Certain Girls Read online

  The whole thing had left me angry. Actually, that was an understatement. It had left me filled with rage that was constantly bubbling just beneath my skin, and I knew that wasn’t a typical way for a bride to feel. Things that would have annoyed a normal person—that would have been worth at most maybe a minute or two of pique—would cause me to literally see red, to shake with anger, to have visions of doing grievous bodily harm to my oppressor, and then to Bruce Guberman, every lazy, stoned, faithless, gone-to-Amsterdam inch of him. The driver of the sportscar that cut me off along I-76; a cop giving me a parking ticket when I double-parked to haul Joy’s stroller out of the trunk; the nurse at the allergist’s office who’d stuck Joy three times, making her cry, before finding a good vein: I could picture myself stomping on the gas and forcing the car onto the Schuylkill; lifting the diaper bag and swinging it, hard, at the cop’s head; grabbing the syringe and jabbing the nurse in her pale, freckled arm. I knew it wasn’t normal, and I couldn’t tell Peter about it. Being as big as I was made me enough of a freak in his world, especially compared to the hard-bodied residents and interns who’d played volleyball all afternoon while I’d sat in the shade at a picnic table, sipping lemonade, watching Joy shovel sand into a bucket and giving my spandex panties the occasional surreptitious tug. He didn’t need to know that I was not just fat but possibly also insane.

  Luckily, I had my excuses ready. “First of all, you should know that if we do get married, I’m totally letting myself go,” I began.

  Peter crossed his legs underneath the steering wheel and looked at me expectantly.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” I said. “But the truth is, even staying this size requires a Herculean effort that will end the minute I take my vows. My plan is to spend the next thirty years or so sitting on the couch, watching TV, and eating sugary cereal with my hands.”

  “No spoon?”

  I shook my head. “Too much effort. By the time I’m forty, I’m gonna look like Jabba the Hutt. You’ll have to move me from room to room with a reinforced wheelbarrow. For exercise, every once in a while, I’ll lean over in the direction where I think you are and yell, ‘Sucker!’”

  Peter lifted one of my hands from my lap and kissed my palm. His forearm was dusted with grains of sand—from the volleyball court, I guessed. “Do you think I won’t love you if you gain weight?” he asked.

  I felt my throat close as I shook my head. I could remember my own parents. My mom would go all the way to New York for her clothes, brightly colored, beautifully made outfits, tunics and caftans and wide-legged pants. You look beautiful, I’d tell her when she came down the stairs, but I could see from the way my father turned his face away, from the way he looked too long at the other doctors’ thinner wives, that he didn’t agree. Another nail in the marriage coffin.

  “And let’s not forget the curse of the InStyle wedding,” I said.

  “What,” Peter rumbled, “is the curse of the InStyle wedding?”

  “Come on. I know I’ve told you about this. Every couple who’s ever appeared in InStyle has gotten divorced, like, ten minutes later. Sometimes before the issue’s even on the stands.”

  “So we won’t let InStyle write about our wedding,” he said.

  “Too late,” I said, sighing. “I already did that freelance piece for them about spring’s new lipsticks. I’m cursed by extension. And what about my parents?”

  Peter dropped my hand and turned to look out the dust-streaked windshield at the empty sidewalk. “We’ve been over this. I am not your father.”

  “And let’s not forget the gays,” I continued. “Until the gays can marry, I think it’s unfair for heterosexuals to exercise the privilege. I mean, think of my mother and Tanya!”

  Peter glared at me. “Your mother and Tanya had a commitment ceremony last year. We were there. You read from Jonathan Livingston Seagull.”

  I bit my lip. He was being too kind. I’d tried to read, per Tanya’s request, from Jonathan Livingston Seagull, but I’d wound up laughing too hard to get the words out, so my sister had taken over, reciting with many dramatic hand gestures a passage about the importance of freeing yourself from the flock.

  “Reason four,” I continued. “I like sex, and I have read in many credible publications that married people don’t have sex anymore.”

  I leaned over to kiss him. He turned his head away so that my lips landed on his ear. “That’s not going to fix things,” he said. “I want to get married. I don’t want to be engaged for the rest of my life. And if you can’t—or won’t—”

  “I wouldn’t be a good wife,” I blurted. The words seemed to hang in the air longer than they should have, and I could almost see the words I was thinking hanging alongside them: I would have been a good wife to Bruce, before all of this happened. I can’t be a good wife to anyone anymore.

  But maybe that was wrong. Maybe I could be a good wife. Maybe I could love Peter the way he deserved to be loved. Maybe I could believe, the way I did on good days, that Peter loved me. What I couldn’t do was get past the mental block of a wedding: the white dress, the walk down the aisle. My ex-boyfriend hadn’t loved me enough to stand by me when I’d had a baby. My own father hadn’t loved me enough to acknowledge me when I’d found him in Los Angeles. Peter deserved better than that: someone who attracted love rather than repelling it. Someone who wasn’t bitter, or broken, or carrying the baggage of a flamboyantly failed relationship. A beautiful bride.

  Peter lifted his chin without looking at me, almost as if he’d sensed the spectral presence of other men in our car. “If you can’t, or won’t, then I think we should . . .” His throat worked. I watched as he pulled his keys out of the ignition, opened the door, unfolded his long legs, and let the door slam shut. Joy woke up, startled, and began crying.

  “Peter,” I said. “Peter, wait!” He didn’t hear me through the glass, over the sound of Joy’s wails. I flinched as the car roof shuddered while he pounded it with his fist. Finally, he bent down and yanked his door open.

  “This isn’t fair,” he said.

  I kept my eyes on my lap. “I know.”

  “It’s not fair,” he said fiercely. His cheeks had gotten sunburned, and I could already tell that his nose was going to peel.

  I lifted my hands helplessly and watched them fall into my lap. “I’m a mess,” I said, twisting around and trying to unstrap a shrieking Joy from her car seat.

  “Candace—”

  “You deserve better,” I said as one of my daughter’s tiny fists caught me on my right cheek. Tears came to my eyes. I blinked them away. “You’re right. You do.”

  “I want you to be happy,” he said doggedly. “But I’ve done everything I can, everything I can think of, to show you that I love you, that I’ll always be here for you and for Joy.”

  The tears were rolling down my face, plopping onto my bisected thighs. I was getting dumped. Right here, right now. “Wait,” I croaked, and reached for Peter’s hand. “Wait.”

  He stared down at me for a long, long moment before he shook his head. “I’m sorry, but I’m done waiting,” he said, and turned and walked away.

  • • •

  I hauled myself out of the car and onto the heat-sticky sidewalk. I slung my purse and Joy’s diaper bag over my shoulder, put my key ring in my teeth, eased Joy’s writhing weight into my arms, nudged the car door shut with my hip, pulled the keys out of my mouth, unlocked the front door, and carried my sleeping daughter up three flights of stairs to my apartment. My legs were numb; my hands, as I unlocked the door, looked like they belonged to someone else. I forced myself to keep moving. I sponged off Joy’s face and hands with a warm washcloth, changed her, put her in pajamas, and settled her into her crib. Baa baa, black sheep, have you any wool? I sang over and over, until she yawned and her eyelids got heavy, then fell shut. I turned on the baby monitor, shoved the receiver into my bra, hooked my little terrier, Nifkin, to his leash, dashed back down the stairs, pulled the stroller out of the backse
at of the car, and let Nifkin pee at the fire hydrant while listening to the monitor, hoping Joy would stay asleep, before hauling the dog and the stroller up the stairs. The apartment was so quiet I imagined I could hear it echoing. Alone, whispered the floorboards, and the water heater, and the walls. Alone, alone, alone. I should have been crying, but I just felt numb as I slipped Peter’s engagement ring off my finger and put it in my jewelry box alongside my one pair of good earrings, a heart-shaped locket Bruce had given me once for my birthday, and a spare key for my bicycle lock.

  I’m so grateful, one of the mothers in my premature-baby-mama support group said every week. She was a tiny thing, with Alice-in-Wonderland blond hair and a high, soft voice. I’m grateful she’s alive, she’d say, wide-eyed, sweet-voiced. I’m grateful I’m all right. After six months of listening to her protestations of gratitude, I’d gotten the guts to approach her at the coffee urn and ask for her secret, half hoping she’d give me the name of some magical antidepressant or maybe just confess that she’d been hitting the crack pipe while her kid did hydrotherapy. Oh, she’d said, swirling a wooden stirrer in her cup. Well, my husband helps me. My church. And I write in a journal. That helps, too.

  I didn’t have a husband, or a church, or a journal. I didn’t have a job, either. I’d been living off the money I’d gotten for selling my screenplay, and, as with most of the things that got sold to Hollywood, it didn’t look like the screenplay would ever be made into a movie. Both of the executives who’d acquired the project had moved on to other studios, and the big-deal director who’d been attached was currently on a sabbatical of unspecified length, hiking along the Annapurna trail (she’d taken to answering my increasingly pointed e-mails about when and whether things would ever move forward with a breezy “Insha’Allah,” which my computer told me means “God willing,” and was neither encouraging nor helpful). So I had what was left of that option payment, plus paychecks from my monthly freelance gig writing about single motherhood for Moxie, and the occasional trend piece or profile I wrote for my pre-baby full-time employer, The Philadelphia Examiner. How long would that keep us afloat? I pushed the thoughts away, walked to the kitchen, and started digging through the junk drawer.

  I’d tried keeping a diary once, when I was twelve or so, but my sister had found it and read out loud from it over dinner, and my father had laughed nastily at the parts about my crush on football captain Scott Spender, his lips curling as he said the word “cliché.” I did, however, have a reporter’s notebook in my junk drawer—an old one, I figured, judging from the pages filled with my notes about the 1996 Miss America pageant. I ripped out pages of Miss Tennessee’s deep thoughts on world peace and stared down at the blank page. Then I found a pen, crept into Joy’s room, sat in the rocker, and wrote, Of all the men who’ve fucked me up and let me down, my father was the first and worst. I sat back and considered the words in the pink glow of my daughter’s Cinderella night-light, with Nifkin curled up in the Moses basket my daughter had finally outgrown. Joy loved her night-light, a gift from my sister. Even though I was trying to keep Joy away from the commodified, phallocentric, “someday my prince will come” world of the Disney princesses, my daughter was so enraptured that I’d broken down and plugged in Cindy. For the past six months, the queen of happily-ever-afters had danced across Joy’s wall, her skirts daintily lifted, her tiny feet flashing in their glass slippers, her painted eyes dreamy beneath her taffy swirl of golden hair, and my daughter now refused to sleep without her.

  I read the words over, sniffling, and wiped my nose on a burp cloth. Write what you know, my tenth-grade English teacher had once told me. So I could write a story about a girl who was a lot like me; her ex-boyfriend, who was a lot like Satan, with a twitchy eyelid and a penis the size of a worn-down nub of eraser; and the happy ending I could barely let myself hope for. I bent down over my notebook and started to write.

  • • •

  That night I left Joy and Elle with their magazines at ten o’clock. I emptied the dishwasher, checked the locks, and went upstairs to where my husband was sleeping. Peter rolled over when I eased myself into bed beside him, and opened his eyes. “How long this time?” he grumbled.

  “A few days,” I said. “And it’s not that bad. Joy talks to Elle, and Elle talks to me, so it’s almost like Joy’s speaking to me again.” I massaged hand cream onto my palms and wrists, smeared anti-aging goop onto my cheeks, then lay down and spooned my body against his back. “You’re a good sport,” I said.

  “It’s why you married me,” he said, his voice muffled by the pillow. “Eventually.”

  “That,” I said, sliding my hands around to the waistband of his pajamas. “And this,” I went on, reaching over his body toward his wallet, which he’d left on the bedside table. “Let’s be honest—in the end, it was your health insurance that won my heart.” In the faint light from the hallway, I could see his smile as he rolled over and kissed me.

  TEN

  On Monday morning, with my backpack over my shoulders and a mug of steaming coffee in my hands, I knocked on the guestroom door. No response. I took a deep breath and knocked harder and finally heard a faint groan.

  “Aunt Elle?” I whispered, easing the door open until I saw her lying on the bed with the Amish quilt pulled up to her chin, earplugs stuffed in her ears, and a rhinestone-trimmed satin sleep mask that read ROCK STAR covering her eyes. The top of her yellow silk pajamas peeked out from underneath the covers, and the bright tangle of her hair fanned out on the satin pillowcase that she’d brought with her from New York. “Aunt Elle?” I whispered again. “Are you awake?”

  Frenchelle hopped onto the bed and applied her flat nose and wrinkled face to my aunt’s cheek. “Sweetie,” my aunt mumbled, batting the dog away. “Coffee.”

  “Aunt Elle,” I said again, waving the mug so she’d smell it.

  She yawned and sat up, shoving the eye mask onto her forehead. “Oh,” she said, blinking. Last night’s eyeliner and mascara had smudged into blurry circles around her eyes. “Whattimeizzit?”

  “Early,” I whispered. “Early” was not when I’d be getting my aunt at her best, but it was the only time we’d get some privacy and be able to talk without my mother sticking her head in, asking if we wanted eggs. “I want to talk to you about something.”

  She yawned again. “Go for it.”

  I hopped onto her bed and sat cross-legged with my backpack on my lap. Aunt Elle sat up and smiled. I adore Aunt Elle. She’s the one who hooked me up with the Jon Carame straightening products and one of her old flat irons. She bought me a black lace bra for my twelfth birthday and snapped, “Lighten up!” when my mother made a face. She tells me all the details of her dates. She does ninety minutes of cardio four days a week and goes tanning on her days off from the gym. My mother wears cotton high-waisted briefs that she buys three in a package at Target. Aunt Elle wears lacy tangerine and turquoise thongs she orders from Frederick’s of Hollywood online. That, in my mind, kind of sums up the entire situation.

  “Listen,” I began. “You know my mom’s book.” She squinted at me. I unzipped my backpack and pulled out my marked-up copy of Big Girls Don’t Cry, in case Aunt Elle needed a visual aid.

  “Oh, you read it?” she said, covering her mouth as she yawned. I nodded a little reluctantly. A long time ago, Elle had told me not to read the book. “It has mature content,” she’d said, and when I’d asked what that meant, she said, “Old people.”

  “It was awful!” I blurted. “It was disgusting! All of that sex stuff!”

  “Hey, don’t knock it,” said Aunt Elle. “All of that sex stuff paid for your summer vacations.” She sat up. “And my recent series of oxygen facials.” She patted her cheeks fondly. “My personal opinion,” she continued, “is that the little sister is the most interesting character in the whole story. I told your mother that the whole book should have been about her.”

  I smiled. Dorrie, the little sister in Big Girls Don’t Cry, had a lot in common with
Elle. She was beautiful, and wild, and secretly working as an escort doing outcalls in a Catholic schoolgirl’s uniform. When Dorrie’s mother asked where she was getting all of her money, Dorrie answered, “Babysitting.”

  “So let me have it. What do you want to know?” asked Elle.

  “Is it true?” I blurted. “About Allie and Drew.” I swallowed hard. “About how my mom got pregnant.”

  “Hmm.” She pulled her mask up over her forehead. “This is, like, ancient history, and I wasn’t around for most of it.”

  I nodded. I knew that when she was in her twenties, Aunt Elle moved to Alaska for a year (“where the odds are good, but the goods are odd”) and lived with a boyfriend in a cabin that he’d built himself. Which, she said, sounded a lot more romantic than it turned out to be. Also, she’d confided, parkas and lace-up fur-lined boots were not that good of a year-round look for anyone.

  “Okay, let’s see, let’s see.” She slurped from her mug, her features softened with sleep and the effort of remembering. “Bruce Guberman and Candace Shapiro dated for almost three years, and if I remember, your mother was the one who wanted time off. Then your father wrote that article in Moxie, and your mother was furious, but then Bruce’s dad died—”

  “Wait. What article?” I asked. Elle frowned at me. “Oh, right,” I said, doing my best to act like I knew what I was talking about. “That article.”

  She turned her mug slowly in her hands. “You know what? Maybe you should ask your mom about this.”