Cannie Shapiro 02 Certain Girls

by Jennifer Weiner

  "I'm never having children," I muttered. My grandmother ignored me. She went into my bathroom and came back with a washcloth that she'd wet with cool water. I used it to wipe off my face.

  "Mona's downstairs. Oh, and Bruce called."

  I sighed. "Tell him I put the credit card in the back pocket of his car seat. It's probably still there."

  "I think you need to tell him that yourself." She kept looking at me with her soft blue eyes and her silver hair pulled back into a nubbin of a ponytail that made her look, Aunt Elle said, like George Washington.

  "I'll return the dress," I grumbled. "It's not like she was going to let me wear it anyhow."

  She nodded again. "Your mother made stew."

  As if I could eat. As if I could ever eat again. But I said okay just to say something, and I let her say all the things that any grandmother would say, about how this would blow over and work itself out and everything would turn out fine.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  "This is nothing," said my mother, draping her towel over the handlebars of the treadmill. "Absolutely nothing. Remember when Elle ran off with that man who had no teeth?"

  "He was a hockey player," I said wearily. "He didn't have no teeth, he just had fake teeth."

  My mother pressed the buttons to increase speed and incline and started to walk, swinging her arms vigorously with each stride. "Josh didn't speak to me for a year and a half. He said his braces hurt too much for him to talk. And you..."

  "Oh, what'd I do?"

  "Hmm." She walked and thought it over.

  "Nothing, that's what. I never do anything. I just sulk for a few years, then write a book. And I'm not the point! The point is Joy!"

  "How can I help?" she asked. It was Saturday morning. I'd sentenced Joy to a day in the company of the ever righteous Mona. They'd go to the bead store, then to Macy's to return the dress, then shopping for art supplies in preparation for a fun afternoon making signs for an upcoming peace march in Washington.

  Meanwhile my mother had taken me to the Avondale Jewish Community Center for a restorative workout. We were walking on adjacent treadmills, me in my Philadelphia Academy sweatpants and one of Peter's shirts, my mother in her LOVE MAKES A FAMILY tie-dyed tank top with her tufted gray hair sticking up over and under a rainbow-colored sweatband.

  "This is motherhood for you," said my own mother. "Going through life with your heart outside your body."

  I plodded along, thinking about Elle and how much grief she must have given my mother with the parade of inappropriate guys and temporary jobs, before Be-ism, or simply time, finally calmed her down. "I don't know what to do," I said, thumping along at four miles an hour. "What am I supposed to do?"

  "Give her time, Candace," my mother intoned. "Give her space. Give her love."

  I snorted. Give her money was the only thing missing from the litany, and that, as far as I was concerned, was the only concrete action I'd taken that had actually helped my sister. Then again, Mom had given Elle time and space and love. She'd also turned a studiously blind eye to my sister's more outrageous adventures, including the time Elle had worked as a stripper and tossed her see-through thongs and a bra with cutouts for the nipples into the household hamper (my mom, if I remembered right, had merely washed them, dried them, folded them, and stacked them without comment on Elle's bed).

  "Joy is falling apart," I complained, loudly enough to earn me an interested look from the ninety-year-old gentleman turtling along on the treadmill on my other side. "She's falling apart, and I'm just supposed to stand around and watch it happen?" I wiped my sleeve against my forehead. "And what am I supposed to tell her about Dad?"

  "Tell her the truth," my mother said calmly. "Tell her your father is still in Los Angeles. Tell her he got divorced again."

  I whipped my head around sideways to stare. "How do you know that?"

  "My lawyer keeps track."

  I sighed. After all these years, my mother still clung to her quixotic, costly hope of someday recovering a portion of the tens of thousands of dollars of alimony and child support my father had never paid her in the 1980s and 1990s. In all that time, she'd been through three lawyers and outlived two judges and hadn't gotten enough money out of her ex-husband to buy a decent purse.

  "What happened?"

  She shrugged, then went back to pumping her arms. "I have no idea. His second wife had a prenup, though."

  Good for her, I thought, but didn't say.

  "Is he in touch with..." It took me a minute to recover the names of my father's second round of children. For years Elle and Josh and I had referred to them exclusively as the Replacements. "Daniel and Rebecca?"

  "I don't know," she said.

  I shook my head again. "The part I can't figure out," I said, "is why. Why even answer Joy? Why pretend that he's this wonderful grandfather who's been shut out of her life because of..." I quickened my pace and hooked my fingers into air quotes. "'Parental estrangement'? Does he need money?"

  "I don't know," said my mother. She shook her head and sighed. "I'm sorry about this."

  "Yeah," I said. "Yeah. Me, too." I hopped off the treadmill, red-faced and panting, and bent down to retie my shoe. "And now she's got some kind of reunion all set in her head."

  "Maybe you should let her," my mother said.

  "What?" I snatched the flimsy towel off the handlebars and wiped my face, hearing my heart beating too hard in my chest, my blood pounding in my ears.

  "Let her see him," she said calmly, her Mona-made bead earrings bobbing as she walked. "Joy's not stupid. She'll see him, and she'll see what he really is."

  I straightened up, shaking my head. "He can be pretty charming when he wants to be. What if she decides that he's right and we're all wrong?"

  "She knows you," said my mother. "She knows us. She's got a good head on her shoulders."

  Not lately, I thought. "She read my book," I said slowly. "And a bunch of articles. She knows..." My voice trailed off. She knows what I am, I thought. Or at least she knew what some reporters had made of the old public version of me--or of Allie, who'd been the bastard child of all of my years' worth of rage. I pictured myself twelve years ago, after my father had left and Bruce had left and I'd pushed Peter away, hunched over my notebook in Joy's bedroom, scribbling so hard that I could see the outline of each word on the page below, thinking, They'll be sorry...they'll pay. I couldn't blame that girl for what she'd done, but still, what mother would ever want her child to see that version of herself, so fucked up and furious?

  My mother had the nerve to sound amused. Her eyes crinkled as she smiled and stopped her own treadmill. "You could just say it was fiction. That's what I've been doing for years!"

  I shook my head wordlessly. Allie wasn't entirely made up. The sex was all hers--well, almost all hers--but the anger was all mine, and surely, being that angry was at least as embarrassing as sleeping with strangers.

  "But you should probably tell her you never had sex in the parking lot at Emek Shalom," my mother urged. "The rabbi hasn't looked me in the eye since the book came out."

  I twisted the towel in my hands and said nothing.

  "Well, I'm going to tell her that Tanya and I met at the hardware store instead of in the hot tub," she said, and led me toward the ladies' locker room, where she stood in front of her locker and began the leisurely process of removing her shoes, then her workout wear.

  "But you and Tanya did meet in the hot tub. Tanya told me about it."

  My mother hung up her T-shirt and looked at me innocently.

  "All about it," I said.

  She shook her head, smiling, wrapped a white towel around her chest, and opened the door to the sauna. Steam whooshed out, obscuring her face. "At least tell her the truth about your father," my mother said as I sat down on a tiled bench beside her. "If you don't, you're only increasing his allure."

  "What allure?" I asked. "What's alluring about a man who never wanted the first thing to do with her?"

  "The al
lure of the unknown," my mother said. "It's like with junk food or Disney princesses. The more you tell a kid she can't have something, the more she wants it."

  I wiped my forehead again as steam poured out of the vents. My mother smiled serenely and closed her eyes.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  "Mother!" I called. It was Friday night. I'd finished my homework and had planned on spending the hour before bedtime doing research for my d'var Torah, the speech I'd give at my bat mitzvah explaining what my Torah portion meant to modern-day Jews in general and me in particular.

  "I'll be right down!" she called. "Just give me a second!" She sounded overjoyed to hear my voice. I hadn't been talking to her more than I absolutely had to, which was making her crazy. In the week since I'd gotten my grandfather's e-mail, she'd tried to start about a hundred conversations, offering to take me out for coffee, or a walk, or tea at the Ritz. Once she'd even dropped a fresh copy of her horrible book on my bed. I guess it's time we talked about this, she'd said. I'd curled my lip and said, I don't have time to read anything that's not on the list for school, and believe me, they don't want us reading that. Her face had gone pale, but she'd just picked up the book and walked out of my room.

  "What do you need?" she called from the top of the stairs.

  "I need to get online." Reasons I hate my mother, number seventeen: She's put so many blockers and parental controls on the Internet in our house that the only places I can surf are the websites for Nickelodeon shows. I think my mother really believed that if I accidentally wandered onto a porn website, my head would explode.

  "Just go to the start-up menu and hit 'disable'!" she called. "I'll be down in a minute!"

  Lie. She was picking up my father, and they were going out to dinner, which meant she'd have to spend at least twenty minutes on her makeup, during which time she was guaranteed to practically blind herself with her eyelash curler. "Never mind!" she yelled. "Just log in as me!"

  "What's your password?"

  "Nifkin!"

  Frenchelle, turning in circles in preparation for a nap on her dog bed, raised her head and growled. I typed in Nifkin and the screen flashed into life. My mom's screen saver was my most recent school picture. In the upper-right-hand corner, a dancing Thin Mint informed me that there were 243 days until Girl Scout cookies went on sale again.

  I rolled my eyes and checked out her favorites. Lyla Dare fan site. Gossip website. A headline reading GIRLIE BOOK AUTHOR EXPOSED! and a comment underneath my mom's picture: I thought the chicks who wrote those books were at least supposed to be good-looking. I winced and clicked to an online store that sold shoes for people with foot arthritis...then a news story about parents who'd had their newborns implanted with silicon chips in case they got kidnapped or lost. I opened up a Google search and typed in bat mitzvah and Jacob and Esau. Then I glanced upstairs, made sure the water was still running, opened another window, and hit "history." Immediately the computer regurgitated all the websites my mom had visited in the last week.

  There were a hundred different Lyla Dare fan sites that my mom had viewed in the last forty-eight hours. I cringed, knowing she must have been looking for her name, still trying to figure out what had happened. At least GrokIt.com had dropped her as a topic for the time being and was instead bashing a TV reporter they'd decided was too fat to be delivering the news. My mom had been browsing on websites about bar mitzvahs and blended families, and she'd been shopping for evening gowns online. But the place where she was spending the most time was the website for the Open Hearts Surrogacy Service.

  I squinted at the home page. Please enter your password, said the text. I typed in Nifkin again. An instant later a smiling, brown-haired woman's face filled the screen. "Hello, CANNIEGIRL70. BETSY82 has posted an update." I clicked on BETSY82, who, according to the website, was a happy, healthy mother of two who was ready, willing, and able to make an infertile couple's dreams come true.

  "Joy?" My mom was standing behind me, barefoot, with her hair dripping on the shoulders of her bathrobe. She squinted at the screen. "What are you--"

  "What is this?" I asked, pointing at the woman's picture. My voice bounced off the walls and windows, buzzing in my hearing aids. I felt monstrous, enormous, like my feet were too big for my shoes and my body had grown too big for my clothes.

  Her hands fumbled at the lapels of her bathrobe. "What are you...how did you..."

  I couldn't let her change the subject. "What's going on?" I demanded, and shut off the computer before she could figure out that I'd been looking at her Internet history. "Are you and Dad going to have a baby?"

  "I...well..." She sat down in the armchair in the corner of the room. It was piled high with books and papers. She didn't seem to see them or feel the big black Lyla Dare binder underneath her. "Your father and I weren't planning on discussing this with you until we were a little further down the road," she said, and at that moment it was like I could hear something click into place. This was real. It was actually happening. They were going to have a baby together, a baby they'd wished for, a baby they wanted, a baby who would be the exact opposite of me.

  "You're getting a surrogate." I felt dizzy and sick. I remembered the first passage I'd inked out in Big Girls Don't Cry, in which Allie takes a pregnancy test. Heads, I win; tails, I lose. One line, please, God, one line. One line, I'm saved; two lines, my life is over.

  That was the truth, right there on the screen. No matter what she said and how she called me her joy, she had never wanted me. And now she was going to have another baby, a wanted baby, a baby with the man she loved.

  "Nothing's final yet," she said, but I knew that was a lie, one more to pile on top of the rest she'd told me. Your grandfather never tried to get in touch. Of course I wanted you, Joy.

  I got to my feet. My mother blinked at me miserably. She'd curled and put mascara on only one set of eyelashes, and she looked like a lopsided raccoon.

  "I don't have to stay here, you know." I said this casually, as if it had just that minute occurred to me.

  She looked up at me, shocked. "What?"

  "I could go live with my father. Bruce. My real father."

  Her eyes got very wide. She twisted her hands in her lap with her head bent. I wished I could take it back, but I couldn't. So I said, "He always says I can stay with him whenever I want to. I could go to the same school as Max and Leo. I'm going to call him right now."

  She gave a wry smile. "Don't you think you'll miss peanut butter?" I just stared at her coldly. She sighed. "Joy, I wish I could sit here and explain everything to you. About that website; about my father. But I can't miss this dinner. It's really important. I need to--"

  I cut her off. "Fine. Go." I blinked as she bounced up out of her chair and stood there, her hair still dripping. The world seem to blur out of focus. That wasn't supposed to happen, and that wasn't what she was supposed to say. She was supposed to say No and Absolutely not. She was supposed to say I won't let you and You're grounded and We're your parents and You belong here. She was maybe even supposed to cry, to reach for me, to ask me over and over again what was wrong until I told her.

  Instead, she twisted her hair around her hand and wiped underneath her made-up eye with one fingertip. "I...I have to go now," she said. "I have to go. I have to meet your father. I have to..." Her eyes, as she looked past me to the clock at the top of the stairs, were almost frantic, and her lips were trembling. "There's food in the fridge. Those spicy string beans you like. Your dad and I will be back by ten, ten-thirty at the absolute latest, I promise, and we can talk. I'll explain everything." She shot another desperate look past me, then started moving, walking fast, taking the stairs two at a time, thighs jiggling underneath the terry cloth.

  I stared with my mouth hanging open. I waited for her to come back down and apologize some more, to give me all the details about the baby, if there was one. Instead, twenty minutes later, she hurried back downstairs in a lacy white skirt and a pink top. I watched as she checked her lipstick
in the mirror and picked up her purse. Again, she repeated, "Your father and I will be home, and we'll talk about everything."

  She bent down to put on her shoes, picked up her purse, gave me one more desperate look, then picked up her keys and practically ran out the door, leaving me sitting there as shocked as I'd ever been. She'd started leaving me alone in the house only when I turned thirteen, but she'd only done it twice before, and before she did, she'd go through about three dozen questions before setting a single foot out the door: Do you have your cell phone? Are your hearing-aid batteries charged? Are you hungry? Thirsty? All set with your homework? I went to the window, positive she'd turn around. But she just kept walking, not even turning back to look at me, moving quickly down the sidewalk, then around the corner, until she disappeared.

  I stood there in the empty office, in the empty house, hearing nothing but the thunder of my heartbeat in my ears. Then I spun on my heels and ran up the stairs. Grandma Audrey had bought me luggage for my last birthday, a pink zippered suitcase and a little carrying case for makeup. I opened the suitcase on my bed and started throwing stuff inside: jeans, underwear, my copy of Big Girls Don't Cry, a picture of me and Tamsin at Sesame Place on my sixth birthday, all the steps of the Jon Carame program, plus my flat iron and my toothbrush. I was panting by the time I zipped the suitcase, and of course Bruce wasn't answering his phone. I didn't leave a message. Bump bump bump went the suitcase as I dragged it down the stairs. I don't care, I don't care, I don't care, I chanted in my head with each step.

  TWENTY-NINE

  I power-walked the entire thirty-two blocks from our front door to the Hospital of the University of Philadelphia, so rattled that I barely realized where I was, so miserable that I almost didn't notice when the blister that had risen on my right heel burst and started bleeding, or that I got on a service elevator instead of the regular kind and wound up riding up to my husband's office next to what I was pretty sure was a corpse. The plan was for me to meet up with Peter. We'd spend a few minutes going over our list of questions for the potential surrogate, then head to the restaurant.