Outport Shadows

I forget that I am fifty-five years old until I look in the mirror. An average, lumpy, middle-aged woman, I move in the world in another body, my younger body, a body I lived in sometime in the past. I haven't forgotten that home. I know it and love it. It is fluid and agile and smooth. Busy. Graceful, I remember. Strong. It loves work. It loves to heap the wheelbarrow with steaming sheep manure and wheel it down the hill to the garden. To dump the load, which requires all its strength. To grab the spade and spread the manure, load after load, over the soil in the hot sun. This body I know loves to lie stretched on its side, reading, my hand – this hand, if I don't look down – absent-mindedly stroking up and over its tight ribs, its bony hip, its long smooth thigh. This body I live inside loves to burst into a sprint to retrieve my wallet from the car. To tease the dog with a romp. To dance when no one is home, the childhood ballet poses – arabesques, pirouettes, fifth position. To make love in the light of winter sun, goose-fleshed and generous. This body catches the eye. Its clothes hang easily, comfortably. Its skin is stretched tight. Its hair swishes heavily in a long blond ponytail. This remembered body I live inside moves large in the world, visible, watched, wanted.

But the mirror reminds me I am a middle-aged woman. I have grown invisible in the world. I am shocked by this shift every single day. I walk table to table at a bookstore, moving around other shoppers, picking up books, reading back covers, authors' introductions. A young man with soft black curls and gentle eyes steps in tight beside me and reaches across for a best-selling novel. I smile, move farther down, and say, "Sorry, I'm in your way." He glances at me, through me, and goes on reading. No one looks up.

I stand in front of my college class, a room packed full of hormones and smooth flesh. We are talking about Tim O'Brien, Viet Nam. I tell them that, when I was their age, we marched against the war in the streets of Cambridge, that we were chased by cops in riot gear, that we believed we were changing the world. Jessica, a favorite student I know from other classes, says, "It's just so hard for us to imagine you our age. I mean, that you were young and did all these things. That you were ever like us." Twenty young faces nod.

I resist this invisibility. Sometimes the protest is silly: I resent the confident young clerk at the grocery store, her shine and elasticity, her belief that she is here, like this, forever. Sometimes I pity her, her failure to foresee her own inevitable fading. Sometimes I foolishly compete, counting calories and walking extra miles, pretending I'm regaining a few years. Mostly, I'm careful not to look at my reflection in the store window as I walk back out to my car.

But I understand that what I am resisting is not just the inevitability of becoming no longer seen, no longer watched, a giving up of that physicality the world once noticed. What I fight is this certainty: I am slipping along toward erasure, toward no body. I will die. Once, I was young and vibrant; now, I am in the middle and eclipsed; soon, I will be old, and then I will be gone. Every time I walk unnoted among people, every time I glance in the mirror, every time I look down and see the ropey veins of my hands, I have to tangle, in a quiet, stunned moment, with this underlying truth: I am far along the path.

My mother died before she was old. The mother I remember from my childhood was a miracle of perpetual motion. On two pots of percolated coffee and a pack of Winstons, my mother went to work and came home and cleaned and gardened and...