Younger (6 page)

The assistant's station outside marketing director Teri Jordan's office looked very empty. The chair had evidently been used as a dumping station for books, and the desk was dusty. That was the good news: This woman was almost certainly desperate for an assistant.

The bad news was Teri Jordan herself. It seemed clear to me even as we shook hands why this woman had had so much trouble hiring an assistant, why it was that I was able to walk in off the street and get an interview with her, right on the spot. Everything about her was severe, from her short slicked-back hair to her black suit to her grim line of a mouth. Ms. Chan, for one, couldn't get out of there fast enough, as if she were throwing me into a tiger's cage like so much raw meat.

I heard Maggie's voice in my head—“Don't let her intimidate you”—but it was too late, I was already intimidated. I'd been intimidated as soon as her handshake crushed the bones in my hand, intimidated as I surveyed the photographs of her three small children atop her completely cleared desk, which held only three perfectly sharpened pencils, all pointing directly at me.

“What makes you think you can work for me?” Teri snapped.

I felt my mouth go dry. Because no matter how nasty you get, you're probably not going to ask me to show you my tits? Because this job is my best chance to get the life I most want?

Be bold, I heard Maggie urge me. Speak from your gut.

But my gut was responding as if she were Gary, home from a long day of drilling root canals. When he was stressed, he'd go on the offense, just as Teri was, and my cowed response had always been to speak in a soothing voice and try to get him to talk about what was really on his mind.

“What do you think it takes to work successfully for you?” I asked.

“Well,” said Teri, “the person has to be thoroughly reliable. I can't take any more of these girls calling in sick every time they get cramps or a sniffle.”

“I haven't been sick in twenty years,” I assured her.

She looked at me strangely. “You're not allowed to be late, either,” she continued. “I'm here by eight, and while I don't expect you to do the same, I'd still want you to be in every day well before nine.”

“I'm up most mornings by six,” I said. “Ever since—”

I'd been about to say that ever since Diana was born, I'd found it impossible to sleep late. But that probably wouldn't be a good idea.

“I'm always up by four-thirty,” she informed me, just in case I should be feeling any sense of superiority about my six
A.M.
wakeups. “That's when I exercise, then I get my house organized before waking up the kids to say good-bye.”

I eyed the pictures of the children—a girl who looked to be about six, with her front teeth missing and a long brown ponytail; a boy of three or four with severely parted hair, looking like a little political candidate; and a round-faced infant of indeterminate gender. It was hard to believe that Teri's knife-thin body had produced these three soft little creatures.

“I work at home in Long Island on Fridays,” Teri was telling me, “but make no mistake, I'm not playing with my kids and checking my e-mail every few hours. I'm really working.”

I imagined her master bedroom with a huge desk and a full array of electrical equipment whirring and beeping, something like a command station. Did her husband stay home with the kids? I wondered. Or maybe she was the general to an army of nannies and housekeepers. It was hard to imagine Teri Jordan scraping by with a quasi-efficient au pair or day-care center and letting the housework slide.

“So part of your job,” she said, “will be to function as my ears and eyes and hands in the office on the days when I'm interfacing from home. Is that understood?”

She'd said “my job.” Did that mean I was hired?

“Now,” she said, “tell me your ideas about marketing the Gentility line.”

Uh-oh, apparently she wanted to know whether I was actually qualified before she hired me. Slight catch there. My only publishing experience, at Gentility itself, was inadmissible evidence. Plus, I still didn't have a clue what marketing
was
.

But I did know Gentility's books, as well, I'd wager, as Florence Whitney herself. I'd followed the company all these years, keeping track of the imprint and trying to read everything it published. Plus, as longtime director of Diana's school book fairs, as a member of my library board and two local reading groups, I knew a lot about how books were packaged and sold.

“Gentility publishes some of the best books by women ever written,” I began cautiously. “There's always a market”—I silently congratulated myself on finding a way to use the word—“for Jane Austen and the Brontës.”

“Yes, yes,” Teri said, waving her hand dismissively. “But it's a smaller market, and we want a bigger share of it. What do we do?”

“Uhhhhhh…” I was terrified of saying the wrong thing, for fear of blowing my chances at the job and also of Teri Jordan leaping across the desk and sinking her sharp little teeth into my throat. But saying nothing was
definitely
wrong. At least if I said what I really thought, as a devoted reader if not a professional marketer, I'd have some minuscule chance of being right.

“There are so many more factors vying for our attention now,” I said, “and the popular images of women are so much sexier and more idealized. The clothes, the bodies—young women feel like they have to look like Paris Hilton or they're nothing.”

Even I, in the past few weeks, had found myself trying to measure up in ways that had never entered my mind before. Shopping for my new younger wardrobe with Maggie, I'd encountered clothes that were both narrower—were these clothes made for thirteen-year-olds? for
men
?—and more revealing than anything I'd ever owned. I'd felt like I was supposed to be both more feminine and more professional, less threatening as well as more ambitious, and I had to spend a lot more money in order to earn less. And no matter how well I fielded those conflicting pressures, I couldn't even get a job.

Teri shook her head. “What does this have to do with marketing books?”

I'd gotten so worked up, I wasn't sure I remembered my point myself.

“I just think you can't sell the classics any longer with classic covers,” I said. “You know, the same old watercolors and portraits of nineteenth-century ladies. To get young women's attention, you have to key into contemporary ideals of women's lives, play with that in terms of bright colors, more exciting ads—”

Now Teri was shaking her head so hard that her hair was actually moving, which I would have thought to be a physical impossibility.

“I want you to understand,” Teri said, “that I'm the only idea person in this department. Are you going to be comfortable with that?”

I nodded, my mouth firmly shut.

“Are you going to be happy xeroxing and FedExing and keeping coffee—black, no sugar—running through my veins?”

Again, I nodded.

“All right,” Teri said, rising and—praise the Lord—not extending her hand and subjecting me to another bone-crushing handshake. “I'll see you bright and early Monday morning.”

 

I didn't let go until I was alone in Gentility's ladies' room. To anyone else, that place might not have felt like a temple of emotional expressiveness, but I'd gone through such big-time emotional events there that the mere sight of its peach tile walls set my heart on fire. I'd come here directly from the lunch when Gary asked me to marry him. Found out I was pregnant with Diana in one of these stalls. And right here, I discovered I was spotting and in danger of losing the pregnancy.

Now, though, it was joy that surged through me, elation and excitement that I'd actually landed this job. “Yes,” I whispered, pumping my hands. That gave way to a full-out chuckle, and then I let out a whoop, complete with arms stretched into the air.

That felt so good, I began to dance. I'd done this after Gary proposed, pranced around this very bathroom to the inner tune of our song: Elvis Costello's “Red Shoes.” I had always remembered that as one of the highest moments of my life, and now I felt almost that good again. I closed my eyes as I swung into a real dance, hearing Elvis the Second's voice in my head: “Red shoes, the angels wanna wear my red…RED SHOES…”

And I guess I was letting myself sing a little bit out loud, because when I opened my eyes and looked into the mirror, there was someone behind me, watching me with an enormous grin on her face.

“Good day?” she asked, still smiling as she moved to wash her hands.

She was so ethereal-looking, she might have been a ghost, with her pale red hair, nearly the pastel of the bathroom walls, and her alabaster skin, which looked even whiter contrasted against her all-black clothing.

“I just got a job here,” I told her.

“Really,” she said, arching her delicate eyebrows. Her eyes were the pale green of jade. “What are you going to be doing?”

“I'm going to be an assistant in the marketing department,” I breathed.

She stared at me for a minute, all traces of a smile now vanished from her face.

Finally she said, “You're not going to work for Teri Jordan, are you?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Oh.” She'd uttered only that one noncommittal syllable, but she looked like she was holding back volumes.

My heart lurched. “What's wrong?”

“Nothing,” she said. “You'll probably be fine.”

“What?” I insisted.

She studied me, seemingly trying to determine whether I could handle the news she was about to deliver. “Well,” she finally said, looking around the bathroom, as I should have done, and lowering her voice almost to a whisper, “she fired the last three girls who worked for her.”

“Really?” I said. While I'd experienced a range of emotions in this room, I'd never swung through the whole range in such a short time.

“I don't think the last one made it through a day.”

“Really.” I felt my shoulders sag as my heart dropped toward the floor. “What's the problem?”

“Mrs. Whitney—you know, she's the head of the company—is apparently convinced that Teri Jordan is brilliant and wonderful. But that's not what the people who work for her think. She's apparently very demanding and not so scrupulous.”

“Not so scrupulous?” I said, thinking guiltily of my own dodgy scruples. “What do you mean?”

“I don't know the specifics,” she shrugged. “I'm in editorial.”

“Editorial,” I breathed. “That's where I really wanted to be.”

“You can move up a lot faster on the business side,” she said, “if you can manage to survive Teri Jordan.”

I let out a sigh so deep, it seemed to have been trapped inside for years. In the past year, I had survived my separation, my only child's departure, and my mother's death. I'd grown both more brave and more afraid, more confident in my ability to deal with pain and more reluctant to open the door to any more of it.

“I don't know,” was all I could manage to say.

“Don't worry,” said the redheaded young woman, laying her hand on my shoulder. “I'll take care of you.”

This waif was going to take care of me? I smiled weakly.

“I'm Lindsay, by the way.”

“Alice.”

“Ah,” she said. “As in Munro. Or Walker.”

I could have kissed her. “Everyone says ‘as in
Wonderland,
' ” I told her.

“I'm not everyone,” she said. “But I'll still be your White Rabbit.” And with that she vanished down the maze of corridors of Gentility Press, leaving me more nervous than ever about the coming week—and more excited.

M
y house in New Jersey looked as strange and distant as if I'd been gone for years, not a mere few weeks. I stood on the sidewalk—mine was the only one on the block that was slick with ice and tamped-down snow—gazing at it as if I were coming home after a long journey. Everything about the place—the towering trees, the broad yard edged with its split-rail fence, the black shutters against the crisp white of the window frames and the warm beige of the painted brick—seemed quiet and peaceful, like a drawing in an old-time romantic novel, captioned “Home.”

Old Mr. Radek from next door edged down his driveway, using his snow shovel like a crutch, and when he caught sight of me he stopped and waved. This is why I'd avoided coming back these past weeks: I didn't want to explain my new hair, my new clothes, what I'd been doing in the city, whether I'd be coming back for good. But Mr. Radek just waved at me, looking sublimely uncurious.

“Hello, Diana,” he called.

Diana. He thought I was my own daughter. Younger neighbors with sharper eyesight would not be so easily fooled. And if one of my two close friends from the neighborhood had been in town, I would have had a lot of explaining to do. But Elaine Petrocelli and her husband Jim, now that their kids were all out of the house, had fulfilled a lifelong dream and were spending a year living in Italy, and my friend Lori, inspired in a kind of backward way by my divorce from Gary, had finally gotten out of her long-unhappy marriage and moved back to Little Rock, her hometown.

Rather than enlightening Mr. Radek, I gave him a friendly wave and headed up my walk. It was almost impossible to open the door because of all the mail littering the hallway, and the place was freezing because I'd turned the heat down before I left for what turned into my endless New Year's weekend at Maggie's.

Now the plan was that I would spend a whirlwind weekend getting the house ready to put on the rental market. The real estate agent I'd called assured me there was high demand for month-to-month rentals to people moving to Homewood or having work done on their own houses who needed a temporary furnished place to stay. That way I could store my things in the attic, even stow my car in the garage, and spend every month until Diana's return at Maggie's.

But standing there in my front hallway, my eyes lighting on one thing after another that I loved—the dented pewter pitcher I'd rescued from Mr. Radek's garbage, the watercolor of the Irish hills done by a book group friend who'd died of breast cancer, the first note Diana had written from camp (“I love you like pancakes love syrup”), which I'd framed and hung on the wall—all I wanted to do was hurl myself on the ground and hang on so tight nothing could make me let go. How could I dream, even for an instant, of camping out in Maggie's drafty loft, of wandering alone through the frigid (in every sense of the word) city streets, when I could be in this wonderful home?

The idea was so overwhelming that I pushed it aside by busying myself the way I always had on coming into the house: hanging up my coat, turning up the heat, sorting the mail, putting on the kettle for tea, building a fire with the wood that had dried out nicely in the big basket beside the living room fireplace.

Maggie had her sculptures, but this—these stenciled walls, these blue-and-white dishes arranged behind glass-fronted cupboard doors, this rich collection of books, and these dark waxed floors—was my work of art. Gary's parents had helped us buy this house right after Diana was born. It was part of the deal: I had to quit my job and lie in bed for the duration of my pregnancy, so Gary, who'd been working at becoming a great poet, needed a more lucrative career. Gary's parents offered to buy us the house and pay all our bills
if
Gary went to dental school, as they'd always dreamed. Though he'd been accepted to dental school at Rutgers before he went off to Oxford to study and write poetry, he'd had no intention of actually going. But now he changed his mind. I didn't want him to sacrifice his poetry for dentistry, but in the end I had to agree that we had no choice.

For a long while, Gary continued writing while he went to school and started practicing, and then he got so involved in dentistry—his specialty was endodontics; root canals—that he stopped. He used to say that doing a really good root canal was like writing a really good poem: a concentrated endeavor in which the tiniest detail could make the difference between pleasure and pain. Maybe that was the problem; he embraced too wholeheartedly the art of the dentist. I admired him for finding a way to love it, but he was also deluding himself and was resentful, I think, deep inside, of me, of his parents, even of Diana, for foisting this lesser life upon him.

And I embraced housewifery and motherhood as enthusiastically as Gary did dentistry, and in much, I see now, the same spirit. Given the threatened miscarriage, Diana's premature birth and delicate health, my repeated and failed attempts to have another child, it had ended up being the best life available to me, and I'd relished it with the same fervor I'd once reserved for dissections of
Jane Eyre
.

I'd even loved the hard work of fixing up the house: ripping the old linoleum up from the wide-board floors, patching and painting the cracked plaster, sewing curtains for the windows made of wavy antique glass. Later, when we had more money, I designed a new kitchen that looked as if it might have been original to the house and put in a perennial garden, now blanketed with snow.

The house, along with Diana's upbringing, was my domain. Gary worked long hours and left all decorating and contracting—as well as parenting—decisions to me, which I'd considered a plus, until I realized it was a symbol of how separate our lives had become. We shared perfectly civil evenings in the same house, but we might as well have been living on different planets.

The heart of the problem was that Gary and I mistook our very romantic meeting in London and ecstatic first weeks together as a sign that we should spend the rest of our lives together. The Royal Wedding did that to a lot of people.

I knew I wasn't happy, but I thought that was just the way marriage was, after twenty years. That's the way many of my friends' marriages were. We rarely had sex, we even more rarely told the truth about anything meaningful, but neither did we fight. It was acceptable; I liked my life, and I certainly wasn't going to leave him, having no confidence there was anything better out there.

But Gary did find something better, in the person of Gina, his dental hygienist. I know, I know, it's a cliché, but where are you going to meet someone new, if not at work (and if you don't have a job, like me, where are you going to meet anyone at all)? I was shattered, humiliated, jealous, furious—but I was also, deep down, relieved. Gary had on some level done me a favor by forcing my life to change, when I was too wimpy to change it myself.

I'd been more genuinely shaken by Diana's flight to Africa, and then, last summer, by my mother's death. My mother had suffered from Alzheimer's for several years, and in the end didn't know me, but there's no finality like death, and once she was gone, I felt, for the first time in my life, truly alone.

I sat now, as I'd sat for so many months, in front of the fire, indulging in my solitary pleasures, a glass of white wine beside my empty mug of tea, a pile of magazines warming my lap. To the world, apparently, I looked like someone new, but sitting here I felt like my same old self: comfortable, frightened of leaving this cozy nest.

And yet the very act of stepping back into a younger life required a spirit of adventure and a belief in the future, in the possibility of possibilities, that I was going to have to revive. Revive and cultivate, as if I were a vampire, and it were my fresh blood.

 

It wasn't until I got to Maggie's, late the next afternoon, exhausted from all the work I'd done and from hauling my suitcases onto the bus and into the subway and through the freezing streets, that I burst into tears. Maggie had been working with wet concrete for a new cube, but she stopped when she saw me, peeling off her elbow-length rubber gloves and rushing to my side.

“What's wrong?” she said.

“I just don't think I can do it.”

“What happened?”

“I miss my house. I miss my daughter. I want my mommy, for Christ's sake.”

I really started blubbering then, and Maggie pulled me to her and held me, patting my back like an infant, while I wept and drooled against her shoulder. It occurred to me, even as I was besmirching her shirt, that she was the only one who'd held me, really held me, in a whole year.

“I'm okay,” I said finally. “I'm just having”—here I paused for a major sigh—“doubts.”

“Doubts?” she said.

“Fears.”

Maggie hesitated. “Which is it, fears or doubts?”

“Fears
and
doubts.”

“Tell me,” she said.

“I'm worried about pulling off this younger act. I mean, maybe I
look
younger, but can I really
be
younger?”

“You don't need to be younger,” Maggie said. “That's the beauty of the new you: you've got the bod of a babe and the mind of a mature adult. You're the perfect woman.”

“But what if I get caught?” I said.

Maggie blew air out through her lips in the universal language for “You're an idiot.” “Who's going to catch you?” she said. “And so what if they do? This is a lark, right?”

“Not totally,” I said. “I really need that job. I really need that money. If this doesn't work out, I might lose the house.”

“So what if you lose the house?” Maggie said.

That felt like a slap. “Maggie, you may have been done with New Jersey a long time ago,” I said, “but it's still my home. I love that house.”

“Okay, okay,” Maggie soothed. “But for now, this is your home.”

I looked around. I'd been camping out on the velvet chaise, but now that I was really moving in, I needed something a tad more permanent. If I kept sleeping on that chaise, pretty soon my neck was going to be frozen in a painful crick, and no amount of hair dye would make me look younger than a hundred and three.

“I think I need a real bed,” I said, thinking of my own top-grade king-size mattress, with its down mattress pad and Egyptian cotton sheets and feather comforter.

A pleased look stole across Maggie's face. Beckoning me to follow her, she led me across the room to the red silk tent that functioned as her closet. She pulled back the fabric that stood in for a door. There, in the red glow inside the tent, instead of racks and shelves full of Maggie's clothes, stood a narrow bed covered with a red satin quilt, and an even narrower dresser.

“What's this?” I asked.

“It's your room,” Maggie beamed.

“I thought it was your closet.”

“Right. But I cleared it out and ran a cord under the door so you could have a little light.”

For Maggie, this was
huge
, not only inviting me to move in with her, but making me my very own space. Once she'd fought her way out of her overcrowded childhood home, she'd never seemed willing to let anyone invade her hard-won privacy. But now she seemed to be welcoming me in. I just had to be sure she was doing it with a full heart.

“Maggie,” I said, sitting on the bed and bouncing a little. “Are you sure you really want me here? I'm afraid I'm going to cramp your style.”

“I want you,” she said firmly. “Plus now that you're in the red tent, it should be easier to stay out of each other's way at night. I'm really on a roll with this new work.”

“You still haven't told me what's with the concrete,” I said. The block she'd been working on when I came in wasn't really a block yet, just a basketball-sized lump that she would add on to until it was the size of a washing machine.

“I'm experimenting,” she said.

“With what?” I insisted.

She let out a big sigh and looked toward the roof of the tent. “Cow hearts,” she said finally.

“Excuse me?”

“I was afraid you'd be grossed out. The idea is to encase a cow heart in concrete, and then to build this block around it, which of course just looks like a block, but contains this secret—this heart, literally. You know, like Chopin's heart is entombed in that pillar in Warsaw.”

“I didn't know that.”

“Of course, Chopin's heart isn't secret,” Maggie went on, caught up now in talking about her art. “But the notion here is that my concrete blocks will emanate this power. You might not know what it's from, but that organic matter hidden inside will give the block this mysterious aura of life.”

I must have looked as clueless as I felt, because Maggie finally looked at me and said, “It's about pregnancy. About how a woman can have a new life growing invisibly inside her, and how that will change her ineffably.”

I was the English major, so I wasn't going to admit I wasn't totally sure what ineffably meant. But suddenly I thought Maggie might be talking about herself.