Younger Read online

  “Give me your boots,” I said.

  She looked puzzled.

  “If you expect me to walk this far and this fast, you’re going to have to trade shoes with me.”

  Maggie looked down at my feet and burst out laughing.

  “You need more help than I thought,” she said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You’ll see.” She was already untying her green boots.

  “Where are we going?” I always trusted Maggie to be my guide to New York, following unquestioningly, like a little girl, wherever she wanted to take me. Tonight, for instance, I thought she said we were going to a cool new restaurant. But now that I took a moment to look around at the low brick buildings and decidedly uncool neighborhood as I stepped into Maggie’s boots, I was starting to wonder.

  “We’re going to my place,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “You’ll see.”

  Even wearing the heels, she walked faster than me, but at least my feet didn’t hurt anymore. And once we passed out of the no-man’s-land that still separated Little Italy from Maggie’s neighborhood, I began to relax. The blocks around her building used to be terrifying, but had improved considerably in the past few years. Tonight, the streets were full of people, and all the hip restaurants and bars were packed. Every place looked good to me—I was starving, I realized—but Maggie was not to be deterred.

  “We’ll go out after,” she said.

  “After what?”

  She smiled mysteriously and repeated the phrase that was becoming her mantra: “You’ll see.”

  It was a five-flight climb to Maggie’s loft, which I used to find daunting but now took with ease, thanks to all the hours I’d logged on the elliptical trainer in the past year. After a lifetime as a dedicated couch potato, I’d started exercising because it was the only thing I could think of, in my past year of horrible events, that would reliably make me feel good. And after a lifetime of dieting, I’d found the pounds disappearing without doing anything at all—anything, that is, except working out for an hour or two every day. I’d even, maybe twice, had a flash of that high you’re supposed to get from working out, though I still preferred a Cosmo.

  Coming from the suburbs, where Pottery Barn was considered the height of living room fashion, Maggie’s loft was always a shock. It was basically one gigantic room that occupied the entire top floor of the building, with windows on all four sides and a bright red silk tent sitting smack in the middle of the three thousand feet of open space—the closet. The only furniture was an enormous iron-framed bed, also bright red, and an ornate purple velvet chaise that provided the place’s sole seating, unless you counted the paint-spattered wooden floor. Which I didn’t.

  “Okay,” Maggie said, as soon as she’d triple-bolted the door behind us. “Let me have a look at you.”

  But I was too distracted by what was different about Maggie’s loft to stand still. All her sculptures, all her nine-foot-tall chicken-wire women, with their size 62 ZZZ breasts and their ballet skirts as full and frothy as flowering cherry trees, had been shoved into one corner, where they mingled like inmates in some prison for works of art. Now occupying the prime spot in Maggie’s work area was a concrete block as big as a refrigerator.

  “What on earth is that?” I said.

  “Something new I’m trying with my work,” said Maggie breezily. “Come on, take off your coat. I want to see what you’re wearing.”

  Now I could finally focus. Maggie wanting to survey my clothes was never a good thing. She was always, from the time we were first able to dress ourselves, trying to make me over, and I was always resisting. Don’t get me wrong, I thought Maggie had fantastic style, but fantastic for her, not for me. Her hair had turned white when she was still in her twenties, and every year it seemed to get a little shorter and messier, standing up in tufts all over her head. As her hair got more butch, her earrings became more feminine and ornate and numerous. The featured attraction tonight was green-jeweled chandelier earrings. Maggie, whose body was still as slim and limber-looking as a teenager’s, also must have had the soul of a French woman. She had that knack for throwing on an odd assortment of clothes—tonight it was the faded jeans she’d had since high school with an antique lace-trimmed cream silk blouse and a long gray-green velvet scarf wound around her neck—that always managed to look enviably perfect.

  She walked around me, rubbing her chin and shaking her head. Finally she reached out and grabbed a hank of the oversize beige sweater I was wearing.

  “Where’d you get this?” she asked.

  “It was Gary’s,” I admitted. One of the many pieces of clothing he’d left behind when he left me exactly a year ago for his dental hygienist. Clothing I’d kept because, for a long time, I assumed he’d come back. And continued to keep because, for the next few months at least, he was still paying the mortgage on the house where his clothes and I lived together.

  “It’s a rag,” Maggie said. “And what about that skirt?”

  The skirt choice I was actually rather pleased with. The same beige as the sweater, it was fitted through the hips and ended above the knee, considerably sexier than the khakis and sweatpants I’d favored for the past two decades.

  “It was Diana’s,” I said proudly. “I couldn’t believe it fit me.”

  “Of course it fits you!” Maggie exclaimed. “You’re a stick! Come here.”

  She spun me around and tried to push me forward.

  “Where are you taking me?”

  “I want you to look at yourself.”

  She propelled me across the loft until we were standing in front of an oval mirror with a curlicued gold frame, like the one the Wicked Stepmother communes with in “Snow White.”

  “Mirror, mirror on the wall,” I said, laughing, trying to get Maggie to join in the joke. But she only gazed poker-faced over my shoulder, refusing to so much as crack a smile.

  “This is serious,” she said, pointing her chin toward the mirror. “Tell me what you see.”

  It had been a long time since I’d looked in a mirror with much enthusiasm. Sometimes, especially when Diana was small, I’d go for days without checking my reflection. And then through the years, as I got heavier, and my hair started to turn gray, and the lines began to appear around my eyes, I discovered I felt happier when I didn’t look at all. In my mind’s eye, I was forever some grown-up but neutral age—thirty-threeish—and some womanly but neutral weight—133ish—and looked acceptable if not gorgeous or sexy or notable in any way. I was always shocked when I caught sight of my reflection in a shop window or a car door and was forced to see that I was considerably older and heavier than I believed.

  But now, compelled to confront my image, really take it in, for the first time in the year my life had been turned upside down and inside out, I had the opposite reaction. I lifted my chin and turned my head to the side; without thinking, I stood up taller and smiled.

  “That’s right,” Maggie said. She gathered the back of my baggy sweater into her hands so the fabric was pulled tight against my newly buff body. “What do you see?”

  “I see—,” I said, trying to think how to put it. There was me, staring back from the glass, but it was some version of myself before child, before husband, before all the years had clouded my vision. “—myself,” I said finally, lamely.

  “Yes!” Maggie cried. “It’s you! It’s the Alice I’ve known and loved all these years, who was getting buried under a layer of fat and misery.”

  “I wasn’t miserable.” I frowned.

  “Oh, pooh,” Maggie said. “How could you not have been miserable? Your husband was never around, your daughter was growing up and leaving home, your mother was fading away, you had nothing to do—”

  I felt stung. “I had the house to take care of,” I said. “My mother to look after. And just because Diana was theoretically grown up and away at college didn’t mean she didn’t need me anymore.”

  “I know,” Maggie so
othed. “I don’t mean to denigrate all you did. What I’m trying to get you to see is how much lighter you look now. How much younger.”

  “Younger?” I said, focusing again on my reflection.

  “It’s partly the weight,” Maggie said meditatively, staring at my image in the mirror, “but it’s something else too, some burden that seems to have been lifted. Besides, you always looked a lot younger than you really were. Don’t you remember when we were seniors in high school, you were the only one who could still get into the movies for the kids’ price? And even when you were in your thirties, long after you had Diana, you’d still get carded in bars.”

  “I don’t think I’d get carded now.”

  “Maybe not, but you could look a lot younger than you are. A lot younger than you do.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that with some color in your hair, a little makeup, some clothes that fit, for God’s sake, you could still look like you were in your twenties!” Maggie exploded. “That’s why I dragged you out of that fucking voodoo parlor! We’re the only ones who have the power to turn our dreams into reality.”

  I smirked at Maggie. She was usually the first one to puncture what she called “that power-of-positive-thinking bullshit.” I was the one who made wishes on stars and birthday candles, who believed, as Cinderella said in the Disney movie I’d watched at least two hundred times with Diana nestled into my side, that “if you dream a thing more than once, it’s sure to come true.” But now instead of smirking back, Maggie only gazed at me with a look of utter conviction.

  “So you think,” I said finally, “that I have the power to make myself younger just by wishing it were so?”

  “Not just by wishing,” she said. “We’re going to need a little help from Lady Clairol. Let’s get started.”

  It was while I was sitting on the purple chaise, munching on a cold slice of pizza that was going to have to count for dinner, with a garbage bag knotted over the chemical glop on my hair, that Maggie told me about her dream. She wanted to have a baby.

  “You’re kidding,” I said, trying to keep my mouth from falling open.

  She looked insulted. So insulted that it was clear this was anything but a joke. It was just that I’d known Maggie as long as I could remember, and she’d never had the least interest in children or motherhood. When I was rocking my baby dolls and tucking in my stuffed animals, Maggie was crouched on the floor, trying a new finger-painting technique. When I was eagerly babysitting to earn extra money, Maggie was mowing lawns, helping people clean out their attics—anything to get out of helping take care of her seven younger brothers and sisters. She always said that growing up, she’d changed enough diapers to last a lifetime.

  And now here she was, at forty-four, suddenly changing her mind.

  “What happened?” I said.

  “Nothing happened. I guess I finally decided that I’d been a kid for long enough. I’m ready to grow up and be the parent now.”

  “But a baby,” I said. Living in the suburbs, I was around mothers and babies all the time—the kids in the house behind me, screaming all day and night; the young moms in the supermarket, struggling to keep their squirming toddlers in the grocery carts. After all my years of wishing for and dreaming of having another baby, of looking at pregnant women and mothers with infants with a level of envy and longing that could literally make me double over, I had finally passed into some other stage where I thought babies, like tiger or bear cubs, were adorable but frightening, best viewed from a distance. Through glass.

  I struggled for a way to convey my misgivings to Maggie without coming straight out and telling her I thought having a baby at this age, after an entire adulthood of independence, was the worst idea she’d had since shaving her head.

  I took Maggie’s hand, rough as a carpenter’s from years of twisting wire into roundness.

  “You know,” I said, in the gentlest voice I could summon, “it’s so much work having a baby, especially on your own. Waking up in the middle of the night, carrying the stroller up and down the stairs, the diapers, the crying—”

  “I grew up with that, remember?” Maggie snapped, snatching back her hand.

  “Exactly!” I said. “But you were helping out your mom then; it wasn’t all on your shoulders. You live in this neighborhood where almost nobody has kids, none of your friends have kids, your life is in no way set up for it. And it’s not just having a baby—you’ve got the nursery school search ahead, tuition payments, adolescence. When the kid’s out of college, you’d be collecting social security.”

  “That’s it, isn’t it?” Maggie said stonily. “You think I’m too old.”

  “You are too old!” I exploded. “We’re both too old!”

  “I thought that you, of all people, would understand my desire for a child,” Maggie said, blinking back tears, “after all you went through to have Diana, after all the years you tried to have another baby.”

  I softened, remembering how powerful my own yearning had been. But I also remembered how completely a baby, even the quest to have a baby, could take over your life; how exhausting parenthood could be even when you were twenty years younger than Maggie and I were now.

  “I do understand,” I told her, trying to take her hand again. “But sometimes you reach a point in life where you’ve just got to leave something behind. When it’s just too late.”

  I knew that was harsh, as Diana would say. But Maggie and I had vowed, way back in fourth grade, to always tell each other the Bottom Line Truth—the BLT—even when we knew the other person didn’t want to hear it. She had told me, back when I married Gary four months after meeting him on the sidewalk outside Buckingham Palace on the day Princess Diana married Prince Charles, that I was crazy to get married so young. Then, when I turned up pregnant a few months later, just like the real Princess Diana, Maggie made no secret of being horrified, especially when I was forced to leave my job.

  Though Maggie had always adored my daughter, it had been from a distance, sending her outrageously frilly dresses from Paris and taking her, once a year, to art galleries and some wildly unsuitable restaurant, where she would be aghast if Diana gagged on the eel. And she’d been asking me since the day I brought Diana home from the hospital when I was going back to work.

  Now she stared at me, with a look I knew only too well. It was the look she got when she was going to say something that she knew I wasn’t going to like.

  “You mean like it’s too late for you to get back into publishing?” she said. “Like it’s too late for you to have a career?”

  Now I was the one struggling not to cry. And it was Maggie’s turn to reach out and squeeze my arm.

  “I don’t really believe that,” she said. “I don’t think it’s too late for you. That’s exactly my point. We’re not a couple of old ladies who should just fold up our tents and shuffle off to the nursing home. There’s still plenty of time for both of us. Come on.”

  Maggie wouldn’t let me look in the mirror again until she was finished. She washed my hair and blow-dried it, spent forever working over me with her makeup brush, buckled me into some very extreme underwear, and zipped me into tight jeans. It was like we were teenagers again, swapping clothes and doing makeovers on each other.

  “How come you have all this girlie stuff?” I asked Maggie.

  “I’m a lesbian,” she said. “Not a man.” She spritzed some perfume on my neck and surveyed me.

  “Okay,” she said, nodding decisively. “I think you’re ready.”

  Once again, she propelled me across the loft to the mirror.

  I swear, at first I didn’t recognize myself. I actually swiveled to look behind me, thinking somebody else may have walked into the place when I wasn’t looking.

  Somebody blond. Somebody hot. And somebody very, very young.

  “I can’t believe it,” I said, blinking hard.

  Maggie grinned. “I’d take you for twenty-two!” she crowed.

  I could
n’t stop staring. Maggie had given me, in its most essential sense, my wish—my wish not merely to be younger but to go back in time and be reinvented as a different person. The woman in the mirror looked like me, sort of, but like a different version of me than had ever existed in real life. When I was really twenty-two, I was finishing up my study of Jane Austen and the Brontës at Mount Holyoke, with my hair scraped back in a ponytail and my body swathed in big baggy sweat clothes and my thick glasses perennially sliding down my unpowdered nose. When I was really twenty-four, I was the mother of a toddler, still wearing the ponytail and the glasses and the sweat clothes, except now they were even bigger and smelled vaguely of spit-up. At twenty-eight, I sometimes made a Big Effort and got myself into leggings and a voluminous sweater to man the kindergarten bake sale.

  I had certainly never looked like this: buff and blond, wearing lipstick and baring cleavage and looking smart and a little bit slutty.

  “Who is she?” I whispered.

  But Maggie, who was busy checking her watch, didn’t hear me. “It’s almost midnight,” she said. “Time to take the new you out for a test run.”

  Chapter 2

  The bar on Maggie’s corner was packed with people, with more thronged out on the sidewalk, but the tall elegant woman barring the doorway to everyone else waved Maggie and me inside.

  “She has a crush on me,” Maggie shouted in my ear.

  “I hope my being here doesn’t give her the impression that you’re taken.”

  “She knows you’re straight.”

  I looked quizzically at Maggie. “How does she know that?”

  “She’s psychic,” Maggie said, with a poker face. And then, “No, really, sweetheart. You could be wearing motorcycle boots and a Melissa Etheridge T-shirt, and you’d still look straight. It’s just something about the vibe.”