The Roots of the Olive Tree

by Courtney Miller Santo

  In the tree Erin showed Anna the underside of a leaf. “See,” she said. “The same color as my eyes, but nobody else’s. I guess I get that from my dad.”

  “You’ve got his fingers, too,” Anna said. “I always thought his hands were too feminine, with such long fingers that had the look of a refined man. Those fingers are what made us start you on the piano.” They didn’t often talk about Carl, her father.

  The child was quiet for a long bit, and then she reached up and ran her fingers across Anna’s high, wide cheekbones. “You and I match here,” she said. “Maybe I’ll be like you and live forever.”

  Anna laughed. “How old do you think I am?”

  Erin shrugged. “As old as the trees?”

  “Smart girl. You know what’s amazing about olive trees? They have a real sense of survival.” Anna wasn’t sure if at eight, Erin knew what survival meant, but the little girl nodded. “If we cut down this tree today, in the spring, it would have about a hundred shoots growing up out of the side and top of the stump.”

  Erin looked skeptical. “You just told me the tree was older than you. How do you know it’ll be all right if you cut it down?”

  “These shoots, they’re sometimes called suckers.” Anna made a noise like she was sucking on a straw. “They suck up all the energy they need to grow from the roots that the original tree left behind. It’s the roots that are important.”

  “Where do the suckers come from?” Erin asked.

  Anna was surprised at the question. She’d thought the girl would want to talk about the miracle of a dead tree coming to life. She held out her hand and helped Erin out of the tree. Then she took off her gloves and dug around in the soil around the trunk. The ground rarely froze in Kidron, although the red dirt had just enough clay in it that it clumped together. She dug down about two knuckles deep and exposed the gnarled bumps on the bark. “Burr knots. They’re sacks of nutrients and energy, and that’s where the suckers come from.”

  Erin ran her fingers over several of the ovuli and smiled. “It’s like someone put olives underneath the bark.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Sixth Generation

  After the geneticist left, Anna took a rest. She awoke to the sound of dinner and found the others in the kitchen eating ham sandwiches on olive loaf. Although she rarely had an appetite, Anna’s nose was as sharp as ever. The smell of the facility where Frank lived was all over Bets. To Anna, the rankness reminded her of rotting fruit, but the rest of the family insisted the odor was nothing more unusual than the combination of antiseptic and sweat. Anna gagged and turned her face away from her daughter.

  “Stop it,” Bets said, swatting at Anna. “I could always put you in there.”

  “I’m not decrepit enough. Still have my brains and my beauty.” Anna smiled, showing off that she still had most of her teeth.

  “It only takes losing one of those two.” Bets turned away from Anna.

  “You know what stinks?” Anna asked, taking a seat next to her daughter. “It’s the perspiration. That’s what smells like rot. I’ve attended enough deathbeds to know the smell of death, and that home you’ve got Frank in reeks of it.”

  Callie put her hands on both women’s arms. “Stop it.”

  “What do you expect?” Bets asked. “I bet two or three people a week die in that place.”

  Erin giggled. “I’ve missed you all so much. I haven’t had a nonphilosophical argument about death since I’ve left.”

  Death was not an abstraction to Anna. When she was a girl, the world was a more dangerous place—men died in farming accidents, mothers died in birth, and children died when schoolhouses caught fire. Erin had never been to a funeral. They’d not allowed her to attend her father’s service, and since then no one she was close to had died.

  “Death is all part of the cycle. It’s neither here nor there, it just is,” Callie said, turning to Bets to ask about Frank. “How’s Dad? Any sign he’s getting better? Or worse?”

  “He’s got a new friend,” Bets said. She continued to talk, describing the man, in his late fifties, who rolled around in a specialized sport wheelchair. Anna noticed that Erin was again eating meat and that as she listened to her great-grandmother’s story, she pulled strands of hair out of her head. Anna got Callie’s attention and nodded in Erin’s direction.

  “Later,” Callie mouthed and then got up to clear the table.

  “So. Who’s coming to visit Mom with me?” Erin asked. Her voice was high and she spoke quickly. Anna knew she’d waited until Callie left the room to ask. In the twenty years Deb had been at Chowchilla, Callie hadn’t visited her daughter once.

  “We’ll both go,” Bets said.

  “Just not right away,” Anna said. “You’ve only just gotten here, and we have so much to catch up with. Can we go next week?”

  Erin looked at the floor. “I’m tired. I think the time change is finally catching up with me.”

  They ushered her off to her room, with Callie pulling down the shades and drawing the thick brocade curtains.

  “She should sleep a good bit,” Bets said outside the girl’s door. Anna wanted to talk about Erin, to discuss her sudden appearance and her strange behavior, but they all went to their own rooms, coming out a few hours later when Anna warmed milk on the stove.

  Anna knew they were digesting the news about Deb. None of them had known that she was up for parole again. As they learned last time, the California State Parole Board was only required to inform the victims of the prisoner’s crimes about parole hearings. Erin was both a victim and family.

  “She’s dead asleep. That jet lag of hers should buy us a few more hours,” Bets said. She’d opened the can of instant cocoa and spooned it into her cup of warm milk.

  Callie scooped an additional teaspoon of chocolate powder into her cup every time she took a sip. “She wasn’t much help at the store. I had to go back and redo all her counts and I finally just put her at a cash register.”

  “She didn’t say anything?” Bets asked. She turned to Anna. “Did you find out when the hearing was?”

  Anna had called after the geneticist left. “We’ve got about two months. It’ll be in January. The warden was surprised we knew anything about it. He seemed to think the family didn’t find out until the hearing was about a month away. I guess they don’t like getting anyone’s hopes up.”

  “The last hearing was all formality,” said Bets.

  Anna watched Callie add two more scoops of cocoa to her milk. “There’s got to be more to this than a parole hearing,” Callie said. “Have we had any luck trying to get in touch with the opera? I’m fairly sure she’s broken some sort of contract with them. It was a three-year deal.”

  Bets shook her head. “I can’t get the times right and I’m not sure if they’ll return a call to the U.S. or even understood what I was trying to say.”

  “None of you know anything about her life? How she spent her time over there? Who her friends were? Wasn’t there a girl from Boston who signed on the same time as her?” Anna’s frustration came out in these rapid-fire questions. The guilt about not knowing these details turned into accusations of Bets and Callie. All that Erin had given her in letters were platitudes, and it was what Anna accepted. She wanted to believe that they’d been successful, that they’d made up for Deb by raising Erin the right way.

  Callie broke under all the veiled accusations and guilt. She had the deepest regrets about Deb, and they carried over into all aspects of her life. The need to be forgiven for failing her own daughter made her fragile. Anna disliked tears. She thought they were wasteful, and the sight of her granddaughter blubbering jolted her out of the pleasantries.

  “Have you considered the obvious?” she asked.

  Bets sighed. “I don’t want to think about it. She’s too young.”

  “Her mother was only seventeen,” Callie said. She’d pushed her milk aside and dabbed at her eyes with a dinner napkin. Anna saw a mound of cocoa had piled up at the bottom o
f her cup.

  “We need to know what we’re dealing with,” Anna said. “I’ll wake her up and we can just ask her.”

  “What if we’re wrong?” Callie asked.

  Anna stood up, but Bets put her hand on her elbow. “Let me.”

  Despite Bets’s hard facade, she had always been the closest to Erin. Callie felt too much guilt to be anyone’s mother figure.

  “What if it’s true?” asked Callie.

  “She’s made a hard choice,” Anna said.

  Bets grimaced. “I don’t want it to be true. We’ve worked so hard to give her the kind of life where the choices aren’t hard. Damn it to hell and back.”

  Anna didn’t want to listen to their supposing. She knew it was true. She’d felt it the moment that Erin had stepped out of her rental car. There was going to be a sixth generation. Anna had dreamed of the child the night before and felt a pull between them, as if the umbilical cord were attached not only to Erin, but also to Anna.

  EXCERPT FROM “THE END OF AGING,” A TALK PRESENTED TO THE AMERICAN COUNCIL ON AGING IN DECEMBER 2006

  BY DR. AMRIT HASHMI

  Many of mankind’s myths are inextricably tied to the quest for immortality. The driving force behind most religions—whether one believes in reincarnation or resurrection—is the promise to extend the span of time for which our consciousness exists. The idea of starting over in a new body or restoring an existing body to its prime might seem laughable to us, until you consider that most of us in this room are attempting to accomplish these feats on a much smaller scale in our lab animals and Petri dishes. We are at the cusp of a new age—one in which mankind turns not to his gods for an answer on eternal life, but to his scientists.

  My particular interest lies not with immortality, but with agelessness. Most of us are surely aware of the tragedy of Eros and her lover Tithonus. This goddess of the dawn, one of the immortal Titans, had the misfortune to fall in love with a mortal. When he began to age, Eros begged Zeus to give Tithonus the gift of everlasting life. In her haste and in her passion, Eros forgot to also ask for eternal youth. This mistake cost Eros her heart, but it cost Tithonus the world. Long after his body had withered, his mind remained. Eros could not bear to be near him in this babbling and immobile state. She entombed him in a room with no windows and a red door. There he remains, wanting only death and wondering how it was that as Tennyson said, “The Gods themselves cannot recall their gifts.”

  We should be mindful of this fate. I’ve sat among this very group and heard the hypothesis that the first person who will live to be a hundred and fifty years old has already been born. While that is extraordinary, I pity that woman (and our research shows it is most likely to be a woman, firstborn in her family, who was raised on the West Coast in a large family). If we cannot unlock the mysteries of the process of senescence, we will continue to prolong life without any measurable benefit to mankind. We will produce an entire generation of elderly who, like Tithonus, will end up locked inside the prison of their own decaying bodies. We must commit together to work toward discovering the key to stopping the aging process. This is what I’ve devoted my life to. At the University of Pittsburgh, I’ve spent the last decade searching out and cataloging people who I, and my staff, have come to call superagers. That is to say those individuals for whom the natural markers of old age appear to have little effect, or I should say a lessened effect.

  These are people who scale Mount Everest in their seventies, swim the English Channel the same year they turn ninety, or run a marathon at age a hundred and one. I believe that is the kind of old age we all want. I don’t have to tell the people in this audience about the raging debate over what causes senescence. There are a dozen theories about the process—aging is a disease, aging is a by-product of evolution, aging is psychological, aging is the accumulation of damage from radiation, etc. The list is endless, and this room is filled with researchers probing every possible avenue for an answer because the simple truth is we don’t know what causes aging.

  We also don’t know the exact mechanism by which aspirin works, or how placebos can be more effective than treatment. It has been said that age is merely the accumulation of defects, but why is it that some people have so many fewer defects? The only way to discover this is to gather as much information as possible about superagers. We’ve been cataloging what they ate, where they lived, how much time they spent in the sun, how much time they spent exercising, how long their parents lived, and searching for some commonality among them. I’ve long suspected that dietary and environmental influences were microscopic in their influence on this process, and through surveys and observation, this conception has been borne out. Many of my superagers are active nonsmokers, nondrinkers, but just as many of them still gleefully embrace the habits they’ve been warned against all their lives. Every time I interview a smoker, they inevitably point the end of their cigarette at me and say, “You were wrong you know, smoking doesn’t kill all of us.”

  What these superagers have in common is the large disparity between their chronological age and their biological age, as determined by the Zyberg scale. In most cases, superagers have the physical, psychological, and social lives of people half their age. They have sex, they sleep through the night, they remember phone numbers and acquaintances’ names. Because Zyberg does not take into account physical appearance, which is primarily influenced by genetics and environment, some of these superagers may look as old as they are, but across the board, their physical health and mental health is usually on par with someone half their age.

  What all of our research points toward is that the ability to stop or at least slow senescence exists within the body—inside the very cells themselves. To prove this, I need evidence of a genetic mutation, and to find such a mutation, I need a family of superagers. The problem with that is not only the rarity of superagers—there are fewer than a thousand in the entire world, but also the unavoidable fact that an accident is just as likely to cause a human’s death as complications from aging. You know how difficult the search is—a twin brother will have died in war, a daughter in childbirth. No matter what we do about aging, the world is still a dangerous place for human beings.

  I was quite discouraged until earlier this year when I came across a remarkable family in California. There exist five generations of women—beginning with the matriarch, who is a hundred and twelve years old, and continuing down through the generations to the youngest, who is in her midtwenties and pregnant. I can’t be sure that all of these women are superagers, but after preliminary questionnaires and extensive interviews, I believe I have found a family who carries the genetic mutation that holds the key to slowing aging.

  Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh have already begun to sequence the entire genomes of these women. Our hope is that within a decade we will be able to identify the genes that slow senescence and then develop drug therapies to activate them in those who age at a normal rate. I also suspect that we will find that in these women several harmful genes have been essentially turned off. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me take you through the research that has gotten me to this point. I will just say that if that child has indeed been born who will live to be a hundred and fifty, that by the time she is middle-aged this research should have produced therapies that will allow her agelessness along with longevity.

  Erin in the Winter

  CHAPTER NINE

  Haircut

  By January, the uproar of Erin’s arrival and pregnancy had settled. With long hours to fill, Erin often thought about her first pregnancy scare. Unlike some girls, she hadn’t had hers until college. She and a boy from her music theory class had been playing at dating. She brought him small tokens of her affection—greeting cards, superhero stickers, his favorite soda, and in return he helped her into her winter coat and paid for dinner. She liked how his deep brown eyes always seemed to be wet, as if at any moment he could be moved by the world around them. They slept together. And once that happen
ed, it was all that ever happened between them. Sex became recreational.

  One of them would call the other and make up an excuse to come over. “I left my glove at your place,” she would say. Or he would claim to have lost his notes from their shared class. After one of these terse exchanges, Erin’s roommate, a thin girl from Vermont, offered her appraisal.

  “So, you’ve finally figured it out.”

  “What,” Erin had said, pulling her hair from its ponytail.

  “That all that boyfriend, girlfriend stuff is for high school.”

  Erin blushed. “We’re together. I mean—”

  “It’s not serious though. And you’re not in a relationship, right? I mean he could sleep with someone else if he wanted to.”

  There was no point in protesting. Erin couldn’t imagine a future with the boy. She nodded.

  “You’re still so naive,” the roommate said. “Most of us figured this stuff out before we got here. But I’ll tell you what you need to do. Especially with this guy. Try just enjoying the sex. Make sure you get off, that he goes down on you. They all claim not to do it, but every boy I know does.”

  Once Erin got over the shock of what she’d said, she realized it was the only useful information she’d learned that semester. From then on when Erin slept with boys, she held on to her heart—offering them nothing more than smiles and an offhand attitude that hid her natural earnestness.