What Comes Next and How to Like It

by Abigail Thomas

  The smell of horse manure wafted over on a breeze from the hansom cabs parked on Fifty-Ninth Street, and sometimes we could hear the clopping hooves. I asked Chuck if he was filled with longing the way I was. A chronic longing I didn’t understand.

  He nodded.

  “What is it,” I asked, “what are we longing for?”

  “There is only the longing,” he answered.

  One lunch hour we were too depressed to sit down. We wandered over to the Tisch Children’s Zoo, where we came upon three little pigs eating shit. We patted them, smelled our hands afterward, and moved on to goats. Chuck noted that goats were particularly dumb, but delicious roasted. I told the goat never mind and it started eating my skirt through the fence. It was a pretty day.

  On the way back to work I bought a paper snake on a stick for a dollar and Chuck grabbed it away, and practiced the wrist action, getting the snake to strike in the air all the way back to work, cheering us up.

  Jennifer’s Blog

  Jen started a blog a few years ago. It’s called Cautionary Trails. Sometimes I’m in the blog, and every once in a while I say, “Oh, can’t you put in the part where I made a cake?” and she answers, “Mom, you write your own blog.” Ugh. Another writer in the family. She writes about the difficulties of being the single parent of twins, of feeling off to the side, of being disorganized. She writes about what she feeds her kids (elaborate delicious dishes hiding all kinds of healthy things like carrots and kale in biscuits and pancakes), and occasionally she writes about men. Here’s one of my favorites:

  the man in the store

  We are visiting my mother. It’s where my kids are happiest. It rains and then it’s sunny and then it rains again. This afternoon when they were drawing Ralphie called out, “Mommy, how do you spell ‘boring’?” I thought he was writing in his diary but he was making a joke poster about Violet. They’re having a good time.

  I drove to the place with the handsome man for a sandwich. I do not have a crush on him but damn he’s good-looking. He asked me if I was related to Abby and I answered yes, I’m her daughter. As I spoke a chip fell out of my mouth. He kept talking and things kept falling. A pepperoncini from my sandwich, a potato chip onto my lap, something onto the floor, and so on. I held my stomach in and hoped my arms weren’t looking too chubby.

  Even when there’s no interest on either side one’s coordination completely disappears in the presence of beauty.

  Jen always calls when she’s finished another piece and reads it to me. I never pretend to love something I don’t. She trusts me. I think she is a marvelous writer. Sometimes she says, “Mom, why is it that only you and I laugh at this?” I am proud of her.

  Time

  I think about time differently since I got to be this old. I think of each moment as a big La-Z-Boy, or perhaps a hammock, and the only direction is a little back and forth, or side to side. For this I need peace and quiet, and I eschew all outside stimulation. Perhaps this is why the future escapes me.

  I love my twelve grandchildren, but they function (as do their parents) on linear time. When they visit, I mobilize. I bake my cookies; I bake ginger snaps and chocolate chips and cornmeal sugar cookies and shortbread. I bake big chewy chocolate cookies. I give everyone two at a time. Why not? You only live once. I notice that with small children everything is a beeline to the next thing. No time for lolling about, which is what I do best. I call myself a writer, but I am stone lazy.

  I appreciate that the advantage of getting old is you don’t want to mess around anymore. In order not to want what I don’t really want, I am careful about the movies I watch and I play music only in the car. When I watch a movie I don’t want to cry or be moved or enlightened and I don’t want to be turned on. There are movies I cannot watch, or watch more than once. I saw the one about Woodstock, and it took me almost two years to get over Viggo Mortensen. I bought the DVD because I loved it so much, but I never opened it. It has sat on the shelf for four years. I like movies with good guys and bad guys and a lot of big guns. I do not want anything stirred up that I can’t handle by myself.

  When the twins came over Christmas I baked cookies and roasted sweet potatoes and chickens and simmered my stews. I loved it when the babies climbed into my lap. After a week of two sets of two-year-old twins having a really good time, I decided it was time to leave the house. “Time to flee” were my exact words to myself. I realized that my gynecologist had died fifteen years ago and thought it prudent to find a new one right now this minute and so I did. I made an appointment with a nice woman doctor. “See you later,” I said to my family and drove away.

  I thought I’d be safe at the gynecologist’s.

  The nice doctor examined me inside and out and then called me into her office. The doctor sat behind a desk. It was a pleasant room with water trickling over stones in a plug-in fountain. She needed to ask a few questions. I nodded.

  “Have you had more than one sexual partner?” the doctor asked. Outside, sun was shining on the snow. This was not the question I was expecting.

  “Yes,” I said. Land sakes, yes.

  “More than five?”

  “Quite a few more,” I said, as modestly as I could. I didn’t want to appear to be bragging, so I added, by way of explanation, “It was the sixties.”

  “Have you ever had a sexually transmitted disease?” was the next question. It seemed a little nosy, but I answered truthfully.

  “Yes,” I said. But now I was remembering how I got it and who I gave it to, and it was Washington Square and I was young and slender and barefoot and it was l968 all over again.

  Damn, I thought.

  It turned out that Medicare will pay for certain yearly exams if you have had more than five sexual partners. Who knew?

  But now, instead of being safe and sound and insulated against desire (shudder), I was suddenly thinking other kinds of thoughts, having other kinds of memories. I went and bought Guitar Town by Steve Earle instead of listening to my better self, and I even played it indoors because when I got home the kids were out. After a bit, and despite my new relationship with time, I began to experience impatience. One song at a time was taking too long. I began to wonder if there wasn’t some way I could cram all this music in at once. Oh hell.

  That’s called fucking.

  Old Lady

  I have to stop smoking. My driver’s license needs renewing in 2015 and will last another ten years and I am struck by the thought that if I keep smoking a pack a day I may expire before it does. I put on my nicotine patches and hope for the best.

  Now I am sitting in the window of Bread Alone while my car gets inspected at the Mobil station, which reminds me again of mortality and the worry that I may die before I’m ready. I should get out more often, I’m thinking now, pouring half-and-half and four tablespoons of sugar into my iced coffee. I’m still sitting in the window and I’m watching men in the rental unit of Houst & Son fiddling with engines and backing up huge tractors into tiny spaces, and one of the guys is smoking, and I calculate that my youngest grandchildren would be only fourteen if I died at seventy-­seven and I want to see who they turn out to be. My oldest grandchild is twenty-five; the youngest twins will be four in February. They are all so interesting, but I don’t get to live forever.

  It isn’t just the dying part; it’s the thought of the day coming when I will have already been dead five, ten, two hundred years. All those centuries piling on top of me, like so many fallen trees. The fact that I will neither know nor care is of little comfort because I’m not, as yet, dead. The only cure for the fear of death is death.

  If I make it to seventy-seven, the license after that will last until I’m eighty-six, but maybe by then I won’t be driving anymore. I imagine my kids hiding my car keys the way my sisters and I hid our mother’s car keys after six months of tolerating her driving at four miles per hour and coming to a complete stop at every lig
ht, including the green ones. We could live with that.

  But then one day our mother came home saying she thought she had run over something. She didn’t know what it was. She was shaking. She said “child.” There were branches down from a storm, we reminded her, but she could not be comforted, no matter how many times we said that in our tiny community we would know the instant something terrible happened.

  So my sisters and I whispered together in our mother’s kitchen and then we snuck the car keys out of her bag and hid them in the bookcase on top of James Thurber and that was that, because Dreesen’s Market delivered, and our mother never wanted to leave the house anymore anyway, but spent her days sitting in our father’s old chair feeding her little dog cheese and chocolate no matter how we railed against it. “But the dog loves it,” our mother said, breaking off another piece, after all she had survived eighty-plus years on cheese and chocolate herself.

  All of which leads me to wonder what kind of old lady I will be. I’m already well past middle age unless I plan to live to 136, and a student recently described me as a “nice old lady with a tattoo,” which startled me because I think of myself as not nice, not old, nor a lady. Didn’t she see me smoking? and downing shots of tequila? Not to mention all the flirting that went on between me and that nice man to whom I took an instant liking? I don’t feel like an old lady unless this is how an old lady feels.

  Connective Tissue

  Catherine was explaining to her boys, then aged four, about the long journey from Philadelphia, where they lived, to Woodstock. “It’s made of many different legs,” she said, “think of the journey as made of different legs. The New Jersey Turnpike, the New York Thruway, Route Twenty-Eight . . .”

  They were on Route 6 at the time. “Is this a leg?” they asked.

  “No,” she said, “this is more like connective tissue.” And those words struck both boys as screamingly funny. They began laughing, and for days after, one of them said to the other “connective tissue” and the insane laughter began again.

  Belize

  Chuck and I went with our friend Ann to Belize. It was lovely, the sea a few steps away, the skies a deep blue, the food delicious. “There are two kinds of people,” Chuck said. He and I were sitting on the deck, that first day, already homesick. “There are those who count the days left of vacation, and those who count the days until they get to go home. That’s us.”

  My room had ants on the floor, great big ones, the kind you imagine ride motorcycles and swing chains. Chuck sprayed them while I stood on my bed. His bed upstairs had biting creatures, maybe bedbugs. Every morning he woke covered with welts.

  “You can sleep in my bed, if you want to,” I said.

  “You’ve been trying to get me in your bed for years, Abigail,” he said, laughing.

  “You wish,” I said.

  Machismo. Machisma.

  Ocean

  I’ve been trying to make an ocean. For some reason it never works. So I make another forest, which also doesn’t work, but I don’t give up on forests, so I scrape and add various blues and greens to make more trees, but it’s still not to my liking. Some days are like this. I do a little halfhearted scraping, turn it over, and presto, there is the ocean, beautiful, many colors blue, deep water, no sky. I love the way this crazy shit works. When you’ve given up, when you least expect it, there it is.

  My Will

  I made a will, feeling like an adult when it was done. Pretty much everything equally divided. Catherine told me she was carrying Augie around the yard, whispering, “One day all of this will be partially yours.”

  Hair

  Catherine’s boys have fine hair that tangles in the back. I watch as she tries in vain to pull a brush through the curls. Her sons protest, wriggling and complaining. We are sitting outside the kitchen in what I laughingly refer to as the patio, full of mismatched chairs, faulty tables, and dead plants. Catherine often declares that one of the most traumatic moments in her childhood was a day when my sister Judy and I tried to get the tangles out of her hair with a bottle of Tame, failed, and, as a last resort, cut her hair. “You and Judy threw me in the shower and then you cut off all my hair!”

  I had no good answer, just that it had to be done.

  “Why didn’t you brush it more often?” she may have said, or at least implied. “You wouldn’t let me,” I replied, or thought of replying. I smile now, as she gives up and the boys run off to ride their bikes or play with the hose, or climb the kitchen steps in order to jump off. “Watch me fly,” they call now, their arms perpendicular at the sides of their bodies. “Watch, I am flying,” they cry, and they zoom up and down the driveway.

  Cell Phone

  Sometimes Chuck’s cell phone calls and I find a message consisting of him having lunch with other people or who knows what. I can hear muffled voices and silverware clinking on plates. These messages go on for so long that the lugubrious voice tells me I have seventeen seconds left of message-receiving time.

  Today I get another call from Chuck. “Hello? Hello?” I yell, but all I hear are rustlings and mutterings, which means I am in his jacket or on the front seat of the car or I’m on the Number One train headed downtown when somebody heavy sits next to him. “Hello, hello,” I yell again, and miraculously he picks up.

  “How long have you been listening to me?” Chuck asks.

  “About thirty-five years,” I say.

  Sixteen Again

  It was fun while it lasted, and it lasted three hours and forty-five minutes, from six-forty-five until ten-thirty. That’s when the restaurant closed. It wasn’t a blind date because I’d seen him around, first at Yum Yum, a tiny restaurant in Woodstock, where he looked gentle and gallant, and next at an art opening, where he looked angry. I was struck by his angular face, and asked my friend Bar if she knew who he was. She nodded, saying she thought he was a sculptor. “I love the way he looks,” I said. A week later he turned up in the audience of a concert Bar gave (she is a wonderful singer-songwriter), and afterward she told him she knew a woman who’d like to meet him, but that the woman was shy. “Tell her that if she doesn’t call I won’t eat for a week,” he said, which charmed the hell out of us. He (let’s call him Luther) gave Bar his number and email so I could get in touch. The telephone was more than I could handle, so I emailed. We made plans to meet the following Monday.

  The best way to prepare for an evening out when you’re pushing seventy is to put the blue eyeliner on before you make coffee in the morning. Eyeliner always looks best after being napped in, blinked on, and showered with, and over the span of a day achieves the smudgy look so prized by Egyptians. The same is true for blush. Put a lot of it on early, and as the day passes it may begin to look natural. I recently found out that if your face is as lined as mine it is better to use cream than powder. I had always thought it was the other way around. “Put it on the apples of your cheeks,” said the pretty young woman who had also asked as tactfully as she could if I spent a lot of time in the sun.

  “Every chance I get,” I told her.

  By six-forty-five both blush and eyeliner looked perfect. I wore a black skirt and a red velvet shirt and my best flowered Betsey Johnson tights, since my ankles are now my best feature. I showed up on time. Three young women were ahead of me in line, whispering, then one turned around and shyly declared me her favorite writer. I thanked her, we blushed, and they were shown to their table. What a lovely way to begin an evening, I thought. Oh, I wish Luther had seen it, I thought.

  I had prepared myself to see Luther’s face fall when we met, but he betrayed no disappointment or surprise. Hello and hello, a pleasant shaking of hands, we took a seat at the bar. He was handsome. His shoulders were like great big folded angel wings. He was tall. His face was bony and also very deeply lined, and he looked as if he made things. We ordered drinks. I had a Manhattan, he had a ginger ale. When did you stop drinking? I wondered, because he didn’t
look like a man who’d been ordering ginger ale all his life. Was I hungry? Oh yes. We moved to a table by the window overlooking the icy creek I can never remember the name of.

  I think I loved him from the moment he looked at the menu, read “petit rack of lamb,” and asked the waitress how big the portion was going to be. “That’s just what they call the way they cut the chops,” she explained, “nothing to do with size.” He had the lamb, and I forget what I had. (I never forget what I have.) We talked about making things, we talked about how he began a sculpture, “with a gesture,” he said, swooping his arm in the air. We talked about what he did after the gesture part was over, and what he did was a lot like what I do with writing, figure out what it’s all about by heading off in different directions, and it was all very exciting. He talked about the boring suburb where he grew up, and how in his early twenties he had become a wilderness leader. Then, when he was proficient at everything—rivers, mountains, rock climbing—“there was nothing left,” he said, “but to take acid and go into the woods.”

  Acid scares me to death, and so do the woods. I asked if he’d ever had a bad trip. He shook his head. “The trick is to get out of the house in time,” he said.

  “When did you stop drinking?” I asked.

  “Eight years ago,” he said.

  We looked out the window at the creek, the shifting patterns of dark water and thin pale ice, and the flat rocks on the bank. “I have already recorded the shape and color of those stones,” he said. This reminded me of The Bourne Identity when Matt Damon told Franka Potente: “I can tell you the license plate numbers of all six cars outside,” but I didn’t say so.