Late-Life Love by Susan Gubar

Author:Susan Gubar
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2018-10-23T16:00:00+00:00

Wrinkled in Time

MY STEPDAUGHTER SUSANNAH had been to the post office, the donut shop, the grocery store, and the farmer’s market. She had cleaned the vegetables and put away the groceries and started planning the meals she would cook and either serve or stock in the freezer, when she looked up from her iPad to declare, “Hey, there’s an apartment house that is going to go up downtown, just one block west of the square. High-end condos.”

As she reached for her phone to call our real estate agent, I plunked down another playing card and considered the energy of people in midlife. What would have taken me a day or two, she had accomplished in an hour or two. My daughters evince the same strength. Was it adrenaline, drive, will, sheer physical stamina? Their speed and vigor underscored my more tentative pace as I slowed down in older age. How does that need to decelerate distinguish later from young loving?

On our way to the Trace, just the other day, I had noticed the vitality of the parents unloading huge SUVs at the dormitories. Don and I had rented a van to take first my older and then my younger daughter to college, a grueling experience for any parent who dreads crowds in Target (which my kids pronounced as if the word were French). Teaching is a profession that accentuates aging because the freshmen stay the same age, whereas their teacher does not. When I began as an associate instructor, I was a few years older than my undergraduates. As a professor, I was old enough to be their mother. Now I am old enough to be the grandmother of the kids sweating in the crowded driveways over their computer equipment, mini refrigerators, and bedding.

The brash dynamism of people who can take for granted the robust resilience of the body: there should be a word for it. Directly after cancer surgery in 2008, I lost that vitality, though I suppose other aging people feel it draining away less dramatically. The early twentieth-century author Vita Sackville-West describes how a healthy woman of eighty-eight, endowed with a mind alert to make the most of the time she has left, experiences the sensation of age: “the body was a little shaky, not very certain of its reliability, not quite certain even of its sense of direction, afraid of stumbling over a step, of spilling a cup of tea; nervous, tremulous; aware that it must not be jostled, or hurried, for fear of betraying its frail inadequacy.” Is this a body capable of desire, sex, or frottage?

“When you and Jack finish that game,” Susannah said as she got off the phone with Zak, “I’m taking him to buy a skateboard and some Hoosier wear and then out to lunch with Julie and maybe a meeting with Zak. Not to worry. We’ll be back in plenty of time to make supper.”

I was beating my fifteen-year-old grandson at gin rummy, but he had trounced me the night

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