Younger

by Pamela Redmond Satran

  I reached out and laid a finger on his lips. “My daughter is twenty-two years old.”

  He pulled back his head and looked at me quizzically, as if this were one of those riddles with an answer that should be obvious—The surgeon was the patient’s mother! There was nothing to do now but tell him the punch line.

  “And I’m not twenty-nine, Josh. I’m forty-four.”

  Everything seemed to stop then. The trees stopped waving in the breeze, the city skyline disappeared from view. Even the plane that was droning overhead in the pristine sky seemed to go silent.

  Finally, Josh shook his head as if trying to clear it of a disturbing vision.

  “That’s not possible.”

  “It’s possible,” I said. “Not only possible, but true.”

  “Jesus, Alice!” he exploded. “It was all a lie from the very beginning!”

  At that, he pushed open the door of the car and strode out across the parking lot onto the expanse of grass, heading toward the line of trees. I waited a moment, thinking he would surely circle back, but he kept going, fast disappearing, until I finally jumped out of the car and ran after him.

  “Josh,” I called. “Stop!”

  He stopped walking, but he didn’t turn around.

  “I never lied,” I panted when I finally caught up with him. “I just didn’t tell the truth.”

  “But that first night at the bar, on New Year’s Eve,” he said, turning to face me. “You pretended right from the beginning to be young.”

  Was that right? I’d made myself look young, but from there, a lot of it was assumption. An assumption I’d actively encouraged.

  “It was supposed to be just for fun,” I said, my heart sinking at the memory.

  “Fun for you. Without caring about how I’d feel.”

  “I did it before there was a you,” I said. “Or at least before I had any idea we were going to get involved. The last thing I expected was that I was going to fall in love with you.”

  Josh looked at me. He looked at me hard.

  “What did you say?” he said.

  I felt the heat rise in my cheeks. I hadn’t intended to say that. Hadn’t known I was even thinking it. But now that I’d said everything else, why hide that?

  “That’s true too,” I said. “I fell in love with you, even though it was supposed to be no commitment. I didn’t want it to happen. But it did. I’m sorry.”

  Josh was staring at me with his mouth open. Then suddenly he spread his arms wide and threw his hands up and cried, “But that’s great! I love you, too! You wouldn’t let me say it before, but it’s true. I love you, Alice. I love you!”

  I shook my head and took a step back, more stunned by his reaction than I would have been had he told me he never wanted to see me again.

  “But you don’t know me,” I said. “Not the real me.”

  He reached out and ran his hands down the outsides of my arms, which I was holding stiffly at my sides. “Here you are,” he said. “This is you, isn’t it? You love me, and I love you. That’s everything I need to know.”

  “Oh, come on, Josh!” I cried. “It’s not that simple. Maybe in some ideal world our ages wouldn’t matter, but the fact is, they do. Just because we love each other is not enough to make a relationship work.”

  He crossed his arms over his chest and stuck his chin into the air. He didn’t look angry anymore, he didn’t look hurt, but instead assumed an expression I’d come to recognize as determined.

  “Why not?” he said, jutting his chin toward me. “It’s enough for me.”

  “Well, for one thing, I can’t pick up and go to Japan with you. I’ve got my house, I’ve got my daughter, I’ve got a life here you don’t know anything about.”

  “So I’ll stay here,” he said. “There are other gaming schools, or I can get a corporate job for a while—”

  I reached out and gripped his forearm. “I’m not going to let you do that,” I said. “I know how much you want this. You can’t give it up for me.”

  “Then we’ll fly back and forth,” he said. “We’ll do a long-distance thing until we can live in the same place again.”

  “And then what?” I burst out. “What is our future really, Josh? You’re young. Eventually you’re going to want marriage, a family—”

  “So we’ll get married.” He grinned.

  I couldn’t let myself take that in, was already shaking my head no. “I can’t have any more children, Josh. I tried for years after my daughter was born. It’s not possible for me.”

  “So we’ll adopt!” he said, moving to embrace me.

  But more quickly, I stepped away again.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t want a baby at this point in my life, Josh. And that’s a huge difference between us. That option is out for me because I want it to be. But for you, it’s all ahead.”

  “That’s not important,” he said, trying to get close again. “I don’t care about babies. I just want you.”

  I held up my hands to make him stop, to let him know I was serious about drawing this line.

  “I’m not going to let you make that decision at this point in your life,” I said. “In five years or ten years or twenty years, you may very well change your mind. And you have to leave yourself that freedom.”

  Josh was silent for an uncomfortably long time, and then he said, in a voice so quiet I almost didn’t hear him, “I thought you said you loved me.”

  I knew what I had to say next, but I needed to postpone saying it, to savor what I suddenly knew was the last moment of my youth, of my own real youth and innocence. All of it, the clothes, the makeup, the pretending to be young, the job, even this relationship, had been not the calculated ploy of a mature woman but a girlish game.

  And then, by getting younger, I had grown up, somehow. I had become my real adult self. The person who now took Josh’s hand in my own.

  “I do love you,” I told him. “That’s why I have to say good-bye.”

  Chapter 21

  “It’s so romantic!” Maggie said, actually clasping her hands near her heart. “It’s like one of those old Bette Davis movies, or A Farewell to Arms.”

  “I never read A Farewell to Arms,” I said glumly.

  “Neither did I,” said Maggie, “but it’s that whole ‘We love each other but we can never be together’ kind of thing. You know what I mean.”

  “I can’t believe you’re going all gooey on me,” I said. “I expected you to tell me that I’m doing the right thing, that it’s time to stop playing with my boy toy and get on with my grown-up life.”

  “Yeah,” said Maggie, “I might have said that, but that was before I realized this was really love.”

  She started blinking hard and took a quick swallow of her wine. We were sitting outside at a sidewalk café near her loft. It was a warm, glistening day, and at first I thought the sun was in Maggie’s eyes. But then I looked closer.

  “Are you…crying?” I asked, aghast. Maggie hated to cry. Over the years, I’d seen her break her arm, get reamed out by her parents, lose lovers, have her artwork dismissed by the critics as trash—and never come close to shedding a tear. And now her eyes were brimming because of something I felt.

  “No, it’s just…” She swiped at her eye, succeeding only in smearing her mascara. “Okay, I am, all right? I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’ve just been a little emotional lately.”

  My heart quickened. “You’re pregnant!” I cried.

  “What? No. I’m definitely not.”

  “How do you know? It’s only been a week since the insemination.”

  “I haven’t taken a test or anything, but I’m just sure I’m not. I don’t feel it. In fact, I think I might be coming down with something. I’ve been really tired and weepy. I cried last night at a cell phone commercial.”

  It sounded like pregnancy to me. In fact, the more I looked at her, the more pregnant Maggie looked, even at this early date. Her angles had softened, her skin looked pinker, eve
n her hair was refusing to spike, instead curling gently around her face.

  “So have you heard from the adoption agency?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said, suddenly animated, grabbing my hand. “That’s my news. I didn’t want to tell you over the phone. I’m officially on the waiting list for a child.”

  “Oh, Maggie, that’s wonderful! Any word on when a baby might be available?”

  “That’s still all up in the air,” Maggie said, her whole being alight. “It could be years, it could be tomorrow. But I’m definitely going to be a mom.”

  “I’m so happy for you,” I said, standing up to enfold her in a hug. “I can’t wait to see you with your child.”

  For the first time in that awful week, my mood lifted with joy for Maggie and excitement about going into her future with her. Sitting back in my chair, looking around the café and at the crowded sidewalk beyond, I was surprised to see how many babies had suddenly appeared, snuggled against the chests of their skinny-again young moms.

  “Since when did this get to be a family neighborhood?” I asked Maggie.

  She looked around. “Isn’t it weird? For years I never saw a kid down here, and now they seem to be everywhere. I thought maybe it was just me, noticing it for the first time now that I’m going to have one of my own.”

  “It looks like you’re going to have a lot of company,” I said. “That’s great.”

  “What about you?” said Maggie. “Why won’t you even consider having another baby, if you’re so crazy about this guy? We could go to China together, raise the girls to be best friends. Hey, the next apartment that opens up in my building, I’ll rent it to you and Josh and the baby, and we’ll all be young parents together.”

  “What about Diana?” I said, amused at Maggie’s communal vision, one that had thrilled me in my early years of motherhood and that Maggie, at that point in our lives, had found pedestrian beyond belief.

  “Well,” Maggie said, “she’d be in there somewhere too.”

  “I’m sure she’d get along well with Josh as her stepfather. They probably like the same music. And they could play video games together.”

  “Gary’s hygienist sweetie isn’t all that much older than Josh,” Maggie pointed out.

  “She’s in her thirties,” I said. “And besides, you know it’s different when the genders are reversed.”

  “It shouldn’t be.” Maggie frowned.

  “Of course not. But it is. And the guy can have kids at whatever age he wants.”

  “So can you, within reason,” Maggie said. “If you adopt.”

  “But I’ve done all that, I’ve lived that entire lifetime,” I said. “I can’t start all over and put myself on hold for the sake of my child.”

  “You wouldn’t be a stay-at-home mom this time,” said Maggie. “You’d keep working, just like I’m going to do.”

  I sighed. It was never that simple; you were never that thoroughly in control. But neither could you fully explain that to someone before they actually had a child of their own.

  “Maybe,” I said. “I could rock the cradle with my foot while I typed on my laptop.”

  “Exactly!” cried Maggie, as if this were a eureka moment. “I plan to let my child work in the studio right beside me. I’m going to get her her own little easel and paintbrushes, and just let her create.”

  “Great,” I said. “What if she paints on the walls?”

  “That would be cool! I think if you give kids freedom, they become truly creative beings. I plan to offer guidance but basically let my daughter make her own choices.”

  All right! A lot of moms-to-be held this kind of theory, I reminded myself; I had too. But once they started dealing with a real live crayon-scribbling, milk-spilling, book-ripping child, they usually changed their thinking. Maggie would have to go through that kind of progression in her parenting style herself—or else decide she could cope with the consequences.

  “Things have been a little better with Diana,” I said, deciding it was time to shift the subject. “She’s trying harder to chip in around the house, and seems to have dropped the teenage attitude.”

  “That’s good. Did you tell her what happened with Josh?”

  I shook my head, hard. “She doesn’t know that there was a Josh, and she never will. At this point, there’s no reason at all for me to tell her about him or about my whole age charade.”

  “Why not?” said Maggie. “I would think she’d find it amusing.”

  “No,” I said firmly. “There are things you don’t tell your kids. You don’t talk about your sex life. You don’t dump your emotional problems on them. And I’m definitely not going to confess I was leading this double life that required I pretend that she didn’t even exist.”

  “When you put it that way,” Maggie said, “I see your point.”

  “It doesn’t matter now anyway,” I said. “I’m right back where I started, and I just need to pick up my life as if this whole stupid escapade hadn’t happened.”

  It took me a minute to realize Maggie was staring at me with a look of incredulity on her newly pink face.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “You are absolutely not right back where you started. You’re writing a book now, correct?”

  “True,” I conceded. Without a job or a boyfriend, I had plenty of time and energy to write, spinning out pages upon pages every day and into the night. “But it’s a book I started before.”

  “But now you have the confidence and the experience to finish it,” she said. “Plus the contacts to get it published.”

  “You mean Gentility Press?” I grunted. “I doubt they’re ever going to want to hear from me again.”

  “See, you can’t get discouraged so easily. Plus, you’ve always had the tenacity to keep going after something you wanted. I remember how long and hard you tried to have another baby after Diana. That’s been a real inspiration to me.”

  “Aw,” I said, realizing for the first time that my persistence in trying to get pregnant was something I might apply to my professional life. “Thanks.”

  “I think Mrs. Whitney might be interested to hear your side of the story after all,” Maggie said. “And I bet Josh would be open to hearing from you again too.”

  On this I had to firmly disagree. “We were going to break up, one way or another, when he left for Tokyo next week,” I told her. “I just made it easier on him.”

  “What about on yourself?” Maggie said.

  “What about it?”

  “Did you make it easier on yourself? I thought you were going to put yourself first from now on. Or maybe that’s what you were doing. Maybe you broke up with him because you were afraid that if he got to know the real you, however willing he was, he wouldn’t love you anymore.”

  “Ouch,” I said.

  “BLT, baby.”

  Suddenly she sniffed at the warm spring air, her lip curling and her face turning from pink to an unflattering shade of green.

  “Oh, my God,” she said. “What’s that horrible smell?”

  I sniffed. “I think it’s broiled chicken.”

  She moaned and looked as if she was going to be sick. “Don’t say that,” she said. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but even hearing that word makes me gag.”

  “What word?” I said, puzzled. “Chick—?”

  She leaped from her seat and rushed inside the restaurant, presumably toward the ladies’ room.

  If she hadn’t left so precipitously, I would have set her straight on a little matter, too. But she’d find out the truth for herself soon enough. It always revealed itself, in the end. BLT, baby, right back atcha.

  I was spending so much time writing that by the end of the weekend I had finished enough pages to send to Mrs. Whitney, via what I knew was the e-mail address she personally checked, with a letter explaining my side of why I’d left Gentility. I didn’t blame Teri or anyone but myself. I said it was wrong for me to mislead everyone. But I also pointed out that I was a deep
admirer of her and her publishing company, that I’d tried to get a job as my middle-aged self and been turned down, and I believed that my actions had just been an attempt to find a creative solution to the problem of age discrimination that plagued the American workplace.

  I was tempted, once I sent this missive off, to devote the rest of my time to praying for a positive outcome, but I knew that if I didn’t keep working, I’d end up obsessively cleaning the house and cooking and gardening and undermine any progress I’d made with getting Diana to pitch in.

  And she had started pitching in. Occasionally. Sloppily. But still. My part of the deal was to retreat to the garden or my bedroom with my laptop, working ahead on my book and letting her take over.

  As the days ticked by, I thought constantly about Josh. Now he’s boxing up his apartment. He’s probably packing his suitcase. Now he’s probably heading to his parents’ place, where I knew he planned to spend the last few days before he left. I’d had his departure date and time, his airline, even his flight number, committed to memory for weeks.

  He was on my mind so incessantly that the afternoon I came home from the supermarket and Diana met me at the front door and said, “You missed a call,” I thought immediately that it had been from Josh. The next day was the day he was supposed to leave, I knew. Maybe he just had to talk with me before he went. Maybe I’d even call him back, to say good-bye. Maybe…

  Diana was talking, interrupting my reverie. It hadn’t, it seemed, been Josh who’d called after all. Diana was saying something about Lindsay.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Lindsay? You must have gotten that wrong.”

  Diana smiled. “Oh, I didn’t get it wrong. Lindsay, the editor you used to work with.”

  I felt the heat rise to my cheeks, the grocery bag slip in my hands. “Am I supposed to call her back?”

  “She was about to leave the office. But she asked me to tell you that she wants to buy your book.”

  Diana took me out to dinner that night to celebrate. When I protested that she couldn’t afford to do that, she winked and said, “Dad gave me some money.”