Free 29 by Adena Halpern

sweatpants that she’d bought when she and Ellie joined that gym they never went back to. Frida thought the sweats were smart and cute, because they were pink. She also put on the matching pink sweat jacket. She went into her closet and found the sneakers she’d worn only that one day at the gym. She noticed immediately how much more comfortable they were than her regular orthopedic shoes. Maybe she’d start wearing them more often. Maybe she’d wear the entire outfit more often.
    Suddenly her phone rang and she rushed to answer it. Maybe it was Ellie.
    “Hello?” Frida answered.
    “YOU HAVEN’T LEFT YET?” a high-pitched nasal roar came over the line.
    “I know, I’m sorry. I’m going down now.”
    “Call me when you get down to Mom’s.”
    “I will.”
    Frida was so startled by Barbara’s call that she decided to leave her morning clothes sitting on the bed where she’d left them. This never happened—Frida was always neat as a pin. But there was absolutely no time to fold them up and put them away. What if Barbara called back? She walked as fast as she could out of her bedroom and toward the door of her apartment.
    The phone rang again, stopping Frida in her tracks.
    What if it was Barbara, and this was another test? She couldn’t take it. This was one of those times she wished she had an answering machine. The answering machine her son bought her some years ago was still in its box, stored in the back of her closet. She could never figure out how to work it.
    She hurried to the front door, opened it, and slammed it shut after her, making sure it was locked from the inside. She jiggled the door handle like she always did for a good fifteen seconds just to make sure it was locked. The phone continued to ring. But there was always time to check to see that the door was locked—even Barbara could understand that.
    When she was finally content with the locked door, she scurried down the hallway to the elevator.
    That’s when a curling feeling went straight through Frida’s heart.
    Frida realized that she left her purse and Barbara’s cellnumber and her keys and the keys to Ellie’s apartment inside her apartment.
    As the elevator door opened, she found she couldn’t move from where she was standing in the hallway. She watched as the elevator door closed without her inside. She continued to stand in the empty hallway, unable to think of what to do next. The only sound that could be heard was the telephone ringing on and on from inside Frida’s apartment.

a woman of a certain age
    I’ll never forget the first time I felt discriminated against because of my age.
    I had gone to get a facial at a chic spa that I had read about in Philadelphia magazine when I first moved into the city. I’m not going to tell you the name of it or where it is, though. I don’t want them to lose any business because of my story. It’s not that the spa treated me shabbily; on the contrary, they couldn’t have been nicer. That was the problem. From the second I walked into the place, I could tell that they didn’t usually deal with people from my age group. Personally, I was a little put off by the streamlined design of the place, anyway. Are masculine chrome walls and hard marble floors really soothing? Also, this awful flute music played constantly. When the aesthetician finished my $180 oxygen facial, she left the room and told me to “breathe in the aromatic scents” while concentrating on that flute music. I wanted to tear my eyes out after a minute, the aromatic scents smelled like the mentholatum I used to rub on Barbara’s chest when she was home from school with a cold. Also, I don’t know about you, but I’ve never found fountains to be a tranquilsound in the least. All they do is make me have to pee. But I’m getting off the track here. (Sorry, I do that sometimes. Howard always made a comment whenever I did that.)
    As I was saying, it wasn’t that the people at the spa were just nice to me. They were