Just As I Thought (34 page)

Still, I must remind myself, having said all this, that there
is
now a women’s community, women’s communities where women stand still, almost breathless to talk to one another, or gather at home or in meeting places—or in a book like
Women of the Fourteenth Moon,
to listen, to say: This is where
my
trouble is; this is where it hurts. And then someone answers, Me too. And listen. This is what I did about it.

—1991

Upstaging Time

I must tell you that at the first upsurge of a contentious or merely complicated concern, I’m likely to slip into a fictional mode. This is a way of thinking, a habit of thought.

For example: A couple of years ago a small boy yelled out as he threw a ball to a smaller boy standing near me, “Hey, dummy, tell that old lady to watch out.”

What? What lady? Old? I’m not vain or unrealistic. For the last twenty years my mirror seems to have reflected—correctly—a woman getting older, not a woman old. Therefore, I took a couple of the hops, skips, and jumps my head is accustomed to making and began to write what would probably become a story. The first sentence is: “That year all the boys on my block were sixty-seven.”

Then I was busy and my disposition, which tends to crude optimism anyway, changed the subject. Also, my sister would call, and from time to time she’d say, “Can you believe it? I’m almost seventy-eight. And Vic is going on eighty. Can you believe it?” No, I couldn’t believe it, and neither could anyone who talked to them or saw them. They’ve always been about fifteen years older than I, and still were. With such a sister and brother preceding me, it would seem bad manners to become old. My aging (the aging of the youngest) must seem awfully pushy to them.

Actually, they’re both so deep into music, archaeology, Russian-conversation lessons, botany, tutoring high-school students, writing, and remembering for grandchildren and great-nephews and -nieces the story of their Russian-language childhood on Chrystie Street and later in Harlem that they may not notice me trailing them at all.

By the time I returned to that first sentence, the boys had become sixty-nine. Most of them were in decent shape, nice-looking older men—those boys whose war was World War II. (There is a war for every boy—usually given by his father’s generation.)

But two of them were no longer present, having leapt out of the air of the world into the actuarial statistics that insurance companies keep, where men, in death as in life, have a sad edge over women, often leaving them years of widowhood. (This is pointed out to us in a kind of accusatory way, as though this new longevity is due to a particular selfishness on our part—female life-greed.) The fact is that women may well be owed a couple of years of extra time, historically speaking, since our deaths as young women in various ritual torments and in childbirth are well known. The great men of history, it is recorded, have often been forced to use more than one wife—serially speaking—in order to properly and sufficiently reproduce themselves. This was sometimes unpleasant for them, too, though not always.

In spite of this parenthetical interruption I returned to my work and was able to write the next sentence of what may still become a story: “Two years later, two of the boys had died and my husband said, ‘Well, I’d better take this old-age business a little more seriously.’” So we did.

[Poem to Prove Seriousness]

Questions

Do you think old people should be put away?

the one red rheumy eye the pupil goes back

                                  
and back

the hands are scaly

         
do you think all that should be hidden

do you think young people should be seen

                                  
so much on Saturday night

hunting and singing in packs the way they do

standing on street corners looking this way

                                  
and that

or the small children who are visible all the time

                                  
everywhere

and have nothing to do but be smart

but be athletes

but jump

but climb high fences

       
do you think hearts should sink

       
do you think the arteries ought to crumble

       
when they could do good

because the heart was made to endure

       
why does it not endure?

       
do you think this is the way it should be?

Dialogue

Don’t you think that poem was kind of gloomy?

But don’t you have to be truthful?

There’s more to getting older than that. What about friendship? All that special energy—you’ve written about it yourself. What about experience and wisdom?

But did you really want me to say it was all okay and zippy? Still, you may be right, a little bit. Because for me, I’m well, my children are well, my stepchildren are well. And as I pointed out, even my oldest siblings, with terrifying surgical memories and arteries sticky with the bakeries of the Upper West Side, offer high examples of liveliness, interest in the world, and hope for tomorrow. This is proven by purchases of long season subscriptions to concerts and ballets and the determination to proceed to those events with whatever spiritual and physical equipment is working. So you are right. Several years ago my sister bought me, for my fifty-fifth birthday, ten Arthur Murray ballroom dancing lessons with her favorite partner.

Okay, so now you agree that poem was gloomy.

You’re right, and you’re wrong, and anyway, that’s not the point. The point is that if you insist on saying that old age is only a slightly different marketplace of good looks, energy, and love, you insult lots of others. For instance, I’m not poor. I’m a white woman in a middle-class life, and even there some luck usually has to apply. Also, when I need to knock wood I can just run out my door to a little forest of maple and hemlock to knock on the best living wood for my luck. Also, I’m not alone in this world, I’m not without decent shelter.

All right, I see what you’re saying. But people do need to be encouraged. Why won’t you admit it? We only want you to be a little upbeat. It’s not against your nature.

Okay. I’ll try from now on. But I might, just once, slip.

The Relativity of Age

About sixteen years ago at the beginning of the energetic prime of my fifties, in Chile, in the town of Quillota, a few months before the Pinochet coup, the death of Allende, we met a man with an attaché case full of American bills. He was a trucker with a small pickup. “Come to my house,” he said, loving Americans. “Here’s a picture of my children. I had fourteen. Twelve live.”

We came to his dusty courtyard, on which the American cash had not yet gone to work. “This is my beautiful daughter,” he said, introducing us. “She’s eighteen. That’s my wife.” He pointed to an old woman leaning on the outdoor washbasin. She turned away. “Sick,” he said. She was thirty-five years old.

*   *   *

In an honest effort to cheer up I asked one of my students to interview any older woman who happened to be passing the stoop where she and I were sitting talking about the apartment situation in New York. She was the kind of kid who’s loaded with initiative. She began at once:

Student Interviewer: Excuse me, ma’am. How do you keep busy?

Older Woman: What do you mean by that? I work. I have to keep my place decent. I take care of my aunt. Her kids moved to California. By the way, you don’t seem to be doing too much yourself except interfering with us promenaders.

S.I.: Do you
feel
old?

O.W.: Well, middle age in this country comes so late, if it wasn’t for the half fares, I’d never give it up.

S.I.: Do you have many friends?

O.W.: Well, I guess I do. We’ve been meaning to get together and have this group—this women’s group on getting older. You know, everything that happens—some things are interesting and some things are not so hot. But the truth is, we’re too busy. Every time we say we’re going to get it together, two people have a long job to finish. It’s a good idea, though.

S.I.: Do you live with your family?

O.W.: My family doesn’t live with
me.
They already have lived with me a number of years.

S.I.: Who do you live with?

O.W.: My lover.

S.I.: Oh. So you’re still interested in sex, that means.

O.W.: Yes, I am.

S.I. (
shyly
): Would you elaborate?

O.W.: Not to you.

What It’s Like

You may begin to notice that you’re invisible. Especially if you’re short and gray-haired. But I say to whom? And so what? All the best minorities have suffered that and are rising nowadays in the joy of righteous wrath.

Some young people will grab your elbow annoyingly to help you off and on the curb at least fifteen years before you’d want them to. Just tell them, “Hands off, kiddy.” Some others with experience in factional political disputes fear the accusation of ageism and, depending on their character, either defer to you with a kind look or treat you cruelly as an equal. On the other hand, people do expect wise and useful remarks—so, naturally, you offer them. This is called the wisdom of the old. It uses clichés the way they ought to be used, as the absolute truth that time and continuous employment have conferred on them.

You are expected to be forgetful. You are. At least as forgetful as you have always been. For instance, you lose your eyeglasses. You have lost your eyeglasses all your life. You have lost your keys, as well as other people’s, frequently. It was once considered a charming if expensive eccentricity, proving that your head was in the literary clouds it was supposed to be in. Your family is not too rude, but you don’t like the way they look at each other. Pretty soon you stop mislaying your keys—not altogether, but enough to prove you could have always done so.

You are expected to forget words or names, and you do. You may look up at the ceiling. People don’t like this. They may say, “Oh come on, you’re not listening.” You’re actually trying to remember their names.

While he could still make explanations, my father explained to me that the little brain twigs, along with other damp parts of the body, dry up, but that there is still an infinity of synaptic opportunities in the brain. If you forget the word for peach (“A wonderful fruit,” he said), you can make other pathways for the peach picture. You can attach it to another word or context, which will then return you to the word “peach,” such as “What a peachy
friend,
” or springtime and peach
blossoms.
This is valuable advice, by the way. It works. Even if you’re only thirty, write it down for later.

My father wanted—in general—to tell me how to grow old. I thought that the restoration of those lost words was almost enough, but he had also taken a stand against wrinkles. He applied creams assiduously to the corners of his mouth and his heels. I did not, when I could, pay enough attention, and now I’m sorry, though it’s probably a scientific fact that your genes have got you by the shortening muscles of your throat as well as the number of hairs time leaves on your head.

Soon it was too late to ask him important questions and our conversations happened in the world where people say, “Is that a story or a fact?”

A Story or a Fact

He had fallen, hurt his head, where time is stored. When he spoke, he made the most direct connections. If I listened, I heard his mind taking the simplest synaptic opportunity and making a kind of poem in that necessity. Follow him for a moment, please.

“Come into the room,” my father called to me, “come into the room. I have located your second husband,” he said. “I have just located him. Not only his body, but his mind. We talked over there on the couch. Does he want my money? Why does he think he can wear old clothes? I have an extra suit. Give it to him. Well, this is the way we are made—getting old—the problem of old men. The problem of old women—we can talk about that later; I’m not interested.

“Do you know these women? The ones I live with in this house. The one who makes my supper, the one that lives in someone’s room—the person that’s missing. (I told you someone very important was missing. Who? Mama?) Last night they made a party. Very wild music. Not unpleasant, but not usual. Some others came. Men who talked nicely. The women invited me to their party and they said why not dance; they offered me a chance to—well, you know what. I said to them, ‘Can’t you see how old I am.’ Look, I told them they were very handsome women, not to be insulted. But I’m old. I had to explain to them. Feelings can be hurt.” Old, he said. Without sadness, but apologetically, as though it were an offense, not the sorrow of human life.

Interviewer: Why did you tell me this story?