Cannie Shapiro 02 Certain Girls Read online

  "But I'm going to get a really great dress," I said. "In New York."

  Amber perked up. "Really? Which store?"

  "My personal shopper and I did some scouting at Bergdorf's," I said casually. "But my mom said I couldn't keep the dress I liked. Too adult or something."

  "Bummer," said Amber.

  "You've got a personal shopper?" Tamsin said.

  "Yes," I said, and gave her a very severe look. "I do." She shrugged again and went back to her book.

  "You're so lucky," Amber said. "I have to get everything at the stupid King of Prussia mall." She gave what was, to her credit, a very theatrical shudder, just as my mom stuck her head into the room again and announced that dinner was served.

  That night, just like on every birthday night I can remember, my mom made my favorites: spa-baked chicken and buttery biscuits flecked with black pepper and cheddar cheese, canned peaches that I'd helped her pick the summer before, and creamed spinach dusted with nutmeg. For dessert, there were my favorite chocolate cupcakes with peanut-butter frosting and silver sprinkles, served on the antique cake stand that Aunt Samantha had given my mom and Peter for their wedding. My mom stuck a candle in mine even though I'd begged her not to, but at least she didn't sing. Amber licked a little frosting off her pink fingernails, took two dainty bites, then set her cupcake aside. I did the same thing. "Aren't you going to eat that?" Tamsin asked, and when I shook my head, she picked up my cupcake and finished it herself.

  After dinner, Amber and Tamsin and I walked to the TLA video store and rented Titanic, which was Amber's choice, and Ghost World, which was Tamsin's ("You've never seen an R movie?" Amber asked me, with her eyes bugging. "Never ever? God. I got the Wedding Crashers special edition for, like, my tenth birthday"). We went back down South Street with Amber on one side of me, talking about dresses, and Tamsin on the other side, absolutely silent, except every once in a while I'd catch her humming a little bit of "Isn't She Lovely." We got lemon water ices at Rita's and ate them on our way home. Then we changed into sweatpants and T-shirts, and for a while I thought everything was going to be okay. My mom and dad moved around the kitchen quietly, running the dishwasher, making coffee. Amber and Tamsin ignored each other, but with the movies on, it wasn't even a problem. At eleven o'clock, my mom said lights-out. We went upstairs and brushed our teeth. I stared straight ahead when Tamsin came out of the bathroom in her Lord of the Rings night-shirt. "Nice shirt," Amber said in the exact same tone she'd told Mr. Shoup "Nice tie." Amber was dressed in a sleeveless white nightgown with pink lace trim. Tamsin ignored Amber as she took her usual place in her sleeping bag on the floor beside my bed and yanked the zipper up to her chin. Frenchie hopped onto the foot of my bed and curled in a ball.

  Amber unrolled her own sleeping bag. "Oh, no," I said. "You can sleep here." I pointed to my bed. "You sure?" said Amber. I nodded as Tamsin's eyes followed me. Amber tucked herself in, and I spread my blanket on the floor on Tamsin's other side. As soon as I'd turned out the lights, Amber pulled her cell phone out of her backpack and flipped it open, filling the room with a bluish glow. Frenchie lifted her head.

  "We should buzz some guys," Amber said. Her braces caught the light from the telephone as she leaned toward me.

  "Um..." I tried not to talk to people I didn't know on the phone. I was never sure whether my voice sounded right. "I don't know."

  Tamsin picked up her book and rolled onto her side. Amber whispered something I couldn't hear. I clicked on my bedside lamp so I could see her lips.

  "Come on, Joy," Amber said. "I'll call Martin. Who do you want to call?"

  Duncan Brodkey was right on the tip of my tongue, but what would I say to him? What if he was sleeping? What if I sounded really weird? What if he thought I was a guy or something? I felt myself starting to blush.

  "You don't say anything," Amber said. "You just hang up."

  "What's the point of that?" asked Tamsin, turning a page.

  "So they know we're thinking about them," Amber said with an extremely disgusted look. "See, if you do a star-sixty-seven, that blocks caller ID, so they can't tell who's calling."

  "How do they know who's thinking about them?" Tamsin asked. "It could be anyone. It could be a wrong number."

  "Don't you have a book to read?" Amber asked. She rolled her eyes at me. I bit my lip and said nothing. "What a drip," Amber whispered. I ducked my head, tucking my chin into my chest, and pretended that I hadn't heard her say that, even though she probably knew I had. Worse, Tamsin heard it, too.

  The next morning I woke up at seven-thirty, got dressed quietly, slipped my hearing aids into place, and shook Amber's shoulder as gently as I could.

  "Huh?" she said without opening her eyes.

  "Can I borrow your phone for a minute?"

  "Sure," she said, rolling onto her side.

  "Can I call long-distance?"

  She yawned. "Unlimited minutes."

  I'd been counting on that. I pulled my copy of Big Girls Don't Cry out from under my mattress, stuffed it into my backpack, put Frenchie on her leash, and double-checked that Amber's phone was snug in my pocket. I wasn't sure whether my mother checked my phone to see who I'd been calling, but I knew she kept track of my minutes and how many texts I sent, and it was important that she not know about this particular call. I left a note--Going to get bagels--on the kitchen counter and slipped out the front door.

  The sky was a deep blue, and a sweet-smelling breeze shook the trees, sending showers of blossoms into my hair and onto Frenchie's back, casting wavering shadows on the sidewalk. I slipped off my jacket and tied it around my waist. "Pretty girl, pretty girl," chanted the homeless guy from his wheelchair on the corner, and the man behind the counter at the bagel place smiled at me and slipped an extra French-toast bagel into my bag. I tucked the bagels under my arm and walked three blocks south, then sat down on a bench underneath a towering dogwood tree in Mario Lanza Park. Frenchie trotted along the perimeter of the dog run, ignoring the other dogs, sticking her nose haughtily into the air when they tried to sniff her. I pulled Big Girls Don't Cry out of my purse, opened it to the page where I'd stuck a Post-it, and began to read.

  My official major at the esteemed Larchmont University was English literature, but by the third week of freshman year, it became clear that my real subject of concentration would be Rich Bitches' Boyfriends. During classes, on tangled sheets where I'd find crumbs and pizza crust (and once an entire slice of stiffened pepperoni), stolen hours that would always end with me traipsing back across Bell Courtyard with a smirk on my face and my XXL panties in my pocket. I was not the kind of girl who slept over. I was not the kind of girl who was even invited over if there was a roommate nearby. I was a guilty pleasure, an indulgence, the girl who'd do anything. Word got around. As did I. I wasn't in it for the sex itself, which ranged from mediocre to merely okay. What I craved were the precious minutes afterward, cradled in the Rich Bitch's Boyfriend's arms, as shafts of dusty sunlight made their way underneath the university-issued green blinds, and I could imagine the words "I love you." Not that Chas or Trip or Trey or Talbot ever said them. They wouldn't even say hello to me if we passed in the courtyard, or ended up sitting next to each other in Freshman Seminar. You could shout about sex from the rooftops if you were having it with one of the anorexic, horse-faced blondes who seemed to comprise half of Larchmont's Class of '91, but sex with a girl like me was a secret...and I plowed through those boys like I'd devoured those long-ago Whitman's samplers my father would bring home before he decided that candy, and then his marriage and his family, were a bad idea.

  I couldn't imagine my mother doing things like that: my mother, with her knitting and her committees and her minivan and the three kinds of stain remover standing at the ready in our laundry room. But what I knew of Big Girls Don't Cry so far had been sort of true. A tweaked version of the truth. True-ish. If my mom had been that much of a slut in college, I figured there was one person who'd be able to tell me about it.

&
nbsp; In the book, my mother's roommate at "Larchmont" was called "Baldwin." In real life, her freshman-year roommate was Alden Langley of Richmond, Virginia. I'd found Alden's new last name (Chernowitz, which seemed like a terrible downgrade) on the Princeton alumni website, which I'd accessed by typing in the code on one of my mother's Princeton Alumni Weeklys that I'd found in the recycling bin. Alden didn't list an e-mail address, which would have been my preferred way to communicate, but she did give her telephone number. I let Frenchie sniff around the base of a trash can while I nibbled the edges of a salt bagel. At nine o'clock exactly, I dialed Amber's phone carefully, rehearsing the words in a whisper, praying I'd sound normal. A man answered on the third ring. "Hello?" I almost lost my nerve and hung up. "Hello-oo?"

  "Is Alden Langley Chernowitz there?" I asked.

  "Who's calling?" asked the man's nasal voice. I could hear kids' voices in the background, which made me feel better. At least I hadn't woken everybody up.

  "My name is Joy Shapiro. Alden went to college with my mom."

  The man paused. "Hold on," he said. There was a click, and silence, then a woman's voice came on the phone.

  "Hello?" The voice sounded puzzled but not unfriendly.

  "Hi. My name is Joy Shapiro. My mom is--"

  "Cannie," the voice said instantly. "How is she? I was hoping she'd be at the reunion."

  "Oh. Oh, I...I'm not sure about that." I'd seen the orange-and-black cards and letters arriving all last year. My mom had tossed them straight into the recycling bin. I'm not ready for that yet, she'd said. "She's good, I guess."

  Alden did not have the kind of voice I'd expected, a snotty rich girl's voice. Instead, her voice was warm and faintly southern, turning my mom's name into "Cann-eh," and "hoping" into "hopin'."

  "So what can I do for you?" she asked.

  "Um." Just get it out, Joy, I told myself. "I read my mom's book?"

  Alden didn't say anything, but I thought I heard her inhale.

  "And I want to know..." About the sex, I thought.

  "About the earrings," Alden said a little sadly. For a minute I didn't know what she was talking about. Then I remembered "Chapter Eight" and flipped to it quickly:

  My mother dropped me off at Larchmont University with two of everything--two pairs of jeans, two long-sleeved T-shirts, two pairs of shoes. It was a good thing that was all I had, because my roommate Baldwin Carruther's clothes took up all of our remaining closet space and filled the antique armoire she'd placed in our common room, next to the stereo system and on top of the Oriental rug she'd brought up with her from Atlanta. Baldwin was a fourth-generation Larchmontian. Baldwin had fine blond hair that she wore gathered into a ponytail thin as a pencil, and thick forearms from years on her prep school's crew team. While I fussed with my sheets, she set a framed picture next to our bunk beds, a shot of her standing beside her sister in a floor-length gown and elbow-length gloves with a corsage around her wrist. "Was that your prom?" I asked, and she said, "No, my debut." Baldwin had a jewelry box full of strands of pearls, gold bangles, silver hoop earrings, pendants, and charms. "Take anything," she said, waving carelessly at the pirate's chest of treasure.

  I never touched her stuff until second semester. I'd been invited to a costume party--really, my entire dorm had been invited--and I was going as Madonna. Baldwin's big gold hoops would be perfect, I thought. I took them out and left a note. When I got back, there was a note on my pillow: RETURN MY EARRINGS, it said. THEY ARE HEIRLOOM.

  I felt sick as I pulled them out of my ears and put them back on top of her cluttered pile of jewelry: the pearls, the bracelets, the locket engraved with her name. "The rich are different," I said out loud. Then I said, "Heirloom." Baldwin didn't say much to me for the next two weeks except "good morning" and "good night," but she clearly hadn't forgotten my transgression. One Saturday night, she stumbled into the room, giggling, with Jasper Jenkins holding her hand. Jasper, my crush from the school paper, where he was a sports reporter and I was the copy editor who wrote his headlines and changed his every "alright" to "all right." I lay there, frozen in place, as she pulled him up to the top bunk and gave him what was, from the sound of it, an extremely inept blow job. ("Watch the teeth!" he hissed more than once.) My hands clenched as I lay there, equally horrified and aroused, thinking, Note to self: don't borrow the rich girl's jewelry, even if she says you can.

  "It wasn't earrings," Alden Langley said. "It was a jacket. A leather jacket. Your mom borrowed it. I got pretty upset."

  "Oh."

  "But not because it was expensive! It was because it was my grandfather's. He'd given it to me in his will. It meant a lot to me. Your mom didn't have any way of knowing that. We had a fight, but we made up afterward. And I could see...I mean, there were girls like that at Princeton. You know, the rich ones who'd make you feel like crap about yourself just because you were breathin' their air." She chuckled again. "You should ask your mama about the girl in our hall who came to college with her own horses."

  "Wow." No big deal, I wrote on my Post-it as Alden kept talking. I wrote horses. I wrote, for reasons I didn't understand, Mama. "So did she...did she..." I couldn't get the words out. Did she sleep with all those boys? Did she walk around with her underwear in her pocket? Was she really that kind of girl?

  Alden chuckled. "Well, it is fiction, honey."

  Fiction, I wrote. But just because it was fiction didn't mean there wasn't truth in there somewhere, glimmering, like coins at the bottom of a well. Who was she? I wondered as I recapped my pen. Who was my mother, really? And who am I? "Hey, is she there?" asked Alden in her honeyed southern voice. "Could I say hello?"

  "She's sleeping," I said.

  Alden laughed. "Lucky duck. Well, you tell her hi from me, honey. You tell her that I think about her." In the background, a kid whined, "Mo-om," and Alden laughed again cheerfully and said, "Gotta go," and hung up.

  FIFTEEN

  "Name," said Peter. I was propped against one arm of the couch, and he was facing me with the laptop open and his bare feet in my lap.

  "Ooh! Ooh!" I said, waving my hand in the air. "I know that one!"

  He looked at me sternly as his fingers rattled over the keyboard. "Dates of birth." More typing as he filled them in. "Address, home phone, work phone, cell phone..." He paused. "Occupations."

  "Well, you're a diet doctor."

  He made a face. "Bariatric physician."

  "Yeah, you keep telling yourself that."

  "And you?"

  I winced. It was Wednesday night. The dishwasher was chugging away, Frenchie was snoozing on her dog bed in the corner, Joy was in her bedroom, and Peter and I were just starting the ten-page application for Open Hearts Surrogate Services. (He'd been the one who'd picked Open Hearts. I, ever the sucker for a good title, had wanted to go with a surrogate and egg-donor business I'd found online called Game Ova.) "Can you just put 'homemaker'? That'll sound good."

  He tapped his fingers against the edge of the laptop. "They want to see ten years of tax returns. 'Homemaker' doesn't explain your income."

  Good point. "How about 'well-compensated homemaker'? Or 'homemaker who won the lottery'?"

  "Candace, it's a very small box." He wiggled his feet. I gave his toes a squeeze, after making sure that Joy was still upstairs. The other night we'd been watching a movie, and when she'd seen me rubbing Peter's feet, she'd given me a look of scorching disgust and walked out of the room.

  "Can you do a footnote?"

  "What am I, David Foster Wallace?" he asked.

  "Can you say former writer? Maybe retired writer?"

  "Writer," he said, and typed it in, then stared at me defiantly, as if daring me to tell him otherwise.

  When the first copies of Big Girls Don't Cry arrived in my mailbox, the hot-pink covers peeking cheekily out of the sober manila envelope, I believed that my whole life was going to change. Years of being a reader, then a reporter, years of dreaming about being a real writer, had trained me to believe that the mo
ment my book entered the world would be the fulcrum on which my life would shift, profoundly and eternally.

  The Monday night before the official publication date, Peter took me to Le Bec Fin, where I enjoyed great quantities of wine and told everyone from the coat-check girl to the cheese-cart guy my good news. After dessert, I wobbled down the sidewalk to the Barnes & Noble with Peter's arm around me. I'd stood, swaying and stuffed, in front of the windows, informing uninterested pedestrians, "My book's in there!" (Unfortunately, I hadn't counted on the bookstore still being open, or on the security guard telling me he'd call the cops if I didn't quit smearing the glass.)

  The next morning, slightly hungover and extremely nervous, my sister Lucy and I dragged my giant gray suitcase and my tiny daughter (plus her car seat, diaper bag, and assorted food and toddler paraphernalia) to the Philadelphia International Airport for the start of my book tour. We began in Cleveland, where I sat, all dressed up, behind a huge stack of hardcovers. After two hours, I'd managed to sell a grand total of one book. We proceeded to Chicago, where one person showed up at my reading, and I'm fairly certain she was homeless and had just wandered in out of the cold.

  In Kansas City, a trembling, white-lipped woman approached me at the podium of a fancy independent bookstore, where they'd had a poster of Big Girls Don't Cry in the window, until one of the regulars had complained. "Your mom said she'd kill me if I didn't come, so will you please call her and tell her I was here?" the woman begged. In Miami my nanna shocked me by showing up with her entire bridge club and announcing loudly enough to be heard over the wailing kids in the children's section, "That's my granddaughter the author." Sadly, her pride didn't extend to her urging her friends to pay the $24.95 cover price. "They can take it out of the library," she assured me before leaving a semi-permanent coral kiss mark on my cheek, telling me that my black skirt was "very slimming," and asking my sister whether she'd gotten a real job yet.