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What follows is obviously a personal reflection, and perhaps it should remain personal. But I’m presenting myself once again with a question that I repeatedly encounter, from within or from without, consciously, pre-reflectively, partially dissociated. How do I know the answer to the question, Am I Old? Am I an Old Woman? Or just an Older Woman. And what does Old mean, anyway?
I’ll begin with my appearance. I was a fat little girl, tall and fat, the second to the fattest girl in the room. I could always feel my mother’s disgust and my father’s concern. My brother Stan, whom I always called “Stanley the Handsome” – he was! – would taunt me as fat, calling me “Stelle the Fatty”. My mother would threaten me with having to buy clothes in the dreaded “big girl’s” section. So I made up my mind early that being “pretty” was not an intelligent goal. Prettiness faded, I reasoned. Better to be “smart”. Intelligence just increased as one grew older, whereas being attractive faded with age. (I didn’t realize how wrong I was. I didn’t know that one’s brain was likely to be subject to ongoing diminishment in power; one could always get injections to tighten the sagging skin, but there were no such injections to improve one’s powers of memory.) In any case, I decided to try to be a smart girl. One of my cousins was notably brilliant, accepted at the University of Chicago in my own home town at age 15, but she was also very beautiful. I couldn’t compete with her. But another of my cousins was more like me, not fat, but not particularly pretty either. However, by the time she was in high school she made straight A’s and was popular with college boys. I realized that going to college would be my opening for recognition. By this time I had slimmed down remarkably. I remember what it was like for me on Farwell Beach in Chicago when I was 17, just before entering college. My appearance in a bathing suit caused a stir. It was wonderful. And in college I did excel, but I had learned the le