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too.”
    “Nope,” she said. “Maybe a little indigestion.”
    That was normal—Frida was always a little dyspeptic.
    “Are you okay?” she asked. “Do you want me to go with you to the doctor?”
    “No, I’m okay,” I told her.
    “Oh, okay.” She yawned again.
    “Go back to sleep, Frida,” I told her.
    “I’ll come by and see you later,” Frida murmured.
    Okay, so Frida hadn’t lost fifty years in her sleep like I had. Chances were that Barbara didn’t get younger, either, or she definitely would have said something. This was all me.
    This isn’t right, though , I said to myself as I ran my hands down my smooth legs. It’s not the way the world works. I’m supposed to be pissed off and sad about being seventy-five. Don’t we all regret our lives in one way or another and wish we could go back and change them? Sure, I know what I wished, but I didn’texpect it to actually happen. I knew that I could not stay this way, not even for a day.
    Also, poor Barbara. What would she think when I told her that I woke up and was twenty-nine again? Barbara is such a fragile person, anyway; she’d have a nervous breakdown over this.
    “No,” I said out loud. “I’ve got to get back to the way I was.”
    I knew Barbara had bought the cake at my favorite bakery, the Swiss Pastry Shop on Nineteenth Street; that’s where we’ve always gotten our cakes. I’ve had cakes everywhere—from Paris to Italy to New York to Philadelphia—and I’ve always said that nothing comes close to the Swiss Pastry Shop. There’s just something about the lightness of the yellow sponge cake combined with the flakes of chocolate on the sides. The icing and filling aren’t too sweet, or too dense. It’s very soothing to the tongue and goes perfectly with a nice hot cup of coffee. Sometimes, even when it’s not someone’s birthday, I’ll run over and get myself a piece of cake. That’s not too often because I watch myself—even with my great metabolism, no one at my age can go too crazy. Once or twice a year is fine for that cake, but nothing more!
    So I ran to my closet room to throw on a quick something and tie back my mane of hair so I could get over there. Luckily, Lucy had left one of her cloth rubber bands here. I had remarked on it one day when she was wearing it. She said it was called a . . . “scrungy”? Or was it a “scrunchy”? She said it was the type of thing you should never wear out of the house. How a hair band could ever be considered a fashion faux pas, I don’t know, but my hair was all over my face and I couldn’t see, so I’d have to buck the trends for a few blocks.
    The first thing I grabbed was my pair of khaki silk-lined pants—the ones I always wear on planes. They are comfortable enough to sit for hours on a flight to Tokyo, and nice enough for first class. Then it occurred to me— No, this is what a seventy-five-year-old woman would wear, not a twenty-nine-year-old girl.
    I knew I had a pair of jeans I’d bought a few years back when we went to a dude ranch in Arizona, so I searched the bowels of my closet looking for them. They were all the way in the back. I grabbed them from the hanger and threw them on under my nightgown. I was sure I’d look exactly like Lucy does in her jeans, and I have to admit I was excited when I ran over to the mirror to look.
    Oh, no, no, no.
    First of all, the jeans were now a size too big. My bottom belly was gone! I’d contemplated having that thing sucked out many times, but if you’ve ever had a face-lift and a brow lift and felt the pain of that, it makes you pause before doing anything else too invasive. Anyway, what did it matter? It was gone! A flat stomach with a cute little belly button was staring back at me in the mirror!
    But I couldn’t think about that; I had to concentrate on poor Barbara. I had to get back to my old self.
    So I threw on a belt, grabbed one of my golf shirts, slipped quickly into my Tod’s driving shoes, and ran out