Younger (19 page)

“Remember all those mornings,” I said to her now, sitting in the same chair she'd always occupied, “I made pancakes for you growing up? If I put chocolate chips or berries in them, you always insisted I use exactly five pieces in each pancake. You'd even count.”

Diana smiled, but she didn't look up. I felt a jolt of annoyance go through me, but pushed it back down.

“What do you have up today?” I asked her.

“I'm going to Dad's,” she said, yawning widely. “Can I take the car?”

“Sure,” I said. “When are you planning to be home?”

“I don't know,” she said. “I'm spending the night, and I may be back by dinner tomorrow, or stay a couple of extra days. I want to play it by ear, all right?”

“Of course,” I said, flipping the pancakes. “It's just, if you're going to take the car—”

Diana snapped the paper and looked up at me. “Mother, you have to stop treating me like a child, okay? If I'm going to live here with you and we're going to get along, you need to treat me like the fellow adult I am.”

I drew in my breath, watching the steam rise around the edges of the pancakes, waiting until I'd lifted them onto the plate and set them on the table in front of Diana to speak.

“You're right,” I said then, surprised at how measured my voice sounded. “And you need to treat me like a fellow adult too. Not like the mommy whose only function is to cook you pancakes in the morning.”

Diana blinked, syrup draining out of the bottle she held tipped over her plate. “Well, you didn't have to make the pancakes if you didn't want to.”

“I did want to,” I assured her. “I'm not saying I don't want to be your mother or I don't want to do things for you. I'm saying I want you to have some consciousness that I'm a human being, and that if I'm home in the middle of the morning from work without being sick, there must be a reason.”

Diana set down the syrup bottle with a thud, but it was too late, the pancakes were drowned in a swamp of goo.

“What's the reason?” she said.

I started crying then, not just from the confrontation right then, but from the force of what had happened all morning.

“I lost my job, all right?” I managed to say.

“What do you mean, lost?”

“I quit. But if I hadn't quit, I would have been fired.”

Diana didn't say anything, but suddenly I heard her chair scrape back and then she was at my side, her hand on my shoulder, gingerly at first, but then pulling me closer.

“Don't worry,” she said. “You'll find another job.”

“No, I won't,” I sobbed. “It was so hard to find this one, and now no one else will ever hire me.”

“Come on, Mom,” Diana said, patting my back as if I was the baby. “You said it was going so well. You had all those great ideas, and everybody loved them. It was just that your boss was a jerk.”

I shook my head against her shoulder. “You don't really know the whole story,” I said.

“Well, tell me!” she burst out, rearing back and holding me at arm's length. “Maybe I don't ask you things sometimes, but you don't tell me, either! I'd love to know the whole story.”

I looked her in the eye, trying to gauge her readiness to hear what she called the whole story, as well as my own readiness to tell it. Maybe she was right, that I had to be willing to tell her more, along with her being willing to ask. Maybe I would even do that, some day soon.

But not today, I thought, remembering Lindsay's reaction this morning, anticipating Josh's tomorrow. Losing a job, a friend, even a lover—those blows were awful, but ultimately ones I knew I could bear. But if I lost my daughter, I might as well curl back up in the corner of my sofa and die.

W
hen I rounded the corner from the subway onto Josh's block, I literally could not believe my eyes. There stood Josh—or at least someone who looked exactly like Josh—outside his building, leaning against a very shiny red Mustang convertible, with the top down. His face lit up when he saw me, and he waved the keys in the air in triumph.

“What's this?” I said.

“A surprise. I thought you needed some fun in your life.”

“God,” I said, “that's so
sweet
. But where did you get this car?”

“I borrowed it,” he said. “From my buddy Russ, the guy who has the band we went to see that first night. But don't hold that against him.”

I laughed. “I don't understand,” I said, surveying the car, its black upholstery polished to a high gloss, its chrome details shining as if they'd been minted yesterday. “Where are we going?”

“Jersey,” he grinned.

“New Jersey?” I said, trying to contain my horror. “Why would you want to go there?”

“Not me,” he said.
“We
. Come on, doesn't it look like a car that some guy in a Springsteen song would have driven? This car is longing to be in Jersey.”

“Well, maybe I'm not,” I said stiffly.

Josh shot me an odd look. “Come on, babe,” he said, opening the passenger door. “I never took you for a snob.”

“No, it's just…,” I said, horrified that he would take me for the kind of New Yorker who sneered at New Jersey, the kind of person I'd always hated. “I really have to talk to you.”

“About your job,” he said, nudging me toward the seat of the car. “I know. I have a plan.”

“And other things, too,” I called out as he walked around to the driver's side.

“I have other things I want to talk to you about, too.” He had slipped behind the wheel now, was fastening his seat belt and reaching for the ignition. “We can discuss everything once we get there.”

“Once we get
where
?” I said, serious panic now beginning to set in.

For the first time, he hesitated. “Well, I just figured we'd get to New Jersey and then look around for something good. Have you ever been to New Jersey?”

“Yes,” I admitted. “I grew up in New Jersey.”

“Cool,” he said, a wide smile breaking over his face. “Then you can direct us.”

He turned the key, and the Mustang roared to life. Roared was the right word: the engine was so loud, and once we started driving, the wind whipped around my head so fiercely that conversation was impossible. I directed Josh with my hands, pointing him toward the Williamsburg Bridge, crossing to Manhattan and then winding our way through the crowded streets of Chinatown and Soho toward the Holland Tunnel.

“Isn't this awesome?” Josh caroled as we sped across the bridge.

“Awesome,” I called back, hoping not too much grit had lodged in my teeth.

In Manhattan, in the odd moment when he wasn't shifting gears, Josh grabbed my hand, smiling and nodding at me above the blare of the horns and the smell of truck fumes. It was getting harder and harder to smile back, imagining the conversation we were going to have once we crossed into my native state.

“Maybe we should stop here,” I said to him, during a momentary lull in noise and traffic on West Broadway, gesturing toward the sidewalk cafés. “This would be a perfect place to talk.”

He shook his head firmly. “I want to get this baby on the open road. Go somewhere completely new with you.”

“I've been to New Jersey,” I reminded him. “A lot.”

But he could not be dissuaded. “Then we'll go to Pennsylvania,” he shouted, shifting into a higher gear as he gunned it through a yellow light onto Canal Street. “Or all the way to California!”

I was never going to make it to California, not in this car. Careening through the Holland Tunnel, assaulted by smoke and noise, imagining the river coursing along directly over my head, I had doubts about my ability to make it to Hoboken. All I could think was, I'm too old for this. Every doubt I'd ever had about my ability to keep up with Josh came rising up to meet me. I knew this was supposed to be fun. I had no doubt that Josh had gone to enormous lengths to create a wonderful experience for me. But I hated it. And I couldn't let it go on for one more minute longer than was necessary.

“Which way?” Josh called as we bombed out of the tunnel.

“Pull over!” I shouted.

“Where?” He looked around, confused. There were only gas stations and warehouse buildings and lanes of highway leading west.

I knew that downtown Hoboken was off to the right. But there was no place to park on the street there to have even a minimal conversation. To the left was Jersey City, as mysterious to me as Calcutta.

“All right, just keep going,” I said, pointing up ahead.

This route I could have driven in my sleep, and sometimes nearly had. It was the terrain that looked like the New Jersey of everyone's imagination: the arching roadways and flattened wastelands, the black metal towers and shells of ugly buildings. I knew each little cutoff and secret shortcut, directing Josh along the Pulaski Skyway and along Route 280, past the buildings of Newark and the highways to nowhere.

Finally, when we broke through to the green hills that hid the suburbs beyond the highway, Homewood among them, Josh seemed to relax.

“This is pretty,” he shouted.

I nodded, steeling myself for what I knew I had to do.

“Are you okay?” he said.

I nodded again, but pointed at the sign for the next exit.

“We're going to get off here,” I said.

He looked surprised. “Here?”

He must have assumed I needed a bathroom, or had an urgent need for water or tissues, as I directed him through the suburban streets, my mind racing through the possibilities of where we could sit without being harassed, where we could park without any of my Homewood acquaintances spotting us, where we could go to talk without making it harder than it was already sure to be. A parking lot seemed too cruel, an isolated road too romantic, and the idea of some anonymous suburban street—with the stay-at-home moms peeking at us through their windows and the joggers staring openly as they ran by—made me want to hurl myself onto the blacktop.

Finally, I directed him into the drive that led to an overblown restaurant, where Gary and I had gone a couple of times for our anniversary, that sat on the top of a cliff overlooking Manhattan. But first, before you got to the restaurant, there was a public park with parking spaces along a promenade with an amazing view of the city. It was here that my friend Lori and I had gone the day the World Trade Center towers were hit, watching in horror with hundreds of strangers as the buildings turned to columns of smoke.

I still saw the ghosts of the towers there on the horizon, a palpable absence from the otherwise glorious vista of the city that Josh and I had been deep inside just a short time ago.

“This is amazing,” he said.

“I'm going to miss you so much,” I blurted, blaming it on the missing towers, the reminder of pain I'd forgotten when I chose this place for its privacy, its beauty, its calm.

Inexplicably, he smiled. “That's what I wanted to talk to you about. See, it doesn't have to be such a bad thing, what happened with your job. Because now you're free. Free to come to Japan with me.”

“Oh, Josh,” I said, horrified at the direction he was taking the conversation, so different from the one I planned. “I can't go to Japan with you.”

“Why not? You don't have your job tying you down now. You can write anywhere.”

“It's not that, Josh.”

This was it. Absolutely. This was the moment I would have to tell him how old I was.

“There are things about myself I haven't told you,” I began.

“I figured,” he said, twisting in the car seat to face me directly. “I mean—are you married, Alice?”

“No!” I said, shocked at what he'd surmised. No, I shouldn't be shocked; it was a logical conclusion. And it wasn't all that far off.

“No,” I said, more softly this time, but determined that full disclosure was the only path. “But I was. I'd already been separated for a year when I met you.”

“Oh,” he said, relief flooding his voice. “I started to think that it was obvious, when you'd disappear for days at a time and would never take me to your apartment.” He laughed a little. “I was starting to think that you really had a husband stashed there and, like, five kids.”

“Only one kid,” I said.

Again, he looked stunned. “But how is that possible? All that time in the city, there wasn't any kid. Unless he was staying with his father or something, or some relative, but it doesn't make sense—”

I reached out and laid a finger on his lips. “My daughter is twenty-two years old.”

He pulled back his head and looked at me quizzically, as if this were one of those riddles with an answer that should be obvious—The surgeon was the patient's mother! There was nothing to do now but tell him the punch line.

“And I'm not twenty-nine, Josh. I'm forty-four.”

Everything seemed to stop then. The trees stopped waving in the breeze, the city skyline disappeared from view. Even the plane that was droning overhead in the pristine sky seemed to go silent.

Finally, Josh shook his head as if trying to clear it of a disturbing vision.

“That's not possible.”

“It's possible,” I said. “Not only possible, but true.”

“Jesus, Alice!” he exploded. “It was all a lie from the very beginning!”

At that, he pushed open the door of the car and strode out across the parking lot onto the expanse of grass, heading toward the line of trees. I waited a moment, thinking he would surely circle back, but he kept going, fast disappearing, until I finally jumped out of the car and ran after him.

“Josh,” I called. “Stop!”

He stopped walking, but he didn't turn around.

“I never lied,” I panted when I finally caught up with him. “I just didn't tell the truth.”

“But that first night at the bar, on New Year's Eve,” he said, turning to face me. “You pretended right from the beginning to be young.”

Was that right? I'd made myself
look
young, but from there, a lot of it was assumption. An assumption I'd actively encouraged.

“It was supposed to be just for fun,” I said, my heart sinking at the memory.

“Fun for you. Without caring about how I'd feel.”

“I did it before there
was
a you,” I said. “Or at least before I had any idea we were going to get involved. The last thing I expected was that I was going to fall in love with you.”

Josh looked at me. He looked at me hard.

“What did you say?” he said.

I felt the heat rise in my cheeks. I hadn't intended to say that. Hadn't known I was even thinking it. But now that I'd said everything else, why hide that?

“That's true too,” I said. “I fell in love with you, even though it was supposed to be no commitment. I didn't want it to happen. But it did. I'm sorry.”

Josh was staring at me with his mouth open. Then suddenly he spread his arms wide and threw his hands up and cried, “But that's great! I love you, too! You wouldn't let me say it before, but it's true. I love you, Alice. I love you!”

I shook my head and took a step back, more stunned by his reaction than I would have been had he told me he never wanted to see me again.

“But you don't know me,” I said. “Not the real me.”

He reached out and ran his hands down the outsides of my arms, which I was holding stiffly at my sides. “Here you are,” he said. “This is you, isn't it? You love me, and I love you. That's everything I need to know.”

“Oh, come on, Josh!” I cried. “It's not that simple. Maybe in some ideal world our ages wouldn't matter, but the fact is, they do. Just because we love each other is not enough to make a relationship work.”

He crossed his arms over his chest and stuck his chin into the air. He didn't look angry anymore, he didn't look hurt, but instead assumed an expression I'd come to recognize as determined.

“Why not?” he said, jutting his chin toward me. “It's enough for me.”

“Well, for one thing, I can't pick up and go to Japan with you. I've got my house, I've got my daughter, I've got a life here you don't know anything about.”

“So I'll stay here,” he said. “There are other gaming schools, or I can get a corporate job for a while—”

I reached out and gripped his forearm. “I'm not going to let you do that,” I said. “I know how much you want this. You can't give it up for me.”