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A decade ago I was approaching 39. When I looked in the mirror I didn’t see a different face or body, but maybe a bus was approaching at 70 miles an hour and I was daydreaming in its path. I met an artist who was in her 60s, and when I told her that I was almost 39 (which really meant 40), I grimaced to show that I knew what this meant: I would be hit broadside, like it or not. She laughed at me and said that a woman’s life began at 40: “All the nonsense is over.”
Nonsense: the worrying most of us have done since before adolescence about what other people think of us: pretty enough, smart enough. Then a time comes to please yourself by living for things that matter and by letting go of the rest, even regret for all the time you’ve wasted.
She was wise but nonsense dies hard. As little girls we put on lipstick to see what we’d look like as women. Now we stretch our faces back to see what we’d look like with facelifts, then we let our faces drop. I look better than I did at 16 and 20. I’m happier, for one thing, and healthier. But this doesn’t stop me from being shocked at my face in the mirror. How did you get to be 49? a friend asked me. You’re the kid.
Claire and I met in Vermont in 1966. I was 21 and she 24. I was back at college after a year in New York, working for a publisher. She’d just graduated and was living in her painting studio above the village grocery store. She was as friendly as I was grumpy, trying hard to impress other people – mostly men – by how smart I was. Now she’s more sister to me than my sisters.
Twenty-five years ago, she kept a framed photo in her apartment of herself lying on her back, her arm behind her head, her full breasts featured. The picture had been taken when she was 16 by her uncle, who’d written “Wow!” on the bottom, as if it were a still of a movie star. She dressed then in jeans and big shirts, and she had a stack of mirrored Indian smocks in Matisse blues, pinks, and greens, her signature shades. There was a picture of her in Vogue, accompanying an article about young women painters: She was moving an enormous canvas, a cigarette in her hand. It is the cigarette more than her clothes or hair that dates the picture.
A few years ago she tilted her chin and pointed to a place on the left side of her face, beside her lip. She didn’t have to look in the mirror to locate it. “Do you see this?” she asked. I looked closely. An indentation to me, a canyon to her. I felt a familiar impatience. She’s always done things just before me – started wearing makeup and real clothes, started using face creams – and each time she enters the next small stage of life, I think that she is being silly. Why bother with all that? And then I can’t help it. When my time comes I call and ask her what to do.
What Laszlo does, what Zia does, what Nu Skin does: They each do something good and nothing to stop time. Nothing does that but death, we tell each other. The past is our local museum that we visit to learn what we thought we were doing. Old loves and ambitions, old friends and places, even old clothes: We leave them in the past, and we return, relieved, to the present. As we approach and pass the ages we used to think were a full measure of life, we find it easier to be wise about anything than about our bodies and our faces.
Her hair used to be bobbypinned back or pulled away from her face when she painted. Her hair is a little longer now and held back softly with combs. I know so much about her but I don’t know who has cut her hair the same way all these years or who now burnishes the fading blond with silver and almost gold. She isn’t a Wow! girl anymore, no kind of girl at all. There is something new in her face – not the lines at her mouth but the prominence of her cheekbones and her softer skin, the difference between reading light and candlelight.
I threaten to send her a picture of herself from 1976. I tell her she looks better now. She doesn’t believe a word I say.
I had tea with a former student, a woman my age. She was curled up at the end of her couch, an odalisque in gold and pink, relaxed and lush, soft hair and skin, creamy clothing. I thought how good she looked despite her weight, better than she did five years ago when she was thinner. If I told her that, she’d be pleased and think I was flattering her. I don’t know and neither does she, how to see her. It’s a kind of visual impairment, like not being able to make out fine images in an etching.
Lauren Hutton looks washed with age, a golden woman but Roman gold, not new shiny stuff. She was modeling a red robe for a Christmas catalogue. Her bare feet look older than the rest of her; the knuckles of her big toes are distorted – for the same reason mine are, I assume, from wearing shoes shaped nothing like the human foot. I liked Lauren Hutton first for the charm of her face, then for a long-ago magazine feature in which she marked up a photo of herself, pointing out her imperfections. So why am I so happy to see that her feet are as imperfect as mine, as happy as I’d have been 30 years ago to think that I had a limb or a curve in common with Verushka? Same nonsense, only older?
When I saw her across the restaurant I had the same feeling I do when I see my own reflection: There is a middle-aged woman. Across the table, I see that her dark, short hair is peppered with white, her hands are freckled and heavier. There are crinkles at her eyes and a line at her mouth, formed by her smile that I know very well, and another set of lines for worry. It isn’t a stranger in the mirror when I see myself. It isn’t a stranger across the lunch table. I see my friend as she was and as she is. If she and I were magically reformed as girls of 19, we would lose our history together. I want to see her for the rest of our lives, and watch as the changes in our bodies and faces record our time together. The physical changes signal the end of our youth when our future was unpredictable and we didn’t know ourselves (or each other) as well as we do now.
Faith is a dozen years older than I, and I’ve known her a dozen years. She dresses slowly in the morning, taking hours to select her clothing, do her exercises, apply her makeup. She wears colors that are harmonious with her forever red hair – alabaster, chamois, flesh, limestone. She lives through her eyes and feasts on clothing. We often shop, not so much to buy as to appreciate. She says, “To see what’s out there.”
A few years ago, a trap door was left open and she fell 10 feet into the dark. Her shoulder was hurt and the corner of her mouth torn open, like a sardine can. Now she can move her shoulder freely and pick up almost anything with that arm. While she was recovering, she could only manage to put on big knit tops and loose pants with elastic waists. There is a faint line going down from her mouth that might be an age line but is a scar from the accident. For years she talked about having a facelift when the time came but now she’s keeping the line and incorporating the comfortable clothing into her wardrobe. She’s always been a great reader. Since the fall, she’s learned a new way to read the lines at the corners of her mouth.
Some lines of poetry for our faces:
It seems most like the battlefields
we desecrate, regret, then consecrate*
We have no aesthetic for the changes in the textures, colors, and shapes of our physical selves. When we moved from girlhood into adolescence, we were prepared by a world of of art and fashion to lose our hard child bodies and to adorn ourselves as women. We move unprepared into middle age and old age, our eyes empty except for images of our mothers in their middle years, who seemed aged and ageless to us when we were their children.
Women age into a beauty we’re not trained to see. We can recognize comfort with themselves in women who have turned the corner and left the nonsense behind, but we need original eyes to see their beauty. If, when I looked at women in their 70s and 80s without imagining how they used to look, I would be free to see them – and myself – just as they are, now and now alone. From “Agnus Dei,” Caroline Marshall, Fugitive Grace
(St. Paul: Minn.: Writers Publishing House, 1979).
Laura Furman is a novelist and short story writer who lives in Austin. She teaches in the English Department at the University of Texas at Austin.
This article appears in June 13 • 1997 and June 13 • 1997 (Cover).