Fear of Fifty by Erica Jong Page B

jeans.”
    â€œUgh—depressing,” said Molly. “I’m glad I didn’t go.”
    â€œThat’s the way you feel at fourteen—but not at fifty,” I said.
    â€œYou’re not fifty,” said Molly. “You’re thirty-five and holding. Yeah—that’s right. I was born when you were twenty-one.”
    I hug her very tight, hoping she never has to do for me what I am doing for Kitty.
    My best friend and I have a plan. We will take handfuls of sleeping pills, then trudge out into the snow near her ranch in Carbondale, Colorado. While the elk and caribou stalk the pure white snow, while Venus rises over Mount Sopris, we’ll make snow angels and quietly expire of hypothermia, sparing our children the mess and fuss of caring for us. Planets and stars will twinkle in the crystalline Colorado air as we peacefully and painlessly freeze to death.
    But will we really? Who knows? By then we may forget how much trouble we are. Memory is the most transient of all possessions. And when it goes, it leaves as few traces as stars that have disappeared.
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    At midnight, my husband finds me in my study, looking through the book of Papa’s drawings.
    Here is his mother, my great-grandmother, laid out after her death from typhus. Her bier turns into ripples on the ocean; caught in its waves are the faces of her children, her grandchildren, and her great-grandchildren. The matriarch is going back into the sea—a sort of reverse Venus. Next come a series of India ink sketches of the galloping horses that always obsessed my grandfather’s pen. Some are galloping into the sea; some are being attacked by wild dogs; some are spurred on by Cossacks wearing huge fur hats, who brandish thunderous cudgels at wretches cowering beneath the horses’ hooves.
    This was the rough Russia my grandfather crossed on foot as a boy of fourteen. He walked across Europe when Europe was much larger than it is now. And he braved its harshness to make a soft life for us all in America. His mother had just died of typhus when he set out across Russia and Europe. Unsparing as Goya or Hogarth in his willingness to confront human inhumanity, my grandfather was always sketching his past as he lived his present. That was the legacy he left to me. Just keep sketching. Try not to ask why. There may not be an answer.
    â€œWhat a wonderful artist he was,” Ken says, looking over my shoulder. I feel Papa’s presence in the room as I riffle through his sketches. He is also the reason I am taking care of Kitty. He guards my life somehow, so I also guard the lives that mattered most to him.
    â€œKittinka,” he would have said. “Poor Kittinka. Look out for her now that she’s too foolish to look out for herself.”
    â€œLet’s go to bed,” I say. And Ken hugs me.
    â€œYou had a rough day,” he says.
    â€œWatching the lion being carried out was the roughest part somehow. I’d rather not have seen that.”
    â€œYou’ll write about it,” he says.
    â€œDoes that redeem it? Does it make any difference to the pain?”
    â€œIt makes it bearable,” he says, “the way Papa’s sketches made his life bearable.”
    I close the book of memory. It comforts me to know it is there to be reopened.
    When we wake up the next morning, the city is in the grip of a storm that threatens to make Manhattan an island again. Pelting rain and gale-force winds, flooded subways, and tidal waves in the streets.
    Ken and I make our way to court somehow, but we are the only ones who do. Kitty and Frank get soaked and turn back. Maxine begs off. And the other two lawyers arrive so late that there is no time to resume the hearing. Again my testimony has to be postponed. Another date is chosen.
    Leaving the courthouse in the furious rain, Ken and I see crowds of huddled people with torn umbrellas waiting at bus stops. The subways are stopped; the city has come to a