Coming into the End Zone

by Doris Grumbach

  After a while I wished the polish remover had completely anesthetized me. Talk between the manicurist and a girl in front of her, who kneeled on her seat to watch the delicate procedures, was excruciating. Boys (whom they called ‘the men’) were the central, recurring subjects. The names and descriptions of complicated beverages figured prominently in the narratives about how they had spent the evening before. The kneeler gave a graphic description of her date with Josh, who vomited in the car after six glasses of rye. Elaborate plans and locations of possible sites for encounters with beach men were formulated. My seatmate expressed a liking for ‘hunks’; the kneeler preferred brains in men and could not understand why she had even agreed to go out with Josh.

  The conversation turned to Julie, a mutual friend at college, who might be pregnant. She had gone home before midterms to get money from her parents, just in case.… The word abortion was never spoken. There were heated expressions of doubt about the value of courses they were taking, the ability of their professors to teach, and their own chances of passing one course or another. The girl beside me, now blowing on her red-tipped outstretched fingers, recalled her date last weekend with Lyman, whose parents had it all, including a Jacuzzi, a hot tub, a heated swimming pool, two Mercedeses.

  ‘Awesome,’ said the apparently envious kneeler. She was quickly reassured by her friend that, on the other hand, Lyman was a complete weirdo, and very, very tight about money.

  The plane bounced. Word came to fasten seat belts. The kneeler turned around and sat down.

  The next hours were instructive. The covey of young women around me spent their time oddly (to my old-fashioned view). Not one of them opened a book or magazine or newspaper. Part of the time, when they were not conversing, their eyes seemed set unmoving in their heads, their expressions blank. They examined their nails, carefully, one by one, as though each were a miniature masterpiece. They conducted detailed searches into their voluminous purses. If their eyes were often inert, their hands were not. When not under inspection their fingers were engaged in playing with strands of their hair, twisting them into loose curls, then letting go and permitting the hair to return to its original Medusa shape.

  Twice or three times an hour one of them would inspect her face in a pocket mirror retrieved from her purse-warren after much rummaging, find something wanting, throw the strap of her purse over her shoulder, and make for the lavatory at the back of the cabin. Twice I was struck in the face by the swinging containers as the young woman beside me went into the aisle. In the course of four hours in the air, she made a total of three such journeys.

  When she returned, her face sparkled with fresh makeup. She settled down, stowed her purse, and began another session of staring ahead or falling asleep. Once again I opened my paperback, Marjorie Perloff’s study of the poet Frank O’Hara, which I had been deterred from reading by my fascination with the theater going on around me. It was a little like living briefly in Schubert Alley. But I didn’t read at once, absorbed as I was by the spectacle of these young women’s contented emptiness. In perfecting their persons, their eyes now shut, are they preparing for the days ahead? Do they anticipate themselves stretched out on the sunny beach on colorful towels, glistening with oil, their eyes covered with dark glasses against the glare, turning every so often in order to acquire an even tan, their minds once again drained of thought?

  I felt a sudden stroke of guilt at my excess of critical scrutiny. Why should I have used all this time, better spent reading Perloff on Frank O’Hara, taking mental notes, all negative, on my fellow travelers? O’Hara wrote an early poem about the critics of his poetry that Perloff uses as epigraph to her book:

  I cannot possibly think of you

  other than you are: the assassin

  of my orchards. You lurk there

  in the shadows, meting out

  conversation like Eve’s first

  confusion between penises and

  snakes. Oh be droll, be jolly

  and be temperate! Do not

  frighten me more than you

  have to! I must live forever.

  Be temperate, I reminded myself. I have never been. I kept inspecting them, like someone worrying a scab. They were all dressed in what might be called a uniform: blue jeans, T-shirts, sweat shirts emblazoned with pictures or sayings, heavy socks and sneakers. They resembled gymnasts after a hard workout, except for the pristine state of their faces and hands, the contrived excesses of their hair.

  How the requirements of dress have changed. I think of my father-in-law, who would never enter a restaurant, no matter how far he had traveled by car or how seedy the place looked, without wearing his starched white shirt and collar, tie, suit jacket, and fedora. No matter how inappropriate it might have seemed to others in the roadside fast-food place, he insisted on his lifelong outfit. He would inspect with distaste those around him, and remark in audible tones:

  ‘Look at all those men. In their shirt sleeves. No tie. Where do they think they are? In the kitchen?’

  Leonard, my former husband, inherited his father’s fastidiousness. For years he wore black socks and wing-tipped shoes, shirt and tie, on Moody Beach, where we spent our summers. Only after a number of vacations in Maine did he ease into sneakers and sports shirts. But I often thought he never felt quite comfortable so attired. He had been equally strict about dress during World War II. I remember he never ventured twenty feet from our front door to the mailbox on the road without wearing his full uniform and fatigue cap.

  Looking at the young women around me, I decided Leonard and Harry were anachronisms, old-fashioned, but insistently decorous and proper. I suppose to others they may have seemed absurd, much as the young women on the plane now appear to me, dressed for continental travel as though they were outfitted for a gymnasium or a softball game.

  Jane Emerson calls to report on Aunt Bet’s health. She is Elizabeth Luther, Bob’s great-aunt, who was 101 years old last October. Now she lives in a Northampton nursing home, alert, still quite beautiful and careful of her appearance. (she has her hair and nails done regularly), confined to a wheelchair, but a constant reader when her eyes are up to it. She is about to have a cataract operation to improve her ability to read. She loves visitors, is a devoted smoker of cigarettes, and an imbiber of apricot brandy to help her sleep.

  At the celebration of her century birthday, people came from all over New England to wish her well. President Ronald Reagan (as he probably did to all centenarians) wrote to her. Someone on television congratulated her. She recognized all her visitors, and made them feel honored to be present at her party. I could not be there, but I had a broadside made by a fine letterpress printer in Oakland, California. It read:

  AGE

  There are so few who can grow old with grace, observed Richard Steele in the Spectator. Elizabeth Blanchfield Luther is one of the happy few.

  How does one grow old with grace? There is a prescription, I believe, but it is not easy to follow. We must feel at home in the world, and then reside in peace with ourselves. We must not so much demand to be loved as to love. For if we love, selflessly and unpossessively, we are then loved.

  Note in the prescription that growing old with grace must mean that somehow our resentments, selfishness, ambitions, and grudges diminish. Compassion, understanding, sympathy take their place. We sleep in peace, we wake with pleasure to enjoy the music, poetry, and glory of the natural world, rather than to rail against its noise and threat, its clangor and crudeness, its misery, meanness, and discord. We sense the spiritual in our friends. We suspect God is in them, and in us.

  Growing old gracefully is surrendering vanity and the strident will, for the heart. As the Greek proverb says, The heart that loves is always young.

  The best part of the prescription is not an observation or an order but a question posed by the immortal pitcher Satchel Paige: How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you was?

  I don’t wish to idealize Aunt Bet. Asked about birthday
s, she says she wants no more of them, that she is tired of living. Yet her behavior belies her pessimism. She acts as though living still holds some pleasures for her. I believe she will come through her eye surgery well. I am starting to collect new biographies (which she most enjoys) to send her when it is over, not foolish ones about movie or rock stars or political figures who have committed crimes against the state or nation and then found God in prison, but good, recent ones, of Willa Cather (by James Woodress), of Ernest Hemingway (by Kenneth Lynn), of John Cheever (by Scott Donaldson), and autobiographies by Emma Goldman, Maya Angelou, Beryl Markham, others.

  ‘Her health is still good?’ I ask Jane.

  ‘She’s fine. And what’s more, she is all there,’ a phrase I take to mean she is in full possession of her mind.

  I like the last sentence of the broadside. How old does she think she is? Of course she knows. She will live out the rest of her life in a sterile place where she is one of three patients still mentally healthy. For her this must be a trial. But her poor hearing is a blessing. The constant babble and laments of the forgotten, deserted, and confused do not disturb her.

  I will make up a box of books next week. On second thought, I think I may slip in a carton of cigarettes, and a bottle of apricot brandy to guarantee her some good nights’ sleep.

  While I pack books tonight, I consider my passion for collecting them. During many moves, from Oakland, California, to Millwood, New York, to Des Moines, Iowa, to Rensselaer and New Baltimore and Albany, New York, to Washington, D.C., and now, in less than two months, to Maine, I have left behind, or sold, or given away, half of every collection I had. I collect, and dispose, collect again, sometimes, later, buying a book I have just given away or sold only to discover I cannot live without it. The other day I came upon a volume of writings by the sixteenth-century Dutch scholar Erasmus, who described his passion for owning books: ‘When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left, I buy food and clothes.’

  This time I have decided to reduce my collection by two-thirds. My single criterion is: Will I ever read this book again? This is a harsh and most difficult rule to observe, for many of the books on my fiction shelves have been given or sent to me, inscribed by the author, and while I read and enjoyed many of them, I know well I will not return to them.

  But even as I make my piles—give away to friends, to the Salvation Army, the Vassar book sale, etc.; sell to a dealer of first editions; move to the apartment we will keep in Washington for ‘the bad months’ (when can they possibly be?); ship to Maine—I am suffering all the triumphs as well as the pains of the true collector. The victory: I am under the impression I have conquered my terrible acquisitiveness. The pain: Even if I think I will not reread them, I am attached to these books, their familiar, fading spines, their width and height. They have been a part of my life for so long that separation from them is loss.

  But then I think, perhaps it is time to stop clinging to myself and my ‘belongings,’ the foolish solipsism that I have always been guilty of, and begin to look outward. If there are to be some good years, I intend to take an elementary course in the moods and changes of Billings Cove, from early morning to the dying light, and then raise my eyes to an advanced study of Eggemoggin Reach beyond the cove, and after that do graduate work on the glory of the surrounding hills and woods. It may be that in this way I will empty my glutted interior self, and fill it with the beauty of a world that is not the self, and never has been.

  A funeral today for a young man I knew, whose family announces, in the New York Times obituary, that he died of pneumonia. He was twenty-eight, unmarried, worked for a ballet company, and leaves his parents, two sisters, and a brother. No mention of a companion or friend. No mention of what I suspect was the real cause of death. Sad, to be so afraid of the most tragic truth of our time, to call it by another name, and so disassociate oneself and one’s frightened family from the life choices and the subsequent agonies of a son.

  I suddenly understand why some people become more attentive to dying persons then they were to them in the years of their health. I know two such persons. I suspect they have a deep fear of death. They pay safe little visits to the mortally ill, relish trial contacts with death, enjoy tentative touches to the dry hand of the moribund. From the secure shores of their own health, they observe the last moments, objective witnesses to the permanent fact of death. Standing fully alive at the bedside of the dead, assuring themselves of their own survival, diminishes their terrible fear … for the moment.

  April

  The house is having its chimney lined, for the first time in one hundred years. So far as we know there has never been a fire in it, but still, the inspector for the new owners insists it be done before the sale is complete. The repair man informs us that ninety percent of the chimneys in the District of Columbia are unlined. For the two months we have to live here, we will have the expensive distinction of being among the ten percent who have a lined one.

  At the same time we have word from the inspector for the Sargentville house we are purchasing that one chimney for the woodstove is unlined, and the other is crumbling and entirely unsafe. We ask our Maine lawyer to see if the owners will make these repairs, or reduce the price of the house. We are quickly informed they will do neither.

  Recently we reroofed the Washington house in preparation for sale. At the same time we learn that the roof on the Maine house is about forty years old and has been therapeutically patched many times. Will the owners consider taking six thousand dollars, the estimated cost of replacing the roof, from the purchase price? They will not.

  But none of this financial drain changes my desire to sell the house here, and begin to live in Sargentville. If I once insisted that it was too late for me to lead a totally new life, I may have been right, but I would like to try to prove I was wrong. Very rapidly, we fix all the things here that have needed doing for a long time, small matters like door latches, wallpaper replacement, and ironwork repainting, and expensive things like lining the chimney. The house is now in better condition than it has been since we bought it years ago, a state of affairs that makes Sybil think, in her profound ambivalence, that we ought not to sell it. She wants to stay, she loves the house more than the unknown virtues of Maine. I want to go, fearing the ugly vices of life in a threatened city, and wishing to become acquainted, for the rest of my life, with peace and isolation.

  No silence exists for twenty miles around great cities like Washington. The space is occupied by the never-ceasing hum and clatter of machines, air conditioners, whistles, elevators, refrigerators, radios, televisions, the clash of bottles and cans, human voices. Almost nowhere can one detect the sound of insects or birds (one may catch sight of them in parks but they seem to be soundless). They are wiped out by the roar, day and night, of traffic, airplanes, sirens. Immediately beyond the twenty-mile outskirts, the circle of another city touches it—there are almost no places of silence left between cities. The greatest ecological failure in my lifetime has been the loss of quiet, a disappearance as soul-wearying as the dirty junkyard that the industrial, ruined earth has become.

  For me there are two saddening consolations. In my youth I trusted the earth to be eternally safe and everlastingly beautiful. The thought of death was bitter, because the fine things I loved in the natural world would go on while I would disappear. Everything beautiful—the pure, enlivening air, the leaves in their metamorphosing glory, the strong, solid Palisades hills and the light-grey waters of the Hudson River, the night (even in Manhattan where I grew up) filled with stars and moonlight, the fresh, brave faces of flowers and the strong, aspiring branches of trees on Riverside Drive, in Van Cortlandt Park, in Central Park (the ‘country’ of my childhood)—would endure. But I would not be here to see it all.

  The consolation: What I so loved has gone, and I may outlive even the little that remains in isolated places far from the cities. The tragedy of modern life is that human beings, for a short time, may be here after natural be
auty has disappeared from their earth.

  The other consolation: I am slowly losing my hearing, so the omnipresent cacophony is largely lost on me.

  Another deprivation: The luxury of ample space has been taken away from us. Too many persons enter the urban world, too fast, and die too slowly. Lebensraum has shrunk until we cannot move or turn around without knocking elbows, stumbling over the feet of others, breathing their exhaled breath. The Great Meadow of Central Park is now a sea of bodies and dust. Stretched-out sunbathers on the nation’s beaches obscure from view every inch of sand. Mountain roads and national parks have become a trail of campers and live-in cars. Restaurants are fast-food troughs for millions of the population always in motion. Every space is taken, as in a mall parking lot. In cities we are each frozen into the space of our own dimensions, limited to the measurements in life of what will be our containers in death.

  I read today that C. S. Lewis thought A Slip of the Tongue would be a good title for a short novel. As far as I can tell he never used it. It occurs to me it might also be a suitable title for a memoir.

  On television I see Mary McCarthy talking about her Vassar friend, the poet Elizabeth Bishop. I notice Mary’s instant, icy smile, so often present when I interviewed her in Paris in 1966 for a book. George Grosz saw the same smile on Lenin’s face. ‘It doesn’t mean a smile,’ he said. I am fascinated by it. It represents, I think, an unsuccessful attempt to soften a harsh, bluntly stated judgment. Last summer, twenty-two years after the book I wrote about her, which she so disliked, appeared, I encountered Mary for the first time in an outdoor market in Blue Hill.

  ‘Hello, Mary,’ I said. ‘Do you remember me?’

  Her smile flashed and then, like a worn-out bulb, disappeared instantly.

  ‘Unpleasantly,’ she said.