Stories About Us

By Lore Segal

在 The New Yorker 杂志上有全文，点击这里阅读。

In the Mail

Once [writers have] finished a new manuscript and put it in the mail, they exist in a state of suspended emotional and psychic animation . . . and it’s cruelty to animals to keep them waiting.

—Robert Gottlieb, The Paris Review

“Let’s get the complaining out of the way,” proposed Hope. “I’ve got me a pacemaker.”

Farah said, “I’m losing my vision.”

Bessie said, “I lost my husband.”

And Bridget said, “I sent my story to a friend from my old writing class.”

“And how is that a complaint?” Bessie asked her.

Bridget said, “Because it feels—maybe it’s something like the actor’s stage fright.”

“What I felt,” Lucinella said to Bridget, “when I sent you my water-bug story. Embarrassed.”

“Water bugs! Yuck!” everybody said, and Bessie said, “But why is it embarrassing?”

Bridget said, “There’s a kind of shyness or shame to be demanding another person’s time and attention.”

“Of exposing oneself,” Lucinella said. “I begged Bridget for her honest opinion, and Bridget wrote me that there is not one of us who doesn’t conceal from herself the hope, the expectation, that the honest opinion will be that we have written a masterpiece.”

“And the fear,” Bridget added, “that we will be found out to be a jackass.”

“What’s your story about?” Farah asked Bridget.

“About a group of women friends getting old together.”

“About us, you mean,” Hope said.

“About us, but you understand that I write stories. About us sitting round the table and talking, but not necessarily what we say and not identifiably any one of us.”

“But why not identifiably us?” asked Farah.

“Maybe so as not to make public what we feel free to tell each other in private; to not offend with what I understand or misunderstand. And because I’ve already killed off two of us on the page. But really it’s about how we make up the people in our stories.”

“Only we’re right here. You don’t have to make us up.”

“Yes, I do. I don’t have to invent, but I have to imagine us. People, pacemakers, and glaucoma are not the stuff that can be pasted into a Microsoft document or onto a sheet of paper. Remember ‘Star Trek’? You’re beamed to a different dimension by being decimated and then reassembled on arrival. I turn us into the words that would allow my friend Anna to imagine us.”

“So what did your Anna think of us?”

“She didn’t.”

“How do you mean?”

“I haven’t heard from her.”

“When did you send her your story?”

“Tomorrow will be four weeks to the day.”

“So what will you do?”

“Lie in bed at night and stew. Dream vengeful dreams. Or imagine Anna putting off the obligation to read my story. I picture her putting off the reading in order to put off the barely thinkable prospect of having to say something to me if she doesn’t like it or doesn’t get the point, and so she puts it off and puts it off until she forgets about it and, eventually, forgets the cause of the pinpoint of guilt in the lower left back side of her brain.”

“Poor Anna,” said everybody.

Grandmother Mole

Hope said, “My agenda? Falling asleep at the movies.”

Farah said, “Now that it’s hard for me to read, I lie on my bed and listen to YouTube philosophy which I don’t understand.”

“What don’t you understand?” Bridget asked her. They were talking on Zoom.

“What is ‘the excluded middle’?” Farah said. “And how does the inability of the finite to imagine the infinite prove the existence of God?”

Bridget said, “I’ve been reading ‘The Peaceable Kingdom’ with great-granddaughter Libby. ‘The lion shall lie down with the lamb and little Libby will lead them.’ ”

Bessie said, “Lucky you to still have a little Libby to read to. My Eve’s Johnny used to like it when I read him the story of Mole who shouts and shouts and doesn’t stop shouting until his Grandmother Mole figures out that what he means is ‘Notice me.’

“Yesterday,” continued Bessie, “I was coming out of the building, when who should be walking up the street but Johnny. ‘You are coming to see me!’ I said. Why, he said—wasn’t I feeling well? I was O.K., I told him. He told me that he was on his way up the block to study with his friend in his friend’s new place, and he said goodbye and I said goodbye. Is it unreasonable of me to think he might have some feelings for his grandmother now that I have lost Colin?”

“Colin wasn’t his real grandfather,” Hope said.

“Maybe not, but he was just lovely with the boy. Used to take him sailing, with me, terrified, watching from the deck of the house.”

“When they turn teens,” Farah said, “we know it isn’t grandmothers they have on their souls. If I live long enough, Hami will become a grownup and we may be friends again.”

Ilka said, “Not necessarily. Maggie is looking through my papers and found—wait!” Ilka disappeared from the screen and returned holding up a fragile postcard. “It’s dated 1889, from the grandmother I never knew to my father. A loose translation: ‘My dearest, so very beloved Hansl, How is it possible that you have not in a whole week found the smallest little minute to send one line to your mama . . .’ ”

“The ur-complaint. Right out of Nichols and May,” said Lucinella. “Listen!” She manipulated her iPad.

A woman’s voice said, “This is your mother. Do you remember me?”

A male voice said, “I was just going to call you. . . . Do you know that I had my finger on the—”

The mother said, “I sat by that phone all day Friday, and all day Friday night, all day Saturday, and all day Sunday. Finally, your father said to me, Phyllis, eat something, you’ll faint. I said, Harold, no, I don’t want to have my mouth full when my son calls me. . . .”

The son’s voice: “I feel awful.” The mother: “Oh, honey, if I could believe that, I’d be the happiest mother in the world.”

•

At the following ladies’ lunch, Bridget read the friends the Nichols-and-May Mole story she had written.

She read: ‘‘When Grandmother Mole met Mole outside her tunnel, she said, ‘I’ve been waiting for you.’ ‘Why, Grandmother Mole, aren’t you feeling well?’ Mole asked her, but Grandmother Mole was feeling well enough. She said, ‘It’s just I want to see you.’ ‘Grandmother Mole, do you need me to go hunting for you?’ ‘No, thank you,’ Grandmother Mole said.’ ”

Bridget interrupted her story to say, “I was going to check Wikipedia. What do moles hunt? Do moles hunt? So, anyway. ‘Grandmother Mole,’ Mole asked her, ‘do you need me to come and dig you a new tunnel?’ But there was nothing wrong with Grandmother Mole’s old tunnel. ‘What I want,’ Grandmother Mole said to her Mole, ‘is for you to want to visit me, to want to talk and to be with me.’ ”

“She means ‘Notice me,’ ” commented Farah.

Bridget returned to her story. “ ‘So goodbye, Grandmother Mole,’ Mole said. And he walked up the block to his friend’s tunnel to study.”

“To hang out,” amended Farah.

Bessie said, “Oh, leave him be. Let him hang out or study or do whatever kids do.”

“What has happened to you?” Lucinella asked Bessie. “What has changed?”

Bessie said, “My grandson e-mailed me. I thought all the kids ever did was ‘text’ each other.”

She pulled out a piece of paper. “Johnny wrote me: ‘I’m sorry I haven’t been available recently!!! How are you? Let’s have lunch or dinner soon. I miss you.’ ”

Why with an Exclamation

At one Old Rockingham lunch before Colin’s illness—so it must have been some three or more years ago, Bridget thought—Colin had invited everyone out on his boat. Bessie had stayed in to deal with the complications of lunch. Hope and Farah opted to help her, but Bridget and Ruth went sailing with Colin. Ruth soon wanted to get back to firm land, but for Bridget it was bliss, the revelation of what she felt she had been born to do, to be.

Today, they were seated at Bridget’s table. Handing around plates and passing the salad, she was reluctant to say what was going to take too long and be too cumbersome. The friends were all readers, but she alone kept returning to Proust. Still, she set sail. “The payoff,” she said, “is that you come across improbable behaviors and recognize your friends—recognize yourself.”

“Like what, for instance?” her friends obliged her by asking.

Bridget said, “Marcel’s father has been more than hinting—has been nudging his excellent friend, whose name I’m not even going to try to recall, for membership in the Institute, to which the friend has the means to get him elected. Well, why does the friend not act for him?

“So Proust tells another story,” continued Bridget, feeling that she was getting farther and farther from the home shore. “Marcel’s father invites a family friend to dinner. Knowing dear old Swann’s desire to meet a certain young woman, he does not invite the young woman.”

“And how does that explain anything?” asked Hope.

“It illustrates the ancient truth that ‘To those who have, shall be given; from those who have not, shall be taken even that they have,’ ” Bridget explained. “But Proust is saying that the trick of generally well-constituted natures is to not give a friend what the friend wants.”

“But why do we?” Bessie said. “That doesn’t explain why we do that.”

Bridget said, “This is not the ‘why’ that expects a ‘because.’ It’s the ‘Why, how curious,’ with an exclamation mark!”

Left Shoulders

Ilka said, “You remember how we said ‘No more planes, no more trains’?”

“And no more movies,” added Farah. “No more going to the theatre.”

“Or going anywhere. Going out,” Bessie said. “Eve asks me don’t I want to take a turn down on Riverside Drive, and I say no. I want to sit where I am sitting.”

“There have been times, lately,” Ilka said, “when I’ve thought, No more talking. There’s something I want to say, but my mouth doesn’t open to say it, or not in the moment when there is a gap in the conversation. I remember my mother sitting beside me at our dinner parties—it was she who had usually cooked. Was I aware, in the heat of what I was saying to whoever sat on my right, of her sitting behind my left shoulder? Did I understand that she no longer had what it takes to make her way into the conversation?”

“The energy to self-start,” Hope said, “to insert oneself.”

Ilka said, “I would go on and on, talking and talking.”

“So many left shoulders,” Bessie said.

“I used to have an Indian friend, Padma,” said Ilka. “Padma might be sitting on the sofa talking with me, and if my husband walked in she would minimally adjust herself to also face him, and if my mother came in, Padma, with the most natural, littlest movement, turned to include her also. It was the prettiest thing to observe. We in the West seem not to have that instinct or that skill. My friend John comes to see me and we are talking. The bell rings and it’s my friend Joe. In another minute, John and Joe are talking and I am behind their two left shoulders.”

Bessie said, “Old people seem always, at any table, to be sitting on the wrong side of left shoulders.”

Hope said, “Lotte used to make us laugh at her old-people stories where old meant being forty or thirty, she sitting in the passenger seat and the driver not flirting with her.”

Bridget said, “Nobody ever flirted with me. I don’t think I knew how. But I used to congratulate myself that, having been a plain girl, I had become a rather well-looking old person. Then I read Proust’s description of the party where he almost mistakes his first love for her mother. She has grown old, all his friends are old. He, Marcel, is old. I was amused that it hurt my feelings when he says that the woman who smiles at him is old and ugly.”

“But we have the blessed Zoom,” Bessie said, “where we are small and at a distance. Zoom hides more than our wrinkles. Much to be said for Zoom.”

“But I was surprised,” Bridget said, “that it hurt my feelings when he said old and ugly.”

Who is Outside?

Ladies’ movie night. The friends, who have become less and less willing to leave their homes, agree to watch a movie on the TV and then meet on Zoom to talk. But here Ilka proves, as she herself says, a dead loss. “I turned it off before the tall guy, who doesn’t know, is about to walk into the room.”

“But that’s the payoff for all that good suspense!” Bessie says. “That’s the edge-of-the-chair moment we have been waiting for.”

“That’s why I turned it off,” Ilka says.

“You don’t like suspense?”

“Hate it. Can’t stomach suspense. I mean that my physical stomach does a number on me.”

“And last week you didn’t finish watching ‘The Quiet Place,’ and that was a nice suspense, a happy ending.”

Ilka says, “There are no happy endings.”

“It’s odd,” Bessie says, “because you always seem the reasonable one of us.”

“I’ve been having nasty nights,” says Ilka.

Here is something they all understand: “You don’t sleep and you have horrible dreams?”

“A revolving dream,” Ilka says, “in which I must find a rhyme, like an algebra problem going around and around and around. It’s this poem I’m trying to translate. Theodor Kramer was a poet in Vienna in the thirties, a Jew. My Uncle Paul’s favorite writer. I’ve got the first verse:

Who is outside ringing at the door?
And we not even out of bed?
I’ll go, love, and take a look.
Only the boy who came and left the bread.

“But the second verse:

Who is outside ringing at the door?
You stay, dear.
It was a man talking with the
neighbors asking who we are?

“When the word doesn’t meet its own rhyme, we are puzzled and then we doubt,” says Ilka.

Lucinella suggests, “How about ‘You stay, my dear’ and ‘asking who we were’—a false rhyme but . . . ”

Ilka says, “No, or maybe yes? Let it stand for the moment.” She adds, “It’s not the night so much as the morning hour, the hideous reëntry into the day—the day, mind you, which I rather like. I do. I like my old lady’s life quite well enough. What I mean is the ugly hour before I’m awake—the necessity to wake up. Remember Lotte, the everlasting questioner, asking, ‘So what is that all about?’ ‘Why do you? Why did you?’ she would ask. And I understood that I was not so interested, that I don’t much believe in my explanations.

“But may I read you the rest of the poem? And maybe you can find me a title:

Who is outside ringing at the door?
Go, love, and run the bath.
The mail has come but not the letter we were waiting for.

Who is outside ringing at the door?
Go, my darling, turn the beds about.
It was the super.
First of next month we have to be out.

Who is outside ringing at the door?
How the fuchsia blooms so near.
Dearest, pack me my toothbrush,
and don’t cry,
They are here.

Vienna, 1938 ♦

Theodor Kramer’s poem is taken from “Gesammelte Gedichte” (“Collected Poems”), in three volumes, edited by Erwin Chvojka. © Paul Zsolnay Verlag, Vienna, 1997-2005.

Owing to a production error, a previous version of this story omitted a line from Theodor Kramer’s poem.

Published in the print edition of the October 7, 2024, issue, with the headline “Stories About Us.”

Lore Segal is the author of several books, including “Half the Kingdom,” “Her First American,” and “Ladies’ Lunch and Other Stories.”