Sister Age

by M. F. K. Fisher

  After too long a time to look at her, I finally knew that I had filled too many boxes with clippings about Old Age. I stopped thinking that I would write a book about the art of aging. (Ursula von Ott was teaching me humility.) I gave away all the boxes of notes and clippings. (She was teaching me how to be simpler.) Finally …

  And here I would like to say then or last night or even this morning, I built a good fire, and broke up the brittle old leather, and burned it and the fruitwood frame and watched them consume and curl themselves into pale ash. But I cannot. (There is more to listen to, more to learn from the old lady.…)

  The picture is beside me, leaning against a bookcase. Its leather thong is long since broken, and all that comes out to my eyes from the dark lacy background is the vivid figure of an aging woman with a little velvet cap on her sparse hair. She ignores the doomful letter with its once-red seal, and the once-fine marble bust, and the once-mockingly pretty pictures of venal pleasures and wishful trappings of a forgotten life. She waits, superbly aloof and untroubled.

  She is my teacher and my sister, and will tell me more, in due time.

  Moment of Wisdom

  Tears do come occasionally into one’s eyes, and they are more often than not a good thing. At least they are salty and, no matter what invisible wound they seep from, they purge and seal the tissues. But when they roll out and down the cheeks it is a different thing, and more amazing to one unaccustomed to such an outward and visible sign of an inward cleansing. Quick tears can sting and tease the eyeballs and their lids into suffusion and then a new clarity. The brimming and, perhaps fortunately, rarer kind, however, leaves things pale and thinned out, so that even a gross face takes on a procelain-like quality, and—in my own case—there is a sensation of great fragility or weariness of the bones and spirit.

  I have had the experience of such tears very few times. Perhaps it is a good idea to mention one or two of them, if for no other reason than to remind myself that such a pure moment may never come again.

  When I was twelve years old, my family was slowly installing itself about a mile down Painter Avenue outside Whittier, California, the thriving little Quaker town where I grew up, on an orange ranch with shaggy, neglected gardens and a long row of half-wild roses along the narrow county road. Our house sat far back in the tangle, with perhaps two hundred yards of gravel driveway leading in toward it.

  There was a wide screened porch across the front of the house, looking into the tangle. It was the heart of the place. We sat there long into the cool evenings of summer, talking softly. Even in winter, we were there for lunch on bright days, and in the afternoon drinking tea or beer. In one corner, there was always a good pile of wood for the hearth fire in the living room, and four wide doors led into that room. They were open most of the time, although the fire burned day and night, brightly or merely a gentle token, all the decades we lived on the Ranch.

  My grandmother had her own small apartment in the house, as seemed natural and part of the way to coexist, and wandering missionaries and other men of her own cut of cloth often came down the road to see her and discuss convocations and get money and other help. They left books of earnest import and dubious literary worth, like one printed in symbols for the young or illiterate, with Jehovah an eye surrounded by shooting beams of forked fire. Grandmother’s friends, of whom I remember not a single one, usually stayed for a meal. Mother was often absent from such unannounced confrontations, prey to almost ritual attacks of what were referred to as “sick headaches,” but my father always carved at his seat, head of the table. Grandmother, of course, was there. Father left early, and we children went up to bed, conditioned to complete lack of interest in the murmur of respectful manly voices and our grandmother’s clear-cut Victorian guidance of the churchly talk below us. That was the pattern the first months at the Ranch, before the old lady died, and I am sure we ate amply and well, and with good manners, and we accepted sober men in dusty black suits as part of being alive.

  When we moved down Painter Avenue into what was then real country, I was near intoxication from the flowers growing everywhere—the scraggly roses lining the road, all viciously thorned as they reverted to wildness, and poppies and lupine in the ditches and still between the rows of orange trees (soon to disappear as their seeds got plowed too deeply into the profitable soil), and exotic bulbs springing up hit or miss in our neglected gardens. I rooted around in all of it like a virgin piglet snuffling for truffles. My mother gave me free rein to keep the house filled with my own interpretations of the word “posy.” It was a fine season in life.

  One day, I came inside, very dusty and hot, with a basket of roses and weeds of beauty. The house seemed mine, airy and empty, full of shade. Perhaps everyone was in Whittier, marketing. I leaned my forehead against the screening of the front porch and breathed the wonderful dry air of temporary freedom, and off from the county road and onto our long narrow driveway came a small man, smaller than I, dressed in the crumpled hot black I recognized at once as the Cloth and carrying a small valise.

  I wiped at my sweaty face and went to the screen door, to be polite to another of my grandmother’s visitors. I wished I had stayed out, anywhere at all, being that age and so on, and aware of rebellion’s new pricks.

  He was indeed tiny, and frail in a way I had never noticed before in anyone. (I think this new awareness and what happened later came from the fact that I was alone in the family house and felt for the moment like a stranger made up of Grandmother and my parents and maybe God—that eye, Jehovah, but with no lightning.) He would not come in. I asked him if he would like some cool water, but he said no. His voice was thin. He asked to see Mother Holbrook, and when I told him she had died a few days before he did not seem at all bothered, and neither was I, except that he might be.

  He asked if I would like to buy a Bible. I said no, we had many of them. His hands were too shaky and weak to open his satchel, but when I asked him again to come in, and started to open the door to go out to help him, he told me in such a firm way to leave him alone that I did. I did not reason about it, for it seemed to be an agreement between us.

  He picked up his dusty satchel, said goodbye in a very gentle voice, and walked back down the long driveway to the county road and then south, thinking God knows what hopeless thoughts. A little past our gate, he stopped to pick one of the dusty roses. I leaned my head against the screening of our porch and was astounded and mystified to feel slow fat quiet tears roll from my unblinking eyes and down my cheeks.

  I could not believe it was happening. Where did they spring from, so fully formed, so unexpectedly? Where had they been waiting, all my long life as a child? What had just happened to me, to make me cry without volition, without a sound or a sob?

  In a kind of justification of what I thought was a weakness, for I had been schooled to consider all tears as such, I thought, If I could have given him something of mine … If I were rich, I would buy him a new black suit.… If I had next week’s allowance and had not spent this week’s on three Cherry Flips … If I could have given him some cool water or my love …

  But the tiny old man, dry as a ditch weed, was past all that, as I came to learn long after my first passionate protest—past or beyond.

  ————

  The first of such tears as mine that dusty day, which are perhaps rightly called the tears of new wisdom, are the most startling to one’s supposed equanimity. Later, they have a different taste. Perhaps they seem more bitter because they are recognizable. But they are always as unpredictable. Once, I was lying with my head back, listening to a long program of radio music from New York, with Toscanini drawing fine blood from his gang. I was hardly conscious of the sound—with my mind, anyway—and when it ended, my two ears, which I had never thought of as cup-like, were so full of silent tears that as I sat up they drenched and darkened my whole front with little gouts of brine. I felt amazed, beyond my embarrassment in a group of near-friends, for the music I had heard was not the kind I t
hought I liked, and the salty water had rolled down from my half-closed eyes like October rain, with no sting to it but perhaps promising a good winter.

  Such things are, I repeat to myself, fortunately rare, for they are too mysterious to accept with equanimity. I prefer not to dig too much into their comings, but it is sure that they cannot be evoked or foretold. If anger has a part in them, it is latent, indirect—not an incentive. The helpless weeping and sobbing and retching that sweeps over somebody who inadvertently hears Churchill’s voice rallying Englishmen to protect their shores, or Roosevelt telling people not to be afraid of fear, or a civil-rights chieftain saying politely that there is such a thing as democracy—those violent physical reactions are proof of one’s being alive and aware. But the slow, large tears that spill from the eye, flowing like unblown rain according to the laws of gravity and desolation—these are the real tears, I think. They are the ones that have been simmered, boiled, sieved, filtered past all anger and into the realm of acceptive serenity.

  ————

  There is a story about a dog and an ape that came to love each other. The dog finally died, trying to keep the ape from returning to the jungle where he should have been all along and where none but another ape could follow. And one becomes the dog, the ape, no matter how clumsily the story is told. One is the hapless lover.

  I am all of them. I feel again the hot dusty screening on my forehead as I watch the little man walk slowly out to the road and turn down past the ditches and stop for a moment by a scraggly rosebush. If I could only give him something, I think. If I could tell him something true.

  It was a beginning for me, as the tears popped out so richly and ran down, without a sigh or cry. I could see clearly through them, with no blurring, and they did not sting. This last is perhaps the most astonishing and fearsome part, past denial of any such encounter with wisdom, or whatever it is.

  Answer in the

  Affirmative

  Yesterday I thought about Mr. Ardamanian and the time I let him make love to me.

  I say “make love,” but it was not that, exactly. It was quite beyond maleness and femaleness. It was a strange thing, one I seldom think of, not because I am ashamed but because it never bothers me. When I do think back upon it, I am filled with a kind of passive wonder that I should have let it happen and that it never bothered me, for I am not the kind of woman who stands still under the hands of an unloved man, nor am I in any way the kind who willy-nilly invites such treatment.

  There is a novel by Somerset Maugham in which an actress lets a stranger sleep with her for one night in a train. As I recall it, she never manages to call up any native shame about this queer adventure but instead comes to recollect it with a certain smugness, pleased with her own wild daring. I do not feel smug about Mr. Ardamanian’s caresses; until yesterday, I believed myself merely puzzled by their happening, or at least their happening to me.

  Yesterday, I had to make a long drive alone in the car. It was a hundred miles or so. I was tired before I started, and filled with a bleak solitariness that gradually became self-conscious, so that before I had passed through the first big town and got out into the vineyards again I was, in spite of myself, thinking of my large bones, my greying hair, my occasional deep weariness at being forty years old and harassed as most forty-year-old women are by overwork, too many bills, outmoded clothes. I thought of ordering something extravagant for myself, like a new suit—black, or perhaps even dark red. Then I thought that I had gained some pounds lately, as always when I am a little miserable, and I began to reproach myself: I was turning slothful, I was slumping, I was neglecting my fine femaleness in a martyr-like and indulgent mood of hyperwifeliness, supermotherliness. I was a fool, I said bitterly, despondently, as I sped with caution through another town.

  I began to think about myself younger, slimmer, less harried, and less warped by the world’s weight. I thought with a kind of tolerant amusement that when I was in my twenties I never noticed my poundage, taking for granted that it was right. Now, I reminded myself as I shot doggedly through the vineyards and then a little town and then the peach orchards near Ontario—now I shuddered, no matter how gluttonously, from every pat of butter, and winced away from every encouraging Martini as if it held snake venom. Still I was fat, and I was tired and old, and when had it happened? Just those few years ago, I had been slender, eager, untwisted by fatigue.

  I had been a good woman, too. I had never lusted for any man but the one I loved. That was why it was so strange, the time Mr. Ardamanian came to the house with my rug.

  We were living near a college where my husband taught, in a beautiful shack held together by layers of paint. I was alone much of the time, and I buzzed like a happy bee through the three rooms, straightening and polishing them. I was never ill at ease or wistful for company, being young, healthy, and well-loved.

  We were very poor, and my mother said, “Jane, why don’t you have Mr. Ardamanian take a few of these old rugs of mine and make them into one of his nice hash-rugs for your living room? It wouldn’t cost much, and anything he can do for our family he will love to do.”

  I thought of Mr. Ardamanian, and of the twenty years or so of seeing him come, with great dignity, to roll up this rug and that rug in our house—for my mother had a great many—and then walk down to his car lightly under the balanced load. He knew us all, first me and my little sister, then the two younger siblings, and my grandmother and the various cooks we had, and even Father. He came in and out of the house, and watched us grow, year after year, while he cleaned and mended rugs for us. Mother told us his name was that of a great family in Armenia, and, true enough, every time since then when I have seen it in books or on shopfronts, mostly for rugs, I have known it to be part of his pride.

  He was small, very old and grey, it seemed, when I was a little girl. He had a high but quiet voice, deep flashing eyes, and strong, white, even teeth. He called my mother Lady. That always pleased me. He did not say Missus, or even Madam, or Lady So-and-So. He said Lady. He dressed in good grey suits, and although he rolled up big rugs and carried them lightly to his car, he was never dusty.

  Mother went ahead with her generous plan, and Mr. Ardamanian did come to the little house near the college, bearing upon his old shoulders a fairly handsome hash-rug made of scraps. He stood at the door under the small pink roses that climbed everywhere, and he looked as he had always looked to me over those twenty years.

  He bowed, said, “Your lady mother has sent me,” and came in.

  I felt warm and friendly toward him, this strange familiar from my earliest days, and as the two of us silently laid the good solid rug upon the painted floor, under my sparse furniture, I was pleased to be with him. We finished the moving, and the rug looked fine, very rich and thick, if not what I was used to at home—the big, worn Baluchistans, the glowing Bokharas.

  Then—I do not quite remember, but I think it started by his saying, in his rather high, courteous voice, the one I knew over so many years, “You are married now. You look very happy. You look like a woman at last, and you have grown a little here … not yet enough here …” and he began very delicately, very surely, to touch me on my waist, my shoulder, my small young breasts.

  It was, and I know it even now, a wonderful feeling. It was as if he were a sculptor. He had the most fastidiously intelligent hands I had ever met with, and he used them with the instinct of an artist moving over something he understood creatively, something alive, deathless, pulsating with beauty but beyond desire.

  I stood, silent and entranced, for I do not know how long, while Mr. Ardamanian seemed to mold my outlines into classical loveliness. I looked with a kind of adoration at his remote, aged face, and felt his mysteriously knowing hands move, calm as God’s, over my body. I was, for those moments of complete easy-breathing silence, as beautiful as any statue ever carved in stone or wood or jade. I was beyond reproach.

  I heard my husband come up the path through the mimosa trees. The old man’s
hands dropped away. I went to the door, unruffled, and I introduced the two men. Then Mr. Ardamanian went gracefully away, and it was not until an hour or so later that I began to remember the strange scene and to wonder what would have happened if he had led me gently to the wide couch and made love to me in the way I, because of my youngness, most easily understood. I felt a vague shame, perhaps, because of my upbringing and my limited spiritual vocabulary, and the whole thing puzzled me in a very minor and peripheral way. There had been no faintest spark of lust between us, no fast urgent breath, no need.…

  So I found myself thinking of all this yesterday, alone in the car. I felt bitter, seeing myself, toward the end of the tiring trip, as a thickening exhausted lump without desire or desirability. I thought fleetingly of the tall, slim, ripe woman who had stood under those ancient hands.

  When I got to my mother’s house, I needed quiet and a glass of sherry and reassuring family talk to jolt me out of a voluptuous depression. Mind you, it was not being forty that really puzzled and hurt me; it was simply that I had got that far along without realizing that I could indeed grow thicker and careless, and let myself eat and drink too much, and wear white gloves with a hole in them, and in general become slovenly.

  Almost the first thing my mother said was that she was waiting for Mr. Ardamanian. I jerked in my chair. It seemed too strange, to have thought about him that morning for the first time in many years. Suddenly I was very upset, for of all things in the world I did not want that old man who had once found me worth touching to see me tired, mopish, middle-aged. I felt cruelly cheated at this twist and I cried out, “But he can’t be alive still! Mother, he must be a hundred years old.”