On Christmas I had Betty over. She baked a turkey and we drank. Betty always liked huge Christmas trees. It must have been 7 feet tall, and 1/2 as wide, covered with lights, bulbs, tinsel, various crap. We drank from a couple of fifths of whiskey,
made love, ate our turkey, drank some more. The nail in the stand was loose and the stand was not big enough to hold the tree. I kept straightening it. Betty stretched out on the bed, passed out. I was drinking on the floor with my shorts on. Then I stretched out. Closed my eyes. Something awakened me. I opened my eyes. Just in time to see the huge tree covered with hot lights, lean slowly toward me, the pointed star coming down like a dagger. I didn’t quite know what it was. It looked like the end of the world. I couldn’t move. The arms of the tree enfolded me. I was under it. The light bulbs were red hot.

“Oh, OH JESUS CHRIST, MERCY! LORD HELP ME! JESUS! JESUS! HELP!”

The bulbs were burning me. I rolled to the left, couldn’t get out, then I rolled to the right.

“YAWK!”

I finally rolled out from under. Betty was up, standing there. “What happened? What is it?”

“CAN’T YOU SEE? THAT GOD DAMNED TREE TRIED TO MURDER ME!”

“What?”

“YES, LOOK AT ME!”

I had red spots all over my body.

“Oh, poor, baby!”

I walked over and pulled the plug from the wall. The lights went out. The thing was dead.

“Oh, my poor tree!”

“Your poor tree?” “Yes, it was so pretty!”

“I’ll stand it up in the morning. I don’t trust it now. I’m giving it the rest of the night off.”

She didn’t like that. I could see an argument coming, so I stood the thing up behind a chair and turned the lights back on. If the thing had burned her tits or ass, she would have thrown it out the window. I thought I was being very kind.

Several days after Christmas I stopped in to see Betty. She was sitting in her room, drunk, at 8:45 a.m. in the morning. She didn’t look well but then neither did I. It seemed that almost every roomer had given her a fifth. There was wine, vodka, whiskey, scotch. The cheapest brands. The bottles filled her room.

“Those damn fools! Don’t they know any better? If you drink all this stuff it will kill you!”

Betty just looked at me. I saw it all in that look.

She had two children who never came to see her, never wrote her. She was a scrubwoman in a cheap hotel. When I had first met her her clothes had been expensive, trim ankles fitting into expensive shoes. She had been firm-fleshed, almost beautiful. Wild-eyed. Laughing. Coming from a rich husband, divorced from him, and he was to die in a car wreck, drunk, burning to death in Connecticut. “You’ll never tame her,” they told me.

There she was. But I’d had some help.

“Listen,” I said, “I ought to take that stuff. I mean, I’ll just give you back a bottle now and then. I won’t drink it.”

“Leave the bottles,” Betty said. She didn’t look at me. Her room was on the top floor and she sat in a chair by the window watching the morning traffic.

I walked over. “Look, I’m beat. I’ve got to leave. But for Christ’s sake, take it easy on that stuff!”

“Sure,” she said.

I leaned over and kissed her goodbye.

About a week and a half later I came by again. There wasn’t any answer to my knock.

“Betty! Betty! Are you all right?”

I turned the knob. The door was open. The bed was turned back. There was a large bloodspot on the sheet.

“Oh shit!” I said. I looked around. All the bottles were gone.

Then I looked around. There was a middle-aged Frenchwo– man who owned the place. She stood in the doorway.

“She’s at County General Hospital. She was very sick. I called the ambulance last night.”

“Did she drink all that stuff?”

“She had some help.”

I ran down the stairway and got into my car. Then I was there. I knew the place well. They told me the room number.

There were 3 or 4 beds in a tiny room. A woman was sitting up in hers across the way, chewing an apple and laughing with two female visitors. I pulled the drop sheet around Betty’s bed, sat down on the stool and leaned over her.

“Betty! Betty!”

I touched her arm. “Betty!”

Her eyes opened. They were beautiful again. Bright calm blue.

“I knew it would be you.” she said.

Then she closed her eyes. Her lips were parched. Yellow spittle had caked at the left corner of her mouth. I took a cloth and washed it away. I cleaned her face, hands and throat. I took another cloth and squeezed a bit of water on her tongue. Then a little more. I wet her lips. I straightened her hair. I heard the women laughing through the sheets that separated us.

“Betty, Betty, Betty. Please, I want you to drink some water, just a sip of water, not too much, just a sip.”

She didn’t respond. I tried for ten minutes. Nothing. More spittle formed at her mouth. I wiped it away.

Then I got up and pulled the drop sheet back. I stared at the 3 women.

I walked out and spoke to the nurse at the desk.

“Listen, why isn’t anything being done for that woman in 45-c? Betty Williams.”

“We’re doing all we can, sir.” “But there’s nobody there.”

“We make our regular rounds.”

“But where are the doctors? I don’t see any doctors.”

“The doctor has seen her, sir.”

“Why do you just let her lay there?” “We’ve done all we can, sir.”

“SIR! SIR! SIR! FORGET THAT 'SIR’ STUFF, WILL YOU? I’ll bet if that were the president or governor or mayor or some rich son of a bitch, there would be doctors all over that room doing something! Why do you just let them die? What’s the sin in being poor?”

‘I’ve told you, sir, that we’ve done ALL we can.”

‘I’ll be back in two hours.”

‘Are you her husband?”

‘I used to be her common-law husband.”

‘May we have your name and phone number?”

I gave her that, then hurried out.