Older

by Pamela Redmond

There was an antique marble mantel in the living room, but no fireplace. The hallway held a stacked washer and dryer, but the second bedroom had a skylight instead of a window and was smaller than Caitlin’s childhood closet.

  Before we left, Caitlin swiped a brochure from the slate countertop, along with the real-estate agent’s card. I heard other people asking when bids were due.

  “That place was so expensive,” I said, halfway down the stairs.

  Caitlin looked surprised. “I was going to say it was cheap.”

  It was the fifth open house we’d been to that day. All the apartments were roughly the same amount of space, the same design.

  “Are you thinking about bidding on it?” I asked carefully.

  “Maybe,” she said. “The light was beautiful. And did you see the skylight in the bedroom?”

  “You can’t let in air through a skylight,” I said. “And living on the top floor would be really hard with a baby.”

  “It keeps you in shape.”

  “Where do you park the stroller? Do you leave the baby upstairs alone when you run down to sign for a package? Do you really want to walk up and down three flights with a one-year-old who could go flying any minute—”

  “Mom, stop!”

  We were outside at the top of the stoop by then. It was a beautiful spring weekend day. Families were parading up and down the sidewalk, pushing strollers, walking dogs, shepherding children who whizzed along on scooters.

  “Sorry,” Caitlin said. “You’re right. And that place was too small for us anyway.”

  We picked our way down to the sidewalk and joined the throng walking toward Fort Greene Park.

  “That’s why we moved to Homewood when I was pregnant with you,” I said. “Have you considered New Jersey?”

  Caitlin stopped stock-still in the middle of the sidewalk, forcing everyone to detour around us. “Let me make something clear, Mother,” she said. Your kid calling you “Mother” is like your mother calling you by your full name when you’re a kid: Get down here right this instant, Elizabeth Margaret. “I will never move to New Jersey.”

  “Okay,” I said, chastened.

  “Nothing against New Jersey,” Caitlin said.

  “Of course not. I love New Jersey.”

  “It’s just that I want our child to have a more diverse upbringing,” said Caitlin.

  “Right. The challenge is to find a big enough place you can afford in the city.”

  Caitlin got a mysterious little smile on her face. Pregnant, she looked ironically more like her little girl self, cheeks softer, body cuddlier. She took my arm and we started walking again toward the park.

  “There is one more place I’d love to show you,” she said.

  We skirted the park and headed down DeKalb Avenue, past the restaurants thronged with Sunday revelers. Every place had set tables and chairs right out on the sidewalk, so that it felt like one continuous New York party.

  The restaurants thinned out and then we reached the Pratt campus. We zigzagged from there down leafy streets and finally stopped outside a three-story wooden building, its pale blue paint peeling, the stone front stoop blocked off with yellow tape. In front was a FOR SALE sign; a young couple who looked like those at the other open houses emerged from the garden-level door under the stoop.

  “Are you interested in this house?” I said to Caitlin, surprised. All the places we’d seen so far had been heavily renovated, but this place looked like it needed ten- or fifteen-years’ worth of work.

  Inside, it was in even worse shape than I’d guessed: walls torn down to the studs, pipes and electricity bared, rough floorboards covered with caked mud.

  But it also had a lot of vintage charm: petite fireplaces with original marble mantels in each room and porcelain fixtures in the two bathrooms.

  The garden floor held a rudimentary kitchen and what might have been—in the nineteenth century—a maid’s room, off which a closet had been converted to a room with a toilet but no sink. The parlor floor was made up of a living room and dining room, both with fireplaces, and on the second floor were three bedrooms, all tiny by modern standards. Ravi might have to sleep with his feet hanging out into the hallway.

  “What do you think?” Caitlin asked.

  “It’s a lot,” I said.

  “I know, it needs work.”

  “Money, too.”

  “But it could be great, don’t you think?”

  “It could,” I agreed. At one point in my life, I would have loved to have gotten my hands on a place like this and restored it to its former glory.

  “I was having this fantasy that maybe we could buy it together,” Caitlin said.

  “Who’s ‘we’?” I said in all innocence.

  “You and me and Ravi!” Caitlin said excitedly. “We could all go in on the down payment, and then I was thinking maybe you could advance us the money for the renovation and do all the design work. You’re so good at that.”

  “But Caitlin,” I said. “I don’t have any money.”

  Caitlin looked as stunned as I felt. “By no money, you mean…”

  I hadn’t hidden my financial situation from my daughter, exactly, but I hadn’t talked to her about it either. My advance for Younger had been less than it had cost me to live during the time it took to write and edit it, even considering the free rent at Mrs. Whitney’s cabin. And then I’d spent most of what I had left in savings on Caitlin and Ravi’s wedding last summer. I hadn’t wanted that to weigh on her or compromise her happiness. But the bottom line was that I had less than fifteen thousand dollars left in my retirement account.

  “I’ve got to get a job so I can afford to rent a crappy apartment,” I said.

  “But if we all lived together,” said Caitlin, “you could take care of the baby and do your writing, and then I could go back to work full-time so we could afford to stay in the city.”

  I had always envisioned myself spending as much time as possible with my daughter’s baby. But eight a.m. to six or seven p.m. five days a week? Maybe not that much time.

  “Oh, Caitie,” I said. “I would love to be able to do that, but I need a job with health insurance and a regular salary that pays me enough to live on. I have a meeting set up with Mrs. Whitney this week to talk about going back to Empirical.”

  “I knew you’d think I should stay home with the baby,” my daughter said. “That I shouldn’t go back to work.”

  “What?” How had she gotten there? “No. That’s not it at all.”

  “Because you stayed home, you think I should stay home.”

  “No! I don’t think that! If anything, the opposite. I didn’t intend to be a stay-at-home mom.”

  “You didn’t?” said Caitlin.

  I was sure she’d heard this story, but maybe it hadn’t felt so relevant before.

  “When we moved to New Jersey, I thought I’d try to have another baby right away and then go back to work, but I lost that pregnancy.…”

  “That was the late miscarriage?”

  “No, the first one was before three months,” I said. “And then I didn’t get pregnant again, so we started going through infertility treatments. It was the second miscarriage that was late.…”

  Caitlin looked terrified. “Is that going to happen to me?” she asked. I saw then that her eyes were shiny with potential tears.

  “No, sweetheart, no. It’s not anything I did or anything you can inherit. Sometimes it just happens. The point is, by the time I stopped trying to have another kid, I’d already been home for ten years and it felt too late to go back.”

  “I always thought you wanted to be home,” Caitlin said.

  Ouch.

  “I did want to be home,” I assured her. “I loved being there with you. But I missed a big chunk of my career, and you know how hard it was for me to go back.”

  “But I also know how nice it was having you stay home with me. Growing up, I always thought I’d want that for my child.”

  I put my arm around my daugh
ter. “So do that if you want. Or go back to work if you want. There are lots of great childcare options out there. Your choice doesn’t have to be dependent on me.”

  “I don’t know if I can leave a newborn with a stranger,” Caitlin said.

  This begged one obvious question. “What about Ravi?” I said.

  “Once Ravi finishes his residency, he’s going to make a lot more money than me,” Caitlin said. “He’s also up for this big fellowship. He says he’ll help out with childcare, but he doesn’t really have time to do that much.”

  That was probably realistic. Caitlin’s father, just starting his dental practice when she was born, had said the same thing. It was so self-perpetuating: Men had more ambitious and lucrative careers, which cast them as breadwinners rather than caregivers, which made them more successful and higher earners, while the parent staying home lost professional ground every year.

  I wanted to be there for my daughter. I wanted to support her and encourage her to go back to work if that’s what she wanted, because I knew it wasn’t going to be easy, no matter what choice she made. But I also knew that having a baby was like entering a long dark tunnel that opened into an unfamiliar and unpredictable world from which you might never emerge. From which you might never want to emerge.

  Becoming a parent was like being a baby all over again, like going from the cozy familiarity of your adult life, through a difficult passage to a new incarnation where you often felt ignorant and overwhelmed. On the precipice, that passage looked much more terrifying to me than it had the first time, now that I’d experienced how life-altering it was, how all-consuming.

  I had contemplated entering it again before, when Josh had told me he wanted to have children after all. And I knew I could not go in, not again. And I was even more sure of that now.

  But how could I leave my daughter to enter it alone? Ravi sometimes worked twenty-four-hour shifts and was often on call, an unreliable support. Caitlin’s father lived way out in Pennsylvania with a new wife and young stepchildren of his own. She needed somebody, and I was who she had.

  “Let’s see how it goes,” I told her. “I don’t know what’s going to happen with Mrs. Whitney. And there’s this other possibility, of Kelsey turning Younger into a television show.”

  “What?” Caitlin yelped. “I mean, that sounds amazing; I’m really happy for you. But would that mean you have to move to LA?”

  “Of course not. Don’t be silly. It’s way premature to worry about what any of this would mean, but I’m not going anywhere.”

  “I’m sorry,” Caitlin said. “My hormones are making me crazy. I’m going to have this tiny person who’ll be completely dependent on me and I’m terrified of screwing it up.”

  I gathered my daughter into my arms. Every mother knows that feeling. You never really get over it. You just learn to live with the tension between needing to create an ideal world for your child and knowing that’s ultimately beyond your power.

  “It’s going to be okay,” I told her, not because I knew it would be, or because I could make it so, but because at least I could help her feel more confident.

  “Promise you’ll be here for me,” she said into my shoulder.

  “I’ll always be here for you,” I said.

  Even, I added to myself, when I’m not here.

  four

  I had always idolized and feared Ruth Whitney, the head of Empirical Press, in equal measure. She was like a queen to me, remote and awe-inspiring when I worked for her company right out of college, a role model when I again got a job with Empirical as my fake younger self.

  Someday, I always thought, when I grow up, I want to be just like Mrs. Whitney.

  The trouble with Mrs. Whitney was that she always seemed light-years ahead of anyplace I thought I could go or anyone I could possibly be. When I first worked for her more than twenty-five years ago, I estimated she was about seventy years old, but now she still looked seventy to me. She was old-school establishment, with her Chanel suits and her social club memberships, but she was also a rule-breaker and an iconoclast, building her publishing company to be more independent in an era when all the competition was becoming more corporate.

  She and I had gotten closer since she became my editor with Younger and loaned me her cabin in Maine. She’d bought that place with her husband in the ’60s—no one I knew had ever met Mr. Whitney, who’d died long ago—and had spent summer holidays and the month of August there until a few years before, when the trip became too difficult for her.

  Staying there had opened the door to a new level of closeness between us, albeit one that existed mostly in my mind. When you’ve slept in somebody’s bed, paged through their books, eaten from their plates, as I did in Maine, you got to know them in an intimate way. Mrs. Whitney felt like a kind of mother to me, albeit one who was not very motherly.

  I always dressed up for our lunches, which invariably took place at the Colony Club, the first New York social club for women, housed in a beautiful and imposing brick-and-marble building on Park Avenue. Today, though, Mrs. Whitney suggested we meet at the Empirical Press offices. Her longtime assistant, Betty, all blond frizzy hair and solicitousness, led me past an alarming number of empty desks back to Mrs. Whitney’s private office.

  Mrs. Whitney still had a knockout view, even if there were at least three new skyscrapers going up between her and the river. And the room was vast and sumptuous with its white linen sofas and cream carpet, though both looked undeniably dingier than I remembered from the last time I was here.

  “Darling,” Mrs. Whitney said, kissing me on each cheek at least two times. “Thank you for that lovely party the other night. I had an absolutely fabulous time.”

  “Thank you for publishing me a beautiful book,” I said.

  She led me over to one of the long white sofas, perching on one end while indicating that I should sit across from her. From here I had a perfect view through the glass wall that separated Mrs. Whitney’s private sanctum from the half-deserted main office.

  “Is this BEA week?” I asked, confused.

  The big BookExpo took place in New York at the end of May every year, which would explain the unoccupied desks. But that was nearly a month away.

  “Oh no. We’ve been paring back,” Mrs. Whitney said breezily. “Slimming down, professionally speaking. Focusing more on what’s really important to us.”

  “Oh,” I said, surprised. “I’d love to hear more about that.”

  “Shall we order some lunch?” Mrs. Whitney said.

  She slid a menu from Burger Barn across the white marble coffee table.

  “No Colony Club?” I said, trying not to sound disappointed, which I was surprised to find I was. It was so much fun to complain about those elaborate lunches, but also so much fun to have them. I had always been embarrassed to make the waiter in white gloves use his silver utensils to pick me a piece of lobster, but now I really missed it.

  “So stuffy,” she said, accurately. “Besides, I don’t know anyone there anymore.”

  That was patently untrue. When you went to lunch with Mrs. Whitney at the Colony, so many people had so much to say to her that you could barely get a word in edgewise. In that sense, I was glad we were lunching at the office.

  “I’m glad to get you to myself,” I said.

  I ordered a grilled cheese and tomato, my standing order when Kelsey and I lunched regularly at the Burger Barn, and Mrs. W. ordered a Cobb salad with dressing on the side. At the Colony, the Cobb had always been her favorite. I had a feeling the Burger Barn version may not live up to that standard, though Mrs. Whitney would undoubtedly repress and deny any disappointment.

  I waited until the lunch had arrived and the Cobb dressing dispensed with entirely—“It’s quite all right! Much better for the waistline!”—to make my pitch.

  “I’d really like to hear what you have planned for Empirical,” I said, “because I’m hoping you’ll hire me back again.”

  Mrs. W.’s fork paused in
midair.

  “You want to come back and work here?” she said. “In a job?”

  “Yes, that’s what I was hoping. After writing three novels, I’d love to specialize in editing women’s fiction, but I could handle some nonfiction too.”

  “No,” Mrs. Whitney said.

  I thought there would be more. There wasn’t.

  “No…?” I said.

  “No, there are no jobs,” Mrs. Whitney said. “Not just for you, for anyone. I can do with freelancers who live in Amagansett or Seattle what it used to take a whole office full of people on salary to do.”

  “Well, maybe I can freelance,” I said. “I can edit from home.…”

  “But you were never really an editor, were you?” Mrs. Whitney said. “I seem to remember you worked in marketing.”

  “Marketing gave me a good sense for how to package books to maximize sales,” I said, grasping. “That, plus my writing experience…”

  Mrs. Whitney reached across the coffee table and laid a hand gently on my knee.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  Frankly, I was thrown. I had no plan B. But I could certainly manufacture one.

  “Then maybe we should talk about a new book,” I said. “I have an idea for another novel.”

  “No,” Mrs. Whitney said.

  “You don’t want to publish what I write, either?”

  “It’s not that I don’t want to publish what you write. I love your writing. I’m just not interested in novels these days.”

  “What are you interested in?” I asked.

  “Reality,” she said. “Do you want to write a book about what it’s like to be fifty in America today? That’s one I might be interested in publishing.”

  “Maybe,” I said, only because I couldn’t say a flat no. But I’d never written nonfiction or read it, either. Plus I had no idea what it was like to be fifty in America.

  “But I can’t give you an advance,” she said.

  I glanced back at the empty office. I’d been loath to bring this up directly, but I couldn’t ignore it any longer.

  “Is there some problem?” I said, feeling my heart pick up speed. “Is the company in… some kind of financial trouble?”