I have not seen my father since we put him away a year ago.  I fly and drive to pick up my mother to sit with my father our father during Sunday lunch.

    "Do I look old?" she asks from the doorway where she greets me.  I break in with a hug.  To hide my surprise (she does look older), I reply, "Do I look older?"  She doesn't say either.

    "Can I help?" she asks, offering to bring in my bag.  "No," I smile.  "I can manage," I reply, imagining the absurdity of my little mother carrying my baggage.  I think of her story of how she carried heavy pails of milk on Uncle Frank's farm when she was a little girl.  That's how she accounts for her arthritis of the neck.
 
    It's 5:00 o'clock.  "Are you hungry?" she asks.  I'm starved," I say, knowing this is her dinner hour and she has been waiting all afternoon for me to join her.  She always ponders before I visit about what to feed me now that I'm a vegetarian.  Last time my older sister advised her to stock up on beans.  When I arrived, my mother offered a variety of salads.  Then she asked, "Would you like some beans?" while opening a cupboard to show me her stock: navy, kidney, lentil, New England baked.  "No thanks," I smiled in reply, trying to explain that vegetarians don't eat just beans.  "Oh," said my mother who served me roast pork and pink applesauce and New England boiled dinners when I was a child.  This visit she seems to have forgotten I'm vegetarian, or to have pretended to have forgotten.  I'm not sure.

    She presents two stuffed Cornish hens, one of her specialties.  "I remember," she tells me while lifting a hen onto my plate, "how much you like stuffing."  From across the table where she has seated me in my father's place, I look at stuffing oozing below the breast and baked-open legs of the little hen.  I imagine turning it over and giving it back its feet and watching it run along the Cornish coast.  I look over at my mother who is busily carving off a leg.  I shudder and spoon out some stuffing.  My mother doesn't notice.  She's enjoying herself.  I slice into the breast to make it look like I ate something, just as I did as a child.  When she gets up to put everything away (always immediately after eating), "Oh, what lovely leftovers!" she exclaims upon looking at my bird.

    The next morning we wait to go and see my father.  "Not yet," she says.  "Soon," she says later.  Then: "It's time."  "We'll take my car," my mother says at 85.  "You drive," she adds.
 
    I squeeze into the too-small front seat of her Ford Tempo that at age five has only traveled a thousand miles.  Taller than my mother who grows smaller and smaller, I hunch forward, startled when the seat belt lynches me.  My mother smiles proudly.  "It's automatic," she says.  She looks over at me and smiles, glad for my company.

    When I pull into the parking lot, she signals me to turn left and go to the end of a row.  "It's better to park there," she explains.  At 18 I would have argued with her or chided her.  Now I smile, obeying her, honoring her:  I understand this is her habit.  So many of her habits are being taken away now, I think to myself, looking across at her, comforted now with familiarity.  We begin walking toward the Home.

    Another visitor ahead of us turns around, as if to greet us.  My mother nods to her and announces, "This is my daughter."  The woman boasts: "My daughter is coming today, too."  At the entrance, she taps out the secret code as if she were entering her P.I.N. number at an ATM.  My mother opens the door and we enter the institution.

    I clench my right hand, forming a fist at the end of my arm that hangs straight like a tree limb with a gnarl at the end. "See," my mother pointed, looking at a photo of me being married at 20.  "What?" I asked.  "See what?"  "Your fist," she said.  "When I saw that, I wondered," she added.  "Why didn't you tell me?" I asked.  "It was too late," she replied.  "You were leaving the church.  Uncle Web snapped the photo.  I was standing here," she explained, "looking up at you. That's when I saw your fist." It took me 13 years to get out of that picture, I thought to myself, looking at my mother, wondering what else she knew.
 
    We walk down a corridor, making our way through white-uniformed women and old people in wheelchairs or wandering. "Where is he?" I ask my mother.  She glances at her watch.  "It's quarter to twelve.  He'll be down there," she points, "at the end of that corridor.  He's waiting for twelve," she says.  I look at her, a little startled, thinking of my German friend who went to see her mother in the hospital.  The doctor told her "it was twelve" when her mother came to see him.  It's a German expression, my friend explained, for the final moment.

    "Let me go first," I say.  I walk down the long corridor past a gray-haired woman holding a gray-haired doll in her arms.  I walk past a scream: "Nurse! Nurse!"  A nurse looks up  from her station and smiles at me.  I see my father sitting at the end of an empty row of chairs as if waiting for a train or plane.  He's been dressed for lunch.  In his green alligator shirt and green & white striped pants and carefully groomed white hair and mustache, he looks dignified.  But what's that?  His collar's turned up, something he would never have done. He doesn't seem to notice or mind.  A few feet away he sees me and breaks into a grin.  He grins & grins at me, and I hug him.

    I sit next to him and wait.  My mother joins us.  He is all grin.  We don't speak. We wait five minutes, ten minutes.  Then my mother says, "See, they're lining them up now for lunch."  It?s time for the first sitting.  My mother signals my father.  He nods and pushes himself up out of his chair.  He has trouble walking.  One toe was amputated.  He wears special shoes that click-click when he walks.  They'd be good for tap dancing, I think, until I watch him struggle to walk alone, bent over, click-click, click-click, trying to get to a side rail.  Once I bought him a walker to try out.  He pushed it away.  My mother offered him her arm.  He pushed her away.  I cheer inside when he reaches the railing and steadies himself.  Slowly he makes his way to the dining room.  This movement takes all his attention.
 
    When he arrives, I help him into a chair and pull up a chair beside him.  My mother shakes her head as she pulls up a chair beside me.  "That woman has taken your father's place," she nods toward the woman with gray hair and look-alike doll.  "He always sits there," my mother says.  "She knows it, too."  I look at the woman coddling her doll, smiling, lost in her world, and wonder if she does know.  A man next to her shakes his head and looks at me as if to say It takes all kinds.  Then he looks at my father and raises his eyebrows.  My father is very busy re-arranging every item on his tray.  I do not say Your food is getting cold.3

    My mother is busy socializing.  She makes the rounds, greeting everyone.  "You have to meet Leo," she tells me.  "He only has one leg," she explains.  "A real character," she adds.  "Leo! Leo!" she waves.  Leo wheels himself in and nods.  The woman we met at the entrance stands behind a nurse wheeling her husband in.  "He's only 75," my mother tells me.  "Low blood sugar," she explains.  "No energy. See?"  I look at him. He moves very slowly as if his battery's worn down.   He tries to speak to the relatives who surround him.   They move their ears closer.  His wife hears.  "He doesn't want to eat," she says.
 
    I cut up my father's food and hand him a fork.  He heads for the lemon meringue pie.  Well, Richard Nixon always ate desserts first, I say to myself.  My mother loved Nixon.  I made her cry when I argued with her about him, I remember.  We were having a picnic at the beach.  My father kept out of it, smoking a cigar, sitting in the wobbly beach chair, looking out to sea.  I move the pie and put the plate of turkey and potatoes and carrots in front of him.  He eats the carrots.  Carrots are good for your eyes, I don't say.3

    I look over at the gray-haired woman who is trying to feed her doll-baby carrots mixed with lemon meringue pie.  The man across from me shakes his head and raises his brows again.  A Very Thin Man neatly dressed in blue pin-striped pajamas is wheeled in and wheeled out.  "He doesn't eat," my mother whispers to me.  I glance at his tray of food, untouched.  Then I see him going out the door, his head held high in his chariot, as if he were some dignitary.  One woman keeps trying to sit at a table.  "She belongs in the second sitting," my mother explains.  The nurses take her out.  Then she's back in.  My father carefully opens a carton of orange juice.  "He won't use a straw," my mother says to me, shaking her head.  He makes a glass-like shape and drinks up.3

    They're starting to line up," my mother says, pointing to the door.  "It's time for the second sitting."  My father signals he's ready.  He manages to get out of his chair and past the line-up until he can grip the side rail again.  Click-click.  Click-click.  I hear him work his way down the corridor.  A nurse stops me.  "He's not eating," she says.  I tell her not to bring the dessert until after.  "Oh," she says, "a good idea."  "My father always loved desserts" I explain, as if he were no longer with us and we were acting on behalf of his memory.  I hear my father snarl, "Come on! Come on! Let's go!!"  He holds onto the rail with one hand and points down the corridor with the other.  My mother and I laugh to see there's life in him yet.
 
    He walks all the way back to where he was sitting before.  We three sit again in a row.  We don't speak.  A man wheeled near us has a coughing fit.  Another man yells "Nurse! Nurse!" again from his room.  No one pays any attention.  My father gets up and walks across the room, intent on something.  He picks up a chair and moves it next to his chair.  I look at my mother.  "That chair belongs there," she explains.  "It's always there."  My father seems satisfied now.  My mother nods at him. "Ready?" she asks.  "Yes," he smiles.  "Want to go to my place now?" he asks me.  I smile to say Sure. We walk down the corridor.  He is not so sure. "They changed his room," my mother says, "and he's mixed up.  He keeps going back to the old room."  We guide him to his new room.  My mother tells him it's his naptime now.  "Oh," he says.  We raise his bed up and say goodbye while he lowers his eyes.

    My mother looks forward to our lunch.  "It's my treat," she says.  I've lost my appetite but I don't say.  She orders a lot but eats little.  We go home.  "You'd better rest now," I tell her.  I go outside to take in the blue sky. My mother nods off on the porch, or so I think.  Soon I hear a knock at the window. My mother calls out to me.  "Did you rest?" I inquire.  "Want some company?" I add. I go in.3

    She goes to her rocking chair opposite his chair.  I sit opposite her in the maple rocker I bought her one Christmas.  I was ten. It took me forever to save thirty dollars.  My father's rocker is empty.  He's off his rocker, I laugh to myself when suddenly I hear my mother slur her words.  At first I think I haven't heard right.  I pause, fearful she is losing her mind.  "How long has this been going on?" I ask. "Quite some time," she mumbles.  "Yes, it was nice, very very nice.  A lovely evening, thank you."  She is lost in memory.  Why, she's talking to the Colonel, as he was called, I think to myself, feeling as if I'm eavesdropping.  A daughter isn't supposed to know these things.  She tells me how much she loves me and all her children and grandchildren and that she did her best.  "I'm scared--" she blurts out, interrupting herself.  "If I lose my mind, will you--" she starts to ask.