I realize that foods introduced to me in childhood and adolescence occupy all the available space for acceptance by my taste buds. Mousses, spaghetti squash, pastas of all sorts, radicchio, pita bread, and a hundred other new arrivals on menus: I cannot grow to like them. My enduring passions for food are tied to ancient memories. When I was five, my nurse took me to a pork store on Broadway. The butcher offered me a slice of liverwurst, the casing carefully removed. I still shiver when I think of how wonderful that taste was; I still try every kind of liver sausage in a vain attempt to recover the intense pleasure of the first piece.
I remember the first spear of fresh asparagus, bathed in butter, that my mother offered me. It has never tasted quite the same since. If ever I am blessed with a garden I will try to grow that wonderful vegetable in an attempt to recapture the initial bliss. Other such irreplaceable memories: the first sweet potato, creamed spinach from a glass box at the Automat, mashed turnips and carrots, the soft remains from the broth of a boiled chicken: carrot, celery, livers and gizzards, parsnips and onions, one glorious mishmash of flavors, eaten from the strainer with a wooden spoon. Wonderful.
No kiwi, no papaya or mango, can come close. My tongue and taste glands are incapable of further education. If there is not a long, comfortable, worn precedent for the food, it is now too late. I grew up in an age of somewhat colorless American cooking; the new interest in foreign and native cooking has passed by my old-fashioned palate.
The last, fine day on the bank of Morgan Bay. I have not grown weary of looking at the water, doing nothing, thinking idly in a haphazard sort of way. Thoreau began his book Cape Cod (I have an edition republished by Houghton Mifflin in 1896 with delicate little watercolors by Amelia Watson that appear in the margins of the text) by denying this is so. ‘When we returned from the seaside, we sometimes ask ourselves why we did not spend more time gazing at the sea; but very soon the traveler does not look at the sea more than at the heavens.’ How long would I have to stay before this indifference set in?
Before we leave Maine to go back to the humid, unpleasant city, I telephone Richard in San Rafael. His voice is thick, as if his tongue were swollen.
‘I have thrush,’ he tells me with an effort. I think first of a small speckled brown songbird, shake my head angrily at the inappropriate thought (much as I had last night to kiwi), and say something stupid like ‘I see.’ Then I remember. In the old days, children got thrush, white spots in their throats, a fungus, I think. Richard, my young friend, so hopeful when last I saw him, is now host to a childhood affliction, together with all his other adult infections.
Washington. I come home to the mail, an avalanche of brown boxes and envelopes, about fifty review books for the ten days we have been away. My daughter Elizabeth, who lives around the corner, has watered the plants, fed the fish, and stacked books in large piles. The mail fills a post office bin. I think of something I read recently, by Marina Tsvetayeva: ‘I am indifferent to books.… I sold off all my French ones; whatever I need, I shall write myself.’ This would be a good resolution for me.
Sybil has gone off happily to work in the bookstore, relieved, I think, to be back in her familiar milieu of friends dropping in to talk about books, neighbors, customers, other dealers. She is a social soul. I often think she finds the isolation of a long vacation with me and only a few occasional friends very trying.
I, on the other hand, sink back into hours of solitude in the carriage house with great pleasure. Does one enjoy solitude more in old age because it is a preparation for the long loneliness, as Dorothy Day called it in another context, of death? Once settled into my study, I move out of my growingly unresponsive body into my head, where I can reside comfortably for long periods of time. It is an effort to come out. Time passes slowly in that abode, more slowly for me than in the world of events, noise, movement, and people.
The first day back: I cannot settle into writing. I forget to bring the clipboard over from my luggage in the house, so, naturally, I cannot write a word. I decide to stretch out on the hardbacked, hard-cushioned couch and find myself making a list, in lieu of anything better to occupy me. I decide to do it in the form of questions rather than statements of fact, because assertions no longer come easily to me. Questions are a more suitable rhetorical mode.
a] (better, more algebraic and ambiguous, than I) Is there anything of significance I still wish to acquire?
b] Is there anything I have that I no longer wish to keep?
c] Is it possible, at this late date, to lead a life based on principles, a guiding or ruling philosophy?
d] Do I take as seriously as I should the fact (this one irrefutable) of my mortality?
After all my childhood joys and terrors, and shallow adolescent anguish; the shock of October 24, 1929, when the stock market crashed and my father, ‘wiped out’ as he said, put his head down on the dining-room table in the middle of dinner and cried, at about the same time that my best friend’s father, whose name, I recall, was Robert Dince, took his life by jumping from a window of a tall building in the garment district of New York; and after the exhilaration of learning how to learn and reason in college; after the suicide (or accidental death) of my friend John Ricksecker, who jumped (or fell) from the roof of the School of Commerce on the last day of classes of our senior year, his arm catching on the no-parking stanchion, stopping his fall for a moment, and then coming off at the shoulder; after the war, in which we women served, and were served by the elevating symbol of the uniform we wore and the power of elating and irresponsible love affairs; after the short-lived postwar optimism during which I had children because I believed the world was going to be better, we would be extraordinarily successful and, someday, very rich; after the slow descent into the present, marked by the dissolution of family ties by death and divorce, by the dilatory liberation of blacks and women, by the minute beginnings of a recognition of overt sexual diversity and androgyny (what in my youth was called ‘perversity’), by the gradual disappearance of traditional forms of religious belief, of hopes for peace after Korea and Vietnam and Cambodia, of faith that the forests were protected, the rainwater, springs, and water table pure, the cities safe, interesting, and clean; and after my sad loss of patriotic conviction that this is the smartest, most ethical, richest, and most trustworthy country on the face of the earth, of certainty that medical science’s injections and pharmaceuticals are a sure protection against most viruses, bacteria, germs, fungi, I have come to this age of anxiety, despair, and hopelessness. All this has happened in my lifetime, in two-thirds of a century. This morning, listing it all as I lie on the couch, I still have no firm answer to the question that continues to plague me:
e] ‘Who am I?’ Or the question that runs parallel to it: ‘What has my life meant?’ Somewhere Nigel Dennis wrote that you are your name, no more. With what I had faith in removed, changed, deleted, my name may well be all I have left. Still, it is a first name from my parents, the other part from my husband, not much of my own.
Tonight, after a day spent trying to change the despairing contents of my head, I read back over the last page, and venture to put down some answers.
a] No
b] Yes. Almost everything. There are notable exceptions. My CD player and disks, this PC on which I am now rewriting, the sixteen-volume OED, my VCR and collection of sixteen operas and ballets on videocassettes, designed to fill evenings when I am too tired and too old to go to the new Met, the State Theater, the Kennedy Center. Two goose-down pillows and one electric blanket, my clipboard, the Library of America volumes, Sybil, my children, my grandson, a few irreplaceable friends. The order is haphazard.
Nothing else I can think of at this time.
c] I don’t know. Perhaps I never was able to.
d] No. I cannot entertain (wrong word?) the thought for more than ten seconds, at last careful count.
e] I don’t know.
I took today off, went to the pool, swam as long and as hard as I was able, and then lay i
n the shade, afraid to indulge my passion for sun on my spotted and aging skin. ‘Off,’ I think, what a strange, ugly, truncated adverb. The day off. At the airport I hear ‘I am off to Nova Scotia.’ I watch the plane take off. On TV the commentator says, ‘He’s off the track on this one.’ Off my feed, my game. On and off. After enough repetition the little grunt-like word seems to mean everything and then nothing. Gertrude Stein: ‘If anything means anything, this means something.’ I suppose.
August
Despite the terrible heat, I have agreed to go to Boston to give a talk. I dislike making speeches, but I hate readings even more, so this is the lesser of two evils. Sybil points out, when the day comes to go and I complain loudly, that I had only to say no at the time I was asked. I explain, once again, that I say yes to invitations issued a year or so in advance because I am quite certain I will not be alive when the time comes. So I am polite and agree to do whatever it is.
I stay at a Marriott hotel where my lodging has been arranged. Chain hotels have grown so large and efficient that they are no longer humane. The door to my room opens with what looks like a credit card. Faucets have levers and buttons, not handles, and I can never figure out whether to push, pull, or turn them, and in which direction. To the right? The left? Up? Down? The buttons on the TV are no longer functional. One must operate it through a cable box. The instructions for this are complicated and located knee-high.
A questionnaire in the shape of a chatty letter from the owner of the chain asks for my views on the equipment and service. The communication is almost as complex as income tax forms. Each system in the room, every electrical appliance, is listed, and I am asked what I think of them all. These polite inquiries are intended to suggest that the management cares about me. The replies, I suspect, will interest no one.
No longer do I check out at the reception desk where a friendly, pleasant lass, or lad, bids me goodbye at six in the morning and tells me to please come again. Not a chance. Now, sometime after midnight, my totaled account is pushed under the door. I leave the key on the desk in my room, telephone to inform a machine I am departing, hoist my luggage on my shoulder or pull it along on its wheels (no bellboy at that hour). I creep ‘off’ into the still-dark morning, feeling like a impecunious boarder escaping the payment of rent. But I know my charges will not be ignored as I have been. They will arrive on the American Express bill three weeks later when I have forgotten I was ever in Boston.
The extraordinary heat of this summer is attributed to what is called the greenhouse effect. No one except scientists seems especially worried about it because it is so cosmic a concept that, like the thought of death, no one can contemplate it for more than a few seconds. The world will end in heat and fire, we are told. In addition the ozone layer that surrounds this planet, an area I never heard of before this summer, is severely threatened. Further damage to it will cause skin cancer and glaucoma among the world’s population.
Where are the old, set-in-stone verities about the familiar earth? Like a rock slide, like an avalanche, they are falling, wiping out what we thought was our sure footing. Birds in all their awesome variety have abandoned the seashore. The gulls at Moody Beach in Maine, where we used to summer, have left the shore and gone inland to Route I to lunch and dine at the refuse heap behind Howard Johnson’s. They dote on the remainders of fried-clam plates.
Today it is too hot to write on the deck at the back of my long, thin Victorian house. The fine American elm between the house and my study is afflicted by what appears to be, in early August, premature senility. Leaves droop, the trunk seems to hang down like a dispirited elephant’s, instead of lifting up above the carriage house. The branches are wilting and look too tired to serve the tree. Squirrels and cats, who usually lead a noisy, adversarial existence in the backyard, are somewhere else. No birds are here at all, as if they too are so affected by the wet heat that their feathers have dragged them down into some cool, subterranean hideaway.
Is the elm aging, like me? I notice I am unhealthily aware of signs of growing old, everywhere. At the Munsons’ last month, I noticed their endearing way of surrounding themselves with old things: the horse, their aging dogs, the elderly cat with its deformed ear as the result of a hematoma, trees that they tell us are close to the end of their lives, antiques for sale in their barn that look as if they had reached the extreme edge of possible endurance. I admire their hospitality to less-than-perfect old animals and, I like to think, people. Like me.
The summer heat has increased the number of homicides in this city, once a peaceful place. The streets are dirtier than I can ever remember, more crowded and, I learn from the evening news, full of people exchanging stolen money and goods for drugs. Recently, a woman was attacked across the street at one in the morning. Sybil heard her cry out, ‘Help me!’ Sybil leaped out of bed, awakening me (my deafness prevented me from hearing the cry), dialed 911. A few minutes later the police were there, a small group of people had assembled, an ambulance roared up. Next morning we learned the young woman had been knocked down and her shoulder hurt by a young black male who had left a car to push her down and grab her purse. He then ran back to the car and sped off. Across our quiet, ‘safe’ street.
So the city grows ever more threatening. At night I park my car (which was stolen and trashed last spring by a fourteen-year-old boy) and sit patiently in it until I am sure there is no one on the street. I walk to the market with money in my pocket, nothing else. I feel myself becoming paranoid and what is worse, racist, and I hate the feelings.
I wonder how long I will be able to see some humor in my beleaguered state. The boy who drove around all night in my car until the police caught him had jimmied the ignition in order to start it. A policewoman in Anacostia called to tell me the car had been found. ‘Come and get it,’ she said, ‘and bring a screwdriver.’ A screwdriver? ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘To start it. Your keys may not work in the car.’
I hung up. Then I heard myself laughing. I had forgotten to ask if I should bring a Phillips-head screwdriver or the common variety. I decided to take both. The car started with a key, I was relieved to discover. I drove it home with a smashed passenger-seat window, and a huge spiderweb of cracks on the windshield caused, the policewoman told me, by a bullet. No sign of the bullet. ‘But I’m glad to say it’s not in the boy. Not a bad boy. Just having a joyride.’
Not a bad boy. I suppose not, when you consider the murderers and gang-war packs and drug dealers she has to deal with every day. This boy who breaks into and steals cars is hardly a criminal deserving of much attention. His thievery is the fourth such event for us. Wayward Books, our out-of-print and medium-rare bookstore on Capitol Hill, has been robbed once, broken into twice. Now it is equipped with bars on the windows and an alarm system. My car also has an alarm system which turns on the horn and the lights if it is entered without a key. Only our persons are without such protective equipment. If I am mugged or knocked down, as somehow I constantly expect to be (cowardly as I have grown), I can only resort to the now-familiar cry: ‘Help me.’
Walking though the variegated, interesting streets of Capitol Hill I come upon three slender trees growing close together, upright and companionable, swaying and seeming, at the top, to bow decorously to each other. The little triangle, or triple alliance, reminds me suddenly, for no reason I can think of, of the decorative element, said to be representative of bundles of bamboo, on the beautiful face of the palacio in the ruined, ancient city of Kabal, in Yucatán.
It is a mystery to me why I remember Maya at this moment, and at so many other times since my first sight of the ruins more than fifty years ago. Stimulated by a view of a nineteenth-century facade somewhere on my walk to the market in Washington, the awesome grey stone surface of a building at Uxmal will come to me, suddenly. I feel the hot breath of the god Chac-mool as he sits proudly at the top of the Great Pyramid at Chichén Itzá, and then a kind of spinal shock as I recall the first sight of the Temple of the Dwarf rising up into the
blue morning air at Uxmal, silent, solemn, not yet invaded and diminished by hordes of camerar-laden and straw-hatted tourists.
Solitary, majestic, honorably old, the ruins at the once-great cities shame the garrulous little Mayan guides and gatekeepers who stand at their bases. The hallowed ruins defy change and death. They do not age; they seem to have finished aging. I have a memory of myself standing at the top of their great heights, a young girl, looking down arrogantly, triumphantly, in the shadow of the small, rectangular temple that caps the ascent of steps. At seventeen I am totally absorbed in celebrating having conquered the challenge of the almost vertical (or so it seems) staircase.
At the bottom stands my traveling companion, shading her eyes to look up at me. She is Margaret Schlauch, professor of English at New York University, the first woman to be made a full professor with tenure at her college. She is in Mexico to compile a Nahuatl grammar of the Aztec tongue. I am here as an undergraduate student at the Universidad in Mexico City. Twenty years separate us, dramatized by my flashy ascent of the temple, her patient wait at the bottom.
Fifty years later, the January of my sixty-eighth year, I am the aging woman watching Kate, my daughter, make the brave climb, her brown head an echo in sepia of mine half a century ago. I know what she is feeling. In youth I imagined myself a member of the priestly caste, performing sacred rites on the elevated platform for hoi polloi at my feet. But in old age, unable to make the climb, I become part of the people, respectful and worshipful at the bottom.
Passage of time is embodied in these ancient stones, one resting immutably upon another. Radiant serpents slither down each side and end in open-mouthed, long-tongued wonder. I wave back to my elevated daughter, envying her youth and energy, resenting my age, awed by the immortality of the temple.
Coming into the End Zone Page 6