The Best American Essays 2014 (9 page)

“Hello!” the second friend says.

The American says hello.

“Our mutual friend has sent me. He would like you to visit the village over the river. He has sent me to bring you across.”

The American tells him that he's okay, that he's fine, that he would like to stay where he is. He is embarrassed to admit that he doesn't want to wade through the water, which is knee-deep, with his small wound, so he says he's tired and would like to stay.

The second friend stands above him, flummoxed. “Please will you come across the river with me?” he asks. “I was given this task.”

The American explains that he's very tired and that he and their mutual friend agreed that he would stay here, on the riverbank, and that this is okay, that the second friend needn't worry.

The second friend's face is twisted, pained. “Well, you see, in our culture,” he says, and the American winces, for these words usually precede an unpleasant request, “we must help our guests. It's my duty to help you get to the other side.”

The American again insists that he doesn't want to or need to go across the river. As a last resort, the American shows him his wound and tries to explain the possibility that it might become infected.

“But this river is clean,” the second friend says.

“I'm sure it is,” the American says, hating himself for seeming fragile, “but I read about the many infections we can get here, given the different microbes . . .” The second friend is looking doubtful. “Just like if you came to the U.S.,” the American continues. “You would be subject to diseases that were unfamiliar to you. You could get far sicker, far quicker, than we could in our own land . . .”

The second friend shakes off all this talk. “But in our culture,” he says again, and the American wants to yell,
This has nothing to do with your culture. You know this and I know this.
“In our culture it is not permitted to allow a guest to sit here like this.”

The second friend continues to look pained, and the American begins to realize that the friend will be in trouble—with their mutual friend, and the mutual friend's family, and with everyone else in the town—if the second friend does not accomplish this one task of getting the American across the river. Now the second friend is looking into the distance, his hands on his hips. He squints at a fisherman who is sitting in a small dugout canoe in the bend of the river, and an idea occurs to him. He goes running to the fisherman.

And soon he is back with the fisherman in tow. “This man will take you across.”

To the American, the notion of this fisherman interrupting what he's doing to ferry him across a shallow river is worse, in so many ways, than the thought of contracting some waterborne infection. He tries to refuse again, but he knows now that he's losing. He's lost.

“I don't want this,” he says.

“Please. This man will take you. You will not get wet.”

The American is smiling grimly, apologetically, at the fisherman, who is not happy to have been asked to do this.
No one wants this
, the American wants to say to the second friend,
no one but you.
But now, because the fisherman is waiting and the second friend has gone to such trouble, it seems that the path of least resistance is to get into the canoe and go across the river. So the American gets in, and notices that in the canoe are six inches of water, so he doesn't sit but only squats among a few nets and no fish.

The fisherman has nowhere to sit, so he stands in the water and begins to pull the canoe across the river in long, labored strides. The second friend is walking next to the fisherman and the two of them argue loudly in Dinka about what's happening. The fisherman is clearly annoyed that this American needs to be ferried across the river like some kind of despot, and the second friend is likely saying,
I know, I know, Lord knows I know.
And the two of them are forming, or confirming, an idea of this American and all Westerners: that they will not walk across a shallow river, that they insist on commandeering canoes from busy fishermen and being pulled across while they squat inside. That they are afraid to get wet.

But the American did not want to go across the river at all. He did not ask for this. He did not ask for any of this. All he wants is to be a man sitting by a riverbed. He doesn't want to be a guest, or a white man, or a stranger or a strange man, or someone who needs to cross the river to see anything at all.

FROM
The American Scholar

 

O
VER THE PAST FEW YEARS
, I've really begun to feel age. I feel it in my left eye, which sometimes leaks spontaneously—I swipe at it with the back of my wrist and people take me to be weeping. I feel it in my new habit of swinging both legs out of the car at the same time, apparently in unconscious response to a directive from the part of my brain that monitors muscle strength and balance. Having risen to my feet, I feel it in an embarrassing arthritic hobble that takes me ten seconds to walk off, hoping all the while that other parking-lot crossers aren't noticing, though several of them seem to be suffering from the same condition, or worse.

I hasten to add that though my muscles may be weakening and my joints stiffening, I'm not infirm. I'm as vigorous as I ever was, and reasonably healthy. Mentally I'm quite intact, though my memory, always bad, grows worse. People tell me I seem younger than my years.

But as I say, I'm feeling age. I feel it in my invisibility to strangers. I haven't been nubile for many years, and never got many glances when I was. I didn't mind that, or told myself I didn't. I saw my ordinary looks as protective coloration, a duck blind behind which I could comfortably observe and take my shots. But I'm not at all sure I like this new kind of anonymity, which is an absolute dismissal. Even in contextualized situations like readings and receptions, eyes slide past me; internal shutters fail to click.

When I was thirty, I felt sure that a paradoxical reward awaited me at sixty, if I made it that far. Having never had any beauty to lose, I reasoned, I'd be exempted from mourning its loss. But as I've grown older, this proposition has turned inside out. I see now that I did have at least some beauty—not much, but some—and exactly because I had so little, I could hardly afford to lose it. Now, at this inconvenient moment, I realize that I do care about my looks. I find myself spending more energy compensating for my inadequacies than I used to. I search for becoming clothes. I color my hair. I experiment, in a gingerly way, with makeup. I suspect these efforts don't do a lot for me, though they do make some difference, if only in letting people know I'm trying.

But it's not easy to judge success or failure, when these days the reference class itself is collapsing. So many women my age have fallen victim to disqualifying conditions; it's hardly a consolation to congratulate myself on having escaped the ones I've so far escaped. After sixty, nearly every blessing is hinged to a curse that has fallen on someone else. Counting those blessings takes the form of saying to myself, At least I don't have varicose veins; at least I don't have a bald spot; at least I don't have a dowager's hump. Surely there's a diminishing utility in these kinds of comparisons, which extend seamlessly from minor gloating to deadly schadenfreude. (At least I haven't lost my mind. At least I'm not alone.)

There's a saving element of aesthetic disinterestedness in my new concern for superficialities. I find I can amuse myself for hours looking at clothes in stores. In the process, I learn about line and mass and balance, note that V-neck sweaters are flattering and that elbow-length sleeves are not. (Would that I'd learned these lessons earlier, when they were more applicable!) I take pleasure in rifling through racks, in running my fingers over fabrics, in holding garments at arm's length and appreciating the poignant way they seem to be offering themselves:
Choose me!
Saleswomen understand what I'm just now coming to acknowledge, which is the primitive imperative to decorate oneself, even if one is a crone—
especially
if one is a crone. “Ready to check out,” they ask as I stand before a mirror, draping myself with scarves, “or still playing?”

I do most of this playing and self-decorating alone, but also sometimes in the company of other women. It's an odd surprise to me that these days I experience myself as more feminine than I ever did in my childbearing years, or at least more identified with other women. Now that all, or most, bets are off, I see that the deep alienation I felt from my gender for most of my life was largely defensive. Under the aspect of decline, I understand other women better. As our sags and wrinkles make us kin, I feel a tenderness for them, particularly for their—for our—slight shoulders and delicate wrists, those skeletal markers of femininity that no drag queen can approximate. I'm persuaded that we're alike, that we were alike all along. I feel a new sympathy for other women, and for myself.

Tiresias-like, I understand men better too, and make allowance for the lust that enslaves them all their lives. I think of the boys I knew when I was a teenager, of what was really going on in their minds. How could I have missed it?

Another small surprise: the intense pleasure I take in pure, strong, flamboyant color. A yellow hibiscus blossom, seen at a distance, will stop me in my tracks. Many years ago my husband and I spent a few nights in a New England guesthouse. One morning I came to breakfast in a bright red top, an unusual choice for me. Our hostess, a bent, muttering old thing, emerged from behind her dark desk under the stairs and trotted up to me, all animation now, her eyes alight. “RED!” she bellowed. “I LOVE RED!” I was baffled and amused. What was this about, this senile glee? Now I begin to understand.

Thirty years ago I assumed I would take the eccentric route as I aged, become one of those bluff, outspoken, truth-telling old women people claim to admire, even as they avoid them. That would have been in keeping with my strong contrarian impulse. But instead of growing bolder and more heedless, I seem to be growing more circumspect, more nervously observant of the proprieties, more conscious of other people's feelings.

At my age, motives are generally multiple. I can think of three explanations for this development in my behavior. Ranged along a continuum that moves from most to least cynical, they are as follows:

1. Age is unnecessary, as Lear observed. More and more I feel that I'm here on sufferance. If I don't want to be left out on an ice floe, I'd better try to be pleasant.
   
2. Being interesting is getting harder, but I can always be good.
   
3. Age is slowly melting away the outer layers of my personality, revealing the sweetness within.
   

I feel my aging in my moods, which have always been volatile, but are steadier now than they were when I was still menstruating and out of my mind for half the month. Even so, I can't say I often feel serene. A lot of the time what I feel is a buzzy muzziness, as though I need to give my head a good shake (perhaps it's tinnitus). And though my moods have stabilized, the background coloration of my subjectivity has darkened. This is a difficult distinction to make, because the concepts of mood and color seem inseparable, but a darkening of mood is not the same as a lowering of mood. It's an indelible staining, the result of a long immersion in the vat of years. Depression can occur concomitantly, of course. In fact, the darkening makes the lowering more likely.

I can't deny that often I am depressed, but I also find myself in the grip of an inalienable stoicism. Even when my moods are acutely painful, I no longer try to force my way out of them through explosion or confrontation or drinking. The price in shame would be too high: after sixty, one no longer gets the discounted rate. I simply wait for my moods to go away. What replaces them is nothing like euphoria. It's often the default state of muzziness I describe above, but sometimes—if the mood has been very bad, and I'm lucky—the muzziness lifts like a California fog and I enjoy an interval of steady, neutral clarity.

Not only am I better at containing my emotions, I'm also much more in control of my appetites, partly because many of them have shrunk. I'm improved in many other ways as well; I'm more conscientious, more prudent, better organized, more reliable. It amazes me that in my youth I was so morally careless and cheerfully self-destructive. I remember late nights in my early twenties, joyously rocketing along piney back roads in some drunk's car toward a party house rented by an older male reprobate. What was I after? I can't recall, though I do remember what I got. Now I feel poisoned if I drink two glasses of wine. Not that feeling poisoned stops me, though it does slow me down.

I'm proud of my newfound moderation and self-control, but I also must report that I've begun to notice in myself a certain age-related tendency to peevishness. Like the fussy old lady in C. S. Lewis's
The Screwtape Letters
, who only wants a properly made cup of tea and a piece of really crisp toast, I get seriously annoyed when the soup I've ordered comes to the table lukewarm. In earlier days I'd have bolted it obliviously, along with a sandwich, but a tiny disappointment like this really bothers me now: the only lunch I'll get today, ruined! Even so, I won't send it back to be reheated. That's not like me. That's the behavior of my alter ego, the grouse-stick-brandishing old bat I haven't become.

I also notice an age-related touchiness, an increased sensitivity to slights and insults to my dignity. I've always been easily hurt and quick to anger, but when I was young there was a robustness to my reactions. What I feel now instead of a straightforward rage is a quivering, querulous outrage that I have no choice but to conceal behind a tight smile. It's as if I suddenly expect chivalric treatment: How can people wound me when I'm old and I can no longer chalk their slights up to experience? How can they hurt me when I can no longer learn anything from it?