“Mom?” Diana said. “Are you still there?”
“I’m here.”
“I know you don’t just sit around. You have your garden club or whatever. But now that I’m here, I just want to stay a little longer. You can understand that, can’t you?”
Of course I could understand that. What I couldn’t understand was why she had to be so hurtful to me.
“Diana,” I said. “If you want to stay, of course you should stay. I’m just a little disappointed, that’s all.”
“See, that’s the problem,” my daughter said. “I don’t think you have a right to be disappointed. Instead of sitting around waiting for me to come back, it’s time to get your own life together.”
Now I could barely breathe. And definitely couldn’t speak.
“Listen,” she said. “This call is costing you—or Daddy or whoever—a million dollars. I’m still not sure how much longer I’m staying, at least a couple more months. I hope you’re going to be okay with this.”
“Mmmmm-hmmmm,” I managed to say.
“All right. I’ll call you again as soon as I can. I love you.”
I was about to say I loved her too, but the line went dead. I stood there for a moment breathing, and then turned around to face Maggie, who took one look at me and leaped out of bed and crossed the room to take me in her arms. Now I let myself go, sobbing against her shoulder. It wasn’t that Diana was staying that left me so shattered. Sure, I felt let down, but I could certainly survive for a few more months, for however long she decided to stay away. What was intolerable was how distant we’d become in every other way, and how impossible it felt for me to reach her.
“That’s all right,” Maggie soothed, patting my back. She hugged me and reassured me as I told her what was happening, what Diana had said, how I felt.
Finally, when I calmed down, she stepped back and forced me to look her in the eye. “You know,” she said, “this might be a blessing in disguise.”
“What do you mean?”
“What you started last night,” Maggie said. “It gives you a chance to see it through.”
“With that guy?” I said. “I’m not really—”
“I’m not talking about the guy,” Maggie interrupted, “though he could be part of it. What I mean is with the looking-younger stuff. You could play it out, see what happens.”
“You mean see how many twenty-five-year-old guys I can hoodwink into kissing me?”
“If you’re going to pretend to be younger,” said Maggie, “you’re going to have to stop using words like hoodwink.”
“What’s wrong with hoodwink?”
“It’s antiquated. It’s the beau or nylons of tomorrow.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Who says I want to pretend I’m younger?”
“Listen to me,” Maggie said. “What happened in the bar last night, that wasn’t a fluke. Since I’ve had my way with you, you look fantastic. And now Diana calls and says she’s not coming home for a while. It’s your opening! There’s nothing stopping you now from putting yourself out there, applying for a few jobs, and why not, maybe going out with a few guys—”
“This is outrageous.”
“What’s outrageous? You said yourself, you wish you were younger. You’ve got to get a job, whether you want one or not.”
“I want one,” I assured her.
“Okay, then. It’s got to be easier going in there as a woman who’s twenty-eight than one who’s forty-four.”
“I don’t like lying,” I said. “I may be wearing tight clothes and a bunch of makeup, but I’m still just myself. Why do I have to be any age?”
“Exactly,” Maggie said. “Why do you have to say you’re forty-four or twenty-eight or whatever? You don’t have to tell the truth or lie.”
I nodded. “Right.”
“So if you look younger, and people assume you’re younger, why not just let them believe it?”
I kept nodding, but we were veering back into problem territory.
“I mean,” said Maggie, leading me over to the minuscule kitchen setup, where she started making coffee in her teeny-tiny pot, “when you go to a job interview and tell them you’re forty-four, that makes them assume all kinds of things about you that aren’t necessarily true, right? Like you’re middle-aged, you’re out of it, you’re too old for an entry-level job.”
I had to admit, she was right.
“And so if they believe you’re somewhere in your twenties,” Maggie continued, “they’ll be more likely to think what you want them to think: that you’re eager to learn, that you’re happy to get a starting position, that you’d have no problem working for some whippersnapper of a department manager.”
“But I’m not in my twenties.”
“But they don’t have to know that,” said Maggie. “In fact, they’re not allowed to ask. Discrimination law.”
“Don’t you remember what Sister Miriam Gervase taught us?” I said. “That’s a sin of omission.”
“ ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell.’ ”
“Sin, sin. Sin, sin.”
“Oh, come on, Alice. You stopped being a Catholic when you got married under a huppah.”
She had me there. Despite my unbroken years of Catholic school education, I’d given up going to church when I went away to college, and completely surrendered my status with the pope when I married a Jew. But though Gary rediscovered his religion after Diana was born, and even tried to get me to convert so Diana would be considered thoroughly Jewish, I had resisted. I couldn’t say I believed Jesus was God. But neither could I bring myself to say I didn’t.
Over the past year, I’d even tried going back to church, feeling the need for spiritual sustenance, seeking some sense of community. The problem was, the Protestant congregations I visited seemed like toy churches, with ministers who were not only married but female—moms!—and bare-walled sanctuaries, devoid of mystery and majesty. But while I didn’t feel like a Unitarian or a Congregationalist or a Presbyterian, I couldn’t make myself reclaim my Catholicism either, given the church’s denial of everything that had been most important in my life: my marriage, my daughter’s legitimacy, even my divorce.
And that was what was really bothering me about Maggie’s idea that I pretend to be younger, I realized now. It wasn’t mainly the lying or the ethical implications that disturbed me, but the idea that, by erasing all those years from my age, I’d also be wiping out everyone and everything that I loved.
“So I’m supposed to pretend that my daughter never existed?” I said, plopping onto the chaise and wrapping the red satin quilt around my shoulders. “That I was never married, that I never lived in my house?”
“You don’t have to pretend anything,” Maggie said. “It isn’t like you’re going to be going home to Diana and Gary every night, leading this double life. In fact, you don’t have to go back to New Jersey and pretend anything to your old friends and neighbors at all. You can sublet your house for a couple of months, move in here with me—”
“Whoa whoa whoa,” I said. “I thought you said you could only fly solo.” Maggie had been involved in some extended romances over the years, but she’d never allowed any of her girlfriends to move in with her. When she traveled, she didn’t even like to share a hotel room.
Maggie grinned. “That’s something I’m going to have to change,” she said, “now that I’m becoming a mom.”
“And you’re going to practice on me.”
“It could be good for both of us.”
God knew Maggie would benefit from learning to share her space and her life with another human before her theoretical child came into her world. And come to think of it, maybe I could use some taking care of, too.
“So you think I should become a totally different person?” I asked her.
“Think of it as a performance piece. You ride it as far as you can—get yourself some new clothes, see if you can land a job—and let it end when it ends.”
“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.”
Chapter 4
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 an
d 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?
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