The Roots of the Olive Tree (5 page)

CHAPTER EIGHT

Sixth Generation

A
fter the geneticist left, Anna took a rest. She awoke to the sound of dinner and found the others in the kitchen eating ham sandwiches on olive loaf. Although she rarely had an appetite, Anna’s nose was as sharp as ever. The smell of the facility where Frank lived was all over Bets. To Anna, the rankness reminded her of rotting fruit, but the rest of the family insisted the odor was nothing more unusual than the combination of antiseptic and sweat. Anna gagged and turned her face away from her daughter.

“Stop it,” Bets said, swatting at Anna. “I could always put you in there.”

“I’m not decrepit enough. Still have my brains and my beauty.” Anna smiled, showing off that she still had most of her teeth.

“It only takes losing one of those two.” Bets turned away from Anna.

“You know what stinks?” Anna asked, taking a seat next to her daughter. “It’s the perspiration. That’s what smells like rot. I’ve attended enough deathbeds to know the smell of death, and that home you’ve got Frank in reeks of it.”

Callie put her hands on both women’s arms. “Stop it.”

“What do you expect?” Bets asked. “I bet two or three people a week die in that place.”

Erin giggled. “I’ve missed you all so much. I haven’t had a nonphilosophical argument about death since I’ve left.”

Death was not an abstraction to Anna. When she was a girl, the world was a more dangerous place—men died in farming accidents, mothers died in birth, and children died when schoolhouses caught fire. Erin had never been to a funeral. They’d not allowed her to attend her father’s service, and since then no one she was close to had died.

“Death is all part of the cycle. It’s neither here nor there, it just is,” Callie said, turning to Bets to ask about Frank. “How’s Dad? Any sign he’s getting better? Or worse?”

“He’s got a new friend,” Bets said. She continued to talk, describing the man, in his late fifties, who rolled around in a specialized sport wheelchair. Anna noticed that Erin was again eating meat and that as she listened to her great-grandmother’s story, she pulled strands of hair out of her head. Anna got Callie’s attention and nodded in Erin’s direction.

“Later,” Callie mouthed and then got up to clear the table.

“So. Who’s coming to visit Mom with me?” Erin asked. Her voice was high and she spoke quickly. Anna knew she’d waited until Callie left the room to ask. In the twenty years Deb had been at Chowchilla, Callie hadn’t visited her daughter once.

“We’ll both go,” Bets said.

“Just not right away,” Anna said. “You’ve only just gotten here, and we have so much to catch up with. Can we go next week?”

Erin looked at the floor. “I’m tired. I think the time change is finally catching up with me.”

They ushered her off to her room, with Callie pulling down the shades and drawing the thick brocade curtains.

“She should sleep a good bit,” Bets said outside the girl’s door. Anna wanted to talk about Erin, to discuss her sudden appearance and her strange behavior, but they all went to their own rooms, coming out a few hours later when Anna warmed milk on the stove.

Anna knew they were digesting the news about Deb. None of them had known that she was up for parole again. As they learned last time, the California State Parole Board was only required to inform the victims of the prisoner’s crimes about parole hearings. Erin was both a victim and family.

“She’s dead asleep. That jet lag of hers should buy us a few more hours,” Bets said. She’d opened the can of instant cocoa and spooned it into her cup of warm milk.

Callie scooped an additional teaspoon of chocolate powder into her cup every time she took a sip. “She wasn’t much help at the store. I had to go back and redo all her counts and I finally just put her at a cash register.”

“She didn’t say anything?” Bets asked. She turned to Anna. “Did you find out when the hearing was?”

Anna had called after the geneticist left. “We’ve got about two months. It’ll be in January. The warden was surprised we knew anything about it. He seemed to think the family didn’t find out until the hearing was about a month away. I guess they don’t like getting anyone’s hopes up.”

“The last hearing was all formality,” said Bets.

Anna watched Callie add two more scoops of cocoa to her milk. “There’s got to be more to this than a parole hearing,” Callie said. “Have we had any luck trying to get in touch with the opera? I’m fairly sure she’s broken some sort of contract with them. It was a three-year deal.”

Bets shook her head. “I can’t get the times right and I’m not sure if they’ll return a call to the U.S. or even understood what I was trying to say.”

“None of you know anything about her life? How she spent her time over there? Who her friends were? Wasn’t there a girl from Boston who signed on the same time as her?” Anna’s frustration came out in these rapid-fire questions. The guilt about not knowing these details turned into accusations of Bets and Callie. All that Erin had given her in letters were platitudes, and it was what Anna accepted. She wanted to believe that they’d been successful, that they’d made up for Deb by raising Erin the right way.

Callie broke under all the veiled accusations and guilt. She had the deepest regrets about Deb, and they carried over into all aspects of her life. The need to be forgiven for failing her own daughter made her fragile. Anna disliked tears. She thought they were wasteful, and the sight of her granddaughter blubbering jolted her out of the pleasantries.

“Have you considered the obvious?” she asked.

Bets sighed. “I don’t want to think about it. She’s too young.”

“Her mother was only seventeen,” Callie said. She’d pushed her milk aside and dabbed at her eyes with a dinner napkin. Anna saw a mound of cocoa had piled up at the bottom of her cup.

“We need to know what we’re dealing with,” Anna said. “I’ll wake her up and we can just ask her.”

“What if we’re wrong?” Callie asked.

Anna stood up, but Bets put her hand on her elbow. “Let me.”

Despite Bets’s hard facade, she had always been the closest to Erin. Callie felt too much guilt to be anyone’s mother figure.

“What if it’s true?” asked Callie.

“She’s made a hard choice,” Anna said.

Bets grimaced. “I don’t want it to be true. We’ve worked so hard to give her the kind of life where the choices aren’t hard. Damn it to hell and back.”

Anna didn’t want to listen to their supposing. She knew it was true. She’d felt it the moment that Erin had stepped out of her rental car. There was going to be a sixth generation. Anna had dreamed of the child the night before and felt a pull between them, as if the umbilical cord were attached not only to Erin, but also to Anna.

E
XCERPT FROM
“T
HE
E
ND OF
A
GING,
”
A TALK PRESENTED TO THE
A
MERICAN
C
OUNCIL ON
A
GING IN
D
ECEMBER 2006

B
Y
D
R.
A
MRIT
H
ASHMI

Many of mankind’s myths are inextricably tied to the quest for immortality. The driving force behind most religions—whether one believes in reincarnation or resurrection—is the promise to extend the span of time for which our consciousness exists. The idea of starting over in a new body or restoring an existing body to its prime might seem laughable to us, until you consider that most of us in this room are attempting to accomplish these feats on a much smaller scale in our lab animals and Petri dishes. We are at the cusp of a new age—one in which mankind turns not to his gods for an answer on eternal life, but to his scientists.

My particular interest lies not with immortality, but with agelessness. Most of us are surely aware of the tragedy of Eros and her lover Tithonus. This goddess of the dawn, one of the immortal Titans, had the misfortune to fall in love with a mortal. When he began to age, Eros begged Zeus to give Tithonus the gift of everlasting life. In her haste and in her passion, Eros forgot to also ask for eternal youth. This mistake cost Eros her heart, but it cost Tithonus the world. Long after his body had withered, his mind remained. Eros could not bear to be near him in this babbling and immobile state. She entombed him in a room with no windows and a red door. There he remains, wanting only death and wondering how it was that as Tennyson said, “The Gods themselves cannot recall their gifts.”

We should be mindful of this fate. I’ve sat among this very group and heard the hypothesis that the first person who will live to be a hundred and fifty years old has already been born. While that is extraordinary, I pity that woman (and our research shows it is most likely to be a woman, firstborn in her family, who was raised on the West Coast in a large family). If we cannot unlock the mysteries of the process of senescence, we will continue to prolong life without any measurable benefit to mankind. We will produce an entire generation of elderly who, like Tithonus, will end up locked inside the prison of their own decaying bodies. We must commit together to work toward discovering the key to stopping the aging process. This is what I’ve devoted my life to. At the University of Pittsburgh, I’ve spent the last decade searching out and cataloging people who I, and my staff, have come to call
superagers
. That is to say those individuals for whom the natural markers of old age appear to have little effect, or I should say a lessened effect.

These are people who scale Mount Everest in their seventies, swim the English Channel the same year they turn ninety, or run a marathon at age a hundred and one. I believe that is the kind of old age we all want. I don’t have to tell the people in this audience about the raging debate over what causes senescence. There are a dozen theories about the process—aging is a disease, aging is a by-product of evolution, aging is psychological, aging is the accumulation of damage from radiation, etc. The list is endless, and this room is filled with researchers probing every possible avenue for an answer because the simple truth is we don’t know what causes aging.

We also don’t know the exact mechanism by which aspirin works, or how placebos can be more effective than treatment. It has been said that age is merely the accumulation of defects, but why is it that some people have so many fewer defects? The only way to discover this is to gather as much information as possible about superagers. We’ve been cataloging what they ate, where they lived, how much time they spent in the sun, how much time they spent exercising, how long their parents lived, and searching for some commonality among them. I’ve long suspected that dietary and environmental influences were microscopic in their influence on this process, and through surveys and observation, this conception has been borne out. Many of my superagers are active nonsmokers, nondrinkers, but just as many of them still gleefully embrace the habits they’ve been warned against all their lives. Every time I interview a smoker, they inevitably point the end of their cigarette at me and say, “You were wrong you know, smoking doesn’t kill all of us.”

What these superagers have in common is the large disparity between their chronological age and their biological age, as determined by the Zyberg scale. In most cases, superagers have the physical, psychological, and social lives of people half their age. They have sex, they sleep through the night, they remember phone numbers and acquaintances’ names. Because Zyberg does not take into account physical appearance, which is primarily influenced by genetics and environment, some of these superagers may look as old as they are, but across the board, their physical health and mental health is usually on par with someone half their age.

What all of our research points toward is that the ability to stop or at least slow senescence exists within the body—inside the very cells themselves. To prove this, I need evidence of a genetic mutation, and to find such a mutation, I need a family of superagers. The problem with that is not only the rarity of superagers—there are fewer than a thousand in the entire world, but also the unavoidable fact that an accident is just as likely to cause a human’s death as complications from aging. You know how difficult the search is—a twin brother will have died in war, a daughter in childbirth. No matter what we do about aging, the world is still a dangerous place for human beings.

I was quite discouraged until earlier this year when I came across a remarkable family in California. There exist five generations of women—beginning with the matriarch, who is a hundred and twelve years old, and continuing down through the generations to the youngest, who is in her midtwenties and pregnant. I can’t be sure that all of these women are superagers, but after preliminary questionnaires and extensive interviews, I believe I have found a family who carries the genetic mutation that holds the key to slowing aging.

Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh have already begun to sequence the entire genomes of these women. Our hope is that within a decade we will be able to identify the genes that slow senescence and then develop drug therapies to activate them in those who age at a normal rate. I also suspect that we will find that in these women several harmful genes have been essentially turned off. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me take you through the research that has gotten me to this point. I will just say that if that child has indeed been born who will live to be a hundred and fifty, that by the time she is middle-aged this research should have produced therapies that will allow her agelessness along with longevity.

Erin in the Winter

CHAPTER NINE

Haircut

B
y January, the uproar of Erin’s arrival and pregnancy had settled. With long hours to fill, Erin often thought about her first pregnancy scare. Unlike some girls, she hadn’t had hers until college. She and a boy from her music theory class had been playing at dating. She brought him small tokens of her affection—greeting cards, superhero stickers, his favorite soda, and in return he helped her into her winter coat and paid for dinner. She liked how his deep brown eyes always seemed to be wet, as if at any moment he could be moved by the world around them. They slept together. And once that happened, it was all that ever happened between them. Sex became recreational.

One of them would call the other and make up an excuse to come over. “I left my glove at your place,” she would say. Or he would claim to have lost his notes from their shared class. After one of these terse exchanges, Erin’s roommate, a thin girl from Vermont, offered her appraisal.

“So, you’ve finally figured it out.”

“What,” Erin had said, pulling her hair from its ponytail.

“That all that boyfriend, girlfriend stuff is for high school.”

Erin blushed. “We’re together. I mean—”

“It’s not serious though. And you’re not in a relationship, right? I mean he could sleep with someone else if he wanted to.”

There was no point in protesting. Erin couldn’t imagine a future with the boy. She nodded.

“You’re still so naive,” the roommate said. “Most of us figured this stuff out before we got here. But I’ll tell you what you need to do. Especially with this guy. Try just enjoying the sex. Make sure you get off, that he goes down on you. They all claim not to do it, but every boy I know does.”

Once Erin got over the shock of what she’d said, she realized it was the only useful information she’d learned that semester. From then on when Erin slept with boys, she held on to her heart—offering them nothing more than smiles and an offhand attitude that hid her natural earnestness.

This new approach served her well when weeks later, Erin missed her period. Ben walked with her to the student health center, talking the whole way about how much he enjoyed Frisbee golf. When Erin came out of the examination room grasping a negative pregnancy test, he was gone. She didn’t see him again until just before graduation when he showed up at her doorstep with a bouquet of carnations and tried to tell her that he was in love with her, that he’d always been in love with her. She slept with him, and the night was a disaster. He cried and then as she held him, patting his back, she got the worst case of the giggles. One that left her gasping for breath and Ben shooting her angry looks, his wet eyes finally blinking back actual tears as he grabbed his wilted bouquet and left.

She thought that she’d cured herself of the sincerity that her grandmothers had instilled in her. And then, five months earlier, in Rome, all of her earnestness came back to her when the pregnancy test turned up positive. She was the one who cried during sex, and although her lover wiped away the tears and promised that he’d make everything between them right when the baby came, all she saw in him was a reflection of her despair. That look and the letter that came two days later from the parole board gave her a reason to leave.

She should have told him she was going back to California, but she couldn’t bring herself to cry in front of him in the daytime. Plus, she was still angry that after she’d told him she was late he’d still wanted to go to dinner.

“But I think I’m pregnant,” she’d said to him as a shopkeeper swept around their feet.

He took her elbow and steered her away from the pregnancy tests. “Of course, of course.”

“I’m not even hungry,” she said, trying to get him to slow his pace.

“We all need to eat, and The Swan has such lovely food.”

She’d eaten dinner with him that night and they didn’t speak once about the pregnancy. She put the unopened test on the table, and he never once asked about it—instead speaking the entire night about his problems with the orchestra and asking her opinion about an alto who was also an American. They discussed plans for an upcoming performance, and despite her frustration, she found herself agreeing to a weekend in Milan.

The next morning, on the way to the airport, she considered that part of his callousness was that he and his wife had never had children. The cabdriver had a picture of an elderly woman and a young girl taped to his dashboard. “She’s lovely,” Erin commented as she paid him. He took her money and held her hand for an extra few seconds while he described his wife and daughter. He referred to them as the “women of my heart.” Erin lifted the handle on her suitcase and considered what he’d said. In the anonymity of the crowded airport, she let her hand rest on her stomach and for the first time in her life stopped wishing for her mother and started to consider what type of mother she would be.

I
n the months since returning to Hill House, Erin found herself still trying to answer that question. The day before the parole hearing, she filched her grandmother’s sewing scissors and cut heavy bangs. “Just wanted a change,” she’d said when Callie witnessed her slipping the shears back into the older woman’s mending basket. In trying to explain, Erin’s voice took on the same thin quality it had when, as a child, she’d been caught getting into any one of her grandmothers’ belongings. Callie took Erin’s chin in her hand and turned her head toward her. Erin shut her eyes against the late winter sun that filtered in the front room.

“I never did like you with bangs. Reminds me of when Bets took you down to Supercuts for a six-dollar haircut and you came back crying, saying you didn’t realize it would stay short.”

Erin pulled away and sat in Anna’s chair. “I was eight. I thought bangs would make me look like a princess.”

“You look all of eight now,” said Callie, taking her knitting from the basket. “Next time use the kitchen shears, you’ll dull the blade on these.”

Erin’s forehead itched. “Fine.”

“Did you clean up the mess in the bathroom? Hair has a way of getting everywhere. Especially with the furnace going all the time, blowing dust onto every surface of this house.”

“I’ll get to it. Thought I’d have some time to myself.” Erin listened to the click of her grandmother’s needles for a bit. She knew Callie expected her to get up immediately and clean the bathroom, but Erin didn’t move. Now that she was having her own child, she felt less compelled to respond to commands. Instead, she tried to get Callie to talk with her about the hearing. “You’re home early. Bets took Anna with her to see Frank. Wanted to get a second visit in, since she can’t go tomorrow.”

Callie didn’t look up from her knitting. “It was a slow day. No one feels like going out after lunch—it gets dark too early. I’m surprised Bets went, she doesn’t drive as well when it is dusk.”

In all the years Deb had been in jail, Callie had never visited, written, or so much as sent a word of greeting, not even when Bets or Anna made their monthly trek to Chowchilla. Erin considered asking again if Callie would come to the hearing. She thought of all the ways she’d asked before, of overhearing Bets tell her that
God doesn’t give do-overs—even to mothers
. The baby turned somersaults in her uterus, and Erin moved to the edge of the chair and stretched her spine. She’d never understood Callie’s decision to excise Deb, her own daughter, from her life.

“Baby’s moving,” she said and reached for her grandmother’s hand. Callie counted out the last row of stitches and set the beginning of a delicate pink bootie aside. They sat quietly with Erin’s hand on Callie’s—moving it when the baby changed places—for several minutes.

“How far along are you now?”

“Doctor said about five months.”

“Have you talked to the father?”

Erin felt herself blush. “A bit. I’m just not ready.”

“They would never say it, but it does bother them. You know this, right? That Anna and Bets just can’t understand how you got yourself into this situation.”

“I guess you understand, though, how people get themselves into this type of situation?” Erin had learned, living with her grandmothers, to meet an attack with an attack.

Callie looked much smaller. “We all understand that. Each one of us, and you’ve gone and grown up on us.”

Erin wasn’t sure whether Callie felt deflated by Erin being an adult or by the reminder that her daughter had also gotten herself knocked up. She considered that there might be sadness in her grandmother that she might never know the cause of. “Had the ultrasound last week,” she said, offering a truce.

“And you still won’t find out whether it’s a girl or not? It would be good to know, for the publicity. I mean, it’s a girl. But to know for sure might help.”

Erin wasn’t frustrated with this push to find out the sex of the baby. The grandmothers had all been anxious to let modern medicine prove their suspicions correct. None of them could understand Erin’s reluctance. The absurdity of lying on the table while the technician slid the sonogram wand around her belly made her laugh. “What’s the use of knowing? You, Anna, and Bets have told me to expect a little girl. It’s in our genes—besides, everything you’ve made the baby is pink. Who would dare mess with all that work? Not even God.”

Callie reached into her pocket for the vial of pills she kept with her and swallowed one. Then she stretched her bad leg out and after leaning back into her chair spoke. “I’m sorry I can’t go. It’s our busiest season, with the casino buses coming in nearly every hour, and I’ve just hired some men to work in the orchard. They’ll need supervising and I—”

“You just said it was slow.”

“Slow today. It gets busier.”

“It’ll always be there. The store isn’t going anyplace, but—” The look of panic that crossed Callie’s face made Erin swallow what she was going to say next. “—It’ll be fine. Just fine.” It wouldn’t be, but she knew when to quit.

Callie rubbed at her leg. “Did you hear about that Lindsey grandchild?”

Erin shook her head and looked out the window as the sun made its slow, steady descent toward the coastal mountains. They gossiped and traded stories about babies and knitting. It was nice to sit and talk as equals, and for a moment she felt a glimmer of hope about becoming a mother. She realized that the light in the room had all but disappeared and pulled the cord to the reading lamp. As she did, her hair came loose from the twist she’d spun it into while they’d been talking.

Callie came at the hearing sideways. “You’ll look even younger if you braid your hair.”

“Gotta pee,” said Erin and left the living room. She hadn’t understood that Callie knew her so well.

She stood in front of the bathroom mirror, plaiting her hair into a single braid and then into two low, loose twists. She worked on different expressions, moving her eyes and mouth around and trying to settle on a look she could wear in the hearing room. One that made her appear vulnerable, like a girl who needed taking care of. The bangs did make her look much younger than twenty-four. It helped that the pregnancy had plumped up her face—gotten rid of her sharp angles. With the darkness of her hair so close to her brow, her own normally light gray eyes appeared darker and, Erin thought, needier.

She started to recite her statement as she brushed bits of black hair that had fallen on the lip of the sink into the bowl. It was important that it not be too rehearsed, but she knew that the appearance of effortlessness took work. She could not trust herself to speak from the heart, which was the only advice Deb’s lawyer had given her. She’d sat in his leatherette chair, staring at his liver-spotted face, and thought that despite the fifty years between them, she knew what he didn’t. The heart was as likely to be full of treachery as of love.