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 v
ery 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.
“Are you telling me,” I said, my heart starting to beat faster, “that you—”
“No no,” she said, her face turning even redder than it already looked thanks to the light shining through the fabric of the tent. “No no no no no no no. But that reminds me of something I need you to do for me. I’m going for my first insemination this week, and I need you to be my partner.”
“You mean you told your doctor,” I said, “that I was your—”
“No,” she said. “No no no. It’s just that my doctor believes insemination has a better chance of taking if you have a loved one with you to, like, commune with in a soothing way afterward. And right now, you’re the closest thing I have to a loved one.”
“Oh,” I said, picturing us sipping champagne and laughing—gently, of course—in a dimly lit examining room. “Okay, sure. When is it?”
“Ten on Tuesday morning.”
“Tuesday morning! That’s my second day at work. Teri Jordan wouldn’t let me take off if it was my own insemination. Can’t we do it in the evening? Or at lunch hour, even?”
“I don’t schedule it, my body does,” Maggie said. “That’s what my doctor says. It’s got to be the morning.”
“Oh, Maggie,” I said, taking her hand in my sweaty one. The mere idea of telling Teri Jordan I needed a morning off summoned a vision of her looming over me, wielding a whip. Or more likely, coolly firing me as she had done to so many before. “Isn’t there any other way?”
Maggie shook her head. “This is it. And depending on my hormones, it may be my only chance.”
All this year, I’d been the one who’d needed Maggie. All this year, she’d been there for me, taking my midnight phone calls about Gary, holding me upright at my mother’s funeral. And now she was asking for something, the first thing, back.
“Of course,” I said, squeezing her hand. As the vision of the whip-cracking Teri rose up again, I whipped her back. “Don’t worry; I’ll figure something out.”
Chapter 6
“Alice!”
My bottom had just touched the seat, but already Teri was calling me back into her office. It had been like this all morning.
I rushed to her deskside.
“My coffee’s cold,” she said, without looking up.
“But I just poured you a fresh cup.” As in, 1.5 seconds ago. “I even put it in the microwave, to be sure it would be super-hot, like you like it.”
The woman drank her coffee so hot, her mouth must be lined with asbestos.
“Microwave hot is not the same thing as real hot,” Teri said. Still without looking at me, she lifted her cup and dropped it into her wire mesh wastebasket—I mean a real cup, not paper, full of hot coffee, which was even now seeping onto the floor.
“You’ll have to clear this away,” Teri said. “And bring me a new cup of coffee.”
As I carried the dripping wastebasket from the office, I told myself that if I wanted a young person’s job, I had to be willing to be servile, obedient—to act, in other words, like a young person. An extremely meek, self-effacing young person, much like the young person, in fact, I’d actually been.
Except now I was determined to be different—and the fact was, I actually was different. All those years of life had made me more self-possessed, better able to know what I thought and more willing to say it out loud. That was the spirit with which I wanted to invest my new young self.
But my new boss would have none of it, I could tell. She wanted an employee even quieter and more frightened than the real entry-level Alice Green had been.
I could do it, I told myself. If I could bring my smarts to bear to get myself this job, I could put them to work keeping it, whatever that involved. Teri Jordan might act like a terror, but the truth was she was younger, more overwhelmed, and a way bigger jerk than me. I could definitely handle her.
I brewed a new pot of coffee, adding an extra scoop of coffee to the filter, running the water until it was really cold, waiting until the entire pot had dripped through so that Teri’s cup would be of maximum strength. Then, arranging a smile on my face, I carried it to her.
“Fuck,” she muttered.
“I made a whole new pot,” I said, wondering what I’d done wrong this time.
“No, it’s this report,” she said. “Like every other publisher, we want to market to the book group ladies, and like every other publisher, we have no fucking idea what they want.”
This was funny to me, because Teri Jordan could very easily be one of the “book group ladies” herself. She was a mom, she lived in the suburbs, she was balancing job and home and marriage. And, presumably, she liked books. But for some reason, she saw the women in the book groups as “them,” very different creatures from “us” here in our bastion of publishing know-how.
“I think they want what we all want,” I said, “a book that’s going to keep them awake beyond half a page at the end of a long involved day. A book that’s going to feel like it was worth the fifteen or twenty bucks they might have spent on a new top or a nice lunch with a girlfriend because it lifts them out of their lives for a few hours. A book that’s rich enough to make that book group night—which might be the only night they get out without their husband or kids—one of the most stimulating, fun nights of the month.”
I hadn’t realized I had so much to say on this subject, but I guess after a couple of decades of book group attendance, my thoughts were pretty well honed. I was certainly holding forth, and Teri was sitting there staring at me, her mouth slightly open, exposing the points of her sharp little teeth.
“We’re not editors,” she said. “We have nothing to do with the quality of the books.”
I felt myself color. I guessed what I’d been talking about did have to do with editorial, not marketing.
“Our job,” Teri said, pronouncing very clearly as if I was hard of hearing, not hard of marketing, “is to get the books in the hands of the book groups. And no one has figured out an effective wa
y to do that: not via the Internet, not through display techniques, not in the books themselves.”
“Maybe we could give special discounts,” I blurted.
Teri looked at me as if I’d spoken Croatian.
“You know, for volume. If a book retails, with discounts, for eighteen dollars, offer it to book groups who order eight or more for fifteen dollars a copy.”
Teri looked away
“My book group was always very price-conscious,” I tried to explain. “We wanted new books, but we didn’t want to pay hardback or even full trade paper prices.”
Now she was shaking her head. “I’m not interested in what some impoverished assistants’ or college girls’ book club is doing,” she said. “We’re marketing to grown-up women with families and houses and professional jobs.”
I opened my mouth to explain, but then realized I couldn’t without incriminating myself.
“I thought I made it clear that I was the only idea person in this department,” she said. “I thought you said you were comfortable with that. Have you changed your mind?”
I pressed my lips together and shook my head no, keeping myself from welling up by focusing on the photos of the angel-faced children smiling in their picture frames, my sole piece of evidence that Teri Jordan was human.
“Good, then,” she said. “Mrs. Whitney has called a staff meeting for three thirty this afternoon. I can’t imagine why she wants assistants there, but she does. Your function will be to occupy a chair.”
She lifted the new cup of coffee I’d made her and took a sip.
“Ugh,” she said, spitting it back into the cup. “This is horrible. You’re going to have to learn to make a decent cup of coffee if you’re going to last in this job.”
When I filed into Mrs. Whitney’s huge corner office for the staff meeting along with, it seemed, virtually everyone else who worked at the company—there were more than fifty people filling the big beige and gold room—I tried to hide behind one of the other assistants and chose a seat in the far corner of the room, as far as possible from where Mrs. Whitney sat near the door. I took out my notebook and kept my head down, relieved I’d let Maggie talk me into cutting long bangs that, if necessary, would cover half my face. I bent my head and let them hang down now, but even so, when everyone was seated and quiet and the meeting finally came to order, I looked up only to find Mrs. Whitney staring hard at me.
Younger Page 6