by Lydia Davis
2.
It is not that you are not qualified to receive the fellowship, it is that your patience must be tested first. Each year, you are patient, but not patient enough. When you have truly learned what it is to be patient, so much so that you forget all about the fellowship, then you will receive the fellowship.
Helen and Vi: A Study in Health and Vitality
Introduction
The following study presents the lives of two elderly women still thriving in their eighties and nineties. Although the account will necessarily be incomplete, depending as it does in part on the subjects’ memories, it will be offered in detail whenever possible. Our hope is that, through this close description, some notion may be formed as to which aspects of the subjects’ behaviors and life histories have produced such all-around physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health.
Both women were born in America, one of African-American parents and one of immigrants from Sweden. The first, Vi, is eighty-five years old, currently still in very good health, working four days a week as a house-and office-cleaner, and active in her church. The other, Helen, ninety-two, is in good health apart from her weakened sight and hearing, and though she now resides in a nursing home, she lived alone and independently until one year ago, caring for herself and her large house and yard with minimal help. She still looks after her own hygiene and tidies her room.
Background
Both Vi and Helen grew up in intact families with other children and two caregivers (in Vi’s case these were her grandparents, for many years). Both were close to their siblings (in Vi’s case there were also cousins in the immediate family) and remained in close touch with them throughout their lives. Both have outlived all of them: Helen was predeceased by an older brother who reached the age of ninety and an older sister who died at seventy-eight; Vi by seven brothers, sisters and cousins, all but one of whom lived into their eighties and nineties. Her last remaining cousin died at the age of ninety-four, still going out to work as a cook.
Vi spent most of her childhood in Virginia on her grandparents’ farm. She was one of eight siblings and cousins, all of whom lived with the grandparents and were raised by them up to a certain age. Her grandfather’s farm was surrounded by fields and woods. The children went barefoot most of the time, so their physical contact with the land was constant, and intimate.
The children never saw a doctor. If one of them was sick, Vi’s grandmother would go out into the fields or woods and find a particular kind of bark or leaf, and “boil it up.” Her grandfather taught the children to recognize certain healthful wild plants, and in particular to tell the male from the female of certain flowers, since each had different properties; then they would be sent to gather the plants themselves. As a regular preventive health measure, at the beginning of each season, the grandmother would give them an infusion to “clean them out”; this would, among other benefits, rid them of the parasitic worms that were a common hazard of rural life at that time. When Vi moved up to Poughkeepsie to live with her mother, the home treatments ceased: when she had even a mild cold, her mother would take her to the doctor and he would give her medicines.
Vi’s grandparents were both hard workers. For instance, in addition to her regular work, her grandmother also made quilts for all eight of the children. She would sew after breakfast and again in the afternoon. She enjoyed it, Vi says: she would use every bit of material, including the smallest scraps. Her grandmother’s hands were nice, “straighter than mine,” says Vi. Her grandmother would also sew clothes for the children out of the printed cotton fabric of flour sacks. On the first day of school, says Vi, she and her girl cousins would be wearing “such pretty dresses.”
Her grandmother was a kind woman. Her grandfather, also kind, was stricter. When he said something, he meant it, says Vi. The kids listened to both, but waited until their grandfather was out of the house to make their special requests, because their grandmother was more likely to give them what they wanted.
Her grandfather raised all his own meat and vegetables. He built a house for them all with his own hands. She says her grandfather’s hands were very bent and crooked.
The family slept on straw mattresses. Once a year her grandmother would have the children empty out the old straw and fill them with new. The kids would roll around on the newly filled mattresses to hear them crackle. The mattresses were stuffed so full that before the straw settled, the kids would keep sliding off. The pillows were stuffed with chicken feathers. Once a year, the grandmother would have the children empty out the old feathers and fill them with new feathers she had saved for the purpose.
The children were expected to do their chores without being reminded. If not, they suffered the consequences. Once, Vi says, she forgot to bring water from the spring. When her grandfather, resting from his day’s work, asked for a drink, she admitted that she had forgotten, and he sent her out to fetch it, even though night had fallen. The way to the spring led past the small burial ground where some of the family rested, and she was frightened to walk by it in the dark. The children believed that ghosts roamed around after the sun was down. She had no choice, however, and she crept past the graveyard and down the hill to the spring, filled the bucket, and then ran all the way home again. She says that by the time she was back at the house, the bucket was half empty. She never forgot that chore again.
All the children grew up to be hard workers except the youngest, she says, who was the baby of the family and spoiled, and who did nothing when she grew up but have babies of her own. And, Vi is quick to point out, this sister died at the earliest age of them all, only seventy-two.
Eventually Vi moved north to live with her mother, who had a dairy farm. She continued going to school, in a two-room schoolhouse where the boys sat on one side of the room and the girls on the other. She attended up to the tenth grade. She took piano lessons for a while, and now wishes she had gone on with them, but she was a child who needed to be “pushed,” she says, and her mother did not push her, being too busy. Besides running the farm, her mother worked for a local family for thirty years, mainly cooking.
Vi was married twice. Her first husband was “no good,” she says: he ran after other women. Her second husband was a good man. She wishes she had met him first. The many affectionate stories she tells about him and their life together indicate that their relationship was full of love, mutual appreciation, and good fun. “When I was a Standish,” Vi will say, meaning when she was married to her first husband and bore his name. She will also express it another way: “Before I was a Harriman.”
She had only one child, a daughter by her first husband, but she helped to raise her two granddaughters, who lived with her for a number of years.
Helen, too, grew up on a farm in her early childhood. Her father, soon after coming over from Sweden, acquired several hundred acres of farmland on the outskirts of a Connecticut village on an elevated plateau of land. Below, in the river valley, was a large thread-manufacturing town. He owned a small herd of cows and sold milk to neighboring families. He also raised chickens and bred the cows. He owned a team of horses for plowing, and the family used to go down the long hill into town in a wagon drawn by the two horses, who would be given a rest and a drink halfway down. Her family lived on the farm until Helen was seven, when they moved into town so that her older brother could go to the local high school.
While Helen’s father worked the farm, her mother kept a kitchen garden and a poultry yard, and looked after the family. After they moved into town, Helen’s father worked as custodian at the high school and later at the local college. In town, Helen’s father, like Vi’s grandfather, built a house with his own hands. It stood on a piece of land behind the house the family occupied. When he eventually sold both houses, her father was able to afford the larger house in which she raised her own family and lived most of her life.
Helen married when she was twenty. Her husband played the saxophone and the clarinet in a dance band. Though his first lo
ve was music, he took a job in a bank to support the family, and over the years played less and less. Helen had two children born close together, both boys, and when they were still quite small, the family moved back into what was now Helen’s parents’ home, a large, though plain, white house in a neighborhood of roomy Victorian houses and mature shade trees on the side of the hill overlooking the river valley and the mills. A self-contained apartment was created for them on the second and third floors. For the rest of their lives, Helen took care of her parents as well as her own family. Her mother was ill and bedridden for the last thirteen years of her life.
After her parents were both gone, the house also sheltered, for a few years following the end of World War II, a succession of displaced families from refugee camps in Germany sponsored by Helen and her husband, some of whom still send her cards in the nursing home. Helen’s sons left home and started families of their own, her husband eventually died, and Helen remained alone in the large house. For a brief time, she rented the second-floor apartment. The tenants were an elderly man and his teenage granddaughter. They left after the granddaughter became pregnant, and Helen did not rent the apartment again, but used the rooms for her sons and their families when they came to visit, and for storage. Now that Helen is gone, the house stands empty.
Employment
Both Vi and Helen began working at an early age, either helping their families or earning money outside the family.
Vi first worked outside the family at age nine, earning five cents for fetching water “for a woman.” One of Vi’s later jobs, with her first husband, was woodcutting: they would use a two-handled saw to cut up “pulp wood” to fill a box car, for which they would earn $500. If they “skinned the bark” off each tree, the load would earn them $600. Later, she worked as a laundress in a nursing home, and still later took jobs cleaning houses and offices.
Vi teases the girls in the office who say they are tired—they’ve been sitting in a chair all day!
At her current housecleaning jobs, Vi works steadily from 9:00 a.m. until 4:00 or 5:00 p.m., rarely stopping, though she will occasionally pause to talk, standing where she is, for as long as ten minutes at a stretch. When she is working she does not like to eat lunch, but she will also, usually, stop once during the day to sit down at the kitchen table and eat a piece of fruit—a banana, a pear, or an apple. If she has not had a piece of fruit by the end of the day, she will take a banana, hold it up in the air with a questioning look, and then sit down sideways at the kitchen table to peel and eat it quietly, or she will take the piece of fruit home with her. In the warm and hot weather she likes to have a tall glass of cold water with an ice cube in it. The heat does not particularly bother her, though, even on days when the mercury is in the nineties.
She works steadily, but she does not hurry. She says her grandmother taught them to take their time doing a job and to be thorough. She will, as she says, “put the night and the day on it,” dusting every bar of a wooden chair and every spindle of a banister.
Vi’s employers value her work and are loyal to her. After her eighty-fifth birthday party, she went down to Washington to visit her granddaughter and stayed away far longer than she had planned. She was having work done on her teeth that extended week after week. Several months went by without a word from her, her bills piled up, and the telephone company threatened to cut off her phone service. She eventually made a visit back home to pay bills and contact employers, but in all this time no one made a move to replace her. Everyone simply got along as best they could until she was back again. She has been cleaning for the same office, a law office, for thirty years.
One of her longtime employers, an elderly woman, finally entered a nursing home. She complained to Vi that the people there did not know how to make a bed properly or to bathe her. She asked Vi if she would come to the home and continue to take care of her. Vi said she would do it in a minute, but she knew that the people who worked there would not let her.
Another employer moved to Washington and asked Vi please to move there with her and continue to work for her, but Vi would not consider moving from her home and community.
Helen helped her mother, who took in laundry, by delivering and picking up the clothes. One of her mother’s customers then employed Helen for a time in her own home, to sweep and serve meals. To earn pocket money, Helen would go out into the countryside, collect wildflowers, and sell them to craft hobbyists who pressed the flowers and used them to decorate trays.
Hope, who, at age 100, would be the third case in an expanded version of this study, used to bake her own bread as a child growing up on the edge of a small town in Iowa. She would sell it to her neighbors in order to pay the costs of supporting her pony. The pony was not her own, but was lent to her for the summer in exchange for the work she would do to gentle and train it.
After her children entered school, Helen took a job doing alterations at a small, family-owned women’s clothing store on Main Street. She would walk down to work and walk home again. Subsequently, she worked in the city of Hartford, also as a seamstress. To go there, she took a slow local train which wound its way through woods and past cemeteries and small towns.
Helen worked for four years for the clothing shop. The owner of this business and his wife looked after their employees, became friends with many of them, and continued some friendships long after the employment had ended. Helen’s working environment was, therefore, an emotionally sustaining one. After she had been in the nursing home a year, her old boss was admitted following a stroke. He lingered for a couple of weeks, and Helen would make her way slowly, with her walker, into his room to visit him. A tall, handsome man with a smooth, pale face, he lay back on his pillow staring at her with his bright eyes, but he did not know her. His wife, often there beside him, visiting, would try to remind him, but he would shake his head.
Physical Activity: Work and Play
Both Helen and Vi have had lives filled with physical activity, most consistently walking, including long-distance, and both spent significant amounts of time outdoors in the fresh air, especially as children, but also as adults. In both cases, once childhood was past, this activity principally consisted of work of one kind or another, either for themselves or for pay. But their leisure pursuits have often been active as well. Neither Vi nor Helen ever played a sport, but both danced regularly, and Vi’s travels have often included a fair amount of walking.
When Vi was a child, she walked into town for errands and to attend school. Apart from her mealtimes and the hours spent in school, she was physically active the entire day, at her chores and at play—principally outdoors—with her siblings, cousins, and friends. As a young and middle-aged adult, too, she was physically active all day, her time divided between work for her own or her family’s maintenance and work for pay, in both cases physical and active.
In these, her late years, Vi continues to do all her housework and yard work herself, with occasional help from family or friends if they are visiting. She will also, from time to time, clean her granddaughter’s house, or a friend’s house. She cooks, gardens, and rearranges her furniture. “I was always moving things,” she says; “my second husband used to call me ‘the moving van.’” Her second husband used to clean the kitchen when she was out working, keeping the stove and oven spotless. He would clip the hedge. Now she does it herself, but thinks she does a pretty poor job of it. Her husband also planted and tended all the rose shrubs, most of which are now gone. After a full day’s work housecleaning, she will take home some plants and immediately put them in the ground. She says she likes to get her hands in the dirt.
After the working day is over, she will not only go on to tend her garden but, on certain days, leave the house after supper and spend the evening at choir practice. At a party just recently, she was one of the models in a fashion show, which required her to change into and out of eight different outfits. She admits to being tired afterward (“I was so tired, I can’t tell you; my bed said to me,
‘I’m waitin’ for you’”). But after going to bed early that night, she rose early the next day, Sunday, baked a pan full of macaroni and cheese for the church dinner, went out and worked in the yard, worked in the house, and after resting went off to the church dinner. After the dinner, because almost everyone else had left, she stayed behind to wash the dishes with a couple of friends, also elderly. They were at the church working until midnight.
Vi washes her clothes in a washing machine but hangs them to dry on a line outdoors or in the basement, as did Helen when she lived at home; neither owns a dryer, though both could afford it. Their caregivers, as they were growing up, no doubt taught them to take advantage of a “good drying day.” It should be noted that hanging clothes out and taking them in again expends considerably more energy than transferring them to a dryer, and also involves exposure to the outside air and sunlight, thus no doubt adding another small measure to Vi’s and Helen’s well-being.
Hope, by contrast, has avoided housework as much as possible all her adult life, having felt she had better things to do.
As Helen was growing up, she, like Vi, would walk considerable distances almost every day. When she lived outside of town, up on the farm, she walked to school, besides helping with housework and farm work and playing outdoors. When she moved into town, she continued to walk to school, a distance of seven or eight blocks each way. Her recreations as a teenager, besides dancing, included such group physical activities as scavenger hunts, then called “mystery hunts,” that involved roaming the town for several hours.
When she was a young mother, she would take her small sons out into the countryside onto friends’ farmland to pick berries, which she would then bake into a pie.
Helen walked wherever she needed to go. Her house was four blocks up from the main street, the last block very steep. She walked down to the shop where she worked, and walked home again. When she went into the city to work or to shop at G. Fox’s department store, she would walk to and from the train station, a distance of at least six blocks. In her later years, when she no longer went down to Main Street, she would still walk half a block up the hill and then several blocks over to her church on Sunday and, unless a friend gave her a lift, back home again.
