Certain Girls Page 4

  “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 time 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.

  “But . . .” Sam’s hair was darker than Brooke’s. Her eyes were brown, not blue. Her face was a different shape, and Brooke Shields was probably three inches taller, fifteen pounds thinner, and not even remotely Semitic. Let it go, I thought. “Why don’t you just take Peter to the wedding?”

  Sam broke off a chunk of biscotti and bounced her water bottle against her thigh. “I’m touched that you’d offer, but my mother’s met him, remember?”

  “Oh, right.” Sam’s mother had joined us a few years ago for Thanksgiving. She’d swept into our house in a floor-length mink, frowned at the turkey as if it had insulted her, eaten precisely one spoonful of cranberry relish, and showered Joy with expensive American Girl dolls and accessories after observing pointedly to no one in particular that she had to spoil little girls when she could, since it was clear that Sam wouldn’t be giving her grandchildren of her own. “Well, isn’t there anyone from work you could take?”

  “The firm directory’s online,” Sam said. “My mother would look up whoever I brought and figure out that he was just doing me a favor.”

  “Your mother would do that? She’d Google your date?”

  Sam shrugged. “I come by my obsessive personality honestly.”

  “How about someone from a different firm? Don’t you meet people at those Continuing Legal Education things?”

  She shook her head. “Married. Gay. Occasionally both.”

  “Um. You could hire an actor.”

  “As a last resort,” she said. “I’ve
already made a few calls.”

  “Really?”

  “I told them I was casting a low-budget commercial. Do you know what SAG’s day rate is?”

  “Do I want to?”

  “You do not. And it doubles on weekends, and you have to pay extra for travel, so never mind.” Sam polished off her biscotti. “You’re so lucky. You have no idea.”

  Then why does Peter want to change everything? I wondered. And what was going on with Joy? I didn’t say any of it out loud. “Go with God,” I said instead, and hugged Samantha goodbye. I retrieved my coat, checked the time, and considered wandering up to Walnut Street for a little window-shopping. But it was almost eight, and Joy might need help with her English homework. I pulled my scarf tight around my neck, tugged my hat over my ears, and started my ten-block walk back home.

  I’d lived in the neighborhood long enough to bore friends and acquaintances with my Used-To tour: the Starbucks that used to be a pizza shop where you could buy twists of garlic bread, three for a dollar; the burrito place that used to be a video store; the shoe store that used to sell books.

  Tiny white Christmas lights still twinkled from the door of the cheesesteak place, and the bright windows of Whole Foods were papered with hopeful red and pink valentines, but there was no denying that we were between holidays. In the bitter trench of winter, the weather had turned ugly again. A hard-edged wind blew grit and newspapers and someone’s discarded weave down South Street, and the bare tree branches shivered in the dark. I fell in behind a pack of girls in rolled-up black jeans and stilettos, snapping pictures of one another with their cell phones. Cold seeped up from the sidewalk through the rubber soles of my boots. How old are these girls, anyhow? I wondered as one of them wiggled her tongue between her spread fingers while her friend snapped a picture. Did their mothers know they were out?

  You’re so lucky, Sam had said. But if our life was so good, why was Peter so eager to shake it all up? A baby, I mused. A baby would change everything. But maybe change was good. Maybe it wasn’t that I’d arrived at the safe harbor I’d longed for during my own unhappy childhood. Maybe it was just inertia—or, worse, fear—that was keeping me in the same place, living in the same house, taking the same vacations, never hoping for more than what I had.

  Of course, I’d hoped for more once, once upon a time, in my fearless twenties, when I’d sold a screenplay and published a novel and been, very briefly, a strange kind of famous. It hadn’t ended well. I pushed down the memories, gave my hat another tug, crossed the street with my breath hanging in front of me in icy white puffs, and hurried back home so fast that anyone watching might have thought I was being chased.

  FOUR

  On Valentine’s Day, the kids at the Philadelphia Academy buy one another sugar cookies shaped like hearts with pink and red frosting, and little cards attached for a message. Each cookie costs a dollar, and all the money goes to the school’s building fund.

  I’ve been going to the Philadelphia Academy since kindergarten, and every year I know exactly what I’ll find on my desk on February 14: one cookie apiece from Tamsin and Todd, and a cookie from Jeremy Albin, whose mother, like mine, makes him buy cookies for every kid in our class.

  I also know that every year at some point during early February, my mother and I will have a fight (“a discussion,” she calls it, but it’s really a fight) about the cookies. I will tell her that I should just buy them with my own money and give them to my actual friends. She’ll reply that I’ll have the rest of my life to start excluding people and that seventh grade (or sixth grade, or whatever grade I’m in at the time) is too early to start.

  I’ll say that if I give cookies to everyone, they don’t mean anything. She’ll sigh, which will make her boobs shift in a way I can’t stand to look at, and say, Yes, they do, they mean “Happy Valentine’s Day from Joy,” and what if there’s a kid who doesn’t get any cookies at all? How would that kid feel? And how would I feel, knowing that I could have prevented such a tragedy by spending her money—not even my own money but hers—making sure that everyone gets a cookie?

  She kind of has a point. It’s true that there are a few kids in my class—Jack Corsey, who has such terrible dandruff that when he wears dark sweaters, it looks like he was out in a snowstorm, and maybe even Tamsin, who can be kind of intense when she starts talking about speculative fiction—who might not get cookies if it wasn’t for me and Jeremy Albin.

  My problem is with the people who don’t deserve extra cookies, like Amber Gross. Amber Gross, as far as I can remember, has never said a single word to me, even though we’ve been going to regular school and Hebrew school together since we started both. Amber and I were even in the same Little People’s Music class when we were two. My mom has pictures, and while there are photographs that show us actually in the same room, we’re never in the same part of the room, leading me to believe that Amber was too cool for me even before we could talk. Amber gets tons of cookies. Believe me, she doesn’t need mine.

  But when I pointed this out to my mother the Friday before Valentine’s Day, she got a sour look on her face and unloaded one of her dozen useless phrases: “Joy,” she said, “life’s too short.”

  Too short for what? I wanted to ask, but the bell started ringing loudly enough for us to hear through the rolled-up windows. My mom slipped a twenty-dollar bill into my hand. “Do it because it’ll make me happy,” she said. She tried to hug me, but I slid to the edge of my seat. “Have a great day!” I could hear her calling as I stuffed the money into the pocket of my jeans and walked across the play yard with my head down while the first bell rang.

  On February 14, like every school day, I set my alarm for five-forty-five. In the shower, I exfoliated my legs and elbows with the Orange Sugar Energy Scrub that Aunt Elle had given me, and shaved my legs and armpits. I washed my hair with Step One of the Jon Carame Secret Agent Anti-Frizz Protection Program and conditioned with Step Two, then turned the water to cold and stood there shivering while I counted to thirty, so the cold water could seal the cuticles.

  By six-fifteen, I was in my towel, teeth flossed and brushed, the next two steps of the Anti-Frizz Protection Program already spritzed (Step Three) and smoothed (Step Four) through my hair. It took me forty-five minutes with a paddle brush and a diffuser to get my hair looking right. It might have taken me less time if I didn’t have to keep checking to make sure the door was locked. My mother doesn’t believe I should straighten my hair. My mother believes I should embrace my natural beauty. This means I am the only girl in the world who has to hide her straightening iron under her bed like it’s a dirty magazine or a gun.

  At seven o’clock, my hair was done. I hung up my wet towel, rinsed my mouth again, and stuck a pantiliner on my underwear. My period isn’t due for weeks, but I don’t take any chances. When you’ve already got one major thing wrong with you, you can’t risk having to run to the nurse’s office with a borrowed sweater flopping around your waist and everyone staring at you, knowing exactly what’s happened.

  I wiped off the sink and counter with toilet paper, put my nightgown back on, and slid back into bed. Five minutes later, my mother knocked on the door.

  “Rise and shine,” she said. Her own hair was shoved back from her face in a sloppy half bun, half ponytail, and she was wearing my dad’s bathrobe, with her glasses sticking out of the V of the chest. “Do you want eggs or oatmeal?”

  I haven’t eaten eggs or oatmeal for breakfast all year. What I eat for breakfast is three-quarters of a cup of high-fiber protein-enriched bran flakes, a half cup of organic skim milk, and six raw almonds. This does not stop my mother from asking if I want eggs or oatmeal every morning. “No, thanks. I’ll just have cereal.” I threw back the covers and went to the bathroom like I hadn’t already been in there for over an hour. I brushed my teeth again, pulled on my jeans and boots and a pink sweater, tucked my mascara and lip gloss into my pocket, and went downstairs to the kitchen, where I found my mother holding the red kettle in he
r hands like it was some kind of magical object she’d never seen before. I counted out my almonds. She didn’t move. “Mom?” I finally asked.

  She set the kettle on the burner and clicked on the flame. “Sorry, honey.” She sat down at the table across from me and sighed before patting her scrunched-up hair, as if that would help (it didn’t). “Just thinking.”

  “About what?”

  She fussed with her hair some more and smiled kind of sadly. “Oh, you know. Grown-up stuff.” Which was, I thought, exactly what a mother would say to her daughter. If her daughter were four.

  She dropped me off, as usual, outside of the chain-link fence that separates the empty play yard from the sidewalk. I stopped in the empty first-floor girls’ room, where I pulled my lip gloss out of my pocket and smoothed some onto my lips. Then I unzipped my backpack and pulled out my lunch, which was stored in a zippered, insulated pink bag with my name monogrammed on the front. I transferred the food out of the horrible pink bag and into a plain plastic bag from the grocery store, which is what every other kid uses.

  At last I reached behind my straightened hair, pulled out my hearing aids, and slipped them into my pocket. It’s not like this is going to fool anyone. Almost every kid in my class remembers how I started kindergarten with the big, square, horrible behind-the-ear hearing aids. Up until third grade, my teachers would wear wireless microphones, and I would wear earphones, like the ones from an iPod, so I could hear them. I’d try to fluff out my crazy, frizzy nest of hair so nobody could see the hearing aids or the headphones, but everyone knew they were there. Which wasn’t entirely bad: The one spell of popularity I’d ever had occurred after Mrs. Mears left her microphone on when she went to the teachers’ lounge and the entire class huddled around my earphones to listen (the next day, instead of discussing photosynthesis, Mrs. Mears’s lecture was “Irritable Bowel Syndrome: It Is Not a Joke”).