According to the directions they’d been given, Mr. and Mrs. Willoughby were very close to the Melanoff mansion, where, they’d been told, someone named Willoughby now lived. But when they passed a small park with some benches on its periphery, Mrs. Willoughby begged her husband to let her sit down.
“I’m all sweaty,” she said. “and my hair is a mess. And look! I’m getting a blister!” She wrenched off one of the too-small high-heeled shoes and showed him an inflamed place on her foot. He looked at it with distaste.
“You’ve never had attractive feet,” he commented.
“I’m rubber, you’re glue, everything you say bounces off me and sticks back on you,” his wife chanted.
Henry Willoughby didn’t reply. How could he? There was no reply to that. Ignoring his wife, he picked up a folded newspaper that someone had left on the bench. Behind them, some teenage boys kicked a soccer ball around on some mowed grass. A missed return sent the ball off the playing field, and a player chased it to where it had landed near the bench where the Willoughbys sat.
“Sorry, sir,” the boy said, as he bent to retrieve the ball.
“Quite all right,” Mr. Willoughby said in his dignified banker voice. “Good game? Not going to blow it the way Argentina did?”1 He gave a hearty laugh, trying to sound athletic and masculine.
“What?” The boy looked confused.
“One to nothing, right? West Germany won it with a penalty kick!”
“What’s West Germany?” The boy asked, looking puzzled for a moment. “I could Google it, I guess,” he added. Then he tossed the ball toward his teammates and jogged over to the field.
Henry Willoughby leaned back on the bench. His shoulders were slumped. “Google it? I don’t know what anyone is talking about,” he complained. After a moment he looked at the newspaper he was still holding. “And this print is too small. If only I hadn’t lost my glasses on that dratted Alp!” He moved the paper closer to his face and squinted at the text.
“Oh my lord,” he groaned suddenly, and turned to his wife, who was continuing to rub her swollen foot. “Frances?”
“What?” She was a little terse, still annoyed about his previous remark about her feet. She thought her feet were quite attractive, actually, if you didn’t look at the blister.
“Look at this!” he said, and pointed to the newspaper. “We’re in serious trouble.”
“Why? Aside from my foot. And if I can just get some Band-Aids and better shoes, my foot’ll be all right.”
“Not your stupid foot. It’s us, both of us. We’re in the wrong year.”
“What on earth are you talking about? And my foot isn’t stupid.”
“We went on that vacation. Remember? With the Reprehensible Travel Company?”
“Of course I remember. There was the helicopter over the volcano, and the kayaking among crocodiles, and then the—”
He interrupted her. “How old were we?”
“Oh lord, I’m not good at math. We had those children. The oldest—what was his name?”
“Tim.”
“Yes, Tim. Dumb name. I can’t imagine why we chose it. Anyway, he was twelve when we went off. And he was born when I was twenty-four. That means I was . . . Help me here. You’re the banker. You’re supposed to be good at numbers.”
“That means you were thirty-six when we took the vacation. I would have been thirty-seven.”
“Okay. So what?”
“Well, look at us.”
Frances Willoughby was accustomed to doing whatever her husband told her to do. So she stared at him.
“How old do I look?” he asked, sitting up straight and pulling his shoulders back and his stomach in.
She shrugged. “Thirty-seven, I guess. How about me?”
“You’re a little broad in the beam,” he told her, “like a hippo. But you look thirty-six.”
“So?” She began to try to wedge her foot back into the shoe. “Why are we in serious trouble?”
“Don’t you get it?” he wailed. “Look at the date on this paper! It’s thirty years later! We were frozen for thirty years!”
Mrs. Willoughby looked very puzzled. “What?”
“We’re supposed to be in our late sixties! Close to seventy!”
His wife thought about that. Then, suddenly, she smiled. “So all the women I knew back then—like Margaret Simpson, remember her? I played bridge with her, and she cheated? And Elaine Cohen, across the street? Always gossiping? And the horrible PTA mothers? All of them—they’re almost seventy now?”
“Yes,” her husband said.
“And I’m not? I mean, we’re not?”
“That’s right.”
She leaned back and began to chortle.
“Don’t be so gleeful,” her husband said.
“Why not? They need face-lifts and I don’t. Ha ha on them!”
“Here’s the problem, Frances. Our children.”
“Them? Tim and . . . the others. I forget their names.”
“There were twins.”
“Yes, that’s right, Barnaby A and Barnaby B. It wasn’t fair that they looked alike. I could never tell them apart. Oh, and . . . now I’m remembering. Didn’t we also have a girl? She whined all the time.”
Mr. Willoughby’s facial expression softened. “Jane,” he said, and sighed. “I liked Jane.”2
“You’re a sucker for whiners. Anyway, what’s the problem with the children, aside from the fact that I suppose we have to be parents again, and it was never much fun?”
“The problem is this: They’re no longer children,” her husband said. “They’re our age. Or older.”
“Oh,” Frances Willoughby replied. “My goodness. How strange. But we won’t have to take care of them. I’m glad of that, at least.”
“I’m afraid they’ll have to take care of us,” Mr. Willoughby said, gritting his teeth. “They’ve inherited our money.”
There was a long silence. Then Mrs. Willoughby struggled to her feet, wincing a bit. “Well,” she said, “let’s find them, then. Because I need new shoes.”