Sister Age

by M. F. K. Fisher

  Surely, I kept saying with some doggedness, I had learned a truth or two from my long ponderings and considerings about the condition most of us animals and plants must bow to. Had I found nothing worth the decades of such compulsive study? I felt lost and somewhat foolish.

  By now, several years after I turned my back on all this, I think that I know a few things more clearly than I did when I was young, long before Ursula helped pull my fumblings into focus.

  I know, for instance, that I like old people, when they have aged well. And old houses with an accumulation of sweet honest living in them are good. And the timelessness that only the passing of Time itself can give to objects both inside and outside the spirit is a continuing reassurance.

  I have formed a strong theory that there is no such thing as “turning into” a Nasty Old Man or an Old Witch. I believe that such people, and of course they are legion, were born nasty and witch-like, and that by the time they were about five years old they had hidden their rotten bitchiness and lived fairly decent lives until they no longer had to conform to rules of social behavior, and could revert to their original horrid natures.

  This theory is hard to prove, because by the time a person begins to show his true-born nature, most of the people who knew him when he was little have either died or gone into more immediate shadows. I still believe that it is probable, however. I have lived long enough to keep a sharp eye on a few of my peers, and they bear out almost frighteningly the sad natures they first promised us to end with.

  On the other hand, there are a lot of people who seem to be born merry or serene or very lively. They are happy vital little babies and children, whether they live in ghettos or in suburban villas surrounded by electronic security systems. They need only one thing in life besides food and shelter, and that is warm open love from some person or animal or thing in their surroundings. They often live until they are very old, through the same delights and sadnesses that everyone else does, but after all the years of social subterfuge and conniving they emerge as bright souls … not nasty, not bitchy, just good.

  If I could choose, I would like that to happen to me, because in our culture it is difficult to be old, and still live with younger fellowmen, and it helps to be tolerably acceptable instead of boring or obnoxious. So far, myself, I think I am in luck, because I was a lively, healthy child who wanted and got a great share of affection. I notice that as I get rid of the protective covering of the middle years, I am more openly amused and incautious and less careful socially, and that all this makes for increasingly pleasant contacts with the world. (It also compensates for some of the plain annoyances of decrepitude, the gradual slowing down of physical things like muscles, eyes, bowels. In other words, old age is more bearable if it can be helped by an early acceptance of being loved and of loving.)

  The physical hindrances are of course important, no matter how little an old person manages to admit their dominance. As I write this I am well into my seventies, and I think that I have aged faster than I meant to, whatever that means! (It means, for one thing, that I resent being stiff and full of creaks and twinges.) I did not plan to be the way I am, although I probably knew more than most of my peers about the inevitabilities of disintegration. Fortunately, though, because I met Sister Age so long ago, I can watch my own aging with a detachment she has taught me. I know about the dismays and delights of my condition, and wish that all of us could prepare ourselves for them as instinctively and with as much outside help as we do those of puberty, adolescence, pregnancy, menopausal and climacteric changes.…

  The Aging Process is a part of most of our lives, and it remains one we try to ignore until it seems to pounce upon us. We evade all its signals. We stay blandly unprepared for some of its obnoxious effects, even though we have coped with the cracked voices and puzzling glands of our emerging natures, and have been guided no matter how clumsily through budding love-pains, morning-sickness, and hot flashes. We do what our mentors teach us to do, but few of us acknowledge that the last years of our lives, if we can survive to live them out, are as physically predictable as infancy’s or those of our full flowering. This seems impossible, but it is true.

  We are helped by wise parents and teachers and doctors to live through our first couple of decades, and then to behave more or less like creative, productive social creatures, and then to withdraw from the fray, if possible on our various kinds of laurels. And then what?

  We are unprepared for the years that may come as our last ones. We are repelled and frightened by our physical changes, some of them hindering and boring, and we feel puzzled and cheated.

  Plainly, I think that this clumsy modern pattern is a wrong one, an ignorant one, and I regret it and wish I could do more to change it. Ours is not a society that can accept with patience the presence of clumsy or inept or slow-spoken human beings, and just as untrained puzzled young people drift aimlessly through our slums, untrained puzzled old men and women wait to die in rest-homes everywhere. The statistics of a Beauvoir tome are as monotonous as the outcries of sensational journalism: there is no room, right now in our society, for the useless.

  That does not mean, though, that some of us who seem meant to survive need do it blindly. I think we must use what wits we have, to admit things like the fact that it is harder to get up off the floor at seventy than at forty … or even fourteen. We must accept and agree with and then attend to with dispassion such things as arthritis, moles that may be cancerous, constipation that may lead to polyps and hernias, all the boring physical symptoms of our ultimate disintegration. (Old clocks tick more slowly than they did when young.)

  What is important, though, is that our dispassionate acceptance of attrition be matched by a full use of everything that has ever happened in all the long wonderful-ghastly years to free a person’s mind from his body … to use the experience, both great and evil, so that physical annoyances are surmountable in an alert and even mirthful appreciation of life itself.

  This sounds mawkish and banal as I try to write it, but I believe it. I am glad that I have been able to live as long as I have, so that I can understand why Ursula von Ott did not weep as she stood by the funeral urn of her son, surrounded by all the vivid signs of his short silly life … the fat cupids, the fatter Venuses whose satiny knees he lolled against. She did not smile, but behind her deep monkey-eyes she surely felt a reassuring warmth of amusement, along with her pity that he never had tried to feel it too.

  Parts of the Aging Process are scary, of course, but the more we know about them, the less they need be. That is why I wish we were more deliberately taught, in early years, to prepare for this condition. It would leave a lot of us freed to enjoy the obvious rewards of being old, when the sound of a child’s laugh, or the catch of sunlight on a flower petal is as poignant as ever was a girl’s voice to an adolescent ear, or the tap of a golf-ball into its cup to a balding banker’s.

  When I was about twelve, my grandmother died and we all relaxed, especially at table. She was puritanical by nature, and did not believe in the indulgences of the flesh, so that sitting lazily after a good meal was not our privilege until she left us. Then we were like mice, with the cat gone. One day, after a long Sunday lunch, my younger sister and I stayed at table with our parents in the cool dining room. We were quiet, full of sponge-cake and peace. Mother murmured toward the end of the table where her husband sat. They sipped glasses of port from the decanter that usually stood untouched on the sideboard. Mother said idly something about Old Mrs. Tolbert, the organist at church. “I do wish she would stop scratching herself,” she said. Father said, just as lazily and with as little malice, “Maybe she doesn’t take enough baths.” His wife protested gently, with a soft shrug and a little grimace. I said, with some boldness because although Anne and I were invited to stay on at the table now and then, we still spoke only when spoken to, as in Grandmother’s recent days, “No. It’s because she itches.”

  My parents put down their glasses. Anne looked daringly at me,
although with correct politeness because of where we were.

  “No,” I said again. “She is old, and old people itch.”

  “Ah?” Mother asked, and Father went on, “Is that so? What do you think you mean?”

  I said, “Well, I think the skin gets drier when people start to wither. You can see old women’s arms. And when the skin gets withery, it itches. And anyway, they don’t know they are scratching. They aren’t dirty. They may just need to be oiled.”

  Anne said, “Scratching is rude. It’s disgusting.”

  “I think so too,” Mother said. “Disgusting. Old Mrs. Tolbert is really …” She sipped the last of her wine, and Father tipped his glass back and stood up. “Now that we’ve had our little lesson in geriatrics,” he said, “and know all about how we’ll itch as we age, I suggest that our medical advisor and her sister clear the table and leave us to our own pursuits. I may rub a little lotion on my chin, or—”

  Mother laughed and we all went our ways on that fine free Sunday afternoon. But I knew I was right about Mrs. Tolbert. I did not like her, because she had a strong smell, but it was plain that she could not help her scratching: she was drying up like an old shoe and needed to be waxed. She did not need soap and water. Anne and I went on talking about this, as we tidied the kitchen before the cook came back from her Sunday cavortings. We decided that baths are all right, even fun, but that old people need oil on their skins, just as new babies do … olive oil, or maybe Hinds’ Honey and Almond Cream, our current dream of exotic ointments.

  And I kept on thinking about old people, and writing notes about them, and readying my spirit to meet Ursula von Ott on that dank crooked street in Zurich. Then, for decades, I kept on clipping and writing some of the notes that are in this book, instead of in a weighty set of statistics on library reference shelves. In one way or another they are about why Ursula was not weeping as she held the notice of her son’s brave death in her slack old hand, and perhaps of why Old Mrs. Tolbert would have been better off with oil instead of soap and water on her itchy skin.

  The crux of it all, perhaps the real secret, is that there was nobody to rub the gentle oil into Mrs. Tolbert’s itch. She was alone, and unprepared to be so. There are too many people like her, caught unready for their last days, unprepared to cope with the logistics of dignified acceptance. She forgot to bathe now and then, forgot that she was scratching herself in front of finicky observers … finally forgot to breathe. There was nobody in the world to help her.

  Mrs. Tolbert possibly started me on my long ponderings about how hard it can be for lonely old people to stay sweet, much less give a small damn whether they are or not. And her common plight leads neatly into the saddest conclusion I have reached about the art of aging, which can and should be as graceful and generally beneficent a “condition” as any other in our lives.

  Our housing is to blame. It is said that by the end of this century most citizens in the Western world will have adapted themselves to living as family units in allotted spaces no bigger than a modern compact car. There will be at least four people to each cubicle: two parents and, temporarily at least, two children. (This social phenomenon is already well developed in Japan, where too many active healthy humans manage to live highly disciplined lives in too little space. Westerners will take longer to accept such an inevitability, and learn to adapt to its paranoidal side effects.)

  There will be well-designed patterns for our prospective quarters, at least for sleeping, and hygiene will perforce be almost as necessary as oxygen, to avoid epidemics of everything from disease to civil mayhem. Bathing will probably be in communal centers, as will most of the eating. Day schools will take care of the children almost from birth. But what about lovemaking, and such perquisites to procreation as a bit of privacy? Will that too be scheduled, by the hour or two, in appointed governmental love-nests? And perhaps most important of all, where will Grandfather Tom and Great-Aunt Bessie go when they no longer feel nimble enough to maintain their own cubicles and their factory jobs? (Dreadful footnote: will they even exist, as family members, once their productive days are over?)

  Perhaps this trend toward one-generation living took firm shape only after World War II, when the first monolithic cities rose in dominoes from devastated farmland around places like Paris and Rome. The healthy young women who had survived bombs and invasions married what men were left, and delighted in the elevators and supermarkets and laundromats and day nurseries that had supplanted their childhood days of drawing well-water and knitting socks while they watched the sheep in the meadows. And more than almost anything they loved being free of their mothers-in-law, their demanding parents. Who needed to make room for a dotty old aunt, when the State would take care of new babies? Who wanted a cranky ancestor sitting by the television all day, taking up space at night? Who wanted to take care of them?

  It was seldom mentioned in the newspapers, for a decade or so after the “cités” went up, that many dotards jumped from high windows rather than live without a patch of earth to plant, a couple of rabbits to feed. Gradually they disappeared from all the high-rise slums, into discreet hostels as well as their final graves, and by about 1965 it was rare to find anyone sixty-five in the supermarkets. There was no room for them in the high-rises. They were a displaced generation, and charitable churches and governments made it cheaper to send them into exile with their peers than to rent space for them with their offspring.

  This new way of life, which I honestly believe was an accident of war to begin with, spread fast through Western cultures. In our homeland, who has room any longer to ask Grandfather to come live with his children after his dear wife has died? Who has a nice attic where dotty old Cousin Etta can be gently locked away during the full of the moon? Who has time, anymore, to see that Great-Uncle George’s meat is discreetly chopped so that he does not have to take out his clickers and lay them nonchalantly beside his plate at dinner? Above all (and this is the crux of the crux, the secret of the whole sad secret!), who has children who accept not only their necessary parents but their grandparents as an intrinsic part of life?

  Until I was almost twelve, my mother’s mother was part of all our lives, like hot buttered toast for breakfast and clean hair on Saturdays. It has long amazed and even hurt me that when she died I never felt one pang of sorrow or regret, but only a general relief. By now I understand this, because I doubt that I would ever have loved her, the way I loved my parents and siblings and a few plain human beings. But Grandmother was essential. She shaped all of us, willy-nilly, so that we talked and ate more politely than we might have without her. We spent long good hours with her, while Mother devoted herself to another batch of new babies, and our conversations were full of thought and instruction. When she went off to her many religious convocations, we laughed more at table, and ate more exciting meals than her Nervous Stomach dictated when she was in residence, but when she came back we settled easily again into her decorous patterns. She was there the way books were, or spoons. I don’t remember ever kissing her or even feeling her hand, but often I held a skein of new yarn for her while she wound the ball, and then leaned my head against her knees as she read good stories from the Bible. Somewhere there is a picture of my face when I was perhaps five, standing in the stiff folds of her long proper alpaca dress. I look safe and trusting. And I wish that every child alive could be with the detached attention of old people, as I was.

  Grandmother’s farthest removed cousins were almost as constant as she, in our house. They came for a month, for the winter, for “a stay.” And they expected to be treated with affection and thoughtful dignity, which they always were. Some of them were plainly mad, and one or two were religious fanatics or uplifted birdwatchers or such-like, but they warmed all of us, and perhaps especially us little people, with their pleasure at being there.

  Probably Mother and Father had their moments of exasperation and ennui at this constant flow of Grandmother’s peers, but Anne and I loved every minute of it, from disse
rtations about the significance of every moment of Jesus Christ’s Crucifixion to how to make paper furniture for the fairies who, one ancient cousin told us over Grandmother’s pious protests, came Midsummer’s Eve to a certain rosebush in the back yard.

  Yes, housing is to blame. Children and old people and the parents in between should be able to live together, in order to learn how to die with grace, together. And I fear that this is purely utopian fantasy, for a few more centuries perhaps. I am sad, that we cannot try again.… I would have rubbed oil on my grandmother’s dry old skin if she had asked me to, and now I would let a child ask to, if there were one nearby. But the course is set, temporarily as History hurtles on, for us to grow up fast, work hard while we are strong, and then die in a premature limbo. I cannot do anything to stop this.

  But Sister Age still looks far past us all (Grandmother, little sister Anne, Mrs. Tolbert, her own spoiled brat called something like Johann Wilhelm Sebastian von Ott …), and her monkey-sad eyes are brighter than ever, and the letter of information remains open but unread in her bony hand.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  After her beginnings in 1908 in Albion, Michigan, and childhood in Whittier, California, M. F. K. Fisher continued her education at Illinois College, Occidental College, and UCLA, and at the University of Dijon in France. She is best known for her gastronomical writings—in 1937 her first book, Serve It Forth, was published, followed in 1941 by Consider the Oyster and in 1942 by How to Cook a Wolf (all of which were collected along with two later books into one volume entitled The Art of Eating, republished in Vintage). Mrs. Fisher has spent a good portion of her life as housewife, mother, and, of course, amateur cook; she has written novels, poetry, a screenplay; for a few years she was a vineyardist in Switzerland; and in the late forties she did a brilliant translation of Brillat-Savarin’s The Physiology of Taste, which has also been republished. Her recent books are Among Friends, about growing up in Whittier, a book celebrating Marseille, A Considerable Town, and As They Were, a book of places, encounters, and reflections. For a long time Mrs. Fisher made her home in St. Helena, California, but for the past ten years or so she has lived near Glen Ellen, in the Sonoma Valley.