Cannie Shapiro 02 Certain Girls Page 9

  My sister was born Lucy Beth Shapiro, but she shed the name years ago. Although she claims to be "thirty-two and holding," she's actually eighteen months younger than I am, but she'll be the first to tell you that she doesn't look a day over twenty-five. For the past eight of her thirty-second birthdays, she's lived in New York City, supporting herself as a bartender, a waitress, an occasional extra in whatever soap opera or HBO drama is filming in her neighborhood, and, every December, doing a two-week stint behind the cosmetics counter at Bergdorf's (which entitles her to a year-round discount).

  "I didn't know you were in town," I said, moving her sunglasses aside so I could plug in my own phone.

  "Well," Elle began. I followed her into the kitchen, where she perched her admirable bottom on one of my bar stools, unfolding a not unfamiliar tale of woe involving a misplaced rent check and an irate landlord ending with a request to "just chill with you guys for a couple of days, if that's okay."

  Peter, retrieving a beer from the refrigerator, made a face. I frowned at him. "Of course it's okay!"

  "You're always welcome," said Peter in a voice a few degrees cooler than my own. Elle either didn't notice or pretended not to.

  Joy perched on the seat beside Elle's while I whisked vinaigrette, and the two of them bent their heads together, giggling, with Frenchie happily snorting at their feet. I got a dish towel and went back to the entryway, where I mopped wine off the hardwood. Back in the kitchen, I set the table with my favorite plates, glazed pumpkin and goldenrod yellow, and the napkins that matched. I put out bread and butter, salad and the dressing, a pitcher of water and the half-empty bottle of wine, and called everyone in for dinner.

  "Yay pot roast!" cheered Elle as she sashayed into her seat. "So homey!" She sat expectantly while I set the pot roast and potatoes on the table. Peter, who'd emerged from the office, filled our water glasses and offered both of us wine. "So sweet!" my sister said, giggling, as Joy stared at her worshipfully and Frenchelle eschewed her dog bed to curl at my sister's feet.

  After dinner Peter and I cleared the dishes. I wiped off the counters and recentered a vase of lilies and gerbera daisies on the dining room table while he loaded the dishwasher. Then he took his crossword puzzle and was heading up to our bedroom when Joy and Elle breezed in for dessert. "Any ice cream?" my sister asked innocently. I pulled out my brand-new quart of mint chocolate cookie ice cream and opened it to discover that someone had meticulously removed each chocolate chunk, leaving behind a pockmarked mass of green. I tried not to make a face, found a quart of vanilla, and handed it over, along with slices of the sugar-dusted pound cake I'd baked the night before.

  Elle took her bowl and pulled a stack of magazines out of her purse. "We're going to look at bat mitzvah dresses!" she said.

  "Great." My heart sank. God only knew what Elle would think was an appropriate dress for a thirteen-year-old. By the time my sister was through with her, Joy would probably be demanding a pimps and hos party complete with monogrammed condoms in the gift bags.

  Joy and Elle went back to the living room. I reopened the denuded mint ice cream and stabbed at it with my spoon, bracing myself for the argument Peter and I would be having in bed, the one I already knew by heart, the one that had once ended so badly that I'd tuned the TV set to the LUV channel (which plays only Hallmark Hall of Fame movies), packed the remote controls in my suitcase, and gone to Samantha's for the night.

  "You can't keep bailing her out," Peter will tell me--his inevitable opening gambit. "You're enabling her."

  I will squirm guiltily and recite my lines: There will always be a gap between what Elle is capable of and what the world in general and her landlord specifically require, and it's my job, as her sister, to bridge it. He'll repeat the word "enabling." I will tell him loftily that I prefer to think of it as generosity, or as tzedakah, if I'm feeling particularly religious or especially obnoxious. He'll roll to the very edge of the bed and stay there until I fit myself against him, kissing the back of his neck and saying that if he had a ne'er-do-well brother or illegitimate child, I would be the very picture of generosity and compassion.

  Then he'll make himself scarce for the remainder of my sister's stay, and I'll take pains to hide my checkbook and ATM receipts so that he'll never figure out the full impact of her tenure, while quietly thanking God that we never merged our finances. I'm sure there are marriage counselors who would recoil in horror at the notion of such duplicity, but, as possibly the only woman alive who's read Erica Jong's memoirs as both cautionary tales and financial-planning primers, I firmly believe that the path to lifelong love is paved with separate checking accounts and that foolish is the woman who does not keep her investments in her own name.

  I stomped into the living room with my needles and yarn and plopped myself onto the couch. Elle and Joy had the TV tuned to the Fashion Channel, and they'd spread their material out on the floor: I saw Vogue and Elle and Prom! and even, God help me, a bridal magazine. Elle looked up, wide-eyed. "Everything all right?"

  "Fine," I said, trying for a smile. Peter came back downstairs, probably for his nightly cup of tea. On his way back from the kitchen, he draped an afghan over my shoulders and retrieved my empty ice-cream mug from the table. When he kissed my forehead, Joy winced, and Elle gave us a sappy smile. "Look at you two," she cooed. "Ward and June."

  I spread the green-and-gold afghan, one I'd knitted when Joy was tiny, over my legs, and wondered whether my sister had ever guessed at the truth, which was that Peter and I almost never got married at all.

  Things came to a head on a hot August night. Peter and I were in the car, parked on the street in front of my apartment, while Joy, who had just turned one that April, dozed in the backseat. Peter's face was lit by the streetlamp. His hands were clenched on the wheel.

  "Why does it matter?" I asked. "We're together. Why do we need to go stand in front of some rabbi and spend all our money on a party? What will it change?"

  "I want a real wedding," he said in his deep voice. "It matters to me."

  I sighed. We'd spent the day at Fairmount Park, at a barbecue for the weight and eating disorders department, where the diet doctors and nurses and support staff played horseshoes and vigorous rounds of volleyball, and the burgers came in your choice of soy or turkey. Peter wore khaki shorts and a dark blue polo shirt with a stethoscope where the alligator would have been. I'd chosen a thin cotton sundress paired with the new miracle panties guaranteed to slim my hips, lift my butt, and prevent the dreaded thigh chafe. They worked, but underneath my dress, I could see the dents in my thighs where the spandex ended and I began...and I assumed, sadly, that if I could see them, everyone at the barbecue could, too.

  After dinner, Peter and I drove home, sunburned and sated, with Joy dozing in her car seat. Everything was fine until we swung by Rittenhouse Square, where there was a wedding in progress.

  We were stopped behind a trash truck, which gave us plenty of time to check out the bride and her attendants posing in front of the fountain in the twilight. Her bare shoulders gleamed against the silk of her dress. She had pearls twined in her updo, and one of her attendants was fanning her with a program.

  "Nice," said Peter.

  "Pret-ty," Joy said sleepily from the backseat before her eyes slid shut again.

  I sighed, knowing what was coming, knowing there was no way to avoid it. Peter had proposed on New Year's Eve, eight months before, and I'd said yes tearfully, joyfully, gratefully. I'd been wearing his ring ever since, while craftily avoiding the question of when we'd actually get hitched. That night I sat in silence as Peter pulled the car up to the curb and asked, "So when is that going to be us?"

  I bit my lip and shrugged. That bride was beautiful, elegant, and slender. Both of her parents were there, the mother glowing in a blue dress, the father puffed up and proud in his tuxedo, directing the photographer.

  "Give me a reason," Peter said. "One good reason why not."

  Because I'm scared, I thought. But I couldn'
t say that. Peter had given me no reason to be afraid. I just couldn't imagine actually going through with it: walking down an aisle, taking the vows. Years ago, before Joy, I'd imagined marrying Bruce Guberman in the synagogue where he'd been bar mitzvahed. I could picture myself standing under the chuppah with his family on one side and mine on the other. In my vision, Bruce had cut off his ponytail, and I'd been radiant in the fitted white gown that I somehow, magically, would have lost enough weight to wear, and my father would have reappeared in time and apologized sufficiently for me to allow him to walk me down the aisle. Our wedding announcement would appear in the Times (sans photograph, of course), and Bruce and I would buy a house in a leafy suburb convenient to both of our jobs, where we'd have two babies with his metabolism and my work ethic, and live happily ever after.

  And what had those dreams gotten me? An illegitimate baby whose premature birth had come, I was convinced, courtesy of Bruce's new girlfriend, who'd shoved me into a sink when we'd met by chance in the ladies' room of the Newark airport. The Pusher, I called her, even though my doctors in the hospital and, later on, my shrink, had told me that my mispositioned placenta would have caused problems whether my belly had met the porcelain or not. So: one premature baby. One hysterectomy. An ex-boyfriend who'd left the country, who had wanted nothing to do with his daughter. His mother sent me five-hundred-dollar checks each month--drawn, I'd noticed, on her account, not Bruce's.

  The whole thing had left me angry. Actually, that was an understatement. It had left me filled with rage that was constantly bubbling just beneath my skin, and I knew that wasn't a typical way for a bride to feel. Things that would have annoyed a normal person--that would have been worth at most maybe a minute or two of pique--would cause me to literally see red, to shake with anger, to have visions of doing grievous bodily harm to my oppressor, and then to Bruce Guberman, every lazy, stoned, faithless, gone-to-Amsterdam inch of him. The driver of the sportscar that cut me off along I-76; a cop giving me a parking ticket when I double-parked to haul Joy's stroller out of the trunk; the nurse at the allergist's office who'd stuck Joy three times, making her cry, before finding a good vein: I could picture myself stomping on the gas and forcing the car onto the Schuylkill; lifting the diaper bag and swinging it, hard, at the cop's head; grabbing the syringe and jabbing the nurse in her pale, freckled arm. I knew it wasn't normal, and I couldn't tell Peter about it. Being as big as I was made me enough of a freak in his world, especially compared to the hard-bodied residents and interns who'd played volleyball all afternoon while I'd sat in the shade at a picnic table, sipping lemonade, watching Joy shovel sand into a bucket and giving my spandex panties the occasional surreptitious tug. He didn't need to know that I was not just fat but possibly also insane.

  Luckily, I had my excuses ready. "First of all, you should know that if we do get married, I'm totally letting myself go," I began.

  Peter crossed his legs underneath the steering wheel and looked at me expectantly.

  "I know what you're thinking," I said. "But the truth is, even staying this size requires a Herculean effort that will end the minute I take my vows. My plan is to spend the next thirty years or so sitting on the couch, watching TV, and eating sugary cereal with my hands."

  "No spoon?"

  I shook my head. "Too much effort. By the time I'm forty, I'm gonna look like Jabba the Hutt. You'll have to move me from room to room with a reinforced wheelbarrow. For exercise, every once in a while, I'll lean over in the direction where I think you are and yell, 'Sucker!'"

  Peter lifted one of my hands from my lap and kissed my palm. His forearm was dusted with grains of sand--from the volleyball court, I guessed. "Do you think I won't love you if you gain weight?" he asked.

  I felt my throat close as I shook my head. I could remember my own parents. My mom would go all the way to New York for her clothes, brightly colored, beautifully made outfits, tunics and caftans and wide-legged pants. You look beautiful, I'd tell her when she came down the stairs, but I could see from the way my father turned his face away, from the way he looked too long at the other doctors' thinner wives, that he didn't agree. Another nail in the marriage coffin.

  "And let's not forget the curse of the InStyle wedding," I said.

  "What," Peter rumbled, "is the curse of the InStyle wedding?"

  "Come on. I know I've told you about this. Every couple who's ever appeared in InStyle has gotten divorced, like, ten minutes later. Sometimes before the issue's even on the stands."

  "So we won't let InStyle write about our wedding," he said.

  "Too late," I said, sighing. "I already did that freelance piece for them about spring's new lipsticks. I'm cursed by extension. And what about my parents?"

  Peter dropped my hand and turned to look out the dust-streaked windshield at the empty sidewalk. "We've been over this. I am not your father."

  "And let's not forget the gays," I continued. "Until the gays can marry, I think it's unfair for heterosexuals to exercise the privilege. I mean, think of my mother and Tanya!"

  Peter glared at me. "Your mother and Tanya had a commitment ceremony last year. We were there. You read from Jonathan Livingston Seagull."

  I bit my lip. He was being too kind. I'd tried to read, per Tanya's request, from Jonathan Livingston Seagull, but I'd wound up laughing too hard to get the words out, so my sister had taken over, reciting with many dramatic hand gestures a passage about the importance of freeing yourself from the flock.

  "Reason four," I continued. "I like sex, and I have read in many credible publications that married people don't have sex anymore."

  I leaned over to kiss him. He turned his head away so that my lips landed on his ear. "That's not going to fix things," he said. "I want to get married. I don't want to be engaged for the rest of my life. And if you can't--or won't--"

  "I wouldn't be a good wife," I blurted. The words seemed to hang in the air longer than they should have, and I could almost see the words I was thinking hanging alongside them: I would have been a good wife to Bruce, before all of this happened. I can't be a good wife to anyone anymore.

  But maybe that was wrong. Maybe I could be a good wife. Maybe I could love Peter the way he deserved to be loved. Maybe I could believe, the way I did on good days, that Peter loved me. What I couldn't do was get past the mental block of a wedding: the white dress, the walk down the aisle. My ex-boyfriend hadn't loved me enough to stand by me when I'd had a baby. My own father hadn't loved me enough to acknowledge me when I'd found him in Los Angeles. Peter deserved better than that: someone who attracted love rather than repelling it. Someone who wasn't bitter, or broken, or carrying the baggage of a flamboyantly failed relationship. A beautiful bride.

  Peter lifted his chin without looking at me, almost as if he'd sensed the spectral presence of other men in our car. "If you can't, or won't, then I think we should..." His throat worked. I watched as he pulled his keys out of the ignition, opened the door, unfolded his long legs, and let the door slam shut. Joy woke up, startled, and began crying.

  "Peter," I said. "Peter, wait!" He didn't hear me through the glass, over the sound of Joy's wails. I flinched as the car roof shuddered while he pounded it with his fist. Finally, he bent down and yanked his door open.

  "This isn't fair," he said.

  I kept my eyes on my lap. "I know."

  "It's not fair," he said fiercely. His cheeks had gotten sunburned, and I could already tell that his nose was going to peel.

  I lifted my hands helplessly and watched them fall into my lap. "I'm a mess," I said, twisting around and trying to unstrap a shrieking Joy from her car seat.

  "Candace--"

  "You deserve better," I said as one of my daughter's tiny fists caught me on my right cheek. Tears came to my eyes. I blinked them away. "You're right. You do."

  "I want you to be happy," he said doggedly. "But I've done everything I can, everything I can think of, to show you that I love you, that I'll always be here for you and for Joy."


  The tears were rolling down my face, plopping onto my bisected thighs. I was getting dumped. Right here, right now. "Wait," I croaked, and reached for Peter's hand. "Wait."

  He stared down at me for a long, long moment before he shook his head. "I'm sorry, but I'm done waiting," he said, and turned and walked away.

  I hauled myself out of the car and onto the heat-sticky sidewalk. I slung my purse and Joy's diaper bag over my shoulder, put my key ring in my teeth, eased Joy's writhing weight into my arms, nudged the car door shut with my hip, pulled the keys out of my mouth, unlocked the front door, and carried my sleeping daughter up three flights of stairs to my apartment. My legs were numb; my hands, as I unlocked the door, looked like they belonged to someone else. I forced myself to keep moving. I sponged off Joy's face and hands with a warm washcloth, changed her, put her in pajamas, and settled her into her crib. Baa baa, black sheep, have you any wool? I sang over and over, until she yawned and her eyelids got heavy, then fell shut. I turned on the baby monitor, shoved the receiver into my bra, hooked my little terrier, Nifkin, to his leash, dashed back down the stairs, pulled the stroller out of the backseat of the car, and let Nifkin pee at the fire hydrant while listening to the monitor, hoping Joy would stay asleep, before hauling the dog and the stroller up the stairs. The apartment was so quiet I imagined I could hear it echoing. Alone, whispered the floorboards, and the water heater, and the walls. Alone, alone, alone. I should have been crying, but I just felt numb as I slipped Peter's engagement ring off my finger and put it in my jewelry box alongside my one pair of good earrings, a heart-shaped locket Bruce had given me once for my birthday, and a spare key for my bicycle lock.

  I'm so grateful, one of the mothers in my premature-baby-mama support group said every week. She was a tiny thing, with Alice-in-Wonderland blond hair and a high, soft voice. I'm grateful she's alive, she'd say, wide-eyed, sweet-voiced. I'm grateful I'm all right. After six months of listening to her protestations of gratitude, I'd gotten the guts to approach her at the coffee urn and ask for her secret, half hoping she'd give me the name of some magical antidepressant or maybe just confess that she'd been hitting the crack pipe while her kid did hydrotherapy. Oh, she'd said, swirling a wooden stirrer in her cup. Well, my husband helps me. My church. And I write in a journal. That helps, too.