Age and Youth

Throughout the collection, the author explores the individual's journey from youth into old age through her characters' relationships with their children, parents, and romantic partners. In many of Paley's narrative realms, elderly characters interact with younger characters, desperate to translate their experience to the next generation. In "Anxiety," for example, when an elderly woman sees a young father berate his little girl for bouncing on his shoulders and repeatedly crying "Oink oink," she leans far out the window, and insists that he stop so she can talk to him (320). While moving the flower pots out of the way, so the father can see her better, the woman remembers, "Once, not too long ago, the tenements were speckled with women like me in every third window up to the fifth story, calling the children from play to receive orders and instruction" (320). Years later, the woman...