Watching Betty at Tiger Place, Cinda looks at me and seems for the most part amused. Again and again, she saves us: She knows the right questions to ask, makes a note or two as Jackie explains the walking tests administered each month, the bus for church pickups and shopping trips, the stages of care: Stage One, Stage Two. There are four stages. I think I may be a Seven.
When I manage to come up with an inquiry that actually seems on point—“Is there anyone to make sure she takes all her pills in the morning?”—Betty interjects, “I can take my own medicine.” But she doesn’t, and every time I hold them out she asks the same question: “What are these? Who said I had to take so many?” She acts like taking pills is some sort of hard labor.
Jackie introduces my mother to a woman with a fancy blouse passing by. “Do you play bridge?” Betty asks. When the woman, who looks a little startled, shakes her head, Betty turns away from her, stares at me coldly. I have promised cards. I want to ask the woman if she likes Wheel of Fortune, but Betty would tell me I am not as funny as I think I am.
“Older people eat small meals,” says Jackie as we head into the dining room for lunch. “They don’t get hungry like we do.” Cinda is a little taken aback, as am I. My mother eats enough for a camp of lumberjacks in the Maine woods. Betty asks of the lunch, “Are they going to charge us for this?” Jackie overhears and assures us that the meal is complimentary. “Well,” Betty says moments later, staring down at what seems only the suggestion of a hamburger, “it better be.
“Don’t you offer to pay,” she whispers to me.
After lunch, we sit for a while in a courtyard filled with flowers. Betty, dejected, reaches out to snap a deadhead off a geranium. I like the courtyard and preparations are under way for a party that evening. It is someone’s birthday. Jackie tells us that she is so devoted to the residents here that she got married in the courtyard.
I would have chosen Chipotle. “Where did you honeymoon?” I want to ask.
. . .
The Tiger Place courtyard is a lovely place and some of the apartments have screened-in porches that look out onto this area. Sitting by the flowers, Betty rests, focusing on the blossoms. For years she has taken flowers to people from church who are sick and alone. Hour after hour, I have watched her standing by the kitchen table, arranging the stems.
“Who tends to these?” she asks Jackie. “It looks like they do a pretty good job.” It is her one concession.
The trek through these halls has worn her down and lunch has certainly not satisfied. “Did you get a look at that hamburger?” she asks me. I say nothing. “No bigger than a half dollar,” she adds.
Maybe I should just give up and let her be, I think, stay in Paris, see her through for as long as it takes. Then I tell myself I am an idiot for always going soft. That is not what the real Betty, who would have run me back to New York with a pitchfork, would have wanted me to do. She would have ordered me to live my life. Of all the changes that have transpired in my mother, it is this new belief that I should give everything up to stay with her that is the most surprising. This tells me just how worried she is, how much she cannot bear to leave her home.
“I know where everything is here,” Betty said the other day, making her way down the hall at home. “I don’t have to think about it. I just know. Even at night. I don’t even have to see.”
. . .
In my mind, I line them up for the auctioneer: the stubby pencils that say BAKER LUMBER, my mother’s coats and scarves, Mammy’s pins, Oscar’s Smith Corona, Wray Chowning’s family photographs, Granny’s china, a jar from Aunt Winnie’s porch. What will not make it? What, meaningful only to me, will be lost or burned? The years of photos, the family letters, touched by many, that said love or mourned a passing, the greetings from the war, the cards from many distant travels—the girls from Hawaii doing hula, the greetings sent from the Muehlebach in Kansas City during the lumbermen’s convention, the vistas of the faraway Pacific that Mammy sent Betty, just married. What will become of these things? I feel like I should have made a place for all this. For generations—my father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and before and before—there have been George Hodgmans, and one day there will be none and it is a bit hard not to feel disappointed that I am the one to close the book on all of us.
. . .
Betty looks so woebegone when I explain to Jackie that I want us to go on the waiting list that I cannot look back at her. It is just a backup—I keep repeating this, trying to make myself believe this, to make Betty understand, but she just shakes her head as Cinda and I follow Jackie into the office to get the form to fill out and write a check. We have to do this. We have to make sure she has a pleasant place if she must leave home.