I can’t remember her name offhand, but I had a distant aunt who was a butcher at a meat-packing plant. And by “butcher,” I don’t mean to imply that she was in there gently frenching the remaining flesh from pasture-fed lamb chops. She was employed hauling carcasses and doing the rough cuts on a metal slab in a meat factory. My father called her Rameeda the Beast, and it suited her perfectly. She was about eight feet tall, was missing two fingers, and had a voice that coincidentally recalled the sound of a band saw cutting through human knuckles. The last time I saw her, she was smoking hands-free and microwaving a prime rib roast for Christmas dinner, while the rest of us were busy patting down the dining room chairs with Scotch tape to get rid of the molting fur of an ancient basset hound named Mr. McDiggity.
My aunt’s missing fingers haunted me. It looked like she had sewn the ends of her fingers closed with black yarn, and then cauterized them with boiling snake venom. I was mesmerized by them. I don’t know if she suffered from any form of phantom limb syndrome, but I certainly did that Christmas, watching her tiny stumps struggle to attach the paper crowns that were meant to adorn the bony ends of our crown rib roast.
“Aww, fuck it. Merry Christmas, everyone,” she said, as she slammed the naked roast onto the table. “Digg-ski in-ski.”
I bet her hands caused her a lot of trouble in life, and having some snippy ten-year-old refuse to eat her mashed potatoes because she had dangled one of her finglets in them for a nanosecond one Christmas couldn’t have helped. I get that now. I totally get it.
I mean, I may have all ten of my fingers, but none of them are attractive on any level. I have old lady hands; I’ve always had them. If you look at pictures of me as an infant, you’d think that the hands of a tiny eighty-year-old hooker had been Photoshopped onto my otherwise smooth, alabaster baby body. They’re kind of small and wrinkly and chapped, and as I age, they’re exploring ever new ways to disappoint me. They’re getting spotty and yellowish from sun damage; I have a tiny (what I think might be a) wart on one finger, and now when you pinch the skin, it kind of stands up on its own for a while before settling back to normal. I have a vague recollection of mocking old people for this very feature when I was a young girl, acts of un-kindness I now regret.
I think we can all agree that most people enjoy getting a massage. It usually feels good when someone else’s hands work their way around your tired, aching muscles, even if the person administering the rubdown isn’t a professional massage therapist. But when my hands are involved, there’s an almost instant feeling of disappointment, followed by growing irritation, and ending with my hands being halted mid-rubdown and patted out of pity. My hands are incapable of convincingly sensual touch.
I’m the only person on Earth who can repel someone with a massage. I don’t know if it’s the pointiness of my fingers or the unsatisfying smallness of the span of my hands that is the problem, but either way, my massages are universally rejected. Judging from people’s reactions to them, my massages are about as sexy as sprinkling dry corn on your back and having a pack of chickens peck their way up and down your spine.
My fingernails are so tiny that they weird out manicurists, and I have sweaty palms with a mole on one of them, which my dermatologist assures me will one day probably turn into melanoma and take my life. I bite my nails, I bite my cuticles. If I could somehow bite someone else’s hands off and attach them to my wrists, that would actually be great.
It takes a lot of mental energy for me to keep my hands out of the public eye. It’s hard to do stuff like pay for things or hold on to a subway pole without revealing my hands to people. Obviously, mitten season is my favorite.
I don’t mean to disparage them entirely, because it seems karmically bad to complain about my fully functioning human hands when people like my aunt and Bob Dole have to make do without. I’ll give you this—they work much better than a metal hook. And if you were to put my hands on a dog, let’s say that dog would be able to do all kinds of incredible things, like clip its own toenails, and dial 911 if something went wrong.
Hands like these make a statement—a statement like “I clean other people’s toilets on a daily basis” or “I gut fish for a living, outside, in frigid weather.” Cheerful, “glass half full” people always look at my hands and say, “Oh! You must be an old soul.” But I know all they’re really saying is, “Wow. Please don’t touch my taut, youthful skin with those leathery hand-claws.”
Sometimes old people look at me, then they scan down to my hands, and they give me a kind of “what’s up” look, like we’re the same. It hurts a little at first, of course, but I’ll take it. I’m a big enough person to take it and run with it. “Yes! I’m an old soul! Hands never lie!”
In my case, though, it’s true. I believe that I actually am an old soul. I get old people. I mean, I really get them. And I’m well aware that one day the rest of my body is going to catch up to the train wreck that is my hands. I know exactly what’s coming—graying pubes (what’s left of them, that is), yellowy eyeballs, footwear worn expressly for the relief of bunions. But I’m not scared. I’m going to be ready for it.
Most people won’t be. They think of old age as something that happens to other people, something they’d rather die than experience. And when all those people are busy falling apart, cracking their hips and shaking their fists at noisy teenagers, that’s when I’m really going to shine. I’m going to come out on top—the Benevolent Overlord of the Old People! I’ve been training for it my whole life. I learned from the best.
I was mostly raised by my maternal grandmother, and until the age of seven, by her mother as well. I lived with my parents a little bit, and I sort of went back and forth between houses, but there, at the center of my universe, were the double grannies, patching up the cracks in my parents’ parenting, packing sensible backup lunches for me, and always being there to wipe my face with a warm wet cloth if I tried going to school again dripping with hair product after an unsuccessful third attempt at a Jheri curl.
And after my great-grandmother died, my grandmother seemed to find her purpose in teaching me everything she knew about being old. Well, to her it was just living, I suppose, but there I was beside her all the time, wide-eyed, absorbing everything. Based on all my grade-school photographs, I was a quick learner. Effectively vetoing my mother’s nonstrategy of letting me choose my own outfits for school, my grandmother always had a plan-B outfit at the ready. Whenever possible, my grandmother would intercept me in the hallway at school and switch me into something that looked “smart” and “age appropriate.” Well, appropriate to her age, anyway.
Early on, she favored the David Niven look: monochromatic turtleneck and slim-leg slack combos, cat-burglar style.
And a photo from my third-grade “concerned guidance counselor” phase shows me sporting a Dorothy Hamill wedge and looking luminous in butter-soft pink leather culottes and panty hose with a pair of dark brown negative heel shoes. (A girl from my class stands behind me in that photo wearing a DON’T TOUCH MY TUTS T-shirt that I secretly coveted, but outwardly I agreed with my grandmother that it totally made her look like a whore.)
My grandmother would send me to phys ed in a navy-blue, puffy-sleeved, one-piece cashmere sweat suit with a patent-leather belt, and warn me not to sweat in it, since it was dry-clean only. I hadn’t broken a sweat so far in my life, so this was a pretty easy directive to follow. I looked fantastic, but I couldn’t have hit a softball if there was a gun to the back of my head, so what difference did it make. Anyway, who could have shinnied up a rope with a patent-leather belt on? It would have gotten snagged on things . . . I’m sure . . . if I had ever tried it.
Being cocooned in a sweater-tard was the least of my worries, as I struggled to protect myself from all the balls flying haphazardly around the room. I tried to focus instead on more and more elaborate excuses for why I wasn’t able to participate that day and had to sit it out on the bench: scoliosis-based fears, highly secretive and therefore unmentionable lady problems, meningitis. And if the roving AARP fashion photographer had happened to drop by my gym class unannounced, then who would have had the last laugh? Us! In your face, children in proper athletic wear!
Under the careful tutelage of my grandmother, I learned to listen to the beat of my own fashion drummer. Even at my prom, while all the other girls went for strapless taffeta, I went in a decidedly Bea Arthur direction, eschewing overall attractiveness and youthful sexuality for a free-flowing cream pantsuit with a matching mid-thigh-length kimono-style jacket. The way it ironed out all those burgeoning female curves and made me look as bland as a plate of Cracker Barrel chicken and dumplings . . . mmm, my date took one look at me and put his erection away for the next six months. But my grandmother and I, celebrating over a glass of Ovaltine, both agreed at the time that I really pulled it off.
We were as close as two people could get.
All of her friends looked up to her. While these old ladies aged gracelessly—all crotchety and falling apart at the seams to the point where catching one “bad wind” could lay them out for a week—my grandmother kept it together physically, and always looked and dressed a little like Rona Barrett, whom she considered to be a real firecracker. She applied makeup well, stayed slim, and never ever wore anything but stylish Italian heels. Even when my mother bought a rundown farmstead and invited her to visit in the dead of winter in the aftermath of a catastrophic ice storm, my grandmother toddled off to visit the barn in a freshly pressed pair of bedazzled denim slacks with a coordinated Western-style chambray vest, an angora cowl-neck sweater, a winter-white wool car coat, and a cashmere accessories set: shell pink gloves with a matching tam perched at a jaunty angle on top of her head.
She was hardwired to care about her appearance even as she was overtaken by a pack of unruly goats. Through the kitchen window, I saw them take her down and rip the tam from her head. As they dragged their dirty goat beards across her face and trampled her fine winter coat, she did a quick under-eye sweep to make sure her mascara wasn’t running. Not that she was superficial; she just had a terrific understanding of the power of her own image. She realized that if she let herself go in old age, no one would ever rush over to serve her at the fish counter, doctors wouldn’t listen to her—she would disappear. And she was not going out like that.
If you were of her generation and you were a man, you could practically do anything and your behavior would be excused. My great-grandmother had married a man who used to grab at women’s breasts and vaginas as they walked by, and everyone would just chuckle, “Oh, him? He’s harmless. He’s just a dirty old man.” And then they would quietly gather up the girl children and usher them into the other room, away from him.
It was disgusting. But there he was—a sex pervert at large, free to grab crotches as if he were just helping himself to another serving from a passing dim sum cart. If you were a woman, though, and you did something as seemingly innocuous as letting your hair go gray, it was over. You might as well live on a park bench and layer yourself with old pizza boxes for warmth.
My grandmother got that. Here was a woman who took my mother to get her first perm and dye job when she was three years old. It was unthinkable for her to have given birth to a child who didn’t have short, curly blond hair and blue eyes, like Shirley Temple. Even though she herself (and my grandfather, for that matter) had straight dark brown hair and brown eyes, she was shattered when my mother emerged with a shock of dark hair and didn’t immediately burst into a rendition of “On the Good Ship Lollipop” worthy of a record deal.
I don’t recognize my mother from a single photograph taken of her as a child. There is simply no correlation between those photographs and what nature had intended for her. I, of course, find this hilarious. But my mother does not. She has terrible memories of my grandmother eventually giving up on her dream of producing a blond cherub and taking her to the hair salon for something called “The Italian Boy.” I told her that, based on all the photos I’ve seen, she made a very handsome little Italian boy. She finds this most hilarious.
Meanwhile, my grandmother thought my mother’s gay male friends were just fashionable straight guys with toned muscles and really tidy roommates. She did those low-impact Jack LaLanne exercise moves and they actually kept her fit. I’d come into the living room and she’d be in front of the TV, gently moving in a skirt and blouse with a pair of Isotoner footies on for traction. If I asked her a question, she’d stop me and say, “Ask me when I’m finished doing my leggies.” Leg lifts were “leggies,” any arm-related exercises were obviously “armies,” and her minimally invasive floor exercises were known as “poochies,” to help get rid of her pooch.
Our favorite game to play together was Do You Wish I Was Fat Like That? We would go to the mall and people-watch in between munching carrot muffins and browsing for matching sale-priced Liz Claiborne fashions. Every once in a while we would end up following someone with a big ass and my grandmother would sigh and say “Do I look like that?” Then she would ask disingenuously “Do you wish I was fat like that? Wouldn’t I be more fun? Wouldn’t I seem more jolly?”
My job was to assure her that she was perfect just as she was. And that’s really how I felt. No matter what, we always spoke honestly with each other and enjoyed each other’s company. Even when I was at my worst as a teen, she could instantly bring me back to civility with a couple of thawed-out chicken kievs and a Newhart/ Cagney & Lacey twofer.
When I did my first play, she blubbered incessantly with pride from the moment she entered the building until three days later, when she was still barely able to compose herself. My acting career became her obsession. We would watch shows together and she would wonder why I wasn’t in any of them. Then she would ask with a sigh, “Do you want me to go down to the station and put your name in?” as though that were the key; you just had to express an interest in being a star and that was all they needed to know to get you started on the road to success.
My grandmother greatly admired celebrities and people of a certain pedigree, but only if they were American. She adored the Kennedys, worshipped the Reagans, wished she were Doris Day; she would have done anything to have been born in the States and be able to claim them as her own people. Having summered in the United States for much of her childhood, she was convinced that she had basically been born there, and as such, adopted a slight difficult-to-place accent whenever she thought someone was picking on America. The more you noticed it, the worse it got, until her defense of Oliver North and his involvement in the Iran-Contra affair was distilled down to the words “Leave us alone! Weah ahr Ahmahricahns!”
Her obsession with American celebrities ran so deep that she practically refused to admit they had been born vaginally She insisted that they had simply emerged, glowing and smooth from their gossamer star nests, surviving by gently nibbling on the most tender leaves and shoots of spring; their twenty-four-inch-waisted bodies permanently draped in the spangly creations of Bob Mackie; the only discharge their tiny bodies could ever emit was in the form of a fragrant potpourri of organic matter that would make your tomatoes come in bigger than ever, should you ever be privileged enough to have one of them over for a garden party.
She respected television and its glittering denizens so much that she couldn’t not watch it, even when she hated it. She disliked certain shows with such intensity that she watched them every day just to spite them and punish them. Trying to effect change on Knots Landing with tongue clicks and exasperated sighs was one thing, but her whole body got involved when The Young and the Restless came on.
With an alarming level of passion she would shriek at the television, “Damn you, Victor Newman. Damn you. Argh! Oh, I could just smash him.” And sometimes when he spoke she would have to run in and out of the room, listening to the scenes without looking at him. She got so worked up by the sight of his bushy mustache that her hands would clench and her jaw would tighten; I later came to recognize that as Gamlust. She literally found him irresistible, and it made her so angry with herself that she wanted to put her fist through a window. (I am similarly conflicted by my fascination with CBS News correspondent Lara Logan, but in my case, it doesn’t make me want to shatter glass. It just makes me want to sniff her pretty hair. I imagine it smells like freshly picked Honey Crisp apples.)
Transitioning into an oldie can be a scary experience, I think. Will it go as smoothly for you as it will for me? Probably not, but one can dream. Who knows, perhaps one day, one of you may even be called up to the position of Deputy Benevolent Overlord of the Old People! (Of course, don’t get your hopes up. I may be old at heart, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have high standards that you are probably incapable of living up to.)
Since I’ve been steeped in Granny juice for as long as I can remember, insight into the old lady brain comes very naturally to me, and I think I can help you out. Recently, I attended a big luncheon and sat at the same table as a woman from the Kennedy family. I was feeling very uncomfortable and out of place, so I started making eyes at the little old lady beside me, since all she had to do was look at my hands and know that I was going to be simpatico. The only thing she really talked to me about was the Kennedy woman’s chest, and her shocking lack of “boobies.” The little old lady was disgusted. “Couldn’t she have at least bothered to put on a pair of falsies before coming out to lunch? These young women today. Slovenly.”
These are the sorts of attitudes that you are going to need to be able to identify and adopt as your own. They may seem foreign to you at first, but give them time. Soon enough they will start to metastasize inside your elder brain, and all of it will make sense. Right around the time you start thinking that teddy bears in Scottish tams actually are cute after all, and that they would make a great stocking stuffer for your fifteen-year-old niece. There are do’s and don’ts, of course. But in the spirit of growing old gracefully, feel free to peruse the suggestions I have arrived at, after years of experience, and accept all of them.
1. First things first. Know for sure that wearing shorts or inappropriate footwear too early in the spring, when it’s not really that warm yet, will give you “the rheumatism.” I often find myself shaking my head sadly at people who have jumped the gun on the season and have cast aside their pants when the nights are still cool. Something is going to happen to their legs in about fifty-odd years—I don’t know what exactly, but I do know it will be terrible for these Young Turks!
2. Also, you’re going to want to pick up “sad head shaking” as soon as possible. It will form the core of your elderly response mechanism, and should not be overlooked.
3. And don’t forget to liberally sprinkle the word the wherever possible. Why have high blood pressure when you could have The High Blood Pressure. It makes everything in your life sound about twice as potentially lethal and, therefore, dicey and thrilling. Like tangling with an alligator, or lifting the toilet seat lid and finding a funnel-web spider lying in wait.
4. Don’t wear cheap plastic shoes. They will give you corns. What are corns, you may ask? Well, don’t ask, because if you have never seen one, you will not believe that they are possible. But they are, and if you get one, you will definitely know it and no one will want to be near your feet ever again. Corn. In your feet. You better recognize.
5. As a vulnerable old wrinkle pup, doing the things that you used to do all the time, like drinking a cold drink while eating warm cake or brownies hot out of the oven, can kill you. Many other seemingly innocuous things can kill you as well. Cold drafts on your neck in movie theaters. Crisp-tender vegetables. Retrieving voice mail messages or Going on The Yahoo. Take a toque wherever you go, and don’t try to operate any machinery of any kind without a grandchild present.
6. If you’re going to have young people over, sitting on the couch in their shorts, you are definitely going to want to put a beach towel down. Otherwise, their youthful bodily oils are going to be absorbed by the fabric and leave a giant greasy patch where their bodies once were, and that is repulsive. I mean, it’s not going to happen right away or anything, but I think they’d be pleasantly surprised to find out how filthy they are. Make sure they know this.
7. Although it’s technically okay to do it sometimes, you shouldn’t rewind your cassette tapes to your favorite song too often or you will wear them out, and then you will have to buy new ones. It’s best just to listen to every other song on one side of the tape, flip it over, give the other side a listen, and then flip it back to the side that has your favorite song. Eventually, you’ll find your way back to the one you like, and you should really try to drink it in; it’s going to be a while before you hear it again.
8. Frowning causes wrinkles, and so does pushing your face into your pillow while you sleep. Even if you are wearing painful plastic curlers to set your hair, try to sleep on your back anyway, like a pharaoh in a sarcophagus, or all that face mushing will age you prematurely. Also, remember to put Scotch tape across your forehead while you sleep, so that you don’t frown when you are having nightmares. Which you will be having because of the hard plastic curlers embedding themselves in your scalp. Don’t worry, it’s definitely worth it. Maybe.
9. Eat an apple every day. They’re good for you and they also brush your teeth! (Sort of.)
10. Also, brush your teeth.
11. Cosmetic plastic surgery is weird. Do not do it unless you are Wayne Newton.
12. A girdle is a must. How else are you planning to whittle your waist down to the twenty-four-inch mark? What’s that, you say? That’s physically impossible? That’s unhealthy? Quit being such a pussy and get on it. Deep breathing and the ability to eat more than one Tic Tac at a time for your lunch are overrated.
13. Showers are like having water attack you. Civilized people take baths.
14. When entertaining, hot dogs are not the same thing as sausages. Hot dogs are made of cow lips and cow vaginas, along with a lot of other crazy shit. Sausages are savory and delicious; they are also possibly made with lips and vaginas, but are more distinctive tasting, so they’re better. Especially the German kind. Prick them with a fork before you try to cook them, otherwise they might swell up and fly off the barbecue, like they did at my First Communion. An elderly person would be ill-advised to risk this sort of catastrophe, as they are not fast enough to outrun the ensuing barrage of molten hot bratwurst. Don’t even get me started on corn on the cob. I’m just saying.
15. Wear a bra, but not at night, so that your aging bodily fluids can sluggishly redistribute themselves. You can also take it off for your gentle bath, but then put it right back on. If you have anything in the way of boobies and don’t adhere to these two rules, your lady lumps will end up looking like two heavy boccie balls dangling from your chest in a pair of tube socks.
16. Also, full-seated panties are a must. Many people call them “granny panties”—this is inappropriate and disparaging. Think of them as a clean, absorbent cotton insurance policy against what is going to happen to you in the future should you happen to laugh and sneeze at the same time. At some point, your thong strap is going to disappear into the folds of your buttocks, and this is counterintuitive to the thong’s original purpose, which is to say, sexiness. Embrace a broad cotton gusset and get on with your life.
17. Finally, Rock Hudson was not gay. That’s ridiculous. Now you’re just trying to upset me.
I myself know exactly what I’m going to look like and act like as an old lady. It’s probably from all the Geritol I’ve taken over the years, but I’ve got my Chico’s wardrobe all picked out, and I totally know that I’m going to do a lot of gardening and pretending that I’m cool with the fact that my children never call me, and that my daughter-in-law is a harpy who marginalizes me in the life of my son. My hair won’t be gray (I’ve already decided), because then my husband elder-Jason won’t have elder-sex with me. But it will be appropriately peppered with lowlights and cut in a shapely but easy-to-maintain bob.
When I think about these things, which is now basically every day of my life, I am reminded of my grandmother’s influence. Every time I do poochies by my desk at work, or congratulate my two totally platonic (I’m positive!) male friends (who also happen to be roommates!) on their amazing ikebana creations—and marvel that no woman has yet been able to capture their hearts—I give a nod to my Gam. Sometimes, when I hold my breath for ten seconds after someone in my vicinity sneezes, to prevent inhalation of their mucus, just like she taught me, I think of her and thank her for teaching me about the importance of evading tuberculosis molecules on public transit. And whenever I look down at my rapidly aging hands, I am reminded of how far ahead of other people I am when it comes to accepting my fate. Because of her good work, I’m already like a little old lady in a little middle-aged lady’s body, and I’m almost okay with it. I may wear push-up bras and dye my hair, but my panties are . . . comprehensive, and my feet just come alive in Birkenstocks. I’m halfway there.