Tillie Olsen’s 1961 “Tell Me a Riddle,” like Sarton’s Mrs. Stevens, implies that traditional women’s roles are not compatible with personal and artistic fulfillment: Mrs. Stevens is an artist who does not mother, and Eva of “Riddle” is a mother who does not write. Like all the stories in this chapter, it uses an old woman’s present to reflect on her youthful possibilities. However, rather than romanticizing a dying woman’s youth, the story centers on the old woman’s present life, offering a glimpse of the end of a life that is being lived, not just remembered.
After a long marriage, Eva and David live intertwined lives, not caught in a youthful fantasy of “happily ever after.” Olsen’s story includes memories of hard times, and poverty is the backdrop of their lives, but the plot does not sentimentalize that poverty any more than it romanticizes youthful passion. In “Riddle,” the old spouses, married for forty-seven years, bicker over how to live the latter years of their lives. Their bickering is animated, and each is equal to the other in bitterness, name-calling, and insult. The roots of their quarrel, we are told, reach back to the early days of their marriage, but the story does not dwell on their early courtship or the loss of another, more idealized romantic entanglement. While its anti-romantic gist deflates the romance plot, the story is also haunted by the past, portraying the ways women suffer not only the brunt of poverty but also the cost of being “forced to move to the rhythms of others.”
The couple’s seven adult children pity their parents, feeling that “at least in old age they should be happy.” However, instead of happily ever after, Eva and David argue constantly now that “the needs of others no longer shackled them together.” The reasoning of their quarrel and their bitterness erupts on every page. David yearns for life in a retirement home where he will have company and diversions, whereas Eva wants to enjoy the solitude she feels she has earned in years of tending to the needs of family. He wants for once in his life to “be carefree” and no longer have the responsibility of worries about money, owning a home, fixing a broken vacuum cleaner, changing the storm windows, or running errands on the streetcar. And she, after tending to housekeeping and meal preparation for decades, wants now to be able to “cook and eat how I want.” He tries to ply her with promises of a reading circle, whereas she is filled with resentment that he never relieved her of childcare years ago when she would have loved to go out on her own. Her memories are not of abandonment by a passionate lover but of irritation at a young husband who returned from late meetings, stimulated and ardent, and tried to pry her away from the only time there was to read after nursing the current baby. She mourns the writing that domestic life made impossible for her.
Unlike Ann Lord, Eva is not aware that she is dying of cancer and her memories are not drug induced. After misdiagnosis of her fatigue and being blamed for her lack of energy, Eva is examined by another doctor and immediately rushed into surgery. Doctors discover that her cancer has metastasized and predict just a few more months of living—basically pain free. Her family agrees not to tell her the prognosis or to upset her by selling the house, but instead to borrow money for travel to visit each of the children. No explanation is given to Eva for why they must visit all the children in their homes rather than be allowed to settle into her dream of solitude.
Not understanding the cost to Eva of motherhood, her daughter wants her to hold the newest baby, assuming she will derive comfort, but Eva is disturbed by “what the feel of a baby evokes.” “It was not that she had not loved her babies, her children. The love—the passion of tending—had risen with the need like a torrent; and like a torrent drowned and immolated all else. But when the need was done—oh the power that was lost in the painful damming back and drying up of what still surged, but had nowhere to go.” In the presence of the new baby, her memories torment her. While they think she is napping, she hides in a closet and attempts to shield herself from invasions of her past.
Maybe the romance plot is extraneous to this story, yet the children and the reader yearn for the reconciliation and peace somehow promised or implied as the outcome to a long marriage. Olsen reveals the cost of that plot, the absence of alternative ways to see the mother when she is old, to even imagine her as continuing to grow and change or to have ever suppressed her self in raising children. In this way, the plot may be more like the others in this chapter than it at first appears, in that what has been repressed comes pouring out when Eva is dying, and that outpouring is—like in the other plots—the outpouring of her girlish self that had so long been submerged in the day-to-day outcome of the romance plot lived out by the working poor. While Olsen’s story refuses the idealized romance plot and calls needed attention to the grinding requirements of domestic life without extensive resources, it does not allow for a more appealing alternative to the romantic fantasy.
After visiting all of the children and grandchildren, Eva finally learns she is dying. On her deathbed, she is cared for by Jeannie, who resigns her nursing job to care for her grandmother. Eva does not return in memory to a distant youthful romantic script of unrequited love or abandonment. She insists, “Let me feel what I feel” and refuses her pills. She chants and vomits. She refuses to go the hospital. She rants at her husband for leaving her and always running, and he sobs to Jeannie, who tells him, “She needs you, Granddaddy . . . Isn’t that what they call love?” Olsen portrays the complexities of a mature love that somehow has existed and changed over decades of hardship and poverty.
While Eva does not revisit past romance, she does release the songs and poetry that persist from her youth of impassioned activism, and in this way, she resembles the protagonists of the other stories. From her mouth pour what David imagines must be everything she ever read or heard. She tells Jeannie bits and pieces of her history, growing up in Olshana, being taught to read by Lisa, a highborn lady but a Tolstoyan she was forbidden to visit, repeating half-memorized phrases from books, in and out of delirium, talking of death and the pole star.
She becomes light like a bird, and like a bird, “sound bubbled in her throat while the body fluttered in agony.” She voices the world of their youth, their beautiful beliefs, that “joyous certainty, that sense of mattering . . . of being one and indivisible with the great of the past, with all that freed, ennobled.”
“Riddle” ends with the italicized words of Olsen’s dedication “for two of that generation”: “Death deepens the wonder.” The reader has known the plot would end in death, but perhaps has not anticipated the sense of wonder. Olsen does not explain what she means by these final words, and the reader is left to unravel them.
Eva makes me sad as I see the hardness of her life, the withering of talent unused, the identification of herself with the physical tasks of a lifetime at such cost to her poetic potential. In three of the plots explored thus far, the underlying assumption is that romance and maternity cancel out art and all creative endeavors, although romance is fickle. In Evening, Ann loses her music after Harris; in Mrs. Stevens, Hilary resists attachment to protect her poetry; in “Riddle,” Eva has no time to read and write. These three plots, despite differences, agree that a woman cannot have a loving partner, children, and artistic fulfillment.
Coming to Age 