Cannie Shapiro 02 Certain Girls Read online

  "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, another 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 grabb
ed 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 namaste 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 for 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?"

  "I wouldn't worry too much," Sam said. "It's not like she's flunking out, and it's seventh grade, not high school. She's probably got a crush or something."

  "It's a phase, right?" I fretted. "I hated my mother. You hated your mother."

  "Still do," Sam said cheerfully. "Which leads us to this week's adventures." She reached into her crocodile bowling bag and extracted a manila folder. "Okay," she said, passing the first page across the table. I looked down at the face of a middle-aged man with thick glasses and thinning hair. His eyes were a watery blue. His smile was an anxious grimace. His biography said that he was forty-seven, divorced, a Reform Jew who attended synagogue on the high holidays, the noncustodial parent of a fifteen-year-old, with a master's degree in urban planning and a penchant for sushi and sunsets. His online handle was Mark the Mensch.

  "Mark the Mensch?" I tried to keep my tone neutral, but my face must have revealed my horror. "He looks..." I studied his picture, his biography, the parameters he'd set for his ideal date. "I don't know. Maybe not a good match for you?"

  "I am not looking for perfect," said Sam, sliding another sheaf of papers across the table. "I'm looking for acceptable." She sighed. "Actually I would take a Jew with a pulse at this point."

  "The wedding?" I asked.

  "What else?"

  Sam's brother, who'd been born Alan and now called himself Avram, was marrying Hannah, born Heather, in August in an Orthodox ceremony in Pittsburgh ("August in Pittsburgh," said Sam. "It's just like April in Paris. Only not"). Upon receiving the news, Samantha--who'd endured so many disastrous blind dates, first dates, group dates, and speed dates that she'd finally bought herself a state-of-the-art vibrator and sworn off men forever--had gone running straight to the Internet, investing five hundred dollars in a Star of David-level membership at AJew4U.com and spending hours downloading profiles of the as-yet-unchosen Chosen People. Never mind that, as I'd pointed out, at an Orthodox wedding the men and women wouldn't even get to dance together and would most likely spend the service and most of the reception in separate rooms. "I'm not looking for love," Sam told me. "I'm not looking for a relationship. I just need one man, for one night, so my mother won't hassle me. Is that so hard?"

  Turns out, it was. Or at least AJew4U.com had failed to yield any prospects so far. But Sam wasn't giving up.

  "What about this guy?" I said, flipping past Mark to the next prospect.

  Sam barely spared him a glance. "Forget it," she said. "He's Canadian."

  I studied the profile. "He lives in Collingswood, New Jersey."

  "Born in Manitoba," Sam said, pointing at the bio. "Once a Canadian, always a Canadian."

  "Now, Samantha," I said. "I went there on my book tour, remember? It's a lovely country, and everyone was very friendly. There's nothing wrong with--"

  "Fake country," she interrupted. "Fake country with fake holidays. Do you really want me to have to celebrate Thanksgiving three weeks after everybody else?"

  "I think it'd actually be six weeks before."

  "Canadian Thanksgiving," she sneered. "They didn't even have pilgrims and Indians there. Whatever. Here," she said, leaning across the table so that one of her pom-poms dangled dangerously close to my coffee. "Look at him."

  I looked. The man in the picture was bald and beaming, and..."Seventy?" I squinted at the small print, certain that I'd read it wrong, then at Sam, who shrugged.

  "Seventy's the new sixty. Sixty's the new forty-five. There was a story about it in the Times."

  "Gah!"

  "Oh, don't be ageist," she snapped.

  "He's old enough to be your father!" I crumpled up the page, but not before accidentally learning that Grandpa's screen name was Sexy Septuagenarian. "Gah!" I said again.

  "You know what would be weird?" Sam asked. "What if your father showed up on one of these websites?"

  "Gah!" I said for the third time--only this time my horror wasn't feigned. "Anyhow, he's married."

  "Oh," said Sam, "and these guys aren't?"

  I shook my head. I'd seen my father only twice in the last fourteen years, and as far as I knew, he was still living in Los Angeles, still married to the much younger dental hygienist with whom he'd had two kids (I'd met them all for the first and only time when he brought them to my college graduation, less out of a desire to see me than because of Princeton's proximity to Sesame Place). I try not to think about him. Most of the ti
me I don't. "That would be weirder than you dating a seventy-year-old?"

  "Fuck you, Smug Married," she said. "Besides, he told me he wasn't interested."

  "Wait. Wait." This was too much. "You propositioned a seventy-year-old?"

  "Walter," said Sam.

  "And Walter turned you down?"

  She sighed, dropped her head, and nodded. When she looked up, her eyes were sparkling, not with excitement but with rage. "Do you think we could figure out a way to short-circuit someone's pacemaker by remote?"

  "What'd he say?"

  "That he was only dating eights and above, and from my picture, I looked like a seven."

  "Oh my God. Are you kidding? What picture are you using?"

  "Brooke," said Sam.

  I groaned. Sam was beautiful, but as she'd waded into the waters of online dating, she'd become increasingly and alarmingly insecure. After her first nibble-free week on AJew4U, she'd found a candid shot of Brooke Shields exiting a friend's baby shower on Us magazine's website. Then, using technologies I had no idea she'd mastered, she downloaded the picture, Photoshopped in her own eyebrows ("So it's not a total lie"), and posted it, without shame or fear of repercussion, underneath her screen name, SassySam.

  "Ouch," I said, and shook my head. "Poor Brooke."

  "Poor Brooke nothing," Samantha said. "She's married, remember? Married twice. Goddamn double-dipper." She glared at the table. "I hate them worse than Canadians."

  "Can I ask you a question?" I waited for her nod, then said, "What are you going to do when one of these guys meets you and notices that you're, um..." There was no delicate way to put it. "Not Brooke Shields?"

  "I'll tell them it's an old picture," Sam said.