Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake

by Anna Quindlen

  That’s not a little story we tell ourselves. It’s a story everything around us tells us, and, worse, it’s a story young women hear as they’re growing to adulthood. The invisible negligible disappearing woman, the cultural ideal just at a time when women are becoming more powerful and participatory in the world. No mystery to that equation. And speaking of equations, zero is nothing.

  I will never be skinny. I want to be strong, strong enough to hike the mountain across the road without getting breathless, strong enough to take a case of wine from the deliveryman and carry it to the kitchen. Strong enough to physically fight the weak-woman surrender that I’ve been fighting spiritually all my life; when I work out hard enough I feel like I want to go out and knock over a convenience store, and for a woman who grew up with her hands folded and her knees together, that’s one fabulous feeling. Scarlett O’Hara had a seventeen-inch waist, but she couldn’t eat anything at the barbecue, and at the end of the book she’s alone. What’s so great about that? When I was first challenged to do the headstand and insisted I was too old to learn a new trick, someone told me that story about a fifty-year-old woman who says she can’t get a college degree at her age. “By the time I’m done I’ll be fifty-four,” she tells a friend, and her friend replies, “In four years you’ll be fifty-four anyway.”

  Maybe I also decided to do the headstand because I was afraid to do it, and I don’t like the idea that I’m afraid. My father was a management consultant, and he taught me about W. Edwards Deming, the business guru who is best known for the reconstruction of the Japanese economy after World War II. Deming has a list of managerial dicta, and one of them is “Drive out fear.” It’s an essential part of maturing, putting fear aside, because if there’s anything that cripples us it is fear. In some ways I think it’s the essential evil because it is the root of so many others. We don’t take jobs we would love because we are afraid to try something new. We don’t move to another city or end a bad relationship because fear smothers adventure and self-interest. We hate new immigrants, people of different backgrounds and races, those with opposing views, because we are afraid, afraid to find out that we are not special, chosen, dominant, right. All great despots play on the fear of their people to get them to embrace bigotry and xenophobia. When you look back on the evil we’ve done as a country or the chances we’ve missed as individuals, fear is almost always the driving force. When we were girls, many of us feared being ourselves.

  As I like to tell students who believe that if you do something competently you must enjoy it, I hate to write precisely because I am afraid every time I look at a blank computer screen, afraid of the gap between what I imagine and what actually materializes. My father declared after his eightieth birthday that he was now part of the Eighty Plus Club and that its members had different rules than do the rest of us. Most of them seemed to consist of not doing things my father didn’t want to do. As a member of the fifty-plus crowd I’m not getting on a roller coaster or even a Tilt-A-Whirl. I reserve the right to certain insignificant aversions.

  I was afraid of the headstand, afraid to be upside down in a way that had a lot more to do with fear than with balance. But nailing it was about fear, too, about being able to will agility and ability into being at a time when so much told me that I was aging out of both. And I had to understand and analyze both my strengths and weaknesses to do so. I wasted a year trying to do a headstand the way the flexible yoga types do, just springing up and over. I’m not flexible, physically or spiritually, and it was when I decided to use my strength and determination instead that I got where I wanted to go. Tripod, leg raise, pelvic tilt. And one day I was up, and then upside down. The world didn’t look much different except that it turned out there was a lot of spare change and a couple of stray earrings under my bureau. But it felt different. I can do something today that I couldn’t do half a century ago. And if I can do one thing like that, perhaps there are others. The learning curve continues, which is just another way of saying you’re alive.

  This isn’t one of those parables about how everything is possible. We do our children a disservice with the new fashion of suggesting that’s so: “You can do anything you set your mind to” is a lovely sentiment, but it’s a bait and switch for the kid with a mediocre voice who sets his sights on Broadway. But sometimes I look at my own existence and think of how improbable most of it is: How I came to live in the city that seems to suit my metabolism the way hot fudge suits vanilla ice cream. How I wound up with three children when I once thought I wanted none at all. How I ached to write novels and managed to do so. I know that along the way I told myself a little story about every stop, a story that always contained the word can’t. But one day, reporter that I am, I decided not to write the story in advance of the facts. I’m focusing on one-armed push-ups at the moment; I suppose they’re good for the chest and back, but that has nothing to do with why I want to do them. They’re the kind of thing a woman my age can’t expect of herself. That’s just another little story, and I’m refusing to tell it. Right now I can do three one-armed push-ups on each side. But a year from now, who knows? Who knows?

  Older

  Here’s what happens when you raise the question of getting older at a restaurant table or a cocktail party or standing in line at a coffee shop: the moans begin, the sighs, the eye rolling. John had a hip replacement. Jane has tennis elbow. The back hurts, the feet ache. And let’s not even talk about age spots or eyesight or buying a bathing suit.

  But what I’ve found is that if you push people a little harder, ask them what’s so terrible about getting older, almost everyone eventually gets past the plantar fasciitis and the crepey neck and winds up admitting that they’re happier now than they were when they were young. They feel as if they’ve settled into their own skin, even if that skin has sun damage.

  A Gallup poll of 340,000 people showed unequivocally that we get more contented as we age. Respondents started out at eighteen feeling really good about themselves and their lives, then became less and less satisfied as the years went by. But after age fifty there was a change in the weather, and from then on happiness was on an upward trajectory into the eighties. As those in the survey grew older, they reported that stress, anger, sadness all declined. Perhaps if we think of life as a job, most of us finally feel that after fifty we’ve gotten good at it.

  All this reminds me of a system I once learned to help make any important decision. Take a sheet of paper, draw a line down the middle, list pros and cons. The old house has a leaky roof, rattling windows, a wilderness of a garden, a damp basement, bad gutters. All cons. I love the place. One pro that obliterates all the others.

  We can graph good sense all we want, but most of the time we feel what we feel. We can lay out the downside with ease. Getting older means the disintegration of the body, and sometimes the mind. It means being seen as yesterday’s news. Perhaps because I grew up in the newspaper business I always realized someday I’d be yesterday’s news. Perhaps because I’m the oldest of five, I’ve always felt older. There’s a lot less to my future than there is to my past, and there are undoubted minefields along the way. But what can I tell you? I look at the list of pros and cons, and I always come to the same conclusion. I like the house.

  This feeling goes double for women, and the reasons are clear when you talk to them. We started out pretending, trying to adjust our throttle to some generally accepted notion of femininity. In her commencement address to the graduating class of Barnard College in 2010, Meryl Streep said that the characterization of the pleasing girl she created in high school was a role she worked on harder than any ever after. Speaking for so many of us, she recalled, “I adjusted my natural temperament, which tends to be slightly bossy, a little opinionated, a little loud, full of pronouncements and high spirits, and I willfully cultivated softness, agreeableness, a breezy natural sort of sweetness, even shyness if you will, which was very, very, very effective on the boys.” Gloria Steinem coined the term “female impersonators�
�� to describe the uncomfortable way in which we women learned early on to play the role of pleaser, with a practiced smile that did not always extend to our eyes.

  The act took its toll, as subterfuge and self-denial tend to do, and we paid with an internal dialogue of criticism. Not smart enough, not pretty enough, not a good enough mother, not a good enough professional. An entire Greek chorus chimed in, a Greek chorus made up of magazines, movies, advice books, alleged friends, and family members who insisted they were telling us only for our own good, only wanted to be certain we would be happy and have no regrets. The problem was, the chorus couldn’t make up its mind; the messages ranged from self-sacrifice to self-promotion, abstinence to sexual freedom. The only constant was that somehow we all needed to be more than we already were, even if that meant playing a role that was essentially false. But more was never enough. Put together all the mixed messages and what you came up with was an ideal woman who was the six-foot swizzle stick in fashion magazines grafted onto a Supreme Court justice, with three successful children and a husband who loved to cook. Notice that there is no one on earth who conforms to this description.

  The only good thing you can say about this nonsense is that at a certain age we learned to see right through it, and that age is now.

  Without the aid of self-help books or inspirational speeches, we came to understand that we look and live fine. By the standards that matter, of friendship and diligence and support and loyalty, we are scoring in the top stanine. Cellulite is not a character defect. At sixty you can look all the superwoman stuff in the face and say to yourself, oh, puh-leeze. The Greek chorus is just faint hurdy-gurdy music in the back of your mind on a bad day.

  Of course, men have not had to deal with these same expectations or demands. The world still permits them to live relatively unexamined lives in terms of how to see themselves; when’s the last time you saw the headline “Five Pounds in Five Days!” on the cover of Esquire? In some fashion this actually makes aging more challenging for men. The constant loop of self-criticism doesn’t end when they are older; it begins there. They wake up at sixty and find themselves flabbergasted if they’re not masters of the universe. By contrast, the women of our generation have usually found themselves a bit surprised at reaching a high rung on the ladder, which is why we talk about luck so often when we talk about accomplishment.

  The result is that many, if not most, women embrace their later years, although they don’t know exactly how to name them. Age is just a number, one saying goes, and like most sayings it has a pleasing sound and means exactly nothing. Age is experience, and arthritis, and receding gums, and old stories, and old friends, and presbyopia, and hot flashes. But what is “old”? What does the word mean at a moment when seventy-year-olds run marathons and corporations, have children (well, the guys anyhow), and appear in movies as the leads and not only the character parts? Is it the first time a clerk calls you ma’am instead of miss? Yeah, you remember that moment, stock-still in your Capri pants, with your big sunglasses pushed up into your salon–sun-streaked hair. How about when the girl behind the glass at the movie theater asks if you want a senior citizen’s ticket, or when the first mailing comes from AARP? Or, conversely, there’s that moment when someone at a bar or liquor store cards you—because it’s their policy to card everyone—and your heart soars, or when your dentist tells you you have the gums of a thirty-year-old and it’s the high point of your day.

  Or maybe it’s when you’re driving along the thruway with an old, old friend, someone with whom you’ve shared job struggles and romantic travails and too much tequila and maybe a joint or two, and you find yourself discussing the fact that neither of you is as comfortable driving at night as you once were. “This is old-people talk,” you say, and he replies, “As Bob Dylan once said, he who is not busy being born is busy dying.” I wonder which one Dylan thought he was, once he’d moved past the formerly statutory retirement age of sixty-five?

  We can all do simple math, yet realizing you’ve become a person of a certain age comes on suddenly, an incongruous surprise. It came to me full force on a muggy day in July, when a tornado struck our house in Pennsylvania. The dogs pressed against the back of my legs as I made a sandwich in the kitchen, apparently sensing something coming several minutes before I did. Then the wind roared through with a freight-train sound, and the trees bowed down outside the window. In an instant the trees had disappeared, obscured by thick gray air flecked with black, like ominous confetti. In the time it took to assemble lunch, it was, then was not. All that was left was the afterward. Most of the big trees closest to the house were gone, their root balls upended into the air, as though the hand of God had wiped the landscape and ordered us to try again. The pond was filled with downed cedars and enormous willow branches. There was no power and no water, but the house was untouched except for a single cracked chimney cap.

  I sent all three of the children messages. Chris was at a German heavy metal festival and didn’t get his for days. Quin was in the New York apartment and wrote back immediately, concerned about whether he should come posthaste. But Maria left her university summer school class early and called, sobbing.

  “I’m just afraid of history repeating itself,” said my daughter, who knows that my own mother died when I was still in college.

  And without thinking I responded, “Oh, honey, I’m too old to die young now.”

  Sometimes things pop out of your mouth that amount to an epiphany, even if they sound like bad country-western songs. This was one of those things. I am no longer young and certainly not elderly. I am past the midpoint of my life. I am at a good point in my life.

  Am I old? Define your terms. One afternoon I went a little ballistic when I read a newspaper story that described an “elderly couple” fending off a burglar. The woman involved was sixty-eight. “How is that elderly?” I ranted. “That’s not elderly! Sixty-eight is not elderly!”

  After the rant, silence, and then one of my children said, “Mom, that’s elderly.”

  “It is,” said another.

  “Definitely,” said the third.

  Nonsense, I thought, and to prove it I went to various journalism sites and writing style books to nail down the cutoff point for “elderly,” the precise definition of an old person, or an older one. It seems that old is a moving target. Some gerontologists divide us into the young-old, ages fifty-five to seventy-four, and the old-old, over seventy-five. In a survey done by the Pew Research Center, most people said old age begins at sixty-eight. But most people over the age of sixty-five thought it began at seventy-five.

  When I searched my own clippings over the course of a long career in journalism for the word “elderly,” I discovered to my horror that I had used the adjective with casual regularity. There were the elderly men on the boardwalk in Coney Island, the elderly women in the beauty parlors of Flatbush. And then—here’s the important thing—the number of uses of the word “elderly” in my copy began to dwindle, and then they died. As I aged, “elderly” seemed more and more pejorative, and my definition of what constituted elderly shifted upward.

  In other words, old is wherever you haven’t gotten to yet.

  It’s all relative, the way it was when I got pregnant for the first time at thirty-one and everyone in our two families thought I’d left it rather late and everyone in our urban friendship circle thought I was rushing into it. When I mentioned writing about aging, women in their seventies and eighties brushed me off: “Oh, you’re too young to write about the subject.” The truth is, I feel young. I certainly feel a good deal younger than the older people of my past. Our grandmothers at sixty, and my friends and I at the same age: we might as well be talking about different species, in the way we dress, talk, work, exercise, plan—in the way we live. When people lived to sixty-five, sixty was old. When they live to be eighty, sixty is something else. We’re just not sure what yet. A friend told me she thought it was summed up in the message inside a birthday card she got from her mother
: “After the middle ages comes the renaissance.”

  So we face an entirely new stage of human existence without nomenclature, which is an interesting challenge, because what we call things matters. That’s why I recoiled from “elderly.” The words we use, and how we perceive those words, reflect how we value, or devalue, people, places, and things. After all, one of the signal semantic goals of the early women’s movement was to make certain grown women were no longer referred to as “girls.”

  I’m also keenly aware of this because I am a writer and I know each word denotes something singular; that’s why I was Anna Quindlen before I married and Anna Quindlen afterward, too, because the words “Anna Quindlen” mean a specific person, and that person is me.

  Or perhaps one of the reasons I absorbed the importance of naming lies in my childhood. On my upper lip, to one side of center, I have a noticeable raised brown spot, and when I was a little girl my mother taught me that it was something called a beauty mark. In fact, on Halloween, if I were dressed as someone dishy, a gypsy or a princess or a ballerina, my mother would add more beauty marks with a black eyebrow pencil, on one cheek, at the corner of my eye. From time to time my mother would point out beautiful actresses who had beauty marks, too; she thought Elizabeth Taylor was the most gorgeous woman in the world, and Elizabeth Taylor had a beauty mark. The words my mother had used to describe what was on my face had made me completely comfortable with it. I often wondered afterward whether I would have felt otherwise had she said that what was on my face was a mole, which is what it is.

  It’s too late to rehabilitate the words “old” and “elderly,” especially in this age of perpetual youth, so we’ve redefined them, often redefined them out of existence. We don’t even have a name for this time of our lives, or a name that seems to work. Second adulthood, one writer called it. The third chapter, says another. Late middle age? Later age?