Cannie Shapiro 02 Certain Girls Read online

  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 fulltime 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 "cliche." 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 guest-room 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."

  "You know she won't tell me anything."

  Aunt Elle grinned, as if my mother's treating me like an infant were funny. "Good point. Well, I can tell you that it wasn't all bad." She swung her legs onto the floor, then stood at the side of the bed, doing some kind of complicated stretch. "Your dad came back eventually..."

  Back from where? I wondered. I pressed my lips together, willing myself not to interrupt.

  "And your mom showed him." She gave a satisfied nod.

  "Showed him what?" Even as I was asking, I thought I knew the answer.

  "She got the book out of it, and a ton of money--and you read the book, right? He should have known better. Never mess with the Shapiro girls." She scratched the top of her head thoughtfully. "Actually, you could mess with your grandmother if you wanted. She probably wouldn't even notice. I swear to God, the woman's been lobotomized."

  "Thanks," I said. I was thinking that trying to get the truth out of my family was like trying to get answers out of a Magic 8-Ball. Yes. No. Ask again later.

  Aunt Elle walked toward the bathroom. "Don't forget to tell your mom we have to go to New York to look at dresses!" she called over her shoulder. "You'll never find anything decent here!"

  The library at the Philadelphia Academy has thirty computers available for students' use, and you can surf the Internet for an hour before school and an hour after, as long as you've got your parents' permission and a password. Needless to say, I have neither. I'm only allowed to use the Internet with either my mom or my dad in the room, and I'm limited to twenty IMs a day.

  There's a way around it, though. Aunt Elle says there's a way around anything (she said this on Sunday afternoon, when my parents were taking Frenchelle to the groomers', just before she extracted a MasterCard from my mother's wallet so that we could go to Buddakan for cocktail hour). When I got to the library first thing Monday morning, it was empty except for Mr. Perrin, the librarian, two sixth-graders I didn't recognize, and Duncan Brodkey, in jeans and a green button-down, with his sneakers loosely laced and his hair flopping over his forehead.

  "Hey, Joy," he said.

  "Hi." I'd sat next to him every other day at lunch for over a month but had barely been able to look at him directly. Today, though, I made myself do it. "Do you have a password?"

  "It's..." He mumbled something I couldn't hear.

  "Sorry, what was that?"

  "Oatmealie!" he practically shouted. Then he lowered his voice and spelled it slowly.

  "Oh." I typed it in, and the screen bloomed to life. "Do you really like oatmeal or something?"

  "Nah. My mom picked it for me. When I was a kid I had a teddy bear called Oatmeal Bear." He shrugged. I was pretty sure he was blushing.

  "Moms are weird," I said, which I thought sounded like something Amber would say.

  He flopped his hair back off his forehead. "Yeah." He scooted his chair close to my computer. "So what are you working on?"

  I fiddled with my hair. I hadn't been counting on Duncan Brodkey at all, let alone Duncan Brodkey with questions. "A research project." Inspiration hit me. "Genealogy. How about you?"

  "English homework." He sighed and turned back to his screen. I leaned forward, went to Google, then typed Moxie and magazine, then Bruce Guberman. The words Loving a Larger Woman filled the screen. I tilted my body so that Duncan wouldn't be able to see the screen, clicked on the link, and read, I'll never forget the day I found out my girlfriend weighed more than I did.

  Oh. Ew. I squeezed my eyes shut, then opened them a crack, enough so that only a sentence or a phrase here and there could sneak through. I knew that C. was a big girl...I never thought of myself as a chubby chaser...her luscious, zaftig heft.

  Oh...my...God, I thought. What was wrong with them? Why was I descended from a pair of sex maniacs? I must have groaned out loud because Duncan looked over at me, looking worried. "Are you okay? Did you just find out that you're related to Jeffrey Dahmer or something?"

  I wish. "I'm fine," I said, and smiled weakly. I flipped open my tattered, dog-eared copy of Big Girls and wrote in tiny letters on the inside of the back cover Loving a Larger Woman, and the date it had been published. Then I counted backward on my fingers. My mom had gotten pregnant with me after this article was written, after she'd already read it, after she and the entire world knew that he'd tried to buy her lingerie and found out that the sizes stopped before she started. It made no sense, but there it was.

  In a flash of inspiration, I went back to Google and typed in Moxie and magazine and my mother's name. Nothing came up under Cannie, so I tried Candace and found that she'd written twelve articles for them. I scrolled through the titles and clicked on the one called "Gone, Daddy, Gone."

  We go around the circle at the premature moms' support group, saying our name, our child's name, our child's diagnosis, our husband's name. Some of the women are so broken up or sleep-deprived that they can barely form a word. Some are so sad that they can barely choke out the names they've chosen for their children. But everyone has a name and a diagnosis, and all of the women have husbands. Everyone but me. I have a sperm donor. Sperm Donor is currently, as far as I know, in Amsterdam. Sperm Donor has met his daughter precisely once, has contributed exactly nothing to her support, and at least once a day (or, if I'm being honest, once an hour), I entertain a brief but vivid fantasy of cramming pannenkoeken down his throat until his face turns purple.

  I squinted. The screen had gotten blurry. I brushed at my eyes, and then, because I couldn't think of what else to do, typed pannenkoeken into Wikipedia. Dutch pancakes, yet unlike the usual American pancake, pannenkoeken are usually larger and thinner and sometimes incorporate slices of smoked bacon or apple and raisins. Great. Maybe I'd make them for World Celebration Day next September.

  I sat there, counting the months again. When my mother wrote that article, I was one year old, and Bruce was gone.

  Your, um, Bruce. That was what my mother always called him, and I couldn't remember a time in my life when he wasn't around to visit every other Sunday, to take me to one of the same places he always took me--the Franklin Institute, the Please Touch Museum, the Camden Aquarium, or the zoo. When I was little, I thought that every kid had an "um, Bruce," a kind of a backup father, the same way you'd have a flashlight and batteries in a drawer in the kitchen in case the power went out, a spare dad to buy you too-big clothes for your birthday, to take you out for pizza and ask you stupid questions about school and homework. When I got old enough to realize that maybe this wasn't normal, my mother told me that they'd been boyfriend and girlfriend, and that even though they'd never gotten married, they'd both wanted me, both loved me, loved me so much.

  But here was the truth in black and white, on the Internet, for the entire world to see. She'd been fat--not that that wasn't obvious. He'd run away, which no one had ever told me. She hadn't wanted me, which I'd figured out from her book. And he'd run away to Amsterdam, which meant that neither one of them had really wanted me at all.

  "Hey, Joy?"

  I looked up. Duncan was standing right behind me, reading over my shoulder. I logged off fast.

  "The bell rang. Didn't you hear it?" he asked.

  I shook my head. I didn't trust my voice yet.

  "Come on." Duncan bent down and scooped up my backpack from under the desk. "Can't be late for Mr. Shoup." He looked at me again as I walked down the hall on legs that felt like they'd been cut off a dead person and stitched onto my hips. "Do you have any big spring-break plans?"

  "Not really," I said, and pasted Amber Gross's smile on my face and walked down the hallway wishing there were an Amsterdam for almost-thirteen-year-old girls, a place I could run to and eat pancakes with apples and raisins, a place where I could go, and change my name to Annika, and never come home again.

  ELEVEN

  Peter kissed me goodbye and dropped us off at Thirtieth Street Station on his way to work Thursday morning. Inside the cavernous, echoing, high-ceilinged chamber, I slid my c
redit card into the automatic ticket machine. Once it spat out three tickets, I bought a large iced coffee, two muffins (one blueberry, one corn), and the latest Us and InStyle and People. At ten-fifteen Joy and Elle and I boarded the Acela, which would get me to New York City in plenty of time for my one o'clock lunch with my agent and publisher, and for Joy (currently on spring break) and Elle (currently on a hiatus of unspecified duration) to spend the afternoon shopping.

  The two of them took seats side by side, turned down my muffins, and spent the hour and fifteen minutes of the trip with their heads bent over Women's Wear Daily and Vogue, whispering to each other, marking the pages with Post-it notes and occasionally looking sideways at me and giggling. I was too preoccupied to care.

  Normally when I went to my publisher's, my editor, Peyson Horowitz, called in for sandwiches, and we bought sodas from the vending machine down the hall. Today, though, I'd be dining with my agent at Michael's, unofficial cafeteria of the media world. It would be the two of us, she'd told me, plus Patsy Philippi, the publisher of Valor Press, which had published all the sci fi I'd written for the last ten years, along with Big Girls Don't Cry.

  I said goodbye to my sister and daughter at Penn Station, and I walked slowly to the restaurant, knowing that even if I dawdled, I'd be embarrassingly early. I browsed at a newsstand, had another iced coffee, and marveled at the women passing by, all gym-tight bodies and perfect hair. In the coffee shop bathroom, I washed my hands and studied myself in the mirror, wishing that I'd swiped Joy's straightening iron, the one I'm not supposed to know about, or that I'd borrowed her lipstick (not supposed to know about that, either), or that I'd accepted Elle's offer of some help with my makeup and outfit selection, because the clothes that had looked perfectly acceptable that morning in Philadelphia--the straight black skirt and low black heels, the gray cotton shirt and the necklace of faceted jet-black beads--now seemed dowdy and dull.