Old Ladies

by Nancy Huddleston Packer

  “I didn’t want to interrupt your work.”

  You’ve already done that, Rachel wants to say. You’ve ruined it. “I’m on my way out. Try me next week.”

  “Just for a minute,” Elaine says. “I want to ask you something—it won’t take long and then I’ll never bother you again.”

  Anything to finally be rid of this pariah. Rachel motions Elaine toward the usual chair and sits down without bothering to remove her raincoat. She won’t let this take long. She leans back and locks her hands behind her head, hardly controlling her distaste. “So what’s on your mind?”

  “The same thing as yesterday. Remember I asked you how I could become what you are?” She pauses. “Can you talk to me now?”

  Rachel laughs dismissively. “Well, work hard, keep your nose clean. That’s about all I can tell you.”

  Elaine’s face is serious, questioning. “You don’t like me, do you?” she says.

  “What?” Rachel drops forward and slaps the arms of her chair. She could never have anticipated this and isn’t sure how to react. “Look, you’re a student, I’m a professor,” she says, throwing her hands up to show how exasperated she is. “I’m not in the habit of getting emotionally involved with students so that I like or dislike them. What’s your problem anyway?”

  “My problem?” Elaine’s eyes fill. “I’m miserable, I hate what I am, and I thought you would understand.”

  “Well, I’m sorry you’re not happy,” Rachel says, “but I don’t know what that has to do with me. I’m just a teacher, not a psychiatrist.”

  “But weren’t you unhappy when you were my age?”

  “Isn’t everyone?”

  “No,” Elaine says. “Those girls and boys, no, they’re not miserable. Maybe anxious about the future, maybe alone for a short while, but not miserable. They know they’ll recover. But you were, weren’t you?”

  Rachel doesn’t like being questioned this way, but she rolls her eyes. “Of course I was. Lots of the time. Most of the time.” She laughs an ironic little laugh. “All of the time?”

  “I knew that,” Elaine says, leaning forward. “But you overcame it. How? What did you do to become…” She pauses. “…what you are now? I want to change. I don’t want to be dull and gray and miserable and sometimes I just don’t want to be alive. Tell me what I can do, what you did. Please help me.”

  Rachel wants to end this terrible encounter, to get this pitiful woman out of her office, out of her life. “I don’t know why you’d come to me. I can’t help you,” she says. “No one can.”

  She puts her hands on the desk, ready to push herself up. But as she sees her words register on Elaine’s face, the past that she had thought buried erupts, and what she sees is not RuthAnne but herself. She knows exactly what Elaine is feeling—the fear, the fury, the loneliness, the self-loathing. Oh, she knows all this very well indeed. The feeling of despair is there all the time, deeply buried now, but ready to leap out. But it doesn’t have to, not if you don’t let it. She reaches across the corner of the desk and puts her hand over Elaine’s where it grips her backpack.

  “What I mean is, it’s up to you. You can be who you want to be. It’s not impossible. You can overcome everything. I did it. I was a goon and I overcame it. So can you.” She tightens her grip on Elaine’s hand and nods insistently. “You’re smart, just as I was, and you’ll learn, just as I did. I promise you you’ll be okay. Don’t give up. That’s how you do it. You don’t give up. Promise me you won’t give up.”

  When Rachel releases her hand, Elaine says, “I won’t. Thank you.” She stands up and hoists her backpack onto her shoulder and heads for the door.

  Rachel calls, “Come back and let’s talk again.” As she watches the door close, she thinks, It’s true, Elaine won’t always be a goon. She’ll overcome it. Slowly the goon will disappear. I did it. She can do it.

  After a moment, Rachel goes over to the diaries. She feels foolish that she had ever thought of deserting these terrific women for pampered Bostonians who had so little to overcome. Mary MacTavish is so much more than just the mother of a domineering son—she had schooled the neighbor children and had sent her youngest son off to the new land-grant college even though Colin had wanted him to stay on the farm. And Winnie—her sentences are dull, yes, but she had raised her three children alone in a cold and lonely place and managed to record it all. And the others, too, courageous women who had created a new world for themselves, who had made something out of the little they were given, just as she had done, just as Elaine will.

  Rachel thinks of Hennie. He was probably driving home when she called. She had been silly to worry, inventing trouble. He’s busy, just as she is. When she gets home she’ll call him and arrange for a weekend, perhaps in La Jolla.

  She puts Clondie and Betty in her briefcase and steps out into the misty night. One of the stray campus cats crouches on a windowsill. In the distance, a young man and a young woman astride their bicycles are laughing and talking. Rachel sets out across the Quad. She’s eager to spend the evening with her wonderful pioneer women.

  Squaring the Circle

  We were widows when we moved into Ridgeside Retirement Residence. We all had children who were to different degrees affectionate and available, but we were of the generation proud not to be dependent on them. Let them lead their life unfettered by old folks, we said, wishing our life had been unfettered by old folks. We set up special occasions to see them and our grandchildren, taking them to restaurants they wouldn’t spend the money to go to on their own or renting a vacation house at Sea Ranch or Lake Tahoe.

  And then we found each other. After that, though we sometimes groused that we had slipped between the cracks of our children’s lives, we didn’t really mind. Our gang at Triple R had become our real life. We always had a project, such as attending a rally for the Democratic senatorial hopeful or a weekend visiting all the museums in LA. We often read plays together, and once we went to a town on the Feather River to buy hand-embroidered blouses from an Indian tribe—none of us ever wore the blouses for fear we’d see our mirror image coming down the hall, but we had all enjoyed the visit.

  There were other gangs at Triple R. The gang we called the Bar Flies met in the bar for drinks almost every night, and sometimes got tipsy and danced along the corridors, singing old songs. The Jockos played golf at the nearby country club and perfected their putting on Triple R’s practice green, all looking hale and hardy except for their skin, leathered by too many California suns. The Card Sharks met every afternoon to play bridge, and through the evening we could hear them rehashing the hands they had played, often lamenting that a slam could have been made if only. The Weight Watchers enrolled in the exercise classes and spent hours walking in twos and threes around the grounds, hoping to work off the pounds with a minimum of pain. A few of the residents were Floaters and moved from one group to another, never quite committing—the few widowers who came to Triple R were Floaters until they hooked up with a widow from another group and became whatever that person was. And there were the Lone Rangers, not really a gang but individuals who silently ate their meals at the communal table and then rushed back to their lonely apartments to do whatever Lone Rangers do.

  The other groups had their nicknames for us, of course. As we walked toward the dining room, some one might call out in a teasing voice, What are the Cracked Eggheads hatching now? or Hide, here come the Culture Vultures, or some other friendly insult. We didn’t mind being ribbed—we were happy to have our gang.

  None of us ever actually said so, but Martha was our leader. At sixty-nine she was the youngest though not by much, and full of energy and ideas. After her three children had grown up, she had gone to work for a non-profit and for fifteen years was its head. One of those odd yet fairly common things happened: the year she retired her husband died as though he had just been hanging on until she had time to take over. After she had settled his affairs and sold her house, she moved into Triple R, tired, she said, of lo
oking after the garage, the garden, the roof, the basement, and everything in between all by herself. We had laughed because we had all been there and were glad now to be at Triple R.

  ***

  And then the General came along. Walter Latimer was his name, but we always thought of him as “the General,” even after he had been among us a while. He moved into Triple R on a Friday and by the traditional Sunday brunch, all four hundred and sixty residents were aware of him. We knew he had been a Major General in Kuwait in ’91 for the first Iraq war. After he retired, he and his wife had moved to Santa Fe, and when she died he came to the Bay Area and Triple R, to be closer to his daughter in San Francisco. Although he had exchanged his army uniform for the usual blue blazer, he had retained his military bearing, his backbone perpendicular and his shoulders parallel. He wore his thick gray hair in an old-fashioned brush cut and clipped his moustache close and neat, and of course you could see your reflection in his black shoes.

  That first week whenever the General marched through the dining room, heads rose and faces turned toward him with broad smiles. Even if they were nearing eighty and alone for twenty years, many of the Triple R widows had held onto their romantic aspirations and always kept their eye out, not exactly expecting anything, but just in case. The General seemed oblivious to all the interest he excited. He took his long strides straight through the room as though on military parade. Ellie, who had a keener eye than the rest of us, said one of the Bar Flies would snag him within a week. And with a disparaging laugh, Jeannette, our divorcée, said no one would want him.

  Our first real contact with him occurred when we were in the library off the main lobby, where we had met to read Chekhov’s Three Sisters. Before we got started, we were gossiping about the General and just as Rena said, “He’d probably call reveille at six a.m.,” speak of the devil and there he was, passing in the hall just outside the room. We grinned and giggled a little bit at the coincidence, and then we started our reading, deepening our voices to read the male roles and prissing a bit when we played the women we didn’t like. Instead of moving on as any decent person would, the General came to stand right in the doorway, his arms crossed as though he were judging a military exercise.

  As Martha was reading the first speech of Baron Tuzenbakh, the General stepped into the room and leaned over her shoulder. “Give his voice some heft,” he barked, “Tuzenbakh’s a soldier, not a schoolmarm.”

  Ruth said in her quiet voice, “Tuzenbakh isn’t a typical soldier.”

  The General snuffled a derisive laugh. “Typical soldier enough to put his honor above his life.”

  That is just what Tuzenbakh does—allows himself to be pointlessly killed in a duel rather than be thought a coward. To be truthful, we were less surprised that the General dared interfere—after all we couldn’t expect a General to be anything but overbearing—than that he actually knew Chekhov well enough to have an opinion about Baron Tuzenbakh. Our notions about the army did not come tumbling down—our scorn for militarism was too deeply embedded for that—but it was obvious that we were shaken. We looked around at each other, wondering if we had been completely misreading the play.

  But Martha was having none of it. “You read Chekhov in your way,” she said in her quiet voice, “and we’ll read him in his way.”

  Without another word, the General turned smartly on his heels and departed. We looked at Martha, marveling at her poise, her cleverness. “You certainly shut him up,” Rena said, chortling. “‘In his way’ was wonderful.”

  “I’m afraid it wasn’t original,” Martha said sheepishly. “I read something like that somewhere.”

  “Never apologize, never explain,” Gertie said. “You were great.”

  Ellie said, “What an insufferable fool.”

  Jeannette said, “The typical conceited male.”

  Ruth said, “You can be a soldier without being insensitive.”

  Carla said, “A perfect symbol of the arrogant military. All he needs is a swagger stick flicking against his thigh.”

  Once we thought we had racked him up pretty well, we went back to the play and picked up where we had stopped. But after a few minutes we realized the General had ruined our mood. Martha even said that perhaps she should give Tuzenbakh a bit more backbone—not, she quickly added, because he was a military man but because Irina wouldn’t want to marry a weakling.

  After just a few more pages, we knew we had lost the spirit, and since it was dinnertime we decided to give it up and start from the beginning when we met again.

  The next day Rena and Jeannette had plans to go to the de Young to see the Chinese calligraphy exhibit, and then came the weekend. So we didn’t meet again until the next Tuesday afternoon. When Martha came in the room, she looked red-nosed and rheumy-eyed, and she said she had caught a cold, perhaps from one of her grandchildren over the weekend, and didn’t want to spread whatever it was she had.

  Once she had left, we closed the door, in case the General came marching by. Jeannette agreed to be Tuzenbakh as well as Olga, and so we began the reading. After a few pages we all knew it wasn’t going well, that it just wasn’t right without Martha. Still, we plowed on in a desultory way until Tuzenbakh is killed and the soldiers say goodbye and the sisters cry and we all felt very sad.

  We didn’t meet as a group for a week, though most of us had dinner together and a few went to a dreadful play at the University and Carla and Gertie did some early Christmas shopping at a craft fair in San Francisco.

  Then Martha said she felt better and we should get going on something, and we set up a meeting.

  As several of us were walking through the lobby toward the meeting room, we looked out the large window that opens onto the rose garden. Rena said, “Isn’t that Martha?” and Ellie said, “Isn’t that the General?” Martha was sitting on the stone bench looking up, and the General was standing with one foot on the bench, elbow on knee, and chin on hand, looking down. “I bet he’s giving her hell,” Rena said, and Jeannette said, “And I hope she’s giving him the dregs of her cold,” and we all laughed.

  When we told Martha we had seen her in the garden being fussed at by the General, she said, “He wasn’t fussing. He was explaining.”

  “How to do the play, the arrogant bastard,” Jeannette said.

  “No, no,” Martha said. “Explaining why he interfered. In the eighties he was the military attaché in Moscow and saw a Russian production of Three Sisters. Apparently the Russians played it with an edge.”

  “He sees the play once and he thinks he’s Chaliapin,” Ellie said.

  “He’s not quite that arrogant,” Martha said with a laugh. “Poor guy just got carried away. Because he loves the play.”

  “Probably hasn’t seen another one since,” Rena said.

  “That’s what’s so sad,” Martha said. “He hasn’t had much opportunity for things like that.”

  We were surprised that Martha had so easily accepted the General’s explanation. Most of us wouldn’t forgive so easily—we had spent too much of our married years accepting male excuses for bad behavior. We probably wouldn’t have admitted it aloud, but not having to do that anymore was one of the small joys of widowhood.

  Carla said. “Well, old soldiers may not die, but let’s just let that one fade away.” We laughed at that and began to discuss what we would read next. Rena suggested Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf but Jeannette vetoed that because it reminded her too much of her own marriage. Ellie thought something new from Broadway, but Rena said if we hadn’t seen or read it, we couldn’t know whether it was worth our while.

  “How about a Shakespeare?” Martha said. “Haven’t ever done one of those.”

  Ruth then suggested Romeo and Juliet and Jeanette thought Macbeth would be fun. Ellie said both of those were too heavy, so what about As You Like It? After ten minutes or so debating the pros and cons of tragedies and comedies, Martha said, “Maybe something in the middle? like Measure for Measure?” and so that’s what
we decided to read. We would all study the play over the weekend and then meet to figure out who would take which role.

  ***

  After we had done our homework, we gathered late Monday afternoon in our usual room off the lobby. Because she had gone to the mixer Triple R put on, Martha wasn’t there when the rest of us arrived. That was a little unusual, but as we waited Gertie said we weren’t stapled together at the hip. Occasionally one or another of us went to the mixer, if for no other reason, Ellie said, than at least we got to drink some of the booze we had to pay for whether we drank it or not.

  When Martha arrived, she looked a tad flushed and a little nervous. We knew she wasn’t drunk—she always nursed one drink through a whole evening. Ruth suggested maybe she should go back to bed and nurse that cold a bit more. But Martha said the party room had just been a little too warm.

  We turned to Measure for Measure. Gertie said she’d like to read a woman’s part since she had had two male parts in Three Sisters, and Jeannette said she wouldn’t mind reading a male role if she could be the executioner, and after we had laughed at that, Rena said she would play a male if she could be the young and handsome Claudio.

  “Who’s going to be the Duke?” Carla asked.

  And that’s when Martha said, “Since there are so many characters, it might get too confusing if it’s just us reading all the parts. What if we invited some of the other Triple Rs to join in? Just this one time. Maybe one of the men could play the Duke?”

  “Ha!” Carla said, “Imagine one of the Bar Flies as the Duke.”

  “Or imagine one of the Jockos,” Rena said.

  Martha shrugged. “Not a Bar Fly or a Jocko.” She paused. “Maybe the General. He has the bearing and the voice for it.”

  We didn’t exactly reel back, but we were all definitely shocked. “That oaf,” Rena said, and Gertie said, “Over my dead body.”

  Martha raised her hands as though warding off an attack. “Never mind. It was just a thought.”