Younger (18 page)

M
y heart lurched when I arrived at work early Monday morning to find Teri already there, standing by my desk.

“You're in early,” I said, working to keep my tone unworried. “Is there a meeting this morning?”

“Come into my office,” Teri said, turning her back on me. Her hair had been freshly cut, coming to a sharp point at the nape of her neck. “I need to speak with you.”

I followed her into her office, feeling my breath catch in my throat. I had barely sat down when Teri said, “I've come across something very disturbing.”

She pushed a piece of paper across the desk at me: a copy of my application for the job at Gentility Press.

“What's the problem?” I asked.

“You tell me,” Teri said coolly. “It seems that all is not accurate on this application.”

“What do you mean?” I was now barely able to speak.

“It seems you didn't really graduate from Mount Holyoke with a degree in English literature, as you claimed.”

I let out my breath.

“Yes, I did,” I said.

I'd actually come across my diploma this weekend, while checking on the important documents I'd stored in the safe Gary had installed at home.

“I called Mount Holyoke myself,” Teri said. “I asked them to look through all their student records, not only for literature graduates but for all graduates, and you weren't there.” She gave a triumphant little smile. “Not at all.”

“What years?” I managed to whisper.

“What?”

“What years?” I said more loudly, suddenly clear about what I was going to do. “What years did you check?”

“Yes, I noticed that you very cleverly left your graduation date off your résumé, which made my job a little harder,” said Teri. “But I had them look at their records for every year dating back to 1990. When you would have been, at my best estimation, roughly ten years old.”

“Thirty,” I said.

“What was that?”

“In 1990, I turned thirty,” I said, feeling, along with the fear, the release of telling the truth.

Teri opened her mouth, and then sat there staring. “I don't believe you,” she said finally.

“It's true. I graduated from Mount Holyoke in 1981.” I lifted the phone on Teri's desk. “Go ahead, call them,” I said. “They'll confirm it right now.”

Teri shut her mouth. “You still lied.”

“How did I lie?”

“You represented yourself as a recent graduate.”

“How so? There's nothing on this résumé or application that says when I graduated or claims I've done anything I haven't.”

“Exactly!” Teri said, slamming her hand on her desk. “It's what you don't say that's inaccurate. If you graduated from Mount Holyoke in 1981, what have you been doing for the past twenty-something years? Surely you haven't been ‘touring Europe,' as you note here, for all that time.”

“I've been home raising a daughter. I've been home mopping floors and being the class mom and, I don't know, baking hams. Or, as more than one personnel director called it when I went to job interviews with all the dates on my résumé, ‘doing nothing.' ”

Teri stared at me. “You lied,” she said finally.

“I didn't lie. I'm a mom, Teri, just like you. But when I tried to return to my career after staying home with my child, I found the door barred to me. So I simply omitted a piece of my history—a piece that wasn't even relevant to my profession.”

I should have known Teri wouldn't have any sympathy for the difficulty of reentering the workforce after being a stay-at-home mom.

“Other mothers keep working despite the sacrifices involved,” she said. “If you choose to sit at home, you have to be willing to pay the price.”

“But why should the price be eternal marginalization?” I began. “I'm ready to give my job my all now—”

“You're dishonest,” she interrupted me. “You're sneaky. This isn't the only problem.”

I caught my breath. “You're talking about the classics project.”

“Yes. You went behind my back on that. Tried to steal all my ideas.”

I opened my mouth. Closed it. And then opened it again—very wide.

“How dare you,” I said. “You're the one who's been stealing my ideas from day one. And not only did you steal my ideas, you stole my exact words to express them with.”

“That's ridiculous,” she said. “I have no idea what you're talking about.”

“You know very well what I'm talking about. You even acknowledged it to my face—you remember, the whole ‘your ideas are my ideas' thing. You just didn't call it stealing.”

“It doesn't matter what you say,” Teri said. “You're a liar, and once what you've done comes out, no one will believe anything you say.”

“Lindsay already knows all about your taking my ideas,” I said. “Even Thad knows some of it. And Mrs. Whitney is undoubtedly putting two and two together, which is probably the real reason you need to get rid of me.”

I stood up then. I'd been so afraid, just a moment ago, that Teri was going to fire me. But now I knew what I wanted to do—
had
to do.

“I love this company, I really do,” I told her. “I even love my job. But I can't work for you anymore. I quit.”

“But,” Teri stammered, “I'm firing you.”

“There you go again,” I said, even managing a smile. “Trying to steal my ideas.”

 

I wished I could talk to Mrs. Whitney before I left, to make sure she knew my version of the truth, but that was going to have to wait for a calmer time. For now, the only person I had to see was Lindsay. The entire company would be buzzing with gossip about my real age within minutes, I knew, but I wanted Lindsay to hear the truth from me.

Lindsay's assistant was away from her desk—probably in the ladies' room, already getting the story on me—so instead of knocking, I opened Lindsay's door and stepped inside her tiny office. She looked up and scowled: she was still unofficially not speaking to me. Before she could protest at my intrusion, I held up my hand.

“I'm just here to say good-bye,” I said. “I quit.”

Immediately a look of concern crossed over her face, which at least gave me hope that my friend was still in there somewhere.

“What happened?” she asked. “Did she try to take credit for your work again?”

“No. I mean, yes, that was part of the problem. But we had a confrontation because Teri found out that I—I guess you would call it,
misrepresented
myself on my résumé. That I wasn't entirely truthful about my background.”

“Did you inflate your experience?” Lindsay asked. “Or expand the dates when you worked someplace? Because if it's something bogus like that, I don't care, I'll talk to Thad myself—”

“It's not that,” I interrupted. I drew in a deep breath. “I didn't tell the truth about my age, Lindsay. To Gentility, to Teri, even to you.”

“To me? I don't think you ever said exactly how old you were. I just assumed—”

“That's the problem. I let everybody assume I was a few years out of school, somewhere in my twenties. But I'm not, Lindsay. I'm forty-four.”

Lindsay's mouth dropped open, and she sat there staring at me, shaking her head. “How can that be?”

“I've always looked young for my age. And my friend Maggie, the artist who sketched those covers for the classics meeting, helped me do my hair, do my makeup, put together a younger-looking wardrobe.” I laughed a little. “Don't you remember how appalled you were by my failure to get a bikini wax?”

“So that was just because you were old and out of it,” she said. “The whole Third World traveling through Europe thing was a lie, too.”

I didn't know which stung worse, being called old or having what I'd said to Lindsay characterized as a lie.

“I never meant to lie to you or hurt you in any way, Lindsay,” I said. “That's why I had to see you before I left—not only to tell you who I really was, but to try and explain why that made me feel the way I did about your relationship with Thad.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I was married for more than twenty years, Lindsay. I was a full-time mom; I have a daughter who's nearly as old as you. And when my husband left me last year, I was totally lost.”

“And so you decided to go out and perpetrate this major fraud on the world?”

“It wasn't like that,” I said. “It started as a lark, and then it just snowballed. I feel terrible now about all the people I lied to, even Teri. It was so wrong.”

“Yes, it was,” said Lindsay, crossing her arms over her chest.

“But don't you see,” I said, “that's why I have to tell you the truth now. I think one reason I wanted to be friends with you was because you remind me of myself when I was your age. I was like you, so anxious to get on with the grown-up part of life. But now I realize that I missed out on so many pleasures of being young. No, more than that—I used my marriage and my child as an escape from the hardest part of becoming an adult myself.”

“Just because you screwed up,” Lindsay said, “doesn't give you the right to assume that I would.”

“No,” I said. “Of course not. But I did have this perspective that made me feel you shouldn't be in such a hurry to get married, shouldn't be so quick to say you'd throw away your career when you had children—”

Lindsay leaped to her feet as if I had burst into flames. As if she had.

“You don't know anything about me,” she said. “My generation, we're not like you. We love men. We want to enjoy our children.”

“I loved my husband,” I said, stunned. “I wanted to enjoy my daughter, too. I
did
enjoy her. But that doesn't mean I feel unambivalently happy about having spent my twenties and thirties sitting in a house with a child. I wish I had worked longer back then, had seen more of the world—”

“And I wish you would get out of my office,” said Lindsay.

I stopped talking.

“I mean it,” said Lindsay. “I want you to go.”

“I thought you'd want to hear the truth,” I said.

Lindsay pointed to the door.

So for the second time that morning, I left.

 

I called both Maggie and Josh from the street to tell them, in varying amounts of detail, what had happened, and though they both wanted to see me right away, I felt that all I had the strength for was dragging myself to the bus and going home. I promised Josh I'd see him tomorrow, when I vowed to myself that I was definitely going to tell him the truth, the whole truth—despite the disastrous consequences of today's revelations. And I made a plan to get together with Maggie later in the week, when she said she'd feel more mobile following the insemination and I suspected I'd even more seriously need her moral support.

Diana was still sleeping when I got home, which was a relief. I curled into a corner of the sofa, pulled the one afghan Maggie hadn't taken up around my neck, and promptly passed out.

I wasn't aware of anything until I felt a hand shaking my shoulder and opened my eyes to see Diana staring down at me, a concerned look on her face.

“Are you sick?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “I came home early.”

I expected then that Diana would ask me why I'd come home early, and I would tell her that I'd quit my job, if not the whole reason behind my departure, and she'd commiserate, maybe brew me a cup of tea, and we'd sit in the sun of the living room, and I'd feel happy to be home with my daughter.

But instead she said, “Oh, great. You know what I'm dying for? Some of your pancakes.”

Never mind that I'd offered to make them for her this weekend, and she'd snubbed me, claiming they were too fattening. Never mind that all I did, in any case, was pour the mix into a bowl and slosh in some water and stir it all around, something she could have done handily herself.

Although I knew it was ridiculous, some part of me felt gratified that my big girl still needed me to be her mommy—more precisely, still
wanted
me to be. I heaved myself off the couch, swallowing any resentment I might have felt about her seeming lack of interest in me, and went into the kitchen, Diana trailing behind me. She sat at the pine table leafing through the morning paper as I put a fresh pot of coffee on to brew, mixed the pancake batter in my mother's green bowl, heated the griddle I'd had since her childhood, with its four perfect silver circles worn into the surface where the pancakes had always been cooked.

I'd made Diana pancakes for breakfast nearly every day of her entire growing up, progressing from homemade batter to the ready-made stuff, adding in chocolate chips or blueberries, putting whipped cream on top or pouring the pancakes in the shape of the letters of her name, according to her whimsy. How many pancakes was that? Four a day for an average of six days a week for, say, fifteen years—close to 20,000 pancakes. Twenty thousand and four, counting today.