by
Lucia Berlin
topic/growing-older
Simone de Beauvoir,
Gina Frangello,
Raymond Carver,
Saul Bellow,
Ingmar Bergman,
David Foster Wallace,
Hari Kunzru,
Blake Crouch,
Robert Hass
It has been seven years since you died. Of course what I’ll say next is that time has flown by. I got old. All of a sudden, de repente. I walk with difficulty. I even drool. I leave the door unlocked in case I die in my sleep, but it’s more likely I’ll go endlessly on until I get put away someplace. I am already dotty. I parked my car around the corner because there was someone in my usual spot. Later when I saw the empty spot I wondered where I had gone. It’s not so strange that I talk to my cat but I feel silly because he is totally deaf.
But there’s never enough time. “Real time,” like the prisoners I used to teach would say, explaining how it just seemed that they had all the time in the world. The time wasn’t ever theirs.
I am now 33 years old, and it feels like much time has passed and is passing faster and faster every day. Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and fun, and then I have to live with the forfeiture of all the other options those choices foreclose. And I’m starting to see how as time gains momentum my choices will narrow and their foreclosures multiply exponentially until I arrive at some point on some branch of all life’s sumptuous branching complexity at which I am finally locked in and stuck on one path and time speeds me through stages of stasis and atrophy and decay until I go down for the third time, all struggle for naught, drowned by time. It is dreadful. But since it’s my own choices that’l lock me in, it seems unavoidable—if I want to be any kind of grownup, I have to make choices and regret foreclosures and try to live with them.
As Ted sat, feeling the evolution of the afternoon, he found himself thinking of Susan. Not the slightly different version of Susan, but Susan herself—his wife—on a day many years ago, before Ted had begun folding up his desire into the tiny shape it had become. On a trip to New York, riding the Staten Island Ferry for fun, because neither one of them had ever done it, Susan turned to him suddenly and said, “Let’s make sure it’s always like this.” And so entwined were their thoughts at that point that Ted knew exactly why she’d said it: not because they’d made love that morning or drunk a bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé at lunch—because she’d felt the passage of time. And then Ted felt it, too, in the leaping brown water, the scudding boats and wind—motion, chaos everywhere—and he’d held Susan’s hand and said, “Always. It will always be like this.”
At one time, my father would drive my mother to New York on dates just so they could get a slice of authentic cheesecake—even in my teens he was known to hunt for the best apple pie all over the state of Michigan, just because. He knew which bakery in Chicago made the freshest doughnuts and drove across the city for a particularly fine custard cake. “If I ever get like that,” he would say of my tiny, elderly nana with her dowager’s hump, chowing on prewrapped brownies and freezer-burned, neon-colored popsicles, “just shoot me.”
Now a big day out for my father is a trip a mile away to the Entenmann’s warehouse, where he can stock up on enough processed coffee cakes and doughnuts covered in waxy chocolate that an avalanche falls out of his freezer when we open it. He buys whichever ice cream is on sale. When my husband and I go shopping for him and buy an ice cream he deems too expensive, he pitches a fit.
“Just shoot me,” he would tell us.
But it’s never that simple. You can’t just snap your fingers and disappear like a magician’s trick. Sometimes you live to turn into your mother-in-law. You remain trapped inside your body, unable to walk, unable to hear, taste buds faded, increasingly incontinent, napping during the day and awake all night, in chronic pain. Waiting.
At last, Death is starting to listen. Almost nightly now, my father dreams of his dead brothers. My mother and I rarely figure in his subconscious. In the dreams, his brothers are still young: Emilio playing the sax; Joe a mildly powerful bookie; Frank on the front porch smiling and waving with his grandkids. In one dream, my father is forcibly taken away on a wagon across a barren white landscape.
“I never took my father out to dinner,” he tells my mother, his voice thick with regret. “He worked himself to the bone for us and I never bought him a meal.”
“You were a young man,” my mother assuages. My paternal grandfather died before I was born. “You had your own life. You didn’t know he would die soon. You thought you had time.”
Mr. Tortorici is dead by now, too, of course.
My mother and I have suggested throwing a party for his ninetieth, where all the many people who love him could gather, but he won’t hear of it. “Oh, Jesus Christ,” he says. The trappings of socializing—having to maneuver around with his walker, possibly falling down as he often does or not making it to the bathroom in time—have been added to the long list of things that make him anxious. His world shrinks, month by month, day by day. Although he can still read, he can no longer recite the alphabet or remember the order of the letters. Only Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton, on the pages of his morning Star, remain as some reminder of wider terrain.
He is on a journey across the white barren land, inside himself. We stand on the periphery and watch him ride away.
I get up in the morning and I used to be eighteen. I’m not eighteen anymore and ninety per cent of my active life is finished. I always looked young. And suddenly I’m going to be forty-eight. I look at myself in the mirror sometimes and I tell myself, ‘What is this fucking head? Who would have such a face?’ So I understand these kind of feelings. Since I’m not particularly vain, I think of someone who has this sort of vanity, someone who would always have been told that they are what other people see in them. This particularly applies to an actor when you seem to be more than you really are, and nobody really knows you or sees your inside. And I think, ‘That’s a problem worth dealing with.’
The three generations of women were important, because the film really is about women and their points of view as professionals. Here’s an old lady, Joan Blondell, who still has all her life and sexual feelings, which you can see though we don’t go into them; and Gena, who’s a few decades down from Joan; and the young girl, who is really seventeen years old. And these three generations do haunt the waking hours of women: your powers waning, your attractiveness having to be worked on more. I think these are real things, and to put them in terms of this story really gave me fits.
I love spending the afternoon with these women! I never talk. I just sit and listen and smile. They tell me everything! They forget I’m a man! I might as well have a dress on. Then I also read for two years all the women’s pages. Everything is how to be younger. How to stay younger. What is the answer? What is the secret? So we made a film. I’m not afraid of putting in aging. I sit up and watch the morning shows. I was watching people patting people on the cheeks all morning. If I made a movie like that they’d kill me because they’d be so embarrassed. I would never choose that because it’s exploitative. That would be taking somebody and embarrassing them.
The problems with getting old have been talked about forever. Aging is a serious problem. It’s a fear. Somebody reaches forty, it’s a bigger fear. They want to be thirty. Somebody’s thirty, they want to be twenty, you know. So they can have all the access to life. So I think I can make a movie about that and maybe some poor sucker who has the same problem can figure it out. What I am asking is, can we beat that? Can we make it unimportant? Can we put it in perspective? Can we see life? Can we afford to talk about something instead of kidding ourselves?
[...] "Once, when I was in high school, a counselor asked me to come to her office. She did it with all the girls, one of us at a time. 'What dreams do you have?' this woman asked me. 'What do you see yourself doing in ten years? Twenty years? I was sixteen or seventeen. I was just a lump. This counselor was about the age I am now. I thought she was old. She's old, I said to myself. I knew her life was half over. And I felt lie I knew something she didn't. Something she'd never know. A secret. Something nobody's supposed to know, or ever talk about. So I stayed quiet. I just shook my head. She must have written me off as a dope. But I couldn't say anything. You know what I mean? I thought I knew things she couldn't guess at. Now, if anybody asked me that question again, about my dreams and all, I'd tell them.
[...]
[...] "'I'd say, 'Dreams, you know, are what you wake up from.' That's what I'd say." [...]
Jenny has a daughter fourteen years old. Today it is her scene.
The young actress is soft and delicate, with a clear voice. It is easy to recognize Linn in her a few years hence, to discover this with tenderness and wistfulness.
I try to picture to myself how I was when I was that young, but I find that my recollection doesn’t go back that far.
Sometimes I feel an anger that I shall never be her again, soft again, have all life’s potential within me. And before me.
How strange it is to sit looking at her and know that I am close to middle age, to see in her eyes that she doesn’t understand that I, too, am fourteen, and wish only for a short time to be her.
Years pass by so quickly and already form a cleft of time that cannot be recrossed between me and what I once was.
Two little girls are sitting and talking together—but one of them is not seen by the other.