Meanwhile, Back at the Fossilfuel Ranch...

It's actually only a ranch house.

Mrs. Fossilfuel will not take a shower. It has been five weeks since she's had a shower or washed her hair. All three of us who go to her house are willing to help her with personal hygiene, but she refuses. And we can't force her.

Esther, who spends 12 hours a day, Monday through Thursday, in the Fossilfuel orbit, took the bull by the horns this week.

"Mrs. Fossilfuel," she said, "you smell. You smell bad. Let me at least give you a sponge bath and wash your hair. And my God, please let me wash that wig!" (At this point the wig is tangled and stiff and all akimbo like a roadkill possum.)

"No, no, honey. We can't bother with that right now. We'll just take care of the important things."

"Mrs. Fossilfuel, being clean IS important."

The argument continued. Esther lost.

When I arrived at 6 p.m. on Tuesday for the evening "shift," Esther was massively honked off. She had had quite enough of the smelly Mrs. F.

"She has been wearing that blue-checked dress every day for a month. And she won't let me wash it. I am ready to choke her."

Somehow I had not yet seen the dress, since Mrs. F. is always in her bedwear when I arrive: her slip (the old-fashioned kind I remember my mother darting around the house in while getting ready for church), her 40,000% polyester quilted pink robe, and her pink fleece bed jacket. I had never seen a bedjacket in real life. I thought they were all in Hollywood draped over the shoulders of skeletal old actresses like Jessica Tandy (wait, she's dead) and Bette Davis (Oh. Also dead.) as they are propped up on pillows to clutch hand-held mirrors in order to paint on their eyebrows.

Esther left and I went to say hello to Mrs. F.

"That Esther..." she says. "She can be so argumentative."

Esther is lucky to be allowed into the Fossilfuel residence at all, because she is half Hispanic. But she is also light-skinned and "passed" as Caucasian. By the time Mrs. F. found out, via Esther, that Esther's mother is Mexican, Mrs. F. said "Well, it's too late now--I already like you."

Many eldercare women have come and gone. Our client is very difficult to please. The agency has run out of people to send.

"They say it's because I'm 'racially biased.' That's what they told me," Mrs. Fossilfuel says. "And all I ever said was 'no Blacks or Mexicans.'"

I do not attempt to correct her. Once you enter that splintery door, you are captured like a butterfly on a bed of nails. Nosiree. And anyway, what's the point? Even if she weren't irreversibly set in her ways, I'm not here in her home to alter her biases. I'm here to cook oatmeal and wash dishes and remind her to take her medications, and drive her to the oncologist. And to occasionally get splattered with enough excrement to cry out for Moses to bring his staff and part the Brown Sea.

At least now there is a potty chair one foot from her bed. When I walked in and saw that thing, a few days after the Castor Oil Night of Horrors, I could not have been happier if a woodland fairy had come along and showered me with solid gold confetti.

Next project: shampooing Mrs. Fossilfuel's hair. This will be accomplished. Even if I have to detach her head and drop it in the washer. On "delicates."