This is Getting Old (16 page)

Already, by the fifth grade, things had begun to change in ominous ways. Starting that year, girls had to wear skirts or dresses to our school. There was no rule
against
dungarees, however, so I wore both: the dress on top, the blue denim sticking out the bottom. From then on, I had to wear a dress to school. (It's hard to believe now, but when I went to college in the sixties, we weren't allowed to wear pants to class unless it was snowing.)

In sixth grade, the ground continued to shift under my feet. I made friends with girls, some of whom, to my surprise, turned out to have things in common with me. At recess, I sometimes played jacks instead of dodgeball.

By seventh grade, my former playmates in Joel's Gang had lost interest in me. They began dating the very girls whose hopscotch games we had disrupted a few years before—girls who whispered and giggled in the bathroom, girls who wore, to my disgust, tight skirts. Try to climb a tree in a tight skirt!

And then puberty hit, like a curtain coming down. I grew breasts: tender objects which weren't there before, bodies on top of my body. They came like strangers, and I was supposed to welcome them as part of myself, even though I'd lived all twelve years of my life without them. The left one started first, and I remember examining myself in the mirror and worrying that the right one would never catch up.

Then, when I was thirteen, I woke up one morning with dried blood on my pajama bottoms. I didn't know what it was at first, because I had imagined that the “the curse” would come in a red flood that would run out from under my desk and along the classroom floor. My mother gave me a pad, and explained how to attach it. Perhaps no one is still menstruating who remembers those horrible elastic belts with hooks in front and back. She was pleased and supportive; but I felt ashamed—I had been claimed by my tribe, marked irrevocably as a second-class citizen. I would be one of them after all. My tree-climbing days were over.

I certainly couldn't buck biology, and it didn't occur to me until much later that I could buck the social definitions that went with it. And so I began to behave accordingly. I tried to please my teachers, to look pretty, to act polite. I grew my hair, and brushed it. At school dances I waited in silent terror that I wouldn't be asked to dance. If asked, I danced in an agony of shyness, unable to think of anything to say. In high school, by a strange twist of fate, I was invited to a formal prep school dance by Joel, of Joel's Gang. We had barely spoken to each other since the third grade. We fox-trotted together, speechless and miserable, no longer able to practice wrestling holds on each other.

All during college and into my twenties, I spurned athletic pursuits as being somehow for stupid people, especially if those people were female. Enthusiasm for physical activity had come to mean the opposite of smart, hip, and sexy. Physical exuberance was gone. I wore constricting undergarments. I hoped I wouldn't sweat, and that the wind wouldn't muss my hair. I now see
this
as my betrayal of my sex—this nice resignation, this alienation from the body called “femininity.”

Now I go to a gym and I lift weights. I want muscles—muscles that show. I like the way they look. I like to feel strong. I like to do the bench press, to shove that big heavy bar up off my chest. If I was wrestling with the bully, I probably couldn't push him off me, but I'd sure try.

As I get older I'm coming back around to where I was before puberty. I may not wear a boy's bathing suit again, but I'm urging myself to ignore what's considered appropriate. My body is no longer limber enough to climb trees, but it's a good time to cultivate a limber and unladylike mind.

I spent a huge chunk of my life trying to look attractive and more or less succeeding. The habit dies hard. Given a choice, I'd rather be pretty than ugly, but at this point the whole matter of physical beauty is becoming irrelevant—just as it was when I was nine—and in this there is some measure of relief.

For years, one of my noticeable features was a great mass of thick blonde hair. Then the time came when I wanted, as Yeats said, to be “loved for myself alone and not my yellow hair.” I cut my hair short, and now I own neither hairbrush nor comb. This cutting off has been both liberating and terrifying.

It's not just a question of how I look. There's the more important matter of behavior. When I was a tomboy, I organized cudgel tournaments. Now my creative projects are less athletic than when I was nine, but I try to rediscover that brave spirit, that determination to follow my heart. When I was nine I didn't waste my time being nice. I didn't do other people's laundry, or read the manuscripts of people I'd never met, for free, just as a favor. My nine-year-old self thinks it might be fun to learn to play the drums, or go on retreat to a Benedictine monastery in northern California, where I can stay in a cottage made of a wine barrel and read about saints.

I'm grateful for my tomboy time, because, as my grandmother used to say, “old age is not for sissies.” If I hadn't had all that
practice climbing forbidden trees, I might slip more easily into loneliness and fear as I grow old.

The crone who's knocking at my front door is not a stranger—she's the girl in dungarees, her hair a glad tangle, come to guide me back to my bravest self. She says I never have to brush my hair again, unless I want to.

PART THREE

In the Realm of the Spirit

Tea with God

A
S A CHILD
, I worried about whether or not to believe in God. He was hardly ever mentioned in our family, except in my mother's exclamations, so I didn't know if he was real or not, but if he was and I didn't believe in him, I thought it would hurt his feelings. I decided to try and make contact, by making a place for him where he knew he'd be welcome. It was under a forsythia bush in our back yard, in the cave formed by its hanging branches. Inside that dim chapel, I cleared the ground of leaves and, though I didn't know what an altar was, I built a fairy table out of twigs and mud, about six inches high. I covered it with a tablecloth I made out of the heads of pansies, blue and purple, laid like overlapping shingles. I sat there in the close-to-dark, pleased with the holy place of mud I'd made. I wanted to talk to God, but I didn't know what to say, so I just sat there.

The next day I crawled back in and saw that the place I had fixed up for God was now alive with big black ants. They drove like tiny cars in a traffic jam across the top of the altar, dragging away with them large pieces of the pansy petals for their larder. They had wrecked it—it was gross, not holy at all. I didn't think God would ever come to this place even if he did exist.

When I was a teenager, I went to Quaker meeting and tried to talk to God there, but I only worried about my French homework. What was wrong with me? I found that if I closed my eyes and rolled them up inside my head, and aimed them at the place above my nose where Hindus put a red spot, I felt something new and strange—a vertigo, a lifting, verging on a headache. Could this be God? If so, he didn't speak to me, nor I to him, and after a while I gave up that method.

When my son Sandy was four, he said, “I just found out how you can see God.” He was lying down in the back seat of the car (in the days before car seats), on the way home from nursery school. “You squeeze your eyes shut, as tight as you can, and you see a blue light, and that's God.”

I tried it myself—later, of course, not while I was driving—but it didn't work for me.

When I began to practice Zen, it didn't matter any more whether I could talk to God or he to me—Zen people don't go in for that. It was a relief to stop worrying about God for a while, though now I worried that I didn't know how to meditate. It looked like I was meditating from the outside, but I was just sitting there, thinking random thoughts, and breathing. Nothing was happening. That's what I still do—just sit, and nothing still happens. By now I've gotten used to it. I've learned that that's what Zen practice is: “just sitting.” Still, sometimes it feels lonesome.

I have no mate; I sleep alone. When I rise, I always drink a cup of green tea, and I watch the day begin. I brew the tea for four minutes in a red iron pot with dragonflies on it, and then I pour it into a white cup with a blue rim.

On Sundays I don't set the alarm. One Sunday not so long
ago I opened my eyes to a foggy morning. The bed was warm, and I didn't have any place I had to go. I thought with pleasure about how good it was going to be to drink my tea. But the catch was, I didn't want to get out of bed.

I had no idea I was going to speak, but suddenly, to my surprise, I said out loud, “God, I have a favor to ask you. Would you bring me a cup of green tea?” It seemed a small thing to ask, especially when you consider that I had never really asked God for anything before.

Then God answered me, out loud, and that surprised me, too. His voice came out of my own mouth.

“I'm sorry, Sue,” he said. “I would if I could, but I don't have the arms and legs the job calls for. But I completely support you in getting yourself a cup of tea. I'm with you all the way!”

I saw that he really wasn't going to do it. “But God,” I said, “I don't have
anybody
to bring me tea in bed.”

God said, “That's not my fault. The fact that there's nobody in the bed with you is the result of choices you yourself have made. Anyway, I'm right here. I'll be glad to go down to the kitchen with you.”

I could tell that he meant it, and I was deeply touched. I tossed back the quilt with a burst of zeal, and swung my bare feet to the cold floor.

I heard God say, just under his breath this time, “You go, Sue!”

While the tea brewed, I had four minutes to think of the times when I
had
had a man in the morning bed, and as far as I could remember, no one had ever brought me tea on Sunday morning. Maybe I never asked.

I sat on the porch with the blue-rimmed cup in my hands. The tea slaked my thirst, and I just sat there, watching a squirrel who was eating the buds of the passionflower vine on the roof next door.

I Wasn't My Self

I
WANT TO TELL YOU
about coming apart, wanting to die, and returning at last to myself, and about how my Buddhist practice both helped and hindered me in this zigzag journey.

Although I was suffering from severe depression, I didn't call it that for most of the several years I was in and out of it. I thought depression was for lethargic people who lay around in bed all day. But my pain was as sharp as an ice pick. Restless in the extreme, I paced and paced, looking for a way out. The visible cause was the drawn-out and difficult end of a relationship. The invisible causes were old griefs and fears, and other conditions unknown to me. In my fifties, I fell down a rabbit hole in time, away from grown-uphood, into the helplessness of a two-year-old.

It's taboo to be depressed. When I was feeling really bad, I still went to work, though I was barely functional. If I had had the flu and had been in a fraction of the pain I was in, I would have called in sick. But I didn't call in “depressed.” One day I threw into the computer's trash can a whole issue of the magazine I was editing, thinking I was saving it. Then I emptied the trash. I had to hire a consultant to look for it in the virtual garbage, and eventually I got most of it back. But it was myself I wanted to put in the trash.