Unaccompanied Women

by Jane Juska

  Somewhere during our adolescent lives we had read that Italian men were outrageous, that they pinched wantonly every creature they believed to be female, that respectable girls and women had to be on the alert at all times; otherwise, a tweak, a bump, a pinch—how dare they! Now here we were in Rome, the capital of pinching, and not a rub. Maybe if we walked slower. One day we found ourselves on the city bus. It was very crowded. It was so crowded you just couldn’t move. Annie, the tallest of us all, stood pinned between passengers in the middle of the bus. Suddenly she uttered a cry heard round the bus. And then she smiled. And we all smiled. She had been deflowered, lucky girl. If one is pinched, can the rest be far behind?

  I had to wait till Paris, where I fell drunkenly in love with Gunnar, a hunk of a Swede who lived on welfare because when he listed his vocation at the welfare office, there wasn’t any work for zither-stringers, which Gunnar insisted he was. So we drank a lot of red wine, danced on tabletops with Russians escaped from Stalin, drank some more wine—Encore! Encore!—until one night I was ready to faire l’amour. Gunnar and I had done a lot of kissing—Embrasse moi, bébé—even in public, which Paris allows couples to do, and it was time, it just was. So I answered yes to Gunnar’s “Come avec moi to my chez.” I weaved with him to his pension, and there, blocking the stairs to his room, stood the concierge, broom held crossways against her bosom. “It is too late for young ladies to go upstairs. Shoo.” She said it in French, of course, but no translation was necessary. Gunnar walked me back to the bistro, where I promised that when I got home to America I would get a job and send him money so he could get to Mexico and then sneak into America, which wouldn’t let him in because he was a Communist. Wow! I’d never met a Communist before, and this one was soooo neat! However, I had the definite feeling my dad would not give me the money for Gunnar’s emigration to America, and that I would have to go to actual work, but I was in love and an almost-woman in love is not to be denied. The job I was able to get—typing—paid me enough to rent a room with a hot plate. Mon amour didn’t even send me a postcard. Tant pis.

  Needless to say, none of the six of us who traveled to Europe in 1955 is a virgin now. We are divorced or we are widowed. Along with Communism, our men exist only in our memories. Except for me, who has been out on a sexual limb for the last four years, we have left romance and danger behind, and here we are, loving our grandchildren and knowing our book clubs aren’t quite enough. Something like 85 percent of women who buy books belong to book clubs. Astounding, though not really, for we are great readers, our generation, and along the way of our lives we have learned to talk about what we read without the specter of professors shushing us and admonishing us to take notes. And so we gather.

  Most of the people who come to my readings are women, most of those middle-aged, I suppose. Maybe it’s young middle age. I have gotten confused by the changes in labeling. Now, at seventy-one, I think I am referred to by gerontologists as middle-old; before seventy I was young-old, and when I hit eighty, I’ll be young-really-old, until ninety, when—there’s just no getting around it—I’ll be old, though by then someone will have come up with different labels. Actually, I have some: 20–30, Medieval; 30–40, Renaissance; 40–50, Baroque; 50–60, Neoclassical; 60–70, Surrealist; 70 until death. Masterpiece. I am, as you can see, early Masterpiece. I like that better than being postmodern.

  Seattle, where I am reading tonight, seems like a good place in which to be whatever age one happens to be at the moment. It is beautiful, very beautiful: snowcapped mountains, lots of hills and water, blue sky, nice people, and good food. I am ready to move here; it is small enough to walk around in and big enough to have a stupendous new library, concert halls, terrific bookstores, and a good basketball team. However, I am advised by those who know that I must spend a winter in the rains of Seattle before I commit my financial resources to buying a house here, though—ha!—real estate prices here are almost as high as they are in Berkeley. Another niche market. Thank you, Bill Gates.

  In the bookstore the man at the end of the line is accompanied by a woman. They introduce themselves to me. “I am Evelyn.” “I am Arthur.” They are smiling broadly, unusual in men and women in their later years—I would label them middle Masterpiece—grimness being too often an accompaniment of old age. “We waited until we could have a bit of time with you. We have a very special thank-you.” Evelyn is pretty, and not just for middle Masterpiece. It is possible to be pretty long after child-rearing and menopause, right up to death. It is even possible to be prettier than you were at twenty-one, though Evelyn strikes me as having been pretty her entire life, one of those girls who dated seniors when she was only a freshman. Arthur, nice-looking, a bit shy, stands just behind Evelyn’s left shoulder. “Tell her,” he whispers to Evelyn, nudging her gently.

  Evelyn leans forward and explains, smiling all the while. “You see, we are both widowed and we have been seeing each other now for quite a few months.” Arthur ducks his head and moves farther behind Evelyn. Evelyn says, “And then I read your book. I loved it, just loved it.”

  Over Evelyn’s shoulder, Arthur whispers, “Go on.”

  “So one day I put the book in the center of the kitchen table, the day I knew Arthur was coming over.”

  Arthur says, “You can’t miss it, that cover. Wow.”

  “So he picked it up and asked, ‘What’s this?’ And I told him about your book and he looked surprised, and I just rushed right ahead and said, ‘Arthur, do you think you and I could ever be intimate?’”

  No longer shy, Arthur steps forward, smiling broadly, “And I said, ‘How about now?’”

  The two of them are radiant. They offer their very special thanks and leave hand in hand, a beautiful couple if ever there was one.

  It has been a long night. Back at my hotel I drink a solitary scotch, climb into bed, and wonder how I might go about finding an Arthur who does not live three thousand miles away. I think kind thoughts about the man from Modesto; maybe I should have stopped him, asked to buy him a cup of coffee, tackled him at the knees before he could get out the door, offered to . . . to . . . Christ, I need a pickup line.

  I remember all too well searching the hardware stores for men, where I figured older men hung out, men who knew how to do stuff. I was right: There they were fingering belts, measuring wire, putting nails into paper sacks, comparing screws to each other. They were busy. Their lives had purpose and meaning. They were going to fix things, to make things, to build things. Do it to me! Peering through the shelves opposite some unsuspecting man I had stalked into the nuts and bolts section, I thought, Now what? What should I say? What’s a nice guy like you doing in a place like this? What time do you get off work? Women of my generation didn’t own pickup lines; those belonged to the men they would turn down. So in the hardware store I turned myself down before I could make a bigger fool of myself, and left.

  But what does one say? Do you tell the truth—I want to lie down next to you, maybe? Of course not. What if it turns out you don’t? Or do? How do you not scare a live man away? How do you protect yourself from rejection? Men have been running these risks forever, and maybe they get used to rejection. But boy, it’s scary. Takes balls. We women are supposed to have them now that we’re equal, but, after all, they don’t grow overnight. Look how long it took me and look what I had to do! And look where I am now! Manless for all practical purposes, potentially homeless, and without a pickup line to call my own.

  All this, of course, I keep under wraps at readings so as not to spoil my readers’ illusion that I knew what I wanted and got it. Well, I did know what I wanted, but getting it doesn’t mean you stop wanting, and maybe, oh fickle creatures that we are, what you want changes into something you don’t have, and then oh boy, the restlessness of the human spirit begins its work, shooing contentment out of its way to make room for yet another ride on the roller coaster.

  Back home, in my post office box, there is a letter. From Bryan. I do not know Bryan, but he write
s, “I found your book on the table of an older woman (I am 40, she 64) whom I was visiting for purposes of business. I enjoyed the book enormously and feel compelled to write our gratitude to you. Your book served us well. Thank you. Please extend our thanks to Graham.”

  Whaddya know. My book has become a pickup line.

  So when Barbara, a complete stranger, calls me on the telephone from her home in San Mateo and breathes, “I’ve just finished reading your book, and I know I have a lot of nerve calling you,” I don’t hang up. She continues, “I’m fifty-three, divorced for ten years . . .” And she invites me to the next meeting of her book club, where A Round-Heeled Woman will be discussed. “Some of the older members,” she says, “will have trouble talking about the sex parts, so if you could come and just sort of facilitate things. You have been so brave.” And then her confession, tears in her voice, “My goodness, I just . . . can’t even . . . get a date!”

  If I were there or she here, I would hug her. I would try to comfort her, to tell her that . . . I don’t know what to tell her. When I began these readings, in June of 2003, I would leave burdened with the responsibility of having opened a great big kettle of fish. Women whispered their longings, their sins, their failures, their hopes for a better future. What had I done? But by the time of Barbara’s call, I have become, if not hardened, at least more sensible. Books, if they’re worth anything at all, let the readers take from them what the readers need to have. Apparently my book did that. If that something is hope, well, there’s little enough of it around, so have at it. To Barbara? Oh, in the absence of truly sound advice, I’d probably tell her to go online. And I do. And she answers, “But what would I say?” My heart goes out to her.

  So, Barbara, I’m thinking of doing something sort of like what Evelyn did: I’m thinking of making T-shirts with the cover of the book on the front and the message, in big bold letters, Ask Me About This Book. If you get shy, you can always wear it inside out.

  CHAPTER 22

  reunions

  Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

  IF HARDWARE STORES or online dating services are not for you, go to a reunion. Reunions are all over the place. High school reunions are the best because so many people there are widowed.

  Julia, a friend of mine for many years, went to her fortieth reunion and hers is a different story. Julia lived in a big old 1826 wonderful house, peaked roof, white clapboard, and green shutters. I used to envy Julia her house and many of the things in it, things she had inherited from her mother, things that belonged to ladies, like candle snuffers (six), and silver tea services (two). I did not envy Julia’s life; she didn’t like it much, either. A bad and short marriage, a daughter she adored forever, and a longtime love affair with Herbert, a man she loved but who couldn’t marry her because his sisters wouldn’t hear of it. Herbert was a good, if somewhat timid, man who loved Julia very much, so much that he paid off the mortgage to her house. So there she sat in her big old wonderful fully paid-for house, loving Herbert for twelve fine years, when news of his death from a heart attack came to her. Julia was fifty-five and would never recover. Herbert’s sizable estate was claimed by his sisters, the evil twins, so it’s a good thing Julia had free lodging for the rest of her life. Even so, she grew bitter.

  She hated her job and the people who worked with her. She stopped going to movies or plays; she refused to travel except to the library across the street, where she read just about everything in it. Reading was her drug, though not strong enough to dull forever the need for company. So one spring, at her daughter’s behest, she drove the few short miles to her high school reunion. And there he was, her high school boyfriend, cute as ever, recovering from colon cancer, and married. They talked and talked, exchanged phone numbers and from that day on spoke every single day on the telephone. “Come to Austin this weekend; I’ll be there for a meeting,” he urged. “I’ll come to see you next month,” he offered. No, no, said Julia, no men, no sex, it was just good to hear a man’s voice telling her that she was smart and pretty and sexy. Julia was smart: no involvement with a married man, no falling in love and spending the rest of her holidays alone, and no participation in adultery. Julia’s ideals remained untarnished, unless you count the hours of foreplay on the telephone.

  If Julia got one thing right in her life, it was Frannie, Julia’s daughter and best friend for life. Frannie grew into a smart, funny, loving, and lovable woman. Frannie married a loving and lovable man, and together they gave Julia two grandsons, whom she loved almost as much as she loved Frannie. Frannie knew about Julia’s phone affair and sometimes urged her mother to go ahead and meet this man, but Julia was adamant, and Frannie stopped counseling her mother and went back to simply loving her.

  Julia retired early from the job she hated and took up drinking. She had always enjoyed a drink; now she drank in earnest. Unfortunately, drinking and reading were incompatible, so when it came time for her to choose, she chose drinking. Frannie worried about her but not terribly, because Julia was always in control of herself in the presence of her grandsons. Besides, what could Frannie do? She went back to her children and her garden and her husband.

  One Wednesday, Frannie got sick. She complained of a terrible headache, vomited, and frightened her husband so that he rushed her to the emergency room, where she was diagnosed with meningitis. What? Julia was unbelieving and rushed to her bedside, where, on Friday, Frannie died. She was thirty-five.

  Julia returned home, sedated by a doctor’s prescription and as much merlot as she could carry. After that she gave up eating in favor of drinking full-time. Not many months later her liver gave out, she was taken to the hospital, tried to walk to the bathroom, fell, and died. She was sixty-four.

  All her life, in addition to Frannie, Julia had loved the Boston Red Sox. If only she had lived a few more months to see them win the World Series, their first in eighty-six years, her world might have brightened a bit, might have given her a reason to persist.

  This may be the saddest story I know. Without a doubt, Julia’s house is the saddest house I have ever known.

  BUT LET US not despair, for Carol, back in my hometown in Ohio, put together a fine celebration for her fiftieth reunion, and here came Jim, retired, wealthy, ever so nice, and widowed. They were married last summer and, between them, have three houses, all of them happy. Likewise Carolyn and Bob in Upper Michigan, who met again at their fortieth high school reunion, and all those couples in Sunday’s New York Times’s wedding section who unite or reunite in later life.

  People are getting married all over the place without, in some cases, the blessings of their expectant heirs, but what the heck, time’s a-wasting. What is the lure of this ritual? At such a late age? One would think that, after suffering through a wretched marriage or a painful illness or both, people would abjure marriage. Why don’t they just live together? Lots of older people do when they find out that their Social Security benefits will drop if they marry. But many men and women go right ahead and do it all over again. Of course, men and women whose marriages were good ones want to repeat them; then, too, there is the urge to repeat an experience in order to correct it: “I’m going to do this until I get it right.” I suppose that once in the fold one yearns to stay. The fold offers convention, and convention offers protection and social security of a sort that has nothing to do with money. The fold provides us a respectable face so that we can look the world in the eye without shame or embarrassment. The fold provides a comfort unavailable to existentialists like me, stuck as we are with the belief in the void. I’d just as soon believe in something else; the void is dark and cold, but faith in it, faith I never asked for, got me here and isn’t letting loose. To ease matters, great literature and my long life have provided me a belief in the indomitability of the human spirit, the human capacity for reason and choice, and I take comfort in that. But often, especially when Carol sends me photographs of her marriage to Jim, and Carolyn sends me a wedding invitation, I long for a partne
r, someone who will keep me warm, light a lamp. I marry; therefore, I am: the credo of blessed partners everywhere. Marrying is easier than thinking, but then, almost anything is.

  However, not everyone looks immediately for commitment and the promise of marriage. There is Susan, who came to my reading in Virginia. She is seventy-eight and is, as she will write to me, “a testament to the miracle of endurance, blessed to be still standing, in love again, and eager to proclaim: It’s not over ’til it’s over.” The real reason she came to my reading was to get the name and address of my agent. Susan has written a memoir, just like me. Her life is much like mine. She wants my good fortunes to be hers. I like her. She is full of life, small and bouncy, and cute as a button. She looks happy. Not only that, she brings the hardcover, the expensive edition, to me to be signed. Of course, I like her. And then, too, she grew up in a small town in Ohio, just like me. She married a cad and a bounder, got divorced, made another life, like me. So, given all that, we are practically best friends. We’re kind of having our own very small reunion right here in the bookstore. As at any good reunion, we are reminded of the past we shared and are delighted in the presence of each other.

  Well, she tells me, there he was, at their sixtieth high school reunion, standing at the punch bowl—alone—and still a hunk. A BMOC sixty years ago, he was still a big man, now a lawyer (ret.), father of four, grandfather of eight, and widowed. Oh, how they talked and talked, and exchanged e-mail addresses, and one year later, Warren came to visit.

  Now, Susan had made for herself a complete and satisfying life; her exhumed friendship with Warren was just that, a friendship. In their e-mailing he had informed her of his impotence and had written, “Consider me a friend if you like.” And so she did.

  On his first visit, Susan put him in the guest room, kissed him goodnight on the cheek, and repaired to her own bed, door closed. In came Warren: “Would you like me to hold you?” After three nights of incomplete but wildly arousing lovemaking, Susan was smitten, and she worried that her feelings had gotten out of hand. There was, after all, the fact of Warren’s steel heart valve. And so off she marched to Warren’s room, where she blurted, “I have become besotted with you. And it is—inappropriate.”