Cannie Shapiro 02 Certain Girls Read online

  "And he said," Peter continued, "that the most important lesson of adulthood he could give us was 'Get off your ass and you'll make a buck.'"

  I laughed. Joy's mouth lifted slightly. "Do I know Uncle Herman?" she asked.

  "He's gone to the great Borscht Belt in the sky," Peter said.

  "But he was at your father's bar mitzvah, and that was important. Having family there...making memories..." I said.

  Joy muttered something under her breath that sounded like Oh, please.

  "Have you thought about what you want?" Peter prompted her.

  "How about Grease?" Joy said.

  "How about no?" I snapped. The two of them stared at me. I shrugged. "Well, what's Grease about? High school delinquents. Unplanned pregnancy. Cliques. Smoking!"

  "Smoking," Peter mused, his voice filled with ersatz sorrow. I gave him a look of Back me up here, please. He nodded soberly. Only someone who'd known him as long as I had could have understood how hard he was struggling not to laugh.

  "What did you have, a Sound of Music theme?" Joy asked me, her lips curling as she named my all-time favorite musical (needless to say, she hated it, refused to watch it with me, and had referred to it more than once as "that thing about the Nazis"). "Was there, like, yodeling?"

  "I didn't really have a party," I said shortly. I didn't have a party because my father was crazy, I didn't add. Crazy and cheap and something of a hypocrite. As the only son of an upper-middle-class family, he'd had a big bar mitzvah--a few hundred people at a black-tie dinner in the synagogue, with Super 8 movies to prove it. But by the time his kids reached the age of Jewish adulthood it was the eighties, and the bar and bat mitzvah bashes were starting to get seriously out of hand. We'd attended four of my cousins' fetes in Ohio before my thirteenth birthday. Each one had been grander than the last (one, I remember, had a circus theme, complete with a troupe of performers on stilts and fire-eaters between courses). On the long car rides back to Pennsylvania, with my mother sitting silently beside him, my father had complained bitterly about the ostentation, the expense, the superficiality, the conspicuous consumption, the way my mother's sister and her husband--a hapless accountant named Phil--had used a religious occasion to spend thousands of dollars to impress friends and relations with the fact that they had thousands of dollars to spend, how none of it had anything to do with God.

  So, unlike my Cleveland cousins and my Hebrew-school classmates, I hadn't had a catered luncheon at the country club or a dinner with dancing on a Saturday night. No disc jockey, no hired entertainers, no fancy favors with my name embossed on a T-shirt or stitched onto a baseball cap. I'd been bat mitzvahed on a Friday night in a ruffled, flounced Gunne Sax dress that my mother had bought off the clearance rack at Marshall's. Two months before the big day, my father had presented me with a box of stationery and his Mont Blanc pen; he'd given me a speech about how the invitations would mean more if they came from me, personally. Every night when I finished my homework, I wrote out invitations: to grandparents and great-grandparents; aunts and uncles and cousins; the three friends I had at the time, inviting them to join me as I became a daughter of the Commandments.

  My mother's mother, full of head shakes and disapproving looks but too cowed by my dad's temper to say anything, had come a week early and spent seven days making rugelach and mandel bread and delicate, scallop-edged butter cookies, so we'd at least have fancy baked goods at the oneg, the reception after Shabbat services. Sprinkling the dough with nuts and sweet wine, my grandmother regaled Elle and Josh and me with details of my cousins' receptions, as if we hadn't been there to witness each blowout: the bands and the food and the favors, how the pastry chef had spelled out our cousins' names in icing on the petit fours.

  So on a Friday night I celebrated with a slightly amplified post-Shabbat reception in the synagogue's social hall. There was no music, no dancing, and no professional photographer, which was probably a good thing, given how awful I'd looked in my ruffled, beribboned dress that I'd realized, too late, looked much better on the models in Seventeen, or my pretty cousins, than it ever would on me. At thirteen, I was all boobs and braces, a too big nose and too short hair. Fifty people came: the Friday-night regulars, my friends, a dozen relatives. My mother told me she loved me. My father kissed my cheek and said that he was proud. My grandmother snapped pictures with her little Instamatic and cried.

  But it hadn't been a disaster. I'd wound up feeling perversely good about my low-budget DIY affair, believing, as my father had instructed, that I was participating in a ceremony that meant something, instead of just an excuse for a big show-off party. After I'd finished my Torah portion with hardly a stumble, I'd bent to touch the spine of my prayer book to the scroll, then lifted it to my lips. My father's hand was a heavy, warm weight on my shoulder. I'm proud of you, he'd said, his voice rumbling through me, his brown eyes soft behind his glasses--and at that minute, standing on the bimah in my all-wrong dress, I felt proud of myself. I felt smart, radiant, even a little bit pretty. I felt vastly superior to my cousins from Ohio, with their fancy parties and the same photographer who'd always made all of the boys stand in a row and pretend to gape at a Playboy centerfold for their picture.

  More than anything, I wanted Joy to have that feeling: of pride, of accomplishment, of actually having done something more than mouthing a little Hebrew and having an over-the-top bash as a reward. There was so much I couldn't give her: my love of books, for one thing; a normal first-comes-love, then-comes-marriage story of her own birth, for another. I just wanted her to feel what I'd felt in front of the congregation at that moment: that she knew who she was, and that it pleased her. I took a deep breath and quickened my pace until I was close enough to hear Frenchelle panting. I reached out my hand for her leash, and Joy handed it over without meeting my eyes.

  "How come you didn't have a real party?" asked Joy.

  I decided to keep it simple. "My parents didn't really believe in them. They wanted my bat mitzvah to be more about religion than having a big party with a theme. They wanted it to be about religion, and meaning, and adulthood. Growing up."

  "Huh." I stopped while Frenchie squatted over a clump of ferns.

  "We want your bat mitzvah to be meaningful, too," I said. "Have you thought about your mitzvah project?"

  Joy shrugged. Even surly and miserable, she was still so lovely, with her honey-colored hair and her coltish figure. "Maybe something with kids," she said. "Or pets."

  Okay, Miss America. "What kind of thing?" I prompted. Another shrug. "Which kids?" I asked. This time she didn't even bother shrugging. She just snatched Frenchelle's leash away from me and started up the path again. "Never mind," Peter said, giving my hand a squeeze. "We've got all morning." I shook my head, staring at my daughter's back as she marched away, head held high, widening the gap with each step.

  At the sunny cafe on Main Street, in Manayunk, Joy drank black coffee and poked at her huevos rancheros, moving beans and eggs and tortillas around the plate without eating much. However, she agreed to step up her search for a mitzvah project that would mean something to her.

  In turn, we agreed to a party with music and dancing, and that I wouldn't make her hand-write sixty invitations (nor would I agree to bake platters of sweets for the party). Joy grudgingly consented to the elegant but relatively inexpensive invitations I'd found online, and agreed that a photo booth was a good idea.

  "And I want to invite everyone in my Hebrew-school class," she said. "I don't want anyone to feel left out."

  "That's really nice," I said, swallowing hard. Here was my good girl, my sweet, serious, considerate Joy who'd tried to give the goldfish crackers left over from her nursery-school lunch to the homeless people we'd pass on our way home from the park. When I smiled at her, she didn't smile back, but she didn't turn away, either. I leaned forward eagerly, thinking this was progress. I could get her talking, get her excited about her bat mitzvah, get past the coldness in her eyes.

  I looked around the res
taurant--the yellow walls hung with paintings, the dark wood tables--and breathed in the good smells of coffee and bacon and corn bread. "You know, I used to take you here all the time when you were little," I said. "We used to do Mommy and Me yoga right across the street with--"

  "Emmett and Zack and Jack," Joy said in a bored voice. "And then we'd go to Whole Foods, and you would get me chickpeas and tofu from the salad bar, because chickpeas and tofu were my favorites."

  "Right," I said. I guessed she'd heard that story once or twice before. When she was little, she'd liked nothing better than to hear me tell stories about when she was a baby, a toddler, the first time she'd said the word "Nifkin," the time I'd put her in her baby backpack and taken her for a walk in the snow. "You always liked that stuff. You ate--"

  "--like I was born in the parking lot at a Grateful Dead show," Joy said in that same bored voice. She raised her eyes and glared at me with such a smoking look of fury that I almost gasped. Then it was gone, and it was just Joy again, her lovely face, her look of bored disdain. "Maybe I got that from my father."

  Beside me, I imagined I could feel Peter flinch. Joy didn't mention Bruce to me too often, and she hardly ever mentioned him in front of Peter. "I don't think you got that much from him," I said. It was equal parts statement and prayer. Please, God, I thought, let the only thing she got from him be her good looks and not his predilection for parental handouts and pot.

  "Is he invited?" Joy asked.

  I scooped a stack of sugar packets, desperate to have something to do with my hands. "Bruce? Of course Bruce is invited."

  "Good." She pushed herself away from the table, stuck her thumbs in the pockets of her jeans, and sauntered off toward the bathroom with her hips and ponytail swinging, drawing appreciative glances from the busboys in her wake.

  I looked at Peter helplessly. "What did I do?" I asked, spreading my hands, palms to the sky. "Did I run over her dog? Steal her boyfriend? My God. Did you see the way she looked at me? It was like"--I gulped--"like she hates me."

  Peter took my hand and pried the sugar packets free. "She's just thirteen."

  "She's not thirteen yet." I ripped off the top of a creamer. "I wasn't like that at thirteen." Cream splashed into my coffee cup. "Maybe sixteen." I searched for my spoon. "Maybe not ever."

  "So she's precocious," he said. "Take it easy. Give her time." I poked at my eggs again. You get what you get had been one of the refrains at Joy's nursery school. If a kid started crying because the snack was pretzels instead of crackers, or the book at story time was George and Martha instead of Charlie and Lola, one of the teachers would swoop in and say, "You get what you get, and you don't get upset!" It was true for the three-year-olds, and maybe true for the mothers of thirteen-year-olds, too. You get what you get, I thought. I'd learned that, and Joy would, too. I leaned sideways until my weight was resting against Peter, and just for a minute, I closed my eyes.

  EIGHT

  Wednesday afternoon is the one day of the week that my mother doesn't pick me up from school. I'm allowed to take the bus down Pine Street, past the boutiques and the galleries and the big brownstones, then walk over one block to Hebrew school at the Center City Synagogue on Spruce Street, along with Tamsin and Todd and Amber Gross and Sasha Swerdlow and the other Jewish kids in our grade.

  From four until four-forty-five, we chant prayers and blessings: the one that says we believe in only one God; the ones that promise to love God "with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your being," the prayer for mourners, exalting the name of God. Then we have half an hour for individual work on our Torah and haftorah portions, the ones we'll chant at our bar and bat mitzvahs. The Torah is the Old Testament, only in Hebrew, and the haftorah is from Prophets. The portion you're assigned depends on your bar or bat mitzvah date. Most kids have the cantor sing their portions into their iPods and just learn them phonetically, but because my mom believes in the deep meaning of everything and exists for the purpose of making my life difficult, she wants me to actually learn the words I'm chanting. She thinks this is going to make it easier for me to write my d'var Torah--the speech I'll have to give in which I explain what my portions are about. My Torah portion's about Jacob and Esau and the story of how Jacob stole the birthright of his older brother, Esau, by dressing up like him and fooling their blind, dying father, which is something you learn in first grade. My haftorah is about how many sheaves of wheat the ancient Israelites had to pay for crimes such as livestock theft. I have no idea how I'm supposed to relate these stories to current events and modern times, unless there are people wandering around Philadelphia stealing each other's birthrights. Or goats.

  But this Wednesday, normal classes were canceled because of a special presentation: "B'nai Mitzvah and the Blended Family." Parents were invited, so of course my mom was there, dressed in jeans and a long purple sweater she'd knitted herself. My mom has lots of nice clothes, all in dry cleaner's plastic at the back of her closet, left over from her book tours. Even though they're old, they're still pretty. If she'd wear those clothes, do her hair, and get that laser-vision surgery and maybe a breast reduction, she'd be fine. Ordinary. Like every other mom. Or at least she'd look that way.

  When I walked into the sanctuary, my mom was talking with Rabbi Grussgott, her body angled toward the door, watching for me, as usual. As soon as she saw me, she started waving, sawing the air with big back-and-forths of her arm. The ruffled sleeves of her sweater fluttered as I made my way over slowly. "Shalom," said the rabbi, and I said hello back, wondering whether she'd read Big Girls Don't Cry and what her religious opinion about it was.

  "Where's Tamsin?" asked my mom, plopping down in her seat and patting the cushion beside her, the way you would if you were trying to get a puppy to hop onto a couch. Her chest bounced, and I imagined the other parents whispering, That's her. She's the one who wrote that book; staring at my mother with her clogs and her tote bag full of knitting and a first-aid kit, a smaller sibling of the one she keeps in our minivan. Phrases from Big Girls Don't Cry popped into my head: blow-job queen and sand-scratchy beach-blanket fucking and I wept until I thought I'd turn myself inside out.

  "Library," I said. That was where the kids who'd had their bar or bat mitzvahs already or whose parents were together had been sent.

  "Ah," said my mother. The truth was, things between me and Tamsin had been weird since I'd started sitting with Amber. I split my time: one day at Amber's table, one day with the drama kids and Tamsin and Todd. I thought it was kind of a biblical solution, at least a fair one, except Amber and her friends hardly seemed to notice when I was gone, and Tamsin didn't seem happy when I was with her. For a minute I thought about telling my mother what was going on, seeing if she had any suggestions. Then someone called my name.

  "Hey, Joy."

  I looked up and smiled. Walking down the aisle toward us, in a suit and a tie, his sandy hair falling over his forehead and his briefcase dangling from one hand, was Bruce Guberman.

  "Hi, Bruce!" I said, and slid over to make room. My mother stared at me with a look that clearly said, What is he doing here? I pretended I didn't see it. I'd e-mailed Bruce the invitation to the seminar, with a note on top reading Hope you can come, and he'd written back saying that he thought he could rearrange his class schedule to be there.

  My mother sat up straight with her tote bag in her lap, holding herself stiffly. Bruce sat down and spread his legs wide, cracked his knuckles, then crossed his ankles and leaned forward, while I tried to look cheerful and not picture the dozens and dozens of disgusting sex scenes in which he--or "Drew"--had starred in Big Girls Don't Cry.

  Bruce is a professor of popular culture at Rutgers and, according to the inside flap of his book, one of the world's leading experts on myth and allegory in Battlestar Galactica and Doctor Who. This means he gets to give lots of speeches to groups of people where at least half of them will be wearing pointy plastic ears or blue body paint. When I was six, he took me to a convention in Philadelphia,
only we got separated after his speech, and I had kind of a freak-out after a really tall guy with a plastic sword tried to direct me to the lost-and-found table in Klingon. In the old pictures I've seen, he had a ponytail and a goatee, but they're both gone now. His hair is the same color as mine and his eyes are the same shape.

  "Candace," he said coolly to my mother.

  She let go of her bag's straps long enough to yank at the hem of her sweater. "Bruce," she said back. The two of them are always super-polite to each other. They say please and thank you and oh, of course, that will be fine. I suppose it could be worse. Last year Tara Carnahan's mother called her father a rat bastard during parent/ teacher conferences, then threw her cell phone at his head, which was a double offense because at the Philadelphia Academy we're supposed to use respectful language at all times, and cell phones aren't allowed.

  "Thanks for coming," I said to Bruce loudly enough for my mother to hear.

  "Sure thing," he said, and blinked at me. That was the thing about Bruce--he blinked too often and too hard. Especially when he was around my mother.

  The rabbi stood at the front of the room and introduced Deirdre Weiss, a national expert on the topic of divorce and b'nai mitzvot.

  "What," Deirdre Weiss began, "does 'bar mitzvah' mean?"

  Someone--it sounded like Amber Gross--groaned. Deirdre's butt jiggled underneath her tight purple skirt as she wrote on the blackboard. "It means, literally, to become a son or daughter of the Commandments. To be an adult in the eyes of Judaism. To read from the Torah, the Word of God, for the first time...to be counted as part of the minyan, the number of Jewish adults necessary for a prayer service to take place. Becoming a bar or bat mitzvah means participating in a lifetime of Jewish values: to study the Torah, to do deeds of charity and loving-kindness, to strive for tikkun olam, the repair of the world." She swept the crowd with her eyes, trying to single out each potential bar or bat mitzvah. "Last but not least, it means that each one of you will be your own responsibility, not your parents' anymore." She looked at us again. We just stared back at her. Did she think we didn't know all of this already?