Lore Segal reads.
January: The Forgetting Olympics
Farah said, “Ladies’ Lunch at my place, my agenda: Forgetting as an Olympic sport. You know how TV uses competition to turn us on to baking, interior decorating, fashion, and what all? I propose the Great Ladies’ Forgetting Olympics.”
Bessie said, “You mean whoever forgets the most names gets the gold?”
“Forgets more words, words, words,” said Bridget.
“And dates and appointments,” Farah said.
Bessie said, “Addresses. I remember Lotte calling me several times for the address of the party that turned out to be—I forget, what do we call a Jewish wake?—for Sylvia’s deceased aunt. Poor Lotte spent the evening trying to remember from where she knew Sylvia or if maybe she had never met her.”
“Forgetting people,” Ilka said. “I had an e-mail from a Samson who writes as if I should know his brother, his mother? The only Samsons I know are Kafka’s bug and the one in the Bible.”
“I picked up a story I published in 2007,” Bridget said. “It’s not that I don’t recognize what I wrote, but I couldn’t think how it ended.”
“So anyway,” said Farah impatiently. “This is this morning. I’m enjoying my coffee, going to turn on the news, and I think, Wait a minute—today is the fifth? Imagine yourself in an elevator in free fall, your stomach has been left behind, or drops into your boots—or is it your heart that drops into your pants—I forget the idiom, but wasn’t it on the fourth I was having dinner with Ervin?
“Ervin’s folks are my mother’s distant cousins who went to Canada. Ervin is the in-between generation, younger than my son but older than my grandson Hami, I think. Anyway. So. I marched myself into my office, turned on the computer—I have this big desktop because of my bad eyes—got briefly hysterical when I couldn’t remember how to find the calendar, found it, and it was! It was yesterday that Ervin was in town. I see him sitting at a table waiting for me, except that I can’t remember where we were supposed to meet. . . .”
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“Wait!” Ilka said, “Wait, wait, wait! Samson! Lotte’s son was Sam and his brother Gregor came from Chicago, was it? And they put Lotte into . . . what’s the name of the assisted-living place?”
Farah said, “I had to decently wait till nine o’clock before calling, and I reached him at the airport, already in line to board. It was a slow line. I said, ‘Ervin! It’s this sorry old head of mine. I forget things!’ He said what we all routinely say—he says, ‘So do I. I forget things, too!,’ meaning, If I forget, forgetting is nothing to do with your embarrassing old age. ‘I forget everything all the time!’ he says. If he thinks he’s going to out-forget me, he has another think coming. I say, ‘I forget names, words, and dates, and yesterday I forgot that it was the fourth.’ So he says, ‘And I can’t remember the number of Cousin Hami’s phone,’ and we’re off to the races. I say, ‘I can’t remember my own phone number, and I forgot my keys inside my apartment and had to call the locksmith.’ He says, ‘I left my bag in the hotel room. They will have to send it on.’
“And now he’s one up on me because I’m not going to tell him, I have forgotten you and what you look like. If we passed in the street I wouldn’t know you.
“Ervin said, ‘The line is beginning to move, Goodbye. Aunt Farah.’ I said, ‘Next time you’re in New York, you’ll come and have dinner at my place and I’ll take you up to our roof and show you the Hudson River right underfoot.’ ‘You showed me already,’ he said. ‘You’ve never been in my place,’ I said. ‘Sure I have,’ he said. ‘Last year, when I was in town, and after dinner we took drinks up to your roof. Goodbye.’
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“ ‘Goodbye, Ervin,’ I said. I try and try and fail to see Ervin sitting—on which chair? Facing in which direction? Looking over the wall on the roof? A mean trick if the loss of vision has taken away my visual memory.”
Ruth said, “Like trying to force the raggedy tail end of a dream to reconstitute the dream before we forget what it was about.”
Farah said, “Before we forget what there is to remember.”
March: Next to Godliness
At Monday’s Ladies’ Lunch, Bridget told her friends the bad thing she had done on her way over. “My neighbor from 6-J got on the elevator and asked me how I was doing, and, instead of saying ‘Fine,’ I said, ‘I’ve had the worst morning! I’m bringing my friends a bottle of wine and went to open the cupboard for a bag and out fell an avalanche of who knows how many years’ worth of paper bags that I must have kept, for whatever future use or need I may have imagined, stuffed in anyhow just anywhere.’ ”
The shifting and resettling on chairs might have alerted Bridget that she was wearying her friends’ interest and attention. Not knowing where she was headed, she continued, “Why, when I already had my coat on, did I start to organize the large and the midsize into separate piles, the small throwaways without handles on the left, and those handsomely engineered to be refolded on the right?”
Lucinella said, “There was a time when I needed, when I had to have my pencils in a row, sharpened to perfect points, all of one length, which, of course, they couldn’t remain unless I kept getting rid of the wrong size.”
“My friend Dario,” Ruth said, “used to come in and sit and talk and fidget and look uncomfortable until he suddenly got up and straightened the picture on the opposite wall.”
Hope said, “The nice woman who comes in once a week to clean doesn’t put things back where they belong.”
“Tell her you want the right things in the right place,” Bessie said.
“Oh, I tell her. I tell her and tell her and tell her. I think she may really not remember where things are supposed to go.”
“Does it matter?” Ilka asked her.
“It so obviously doesn’t, so why is it driving me insane?”
Bessie said, “My Eve and Jenny are terminally untidy, which reminds me of my mother standing in my doorway saying it looked as if a band of robbers had gone through the things in my room.”
The group considered Bessie to be the arbiter of Ladies’ Lunch agendas. This week she had e-mailed them an idea suggested by a recent New York Times article that, she explained, “compared our children’s relations with us with our attitudes toward the adults of our day.”
“And my suggestion,” put in Ruth, “was that we should think about what our lot understands by ‘wokeness.’ ”
Lucinella said, “I don’t know that I know what exactly it is.”
“That’s what I want us to talk about.”
“Yes,” Bridget said, “yes, but why do Hope’s things need to be in the right place?”
“So she can find them?” suggested Farah.
“I grant you that, O.K.,” Bridget said. “But that is not why we arrange things in rows. Who benefits from my smoothing the wrinkles of my bedcover? Why do I correct what is off-center?”
“Because you want things to look neat and tidy.”
“I do. I know I do. But why do I? What’s it for? Why do we neaten nature into gardens? What is the virtue of a tidy grass border? And why did I take the trouble to hang the picture parallel to the floor in the first place?”
“Well, jeez, you wouldn’t purposely hang it askew.”
“No. I certainly would not,” said Bridget. “That’s what I mean. Why not?”
Bessie said, “Do you remember Lotte saying that things not put properly away were like ‘visual noise’? Don’t we have a need—don’t we yearn for order?”
There followed a moment in which Bridget did not say “Why do we?,” Bessie was remembering where Lotte used to sit, with her back to the window, and Farah understood that she was seeing her friends across the table as if through a plastic baggie.
Ruth picked up the Times and put it down again: they were not going to talk about wokeness.
Hope said, “Isn’t ‘neatliness’ supposed to be next to ‘godliness’?”
Bessie said, “That order is better than disorder is self-explanatory. ”
“Explain it,” said Bridget.
June: Funk
“Woke up in some sort of state,” Bridget e-mailed Ruth on the day of Ladies’ Lunch. “I don’t like to do this, but I’m not going to make it to your place.”
“Do you want us to come to you?” Ruth e-mailed back.
“What I want is for this week to be the week after next,” Bridget returned.
“Farah and I are coming over,” Ruth wrote.
“I don’t think I have any food,” wrote Bridget.
•
“Hi! We’ve brought sushi,” Ruth said, and Farah said, “Bessie and Ilka are on their way up. Hope might come a bit later. What’s going on? Talk to us.”
They seated themselves around Bridget’s table. She said, “It’s the stupid nerves before giving a talk. I’m on this panel on Wednesday and I have to give the opening statement. This is stuff I do all the time.”
“But public speaking is famously nerve-wracking,” said Ruth, the retired lawyer. “I used to worry weeks ahead, and then only one week, and later one day, then just for the five minutes before going on, until I learned to just be nervous.”
“And I’m frazzled by all the things I haven’t got done around the house,” Bridget said.
“Like what, for instance?”
“Like . . . I can’t remember—and I don’t know how to find—the name of the guy who washes my windows, so I can’t call to find out when he is supposed to come. Hope, hello!” she greeted the latecomer. “Sit down. Have sushi.”
“Sorry I’m late,” Hope said. “What’s happening?”
“Bridget can’t remember the name of her window washer,” reported Bessie.
“Oh, wow!” commented Hope.
“Bridget is on a panel and has to give a talk,” added Ruth.
“I know. I’m coming to hear you. It’s this Wednesday, isn’t it? Not the end of the world?” Hope finished on a questioning note.
“You know that,” Bridget said. “And I know that, but you tell me why my blood pressure is way up, heart thumping, my sleep lousy with nightmares.”
“That’s unlike you,” Farah said. “We rely on you to make us see our discomforts, even our disasters, as interesting experiences.”
“Well, there is nothing interesting, I promise you, in not being at home when the window washer comes to wash your windows, or in being home when he comes to wash the windows and you haven’t cleared a lifetime collection of colored glassware from the windowsills.”
“Why not move everything and then he can come when he comes?”
“And live, for who knows how long, in a world with glass objects on every surface?”
Ilka said, “I must have quoted to you my old friend Carter, who numbered the things that do not matter, which drove him to drink? ‘It do not matter’ became our watchword. It’s surprising how many things that applies to.”
Bridget said, “Anxiety is surprisingly uncomfortable. I remember and long for my normal, well-enough-regulated self. It’s like not being able to imagine summer afternoons when your coat won’t zip on a windy street corner in February.”
“Wait! Hang on,” Hope said. “Now imagine Hell as an eternal February on a windy corner with the zipper irreparably broken.”
“What sin is it punishment for?” Ruth asked.
“No sin. Pure punishment. The greatest imaginable discomfort without the possibility of change or end is my idea of Hell. What’s yours?”
“I’ve got a good one,” Farah said. “Being on a telephone hold that cannot be disconnected and will never be answered.”
They took turns imagining eternities of what each thought unbearable until Bessie said, “Watching my Colin in pain.”
Here’s where Hope opened the bottle of wine she had brought, and Bridget said, “My anxiety is a moderate Hell, like a low-grade, generalized fear about personal stuff I don’t know how to fix and the stuff in the news that nobody knows how to fix, so I’m going to do what I know how to do, which is to write a story and call it ‘Funk.’ ”
November: No More Trains
“But no more trips, no more trains,” Hope said.
“Except to go and see Lotte at her ‘facility,’ ” Ruth said.
It was early one September. The friends had taken the train to Old Rockingham to have Ladies’ Lunch at Bessie’s. Colin, who was having one of his bad days, had gone into his room. They lunched on the wooden deck overlooking the curling blue bay with its traffic of pleasure boats. “Like so many little white triangles. It’s lovely,” they said, and Hope added, “But no more trips.”
“The Connecticut train out here wasn’t bad,” Ruth said, and Hope said, “Oh, I like the train. I always feel that little thrill as soon as I sit in the taxi to the train or to a plane. It’s the anxiety of the days—of the week—before a trip that’s hard to survive.”
“Oh, that. Yes,” they had all agreed, and Farah said, “My balance is shot, and, with my eyes getting worse by the day, it’s the thought of the two blocks to Broadway that produces a small agoraphobia.”
Bridget said, “I feel—do we agree—that we don’t need more adventures, don’t need new experiences? That we can batten on past travels?”
Bessie said, “The time Lotte and I and our two guys lit out for Europe after our final exams—the four of us lugging our bags, the only people out in the streets of midnight Venice.”
“China,” Bridget said. “In the eighties. We noticed the designs on the houses along the Burma Road—each village had its signature. A very old woman bent down to her grandchild and pointed at me: ‘Look! An American.’ ”
Ilka said, “When you’ve made it up the mountain, you get to look over the top, and there is a new bit of the world that you could not have supposed.”
They continued to meet for Ladies’ Lunch and continued to say “If someone would drive us we could go to see Lotte in Green What’s Its Name.” Lotte had begun to call them hallucinating missing keys to a car that she seemed to believe she had bought to take herself home to her apartment.
“We didn’t—we couldn’t go to see her,” they said after Lotte died. This, too, is now—how long ago?
•
At lunch in November, Ruth said, “I accepted an invitation to dinner—another one of these longtime get-togethers—and at the last moment it seemed too complicated and I begged off.”
“And you regret not going?”
“Not the dinner, and not the not getting together so much as not having gone, which makes it easier to not go the next time.”
Bessie said, “Colin can no longer do without me, and it’s getting harder for me to take the train into the city. I’m going to let Eve have the Ninety-fourth Street pied-à-terre. The light is good for her painting.”
“No more lunches at the Café Provence,” said Hope, who’d learned that her old friend Jack had died. “That was in June,” she said. “Curious to have been living for months in a world without Jack living in it.”
“So can we batten on the love it is better to have had and lost than never to have had at all?” said Bridget.
“Yes,” Farah said. “Yes.” And her friends waited for the story. Farah said, “I’ve been toying with a notion that losing my sight is the punishment for my great, grand forbidden affair.”
“Oh, for goodness’ sake, no you haven’t! You don’t really believe in punishment,” Ruth said.
“I really don’t,” said Farah, “but punishment feels like the right idea.”
“You mean that you wouldn’t do it if you had it to do again?”
“Yes, I would!” said Farah.
“Will you tell us the story?”
“No,” Farah said. “Did I mention that Medicare is sending me a walker?”
•
Then there was covid and their children worried about them. Ruth undertook to Zoom Ladies’ Lunch. They became accustomed to watching themselves talking to one another out of squares that showed their beds, their bookshelves, the doors to their bathrooms. It turned out to be easier to stay at home—not to have to leave the house. Then, one day, Ruth e-mailed everybody to ask if anyone would mind if they took a hiatus. Nobody minded, and it has become easier to not have Ladies’ Lunch. For now? ♦
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