Winter Birds (21 page)

And this teacher’s diaries—where are they now, I wonder? No doubt some younger relative has already come across them, pronounced them redundant for the purposes of modern living, and relegated them to their final resting place in the great trash heaps of mankind.

“DIED. FAY WRAY, 96, shriektacular heroine of the original
King Kong
and other thrillers of the early talkie era.” “DIED. WILLIAM MITCHELL, 92, food scientist who accidentally invented Pop Rocks, the exploding candy that burst onto the market in 1975.” “DIED. RODGER WARD, 83, one of auto racing’s most prominent figures during the glory days of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.” “DIED. JAN MINER, 86, stage and film actress best known for her role as Madge, the manicurist in Palmolive commercials from 1966 to 1992.”

How light the weight of what man leaves behind. How pitiful that a person’s life may come down to so little—a scream, a candy, a speeding car, a television commercial. And these are the people judged to be famous enough for
Time
magazine.

The sky begins to lighten in the east. I am wearing a dress I have worn for four straight days. It is blue with dark spots where I have spilled my food on it. Shakespeare’s second sonnet speaks of the wrinkled brow and sunken eyes of a loved one besieged by “forty winters.” My winters are twice as many, the garment of my youth now “a tattered weed, of small worth held.”

But enough of this, I tell myself. “Get a plan”—this was something I often heard my father say, though his own plans were most often thwarted. Rise from your chair on Christmas morning, I tell myself. Put your stained dress in the clothes hamper, from which Rachel will take it and return it spotless. Draw a bath before your breakfast arrives. These are things you can do. Then set your teeth and see the day through.

I lay my fingers to the buttons of my dress. The top one is more securely fastened than the others, the result of my recent deception and Rachel’s needle and thread. It strikes me that Patrick and Rachel have taken me in as one would a stray cat, except for the fact that stray cats have no monthly social security checks to share, no inheritance to promise in return for food and shelter. They are also, I must remember, less bother than an old woman who soils her clothes and pulls off buttons.

Chapter 16

Like a Rich Armor, Worn in Heat of Day

The Brewer’s blackbird is not easily intimidated. It has been known to light among farmyard chickens and drive them off, then eat their grain. Flying in flocks of thousands, they appear to flow through the air like a shimmering black river, dipping and turning in unison
.

With the aid of a safety bar and with the traction provided by adhesive strips, I have managed to ease myself into a tubful of brown bath water. Looking down at herself in the bathtub, an old woman’s view does nothing to lift her spirits. From one extremity to the other, it is a depressing sight. However, the water is warm, the hum of the exhaust fan is low and steady, and my thoughts are singularly clear. I will get through another Christmas Day. I will bathe and dress in clean clothes; I will eat; I will watch my birds; I will breathe in and out. I will try to stay in the waiting room today. No trips to the corridor with its many uncertain cubicles.

I fix my eyes on my feet. They are not a pretty sight, yet they have served me for eighty years. One cannot demand more than dependability from servants. I keep them protected by thick socks and soft-soled slippers. Still, there is something that hurts when I walk. Perhaps it is a wart. I cannot see it. The second toe on both feet is longer than the first and overlaps it—a condition known as hammertoe. I have heard of people undergoing surgery to correct the defect, but having inherited my mother’s aversion to doctors, I have never been tempted to do so.

Finding comfortable shoes has been a lifelong challenge. Had I wanted to wear fashionable shoes, I couldn’t have. As I did not, I suffered no great disappointment. I left it to my sisters to wear fashionable shoes. I chose comfort instead. But my days of buying shoes are over. Morticians ask family members to bring in clothing for the burial of loved ones, including stockings and undergarments. They do not, however, request shoes. And when one is cremated, he needs no special clothes at all.

My legs have the wasted look of an invalid’s. No larger than the shanks of a colt, they belie the burden they have supported through the years. Though I cannot see them now, great networks of spidery purple veins spread themselves down the backs of my legs, not from carrying children but from bearing my own weight. My eyes skim upward, passing over withered, sagging parts too sad to behold.

I move quickly over stretches of nakedness totally devoid of the appeal usually associated with the female form and come at last to the only part of my body I once thought a man could love, now simply two hugely empty bowls. When I married Eliot almost forty years ago, I imagined that he would feel great joy over such bounty. If he did, he concealed his joy. Alarm was the look in his eyes on our wedding night, as if such immoderation were a thing to be shunned.

My arms, unlike my legs, are large. When I lift them, I feel the great loose weight of flesh that has fallen away from bone. The skin of my forearms is finely wrinkled and strangely pigmented, a coat of many colors, from the palest patches of white to the dark brown spots of age. This is the body of Sophia Hess. Observe it and be instructed that time is an invincible foe.

My face I cannot see, but I know it well enough. Time has had its way there, also, though with faces it is different. Time levels facial beauty. A woman called beautiful in her youth will not be so when she is old. Put an ugly child and a pretty child side by side, add seventy or eighty years, and you will see no appreciable difference in their faces. One may have fewer wrinkles, brighter eyes, or a nicer smile, but the same adjective will be applied to both: old. My face is a map of time, many small roads crossing its planes, all leading downward. A cluster of broken blood vessels, like a tiny burst of fireworks, blooms beneath my left eye.

“DIED. ELISABETH KUBLER-ROSS, 78, Swiss-born psychiatrist whose incisive research in the 1960s demolished medical taboos against discussing death with the dying and helped establish hospice care in the U.S.” In her book
On Death and Dying
, Dr. Kubler-Ross “gave permission,” according to
Time
magazine, for us to “speak openly about our greatest fear.” Her book described the “wondrous capacity” of the human mind “to prepare itself for dying” by progressing through five stages, beginning with denial and ending with acceptance, leading finally to “a peaceful resolution.” No details of Dr. Kubler-Ross’s own death are given except for the fact that she died in Scottsdale, Arizona. One must wonder if she talked candidly about her own death, if she coached herself through the five stages she identified for the world, if at the end she closed her eyes in peaceful resolution.

I think of the centenarians featured on the Discovery Channel one day last week. There are pockets of such people scattered around the globe, but the ones on this program lived in Nova Scotia. Medical researchers have studied them, trying to determine the factors contributing to their longevity. A lifetime of eating healthful foods hardly seems to be the answer, for most of the Nova Scotians supplement their seafood, a staple common to any coastal location, with traditional favorites such as buttermilk, curds, cream, bread, butter, and fried foods.

One of the men interviewed in the program had spent his life building fishing boats. This man, who was 103, looked right into the camera and said, “I’ve always worked hard and eaten plenty of sweets.” I took heart from his words. If hard work and consumption of sweets are qualifications for living a century, I am eligible.

After almost an hour of interviews with a number of the centenarians, who routinely engaged in pastimes such as reading, piano playing, cooking, computer games, and crossword puzzles, the program concluded with this fact: Researchers are still mystified by the causes of the advanced years achieved by so many of the Nova Scotia elderly. Except for its sensationalism, therefore, the program was of little value. It was tantamount to an ogling of freaks.

The final word was “One thing is sure. Out of all the folks we talked to in this little corner of the world, there didn’t seem to be an ill-tempered one in the lot. The centenarians of Nova Scotia are a contented and optimistic people, ready to share a kind word and a laugh with anyone, friend or stranger, who happens along.” I did not take heart from these words. Besides the folksy, condescending tone in which they were offered, the implication was troubling. If contentment and optimism are qualifications for reaching the age of one hundred, I am not eligible. To the question “Why would anyone want to live to one hundred?” I counter with “Why would anyone want to die?”

I pick up the bar of Dove soap, with which Rachel keeps me supplied, and lather my washcloth. I take stock of my ailments on Christmas morning. I have arthritis. My shoulders and back ache. My knees are stiff. This is nothing out of the ordinary for one my age. Because of whatever is on the bottom of my foot, I limp slightly when I walk. I forget more easily than I once did. I once had a mind for names, but today I can recall the names of only a handful of my elementary students and none from my years of university teaching.

I am weak and slow. To say that I am overweight would be a kindness.

In my youth I was quite strong. When I married Eliot and moved my things to his house, he reproved me for carrying a heavy box of books by myself. “You will hurt yourself, Sophia,” he said. Having carried my own boxes many times in the past, I found his remark humorous, but I obeyed when he instructed me to set the box down, then take up one end of it while he took the other. Such an arrangement of carrying was awkward and slow, but I was touched by his solicitousness. It did not occur to me at the time that he could have offered to carry the box by himself.

I have other ailments common with age, things related to stomach, bowel, and bladder that one does not like to talk about. I frequently hear a ringing in my ears. My heart often beats too fast. I sometimes must lie on my bed and breathe deeply to slow it down. When I get up, I often feel dizzy and must hold myself very still until the sensation passes. Some days I feel dizzy most of the day. My left arm throbs on cold, rainy days, perhaps a phantom pain from a shattered elbow as a child. I sometimes burp or break wind suddenly, with no warning.

Occasionally I find it hard to swallow. My vision blurs when I read for long periods of time. My hair is thin and wispy, like the underplumage of birds. From time to time patches of eczema erupt on my arms and hands. I have poor circulation in my legs and feet. My fingers are not reliable in following simple instructions. When instructed on a package to “Tear here,” it is often beyond my ability.

On the other hand, I can walk, dress and feed myself, speak intelligently when I choose. I can hear reasonably well. I chew with my own teeth. I have food, shelter, and clothing. I have a thermostat by which I can keep my apartment as warm as I like. I have windows. I have a great amount of money in store.

I take my time with soap and water on Christmas morning, slowly washing my body inch by inch, for I know several days may pass before I undertake another bath. I do not set such a store on cleanliness as I once did. It comes to me that it must be getting light outdoors by now, but because I have taken myself away from my post by the bird feeder, I cannot see which bird comes first. And yet, I remind myself, this is no great loss. I would be no better off knowing such a fact than not knowing.

I wash the backs of my hands carefully. I close my eyes and feel the large ropy veins through the washcloth. Even in their youth, these were not hands that Madge the manicurist could have improved with Palmolive dish soap. Short and broad to match the rest of me, they are hands that have not shirked hard work. They are hands that wear no jewels. Though I once wore a wedding band, I had no engagement ring. I would not have been opposed to one, but Eliot neither produced one nor ever mentioned such a possibility. The wedding band he presented to me was plain but beautiful in my eyes. It was not shiny but rather a flat, scrubbed-looking gold. At some point during our marriage, it crossed my mind briefly to wonder whether this was the ring Eliot’s first wife wore. I had no way of knowing, and I would never have asked.

In spite of my determination to remain in the present today, my thoughts flash, before I can retrieve them, to my second Christmas with Eliot. This is the trouble with Christmas Day. I can scrape together a few pleasant thoughts of past Thanksgivings, July Fourths, and birthdays, but not of Christmases.

Neither Portia nor Alonso made an appearance at home that second Christmas. Eliot stated that Alonso had possibly hitchhiked to Vermont to visit Portia at Middlebury, but I doubted it. Though only a year apart in age, they were not close siblings. The only interchange I had ever witnessed between the two of them took place on the back porch of their house a month before Eliot and I married. Out of my sight but not my hearing, they quarreled heatedly about who would take the car that night. It was a used car their father had bought for them to share, though the concept of sharing was one neither of them had ever learned. All manner of underhanded behavior occurred in the securing of the car keys from day to day.

On this particular night I heard sounds from the porch indicating more than just the exchange of words. I heard Alonso curse his sister with language I had never heard at his age. I heard the rip of clothing, the slap of flesh on flesh, the grunt of deeper blows received. I heard the clatter of garbage cans knocked over as the winner fled the driveway in the car. The loser, whoever it was, must have left on foot, for the porch screen slammed, and all was quiet.

This had happened some sixteen or seventeen months before my second Christmas as Mrs. Eliot Hess, however, and served only to stir my doubt that Alonso had gone to Vermont. I believed he was spending Christmas in Hillcrest, the same town where we lived, ingesting large quantities of drugs and alcohol with other young derelicts unacquainted with the words
work
,
study
, or
respect
.