Sister Age

by M. F. K. Fisher

  He and the girls teased me a little when I got into the 2 CV, for when we made the trip up from the village I had threatened that on our return I would walk down the mountain and meet them at Le Truel. But by now I felt so serene in spirit that the slow crazy crawl around all those curves did no more than interest me in how quickly I myself could grow used to driving them.

  Once down from the mountain, the air did indeed feel heavier; I touched my hair, and it seemed to have lost its silkiness. But when I touched my cheek, too, it felt firmer and smoother than it had a week before. M. Lov’ was waiting for us by the bridge at the entrance to the pretty village of Saint-Rome-de-Tarn. We introduced him as a friend (which he was) who was passing through the country, for even in the face of Georges’ obvious relief at not having to take us any farther, I did not want him to know that we had hired a car so extravagantly. He has worried for almost forty years about my financial insouciance.

  We embraced him very tenderly, and left him sitting on the stone wall of the bridge. He looked like Don Quixote, gaunt and old and still eager for new windmills to tilt at. “I am secret,” I heard him say again.

  Nine months after our visit, on February 20, 1961, Pépé was a hundred years old. For his centennial, there was a great celebration in Dijon. Georges and the mayor, Canon Kir, gave a reception at the town hall, the Ducal Palace. Dozens of relatives and friends were put up at the Hotel Terminus, where red and white wines are piped into some of the bedrooms, and there was much feasting. Pépé was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor, and several other things, for he was not only a hundred years old but a lifelong public servant in the Postes-Téléphones-Télégraphes of Paris. We were invited to all of it, but we were far away in California. So Georges sent us a picture taken of Pépé in the Dijon garden, wearing a sporty-looking tweed jacket and baggy grey flannels, and a grey felt hat with the brim turned up all the way around and slightly cocked over his left eye, which we knew to be large, steady, and bright blue. On the back of the snapshot, Pépé wrote, “To Mme. Fisher and her young ladies, most beloved and lovable, a token from Albert Connes, one hundred today,” and he signed it officially with the banker’s delight, the flourishes and curlicues of a true French signature.

  Pépé lived for another year and a few days. After Georges wrote that he had died, I asked, “How?” and Georges replied, “Here is the truth, since you demanded it. It is sad. Pépé’s death was painful, and even cruel, for he did not die of old age and weariness but because of a lung congestion. It lasted eleven days, beginning on February 20, the day he was 101. We tried everything: antibiotics by mouth, which he could not assimilate, and then injections, which he could stand no better, and then an oxygen tent. He became pessimistic: ‘Why are we born? What have I done to be this unhappy?’ His last night, unconscious, he wanted to flee, and I had to battle with him. ‘You are hurting me’ were almost his last words. ‘That really hurt me.’ Then he had a final, generous thought: ‘But it is I who have hurt you.’ A shot of morphine calmed his last eight hours. We buried him discreetly in the little cemetery of Fontaine-lès-Dijon, still almost like a country graveyard; I did my best to avoid publicity, and only a dozen of us went with him. My next trip back to Les Pénarderies was truly melancholy: in ten places I came upon the image of him.”

  I was some six thousand miles removed, but my loss seemed the realer for it, and mixed with missing Pépé for the rest of my life was a feeling of amazement and delight that I had actually lived with him, been embraced by him, and listened to him sing.

  A Question Answered

  Mrs. Mack, born Eileen Oliver, noticed as she went toward her seventies that occasionally people forgot who she was. It did not bother her at first. She sometimes covered it deliberately by blurring her own name at the kind of party where one has to introduce oneself and then someone else. She felt thoughtful, and tolerant, and understanding for quite a long time before she began to worry.

  She liked her name. She always had. In school, other girls often pretended to loathe what they were called, and she had several friends who went through phases of trying to change their personalities by being Hannah instead of Anne, or Gloria instead of Violet. She liked being Eileen. Eileen Oliver and then Eileen Mack sounded fine to her, because she really enjoyed being a girl and later married and a mother—which is to say, herself.

  Gradually, though, after her husband died and her children grew away, she began to notice that people she hardly knew were coming up to her at meetings and parties and saying “Hi, Maggie!” or “Hello there, Sheila!” Or “Sue, darling!” She did not pay much attention; they were casual friends, or a little drunk perhaps, or she had on a new hat. But she kept an ear out, and one day a man who had worked with her husband for years, and whose first wife she had comforted during a parent’s illness and demise, and whose second wife she knew to nod to, put his arm around her shoulders and said, “Martha honey, you’ve meant more to me than anybody, and I mean anybody.” This upset Mrs. Mack very much.

  She wondered whether she should consult a psychiatrist. An appointment could be arranged, she felt sure, through one of her many friends in their own therapies everywhere. Or perhaps a doctor of divinity could help her? Or were there some pills, to make her clearer to other people—less forgettable? She continued to feel sure—at any rate, most of the time—that she was indeed Eileen Oliver Mack.

  As often happens when people least plan or expect to be swamped with problems, Mrs. Mack found herself paddling in a sudden flood of them, with the children come home, filling the house after so much emptiness, and her mind barely surfacing, in predawn sessions with herself, from crowded days and long noisy after-dinner conversations, most of them well controlled and courteous in spite of the stormy family weather.

  She hated to have her oldest son running from his commendable young wife and two correctly photogenic infants, and it distressed her to have him come to dinner, even at the good old kitchen table, with bare feet and a shirt open to his rather oily-looking navel. Once, she found herself staring at a wiry stark-white hair on his chest and was tempted to tease him cruelly—oh, delayed adolescent—but did not. He already felt cosmically cheated and outraged at being almost forty.

  The firstborn girl was home, too—the one named Eileen. She was very cool and detached, and during the long evening talks around the table she would push back from the lighted circle, wrapped in a cloud of smoke that made Mrs. Mack cough quietly. The daughter looked as if she felt age-old, which is quite possible when one is fairly young. She was, from what could be gathered, on her way to India with an exchange student who was an authority on the sitar. She planned to take her little boy with her, and when Mrs. Mack let herself think of that she felt a twist in her guts just below her diaphragm, which she assumed to be visceral and therefore, according to the second Eileen, easily controlled through breathing exercises and certain chants.

  There were always people going in and out of the old house—school friends comparing notes on how long they meditated, discussing whether it would be worthwhile to join a chamber-music group for the recorder, the price of whiskey in Ascona. It was fun to listen to the talk and to see that the house was running smoothly, with good meals and clean sheets and plenty of potables when indicated. Mrs. Mack was adept at all that, or had felt herself to be so before the family went off, and most of the time her two older children were there she lost her obviously neurotic puzzlement about why people seemed to be forgetting her name.

  Occasionally she would go out of the kitchen, while the young ones talked on and on and poured their mint tea or Zinfandel and filled the big room with the smoke of tobacco and sometimes marijuana and, of course, words. She would walk quietly into the dim living room. Her small chronic cough, which came when she was tired or filled with other people’s breathings and mouthings, sounded louder in the silent room, and then vanished, as if to make clear her private insistence that it was largely psychosomatic. She would stand still, smelling the sweet air from her nei
ghbors’ gardens through the tall open windows and thinking how good it was to be by herself for a few minutes, not worrying silently about the children’s children as their parents talked so passionately of every other possible concern, not wondering what they might like to eat tomorrow and how many extra people there would be, or what it would be like to live in India, or what people do when they have given up a profession and a wife and seem to want only to scratch themselves for a time.

  One night, she walked across the shadowy familiar room and leaned her arms on a lower shelf of the long high bookcase, her forehead against the shelf above it. The books sent out a delicate reassuring perfume of inky paper, dust, fingerprints. She inhaled it gratefully, after the pungent air in the kitchen around the big table, and noticed somewhat mockingly that she had no desire to cough. The air was quiet, and the fierce voices in the other room did not exist for her. She was suddenly apart from all that stress. From outside one of the windows she heard the leaves of the great oak tree stirring as if they were inside her head, each leaf against each leaf. One fell, and she heard it pull away from the twig, fall slowly through the still air, and touch the ground far below. She moved her elbows a little along the wooden shelf and heard her shoulder joints creak subtly under the louder noise of her warm skin against the paint. Then she heard what later seemed like a very small cough—a copy of her own—and looked up to the top of the bookcase, perhaps a foot above her eye level.

  A rat was sitting there, looking at her intently. It was larger than a mouse, certainly, but not like the one other rat Mrs. Mack remembered seeing at such close range, as big as a cat, staring at her through her porthole, dockside in Panama City long since. She had flapped a towel at it, feeling quite composed but sickish, and it had shrugged insolently and then vanished. This rat sitting on top of her long bookcase was at first sight a friend, which did not seem ridiculous to her, although she had never before recognized any such rapport with a rodent, and had never even wanted a white mouse or a hamster when she was young.

  As she looked quietly up at him in the cool, darkening room, she remembered her indifference when her children had kept such animals as quondam familiars. They had never looked at her, nor she at them, as was now happening with the small, intensely live animal above her head.

  They stared at each other for what may have been two seconds or several minutes—a time impossible to count, because Mrs. Mack did not think to listen to her pulse or anything else. There was an almost tangible band flowing between them. It could have been the recognition of spirits inexplicably released from their bodies. It was mysterious, and both of them seemed to have known the mystery before and to accept it anew, the way a bird accepts winter or a moth the flame.

  Mrs. Mack said, or thought—or however it was that she knew she was communicating with the rat—that she was basically worried about how people seemed to be forgetting her name. Most of the time she did not worry about it, perhaps because she was currently busy with younger people’s affairs, but underneath her measured manners she often felt almost panicky, she told the rat.

  He kept on looking down at her, the band of communication strong between them, and she noticed how precisely his delicate paws were folded over his chest and how clean his teeth were, shining in the dim light.

  I suppose I am worried, she confessed silently.

  You should not be, he said very firmly, because—and then he turned away almost irritably, as four other rats slipped silently along the back length of the bookcase toward him. Mrs. Mack knew that he felt annoyed to be interrupted at such an important moment to both of them, when he was plainly about to give the reason for her to stay calm.

  She sighed and unfolded her arms from the shelf, and at that the four intruders vanished like mist, with only a tiny scuttering sound in their haste.

  Her friend followed them more slowly. She waited for him to turn back to her, which she knew he would do, and when he stood once more above her the band fluttered between them and he said firmly, I know your name, and that is why you must never worry.

  He turned and ran like a shadow along the inner side of the bookcase, and disappeared after the others down a path she had never suspected but now knew as clearly as if she had travelled it for centuries. It went behind the big bookcase, into the floor, outside for a few feet on the stone foundations of the wooden house, and then onto the bottom floor where she spent most of her time when she was alone, and where she now slept while her family was recovering its focus from its present dizziness.

  That is fine, she thought pleasurably. He often comes here. I’ll talk again with him, and find out.

  She went back toward the lighted, smoky kitchen, filled with the smell of freshly made coffee. Her son was outlining plans to spend a year in Tahiti, and her girl, Eileen, had very bright, large eyes glowing through her private cloud of smoke, and their friends half stood up with perfunctory politeness when Mrs. Mack returned to the table. They did not lose a word of all their ferocious dialogues, which pleased her remotely.

  Mrs. Mack soon realized that she had been drunk like a schoolgirl on the excitement of her one conversation—or whatever it could be called—Zinfandel and other people’s nicotine. Had the younger Eileen been smoking pot that night? Could one get high secondhand? Had anyone ever talked with a rat before?

  Gradually doubts smudged the once clear certainty that some other being knew who she was. The children went away again, one to India probably, the other either to Mexico or to Alaska, and neither of them wanted their mother to have anything to do with her grandchildren, so she had to push all that out of her thoughts, mixed as they were between unswerving devotion and physical misgivings at how to cope with a third generation. She decided to stay on in the bottom floor of the newly empty house rather than go back up to the room her daughter had used, and sometimes she wondered if indeed she might be a little dotty to sleep alone in the dim enormous place in hopes, or perhaps even fear, that a rat might come to look at her. Perhaps, she thought oftener each time she got into bed, I am finally losing my mind. Before long, I shall forget who I am, the way everyone else is doing. Perhaps the rat is really the only one who knows, and of course he is busy with those other rats, bossing them around. Or did I simply imagine all that because I was tired, drunk, high? Yes. No. I am Eileen Oliver Mack. I live alone, waiting for the next visit.

  Everything looked as if it went on as usual, of course. Mrs. Mack’s son wrote from Algeria, not much to her surprise, and said his wife and kids were fine in Carmel, or perhaps Laguna Beach. One of Eileen’s old boyfriends sent a picture he had received from India, of Mrs. Mack’s grandson playing a kind of flute and crouching in a G-string on a beach that looked very much like Acapulco. And she saw the school friends now and then, and they all talked of what fun it had been when everybody was young and at home and said they wanted to stop by for a drink or something, but they never did. And she began to notice that they never called her by name anymore. They never said “Mrs. Mack.” That seemed odd to her at first, and then significant, as she kept waiting for confirmations of being what and who she had always assumed she was. She began to sleep patchily.

  One bright morning, she saw without astonishment that there was a subtle but clear path going from a little hole—an oblong crack, really—in the stone foundations that formed the wall alongside her bed to another part of the lower floor that was beneath the front porch. It was plainly made by very small animals. It went down the wall near the head of her bed, and behind a long row of French novels on a ledge that formed a good natural bookcase, and then it disappeared past the foot of her bed under the porch wall.

  She felt a twist of excitement—like a young woman perhaps waiting for a love letter, as she admitted wryly. Her friend had disappeared, true enough, behind his cohorts, but this track might be his regular path down from the big bookcase upstairs. She would watch. And she did, for much of every night. She was thankful that as she aged she needed less sleep, and, what was even more miraculously
convenient, that she seemed to be able to see more and more clearly in the dark. At first, she left a small light at the other end of the big room. Then she decided it might offend the rat, either for himself or because of the others, whom she began to think of somewhat toploftily as his henchmen. After all, at their first meeting he had literally ordered them to leave the top of the bookcase!

  The faint path down from the almost invisible gateway and behind the books stayed well trodden, but it was not for some time that Mrs. Mack saw any creatures using it. Finally, she learned how to breathe in a light rhythm that was neither sleep nor watchfulness. She knew that it could never fool her friend, but the duller rats were tricked by it, and she grew used to watching them, sometimes eight or nine in single silent file, slip down from the outside stones, disappear behind the row of Colettes and Simenons, and then flick jauntily up and out toward the porch foundations. She always felt superior and amused by her trickiness and their gullibility, and although she wanted very much to talk again with her friend, she knew he had his own reasons for giving the field to his minions. She was sure he had something to say to her that would explain everything but that he must wait for the right time.

  Of course, she asked herself now and then what she meant by “everything.” She meant, she answered, the whole peculiar muddle of what was happening to people she loved, and why she was not permitted to be near to them, and why and how she knew that she could not be near anyway. Mostly, though, she wanted to know why everybody seemed to forget who she was. Or was that truly it—that everybody had forgotten that she was Eileen Oliver Mack, their mother, friend, grandmother? She felt more strongly all the time that she herself knew who she was, and she understood that it did not matter inwardly if she was called Mrs. Mack or Mrs. von Rasmussleiten, but it did seem increasingly strange to her that people were forgetting what they surely must have grown used to: her social label. She found herself watching and listening to them sharply, and then laughed at herself as a precociously senile fool—except occasionally, when she would foil someone’s possible lapse of memory or attention by interrupting him with a quick brisk “I’m Eileen Mack,” and then try not to notice his astonishment.