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  “Merci beaucoup,” I said and winked. Oh, how fun!

  Finally I was back in my apartment. I placed the cakes on my dining room table for a moment. Before I returned to my old self, I wanted to try on my new dress one more time.

  I went into my bedroom and cautiously lifted the tissue-wrapped dress from the bag and placed it on my bed. I slowly opened the tissue and admired the dress, neatly folded, with the words lucy jerome on the label. I threw off my clothes and carefully slipped the dress over my head. Then I walked over to the mirror.

  Only now and never before. I can honestly say I now know what George Bernard Shaw meant when he said that youth is wasted on the young. How wonderful it would be if everyone could age backward like I did, if even for a moment. You can’t imagine the feeling youth gives you when you haven’t had it for some time. It feels like a treasure that should only be given to those who appreciate it, and not something that is given to people who don’t know what to do with it.

  Inside, I was seventy-five. The eyes I saw through were still seventy-five. I looked at this twenty-nine-year-old body like it was a sculpture. I took my finger and followed the delicate line from my chin to my neck that so recently was wrinkled and saggy but was now smooth and straight. I felt my chest and waist, which had only yesterday felt brittle and shapeless. How could I feel so sad and absolutely glorious at the same time?

  This was a wonderful trip, a wonderful morning with the most wonderful gift I could ever receive, but it just wasn’t right. Even though I felt I’d wasted my youth, it was all I should have had.

  I walked into the dining room. I placed twenty-five candles on each cake and then lit each one. (Which, by the way, was a pain in the ass. Have you ever tried to light seventy-five of those measly candles? It’s impossible to get them all lit at the same time; no wonder Barbara only put twenty-nine on the other cake.)

  I shut my eyes and wished.

  I wished that I could be seventy-five again.

  For Barbara, for Lucy, and even for Howard.

  I wished as I took a deep breath and was getting ready to blow.

  “Excuse me!” a voice behind me suddenly shouted, startling me. “What the hell are you doing in my grandmother’s apartment, and what the hell are you doing with that dress on?”

  grandma?

  Jesus, Lucy, you almost gave me a heart attack!” I gasped, grabbing my chest and turning around.

  “Where is my grandmother?” she bellowed, picking up the priceless Italian vase that Howard and I smuggled back in my suitcase so we wouldn’t have to declare it on the way back from Tuscany that time.

  “Would you put that down?” I insisted, walking over to her. But she swung it toward me, anyway. “It’s me!” I shouted. “It’s Grandma! It’s your grandmother, Ellie Jerome!”

  “You really think I’m that stupid?” she said, continuing to swing the vase.

  “I swear, it’s me. Look, put the vase down and listen to me. Look into my eyes. It’s me, I swear it. Why don’t you sit down for a moment? Let me get you something to eat. Are you hungry? I have leftover broiled chicken from the other night.”

  Then I remembered all the candles burning on the cakes; they were almost down to the nubs.

  “Oh, for the love of . . .” I snapped as I started to walk over to the cakes. “Do you see what you made me do? Now I have to get more candles.”

  “Stay where you are,” Lucy demanded as she went over to the cakes and blew the candles out herself.

  “Lucy!” I ran over to her, but she backed up a few steps. “Oh, for god’s sake. Your name is Lucy Morgan Sustamorn, but now you’re Lucy Jerome. I thought Lucille should have gone on your birth certificate, but your mother insisted on just Lucy. She had a thing for the show I Love Lucy. I still think your mother was wrong, but that’s beside the point. You were born on December seventh at Pennsylvania Hospital. It snowed that morning, and Poppy Howard put chains on the tires of our car so we could drive to the hospital and see you. You were named after your Poppy Howard’s father, Leonard, your great-grandfather.”

  “Anyone could know that. I have a blog!” she screamed.

  “You named this dress after me!” I said, pulling on the fabric to show her. “You constructed it after you saw the one I had my closet.”

  “Everyone knows that!”

  “Okay, what about this? Your favorite television show is . . . Oh, what’s the name of that singing program?”

  “Idol?” she asked.

  “No, the other one.” I snapped my fingers, trying to remember.

  “Star Search.”

  “No, the one where you have to sing where the music stops.”

  “Don’t Forget the Lyrics?” she asked, looking at me sideways.

  “Yes, that one!” I jumped.

  “I hate that show!”

  “You do? Okay, fine, how about this one: you say your favorite movie is Citizen Kane but it’s really Legally Blonde.”

  This made her stop.

  “Who told you that?”

  “No one! I’ve had to sit and watch that picture with you a hundred times. You think I enjoy it?”

  “Wrong!” She pointed the vase at me. “You said it was your favorite movie, too.”

  She had me; I laughed. I love that movie, with the cute girl and the little dog.

  “See, you know it’s me! I tell people my favorite movie is Little Women.”

  “And any Jane Austen adaptation.”

  “Yes, but that’s actually true—especially the one with that actress, what’s her name?”

  “Anne Hathaway?”

  “No, the other one.”

  “Gwyneth Paltrow?”

  “No, Lucy think, think!”

  “Keira Knightley?”

  “Jesus, Lucy.” I was starting to get annoyed. “No, the other one, the other one . . .”

  “I’m not supposed to tell you!” she screamed. “You have to prove it to me!”

  “Oh, come on. I may look twenty-nine, but I still have the mind of seventy-five-year-old. You know I forget everything. Oh, Emma Thompson!” I said, remembering the actress.

  That did it for Lucy, I thought. She stood there wide-eyed, not saying a word.

  “Is that her name?” I asked.

  “Yes!” Lucy whispered.

  She stopped for a long couple of seconds and just looked at me. “What was my favorite stuffed animal when I was little?” she asked.

  “Oh, that’s an easy one. It was that bunny.” I smiled, remembering. “Rae-Rae, that was the name of the bunny. Rae-Rae. You were never without Rae-Rae. We had to buy extras just in case you lost it. And when we did lose Rae-Rae from time to time, you always knew the difference when we handed you a backup. Oh, Lucy, you were so smart.”

  She paused again and looked at me inquisitively. “Okay,” she said, on the defensive again, “what was my Flubby?”

  “Flubby?”

  “Yes, what was my Flubby?”

  I thought for a second. “Oh, it was your blanket.”

  “Wrong! My Flubby was my pink alligator. My blanket was called Scrubby.”

  “Oh, come on, how am I supposed to remember that? Give me something a little easier.”

  “Okay, fine. If you’re really my grandmother, here is something that only you would know.”

  “Fine, but don’t make it too hard.”

  “No, this should be easy. What did we have for dinner last Tuesday?”

  “Lucy, how the hell am I supposed to remember what we had last Tuesday . . .” And then I did remember. “We had ice cream! Our secret meal! We had the one with the chocolate-chip cookie dough! No one knows that, now do they? We swore to each other!”

  Lucy gasped and stood there in shock. Oh, the poor girl.

  “Look,” I said, trying to get near her, “before you start asking me what on God’s green earth happened here, sit down and let me explain. And could you put that vase down? Your grandfather and I schlepped it all the way back here from Italy.”
>
  “Grandma?” She was staring at me.

  “Yes, it’s me, but it’s only temporary,” I said, walking toward her again. “I mean, I think it’s only temporary.”

  “But this can’t be.” She spoke softly as she looked at me in shock.

  Now, I’m not an emotional person. I haven’t cried since I can’t remember when . . . Oh, wait, I can remember—Howard’s funeral. But other than that I never cry. When you get older, all those emotional outbursts that we women have—you know what I’m talking about? Well, they kind of go away. I don’t know what it is; things just roll off your back easier. You become stoic about things. How odd it was that when faced with my youth I feared death the most.

  “I know,” I said, getting emotional. “I’m pretty sure I’m dead. I think I might have had a stroke and died in the middle of the night. What do you think?”

  She walked over to me and touched my arm.

  “Wouldn’t my hand just go through it if you were a ghost?” she wondered aloud to me.

  “How the hell should I know?” I grabbed a tissue and wiped the tears from my eyes.

  “But I don’t understand,” she practically whispered, looking at my face. “This doesn’t happen.”

  “How do you think I feel? This isn’t right! What would your mother say if she found out?”

  “Oh, Mom can never find out.” Lucy shook her head. “No way.”

  “I know—she’d have a coronary, and at her age! Well, of course with the way Barbara never takes care of herself, frankly I wouldn’t be so surprised.”

  She looked at me again, speechless.

  “You really are my grandmother!”

  “That’s what I keep trying to tell you!” I threw my hands up in the air.

  She just looked at me.

  “You. Are. Gorgeous!” She smiled.

  And then we hugged. She put down the vase first, carefully, of course, and on my good chair. We hugged and hugged, and then we just started to laugh. I couldn’t remember laughing like that in years.

  “But I can’t stay this way,” I told her.

  “Why can’t you?”

  “Lucy, this is ridiculous. I’m a seventy-five-year-old woman. It’s like defying God, or the universe, or something.”

  Lucy walked over to the couch and sat down.

  “Okay, this is just really, really, really strange,” she said, still staring at me. “How did this happen?”

  So I told her the whole thing, or as much as I knew about it. I told her about the wish for one day, and then how I woke up in the morning and found myself this way.

  “So that’s the deal with the cakes?” she said, walking over and picking off a flake of chocolate and eating it.

  “That’s probably the first thing you’ve eaten all day, Lucy,” I said. “Come on. Let me make you something proper.”

  “I’m sorry, but I can’t obey you when you look like this.” She laughed.

  “Oh, I know, everything is backwards. You should have seen the look on the poor woman’s face at Plage Tahiti when she saw my underwear.” I lifted up my dress to show her, and then tugged the dress down and giggled. How indecent of me!

  “Yeah, she mentioned it to me after you ran out of the store,” she said. This made her laugh. “You really ran out of the store?”

  “I couldn’t think of anything else to do,” I tried to say through my laughter.

  “Well, one thing is for sure—before you go back to your normal self, you should at least get yourself some cute underwear to try on.”

  “You think that’s something? You should see my bra.”

  “I don’t want to, thank you,” she said and laughed again.

  “I’ve always wanted to wear one of those little lace bras with no support.” I smiled.

  “Jeez, Gram—uh, Ellie. I don’t know what to call you!”

  “I’m still your grandmother.”

  “No, you’re not. You’re like my drinking buddy, but that’s not important right now. What is important is the actual wish. Are you sure you’ll only be like this for one day?”

  “How the hell do I know?”

  “What exactly was your wish?”

  “I can’t remember anymore.”

  “Well, it’s kind of important. Did you wish to be twenty-nine for the rest of your life? Did you wish for a week, or was it just a day?”

  I thought for a second. “Oh, yes, I do remember what I wished, but it was a birthday wish. You’re not supposed to tell birthday wishes, or they don’t come true.”

  She stared at my twenty-nine-year-old self for a moment, until my brain caught up with what I was saying.

  “Oh, so I guess since it came true, I can tell you what I wished for.”

  “Bingo.” She clapped her hands together.

  “It was one day. I wished that I could be twenty-nine for one day.”

  “So there you go. It’s one day. So why don’t you just be twenty-nine for the rest of the day? If it’s that easy, let’s just have some fun today.”

  I thought about that for a moment. Barbara would never have to know, and it would only be one day.

  “You think I should do it?”

  “Why not?” she practically shouted.

  “I’ve always wanted to wear a bikini,” I said, thinking out loud.

  “So we’ll get you one!”

  “And I’ve always wanted to go to one of your bars.” I smiled.

  “So we’ll go! Not in a bikini, though.”

  I couldn’t stop thinking of all the things I wanted to do. Oh, what was I thinking, not allowing myself one day? Of course! It was only one day! I started bubbling with excitement imagining all the possibilities.

  “I want to smoke pot!” I shouted.

  “You’re not smoking pot.”

  “Well, I want to do something crazy, and whatever I say goes. Whatever I look like, I’m still your grandmother,” I warned her.

  “Okay, fine,” Lucy agreed. “So here’s the agenda. First we’re going to get your hair done. It looks awful, Gram. And why are you wearing that scrunchy?”

  “I know what you said about the scrunchy, but my hair was all over the place. I looked like an animal.”

  “Okay, first, hair. Second, bras and underwear.”

  “Check,” I said, running into the kitchen to grab the pad I always keep next to the phone.

  “Third, lunch,” she said, and then stopped. “Actually, let’s have lunch after we get your hair done. I’m starting to get hungry.”

  “I’ve got that cold chicken,” I reminded her.

  “It’s so weird.” She laughed. “You’re so my grandmother, but you’re so not!”

  And then we paused and stared at each other one more time.

  “AHHHHH!” we screamed, hugging each other.

  “Lucy?” we suddenly heard. It was Frida, looking all eighty-five years to her seventy-five. I tell her all the time, Don’t wear your housecoat out of the house, but does she listen to me?

  “Hi, Aunt Frida.” Lucy tried to appear calm as she looked to me for what to do. What could we do?

  “I was just stopping down here from my apartment to see your grandmother. I have a key, you know, so I’m sorry to barge in like this. She didn’t sound right this morning so I just came to check on her.”

  “Oh, she went out,” I said, trying to think of something believable.

  “Oh, she did, did she?” Frida looked at me, and then came a little closer. “You know, it’s the strangest thing, but your friend here looks just like your grandmother when she was young,” she said to Lucy.

  “This is my cousin,” Lucy answered her. “This is Grandma’s brother’s granddaughter, uh, Michele.”

  “It’s uncanny,” Frida said, again looking at me closely.

  “P-people say that,” I stammered.

  “It’s like looking through time,” Frida uttered.

  “Everyone says that, too,” I said.

  Frida paused. “But I don’t remember Ellie
’s brother having a granddaughter.”

  “Sure you do,” I said confidently, knowing Frida as well as I do. Once, when we were kids, I convinced Frida it was raining on a sunny day. Frida was never very brainy.

  “Well, now that you mention it, are you from Chicago?” she asked.

  “Yes, Chicago,” I said with certainty.

  “Oh, of course. Well . . . welcome to Philadelphia.” She smiled.

  Poor Frida, who has known me my entire life and spoken to me almost every single day. No one in my family has ever lived in Chicago; where she got that from I’ll never know.

  “So where is your grandmother?” she asked.

  “Oh, Gram went out to Mom’s house,” Lucy replied.

  “Oh, okay. Well, as long as she’s okay, I guess I shouldn’t bother you girls any more,” she said, turning away.

  Something about Frida standing there in her housecoat got to me. She has always been a gentle, fragile woman I’ve always felt I had to take care of, starting when we were kids, right up to when she had a family of her own. Frida was never a great beauty, she never wore the right clothes; she was never young, even when she was young. I don’t know what Frida would have done if I told her it was really me. She isn’t strong like that. She never was.

  “Frida,” I said, stopping her. “Would you like to go to lunch with us?”

  She turned around and looked at us and smiled. I knew that’s all she wanted to hear.

  “Thank you, but I’ve got too many things to do today.” Lie. “Well, have a nice day,” she said, turning again to leave.

  “See you, Frida.” I waved as we watched her walk out the door. My heart sank.

  That really snapped me out of it. Frida. Barbara. Even Lucy saying she couldn’t look at me as her grandmother. No.

  I just couldn’t go through with it, not even for a day. This just wasn’t right.

  “I can’t do this,” I told Lucy.

  “What can’t you do?”

  “I have to get back to my own age. You’ll never look at me the same again. Poor Frida, I lied to my best friend.”

  “You’ve lied to Frida a million times.”

  “When? When have I ever lied to Frida?” I demanded.

  “Last week, when Frida called to ask you to come with her to the symphony.”

  “That was different,” I argued. “It was Bach; you know how I feel about Bach.”