Young Susan Becky Hagenston (bio) On her fiftieth birthday, Susan bequeaths her old diaries to her children: James, 25, and Kate, 22. "Bequeath sounds like you're dead," says Kate. She takes the notebook-filled JC Penney bag between two fingers and then drops it quickly beneath her chair. They are at Red Lobster, Susan's favorite restaurant, a place where they have celebrated graduations and birthdays and, once upon a time, anniversaries. And now: "You lucky kids! Kate, you get to read all about my college years, and my study abroad in London. And James, you get to read about my childhood and my twenties. Doesn't that sound interesting?" Kate is staring down at her plate, at the boiled red creature that was so recently alive—or was it recent? Or was it frozen and shipped from someplace far away, after being plucked from the sea by an exploited child laborer? She heard something on the radio about this recently, but she can't remember the details. Just that the details are horrible. She brings a finger to her mouth and sucks, a habit from babyhood. "Sure, Mom," says James, in a voice pitched a little too high. He frowns down at his own Ann Taylor bag, then pulls out a green diary with a broken latch and opens it to a page of black crayon: Mommy turned 30! We ate cake! His mother paws the diary out of his hands, saying, "This is from 1971. I was a very precocious child. These ones are from my early childhood, and these composition books are from the Tucson Years." She arches a brow. The Tucson Years are the years just before Susan met Kate and James' father. She stopped keeping a journal after that. There was no point, really, as she'd learned. Your life just ceased to amaze. Or when it did amaze, words didn't suffice. She met Gregory; they moved to Maryland; they had kids. They got divorced. She dated a few men she could only describe as unexceptional—so why describe them at all? Over the years, she has considered destroying her journals, but this makes more sense. She will pass them along to her offspring: a record of their mother's madcap youth. Some of it really is madcap. She can hardly remember some of it. "You can swap with each other when you're done," she says, dabbing her mouth with her napkin. She takes a sip of iced tea. "I feel very uncomfortable," says Kate. "These are so personal." "They're personal to young me, but old me wants you to have them." Susan realizes that both of her children have stopped eating. "I'm hoping you'll enjoy getting to know your young mom," she says. "I'm [End Page 33] hoping you might learn something." "Learn what?" asks James. He has stuffed the bag under the table and is ignoring his sister's heel digging into the side of his ankle. "You tell me." Susan points at him with a bread stick. "You. Tell. Me." ________ When Kate was five, her favorite storybook was about a little bear that buried food in the dirt and then dug it up and fixed a meal for Mama and Papa Bear. There was probably more to it than that, but as Kate drives home in the October fog from her mother's birthday lunch, back to the Annapolis house she shares with two roommates—one she made the mistake of sleeping with last week—she is thinking of that story, and of her five-year-old self going through the refrigerator looking for food to bury. She thinks of her brother saying, "You're going to get in trouble," as she carried a packet of ground beef, a carrot, and a foil-wrapped block of Velveeta into the back yard. She dug the hole with her sandbox shovel, unwrapped the meat and cheese, and placed the food in the ground. It was immensely satisfying, filling that hole in the ground with food and then dirt, and it was satisfying even after James tattled, after the spanking, after the lecture about food being too...