Somebody bought us a round of drinks; the waitress wouldn’t tell us who, they wanted to be anonymous. I thought maybe it was the nice young woman who had spoken to me earlier. “No tip unless you tell us,” Luther said, but she kept her secret. I kept wanting to lean across the table and kiss him. “Hold still,” I wanted to say. I haven’t felt like that in twenty years. We were still talking when we realized the restaurant was closing. We split the bill, got up to leave. He introduced me to two friends still at the bar, both of whom were named John. Then we left. He peered into the back of my car and mentioned something about the dog food there. “I’d love to do this again,” I said, and he said something I didn’t hear because I was opening the car door.
I got home and called Bar. “I had the best time,” I said. “I just love him.”
I never saw him again. I emailed him after a day or two saying I hoped he’d had as good a time as I had, and asking him a quick question about something he’d said. “Who was it you said said ‘Man wants but little here below but wants that little long’? Was it Oliver someone?” Of course I knew the answer.
His reply was brief. “Yes, Goldsmith, but not but, it’s nor.” Not another word.
Oh my god, I thought. You’re a dick! But being seventy has its advantages. I did not spend any time wondering what I’d done wrong, or what I could or should have done differently, whether I was too old or too fat or ask too many questions. I am who I am and it has taken me a long time to get here. But part of me was sad, because I liked him, and we did have a good time. It was like an island you stumble on with a stranger, and you spend a few pleasant hours together there, but you can never find the island again. I ached a little.
But then, oh god, I suddenly remembered waiting for a glimpse of Tony Wallace as he drove up or down the hill outside our house. It was 1956, I think. I swear I could hear his car coming forty miles away, and I’d rush to the window hoping for a glimpse of his elbow sticking out the driver’s side if he was driving up the hill, or a girl in the passenger seat when he was driving down. Either way I was filled with love and longing, an ache that was almost pain. Tony was tall and gentle and beautiful with sad sad eyes. He was older than I was. He had asked me out a few times, and it was he who taught me how to French-kiss on that hill overlooking the Hudson, the smell of wisteria everywhere, but finally I was just too young. Oh, Tony, is all I’m thinking now.
Where are you?
Sarah’s Reaction
Where does Luther live, Mom?” she asked. “I want to kill him.”
Vacation in Jamaica, 2010
One morning, just in time to avoid stepping on it, I saw on the veranda outside my bedroom door what looked at first like a pale nut, or a small wooden knob off a child’s toy, but which turned out on closer inspection to be a snail. It just sat there. There was no clue as to where it was going, or where it had been, it might as well have dropped from the sky. I took a shower and brushed my teeth, and when I opened the door again the snail was making its slow way under a table. I watched. Its silvery track vanished on the green veranda floor in the morning heat like the vapor trail evaporating behind a jet in the sky, although the comparison messed with my sense of time and proportion. I didn’t want anyone to step on what I had begun to think of as my snail, but it was headed for safety, and I went across the street to look at the beach. I was glad it was morning. My nights are crowded with worry and fear, the old timor mortis back in action.
I sat on the stone jetty surrounded by the water, wondering if that shade of blue even has a name. Cerulean? Teal? Turquoise? Nothing covers it. Then I ached for two of my children who were going through hard times. Then I thought about hurricanes. Then I wondered if I had to decide between looking at blue or green for eternity, which would I choose? Then I wondered how to paint those clouds. Then my thoughts were of no more consequence than little sticks floating in the water. It was a sweet hour.
I went back to the house and got a cup of the most delicious coffee I’ve ever tasted and I sat on the back porch and a few feet away a large shiny brown cockroach was staggering through the grass, very uncockroach-like, they are ordinarily such lithe creatures. Moments later, it tipped forward headfirst into a tiny declivity, dead as a doornail.
Insecticide, I thought, and looked around for my shoes.
“What’s the life expectancy of a snail?” I asked my friends, and they set to work. Some live for five years, we discovered. That’s a long time to be a snail.
After breakfast, I went back to my room. My bed had been made, my clothes folded, towels hung neatly on the rack, but the snail was gone. I looked for traces, but there were none; I looked under the table, and on the legs of the table. I looked on the sides of the house and the walls of the porch. I examined the sturdy mahogany shutters. Nothing. I wondered if one of the beautiful slow-moving women who keep this place shipshape had swept it up and away. Where does it make its home? I wondered, then realized that it was already in its fragile residence. Which reminded me that with or without a roof over our heads, or a veranda under our feet, so are we.
Spatulas
A winter afternoon spent in bed, the arthritis in my hip hurting and me too lazy to find the Advil. Rosie sleeps with me, jamming her spine into my shoulder. Ah. Heavenly. My houseful of company has gone, bed is where I am headed. Lovely. My sister Eliza calls. How was my date? she asks. “It was wonderful,” I tell her, “but he’s not interested in another.” Eliza knows not to ask too many questions. It took me two days to get over Luther, and it’s already boring.
She is going to watch a movie but won’t tell me its name because she says she likes chick flicks and is too embarrassed to tell me which ones.
“How can you be embarrassed,” I say, “when you know I have watched every Transporter movie five times?” I love Jason Statham. She still refuses to tell me. We are both yawning during our conversation, a lot of yawns, like something fluid we are both bathing in, or tennis. “I am going to watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” I tell her and she says maybe she will too and I say “I’m up to Spike, oh yum,” and she says she meant the movie. She doesn’t watch series because they would keep her up too late.
We hang up. I go upstairs to check my email (nothing) and climb into bed, but the phone rings and I rush downstairs to pick it up. It is my sister again.
“Do you know what I’m doing instead of watching a chick flick?” she asks.
“What?” I say.
“I am looking at spatulas on Amazon. There are thousands of them, and they all have hundreds of ratings,” and she starts her hysterical laugh, the one I love, and she goes on, “and I’m reading every one,” more laughter. “It’s so hard to find a flexible spatula,” she says, her voice rising a little, and I am laughing now and thinking actually I have a flexible one and maybe I can find one for my sister for Christmas, and she is saying, “They are all so stiff,” and then we both collapse in hysterics.
Uh-oh
I am becoming the kind of old lady who puts her lipstick on crooked and wears too much blush—of whom when she wakes in the morning and goes downstairs to make coffee, her daughter says, “Mom, you look crazy,” and it’s only partly because of her hair, which sticks up in bunches like feathers. The kind of old woman who can’t remember the word “pastels” speaking of the chalk you draw with and forgets where she put her bag her keys her glasses her book but can remember Steve Buscemi’s name and two of his movies: Con Air and Fargo.
Names I Forget
Robert Duvall
Gene Hackman
Julia Stiles (I always want to call her Clementine)
Bill Paxton
Someone else I can’t remember
Roy Orbison
Late Fall
Late fall, and the color is gone. This is the season of bare trees, the kinds of trees my sister Judy describes as looking as if they died of fright. A perfect description. Judy should be a writ
er, I nag her all the time. “If you’re not going to use it, I am,” I say, but I’m careful to give credit.
The leaves this year were glorious yellows and reds and browns, but a few along Tinker Street (and one you could see only from Cumberland Farms) were a deep shade of rose. Rose! You had to gasp. But except for those moments of painfully beautiful color, I haven’t felt like shouting, can’t think of anything to write or paint (I don’t know how to do autumn), and nothing more has occurred to me recently about failure, except that it’s failure.
But when it gets dark, I’m off the hook. The day is officially rolled up and put away. I’m free to watch movies or stare at the wall, no longer holding myself accountable for what I might or might not have gotten done because the time for getting something done is over until tomorrow.
My chair is worn and comfortable, my dog Rosie is lying on the pillow behind my back, like a warm shawl. All three dogs are snoring in different registers, the two clocks tick out of sync, and I am simply enjoying being in this room alive. My body thrums with pleasure. Everything I look at I love. Just as I’m wondering if there are any cement nails lying around so I can hammer this old wooden wheel into the mortar, it hits me that these bricks are going to outlast me. Ditto the wooden wheel. This room, and almost everything in it, it’s all going to be here after I die. The pleasure leaves my body. I feel a marked detachment from my surroundings, a cooling of affection for these objects. I am experiencing my own absence, and the room without me in it is just any old room, its details of no consequence. I get one of those awful moments when I feel nothing at all.
Then thank god Harry farts one of his room-clearing farts and I have to put the scarf over my nose and I get up and find The Bourne Identity and stick it in the DVD player and the unfeeling retreats, but doesn’t disappear. Once you’ve felt this, you can’t unfeel it. Once the carnal knowledge of your own death has jumped you, your innocent days are over. You can’t put the shit back in the pig.
Remains
I have decided that when I’m dead I’d like my body in the woods under a light coating of leaves. That being against the law, maybe I will go for cremation. I ask Chuck what he wants done with his remains.
“Remains?” says Chuck. “Do there have to be remains? Can’t I just vanish? Be no more?”
I tell him I’m sorry but yes, he has to have remains.
“Either I’m too young to be thinking about this,” he says, “or I have to figure out a way of offing myself that will leave no remains. I could get in the shower with a chain saw,” he says, “and limit the cleanup.”
I don’t say anything. “Or I believe some sort of explosive device might do the trick,” he says, but I point out there will be remains anyway.
“It’s better than being carried away in a zippered black bag and then burned,” he says. This is uncomfortably real. I’m just poking at death with a long stick to see what happens.
Eggs
This morning, I woke up, let the dogs out, made the coffee, and put the fire on in the fireplace. I cover myself in my ratty old knitted blanket and I’m just sitting here on this dark morning and the clouds are gray and darker gray and I think, God, gray, how many grays there are! So now I’m thinking black stems and gorgeous white flowers and a dark gray sky and a big pale moon? Or gray stems and black sky? Blue stems or mix green with black stems or what, I can’t decide; the only things that stay the same are the gorgeous white flowers almost like midnight moths or butterflies, luscious like the fat juiciness of lichee fruit, or gardenias, and I know I can make these and I jump up and first write this down lest it get lost and now I’m heading out back to look at my eleven-by-fourteen piece of glass until it tells me what it wants to be.
Later, on a piece of plate glass thirty by fourteen that used to be a shelf in the Golden Notebook’s children’s section, I make a row of fried eggs with gorgeous yellow yolks.
It is now three days later and I have made dozens of eggs. I can’t stop. I want the world to see them. The eggs are turning me into an entrepreneur. I don’t want to sell them, but I am thinking of ways I could.
One Difference
One difference between painting and writing is that when I’m done with a painting and I love it, I don’t care what anyone else thinks. If someone comes into my studio and says only “My, you’ve been busy,” I don’t take it out on my paintings. I simply never ask this person over for coffee again.
No Stiff Necks
Here’s what I love about dogs. They aren’t careful not to disturb you. They don’t overthink. They jump on the bed or the sofa or the chair and plop down. They come and they go. I’m not sure they love me exactly, but they count on me because I am a source of heat and food and pleasure and affection. If one of them is lying next to me and suddenly prefers the sofa, I don’t take it personally. Dogs don’t wake up on the wrong side of the bed. There is no wrong side of the bed for a dog.
I used to lie in a lover’s arms getting a stiff neck, or needing to scratch my nose, or losing all sensation in my arm, unwilling to move lest the man find out I wasn’t comfortable in his embrace. I spent hours hyperventilating in the arms of my soon to be second husband, feeling claustrophobic and terrified, yet unable to free myself lest I disturb his sleep. Would Snow White have rested all eight pounds of her head on any part of the prince? I doubt it, and I never did either. Sarah says that is why elderly women have such prominent cords in their necks.
Deaf
Harry is going deaf. Still, he lifts his head to monitor a scent drifting through the closed but leaky windows and up he gets, creakily, and off he limps to the back door to strut what remains of his stuff. He has never learned to negotiate the dog door flap, so I rise, also creakily, to let him out. The other two, Rosie and Carolina, who were awakened by Harry, have already zoomed past us into the yard, noses to the ground. Rosie’s hearing even at eleven is fine. She can hear me open my eyes. Carolina is all about her nose. I love their enthusiasm. Sometimes I see Rosie rolling on her back in the ice-crusted snow, all four legs pawing at air, having a ball. Carolina can howl for hours, which is admirable, but a mixed blessing. I think it’s because she can’t complete the circuit. Whatever varmint traipsed through the yard last night passed over the underground electrical fence that keeps Carolina in the yard. So she has to keep going back over old ground, running in circles. No payoff.
My hearing is no longer keen either. A goldfish coming to the surface of the bowl blowing bubbles used to keep me awake. Now I watch American movies with the subtitles on; I cup my hand behind my ear when sitting with a murmurer, and cup my hands behind both ears in a restaurant, but the loss has been incremental so it’s no big deal. The curious thing is that, as if to make up for what I’m missing, I am now hearing things that aren’t happening: voices, conversations, messages left on my answering machine that aren’t there when I run downstairs to retrieve them. Maybe what I am hearing are ghosts of conversations. Today from the bottom of my pocketbook while I was unpacking groceries I heard a man’s voice saying something that sounded pleasant but when I dug to the bottom, my cell phone was off. No message. No record of a new call. I can accept this. Stranger things have happened. I tell Catherine, who has come for tea. She is alarmed. “Mom,” she says. “Maybe you should have a CT scan.”
“Don’t worry,” I say, putting a PG Tips tea bag in her mug. “It’s been happening for years. It’s not getting worse. Besides, I’m not hearing voices, I’m overhearing them. I just don’t know what they are saying.”
I’m also losing my memory. Great chunks are falling away, like cliffs into the sea. I never had a good memory, so the loss of a name or a month or what I am doing in the kitchen (living room bedroom dining room yard) is familiar. Telephone conversations after nine at night seem to be lost forever. What I read last week, vanished. What I read yesterday, pretty much ditto. But this evening I asked my grandson Joe what he did today and he told me. Four minutes la
ter I asked him what he did today. Joe is twenty-six, and kind, and he began to tell me again. “Oh god,” I said, interrupting him, “I’m so sorry. I think my brain is erasing itself.”
“I forget all the time,” said Joe, “I forgot . . .” and then he told me something he forgot, which I’ve forgotten.
He is very nice to have around. He has been living with me about a month now, and his brother Sam visits often. They are in their twenties figuring out their lives. I keep wanting to say, “Forget career, forget the future, forget existential worries, just get yourselves a couple of dogs, and everything will be all right.” The way I remember how long they’ve been here is by the number of meals I have actually cooked. I still have a good memory for food. Pork tenderloin, lamb stew, chicken soup with dumplings, roast chicken with carrots and onions, pasta with capers and tuna and lemon juice and olive oil and other things I forget. Baked Indian pudding, made with sorghum from Kentucky.
But that’s as far back as my memory goes.
I have been meaning to write more about losing my mind, but instead I keep falling asleep. Anyway, besides what I’m forgetting, and besides what I can no longer hear, I’m recalling all kinds of unnecessary things like going to Sardi’s when I was fourteen with Tony Wallace and his family and seeing an actress named Betsy Palmer at a neighboring table. I was wearing a scoop-neck black velvet blouse belonging to my mother, and it didn’t fit. I ordered pheasant under glass because I’d never heard of it. Why do I remember this? But I do, vividly. Now it turns out I might have gone to Sardi’s with Barry Burcaw and his family. I spoke to Barry recently, and he remembered an evening we spent there with his parents. We were both of us children. Back then, according to him, I was someone I don’t recognize or remember: pretty, charming, unattainable, perfect crush material for a boy in the seventh grade. A couple of years later my family moved away and the future shifted.
What Comes Next and How to Like It Page 6