. She was imagining things. “Go away,” she told him. She’d heard that once: When confronted with an apparition, one should tell it to go away.

He stayed put, grinning that awful grin, his red eyes boring into her.

“I don’t believe in you for a minute,” Betty croaked, fear rising into her throat.

The red man threw his head back and laughed, his malevolent voice echoing through the Beehive Recreation Hall.

Betty had never felt terror like this, not even all those years ago when that mess happened with her daughter.

“Betty?” Helen and Gladys were still looking at Betty, worry etched into their faces. They seemed completely unaware of the red man sitting next to them. Good, Betty thought. I’ll just ignore the apparition and nobody will know.

“I’m fine,” she said. Then to show them how fine she was, she smiled sweetly, and, careful to avoid eye contact with the red man across the table, she picked up her fork, her hand trembling only slightly, and swallowed several bites of stewed potatoes with only a little difficulty.

At the other end of the Hall, Jolene, the receptionist who doubled as a pianist, sat down at the scuffed baby grand, signaling the entertainment would soon begin. Rosa appeared, her arms full of sheet music. Residents moved from the dining tables to the couches and chairs clustered around the piano. Helen and Gladys shot longing glances at the gathering audience. Betty didn’t understand why, but her friends actually liked watching Rosa up close. “Go. Go,” she commanded. “You don’t need to babysit me.” Her friends gave her guilty smiles, but pushed themselves out of their chairs and made their way across the hall to the flower-patterned couch nearest the Christmas tree. Helen, short and squat, moved slowly with her walker. Gladys, lanky as a giraffe, glided along next to her.

Betty tried to focus on Rachel, who sang “Joy to the World” with inappropriate jazziness, warbling on “his love” like a cat in heat, adding extra swooping notes to “His lo-o-o-ve.” Jesus’ love should not sound so sexual, Betty whispered to herself, forcing herself not to look over at the fire-engine red man. And why did Rosa have to drape herself so suggestively over the edge of the baby grand? Did she think this posture, in those baggy pink scrubs, would do something for Walter and Del, both in their nineties and hunched down in their wheelchairs?

She glanced over, hoping the red man would be gone by now. He wasn’t. “You’re not real,” she told him.

“Oh, I’m real.”

“Rosa gave me the wrong medication this morning. Or else this is Parkinson’s dementia. Nurse Nedra said this might happen, and there’s pills to control it.”

Apparently he thought this hilarious because he chuckled, then chortled, then leered at her maliciously. “Dream on.”

The terror rose up again, and Betty began to gulp air. She grabbed the edge of the table and counted to ten, but instead of calming her, this speeded her up. “If you’re here to…snatch my soul away…I won’t let you have it. I’ve been good all my…life. I taught Sunday School. I took in unwed mothers after Earl died. I baked cookies for the homeless. I’m…good.”

His face softened. He looked almost sympathetic. “I snatch nothing or no one who doesn’t want to be snatched.” He placed his palms down on the table, his eyes glittering with delight, and he leaned forward. His torso must have been very long, because his face now hovered right in front of hers. “Isn’t today an anniversary of sorts,” he hissed, “for your daughter?”

“I don’t have a daughter.”

His smirk was terrible.

“I don’t,” she insisted.

“You’re a liar, Betty.”

“We were content without children.” She spit the words.

The red man howled with laughter.

“All right, I had a daughter, but that ended half a century ago.”

“She’s still your daughter.”

“She chose what she did. I didn’t choose it.”

“More lies, Betty.”

“She rejected me and her father and all of life.”

“Lies upon lies upon lies.”

“Stop calling me a liar!” Like a fish on dry land, Betty couldn’t get enough air. “My daughter couldn’t take things, that was her problem.” Betty felt her rib cage pressing in on her. “People say hard things sometimes, critical things; it’s good for a person, it corrects a person. People said hard things to me when I was her age.” She gulped and gulped. “But I didn’t go and…” She gulped. “I would never…” She gulped. “Never ever…!”

She threw her head back, opened her mouth wide, and forced her lungs to expand. A rush of air, like the wind, filled her up. Then she yanked on her joystick. She needed to get her wheelchair away from that table, away from all that fire-engine red, away from that devil man she must, must, must be hallucinating. But her hand didn’t obey her commands, and the wheelchair crashed into the table—once, twice, three times. Dishes, glasses, and silverware tumbled across the floor. It made a terrible clatter.

The singing stopped. The residents turned in their seats and were all gaping at her. Helen and Gladys were struggling to get up from the couch and come help her.

Rosa was already running toward her. She pushed broken plates and globs of food out of the way so she could kneel at Betty’s feet. She took Betty’s hand, rubbing it as if to get the circulation going again. “Look at me, Betty. It’ll help get you grounded. Look right in my eyes.”

Normally Betty requested Dolores or Lark, who were Mormon and White, to push her wheelchair, but today she let Rosa wheel her down Hall C, past the nurse’s station, and left into her room. Her roommate, Sally, was sleeping, which was a relief for Betty, and the familiar photos of her late husband, Earl, comforted her, but then she noticed the devil man sitting in her easy chair, grinning at her, his long red tail curled on the floor beside him, which made her scream. Rosa held a paper bag to Betty’s mouth to slow the panting. She wiped bits of pie from Betty’s chin, draped Betty’s arm around her neck, and moved the old woman, limp with Parkinson’s, onto the bed, where she changed Betty out of her soiled clothes into her flannel pajamas. She helped her lie back and pulled the blankets over her.

“You can leave now,” Betty told her.

“You’re not my favorite person either,” Rosa said, “but you’re sick and this is my job, so we’re kind of stuck with each other. At least ’til the doctor comes.” She picked up the Bible from the night table. “How ‘bout I read something to you so we don’t have to talk.”

Betty felt something at her left—the devil man? No it was her daughter, Debra, lying next to her on the pillow, Debra’s sandy brown curls like a cloud around her head, those impish brown eyes sparkling with life, exactly as the child had looked when she played carols on her violin for the church Christmas dinner. Betty had sewn Debra a pink satin dress for the occasion, with puffy sleeves and lace decorating the bodice. Debra had stood proudly on the church auditorium stage and played “Joy to the World” and an exultant version of “Jingle Bells.” The congregation had listened, rapt, and Betty had felt her daughter’s violin sing right into her heart.

Betty beamed at Debra, so happy to see her after all these years. She had missed her so. But Debra’s face darkened, and she squirmed on the pillow as if trying to twist away from something painful. Aren’t you sorry? she seemed to say, though her lips didn’t move. Aren’t you sorry for what you said?

Betty tried to shove Debra away, but her arms wouldn’t move.

When you found me behind the school library? When you caught me kissing that boy?

Betty wanted to close her eyes, but they wouldn’t shut, and Debra’s face kept coming closer.

“His hands were all over you!” Betty yelled, though no sound came out. “And your hands were all over him! And he wasn’t even Mormon. He was Black!”

He was Shoshoni, Mom. And I loved him.

From far away, Betty could hear Rachel’s voice. Rosa was reading something. Was that the twenty-third psalm? Betty loved the twenty-third psalm. She turned herself toward the voice and she opened her eyes.

But instead of Rosa it was the devil standing over her, laughing. Betty screamed louder than she ever had before, louder than when she found her fourteen-year-old daughter, Debra, hanging dead from a beam in the attic by the belt of her pink bathrobe.

“Betty. What is it? What’s wrong?”

“She’s not sullied. I lied when I said she was sullied.”

“Who are you talking about?”

“Debra.” Betty didn’t care if Rosa could see her old woman’s face scrunched up with crying, mucus streaming out of her nose. “She died. Fifty years ago today.” The sobbing brought on a coughing fit, which turned into hiccupping.

Rosa did her job. She patted the old woman’s back until she was calm enough to breathe.

“You know the last thing I said to her,” Betty gasped, “the last thing she ever heard?”

“No, Betty. What?”

“I told her God hated her,” Betty hiccupped again, then felt herself choking. “‘God hates girls like you.’ Can you imagine hearing anything more hurtful?”

Rosa had stopped patting and leaned back in her chair. “No I can’t,” she said softly.

Betty began coughing again, hacking, her lungs straining to eject something bulbous and ugly. The devil man perched at the foot of her bed like a bird of prey, his red eyes watching her as she coughed and hacked and choked. She didn’t mind him anymore. At least he wasn’t grinning. An alarm beeped. Rosa must have hit the emergency call button. Betty was vaguely aware of someone raising her bed, of a tube being pushed down her throat, of suctioning sounds.

Slowly, the devil at the end of her bed dissolved into something gold, the same shade of gold as the Styrofoam angels on the card tables. His pointed ears turned into wings, and his bony arms multiplied and multiplied—Betty saw her husband Earl’s arms, her parents’ arms, Helen’s and Gladys’s, and all the arms of countless others who had lived on the earth and had told lies sometimes, all of them opening and ready to receive her. She even saw Rachel’s arms opening to her, but where were Debra’s arms? Betty looked and looked for Debra’s arms.

THE END

Author Bio: Wendy Hammond is a working playwright, screenwriter, and professor. Her plays have been produced off-Broadway and in regional U.S. theaters as well as internationally in London, Rome, Melbourne, and Singapore. She has received a Drama League Award, a McKnight Fellowship, an NEA Grant, and publication by Dramatists Play Service, Broadway Play Publishing, and McFarland & Company. The film of her screenplay, Julie Johnson, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and won awards including Best Feature in the Barcelona Film Festival and an Audience Award in Berlin. Wendy has taught playwriting and screenwriting at NYU, Brooklyn College, and other universities. She holds an MFA in Dramatic Writing from NYU, a Master of Divinity from Yale, and an MFA in Creative Writing-Memoir from Hunter College. She loves to bowl and likes to imagine she’s talented at it.

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