Younger (16 page)

Maggie looked up at me and grinned. “I never pictured myself as the baking kind of mom. I kind of figured I'd take her out for sushi every night.”

I could tell she was only half kidding, and who knew, maybe Maggie would be lucky enough to get the kind of kid who'd sit quietly in a restaurant, chowing down on raw fish. My child had been more the Cheerios-in-front-of-the-TV type, but maybe that was because I hadn't demanded anything more sophisticated.

“What if you have a boy?” I said, teasing her.

Maggie looked taken aback, as if this had never occurred to her. Then she said, “Well, I'll take him out for sushi too.”

“Maybe you have the right idea,” I said. “I think I made everything so comfortable for Diana, smoothed the way for her so thoroughly, that it came as a great shock when she started school and discovered the world really didn't revolve around her.”

“Diana's a great girl,” Maggie said. “Really, you should be proud of the job you did raising her. Seeing how well she turned out, watching how gratifying motherhood was for you—that was a big part of what finally made me want to have a child of my own.”

I was so touched, I felt tears spring to my eyes. “Wow,” I said. “And here I always worried you thought I was wasting my life, compared to doing something important like being an artist.”

“Diana is your work of art,” Maggie said. “And now you're starting this whole new phase of your life. Come on now, what's next?”

“Well,” I said, “it's time for the sugar.”

We'd bought white and brown on our grocery run, and now Maggie held a cupful up for my inspection.

“However much you think is right,” I smiled. “You decide.”

“So you really think I can do this on my own?” she said, dumping in the sugar with a wobbly grin, not quite meeting my eye.

I knew she was asking about more than the pie crust. We hadn't had a straight-out discussion about the baby issue since New Year's Eve, when I told Maggie I thought she might be too old to take on the demands of motherhood. I'd done my best to be supportive since then, but now I realized I'd come to truly believe in Maggie's quest for a baby. She'd extended herself so far for me, opened up herself and her world in a way I knew she couldn't have even a few years before, that it was clear she was more than ready to let a child into her life.

I still couldn't, for myself, imagine having the energy to take care of an infant, to keep up with a toddler, but neither could I imagine my life feeling complete if I'd never had a child at all. Thinking about this, my heart filled with joy for Maggie, that she'd realized what she wanted before it was too late, that she was doing everything in her power—and more—to make her dream of motherhood come true.

I reached out and squeezed her arm. “The BLT?” I asked.

“Of course,” she said. But she looked apprehensive about hearing what I had to say.

“I do,” I assured her.

She looked up at me then. “You honestly think I have what it takes to be a good mother?”

“I know you do,” I said. “You're already doing things for this child I never knew you were capable of.”

Maggie looked at me questioningly.

“Wearing khakis, for instance,” I said, letting a smile steal across my face. Maggie had always been militantly anti-beige in all areas of life, but today in J. C. Penney—J. C. Penney of all stores!—she'd picked out a pair of part-polyester khakis for herself, positing that the adoption people would feel reassured if she were dressed in “momwear.”

I gestured to the green bowl, where she was using her fingers to mingle the sugar and the flour.

“And baking,” I pointed out.

She frowned at her mixture, white and powdery. “This doesn't look much like crumb topping.”

“It needs brown sugar,” I said. “And butter. And a couple of spices—cinnamon, nutmeg—whatever you want.”

“Oh, I definitely want spices,” Maggie said, grinning. “As many and as much as possible. That's okay, isn't it?”

“It's completely up to you.”

“Is it really?” Maggie asked, suddenly turning serious again. “What I mean is, do you think I can still be myself and be a good mother, too? Because I'm uncomfortable with this, all this changing.”

I was about to answer quickly that yes, of course, she could still be herself and be a good mother, that the changes were just temporary, only superficial, nothing that would undercut the essence of Maggie's most essential self.

But then I thought, Are they really? I'd thought, on New Year's Eve, that I was just coloring my hair, only changing my shoes. And now I felt as if not only my life but my very self had changed at least as radically as the surface me.

Yet weren't those changes positive? And wouldn't the changes in Maggie that would inevitably come with motherhood be equally positive, even if less predictable? Sure, it was frightening to find your life turning inside out. But I remembered Maggie herself, way back in high school, telling me that fear and excitement were two different aspects of the same emotion.

“One of the smartest things anyone told me,” I said to Maggie now, “was that before you have children, you try to figure out how you're going to fit your kids into your life. And then once the baby comes along, you try to figure out how you're going to fit your life into your kids.”

Maggie blinked. “I'm not sure I totally get that,” she said.

I was about to explain how the notion had played out for me, how it had played out for every mother—and a good portion of the fathers—I knew. But then I thought that, like age, like love, it might be one of those things you had to live through to fully comprehend.

“You will,” I told Maggie. “You will.”

 

Late that night, as I lay in my old bed on my own crisp white sheets, wide awake with the strange familiarity of it all, with the unaccustomed quiet of the night outside, I heard my phone ring. Not the phone on my bedside table, but my cell phone, all the way downstairs in my purse. I had no problem, in the moonlight, finding my way through the hall and down the stairs and to the purse I'd left as had long been my habit on the bench in the front hall.

I expected it to be Josh. I'd told him I was going away for a girls' weekend with Maggie—“Can I come?” he'd joked—and I figured he was calling to tell me he missed me.

So I was startled to hear Diana's voice on the line.

“Honey,” I said quickly, feeling my pulse pick up. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Are you?”

“Of course.” I looked around me. Even in the dark, I could almost imagine her small self, skipping through the rooms. “Do you know where I am now? I'm home. In New Jersey. In our house.”

I waited, expecting to hear Diana's cry of surprise, or even a grunt of indifference before she launched into a story of her latest adventure. I was shocked when, instead, she started crying.

“Sweetheart!” I said, alarmed. “What is it? What's wrong?”

“I miss it,” Diana said. “I don't feel like I have a home anymore.”

“Oh, darling! Of course you have a home! Even if I sell the house, you'll always have a home with me.”

“So that's it,” Diana said, her voice growing stony. “You're going to sell the house.”

“No, no, that's not what I'm saying. I mean, maybe someday, but—” I realized I was confused. “I thought you weren't ready to come back.”

“I thought you didn't want me to come back.”

“Oh, no. Of course I want you to come back,” I said, trying to telegraph the conviction I felt through the phone wires, “if that's what you want for yourself. I'd love it if you were here, but more than anything I want you to feel happy and satisfied with what you're doing.”

There was a silence so long I thought we had lost our connection, until finally I ventured, “Diana?”

“Well, I don't know if I want to come back right now,” she said, sounding as if I had roused her from a reverie. “I still have a lot of work I need to do here.”

This felt more like mother-daughter business as usual.

“Whatever you decide,” I told her. “I just want you to know that if you want to come home, I want to have you here.”

I
was sure when I went into the office Monday morning, I would find Teri there. But she was still at home, although well enough to begin looking at work that I would messenger to her.

Getting the first package ready to send to her, I felt my mouth go dry and my heart begin to thump, much as if I were coming down with the flu. But my problem was emotional, not physical. I was suddenly worried, for the first time, what Teri was going to make of all the work I'd done on the classics project. As long as she'd been completely out of the picture, I'd been secure in Mrs. Whitney's support and the power of the ideas themselves. But now I began to consider that Teri might feel seriously threatened by how far I'd run with this project.

Should I send her everything I'd done? I wondered. Or maybe I should hold some memos and e-mails back, break the whole thing to her gradually. Gee, Teri, Mrs. Whitney was pleased with our presentation. She asked me to take it a step further. My expanded plans for the line were a big success. And now, ooops, it looks like I'm gonna be
your
boss!

That last part was still in my fantasies, but I couldn't help imagining how Teri would react if
she
saw that as the logical progression of things. Which, from what I knew of how her mind worked, she very well might.

I needed Lindsay's advice, but when I went to her office, she was sitting there ashen-faced—which, considering how pale Lindsay was normally, was saying a lot—moving piles of paper from one side of her desk to the other. She didn't even look up when I said hello.

“What's wrong?” I asked.

She picked up a stack of manuscripts, then thumped them down on the other side of her desk.

“Thad broke up with me,” she said, still not looking at me.

“Oh, God!” I said. “I'm sorry.”

Then, finally, Lindsay met my eye. “Are you?” she said. “I thought you might be glad.”

I felt my cheeks flush with guilt: Although I
was
sorry that Lindsay seemed so miserable, I was also glad on some level that she was finally out of what I saw as a not-great relationship. Thad seemed so controlling, so ready to quash Lindsay's free spirit, which she seemed blindly willing to trade for the security of marriage—a kind of security, I knew, that didn't necessarily last.

But I didn't feel as if I could say anything that straightforward to her. I was her friend, not her mother, as she'd made abundantly clear to me that night at the club. As a theoretical contemporary, how did I have any more perspective on this than she did? And she'd long deemed my disinterest in marriage as completely wacky, rendering any romantic advice I might offer null and void.

“Did you?” I asked. “Why would you think that?”

“Oh, please,” Lindsay said. “You've never liked Thad.”

I guessed I hadn't been hiding it as well as I hoped.

“This isn't about whether I like Thad,” I said. “It's about whether he's really the best guy for you. What happened, anyway?”

“When Thad found out about that guy from the club,” she said, “he was furious and broke it off.”

This wasn't computing. “But this all happened a week and a half ago,” I said. “He's been out of town. How did he find out about it now?”

“I told him,” she said miserably. “When he got home.”

“Why on earth did you tell him?” I said. “What happened to being a free agent until that ring was on your finger?”

“But that's exactly why I told him,” she said. “When he came back from California, he seemed to assume I'd been sitting around knitting the whole time he'd been gone. I wanted to make him see that if he wanted that kind of commitment from me, then we were going to need to get engaged.”

Or maybe, it occurred to me, she told Thad about the other guy because she wanted to provoke a breakup. Maybe she knew in her heart that Thad wasn't the right man for her, that she needed to have more experiences before she settled down.

“It might be for the best,” I said gently. “Now is the time you should be going out, having fun—”

“I knew you'd say something like that,” Lindsay snapped.

“Listen,” I told her. “It's you I care about. Your happiness. And I believe you might find more happiness somewhere beyond Thad.”

“My life is ruined,” she said, covering her face with her hands and beginning to sob.

“Lindsay, come on…,” I said, laying my hand on her shoulder.

“Just because you're determined to screw up your own life,” she told me, shaking off my touch, “doesn't mean I'm going to let you screw up mine.”

 

Was I determined to screw up my own life? That wasn't the way I saw it, though Lindsay's words kept echoing in my ears. Certainly, I felt less secure at work, more worried about what was going to happen when Teri returned, without her and Thad in my corner. And I plain missed her friendship, the fun she brought into my life. Taking the long bus ride home to New Jersey every night, traveling, it seemed, into my own past and future at the same time, had reopened a lot of questions I'd been working hard to set aside.

The question of Josh, for instance.

At the same time I wanted to start telling him only the truth, I found myself lying more and more. My burgeoning number of little lies all stemmed from one major lie: I was hiding the fact that I had moved home to New Jersey, given that he'd had no idea in the first place there
was
any home in New Jersey. Via the miracle of cell phones and meaningless area codes, I could be anywhere, as far as he was concerned—so I pretended I was either working late or recovering from working late at Maggie's loft.

It wasn't that I didn't want to see him. It was more that seeing him confused me even more than I was already confused. Going back to New Jersey, reclaiming my home, rediscovering every minute of every day who I'd been all these years—as well as being reminded how many years I'd been that person—made me feel as if I could not go and see Josh and play a role any longer. But how could I confess to him the enormity of my charade? I wanted to come clean, but each time I imagined it, I ended with the certainty that it would mean losing him. And one of the few things I felt sure about was that I didn't want that to happen.

“I miss you,” Josh said.

I was talking on my cell phone, sitting in the living room of the house in Homewood. I had thrown the windows open to the warm spring evening and had also built a fire, just because I could. The little Chinese lamp was turned on; the only other light came from the candles I'd lit around the room. Everything was back in place now, all the photos of Diana in their sterling frames on the mantel, all my favorite pillows and books, dishes and knickknacks, placed just the way I liked them. I still hadn't decided what I was going to do about the house, beyond making the most of it in whatever time I had here.

“I really miss you,” he said, apparently thinking I hadn't heard him the first time.

I sighed deeply and involuntarily with the force of all the feelings and thoughts I was holding inside.

“I miss you, too,” I said at last. “I'll see you soon.”

But I found myself wanting to gobble up every minute I had in my house. With Teri still out, I was free to fudge my hours, coming in a bit later in the morning, rushing out the door in the afternoon, savoring all the things about home I'd forgotten I loved so much. I made myself drink my coffee in the sunniest place in the kitchen each morning, angling my chair so that I could see the cherry tree budding in the yard. When I read, I curled up in the big window seat rather than sitting lazily on my bed. I took baths in the huge Deco tub off the master bedroom, the tub that had been one of the main reasons I'd wanted the house but that I'd rarely let myself luxuriate in before.

And I used all my favorite things, everything I'd collected for so many years. The white cotton sheets with the hand-crocheted edging. The chunky blue spatterware mugs, and the cream dishes. The sterling napkin rings with the
A
engraved on them, and the dented coin-silver spoons that were so perfectly contoured for grapefruit.

I arranged my favorite kilim and hooked rugs so that my feet could glide from one to the next, never touching wood, as I wound my customary path through the house. When I ate, I used the etched crystal wineglasses—Gary's grandmother's, though he seemed to have forgotten about them—and lit every one of the golden beeswax candles in the hand-forged iron chandelier.

I washed the red cross-stitched bedspread by hand, and suspended it from the branches of the lilac tree to dry. Then I ironed it stiff, along with the linen napkins and hand towels. I polished the silver candlesticks and the copper pots, and buffed the pine floors on my hands and knees. I used Gary's abandoned toothbrush to clean the grout between the old subway tiles in the bathroom.

For every meal, I leafed through my bulging recipe file, indulging myself by cooking all of my favorites, not minding somehow doing all that work just for myself. I made Grandma Giovane's spaghetti sauce from scratch, simmering it on top of the stove until the house was drenched in the sugary scent of tomatoes. I baked myself a chocolate cake and an onion tart; I constructed a Cobb salad and even fried myself the homemade precursor to chicken nuggets, the treat that, as a girl, I'd always requested for my birthday dinner.

The place I spent most of my time, though, was my garden. This had always been my favorite time of year here, with everything popping from the ground so fast it seemed you could stand there and watch it grow. I cleared out all the old leaves and dead stalks from last year, and rooted out the yellow columbine that would take over if I didn't get it now. I pruned the roses and laid brick for a new path and planted white geraniums in all the window boxes.

I couldn't afford to let my time at the house drag on without making a decision about renting it again, or at least beginning to investigate its sale. But before I did that, I wanted one uninterrupted weekend there alone. Besides, I rationalized, this was my chance to tackle the larger organizational tasks that I'd always put off in the past, and now would have to do if the house were sold.

I went through all the bookshelves, carting boxes full of books to the library for donation, to the university club for sale.

I sorted through all the unworn clothes in the attic, getting rid finally of all the ordinary gear from Diana's childhood, all of my own clothes bigger than size 10, and every single item that had belonged to Gary.

I threw out Gary's notes from dental school, my notes from Russian lit, and Diana's seventh-grade social studies project. I finally gathered Diana's childhood drawings into pretty portfolios, and went through boxes of papers from my mother's house, ditching old gas bills but framing an award my mother had won for penmanship in 1933.

And then, at the dusty bottom of one of the attic's dustiest boxes, I found it: the manuscript of the novel I'd started writing when Diana was a toddler, the chapters I'd labored over for months, only to lose heart. I thought I'd thrown this away long ago, but now I sat down right on the splintery boards of the attic floor and started reading. And kept reading.

I imagined coming across this manuscript at Gentility Press. I'd be excited, I thought. The story felt familiar yet not stale, a domestic comedy about the suburban mother of a young child, feeling that she wants more out of life but not knowing how to get it. It was the not-knowing-how-to-get-it part of the story that tripped me up, I saw now. I didn't know how to keep writing the novel because I didn't know how to get more out of my life. Couldn't imagine how, for my heroine or myself. I thought I'd run out of ideas and energy writing the book. But what I'd really been clueless about was how to go forward with my own life.

Now, though, it seemed so obvious what the woman in the story should do, how she should fail, what she should try next. If I had had a pen, I would have started writing right there on the attic floor, but instead I moved downstairs to the chair near the fireplace, my laptop balanced on my knees, forgetting that I was covered with dust, stopping only when I realized it had gotten too dark to see.

Then I roused myself to build a fire, make some tea and smear some peanut butter on a hunk of Italian bread, and rush back to my chair to start writing again.

I was still sitting there when I heard a car door slam outside and then, alarmingly, footsteps on the porch stairs and a key in the lock.

I stood up, heart hammering, scribbling pages falling from my lap, just in time to see my daughter Diana burst through the front door.

“Hi, Mommy,” she said. “I'm home.”