BETTY JUNE
ALM No.93, September 2026
ESSAYS
There’s an antique mirror on the dresser to my left. On the back, dark pretty graphite in big loops of cursive on cardboard reads, “Merry Christmas Liz, may you always see yourself clearly. With affection, Roger.” You were in love and separated by circumstance. I’ve seen photos of you with Roger – Mom said he was like a father to her. On my bed across from me lies the little quilt you made for me when I was tiny enough to fit underneath it, with criss-crossing patches of purple and dark blue patterned squares creating diamonds of white space within their border. Fragments of you dot my life, and when I look long enough I begin to see phantom lines stretched between each point to form a familiar constellation.
The camcorder was tucked away in a dark corner of my parents’ house. I popped a small cassette labeled “Christmas 2005” into the deck, snapped the compartment shut, rewound it, and watched the blue screen come alive. I wanted to see you.
I saw myself opening gifts in the living room on our old couch, little seven-year-old me with a bob haircut. My aunt passed me a gift from Grandma, but you weren’t there. Mom watched with me, and she remembered you missed Christmas that year because you were in the hospital again. The cancer wasn’t going away, it was getting worse. She told me we filmed that Christmas to show you. You didn’t come back from the hospital that time, you died in early January.
Mom was at your bedside, Dad was working second shift, and my brother was babysitting me while we played games on the PS2 in his room upstairs. One of the first videos he took with his new camcorder was of the deep, square TV with Ratchet and Clank playing on screen. We had two controllers, but I usually just watched. I remember Dad walked into the room in his work clothes – he wasn’t supposed to be home yet. I had recently learned how to spell “penguin.” I was about to learn something else.
Dad said nothing. Dylan commented, “You’re home early.”
His exact response slips my mind. I know the air was heavy, too dense to breathe when he told us you were gone. There was a sensation of rushing all at once towards the massive void we’d circled for months and into a black hole. All of existence was concentrated within that singular moment, which lacked any characteristics fathomable to a child’s mind other than its bending and sucking in of light. I ran around the foot of the bed and pushed past Dad to get out, into the frigid cold of space and the room I shared with Mom, where I threw myself face down on the empty bed and burst. To burst into tears is a very familiar experience for a child, but that time it was something different, I think all of my atoms scattered outward like the dawn of creation. With a frightful bang I became something which contained everything, most of all emptiness. Dad came to find me and hold the pieces together as best as he could.
I put a different tape in, one from the year before. We were in Port Huron, Dylan filmed a freighter on the river to show you when we got home. Every video was to show Grandma. You were omnipresent, you just weren’t there.
***
I’d like to show you a few things now that I’m grown up, if you have a moment. Rather, if you’re able to share this moment with me. If I put a blank tape in the camcorder, what would I want you to see?
In my early teens I was smitten with The Chronicles of Narnia. I read them from the box set you gave Dylan, and fantasized about leaving my world and discovering a sweeter place full of adventure. It seemed like I should’ve been doing something more than just middle school – I was more than the pubescent hierarchy that pervaded the halls. I convinced Dad to go on a day trip with me to Wheaton College near Chicago, where a study full of C.S. Lewis’ and J.R.R. Tolkien’s belongings sat quietly in one of the campus buildings. I was holding out on a final hope.
Among the collection of fountain pens, letters, and heavy wooden writing desks was a wardrobe. It had belonged to Lewis when he was a boy, and if any object might be a portal to something else, I was sure that must be it. When we entered the room I meandered around and studied other exhibits first, savoring the fantasy until I was ready to face the disappointment I was sure to find. Finally, with gentle respect, I opened the wardrobe and reached back through the coats hanging within, extending tentative fingers until they brushed solid wood. It was no portal, only a wardrobe. Childhood shrunk to the size of printed words on a yellowing page. No degree of willpower would expand those stories into my universe, and the end of a book was just that – the point where it stopped and I kept going.
I got my first tattoo when I turned eighteen – a simple line drawing of a whale with its tail out of the water and outlined against the full moon, and a bird swooping low over the waves. You loved the song “Fish and Bird” by Tom Waits, so much so that you added it to your Christmas mix, the one we still listen to every year. I made a sketch in my notebook during computer programming class sophomore year of high school to illustrate his lyrics, “there’s a whale in the moon when it’s clear, and a bird on the tide.” The sailor tells a story of a bird who fell in love with a whale, and how they longed for each other in their separate worlds. They must have met through the rippling surface and seen something of themselves in each other. I imagine a seagull silhouetted against a starry sky, spotting the shimmer of a great eye beneath the waves, seeing its home reflected in the knowing darkness of its gaze. The lyrics to that song spoke to you about something I’ll never know, and now they beckon me to find what that might have been. Maybe you were reminded of Roger – someone you loved who couldn’t stay.
I took a Shakespeare class in college and didn’t need to buy any of the books because you already had them all. I carried your massive copy of The Riverside Shakespeare with me and read miniscule words from its thin, lightly glossed pages. I adorned it with sticky notes and ran my thumb over its fine edges.
We have a different couch in the living room, which has been repainted since the last time you saw it. The Christmas tree is in a different spot this year. I’m gay now and Dylan has a beard and a curly mullet. There are touch screen phones, streaming services, and lots of new species of frog. I graduated college with an irrelevant Bachelor’s and I’m working a decent job.
On Christmas Eve I wore the sweater you knitted for me. I remember going to a small crafts shop with you where I picked the yarn I wanted you to use – black with a band of rainbow threads spiraling through. It was too big for me when you finished it, and I didn’t wear it for about a decade. I wonder if you planned it that way. I tried it on again once I was grown, and it looked very stylish. The sleeves are a medium length, still billowy, but intentionally so. I’m no longer lost in its pattern.
Despite all that’s different I still tell time by the petite circular face of your golden Seiko watch with a brown leather band. I’ve had the strap replaced and the battery changed a few times. When I take it to the jeweler downtown they recognize my last name because they went to church with you. Your watch has traveled to Thailand, Ireland, Portugal, and France. I’d love to show you pictures. At a hostel in Lisbon, I was drinking sangria in the dining area with other guests and a man from Iraq with long black hair complimented my watch. I told him, “Thanks, it was my grandma’s.”
***
I was home for New Year’s, at the house you bought and raised your daughters in, which Mom inherited from you. There’s a drawer in the dining room buffet that holds a few heavy photo albums archiving our family’s history. One of those albums is full of pictures of you. Some classically cute baby photos, then some when you were a bit older and looked like a Hollywood sweetheart to rival Judy Garland. The last pictures are of you with my grandfather, age nineteen with dark eyebrows and Irish good looks, marrying a handsome man in his Navy uniform who would leave you with three children. You had a whole life ahead of you – starting a family, getting divorced, going to college, falling in love again. It would be some time yet before you met Roger.
I’m moving out of my studio apartment soon and going to France for a little while, then starting again in Kalamazoo. Tonight I took a few instant photos of my place – the little couch and the corner it inhabits with dark wooden antiques that I’m sure you’d like, my view watching TV with a collection of plants in the corner where sunlight hits through the north-facing window in the summer, and one of my goldfish who’s ten years old and just keeps going. By the time I was ten, you were already gone. Instant photos feel more potent than those on my phone screen. They come into being the moment they’re taken, they’re present on the scene, then never produced again. A wisp of the past between plastic and film like a bug in amber.
The mirror given to you by a lover, the sweater you knitted for me, the watch you once wore, and the house you claimed for your family all hold moments of you within them. They were there, and they knew you, just like I knew you for a little while.
I met Roger for the first time a few months ago, he’s in his nineties now but remembers you well. I spoke to him again at a celebration on New Year’s weekend. He asked me if I knew my Grandma or if you died before I was born. I clarified, “My Grandma, you mean Liz?”
“Yeah, yeah do you remember her?”
“I do, I was about seven when she died.”
Roger looked thoughtful. “She was a special woman.”
I smiled and looked down at my drink while my eyes stung and my throat tightened, I didn’t want to cry. I managed to chuckle. “Yeah, I know it.”
Lois Rustenholtz is a queer woman in her late twenties working to balance a full-time job as a mechanic with her passions for travel and writing. Her storytelling seeks the universality within an individual's formative experiences.
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