Cannie Shapiro 02 Certain Girls Page 6

  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 "Chapter Sixteen" 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 "Chapter Sixteen", 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 s
ilver 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 COUNTRY 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 hand-held.

  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.

  My mother squirted honey into her tea and shook some Wheat Thins onto a yellow plate. "You'd probably sit at the kids' table, with Tyler and his friends, and his sister, um..."

  "Ruth," I said. My tone made it clear that my family, my biological family, Bruce's side of the family, was also none of her business. But either she didn't catch my dirty look or she decided to ignore it.

  "Ruth. Right. It might be fun," she said in a perfectly neutral voice.

  I shrugged again and arranged the pieces of the invitation in a neat stack.

  My mom looked at me. "You know that your invitations won't be quite as..." She paused, and I could tell she was picking out her next word carefully. "Elaborate as Tyler's," she finished.

  I shrugged. "Tyler's kind of a geek."

  "Well, it's up to you. Just let me know." Her voice was still neutral, but I could tell from the look on her face that she was pleased, as if I'd passed some kind of test. I wished I'd told her that I wanted to go, that what I wanted more than anything was to be a part of Bruce's normal family.

  I braced myself, waiting for her to say something or ask me what I was thinking. But she surprised me and managed to restrain herself, leaving me in the kitchen as she carried her tea into the office. After a minute, I heard the familiar sound of her fingers rattling across the keyboard.

  I looked down at the invitation, then slid all of the pieces except for the reply card back into the oversize envelope, which I left on top of the recycling bin, where my mother would be sure to see it. I stuck the reply card in my back pocket. After dinner, when my mom was watching one of her reality-TV shows and my father was editing some medical-journal article, I pulled it out and carefully wrote, Miss Joy Shapiro Krushelevansky will be pleased to attend. Then I slipped the card underneath a stack of underwear in my top dresser drawer, thinking, Maybe. Maybe not.

  SEVEN

  "All right!" I said as we piled out of the minivan, doing my best to sound upbeat and cheerful, as opposed to desperate and panicky. "Who wants to start?" It was a sunny March morning, the weather warming, the sky a clear blue, the air soft and scented with honeysuckle. The trees were beginning to bud, and the path along Forbidden Drive was only slightly muddy. My plan was to go for a family hike--two miles up, then two miles back, with a stop to feed the ducks in between. Then we'd drive to Manayunk for brunch and hammer out the plans for Joy's bat mitzvah along the way.

  My daughter slammed her car door and stood in her familiar posture: chin tucked against her chest, shoulders drawn up toward her ears. Her long legs were encased in tight jeans that she'd topped with a fleece jacket that matched her bright blue fleece headband. Frenchelle's leash was wrapped around her right wrist, and her left hand was shoved into her pocket, presumably beside the fleece hat I'd made her take (I'd also told her she might want to bring a scarf, but she'd glared at me as if I'd proposed she wear a petticoat, so I'd just wrapped an extra around my own neck).

  While Peter rummaged in the glove compartment for the energy bar he was certain he'd left there, Joy started walking, head down, fists clenched, looking like she expected to find gates reading ARBEIT MACHT FREI at the top of the path, instead of a stand that sells sports drinks and ice-cream bars in the summertime. I resisted the urge to chase her, to run up the path and walk with her until she tells me what is wrong.

  "Joy," I called. She didn't turn. "Joy!" I said.

  She stopped ten yards ahead of us. Her entire body seemed to sigh as she let me catch up.

  "Joy," I said, panting slightly. "Slow your roll. Bat mitzvah. Ideas."

  She shrugged. "Well, I guess I'm having one, right?"

  I bit back the half-dozen replies that instantly occurred to me. "Yes," I said pleasantly to my daughter's back. "You're having a bat mitzvah. A fate worse than death, I know, but somehow you'll have to endure. Your father and I were thinking about a Saturday-morning service and a luncheon afterward."

  This earned me another shrug, coupled with a contemptuous look at my hiking gear: sweatpants, sneakers, a long-sleeved T-shirt with a short-sleeved V-neck on top. Was that so bad? Judging from her face, it was. Probably the two scarves, I thought.

  "Well, if you've already decided, what do you need me for?" Joy asked.

  I stopped walking, frozen in place on the damp dirt of the path, staring at my daughter and imagining my hands on her shoulders, digging into the fleece and the flesh underneath as I gave her the brisk, corrective shake that she so desperately deserved. Last year at this time, before her jeans got tight and her grades and attitude got rotten, she'd have been delighted to spend an afternoon with Peter and me on an adventure: a hike or a bike ride or a trip to the antique shops in Lancaster. We'd done this same walk a dozen times with my sister or Samantha or my mom, and Joy had never objected, never behaved like this. I gave Peter what was quickly becoming my own patented look of desperation: the I can't talk to her; you take it from here. Maybe it was being older, or a man, that made him so patient. Or maybe, I'd think sometimes, and instantly feel guilty for thinking it, it was because she wasn't really his. He was less invested; he could afford to keep his cool.

  "How about colors?" Peter asked Joy, catching up with us effortlessly. "Is pink still your favorite?"

  "Pink," Joy said icily, "was never my favorite."

  Peter looked back at me. I shrugged. Pink had definitely been her favorite when she was eight years old. We'd spent a whole afternoon at the paint store, and we'd brushed patches of the three different shades we'd chosen on her bedroom wall and observed them in the morning, afternoon, and evening light to determine the perfect pink.

  "Do you want favo
rs?" Peter continued. "We could have a photo booth, like Tamsin and Todd did."

  Shrug. "Whatever."

  "Monogrammed clamshells?" I inquired, unable to keep from sounding frustrated. "Fake gold bling? Do you need me to get implants ahead of time? Because, sweetheart, if that's important to you--"

  "Like anyone would ever give you implants," Joy said, her tone matching mine.

  "Joy, did I ever show you my bar mitzvah party pictures?" Peter asked. His face was calm and his voice untroubled enough to suggest that we'd been having a cordial conversation.

  Joy shrugged, but it was a slightly less hostile shrug than what we'd previously enjoyed.

  "We partied at the Pound Ridge Country Club," said Peter. "My theme was Star Wars. Cocktail hour featured a Death Star constructed entirely from chopped liver."

  The faintest smile flickered across Joy's face. "No way."

  "Way. Did you ever see pictures of my grandfather? By the time he was ninety, the man was a dead ringer for Yoda. Wise he was," Peter said, shaking his head sadly.

  I gave him a grateful look, knowing that he was lying: Star Wars wouldn't have come out until after Peter's bar mitzvah; the senior Krushelevanskys hadn't been what you'd call whimsical folks; and his grandfather Irv hadn't even slightly resembled Yoda.

  "We had inflatable light sabers for favors," Peter continued.

  "Even the girls?" Joy asked.

  "Hmm," Peter rumbled. "Maybe they got something different." He walked, lanky and loose-limbed in his khakis and sweatshirt. "Fake Princess Leia hair?"

  "Ha ha ha," said Joy.

  "I remember that my uncle Herman made the kiddush, and after he was done with the blessing, he told all my friends to stand up and reach under their seats. He'd taped dollar bills under every seat at the kids' table--"

  "A dollar was a lot of money in those days," I interjected, which earned me, inevitably, another eye roll from Joy.