Certain Girls Read online

  “Do you think they’re shills?” I whispered to Peter after we’d taken our seats underneath a reproduction of a Mary Cassatt portrait of a mother and child. If I were a reproductive endocrinologist trying to pique the curiosity and pry open the checkbooks of over-forty hopefuls, I’d stock my waiting room with expectant ladies. Or maybe I’d hire actresses. Stick them in pregnancy pillows, have them sit in the chairs, maybe rub their backs every once in a while and groan convincingly.

  I looked away from the knocked-up chorus line and turned my attention to the forms in my lap. Age. Address. Height. Weight. Ugh. Previous pregnancies. I wrote, One. Previous surgeries. I wrote, C-section and hysterectomy, and the date: Joy’s birthday.

  “Mrs. Krushelevansky?”

  I got to my feet and proceeded to the exam room, where I stripped from the waist down, draped myself in three different cotton robes (one to cover my front, one to cover my back, and one on top of those two in case there was any stray flesh peeking out), and arranged myself on the examination table, my legs in stirrups. I lay back, eyes closed, and practiced my pranayama breathing. I breathed in, and Joy appeared before me, eyes averted, face cast down, hands shoved in her pockets and shoulders hunched as if steeled for a blow, hurrying across the school yard. I breathed out, imagining my reaching for her, feeling my hand on the soft wool of her sweater. Baby, what’s wrong? Tell me. I’ll help you. I’ll fix it. Breathe in, and the image dissolved. Breathe out. I should call that child psychologist, the one the synagogue brought in last month to talk about the overscheduled child, the stress of pre-adolescence. Breathe in. If she’d just talk to me. Breathe out. Where had I put my copy of Reviving Ophelia? Breathe in. Maybe there was an explanation for her behavior other than “throes of adolescence.” Maybe she actually did have a crush on some boy who’d spurned her. Breathe out. I could help with that. I’d take her out somewhere special: maybe the chocolate buffet at the Ritz-Carlton. I’d sit her down and tell her that having your heart broken is a part of growing up. I’d share with her some of the less lurid examples from my own life, and then I’d point to Peter and tell her that everything happens for a reason, that every heartbreak serves a purpose, and that it all works out in the end.

  There was a brisk knock, then the door swung open. “Hello there!” said Dr. Neville, who turned out to be a black man in his sixties, with close-cropped iron-gray hair. Peter wheeled over a stool and sat by my side as Dr. Neville stood at the counter with his back to me, squirting gel from a squeeze bottle onto . . . oh my God.

  “Is that . . . are you . . .” I gestured vaguely at the probe in his hands, which bore a disturbing resemblance to the item Sam had given me for my bachelorette party. “Shouldn’t you at least buy me dinner first?”

  Peter and Dr. Neville shared a collegial chuckle. As they “ho ho ho’d,” I closed my eyes and tried to relax. The nurse dimmed the lights and tilted the monitor so that I could see it. I sucked in my breath as the probe slid inside of me.

  “And . . . look! There we are.”

  I turned my head toward the screen and saw a swirling mass of gray—and then, against it, tiny circles like glowing nickels, like little moons.

  “Those are your eggs,” Dr. Neville said, all hearty and congratulatory, as if I was personally responsible for their presence. He nodded, satisfied, pulled out the probe, and handed it off to his nurse. Peter squeezed my shoulder as the doctor offered a solemn high five and said, “Congratulations, guys. We’re in business!”

  After I’d gotten dressed, I met Peter in the doctor’s wood-paneled office, where everything from the business-card holder to the mouse pad was emblazoned with the name of a different pharmaceutical company, and the walls were papered with pictures of babies. Dr. Neville led us through the particulars of the process: the half-dozen drugs I’d have to take to override my natural cycle, ripen the largest possible number of eggs, and set the optimal conditions for the harvest—“a simple procedure, really,” Dr. Neville assured me, that would be performed in the hospital, under sedation, not even anesthesia.

  “And this is all safe? The surgery? All those hormones?” More doctorly chuckling between the men with MDs before I got my answer, which came down to: Yes, we think so, but the technology’s relatively new. However, long-term longitudinal studies seem to reveal . . .

  I tuned out the tech-speak and stared at the walls. All those happy families. Moms and dads, siblings and grandparents, and their brand-new babies, pink and serene as miniature Buddhas or screaming from underneath their pink-and-blue caps with their eyes shut and their toothless mouths open wide.

  SIX

  When I put my hearing aids back in my ears in the locker room after swim practice, I feel like I’m coming up from underwater again. Down in the deep end of the school’s swimming pool, or bodysurfing the waves in the summertime on the beach in Avalon, every sound is faint and muffled. You have to work harder than normal to make sense of them, and what you feel is the water itself, heavy against the bones of your face. Breaking the surface of the pool is a relief and a disappointment. For me, it’s like leaving a secret world where everyone’s equal, where everyone hears the same way as me, and where our coach yells and signs instructions so that I get them at the same time as everyone else.

  I slid the little pink knobs inside my ears and took a breath, hearing the sound of my own exhalation, the water dripping from the shower onto the tiled floor, the echo of my teammates’ voices. Then I pulled on my coat and fleece hat and walked out to the curb, where my mother was waiting, same as always. “How was school?” she asked, and I said, “Fine,” which was what I always said. It’s strange, but she had no idea how much everything had changed. She didn’t know that I’d had lunch with Amber Gross and her popular friends, that I maybe could be one of those girls.

  At home, my mother made me a snack and sat down at the table with me, leaning forward expectantly, as if we were going to have some big heart-to-heart. “I’m going to Tamsin and Todd’s to do my homework,” I said.

  Disappointment flickered across her face, but her voice was chirpy as ever. “Home for dinner, right?”

  “Sure,” I said. Twenty minutes later, Tamsin and Todd and I were walking down Bainbridge Street, toward the used bookstore on the corner.

  “I don’t know if this is such a good idea,” Todd said. I kept walking. It felt as if all of my senses had gotten sharper since I’d left the house. I could see every bit of grime on the curbs, every piece of trash blowing down the sidewalk, the words FUCK YOU inked across the yellow metal box stuffed full of free newspapers; I could feel the damp breeze on my cheek, could smell frying onions from the cheesesteak place a block away.

  “Why is it a bad idea?” I asked. “You guys have read it, haven’t you?”

  “Um,” said Todd. Tamsin shot him a look. Then neither one of them said anything else as the bookstore door swung open. Todd followed me through the stacks, and Tamsin drifted off toward the comics.

  It took me only a minute of wandering the dusty aisle to find Big Girls Don’t Cry. There were five copies: three big paperbacks and two chunky smaller ones, with the words THE SMASH HIT WORLDWIDE BESTSELLER written in gold foil underneath the title. I picked one of the small paperbacks because it was the cheapest.

  “Ah, an oldie but a goodie,” said the clerk, sliding the book into a brown paper bag. “You know, the author used to live in Philadelphia.”

  I didn’t answer. It was strange to hear my mother referred to in the past tense, as if she’d moved away or died.

  I tucked the bag into my coat pocket, and Tamsin and Todd and I walked to Three Bears Park, where we’d played when we were little. Weak sunshine was starting to filter through the clouds; it had warmed up enough for the kids to take off their jackets. Toddler-sized coats in bright yellows and soft pinks were piled on one of the benches, and kids chased one another around the big circular planter that was still filled with mounds of half-melted snow.

  I sat on a bench, flipped the book
open at random, and read out loud. “Baby,” Drew gasped, and eased one sweat-sticky hand down my panties.

  Todd was watching the kids on the slide. Tamsin pulled a book out of her own shopping bag. I gulped and kept reading to myself. I wriggled out of my bra and straddled his lap, careful to distribute my weight so that I wouldn’t leave bruises. If I was bigger than other girls who’d been there before, he didn’t seem to mind, as he gasped my name and licked my . . . “You know what? This isn’t fair. It’s a sex scene. I mean . . .” I flipped the book open to another page and started reading that. “It’s tiny,” I told Sarah. “Teeny-tiny! Like the end of one of those pencils they give you at the miniature golf course. I didn’t know whether he was trying to fuck me or erase me!” “Okay,” I said, slamming the book shut. “Is this entire thing just people having sex?”

  Todd shrugged.

  “It’s not all sex scenes,” said Tamsin, slipping her own book back into her bag. “There’s stuff about your family, too. I mean,” she added quickly, “the heroine’s family.”

  I turned the book over. My mom’s picture was on the back cover, beaming at me from ten years ago. Her hair was longer and curled, like she was auditioning to be a newscaster, and her lipstick was the exact same shade as the stuff I’d just wiped off my mouth in the school bathroom. “Has everyone in our grade read this?” I asked.

  “No idea,” Todd said too fast. I flipped through the pages slowly, letting them fan against my fingers. Words and phrases jumped out. “Fat . . . his fingers caressed my lardy, dimpled thighs . . . the lavender mafia rides to the rescue . . . my father, the Bad Dad . . .”

  I closed the book carefully. I yanked my hair down tight against my cheeks, something I did when I was nervous, to make sure nobody could see my hearing aids. Then I wrapped my arms around myself. “This is awful.”

  Todd said nothing. Tamsin pressed her lips together without meeting my eyes. Little kids raced around our bench, screeching and waving plastic wands, filling the air with iridescent soap bubbles.

  “It’s not that bad,” Todd finally said. “It’s not about you.”

  Except, as I found out when I read all 372 pages of Big Girls Don’t Cry, it kind of was.

  I once heard a story about a man in Dallas who ate a 747. How, asked the interviewer, did you manage to eat an entire airplane? The man—he sounded like a very normal man—said, One bite at a time. I read my mother’s book the same way, one bite at a time. It took me over three weeks of late-night reading: three weeks when I sat with Amber every day for lunch, and every afternoon when my mother asked how school was, I always answered “fine.” The days went by just like normal—swim practice and homework and getting up early to style my hair—except it felt as though there was another life, a secret life, unfolding at the same time. It was almost like my real life felt fake—the life of school and homework and swimming and listening to my parents trying to figure out whether to rent the same beach house for two weeks that summer. The world that was happening on the pages seemed somehow more real and more true.

  By the middle of March, I had choked down every word, from the dedication on the first page (“For my Joy”) to the Interview with the Author in the back. “Why did you write Big Girls Don’t Cry?” was the first question. “In part, there was an impulse to rewrite elements of my own life story, to take them apart and put them back together, to make them work,” my mom said. Which meant what, exactly? That the book was true? Made up? That there were elements of truth, only scrambled, rearranged? And if this book was an improved version of life, how bad had her real life been?

  I felt as though every page of the book was now permanently engraved on my brain: the part about how my mom’s (“Allie’s”) father forced her to stand on a scale in front of her entire family every time she came home from prep school for vacation, the part where she tells how her boyfriend (“Drew”) had a penis that looked like a malnourished gherkin. That small or that green? I’d wondered, and put the book aside, even though I’d read only seven pages that night.

  What I learned by the time I finished was that my mother, or “Allie,” the heroine of the book, weighed more than the average football player by the time she was in high school, where she had more sex than every girl I knew combined. She may be a nymphomaniac—and if the last part of the book is true, or based on truth, or even only sort of true, I was definitely an accident.

  Of course, this was not what she’d told me about how I was born. I always wanted a baby, she’d said to me about a million times, pulling me onto her lap or smoothing my hair, her eyes misty with tears. I was so happy when I found out . . . and even though it was kind of a surprise, Bruce was happy, too. We were both so happy to have you. I am so happy you’re here.

  When I was little, that didn’t sound much different from any other kid’s story. We wanted a baby so much is what parents who adopted or used donor sperm or donor eggs or had a baby some other way always say. You were all we ever wanted. We were so happy. I knew kids with moms and dads, and moms and moms, and dads and dads, and single mothers who’d been divorced, and single mothers who’d gone to gay friends or to sperm banks to get pregnant, or to China or Guatemala to adopt, and every story was a version of the same thing: I wanted a baby, and then I got you.

  Except if what she’d written in her book was true, my mother hadn’t wanted me, or any baby at all. I flipped to page 178 and reread the passage I’d already memorized: I hold the stick, still drippy with pee, between two fingers. Heads, I win; tails, I lose. One line, please God, one line, and if I ever have sex again, I’ll get two IUDs and a prescription for the pill, I’ll make him wear a condom and pull out before he comes. “One line, one line, one line,” I chanted. “One line, I’m saved; two lines, my life is over.”

  “Fuck,” I whispered, sitting cross-legged in my pink bed underneath the fake stars. I swallowed hard, queasy with shame. I’d been fooled. I’d been lied to. No matter how much she said she loves me, no matter how careful she was, the truth, in black and white, was that my grandmother was a lesbian, my grandfather was a jerk, and my parents hadn’t wanted me at all. Worse than that, everyone who read the book knew it: everyone in my school, everyone in my life, everyone in the world, maybe. Everybody knows.

  My hands clenched into fists. I stomped down the stairs to my mother’s office and snatched a black Sharpie from the mug on her desk. Back on my bed, I dragged the marker over page 178, erasing the pee-drippy pregnancy test and all of Allie’s “fucks,” running the black tip back and forth until the ink bled onto the page underneath and I’d obliterated every single letter of every shameful word.

  • • •

  When we got home from school the day after I’d finished the book, my mom went to the kitchen and started unloading the dishwasher. “You got a letter,” she said casually.

  “Oh yeah?” The mail was stacked on the kitchen counter, and on top of the stack was a giant glossy black envelope with my name—MISS JOY SHAPIRO KRUSHELEVANSKY—written on the front in fancy silver script.

  I stared at it. “What is it?”

  My mother poked at the envelope with a spatula, making it scoot along the countertop. “I don’t know,” she said.

  The envelope, which was the size of one of my school folders, felt like it was made of thin glass or plastic, not paper. The return address—written on the back, in the same calligraphy as my name and address—was from the Pokitilow family in Cedar Hill, New Jersey. Tyler’s bar mitzvah, I thought, and tore the envelope open. A piece of cream-colored paper with a silver border that looked like a cross between a diploma and a diner menu slid into my hands. Black and silver ribbons were laced through the top of the invitation, and they fell against the printed part in long curls, like pigtails.

  WITH GREAT HAPPINESS, BONNIE AND BOB POKITILOW INVITE YOU TO ATTEND THE BAR MITZVAH OF THEIR SON TYLER BENJAMIN ON SATURDAY, APRIL 21, AT TEN O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING TEMPLE BETH ISRAEL, SHORT HILLS, NEW JERSEY LUNCHEON AND DANCING TO FOLLOW SHORT HILLS COUN
TRY CLUB.

  “Huh,” said my mom, who’d sneaked up behind me and was reading over my shoulder. I turned away fast, picked up the giant envelope, and shook it gently. More pieces of paper rained down onto the counter: a small envelope with another card that fit inside of it (THE COURTESY OF A REPLY IS REQUESTED BY APRIL FIFTH), a map of how to get to the temple and the country club, another little card on which I could check off my selection of beef or salmon for lunch. All the pieces of the invitation also had the address of Tyler’s bar mitzvah website at the bottom. As I smoothed the ribbons, my mother read it out loud: “‘www.Tylersbigbash.com.’ Well. Hmm.” She ducked her head, and I could tell she was trying not to say something, or laugh. She turned away to pick the kettle up from the stove and fill it at the sink. “Want some tea?”

  I shook my head, went to the refrigerator, and poured myself more juice. She flicked the burner on and put the kettle down. It hissed as the flame burned away the water that had collected on the bottom. “Your April’s pretty free,” she said.

  I sipped my juice and thought it over. Bonnie Pokitilow was Bruce’s first cousin. She had pale, freckly skin and curly hair like mine, only hers was a brown so dark it was almost black. I see her, and her husband, and my cousin Tyler, who’s about my age, at my grandma Audrey’s house for Passover and at the birthday parties Grandma Audrey used to have for me when I was little. Tyler and I don’t really have much in common. Last Passover, he spent the entire night in Grandma Audrey’s living room reading Harry Potter and watching old professional wrestling matches on his handheld.

  I wondered who I’d know there. Then, as if reading my mind, my mom said, “Bruce would be there, with, um, Emily, and their kids, and your grandma Audrey. If you wanted, I could give you a ride.”

  I hoisted myself onto one of the stools at the breakfast bar. I didn’t want her doing me any favors. As far as I was concerned, she’d done enough to me already.