Go Ask Alice…when she's 94

For the past month, Alice has been listening to her dining room partner, Libby, comment frequently on what’s happening with the flag, viewed from Libby’s position facing the front window: “The flag is waving. It’s windy.” “The flag stopped waving. Wind must have died down.” “The flag has a hole in it. They should replace it.” “The flag is at half-staff. Who died? Wait a minute. No, it’s not. It’s the normal way.” “The flag looks droopy. Must be sad.”

Libby cleans her fingernails with her fork, stares and points at people with palsy, shouts at passersby, and wipes her plate with her napkin when she’s finished eating and then uses the napkin to wrap up food she then places in a pocket she calls “the garbage dump.” She also talks with her mouth full.

When her original dining room partner, Irene, died, management decided Alice shouldn’t eat meals alone, even though she wanted to. After a few weeks of Libby, Alice could hardly finish a meal. Every time I suggested that either she or I ask for a new table mate for her, she resisted. It might hurt Libby’s feelings.

“Don’t say anything,” she instructed. “Huh-uh.”

But finally she complained to an aide, who reported the problem to management. They responded with an offer of a different table for Alice.

She said no. She likes her view. She can see Mr. Fickle as he turns the corner from the staircase and heads into the dining room. She can watch the Dapper Man arrive from his apartment across the way. When her friend Susie Obama comes down the elevator, she greets her as soon as the doors sweep open.

Also, sitting at a table with other people would cause even more stress, she told the staff, because only group tables were available. It’s a strain to try to hear one person; the idea of trying to hear three others almost made her cry.

If the best The Place had to offer was a different table with more people seated at it, she had to refuse.

One morning I happened to walk past Jamie, who sits at the front desk just off the dining room. Jamie knows and sees all. I planned only to say Hello, but heard myself blurting out a question about the possibility of Alice getting a new table mate rather than sitting at a different table.

Jamie is around forty. She changes her hair color almost weekly but her eyebrows remain thick and black and active, adding a dimension of seriousness to whatever she has to say. That day her hair was blonde with a few purple streaks.

Change had to go through certain channels, she explained. The channels had opened and then closed up again apparently. So no. It wasn’t going to happen.

Every day and night for some weeks I’d been getting lengthy reports about Libby’s bad habits, I explained. My stress level was rising along with Alice’s whenever she talked about Libby pointing, staring, and shouting. And, for God’s sake, the flag, the flag, the flag!

I asked how my mother came to be sitting with Libby in the first place. Who matched them up?

She rose behind her desk, turned her body sideways, and stared off into the distance toward the flag, maybe to protect it from my opinion that a person can actually mention it too often over dinner. “We couldn’t find another table for Libby,” she said. “She’s been kicked off every table she’s ever sat at. Now it’s been settled.”

“But Alice’s friend Irene just died a short time ago,” I said. “Her sister Pearl died at around the same time. She’s sad. She misses them. Why does she now, on top of all that, have to sit with a woman nobody else wants to sit with?”

Jamie glanced at me for a few seconds. Even though she’s been working there for about a year, I sensed that this notion, that the old might feel sad at the deaths of close friends and relatives, also old, seemed new to her. Shouldn’t they be used to death by now when it was such a common occurrence in their lives? How could you lump them all together and easily manipulate them if the old were like everybody else, individuals with feelings that mattered?

I reminded her that Irene was completely different from Libby. “Doesn’t anyone recognize that?”

Jamie sat at her desk again. She smiled. Her eyebrows wiggled for a few seconds, then settled down. Nothing more to say.

I walked away thinking it would take a clandestine multinational operation to bring about a new seating arrangement.

That evening I saw my former husband, who is our dear friend and the one man closest to a son Alice has left. Maleness automatically means authority to her, as it does to a lot of women in her generation, and Michael and I both know it. More importantly, he truly cares about her.

“Please tell Alice I have a message for her,” he said at our happy birthday dinner for his wife, my friend Petra.(You’ll have to make up your own version of how all this works; this blog’s about Alice.)

“Tell her,” he said, “that I wouldn’t tolerate sitting with Libby and she shouldn’t either. Tell her I might have to talk to someone there about it.”

Petra agreed and told a story about her elderly parents at their assisted living facility in Germany. For a while they had to share a table with a man who chewed his meat and then placed the chewed pieces on the edge of his plate. “My parents insisted on a new table,” she said.

Was it wrong of me to wish that Libby could be sharing a table with this German fellow who left chewed meat on his plate?

When I told Alice that Michael said he was putting his foot down about her sitting with Libby, she blushed, flattered. However, it turned out she’d been working on the problem all by herself.

When she got her TB test she’d spoken to the nurse about her blood pressure. “Look at the daily records,” she urged her. “It’s been high. Want to know why?”

Of course the nurse wanted to know why, and when she learned the reason she promised to do something about the situation.

Two days after that Alice called and announced, “It is done.”

Her phrasing sounded unusual, almost Biblical. I quickly realized this may be due to her current reading material.

“I have a new table partner,” she said.

The new person is a woman in her eighties named Celia; Libby was placed two tables away.

Libby wasn’t happy. She told Alice that the change didn’t mean anything, that they could change back. Alice shook her head. “No,” she said. “I think we have to do what the staff says, Libby.”

For a while, the dining room had a Wild West feel to it. Alice phoned in reports of Libby waylaying Mr. Fickle by looping a finger into a buttonhole on his cardigan and pulling him close to discuss the recent switcheroo.

“Oh no. No no no…” Alice could hear Mr. Fickle say, as he tried to pull away.

Libby also smacked Lyle with her cane as she passed by his chair one night in the dining room. Alice thought Lyle had made himself fair game by loudly defending the new order of things. “He thinks he’s helping me,” she said, “but he’s not. He’s being rude.”

Libby’s antics were termed a ruckus by Susie Obama, who urged Alice not to pay any attention. “It’ll blow over.”

“Poor woman,” Alice said about Libby, but she was not turning back. She’s delighted with Celia, and wants to keep her.

Celia and Alice can’t hear each other so they pass notes back and forth. Alice showed me one of them.

A: I’m going to watch All in the Family after dinner.
C: I’m going to watch Jeopardy.
A: Lawrence Welk is on later.
C: I don’t get that channel.
A: I grew up not too far from where he lived. My sister LaRue danced with him once.
C: OH MY!
A: I have to get back to my apartment before Rosary group starts or else go all the way around the building outside while they’re praying. Do you belong to a church?
C: I used to be a Seventh Day Adventist.
A: What happened?
C: The church burned down.
A: Was it hard to leave your house and come here?
C: I cried and cried.
A: Me too.
C: That woman you used to sit with just took something off that table over there. She put it in her pocket.
A: She does that sometimes.

Probably a sugar dish, Alice thought. Or a salt shaker.

The next day after a trip to the dentist, Alice and I were stopped at a light when two women in their seventies crossed the street in front of us. One wore a long red coat like this:

She carried an impressive walking stick kind of like this:

And wore a sequined hat:

The other dressed in a gray jacket and gray pants and had gray hair. No hat, sequined or otherwise.

“Wow!” I said. “Look at that woman.”

“So much like Celia,” Alice said.

I haven’t yet met Celia. I was impressed. “Exotic,” I said.

But it wasn’t the red-coated, sequin-hatted, walking stick woman she meant. “No,” she said, “the other one.”

I looked over at my mother and she was smiling as she watched the two women continue down the street.

“Oh that Celia,” she said, shaking her head. “You can’t help but like her.”