Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake

by Anna Quindlen

  I hate January. At the beginning of every new year I get a sinking sensation. All these years later, sometimes I think it’s the lack of sunlight, or the unwavering cold. And then I remember. There are some things that are deep inside me now, chemical, biological: The way my head swivels when a little voice cries, “Mommy!” in a crowded supermarket. The adrenaline rush late on an election night. The anvil weight of January.

  In Angels in America, the brilliant play by Tony Kushner, a play about illness and love and loss and death, there is this valediction: “But still. Still bless me anyway. I want more life. I can’t help myself. I do.” I do.

  To Be Continued

  There’s a pond to one side of our house in the country. It is full of fish, most of them bought and paid for: bass, sunnies, trout, and the fat old grass carp that are supposed to keep the bottom vegetation in check. My son and I found a turtle on the banks with a freshwater leech and its dozens of young attached to the shell, so the pond must have leeches, too. I put a hundred catfish in the pond and haven’t seen one since the hatchery truck drove away, except the one the young dog managed to catch and then couldn’t manage to eat because of that spiny dorsal fin.

  The pond is man-made but you’d never know it. The previous owner, who was a successful businessman but had the soul and the inclination of an engineer, designed it perfectly. At times of flood it remains precisely within its banks, and at times of drought it does the same. It is fed by five springs and disgorges into a narrow spillway that leads to Cherry Creek. The trees bud, leaf, drop their leaves, shiver in the winter wind; the shrubs bloom, go to seed, hunch beneath the snow. But the pond never changes. Sometimes if it’s extremely cold in winter it will get a sheet of ice over the section near the dock, but the ice is never thick enough to walk on.

  When we first looked at the place, the man who’d long taken care of it told us there was a bit of a heron problem. We thought that was hilarious, and amazing. A heron problem! We would see heron! How could that be a problem? Now I swear softly at them as they rise from the banks of the pond just after dawn, silver ghosts on stilt legs, spearing my fish.

  When I’m here I walk around the perimeter of the pond two, sometimes three times a day. Early in our tenancy I imagined for just a moment that I saw a woman sitting in one of the Adirondack chairs at the far end. She had silver hair and was wearing nothing-colored clothes, a loose shirt and pants. At first I couldn’t tell who she was. The only other woman I’d ever encountered unexpectedly on the property was the previous owner’s wife, who had long outlived him and died at age ninety-one. After we had taken title but before we’d moved in, I had spent three days there alone, putting sheets on the beds, hanging pictures, placing towels, making the house my own. But I was sleeping in her old bedroom and using her beautiful old cherry desk, and the first night as I fell asleep I felt as though someone incorporeal was standing next to the bed. So I said very loudly, “Bess, this is my house now.” And that was that.

  I am not in the least the kind of person who believes in ghosts or vibrations or hauntings or visions. I wish I were; there are all sorts of people I would love to see again even if I could see through them. And the woman in the Adirondack chair wasn’t someone who, in the parlance of spiritualists, had passed over. When I squinted at her I realized that she looked familiar, and the reason she looked familiar was that she looked like me, only much older. Then she was gone, and there was just a rain jacket that had been left draped across the chair and a tree branch at an odd angle behind it. It was all my overactive imagination. But frankly, for just an instant I thought I looked pretty good.

  It’s hard to imagine yourself in the future. It’s why people do so many dumb things, because they’re mired in the moment. Smoking, drinking, making disastrous marriages, putting off medical tests. The reason we’ve made a mess of the planet is that being its stewards required us to imagine not our own futures but those four or five generations removed. It’s a quantum leap, from unthinkingly letting the water run into the drain as you brush your teeth to global shortages of water when your great-grandchildren are old people themselves. It’s probably unimaginable in any concrete way.

  “The human being is the only animal that thinks about the future,” Daniel Gilbert wrote in his book, Stumbling on Happiness. But thinking about it is different from inhabiting it, or imagining it, or believing in it truly. Thinking about the future is how people come up with a route to the top job. Inhabiting it is how they realize the top job is an invitation to a coronary and a life of misery. The second mostly happens in real time.

  It’s not surprising to me that I can’t really imagine what I will be like at eighty. I can’t imagine myself at twenty. I know the anecdotes, the life passages, the résumé. But to feel what that girl felt, to close my eyes and actually be her: it’s beyond me. Like one of those paintings on which artists have put several strata of fully realized compositions, there’s simply been too much layered upon the way she was for me to see it clearly. I’m always amazed by people who can tell you precisely how they felt in first grade, at their junior prom. Sometimes I can tell you who was there, what I wore, the address of the house. The reporter remembers the facts: I grew up in a center-hall colonial at 511 Kenwood Road. When you walk in the front door, the living room is to the left, the dining room to the right. But the novelist cannot truly evoke the emotions, conjure the scene. Or she can, but has no idea whether it is accurate or merely imagined. Only ephemera makes the past seem somewhat real, poems written in my more rounded youthful script, photographs found in a drawer, a forgotten earring at the bottom of the jewelry box. So much of the rest is like a movie whose plot outline I recall but whose scenes I’ve mostly forgotten.

  Sometimes I think we can’t imagine our future because we’re afraid to think of the bad or to hope for the good. Besides, it’s the surprises that make the best plot twists. My life is nothing like I imagined, and so much better than I could have expected, and that goes for this moment in my life, when I am beginning to flirt with the idea of old age. I have a feeling I may be cut out to be an old woman. I was a weird little girl and an odd teenager, a mixture of bravado and insecurity that, together, was like one of those vinegar-and-baking-soda volcanoes you made for science as a kid, explosive and unpredictable. I felt as though my personality was not fit for a normal life in the world; I was always slightly at sea. Today I’m on terra firma. Will it last?

  The great hallmark of my life, my generation, my time, has been choice. We’ve been a wandering breed, we Americans straddling the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, changing jobs, changing homes, changing spouses, religions, political parties. We’ve had more options than any generation before us, to marry those of different races or religions, to marry those of our own sex, to not marry at all but live together without legal obligation or live without a lifelong partner. I don’t think any of this ever occurred to a man like my grandfather, who lived all his life in the city in which he was born, who took a job and stuck with it, who expected his children to do the same. Obligation trumped choice for his generation; for my own it is the other way around. The ability to exercise all those choices, to be a police officer who becomes a lawyer or a firefighter who becomes a florist, to raise kids in the suburbs and then leave for the city or even another country, have all given us a sense that we decide what happens next. Sometimes, if we dig deep, the choices are limited, even illusory. But we hold fast to the notion just the same.

  It’s not only death that terrifies us when we think about passing through the decades that come next. Maybe it’s not even mainly death. It’s the diminution of choices. There is nothing, nothing that enrages me more than listening to people talk about having those ugly little conversations with their aged parents. “That house is just too much for them,” one will say. “I had to tell her that she just can’t live alone anymore,” another will add. “He just can’t take care of himself,” says a third. And my back goes up like a Halloween cat as I think: The people
you are discussing are adults. They can make their own decisions, and they’ve earned the right to do so.

  I don’t like the notion of the child becoming father to the man, or, more likely, mother to the woman, perhaps because I saw firsthand how distressed my mother was by the notion. One day it was decided that she was too ill to do what she had always done, to be who she had always been, to put the chicken in the oven, to change the beds. When I showed up, with bad grace and humor, to take over her life, it must have seemed as though she was diminished, defeated, perhaps already dead.

  On a sailing trip to the British Virgin Islands, the five of us, my husband and I and our three children, decided to swim from the dinghy to the rocky beach in a particularly vicious chop. I floundered in the strong current despite all my aerobic exercise and weight training and had to be helped to shore by the first mate, a lively college graduate who had been raised in St. Thomas and knew how to negotiate the undertow. “Charlotte saved my life!” I repeated jauntily during the rest of the trip, but at the time I didn’t feel the least bit jaunty, simply aged and defeated and, yes, frightened—not frightened of death but of weakness and incapacity. Of course, I also had to swim back to the dinghy in the opposite direction, this time with a new sense of purpose, a sense that I would make it to that boat if it was the last thing I did. As I beat at the roiling sea with my oscillating arms, I heard one of my sons say in a panicky voice, “You okay, Mom?” And I am ashamed to admit that I shouted fiercely, “Leave me alone!” I apologized afterward for my overwrought response to his question, but I wasn’t responding to his question at all. I was responding to my own fear, of burdening my children with concern, oversight, the need to take care of me, to someday decide that my home was too large or my stairs too steep. I was imagining what, for me, is the worst-case future.

  When I think of that future, I know that my choices will narrow, have been narrowing as surely as a perspective drawing leading the eye to the focal point. I won’t be going to medical school and becoming a surgeon. I’m not going to live in Italy or learn Chinese. I may have to become more thrifty and less spontaneous, may be lonelier and needier than I’d like. “Aging, particularly in the later decades, is a drawing in,” Carolyn Heilbrun wrote when she herself was in her seventies. And I like drawing in okay. I like sitting in a big chair with a long book. I like spending an hour pulling together ingredients for a stew and then staying inside all day while its aroma seeps into every corner of the house. And later on, I don’t mind dishing out a portion for myself alone and eating it while I read, my book to one side of the plate, although I prefer dishing it out to my husband and our children and listening to them all talk together, like a tennis match of words and jokes and old, old stories.

  I think I could be okay with that more solitary life. But I would like to be strong and healthy enough to control how I live it. Each summer I go to the cemetery and lay a few flowers on the grave of a woman named Maxine Smiley, who was once our next-door neighbor. She was in her seventies when we first met her, and she and my toddler daughter struck up an unlikely friendship abetted by a break in the hedge between our properties and the fact that they were two of the most strong-minded people I have ever met. Maria would light Mrs. Smiley’s cigarette; once, when she began to give her the enlightened modern child’s view of smoking, acquired in a school session on good health, Mrs. Smiley said, “If you do that you can’t come here anymore.” Sometimes I would see Maria stalk across our lawn, the out-thrust bottom lip visible despite the lowered head, and when she got to the door she would mutter, “Mrs. Smiley was crabby to me,” and go off to find her brothers. But when she had to write an essay in sixth grade about a person who had made a difference in her life, she wrote about Mrs. Smiley and titled it “My Best Friend.”

  I, too, cut through the hedge to visit Mrs. Smiley, trading local gossip and updates on the state of the produce available at the farm stands in the area, the sweet corn, the white peaches. I admired the fact that she always cooked for herself, ate dinner on a tray table when she was alone but always ate well, a nice salad, broiled fish with a dill or caper sauce. I never stayed too long when I went to see her because it was clear that Mrs. Smiley welcomed visitors, and welcomed their leave-taking as well. She read, watched certain TV programs, spoke on the phone, went to the market until she concluded that she ought no longer to drive her big old sedan. “Other people want to go a lot faster than I do,” she said philosophically.

  Every summer we would go out to dinner together, just the two of us. It’s the only time I’ve ever reserved a table in the smoking section. I would never have told Mrs. Smiley what to do, and neither, from my experience, would anyone else. And perhaps as a result of that strength and specificity she had what I think of as a good old age, in her own home, on her own schedule, by her own lights. She had one of those stupid accidents we all sometimes have, the ones that become increasingly onerous the older we become, and she wound up in the hospital for a brief stay that ended in her death. But she didn’t dwindle into senescence or live in a place where she would have been confined by four unfamiliar institutional walls, or, worse for a woman of her character, live surrounded by those she thought foolish and boring.

  At dinner we would sometimes talk about the long span of her life. She’d been trained as a nurse but worked as one of the earliest flight attendants. The planes flew low, the trips were rocky, some of the passengers got sick. She raised an eyebrow whenever I mentioned the discomforts of modern flying, remembering those early days. She’d been born in one century and died in another. There was so much to remember, to amaze.

  Anyone who was born, as I was, in the middle of the twentieth century and is now living through the early decades of the twenty-first should appreciate the feeling. What a time we’ve lived through, so revolutionary that the list could go on and on: the Pill, the heart transplant, the moon landings, cellphones, cable television, computer communication. As a small child I listened to the sound track of South Pacific on a series of long-playing albums; now I have it downloaded onto my laptop. When my boys were little and I worked at home I had one of the earliest personal computers, an IBM XT that made a sound like a stomach growling when it saved my documents. It had less memory than a digital watch does today.

  On the morning after the presidential election of 2008, my father said, a catch in his voice, “I’m glad I’ve lived long enough to see the Phillies win the World Series and a black man elected president.” I remember once sitting outside with Mrs. Smiley as an enormous jet passed silently overhead, like a shining exclamation point in the blue sky, and saying to her, remembering her stories of planes with no pressure and enough seats for only a handful of passengers, “That must be so strange for you.”

  “It’s interesting,” she’d replied, looking up.

  I want to see what happens next. I want to see the future and be a little bit of a crank about the past, to tell my grandchildren stories about black-and-white televisions and cars without seatbelts and watch them light up when they’re young and turn off when they’re teenagers. I want to bore them with my memories, or what’s left of them. People like to rehearse their worst fears by looking at them from a safe distance, denatured. In my case I’ve watched on more than a few occasions a lovely small movie called Iris. It’s about the brilliant British writer Iris Murdoch, who wrote more than two dozen books and who was selected as one of the most influential English authors of the twentieth century. The film crosscuts between Murdoch’s early years and her last ones, when she was locked in the dungeon of Alzheimer’s. And no matter how often I’ve seen it, there is one moment when I always go over an emotional cliff. The actress Judi Dench, who plays Murdoch, turns to her husband and says, haltingly, as though she is pulling something precious from a deep dark pit, “I … wrote … books.”

  I want to be able to remember it all, not just the books but the newsrooms and the playgroups and the bad jokes and the holiday traditions. In my mind I can walk through the house whe
re I grew up even though I have not been inside it for decades. (I did drive by once, a few years ago, sure that it would look shabby, diminished, not what I recalled. It looked exactly the same, foursquare and lovely.) I want to be able to walk through the house of my own life until my life is done. I want to hold on to who and what I have been even as both become somehow inevitably less.

  Most of us convince ourselves that we will reach a plateau from our peak, not a valley. When we’re young we take chances—we won’t be the one who gets pregnant having unprotected sex or gets thrown from the speeding car when not belted in. Even as we become more responsible and wise, our mind tells us that we will beat the odds, that the mammogram and the colonoscopy are simply annoyances, to be gotten overwith.

  And I suspect many of us feel the same way about advanced age. We visit a nursing home and see patients in the hallways, in wheelchairs, curved into themselves like invertebrates or staring blankly into the fuggy air. We hear of those whose minds have been wiped clean or whose bodies have become crippled. Or we simply have friends and relations dealing with the less important but still irritating inconveniences, the memory glitches, the incontinence, the falls. “If you break a hip, you’re finished,” Mrs. Smiley once told me. It was an overstatement, but I think what she was really trying to say was that sometimes a single moment can mark the dividing line between who you are and who you never wanted to be.

  I try to imagine all the contingencies, but I admit I focus on the ones I like best. Sitting at a book club meeting next to a ninety-one-year-old woman, listening to her talk about taking the bus because cabs are highway robbery. Or hearing the story of a ninety-nine-year-old still practicing law. Or watching a woman who I’m certain is in her eighties whizzing by beneath the West Side Highway on in-line skates. Never mind that I have never been able to skate. Yes, yes, yes, I say to myself.