FICTION

Young Ladies

By Becky Hagenston     VOLUME 59 No. 3

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In the Uber, Rachel and I pretend to be rich people. “I’ll just have to tell Marvin to return the Shetland ponies,” she says. “Vanessa is allergic, and she simply can’t be itchy for her sweet sixteen, not with that minor prince attending.” We don’t know anyone named Marvin or Vanessa. We don’t know any minor princes.

I say, “Cosmo will be so relieved. That’s why he always stays in the car when we come over. There are just too many ponies.”

Rachel stares out the window at Madison Avenue. “What will he be like?” she asks, and I know this is a real question.

“Old. Like us.”

For our fiftieth birthdays, we’ve decided to seduce our middle school shop teacher, Mr. Sweeney. Not together. One of us will win, and the other will spend the night alone, feeling stupid. Rachel and I have competed with each other since we were seven—dodgeball, ballet, Girl Scouts, boyfriends. We’ve had a crush on Mr. Sweeney since we were twelve. His arm muscles, his mustache, his good looks behind the plastic safety goggles.

“Cosmo is going back to Geneva this week,” I say, “to deal with Penelope.”

“Oh, Penelope is a piece of work. And does Matilda still have those webbed feet?”

I realize I’ve forgotten who Matilda is. In middle school, we invented a soap opera of characters: Marvin and Vanessa, Cosmo and his scheming ex-wife, Penelope. But who was Matilda? We’d pass notes in class, leave letters in each other’s mailboxes. Sometimes our mothers would find them and arch an eyebrow as they handed over the folded-up paper: Says this is a telegram from someone named Cosmo in Geneva?  Sometimes they’d read the notes and fold them up again without comment.

That was long ago, in Maryland. Now Rachel lives in Tucson, and Mr. Sweeney (Robert) lives in Brooklyn, with his grown daughter. He’s divorced, like us. Rachel knows this from stalking him on Facebook.

We’re moving slowly toward Central Park, through the Sunday brunch traffic. It’s mid-May and the sunlight is falling in bright slabs on the sidewalks. We pass a church, a pile of blankets.

“Well, I declare, I do believe we’re going to be late,” Rachel says, trotting out another character: Annabelle from Alabama.

“We should have used Beauregard’s helicopter,” I say. “But it’s in the shop having a propeller repaired after it flew into all those hot-air balloonists.”

“So rude of those balloonists!”

I feel queasy from too many vodka tonics last night and from the thought of seeing Mr. Sweeney. What will he remember about me? In middle school, I had big glasses, and now I have smaller glasses.

Once, on a dare at a slumber party, I called his home number, and when his wife answered, I said: “Hi, honey, is my lovah there?” in a high-pitched voice. Then hung up feeling about as sick as I do now.



When we get to the Central Park Boathouse restaurant, he’s already there, staring out at the green water. A bride and groom are being attacked by geese on a big rock while a photographer snaps pictures. For a moment before he sees us, I feel woozy, and I remember how he would call me Dizzy Lizzy because of one time--One time!—when I cut my thumb with a handsaw and passed out.

You never consider this when you’re young: how the decades will both change you and hold you in place. Mr. Sweeney’s hair has gone white. No more mustache. Even from a distance, I can see how mottled his skin is, like something within him has curdled. But his eyes are still green behind his glasses, and when he rises to his feet, he looks as slim as he did when he walked around the room checking our progress with the table saw or the wood varnish. “They told me I had to wait until my party arrived.” He kisses our cheeks. His lips are dry, like an old flower. “And I said I would keel over if I didn’t sit down immediately.”

“Well, the party’s here,” Rachel says. “You look great!”

He blushes and says, “Oh, no, you both look great. All grown up!”

And then she takes the seat next to him and raises an eyebrow at me as if to say: Here we go.

He’s wearing a yellow button-down shirt, the color his hair used to be. “Mimosas, please,” he calls to a waiter, holding up three fingers. “Brunch is my treat. No arguments.”

“No argument here,” says Rachel. She snaps a white napkin open on her lap. When we were in middle school, her hair was so long she could sit on it. Now we both have short haircuts, no bangs. We’re wearing summer dresses and cardigans, like we’re going to church.

“I’ve been watching this situation,” Mr. Sweeney says, pointing out at the wedding couple. “The groom almost fell in. But disaster averted.”

He used to say that a lot in shop class: Disaster averted.

A helicopter slices through the blue sky. Waiters swing through the tables with omelets and quiches and mimosas and Bloody Marys. I feel like one of the rich people I used to pretend to be. The last time I was in New York City was on my honeymoon, twenty-six years ago. My husband and I were broke and stayed at a dingy motel near Times Square. Now that I’m old, I can afford a Hilton Garden Inn near Herald Square. Rachel has a connecting room, and last night I swear I could hear her snoring like she used to at slumber parties.

“It’s so nice,” says Mr. Sweeney, “that you young ladies have stayed in touch.”

“We got back in touch over the pandemic,” Rachel tells him. “I can’t even remember who emailed who.”

“You emailed me.” This is the first thing I’ve said since we sat down. The email’s subject was HELLO, OLD FRIEND, and I thought it was a scam. But I was so lonely I clicked on it anyway. After that, we started Zooming every week or two. There was so much to catch up on—children (hers), divorces and parents and jobs. I told her about creating websites for universities, and she told me about selling hospital supplies, and we complained about not being rich. But mostly we drank wine and talked about childhood.

“It was my idea to come to New York,” Rachel says. “Our birthdays are one day apart. We used to have joint birthday parties so kids wouldn’t have to choose which party to come to.”

“Well, happy birthday. I’m glad you looked me up. Honored,” he says and ducks his head in a little bow. There were rumors about him, back in middle school, that something happened with a girl in the music room. Rumors that Rachel and I started because we were children and learning new ways to be cruel.

My phone buzzes, and I know it’s a text from my father. I moved in with him a year ago, after his heart attack. I make meals for him, make sure he’s taken his meds. There’s still an Olan Mills family portrait on the living room wall: me and my parents posing next to a fake wagon wheel in a fake forest. When my mother died a decade ago, he dug out their wedding photos and put them all over the house, even though they’d been divorced for twenty years. Or maybe because of it.

We eat our omelets. At a table behind us, a British woman is complaining about the shops being “rubbish,” and another British woman is calling her a snob. I wonder if they’re childhood friends reuniting. I wonder if their accents are real or if they’re pretending to be other people.

Mr. Sweeney shows us photos on his phone of his grandchildren: smiling red-haired girls. He tells us about a Viking Cruise he’s going on next year.

“With anybody special?” Rachel cocks her head, and I feel a twinge of electricity in my chest. Last night, in the blue lights of the Algonquin bar, I’d said: Let’s see which one of us can seduce Mr. Sweeney, and she’d said, You’re on, and we clinked glasses. But now, with him sitting across from us in his yellow shirt, no mustache, it’s clear we had been joking. Isn’t it?

“Oh, just with some friends,” he says. There’s a piece of egg stuck to the side of his mouth, and I want to reach over and flick it off. “A tour of the Rhine Valley. Have either of you been to Europe?”

We say we haven’t. There seems to be a vast space between all of us, bubbles of lost time. I don’t say anything about living with my father, or how he likes to go outside with his telescope and stare at the planets, or that one night I heard him calling me from the yard and I found him on the ground and had to call an ambulance because I couldn’t get him up. I don’t mention that the last man I dated ended things to go back to his wife.

“My daughter’s at Harvard,” says Rachel. “Studying chemistry. She definitely doesn’t get that from me.”

Her daughter is in a rehab facility in Phoenix. They barely speak to each other. I can’t tell if she’s making up lies about her daughter or if she’s invented a whole new daughter.

In Mr. Sweeney’s class, we made marionettes out of wood. Mine was a bird with little feet that danced. We made iron sconces. Coat racks. We bent metal; we sawed wood and stained it. I still remember the smell of varnish and solder and sawdust. At the time, it seemed about as useless as square dancing, but we loved that class because we loved Mr. Sweeney. His muscular thighs in corduroy pants. We knew he had a wife and a baby, and we were jealous of both.

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BECKY HAGENSTON is the author of four award-winning story collections, most recently The Age of Discovery and Other Stories. Her stories have appeared in American Short Fiction, Story, Ploughshares, New England Review, and many other journals, and have been chosen for a Pushcart Prize and twice for an O. Henry Award. She is a professor of English at Mississippi State University.


VOLUME 59 No. 3