Certain Girls Read online

  “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 credit 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.

  My agent, Larissa, waved to me from beside the maître d’s stand and kissed me on both cheeks, a recent affectation, I assumed. I air-kissed back, trying not to stare at the elderly lady broadcaster ensconced at a table for four by the window, whose famous face had been lifted so many times that her eyebrows and her hairline were more or less in the same place. “And you remember Patsy, of course,” Larissa said.

  I nodded and submitted to Patsy’s double kiss. I’d met Patsy only once, when Valor had held a champagne-and-cake reception to celebrate Big Girls’s sixth month on the best-seller list. Patsy was short and plump and looked vaguely like Mrs. Claus, with her white curls and twinkling gold-rimmed glasses. Looking at her, you’d never guess that she’d earned her Ph.D. in comparative literature by twenty-three, or that beneath her sugar-cookie exterior she was scary-smart (and sometimes, I’d read, just plain scary).

  Larissa removed her coat, revealing one of what I’d once joked were her two hundred identical black pantsuits. Over her arm, she carried what looked like a bowling-ball bag made of green leather, ornamented with all manner of fringes and tassels plus a heavy brass padlock—the kind of thing my sister would have been able to identify by name, designer, and price tag on sight.

  Finding Larissa had been a happy accident. After I’d written my book, I’d gotten in touch with Violet, the agent who’d sold my screenplay.

  “A novel?” she’d repeated dubiously.

  “You know,” I’d said. “The things that screenplays are sometimes based on?”

  “Can’t help you, lovey. I—Hey, fuck you, asshat!”

  I’d grinned. Violet looked like a Girl Scout and cursed like Chris Rock. “You okay?”

  “Yeah, yeah. Some douche-sip took my parking spot. Listen, I’ll shoot you the names of some book agents. How’s New York?”

  “Philadelphia,” I’d reminded her. She’d apologized and sent me ten names within the hour. Larissa had been the first one on the list to request the entire manuscript, and she’d called me on a Saturday to tell me, in her tiny, squeaky voice, how much she’d loved the book, how it had spoken to her (at the time, I distinctly remember thinking, How?).

  The hostess led us across the sunny restaurant, through the maze of tightly packed tables set along white walls filled with bright modern art, past editors and agents lunching on salads and grilled fish, to a prime table for four. A waiter passed out oversize menus and offered sparkling, tap, or still water. We made small talk about my train trip, the renovations of Patsy’s flat in London, and Larissa’s new assistant, who’d put herself through college working weekends in her family’s nail salon and insisted, each week, on giving her boss a pedicure. Patsy’s dress was navy, and when I looked more closely, I saw that Larissa’s black suit was actually a very dark blue. Navy, I thought regretfully. Navy was the new black. How had I missed that? Why couldn’t I have been a tenth as obsessed with high heels and high fashion as the Big Girls Don’t Cry critics had once claimed? Ah, well. Content of my character, I thought, and Seven pounds thinner.

  After a few more minutes of small talk, the waiter returned. “Ready to order?” he asked.

  I requested a Cobb salad. “Dressing on the side?” he asked.

  “Oh. Sure.” Silly me. I hadn’t realized that the object of the game was to order a Cobb salad with so many things omitted that you’d be left with basically a twenty-four-dollar pile of lettuce leaves and tomatoes. Larissa asked for a Cobb salad without bacon, dressing on the side. Patsy ordered hers without bacon or avocado, or any dressing at all.

  Yummy, I thought. I slipped my feet out of my shoes and set them on the carpet, which I could feel literally buzzing beneath me. The electric energy of New York, I thought a little romantically. Then I realized that what I was feeling was the reverb from a dozen cell phones and handhelds and BlackBerries set on vibrate and humming away from a dozen different expensive purses on the floor.

  I smiled at Patsy as she sat back and said, “So!” Then I reached into my own pedigree-free bag. I’d brought the latest Lyla Dare manuscript, completed just the night before. I slid the pages across the table.

  Patsy shook her head. “Actually, we didn’t ask you here to talk Lyla. Although you’ve been doing an excellent job,” she added.

  I slipped the manuscript back into my purse. “Okay.” I was starting, very belatedly, to get an idea about why they’d asked me to New York instead of sending me the usual edit memo by e-mail; about why I was nibbling lettuce in the plush front room of Michael’s, sitting on bentwood chairs at a linen-draped table within earshot of an executive editor at Allure, seeing and being seen, instead of in Peyson’s tiny windowless office, eating corned beef off of wax paper.

  Patsy steepled her chubby fingers underneath her chin and leaned forward, blue eyes saucer-wide. “As you know,” she began, “the tenth anniversary of Big Girls Don’t Cry is coming up this fall.”

  I nodded. My knees were already starting to shake, and my hands, when I wiped them on my napkin, were slimy.

  “We’d like to do a special rerelease,” said Patsy. “New cover, new packaging, a beautiful new author photo, a whole new publicity campaign.”

  “That sounds amazing,” said Larissa. I nodded numbly. Well, they owned the rights to the thing. It wasn’t as if I could stop them.

  “We were hoping,” Patsy continued, “that you’d be available to help us promote it. We were thinking about a sixteen-city tour.”

  “Oh, I can’t.” I tried to sound apologetic rather than insane. Judging from the looks I was getting, I didn’t think I’d been entirely successful. I lifted my water glass with a trembling hand and took a sip. “I’m sorry,” I said. “But I just don’t think I can leave home anytime soon. Joy’s bat mitzvah’s this fall, too, and there’s a lot of planning t
o do.”

  “Of course,” said Patsy. Perhaps sensing my discomfort, she reached across the table and patted my icy hand with her warm one. “Maybe just a satellite-radio tour, some TV bookings. And a reading here in New York, of course. It could be fantastic.”

  I nodded, thinking I’d get out of that when the time came. There were excuses I could make, illnesses I could feign. Actually, I probably wouldn’t even need to fake it. Just the thought of having to sit on a couch with some newscaster and relive that part of my past made me want to heave.

  Patsy tugged at one of her white corkscrew curls and resettled her napkin on her lap. At the table beside us, a young woman in navy (of course) was settling into the chair the waiter had pulled out. “My agent will be joining me,” she said proudly. I turned away.

  “And,” Patsy continued, “with the tenth anniversary of publication this spring, everyone at this table, all of us at Valor”—she favored me with her warmest smile—“and the millions of Big Girl fans, of course . . .”

  I smiled weakly, bracing myself.

  Patsy went on. “. . . we’re all wondering whether you’ve given any thought to another novel.” She beamed at me as if she’d just set a beautifully wrapped gift on the table.

  “It’s very flattering. I’ll, um, think about it,” I stammered.

  “We don’t need a whole book right now,” said Patsy in her softest and most soothing tone. “It doesn’t have to be a sequel, either. If there’s just an idea you’ve had kicking around . . .”

  “Will you excuse me?” I pushed myself up and out of my chair. My water glass shivered as I turned around fast, almost crashing into the waiter, who was carrying our denuded salads to the table. “Excuse me,” I said again, and hurried around the corner to the ladies’ room, where I sat in the tiny marble stall with my head in my hands.

  A dream come true. Cliché city, right? Yet no fewer than twenty newspaper articles about the surprising success of Big Girls Don’t Cry had quoted me saying exactly that. It is a dream come true. It certainly looked that way: unlucky-in-love, oppressed-at-the-office, unhappy-in-her-own-skin big girl from broken home gets love, and a man, and a beautiful baby, and a best-seller. Not necessarily in that order, but still, an undeniable happy ending.