Younger (4 page)

“Alice,” I said.

“Ali?”

“No. Alice.”

“Okay, Alice, pick a number between one and thirty-one.”

The number that popped into my head was what I guessed his age to be. “Twenty-five,” I said.

He sighed. “Couldn't you pick a lower number?”

Oh, God, I hoped not. “No,” I told him.

“All right.” More punching of buttons. “We have a date on January twenty-fifth.”

“We do?”

“Yes. I set your phone alarm to remind you. We're going to have a drink at…name a bar.”

“What if I don't want to have a drink with you?”

“You have twenty-five days to think about it. If you decide you don't want to do it, you can always cancel. Now pick a bar.”

The only bar I could think of was the famous place, Gilberto's, around the corner from the office of my one and only long-ago employer, Gentility Press. That was the last time I had any real occasion to go out for a drink in the city. I had a moment of panic wondering whether Gilberto's was even still there, but Josh told me he knew exactly where it was, and noted the name and address in my phone before handing it back to me.

“I don't know how to use that phone alarm,” I warned him.

“You don't have to do anything,” he said. “At four o'clock on the twenty-fifth you'll hear the alarm go off, and the phone will tell you everything you need to know. I'll see you then.”

T
he ringing of my cell phone jarred me out of a deep sleep. The first thing I thought, still in a fog after the late night, and in the unfamiliar light of Maggie's loft, was that it was the alarm going off for my date with Josh. I'd been dreaming about him, something vaguely erotic that was hurtling out of my reach as the phone kept up its insistent trilling.

I finally managed to wake up—my neck was stiff from sleeping on the purple chaise—and find the phone still lodged in the pocket of the jeans I'd worn, crumpled on the floor. After I said hello, there was only crackling on the line, crackling and silence, and I was about to hang up except finally, tinny and far away, I heard my daughter Diana's voice.

“Mom?” she said. “Mommy? Is that you?”

“It's me, sweetheart,” I said, at once fully awake. Diana wasn't able to call often. The nearest phone was a ten-mile hike from the village where she was working as a Peace Corps volunteer. Contrary to popular belief, there still were some places—make that many places—where cell phones and the Internet didn't reach.

“It doesn't sound like you,” Diana said.

I ran my hand over my hair, remembering as I did everything that had happened last night, my transformation at Maggie's hand, the encounter in the bar. Getting up off the chaise, I walked over to the oval mirror and looked at myself. With the makeup washed off, I looked more like the old Alice. But my newly pale hair and the choppy cut Maggie had given me had done wonders. Even in this early-morning raw state, I looked like a young woman.

But not a young woman that my daughter was ever going to encounter. Like my pot-smoking days and a few drunken and semi-anonymous sexual adventures, this was not something I was ever going to tell Diana. “It's me,” I assured her. “Are you all right?”

“I'm fine, Mom,” she said, with that edge to her voice that let me know she thought I shouldn't be questioning her fineness. Of course she was fine. She was a grown-up and didn't need me to take care of her.

“Good,” I said. “Are you in town just for the day?”

There was a silence so long I thought we may have lost our connection, but then Diana said, “No, I actually went to Morocco for a few days with a couple of the other volunteers. I thought I told you.”

It was as if she had slapped me. She definitely had not told me, and I knew she knew it. I had wanted Diana to come home for Christmas, and she had raged at me that since her tour of duty was almost over, there was no way she could possibly leave her village, that just because it was a holiday in the United States didn't mean anything where she was, that poverty and need didn't
take
any holidays, and so on until I was apologizing for being so selfish as to have offered to buy her a ticket home.

Don't start a fight with her, I told myself. It's not worth it, she'll be home soon, none of this will matter.

“I didn't remember that,” I said. “How was it?”

“You never remember anything I tell you,” she said. “I don't know why I even call.”

Oh, Lord. It had been like this for the past year, ever since her father and I had broken up. Even though he'd been the one who'd left, it was me Diana had been furious with, maybe because I was safer, maybe for the very reason that I was the one she was closest to, who wouldn't abandon her. Last January, two weeks after Gary left, Diana announced that instead of returning to NYU to finish her senior year, she had joined the Peace Corps and was leaving for a year's posting to Africa. Now, after a lifetime of affection and closeness—Diana had not even gone through an adolescent period of testiness—she called me from five thousand miles away to pick a fight.

“I'm glad you called,” I reassured her. “I can't wait until I see you again.”

More silence. I guess she needed a few minutes to find something wrong with my having said that.

“Well, you're going to have to wait a little longer,” Diana said finally. “I've decided to extend my stay here another couple of months.”

My breath caught in my throat. I'd managed to suspend everything—my fear; my anxiety; my overwhelming desire to be close to her, physically and emotionally, again—by telling myself she'd be back in January. And now all those feelings I'd kept dammed up came flooding through me, and I let out a cry that was much louder than I'd intended. Across the room in the red iron bed, Maggie's eyes popped open, and on the other end of the phone line, Diana was squawking.

“How dare you give me a hard time about this?” she said. “I have my own life to live. Just because all you want to do is sit in that house in New Jersey doesn't mean it's enough for me.”

I felt myself go very still. Maggie was sitting up in bed now, staring across the room at me with a look of concern on her face. She raised her hands and her shoulders as if to ask, What's going on? and I had to turn my back to her to keep from bursting into tears.

“Mom?” Diana said. “Are you still there?”

“I'm here.”

“I know you don't just sit around. You have your garden club or whatever. But now that I'm here, I just want to stay a little longer. You can understand that, can't you?”

Of course I could understand that. What I couldn't understand was why she had to be so hurtful to me.

“Diana,” I said. “If you want to stay, of course you should stay. I'm just a little disappointed, that's all.”

“See, that's the problem,” my daughter said. “I don't think you have a right to be disappointed. Instead of sitting around waiting for me to come back, it's time to get your own life together.”

Now I could barely breathe. And definitely couldn't speak.

“Listen,” she said. “This call is costing you—or Daddy or whoever—a million dollars. I'm still not sure how much longer I'm staying, at least a couple more months. I hope you're going to be okay with this.”

“Mmmmm-hmmmm,” I managed to say.

“All right. I'll call you again as soon as I can. I love you.”

I was about to say I loved her too, but the line went dead. I stood there for a moment breathing, and then turned around to face Maggie, who took one look at me and leaped out of bed and crossed the room to take me in her arms. Now I let myself go, sobbing against her shoulder. It wasn't that Diana was staying that left me so shattered. Sure, I felt let down, but I could certainly survive for a few more months, for however long she decided to stay away. What was intolerable was how distant we'd become in every other way, and how impossible it felt for me to reach her.

“That's all right,” Maggie soothed, patting my back. She hugged me and reassured me as I told her what was happening, what Diana had said, how I felt.

Finally, when I calmed down, she stepped back and forced me to look her in the eye. “You know,” she said, “this might be a blessing in disguise.”

“What do you mean?”

“What you started last night,” Maggie said. “It gives you a chance to see it through.”

“With that guy?” I said. “I'm not really—”

“I'm not talking about the guy,” Maggie interrupted, “though he could be part of it. What I mean is with the looking-younger stuff. You could play it out, see what happens.”

“You mean see how many twenty-five-year-old guys I can hoodwink into kissing me?”

“If you're going to pretend to be younger,” said Maggie, “you're going to have to stop using words like
hoodwink
.”

“What's wrong with
hoodwink
?”

“It's antiquated. It's the
beau
or
nylons
of tomorrow.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Who says I want to pretend I'm younger?”

“Listen to me,” Maggie said. “What happened in the bar last night, that wasn't a fluke. Since I've had my way with you, you look fantastic. And now Diana calls and says she's not coming home for a while. It's your opening! There's nothing stopping you now from putting yourself out there, applying for a few jobs, and why not, maybe going out with a few guys—”

“This is outrageous.”

“What's outrageous? You said yourself, you wish you were younger. You've got to get a job, whether you want one or not.”

“I want one,” I assured her.

“Okay, then. It's got to be easier going in there as a woman who's twenty-eight than one who's forty-four.”

“I don't like lying,” I said. “I may be wearing tight clothes and a bunch of makeup, but I'm still just myself. Why do I have to be any age?”

“Exactly,” Maggie said. “Why do you have to say you're forty-four or twenty-eight or whatever? You don't have to tell the truth or lie.”

I nodded. “Right.”

“So if you look younger, and people assume you're younger, why not just let them believe it?”

I kept nodding, but we were veering back into problem territory.

“I mean,” said Maggie, leading me over to the minuscule kitchen setup, where she started making coffee in her teeny-tiny pot, “when you go to a job interview and tell them you're forty-four, that makes them assume all kinds of things about you that aren't necessarily true, right? Like you're middle-aged, you're out of it, you're too old for an entry-level job.”

I had to admit, she was right.

“And so if they believe you're somewhere in your twenties,” Maggie continued, “they'll be more likely to think what you want them to think: that you're eager to learn, that you're happy to get a starting position, that you'd have no problem working for some whippersnapper of a department manager.”

“But I'm not in my twenties.”

“But they don't have to know that,” said Maggie. “In fact, they're not allowed to ask. Discrimination law.”

“Don't you remember what Sister Miriam Gervase taught us?” I said. “That's a sin of omission.”

“ ‘Don't ask, don't tell.' ”

“Sin, sin. Sin, sin.”

“Oh, come on, Alice. You stopped being a Catholic when you got married under a huppah.”

She had me there. Despite my unbroken years of Catholic school education, I'd given up going to church when I went away to college, and completely surrendered my status with the pope when I married a Jew. But though Gary rediscovered his religion after Diana was born, and even tried to get me to convert so Diana would be considered thoroughly Jewish, I had resisted. I couldn't say I believed Jesus was God. But neither could I bring myself to say I didn't.

Over the past year, I'd even tried going back to church, feeling the need for spiritual sustenance, seeking some sense of community. The problem was, the Protestant congregations I visited seemed like toy churches, with ministers who were not only married but female—moms!—and bare-walled sanctuaries, devoid of mystery and majesty. But while I didn't feel like a Unitarian or a Congregationalist or a Presbyterian, I couldn't make myself reclaim my Catholicism either, given the church's denial of everything that had been most important in my life: my marriage, my daughter's legitimacy, even my divorce.

And that was what was really bothering me about Maggie's idea that I pretend to be younger, I realized now. It wasn't mainly the lying or the ethical implications that disturbed me, but the idea that, by erasing all those years from my age, I'd also be wiping out everyone and everything that I loved.

“So I'm supposed to pretend that my daughter never existed?” I said, plopping onto the chaise and wrapping the red satin quilt around my shoulders. “That I was never married, that I never lived in my house?”

“You don't have to pretend anything,” Maggie said. “It isn't like you're going to be going home to Diana and Gary every night, leading this double life. In fact, you don't have to go back to New Jersey and pretend anything to your old friends and neighbors at all. You can sublet your house for a couple of months, move in here with me—”

“Whoa whoa whoa,” I said. “I thought you said you could only fly solo.” Maggie had been involved in some extended romances over the years, but she'd never allowed any of her girlfriends to move in with her. When she traveled, she didn't even like to share a hotel room.

Maggie grinned. “That's something I'm going to have to change,” she said, “now that I'm becoming a mom.”

“And you're going to practice on me.”

“It could be good for both of us.”

God knew Maggie would benefit from learning to share her space and her life with another human before her theoretical child came into her world. And come to think of it, maybe I could use some taking care of, too.

“So you think I should become a totally different person?” I asked her.

“Think of it as a performance piece. You ride it as far as you can—get yourself some new clothes, see if you can land a job—and let it end when it ends.”