Coming into the End Zone

by Doris Grumbach

  We looked at a number of places, large Maine houses with attached barns, a house high on a rise that looked out on the road before the bay, another buried in woods, one with ‘a partial view,’ which turned out to mean, in real estate parlance, that one could see the water in winter if one climbed to the second floor and squinted out of one window. Sybil is interested in proximity to a good road, in order to relocate Wayward Books someday; I want a generous view of the water, and complete privacy. Neither of us thought about immediate purchase and relocation. But we trudged from place to place, voicing our objections, almost glad that nothing suitable presented itself.

  At one house, a former bed-and-breakfast, we met another agent who listened patiently to our dislikes and needs and then told Bill that he knew a place in Sargentville, down the road a bit, that we might like. Bill had not seen this place but still would take us there. Now we were a procession of three cars. Sybil rode with George, the new agent, Bob and Ted followed, Bill and I came behind.

  We had just pulled into the driveway of the house and stopped when I saw Sybil coming around from the front. Her face was flushed and she seemed to be breathing hard. I rolled down the window. She put her head into the car and said:

  ‘I think we are in serious trouble.’

  I got out and followed her. A little way around the stark, simple, undecorated house, we came upon a magnificent view, a cove at low tide. Beyond it was a strip of blue water, a deep-water mooring marked off by a crocodile-shaped strip of black rocks, and then two grey buildings far down the opposite shore. The grey hills of Deer Isle were in the distance. The view was constructed like a theatrical set, with diminishing coulisses extending to the rear. Over it all, winter-gaunt gulls rose and descended. The trees—an oak at one side of the cove, two spruces at the other—were barren or browned, the ground at our feet crisp and grey, like frozen shredded wheat, the uncut meadow beyond a low jungle of vines and what appeared to us to be weeds.

  We were indeed lost. Without ever having set foot in the house, we knew instantly we wanted to live on this cove, in sight of all that varied, layered beauty and blue winter water. We went through the house, a place that had an adequate but not excessive number of rooms. One, a former summer kitchen, might be converted to a decent-sized study. Painting was needed everywhere, one chimney was broken down, another unlined, the roof needed work. We might add a deck from which to view the cove by day, the big sky by night, and a screened porch to avoid the annual April, May, and June mosquitoes and black flies, a somewhat different kitchen and bathroom, perhaps. But what was all that in the light of the glorious cove?

  We went to lunch with Bill and, to our amazement, talked about a contract. The next day we signed one, containing an offer to be submitted to the owners, closed our eyes, and breathed deeply (Sybil admitted she felt sick to her stomach from the moment she put her name on the paper), overwhelmed by what we had done so precipitately. We owned a house in Washington we had to sell before we could buy this one, Sybil had years to go before her planned retirement from the Library of Congress. I was horrified by the prospect of moving five thousand books and the contents of the North Carolina Avenue house (the overloaded result of the consolidation of our two households years ago) to Maine. By May. The closing on the sale was set for late April.

  How could we make sense, order, and progress out of all this? We flew home in a state of shock, bewildered by what we had done. A chaotic future stretched out before us, a jumble of real estate dealings, cliff-hanging financial arrangements, and, once again (five years after we had vowed we would never move again, never go through those terrible months of upheaval, restoration, and dislocation), all the slings and arrows of settling into a new, strange place, fixing another house, learning the vagaries of a capricious and, we had heard, most difficult and lengthy winter, and acquiring, at our unlikely ages, new acquaintances and friends.

  A year ago I wrote in this memoir: ‘It is too late now to live in a new place.’ Now I think: How dare I plan to live a life in Maine in the dwindling time that remains ahead for me? The joke is that people are now mentioning such absurd things to us as a thirty-year mortgage. I remember when Jack Leggett, in the summer of 1982, asked if I would like to come to the Iowa Writers Workshop for a semester. I said, ‘When?’ He said, ‘Oh maybe, the spring of ’84.’

  I thought: How dare I think so far ahead, at my vulnerable age? But now it seemed the older one grew, the less realistic one was about the future. Even with all the dire anatomical warnings that arrive on occasion, optimism rules one’s decisions. History serves my hopes. Once before, when I was fifty-four, I left the life I had led for more than thirty years, my marriage, my longtime tenured teaching job, everyone I knew, the city I had lived in or near for more than twenty years, and went off, like the youngest son in fairy tales, to seek my fortune, and another, different life.

  But then I was younger or, I think now, young. Now I am old, having despairingly celebrated my seventieth birthday last summer. This should be the age of settled decorum, stability, even sedentary acceptance of what one has or is left with. How is it possible to change everything again? Will it work?

  Less than two weeks after our house is opened to the public (a violation hard to bear, but there is no other way to sell it but to ‘show’ it) there is a sale contract on it. The reality of what we have done bears down upon us. If we sell it at the price we have agreed to, there will be no mortgage on the Maine house. At this point I remember Sybil’s utterance when first she saw the cove. Now she decides, when the time comes to live in it, that we should name the house Serious Trouble.

  Certain that we will be leaving this house on the Hill, it suddenly becomes dear to us. We stand on the deck we built, and watch the evening shadow of our one backyard tree, a lovely American elm we have nursed, fed, pruned, and venerated. Against the carriage house it makes a spare design, like a Japanese print. We listen to the water recycling in our minuscule pond and think of Lazarus, whom we forget to bring into the house this winter. He led a miraculous life in the pond, emerging from the slime that had formed into a frozen crust on the water, to show himself as grey-black and much thinner, but alive, resurrected, a sign of his faith in the arrival of spring. We watch bulbs emerging from the once bare spaces in the front garden and realize that after five years, it is finally shaped and filled in the way we hoped it would be. We remember its hazardous state five years ago when, in the weeks after we moved in, we discovered it was inhabited by the bravest stand of poison ivy on Capitol Hill. Banished after much work by gardeners, both of whom, in the process, contracted terrible cases of the rash, is the lethal growth. Soon, we, the conquerors, will be gone as well.

  I find written on the flyleaf of a book I bought yesterday:

  MARCUS AURELIUS: ‘Look within. Let neither the peculiar quality of anything nor its value escape you.’

  We resolve to have framed and to take with us to Maine a pen-and-ink drawing of the facade of the house on North Carolina Avenue made a few years ago by a local artist. We believe we wish to be reminded of our contented years here. Sybil is depressed by the prospect of leaving. I am apprehensive about the future, but glad to abandon Washington, having grown less courageous in these past months about threats and mugging on the streets and robbery in our house and store, and our proximity to crack houses in the city. I am aware of my sensitivity to traffic noises, sirens, midnight cries of children in the house contiguous to ours, circling helicopters, passing airplanes.

  Yesterday I sat in the waiting room of the physician who is taking care of my slowly healing shoulder. Around me are elderly patients with casts on ankles, arms, necks, a few in wheelchairs accompanied by exasperated-looking middle-aged children. There is a look I have grown to recognize on the faces of captive offspring caring for parents they have long since ceased to love.

  A white-gowned young blonde woman with the high, structured hairdo called a ‘beehive’ appears at the door of the waiting room and says:

  �
��We’re ready for you now, Lucy.’

  One of the annoyed-looking men stands up and wheels ‘Lucy,’ who is clearly over eighty, through the door. He is carrying the pink slips that indicate ‘Lucy’ is a first-time patient.

  I am in my customary state of fury. How dare that receptionist, surely not more than twenty years old, address the elderly woman by her first name. She has never met her before, knows nothing about her except that she is old, and sick. Lucy!

  I sit there fuming, remembering a visit I made a few years ago to a nursing home on Wisconsin Avenue in Washington. My acquaintance, a professor emeritus of English literature, had broken her hip, and was here to recuperate. We talked for a while, about the study of Whitman by Paul Zweig she had been reading, about the new Marguerite Yourcenar I was reviewing. Then a young woman in white carrying a pail and mop came into the room, smiled brightly to the professor (whose doctoral work had been done, as I recall, at Oxford), and said:

  ‘Hiya, Eda Lou. Don’t mind me. I’ll be out in a minute.’

  Professor Morton shut her eyes.

  ‘That’s a good girl. Don’t need to watch while I clean.’

  I said: ‘She is Dr. Morton, not Eda Lou.’

  But the young woman, engrossed in her task, which took her through the middle of the professor’s room but under nothing, seemed not to hear me. She finished quickly while I sat stonily and the professor lay with her eyes closed as if waiting for the final assault. It came as the young woman went out the door, calling behind her:

  ‘Be good, Eda Lou. See ya tomorra.’

  Let neither the peculiar quality of anything nor its value escape you. The peculiar quality of this encounter has stayed with me, sensitizing me to the indignity, in hospitals and nursing homes and waiting rooms, of reducing the elderly sick to children, ignoring the respect due their years and accomplishments, and the dignity of their adult titles or married names.

  My turn comes for the orthopedic surgeon’s attention.

  ‘Ready for you now, Doris,’ the woman with the beehive head says, the same bright smile on her face as the cleaning woman had in the nursing home, displaying her affected charm and familiarity with the patient.

  This time I am ready. I do not move.

  ‘Doris?’ the young woman says, somewhat louder, suggesting by her tone that I, the only woman left in the room, must be deaf.

  Aha, I think, I have her. She comes toward me, by now convinced I must be both deaf and, as we used to say, dumb.

  ‘DORIS?’ she shouts almost in my ear.

  I stand up, forcing her to step back.

  ‘Miss,’ I say, ‘I am Mrs. Grumbach. A stranger to you. About fifty years older than you, I would guess. Don’t call me by my first name. What is your name, by the way?’

  ‘Susan, er, I mean, Miss Lewis.’

  To her credit, she blushes furiously, apologizes, and follows me into the doctor’s office. ‘Please be seated, Mrs. Grumbach,’ she says. ‘Dr. Moore will be with you in a moment.’

  ‘Thank you, Miss Lewis,’ I say. The war, of course, is still to be waged, but I have won this small skirmish. As it turns out, my shoulder appears to be better. Probably because the weight of my indignation has been lifted from it.

  January

  Washington is dull, grey, damp, cold. I want to go to Mexico, as we often do at this time. Our reservations for air travel, and a week of tenting at Kailuum, are in place. But Sybil worries about being here for all the paperwork, inspections, etc. that will be involved in completing the sale of the house. My selfishness triumphs. I will go away at the end of the month, with Ted and Bob, who have never seen the ruins at Chichén Itzá and Uxmal, and then, if everything is finished in Washington, Sybil will join us at Kailuum.

  Does one grow more selfish as one ages? Clearly yes. I have said more times than I care to recall that now I will do nothing in my life that I do not want to do. Nothing. Ever again. Pure selfishness. Sybil bridles at this firm declaration but diplomatically says nothing.

  A certain willfulness does not prevent me from talking about myself more than I would like, looking back in the evening at conversations during the day. My frame of reference has narrowed. I have become more Ptolemaic in my view of the world. Events and people surround me, I do not encircle them, along with everyone else. I remember: In the convent in Marian Engel’s novel The Glassy Sea, the Eglantine Sisters are permitted mild conversation but are not allowed to talk about themselves. I would do well to practice this.

  Before I start to prepare for Mexico (thank God it is not for Paris; finding my mask, snorkel, and flippers and resurrecting old sneakers, shorts, and bathing suits will be the main tasks), I have been trying to work longer hours on Camp. The novella form is new to me. I find it hard. At moments I think the story ought to be expanded to a novel. At other times, I feel the desire to shrink it to a short story. This morning my impulse was to gather the printout pages, fold them neatly, tear them in half, and bestow them on the trash basket.

  At moments like this, the meagerness of my imagination overcomes me. James Joyce is said to have written to an aspiring author: ‘Young man, you have not enough chaos in you to write a novel.’ Growing old, there is less chance of creative chaos. Or what there was was long ago smoothed out and reduced to orderliness by pedestrian prose.

  I am preparing to send my stack of notebooks, dating back to 1950, to the University of Virginia, together with other papers they are storing for me, on the slight chance that someday they will be of interest to someone. Idly I examine the notebook for 1981 that starts with a list of resolutions for the new year. It begins with ‘Accustom myself to enjoying solitude.’ The second is humorous, in the light of the past and the future: ‘Grow thinner.’ 3: ‘Finish The Magician’s Girl.’ That one I managed to fulfill. 4. ‘Work steadily on the Willa Cather book.’ (Fitfully, it turned out, would be a better word. I am still at it, eight years later.) 5. ‘Spend less.’ Humbug. This never has happened, probably never will, until I am forced to do it by a drastic reduction of income. Otherwise, I will always spend a little more than I have. Number 6 was, is, a perpetual resolution: ‘Practice my faith more regularly, more thoughtfully.’ The list ends with: ‘Simplify—my life, possessions, number of friends and acquaintances, emotional responses, food.’

  At the back of the same notebook is the next year’s list. Revisions have taken place. Number 7 has become I and says simply: ‘Simplify.’ Number 2 remains the same. Number I has slipped to 3, 6 has moved to 4. Number 5, for some enigmatic reason that must have had to do with an unproductive year, reads: ‘Work.’

  Making resolutions is an absurd but traditional rite of the New Year. This month, I’ve made a single, long, interrelated one: ‘One more time, prepare to CHANGE. Do not regret the present. Do not fear the future. Adapt psychically to moving and difference.’

  Reading my old notebooks bores me. How dull and unimaginative I was, what foolish things I found to say about what I was reading and seeing. To restore my confidence in this sort of literary egocentricity I find on my shelf a book I have not looked at in years, Anton Chekhov’s Note-Book, translated, interestingly enough, by May Sarton’s friend S.S. Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf. Published in 1921, it contains a note by the publisher B.W. Huebsch explaining that it contains ‘notes, themes, and sketches for works which Anton Chekhov intended to write.’

  Now, I think, I will see what real, useful, suggestive, interesting journal-keeping is like. In the introduction, Huebsch assures me these entries are ‘characteristic of the methods of his [Chekhov’s] artistic production.’ I sit in the corner of the dining room in my new leather chair that tilts back, my feet on the matching leather hassock, and read through the book’s almost 150 pages.

  My disappointment is profound. Or perhaps it is my denseness in not being able to recognize the implications of these entries:

  ‘On a Sunday morning in summer is heard the rumble of a carriage.’

  ‘They say: “In the long run truth will triumph
”; but it is untrue.’

  ‘They fell upon the soft caviar greedily, and devoured it in a minute.’

  ‘What a lot of idiots there are among ladies. People get so used to it that they do not notice it.’

  ‘The parlormaid Nadya fell in love with an exterminator of bugs and black beetles.’

  ‘He learned Swedish in order to study Ibsen, spent a lot of time and trouble, and suddenly realized that Ibsen is not important; he could not conceive what use he could now make of the Swedish language.’

  These few samples are not selectively culled; I chose them at random. I could easily have included most of the entries. Note the last, curious one, about Ibsen. Surely Chekhov must have known that Ibsen wrote in Norwegian. A slip of the pen? Translator Koteliansky, clearly an admirer as most translators are of their subjects, suggests that it is a quotation, something C. overheard. He has simply omitted quotation marks. Hmm.

  But my own notebooks are even more sterile. The surprise of Chekhov’s pages is the curiously unproductive (to this reader’s thinking), barren, unrewarding nature of the entries. What could he have made of them? Clearly he expected something, but of themselves they hardly seem worth puttting down. If I had come upon them in my notebooks I probably would have burned them. But Chekhov surely thought them capable of blooming. Huebsch says: ‘The significance which Chekhov attributed to this material may be judged from the fact that he recopied most of it into a special copy book.’

  I open up my notebook for this day and enter another typically plodding, forgettable sentence. ‘Perfect name for an actress: Fay Wray.’

  A sudden memory flashback this morning when the mail brought a copy of The Southern Review. About ten years ago, I had a telephone call from Pamela Broughton at Louisiana State University. She wanted to know if I would wish to be considered for an appointment that involved editing The Southern Review and some teaching of literature. The term would be five to ten years. I said I would think about it and call her back.