4. Put anything away.
5. Allow me to talk “long distance” for more than three minutes without yelling in the background.
6. Give up without a fight.
One night late last week, not long after 10 p.m., Betty screamed very loudly. I bounded into her room, certain that this was it. The end. When I got in there, she was perched on the side of her bed, looking sheepish.
“What on earth?” I cried out, reaching for the phone. “Are you all right? Do you need an ambulance?”
Betty just looked at me.
“Why did you scream?” I asked.
“Why do you need an explanation?”
“Because you screamed.”
Some moments passed.
“I thought I felt a bedbug run across my leg,” she confessed.
For several days, been reading about a bedbug infestation in Columbia in the Tribune. On the night of the scream she had read the most recent story aloud to me. She seemed to expect me to fumigate immediately.
“The bedbugs are in Columbia,” I said. “It’s fifty miles away.”
“They travel.”
“But they don’t drive,” I said.
“Do you need a Xanax?” I ask a few minutes later.
“I’d rather have a gin and tonic.”
The next day we were in the office of Dr. C., one of Betty’s eye doctors, a cornea specialist. In Columbia. As I took her into the examining room, she said to the assistant: “I read you have a lot of bedbugs over here.”
“I don’t know,” said the young woman, “but I got scabies from a patient once.”
My side hurt. I wondered if it was gallbladder. My mother says everyone in our family gets gallbladder sooner or later. Her much repeated advice over many years, her admonition for after she is gone: “One of these days your stomach is going to feel it is about to explode. Remember I told you. Gallbladder. You are going to feel awful.”
I thought the whole thing was stress. I didn’t want to see Dr. C. I never do. He has hated me for twenty years—since I tripped on my untied shoelace and collided with an extremely delicate and apparently expensive piece of diagnostic equipment that was waiting in his hall to be installed.
He eyed me coolly.
“So you’re still around?” he asked.
“I think I have gallbladder,” I said, but Betty interrupted before I could list my symptoms.
“How many grandchildren do you have now, Dr. C.?” Betty asked.
“Forty-one.”
“Good God,” I cried out. I couldn’t help it. I blurted.
Doctor C. eyed me as if he planned to detach my retina.
“I love children,” I said.
. . .
Our weekend was okay, except for a major snafu at the farmers’ market. The woman who makes the cinnamon rolls was late. If you cannot count on the Amish to be punctual, where are we? How long does it take to throw on a bonnet?
On Monday, Betty is normal and energetic. She moves around the house, semispringy, even speaking of making chicken salad. Any sign of her taking part in something is enough to almost make my day. By Tuesday, though, she is a gray ghost, hunched over, so small now, and does not seem to want to move at all. She moans; she groans; she whines; she emits tiny whimpers, chuckles without mirth, mutters to herself, bubbles up with small utterances. It is as if she is trembling verbally and repeating the same phrases again and again: “Let’s go. Let’s go. Let’s go.”
Nowhere in the house, it seems, is there a place her noises cannot penetrate.
“Well, you’ve got it upside down,” she says to herself. “This is upside down. What? What? What?” It is as if these repetitions give her some control. Every word is like a brick in the wall guarding her against some intruder she cannot name or get a glimpse of. The phantom is frightening; sometimes it seems she is on the verge of tears. Betty. On the verge of tears. Sometimes she talks to herself, half sentences, little cries out as she shakes her hands or fists. It is like there is someone else inside her, the real Betty, anguished and panicked, and she cannot get out. She is trapped inside.
I e-mail a friend who cared for her mother, who suffered from dementia before her death. “Did she make sounds?” I ask. “No,” she responds, “but demented people are like snowflakes. They are all different.” I cannot see this. Snowflakes drift so peacefully, but Betty has no calm, quiet ground to stop her fall or rest on.
By Wednesday, I cannot take it. Everywhere I look in the house, there is a mess. Everything is falling apart. “Where’s my lunch?” she asks. It is 2:30. I have forgotten there is such a thing as food. I take things from the refrigerator, but stop: Suddenly I do not know how to make a sandwich. I cannot remember, cannot complete the act.