My mother stakes her claims to life in the same way so many others of failing health and advancing age do: she dissociates herself from those who may be carriers of death.

I called her this past weekend. The phone rang and rang with no answer. When this happens, it scares me. My mind churns with scenarios to explain why she isn’t picking up on the other end. It works to full-throttle, engine-whining speed, imagining increasingly vivid and macabre explanations of her whereabouts: she’s walked outside, followed a butterfly through the neighborhood, and has wandered until she’s utterly lost, unable to remember the most basic of landmarks to guide herself back home; she’s fallen and is lying on the ground, agonizing with a broken hip; she’s dead.

I literally shake the images from my head and call again. This weekend, she answered the second time. I asked her where she’d been, that she’d missed my earlier phone call. She got pissed and lied.

“Do you think I have nothing else to do but sit around and wait for your call? I have things I need to do, Ann. I don’t just sit around here all day, you know.”

Uh huh. Sure, Momma, sure. “Sorry. I just got scared when you didn’t answer.”

She took a deep breath on the other end, a deep, wheezing, rattling breath that forced a cough from her embattled lungs. “You know that I take the old woman on the first floor my newspaper when I finish with it. She has no other contact with the outside world.” I can imagine my mother’s hmph on the other end, the straightening of her back, the lifting of her chin, the crossing of her ankles, the gentle shaking of her hair, the placing of her folded hands on her lap. It is funny to me that my mother ignores that she, herself, at 71 years old, with few friends and limited contact with others outside of her own children, is, too, at least a bit aged and misanthropic. But she claims life this way.

Momma then started a story, one of her seemingly aimless stories where I can’t quite anticipate the next part, with the ending remaining an absolute mystery until it is blurted out, and sometimes the mystery remains even then. She started with, “You know I hate those damn potlucks they have downstairs. I don’t want to eat anything any of these folks have cooked. These old people are nasty—some of them haven’t cleaned their kitchens in years, I suspect.” She stakes another claim.

She told me one story after another of brief glimpses into the kitchens of her neighbors, giving me their names, coupled with the details of the stacks of newspaper on the tables, the mounds of trash in the corners, the open cans of tuna and beans and the uncooked bacon on the countertops, the generalized clutter of the accumulations of a long life. These descriptions go on and on, serving to magnify, I suppose, her claim.

Then Momma told me about the most recent potluck, with dish after dish brimming with unrecognizable food stuff, or at least foul-smelling and/or ill-prepared food stuff, with one woman having the “sheer audacity” to offer up macaroni and cheese, the "kind that comes in a box with the pouches of powder. There’s not even any real cheese. That’s the crap you feed to people who don’t know any better, and you know, I do!” Yet another hmph for Momma, yet another claim she’s staked.

She then told me that the old man down the hall passed away, that the police came, put yellow tape up in the area, and how the maid stood guard, steering all passers-by away from the anywhere near the goings-on. Momma told me he’d been a nice man and that, if she had her choice, he certainly wouldn’t have been the one to die. “Poor bastard, I don’t even remember that he was sick or anything.” She pauses. “I wonder if he ate that macaroni and cheese.”

I laugh heartily and at length—my wonderfully wicked, cynical mother. When I stop to catch my breath, I hear that she isn’t laughing. “Momma, you’re joking, right?”

“No, of course not. If it killed him…”

“Momma!,” I interrupted, something about which she’s chided me since I learned to talk. “You need to keep your macaroni and cheese theory to yourself—you don’t want to hurt someone’s feelings just because you don’t like their food.”

“Ann, if you had just let me finish…you just think, if it killed a healthy man like him, what do you think it would’ve done to Beatrice? Poor thing, she just had to get a new wheelchair because her big, ol’ fat feet can’t bear her load anymore….” and she prattled on, staking yet another claim to her life.