A Mature Woman Looks For Love - And In America's Diverse Society, There Are Many Rocks To Look Under

Vicki Chalmers never thought of herself as a 'mature' woman, for like most elderly people the inside never matches the outside, youth still rages within while cracks, lines, sags, and liver spots deny it. 

She was not a 'senior' and refused to even consider moving to Brightwood, the elite retirement complex in Washington, the go-to place for the Capital's best and brightest, now much dimmer and in need of elder care, but still up to a challenging discussion about interest rates, Russia, or Kierkegaard.  

A few names might be lost in the muddle, dates no longer at one's fingertips, and seminal quotes recalled with difficulty or not at all, but everyone was in the same boat so sentences were finished by others without missing a beat. 

Vicki was not 'ready for the glue factory' as she said to her daughter who suggested that now that Dad was dead and buried, perhaps her living in that big house in Spring Valley might be a burden rather than a comfort.  No, she insisted, the only way I will leave this house is feet first, and so her daughter and her two siblings resigned themselves to looking after Mom as she aged in place. 

However, Vicki was not the aging in place type of person.  She was more the 'dying in her traces' kind, someone who would not go softly into that good night, but raging as Dylan Thomas recommended.  Raging might be putting it a bit out of her reach, but still something energetic, positive, life-affirming was well within her grasp.  Phooey, she said to those who said that these golden years were for reflection,  preparing to meet one's maker, and putting one's things in order.  She was no sanyasi, a sadhu in rags in the Himalayas contemplating The Great Beyond.  She was Vicki Chalmers, goddamn it, with a lot of piss and vinegar left in the tank. 

 

One advantage to old age, at least in an adventuresome woman like Vicki, was that one might as well try everything before one's time was up.  Taboos, social opprobrium, priestly advisement - none of that mattered now. 

Vicki was a lifelong liberal, deeply committed to progressive causes, convinced that the planet was warming disastrously, that the black man was the true inheritor of God's grace, that capitalism was a nefarious, disastrous economic system in which the poor were enslaved, and that the gender spectrum was a welcome evolution from the hidebound man-woman sexual paradigm.  

But, typical of most well-educated, wealthy, white progressive woman of her era, she had espoused these beliefs without actually experiencing them.  She was an a priori liberal.  Although she did once consider travelling on a Freedom Ride bus to Alabama to march with Martin and Ralph, she demurred.  The thought of singing camp songs all the way down South was not her cup of tea.  It all smacked too much of Girl Scout jamborees and summer vacation. 

The ghetto, considered by her progressive colleagues to be the cultural center of the new polymorphous, diverse America, did not interest her.  What more could she learn about inner city dysfunctionality by going there?  Weren't the images of the wretched place enough?

As much as she promoted gender fluidity, the right and obligation to choose one's sexuality, she found the whole affair a circus side show.  In fact what could be more circus-ready than a man all tarted up as a floozy, flouncing and swishing down Main Street? Or a great, muscled bull dyke downing boilermakers at the Blarney Stone?  Pretty boys and tough girls, buggers and trannies, every possible permutation in the natural order?  Not for her. 

'Perhaps I have been missing out', she thought to herself.  Perhaps there actually was some substance to the theory, some vital signs, some actual reason for believing.  Of course she did believe.  If not her whole life would have been a hypocritical joke; but still and all there always had been something missing - the 'out there' was not particularly appealing, and it should have been. 

But where to start?  The only black men she knew were the garbagemen who picked up her trash once a week and she only got near enough to call the encounter personal at Christmastime when she rushed out into the alley with two twenties at the sound of their horn.  They seemed nice enough and at least had a job unlike most of their brothers and sisters in Anacostia; but the idea of actually fraternizing with them was unthinkable.  What would they talk about, and would she have to drink malt liquor from a can?

The black nanny who took care of the neighbor's children was not really black, but Haitian; so interaction with her would be cross-cultural, not cross-racial.  The uppity register queens at CVS or the snarly clerks at the post office offered no promise; and the list went on.  There seemed to be no way to cross the racial Rubicon. 

Gender would be a lot easier.  There were gay men who had worked in her office, but they were as straight looking as Charlton Heston.  There was butch Mandy Phillips in Accounting, the sourest and most unpleasant woman on the floor with an attitude to boot. Invite her to tea? Think again. 

As far as the capitalist menace, there weren't any communists in her crowd, no real Marxist-Leninists who had stayed faithful to the canon despite the fall of the Berlin Wall and the demise of the Soviet Union; but she happened on one at an open house last Christmas.  The man looked like a Hollywood version of a communist, all Marxist beard and that Lenin chin, and true to form he was holding forth on Hegel and the means of production; but he was as unattractive as any man she knew - short, balding, and fat.  He could very well have been a professor at Columbia, but spending even fifteen minutes with him would be torture. 

 

What else was there?  Oh yes, climate; but that was harder to personalize.  Just about everyone in her progressive claque was a committed environmentalist convinced that unless something were done now, the planet would be burned to a crisp in a generation. 

So, Vicki didn't get very far in her late-stage epiphany.  She had wanted to personalize the progressive canon, see for herself the reality of black dysfunction, gay and lesbian sexual authority, and radical anti-capitalism right next to her (here she thought of having pastrami and chicken liver sandwiches with a group of Communists at Katz's in the East Village). 

However the thought of intimacy with any of them was distasteful at best.  While she might be an old, dried-up and overused widow, she still had her notions of sexual intimacy - at least her judgment of other people was largely based on sexual attractiveness - and this lot was dreck. 

'Stick to your own kind' was the resonant aria of Maria in West Side Story and after a year or so of muddling around with the same adolescent fantasies of the old musical, she returned to form, a solidly Protestant, upper middle class Georgetown matron. 

At the same time, a year in the trenches, seeing the real progressivism in the flesh in all its Barnum & Bailey trapeze act big top finery, not only gave her pause, but turned her right.  When you get down and dirty it doesn't take much to see what a charade the whole gabbling, posturing, hysteria is all about. 

Besides ,conservatism was more fitting for a proper older lady like herself.