Three Old Women: The Not So Golden Age

•

Hazel Triplett
To ourselves we are always seventeen with red lips.
—Lawrence Olivier

In Key West her cottage was covered in vines, a vacancy sign posted in her front yard, while the sun blazed outside, and each house was lit in a Hopper glare. "Come in" said a small voice, and I saw a tiny woman walk slowly down the stairs, a kerchief covering her bald hair. Though her house was black as a coal pit, across the room I could see the old conservatory choked with dead and dying plants climbing to the ceiling, where light strove in. "I'm legally blind now" she said "and have cancer. The flowers were gorgeous once, she gestured towards the glass doors. I used to have such nice hair, until it started coming out in clumps. It kept me from looking old."

Falling
It is myself, not the poor beast lying there yelping with pain.
—William Carlos Williams

The brittle boned women in my family were constantly falling, suffering broken kneecaps, fractured wrists, and smashed tibias. So once at the farmers market I watched with horror a small white haired woman skipping ahead of a younger man, shouting in anguish, "Watch it mom", followed by a gaggle of her friends beaming as though let out of prison. She missed the curb, grabbed the swinging door of the van, before which a cornucopia of fruit stood and collapsed in a heap. You could hear her bones snap. "Oh God, not again!" she cried. Her scrawny body heaped under the colorful clothes, like road kill.

Martha Graham

Smuggled backstage at the Met by a stagehand friend, I stood among the ladder of colored gels, as she sat below me in the shadows behind the gold curtain. Her clasped hands swollen, unrecognizable in black cotton gloves. Her feet, in Chinese cloth slippers, toes curved like claws. I watch her as she watched Nuryev dancing her dance as she no longer could. So this is what is comes to after all the fame, the revolution, her teaching us to love what she does—an old woman, dressed in black. But then, as in a film, I see her young body rise above her old one, stretching, body and legs extended, fingers and toes straight, flexible again, swaying tree-like, bending, a reed on its stem.