Ina had visited Babette in a variety of structures, ranging from a gabled Victorian in the woods to a sprawling ranch on a hilltop with a distant view of the sea. The most memorable was a sleek fabrication of severe right angles, very modern but somehow also very hot. There, Babette had stripped off her clothes, prompting the medicos to add “exhibitionism” to her chart when really Babette was just hot. The clothes Babette had been forced to put back on trapped both heat and sweat and Babette had developed a nasty rash. After Babette was transferred, the rash subsided. A faint rash ring remained near Babette’s elbow, but it too was fading. By and large Babette’s skin had called off its revolt.

Running late, Ina ran up the stone steps of the facility and continued to jog through strangely empty hallways. She usually had to check in and confirm her family connection before proceeding, but since no one sat behind the registration desk and she knew the location of Babette’s third floor quarters, she jogged on, knocked faintly as a courtesy to her cousin and entered.

Babette lay on the bed, looking like a languid saint, gaze canted toward a corner of the ceiling, a pose she maintained.

Ina took no offense. Babette never immediately acknowledged her presence. Strangers appeared in Babette’s domain at every hour of the day and night, peering, querying. There was no reason for Babette to assume the person in the room was a relative who had genuinely come to visit.

Because Ina did not want to rush Babette’s process by crowding the bed, she took a seat on the floor, back against the wall. Ina might have preferred sitting on the floor even if there had been a chair. The floor was spotlessly clean. Once upon a time in-room chairs had been provided for visitors, but a resident—not Babette—had tried to use one as a battering ram to break the window and thereafter chair privileges had been revoked.

At the time Babette mused: “I wonder how, after breaking glass, she planned to get past the bars.”

“It’s a question,” Ina had said because that was what she thought, and for a while Ina and Babette jointly pondered the unanswerable together.

Waiting today for Babette to intuit their cousinship, knees cocked, Ina noticed scuffs on her shoes. The pristine floor had thrown their scuffiness into relief. Ina was tempted—but only tempted—to lick a finger and swipe at the leather when such a touch-up was indefinitely deferred by a tremendous crash on the floor above, followed by what sounded like a stampede.

Babette turned her way.

“Hello, cousin,” she said and smiled.

On her butt Ina scooted over to Babette’s bedside.

“Apologies for the noise,” Babette said.

“What noise?” Ina asked.

After which they both teehee-ed as they had when, as children, they lied in unison.

Today, by Babette’s instigation, they discussed blue, a broad topic quickly narrowed to a blue jar belonging to their Aunt Careen.

Above the noise above their heads, they spoke in blue jar terms.

—Oval.

—More round, than oval.

—A chip in the lid.

—Two chips.

—Rose petals inside.

—Licorice.

—Marbles.

—Seashells.

It was not a contentious discussion, nothing close to an argument. Both Ina and Babette were fully aware that people rarely agreed on what had occurred the moment before, much less on the details of childhood. They carried on their remembering with no investment in achieving a memory merge or in persuading the other of the superiority of her recollection. Such intention would have been ludicrous.

Because Ina was still sitting on the floor and also because she and Babette were deep in the wallows of reminiscing, Ina had ceased to pay close attention to the noise that had left the fourth floor, taken the stairs, and spilled onto Babette’s hallway with an added component: jangling keys. The result was that Ina had not with the necessary speed scrambled to her feet, gained the door, identified herself to whomever stood on the other side and clarified the cause of her visitor card-less state before a key engaged the lock on Babette’s door.

Ina and Babette had not finished visiting. Until prevented, Ina had been in no hurry to leave.

Appalled in advance at the stupid predictability of her reactions, Ina embarked on a standard course of useless countermeasures: wrenching the doorknob, pounding on the door itself, shouting for help, demanding some unknown someone come immediately to her rescue.

Embarrassing behavior, start to finish.

“You could hide under my bed,” Babette offered, not quite as spot on as Babette typically was in reading Ina’s thoughts. In any case Babette’s single bed had no bed skirt and was not much of a hiding place, clean though the floor beneath appeared to be.

Regardless, it was kind of Babette to offer. 

“If worse comes to worst,” Ina said.

Babette nodded.

The commotion now seemed to be centered farther away, somewhere in the vicinity of the front lawn. 

Ina remained seated on the floor. Babette, supine, resumed staring at a corner of the ceiling. Despite the room being almost chilly, Ina realized she was sweating. Babette sneezed once, a jolting, violent sneeze, then returned to a state of tranquility. Ina dabbed at her sweaty armpits. Judging by the slant of the light, it was late afternoon before the footsteps of another someone with keys approached Babette’s door.

Correctly reading Ina’s thoughts on this occasion, Babette swiftly summarized the problem. Even if Ina got through the door and made a dash for the parking lot she would, due to current circumstances, be taken for an escapee, grabbed, hustled back inside and very likely deposited in a room other than Babette’s where Ina would enjoy no company at all.

And yet the moment the door budged, Ina could not help herself. She rushed forward, shoving hard at the obstacle between herself and the hallway, a sequence with consequences preordained.

“I told you to hide, cousin,” Babette said sorrowfully though not in reprimand, which Ina greatly appreciated.

Notwithstanding Babette’s exquisite tact, they each knew what they knew.

A rookie, Ina had made a rookie mistake.

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While Visiting Babette is now available from Sagging Meniscus. You can order a copy here.

Kat Meads is the author of more than 20 books and chapbooks of prose and poetry, including the novelette While Visiting Babette (Sagging Meniscus, 2025) and a collection of essays about  women famous and infamous, These Particular Women (2023). She lives in California. Website: http://katmeads.com/