Visiting Betty

        We stand outside the automatic door marked with a handicapped symbol. The ladies in the upholstered living room wave their automatic wands and the door clicks, drifting open toward us. The University students visit the assisted living home a few times a week to play Wii Bowling and take a few of the residents grocery shopping. My last visit was a few months before.

            “Betty, you remember Julia,” Steven says to the wrinkled woman, who at ninety-three looks young for her age. She grips her walker with shaky hands and peers through her rimless glasses at me. Her steady blue eyes gaze at me without recognition. She purses her mouth and briefly reaches up to touch her short silver hair, signaling to mine.

            “Yes, that changed,” I say, smiling. I had dyed my light blonde hair a dark auburn. It’d turned a brassy strawberry when I’d tried to dye it back, the red deposits seeping into the follicles of my hair.

            “Oh yes, I remember,” Betty mumbles. She moves her walker around me, avoiding my eyes.

    

        She used to do this at the grocery store every Friday. A woman, usually the daughter of someone from church, or someone Betty babysat since they were knee-high, would come up to her, gushing, “Betty! How are you?” The woman would go on to talk about her mother or what her little brother had been up to these days. Betty would nod and smile, plastic glazing her eyes. She would turn to me as soon as the woman gave her best wishes and headed to the next aisle.

            She’d tug at my arm and I would lean down to listen. “I have no idea who that was,” she’d whisper into my ear, shaking her head.

            I visited Betty every Wednesday for a year, knocking on her door around one o’clock. She’d lean back in her recliner, using a remote to move up the leg rest and carefully lift her legs up, one at a time. I would sit on the couch perpendicular to the window. Out the window you could see the whole town.

            “Do you see that brown one there? That was the house I grew up in. You know I was born in Wheeling though. And that white house one block away—I moved into it after I got married,” She had said to me, holding onto the window sill with unsteady arms, one with a purple blotch. She’d fallen a week earlier and the doctor had told her there was nothing he could really do.

            “I’m just an old woman,” Betty had said, explaining. She said this to explain a lot of things, mostly when I asked for stories. I had once asked her what it was like living during the Great Depression.

            “It wasn’t like anything,” she scoffed at me. “We just lived. I don’t remember anyway. I’m just an old woman.”

            She had a book of old photographs we looked through sometimes, page by page. There was a picture of Betty as a child, maybe two years old, standing in the grass with some daisies. It would have been 1921. There were also some of her in the sixties—the Coke-bottle glasses and the high-waisted mom-jeans.

            There was one picture with her first husband in it. I don’t recall if she ever told me his name. “He didn’t work, so I had to get a job up at the A&P. Do you know, on High Street?” It’s where the Belko Foods is now. He didn’t look like a bad man. He looked stern with dark, thick eyebrows, a sharp chin, and a mouth with scowl lines.

            Betty was beautiful—full lips, hourglass figure, and unblemished skin. Wide-eyed Betty held her daughter in her arms. This was Rita.

            Betty told me about Rita every Wednesday I visited, pointing her wrinkled fingers at the picture next to her VCR. Rita had committed suicide when she was in her fifties, and Betty talked about her like she was Amelia Earhart, lost in the sky or the ocean. It was as if Rita had been on a journey and never come home, like she was wandering through a forest after forty years, picking berries and burning a fire every night.

            Eventually Betty got tired of Wednesday visits. She looked at me like a wilted flower and said, “Don’t come back anymore. It’s too much for me. I am too old. I am just an old woman.” So I stopped visiting, filling my after-lunch hour with other things.

            One day, before she had asked me to stop coming, I put her groceries away alone. She walked me to the door and I opened it. Her mouth trembled, and she looked into my eyes, tearful.

            “Don’t forget me,” she said. “Tell your friends about me, and your boyfriend. Tell your family.”

            It is so strange to be the keeper of this set of memories. Somewhere in her mind I lost my existence, and I don’t know if that changes me or if it changes her. It is like two people packed a suitcase to go on a journey but one of them forgot they were leaving town at all.