From the sink, I bring a damp cloth to erase a dusty streak on the trousers. Her gaze meets mine, but quickly she looks away from whatever my eyes show.
She is under siege, from scary thoughts, from new shoes, from a son who does not understand, from a world that cannot comprehend the confusion and pain of the secret battle she does not acknowledge to anyone, maybe not even herself—the struggle to stay, to hold on, to maintain. She stares up at me, her elbow on the kitchen table, her hand gripping her forehead as if it is too heavy to hold up. Her eyes, where clouds have settled in, which seem to grow larger, more liquid every day, are full of fear, her expression anguished. How hard she is trying here. No one knows. Age is taking everything away. Now I, the one who she counted to be on her side, have taken her shoes, the only ones that still soothe her tired, sore feet that carry her load. She is so hurt.
This is what I see in her face: the wandering one, the one who is letting go, and the anguished one, the one who remains, but who knows she is losing, barely holding on. They coexist, alternating, the one gradually ceding to the other. As the surrender progresses, she becomes more and more anxious, sometimes even terrified.
“Betty’s okay,” I whisper. “Betty’s fine. Betty’s home. Betty’s okay. Betty’s fine. Betty’s home.” When I finally get her in the car, she looks at me as if she has lost the only person in the world she trusts. I get her to church, hold open the car door, help her in and down the basement stairs, a flight of concrete steps that terrify her always. Reluctantly, she grabs my arm and holds on tight. In the meeting room, gathered around the table, the other members of the committee are waiting and not everyone looks like they have maintained their patience. As she starts into the room, she rallies; she straightens her shoulders. She heads into the fray, reaching for my arm as I leave to say that she is sorry. When my mother walks into the meeting, I think of all the people quietly doing so many things that are hard.
. . .
There was a day once, a few years back, before I realized how bad her eyes had gotten, when I had left her at the church to practice. Detained at the lawyer’s office, I was late to pick her up. When I returned, I saw no other cars in the parking lot and glimpsed Betty, walking close by the side of the church, keeping both hands on the wall of the building, moving tentatively toward the side yard to wait by the steps for me. There was no sun; it was a cloudy day. She moved very slowly, as if just ahead there might be something waiting, something that might take an old woman down forever.
My mother speaks of the night when Mammy fell and broke her hip as the moment when her mother stopped being herself. Betty is petrified of falling. It is what she fears above all. Already she has gone down twice, once bruising her tailbone. She will not admit—even to herself—that this ever occurred. Yet in the hall at night, I hear her: “I can’t fall. Don’t fall. Don’t fall. Don’t fall.”
My parents were at a party the night my grandmother’s accident occurred. After they left the house, after I was forced to watch Lawrence Welk, after I was asleep, my grandmother tumbled down some steps and broke her hip. I slept on, not hearing her cries. My parents found her when they returned and I woke to the voices of the ambulance men. For the rest of her life—and she lived to be a very old woman—my grandmother used a cane, and then later a walker, which she called her horse, to get around.
I woke up, very late, to find my mother sitting on the edge of my bed, gently patting my back.
“Ssshhh,” she said. “Sssshhhh.” Maybe she was crying; I couldn’t tell for sure. We hadn’t said our prayers together as we always did. It seemed now especially that we should not miss. “Do you want to say our prayers?” I asked.
My mother said nothing, just kept patting my back. I do not know if Betty’s sorrow stemmed from her mother’s loss of independence or her own. Mammy would need care. There would be another person depending on my mother, a situation to make a woman like her feel more hemmed in. That wouldn’t be easy for anyone. Mammy felt terrible for falling.
. . .