by Anne Lamott
Still, I have seen an amorphous interest on her face, during the holiday prayers I always offer, when I lift up her husband, my father, my mother. I know she feels the three of them, then, in a way different from memory: more like the way you light the tissue paper that amaretti cookies come wrapped in, stamped with pale pink and blue and green, and make a wish as they flutter on fire into the air, wisps of sparks and then ashes.
I told her I had to leave for an appointment in Berkeley but would call her on my way back to see if she’d changed her mind.
She’s very stubborn; really, if you ask me, impossible. The only reason I do not feel like attacking her more often is that she isn’t my real mother. But I’ve come close. Every year when Sam and I take her with us to a writers’ conference in the mountains, there are times when I have to leave the living room of our condo to compose myself. Yet she and I will spend hours together happily, reading, making food for Sam and the friends he brings along, cleaning up after; I’ll listen to her endless comments, opinions, and questions, and they don’t bother me. I’ll be a weird old lady someday, too, with opinions on everything, if I live.
Age itself is weird. Everything gets solidified and liquefied at the same time. I honor Gertrud by simply noting her need for constant engagement. But then she’ll insist on something that I don’t agree with, and in her honeyed voice I’ll hear the burr of friendly fascism, which makes me crazy. I’ll hear criticism, the hideous drive of the Viennese waltz—“You vill valtz!”—the glittering pleasure of “I told you so.” And let’s not even get into the garbage-eating.
Well, okay, but just briefly. Do all Europeans who survived the war eat garbage? Not simply cutting off half-inches of mold on cheese; I do that. This is the insistence that the bit of toasted bagel that Sam left on his plate yesterday will make a perfectly nice breakfast today—for her.
She’s not trying to make me eat it, and still it enrages me.
“Gertrud!” I say. “That is garbage!”
Or I’ll come upon her gnawing on an absolutely white cantaloupe rind that she’s found on Sam’s breakfast plate. Or she’ll wrap up overcooked ravioli from yesterday that she wants to take with her, to eat for dinner later. Table scrapings.
But mostly, Gertrud and I find enormous solace in each other. We read the papers together, muttering angrily. She reads Noam Chomsky for pleasure. She brings me great chocolate.
We hike almost every day when we are in the mountains. On our last night up there two years ago, we went stargazing at High Camp, in Squaw Valley. Already at 7,500 feet, we took the gondola up to the meadow where fifty others had gathered to watch a rare Perseid meteor shower. Two astronomers were there to guide us, with powerful telescopes.
Gertrud was the oldest person there, by a good ten years or so. She was wearing a hat, warm clothes, and hiking boots, walking stick in hand, ready for action. You could tilt your head back and see a shooting star every few minutes. Gertrud held on to my arm and leaned back unsteadily.
The astronomers pointed out binary stars we could see with our naked eyes, fuzzy patches they said were stellar graveyards, our old friend the Big Dipper, and Venus, almost below the horizon. We had hiked on this exact spot of land the day before, on a wild flower walk, and the sky tonight was as bright as the field of weedy yellow flowers had been.
Gertrud won’t wait in line. Maybe it is a European thing, like the garbage-eating. Maybe she has waited in enough lines to last a lifetime. But I took my turn when she said she was steady enough to stand alone. When I reported that you could see twin stars and stellar graveyards through the telescope, she said rather huffily, “I’ll just wait right where I am, and see what I can see.”
The stars were as close as berries on a bush.
After a while, Gertrud began to shiver. The night was not that cold, but she is so thin. She teetered as she held on to me, and I stood like a handrail while she got her balance. She held on so tight that it hurt: I could see by the light of the stars and the gondola that her knuckles were white. I rubbed her shoulders briskly, the way you warm up a child just out of the ocean, and we headed down the mountain.
I was thinking of that night when I called her after my appointment in Berkeley, to see whether she wanted me to pick her up after all.
“Yes, please,” she said now. When I got to her house an hour later, she was waiting outside, ready for action again: this time, instead of hiking boots, she was wearing a dark blue knit cardigan with gold buttons, and a scarf tucked in around her neck; very nautical, still the admiral of her fleet. She was teary, but composed. All I knew to do was to be willing to feel really shitty with her.
“When did you decide to sell the house?” I asked as we started off.
She said with genuine confusion that she didn’t know how it had come to be—she had meant to sell only the parcel of land. A number of friends had convinced her that it made sense to sell both properties now, and rent the house back for a year. This would give her time to find a smaller place, with a garden and a view, and people around to help her in case she fell.
“Couldn’t you hire someone to help around the house and drive?”
She said she had changed her mind too many times; had put everybody through too much already, the realtor, the buyer, and her children.
Everything in me wanted to save her—to offer her the extra room in our house, or promise to drop in on her every day. But instead, I did an incredible thing, something I have not done nearly enough in my life: I did nothing. Or at any rate, I did not talk. Miserable and desperate to flee, I listened instead.
Fear and frustration poured out of her as we drove past my entire childhood, past the hillsides that used to be bare, where we slid down the long grass on cardboard boxes, past the little white church on the hill, past the supermarket built on the swamps where we used to raft, past the stores on the boardwalk, on top of which the Christmas star shines every year.
Without particularly meaning to, just before we got on the clotted freeway, I pulled off the road and parked the car in a bus zone.
“Wait a minute, Gertrud. Let me ask you something: What do you want to do? What does your heart say?”
She answered after a long moment. “I don’t want to sell my house.”
“Are you sure?” This was shocking news, and the timing just terrible.
“Yes. But now I have to. I’ve changed my mind so often.”
Neither of us spoke for a minute. “That’s the worst reason to do something,” I said. She looked at me. “You have the right to change your mind again.”
“Really, Annie?”
“Yep.”
Gertrud looked around with confusion, disbelief, misery. She dried her tears, reapplied lipstick, and picked at invisible lint on her blue knit sweater.
When we pulled onto the realtor’s street, she said, “Oh, Annie. This will be such bad news for everyone but me.”
“There’s a first time for everything,” I said. “Besides, your friend can build a nice home for himself on the land.”
They were waiting for us when we arrived, and they managed to be giddy and gentle at the same time. They fussed over Gertrud. These were not men in black capes with twirly mustaches, stealing her house away; they were old friends. After a few minutes of small talk, she looked at the ground. Then she did not look up for a while. Everyone grew quiet, puzzled.
“I’ve changed my mind,” she said, firm, clear, deeply apologetic. “I don’t want to sell my house. Only the parcel of land.” I held my breath. Old age on a good day is a dance we don’t know the steps to: we falter. We may not be going in the direction we’d anticipated, or have any clue at all about which way to turn next.
“Gertrud,” the realtor asked, “are you sure?”
She nodded and said, “Yes, yes,” and held on to the arms of her walker so her knuckles turned white, as they had on the night of the meteor shower. Her voice was trembly. I remembered how she’d shivered from the cold. I remembered how one of the astro
nomers pointed out that the stars were not all one color: there were orange stars, red stars, pale yellow stars. Venus was so close and bright I thought it was a plane, and through the telescope I could see fuzzy cotton balls hundreds of millions of miles away, stellar graveyards, and stellar nurseries, where stars were being hatched.
A Field Theory of Beauty
I woke up from a nap years ago to find my son gazing at me. He took my face into his hands, and peering at me like an old Jewish relative said, “I love that little face.”
But I didn’t love that little face yet. For too long, and despite what people told me, I had fallen for what the culture said about beauty, youth, features, heights, weights, hair textures, upper arms. Sometimes, in certain lights, I could see that I was beautiful, not in spite of but because of unusual features—funky teeth, wild hair, acne scars. My mother’s nose, very English, with pinched indents at the tip and what she called her horns—incredibly helpful to my self-esteem as a child and which I now call my proton nobulators. My father’s crooked teeth. Cellulite that would make Jesus weep.
I was forty. My best friend had died two years earlier, at thirty-seven, highly intelligent and pretty. Until she got sick, I’d believed that beauty protected you, surrounded you with a Gardol Shield. Her cancer kicked this belief to pieces. She used to make me wear scarves in my hair, for the burst of color. She’d say, “You have to wear a scarf today, I have cancer.” If I protested, she’d say, “It will cheer me up!”
She was so pretty in the scarves and caps she wore to cover her bald head. Many great-looking women in Marin County have lost their hair. At the bank the other day, I ran into an old friend, the Christian Scientist mother of one of my elementary school classmates. She has great polish and style, although she’s not exactly pretty. Her hair was gone, replaced by white fuzz, yet she was brimming with health and joy. I said. “Barbara? Are you just finishing up chemo?”
Brightly, she answered, “Oh no, this is something I go through sometimes.”
I started comparing notes with her, because on top of having had impossible hair my entire life, now it is falling out. I worry that I will start looking like Richard Nixon with dreadlocks.
“I have a fantastic doctor who helps me with this,” she said. I begged for the number and she gave it to me, and it was not until later that I asked myself, Why would you beg for the number of a hair-loss specialist from one of that doctor’s bald patients?
It was because she was so beautiful, and she knew and exuded that.
Most of us don’t notice how great we look until years, even decades later. Not long ago, I was looking at photos of myself at various ages and weights—way before the neckular deterioration began, way before the fanny pack of menopause—and I could see how gorgeous I must have looked to everyone else. At sixteen, with an Afro, twenty pounds heavier than I’d been the year before, I was radiant with youth, athleticism, and intelligence; at the time, I thought I looked like Marty Feldman. In my mid-twenties, an anorexic hippie, I had a best friend who frequently mentioned that she was the pretty one, which I thought went without saying. But from the pictures I was looking at, I could see that I was the other pretty one, a waifish Renaissance fairy, mesmerizing. Then, at thirty-three, clean, sober, and healing from bulimia, twenty pounds and twenty years lighter than I am now, I’m posing in a periwinkle swimsuit, but covering my thighs in shame, as if someone were photographing me in the junior high locker room instead of on a public beach. There is a rip in the photo; I started to tear it so no one would see. Twenty pounds ago! Twenty years! Why did it take me so long to discover what a dish I was? And not just because of externals. And how crazy would you have to be, knowing this, yet still not rejoicing in your current looks?
This culture’s pursuit of beauty is a crazy, sick, losing game, for women, men, teenagers, and with the need to increase advertising revenues, now for pre-adolescents, too. We’re starting to see more and more anorexic eight-and nine-year-olds. It’s a game we cannot win. Every time we agree to play another round, and step out onto the court to try again, we’ve already lost. The only way to win is to stay off the court. No matter how much of our time is spent in pursuit of physical beauty, even to great success, the Mirror on the Wall will always say, “Snow White lives,” and this is in fact a lie—Snow White is a fairy tale. Lies cannot nourish or protect you. Only freedom from fear, freedom from lies, can make us beautiful, and keep us safe. There is a line I try to live by, spoken at the end of each Vedanta service: “And may the free make others free.”
Of course, some days go better than others.
Let’s start with something easy: To step into beauty, does one have to give up on losing a little weight? No, of course not. Only if you’re sick of suffering. Because if you cannot see that you’re okay now, you won’t be able to see it if you lose twenty pounds. It’s an inside job.
I should know: I lost ten pounds last year. Someone who spent $30,000 at a diet hospital told me the secret of how she lost weight there: Eat less, exercise more. Oh, and here’s $5,000 worth of cutting-edge advice: Drink more water. So I did that, and in only three months lost ten pounds. You couldn’t sell one copy of a magazine by putting this on the cover: “Lose Ten Pounds in Just Three Months.” Oh, boy! But it worked, and guess what? No one noticed, as God is my witness, except Sam and my boyfriend and a couple of friends, whom I badgered constantly for assurance that I looked thinner.
Oh, and my tennis partner, who cried out joyfully, “Annie! Have you lost weight? Look how thin your neck is now!”
It’s so hopeless. What are we going to do? I don’t know. But I suppose, while we are on the subject of weight, we might as well address the neck. The neckage.
The situation is deeply distressing: the wattle and the wrinkles that gather like Roman shades. The liver spots. The soft pouch like a frog’s vocal sac, or the gular pouches of Komodo dragons that now connect the chin to the neck. But it could be so much worse, as is usually the case, because at least the neck is recessed. God recessed the neck for a loving, caring reason. While the face is right out front, She set the neck back, out of direct light, in the shadows.
Sure, you can still see that gravity is having its say, because the neck is where it all shows—it’s like the thighs of the head.
Yet it helps to think of the neck as something—a pedestal, say, or a plinth—on which you’d set a work of art. A stand for the head and the face. The fact that it is not an incredibly attractive stand doesn’t matter one bit. It’s there to display your face, your eyes—which is where you carry who you are—your intelligence, goodness, humanity, excitement, serenity. Over time, these are the things that change the musculature of your face, as do laughter, and animation, and especially whatever peace you can broker with the person inside.
It’s furrow, pinch, and judgment that make us look older—our mothers were right. They said that if you made certain faces, they would stick, and they do. But our mothers forgot that faces of kindness and integrity stick as well.
I have a friend who has a big pancake face and feathery brown hair, with patches of scalp showing. She has peasanty potato features, and she’s too tall, and totally inelegant. But she loves her life. She’s chosen a life of prayer, service, and travel. She’s always in a sort of infuriating state of wonder, of appreciating what is, instead of fretting about what she wishes was. But she’s great-looking—everyone thinks so—because of the expressions on her face and the way she looks at you.
She is radiant with spirituality and humor; she was dealt the same basic cards we all were, but somehow she could see that the cards were marked, so she put them down and refused to play. You can’t win with marked cards. Refusing to play has left her with hands free to do what really matters to her, what her heart longs to do in this life. Doing those things has made her beautiful. She puts on lipstick, a warm, soft fleece vest, a matching scarf, and she’s set, way ahead of the game.
Joy is the best makeup. Joy, and good lighting.
&
nbsp; If you ask me, a little lipstick is a close runner-up.
I know women from every place on the makeup continuum: some who wear none; some who wear a lot, who spackle it on, who could play Shakespeare in the park as soon as they drop the kids off. I know some who wear a lot, and look wonderful.
It’s only when you think you need to be concealed, because you’re unacceptable, that makeup causes harm. Skin does get rattled with age; wrinkles and hectic color do not contribute to an impression of the dewy calmness of youth. But some makeup, while perhaps not simulating dewy youth, acts as a kind of airbrushing. It restores balance to the face. It makes you look less terminal.
Also, it distracts from the melatonin mustache.
And pretty lipstick makes you look so much less tense and mean. Left to their own devices, lips pucker with the purse strings of age; lipstick can make them soft and more relaxed again.
I wear tinted moisturizer, light blush, and lipstick. It gives me a face I am happier to bring into the world. I look less scary. I’m very glad to claim the crone who is coming to life within me; I just don’t want her to screech so loudly that she silences the little girl who is still around, drowns out the naughty teenager, or mutes the flirtatious middle-aged woman.
Here is my theory: I am all the ages I’ve ever been. You realize this at some point about your child—even when your kid is sixteen, you can see all the ages in him, the baby wrapped up like a burrito, the one-year-old about to walk, the four-year-old napping, the ten-year-old on a trampoline.
We’re like Magic 8-Balls. After you ask your question and shake the 8-Ball, you read the answer in the little window. If you ever broke open a Magic 8-Ball with a hammer, you discovered that it contained a many-sided plastic object, with an answer on every facet, floating in a cylinder of murky blue fluid. The many-sided core held the answer to your question. My theory is that, as with our children, as with every surface of that geodesic dome inside the 8-Ball, every age we’ve ever been is who we are.
