Younger

by Pamela Redmond Satran

  “What about a donor egg?” I asked. “I’d give you one.”

  “You may be looking pretty hot these days, sweetie,” said Maggie, “but your eggs are as old as mine.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I forgot.”

  “Plus it’s not only your eggs that go, but this hormone that needs to be at a certain level to sustain a pregnancy,” Maggie said. “Mine’s borderline right now, and the doctor said if it dips any lower, he wouldn’t even attempt an insemination. So I’ve put my name in for a Vietnamese adoption.”

  “Maggie, that’s awesome!”

  “Don’t use that word around me, okay? I just felt I should cover all my bases. Plus, it seems even harder to adopt than to get pregnant. They do all these elaborate character checks.”

  “I guess they want to be sure you’ll be a good parent.”

  “It’s so ridiculous,” Maggie said, “that poor teenagers and alcoholics and child abusers can have babies whenever they feel like it, and someone like me, with money and love and attention to give, has to be monitored by teams of people who might decide I’m just not going to get a baby, and that will be it.”

  I didn’t think it necessary to point out that some of those people might sooner give a baby to a crack-smoking stripper than a lesbian. And that nature seemed out of step with modern society to make it easier for a fourteen-year-old to get pregnant than a forty-four-year-old. Instead, I smiled and squeezed her hand.

  “I only wish I’d started this long ago,” Maggie said. “Did you know that fertility declines at thirty-five, not forty or forty-five, the way they told us when we were young?”

  In fact, I did know that because Lindsay had told me so at the bar last night, when Thad went to find the men’s room and she informed me that she was dying to marry him, the sooner the better.

  When I asked Lindsay what her big rush was, she fed me the fertility and age statistics and said that if I were smart, I’d get busy looking for a husband and starting a family too.

  “Otherwise you could find yourself forty-five and all alone,” she informed me.

  “That could happen anyway,” I said.

  She looked at me strangely. “Not if you play your cards right.”

  That was an aspect of youth I didn’t think, no matter how good my makeup or my acting skills, I’d be able to reclaim: the belief that if you were smart or ambitious or beautiful or together enough, you could make your life turn out exactly as you wanted.

  “I saw that guy last night,” I told Maggie suddenly. Coming home from drinks, I’d told her all about Lindsay and Thad and Teri and my first day at work. But I’d forgotten to tell her about Josh. “You know, the guy from New Year’s Eve.”

  “Ohhhh,” Maggie said, remembering. “The kiss guy. Where did you see him?”

  I realized I’d never told Maggie about the theoretical date, not having had any intention of keeping it. Now I told her about how he’d set my phone alarm and how the arrangement had totally slipped my mind. But also about how attractive he’d looked, sitting on the bar stool at Gilberto’s.

  “So why didn’t you go in?” Maggie asked me.

  “I was on my way to meet Lindsay and Thad. Plus, what would I have said? Hi, I wasn’t going to come meet you, and I’m never going to see you again, but you looked so cute I just had to say hello?”

  “How can you be so sure you never would have wanted to see him again?”

  “Oh, come on, Mags. You said it yourself: He’s a baby. I can’t date a twenty-five-year-old.”

  “Why not? I hear the older woman/younger man thing is very cool right now. You’re both at your sexual peaks. Plus, no one needs to know you’re older, not even him.”

  I felt myself blush. “It makes me uncomfortable,” I said, “all this lying.”

  Maggie raised her eyebrows. “It seems to me,” she said, “that you’re wasting an opportunity if you don’t at least carry this a little bit further. I mean, what can it hurt? You said you wanted to be younger, and now you got your wish. Make the most of it.”

  “Lindsay wants to fix me up with some friend of her boring boyfriend’s,” I said miserably.

  “And you’re going to let her do that?”

  “They’re really in a position to help me at work. They’re why I get to be here this morning instead of acting as Teri Jordan’s full-time barista.”

  Last night, Lindsay had made Thad promise to tell Teri that he was sending me to a corporate orientation session.

  “That doesn’t mean you have to be their ho,” said Maggie. “Stand up for yourself! I thought that was what this whole younger thing was about!”

  She was really agitated now, up on her elbows, wagging her head as she talked. Her earrings, a row of silver hoops getting bigger and bigger as they worked their way down to her shoulders, shimmied in the candlelight.

  “Calm down,” I said, putting my hand on her arm and trying to ease her back onto the table. “Remember, you have to create a peaceful environment for the sperm and egg to meet.”

  That, at least, persuaded Maggie to flop back down.

  “I just think you have to be more assertive and do what you want, right from the beginning,” she said, staring at the ceiling. “How are you going to become a brand-new person if you keep acting like your same old self?”

  It wasn’t until Thursday and what I’ve come to think of as the Bikini Wax Incident, after the Krav Maga—a form of Israeli martial arts—class Lindsay dragged me to, that I got up the nerve to tell her I didn’t want to go to the dinner at Thad’s with Porter Swift.

  It all started when I asked Lindsay whether she knew of a gym near the office that I might join. I’d gone for nearly a month without following my daily Lady Fitness routine, and I was afraid that any minute all the muscles in my new killer bod were going to give way, totally blowing my cover. In just four days of working for Teri Jordan, I’d found myself reverting to some of my old comfort-eating habits, hiding a bag of Hershey’s Kisses in my desk drawer and whipping up a pot of creamy mashed potatoes before bedtime every night, spooning out a crater that I filled with molten butter and salt and then savoring the concoction under the covers in my tent.

  Lindsay asked what kind of exercise I liked to do, and when I mentioned the elliptical trainer and hand weights, she looked at me as if I had said I did calisthenics under the tutelage of Jack LaLanne.

  “That’s kind of retro,” she said, giving the word a twist that made it impossible for me to tell whether she considered that a good or a bad thing. “Why don’t you come with me Thursday night to my Krav Maga class? It’s awesome.”

  In the class, I felt as if I burned off the entire week’s intake of chocolate kisses, along with learning to disable any terrorists I might encounter on the way home. In the plush locker room, I tried to follow Lady Fitness etiquette and keep my eyes averted, which was difficult, as Lindsay was standing beside me holding forth on the menu for her upcoming dinner party while completely and unself-consciously naked.

  It was further difficult not to look because Lindsay’s severe black clothing had been hiding several remarkable physical attributes. Her breasts, for instance, were so high that there was far more square inchage on the part below the nipple than above it. Was that normal for women in their twenties, I wondered—I mean for women in their twenties who weren’t featured in the magazines I sometimes found when I cleaned under Gary’s side of the bed? I couldn’t remember, though the contrast with my own breasts, which until now I’d considered one of my best unclothed features, made me hunch over in shame.

  Lindsay also sported several startling tattoos—a dragonfly on her shoulder, a snake at her hip, and what looked like a USDA symbol perched atop the crack of her butt—made all the more vivid by the contrast of their inkiness against her ethereally pale skin. And the color of the tattoos seemed to provide the only variation in the expanse of paleness: Lindsay’s nipples were the faintest blush of pink, her pubic hair a thin strip of peach fuzz.

  “Alice,”
she said.

  “Hmmmm?” I feigned nonchalance as I trained my eyes on my locker, pretending to rummage around for my bra, which I knew was hanging beside my sweater.

  “What do you think I should make for dessert Saturday night? I was thinking about trying to do this amazing pear crostada that Thad had the other night at Craft.”

  I pulled my bra out of the locker and fumbled to slip it on while keeping my body angled away from Lindsay’s gaze, without making it seem like I was trying to keep it angled away.

  “But then I was thinking,” Lindsay said, propping her hand on her hip, right beside the indigo snake, “that maybe I should just go with something simple, like a crème brûlée.”

  I was about to answer that making crème brûlée was anything but simple when Lindsay let out a little scream and, pointing directly at my crotch, cried, “Ew! What is that?”

  I looked down. Had my period started? Had she spotted a stretch mark? Had all those mashed potatoes waited until this moment to deposit themselves as a pad of fat atop my belly? But no, despite all the eating I’d done the past few days, my stomach was still taut from my year of exercising compulsively.

  “That jungle of pubic hair!” she squealed. “It’s practically down to your knees!”

  “Oh,” I said. “Well…”

  “Is that what they do where you were?”

  “Where I was?”

  “Wherever it was you were traveling,” she said. “Like you told Thad the other night.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Right.”

  “So they just went all natural there?” Lindsay pressed. “Were you in, like, the Third World?”

  “Sort of,” I said. Well, some Manhattanites consider New Jersey the Third World.

  “We’re going to have to do something about that,” Lindsay said, “before you hook up with Porter.”

  “Do something?” I said.

  I must have made a terrible face and cringed away from her, because she laughed and said, “Don’t worry, I’m not going to whip out a straight razor. But tomorrow after work, I’m taking you to my waxing person, Yolanda, for a Brazilian.”

  “A Brazilian?”

  I tried to imagine it, but never having been to Brazil or known a Brazilian person, never mind glimpsed its native pubic hairstyle, all I came up with was something vaguely bikini shaped. Which is what I believed mine was to begin with.

  “Like mine!” Lindsay cried, presenting the look with a flourish of her hands that reminded me of Vanna White directing the television viewers’ attention to a new Buick.

  “Oh,” I said, eyeing Lindsay’s narrow strip of hair. “I don’t know.”

  “You have to!” Lindsay said. “None of the girls in New York go natural anymore. Porter would be shocked.”

  Thad’s friend. Saturday night. Dressed or undressed, hairy or plucked, I couldn’t let this go on a minute longer.

  “Lindsay,” I said. “You and Thad have been great to me, and I’m really glad we’re becoming friends, but I’m not interested in hooking up with Porter.”

  Lindsay looked at me, both hands now on her hips, as if I had told her I’d recently landed from the planet Xenon.

  “But Porter is the perfect catch,” she said finally.

  “I can’t do it,” I told her, my mind churning in search of an argument-proof excuse. Because…we Xenonians are forbidden to consort with earthlings? “In fact, I have a confession to make. There’s another guy.”

  “You said you didn’t have a boyfriend.”

  Now even the truth was getting me in trouble. “He’s not really my boyfriend. Just somebody I’m…hooking up with. You know, the alarm guy. Josh.”

  Lindsay shook her head, worked her lips. Finally she said, “I don’t believe you.”

  Without even trying, I’d convinced her I was twenty-whatever years old. That I’d never done anything more involved in my life than backpack through Bulgaria or some similarly unwaxed place. But I couldn’t convince her of this.

  “It’s true,” I said.

  She looked at me for a few moments, and then finally she nodded and said, “Okay, prove it.”

  “Prove it?” I gave up a forced little laugh. “How am I supposed to prove it?”

  She reached into her locker, took out her bag, extracted her phone, and handed it to me.

  “Call him,” she said. “Right now. Go ahead.”

  I didn’t take the phone. “What am I supposed to say?”

  “Invite him to dinner on Saturday. At Thad’s. That is, if you’re really hooking up with him.”

  I hesitated, partly because I realized I wasn’t really sure what hooking up meant. Dating? Having sex? Pledging eternal conjoinment? Whatever, I decided, if it meant getting out of a blind date with a friend of Thad’s.

  “All right,” I said finally. “But I have to call him on my phone.”

  “Why do you have to call him on your phone?”

  Because I don’t know his phone number. Because, under the circumstances, it’s lucky I remember that at least he programmed his number into my phone, which I retrieved from my bag, trying to think.

  “He won’t answer if he doesn’t know the incoming number,” I told Lindsay, finding Josh in my phone book, holding my breath as I pushed Send. Lindsay stood above me, still naked, her arms crossed over her high little breasts. I listened to the phone ring, and prayed for voice mail.

  Instead I heard Josh’s voice. “Okay, I understand,” he said.

  “This is Alice,” I said. It sounded as if he’d been expecting someone else.

  “I know,” he said. “I’m telling you I understand why you blew me off the other night.”

  “I couldn’t—,” I began.

  “I know,” he said.

  “I thought about it,” I said truthfully. There was something about him that made me want to tell the truth.

  “Favorably?”

  I laughed. “At times.”

  “It’s all right,” he said. On the phone, his voice sounded as warm as his eyes had looked on New Year’s Eve. “You’re here now.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m here.”

  I sat there with the phone pressed to my ear, staring at the orange metal locker, thinking of him, until Lindsay, whom I’d nearly forgotten was standing above me, cleared her throat.

  “My new friend Lindsay from work wants me to invite you to a dinner party on Saturday night,” I said.

  “You got a job,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “Where?”

  Lindsay began drumming her fingers against her creamy thigh.

  “I’ll tell you on Saturday,” I said. “If you want. If you’re free. Which you’re probably not.”

  “I’m not,” he said.

  “Oh, good,” I said, though I found to my surprise that I was disappointed.

  “Good? So you don’t really want me to come?”

  “I do,” I said. “I thought it might not be your thing.”

  Lindsay nudged me in the shin with a pedicured toe, and I turned all the way away from her.

  Did people still call something they liked their “thing”? In exactly how many ways was I making an idiot of myself?

  “Seeing you is my thing,” he said. “If we could leave the dinner party a little early, I could get to this other place a little late. Do you like rock music?”

  I knew the right answer was yes. But I gave him the true answer: “No.”

  He laughed. “A friend of mine is in a band that’s playing at a club downtown, and I told him I’d go see him. So how about if I go to the dinner party with you, and then you come to the club with me.”

  “All right,” I said.

  Then I hung up and sat there, so lost in thought I really did lose sight of Lindsay and everything else around me. I had my first date in nearly a quarter of a century.

  Chapter 8

  It was when I was getting dressed for Lindsay’s dinner party that Diana called. Maggie was reclining on the chaise—trying to “
baby,” as she put it, the embryo she hoped had taken hold inside her—flipping through a Japanese style magazine and passing judgment on everything I tried on. Negative judgment. She thought I should wear the old jeans of Diana’s I’d grabbed when I left home, but I was afraid Thad would consider them too casual. I couldn’t stand Thad, but I still wanted him to think well of me.

  “Whatever you wear on bottom,” Maggie said, “the top’s got to be really feminine. Lacy.”

  “I don’t want to look like I’m wearing my underwear.”

  Her eyes lit up. “That’s a good idea. Why don’t you go over and check out what’s in my top drawer. I have a couple of amazing lace camisoles.”

  I was about to protest when, from my red tent, I heard my cell phone ring. Please let it be Lindsay or Thad canceling the dinner, I thought. Please let it not be Josh, telling me that the longer he’s thought about it, the more certain he is that I’m an old lady in disguise.

  So sure was I that it would be one of these people that I was stumped when I first heard the trademark crackling line from Africa, as if Diana was calling from several decades as well as several thousand miles away, and my own daughter’s voice.

  “Mom?” she said. “You sound different.”

  “No,” I said. “I’m just…”

  Trying to act your age? Getting ready to go out with a man who might have gone to high school with you?

  I’d left a message with her field office telling her I’d gone back to work at Gentility and was staying in Manhattan with Maggie, that she should call me on my cell phone in case she needed to reach me. That was all she needed to know.

  “You sound different too,” I said, attempting to reclaim my Mom voice.

  Then I realized part of the reason I was so surprised that it was Diana on the phone. I was accustomed, whenever my cell phone rang, to calculating the time in Africa to anticipate whether it might be her. And right now, in her time zone, it was the middle of the night.

  “Where are you?” I asked, holding my breath, half expecting her, despite the static on the line, to tell me she’d just landed right here in New York. I’d be thrilled, blown away. But I’d also be, I had to admit to myself, a tiny bit disappointed at having to cancel my own party when it was just getting under way.