own aging, here at the tail end of her forties, she had drawn these women to her. But more likely they had drawn her to them via some kind of post-menopausal force. When young women lived together, after all, or even stayed for a time in the same area, their periods grew to coincide—the pull of pheromones, legend had it. Possibly this was like that, minus fertility. The other end of the life cycle: contagious senility. Because she was less rational with each day that passed, less grounded. Wasn’t she? More closely tied to the place, but less closely tied to herself . . . she felt a quick, deep regret.
Once she had been pragmatic: once, when she was a younger person, she’d passed for normal on a daily basis. She’d been a teacher after all, first grade, second grade. She had personally been a trusted guide for children, had led them up to the new and tried to help them decipher it. She had felt the newness herself now and then—felt for an instant, as she showed them a simple picture of an apple, that she herself had never seen an apple before—never in two dimensions, never so flat. And so perfect.
In that instant she had a glimpse over the wall of a garden.
And society had let her do this, had even thanked her for it. Society had deemed her fully responsible, a shepherd of the dear flock. There had been small teaching awards; there had been offers of dull administrative positions as a reward for her years of service. The children had often loved her, the parents had smiled and thanked her profusely and the mothers brought her generic female gifts, soap or scented candles. Now—much of the time alone, far, far away from those glowing children—she roamed a big, dim mansion whose walls were lined with dead animals, herself growing old, surrounded by dust and fur, by remnants of fierceness, remnants of wildness, remnants of what had once been the world.
The old women weren’t dying quite yet but they were feeble and growing paler all the time, pale speech, pale minds, pale hair, pale skin. As the youth fell away they also shed the pigment, they shed every last vestige of youthful color . . . maybe that was why old women often wore clothes in garish hues. She forgot what the theories were about aging—cells failing to divide, cells dividing too fast. But however the molecules were getting it done, the women themselves were fading, lost to entropy and washing out. They went gray, grayer, white, toward the day in the future when they attained translucence. And so the reds, the violets, the pinks and emerald greens they wore were a desperate grab at pigment again, a simulation of life.
She was filled with longing. She knew what it was. She recognized it instantly. She wanted the small children back.
Yes, it was sentimental—it was pathetic, this yearning. But they were good; they were, almost always, so good. She missed their perfect skin—their beauty, the swiftly given trust. She wanted to see them again. She wanted them all around her. How had she ever let them go? Children! Come back. Come back now, dears, you dear beings. When I left, you know, I was only joking—a foolish joke, wasn’t it. I wouldn’t leave you. I’m here again.
When had this happened? Not with Hal’s death. Not with his death—long before that. It happened with the accident. She had turned from the children because of a terrible certainty, a certainty of what was coming.
“Are you all right, Susan?”
She realized the backhoe driver was staring. He wore a tie-dyed T-shirt with large underarm stains.
“Why don’t we let the gentleman begin his excavation,” went on Portia. “I’d like to go inside for a few minutes and check up on the ladies.” She tapped Susan’s arm and they turned back toward the pool and the tennis court. Tie-dye, Susan thought, was limited in its appeal to those who were dropping acid. No one in a sober frame of mind could possibly find it pleasing to the eye—though possibly the old women admired it for its garishness.
“Go inside,” she echoed, and nodded.
“You know: Ellen has to take her hypertension pills. I don’t like to leave it to Angela. Angela doesn’t run on a schedule and so she tends to forget.”
Portia must only be here to manage the others, Susan realized as they picked their way along the flagstones—or to ensure, rather, that Angela did