WHEN I WAS YOUNG I was a fairly good judge of age. No longer. Everyone between twenty and forty looks more or less the same to me, and so does everyone between forty and sixty. But for some reason I can tell the ages of children very accurately: I can see the difference between three and a half and four, or eight and nine.
Also, my friends do not age. They all seem around forty-five. Some are in fact around forty-five and some are less: over the years I’ve made several young friends, partly with selfish calculation—in case I live long, I won’t find myself friendless, the friends of my age having died off. But even the older ones seem around forty-five. If I make a serious effort to recall their age, I always come up with the age they were when I first learned it, as if our friendship has persisted in a timeless medium. This is true even of the friends who are what is called “a certain age”—the women, that is, for it is invariably women who attain a certain age; men have a number.
“A certain age.” As if the actual number were too shameful to utter. A phrase rich with contempt in the guise of deference. A condescending phrase. Cancer was spoken of that way not so long ago. People didn’t want to embarrass the poor sufferer by speaking the word. And they were superstitious—it might happen to them, if they let the word so much as float over their tongues. “He has a growth,” they would say. “It’s malignant,” if they were brave. A certain age is malignant too. I will surely die of it in time.
Now that I myself may be a certain age—I’m not sure when it starts, since it is never specified—I think about age all the time. I think about age the way younger people think about sex. I haven’t stopped thinking about sex, but its mysteries no longer tease me. I know a lot about sex at my certain age. But age is still a mystery, so I think about it. I watch for its signs. Not so much the tangible signs, though those are appalling in their sneaky gradualness and irreversibility, and I work hard at staving them off. I imagine a contest between my efforts and age’s incursions. I know, of course, who the winner will be; the thrill of the contest is seeing how long I can delay its victory. The signs I watch for more closely are not the obvious ones but the negative ones, the little things I can no longer do, or do as well. The diminishments. So far they are few and I would not, at this point at least, dream of naming them.
Thinking about age has borne prejudices, alas. I have preconceptions about people depending on their age; I like to ascertain people’s ages so I can judge them properly. I favor the old. I have always had an affinity for the old, even when I was young. I like the way they look. I’ve never especially connected beauty with youth and am always surprised when someone says of an older woman, a woman of a certain age, She must have been a great beauty, since to me she still is. But then I’m not looking the way men look, with “beauty” meaning they’d like to sleep with her. I’m looking at the aesthetic object.
The old are more substantial, even when physically frail. Time has textured their nature and their words along with their skin and their voices. I tend to think the opinions of people under thirty-five are negligible; by the time they’re forty or so they may be worth paying attention to. People over fifty are trustworthy; over sixty, they’re either wise or they should be. All this is very wrong, I know. Older people tolerated me and listened to me when I was young. I appreciate now how tolerant they were. And yet, like racists or sexists who also should know better, I cling to my prejudices as truth.
Even worse, I feel the only people who can understand and properly appreciate me are around my age. I used to allow a ten-year range for this understanding, then a five-year range. Now I feel the most kinship for people within two or three years of my age, and the time may come when I can speak freely and wholeheartedly only to people born in the same month as I was.
One of the many things young people don’t know is that everyone no longer chronologically young is privately young, or at least younger; we all have an age at which, subjectively, we stopped aging. We were comfortable there and remained: perhaps it’s the age at which we felt fully ourselves, or felt finally grown-up. But if we each have an optimum age, what happens when we pass it? We lead a kind of double life, one life in the actual world, where the numbers accumulate, and the other in a temporal no-man’s-land.
I regret that in years to come my children will not often think of me as I was at thirty-eight, say, or even forty-one, but most likely as I am just before death. That is how I most often recall my mother. It’s hard to keep in mind, when picturing the dead, that they spent only a short time in that worn state in which we picture them, and that for most of their life they were younger and more vigorous, blessed with an uncertain future.
As a child, when I asked my mother her age she was coy and evasive: in our family, the ages of women were never spoken aloud. My father liked to boast of his age in company, as if the combination of his years and his vigor were noteworthy, and my mother would fret and try to make him stop, for if he announced he was sixty, could she be far behind? As an adult, I didn’t dream of asking her age—it would have been an immense breach of courtesy. I figured I’d find out when she died. I didn’t have to wait that long. At some point, she wanted us to open a joint bank account, and I saw her year of birth on the cards the bank had us fill out. Had she really cared about concealing her age, she could have had me fill out my section of the cards first, when they were blank. I took this oversight or perhaps nonchalance about her age as itself a sign of age: either she had lost the acuity to be devious, or else she was giving in, her vanity depleted. Her age surprised me—my guesses had been off by about six years; her past evasions had been successful.
I think I may begin lying about my age too. I can imagine times when it would be advantageous. Or just for the hell of it. I can probably get away with about five or six years, like my mother. For now, at any rate. But if I start now and later on begin to look my actual age, people will think I have aged prematurely or look old for my age. That is not desirable either. A dilemma to ponder—but not for too long.
Why lie? Despite the encouraging books on aging which proclaim its great gifts, old age is an embarrassment, both for those who have it and those who regard it. If its gifts were so great, there would be no need for books to proclaim them. The old, however beautiful and substantial, are disconcerting. They mar the tableau vivant, not by their appearance but by what they signify, the nearness of death. Mortality embarrasses us; the notion that notwithstanding all our efforts we must die is literally mortifying. The old, in all their gallantry, signify our common helplessness: the more gallant they are in the face of approaching death, the more vividly they denote our plight.
Thinking about age is thinking about death. Approaching death: how to parse the phrase? Is it approaching me, or am I approaching it? Either way, will we come face to face in ten minutes or ten months or ten years, and what, exactly, will be the form of our greeting? Which indignities are in store? Once, I thought I’d rather die than live with certain physical humiliations; now I’m more amenable. I could manage, given the alternative.
For the most part death seems an outrage, the rudest of interruptions. But at times it seems not so bad—a relief, even, to have the whole business over with. There are a few things I’d like to get done first, though. Also a few things I’d like to live to see. Still, it is some consolation to think that if I died in ten minutes, or even ten months, I’d be considered young to die, even if I’m not considered young to be alive.
I may not even be considered truly alive; I can’t be sure. I recently had an intense, intimate, and mildly sexually charged conversation with a man I assumed was my own age. He had that nice, substantial, slightly worn look. Later I discovered he was quite a bit younger. Maybe I had mistaken the sexual charge; maybe he was talking so intimately because he felt the freedom of talking to an “older” woman. Not a happy thought. At this certain age, when I make such a discovery, I cannot say with confidence exactly what the air was charged with.
This is because a certain age engenders the famous invisibility. I’ve observed it, naturally: men digging up the street no longer stop eating their sandwiches to gawk at me. But I’m not invisible to everyone. Old men look at me, men over fifty, that is. We look at each other. There’s an implicit and amused recognition along with the sexual flicker: Those kids must be blind! we say. Yes, it’s not that we’re invisible, but that they’re blind! This is pleasant, especially as I’ve always been drawn to older, even old, men. Despite this penchant, I married a man who is a mere four years older, which at the time I married him was an appropriate and conventional age difference. I was incapable, then, of doing anything so unconventional as marrying an “older” man, and at this point it’s a good thing I didn’t, for he might well be dead. Out in the world, I would look at old men, then think, This is silly, why am I looking at these old guys when I have this attractive and virile youngish man right at home? Now, with time, he has become just the sort of older man I always liked. This is one of the unanticipated rewards of age. Not a reward that would be granted to old men who like young women, and if I had in fact broken with convention to marry one of those, as time passed he might have become increasingly disenchanted and left me for someone younger.
It’s assumed that women who like older men are thinking of their fathers. This is true only in a very small way, like most psychological explanations. I loved my father, but he was not really my type. I enjoy seeing one of his features, a tone of voice or a gesture, turn up in some stranger, but apart from the little gust of nostalgia, the intriguing thing is how my father’s familiar tone of voice or gesture meshes into the unfamiliar configuration of a stranger who is unlike my father in every other way. I would not like the stranger any better were he more like my father; I might like him less.
But this may be taking the psychological explanation too literally. Apart from their specific features, fathers, ideally, are people who take care of you, and perhaps women who like older men want to be taken care of. That would be appealing, I grant, but in fact at a certain age one no longer expects it to happen—one has become so accustomed to taking care of others—and besides, the ways I would enjoy being taken care of are not at all the ways—quite solid, honorable, and uninteresting—I recall my father taking care of me.
Obviously this could lead to further thickets of the psyche, but psychological explanations are among the many sets of beliefs I’ve shed with age. I hardly believe in anything any more except the brutality, greed, stupidity, and capacity for destruction demonstrated by the human race, and the need to counteract them by doing good. I’m not much interested in personal improvement either, as I was when young. I thought of myself and my life as a kind of giant sculpture I worked on patiently day by day, chipping away here, adding there, forever remodeling with a view to perfection. No longer. I may still chip and model, but more in a spirit of curiosity than of perfectibility.
Age itself, in the encouraging books, is considered ameliorative, bringing wisdom, acceptance, and freedom from petty vanities. It’s true that at a certain age a certain wise and philosophical acceptance settles over you, like a cloud. That is inevitable, considering all we’ve seen, and one should never scorn wisdom. Still, my own acceptance seems a loss of vitality. No doubt I’m obtuse in thinking so, but I would rather retain the qualities that need to vanish in order for wisdom, acceptance, and freedom from vanity to take their place, qualities like impulsiveness and struggle and energy and endless hope. The thing about fighting and struggle that philosophical and accepting people don’t grasp is that we fighters and strugglers enjoy it. Luckily I can still struggle to accept my acceptance.
My mother, were she still alive, would be horrified at my setting down these thoughts. Not horrified at the thoughts themselves. No. She would say, You’re telling the whole world how old you are. But now that I may be a certain age, it may be time to stop thinking about what my mother would say.