This is Getting Old (9 page)

I started out on a hike with friends, and when the path turned steeply and unexpectedly upward, I had to send them on without me, knowing my knees would not be able to bring me back down. I sat on a rock before returning to the lodge. This was not what we usually think of as a senior moment, but I speak of it here because it was another occasion when the frailty of age dropped me into a gap in time. I listened to my friends' voices, to their twig-snapping and leaf-rustling, until I could hear them no longer. I was cross at my knees for making me miss the companionship, though I knew they hadn't done it on purpose. I watched a yellow leaf twist its way down to the ground, and I heard it land on another leaf. Have you ever heard a leaf land on another leaf? OK—it wasn't the most exciting moment of my life, but it was good enough, and I wasn't missing it.

I say, “I'm having a senior moment” when I blow it, hoping to fend off the irritation of others with humor. But the next time
the blankness comes over me, I'll try to be bold and move beyond self-deprecation. I'll say, “Senior moment, wonderful moment!” in order to remind the people around me of the wisdom that is to be found in these little coffee breaks of the brain.

A friend of mine takes another tack. He tells me he memorizes a stock phrase and keeps it handy to fill the gaps. So, if he's saying to an acquaintance over lunch, “Have you ever noticed that . . .” and he suddenly forgets the rest of the sentence, he brings out his all-purpose phrase: “It's incredibly hard to get the wrapper off a new CD.” Or if he sees two old friends who don't know each other at a party, and their names vanish into the yawning void when the moment comes to introduce them, he shakes hands enthusiastically and says it again: “It's incredibly hard to get the wrapper off a new CD!” Like a pebble striking bamboo in an old Zen koan, his shocking statement offers his listeners a wake-up call to be here now.

It's not my fault when I have a senior moment any more than it was my fault when my hair turned gray. I'm just a human being, after all. I've had a lifetime of junior moments, when one word follows another in logical—and boring—succession, when each action leads to the next appropriate action. For countless years, I have remembered to bring the pencil with me when I go downstairs to use the pencil sharpener. I think I've earned the right to break free from the imprisonment of sequential thinking.

A senior moment is a stop sign on the road of life. It could even be a leg up toward enlightenment. So I stay calm, let the engine idle, and enjoy the scenery. What happens next will be revealed in due course.

PART TWO

Changing Relationships

In the Shade of My Own Tree

W
HEN
I
WAS A CHILD
, we used to play “Old Maid,” matching up pairs of cards until the loser was left with the only card that had no mate—the old maid card. The old maid's spectacles perched at the end of a long bony nose, twigs of hair stuck out from her bun, and she had a big mole on her chin. This image, which it didn't occur to me to question, struck a certain dread in my heart, and now, here I am, an old maid myself. Granted, in the strict sense of the word I'm not a
maid
, but I'm old and not married.

When I was a teenager, the models I had of older single women—we even used the word
spinster
back then—were not much more appealing to me than the old maid card. My high school education in a girls' prep school was delivered to me almost entirely by spinsters. I think of Miss Biddle, Miss Beveridge, Mlle. Casals, and our gym teachers, the Misses Sullivan and Bailey. They all tended to be shaped the same, like boards, with no hips and high shoulders, and I saw them as utterly sexless. They seemed to me to have washed up on the shores of that old-fashioned girls' school like flotsam. A callow teenage girl, I never wondered if they were lonely on Saturday nights.

Now I think of those teachers of mine with affection and sadness.

It's hard to be an older woman without a partner. I know from talking to friends that I'm not the only one who occasionally wakes up in the middle of the night alone in her bed and asks herself:
Wait a minute! How the hell did this happen?
Three in the morning is the loneliest time. What if the Big Earthquake comes right then and I've got no one to hold on to?

The world I live in puts people in pairs. We are taught to think in binary terms, to believe Plato's story that human beings were originally just one sex, and then were divided in two, and ever since, the two halves of one complete being are incomplete until they find each other.

This belief is affirmed by the earnest couples whose faces appear beside each other on book jackets. These experts on finding enlightenment through partnership smile into each other's eyes, and they declare right there on the back cover that the deepest understanding of what it means to be a human being can only be achieved through intimate partnership. Could it be that that's only one of the ways?

Even if you put enlightenment aside, there's still the need for simple animal companionship. When I broke a bone in my left shoulder not so many years ago, I could only sleep on my right side with my injured left arm carefully balanced on my torso like dead weight. When I lay down in bed at night, my good right arm was pinned under me, and it was a miserable moment when I realized that I couldn't do the simple and comforting thing that came next: I couldn't pull the covers up over myself. I felt keenly the absence of a person who had promised to stay with me in sickness and in health, who had vowed before witnesses to pull up the covers. I had to learn to hold the covers in my teeth while I lowered myself down on my good arm.

And those teachers of mine—I wonder now if anyone came to help them when they broke a bone. I wonder if any of them had loving friendships. Were they perhaps lesbians? Might any of
them have chosen not to marry in order to devote their lives to mentoring young women?

One of them, the tiny Miss Punderson, with her sparkling blue eyes and thick white hair in a bun, made a surprising escape from spinsterhood. She had taught Chaucer and Milton to my mother a generation before and seemed to be an immortal spinster. But she retired at age sixty-five, the same year I graduated from the school, returned to her native Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and stunned us by marrying her old friend, the widowed painter Norman Rockwell. Could such a thing possibly happen to me? It's highly unlikely according to statistics; the older a single woman gets the harder it becomes to find a partner.

When my last long-term relationship ended, I was in my mid-fifties. I feared I had passed over a certain invisible threshold and that my marketability was way down. I worried about the critical density of wrinkles on the face, sagginess under the chin, brown spots on the back of the hands. It seemed that this complex arithmetic of signals was registered in a flash by single males of the species, whereupon they would turn away to talk to a younger woman if there was one about. The men my age were getting wattles, too, but I didn't look away from them.

As I anticipated turning sixty, I felt a new sense of urgency. If I really wanted to have a partner, I figured I'd better get busy, before the wrinkles around my mouth branched into my very lips. Afraid of being alone when I was really and truly old, I wanted to find someone who would have me before I moved on from the stage of gently faded gray to the even less marriageable stage of acrid breath. I wanted to find someone who, later on, could push my wheelchair, if it came to that. (I kept forgetting that if I did manage to hook up with a man my age, it might be just in time for me to start pushing
his
wheelchair.)

I embarked on a bout of dating, looking, as a friend put it, for “Codger Right.” I called a dating service that advertised on
the classical music station on the radio, so it had a veneer of propriety. They used to arrange dinners for three men and three women.

The woman who answered the phone asked my age, and when I told her I was fifty-nine she said, in a warm but businesslike voice, “I'm sorry, but currently we're not taking any women over fifty-two.” I asked her what age men they were “taking,” but she wouldn't tell me.

A lesbian couple who are my friends met and fell in love at the age of sixty-five. They told me, “You have plenty of time!” They encouraged me to consider women, reminding me that women generally don't mind the wrinkles as much as men do. I said, “I had some experience with that years ago, and I found out I'm not really a lesbian.” They said, “Sex doesn't have to be all that important. It's nice, but it's a small part of the show.” Still, it didn't seem right to decide to be a lesbian solely because I had despaired of attracting a man.

I consulted the personal ads and set bravely forth on several blind dates. In one of my last efforts, I “went out for coffee” with an enthusiastic hiker and cyclist in his sixties, who did environmental consulting work. He seemed like a nice man. His wife of thirty-four years had died of cancer, and after two years of grieving, he was turning his attention to the world of dating. It made me like him that he had waited those two years.

He asked what had gone wrong with my marriage. That was a long time ago, I said. It was hard to stay married in Berkeley in the seventies. Nobody even believed in marriage.

He wanted to know what had gone wrong with my last relationship. Well, I said, I needed more independence in my life than he could make room for, and he needed more domestic companionship than I could give him.

So what had gone wrong with the relationships in between? I mumbled about being a single mother and the difficulties of balancing the needs of children and a boyfriend.

Then he wanted to know what made me think any relationship was ever going to work. Why was I answering ads? Why had I called him? “I'm just an ordinary person,” he said. “I'm probably not any better than any of the others. Supposing we became involved, why should I imagine you'd want to stay with me?”

That brought me up short. “I hope I've learned from my mistakes,” I said. “How did you stay with your wife all that time?”

“It was the commitment to the marriage,” he said. “We never questioned our commitment, even in the rough times.”

Before he wheeled his bike down the sidewalk, he said he didn't think there was much point in us meeting again.

It was hard, after a conversation like that, not to blame myself.

I called together a group of women friends my age who were single to talk about our situation. I wanted to know how they faced the challenge. We had a potluck lunch and sat in the sun and talked. We shared lonely feelings: “I don't know what my identity is without a partner,” said one. Another said, “I miss the container of a relationship.”

And we encouraged each other, too. One woman said she talked to a good friend every day on the phone, and it helped her feel connected. Another commented, “It occurs to me that the feeling of being in love that I've had at first with so many guys is actually nausea,” and another added, “I need a lot of solitude in order to hear myself think.”

We didn't all feel the same about being single, but we felt connected to each other and we made each other laugh.

It's hard work trying to meet a partner. It generally doesn't happen by itself if you're an older woman and so you have to take the initiative. People used to tell me, “Just let go and that's when it will happen,” but I noticed they stopped saying it when
I got past sixty. You're constantly reaching for a state other than the one you're in, and this, as we know from Buddha and other experts, is the cause of suffering. Joy comes from accepting things as they are, but when you are looking for a mate, you are wishing for something you don't have.

I couldn't completely enjoy the fullness of my life because I always had this partner business in the back of my mind. It wasn't just the feeling of dissatisfaction that got me down; it was the constant strategizing, like making my vacation plans according to where I might meet the most single men. I was too old to sign up for hang-gliding lessons, but a wilderness photography class bore temporary fruit in the form of a dinner date. And then I was reminded again that there's a lot of distance to travel between meeting a guy and setting up house with him.