Chapter Sixteen. Betty, 1964
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“The deputy director of the CIA revealed that over thirty universities and institutions were involved in an ‘extensive testing and experimentation’ program, which included covert drug tests on unwitting citizens.”
—A US Senate hearing report
“I need this recipe, Bets!” Ivy cried. “It’s divine.”
Betty turned as she stirred the gravy on the Chambers stovetop to see Ivy dragging a pretzel stick through the cheese porcupine appetizer.
“Just four ingredients, too. All you do is blend cream cheese with beer and shape it, then add black olives for eyes and pretzel sticks for quills,” Betty said.
“I better not have any more,” Ivy moaned. “I’ve already put on sixteen pounds and I’m not due for a month!” She shook a cigarette out of her pack and lit it. “It’s a good thing smoking helps curb my appetite.”
“Is the recipe from Good Housekeeping?” Helen asked.
Betty nodded. “I clip all their best recipes, so let me know if you’d ever like to look through them.”
Betty knew Helen didn’t have a boyfriend, but at eighteen, she still had time for someone to propose, and it wouldn’t hurt to have a few crackerjack meals up her sleeve. After all, everyone knew the quickest way to a man’s heart.
“Your dinette table is real classy,” Ivy told Betty. “Is it from Sears?”
Betty nodded, feeling a swell of pride.
“Sweetheart? Is dinner almost ready?” Douglas called from the living room.
“Almost! Do you gentlemen need your drinks freshened?” Betty asked as she hurried to the living room with the martini shaker.
“I could use a top-up,” said David Lennox, Ivy’s husband. He made Betty vaguely uncomfortable, even though he’d never done anything wrong. She felt his eyes trace the curve of her behind as she bent over to refill his drink, but that was the sort of thing a lot of red-blooded men did.
“I wouldn’t mind one, either. Thank you, Betty,” Ronald said, giving her a warm smile. He was the male version of Kathleen—kind, confident, and a total dreamboat.
In the living room, the men talked about the usual things: the stock market, the winning streak of the Richmond Tigers football team, their excitement over a new car called the Ford Mustang.
But for the four women in the kitchen, it was different. Ever since they’d signed Dr. Trimble’s privacy agreements, an invisible boundary had encircled the four, cinching them together.
Douglas knew some of what was going on, of course.
But even he wasn’t privy to all of Dr. Trimble’s latest experiments and theories.
Dr. Trimble was slightly paranoid, Betty had come to believe.
Or maybe he was being prudent. After all, competitors were working around the world.
Dr. Trimble had showed the women a journal from the Society for Psychical Research, printed just last June.
Tests in places like Boston and London were producing impressive results, with subjects able to transmit thoughts of specific images and predict unsettling events.
Dr. Trimble responded by demanding more of their time.
Already they saw him five days a week. Now he was stretching the lengths of those days, and calling them in on some Saturdays, too.
Every day, when the women showed up at the laboratory, they found the stiff, white dresses his wife had sewn waiting for them.
She must come collect them in the evenings and launder them, Betty thought, because the dresses were always crisp and snowy, smelling faintly of bleach.
They’d only seen Mrs. Trimble a few times when she’d come to deliver their lunches: usually simple meals like cheese sandwiches on white bread with a side of potato salad.
Mrs. Trimble wasn’t an old woman, but her face was devoid of color and her body sagged, like the life was being slowly leached out of her.
It was hard to discern her age, but she could be anywhere from thirty to forty-five.
She always gave a little nod of her head to Dr. Trimble as she silently exited, but he didn’t acknowledge her.
Dr. Trimble seemed to have a special interest in Betty. Most subjects, he told her, excelled in one arena. Kathleen was very strong in telepathy, Ivy excelled at precognition, and Helen was exceptional in clairvoyance.
“But you, Betty, are highly gifted in every single category,” he’d said just this afternoon. “What are the chances? Infinitesimal. And somehow you were drawn to me, as if following a path determined long before either of us knew the other existed.”
Betty had clenched her hands nervously. She hadn’t been drawn to him—if anything, being in his presence made her feel trapped. But she hadn’t dared breathe a word of protest.
Instead of bringing her closer to her husband, her work with Dr. Trimble was having the opposite effect. Betty could barely bring herself to identify what was happening, because it sounded so awful. But the truth was, sometimes Douglas acted like a petulant child.
“What did you talk about with Dr. Trimble today?” he might ask.
“He told me about a new experiment they’re trying in Boston,” she’d say. Or “Nothing, really, I just spent more time in Testing Room 1 with the girls.”
No matter what she said, it was never the right answer.
Douglas would turn away from her, his body rigid. At night, he reached for her far less frequently.
Tonight she hoped to undo some of the tension between them. Even though it was Saturday and she’d spent all day working with Dr. Trimble, she’d stayed up late the previous evening vacuuming and polishing and scrubbing. She wanted Douglas to feel proud of her hostessing abilities.
Now Betty opened the oven to check on the roast, releasing a delicious-smelling puff of hot air. “I won’t be returning to school next semester,” she told the other women. She hoped the flush in her cheeks was seen as an effect of heat from the oven.
Ivy clapped her hands and squealed, clearly thinking Betty was about to make an announcement, but she had it all wrong. “Dr. Trimble talked to my professors and they agreed it would be best if I focused on helping him,” Betty explained.
Helen and Ivy nodded. Only Kathleen, chic as always in a peach dress and matching wide headband with the back of her hair teased high, regarded Betty with a concerned look.
“You’re already in the lab every day,” Kathleen pointed out. “We all are lately. It doesn’t matter as much for the rest of us—we weren’t doing anything important—but I thought you wanted to earn your degree.”
“It’s fine,” Betty said quickly. “It’s not like I was going to be a career girl. Douglas and I want a family soon.”
Kathleen nodded. “That’s good, then. I swear, if it wasn’t for the three of you, I’d have quit long ago. But the truth is, Ronald is so busy studying all the time these days that I don’t know what I’d do to occupy myself. And I’d miss you three too much if I left. I just wish…”
Betty knew what Kathleen was about to say.
She felt it, too. Kathleen wished Dr. Trimble wasn’t demanding so much of them.
These past few weeks, the women had no free time because every spare minute was spent at the institute.
They were all feeling rundown. Stretched too thin.
You could see it in the dark shadows under Ivy’s eyes, the way Kathleen had grown even thinner, and in how Helen kept hiding a yawn behind her hand.
But Kathleen never got to finish her sentence.
“Feel this!” Ivy grabbed Betty’s hand and held it against her stomach. Betty felt a tiny foot or elbow press back.
“Hi, little one,” Betty cooed.
“She must love the cheese dip, too,” Ivy said.
“She?” Kathleen asked.
“David insists we’re having a boy, but I know she’s a girl.” Ivy lowered her voice. “I already sewed a pink dress for when we bring her home from the hospital.”
While the other women touched Ivy’s swollen belly, Betty pulled the roast out of the oven. It looked perfect, as did the carrots and potatoes surrounding it.
Douglas would have to be pleased.
She opened her mouth to call Douglas in to carve just as the phone rang.
Douglas was closest, so he answered. She heard the happy boom of his voice, then winced as it deflated.
“It’s for you,” he called to Betty.
She walked into the living room and took the receiver from his hand, stretching the curling cord a few feet away.
It didn’t matter that it was six thirty on a Saturday night. Dr. Trimble wanted to talk to her.
“I need you girls tomorrow,” he said. “Come at noon and prepare to stay overnight.”
It was a Sunday. Her sole day off to do the shopping and ironing and get her hair done.
Betty had planned to spend time with Douglas. To try to patch the new hole in her marriage. But there was only one answer.
“Of course, Dr. Trimble.”