Last evening, Betty was on an upswing. Studying a newspaper column, she yelled, “You’re too old” at the page, then looked at me. “She’s seventy,” she says, referring to a letter in an advice column. “Says intercourse is too painful. Fix me another gin and tonic.”
“Please be quiet, Judy Garland.”
I think she believed a hint of daring would change my mind about today’s mission. She doesn’t need to leave her home, not this cantankerous party girl. She looked at me expectantly. “I see through you,” I almost told her, but instead let her carry on until it was time to sleep and she realized I wasn’t giving up, that we would have to make this trip. All through the night, I got up, and up, and up again, finally heading up to visit the lonely dog who lay completely stretched out on the concrete floor of the pen, doing his best to cool himself. His yellow eyes shone in the dark as I splashed him with water from a pail I had brought for this purpose.
At the convenience store where I stopped for powdered sugar doughnuts to spruce up Betty’s breakfast, I watched a man hand over a five and a one for cigarettes and a tiny Bic lighter. “I need thirty-two more cents,” the cashier said.
“Well, you’re gonna have to git it from somebody who likes you more than me,” the man responded.
“Oh, quiet down. I’m trying to do three things at once here. . . . Do you like my new eyebrows?”
He just stared.
“They’re tattoos.”
. . .
Everyone thinks Tiger Place is Betty’s best option. At the very least, even if she remains at home for a while longer or even permanently, we need a safety net, a plan in case she is suddenly beyond my care. The good places have waiting lists and she needs to be on one, to be prepared. She has always dreaded the idea of winding up at Monroe Manor, the senior citizens’ home in Paris where Mammy lived before her death.
Run by the University of Missouri, Tiger Place is a cutting-edge facility that attracts retired professors or the parents of professors. For my mother, who does not see how lucky she would be to get admitted here, this cast is not a selling point. When Jackie, our guide, mentions the lectures by visiting scholars on fascinating contemporary subjects, Betty looks pained, bored in advance. She is not the type to sit and listen. At church, a few ministers back, she developed the habit of holding up her wristwatch when the old man got long-winded. A stimulating roundtable on The Vagina Monologues with a women’s studies professor is probably not going to make her day.
“What is that?” she asks as I gaze at the lecture schedule. When I explain she asks if she will be able to get a gin and tonic.
She may not even be accepted for admission. Residents must show that they are able to care for themselves and become part of the community. There is a list of criteria that people admitted here must meet. Betty, inclined to fall inside herself, to just not register the goings-on around her, to refuse to do what she is asked, may be beyond assisted living here. But I don’t want her to fail further and wind up somewhere dismal. Dementia or Alzheimer’s facilities would be the end of her. Without the stimulation of active people, she would fall fast and fade. But I can’t say these things to her and she won’t see that I am just trying to take care, to be the strong one now. For her.
Last night, I heard her at the piano, when I thought she finally was in bed. The hymn she was playing was “Take My Life and Let It Be.”
“Don’t play that,” I yelled out.
“Well, what do you want me to play?”
“Something cheerful.”
“Wait for Christmas.”
At Tiger Place, there are chairs upholstered in cheerful shades that make Betty grimace and carpet that, unlike our own, shows no spills. The residents are mostly younger and in better shape than my mother. Would she mix well, I wonder, try to socialize or hide in her room? Would she dress in the morning or just stay in her robe, as she does if I do not force the issue? Would the ladies, gathered in cliques, understand or shun her because of her eccentricities? I just don’t want to see her hurt.
Dragging her feet down the hall, Betty looks a little sad like the kind of old lady she has never let herself become, but steels herself, trying to get through this day, to cooperate a little. My cousin Lucinda has joined us to help out and Betty is more docile with her on hand.
. . .