Her mobility was limited by Parkinson’s disease, fading eyesight, and other age-related infirmities, but Fisher’s mind ranged as far as ever, from recollections of the France and Switzerland of her youth to her rage over pesticide use in the Sonoma Valley. Opinionated and feisty, she was generous with praise for authors she admired, but not above dishing dirt — off the record — about a certain prominent food writer whose pretensions, Fisher believed, exceeded her talent. Perhaps trying to find a comfortable position, she moved constantly as she spoke, reaching an arm straight up in the air, leaning her chin or cheek in her cupped hand, shifting from hip to hip in the big chair.
So many friends and admirers crowded her calendar that she invented a two-week “vacation” the previous summer so she’d have an excuse to decline their offers. What she didn’t say was that she never left home, but used the quiet time for work. Though she seemed to love the company, she was ambivalent about the praise. Fisher pointed to a carton overflowing with envelopes given to her at her 80th birthday party in 1988.
“See that red box over there?” she asked. “It’s filled with 180 people’s birthday greetings to me, and I have not yet opened them. I wrote them all and said thank you very much, but I’m too scared to open them.”
Why?
“Because they’re sort of ego trips, all of them, you know. They’re very personal, very embarrassing to me. It’s embarrassing to hear what they think of me, because I know what I think of me.”
Which is?
“Not very much,” she said. She didn’t seem as if she wanted to be contradicted.
“With some people I just feel awed that they see things in me that I don’t see in myself at all,” Fisher continued. “I know they’re mistaken, but now and then I know they’re not mistaken. They see what they see, so therefore it must be me, even if it’s not me. It’s not my fault. I don’t pretend to be anything I’m not.”
Everywhere in the room were reminders of her stories. In a niche by the bed stood a line-up of the carved wooden santons, Provençal folk-art figures of saints, that she wrote about in her book on Marseille. A photo panorama leaning against the bookshelves showed the view from the French mountain cabin she described in her story “The Oldest Man.”
