by Grace Paley
In spite of this parenthetical interruption I returned to my work and was able to write the next sentence of what may still become a story: “Two years later, two of the boys had died and my husband said, ‘Well, I’d better take this old-age business a little more seriously.’” So we did.
[Poem to Prove Seriousness]
Questions
Do you think old people should be put away?
the one red rheumy eye the pupil goes back
and back
the hands are scaly
do you think all that should be hidden
do you think young people should be seen
so much on Saturday night
hunting and singing in packs the way they do
standing on street corners looking this way
and that
or the small children who are visible all the time
everywhere
and have nothing to do but be smart
but be athletes
but jump
but climb high fences
do you think hearts should sink
do you think the arteries ought to crumble
when they could do good
because the heart was made to endure
why does it not endure?
do you think this is the way it should be?
Dialogue
Don’t you think that poem was kind of gloomy?
But don’t you have to be truthful?
There’s more to getting older than that. What about friendship? All that special energy—you’ve written about it yourself. What about experience and wisdom?
But did you really want me to say it was all okay and zippy? Still, you may be right, a little bit. Because for me, I’m well, my children are well, my stepchildren are well. And as I pointed out, even my oldest siblings, with terrifying surgical memories and arteries sticky with the bakeries of the Upper West Side, offer high examples of liveliness, interest in the world, and hope for tomorrow. This is proven by purchases of long season subscriptions to concerts and ballets and the determination to proceed to those events with whatever spiritual and physical equipment is working. So you are right. Several years ago my sister bought me, for my fifty-fifth birthday, ten Arthur Murray ballroom dancing lessons with her favorite partner.
Okay, so now you agree that poem was gloomy.
You’re right, and you’re wrong, and anyway, that’s not the point. The point is that if you insist on saying that old age is only a slightly different marketplace of good looks, energy, and love, you insult lots of others. For instance, I’m not poor. I’m a white woman in a middle-class life, and even there some luck usually has to apply. Also, when I need to knock wood I can just run out my door to a little forest of maple and hemlock to knock on the best living wood for my luck. Also, I’m not alone in this world, I’m not without decent shelter.
All right, I see what you’re saying. But people do need to be encouraged. Why won’t you admit it? We only want you to be a little upbeat. It’s not against your nature.
Okay. I’ll try from now on. But I might, just once, slip.
The Relativity of Age
About sixteen years ago at the beginning of the energetic prime of my fifties, in Chile, in the town of Quillota, a few months before the Pinochet coup, the death of Allende, we met a man with an attaché case full of American bills. He was a trucker with a small pickup. “Come to my house,” he said, loving Americans. “Here’s a picture of my children. I had fourteen. Twelve live.”
We came to his dusty courtyard, on which the American cash had not yet gone to work. “This is my beautiful daughter,” he said, introducing us. “She’s eighteen. That’s my wife.” He pointed to an old woman leaning on the outdoor washbasin. She turned away. “Sick,” he said. She was thirty-five years old.
* * *
In an honest effort to cheer up I asked one of my students to interview any older woman who happened to be passing the stoop where she and I were sitting talking about the apartment situation in New York. She was the kind of kid who’s loaded with initiative. She began at once:
Student Interviewer: Excuse me, ma’am. How do you keep busy?
Older Woman: What do you mean by that? I work. I have to keep my place decent. I take care of my aunt. Her kids moved to California. By the way, you don’t seem to be doing too much yourself except interfering with us promenaders.
S.I.: Do you feel old?
O.W.: Well, middle age in this country comes so late, if it wasn’t for the half fares, I’d never give it up.
S.I.: Do you have many friends?
O.W.: Well, I guess I do. We’ve been meaning to get together and have this group—this women’s group on getting older. You know, everything that happens—some things are interesting and some things are not so hot. But the truth is, we’re too busy. Every time we say we’re going to get it together, two people have a long job to finish. It’s a good idea, though.
S.I.: Do you live with your family?
O.W.: My family doesn’t live with me. They already have lived with me a number of years.
S.I.: Who do you live with?
O.W.: My lover.
S.I.: Oh. So you’re still interested in sex, that means.
O.W.: Yes, I am.
S.I. (shyly): Would you elaborate?
O.W.: Not to you.
What It’s Like
You may begin to notice that you’re invisible. Especially if you’re short and gray-haired. But I say to whom? And so what? All the best minorities have suffered that and are rising nowadays in the joy of righteous wrath.
Some young people will grab your elbow annoyingly to help you off and on the curb at least fifteen years before you’d want them to. Just tell them, “Hands off, kiddy.” Some others with experience in factional political disputes fear the accusation of ageism and, depending on their character, either defer to you with a kind look or treat you cruelly as an equal. On the other hand, people do expect wise and useful remarks—so, naturally, you offer them. This is called the wisdom of the old. It uses clichés the way they ought to be used, as the absolute truth that time and continuous employment have conferred on them.
You are expected to be forgetful. You are. At least as forgetful as you have always been. For instance, you lose your eyeglasses. You have lost your eyeglasses all your life. You have lost your keys, as well as other people’s, frequently. It was once considered a charming if expensive eccentricity, proving that your head was in the literary clouds it was supposed to be in. Your family is not too rude, but you don’t like the way they look at each other. Pretty soon you stop mislaying your keys—not altogether, but enough to prove you could have always done so.
You are expected to forget words or names, and you do. You may look up at the ceiling. People don’t like this. They may say, “Oh come on, you’re not listening.” You’re actually trying to remember their names.
While he could still make explanations, my father explained to me that the little brain twigs, along with other damp parts of the body, dry up, but that there is still an infinity of synaptic opportunities in the brain. If you forget the word for peach (“A wonderful fruit,” he said), you can make other pathways for the peach picture. You can attach it to another word or context, which will then return you to the word “peach,” such as “What a peachy friend,” or springtime and peach blossoms. This is valuable advice, by the way. It works. Even if you’re only thirty, write it down for later.
My father wanted—in general—to tell me how to grow old. I thought that the restoration of those lost words was almost enough, but he had also taken a stand against wrinkles. He applied creams assiduously to the corners of his mouth and his heels. I did not, when I could, pay enough attention, and now I’m sorry, though it’s probably a scientific fact that your genes have got you by the shortening muscles of your throat as well as the number of hairs time leaves on your head.
Soon it was too late to ask him important questions and our conversations h
appened in the world where people say, “Is that a story or a fact?”
A Story or a Fact
He had fallen, hurt his head, where time is stored. When he spoke, he made the most direct connections. If I listened, I heard his mind taking the simplest synaptic opportunity and making a kind of poem in that necessity. Follow him for a moment, please.
“Come into the room,” my father called to me, “come into the room. I have located your second husband,” he said. “I have just located him. Not only his body, but his mind. We talked over there on the couch. Does he want my money? Why does he think he can wear old clothes? I have an extra suit. Give it to him. Well, this is the way we are made—getting old—the problem of old men. The problem of old women—we can talk about that later; I’m not interested.
“Do you know these women? The ones I live with in this house. The one who makes my supper, the one that lives in someone’s room—the person that’s missing. (I told you someone very important was missing. Who? Mama?) Last night they made a party. Very wild music. Not unpleasant, but not usual. Some others came. Men who talked nicely. The women invited me to their party and they said why not dance; they offered me a chance to—well, you know what. I said to them, ‘Can’t you see how old I am.’ Look, I told them they were very handsome women, not to be insulted. But I’m old. I had to explain to them. Feelings can be hurt.” Old, he said. Without sadness, but apologetically, as though it were an offense, not the sorrow of human life.
Interviewer: Why did you tell me this story?
Grace: Because I saw you bought a stunning new winter coat and were about to become too sentimental.
Interviewer: Why are you so hard?
Grace: Well, am I? You do have to come out of late middle age into this older time with your muscles of imagination in good shape, and your muscles of swimming against the tides of misinformation pretty strong—as well as the usual back and abdominal muscles, which are kind of easy to exercise in the morning.
Interviewer: You’re not so easy to deal with.
Grace: Why should I be? Like most people my age, I’ve accumulated enough experience to be easy or difficult, whatever the provocation exacts. Your trouble is you don’t have a gift, or the character, for normal tragedy.
Interviewer: That’s not really fair. I suppose I have to let it go at that, but I do have a few fairly simple questions I’d like to ask you. What have you liked about your life?
Grace: I’ve liked being Jewish. I’ve liked being a woman. When I was a little girl, I liked thinking I was a boy. I loved growing up in New York City, the Bronx, my street—and I’ve tried to give those advantages to my children.
Interviewer: What do you miss?
Grace: My mother, who died before we had all the good talks that are now in books, thanks to the women’s movement. I miss my children’s childhood. Now that I live in the country, which I love, I miss my political, grass-roots life in the New York streets. Vigiling in a shopping center in New Hampshire is not quite the same.
Interviewer: Do you mind having to get older?
Grace (somewhat annoyed, but luckily slips into another story): When I was twelve and a half, I was walking along Southern Boulevard in the Bronx on the way to the Elsemere movie house with a boy named David, with whom I was in love. He was fourteen and very sophisticated. “What do you think is the greatest age for a woman?” he asked. I pretended to think, though I already knew. “Eighteen,” I said. “Oh no,” he sighed, “twenty-six, twenty-six—that’s the age a woman should be.” “That old?” I asked. “That’s awful. It’s disgusting.” David looked at me as though he had never noticed how young I was. He dropped my hand.
By the way, my answer to your question is, I feel great. I like my life a lot. It’s interesting every day. But it so happens I do mind.
—1989
Life in the Country: A City Friend Asks, “Is It Boring?”
No! Living in the country is extremely lively, busy. After the gardens have gone to flower, to seed, to frost, the fruits canned, frozen, dried, the days and evenings are full of social event and human communication. Most of it dependent on the automobile or phone, though a few tasks can be accomplished on foot or ski. Even if you are not worried about the plain physical future of the world, there’s a lot to do. If you are concerned about your village, there are zoning meetings, water-board meetings, school meetings and school-board meetings, PTA meetings. There’s the Improvement Society, whose main task is sustaining the life of the Green or Common as the elms die away from us. There’s also the Ladies Benevolent, whose name explains itself. For some there is the interesting Historical Society of their town; there are selectmen meetings. There’s the conservation committee, the agricultural committee for those who count the farms each year and find several missing. There are the food co-op meetings: one for ordering, one for distributing, one for the co-op board. For those who love theater, there are groups flourishing in several of the towns of the county, all requiring lots of rehearsal, costume making, and, in the event of a success, traveling to other towns. Of course many of these meetings happen in bad weather, ice, sleet, and require pot-luck suppers, so there is a great deal of cooking and baking.
All of this liveliness happens after the workday world and the meetings of that world, union or managerial. Nor have I mentioned purely social events: returning a neighbor’s dinner invitation, going to a church supper, a fair, the high-school basketball game, or a square dance for the pleasure of it.
Many of us, fearing the world’s end and saddened by our country’s determined intervention, have been involved in political work, and this requires the following: one meeting every two weeks of our affinity group, a meeting every month or two of a coalition, the special legal meetings which usually precede and follow illegal actions. Then the frequent meetings once an action has been decided upon. If these actions include civil disobedience, there will be training meetings as well as legal ones, so that by role-playing and other methods we retain our nonviolent beliefs and strategies.
And then there is ordinary life. For instance, there is keeping the mud and hay out of the house, and stacking the wood in the woodshed. There is also stuffing newspapers and rags into the cracks and chinks that each new descent of temperature exposes. There is also skiing across shining fields and through dangerous woods full of trees one must avoid.
And of course there is standing in the front yard (or back) staring at the work time has accomplished in crumpling the hills into mountains, then stretching them out again only a few miles away into broad river plains, stippling white pink rust black across the wooded hills, clarifying the topography by first aging, then blowing away the brilliant autumn leaves. Although here and there the wrinkled brown leaves of the oak hold tight, and the beech leaf, whose tree will die young, grows daily more transparent, but waits all winter for the buds of spring.
—1991
Across the River
There was the pretty town. There was the beautiful farm full of orchards and fields. There was the big barn. It burned. Silo and all. Cattle horses pigs the chicken house one-third of the orchard.
Almost immediately, in order to raise money, the women of the community began to design a patchwork quilt. It would be patched with the old cotton dresses of their little girls and their grandmas’ stored remnants. Little by little it became the history of the beautiful farm, with solid-colored dates, polka-dotted outhouses on backgrounds of flowering cattle, light green hills specked with golden dandelions. Raffles were sold at all the banks, but the event itself was saved for Labor Day, so that the summer people could contribute to the good work.
There was also the small, well-endowed college nearby. On its handsome campus, silk-screened posters appeared asking for contributions to help restore the big barn to the beautiful farm.
One day in early June, the trash truck came up the hill to our house. There were a young trashman and an old trashman on the truck. The young trashman shyly worked at our spring cleanup mess.
I said to the old trashman, Isn’t it hot for May? —No rain either, he said. —Awful day right now, I said. —Desperate for rain, he said.
There must be lots of fires, I said. Many, he said.
I asked, Do you know that big place across the river, burned up, people are collecting money for it?
I do, he said. Terrible fire. Collecting money, that’s good of the kids. He looked sideways at our woodpile for a couple of minutes. Have you thought of this? he asked, turning to me. Now what if a poor man’s place burned? Small barn, a couple of cows, no insurance. Why, who’d help him? Maybe a couple of fellows from the firehouse or the Legion’d help nail some old boards. Would there be a collection? Would those college boys be running from door to door? No, they wouldn’t. The poor farmer would have to begin again like always, like when his last barn went probably when he was young and there was help. And if this farmer was old and his boys disgusted with farming, why—the old trashman shrugged and heaved a great black plastic bag of last summer’s junk into the truck—why, it’d be too bad for that poor fool of a farmer, wouldn’t it?
—1978
In a Vermont Jury Room
We had been in the jury room of a Vermont county court for hours, waiting for deals to be made and justice to be defined. In the courtroom itself the defendants were probably watching the important backs of the lawyers and the face of the judge. We waited as juries often do when secret information is being exchanged and the area of the case narrows. The idea that the jury’s best verdict can be reached by what seems to be the smallest amount of information is amazing to me. My co-jurors agreed. We were all feeling left out, mocked by the rules of the game.
