This is Getting Old (15 page)

We see other people get old, but we can't believe we'll succumb. If we remain firm in our resolve, if we exercise and eat the right foods, surely we won't catch the old-age bug. Or science will figure it out for us. A cover of
Harvard Magazine
asked: “Is Aging Necessary?” But thus far, time keeps passing, signing its name across our bodies as it goes.

I'm still on the cusp. I have one foot on each side of the border—the border between getting-old and just-plain-old. It's
a shifting border. Remember “Don't trust anyone over thirty”? I recall the time when I thought forty was old, then it was fifty, then it was sixty. But at a certain point, “old” will have no place left to recede to, and, like it or not, I'll be settling my porous bones in a rocking chair on the senior side of the border.

My mother told me she, too, felt invisible as she aged. When she was in her fifties she started an artists' retreat center. She was in her prime; she was taken seriously. But by the time she was seventy, she claimed the board and staff didn't pay any attention to what she said because they thought she was a silly old lady. She sometimes lost her temper and shouted at people in meetings, just as she did on the airplane walkway—she said it was the only way to get people to listen to her. I used to think she was being paranoid, but I'm beginning to see what she means.

In a planning meeting connected with my work, a man brought up a suggestion I had made and credited it to a male colleague about my age: “As Bill so cogently pointed out . . .” I don't believe he was trying to slight me. He must have heard my words when they came out of my mouth, but in his memory, he had heard a man say them. Older men are easier to see than older women. Is it just my imagination, or did my words carry more weight when I was younger and prettier? I don't know. I should also explain that in this case, I was crocheting a shawl during the meeting, so it was partly my fault. If you're a woman over forty-five, it's better not to do any kind of needlework in important meetings.

I'm inspired by the admirable example of the Raging Grannies, who take the stereotype of the little old lady and run with it. They are peace activists who go to demonstrations in theatrical flowered hats and aprons, looking sweet and innocent, which they are not. For example, some Raging Grannies were arrested when they attempted to enlist at a U.S. Army recruiting center in Tucson, saying they wanted to be sent to Iraq so that their grandchildren could come home.

Last year I dyed my gray hair bright red. (There weren't any Buddhist conferences coming up at the time.) My hair was never red all by itself, and I wasn't trying to fool anybody. When the hairdresser asked me what effect I was going for, I said I wanted to do something wild. I said I didn't care if the color didn't look natural, but I
did
want to look . . . well . . . not to put too fine a point on it . . .
younger
. I wanted a hair color that would make people interested in what I had to say.

The hairdresser was expensive but skillful. For about two weeks, the red was very bright, and I was startled to discover that it made a difference. Strangers looked at me directly. From a distance I did look younger, more powerful, maybe even more passionate—a redhead! I became visible to clerks in crowded stores.

After a couple of weeks the color faded to a chemical orange: it's an uphill battle, editing out the marks of age on an aging body. It's expensive, too: if older women didn't mind looking old, a huge sector of the economy would collapse.

I was complaining to my younger sister about feeling invisible as an older woman, like a dry leaf, and I think she felt annoyed with my self-concern, though she didn't say so. She said gently, “What about the idea of dignity? Why don't you cultivate a sense of dignity?” I put the word
dignity
into my pocket like a smooth stone, and held onto it, finding comfort in it.

Not long after, I saw an old woman in the airport in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. She must have been about ninety. We were both sitting in the departure lounge, waiting for a plane to California. She was wearing turquoise jewelry, a long denim skirt, and a bright pink Mexican shawl, and her extremely wrinkled face, bent over a paperback book, was full of character. Her white hair was rolled into a bun on the back of her head and fastened with wooden sticks—I think they were chopsticks. She looked
like an artist, I thought—an
old
artist. She seemed to be traveling alone, but she didn't look afraid or tentative; she looked happy, sitting there reading, with her boarding pass tucked into the pages of her book. She didn't know it, but she was a visitation—a messenger of age. The opposite of invisible, she shone for me—her white hair, her fuchsia shawl. She reminded me not to feel sorry for myself. She got up when they called for early boarding, and walked, slowly and stiffly, with a cane, and smiling, onto the plane. She had dignity.

The Tomboy Returns

E
VENTUALLY
I
LEARNED
how to pass for a woman. I learned to brush my long blonde hair every day, and I wore contact lenses when I was trying to look pretty. From time to time, I even put on a dress without being bribed. I got married, gave birth to two children, nursed them, raised them. But there's a nine-year-old inside of me who still remembers all the good climbing trees in the faraway neighborhood where I grew up, and which shrubs have the straightest twigs to make arrows out of. Surprisingly, the further I get from her in years, the more connected to her I feel. I wish I could make amends to her for the betrayals she suffered.

My children have long since flown, and I've got nobody to make breakfast for. Ever since I passed through menopause, at fifty, and my female organs left me alone again, I have been getting reacquainted with my tomboy self. I honor her adventurous spirit, her brave refusal to be limited by social expectations.

In third grade at school, I was the only girl in Joel's Gang. In order to get in, you had to have a wrestling match with everybody who was already a member. We ran around pretending to be fierce, charging through the middle of the sissy girls' hopscotch games. We practiced wrestling holds on each other and played
mumbledy-peg in the forsythia bushes, where the teachers wouldn't see our jackknives.

In those days my mother used to pay me a quarter to put on a dress, on the occasions when a dress was called for—like the visit of a relative. Otherwise I wore dungarees—that's what we called jeans—with a cowboy belt.

With the boys in my neighborhood—Robert and Skipper, Evan and Sammy—I played cops and robbers, and cowboys and Indians: racist, violent games that, years later, I righteously tried to keep my own children from playing. We climbed trees and rode no-hands on our bicycles. I had cap pistols hanging on hooks on my bedroom wall. I traded baseball cards, memorized the batting averages of all the players on the Boston Braves, and played catch by the hour. I read the Hardy Boys mysteries and
Lou Gehrig, Boy of the Sand Lots
. I started the Pirate Club, the Walky-Talky Club, and the Cowboy Comic Collectors Club.

I wore boys' bathing trunks every summer, until I was eight or nine years old. I didn't put on a girls' bathing suit, with all that frilly and deceptive packaging that poked its bones into my flat chest, until another girl taunted me:
You think you're a boy! You think you're a boy!
I was so mad I got out of the swimming pool and hid her clothes in a closet. She had to go home in a wet bathing suit and I pretended I didn't know anything about it.

But why was I in Joel's Gang, instead of playing hopscotch? Perhaps it was my way of refusing to submit.

I think of my parents' body language. My mother didn't seem happy inside her skin. She moved as if trying to hide her body with her body. Other women, too, seemed to move in shuffle and shadow. But in my father's body there was elasticity and readiness. He used to walk a lot, and ride a bicycle. When my mother wanted to go somewhere, she drove a car.

Everywhere I looked, men were running the show, and women were just the helpers: the president and his wife, the school principal and his secretary, the dentist and his hygienist,
the pilot and the stewardess. Though I couldn't have stated it consciously, I breathed in the knowledge that a woman's body was not a powerful place to live.

As for me, I wanted to run and jump and climb over fences, even if it meant tearing my clothes. I didn't try to pretend I was a boy, I just wanted to be ungendered, and therefore unlimited. I hated getting my hair cut, for example, and had a wild bush of hair, like a feral child. I didn't want to have to look pretty, but I liked the way I looked in my classy felt cowboy hat—a “real” one like “real” cowboys wore. Far from being a denial of my sexuality, I think my tomboyhood gave me good practice at living in my body and finding pleasure there.

My parents never objected to my bathing trunks or cowboyphilia, and my mother patiently quizzed me on baseball statistics when I asked her to. But I think it wasn't quite OK for me to be a tomboy. I looked up
tomboy
in Doctor Spock, by whose lights I was raised, but he says nothing on the subject. I think my parents must have been at a loss. Perhaps they feared that I would never agree to brush my hair my whole life long and, by logical extension, that I would never become a wife-and-mother.

I think so because in the fourth grade, I was sent to dancing school—ballroom dancing!—years before my schoolmates had to undergo this humiliating rite of passage. I was taught to sit with my ankles crossed until a boy, in parallel agony no doubt, asked me to dance. I learned to do the “box step,” an apt name for a spiritless movement that had nothing whatever to do with dancing. (“Step-step-right-together-step-step-left-together.”)

For a brief period, I was sent on Sunday afternoons to the home of an elderly Jewish refugee from Vienna who gave me sewing lessons, an activity in which I had no interest whatever. Because I suffered from night terrors and frequent nightmares, I was taken to a child psychiatrist when I was about ten. He asked me intrusive questions like, “Have any of the girls in your class at school begun to menstruate?” It was rumored that one particular girl had already gotten “the curse,” but I didn't see that it was
any of his business, and so I answered numbly, “I don't know.” For Christmas he gave me a perfume-making kit, which I poured down the toilet in disgust.

But there were contradictory messages in my own family. On the one hand, my grandmother told me that I should brush my hair one hundred strokes a day to make it shine. “On doît souffrir pour être belle,” she said, with a hint of irony in her voice. One must suffer to be beautiful. On the other hand, a photograph in a family album shows me and my two younger sisters marching around on the lawn at my grandparents' house, pretending to be soldiers, drilling, with sticks over our shoulders for rifles, wearing three-cornered newspaper hats. Grandpa, who came from a military family, was our drill sergeant. We're obviously having a great time, puffing out our childish chests.

I always knew I wasn't a boy. One day I went into the nearby vacant lot that we kids called “the woods.” I was carrying my precious handmade bow, and I was looking for arrows. I pushed my way through a tangled arch of bushes, and there was the neighborhood bully, sitting on a stump. He was an archetypal figure, like Butch, the leader of the West Side Gang, in the
Little Lulu
comics I read so avidly. “Give me that bow or pull down your pants,” he demanded. Girl that I was, trained to obedience, it never occurred to me that there were any other choices. I handed him the bow.

Not long after, the neighborhood kids gathered in my friend Sammy's back yard for a wrestling tournament. My turn came to wrestle the dreaded bully. I got him to the ground and held him down for the count of ten. I had won! Fair and square. But when I released him and we stood up, I saw that he wanted to kill me for defeating him in public. Terrified, I turned and ran, and he ran after me. I remember the rush of adrenaline that put wings on my heels. I made it safely home, locked the door behind me, and collapsed in fright. The fact that I had just wrestled him to the ground had no transfer value. As soon as the structured contest was over, I went back to being a girl who was scared of a bully.

Another time, Skipper and Evan and I were riding our bicycles around the neighborhood, and we discovered an old carriage house behind a big Victorian house. Upstairs, in the unlocked attic, we searched shamelessly through boxes and found a huge purple jewel, which we stole and buried in Skipper's back yard. We made a treasure map to record the spot—ten paces from the maple tree and fifteen paces from the corner of Skipper's garage—and we solemnly promised each other we'd leave it buried there forever, or at least until we grew up. Then, if one of us was in trouble, we'd dig it up, sell it, and use the money to help that person.

That night I couldn't go to sleep for feeling guilty, and finally I gave in and told my mother about the stolen jewel. The next day, she made us dig it up and take it back and apologize. Luckily, the lady who lived in the Victorian house was not too mad. She explained that the jewel was a glass doorknob. She told us to stay out of her carriage house, and she gave us some cookies. Skipper and Evan were not pleased with me, cookies notwithstanding. Why did I tell? Because I was the only girl? Is that why you shouldn't let women into men's clubs?