Younger (23 page)

After Edie was tucked in her crib, after Diana and I cleaned up and left Maggie to sleep, after Diana went to meet her friends, I decided to go out for a walk. The snow was still falling, the powder covering the sidewalks and streets so lightly it seemed like a dusting of sugar, sweetening the world.

The snow had kept most people inside, so that instead of a holiday this felt like a night quieter than most others. My thought was that I would go down to the restaurant where Maggie and I had gone last year and drink a glass of champagne, but then it was so beautiful outside, I decided to just keep walking. Wearing corduroys and hiking boots, an old ski jacket and Maggie's leopard-skin hunting cap, I trooped through the fringes of Little Italy and the north end of Chinatown into Soho, where the sidewalks were cleared and the restaurants were full of people.

I thought again about stopping for a drink, but again, kept walking. I turned south, thinking of how I'd borrowed Maggie's boots that night after my heels were killing me.

It was then that I remembered Madame Aurora. Was she still there? Still offering New Year's wishes? I tried to refocus, tried to think of what I'd wish for, how I'd answer Diana's question, what I might tell Madame Aurora if I laid down my money.

The first thing that had come to mind, back in Maggie's loft, was that I wished I could have Josh again, that we could be in love just like before, better than before, for always. But almost immediately, I questioned whether that was what I really wanted, whether that was what he would really want.

So what then, for myself: success for my books? Yes, I wished that. But now that I was actually writing, I saw that as something within my power, not something to pray to the heavens for when blowing out the candles on a cake or spying the first star.

What? Happiness for Diana? For Maggie? Yes, yes. But was that really my one true New Year's wish?

As I neared Madame Aurora's street, I considered whether I would go in and see the gypsy. Who knew, maybe there had been some power in going there after all, in stating my desire out loud. Something, somehow, that made it come true.

I shivered, despite myself. I didn't want to believe that. I didn't even want to think about putting myself in that position again. I'd walk down a different street. I didn't even want to see the fortune-teller's shop, didn't want to place myself within its force field.

But once I got to Madame Aurora's street, I couldn't resist turning down. I had to just know, had to just see, had to let myself feel again what I'd felt a year ago, before anything had happened, to try to judge how much of the power for change had come from within me, and how much from magic. I slowed my steps as I neared the storefront, my heart throbbing in my throat.

And then I stood, not believing what was in front of my eyes. There was no Madame Aurora's. Where the shop had been stood a shoe store, the window filled with pumps and boots and silver sneakers. I looked around, thinking I might have the wrong street, the wrong address. But no, this was it, everything else was right. But Madame Aurora's shop had vanished as thoroughly as Cinderella's coach.

I reeled blindly away and trudged forward as if by rote, not focusing on anything around me or thinking about where I was going until I found myself in Tribeca, near the dock for the New Jersey–bound ferry. When I'd landed here last New Year's Eve, it had been so crowded with people, but now it seemed almost sleepy, a few stragglers ambling toward the tented dock where the boat was waiting, its lights beckoning.

Well, why not? The moon was full, the snow had stopped, and the Statue of Liberty glowed gorgeous in the distance. It could be the ride that I had dreamed of and hadn't really gotten the year before.

I paid my money and boarded the boat and headed directly for the deck upstairs. There were two other people out there, but I had no trouble claiming the perch at the front, exactly where I'd stood last year. Holding on as the engines roared to life, I thought that maybe this—this ride, this view—would inspire the wish that had been eluding me all night.

The boat pulled away from the dock, and I anticipated that, as had happened the year before, we would swing around once we'd cleared the shoreline. I held the railing and gazed at New Jersey, at the enormous clock on the dock there, the high-rises and the darkness beyond. That was my past, I thought, and any second now the boat will turn around and I'll be riding backward, but facing my future, the buildings of New York, my new home.

But the boat didn't turn around this time, and I found myself, once again, careening directly toward New Jersey. I caught my breath in dismay, thinking that maybe this was a sign that I was condemned never to escape, that New Jersey was indeed my inexorable fate. But then I looked back over my shoulder at the receding skyscrapers and realized that getting a different view was as easy as turning my head. If I stood just so, if I adjusted my angle a tiny bit, I could see both New Jersey and New York, both my past and my future, at the same time.

That's when my wish came, unbidden and impossible, to my mind: I wish, I thought, that my life would stay exactly as it is, right this minute, forever.

WHERE DID THE IDEA FOR
YOUNGER
COME FROM?

I wanted to write about what I saw as the war between younger and older women, and I came up with the idea to let that struggle play out within one person, my heroine Alice. My first notion of the book was very dark: I saw Alice as a rich and shallow woman on the brink of killing herself who decides to spend her last hour of life reading
Vogue
—and therein discovers a miracle-working plastic surgeon whom she gets to transform her into someone who looks young. But I had no interest in writing about the kind of woman who would do such a thing, however redeemed she may be by the end of the book. Then I spent a long time imagining that the fortune-teller, Madame Aurora, would magically transform Alice into a younger woman. And then finally I realized that Alice could simply pretend to be younger, that in fact her rejuvenation by act of will was more powerful than it could ever be by magic or surgery.

LET'S GO BACK TO THAT WAR BETWEEN YOUNGER AND OLDER WOMEN—WHAT'S THAT ALL ABOUT?

I believe all women are under a tremendous amount of pressure, imposed by time and age, to get all the pistons of their lives—relationships, babies, home, career—firing efficiently. Younger women seem to have a need to believe that it's going to be different for them than it was for the generation before them, that they'll have an easier time balancing work and motherhood, for instance, and that their own marriages will stay as hot as their bodies. And older women, of course, have some need to see them fail, to prove that they really couldn't have done it any better no matter how hard they might have tried. And of course both groups are raging against the same truth: That most women's lives demand considerably more compromise than men's lives do.

WHAT KINDS OF COMPROMISES?

The main one, of course, is the relatively narrow window women have in which to have their children. Young women today are more aware of that than women now in their forties or fifties were; they know they really need to be having their children by age thirty-five, which doesn't leave them any time to fool around. But older women know how difficult it is to keep a career moving forward in high gear once you have kids, or to step off the career path for a few years and then hop back on. They know that devoting your life whole-heartedly to either children or a career can mean sacrificing the other, and that trying to do both often means constant compromise.

HOW HAS THIS PLAYED OUT IN YOUR LIFE AS A WRITER?

I have three children and I've always worked, but the biggest sacrifice I made when my children were younger was that I stopped writing fiction completely for ten years. I only had time to write purely for money—magazine articles and nonfiction books—and to be a mom. Then when my youngest child was five and started kindergarten, I felt ready to go back to working a longer day and was able to devote half my time to working on what became my first novel,
The Man I Should Have Married
. That book took a long time to write, mostly because I had no idea what I was doing, and I wasn't getting paid for those thousands of hours—and didn't know whether the book would ever be sold. But with my nonfiction career well established and my children more independent and those incredibly overwhelming years of pregnancy and babies behind me, I was able to take that professional risk.

IN WHAT WAYS ARE YOU LIKE ALICE, THE HEROINE OF
YOUNGER
?

I love my house; many writers, I've found, invest a lot of creative energy in their houses, maybe because they spend so much time there. And I have a daughter, my oldest child, who's the same age as Alice's daughter. Although I haven't lived Alice's life of being a full-time mom, I do relate very much to that feeling in your forties of wanting to live out your dreams before it's too late. For Alice, looking younger began as merely a means to reclaiming her old job as an editor. The corollary in my life was writing fiction, something I'd done in my early twenties and then given up for years.

WHY DID YOU MAKE ALICE'S FRIEND MAGGIE GAY?

She didn't start out being gay, but I always wanted her to be someone who'd lived independently, who'd never wanted to get married and have kids, and her being a lesbian explained all that very neatly. Also, Maggie is the opposite of Alice in that she's never tried to fit in or be conventional in any way. But the fact that the two have stayed best friends all these years is a testament both to Alice's constancy and her willingness to step outside the box.

WHAT DOES ALICE LEARN FROM BECOMING YOUNGER?

In some ways, she learns that she is who she is, regardless of age. Being younger doesn't automatically make you braver or wilder or more independent. In the same vein, she realizes that if she wants to change those aspects of herself, she's going to have to put a lot of hard work into it, work she avoided because it was too difficult the first time around. She really grows up from this second chance at youth.

WOULD YOU BECOME YOUNGER THE WAY ALICE DID IF YOU HAD THE CHANCE?

What woman wouldn't look fifteen or twenty years younger if she could? The trick is owning your hard-won experience and life and getting the respect of someone older while also enjoying the fruits of looking like a babe—and it doesn't usually work like that, as Alice found out when Teri didn't take her seriously at work. I'd love to have the option of looking younger when it suited my purposes, but I don't have that kind of face or body. I have friends who do, though, women in their forties with kids in high school who can pass for being in their mid-twenties. It's amazing. But I don't think I'd like to go back to that stage of life of being confused about love, of having to prove myself all the time. That's not fun for anyone.

DO YOU BELIEVE IN HAPPY ENDINGS?

Although I know it's not very cool, I do believe in happy endings. I need to believe in at least the possibility of a happy ending, in a story as well as in life. All of my books have a fairy-tale aspect to them, which reflects my earliest reading love along with some underlying wish I have about how things will work out in real life. I continue to believe in magic, in hope, in change, in true love. And any of those things, or all of them together, can lead to a happy ending.