Certain Girls Read online

  I sighed. Todd and Tamsin have been my best friends since kindergarten. We met the day Matthew Swatner started teasing me because of my hearing aids and calling me Machinehead. The two of them had plopped themselves down beside me at the sand table—Tamsin with her hair in pigtails tied with red ribbons, Todd in a red baseball cap—and told Matthew to leave me alone. Then Todd had given me his baseball cap to wear, and Tamsin had tied one of her ribbons around my wrist, and at snack time they’d sat on either side of me, glaring at Matthew, at anyone who stared. Your own personal Fruits of Islam, my mother had said when she’d seen them. I still don’t know what she meant by that, but I know for sure that even after all our years together, Tamsin and Todd still don’t get the deal of my mom.

  “Her chest is ridiculous,” I said. “Do you know what size bra she wears? Thirty-six G.”

  “G?” Todd repeated. “Is that a real size?”

  “Sort of. She has to order them online because the regular store doesn’t have them.”

  “Wow,” said Tamsin, but she sounded respectful, not horrified, the way I’d been when I’d seen the tag on my mother’s bra.

  “And she always wears clothes where you can see her chest!” I shook my head. “But that’s probably not her fault. I mean, what’s she going to wear so you can’t see her chest?” I stared at the ceiling and told my friends the worst part. “And now I’m getting them, too.”

  “You’re lucky,” Tamsin said, looking up from her book to gaze unhappily at her own chest. “Guys love big boobs.”

  “Which is why our mom bought hers,” Todd said.

  “She says I can get implants, too, when I’m sixteen,” said Tamsin. “As if.”

  I flushed, thinking of James again, who hadn’t seemed bothered by my chest. “Amber Gross doesn’t have big boobs,” I said. “Amber Gross barely has any boobs at all.”

  “Yeah, but she’s Amber Gross.” Out loud, it sounded stupid, but I knew exactly what Tamsin meant. In spite of her last name, which you’d think would be an automatic disqualifier, Amber Gross is the most popular girl in our grade. Amber Gross has chestnut-brown hair, straight and shiny as a satin curtain, and a twinkly smile that would make you think her braces are jewelry she had commissioned for her teeth. No zit would ever dare deface her skin. Her body is tiny and perfect, and her clothes are tiny and perfect, and she is going out with Martin Baker, who’s on the J.V. soccer team even though he’s only a seventh-grader. Best of all, most important, Amber can talk to anybody, parents or teachers or boys, and everything that comes out of her mouth—the words and the sound of the words—is always just right.

  I am the anti-Amber, the girl whose face you’d skip right over, the one who stands in the back row of class pictures, slouching, looking away; the one who smiles and nods at things she can’t quite hear and hopes that will be good enough. I never know the right thing to say, not even in my own head, and half the time, if I do manage to say something, people ask me to speak up or repeat myself, because my voice is so low and gravelly and strange-sounding that they can’t hear me or understand what I’m saying.

  I used to think that I was special—special in a good way, like my mother used to tell me. I remember being maybe three or four, in my speech therapist’s office, feeling my mother’s fingers against my chin as she gently moved my face so I was looking at her lips in the mirror. Watch me, Joy. I was born premature, with mild hearing loss in one ear and moderate loss in the other, so it took me longer to talk than most kids. In nursery school, I’d get frustrated when people couldn’t understand me. I’d scream, throw things, hurl myself onto the ABC carpet and pound it with my feet and fists. My mother came to school with me every day. She never got mad at me or lost her patience. She’d wait until I stopped crying. She’d wipe my face and give me apple juice in a sippie cup and lead me over to the easels or the Story Corner, where she’d settle me in her lap and read me a book. At home, we’d practice in front of the mirror, her eyes on my eyes and her fingers on my chin. You’re doing so well! You’re doing just great! Say “mmm.” She’d sit with me in her lap, pressing one of my hands against my throat so I could feel the sound’s vibration, and my other hand on my lips, so I could feel the air streaming out of my nose. Say “mmm.” Say “mmm.” Say “Mama.”

  We’d walk home together at lunchtime, and if it had been a hard day, I would get a treat. We’d go to Pearl Art Supplies for water-color paint or new buttons, or to Rita’s for water ice when it was warm, and my mother would scoop me into her arms and say that she was so proud, that I was so special. It has taken me all of this time to learn that I’m really not. The only reason anyone in the real world thinks I’m special is because of my hearing aids and my weird voice and because once, a long time ago, my mother wrote a book.

  “Can I go now?” asked Tamsin. She had one hand curled around Ghost World, her finger marking her place.

  “I’m only on two. Two,” I said. “She and my father are disgusting.” They laugh together all the time. They kiss when they think I’m not watching. They speak a private language, one made up of all the movies and TV shows they’ve seen and the magazines they’ve read. One of them will say something like “Can’t we all just get along?” or “Lewis Lapham has gone too far this time,” and the other one will start laughing. “Who is Lewis Lapham? What’s so funny about a sweatshirt that just says ‘College’?” I’ll ask, and they’ll try to explain, but it’s like when I was little again: Even though I can hear the words, they don’t come together in a way that makes sense.

  “My turn,” said Tamsin. She sat up and piled her hair into a knot on top of her head. “Um . . .”

  I turned away. If Tamsin could find even one thing she didn’t like about her mother, I would be shocked. Mrs. Marmer has a normal-size chest—or at least she did before the implants. Tamsin and Todd’s father is her husband, not an old boyfriend who got Mrs. Marmer pregnant and never even married her.

  But the best thing about Mrs. Marmer is that she leaves her kids alone. Last month she was twenty minutes late to the all-school holiday musical. Tamsin, who was sitting next to me and checking the time on her cell phone every thirty seconds, glared as her mom came tiptoeing in right in the middle of Todd’s first solo, one hand pressed to her mouth, flimsy rubber flip-flops slapping against the auditorium floor. Traffic, she mouthed, easing herself into the seat next to Tamsin. “I’m so sorry, baby, did I miss much?” My mom was sitting on my other side, and I saw her lips tighten as she took in Mrs. Marmer’s flip-flops and bright coral toenails. My mom’s face relaxed when she saw me looking, and she shrugged. “Things happen,” she whispered while Tamsin flipped her cell phone shut, pressing her lips together.

  I thought that I’d never been so jealous of my friends. My mother would never, ever forget me. Not even for twenty minutes. Probably not even for twenty seconds. I am the main topic of interest in her life. She drops me off at school every morning (every other kid in my class walks or takes the bus), and every afternoon, as soon as the last bell rings, her minivan (chosen because Consumers Digest rated it the safest car on the market) is first in line to pick me up. When I have swim practice or show choir rehearsal, she waits for me, sitting in the bleachers or the auditorium, knitting or tapping away on her laptop. She’s the president of the home/school association, and my room mother, and she’s always the first one to volunteer to bring the cut-up fruit and sports drink to the meets, or host the cast parties after the shows, or push a book into my hand, something about Terabithia or Narnia, something by Philip Pullman or Roald Dahl. Ooh, Joy, you’re going to love this one; it was my favorite when I was your age!

  She’s with me almost every minute of the day when I’m not in class, watching me like she’s waiting for me to throw my sippie cup across the floor and start kicking the carpet, to need her again, the way I did when I was three. And when she’s not with me, she’s thinking about me, planning some kind of mother-daughter activity or knitting me something I don’t need (another scarf, ano
ther sweater, another pair of mittens), buying me yet another book that I’ll just leave on my bookshelf or installing special safety locks on my bedroom window because once, before I was born, some rock star’s kid fell out of a window (I looked it up online and found out that the window was on the fifty-third floor of a high-rise in New York City, and the kid was four, but even after I’d explained all of that to my mother, she still had the safety locks installed).

  “Our mom makes terrible school lunches,” Tamsin finally managed.

  “The worst,” Todd said, nodding. I tried to sound sympathetic, but I was thinking that I’d trade a soggy cream-cheese-and-olive sandwich or a leftover low-carb burrito any day of the week if I’d get Mrs. Marmer instead of a mother who never left me alone. She doesn’t hold my chin anymore, but sometimes I think I can still feel her fingers on my face. As soon as I get into the car after school, it starts: How was your day? How was school? Can I get you a snack? Want to help me make dinner? Can I pick you up anything at the supermarket? Do you need any help with your homework? until I just want to scream, Leave me alone, leave me alone, I can’t breathe with you this close to me!, but I can’t, because if I do, she will look at me like I slapped her or stuck a knife in her tire or did something else on purpose, just to hurt her.

  I adjusted my pillow, half listening to Tamsin and Todd describe the latest horror they’d pulled out of their lunch bags (“She thought she was being this great mother for buying the all-natural peanut butter that’s all oily on top, but I don’t even like peanut butter, and then she didn’t even stir it, so I was, like, eating a grease sandwich”), staring at the glow-in-the-dark stars my mother and I had pasted to the ceiling when I was little, a long time ago.

  “Shh,” I said as I heard my mother’s footsteps approaching. I turned out the lights, and the three of us lay in the darkness. Tamsin clicked her retainer in and out of her mouth and picked up her book and tried to read it by the light of the digital clock, and I whispered for her to be quiet and put it away. Frenchie grumbled in her sleep. The numbers on the clock changed from 12:45 to 12:46.

  “Why does she do this?” Todd wondered.

  “She just loves me so much,” I said. I’d meant for it to come out sarcastic, but instead it just sounded pathetic, and weak, and worst of all, true.

  At 12:57, the door creaked open. I made sure my hair was over my ears so that my mom wouldn’t see my hearing aids and know that we’d been talking, and I held my breath, hoping that Tamsin wouldn’t start with her retainer and give us away. My mother approached the bed and stood there for a moment, not touching me but looking down, the way she did every single night of my life, standing in the dark, listening to me breathe. When she turned toward the window, I opened my eyes a crack, and I could see her in the lamplight, her secret face, the one she shows only to me.

  THREE

  “He wants . . . to have . . . a baby.”

  “That bastard,” said Samantha from the yoga mat beside me. “Okay, wait. Who are we talking about?”

  I smiled. My best friend had been having a rough few months, guywise, that had culminated in a painful breakup with her latest beau. During what Sam delicately called “an intimate moment,” he’d grabbed some lotion from the bedside table and wound up slathering her breasts and his business with her five-hundred-dollar-an-ounce anti-wrinkle cream. Sam had been furious, and her gentleman caller had been furious that she’d been furious (“What? You’re saying I’m not worth it!” he’d shouted, and she’d informed him that no man was worth five hundred dollars per session, plus the time she’d have to spend on the Cellex-C waiting list to get more).

  “Peter. My husband,” I said. “Guy I married? Tall, dark hair? Bought me a Roomba for my birthday?” I lowered my voice. Linda Larson was two rows ahead of us; Linda, with the body of a nineteen-year-old starlet and the ears of a CIA snoop. “My husband, Peter, wants to have a baby.”

  “Oh my,” Samantha said. She shook her rich, glossy hair and adjusted her headband, then her pigeon pose.

  I gave up on my own pigeon and rolled from my hands and knees onto the forgiving floor. Sam, meanwhile, had eased into downward dog, then, in one ridiculously fluid movement, rolled into a shoulder stand. It was six o’clock on Tuesday night, and we were at Yoga Child on South Street for Over Forty Yoga. I’d signed us up in September, optimistically picturing a class full of stooped-over grannies with walkers and osteoporosis who’d complain about their hot flashes in between the chants. How wrong I’d been. Our group was comprised of eight fit, firm babes in black stretchy yoga pants, none of whom—Sam and Linda included—appeared to be over thirty-five, and me, in extra-large blue sweatpants and a Philadelphia Academy T-shirt, looking every year of my age, trying, and mostly failing, to keep up.

  “So what are you going to do?” asked Sam.

  “Hang . . . on,” I huffed, heaving myself into an epically clumsy downward dog. The room smelled like oranges and beeswax candles and competing perfumes. Sam flipped onto her belly, pushed up into a baby cobra, and swiveled her long neck so she could look at me.

  “Peter made me an appointment. I’m supposed to find out if I have viable eggs,” I whispered. “And then find a surrogate, I guess.”

  Sam looked horrified. “Cannie, I love you like a sister, but I hope you’re not going to ask me what I think you’re going to ask me. Get your mind off my vagina!”

  “It’d be your uterus, actually,” I whispered back.

  “Either way, it ain’t happening.”

  Ashleigh, our instructor, looked at us sternly. “Let’s all move into happy baby,” she said in her low, soothing voice.

  “God, I hate it when yoga becomes ironic,” I muttered as we shifted onto our backs and grabbed our feet, pulling our knees to our chests.

  “Do you even want another baby?” Sam asked.

  “Not sure.” Babies. How could I think about babies when Joy was already talking about her bat mitzvah party, and I was buying my Tylenol in the easy-to-open bottles with the warning printed in big, easy-to-read letters on the side? “I’m old.”

  “Oh, you are not,” said Sam loyally (and a bit defensively—she’s six months older than I am).

  “Forty-two is too old to be doing three A.M. feedings.”

  “Madonna did it,” Sam offered.

  “Madonna isn’t human,” I replied.

  At Ashleigh’s instructions, we lowered our legs to the floor, let our arms fall heavily to our sides, breathed through five minutes of shivasana, then sat cross-legged for the final meditation.

  “You could hire someone,” Sam offered. “Like a wet nurse.” Ashleigh frowned at us again. “Wet nurse” didn’t sound even vaguely like om shanti shanti. Sam pressed her hands together in front of her chest. “They’re bound to come back. Everything else has. Anyhow, wet nurses aren’t the point. The point is, do you really want another baby?”

  I sat up, pressed my clasped hands against my heart, and nodded namasté at Ashleigh. “It’s something I’m not unwilling to consider,” I finally said.

  “You’ve been hanging around too many lawyers,” Sam said.

  I shook my head. “Only you. And it might not even matter. My eggs are probably funky.”

  We rolled up our mats while Ashleigh stood at the doorway, bidding each of us a serene Zen farewell. We dropped our blocks and straps into the basket by the door, then sat on the futon in the foyer to pull on our boots and our jackets. I was wearing a wool hat with earflaps that I’d knitted myself, a matching scarf, and a puffy fuchsia down coat that made me, by my own charitable assessment, about the size of a compact car. Sam had on a gorgeous red cashmere poncho, trimmed with red and orange angora pom-poms. If I wore that, I thought, I’d look like an erupting volcano.

  We crossed snow-lined South Street to the coffee shop, where it had become our tradition to follow yoga class with double-shot lattes. Inside, I hung my coat on the back of a chair while Sam doctored her drink with cinnamon and nutmeg. A little brother or sister fo
r Joy, I thought. A baby with Peter’s brown hair and his dark eyes, his slow, thoughtful manner, and nothing at all of my ex-boyfriend, Bruce Guberman, who’d celebrated Joy’s birth by taking a two-year vacation to Amsterdam, where, I can only assume, he devoted himself to the noble goal of smoking his body weight in marijuana.

  I grow old, I grow old, I thought as Sam sat down with a chocolate-dipped biscotti in her hand and a wicked gleam in her eye.

  “The thing is, Joy’s in trouble,” I blurted.

  Sam looked surprised. “What?”

  “She got a C in English.”

  Sam’s expression shifted from surprise to bemusement.

  “Okay, I know, no big deal, but every time I ask her about it, she ignores me. She talks to me like she’s being charged by the word, and she looks at me like I smell bad.”

  “Puberty,” Sam pronounced, dipping her biscotti into her latte.

  “Already?” I thought back to Joy’s teacher asking if she had a boyfriend, and how swiftly I’d dismissed the very notion.

  “It’s the hormones in the milk,” Sam said. “60 Minutes did a special. Little eight-year-olds in Texas with tampons in their lunch boxes.”

  I shuddered. “Joy hasn’t gotten her period.” At least she hadn’t said anything about it. And if she had gotten her period, she’d have told me, I thought—even as a twinge of unease worked its way up my spine and I wondered whether it was true. “And what about her grades?”