Kiss Tomorrow Hello: Notes from the Midlife Underground by Twenty-Five Women Over Forty

She Who Once Was
REBECCA MCCLANAHAN
We were standing at the kitchen sink, chopping vegetables for a salad, when Martha announced her plan. She'd thought about it for months, she said. Maybe years. I regretted my response immediately, and to this day still regret it. Just listen to me. I am telling my friend that she does not need a face-lift, that she is one of the most beautiful women I know.

"I knew you'd say that," she says, as if I've insulted her. In this kitchen moment, Martha is fifty-three, the age I am now, seven years later, as I write these words. She is trim and fit, a marathon runner with classic good looks, a dazzling smile, and the angular facial structure of a photographer's model. The kind of woman who turns heads when she enters a room.

"The person in the mirror is older than the person I am inside," she continues, her chiseled features sharpening.

"The world needs beautiful older women," I say.

She flinches as though I've slapped her. "I'm not ready to be an older woman."

Something scratches at the edge of consciousness. A memory, jagged, fleeting: a few months before, Christmas breakfast at my brother's table. We are on vacation, my husband and I, still wearing our robes and luxuriating in our laziness, the California sun pouring through the tall windows onto our faces. My brother takes a seat across the table. "Hmm," he says, staring at my face, then turning his gaze to Donald. "The wife looks a little different in this light, doesn't she?" End of Christmas morning, end of sunlight on my face.

"When I look in the mirror," Martha is saying, "I don't know who that person is."

"Then don't look in the mirror," I snap. I study her face--the strong, taut jaw, the high cheekbones, the smooth brow. What could she possibly want to change?

Martha takes a sip of wine. "I just thought you should know that I'll be out of commission for a while, until everything heals. I won't be going out. Some friends"--and here she hesitates, as if considering whether to include me in this group--"plan to come by. To bring a movie, a meal." A few years before, I had visited Martha in the hospital, bringing flowers and candy, steadying her as she shuffled down the corridor. But that was for a hysterectomy. Something to save her life, to prolong it. This hardly fits in the same category, does it?

This is when I should start backpedaling. After all, it's her face, her decision. But I can't let it go. The arguments stack up in my mind; some form into sentences. I am morally opposed to plastic surgery. And what about the expense? You could send a kid to college for what it would cost. And what about the messages this sends to young women, to our own nieces? I know I should get off my high horse, try another ploy, but I am suddenly desperate to make my point. I ask her if she's seen the PBS series, the British one with the older woman and her much younger lover. "She's very sexy," I say. "Age can be very sexy."

Martha clenches her jaw, but still I don't stop, though I have long since depleted my arsenal of logic and must resort to dumb repetition. "You need to get your vision checked. You are one of the most beautiful women I know." I mention the plaque that hangs over the bureau in my friend Suzanne's guest room, where most people would hang a mirror: the best mirror is an old friend. Until this moment, I'd assumed that "old" referred to the longevity of the friendship. Now it occurs to me that the plaque carries another meaning altogether. Okay, how far am I willing to go with this? "If you look old to yourself," I begin, "then your friends must look old, too." I don't know what I expect her to say other than the truth, which is the last thing I want to hear.

"You're right," she says. "They do."
The first and only time I saw Aunt Bessie cry was the night I played Lottie Moon. It was 1965 and the production was Her Lengthened Shadow, a sentimental playlet about a woman missionary who died nearly a century ago. I was fifteen, the same age Lottie Moon is when the play opens, and in the hour it took to perform the play, I aged fifty-seven years. Great-Aunt Bessie, a fixture in my parents' home for many years and my sometime roommate, had gone to church with the rest of the family to see the play. My mother had sewn the costumes and someone else's mother had applied the pancake makeup and, during scene changes, penciled in lines between my eyes and on the sides of my mouth. I remember frowning mightily to create forehead furrows and smiling crazily, unnaturally, to form craters around my mouth so that she could guide the eyebrow pencil into the depressions. In the last scene, when a special lightbulb cast a shadow across the stage, signifying my death at the unthinkably old age of seventy-two, I heard gasps in the audience and knew I had played my part well.

After changing back into my clothes and cold-creaming the years from my face, I walked out to the family's station wagon, parked at the edge of the church parking lot. My parents and siblings were waiting with almost universal praise, but Bessie was uncharacteristically silent, facing straight ahead, her hands clasped tightly in her lap. I climbed into the backseat beside her. Though I was a petite teenager, I sat higher in the seat than Bessie, who, try as she might, could never quite keep herself erect; her crooked hip tilted her body to the side. Bessie was smaller than any grown-up I knew, but her hands were disproportionately large, marbled by dark, prominent veins and mottled with age spots. Did I mention that Bessie was old? Always, always, from my first knowledge of her, old. And now, smack-dab in the middle of the Lottie Moon memory, I am stopping to do the math. Nineteen sixty-five. Bessie was eighty-five years old. Tears were sliding down her ancient face. Tears? I had known Bessie all my life, had slept in the same room with her, the same bed, had, I now realize, even loved her in my selfish, adolescent way. But I had never seen her cry.

I tapped my mother on the shoulder. "What's wrong?" I asked. I often talked around Aunt Bessie as if she weren't there, as if she were a piece of furniture that had been in the house so long, you no longer saw it--may the universe forgive me for this. My mother turned from the front seat and calmly shook her head as if to silence the question. But Aunt Bessie had heard, and she turned to me, her eyes rimmed with red, brimming. "You looked so old," she said. "It hurt to see you look so old."
Early photographs of my mother bear witness to my father's frequent remark: "She was a living doll." Sometimes I correct him, joking that if he's looking to make point, he shouldn't use the past tense. But usually I don't make a federal case about it, partly because the remark doesn't seem to bother my mother, but mostly because his affection for her is so obvious and steadfast, so daily. Let's say she's getting up from her chair, where she's been piecing a quilt or arranging photographs in an album or writing a note to one of their fifteen grandchildren. As she moves across the room, without fail my father's gaze will follow her with all the admiration of a newlywed, for, if we are to believe his eyes, she is all news to him, this woman to whom he has been married sixty years. Sometimes, out of the blue, he will say to me, "Juanita is a wonderful woman. You have an amazing mother. Do you know that?" This is a rare gift, I realize, for a daughter--of any age, let alone a daughter as old as I am--to witness a father's love for her mother, and hers for him. And I mark it here, so I will not forget. If beauty resides in the beholder's eyes, my mother is still beautiful to her beholder. Yet even so, there remains that troublesome past tense: My mother was a living doll.
As I mentioned earlier, on the afternoon in which she announced her plans, Martha was a beautiful woman. Two weeks ago, a few days past her sixtieth birthday, I visited her in her southern city and I can attest that she is still a beautiful woman. I hesitate to phrase it that way. To say that a woman is still beautiful suggests a remove from what went before. It hints at time, change and loss, placing the receiver of the compliment in a fragile holding pattern. Still beautiful. Still holding. I don't like the implications, but it is difficult to compliment an aging woman, even one as attractive as Martha, without employing some syntactic time marker. She looks so youthful, we say. Or: She is aging well. Recently, a young colleague, after seeing my age reported in a magazine, said, "If I hadn't seen this in print, I wouldn't believe it. I mean, you look good." As if it were some minor miracle, at my advanced age, to look presentable. I shushed her with thanks before she could say more, before I could say more. No need to confuse her with details that are no one's business but my own: that, on the advice of my older sister, I touch up my hair color every six weeks or so. That, to be honest, I have been doing this for over a decade now, long before Martha had her face-lift. "Nothing ages a woman faster than gray hair," my sister had said, though there was no need to convince me. The first wiry gray coils had sprouted shortly after my fortieth birthday. No way, I thought. No way is the woman in the mirror going to be older than the woman I am inside. I'm too young to be old.
Last month, one of my nieces gave birth to a daughter, and I am happy to report that little Addison Kate is aging quite well. She came into this world already nine months old and, if the universe permits, she will continue to age until she dies. If Addie keeps growing old, perhaps one day a century from now some young sculptor will cast her likeness in bronze as Rodin did the old woman we now call the H...