Seventy Is the New Sixty-Nine

Embracing Age, Madness and Misanthropy.

​"...That’s all.  Out of a lifetime, a few words, a few pictures
      and everything you have lost is lurking there in the dark, poised to strike."
From  Louis Jenkins' poem, It Was a Snake

                                  
       Marlea Evans:  Introducing myself to readers with an eclectic group of true stories, some written in the 1990’s, some in a poetic style, and some brand new in essay mode, Seventy is the New Sixty Nine stands simply for the fact that I can no longer take twenty years off of my age and get away with it.  As for the subtitle, I understand, even being smart-assed or ironic about it, why would anyone want to embrace age, madness and misanthropy?  An antidote to positive thinking? If you are tired like I am of "follow your dream," and "you can be anything," proliferating the airwaves like religious mantras, and you'd like to read about a person's long work of finding out what that really means, then, "I'm your man."

         Of AGE, I have no choice. Here I am, over seventy, a little Botox, a smidgen of Juviderm and even the strength of my young attitude is just not cutting it anymore. I don’t look a day over sixty-nine. I am deluded sometimes, like one of my favorite New Yorker cartoons: a large glass of hot fudge sundae looks in the mirror and sees a svelte, fresh green-topped carrot.

         Of MADNESS, the opposite of sanity (whatever that is), I’ve lingered around the edges of it since I was a teen, suffering what I call metabolic depression, scattered thinking, now known as ADD, running from one thing to another; hospitalized for two weeks in my late 20’s, I've been wrestling the demon since. To be human is to be aware, unable to understand what that awareness means, and therefore, to be mad.

         On MISANTHROPY: There are many definitions of it, starting with the Greeks, but most commonly it means to despise mankind, like Moliere's Misanthrope, Alceste, because it simply does not live up to your moral expectations. I experience it as a hatred of crowds, of noise, of group think and group ideologies that push you to act and feel as they do. And I love spending time alone. Here is a quote on misanthropy from Wikipedia: “It should be added that misanthropy does not necessarily equate with an inhumane attitude towards humanity. Schopenhauer concluded, in fact, that ethical treatment of others was the best attitude, for we are all fellow sufferers and all part of the same will-to-live.” I embrace misanthropy on that basis. 
                                                                                                     ​___________________________
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​Seven memoir pieces are published below. Meanwhile, the seven stories can be  found by scrolling down, one after the other.    KEEP SCROLLING DOWN TO READ STORIES:

                                                             Trio -  Farm Funeral  -  In Training -  Boom and Gloom                                                      
                                                             Death is the New Prom  -  Body Bags  -  Horoscope Rag

Trio

© 2003 marlea evans

1952
            The farmhouse, vintage 1902, is freshly painted white with white trim. A wrap-around porch has been enclosed to give the family a generosity of space. To look through a plate glass window from outside is to see zebra-striped climbing ivy divide the living room from the den, an entry pair of planters, like boxed messages from the jungle. Rounded mound of the old storm cellar rises outside the back kitchen door; it is covered in grass, the boy and girl’s favorite place to play. Under the grass, lies the dug out cellar, protection in a tornado, where lines of glass put-up vegetables glow in the candlelight, and where botulism poisoning comes up as a topic of conversation. Are the jars safe, were they sealed properly, an entire family found dead south of Wilbur.  Beyond the cellar is the gate to the slanted chicken house of egg-finding fun, and on down a crusty path is the big red barn with white trim. From the hayloft, the girl and boy hide from chores to watch their father work on the family garden. He looks like an alien presence in his overalls pumping DDT in clouds of grey mist on the vegetables. The market in town has everything they need. He is superintendent of the schools, why does he hoe and plant? Pastures of fescue and rye dominate both sides of the house delineated by whitewash wooden fences, and at the driveway entrance, large painted wagon wheels with iron spokes give artistic finish to the perception that this spread is a "gentleman’s farm." Cows and steers all the same brown and white Holstein are in the barn, down dozing in the darkness like mounds of irregular stone.

             The girl and boy’s faces are smashed into pillows in their back bedrooms at four am in the morning, quiet, breathing in and out the verdant, blossoming spring air of the plains.  Not too hot, not too cold, but just right.  A scream rings out from the girl’s bedroom—father and mother clamber out of bed in alarm. Brother groans and turns over, grumbling to no one: she’s having that nightmare again. The girl had told Brother what the dream was like—it was the end of the world. Two massive orange planets move overhead, collide and burst into red flames hurtling toward earth. From his advanced age, two years older, Brother had explained to her that she was seeing Mars or perhaps the moon colliding with an asteroid, exploding and enveloping the earth in fiery orange flames. It was a scenario, he’d told her with eleven-year-old certitude, which was very likely to happen someday.

            Shaking and crying into her mother’s chest, the girl burrows deeper, choking with fear. Mother and Father look at each other, ashamed and concerned; what’s wrong with her? Is it my fault? Is she ill? Is there poison in the well water? What will people think? Will she be normal? Why is she always dreaming of the end of the world?  

                                                                      
1977           
            Mother speaks, her mouth is moving, but nobody hears:  
            "I’m dying. I know that. It’s a hospital, I can hardly breathe, I’ve been sick a long time. Who is the girl, what is she doing? Taping something to the wall, a photograph, a painting, it’s one of those impressionist things. She’s sticking it to the wall so I can look at it. Blues, greens…some mauve. A good one, not one of those badly done goopy Parisian street scenes that everybody just loves. Maybe Monet? Where did she get that idea, to tape up a print on the wall of the dying—from some morning show on TV? Helpful hints from Heloise, home beautification for the walking dead? My homes were always attractive. I could have been an artist, but a woman’s got to get married, you know. In my time, you got married! That girl is slender, but she’s not that young, thirty something. She looks like Father—of course, she’s his daughter. Oh. Good grief.

            "Why is she still alive and I am dying? I’m not yet seventy years old and I don’t want to die! It’s she who should be hightailing it off the planet; she never believed in living a life, always waking in the night afraid of orange planets exploding over her head, the world ending, always leaving one perfectly good life for another questionable life, as if sticking to a job or a man or a city would give you the plague. In Philadelphia, we saw her in that dreadful sad play by some English witty person. Father fell asleep; I loved the language, crisp and learned.  But she doesn’t have what it takes to be a movie star on TV. You are born with that, and she is an inner girl, a closed door.  She never had a decent apartment in the city of brotherly love, and now she’s in New York. The first place was on Park Avenue with some lovely Hispanic guy, yes, Raul. Father called him Rawl; he came out here where the winds sweep down the plains, and sang to me with his guitar. “Good Night Irene,” he sang and wept. I didn’t cry, I was all cried out. I admit it, I was jealous of her then, that she had loved different men with different skins.

            "But then she left him. No! It must be that he left her because men leave women who don’t want anything from them, don’t demand children and homes and bank accounts; men don’t want women who only want to be loved. A woman in a kind of trance.  Now I hear she’s in some five-floor walk up dating a man too young for her and she’s poor, like she wasn’t raised to have nice houses, well-appointed rooms with a bit of flair. Freedom, she says. All she wants is to be free, but doesn’t she know it’s just nothing left to lose—even I know what Janice Joplin taught us before she overdosed.  Is it my fault my daughter never believed in the world? We made navigating it too easy for her, cleaned it up, gave it pretty fences and gardens, kept out the polio germ, paid for her college. She didn’t have to work, and we kept her from the grimy business of killing. Doesn’t she know that life is killing, chickens or cows to eat, mortal enemies like Hitler. You’ve got to kill the competition. We gave her cars, now all she can afford is public transportation. Now she stands over me, a tragic mask of a face, waiting to be told how pretty that is on the wall, that splattering of paint from some Monet living on a placid pond outside of Versailles. She thinks it will make the medicine go down. Dead soon. Me. What if she is poisoning me? She is poisoning me. Are you poisoning me? Help. Help. You are poisoning me!"


2010
            I wake up with a start, a little spit in the corner of my mouth, on the couch, in the middle of another end-of-the-world dream—the Hollywood version. The smell of three cigarettes I smoked seep into my nose. I have no desire to get up and brush my teeth. There is something comforting in the garlic from supper and nicotine hanging on in my mouth.  I don’t want to move and go to bed. Bill snores. He is warm, though, and the night is cold. I’ll throw my leg over him, he’ll groan, oh no, I’ll laugh and stay until my body temperature reaches his.  But, I don’t move from the couch.  I want to stay here in this twilight of gods and man and sleep, because in this in-between mind, I can almost comprehend the hypothesis that I might be a hologram on the rim of a black hole, that replicates of me live in alternate universes, that I swim in dark matter, that every stroke of my arm, every flight of a butterfly, the kind and unkind movements I make disturb and ripple out into the massive invisible ocean of the universe.

            I am the same age now as she was when she died. Mother. Looks like I’ll make it to seventy, whether I like it or not. She disapproved of all my actions and felt that they were her fault at the same time. But I still feel like a girl, the one who witnessed a strange funeral in red-dirt country, of a cousin who died in a fire. I’m a woman who never raised a child, only loved the men she loved and finally found a man who only wants to be loved.  I’ve written closets full of pages, boxes full of words, but I can never find the story I am looking for. When the spaceship crashed into the eye of the Man in the Moon in Melies’s early silent movie, 67 years later our spaceships landed on the craters of the moon.  Jules Verne and his lunar modules, solar sails, Spock and Captain Kirk and their cell phones and laser beams—all of it happened. The movie on our already-out-of-date flat screen Blue Ray HD, is telling us to get ready, the world will be ending, but if you can fly planes through crumbling skyscrapers and over massive erupting volcanoes, and are a movie star, you can save your family. 

            Was it her fault that I dreamed of the end of the world? Mother? At the end, she believed I was poisoning her. It was her failing kidneys, the handsome young doctor told me, that made her look at me with eyes wide in horror and claim that I was killing her.
​
              The world is essentially toxic, isn't it, and wonderful and marvelous to behold in all of its creation, but much too beautiful and poisonous to last forever.

~~~

Farm Funeral
© 2008 marlea evans
​

           I was nine when Mother’s brother’s child died in a house fire. The child was a boy, one of a set of twins, and when one side of the farmhouse burned down, only one of the infants was saved. They were not even a year old. Father drove the new Chevrolet deep, deep, deeper into the western Oklahoma countryside to where furrows of dry red dirt turned to dust, where aging brown barns and rusty windmills leaned against the sky.
            “Don’t be surprised,” Mother said. “My brother Jim is very poor.”
             “Are we rich?” I asked.
              Father laughed. The way he had of laughing, covering the side of his mouth. He was a high school superintendent and Mother the English teacher, and they were relatively well off for the times. Not land rich, not money rich, but educators paid well for their services, with health insurance and a lot of respect. That was a long time ago.
​                 In the distance we saw a sagging wooden windmill that turned listlessly in the sun. Mother began to speak quietly: “The barn opposed across the way/ That would have joined the house in flame/ Had it been the will of the wind, was left/To bear forsaken the place's name.”  
                  “What was that you said, Mama,” asked Father.
                    I looked at her for an answer, but she looked away without helping me understand. She said, “Robert Frost” in an irritated way, like I should know it was a poem of Robert Frost. Knots in my stomach at the sight of her mouth struggling to keep away tears kept me from saying anything else.
  A bumpy driveway shook me from the spell of Mother’s blue and distant eyes. All that I had been told—none of it prepared me for the sight of the ramshackle house, one side burned, the other browning. An old covered porch, small, dirty, smelling of empty milk cans and ancient butter churns assaulted my senses. Tacky linoleum was kicked up and left to curl.  Outside, the well had a pump with a faucet attached. It was the first place Brother and I ran; it was fun to prime its huge handle and let the water flow. We were splashing it all over the yard and our clothes when mother shushed us up, pulled us to stand still.
                 Uncle Jim and two other uncles appeared from around the front of the house. They solemnly carried out a small white coffin and set it down on a table facing west, where the sun would set in an hour. Aunt Lilly wept as if her heart would turn to ash as bitter and burnt as the house. My stomach felt punched. It hurt me to look. The coffin was open with a white net covering the baby’s body inside.  Flies buzzed and bumped against the net, eager to reach the dead un-embalmed boy. The sound of my aunts weeping and the soured face of Uncle Jim touching the white coffin undid me. Another uncle swatted half-heartedly at the insects with a paper church fan, the blonde Jesus on one side and a grain elevator ad on the other.
                 Who are these people? I felt sorrow and repulsion at the same time. I had seen uncle Jim and aunt Lilly at reunions; they were sweet silent presences, always with a baby on the breast or knee. Three of Mother’s brothers still lived on farms, but the houses were painted white with large porches, tire swings in the trees and barns full of hay. This place was a ruin. Tears welled in Mother’s eyes and something deeper inside the blue of them looked sad for her and for the places she had come from, for the dead she missed or the departed she hated. I was not sure. Jim and Lilly were quiet, silent in a scary way so that it seemed painful for them to utter a word. Later, I watched Father step on that silence with his garrulous, can-do personality, trying to break through the gray emotional weather as cloudy as the net over the boy’s body:
                “How ‘bout those Sooners?” he said, then wished that he hadn’t, and shuffled his feet in the dirt.  No answer came. Uncle Jim didn’t give a good god damn about the university football team.
                   Later in the car, Mother broke the awful quiet:  “Doesn’t matter. They worked as hard as everybody else. They wanted a big farm, they wanted to grow the best, the cotton or the wheat; they wanted to give their kids nice things.  Not their fault.  It was poor land.  It’s just that…nothing would grow.”  I felt I was learning that life was not under your control, it came to you from out of the earth, it came to you sweet or it came to you with the bitter root.  It came to you with weather and the content of the soil, and good luck would come to you or it would not.  It was no use wanting things. 

~~~

​

In Training
© 1991 marlea evans

         I cried, I swooned and I begged for it — the training bra.  I knew it was nothing but an ugly swath of wide white cotton, but I wanted it. When I heard Mother say, "You don't need a training bra, you’re just a baby," I kicked my heels into the floor having a tantrum.  The training bra may have been nothing but flat cotton circles with a hook in the back, but to me it promised an alluring future of satins, bones and stays, photos I saw in fashion magazines and something else I could not name. It was a feeling like puffed-up bread in the oven, hot and yeasty, a yearning.  Or so I felt, a ten-year old girl whose baby chest had ached and swelled without warning. 

         One Saturday morning Mother and I walked hand in hand from the scrub-oak, red-dirt acreage down to the highway to catch a bus to Oklahoma City.  Father had driven the car, and Brother was behind the wheel of the pickup. They were headed to a 4-H competition with Sir Maxwell, our stud Angus bull, bound and braced in the back, straps holding him upright and safe. 

         "Please sit down, Miss," the bus driver told me twice. I grinned at the lanky man in a Greyhound cap the way I'd seen Mother spread a smile many times to get her way. I sat and stood again, peering forward through the glass at ordinary things transformed by the sun into enchanted signposts of my future as woman in a bra.  I pointed at ordered rows of summer cotton, standing cattle, ragged outskirts of the City, the dome-less Capitol Building where an oil well pumped, chug-a-chug, overlooking what mother called the "colored slums."    
    
         "Hope and Twenty Third!" The bus driver swung open the door and looked sorry to see the black-haired, blue-eyed woman and her daughter get out.  I imitated Mother's adult stride towards the pink neon rose on a green plaster stem that beckoned from Rosy's Lingerie.  Rosy herself cracked open the portal with a whoosh, letting out exotic perfume mixed with odors of rubber latex.  I grabbed Mother's hand.  She said hello to Rosy then nudged me, "Say hello, Linda Glen. I guess we want a training bra?” In one, quick, calculating glance, Rosy withered my grown-up pose; she did not hide her disappointment that her wares would be displayed to a flat chested girl in a Peter Pan blouse. She groaned audibly as she bent over, straining against her tight black dress and the grip of the panty girdle underneath. 
"Triple A," she drawled in a smoky voice, and clawed contents of the bottom drawer to dig out the smallest size.  She sighed heavily and pointed across the store to a pair of pink curtains with a dark slit in the middle.
                                                                                                    ​~
         "The horse is in the bridle, la dee dah," Mother sang out, snapping the hooks, and adjusting the straps. Under the painted-pink bulb of the dressing room, only the bra white reflected back to me in the mirror; the rest of me broke up like a movie when the projector is breaking down.  Mother had been taking me with her to the picture shows since I was a baby, where I'd stare open-mouthed at black-and-white movie stars, women who wore tough suits, strode, smoked, sassed and told everybody what to do. But in their bedrooms, pulling off the mannish suits, they revealed silken underwear, soft, free, loose and easy. Getting old enough to go to new movies with my girlfriends, I noticed the underwear was different, and the women had changed too. I stuck out my chest to imitate the modern glamour girls who walked with their knees together, puckered their lips, and wore dresses so tight they squealed and never knew what to say or to think. Their brassieres pointed out straight as if they were loaded and aimed at the world like weapons.

         "Linda Glen?" At the sound of Mother's voice calling me, the boyish slightness of me reappeared in the mirror.  I looked up at her, needing an assessment, her approval.  She was staring at me funny, eyes reddened, lips pulled back like she was about to snicker.

         "Don't laugh at me!"

          "You're just a little baby," she said.

          "What if they don't grow?" I begged her to tell me, "or what if they get too big like a pair of water balloons?"

          The worried crease on either side of her nose seemed deeper, and I remembered how the night before she had pulled up her blouse, unhooked her huge, armored bra and rubbed sore red lines imprinted in her skin. "What's hurting you, Mother," Father had asked her, then turned on the TV and didn't wait for an answer.

         Suddenly Rosy pushed herself inside the pink curtains, a sneer on the slash of her red mouth, like the evil queen in Snow White, and traced a chilling line across my back with her blood-red nails. "Perrfect fit," she growled.

           I jerked the training bra over my head, threw it against the curtains and pulled on my Peter Pan blouse. "I'm not going to have breasts," I screamed.  Running for the outside door I heard Mother laugh out loud, humiliating me with her falling musical cadence:
​
         "But you will have breasts, Linda Glen, and the sun will rise, and summer will end, and old folks will die, and you will wear bras for the rest of your life!" 
                                                                                                    ​~
          On the bus stop bench, a pale woman with pencil-thin eyebrows and short red hair sat hunched over a magazine.  I gaped open-mouthed at her breasts that pointed through her crimped yellow blouse encased in striated cotton cones.  Standing beside the bench, a giantess of a Negro lady waited for the bus, though there was plenty of room to sit down next to the redhead.  Weary looking, holding heavy bags, the black woman forced herself erect. A single monumental mound of breast splayed and parted her green buttons; a bra not generous enough bound her in.  I looked at her and pointed down at the half-empty bench. The redhead sat up quickly and frowned. The black lady pretended not to see.

           I flopped down beside redhead, swung my legs back and forth, and ran my hands over the tiny swellings under my shirt trying to push them back in.  Redhead was flipping through the pages of Life Magazine. I scrunched in close and peeked at a photo of Mamie Eisenhower with her chest puffed up in the bodice of a beaded gown.  Redhead gathered herself up tall, snapped the magazine shut and checked her watch.  I slithered away from her and stared all the way back up to Giant Lady's brown moon face.  She winked.

         Mother rushed out of the store. "Here you are, Skeezex, she said with a laugh."  She discretely pointed to a rose-colored bag. "You may want it tomorrow."

         "Don't call me Skeezex," I said, chewing on a fingernail, but secretly liked the childish nickname.  Mother slapped my hand away from my mouth and prepared to sit next to me on the bench when she saw Giant Lady standing.  "Oh...wouldn't you...like to sit down?"  Mother spoke much too carefully to the black lady, like you would to a child.  "No, Ma'am," Giant Lady answered and stood in mountainous resignation, except for her gaze that turned on Mother and froze. The rich honey of her voice was not a match for the chill in her eyes: "No, Ma'am," she repeated. "Thank you Ma'am. You sit down Ma'am."   Redhead, who had started up ready to flee, flicked us a nasty glare and shimmied back to resume her skimming through Life.  Unspoken, spring-loaded messages ricocheted around the women, like Ouija Board letters on a stormy night.  "What's the matter?" I asked.  Mother picked at her dress and said, "Hush up now."  Redhead tapped her foot like the beat of a drum. Giant Lady hummed a hymn tune with her lips pressed tight.

               Tears welled up in my eyes. I wanted to go back.  Past the rows of summer cotton, past the farmland fresh with fescue and rye, back to the whitewashed fence with wagon wheels at the entrance to our acreage, back to the pasture and Chicken Dog and the barn full of cats. Only yesterday afternoon I'd thrown off all my clothes, laid down in Sugar Creek and sang: "Bongo Bongo Bongo, I don't want to leave the Congo."  Tears splattered down on my shorts.  I was too old to treat like a baby, but Mother pulled me on her lap and rocked me back and forth.  I peeked inside the rose-colored bag. There it lay, coiled like a white snake.  Mucus streamed from my nose. Mother was searching through her purse for a Kleenex when redhead jumped up, disgusted, her pointy tetons sharp and relentless, and tottered on high heels ten feet away to stand in front of a shiny new chain store with an orange plastic marquee.  Giant Lady looked both ways and daintily slid onto the edge of the bench, as if she might have to jump up quickly. She reached into her pocket and handed me a clean, ironed embroidered handkerchief. 

         "Thank you!"  Mother spoke too loud again, as if the lady might be deaf. 

           Giant Lady gave Mother a long look, as if deciding whether to make some great effort, after which she ignored Mother and focused on me. “Keep that old handkerchief,” she said, in that honeyed voice. “I tell you what, it’s been through hell and high water."

                Mother rambled on in a pitch too high trying to bridge the distance, some guilt corrupting her voice: "My daughter...doesn't want to grow up."
​
​                 Giant Lady's cocoa eyes disappeared when she roared a laugh and bared her teeth, like she was showing off a rarely opened box of treasure: "That's one smart little girl you got yourself there!" 

​​~~~

Some things from now.

Boom and Gloom
© 2014 marlea evans

 “At the moment, the Baby Boomers are pretty glum. Some of the gloominess, however, appears to be particular to Boomers, who bounded onto the national stage in the 1960s with high hopes for remaking society, but who’ve spent most of their adulthood trailing other age cohorts in overall life satisfaction. Fully 80% say they are dissatisfied with the way things are going in the country today, compared with 60% of those ages 18 to 29 (Millennials); 69% of those ages 30 to 45 (Generation Xers) and 76% of those 65 and older (the Silent and Greatest Generations).” 
-Pew Research Center

The boomers are busted
Oh, how we trusted
Upward mobility forever...

           “Don’t use the Amex card any more,” Bill yells from the office after another survey of the credit card damage we’ve done the last few years. It was our habit to pay cards off, but with no assistant sound editor film jobs for three years, he was forced to work as a painter, builder or art and antique mover. Those jobs do not pay anywhere near as well as film editing jobs. 14 years older than Bill, I seem to be unemployable. We’ve charged quite a bit to approximate the life style we had before the movie slump. My petite social security check reflects the sporadic work nature of my life as an actor/writer and helps out with groceries, and buys my fripperies, face products and fun. Yes, I am looking for a part-time job.

            “Did you hear me, Little One!?”

            “You know I can’t hear you when the water’s running,” I say, sarcastically, a quote from an old-one act play popular in the late 60’s on Broadway at a time when I was day dreaming of running away from my first husband and appearing on Broadway. Bill was ten or eleven at the time, but he knows theater allusions from any time.

             “Let a woman in your life!” he groans from My Fair Lady, giving it a Rex Harrison spin. “Don’t use the credit card…”

            “Okay,” I yell irritably. “What are you doing in there, Big One?”

            “Paying bills! He barks with a rude snort.

            “You don’t have to snap at me!”

            “I thought it was obvious what I am doing, “ he said in that tone of voice that means we don’t know what the hell will become of both of us if we live too long. We were both fatalists when younger, not that delighted by life, except in spurts of joy and sex. Both of us are disorganized and child-like, and both of us are surprised to still be alive.  Folks like us did not live like the good squirrel collecting his nuts for winter. In spite of my smart-assed scorn for almost everything human combined with a tendency toward personal gloom, the social dark outlook of the Pew Report pervades my life too. By tomorrow, however, I will forget the gloom and bathe in Pollyanna hopefulness and a contentedness better than anything I achieved when young. I, as the book title suggests, am seventy years old, but satisfaction and happiness and lack of stress has come with age for me—but not with money. I am the voice in the wilderness crying, Don’t live your life for money! You will suffer sometimes, yes, but if you live, even when you did not expect to live, your happiness comes from your freedom and from the simple things in nature.

            “What bullshit,” Bill yells from the bedroom, where he sits abed like Louis XIV, his life spread out in papers around him awaiting an audience.

            “You heard what I was thinking?” I enter the bedroom and smirk at him.

               What you won’t find in most boomer households is such an age disparity between man and wife.  I was in the avant guarde of the baby boom, and Bill trails in at the end of it in 1958. I can only imagine what he must be feeling, taking care of a woman who looked younger than her years for most of their lives, but now, well, now seventy years are hard to hide. And if you try to hide them too hard, you end up looking like cat woman with a pulled face and puffed lips, and you can’t tell one woman from another. I’m glad I don’t have enough money to achieve that look.

            “I can feel it coming, honey,” he says, “in the tone of your voice. It’s going to be a dark day, not a daisy day.” Dark and Daisy he calls me, because with me, you are sure to get a day of sun or a day of storm clouds.

            “I look old, how can you stand it?” I stare at the bedroom full-length mirror, the extra weight and double chin hitting me full force in the bright sunlight.

               "You are adorable," he says. "I don't care what you say."

                 At seventy, I also live in the world of late fifty-something’s, because that is where Bill’s age friends and jobs reside.Those boomers are taking up new careers and worrying about everything, not just financial but also political, or their children. What do I worry about? The country. I know. But I do. When things go really bad, the fascist spirit steps in to assert its ugly face, and I believe that spirit has revived and it is all around us just waiting to turn life into a horror show. That is a complex subject needing historical and sociological evidence to back it up, so I will drop it.

             Most of my 7.0 girl friends are much better off than I am financially, because they had the good sense to consider that they might live past 50, and that work and money, real estate and investment are key components to having a good life. But even they are a bit under the weather in mood. They retreat into the comfort of their bounty, and I don’t blame them; they are hard workers, who made a good life happen, and see no reason to give it away in taxes. No one seems to know what to do about the few people taking all the money in this society and around the world. This boomer gloom is financial, but it is also global. We are not stupid, so much information comes at us (“a little knowledge is a dangerous thing”), and most of us know that the earth cannot support us all in the way in which Americans are accustomed. Third world life is threatened by lack of clean water and food. Monsanto just wants to help, don’t they? I feel angry and helpless that huge companies are vying to OWN plant life, by making hybrids with a patent, so you won’t be able to survive unless you pay them for it, and they sue you if you try to grow your own.

            “Mother effing Monsanto,” Bill yells at the TV.

            “Et voila!”

            These are the same kinds of corporations that slow down solar energy development because they want to drain all the oil profits first, and they can’t yet figure out how to make you PAY by the month for use of the sun once you’ve paid the cost of the panels. They will get there, I have no doubt. I feel loads of gloom that the best minds of generations are working to own us in every way for profit. And that leads to spiritual gloom in the ancient meaning of spiritus, breathing, having vigor, being alive, therefore hopeful. We know everything so quickly now at the click of a digit, the best and the worst come at us, the saddest and meanest places where people die every day, where women are stoned, beheadings are usual, where everything horrific and hard for us to accept still exists, and the sadness that in spite of all the work of marvelous human beings, we haven’t yet rid the world of baseness and greed—oh that is depressing.

            I suffer from survivor’s guilt too. Between World War Two and this state of endless war predicted by George Orwell, I lived a life of real freedom as a white woman with upwardly mobile parents who gave me all that was required to keep moving up. I did not move up financially, but no one ever stopped me from moving to another city, sleeping with a lover of my choice, trying out another career. I never starved even when living on practically nothing. I believe us generations of Boomers might be the last Americans to have lived such free lives. No one was watching us on the streets or on computers. Soon we will be surveilled at every moment and movement of our lives.

            I jump in bed next to Bill and celebrate our sometime contentment without financial security, and retreat into his skin, and our laughter that always erupts without a reason, and I marvel that we are still together and that I am still alive.

            “I’ve given you all this,” Bill announces with pride, swinging his arm and hand across the bedroom and beyond to the hallway of our nice old 1927 spacious and interesting apartment. And we laugh.
​
            “An estate of madness and glee,” I say.

            You do what you must to relieve the gloom.

​~~~

Death Is the New Prom
© 2015 marlea evans

         The wonderful thing about turning seventy and having had no success, as the world defines it—fame or money—is that I’m still looking forward to getting it. So? Well? And so what? It’s never too late. To be paid for my work, at least, so that my husband and I can enjoy the old age we did not plan on having. Impossible, they say. You are too old. It’s too late. But, why not? I have as much talent and spirit as those who have money and relative levels of success—more than some young persons. I can plan it and I can imagine it; I see myself walking up to the stage, the oldest Emmy winner for writing ever! Maybe I’ll roll up in a wheelchair. And if I don’t “make it” the way I imagine it, there is something even more mysterious and wondrous coming down the pike. Something to prepare for, an event to find something to wear for, planning your flowers and dress and shoes and accessories for—the big dance like the prom. I am speaking of death.

         We girls in high school huddled together and talked in excited ways, pulled at our hair, bra straps and laughed too much. My breasts were DeMilo perfect (I wish I had them now), but showing them off or bragging was out of the question. My sometime boyfriend from a neighboring town had touched the tops of them in my summer dress of blue flowers and spaghetti straps, and he had fallen into a kind of swoon, making strange noises, his face like a saint in rapture. But I said nothing to my girlfriends. We’d learned in the early sixties to put sex in a box that we did not open. Our private parts and bodies were in there somewhere, but Lord help the girl who opened the lid! We laughed and giggled about next week. And what about after graduation? After was an unknown space—a universe that spread out before us generating only questions, a blank space on an important test. Everything would be so different from our small town, where the homeroom and band and gym and the high school musical were part of a known world. Our voices ratcheted up with anticipation, and there was sometimes a kind of hidden and choking fear. The unknown. Sex, of course. And the worst worry of all: who would take us to the prom?

         Why was the prom so damned important, what would happen there that would steer the course of our lives? Kings and Queens were crowned there. The band had to learn Pomp and Circumstance by some old sir of England to be played at graduation before the prom. Expectations and preparations were mighty. My mother would never let me buy that Liz -Taylor white strapless gown or anything like Jacqueline Kennedy might wear. I wouldn’t be able to pick out the corsage I would l be forced to pin to my dress. I hoped it would be a gardenia. The smell of gardenia promised beauties of life yet unrealized. Going all the way with our boyfriends before or after the prom was, of course, verboten, but we were all thinking about it. Pregnancy was an ugly word that stopped life in its tracks. And the colleges, the green and gothic state campuses we tried to see ourselves in, that our parents sat with us applying for and wrote checks to, would they accept us? And would we find a husband there? Girls at that time who did not find a husband were old maids, or worse, they were selfish bitches.      
     
         In secret I read books too sophisticated for me. I was neurotic, my brother told me, and from the vantage point of seventy years, I’ll cop to Sylvia Plath’s definition: “If neurotic is wanting two separate things at one and the same time, then I’m neurotic as hell.” I wanted to be my future unknown husband’s virginal good woman, and at the same time, I wanted to be Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre’s woman who did whatever the hell she wanted and kept up with the boys in every way.

         A sweaty combination of fear and anticipation rose especially on the subject of babies. The rip and tear of having children torn from our bodies; how could such a thing come from our flesh? But our voices trembled—children—as unknown a place as the Andromeda galaxy. We could see around us those who had gone before into the future having families upon which to base our projections of ourselves. For some, this was good enough; plans could be made to marry and procreate, though their voices shook a little, because we all knew about Robert Burns and his little Mousie, “…proving foresight in vain/the best laid schemes of mice and men/leaving nothing but grief and pain.” The town had slurries and strip pits and remote woods, places where terrible things happened. A car accident left a classmate brain damaged with a changed personality. A girl running away from home was picked up on the road to Wister Lake, murdered and thrown out like trash in a ditch. Fear grew. Mary Lou married the love of her life; now she’s fat and miserable with three kids alone, because he left her for the sheriff’s daughter. Now he’s the sheriff. Remember Kelly Jones and Buddy G., the most beautiful couple on earth? Everyone’s ideal couple, to make it forever? Well…. Buddy strangled her, left her for dead, and ran off to Mexico—with a boy. You know what I mean.

         But do you have a date for the prom?

         I had assumed early on that I would take my boyfriend to the prom, two years older than I, from a neighboring town. He had taken me to his prom. My mother had a dress made for me, white eyelets over blue satin that I thought was dowdy. Strapless, but with an idiotic chiffon piece tacked around the shoulders that did not say sexy. My hair did not cooperate the way I planned. He did not get a gardenia, but some funereal smelling wrist corsage. But there was a live band, and on the gym ceiling above there was a universe made of spinning lights shaped like stars. When they turned off the lights for the Platters hit, “Only You,” and he held me close, and his skin smelled like home, and we moved in gravity free motion, I wanted, I wished, I conjured that dance to last forever. Thoughts, judgment, all evaluation of him and a future life for myself ended where that feeling began. Throughout my body a heat, but a heat so soft that it is cool, like Shakespeare’s burning ice. It is a rapture poets have spent lifetimes trying to capture. But then, as he and I unwound our bodies when the music died, he took my arm and suddenly was so struck by a tall blonde at a nearby table that he forgot I was there for a few moments.  I spent the rest of the evening criticizing the hopeless banality of living in our backward state, having the recurring argument: why would he want to stay in Oklahoma? I could not wait to get out of there and live in Paris. In the car in the driveway of our house, I slapped him for ogling that blonde. I hated him, and he took me in his arms and kissed me for hours. It was pure rapture. By the time my senior year came up and time for my prom, I could not invite him. He was two years gone to college and already engaged to marry a girl he was unfaithful to. I know because he was unfaithful to her with me. Not all the way, of course, but he betrayed her in his head and heart when he drove up to my house. I had read Jean Paul Sartre and Colette; I was a freethinking, make-out, but never go all the way, sexual sophisticate. 

         I had done too much reading to ever trust the future to the love of a boy. But I wanted it at the same time. I already believed that all human beings struggle and are sad, because being human is confusing and sad, and you are always one step away from an event you cannot control, and one step from feelings that carve holes into your center, where the moon shines through and the waters run in tears. I did not plan the future. I grew passive and waited for things to happen. Girls who planned their lives according to their talents were hard and cold, and ended up alone—that was the clear message in films and television. The strongest plan I could manage in a head full of hormones, was running away from all I had already seen, or had been, to experience something different; but where would I go, what big city could I live in?  Paris. What a cliché. So, all that we girls in our summer dresses and Doris Day haircuts could do was laugh a gallows laugh and stare into the empty space of our futures.
And find a date for the prom!

         Among my friends now decades later, my escape plans fulfilled, some escape plans gone awry, and a love that is everything found, death is the subject that rises and spirals in hushed, anticipatory tones around all of us on the runway approaching 70. My husband’s young niece died suddenly at 39, leaving children and husband stunned. Many of our friends and family have died. Secretly we plan that we will never be hooked up to tubes and IVs, a half corpse without dignity; we will not be trapped like our loved ones, covertly fearing that we will. And we miss the dead. We are mad because we can’t talk to them anymore, and we can’t ask them where they are, what they are doing. My mother’s hand in mind as she died was cold and grew colder, and I stood looking up. Was she hovering above her body, seeing me looking at her? She gave me nothing. No sign. We cry out, but the response is nothing. Their going before us makes us certain that we are all going too; but what will after be? The prom analogy fails, really, because as kids we felt we would be breathing and acting in the world, no matter how out of our control events became. From death, we cannot witness any person doing anything to base our future expectations upon, and there is no provable message from beyond the grave. Only thousands of years of speculation based on meditation and prayer, ancient wisdom, science, and above all, imagination—the results of brilliant minds banging up against this furious finality.    
​     
         Today, with my husband and friends, talking of the dead, and of our own deaths, thoughts of us girls and the prom kept coming to mind as I listened to this same rising and lowering of voices, an edge of anticipation and fear of the unknown. Something to prepare for, an event to find something to wear for, planning your dress or suit, shoes and accessories for the last dance. Each of us trying to imagine it and coming up with nothing but questions: Will there be pompoms and crepe paper on the other side? Will I see my mother again? Will anyone escort me?  Will I know the time is approaching, so the flower choice will be under my control? Should I be burned and kept in an urn? If it is sudden, will I know that I am gone? Is it just black, like anesthesia?  Is it a trip through a psychedelic funnel into the galaxies, where all the mysteries are explained to you, and then, at the height of your ecstasy and understanding, are you told that you are not enlightened enough, and get dumped back into a screaming baby’s body to do it all over again?  Or if young yearnings and thoughts are things that can create reality, will I find myself in the darkness with spinning stars overhead, dancing in the high school boy’s arms forever?

~~~

Body Bags
© 2016 marlea evans

         A full moon climbs above the California canyons near Yosemite. Moon is closer to earth on this orbit, and his light is fierce, illuminating a bald spot among the pines on the apron of a cliff. What is this? A woman staring back at him in a sleeping bag trying to communicate with him:
 Take me with you, take me through the universe, she is saying. I am dying and I love you and I am ready to go with you.
         
​            Moon is befuddled, embarrassed, and quickly slips away behind a thunderhead, because what can he do for the woman?  He’s a moon, a lover to Earth, not a paper moon like they sing of him, but a satellite made of iron, silicon, magnesium and a dash of unpronounceable compounds. He can’t pick up this woman in a sleeping bag and send her into infinity. Oh, he would like to go traveling in the universe too, but a moon can’t just leave his elliptical orbit. It isn’t done. Really, she wouldn’t like to see what would happen to Earth if Moon had the power to throw away his gravitational pull. Total annihilation. Chaos. Humans engage in such devastating activities, creating horror and mayhem on the surface of that loveliest girl, Earth, but not he. Moon does not like that people of earth mistake him as a kindly old man and sometimes as a female presence, with June, gloom, tune, spoon and such silly rhyming idiocies, when he is in fact a virile metallic orb big enough to wipe them all out with the tiniest wobble.  Moon has upset himself with his murderous pondering: moon, the destroyer of earth. He is disturbed by seeing this woman pray to him from her sleeping bag, although, to be honest, a little flattered and warmed by her attention.

           The high, dark thunderhead deserts him, losing the hiding place, and once again Moon finds his light reflected in the woman’s eyes gazing upon him, pleading. She throws in his face innumerable nights long ago on a roof in Philadelphia when she was so close to him he was her lover. In New York, she did not abandon him, finding him on the tarred top of her five-floor walk-up in Hell’s Kitchen. And long ago on the plains of Oklahoma, where the people could still remember the importance of the rising of the moon for seeing your way on a path through the forests, for the feeling of awe and mystery that such a beautiful apparition in the sky always delivered, she was there. She knew him as a child, knew him for his great power, and had loved him always.

​            Moon wants to weep in gratitude of her adoration of him, but his moisture is bound up in patches of hard ice. He gives her instead the full force of his reflected light from that big gas bag, the Sun, and he sees that the woman is high on some wonderful drug that has made her ecstatic, and he realizes that she is not in a sleeping bag, but a heavy government-issue body bag. It is lined with fur, illegal undoubtedly, but he is glad to know that she is warm. She has come to the side of the mountain, to be with him, her lover, to die. How inventive she is, he observes, the bag is strong so that she won’t be torn apart by animals and can be removed from the hill without a messy cleanup. What a thoughtful and lovely woman. The fur frames her face, so she remains warm as life slips from her body. She smiles up to him, her lover, and with her last bit of strength, closes the top of the bag, and  flies up to him in wild abandon.
                                                                                                    ​~
        

              A few companies sell body bags on line. They have rust resistant zippers, some are clear, some are off white, and others opaque black. You can find your style if you are so inclined to buy.  If you are reading me, you must indulge my fantasies. At seventy years old, death is much on my mind. How will I die? Quickly, I say, with hope. But, if I have a long illness of pain and financial drain on my husband, could I end it by my own choice? An ideal moment of my death I have described in the above fantasy.

         It never occurred to me that I would survive this long. My mother died at 68. And common wisdom has it that a person who suffers from depression and indulges in negativity dies earlier than those who are generally positive. I do not agree. If negative thinking could kill, I’d have been dead a long time ago.

         Imagining the way you will die is common when you enter your seventies, but the worst of the obsessive thoughts that plague you at this age might be: What the hell have I been doing for seventy years? Did I live life the way I wanted? Can I examine my life without wanting to throw up my hands in judgment? I believe the body bag is not only a good metaphor for the chrysalis we are born in, those warm closed sacs of safety we are thrust out of into the jarring air and light, but also a way to describe the kinds of bags we zip ourselves up in to protect us from the pain of living.

          When asked what I wanted out of life, what had always been important to me, I always answered truthfully that I wanted to be FREE—a statement that would have caused a black maid getting on a bus in Birmingham in the 1950s to laugh out loud.  I know. Being white, reasonably attractive, and having parents who paid for my education, what could possibly keep me in chains? Ralph Ellison of Invisible Man, a fellow Oklahoman, understood, when he said, “As soon as I know who I am, I will be free.” How many times was I working on that knowledge, so that freedom in that sense of the word offered itself to me, to which offer, I answered by zipping myself up into a body bag of something that felt like safety, in my case, a sorority, a husband, a lover, but most of the time, it was a cocoon of my own fearful or prideful thinking that held me back. Toni Morrison’s quotes on the subject of freedom are profound. She said: “Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.” And my favorite words of hers, “You wanna’ fly, you gotta’ give up the shit that weighs you down.”

         In 1961 I went to the University of Oklahoma. I was seventeen years old. I wanted to escape the little town in southeast Oklahoma where my family had lived for the past six years so badly, that I chose to go to the University in Norman to avoid going to Oklahoma State University in Stillwater where my girlfriends were going. I wanted to scrub my identity. The boy I loved then had also gone to Oklahoma State and because he had such power over my emotions, I did not want him anywhere near me. He loved Oklahoma and would never leave it. I needed new boyfriends, new girlfriends, to prepare for my life living in Paris or New York. I had the clichéd desires of a girl who reads too much and knows nothing. I wanted no past identity clinging to me. It was a negative reaction, knowing what I did not want, a habit of negativity that persisted throughout my life. I didn’t say, I am looking for who I am, I just did not want to be the superintendent’s daughter from Poteau, Oklahoma anymore. You couldn’t tell people where you were from without embarrassment because the natives pronounce it Po-do, too close to a word like Podunk, and if you say it correctly, Po-toh, a new person would ask, what is that? I would explain it had been an outpost of French exploration and fur trading enterprises before the Louisiana Purchase, of which it was a part, and the word Poteau just meant post--an outpost for trappers. Today, I do not mince words, I simply quote Steven Colbert: “It’s French, bitch!”

          I would study French as a major, another negative choice, because I felt I wanted to be an actress or a writer. In Poteau, we actually had a French teacher, and a drama teacher, but I was afraid to study theater or writing in college. That wasn’t safe. I wasn’t good enough, pretty enough, I did not write well enough. I refused to go through Greek rush, because being in a sorority would enforce some kind of identity upon me, and, of course, I wanted to be free. Within three months, the girlfriends I made in the dorm convinced me I needed to be with them in their sorority. I was not hard to convince. It was one of the best, with scholars, campus leaders and beauty queens, and the grand new house at the end of a circular, spacious cul de sac looked like Scarlett O’Hara’s Tara.  I found it super ugly and judged it, having just read Henry Miller’s Air Conditioned Nightmare. Having always lived in homes that had some architectural interest, to me the red brick imitation southern mansion looked like the worst of suburbia, but bigger. But, I was afraid. I was used to being popular, a noticeable fish in a tiny pond, and the so-called Independents on campus had a hard time finding friends and influencing people. I gave in to the girls because they liked me. I zipped myself firmly up in the body bag of Pi Beta Phi sorority, fur lined and narrow, guaranteed to bring dates with boys in the good fraternities, like S.A.E. (Yes, the one that was recently thrown off university grounds by president David Boren for its racist chant.) There were no integrated Greek organizations, and life was segregated in Norman, just like it had been in the French-bitch town of Poteau. Around three hundred African Americans lived in Poteau, but they all lived “across the tracks” or in “colored town,” names given to segregated areas in the separate but “equal” United States. I never made mention of this phenomenon, or even noticed it, as a girl.  I was a coward. I opted for safety. Not knowing is a great warm bag to lock yourself up in. Knowing is not comfortable. I opted for being comfortable with other comfortables, in the big comfortable house that looked like a southern mansion, in the comfortable college town, and after the sorority, I married a handsome man who made me feel comfortable. 

          I was anything but comfortable. Living with deep ambivalence brings no peace of mind, and I have a disorganized mind that slips easily away to the moon, or into the book I am reading, or into the person across from me, and especially into the man I love.  My attempts to find freedom always came with a lot of acting first and thinking about it later. To make a plan was anathema to my personality. I will tell you more about my serendipitous, sometimes wild and sometimes cautious ways of escaping comfort looking for freedom, how I got to Philadelphia and New York, and the times I zipped myself back up in safety, but those are other stories. 

         I expected to die young, being so disorganized; and living too often between pain and joy was very tiring. At forty, I moved to Los Angeles, to escape a lover too young for me, and because the weather was nice and I had heard the hospitals were better than in New York. I began to collect some old stories I had on napkins, or typewritten pages thrown into the suitcase. I started to try to make them stories, but they were stories that had no plot and came out of sounds I was hearing in my mind. Phrases from childhood, from the Bible, the music, the neighbors or relatives of the place I came from: “You've gone as far West as you can go, Mona Lee, to peevish and cocked California. Though you can't see the sun in the cataract sky, hide under a tree or else you will fry. To my east rise skinny New England witch birches, defrocked, and to the west only rat-infested palms that offer me no cool. Where, oh where, are the cottonwood trees at Oxbow Bend on the Arkansas River banks that multiply over you, high and lurid, a magnanimous fan dance waving?”     
   
          Stuff like that. I was starting to feel that surge of newness and freedom that I craved, when young lover Bill came out here too, and we zipped each other up in our bags of mutual need. Who can say if such action killed my freedom or saved my life? But, surprised at fifty years old, to be still looking okay and going strong, then at sixty and sixty five, I thought, you can’t be serious! At seventy, I’ve outlived my Mother and soon, my father too. Cancer took them. It takes most Americans in a way that is painful and sad and ferocious. I am surprised with my family history that I have not had some form of the big C.  Actually a tiny carcinoma of the cervix preceded my hysterectomy on the day George Bush started the first Gulf War. I recovered better from my surgery than Bush did from launching his limited war that led eventually to the disastrous one waged by his son. I’ve had no recurrence, but the cancer of the Middle East and our interventions have spread like wildfire.

         For the last twenty years, my doctors have been warning me of another big C. I will soon drop dead of a heart attack or have a stroke and live disabled for the rest of my life, they said. My cholesterol levels are astronomical, the good cholesterol numbers are bad and the bad ones’ numbers are worse. An immediate prescription for a statin drug was always the first thing a new doctor gave me after blood tests. I decided to check them out on Google first, and up came how Crestor was “killing” all of the competitors, cutting the fat in your blood faster and lower and making more money than all three of the other brands put together. Money made from the drug, I felt, was the most valued discussion about the pills. I have a simplistic belief that money has ruined America, and when someone tries to explain the Market to me, I can only feel we are talking about the god Mammon. Googling the existence of some Italian, Greek, and Swedish groups living to be a hundred years of age with astronomical cholesterol levels in their blood and knowing that many European medical people disputed the importance of cholesterol in causing heart attacks and strokes, for the first time in my life, I refused to take a drug prescribed by a doctor. I have been lucky, with low blood pressure and a snappy immune system, that I’d never needed any substance to survive serious illness. This was the first drug prescribed to me that would be every day forever, the doctor said.  Getting on some drug for the rest of my life without having a serious illness or any indication of heart trouble, I intuited, made no sense! It’s never too late to listen to intuition. And I stuck with it. I said, No, fighting with three different doctors, including the most recent one. New studies are proving me to be right. Unless you have had a heart attack, there is no proof that those drugs will do you any good at all. And often they harm your liver.  And my disorganized way of thinking tells me that a sudden stroke or heart attack that finishes you fast is a good way to go. So, I refused the body bag of constant medication that so many Americans find themselves caught in until the end of their lives. I know I have been lucky, but questioning is one of my favorite ways of finding freedom.

         Life is joy, beauty, and pain, no matter what circumstances you are born into, or choose to live under, and I don’t blame myself or any other human being for finding one or several locked up safe places in order to bear being alive.  I am no benefactor or activist. I am curious, but I am needy. I am a consciousness that slips in and out of others lives in literature, news, film, and television series. Lately I have decided to publish my own writing. I’m excited about what the future will look like. I cook and clean and support and love and I don’t worry about having money. And I think about death.
​
         In Los Angeles, the full moon in the early evening rises in the east at the end of Beverly Boulevard, majestic and orange, where I will sometimes pull over and park for a tryst with my bright lover. Later, he shines white in the sky outside our bedroom window. I open the blinds and let him come in. A story or legend I read somewhere long ago keeps a grip on my mind—that the souls of the dead live on the moon. “I’ll be looking at the moon/but I’ll be seeing you.”
​

~~~



​Philadelphia

Horoscope Rag
© 2015 marlea evans

Anna Karinina left her child and husband to find eternal love with Vronsky. If she could not achieve that perfection, then she was a failure and an evil woman. Self-destruction was the only answer. These messages came from every corner of the culture. How easy it was to suddenly feel like a prisoner with all the lights of the prison yard piercing your imperfections. I shifted my allegiance from goals to the idea of goodness.  A good woman loves and is loyal.
 

         Fame will come. Your stars are working up to a fortuitous alignment, said the young man minding the bookstore, moonlighting as an astrologist, somewhere in the city wilds of New Jersey. It was the winter of 1974.  I did not believe in the stars any more than I believed in praying to Jesus, but I had been treated to it whether I wanted it or not—the astrological tour had been foisted upon me by my lover, Ludwig Von Beethoven. Well, that’s what I called him, because that’s who he looked like, portraits of the young Beethoven, hair falling naturally away from his face that wore a permanent scowl of single minded genius. And, of course, my Ludwig was a musician.  I knew he bought this belated birthday present for me to calm me down, and I was half-listening to my future prospects for fame, while Ludwig perused the aisles in his velvet-collared coat, smelling of his meerschaum pipe, pretending to look at books, peering at me through nearby shelves from behind round wire framed glasses that magnified his onyx eyes.

         However, said the bookstore astrologist, pausing for me to focus, studying the chart, it’s not gonna’ happen to you until you are old.  My voice stuck in my throat and then ratcheted up to an un-attractive screech: I am old, I am thirty!

         He looked at his chart again for a trail of Mercury or Saturn through my illogical conjunction of practical Capricorn colliding with mad, scattered, unhinged Gemini and said, No, no, I mean really old, like seventy or eighty. 

         Great! What can I say to that?  First off, I’ll never live to be seventy, but if I should, what do you mean? You mean I’ll be celebrated, or accomplished, or—Ludwig’s voice chimed in to finish the three—Notorious? The astrologer paused for us to laugh, which we didn’t. Ludwig’s eyes twinkled with merriment, his “laughing inside his head” as he called his manifestation of enjoyment.  Did he put you up to this as a joke? I pointed to Ludwig.

         This is your chart, Miss, but it isn’t possible to say exactly, it’s just that with all of these great expectations of alignments, it could mean only that you, when you are old, will just be very happy.
​Happy? Now I was insulted. Happiness was a bourgeois concept. I was so Jean Paul Sartre, so de Beauvoir, so Roads to Freedom, and in that search for freedom, my life had grown into a disaster from which I was not likely to rebound. If one had placed a bet on me at the time, great odds would have been to wager that I would die in my thirties and never reach old age.
                                                                                                    ​~
         Living with Ludwig, in a tormented rage after an argument, I had slammed both of my fists through a huge window in our vintage apartment building. I wanted to stop him with my fury, to make the biggest noise possible, just at the moment he reached the bottom of the five flights and walked onto Pine Street. The shattering sound was horrific. I saw him turn and look up at the window in terror. I screamed. The unintended consequence of my outburst, one cut finger on the left hand and a gash in upper palm and wrist on the right. The blood vessel had been severed, and by the time Ludwig ran back up the stairs, the spurt of blood from my wrist was shooting up and hitting the ceiling. I was in shock. Oh shit, I did not mean to do that, was running through my mind. Ludwig saved my life with a very fast application of a New Jersey Boy Scouts of America tourniquet before calling paramedics.

         I had very few memories just afterward, but one was the young surgeon studying the damage to my hand and wrist before the administration of anesthesia. He told me that there might be some nerve damage in my right hand. “I am not sure that I can repair it all but I will do my best,” he said. Then he asked me with a smile: “What do you do? For a living?” I looked at him, smiled back and said, “I’m a concert pianist.” His face turned white as the light above, and I laughed. “No, I’m only kidding, I used to be a French teacher, the wife of lawyer, but now, I’m just an actress, just an actress, just an act…. then I passed into the sweet oblivion of the drug that removes pain and suffering.

         Ludwig and I had lived together for some amount of time in that five-floor walk up across the street from Pennsylvania Hospital, a most historic and lovely area of Philadelphia. It was walking distance to the Italian market, crumbling heroic graveyards, Independence Hall and the park—it was a wonderful place to be young and carefree. But, I was reaching the nether end of my twenties, 27, afraid of turning thirty. To be thirty was to be a person you could no longer trust—you remember—and for a woman, practically too old to be alive. Ludwig was 21.

         We had been so in love, we were a little mad with love, so what got in the way? Let me re-count the first way. I was an actress in a theater company, which I had helped to build, and Ludwig was an insecure and jealous monster. My appearance in a very modest bra and panties in Joe Orton’s What the Butler Saw drove him to abuse me verbally and accuse me of infidelity. Just getting my legs as a woman living on my own, who wanted to be free, who wanted to learn to make a living as an actress, he heaped upon me guilt and confusion. I already had guilt for leaving my husband after having an affair with the director of the theater company, and so I felt I had to be true to this new love, or I was nothing but a slut. You know, this was before it was alright for a woman to be a serial monogamist—you were just a slut.

         Ludwig’s first sight of me was at rehearsal for a children’s musical play. He was the hired piano. I wore my hair in dog-ears, costumed in a checkered shirt and rolled up jeans, playing a ten-year old girl brat, singing well and on key. He was smitten. I thought it was cute, but inconsequential. Still living with my husband, a Navy JAG lawyer, Ludwig began calling me at home. What cheek! I ignored the sweet looking young man with balls of brass, vintage glasses and an attractive scowl on his face, for at least another six months. It was only after my separation, during my short affair with the director, and at the intermission of a concert Ludwig begged me to attend, that he kept his eyes on me while crossing the orchestra to get to me, and slammed into the largest gong set I had ever seen. He knocked it over onto a pair of cymbals, and the sound reverberated through the church and out onto the street, but most importantly through my body. Many other instruments had fallen with the tam tam creating a cacophony of clangs, twangs, bangs and crashes. His delighted laugh at himself, his refusal to take his eyes off of me for even one second, while stumbling, tripping and listening to the eruption of instrumental chaos, just to get to me—it was not something a sensitive girl could defend herself against.

         After that, there was nothing else. Freedom be damned. He fought for me, defying his parents wishes to be with me: His father ordered him: do NOT get involved with a still-married woman who has an angry husband living in West Philly, a Navy man from Oklahoma, who will kick your ass or kill you. To that command, Ludwig brought me home to his parents in New Jersey, telling them, get used to her, I love her. His mother was cowed and his father was afraid of him too, awed by his precocious talent. They had paid for lessons when as a child he picked out a tune on a piano, but they had no knowledge of the scope of his abilities.

          On his orders, we slept together in his childhood room. In his basement, he played an old upright piano for me, each hammer stuck with tacks so that it sounded like his favorite instrument, the harpsichord. His classical piano skills were prodigious, but he was also an accomplished player of progressive jazz and performed with some well-known artists. Scott Joplin's Ragtime flying from his fingers made me dance around him in joy. Another of his instruments was the baroque trumpet, the old kind without stops, and his embouchure was so strong that he could roll up a rubber garden hose and blast forth strains of Monteverdi. He composed on a great draft board, large sheets of music spread across the floor, and he taught me the music of Boulez, Stockhausen, Cage, Glass, tonal and serial compositions like Green Function on Wire. Shyly, I played for him too, a Bach two-part invention that I could still remember, a little of a Mozart sonata. Where did a girl from Oklahoma get such a musical education? My brothers, I told him. I grew up with piano music and singing opera with them. He was impressed. Music, moody food of love, music that soothes the savage beast, and all that Shakespeare had written of love—all of that all ended in a rage in Pennsylvania Hospital.
                                                                                                     ​~
         Ludwig had been compassionate after the episode. I needed help and he was there during the first week in the psychiatric ward necessary for the doctors to ascertain that I had no brain abnormality that would cause uncontrollable rage, and that I had stopped being a danger to myself and others. He was there for my six weeks with full lower arm cast, and then six months in a wire and rubber contraption designed to exercise the hand to prevent nerve damage from turning it into a claw—nerve damage that limits my right hand motion a little still today, and a big half-moon shaped scar that never lets me forget. Later, he took me to the emergency room when I could not stop crying and helped me sign myself up for a two-week stay for nervous exhaustion. Ludwig was there for me, but his ardor had cooled.

         Off and on for two more years, we came and went from each other’s lives, and during that last year we found ourselves in the bookstore, where I was promised fame or happiness in my old age. Ludwig was living in New Jersey then, in a small house, and—uninvited—I had taken a subway, three busses and a train to get to him that day. He was not home, and when he finally arrived, I was exhausted and had been sitting on his steps, hot and sweating in the freezing air for over an hour. He could see that my nerves were rising toward hysteria into the danger zone. I had proven that I was no longer capable of breaking windows, but in my realm of upset, I might begin to yell at him or accuse him of neglect. He quickly said, come with me, I have to get some music paper and a book. A neutral place to calm me down. I knew that he wanted to get rid of me already from his life. And I wanted to move on, too. But I also knew that he sometimes missed me as much as I missed him. And I knew that he knew that afterwards, we would go back to his house and make love. Spend the night. The flesh wants what it wants; it wants what is familiar. It wants to feel.

         I am over seventy now and inclined to laugh at the me of 1974, and to wonder if I missed the boat not following astrology. It was an accurate prognostication, after all. I have experienced a lot of safety and joy with a partner who is not afraid of my style of crazy.  I still don’t believe in happiness, except that I know now it is a state of mind that you choose, but how I got from there to here is a mystery I am trying to unravel.
 
         Searching for freedom, as a goal in life—that is fraught with danger, and then, when you discover that freedom is not flight, but sticking to it, a day-by-day commitment to work you that are suited to, or to another person you love, well, then, still, in the end…you die. 

~~~