The New Yorker Stories - Ann Beattie [266]
“Tim, I suggest you visit before Christmas.”
“That sounds more than a little ominous. May I say that? You call when I’ve just gotten home from a day I couldn’t paraphrase, and you tell me—as you have so many times—that she’s about to die, or lose her marbles entirely, and then you say—”
“Take care, Tim,” I say, and hang up.
I drive to my mother’s apartment to kill time while she gets her hair done, and go into the living room and see that the plants need watering. Two are new arrivals, plants that friends brought her when she was in the hospital, having her foot operated on: a kalanchoe and a miniature chrysanthemum. I rinse out the mug she probably had her morning coffee in and fill it under the faucet. I douse the plants, refilling the mug twice. My brother is rethinking Wordsworth at a university in Ohio, and for years I have been back in this small town in Virginia where we grew up, looking out for our mother. Kudos, as he would say.
“Okay,” the doctor says. “We’ve known the time was coming. It will be much better if she’s in an environment where her needs are met. I’m only talking about assisted living. If it will help, I’m happy to meet with her and explain that things have reached a point where she needs a more comprehensive support system.”
“She’ll say no.”
“Regardless,” he says. “You and I know that if there was a fire she wouldn’t be capable of processing the necessity of getting out. Does she eat dinner? We can’t say for sure that she eats, now, can we? She needs to maintain her caloric intake. We want to allow her to avail herself of resources structured so that she can best meet her own needs.”
“She’ll say no,” I say again.
“May I suggest that you let Tim operate as a support system?”
“Forget him. He’s already been denied tenure twice.”
“Be that as it may, if your brother knows she’s not eating—”
“Do you know she’s not eating?”
“Let’s say she’s not eating,” he says. “It’s a slippery slope.”
“Pretending that I have my brother as a ‘support system’ has no basis in reality. You want me to admit that she’s thin? Okay. She’s thin.”
“Please grant my point, without—”
“Why? Because you’re a doctor? Because you’re pissed off that she misbehaved at some cashier’s stand in a parking lot?”
“You told me she pulled the fire alarm,” he says. “She’s out of control! Face it.”
“I’m not sure,” I say, my voice quivering.
“I am. I’ve known you forever. I remember your mother making chocolate-chip cookies, my father always going to your house to see if she’d made the damned cookies. I know how difficult it is when a parent isn’t able to take care of himself. My father lived in my house, and Donna took care of him in a way I can never thank her enough for, until he . . . well, until he died.”
“Tim wants me to move her to a cheap nursing home in Ohio.”
“Out of the question.”
“Right. She hasn’t come to the point where she needs to go to Ohio. On the other hand, we should put her in the slammer here.”
“The slammer. We can’t have a serious discussion if you pretend we’re talking to each other in a comic strip.”
I bring my knees to my forehead, clasp my legs, and press the kneecaps hard into my eyes.
“I understand from Dr. Milrus that you’re having a difficult time,” the therapist says. Her office is windowless, the chairs cheerfully mismatched. “Why don’t you fill me in?”
“Well, my mother had a stroke a year ago. It did something. . . . Not that she didn’t have some confusions before, but after the stroke she thought my brother was ten years old. She still sometimes says things about him that I can’t make any sense of, unless I remember that she often, really quite often, thinks he’s still ten. She also believes that I’m sixty. I mean, she thinks I’m only fourteen years younger than she is! And, to her, that’s proof that my