I get what makes sense; I just can’t bear to do it. I cannot imagine the sorrow of dragging her out of this house.
Hours and hours I’ve spent on the Internet, considering and agonizing over assisted living and senior-care situations. One, particularly, Tiger Place, has many advantages, including sensors that can detect bathroom falls, a full calendar of social events, cocktail hours, movies with popcorn, a gourmet cook. Maybe I can convince her she’s on a long cruise. We are to visit there at the end of the week, a feat it has taken months to arrange. I don’t know if I can actually get her to make the trip. “Several women I know have died there,” she said when we last discussed Tiger Place.
“It’s for old people,” I said. “Old people die sometimes.”
“You just want to get rid of me.”
“No.”
“Someday something will get me.”
“Probably your bladder.”
. . .
Betty is determined to stay put. Do we literally, I wonder, carry her out of her own house? Will it come to that? Who gets to say? Me? Me? Betty, a woman who has lived her life in conventional clothes, possesses a will as strong as any man’s. She has always seen herself as a bit above most women, silly ones prone to marital turmoil and cosmetic overdose, women easily taken in who mooned over their husbands.
One summer before we moved to Paris, the marriage of the Bucks, who lived just up the street in the late Blanche Mitchell’s big old southern-style house, was a topic of discussion all over Madison. Willie Buck, a cattle buyer whose job kept him traveling, was having an affair with the receptionist of Arthur Fleming, a pediatrician. Arthur’s wife, Evelyn, was my mother’s best friend.
Betty and Evelyn conferred often. I eavesdropped. Evelyn said the receptionist had no shame. “She just parades it,” Evelyn declared. “I know,” Betty replied. She was not a woman to gossip, but did comment that Blanche Mitchell had to be turning over in her grave.
“She never should have sold them that house,” Betty commented. “But who knew?” Evelyn assured Betty that “in situations like this,” she was always “for the marriage.”
Betty said she was for Lena Buck getting a lawyer and taking Willie for every cent she could locate along with every Hereford in that pasture. Lena, Betty pointed out, was raising four children practically on her own while Willie shorted her on money for the house and kids.
Something in me loved Lena. Perpetually tanned, she came from the Mississippi Delta and reminded me of the dark-haired queen who gifted Columbus with the Pinta, the Ni?a, and the Santa Maria. As a little boy, I spent long hours at the Bucks’ house on rainy days, ordering their son Bobby around. At the slightest hint of precipitation, I would throw on my cowboy hat and pull on my red galoshes and head up there.
“When I look out and see you coming in that hat and those boots, I always have to take a nerve pill,” Lena told me once.
When Bobby Kennedy was assassinated, I was playing with Bobby. “They killed another of the Kennedys,” Lena announced to us. “Shot him dead. Now I’d like to know what they expect of you kids.”
Lena was a fan of country music, especially Elvis. I did not care for the King, but Lena’s soft sing-alongs to “Kentucky Rain” were an education in the realities of winter afternoons in a drafty old house bent over a sink of soap bubbles. I did my best to advise her on the matter of her wardrobe, a thankless task for even a zealous fashion adviser.
“Don’t mix plaids,” I told her. “My mother says.” But Lena was stubborn—and no Twiggy.
“She lays it on with a trowel,” my mother said to Evelyn.
Mother told me to keep my nose out of the affair business, but often we would wake to find Lena on our patio, trying to avoid her husband and seeking companionship. Or advice. There she would be, lying flat on her back on the top of the table, arm flung over her forehead in a gesture of romantic tragedy. I am not sure what my mother said to Lena on those mornings, but, watching from the kitchen window, I would see Lena listening and nodding her head. Sometimes I ran from the house with a warm honey bun for our visitor as Betty glared. “Get back in that house,” my mother would say.
I would go to the window to spy, watching my mother patting Lena’s hand or occasionally touching her shoulder. I had no idea that Betty knew what to do with a broken heart, but she was gentle with Lena and sometimes looked a little sad herself. So this was how my mother looked when she talked about love.
My mother never talks about love. What has always drawn her interest is money: Growing up without much extra has left her with the taste for seeing her name attached to significant amounts. She is careful with money and remains a firm advocate of the early bird special. I am afraid to ask about her funeral preferences, fearful she will demand a salad bar.