Younger (5 page)

“And what if I do get a job? Then this so-called performance piece will be my real life.”

“I thought you said if you were younger you'd take more risks and be more selfish,” said Maggie, as the espresso began to percolate. “See, I knew you couldn't do it.”

“I could do it.”

“Then do it,” said Maggie. “Go ahead. I dare you.”

I
stood in the lineup of young women—I mean, genuinely young women—all of us holding our résumés and waiting our turn to speak with the baby-faced owner of the supposedly hippest new restaurant-to-be in Manhattan, Ici. There must have been fifty of us, all vying for the coveted position of waitress, and as far as I could see, I didn't stand a chance.

I may have been blond, I may have been thin, I may even have passed successfully—and no one had batted an eyelash—for young. But these other women were from some different planet than me, some land where big boobs and boyish hips coexisted on the same body, where teeth were white as paper and feet felt as comfortable in four-inch heels as they did in nothing at all.

I, mere mortal, could have sat down right there on the poured concrete floor. I could smile, I could enthuse, I could even swing my hips with the youngest of them. But I just couldn't train my old feet to like wearing high heels.

“Ms. Green?” the baby restaurateur called. “Ali Green?”

I hobbled his way, trying to make it look as if I was gliding. This was my fourth interview of the day. My first week out, I'd dispensed with all the book-publishing companies—all except my old employer Gentility Press, where I'd been turned down not once but twice last year. Although Gentility was still the company where I'd most like to work—it published all my favorite books, and its founder Mrs. Whitney was one of my idols—I was afraid that either they'd recognize me if I showed up again, or turn me down a third time. Or both.

After striking out with the book publishers, I'd moved on to the national magazines, then the trade magazines, then the public relations and advertising firms, on down to such deathless publications as
Drugstore Coupons Today
.

Everywhere, the story was the same. There were so few entry-level positions, and the ones that existed were mostly claimed by interns, not actual paid help. I'd been offered a few work-for-experience-not-money positions, but I couldn't afford to do that.

This week, I'd started looking for a waitressing job. Next would be bagger at the supermarket—but if I had to do that, I was going to go back to being forty-four, when at least I'd get to wear comfortable shoes and no one would stare at my chest.

“Alice,” I said, handing him my résumé. “My name is Alice.” He looked at me as if he'd never heard the name before.

“You know,” I tried to help him. “As in
Wonderland
.”

He didn't so much as crack a smile.

“Would you consider a name change?” he asked me.

Maybe if he were offering me the lead role in an Oscar-worthy movie. But to sling Cosmos in some Tribeca dump?

Still, this was too intriguing to shoot down without first stringing him along.

“What would you suggest I change my name to?” I asked. “Ali?”

“Or Alex,” he said. “Or maybe Alexa. Or, I know: Alexis!”

“Like on
Dynasty
,” I said.

“Alexis is hot,” he insisted, ignoring my analogy. Or more likely, not getting it.

“Is this like the Mayflower Madam?” I asked him. “You know, she had lists of alternate names for the girls, names she considered hot. Or maybe they didn't say ‘hot' back then. They probably just said ‘sexy.' ”

He looked blank, and I tried to look just as blank back. The truth was, I really couldn't take much more of this crap. This guy—I'd actually Googled him before I came, on the mistaken belief that doing my homework mattered more than the hotness of my name—considered himself some kind of culinary genius. But what, I wondered, could some infant in size 26 jeans possibly know about cooking? So, he put pepper in his ice cream. It was different, but was it edible?

I missed cooking. Despite being alone, despite losing weight, I still cooked all my favorite recipes, getting out my best china and my grandmother's silver that she'd carried over from Italy, lighting candles and putting on a nice CD. In the few weeks I'd been camping at Maggie's, seeing whether I could even find a job before I took the leap of renting out my house, I tried to cook for her, but she was usually deep in her work by dinnertime, slurping ramen noodles from a coffee mug and staring at her gargantuan block of cement.

“I'm very interested in food,” I told the baby genius, in an attempt to steer the interview back to Planet Earth.

He yawned. “That's nice. Are you an actress?”

“No,” I said.

That got his attention. He studied me, his eyebrows raised. “You don't want to work in the kitchen, do you?” he said. “Because I can't have girls in my kitchen.”

Talk about illegal! I shook my head no, but this kind of blatant discrimination made me feel better about my age fibs.

As if he were reading my mind, he asked, “How old are you, Alexis?”

With someone else, I might have fudged this question. Or even, in the face of such a flat-out question, told the truth. But I looked him straight in the eye and said, “Sixteen.”

Finally, a laugh. “Oh, a comic. I get it. All right. Show me your tits.”

I looked for another laugh, but none was forthcoming. Instead, he sat there waiting.

“You have got to be kidding,” I said.

He kept sitting there, obviously not kidding.

I reminded myself that I needed, really needed this job. If I were really twenty-two or twenty-seven, I wondered, what would I do? Make a joke of it? Maybe even show him, and cringe whenever I thought of it for the rest of my life? Or maybe, like the young women in the MTV videos that Diana watched or on the covers of the outrageous new men's magazines I saw on the newsstand, I'd do it and think nothing of it.

But that wasn't me. No matter how much makeup I put on, I'd never be that young or have the mind-set of that generation. And I was becoming more assertive, wasn't I?

“What do my tits, as you call them, have to do with my ability to be a good waitress?” I asked him.

His answer: “Everything.”

I was about to argue back, but then I thought, He's right. All it takes to get hired and be a good waitress and make good tips here is to be gorgeous and sexy. This is going to be one of those fake hip places where I couldn't even get a table. He isn't going to give me a job, whether I show him my breasts or not. He doesn't even have the slightest interest in seeing my breasts; he just wants to humiliate me. Well, I'm done.

I snatched back my résumé. I wouldn't leave even a piece of paper in his custody.

“I don't want to work for you,” I said. “And my name is Alice.”

Out on the street, my feet didn't hurt anymore. I was walking too fast, too driven by the pounding of my heart. I couldn't keep doing this, keep competing for jobs I didn't want and pretending to be someone I didn't even like. If looking younger could help me get a great job, the kind of job I dreamed of when I first started applying last year, the kind of job I'd had at Gentility Press so long ago, then I was willing to go forward with the masquerade. But so far, being young was even worse than being old.

As I walked, I started thinking that maybe it was time to give this up. I was exhausted from sleeping on Maggie's chaise, with the covers over my head to block out the lights and noise from her working late into the night. I had spent money I didn't really have on work clothes I couldn't wear. Now I just wanted to go home.

Except.

Except there was still Gentility. My choices, as I saw them, were to go to Gentility and risk probable failure, or head back to New Jersey and certain failure.

Looking at it that way, it was clear I had to head back to Gentility. At the very least, I'd show Maggie that I could be bold and assertive. In fact, I felt bold and assertive, marching toward Gentility's offices. True, I was wearing an outfit chosen to apply for a cocktail waitress's job—a red silk blouse and black-and-white-checked mini, plus full makeup. Maybe I should go back to Maggie's and change. Oh, screw it. It was a bold and assertive look in perfect harmony with my mood.

 

Half an hour later, cheeks flushed from my speed walk uptown, I was sitting in the office of Gentility's Human Resources Department, filling out the very familiar-looking application form. Good thing I had an ordinary name. My résumé was nearly the same as it had always been, but without any dates or mention of my twenty years of volunteer work. I used Maggie's address instead of my New Jersey one, and my cell phone number instead of my home phone, and prayed I'd be interviewed by the assistant rather than by Sarah Chan, the head of HR.

No luck. I wanted to melt into the floor as the all-too-familiar Ms. Chan, thirtyish and lovely and completely humorless, came striding across the gray-carpeted room toward me, manicured hand outstretched.

I stood up and braced myself for the look of recognition to cross her face. Sarah Chan was way too young to have been working at Gentility when I was. The first time we met was last February, right after I got done drying my tears from the breakup with Gary and Diana's departure for Africa. I'd walked into Gentility, in the size 14 suit I'd bought to accept my Parent of the Year award from Diana's middle school seven years before, assuming they were automatically going to rehire me for the job I'd left when I was pregnant. Even when the interview was over twenty minutes after it started, even as Ms. Chan, as she introduced herself, suggested I “keep in touch” rather than talking salary and title, I still expected she'd be calling me any day.

By June, when I hadn't heard from her, I'd gone back in, wearing the same suit—a little baggy by then—and carrying a handkerchief because my hands were sweating. Maybe I hadn't made myself clear the last time, I told her. I hadn't been stopping into Gentility just for a visit, for old time's sake. I was there because I wanted an editorial job,
needed
a job. I knew it
looked
like I hadn't been working, but I'd been doing many things that demanded all my organizational and managerial skills. And books, especially women's classics like the ones Gentility published, hadn't changed, had they?

That time, Sarah Chan was more direct. She had understood before that I was applying for a job. Sadly, all the editorial positions were filled. There might be something in publicity, if I…? But as recently as June, I wouldn't consider anything in publicity, anything except editing. Editing, working with writers, with words, was where my interest and talent lay. Anything else was a waste of time, I foolishly thought just a few months ago.

Now Sarah Chan poised in the middle of our handshake and looked at me curiously, her head tilted to one side.

“Have we met?” she asked.

I could confess all, say I'd moved, I was back for a third go, obviously not having learned the meaning of no.

Or I could think of it, as Maggie had coached, as a performance piece. Not lie, exactly, but play things out as far as I could.

“I don't know,” I said, tilting my head to match Sarah Chan's and looking her straight in the eye. “Have we?”

I'd had the feeling, when I was here before, that she wasn't really seeing me. That she, like so many young professional women, saw me and registered: old, fat, housewife. And instantly the curtain slammed down.

Now she pressed her lips together and shook her head and looked puzzled. “You look awfully familiar.”

“So do you,” I said, mimicking her mystified expression.

“Oh, well,” she said, giving up with a more vigorous shake of the head. “Come in and tell me about yourself.”

This time, it seemed as if she really wanted to hear. She asked me about the literature classes I'd taken at Mount Holyoke, about my interest in Gentility. Although what I told her was virtually the same as what I'd said—twice—last year, this time she seemed to really be listening. And I'd gotten smarter in the intervening months as well. Rather than insisting that the only kind of job I was open to was editorial, I now claimed I was interested in all phases of the publishing business.

Ms. Chan tapped her pencil against my résumé and said there was something in marketing that might be right for me. Marketing? Of course! I
loved
marketing, or at least I thought I might, if I had any idea (this part I didn't say out loud) what it was. Absolutely, I had time to talk with Teri Jordan, the director of marketing.

Walking along the halls, wending my way behind Sarah Chan through the cubicles, I was struck by how much the same the offices looked after all these years—the same, but not as prosperous. I'd been there when the company was flush from the feminist fever of the 1970s, when women were buying feminist tracts and classics by the great female writers as fast as Gentility could print them. Now, nobody read as much of anything, and Gentility was clearly feeling the pinch.

Scuff-marked paint and worn carpets aside, Gentility looked just as it had when I'd worked there last time, only all the people were different. Not only different, but
younger
, though I suppose we were all young when I worked there too. The only exception was the towering white-haired founder of the company, Florence Whitney, whom I glimpsed now only from afar. Mrs. Whitney was still a goddess to me, a decisive visionary who'd been a huge inspiration to all the women who worked for her, and I was glad not to be allowed to get too close. I might have knelt in adoration at her feet, and thoroughly given myself away.