Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake

by Anna Quindlen

  PART III

  The Element of Surprise

  How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you were?

  — SATCHEL PAIGE

  Every once in a while we meet our long-ago selves across a dining table or a desk, when younger women come to ask for advice or to interview for a job. They’re so eager and so smart, with their dresses and their shiny hair, and we know exactly what they want because we once wanted it, too. They want a formula, a plan, a set of directions, an assembly kit. Connect A to B, C to D, and in the end there it is, the life you crave. The job, the salary, the companion, the home.

  It’s so hard to tell them the truth, that there is no formula, no plan. It’s harder still to communicate that your life has been filled with accidents and that they have determined so much of how things turned out. Some have been happy accidents, some not. There were plans for a family but the right partner didn’t come along, or came along too late. There were plans for a big family but after the first child there was no other, or plans for an only child that were changed by an accidental pregnancy. My early plans to have no children at all morphed into plans to have four, and we wound up with three. And now that seems exactly right, even fated somehow. It’s amazing how resilient people are, and how the things that didn’t come true become, after a while, simply the way things are.

  It often seems, looking back, that the unexpected comes to define us, the paths we didn’t see coming and may have wandered down by mistake. The older we get the more willing we are to follow those, to surprise ourselves. After all, all we can do is fail, and failure loses so much of its sting over time. We not only know how to fall, we know how to get up. We’ve done it so often.

  Failure is so terrifying to the young. So is unpredictability. They’re afraid they’ll get it wrong. You have to use cookbooks for a long time before you realize that you can leave out the beans, throw in some tomatoes, substitute rosemary for basil, jettison the formula, try something different. Sometimes the improvisation is better than the original recipe, sometimes just as good, and sometimes you pour it down the Disposall and make a nice fettucine Alfredo, which never hurt anyone.

  Eleanor Roosevelt once famously said that it was important to do something every day that scared you, and it’s a pretty good piece of advice. But it’s more challenging when you’re older because you’re afraid of fewer things, certainly fewer of those small everyday things that I think Eleanor meant. The things we fear now supplant asking for a raise or sending a story to a magazine or inviting a stranger to dinner. They are more cosmic, more philosophical, about a more difficult and dependent future. Perhaps instead of scaring ourselves we need to surprise ourselves every day. We are, after all, always a work in progress. There were things I hadn’t done, didn’t know, couldn’t imagine at fifty that have all come true in the last decade. There must be such things in the decades to come as well. They arrive not because of the engraved invitations of careful planning but through happy happenstance, doodles on the to-do list of life.

  The Little Stories We Tell Ourselves

  This is a story about balance, strength, and persistence. It’s about the determination not to give up and give in, the refusal to see “older” as synonymous with “less.”

  And at the end I stand on my head.

  It took me two years to get there, but today I can do a headstand at a moment’s notice. No brag, just fact. Actually, it’s all brag. I worked hard on this headstand, indefatigably, systematically, harder than I’ve worked on my own work, which comes fairly naturally to me. What I don’t have naturally is a sense of balance.

  “That’s just a little story you tell yourself,” said Anita, who is a trainer, performs weddings, makes jewelry, and functions as a kind of freelance Italian American guru.

  Oh, those little stories we tell ourselves. They make us what we are, and, too often, what we’re not. They are the ten commandments of incapability, cut to order. I can’t cook. I’m not smart. I’m a bad driver. I’m no jock. Maybe they’re even true. It’s hard to tell at a certain point. The little stories we tell ourselves become mythic, difficult if not impossible to discount or overcome. They get written into our DNA, so that when the plane hits a bump, adrenaline floods our bodies as we say to ourselves, “I am afraid of flying.” Sometimes over time it becomes clear how many of the little stories are fictional or, more particularly, lies.

  As we age there are the stories we tell ourselves about our lack of allure, our physical incapacity, even our degeneration. So far my body has not betrayed me with illness or infirmity, but I am always watching, especially on what I think of as Mortality Mondays, when I have my annual mammogram first thing on a fall morning. All we have to do is look at the data to know that our suspicions of our very own self as incubus have some foundation, that something bad may be happening within even as we eat our leafy greens, walk briskly up the stairs, take the multivitamin. The price we pay for an information culture is that every day, in every way, we are learning that our bodies could let us down.

  Let’s face it: they already have. We may have more equanimity about how we look, but we’ve managed to achieve that equanimity just at the moment when our bodies are starting to be less, not by twisted cultural standards but by the standards of our own past lives. When I was young I was voluble about the shortcomings of my legs (bowed), my breasts (large), my butt (ditto), my waist (nonexistent). It almost goes without saying that I looked fine. Now I’m mainly running to stay in place, and when I do, sometimes something hurts. It’s just the way things are, but it doesn’t mean we have to like it, or even accept it.

  We each find the thing about these inevitable changes that makes us crazy. For me it happens to be my eyes. I’m shortwaisted and flat-footed, but I’ve always had perfect vision. I was the person who could read the fine print on the container of children’s Tylenol, spot the street sign a block away from a moving car, thread a needle without scrunching up my face.

  Ah, but that was then. This is now. I have glasses. Many pairs of glasses. I have so many because they are somehow never where I am. The red ones, the tortoiseshell ones. I wander the house and find three pairs in my purse, although not the purse I am currently using. “Here they are,” I am always saying.

  The optometrist was so jolly when I bought the first pair. How old? Forty-two. Right on schedule, he crowed. You know what they say, he said. It’s not that your vision’s bad, it’s that your arms are too short. Magnification 1.75, then 2.25, now 3.0. I hate my glasses because they were the very first thing that alerted me to the notion that I was on a slippery slope of losing—my hair color, my jawline, my bone mass, my vision. I keep a magnifying mirror on the vanity in the bathroom even though I believe it’s a tool of the devil.

  My memory, too, has become a strange shape-shifter, playing hide-and-seek with the obvious. I lose a number or a name for fifteen or twenty minutes and then it returns, so indelible that I can’t quite understand how it was ever gone. Word retrieval is a bit of a challenge, which would be less important if I didn’t have to build a house of sentences almost every day. Conspicuous. Perfunctory. Malfeasance. They hang in the air somewhere to the left of my conscious brain, where my mind could pick them up if my mind had peripheral vision. I can feel the shape of them, the syllables, usually the first letter. Then, like the Cheshire cat, they materialize while I’m not paying attention and I slam them into print so they can’t disappear again.

  Which would we rather, this or the more physical, the aching back, the wonky hip? Neither, thank you.

  When we were kids we used to amuse ourselves with physical disasters that never happened. If you had to choose, would you be blind or deaf? (Deaf.) If you had to lose an arm or a leg, which would it be? (Arm. Everyone said arm.) But of course, being young, we never asked ourselves the questions that now concern or haunt us, the real questions: Is that pain between the eyes a hangover, a headache, or a brain tumor?

  The way the human body works, or, finally, doesn’t, re
minds me of a run-in I had with a Cuisinart full of the ingredients for black bean soup. I turned the lid and instead of the familiar growl heard nothing but silence. Again. Again. Rattled it, the last refuge of the angry nonmechanically minded. Gave it a shot of WD-40 and tried not to think what that was going to do to the taste of the soup. Then finally said aloud, “I can’t believe this damn thing conked out after only”—and did the math in my head, then did it again. The Cuisinart had been a wedding gift, which meant that I had been using it for more than thirty years. After all that time I should have delivered an impassioned eulogy for the thing instead of hitting it with a spatula.

  Our bodies, too, are major appliances that have delivered decades of faithful service with precious little downtime. I’ve been bending these knees since they were scabby and scraped from falling on the pavement, been walking on these flat feet since I was ten months old, been using these eyes for six decades. If the human body had a warranty, mine would have run out ages ago.

  It’s indisputable that I’m not the newer model. There’s an Agatha Christie novel in which a major plot fulcrum has to do with the knees of one of the characters. She’s been pretending to be quite a young woman, but she’s actually considerably older, and our ace detective knows this by looking at her knees. I can’t remember whether the detective is Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot, or even what the story was about; one of the great things about being the age I am now and having a reliably unreliable memory is that I can reread mystery novels. I either don’t remember whodunit or, when I do figure it out, I convince myself that it’s because I’m canny and wise. All I can remember about that particular book is the knees. And because of it, from time to time, I have looked at my own, squinting suspiciously. I can’t compare them to my knees at twenty; I never paid the least bit of attention to my knees at twenty. But I’m quite certain they had something that they don’t have now. Everything tells me so.

  One of the reasons I passed quietly into the country of menopause is, I think, that I had an adolescent girl around the house whose estrogen was in hyperdrive at the same time my own gauge was inching toward empty. There are lots of advantages to having children in your thirties instead of your twenties—for me, it meant that I never looked down at a sleeping infant and thought, Darn it, wish I was out clubbing—but one is that it eventually makes it impossible for you to deny that hormones are a dangerous controlled substance. When your daughter enters the house, throws her backpack across the dining room, stomps up the stairs, and slams her bedroom door with a sound like a building being dynamited, then screams, “Nothing!” when you ask what’s wrong, there’s a temptation to think that she’s overreacting. But not if you’ve woken in a cold sweat at 2:00 A.M., incapable of finding sleep again, staring at a crack in the moonlit ceiling and thinking about how your husband’s regular breathing makes you want to elbow him, hard. Unless you’re completely unhinged—and some of the time that may be the case—you can’t help realizing that you and your daughter are having different variations on the same theme. She up, you down. She in, you out.

  Modern medicine has made it possible for women to pretend that their fecund years are not over, by providing hormones that come out of pill vials instead of ovaries. These were originally sold as something to keep us cheerful so we wouldn’t annoy men. One early ad for Premarin featured a photograph of an adoring woman watching a man pilot a boat, with the accompanying words, “It is no easy thing for man to take the stings and barbs of business life, then to come home to the turmoil of a woman ‘going through the change of life.’ ” (Unfortunately the next frame of the ad does not show the woman smashing a hole in the bottom of the boat, allowing it to fill with water and then sink.)

  People today discuss hormones as a fountain of youth for everything from the bones to the skin to the memory; in other words, at a time of systematic losing, you can be a winner through chemistry. I’ve had friends who swear that that kind of pharmaceutical intervention saved their lives, saved them from mood swings so severe that they felt like a multiple personality case on a bad day. Luckily I was spared the worst; I mostly wound up taking the sweater off and putting the sweater on, so I took a pass on the pills and the patch for any number of reasons. Perhaps because my mother took a synthetic estrogen called DES during her pregnancies that cost me long diagnostic hours in doctors’ offices, I’m someone who responds to the directive “Take this” with the question “Why?”

  But eschewing hormones doesn’t mean I don’t want to find my own fountain of youth, or at least fountain of youthful. There was nothing I could do about my eyes except wear glasses, and I’m not sure any of those skin creams make a bit of difference. Instead I decided that rather than hold on to what I’d once had, I would find some way to become something new. My doctor, who is about the same age as I am, provided a way to make that happen at just about the same time that my vision started to blur. On a prescription pad she wrote, “Hire a trainer.”

  (It’s interesting how much force a scrip gives to a simple directive. A friend told me her husband, a psychiatrist, once wrote two for a patient, one for a mild antidepressant and another that said, “Get a dog.” The guy got a dog, too, and I’m going to guess that that was at least as much help in mood elevation as the pills.)

  Those trainers—Jenny, Anita, Meegan, I salute you—led me to dead lifts and one-legged squats and biceps curls. They led me to question the little stories I’d long told myself about my strength and my balance, and that led me to the headstand, my personal symbol of opposition to the pernicious pessimism that accompanies aging. There’s something seductive about the thing we believe we cannot do, the achievement that seems out of reach. I imagine it’s what keeps people climbing mountains or surfing during storms, that sense of going to the edge of possibility and then over it successfully.

  I’ve never been that kind of risk taker. I avoided physical derring-do, especially anything that required me to take my feet off the ground. The fact that all three of my children wanted to go skydiving made me wonder whether they’d been switched at birth. But as I assessed the bill of goods I’d sold myself over the decades, it occurred to me that maybe I’d reached a moment when I could stop telling myself old stories and start inventing some new ones.

  Part of it was sheer stubbornness, the notion that I will accept the things I cannot change but will change the things I can or die trying. Isaac Newton learned about gravity from a falling apple; I learned about gravity from my butt, and I’m fighting the falling. Hence the free weights, the kettle bells, the Swiss ball, the Bosu ball, the medicine balls, and the weighted balls. One day my husband looked around our bedroom and said, “Are you making a model of the solar system?” Pilates teaser, triceps dips, torso twists: sometimes it all makes me a little sad. If I’d worked out like this when I was twenty-five, I would have been a goddess. Except that I wouldn’t have worked out like this when I was twenty-five. There is, I’m convinced, a kind of dogged determination that can come with getting older, a determination not to be overcome by can’t or don’t, by perceived shortcomings. I feel it most conspicuously when I work out. Chest press … I will not … side plank … let myself … squat thrust … be beaten. Push-up push-up push-up. Crunch crunch crunch.

  I would have sworn to you when I was younger that I would never have wound up here on the bedroom floor, huffing and puffing and pumping iron. The little story I told myself then was that I wasn’t the kind of woman who exercised. I have a short attention span, and I’d always rather run my mouth than run. I haven’t since become one of those exercise junkies, buzzing on endorphins and sweat. But I’ve finally recognized my body for what it is: a personality delivery system, designed expressly to carry my character from place to place, now and in the years to come. It’s like a car, and while I like a red convertible or even a Bentley as well as the next person, what I really need are four tires and an engine. I don’t require a hood ornament. It’s not about how my body looks at this point; it’s about how it works.


  We women have such a strange relationship with our bodies nowadays, even stranger than it was when I was a girl. All of it takes place at the margins, between the Boston Marathon and all-you-can-eat buffets, between draconian diet plans and the Triple Quarter Pounder with cheese. Obesity and anorexia—you have to hand it to us Americans, we never do anything halfway. We have a culture that elevates women in advertisements who are contoured like thirteen-year-old boys, a culture that showcases actresses on television so undernourished that they look like bobblehead dolls. We’ve invented a new—and apparently desirable—class of clothes, size 0. A Harvard University study showed that up to two-thirds of underweight twelve-year-old girls considered themselves to be too fat. In other words, we have a culture that reflects contempt and antipathy toward a realistic female body, which is just another form of hating women.