As We Are Now: A Novel

By May Sarton

Bestselling author “May Sarton has never been better than she is in this beautiful, harrowing novel about being old, unwanted, yet refusing to give up” (The Boston Globe).

After seventy-six-year-old Caro Spencer suffers a heart attack, her family sends her to a private retirement home to wait out the rest of her days. Her memory growing fuzzy, Caro decides to keep a journal to document the daily goings-on—her feelings of confinement and boredom; her distrust of the home’s owner, Harriet Hatfield, and her daughter, Rose; her pity for the more incapacitated residents; her resentment of her brother, John, for leaving her alone. The journal entries describe not only her frustrations, but also small moments of beauty—found in a welcome visit from her minister, or in watching a bird in the garden. But as she writes, Caro grows increasingly sensitive to the casual atrocities of retirement-home life. Even as she acknowledges her mind is beginning to fail, she is determined to fight back against the injustices foisted upon the home’s occupants.

This ebook features an extended biography of May Sarton.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Release date: Jul 22, 2014
• ISBN: 9781497646315

May Sarton

May Sarton (1912–1995) was born on May 3 in Wondelgem, Belgium, and grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her first volume of poetry, Encounters in April, was published in 1937 and her first novel, The Single Hound, in 1938. Her novels A Shower of Summer Days, The Birth of a Grandfather, and Faithful Are the Wounds, as well as her poetry collection In Time Like Air, all received nominations for the National Book Award. An accomplished memoirist, Sarton came out as a lesbian in her 1965 book Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing. Her memoir Journal of a Solitude (1973) was an account of her experiences as a female artist. Sarton spent her later years in York, Maine, living and writing by the sea. In her last memoir, Endgame: A Journal of the Seventy-Ninth Year (1992), she shares her own personal thoughts on getting older. Her final poetry collection, Coming into Eighty, was published in 1994. Sarton died on July 16, 1995, in York, Maine.

Book preview

I am not mad, only old. I make this statement to give me courage. To give you an idea what I mean by courage, suffice it to say that it has taken two weeks for me to obtain this notebook and a pen. I am in a concentration camp for the old, a place where people dump their parents or relatives exactly as though it were an ash can.

My brother, John, brought me here two weeks ago. Of course I knew from the beginning that living with him would never work. I had to close my own house after the heart attack (the stairs were too much for me). John is four years older than I am and married a much younger woman after Elizabeth, his first wife, died. Ginny never liked me. I make her feel inferior and I cannot help it. John is a reader and always has been. So am I. John is interested in politics. So am I. Ginny’s only interests appear to be malicious gossip, bridge, and trying out new recipes. Unfortunately she is not a born cook. I find the above paragraph extremely boring and it has been a very great effort to set it down. No one wants to look hard at disagreeable things. I am not alone in that.

I am forcing myself to get everything clear in my mind by writing it down so I know where I am at. There is no reality now except what I can sustain inside me. My memory is failing. I have to hang on to every scrap of information I have to keep my sanity, and it is for that purpose that I am keeping a journal. Then if I forget things later, I can always go back and read them here.

I call it The Book of the Dead. By the time I finish it I shall be dead. I want to be ready, to have gathered everything together and sorted it out, as if I were preparing for a great final journey. I intend to make myself whole here in this Hell. It is the thing that is set before me to do. So, in a way, this path inward and back into the past is like a map, the map of my world. If I can draw it accurately, I shall know where I am.

I do not blame John. That is the first thing. In his way he is fighting to keep whole, as I am, and Ginny was making life intolerable for both of us. Far better to dump me here than lose me in a quicksand of jealousy and hatred. He had to make a choice. The only thing I do not know is why he has not come to see me. Perhaps he is ill. Perhaps they have gone away. It does seem queer.

Also, although it is clear in my mind that I had to go somewhere, it is not clear why the place chosen should seem a place of punishment. But I must not dwell on this if possible. Sometimes old people imagine that everyone is against them. They have delusions of persecution. I must not fall into that trap.

It is better to smile at the image of that big white Cadillac turning off macadam onto a rough dirt road, the rain—of course it had to be raining, and not just a quiet rain, but a real downpour that would make almost anyone consider building an ark! I wondered whether Ginny had taken a wrong turning. When we stopped at a small red farmhouse that looked as though it had been gradually sinking into the mud for years, I thought it must be to ask directions. There was no sign, only two elms—the nursing home is called Twin Elms. Five enormous geese stretched out their necks and hissed at us when we got out of the car. I noticed there was a barn over to the right. In the rain, the whole place seemed enclosed in darkness.

Well, John said, here we are, Caro. His voice had become unnaturally cheerful in the way voices do when addressing children or the feeble-minded.

There were two doors, but the front door opened into a sea of mud and was evidently not used. Ginny had parked close to the side door. We pushed our way in without ringing because of the downpour. Even in those few minutes I got soaking wet. There was no hall. We found ourselves in a large room with four or five beds in it. There was no light on. It took a moment before I realized that beside each bed an old man sat on a straight chair. One had his head in his hands. A younger man, whose legs were bandaged and who was half lying and half sitting in a sort of medical rocker, tried to speak but half choked. He was clearly out of his mind. However, he smiled, the only person in that room who did or who could.

Ginny called out loudly, Here we are! Is there anyone home?

Then an enormous woman filled the doorway, wiping her hands on her apron.

Oh … well, she said, as if she had been taken by surprise. My daughter is just making up Miss Spencer’s room. But I guess you can go in now. She laughed. We’re up tight these days, no place to ask you to sit down.

I had had so many shocks by then that I felt quite numb and only wanted to be left alone as soon as possible. My heart started up and I was afraid I might faint. But it was a comfort to find that I had a room of my own, just big enough for a bed, an armchair, and a bureau. The bed was parallel to the window, and the window looked out, much to my astonishment, on a long field with tall trees at the end and, beyond them, gentle hills.

Look at the view, Ginny said. Isn’t it marvelous?

What is that woman’s name? I asked in a whisper. I had the feeling already that even a whisper would be heard.

Mrs. Hatfield—Harriet Hatfield. She is a trained nurse. (That is what Ginny said, but of course she must have known that Mrs. Hatfield’s only experience had been as an aide in the State Hospital for two years.) She and her daughter work very hard to keep things going here.

There was dust under the bureau and an old piece of Kleenex.

John disappeared for a time. They brought me a cup of tea and a cheap biscuit, which I didn’t eat. They offered to help me unpack my two suitcases, but I managed to make it clear that I am not infirm. I set the photographs of my mother and father and one of me with John when I was fourteen and he was in college on the bureau, and three things I treasure: a Japanese bronze turtle, a small Swedish glass vase, and the Oxford Book of English Verse. I found my little pillow and lay down on the bed then. After a while I recited the Lord’s Prayer three times. I do not believe this prayer is heard by the Person to whom it is addressed, but I find it comforting, like a rune, something to hold onto.

When John and Ginny left, he said, We’ll be seeing you.

After a while I slept. The rain drummed on the roof. I felt that for a time I must be absolutely passive, float from moment to moment and from hour to hour, shut out feeling and thought. They were both too dangerous. And I feared the weeping. Lately, since the hospital, I have cried a lot, and that may be one reason John felt I must go. Tears are an offense and make other people not so much suffer as feel attacked and irritable. When the inner world overflows in this way, it forces something entirely private out into the open where it does not belong, not at my age anyway. Only children are permitted tears, so in a way perhaps my being sent here is a punishment. Oh dear, I must not think about that now. Everything is dangerous that is not passive. I am learning to accept.

Harriet Hatfield woke me, not ungently, and pretty soon her daughter, Rose, came in with my supper on a tray. At least I do not have to eat with the others and watch them spill their soup. I can lie here and look out at the hills. Supper was cornflakes with milk and a banana that first evening. I enjoyed it far more than one of Ginny’s gourmet concoctions. But then I could not sleep. I had to get accustomed to the noises, queer little creaks, the groans and snores in the big room where the men are. It seemed a terribly long night. When I went to the bathroom I bumped into a chair in the hall and bruised my leg. Perhaps John will bring me a flashlight when he comes. I will ask for note paper and stamps, a daily newspaper, and maybe a bottle of Scotch. It would be a help to have a small drink measured out each evening before supper.

That thought was a comfort when I wrote it several days ago. Now I know that good things like that are not going to happen. Old age, they say, is a gradual giving up. But it is strange when it all happens at once. That is a real test of character, a kind of solitary confinement. Whatever I have now is in my own mind.

Lately I have thought often of Doug, a former student of mine, who was put in solitary for two years by the Russians. When he came back he talked and talked about it and I listened. I thought I was helping him by listening. I never imagined that one day all he told me would be helping me. One thing he did was make a study of spiders, and later of mice. He remembered all the people he had known in school and tried to imagine exactly what had happened to them since, which amounted to making up novels in his head. He did mathematical problems. But he was under forty when this happened to him, and I, Caro Spencer, am over seventy—seventy-six. Time gets muddled up and what I lack, I fear, is the capacity to stick with a routine, to discipline myself—my mind goes wandering off. I see this all around me—when the TV is on, the old men stare at it in a daze. They do not pay attention for more than a few minutes, even to a ball game. I must try to pay attention to something for at least an hour every day. This last remark struck

Reviews for As We Are Now

[bookconcierge · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A finely crafted novella about aging and the indignity of being "stored" in a nursing home. It was written in 1973 and I have to ask, "Is it true today?" I love Caro's spirit, but am uncomfortable with the book. (The fact that I had just moved my mother to an Alzheimer's unit three months prior to reading this obviously colored my perspective.)

[oldblack-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is very close to what I would call 5-stars. The only thing missing for me was a deeper understanding of how the main character, Caro, came to feel so oppressed by her environment. It's only a short book - a novella really - and I think it would have greatly benefited from some more (remembered?) background or more details of her treatment in the nursing home. If she was partly "mad" I would have liked to have seen more background to that condition...the earlier signs. My simple reading of the book was, however, that Caro was in fact completely same and it was her environment which forced her into tragic behaviour. On the other hand, maybe Sarton meant there to be this much ambiguity about Caro's behaviour. Perhaps she is deliberately saying to all us readers that regardless of how mad or sane, regardless of how young or old and near to death, everyone deserves to be treated as a full human being with physical, emotional, and intellectual needs.We can never know what's really going on in another person's mind, but maybe it's a good thing to try & find out?...to try to meet the real person, not just a cardboard image which is more convenient to handle.The next time I visit my mother in her institution I think I will see with different eyes, thanks to May Sarton.

[timbazzett · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

If Anne Frank's diary was the story of a young girl, then May Sarton's AS WE ARE NOW (first published in 1973) is the story of an old woman - and one not really so very old at that. And Sarton's story of Caroline Spencer, a single 76 year-old former school teacher, was even purposely designed for the reader to draw comparisons between nursing homes and concentration camps, between modern society's 'warehousing' of old people and the Holocaust. The opening page sets the tone:"I am not mad, only old ... I am in a concentration camp for the old, a place where people dump their parents or relatives exactly as though it were an ash can."Caroline Spencer - "Caro" - is a woman in full possession of her faculties when her brother and his wife place her in "Twin Elms," a private nursing home, run down and not very clean, a place which harkens back to the county poor farms of the twenties and thirties. It is run by Harriet and her daughter Rose, both overweight unhappy harridans who, in their treatment of Caro and the several old men residents, are living proof that absolute power corrupts and breeds cruelty and evil. AS WE ARE NOW is the journal that Caro keeps during her stay there as she slips slowly but surely into hopelessness and despair, with only a few bright spots in visits by a minister and his daughter and a brief respite offered when another woman, a kind farm wife, comes to take care of her while Harriet is on vacation. Caro makes only one friend in the place, a defiant, dying old man, Standish Flint, who refuses his medicine, stops eating, and yet manages, against the odds, to maintain some of his dignity, angrily noting more than once, "I didn't think it would end like this." It is a flat statement that should give us all pause, since, barring sudden death, we are all headed to this frightening country of the old. Caro's journal also gives us glimpses back into her life; how she never married, but loved teaching, fine things and learning, had a lover in England before the war - the kinds of fond memories and regrets we all have. AS WE ARE NOW is not the sort of book I would normally seek out and read, but my own mother died at the age of 96 just three months ago and she is still very much on my mind. Indeed she will probably always be. Recently I read another book, Canadian Margaret Laurence's THE STONE ANGEL, also about growing old, which led to this book by Sarton. Ironically, I remembered too that Sarton was a correspondent and Maine neighbor of yet another author who wrote about aging and death, Doris Grumbach (COMING INTO THE END ZONE and EXTRA INNINGS). Everything is so very connected, you know. One particular phrase in Sarton's book affected me deeply, when Caro, reflecting back on her life, all those memories, says: "Who but me remembers? It's all melting away ... like snow ... a whole lifetime ... nothing."I find these days that there are so many questions I wish I had asked my mother. Too late. All gone, a whole lifetime. Nothing.This is a beautifully written book. But it is also unbearably sad, making it very difficult to read. Its views on old people and how they can be - and often are - treated are frighteningly, brutally honest. Caro Spencer's story will teach you, among other things, that it takes guts, grace and imagination to grow old gracefully, if indeed that is possible at all.

[lisa2013_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

recommended for: everybody, especially caregivers for the elderly, May Sarton fansThis is one of the grimmest accounts of growing old I ever read. It’s told with unflinching honesty by a perceptive elderly woman who’s been put in a nursing home. Effective for engendering empathy for vulnerable older people, at least it was thought provoking for me when I read it many years ago as a young woman of 19 or 20 years old. Beautifully told but disturbing. I've been haunted by this story for years, and as I approach more closely the age of the heroine, I'm sure that reading about her experience would be even more devastating for me, if that is possible.

[donna828 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The inner thoughts of Caroline Spencer, an aging woman who refuses "to go gently into that good night." Sarton conveys Caro's diminishing vigor and hope in a plaintive yet unsentimental manner.Keep in mind, this is one (fictional) woman's experience in a nursing home. There are indeed many negatives to becoming older, but neglect and humiliation is not everyone's lot. Read this heartwrenching account, then go visit someone in a nursing home.

[tapestry100 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A searing look at the hopelessness of despair, loneliness and old age, May Sarton's As We Are Now is a powerful study of a woman's resolve to relinquish herself by any means possible from the depths of the anger and anguish she feels from her surroundings. Told through the journals of Caro Spencer who has moved into a "home," not due to a lack of mental strength but of a physical frailty that leaves her unable to live alone. She keeps the journals at first as a record of her days as she fears she is losing her memory, but later the journals become a record of the mistreatment that she and the other "inmates" must endure at the hands of the two women who run the home. Told over the course of several months, this is the story of one woman's battle against age and the carelessness that the elderly can be treated with.It's a powerful book, told quickly and to the point, and there are times that you forget you are reading a novel and feel like you are being given a first-hand account of a woman's battle against her keepers. I found myself feeling hopeless as there should be something that I could do to help ease her suffering, but then I would need to remind myself that this is a novel. One of Sarton's more powerful works.

[laytonwoman3rd · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This was my first experience with May Sarton, and I was fully impressed with her writing. Her main character, Caroline Spencer, is a heart-breaking gem. I wanted to take her into my home, like Evelyn with Mrs. Threadgoode in Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistlestop Cafe. As We Are Now is written in the form of a journal kept by a woman consigned to a "home" after a heart attack makes her unable to live alone any longer. Initially, she keeps the journal to fight her fear of losing her memory and her mind in what she refers to as a "concentration camp for the old". This is no institution, but a large house run by two women; Miss Spencer is the only female "guest" among a number of mainly somnolent men.From the beginning she cautions herself against hope, "the most dangerous emotion", but nevertheless strives to maintain her sense of self in a terminally dehumanizing situation.It took some courage to finish the book, because very little good stuff happens, and how it will all end is fairly clear about half way through. But I am very glad I read it, and I think everyone should. We all have aging relatives, and we all will be old one day if we live long enough. An emotionally difficult subject, artfully handled.