The Stairs

It should be one of the proudest events of my life. Instead, it’s an existential crisis.

Photo by Icarus Yang on Unsplash

I don’t fret much about looking old. That may be mostly because I don’t. Being a little bit fat most of my life has given my face natural filler. My red hair, which I would have liked to get rid of as an adolescent (glamour then being blonde and blue-eyed) has had its revenge and has never gone grey, and I have a lot of it. I know I’m pretty—something I only realized was true after decades of not knowing, and I’m not about to give it up now just because some parts of my face sag. With mascara and blush and my big hair styled I clean up well.

But that’s just my “looks.” Having a body that’s 76 is another thing.

The body doesn’t let us forget that it has what academics call “materiality”—as when I threw my 50-year-old leg over the baby-gate, forgetting for a moment that I wasn’t the limber 16-year-old who had actually given birth to my daughter, or when I tried to keep up with the 30-year-olds at a Pilates class. I was young enough then so those injuries healed, but as we get older there’s always the worry: Is this the beginning of an inexorable decline?

When my back started to bother me, at first I didn’t think about it much—I’d habitually powered through aches and pains—until my husband and I went on vacation at the Delaware shore. I’d been looking forward to it for months. I love being near the ocean, I love walking on the beach, I love boardwalks, fried clams, salt-water taffy, and tacky souvenir hoodies. And now I couldn’t go more than a block without having to sit down on a bench because of the pain in my back.

Being someone whose brain is almost always in overdrive, I immediately began to torture myself with memories of my hardy, not athletic but fairly limber younger self: Early-morning walks on other beaches, shopping from store to store in malls for hours, a trip to Paris, not all that many years before, when I’d walked all over the city, transfixed by the beauty. The many trains I’d run to catch as I’d travelled to give talks.

My husband reassured me that I was probably just out of condition, and needed to spend more time on the treadmill. That didn’t help all that much, as he, at 83, bikes every day and runs in marathons. He’s almost an alien species. And then, after we got home, there was a day when the pain shot fiercely from a spot just under my waist, down my left leg, and into my foot. After advil and ice, the sharp pain went away, leaving a trail of tingling and numbness down my leg and foot, and when I stood up, my left leg had altered it’s previously compatible relationship with the right. “Shit,” I thought, imagining stair lifts and motoring through the supermarket, “I’m really an old person now.”

The chiropractor diagnosed several not-very-unusual problems for a person of 74, prescribed regular sessions, massage, and at-home stretches several times a day. But despite the stretches, despite chiropractic and massage, despite better shoes and regular hours on the treadmill, despite Feldenkrais—which helped more than any of the others—the numbness and the balance issues that came with it never did go away. It’s a minor problem compared with what others have to deal with, but I have an overactive mind, and became unable to just walk without thinking about every step, without assessing the state of my back pain, without my body-consciousness in overdrive. And once you shift into overdrive, things can only get worse.

My best friend tells me I have a haunted body. In the 19th century, I probably would have been diagnosed with hysteria. When I was 21 and realized I had just married a person who was totally wrong for me, I developed a severe case of agoraphobia which effectively stopped me from leaving him (or our apartment) for a year. When I was in graduate school and told the first draft of my dissertation proposal was way too ambitious, my throat closed up and I couldn’t swallow for months. When in my forty’s, having tried to get pregnant without success, my ears got blocked, I developed a somatic phobia so preoccupying that it necessitated taking a leave from teaching. I experienced my ears as filled with tunnel-like tubes travelling from outer to inner and back out again. And yet it came with a jolt when, explaining the sensation to my therapist, I referrto the malfunctioning working of my inner ear as fallopian tubes. 

You could say I think too much—except that’s what’s saved me, too. And for decades, Susan the writer and her body operated pretty happily as one. They both had their secret phobias, parts of private life that were carefully guarded, pasts of sexual adventure and sexual desperation that only my best friends knew about. But when I walked into the classroom or stood at the podium of an auditorium of people what they saw was basically what they expected. Writing made me feel free and confident and ageless, and that’s what they got from the person in front of them.

There were times when I had to struggle to keep that persona intact. But the struggle was behind-the-scenes. After a lie-down in the hotel room, the mascara and blush applied, the funky but stylish outfit selected, the necklaces assembled, by the time the Dean’s introduction to the illustrious person I hardly recognized was done, the Susan Bordo he had described and that people expected materialized. If her knee hurt or her heart ached, no one knew it.

Then I retired. Then the pandemic happened. Then my older sister died. And during the period that I was home almost all the time, staying “safe” from a virus or deep in mourning over my sister, my body got older and my leg got numb. (My daughter also has a numb leg—from an operation for compartment syndrome—but she’s 24, and is extremely proficient, like many natural athletes, at getting her body to do what she wants it to do no matter what’s wrong. I worry about that sometimes, but right now it’s serving her well.)

In just over a week, I’m going to be inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. A huge honor. But now that—thanks to my Facebook advisors—I have appropriate outfits picked out, all I can think about are the stairs leading to the stage. Not the stairs themselves, but the fact that I will look like such an old lady hauling my no-longer-always-cooperative legs up them and the fact that they will be providing an usher to help with the section where there are no railings.

I remember older actresses being helped that way at the Oscars, I remember some of them tripping. I remember the nasty comments on Facebook. Whenever a public person of my age comes down from an airplane, or walks up to a podium I assess the ease (or lack of it) that they exhibit. They are almost always less awkward than I’m sure I’ll be. I’m especially envious of Jill Biden and Hilary Clinton, who seem to do it pretty comfortably. And of course, there’s the incessant drone about Joe Biden’s age—largely based on the stiffness of his gait. And even he seems pretty good going up and down stairs.

The discourse around Biden’s age has revealed how much we judge vitality and capability on the basis sheerly of body stuff. Trump never gets described as “old,” although the non-lizard part of his brain, which never worked very well to begin with, is clearly lacking in executive function, whether you take that word in the brain department sense or the POTUS sense. But injections of venom and extra bulk have made him seem “robust.” His voice is loud enough and his tongue does ok getting words out but the words themselves are absurd, ignorant, and oblivious to truth. Biden speaks softly, and pauses frequently; he arguably takes his time answering because he’s thinking about how to avoid traps laid by the press, inadvertently insulting allies, or gaffing in some way (as he used to do when younger.) Like other former stutterers, when he’s tired he sometimes slips into a near-stammer, especially when he’s trying to follow the rolling prompter. He once tripped over some obstacle on the stage. What does any of it signify?

Thinking about my own moment going up the stairs, I realize how upset I am about the prospect of my seeming “old.” The concern is, in part, about how others will then think about me. Will younger feminists want to send me out on a raft or into the woods, convinced I have nothing left to offer? Will men who have found me attractive in photographs be shocked to find I’m not as youthfully agile as they thought? Will students who have read my books and imagined me as “cool” dismiss me as they’ve dismissed other women of my generation?

I know these concerns are exacerbated by the age-phobic culture we now live in. But my anxiety is also existential. If others see me as old, I will be forced to confront the fact that I am old, a realization that my hair and strong voice (both as a writer and a speaker) and relatively good health have allowed me, self-deceptively, to avoid. And now, as I walk up the stairs to sign my name in a book of great honor—a moment that ought to be pure pleasure for me—that illusion will be destroyed. I realize that’s a good thing. But it’s also a challenge that I worry I won’t manage with the grace or courage I’ve admired in others.

I’ll let you all know how it goes.

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And, as promised, here’s how it went: