The Best American Essays 2014 (10 page)

I've become much more sensible about my health, but also more relaxed about the prospect of getting sick. For many years I interpreted every flutter in my stomach as the sure sign of something terminal. Occasionally my panics took me to the emergency room, where irritated interns looked me over and sent me home, but mostly I avoided doctors because I feared that they'd catch me out. Diagnosis meant judgment, and sickness meant death. I lived much of my adult life in a state of medical dread. I look back on my earlier self with exasperation: so much of life wasted in vague neurotic terror, when now it turns out that all along I was quite well. Only a person who knew nothing of illness could have romanticized it the way I did, allowed it to carry so much existential freight.

Now I shrug off symptoms that thirty years ago would have had me calling an ambulance; but I also monitor my health. I take long conditioning walks, I floss faithfully, I keep regular hours, I seek balance. I actually find it comforting to stand in line at the pharmacy, to produce my Aetna card at the doctor's office. I suffer from none of the obscure and terrifying ailments I feared when I was younger, though I do require medication for elevated blood pressure and high cholesterol. I find it almost reassuring to have developed these garden-variety, though serious, conditions. I've joined the great citizen army of the elderly, and finally I'm like everyone else. In a few weeks I'll be eligible for Medicare!

My fear of death is considerably diminished, or perhaps it's only more diffuse, more mixed together with the other elements of my subjectivity. At any rate, I no longer sit bolt upright in bed, gasping at the thought of personal extinction. I suppose that aging is getting me used to the idea—limbering me up for it, so to speak. What fills me with dread these days is not the prospect of my own death but the thought of losing my husband.

 

I check in with a psychiatrist at irregular intervals, a cheerful man in his mid-seventies. I admire his graceful and realistic acceptance of his own aging, and would take him as a model if I could feel any certainty that the path of my aging will follow his—there are so many possible branchings. The last time I was in his office, I asked him,
What are the compensations of age?
“Well,” he said, tentatively, “how about wisdom?” I was disappointed. That was it, wisdom? “Wisdom?” I said. “I'm wise enough already.” He smiled faintly at this wise-guy riposte, lapsed into silence for a moment, and then quietly mentioned that old friends of his had been dying at an increasing rate lately. “Just one,” he said, “after another.”

Oh, how foolish I was in an essay I wrote a decade ago, to carry on as though I were ancient and resigned to it. Such presumption, and I was barely menopausal! The prematurity of this claim left me in an awkward position, like a sheepish party guest who has made a great show of saying goodnight to everyone and then finds she must return to retrieve her car keys.

Young people are forever professing shock when I mention my age. “You can't be,” they say, and I assure them, with a certain grim relish, that I am. They continue to protest, but begin to take my word for it. I walk away from these encounters feeling like a fraud, partly because I've so obviously been fishing for compliments, but more importantly because I've left the impression that I'm an authority about age, that I know where I am in my life. I'm reminded of the shame I felt when I was twelve and I told my eight-year-old cousin some nonsense about sex in a falsely wised-up way.

This is a good time in my life. To say otherwise would be rank ingratitude. I've finally worked free of the agitation and misery of youth, which in my case extended well into middle age. I've learned better how to live, to do my part in maintaining my marriage, to master impulse and cultivate self-respect. If only, I find myself thinking, I can manage to keep it up for a while, I can shape the end of my life in a way that justifies and redeems what came before. But I'm suspicious of that ambition: it puts me in mind of some heresy I read about once—I forget its name.

I can't know, of course, how long I'll be able to keep it up. I can't know where I stand in relation to the end. What I do know is that a lot can happen during the time I have. It's a happening time: the late years are an avalanche of contingency. All the ways of going, all the ways that lead up to going—the ischemic episodes, embolisms, syncopes, infarctions, -omas! I could have a bad fall, drift into dementia, develop diabetes or pulmonary obstruction or heart disease or all three at once, discover I have cancer. I could lose my sight, my hearing, my colon, my husband. A sinister home health aide could steal my electronics and credit cards and disappear, leaving me without food for days. The state could take away my driver's license.

Any of these things, or any combination of them, could happen, and soon. Or not: I could continue moving along the gently tilted plateau I've been negotiating for years now, though the angle has been growing a little steeper. I could continue to write, to take walks and cook and travel and drink (moderately) and have lunch with friends and talk to my husband. Whatever happens, I continue to have a future. What will that future consist of? As always, I don't know, though the range of possibility has narrowed considerably. I don't know, and the reason I'm tempted to carry on as if I did is that I'm trying to bargain, in some primitive way, with my unknown fate. But there's no bargaining, no knowing the worst, no protecting myself from the shocks of age.

“Lord,” says the psalmist, “make me to know mine end, and the measure of my days, what it is; that I may know how frail I am.” The Lord, if I read the psalm correctly, gives no response. In the psalm's last line, the psalmist-petitioner drops his demand for knowledge in favor of a plea for an extension: “O spare me, that I may recover strength, before I go hence and be no more.”

FROM
Salmagundi

 

1—Trying for a Definition

 

The word
enemy
comes to my mind, and suddenly I hear it everywhere. It is a strong word, not only strong but powerful. To use it can have consequences, and those consequences can be and have been grave.

 

I am trying to understand the meaning of
enemy
, to consider what it might mean. I am trying, before anything else, to reach a definition.

 

What can be said of the word
enemy
? Can we at least begin by saying these things:

The enemy is one who does me harm.

My enemy is one who desires my harm.

I know my enemy because she is the one who desires to harm me.

Is everyone who has done me harm my enemy?

 

But then, there must be other questions.

Who defines the enemy, who is it that names him?

Is it the one harmed by him? Is the one harmed always right in his naming?

Is it possible to misname someone an enemy, because one feels harmed, feels that the harming is deliberate, personal, though in fact the one called the enemy had no desire to harm any particular person? Had only an unfocused, unformed impulse to harm? Perhaps felt a duty to do some sort of harm?

 

The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

The friend of my enemy is my enemy.

 

2—On Hearing of the Death of an Enemy

 

She wished me harm. She wanted to harm me. I never knew why. Others said that she was jealous, or that perhaps she loved me, and that her love was blocked, balked. She said that I had stolen her life. That I wanted too much of her, wanted us to be best friends, assumed that we were equals and we were not: she was a professor, I a graduate student, and by insisting that she link herself with me I was destroying her possibilities for professional advancement. It was the early seventies. We both had dogs. I phoned her one night to ask her to take care of my dog because I wanted to spend the night with someone I had just met. She agreed; it didn't occur to me that this would be a problem.

 

A few days later, I left for a three-week holiday. When I returned my mailbox was full: twenty-five letters, in which she told me how I had destroyed her life. In the three weeks that I was gone, she told everyone everything I had said about them. Repeated all the gossip we'd bred and stored in a year of being what I had thought was best friends. Many people felt betrayed by the things she told them and no longer wanted to see me. Others took her side because they felt that she was mentally fragile and I was strong, that she was a professor and deserved, therefore, their allegiance, and anyway I would be leaving soon. She told me that, as Haldeman or Ehrlichman said to John Dean (this was the time of Watergate), if I said anything to anyone she would “blast me out of the water.”

 

Thirty-five years later, at lunch with mutual friends, I discover that she died, young, of breast cancer.

 

I think of all the hours I spent in torment connected to her.

 

At the table, a phrase comes to me:

Wasted sorrow.

 

3—A Story About a Baby

 

I heard this story many years ago, but it is a story no one can forget. I didn't know either the man or the woman, but I know people who knew them, knew them very well. They were poets. He was older. He had been her teacher, and established, successful, whereas she was only starting out. They had a child. The child was two years old. I don't know if they were married, but whatever their legal situation, she had understood, or perhaps it is better to say misunderstood, that he would be her partner, living beside her, involved with the rearing of the child. As it turns out, this was not his understanding. She was happy that they were both being offered jobs in the same city. A minor city in one of the less desirable (certainly for a poet) places in America. Then he was offered a better job in a more desirable city. There was no job there for her. She found herself abandoned, although he did not think of it as abandonment, though he left her in an undesirable city with a two-year-old child. She took a knife and stabbed her baby, whom everyone says was a beautiful boy, and then herself. His last sight on earth was of his mother coming at him with a knife. Was his last thought, My mother is my enemy?

 

4—Jerusalem

 

I am in Kennedy airport, waiting for a flight to Tel Aviv. A blond American couple complain about the extent of the security. An Orthodox boy, in yarmulke and tallit, says, “We have a lot of enemies.” The American man says, “You've made a lot of enemies.” Across the aisle from me, the American couple, and the Orthodox boy are a man and wife. The man, his hair in long side curls, seems to be dressed in a costume from the nineteenth century: black suit, black overcoat trailing the floor, black fedora. His wife is dressed in floor-length black as well; her hair is covered by a black wool scarf. During the exchange between the boy and the American couple, they seemed to be praying. Silently, they rise and move several rows away. I can no longer see them.

 

5—My Husband Tells Me a Story About the War

 

My husband tells me this story, which took place in an army hospital in Paris at the end of the Second World War. There was a hideous colonel in charge of the hospital. The French workers who had worked, in turn, for the French, the Germans, and the Americans said he was worse than any of the Nazis they'd worked for. Inspecting the hospital with my husband, a young corporal, in tow, the colonel sees a broom leaning against the wall of a corridor. Enraged, he asks who left it there. My husband knows it is a little French cleaner whose husband or lover has just been killed in the war. He knows she is very poor. And so he says, “I left it there.” The colonel knows that he is lying and storms off, furious. Then he comes back half an hour later to say he has fired the cleaning woman. Weeping, she says goodbye to all her friends, and knowing what my husband did for her, she whispers, “I will never forget what you did.”

 

It immediately occurs to me that the colonel fired her to punish my husband, to make a point about the folly of his assumptions. My husband is shocked. He never thought of it this way. He wanted to revel in the good feeling of having someone who would never forget him.

 

Why did I have to tell him what I thought?

 

Does this mean that I am his enemy, or the enemy of his happiness?

 

Clearly the colonel was the enemy of the little cleaner. But why? Did he consider her his enemy, one enemy in his larger fight against disorder?

 

Who did she think of as her enemy?

 

Did she consider herself a person of so little consequence that she thought no one would believe her if she said someone had taken her seriously enough to define himself as her enemy?

 

6—Simone Weil and Georges Bernanos

 

Simone Weil and Georges Bernanos both, or each, traveled to Spain to cover the Spanish Civil War, Bernanos for the right-wing press, Weil for the left. Each wrote: This war is hopeless, it is impossible to tell good from evil, there is such evil, such cruelty, such barbarity on both sides. Simone Weil wrote to Bernanos, “I thought you were my enemy, but you are my brother.”

 

7—Do Animals Have Enemies?

 

From watching my dogs, I know that the sight of certain dogs creates in my dogs the impulse to aggression, even though the other dog has done nothing provocative to warrant it. Is it the memory of past conflict that triggers the urge to aggression? Aggression toward themselves? Their ancestors? Do dogs have in their minds the category “enemy,” into which they place an individual who fits the category, even if the individual is entirely innocent? If this is true of animals, what does it say about us? About the possibility for innocence, or reformation?