Break It Down

What an Old Woman Will Wear

She looked forward to being an old woman and wearing strange clothes. She would wear a shapeless dark brown or black dress of thin material, perhaps with little flowers on it, certainly frayed at the neck and hem and under the arms, and hanging lopsided from her bony shoulders down past her bony hips and knees. She would wear a straw hat with her brown dress in the summer, and then in the cold weather a turban or a helmet and a warm coat of something black and curly like lambswool. Less interesting would be her black shoes with their square heels and her thick stockings gathered around her ankles.

But before she was that old, she would still be a good deal older than she was now, and she also looked forward to being that age, what would be called past the prime of her life and slowing down.

If she had a husband, she would sit out on the lawn with her husband. She hoped she would have a husband by then. Or still have one. She had once had a husband, and she wasn’t surprised that she had once had one, didn’t have one now, and hoped to have one later in her life. Everything seemed to happen in the right order, generally. She had also had a child; the child was growing, and in a few more years the child would be grown and she would want to slow down and have someone to talk to.

She told her friend Mitchell, as they were sitting together on a park bench, that she was looking forward to her late middle age. That was what she could call it, since she was now past what another friend had called her late youth and well into her early middle age. It will be so much calmer, she said to Mitchell, because of the absence of sexual desire.

Absence? he said, and he seemed angry, although he was no older than she.

The lessening of sexual desire, then, she said. He looked dubious, as far as she could tell, though he was out of sorts that afternoon and had only looked either dubious or angry at everything she had said so far.

Then he answered, as though it was one thing he was sure of, while she was certainly not sure of it, that there would be more wisdom at that age. But think of the pain, he went on, or at best the problems with one’s health, and he pointed to a couple in late middle age who were entering the park together, arm in arm. She had already been watching them.

Right now they are probably in pain, he said. It was true that although they were upright, they held on to each other too firmly and the footsteps of the man were tentative. Who knew what pain they might be suffering? She thought of all the people of late middle age and old age in the city whose pain was not always visible on their faces.

Yes, it was in old age that everything would break down. Her hearing would go. It was already going. She had to cup her hands around her ears in certain situations to distinguish words at all. She would have operations for cataracts on both eyes, and before that she would only be able to see things straight ahead in spots like coins, nothing to the sides. She would misplace things. She hoped she would still have the use of her legs.

She would go into the post office wearing a straw hat that sat too high up on her head. She would finish her business and make her way from the counter out past the line of people waiting that would include a little baby flat on its back in its carriage. She would spot the baby, smile a greedy, painful smile with a few teeth showing, say something out loud to the line of people, who would not respond, and go over to look at the baby.

She would be seventy-six, and she would have to lie down for a while because she had been talking and planned to talk again later in the evening. She was going to a party. She was going to the party only to make sure that certain people knew she was still alive. At the party, nearly everyone would avoid talking to her. No one would admire it when she drank too much.

She would have trouble sleeping, waking often in the night and staying awake early in the morning when it was still dark, feeling as alone in the world as she would ever feel. She would go out early and sometimes dig up a small plant from a neighbor’s garden, looking first to see that her neighbor’s blinds were down. When she sat in a train or a bus with her eyes fixed on the scenery outside the window, she would hum without stopping for an hour at a time in a high-pitched, quavering voice that sounded a little like a mosquito, so that people around her would become irritated. When she stopped humming, she would be asleep with her head tipped back and her mouth open.

But first there would be the slowing down, a little past the prime, when there would not be as much going on, not as much as there was now, when she wouldn’t expect as much, not as much as she did now, when she either would or would not have achieved a certain position which was not likely to change, and best of all when she would have developed some fixed habits, so she would know they were going to sit out on the lawn after supper, for example, she and her husband, and read their books, in the long evenings of summer, her husband in shorts and she in a clean skirt and blouse with her bare feet up on the edge of his chair, and maybe even her mother or his mother there too, reading a book, and the mother would be twenty years older than she was, and therefore well into her old age, though still able to dig in the garden, and they would all dig in the garden together, and pick up leaves, or plan the garden together; they would stand under the sky on this little piece of ground here in the city, planning it out together, the way it should be, surrounding them as they sit in the evening on three folding chairs close together, reading and rarely saying a word.

But she was not only looking forward to that age, she said to Mitchell, when things would slow down and when she would have a husband who had slowed down too, she was also looking forward to a time about twenty years after that when she could wear any hat she wanted to and not care if she looked foolish, and wouldn’t even have a husband to tell her she looked foolish.

Her friend Mitchell did not appear to understand her at all.

Though of course she knew it might be true that when the time came, a hat and that freedom would not make up for everything else she had lost with the coming of old age. And now that she had said this out loud, she thought maybe there was no joy, after all, in even thinking about such freedom.