In Atlanta, my author escort, the woman my publisher had hired to take me to my events, spent the hour-long trip from the airport telling me all of the details of her husband's death the month before, then got us so abysmally lost that I was an hour late to my own reading. In Milwaukee, an Orthodox Jewish woman in a crooked shaytel berated me for having my heroine eat trayf. I kept waiting for her to complain about the scene where Allie has sex with a non-Jewish janitor in the synagogue parking lot on Yom Kippur, which had to be more of an affront to the Almighty than the BLT on "Chapter Nineteen", but the outrage never came. Apparently, pork was a problem; porking was not.
I buckled Joy's car seat into a different escort's car in a new city every day, driving from bookstore to bookstore to sign copies of my book all afternoon, doing readings every night. After the readings, I'd order a room-service salad, then lie in my hotel bed, on soft cotton sheets, with Joy asleep beside me and my sister rummaging through the minibar, as my thoughts chased around my head. The tour had to be costing a fortune. Except for the night of my nanna's bridge club, attendance at the readings had yet to crack the double digits, which meant that Big Girls probably wasn't doing very well. Would my publisher hold me responsible? Would they ask for the advance back? Did that ever happen?
Not that I was particularly surprised. I had expected Big Girls Don't Cry to be like a radio signal at the far end of the dial that you could tune in to only on clear, starless nights. I had thought the book would be passed between friends or sisters or mothers and daughters; that my sisters, the unlucky-in-love, unhappy-in-their-own-skin big girls, would find it in the library or on the shelf at a rented summer house, or at a tag sale or a flea market; that they would read it and be comforted. That would be enough for me. I just had to hope it would be enough for my publisher.
I was in Seattle on a Wednesday afternoon, signing copies of my book at the bookstore's information desk and answering patrons' questions about the location of the restrooms and whether I knew the name of a book about love with a red or possibly dark blue cover, when my cell phone trilled and the screen flashed my agent's number.
"Hey, guess what?" I told Larissa, scooping Joy into my arms before she pulled down an entire display of Curious George books. "Five people came last night! And all of them looked like they lived indoors!"
"Never mind that. I am faxing an entire copy of next week's New York Times Book Review, which I have obtained with great difficulty and at great expense, to your hotel," Larissa announced.
"Why?" The Times rarely reviewed my kind of breezy female-centered book, unless they were romans a clef that cast some thinly veiled Manhattan bigwig as the villain (in those cases, the Times would typically hire one of the thinly veiled Manhattan bigwig's lieutenants to write the takedown).
"Just wait! You'll see!"
I bought a sticker book for Joy and a nonfat Frappuccino for my sister, and my escort took us back to the five-star hotel in her SUV, which was so far off the ground that she kept a stepstool in the backseat for elderly authors. The entire book review, in fax form, was waiting for me at the front desk. I paged through it slowly. The cover piece was a review of a 160-page short-story collection, Budapest Nights, by Daniel Furstmann Friedlander, who'd been written up the week before in a ten-page profile in The New Yorker that had made much of his boyish good looks and charming Russian accent. Weird. I'd known Dan back in college, when he'd had two names and no accent at all.
On page three, a cultural critic from one of the slim liberal glossies was calling a columnist from a rival magazine an asstard. On page twenty-six, the best-seller column was ignoring the actual best-seller list in order to tout a book currently available only in Germany, in its original German. I was on the verge of calling Larissa to ask what I was missing. Then the best-seller list caught my eye. And there it was: number 11. A Philadelphia singleton makes the journey from anonymous sexual encounters and family trauma to motherhood, read the summary. I leaned against the registration desk in shock. "Wow." My sister, who was still going by Lucy back then, snatched the pages from my hand, then squealed in triumph. "Congratulations," said my escort, and she gravely shook my hand.
Peter sent flowers. My publisher sent champagne, which my sister swiftly commandeered. Larissa sent chocolates and a rubber ducky for Joy. People sent a reporter, a photographer, and, thank God, a makeup artist to my next tour stop for an interview, which ran with the People-mandated picture of Joy and me jumping on yet another hotel bed, above the inevitable caption: "Happy Endings." A New York City magazine, 24/7, dispatched their star reporter, a terrifyingly thin middle-aged woman with her skin stretched over her cheekbones so tightly that I could see the veins underneath, to do a profile during my three-day layover in Los Angeles. The woman launched into her interview by snapping open her notebook and snarling, "Did you write your book because you wanted people to like you?"
"No," I said once I'd caught my breath. "No, that's why I'm promiscuous."
My publisher extended my tour to another four cities: Denver, Albuquerque, San Francisco, then back to L.A. By the night of my last reading in Pasadena, I was out of underwear, I'd lost every single one of Joy's Polly Pocket dolls, and I wanted nothing more than to go home, sleep for a week or so, and plan my wedding.
"Someone special's here to see you!" the bookstore manager caroled, leading me out of her office toward the podium as my sister led Joy off to find the Eloise books.
"Oh?" Maxi, I figured. My movie-star friend had told me she'd be away on a reshoot in Vancouver (which, she swore, could be made to look an awful lot like New York), but maybe she'd made a special trip back. I scanned the crowd hopefully. Twenty people. Not bad. "Hi," I said cheerfully, pushing away my weariness, putting on my meet-the-public smile. "Thanks so much for coming tonight. I'm going to read a little bit from the very beginning of Big Girls Don't Cry." I held up the book, per Larissa's instructions, so that everyone could get a good look at the cover. Not that anyone could miss it, given that it featured big, barely clad breasts on either side of a whipped-cream-topped sundae, with a maraschino cherry sliding suggestively into the cleavage. Not exactly an understated literary look. Daniel Furstmann Friedlander's book had featured a grainy black-and-white shot of a Czechoslovakian castle. Oh, well, I thought. Maybe next time. "Then, if you have any questions..." My voice trailed off as I caught sight of the man hovering by the back row without taking a seat. He wore a dark blue suit and his curly dark hair was shot with silver. Everything about him seemed to gleam: his gold watch and wedding band, his glasses and his teeth. My heart stopped as my father raised his hand.
"Cannie," he said, his voice low and intimate, as if we were the only two people in the bookstore.
I swallowed hard, forcing my tongue to move, my mouth to open. "Hi, Dad."
A murmur moved through the room, probably driven by the people who'd read the book, who'd remembered the horrible father it had described. I forced myself to flip open the cover and began to read, from memory, the words I'd started with long ago.
Of all the men who've fucked me up and let me down, my father was the first and worst. Drew Blankenship was a close second. When I opened my copy of Cosmo, sucked in, as always, by the promise of dropping a fast ten pounds, mastering the makeup tricks of the stars, and learning some exotic new position that would make him moan and whine and beg like a dog for more, I was astonished to see Drew's byline at the top of a piece titled "Big Big Love." Drew wrote an article? I thought. I was the one who hustled freelance assignments. I was the one who'd kill to have my byline in a national magazine. Up until that moment, I'd thought that Drew's fondest dream was to someday grow a marijuana plant that would appear in High Times. It seemed, I realized, scanning the article as my heartbeat sped up and my hands went icy, that I'd gotten it wrong.
The crowd laughed in all the right places, gasped appreciatively when it was revealed that "Big Big Love" was about Allie's plus-size figure (God knows it couldn't have been referring to Drew's equipment, I'd
written. Poetic license will only get you so far.) As I read, I sneaked glances at my father, who was still standing in the back row, his hands in his pockets, his face unreadable. If that line about being fucked up by a father had bothered him at all, I didn't see it. I turned my eyes back to the page and concentrated, as hard as I could, on my little sister and Joy, safe in an oversize armchair with their backs to the reading. Keep her away, keep her away, keep her away from him. Blood roared in my ears, and my hands were slick with sweat. "Questions?" I managed.
A woman in the front row raised her hand. "I've been working on a novel," she began. My mouth moved without my having to think about it as I answered the questions about writing a book and finding an agent and twisting truth until it was fiction. My breath caught in my throat as Joy toddled down the aisle with Eloise in her hands, heading right for me. "Excuse me," I murmured. "Lucy?" I said into the microphone. My sister hurried out of the children's section. Fast--but not fast enough. As the crowd murmured, my father bent down and scooped Joy into his arms, and Joy, who usually shrieked at the sight of a strange man--assuming, often correctly, that the strange man was yet another doctor who'd want to stick her with a needle--snuggled against him and flung her arms around his neck. My heart stopped.
"Hi, kitten," my father said.
"Kitten!" Joy repeated, and clapped her hands in delight. I stood there, frozen and numb, unable to move or believe what I was seeing as my father pulled a little silver camera from his pocket and, with a smile, handed it off to another patron who happily snapped their picture. Finally, I got my legs moving. "Joy," I said, holding out my arms.
"Kitten!" Joy chortled.
"Congratulations," my father said. He set Joy gently on the ground. By the time I'd blinked away my tears and picked up my daughter, he was gone, and I was left standing there, heart pounding, legs numb, equal parts furious and bewildered. After all these years, why would my father show up now? I sat down in an armchair and closed my eyes. Never mind. We were leaving first thing in the morning. I could figure it out at home.
The next day we made it back to Philadelphia, to my cozy row house and to Peter, whom I'd missed with a pain that, by the last week on the road, had felt like a permanent stitch in my side. Two of the wheels had fallen off my suitcase. My sister was limping after an injury sustained when she'd tried to climb into Joy's Pack 'n' Play ("I wanted," she explained, with a certain tipsy dignity, "to see if I could fit"). The garden I'd planted before I'd left was choked with weeds; my baskets of pansies and petunias were dying from lack of water. The book had erased an entire season.
But as the in-print flavor of the week, not to mention the de facto poster girl for every woman size fourteen and up, I did come home to a nice consolation prize: a stack of offers for my consideration, each one weirder than the next. Did I want, for example, to be the new face of Weight Watchers? "But I'm fat!" I spluttered to Larissa, who replied, "I suspect that once they're done with you, you won't be." Did I want to endorse low-calorie cookies, fat-free ice cream, plus-size maternity wear? (No, no, and, tempting, but no.)
My credit-card company upgraded me to the White Card, the rare and fabled instrument that had no spending limits and offered all manner of upgrades and perks. A doctor in Illinois offered me a free gastric bypass. A plastic surgeon in Pittsburgh pledged a gratis nose job. A third cousin whom I'd met twice asked for a loan to start a combination personal training business/smoothie bar. (I told him no but added that if he was interested in having either his nose or his stomach bobbed, I'd be happy to hook him up.)
The strangest pitch came from a company asking if I'd be their on-campus spokesperson for tampons.
"Would I have to visit colleges dressed up as a giant tampon?" I asked Larissa.
I could imagine her behind her antique maple desk, sitting in her padded pink chair, flipping the pages. "I don't think so," she said crisply.
I persisted. "Could I dress up as a giant tampon if I wanted to?"
"Um..."
"Does this offer have strings attached?"
Larissa sighed. "Any more period-related humor?"
"Well," I said meekly, "it is a lot to absorb."
And there wasn't much time to absorb it. My publisher had arranged for another half-dozen interviews once I was home. Prior to selling my book, before I'd had my baby, I'd spent years covering entertainment for The Philadelphia Examiner. I'd figured that almost a decade of making sausage might have prepared me for my own trip through the grinder. I was sadly mistaken. I'd open the door to my house to my former colleagues--fresh-faced or zit-smattered; harried working mothers with their cell phones buzzing; ambling, long-in-the-tooth good ol' boys who'd bounced from paper to paper and magazine to magazine. I'd show them around my house, tell them stories about the book tour, let them meet Joy. Most of the time it worked out well, even if Publishing Today was unimpressed by the contents of my refrigerator (too much butter and not enough fresh fruit for the reporter's taste), and the Chicago weekly's headline had been the regrettable HEFTY GAL IS QUEEN OF MODERN ROMANCE. ("Hefty?" I'd railed to Peter, waving the clipping for emphasis. "Hefty? For the record, 'Hefty' is a trash bag. I am festively plump.")
Then one Sunday morning I'd opened my door and found that the Examiner wasn't there. "Did you get the paper?" I called.
Peter shook his head without meeting my eyes. "No paper today," he said. My heart sank. The paper always came, which meant that he must have gotten up early and disposed of it. And I knew why. The week before I'd sat down with the reporter the Examiner had hired to replace me, a meek-voiced girl who'd shown up with a grocery-store bouquet of carnations. "I love kids," she'd announced upon meeting my daughter. "You know, if you ever need a sitter..." I'd thanked her while quietly arriving at the conclusion that the Examiner wasn't paying her as much as they'd paid me. The interview had lasted all of half an hour and had consisted mostly of questions about how I'd found the time to write a book while working for the paper, how I'd found an agent for the book, and whether my agent might have time to read her book, now that I'd told her how to find time to write one.
Peter stood behind me, his hands warm on my shoulders. I took a deep breath, bracing myself. "How bad?" I asked.
"You probably shouldn't read it."
"Come on. My ex-boyfriend called me fat in Moxie. What could be worse than that?"
There was an agonizing pause. "I don't think--" Peter began.
The telephone rang, and I snatched it. "Hello?"
"Why did you tell the Examiner that I went to rehab?" my sister shrieked.
My mouth fell open. "Why did I what?"
"Why...did...you...tell...the...Examiner...that I went to REHAB?" She sounded angrier than I'd ever heard her. "And if you had to mention it, how come you didn't say that I just did it to meet guys?"
"I don't know what you're talking about. I never told that reporter anything about you!"
My sister's voice got even louder. "Why not? Don't you know I need the press?"
"Hang on," I said, plugging my laptop into the outlet on the kitchen wall and ignoring Peter's urgent head shakes. "I haven't read the story yet." I loaded the page while my sister continued to shriek in my ear. Then I gulped. SPILLING SECRETS, read the headline. HOW FORMER EXAMINER REPORTER CANDACE SHAPIRO TURNED HER FAMILY'S DIRTY LAUNDRY INTO GOLD.
"Spilling secrets?" I said out loud. "Dirty laundry?" The call waiting beeped. "Hang on," I said. "Hello?"
"Candace," barked my brother.
"Josh," I replied as the story loaded. "Are you calling to ask why I told the paper about Lucy going to rehab?"
"No," he said. "I just want to know why you told them I got arrested for violating the city's open-container law when I was fifteen."
"I didn't." I scanned the article. Candace Shapiro sits on the couch of her posh Center City row house, plump legs not quite crossed, a grin creasing her fleshy face, as if she can't quite believe the good fortune that's fallen into her lap. "Oh, good God." I kept reading, and th
ere it was: Josh's arrest (he'd been busted on a friend's front lawn with a Merry Berry wine cooler), and my sister's brief stint in rehab. The piece not only reported the amount of my advance, it also printed our street address and the price of our house, something I'd done to only one of my subjects, an Eagles quarterback embroiled in a particularly bitter divorce. "'A rumpled sundress--size sixteen, Lane Bryant--lies on top of Shapiro's unmade bed, the $399.99 price tag still attached,'" I read out loud. "Okay, first of all, that sundress was $39.99!"
The doorbell rang. "I'll get that," Peter said as my call waiting beeped again.
"Lucy?"
"This would be your mother," said my mother in her sweet, placid voice. "Now, Cannie, you know that I'm happy to provide you with material, but I have to ask whether it was really necessary to tell the reading public that I met Tanya in the hot tub at the JCC?"
"Oh, God," I groaned. "Mom, I didn't--"
Joy's bedroom door swung open, and my daughter, naked except for a tricornered hat and a pair of Ariel underwear with a toothbrush stuck in the waistband, made her way down the stairs. "Pirate Joy!"
"Let me call you back," I told my mother. I hung up the phone and gave Joy a kiss. "Go get dressed, boots. Pants and shirt."
"Scurvy dogs," she said sadly, and padded back to her bedroom.
Peter came back into the kitchen with a wrapped brown-paper package in his hands. "Someone baked you cookies," he said, swiftly dumping the package into the trash can and washing his hands. "I don't think we should eat them."
"Ya think?" I replied, reading the article in cringing snatches, feeling, with each word, a little bit more as if I'd been hit in the midsection by a Septa bus. "'Neurotic and bitter'? 'Compulsively confessional'? She wasn't around me long enough to know how crazy I really am. And she got Joy's name wrong! It's not Joyce!"
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