A few days back, because I wasn’t feeling well, I called a woman I have known since high school. She has had continuing health problems, which makes her akin to medical dictionary. As we have lived in different states and have taken on good and bad jobs and have each married our own Mr. Wrong, we always have a great deal to say to each other.
Our conversations resemble throwing the shuttle through the webs we lined on the looms of our lives. We go back and forth, jumping from music to politics, complaining about our yards, mine overgrown because the mower broke and hers trimmed only in the front because she lacks the stamina to do both sides of the house. Our subject changed when she mentioned having finally found a catalpa tree, a species which she admired for years. Because I’ve been fighting the forest they are planting on my property, I said nothing. After all, she did say she has wanted one for years.
After we talk about our stomachs and joints, headaches and heat, we switch to our mistakes. Neither of us married men we loved. I think fate intervened or that we had met these men too early in our lives, before we created sufficient faith in ourselves.
The next day, while in the Co-op, I bought a frozen juice pop and took it off to the side where tables are available for customers to eat in. I noticed a woman was waiving at me, a woman I have known for 15 years. Our relationship is both shorter than my relationship with my high school friend, nor is it as intimate. However, both relationships shared time in which we saw each other frequently, broken by months without a call or a brief passing at the Co-op. I was particularly glad to see her today because, earlier, I saw a woman who is her double. Had she not been dressed in garments my friend would never wear, colored black and white, and, not in my friend’s oranges and teals, I would have taken this woman to be my friend.
She, too, was particularly happy to see a familiar face because her best friend in the tiny village where she lives, died a few days before. It was the second death of someone she knew as a neighbor, someone to share the occasional light conversation with, this year.
Both women are above average in intelligence and yet none of us made an indelible mark on the world. One took the business course and later became an accountant, one became a social worker and one wasted four years in pre-law because her parents objected to her desire to become an archaeologist. We all face criticism from people we know for living alone in a house. One likes the privacy of closing her door on the world, one loves the views from her hilltop and one recently began to see the house as a mistake but knows she would hate living in an apartment building where her door would open upon a colorless corridor.
What we have most in common is how much we hate old age, with distended tummies and lines above our lips. We hate the ebbing of our strength. We hate the pains of pinched nerves and stiff joints. We hate global warming and how it exhausts us. We hate that nouns flee from us when we are trying to make ourselves heard. We hate skipping a movie because even the senior discount is insufficient. If we do feel we can afford the show, we sigh inwardly and wish we had a companion to hold hands with. We wish there was some reason to wear a pretty dress when we remember the man who said he loved the green velvet or the pale linen or the red sweater when we sat next to him. But we feel alarmed when we wake after having seen his face and his runner’s stride in a dream.
Most of all, we are frightened by the decay around us and we wonder when will the clock stop ticking.
Susan Wozniak has been a caseworker, a college professor and journalist. She is a mother and grandmother.