Sister Age

by M. F. K. Fisher

  In bed, with the sound of Hubert’s fiddle still squeaking underneath her and the knowledge that her daughter was across the house in a properly lush room with two turned-down beds and dim lights, the girl-like docile woman probably still covered in a bride’s pearly satin, the mother lay without smiling. She asked how she could stop seeming foolish, just because she refused to mourn in public, weep into her beer, sob at weddings. She had been as she was long before Mr. J. Allen Tomlinson died at an early age, leaving her one child and a great deal of money. She had laughed almost since her birth, which was why he loved and married her.

  But in spite of the mother’s ever-blooming smile, their child was basically glum, so that the mother ran off finally to Cannes and Salzburg to hide her laughter, and the daughter drifted mournfully in Haight-Ashbury for a few years. By now it did not really matter, Alice told herself as she lay in bed listening to her son-in-law finish “Für Elise” and then come upstairs. By now Anne was happy. By now she was involved in civic projects, and she entertained often and smartly. It was perhaps too bad that she and Hubert had decided not to have children, Alice thought, and then grinned at the idea of a composite human being with Anne’s straight nose, Hubert’s straight mouth, both their straight minds.… She went off into a good, well-fed sleep.

  Some time later—perhaps three hours—things seemed stifling, and Alice threw off all the covers and then leaped out of bed, felt the floor too hot to bear and leaped back. There were sirens toward the front of the hillside house. Everything went very fast: screams from Anne, bellowing calls from Hubert, men outside, the rippling sound of water pushing against flames all through the downstairs. Oh, the violin, she thought. Water on a good fiddle!

  She tried stepping out of bed again, but the floor was hotter. She put on the little silky jacket she always kept by her pillow, and sat there otherwise uncovered, feeling like a draped Hindu ascetic waiting to be roasted. “Purdah at last,” she said, and laughed, in a familiar casual way, as if she already knew it.

  Sirens howled louder. People shouted. A woman kept screaming, and Alice Tomlinson knew with vague pleasure that it was her girl Anne. That was nice, she thought without malice: Anne was possibly screaming for her.

  The air was thick. Alice wondered about breathing. Was it like freezing, when one grew drowsy, according to reports, and then snoozed off? Would she have to choke a bit? She hated choking.

  The bed she was sitting on began to tip. Plainly, the floor beneath it was weakening. She thought, This is interesting—I am going to be tossed into the fires of Hell in spite of all my efforts to stay clear! She wished she had brought a nightcap of brandy to blaze with her. She felt somewhat light-headed in the thinning oxygen but quite clear in mind.

  The door crashed as if it were paper, and her son-in-law Hubert lunged into the room. His beard and hair were gone, and she realized that he had a fine skull. How stupid of her not to have seen it before! He grabbed her right hand, and pulled her off the teetering bed to the more solid floor near the hallway, which was as dark with smoke as a pit. Behind them the whole end of the house fell into the basement, so lately riddled with fiddle squeaks.

  She smiled delightedly.

  “Come on!” Hubert cried. He pulled her up. They were in the air. Below, the house blazed and there was an ambulance alongside some fire trucks, with a lot of light and bustle. “Come on!”

  She felt her hand strongly and warmly held in his, and they circled over the house as it crumbled into a red glowing heap. The ambulance drove off. Two of the fire trucks stayed nearby. Neighbors went home, shaking their heads, and Hubert and Alice stayed lazily above them. She laughed a little, as lightly as snowbells.

  At first, she felt somewhat timorous or giddy, high over the hot turmoil below. There had been a scary roar when the structure collapsed, but the hand that grasped hers was so strong and she felt such compassion and strength coming from it into her own bones that she held on firmly as they rose higher and higher.

  Never had she known such a warm loving clasp. It told whatever she had always looked for. She felt innocent and undemanding, which she had always meant to be anyway. And Anne would come along later.

  Notes on a

  Necessary Pact

  I. There Is a Remedy

  (… for everything but death—CERVANTES)

  Once there was a woman who helped her father (Hodgkin’s disease), her mother (grief and obesity), her child (premature birth), an unknown stranger in a war, two of her three husbands, and finally her dearest friend, die various ugly deaths. She resolved, at forty-some, that since she herself must die, she would do it as gracefully as possible, as free as possible from vomitings, moans, the ignominy of basins, bedsores, and enemas, not to mention the intenser ignominious dependence of weak knees and various torments of the troubled mind.

  For years she lived carefully. After much consultation and study she reached a state in which her bowels functioned almost perfectly, her bile manufactured itself in the correct amounts, and even her sweat glands responded more to the whip of her current diet than to the goad of temperature. She never sniffed or coughed, and so perfect was her superannuated but hyperdigestive digestive system that if she wanted to splurge occasionally she could eat a half pound of caviar and drink a quart of almost any commendable Champagne without belching.

  Gradually, as her body, pickled in good health, ticked relentlessly and with no apparent slackening toward an infinity of common-sense living, she began to realize that she was all alone. At first she comforted herself by thinking of the weak self-indulgences of her poor friends: high blood pressure, of course, or cirrhosis of the liver. Why not, the way dear Amy loved her pastries, and Oscar his dry-Martinis-cum-Scotch?

  Then, as this suddenly bereft woman roamed her various kinds of loneliness, she blamed her own firm limbs and well-preserved smooth sexless outlines on her basic chastity. She even invoked the rules of the Church, those equivocal utterances which laud celibacy and still encourage the lack of it. She thought of the years since she first resolved to die her own stainless death: of her occasional well-planned, exquisitely fornicated affairs, which had left her feeling healthier than ever and without a care. Now that she was lonely and very old, she would remember a cheek, a sad, bewildered boyish eye like a fine colt’s; her heart felt stirred in what had once been her bosom, and she felt a strange yawn in her well-preserved ageless thighs.

  Then she thought of her cautious intellectualisms, of her daily hours for meditation, for thinking. How well she had done both, how thoroughly, during all those years when she had prepared herself to die an un-ugly death, when with one hand she had pushed away the crying-out orgasms of pain she had seen and with the other firm hand fondled the smooth comfort of Spinoza and Russell and Virginia Woolf!

  But now, how lonely she was!

  She thought for quite a few hours or weeks, and then she deliberately put away all her careful gourmandise and her life of planned asceticism and ecstasy, and her by now almost natural intellectualism. She ate chocolate candies, with some repressed faint nausea, and played Wagner’s lushest music on the phonograph, since any more physical lovemaking was by now beyond her, and read the first serial novel she could lay her hands on in a “woman’s magazine.”

  Nothing made her sick. Her guts, her private parts, her mind: all clicked on sturdily, as if she were a young unthinking virgin. She was, at last, ready to die, and nothing was able to kill her.

  She lay down on her couch, in the vibrant hot summer twilight filled with little airplanes practicing power dives, and prayed with all the fibers of her stringlike nerves and her ingrown sad old soul to be able to vomit, to moan, to cough and whine. She wanted to die … but after all her early acquaintance with the lewdities of quitting this life, she did not know how to.

  And exactly eighty-seven years, three months, and twenty-seven days after she had been born Susan Johnson, Mrs. Farstrey-Abbott-de Castranomi-Hodges died quietly in her bedroom in the Casa de Montana Hotel in P
asadena, California. It was plain to the servants that she had a look of deep disappointment on her face.

  She lay in death like a ripe peach, and over her gathered myriad tiny flies, the like of which had never before been seen in that country. They gave off a soft light, so that for her wake no candles were required.

  II. A Female About to Give Death

  At first, the body lay crisscrossed. The arms were spread out, and the legs stretched in welcome. Gradually the immediate impact of astonishment grew less. The legs came up, and crossed at ankles; arms folded softly across the racked chest cage, and the abandoned breast softened and came alive again. The body grew quiescent, receptive—a chrysalis, not dead, but reviving, curling into a further acceptance of the same process, the same physical position.

  Within, there was still a mechanical protest.

  “Why again?” asked the vigorous spirit.

  This time is surely enough, to be stretched out and pinned, soused in the brine of dying.

  “No,” said the spirit.

  But the legs straightened and then pulled up, the arms crossed with gentle resignation over the breasts, and the life began to slow to the waiting throb in the ever-hollowed still soft bosom.

  Everything was ready for more.

  III. A Communication

  I went into the dark cool room again, and turned on the center light, and sure enough, she lay against the wall, her back twisted a bit and her eyes staring crossways at me, with her tail curled as beautifully as a fern frond or a twig. Yes, that is what she seemed, completely and suddenly: a twig, a dry frond.

  It is a strange thing, to have been in at the death of anything, whether man or beast or lizard. This was a lizard.

  I came into the basement room, a while ago, to see her walk clumsily past a bottle of gin and one of soda water I had put on a kind of buffet there in the side of the stone wall. She moved her fingers, such delicate ones, as if she were tired. The poor wee thing, I thought. She might even be a salamander away from any fire, looking for one.

  She went halfway up her body length against the cold wall. I would have liked to move her down, but I knew she would not want me to touch her, even in extremis, just as I know some people in or out of it do not want me to approach them with words. I held myself away.

  Her indescribably, unbelievably fragile fingers touched the wall. She turned to look at me. I felt alien. I had no right to see what I then saw, for she got down slowly from the stone and let her tail twist around in a frond-like loop, and that a lizard does not do unless she is dying. I looked, startled and disbelieving, into her eyes. I had never been allowed by a lizard to watch such intimacy. I felt shy.

  But she did not. She died there graciously before me, before my eyes. Her own eyes fixed themselves, somewhat crossed, upon a goal I could not guess or comprehend. Her spine stiffened in a small sideways arch. Her little hands clung still to the rock and to the flat chill surface of the buffet with the bottles on it. Her tail remained like a frond, a Gothic artifact, a kind of earnest of the symmetry of death.

  I stood looking at this, almost shocked that I had been permitted to see it. How could this tiny creature, breathing, alive, putting up and down its jewel-like head, have been subjected to the ordeal of dying in front of me, me of all people? Why had it not died alone? It could have gone under a log or a chair or even a warm pillow in this room. But instead it looked at me, curled its tail on the slab of concrete that made the buffet, and fixed its eyes upon me and then nothing.

  It lies there, cold as the stone to begin with and now somewhat colder and dead.

  I do not understand my feeling of amazement. It is as if I had been awarded a coin struck from a special metal, or allowed to peep through a special hole into Heaven or Hell, to stand there and see this little lizard end. I lean back, my hands raised in astonishment and perhaps prayer.

  The tiny scaled creature lies curled irrevocably upon the stone. I await, still warm and breathing, looking upon it as a miracle, wondering where what it was has gone, as I have wondered upon looking at my gone brother, father, even another.…

  The thing that made this lizard what she was, made them and now makes me. The reason for my having to look at them and at her is still beyond my understanding.

  When it comes to me, no matter where I am, I shall most probably fold myself into some sort of commendable shape and look far past the present, as did the little reptile. Someone will wrap me in a clean cloth and dispose of it all, as I have done before and shall do now. But I doubt that anyone in this world will ever know more clearly what I know tonight, from having the lizard look at me.

  IV. The Question

  For instance, it is like being with a very old person, one dying or near there. You are filled, bursting, with questions to be asked and things to be told about—things only that tired, caved-in stubborn one can even dare discuss.

  He or she, by now past sex as well as most other hungers, could tell, might reply. But it is either too late for you to be presumptuous, this point of self-betrayal, or else you note the bone-weary patience, the kindness, and you dare not mar it.

  Very soon it will be too late, to ask or to know. All that is left, other than your silent ageless cry (“Tell, tell me now …”), is the new strength, the fertile power left over to you, and then to your own questioners, not sooner but later.

  V. A Rehearsal

  I was told when young that my grandfather had often said that the climax of a sneeze was the nearest men could come to knowing what actual death felt like. I was also told that dreams are always in black and white, never in color, and that one cannot dream music or sounds. I am of course not sure about the sneezing, except that I enjoy the act, but I know for the truth that I often dream in full color and with anything from a shepherd’s pipe to the New York Philharmonic as accompanists.

  Another thing I was told is that no human creature can die in a dream without actually finishing it, doing it. That does not mean that death is a dream, but that it is a unique obligation that cannot be played with. I wish to refute that truism along with the others.

  It may not be a common experience, but I think it is at least recognized by all but the Old Wives, that a person can indeed die in a dream, and then continue to live. And I did die once, and nearly twice. The second time I seemed reticent, or perhaps only cautious, about the final bliss (the sneeze) I had felt the first time.

  I was almost asleep one night, lying on my left side, waiting without impatience for my dream life to begin. Suddenly I was recollecting, but without meaning to, a dream I had quite forgotten, one that happened a week or a few nights before. I knew that I was merely remembering, and that I was not redreaming. I did not question it, but I was conscious that this was a strange experience, never known to me before, a contradiction.

  The second time, it was the actual dying that was important, much like the dénouement of a familiar novel. I felt the hole form around the bullet as it entered the base of my skull and proceeded firmly upward, toward the right eye socket.

  Then, deliberately, but with no fear or repugnance, I stopped the thing, waking myself, and for a time was in full possession of the first dream, of which this was the near-end. (Already it fades, but a wonderment remains.)

  In the beginning, the first dream, I was a fictional woman, having an affair with a strong, vicious, or at least ruthless man. We decided to kill his wife, and got a beautiful little gun. It was pale blue, I think … a pretty toy.

  Then she was sitting at a table, her back to a low stone wall, and she became me and I her, as behind her/me the man spoke over the wall, framed in dappled sunlight and leaves and flowers, as from a gladsome pergola, and said that he had decided to kill me instead.

  I turned slowly and saw the gun. I knew it was my turn to die, and at once. I felt a flash of fear, but only a flash, and a question about how long it would hurt, but there was no time for protest.

  I leaned a little forward on the table, which was the stone one I once sat a
t in Provence. “Look,” I had said jokingly that other day. “Here is my typewriter, and I am writing a book, a beautiful one, my best!”

  Behind me now I knew the toy blue gun in the dappled light was aiming at me. I did not hear it fire, but as I dropped lazily onto the table the hole at the base of my skull formed itself to welcome the bullet, much as lips will form themselves for a good kiss. The kiss then went in an almost leisurely way toward my right eye socket. I was somewhat surprised at the obvious path it took, and at the general lack of confusion. I had guessed that there might be lightning, or ugly noises, but the only positive thing was its irrevocability. It was at once an accomplished fact.

  About halfway through my head I began to fade … or rather there was a strong cloudiness that seemed to spread out from the bullet. I knew I was almost dead. There was no pain or fear. In another inch along the path I was nearly formless, a fog, a great mist. It was a merging of my identity with non-identity, and never had I been so real, so vast, so meaningless. I disappeared, and the bullet no doubt emerged through the right eye socket, but it did not matter to anything.

  Afterword

  Of course it was strange to send away some forty years of accumulated clippings and notes and even lengthy writings that I had kept since my first meeting with Ursula von Ott, Sister Age, in Zurich. There were a lot of books by other people too, everything from Simone de Beauvoir’s lengthy documents about the aging process, to slim tacky collections of written “thoughts” by therapy-groups of senior citizens in small Texas towns. I felt surgically bewildered as the cartons went off to their chosen resting-place, as if I’d had more than my limbs amputated. I wondered why my breath still kept going in and out, why my truncated mind still clicked. What had all these readings taught me? What was left?