The shoe would not fit.
The grandmother lied,
And the three little pigs’
Insurance company went bankrupt.

Somebody conned us.
Somebody mean
Traded our childhood dreams
In the stock market-
And had all the bad hunches.
Our depreciated hopes were
Returned to us
Without an apology.
Because that was what life was all about,
Didn’t we know?

And still we cling to God
Because he must be more reliable than Santa.
Because although the Tooth Fairy failed to deliver,
We know that somebody
Must remember;
Somebody must see the pattern
And the sense.

Because we cannot
Bring ourselves to believe
We were brought to the edge
Of the cliff
Just for the fun of seeing us fall.

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Baba had legs like pillars, flabby folds of flesh for ankles, and shuffled her feet without the slightest bending of the soles, which gave her, on the whole, the mechanical gait of a robot. To this we must add a stately six feet which age had not dared meddle with, and a body massive and square like a Roman statue’s –minus the taut abdominal muscles, plus two huge watermelon breasts. She seemed enormous then, and loomed over us like some fearful Biblical creature. Baba meant “grandma” in her native language, and that is what we grandchildren called her. That was as far as her handing down of traditions would go. Or almost. I might add the usual two or three swear words, painted eggs for Easter, and that exotic, pink, jelly-like candy which tasted slightly of perfume and was enthusiastically retrieved from under mountains of icing sugar. This precious treat came in wooden boxes with inscriptions in strange alphabets, brought by the occasional visiting sailor. When one of these rugged strangers turned up, you were picked up by a big brawny being with a rough beard and a strong acrid smell, lifted to roller coaster heights, kissed on both cheeks, and addressed like a baby in a booming voice that spoke a language which, paradoxically, sounded like the rustle of leaves in a breeze.Baba was, very appropriately, married to Dede. He was her third husband, the first two having died before our birth in ways that made us children feel part of an adventure movie. Her first husband, a sea captain, had sunk with his ship. Body found three months later. Her second husband had been shot, under what circumstances we were not told until much later. What we gathered from the sideways looks and whispers, silences, and nervous coughs of the adult conversations was, conveniently, just what our burgeoning young minds were concocting. So, what has stuck with me to this day is the gangster –complete with machine gun and bandoleer- falling off a black Ford careening wildly round a corner, rather than the quiet immigrant sipping coffee at a sleazy bar attacked by a deranged tenant who owed him three months’ rent to an even sleazier upstairs room.

Baba had never been happy in this country, or grateful to it for having spared her the miseries of war and the hardships of working in the fields. She preferred to believe she was really bestowing an honor on this land by her mere presence, and managed to regard her forty-odd years here as a somewhat lengthy sojourn. Her references to the people she “would not mix with” included almost everybody except the next of kin. She acted as if she belonged to some obscure and forgotten mid-European dynasty which historians had unforgivably omitted from their records. Still, people seemed to like her because there was something about her that made what should have sounded pedantic or downright annoying be perceived as charming and dignified. She did not miss a chance to remind us how infinitely better things “back there” were. How she had only agreed to leave “all that” because of promises made to her husband, whom she had been more in youth than in love with. What she told us could be summarized in a few basic principles: all fruits were six times the average size here, women were stronger and prettier than the sickly blossoms of our motherland (a statement which confoundedly included and excluded us), and men “back there”…well, they worked harder, but for her men were men all over the place, and they were and would forever remain an inevitable, lower outgrowth of the female kingdom.

Religious she was not. She was not emotional either. However, there were certain events, like wakes, funerals and visits to the dying that would bring out her theo-histrionic best. Wrapped in black, headdress and all, her face all of a sudden became paler, thinner, took on an almost emaciated look. We stood in awe before the preparations and, if our mother was not there to prevent it, we would tag along too. I hate to admit we not only loved going, but actually came to the point of guiltily looking forward to these morbid escapades.

There were never any “friends” around Baba, but she was friendly with about a dozen “neighbors”; a word that had a ring about it which made it sound like fellow mason, accomplice or brother. Whenever one of them came to visit, with the usual dish of a little homemade something wrapped up in a checked kitchen cloth of dubious cleanliness, we would wickedly search their faces for some sign of deterioration. If the visitors remained adamantly healthy, we tried to fish in the sighs and ahhhs that seemed to punctuate all their sentences for a clue that might warn us of some approaching tragedy.

I now think that the first wake we attended must have been traumatic, but either because of a defense mechanism or just an innate evil streak, we soon began to enjoy them enormously. We walked from Baba’s house in a solemn procession. Anything we said was answered in the same grave tone. Whether I announced that my nose was running or Baby said she had wetted herself, the reply always sounded as transcendental as our comments were made to sound inadequate. This made us feel guilty and slightly afraid, so eventually a code developed through which nothing was to be said during those walks. As a consequence, the cortege often donned mysteriously pursed lips, sniffs and even the occasional suppressed whimper.

The House of Death was signaled to us from about a block away by some dozen replicas of Baba standing at the door. The children, eerily silent and well behaved, were in turn miniature copies of their elders, as if the black matrioshkas had disgorged them for the event. The grieving sea of mourners parted for us to go in, among the laments and loud crying. All the homes had the same distinctive musty smell, made stronger now by the assorted bouquets picked from small backyards and the often lonely wreath sent by the factory owner or the Union. We would go through one cluttered room into the empty bedroom where the coffin lay. And then we were actually allowed to see Death face to face. Skull-like faces with slightly open mouths which showed one or two gold teeth, and many gone. Ladies with moustaches. Hands white like lilies with dirty fingernails holding rosaries that looked too heavy to lift. Old men and women wrapped in baby clothes with frills and lace. It was a cross between a freak and a horror show, and we were mesmerized. Eventually, a firm push that indicated somebody else had arrived and we had to move on would bring us back from our ecstasy. We were always careful to never dwell too much on what we had seen when we got back home, lest our mother should take a firmer stance on the issue and our visits should come to an end.

The next stop was generally the kitchen. The smell was different there; something always seemed to be cooking, which I now find surprising, considering food was not precisely abundant in those homes. When I later on read the story about the man who told the town he could make soup with a stone, those kitchens came to my mind to provide a picture. What had been boiling most of the time were probably vegetables, the onions and peppers that flavored the proverbial childhood soups. In this female haven of wooden spoons and dented pots the women, who seemed invigorated rather than weakened by the actual confrontation with death, had dared remove their black kerchiefs for a while and started chatting in subdued voices. They found, in the numerous sufferings that had led to the end of the deceased, a mirror, an anticipation, and hope.

The men were to be found generally at the back of the house. Death, like birth, seemed to be basically a woman’s affair. Men just would not understand; and the timid retreat of the burly, bear-like men to the tiny back yard seemed to prove that they, too, felt it was not their realm. If the stay was unusually long, the children would join them to escape a show that was beginning to expose its actuality and become frightening.

The visits to the dying were different. For some reason – which was definitely not a concern for the psychological- we were never allowed into the room where the sick lay. The idea behind it was that everything one could die of was bad enough to be contagious, so whether it was pneumonia or a stroke, the young were kept safely at bay. We struggled for peeps of the bed and the many pillows that were for some reason thought necessary, perhaps to prevent the invalids from sinking deeper into disease and death. The best silk cover was on, often red or burgundy, lit by the orange light of lamps with low voltage bulbs, or premature candles. A smell of eucalyptus pervaded it all, and cups of strong, very sweet tea were brought in for the guests, as if they, too, could stomach nothing else.

When our stertorous answering machine said Baba was in the hospital, I thought I had misheard. She had never been seriously ill, and she was already in her eighties. I then had a flash of my grandmother in the squalid coffins of my childhood. Only her features did not match. Some twenty odd years had gone by since the days of the wakes, and she had not become noticeably smaller, or bent. She had lost almost all mobility to arthritis, but when she did walk, it was shuffling on the same two solid legs. Her appetite had not diminished, her face was still rounded and her cheeks often red. She always seemed to look the same age. Teenage motherhood had robbed her of her adolescence, and life, in an unexpected act of generosity, had allowed her to get even.

I am instinctively wary of hospitals. I learnt about sickness and death in homes crowded with people, where children and cooking were constant reminders of life. Like the circle Baba made by juggling the five frantic crochet needles which gave us multicolored clown socks of leftover yarn, those were homes where the cycle was permanently being recreated. Death was part of life, and both revered and celebrated with as much dedication as births or marriages.

But a hospital is not about the past, or acceptance, or closure. It is about the bold belief in the myriad blessings of science and the challenge of mortality. So here I was, in this mega igloo where the prevailing smell was the usual medley of unknown substances, and the lights glared boldly, exposing the abject intimacies of pain. I had asked my husband to meet me at the door. We were told my grandmother was in the intensive care unit. Only one visitor a time, not more than three, three to five minutes each. Please do not talk to her too much or upset her in any way. The litany of instructions was dutifully recited to us although my grandmother was already in a coma. And then I went in.

She looked just asleep, and seemed to be in no pain. Her skin seemed to have even fewer wrinkles. Her stomach seemed bigger, or maybe the big matronly breasts I remembered from my youth had in fact shrunk. There were tubes for fluids going in and out of her. Had the ghoulish madonnas of my childhood been through this before I saw them? Somehow I had always thought they were just taken ill one day, then confined to their sordid Snow White beds, and eventually moved to that other bed, the one we looked into balancing on the tips of our toes, our warm, grubby hands on the chilling bronze edges. Would any of the women in black come, or were they all dead already? Did my grandmother have a gold tooth that would show through her half open lips? I did not remember. But I knew a mortuary would do a better job these days. We had come a long way, and could afford other deaths.

The curtain around the bed next to Baba’s was flicked shut. I gave a start. I wanted so much to take her away from there, take her home. Did they know she had been Chrysanthemum Queen when she was only fourteen, a ring of flowers for a crown, and a real muslin dress? She had been so beautiful back there, in the place with the consonant ridden name, its utterance a secret for the initiated. A captain’s wife. He had sunk with his ship. Body found three months later. And now here they were taking all her pride and dignity away. Here, where there was no eucalyptus scent to help her breathe, no one to bring strong dark golden tea in tall glasses to comfort us, and no back yard to go to when the pain was too much.

Beatrice Laster

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The doormat was a Monet. Water lilies. The bell, an unobtrusive, crystalline chord of low bells. As the door opened, the country smell of the fresh sweet marjoram I was holding was overtaken by a penetrating whiff of designer eau de parfum. Chloe, impeccably dressed, coiffed and mannered, hugged me gently, and took the pot with the herbs as if it were a fragile Murano vase.

“Oh, God, you look gorgeous! Is this your own?” she asked, stressing every single word in the question but “is”.

“Our very own. The best you are ever going to get”, I answered, proudly. She placed the pot on a coffee table, next to some pictures, and waved towards the kitchen.

“Come keep me company. I’m almost done”

The very stylish kitchen had only one point in common with mine: an unruly, crammed refrigerator door that contrasted sharply with the child-unfriendly, streamlined furniture, and the fudge-fingerprint free sleek surfaces. Most of the refrigerator door was covered with pictures: summer resorts, winter resorts, season-proof expensive restaurants. In all of them, Chloe and -as my mother would have put it- “some nice young man she’d met”.

Chloe’s love life was like a crime file. Every picture of a former boyfriend had a list of misdemeanors to go with it, and you could tell how much she had loved him by the length of the list. For instance, there was this man whose name she could not recall however hard she tried, which surprised me because they had spent a long holiday together back in 1995. She had a picture of him, though. A good-looking man in his forties with a fatherly look in his eyes, and who had doted on her naively thinking that that was the way to her heart. Not that way. No way. Not Chloe’s heart. He stood grinning from his picture, like some twelve others scattered around bedroom, living room and kitchen. Chloe and her lovers held on to the fridge door by little magnets which had proved stronger than whatever kind of bond had drawn them together for some time. As usual, the conversation had quickly veered towards Chloe’s latest dates.

"It’s all in your name", I insisted." If you were called, say, Judy, things would have been easier" I argued.

"Yes" she said, whipping the cream with fury, "Like for Judy Garland…"

"That’s one Judy out of thousands.. .I bet there are not even a thousand Chloe’s, for god’s sake….it’s a name out of a perfume catalogue….’spicy…a dash of the oriental…..a scent for the lovers of the exotic…"

"Daniel", she interrupted, spitting out the name as if she were getting rid of a stubborn bit of hair on the tip of her tongue.

"What?” I asked, distracted from the glossy surface of the perfume ad on my imaginary page from Vogue.

"Daniel; that was his name. The guy in the picture", she clarified impatiently.

"Ah…Daniel in the Lion’s Den….!."

"The groundhog’s warren, rather…..I can’t figure out to this day how I managed to stomach that creep a whole solid month….I was younger, that is the only thing I can think of…", she almost mumbled, letting her shoulders fall with such weight that all of sudden she looked her real age.

Another pickle, I thought. Chloe called the men that came in between two passionate love affairs "pickles". She hated pickles and judiciously removed them from every single sandwich or burger she ate. I always asked whether it was not easier to order without them, but she just shrugged and dipped her long fingers into the mustard and ketchup to weed her food from unwanted tastes. She had become quite skilled at it, and did it in a very short time and with the minimum mess.

“A pickle!” I bingoed.

"Oh, yeah" she chuckled, some of her anger and/or sadness apparently beginning to fade." Very definitely a pickle. Homemade….Organic……Oh, my!" She was laughing now. Like with most people one has known for a long time, our laughter was almost synchronized, unconsciously, to make the most of the moment, to laugh louder and longer. When we got together like this, at her place on a weekend, I felt I was twenty again. These visits had become rarer now, and though Chloe seemed to enjoy them, I knew she did not feel the same thrill of anticipation. For me it was a party. I planned each visit carefully, made arrangements with at least three people so my children and husband would all be in places they would enjoy and not sitting at home between bouts of telephone -call compulsion. "Hello, love. Oh, just called to say everything was OK because I know you worry". The question that was generally the answer to this statement – “So, everything’s OK?” – always revealed some minor domestic catastrophe and it always started with a "Well…." or a "Oh, yes, but….” And so, after this delicate exchange of mutual guilts and complaints, my visit would be shortened by two or three hours, and the best wine-induced gossip would remain on the table, untouched. A few years ago, I made a point of this not happening again. Today Chris would pick the kids up from their friends’ at about seven, and they would have a late dinner which would hopefully leave very little free time between digestion and sleep. It took a lot of work, but now Chloe and I could drink and talk well into the night.

Chloe had somehow got it into her head that she had a duty to account for the slip in memory that had erased Mr. Blurr, or that had put him there in the first place. She was truly angry, an antiques collector that has been conned into buying a fake.

"Or maybe it was the beach. I swear it was chalk white, like those you only see in travel brochures. I later on learnt there had been 5 shark attacks the previous season."

“I was always suspicious of those deserted beaches that people find so attractive", I added, glad to find a reason for skipping the tropics that was not money.

“Honestly, I would have traded a few stitches for being spared that slobbering idiot…."

"Oh, you wouldn’t….” My eyes rested on a picture on the fridge door: a pleasant face, glasses, a cross between young Freud and Maximilian Schell. "By the way, do you remember Coen?” I took great care to pronounce it as I had been taught to: “Coon”.

"Oh, shit!” Chloe’s right index finger shot to her mouth.

"What’s the matter?"

Chloe answered, while sucking the blood on her finger ,"I -ut- I- inger!. Shtu-id ine-uh-el…”, then she went on, on a more intelligible note, “Stupid fruit….all that sweetness inside this prickly shell……Mother Nature! Some mother!” she sighed.

"Michelle calls pineapples the hedgehog fruit", I added, as if the thoughts of a five-year-old could lend any weight to her complaint.

In a rating of offences, Coen was on death row. He was a Dutch architect who had been working on a project for the UN when they met. He looked like a character out of a Woody Allen movie, down to the tweed jacket with suede elbow patches. What men looked like was always a big thing with Chloe. I had tried all my persuasion tactics with her but had failed. Stupid, she could stomach; short, bald, thin or fat would not get even to a first date.

"It seems I do remember him, doesn’t it?", Chloe examined the hand with the cut finger stretching her arm before her, like they do in jewelers’ commercials..

"Did I tell you he wrote to me after he married?” she added, putting the hand with the diamond ring under the tap water.

"Yes", I said, by now regretting having asked the question at all, and annoyed at myself for going on.

"But you never told me what he said”.

I had known her long enough to know that the four seconds that elapsed between question and answer were an evaluation of pros and cons, and a decision to evade a straight answer.

"Oh, the usual thing. I’m so sorry blah, blah, blah…"

Flora, the cat, squeezed between our legs with the sensuality of a belly dancer and the skill of a limbo pro, only the tips of her soft pearly grey hair touching us. Then, with a brief shudder of her stiff tail, she gave us a sideways goodbye-and-aren’t-you-sooo-pleased-I-came glance, and headed back to the bedroom. Chloe had at first rejected my offer of a kitten. She felt cat ownership was the ticket to spinsterhood. But this time my belief in the numerous virtues of pets had been strengthened by a recent litter of nine kittens that we were finding difficult to place, were starting to annoy the Lama patience of our ancient Labrador, and were just beginning to discover the ecstatic joy of clawing on fabric. All this had evidently made me persuasive enough for Chloe to take in Flora.

"Did you write back?” I kept asking, unable to help myself.

“A stupid postcard"

“Why stupid?"

"Oh, it was stupid to write in the first place…I lied. I told him I was happily married. No regrets. No hard feelings…” she shook her head, echoing the “nos".

I helped her lay the table. She had such annoyingly good taste and was so tidy. I had never been. I could blame it on the kids now, but when I lived on my own things were always in a mess too. "The Jumble", we used to call it. Chris and I have always had names for things, a form of appropriation, marking territory. Almost everything had a name, from my breasts to the computer, the car, his penis, the microwave -named “Satan” after it turned Bottom Round Roast into Beef Jerky- the old shaky, noisy drier we called "the tap dancer"…. Chloe handed me the place mats. They were wicker, with edges of a silky fabric in soft pastels. Ochres, yellows, dark, deep oranges. Piña colada on a tropical beach. They actually matched the food, and with Chloe one could be sure it was not by chance. She laid out a cheese platter and a variety of crackers and bread. We went back to the kitchen for the finishing touches of the salad.

"Tell me about this guy you are seeing"

"Guy makes him seem young. ‘Gentleman’ is more like it…”

"So?"

“He is fifty-two. A widower. A son and a daughter. The wife – you won’t believe this – died two years ago because the elevator in the building collapsed. And he doesn’t seem to have made it up. I suppose those things happen, too."

"So?"

“He calls almost every day. Wants me to go somewhere with him for a weekend. Buys me flowers. Sends me flowers, for god’s sake! With white cards and silk bows, like in Audrey Hepburn films….Well. I suppose that is what he grew up on….."

“It sounds all right to me….” I said, envious, having starred mostly in less chic scenarios.

"Yes, I suppose I find it moving too, all that care", she said, sounding between puzzled and sorry.

"So?"

"Oh, can you stop saying "So?” you make me nervous"

"OK., OK…….Then?"

"Oh, sex is all right. Sex is very good in fact. He was married for many years, you know…"

“What exactly is that supposed to mean?"

“Oh, well, he’s no so anxious about it, for one thing. And, well, he must have learnt things, how to be more patient. Well, you know…”

The idea of marriage made Chloe uneasy. It was untrodden territory. She felt there were some secrets about marriage that were only disclosed to the other initiates. Sex was different, people changed, entered some sort of Siamese twinhood. Still,. during these meetings together, our giggles and gossip took us back to our college years, and that made her forget my status as a married woman and she was more relaxed. Still, whenever something reminded her of my real "marital stature", as she used to call it, she would become shier, less confident.

“I think you idealize things a bit. He might have learnt, but he also might have forgotten. Time is not only the great leveler; it can be the great destroyer as well…” I added, feeling I sounded like Mrs. Forbes at College, rambling on about Andrew Marvell or John Donne. I needn’t have worried. Chloe was not listening. The fruit salad was ready. It was all whites, bones, greens and mango-oranges. No jarring red cherries or strawberries. She had planned the salad like Frank Lloyd Wright had planned the curves in the Guggenheim. We went back to the living room, where the cheese platter was starting to make its very French presence smelt.

“So… is the elderly gentleman the only one in sight at the moment…?”

“Yes. And it’s all American Airlines’s fault.”

“I beg your pardon?” I asked, while my mouth spurted bits of Brie propelled by my laugh all over the impeccably matched place mats. “What do you mean?”

“I mean there was this incredibly hot guy, must have been Mel Gibson’s twin brother, sitting two rows behind me. There he sat, flanked by these two mummies from Boca Raton, who kept talking to him, asking him to get them stuff, to place their pillows in the right angle, what have you, so I couldn’t get a word edgeways. I got up about ten times – he probably thought I was a bad case of urinary infection- and never got beyond the two second eye contact. Would it be sooo hard for the airlines to be a little more user-friendly? I mean, they knew I was traveling alone. Couldn’t they possibly say something like: Madam, we know you are traveling alone, so we’ll seat you next to this young gentleman…Is it too much to ask?” And in spite of her tongue-in-cheek smile and rolled up eyes, I was sure she meant it.

Dinner was over and we were sprawled in her huge empty sofas. We each had one all to ourselves. Chloe, Flora and me. My champagne glass had been refilled five times, and I was beginning to dread the idea of the drive back home.

“I think I am ready for coffee”, I said. My head was swirling with names and places, as if I had been watching five simultaneous movies.

“So, how’s the herb garden going “. The Herb Garden was now a sizable, growing business. Our one shop had grown into six, exceeding all our -and our creditors’- expectations.

“Swell, really, so much better than we expected”

“If all your produce is like that sweet marjoram you brought, I can understand how that happened. Chris must be thrilled.”

“He is. We risked so much. Mortgages, loans, but it is all working out.” Worries about mortgages and loans were probably as alien to Chloe as diapers and PTA meetings. She had joined a top law firm shortly after College and had never known anything but financial bliss. As she used to say, “I save lavishly, and spend a little”. I shivered to think how much she saved.

She poured the coffee into two elegant black cups. She was wearing a black dress, and I had this flash of Morticia Adams in her usual perfect hostess role.

“You should bring one of the kids over next time”, she lied.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about”, I replied through the wine in great earnest.

“Oh, come on. How old is Bea now, twelve? I’m sure she’s quite a lady…”

“She is, most of the time, but I can assure you she is the only one you ever want around here” I said, conjuring up Giovanni’s endemically grubby hands and his relentless, Formula 1, crawling.

“I don’t know how you can handle it all: the business, the kids, Chris…”

“I don’t really know either, it just happens; I must admit it feels like too much, at times”

“I’ m sure. Even one tenth of what you do would be totally beyond me”

“Oh, come on, you’ve always been a workaholic yourself”

“Yes, but it is different. I still have a lot of time for myself, I…” Chloe paused, the conversation having taken the turn it often took when we had drunk enough and were a little bolder. A turn that was seldom pursued.

“You mean don’t do so much for others?”

“No, no, no. That makes it sound so selfish. It’s that a lot of the work one has to do around the house and for kids seems somehow so….so …ephemeral…” she said, proud to have found a word whose sophistication lessened its aggressiveness. Flora stretched, gave us a tired look with half-shut eyes and resettled, paws huddled under her breast.

“Well, yes, but that is not the work that counts”

“I know, but doesn’t it take up an awful amount of time?”

“Yes, yes, it does, but it is like the time you spend on planes, it comes with the job…” I said, happy to have found a satisfactory reply, not knowing exactly what I was trying to get even about.

“I can still work on planes, though”, reflected Chloe. Could I work while changing diapers, could I think during the mad supermarket raids? How often was it that I felt I was waking up from a trance, my mind numbed by the adrenaline rush of what had to be done, or what I suddenly remembered I had forgotten?

“No, I just could not have kids”, she said with conviction. “I would be constantly blaming me or them. I may have doubts about other decisions I have taken, but that is definitely one I feel sooo happy to have made!”

I refilled my coffee cup. I was beginning to run out of words to express what I felt. I did not want it to sound like the spiteful revenge of a homemaker, so I settled for the trite.

“I guess we are both happy with our choices, then. Let’s toast to our wonderful, different lives then..!” I said, raising my coffee cup and wondering at the word “choices”.

“..And to Signor Right!”

“Senior Right, I should say! And to Martin, I’m sorry …Chris!” she did not even pretend to look embarrassed at the mistake. Martin had been a College boyfriend I had given up for Chris. Chloe, though she would never say it, felt I had made the wrong choice. Martin was now a painter, selling pretty well. One of his pictures hung in Chloe’s study: Perfect Sphere with holes, which looked like a cross between a gruyere and a golf ball. Chloe was a little more appreciative, but often spoke about it as one of her “investments”, which somehow obscured her aesthetic sensitivity for the piece. The coffee was working its usual Caribbean magic, and I was feeling much less dizzy. We said the usual hug-ridden goodbyes and I left.

The image the lift mirror gave me back as I stepped in surprised me. I seldom dressed this elegantly. I had forgotten I was also wearing a black dress. The three pregnancies had been quite merciful on my tummy, and the wonder bra lived up to every single syllable of its name. I had felt so inadequate all evening, and now I could not understand why. Was it just that I had overdressed?

My very American SUV stood out from the sea of foreign makes. I stepped into a controlled atmosphere of sour milk and stale fries. One of my stilettos gave a can of fruit punch a powerful kick, and sent it to the Corner Where Everything Drifted, to be later joined by the punishing shoes themselves. It was a clear, beautiful night, and the streets were relatively quiet. During the drive my mind kept going over snippets of dialogue. The odors got milder and then disappeared. I was actually able to get whiffs of my own perfume. When I was approaching home I started wondering whether Chris and the older kids would be still awake. I could have bet that they had ordered junk food and refrozen what I had left for them. The most likely sight would be Chris asleep on the sofa, Michelle’s matted hair against his damp, warm cheek, their mouths slightly opened, slightly dribbling. Ulysses, our lab, asleep on the greasy pizza box, would raise its lazy head, reassured to see the feeder was back, and give a cursory wag of his tail only to go back to sleep. I turned off the avenue into our community. The barrier rose and dropped. I had had too much coffee; I would have trouble getting to sleep and would regret it in the morning. As I turned the corner, the car lights flashed briefly on the big blue sign on the right. The golden letters shone brightly against the velvety blue background: Welcome Home.

Beatrice Laster

Share This Tags: age, Fiction, hair, mirror, strength, woman

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His vision of it was a palimpsest of childhood and literary memories. To me, it was totally new at a time when newness was always moving, having reached an age when more had happened than was awaiting. He remembered distant holidays, and the ground seething with tiny crabs, a moving sand of prickly pre-historic creatures. He could also remember a writer’s tale of a gaucho whose horse’s hooves had sunk in the porous, slimy soil of the cangrejales. Unable to free itself or being freed by its rider, the horse had eventually been eaten up by the scavenging troops before its impotent, heartbroken owner.

This was surely an exaggeration, or just an account from the days when the cangrejales had covered a larger area. Now, in spite of the well-meaning greens that had fought to turn the place into a reserve, the crab tenements had been dramatically reduced in size and depth, and we were forced to give a few turns before we were able to find a stretch of beach with any sign of the pincered dwellers. Our son was the first to spot them, and his high pitched cry was lost in the screech of my sudden push on the brakes..

We stepped out onto a slithery carpet crisscrossed with the tripod prints of seagulls’ feet. I could see no crabs. I looked harder and tried my childhood trick of forcing my sight out of focus, and then, out of the buff-colored floor, came a slight movement. They were all over the place. Not as many, though, as had crammed Paul’s memory, but they were there all right. I picked up a tiny violinist and held it out on the palm of my hand for my son to see. I was proud of my family’s admiration for this skill of mine, holding frogs, lizards and even spiders without fear. An occasional heroine to dad’s regular hero. The tiny thing in my hand managed to look powerful, dangerous, and angry. Mark was thrilled. I was, as I usually am in close encounters with nature, overwhelmed and slightly at a loss. For all my love of animals, I remain essentially an indoor person, always an intruder, a trespasser outside. Paul was disappointed in me and in his memories. We both had failed to live up to the expected emotions. To me, at least, there was the benefit – shall I call it pleasure?- of clicking in one more piece of the puzzle of my husband’s past. One more item ticked off the list. The so often told story of crab country now had pictures to go with it.

-Do you think this is all that’s left, this stretch of beach?

I tried my usual bit of psychology on childhood memories, but he would not be persuaded. That could not be place. Either it was the wrong one or the real one had been destroyed, but it was definitely not his mind playing tricks.

After much scanning of horizons we concluded crab country had gone under some bulldozer come to avenge the sunken horse, and started driving away from the beach down the narrow dirt road that lead out of the cangrejales. Suddenly Mark’s shrill voice rang out again in the deserted countryside like a banshee’s:

-Look, dad, look! There they are!

He was pointing to a place to the right of the track to what looked at first sight like a small lagoon. We stopped the car, got out and walked down a rather steep slope onto yet more slimy ground. But this time it was the real thing. There were a myriad caves with creatures coming out and disappearing into holes. I tried to step gently to avoid them, but it seemed impossible. There must have been layers and layers of the tiny caves and my feet kept sinking in the spongy floor, deeper each time. The slimy sand caked around my shoes in thick lumps turning them heavier each second. Pulling my feet out became harder each time. They were released with effort to an unpleasant plopping sound like that of a pricked, half-deflated balloon’s. There was also the fear of the imminent cracking sound of a crab being killed or maimed in one of their million underground bubbles. But that did not happen, just the yielding sand. Paul and Mark were way ahead, laughing. Paul almost giggling in the delight of reassurance, of a dream come true; an instant confirmation of all the other unredeemed echoes of his past. They went on laughing, asking, explaining, understanding. Then Paul turned his head to see how I was doing. I was ankle deep in the voracious mud, struggling before my next step. Paul shouted to me from a smile:

-See what I meant, about the horse?

I decided I would be going no further, and started back towards the car. Although of course I knew I was not going to sink any deeper, for a split second I thought I would not make it. I plodded on, chuckling at my irrational fears, and eventually emerging with shoes turned fetters, caked in a muddy sand that would not come off with shaking. I opened the trunk, dumped my shoes in, and got barefoot into the car. I eased my feet on the plushy floor and looked at my wriggling toes, free from the moving sands. I had never been barefoot in the car before, and I liked it. I tried to focus all my attention on that feeling, trying to forget how stupidly terrified I had been. A bluebottle buzzed mockingly, obscenely, outside my window, as if looking in. I pushed a button to close out the heat and the insect, and turned on the air-conditioning.

Half an hour later, I saw the two proud, satisfied explorers sauntering back in the rearview mirror, a sense of achievement around them like a halo.

-Wasn’t it just ggrrreat, mum?

I smiled, but was too tired and confused to answer, and the question was surprisingly not repeated. A response was not required for no confirmation was necessary. It was pure rhetoric. It had been great, whatever I could possibly have to say.

Beatrice Laster

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I have just finished reading a book I´d been meaning to read for some time and somehow never came round to reading: Healthy Aging, by Andrew Weil, M.D. Among many, many, many other very interesting things, he says very plainly that he believes people are afraid of aging because they are afraid of facing the idea of dying. He refuses to address the concept of “anti-aging”, focusing instead on “healthy aging”. What he proposes is what I believe to be the essence of happiness as we age: an acceptance of the fact that we are aging and will eventually die, a physical and spiritual/ emotional life that will be conducive to healthy aging, and the constant exercise of our minds through learning and projects. Dr. Weil’s is a professional, sensible, useful, and realistic approach to aging in an active, healthy and productive way.

Going back to gray hair, here are some other thoughts. If you look at pictures of women who wear their gray, white or graying hair with elegance and care, you have to admit that the only thing that there is not to like about it, if that bothers you, is that it shows a woman’s age. It is elegant, shiny if kept well, has volume, can be worn in a variety of styles, with a variety of accessories to personalize and enhance it.

So, no, it is definitely not about beauty, it is about something else. If human beings were born with white hair which darkened as we grew older, most people would be crazy about dying their hair gray or white. It is not about the color, it is about what it stands for.

Something else that I believe might bother people about gray and white is that they might feel it detracts from their identity. If you’ve always seen yourself as a “brunette” or a “blonde” or a “red-head”, you may feel gray and white will take you into some homogenized “realm of the graying women”, where we are all alike, and where white hair becomes some sort of identity-sucking leveler of some kind.

Not really. Yes, it tells people you are not twenty years younger than you are (but then, who is fooled by hair-dye, really? What about hands, neck, your children’s age, the things you talk about, the words you use….age is much more pervasive that just looks!), but, no, it does not rob you of your identity. For one, all gray and white hair is different in tone and texture. If to that you add a cut and your own choice of accessories or hairdo, you can be as personal with your white hair as you were with your previous color.

I’ve heard this so many times: “I don’t mind aging, really, it’s just that I want to look as well as I can”. Why does “well” and “better” always mean “younger”? Does this mean that women who do not dye their hair do not want “to look as well as they can”? However you look at it, what drives everyone to hair-dye and surgery is the fear to age. Which is not at all surprising, by the way, just pick up a women’s magazine or watch the ads on TV. For an in- depth analysis of the social pressures to look young, I refer you to the book I mentioned in my last post, Going Gray , which does nothing but confirm (with a couple of surprising exceptions that clarify misconceptions) what we all know from experience: our society does not welcome the “not young”, or rather, the “not young-looking”.

Now, who if not the baby boomers, who changed so much for the generations that came after them, will be able to change this for our daughters and grand-daughters, sons and grandsons? Who, if not we, the baby boomers, can start the wave that will slowly gain momentum against the cosmetic giants?

Let that be our project, our version of serum and Botox and anti-aging creams, let that be what makes us age beautifully, gracefully and joyfully.

For a nice perspective on white hair visit:

http://www.care2.com/greenliving/real-beauty-gray-hair.html

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