"Are you having a medical emergency?" the sweet young thing behind the desk at the weight and eating disorders center asked as I limped through the door with my shoes in my hand. The concern on her face told me better than any mirror just how bad I looked.
"No," I said, twisting my hair into an impromptu bun. "No, no emergency, I'm meeting Dr. Krushelevansky."
She looked dubiously at the schedule spread in front of her. "He's running a little late..."
Great. Figured. "I'll wait," I replied. "Tell him it's Cannie." I asked for a Band-Aid, stuck it over the oozing patch on my heel, and plopped myself into one of the clinic's new chairs (armless, for the plus-size patient's comfort--a sign of progress if ever there was one). There was a limp year-old issue of Ladies' Home Journal on the table. I fanned myself a few times, then started reading recipes for cakes that looked like Easter eggs.
The woman spilling over the sides of the chair across from mine frowned at me. "You here to see Dr. K.?"
I nodded.
"He's running late," the woman said.
"He gets busy," I said.
"Oh, sure. I know that." The woman stretched her legs out in front of her, rotating her ankles. "Don't worry, I'm done. Just waiting for my daughter to get me. I wouldn't see anyone else anyhow. Dr. K. saved my life."
"Did he?" The armless chairs were a step in the right direction, but that stupid poster--TAKING IT OFF, ONE DAY AT A TIME--was still there, a relic from my own trip through the weight-loss drug trial I'd signed up for all those years ago. The skinny model on the sun-faded poster romping through the field full of wildflowers was looking decidedly dated in her leotard and leg warmers. How many times had I told Peter that fat ladies would not find that image encouraging? No matter how thin one gets, I'd said, one has a hard time imagining a situation in which one would don a leotard and appear in public, and under no circumstances would one run in public unless one were being chased.
"Oh, yes," said the woman. She put down her right foot and lifted her left. "I had that lap-band surgery?" She dropped her voice. "In Mexico? My insurance wouldn't cover it here. They said I wasn't obese enough. Not obese enough," she said, looking ruefully at her belly. "Can you imagine? I told them to give me a month and a few boxes of Krispy Kremes, and then let's talk."
"Uh-huh," I said. I pulled my phone out of my purse to see if I'd missed any calls. I hadn't. I wondered where Joy was. At Thirtieth Street Station? On a train to New Jersey? Knocking on Bruce and Emily's front door?
"So I had the band put in down in Puerto Vallarta, and I'm on a plane back home, and everything's fine, you know. My ankles were swollen a little, but I figured that's just normal..."
I nodded. The GPS locator put Joy in our living room, probably sitting right where I'd left her. Or maybe she was on the phone, pouring her heart out to Bruce, begging him to rescue her from her monstrous mother and reunite her with her no-doubt-loving grandfather who'd been so cruelly kept from her for her entire life. I pressed my eyes shut, willing myself not to cry, willing myself into stillness even though I wanted to spring up from the chair and race down the staircase, out to the street, and back home. But I couldn't. We'd just get dinner as fast as we could without offending our guest. Maybe we'd pick up a quart of lemon water ice from Rita's. That was Joy's favorite. I'd take her to the living room and explain everything calmly, whether she wanted to listen or not: about the surrogate, about the possibility of a baby, about my sex life or lack of same in high school and college; the truth about who Allie was, and who I'd been, the truth about my father. So I'd been a nerd, I thought, and insecure, and unhappy, and bigger than the average mother. So my sister had been to rehab, and my mom had had illicit congress in a hot tub. So my father had hit me up for a six-figure loan and her biological father had dumped us and run off to Amsterdam. We'd all survived. We'd all come through. Surely that had to count for something!
"...I wake up, and I'm in agony. 'Call 911!' I say to my husband. The poor guy's white as a sheet. He never wanted me to get the surgery in the first place. 'Why don't you just eat a little less, exercise a little more?' he says to me. Ha. Like that's gonna work. So he calls 911, and the ambulance comes, and the next thing I know--"
I nodded and sighed in all the right places as she unfurled her story of sepsis, necrotic tissue, and the lifesaving surgery that my husband had performed.
"So it's working now, I guess," she said. "I mean, they say slow and steady, but the band people go to the same support groups as the bypass people, and it looks like they're having a lot more luck. I'm thinking about a revision."
Peter popped his head out of his office door. "Mrs. Lefferts? What are you still doing here?"
The south-of-the-border-surgery-happy Mrs. Lefferts told Peter that she was waiting for her ride. Peter nodded, then smiled at me. "Are we all set?"
"All set." I got to my feet.
Mrs. Lefferts looked from Peter back to me. "You two know each other?"
"In a manner of speaking," I said.
"We're married," said Peter, and looked at me sternly.
Mrs. Lefferts looked me up and down. "Lucky you," she said, and picked up her purse, waving through the window at her daughter.
Five minutes later Peter and I were on a corpse-free elevator, and I was filling him in on the latest with Joy.
"I don't think she's serious about going to the Gubermans'," he said as we hurried down Thirty-fourth Street, surrounded by throngs of disgustingly young students in the beaded leather sandals everyone under thirty was wearing that spring. "I told her she'd miss peanut butter." A cyclist whizzed within inches of us, calling "On your left!" "We need to get her a therapist. Or maybe send her to one of those tough-love boot camps in Wyoming."
"I think those are just for kids with substance-abuse problems." A cab pulled to a halt at the curb in front of us. Peter held the door, and I scooched over toward the window while he gave the driver the restaurant's address.
"Stealing credit cards and leaving the state without your parents' knowing has to count for something. I'm finding her a therapist. First thing in the morning. She should be talking to someone."
The cab bumped and jolted past the Oriental-rug shops and cafes and brick row houses with painted doors and bright flower boxes. When we crossed Twenty-third Street, I made myself ask the question: "Do you think I was wrong to not tell her about the..." I couldn't bring myself to say "baby" yet. "The surrogate? About my father? To say that he'd never seen her? No, I wasn't," I said before Peter had a chance to answer. "I wasn't wrong. My father's nuts. He shouldn't have anything to do with her."
Peter reached for my hand. "If getting her a therapist would make you feel better, then by all means, we should. But this is going to be fine. She's being a teenager. It's what they do."
We zipped across Broad Street, passing beneath the big red University of the Arts sign that curved around a building on the corner. Peter looked at his watch, then squeezed my hand in both of his as, one by one, the streetlights flared to life.
"So what can I tell you?" BETSY82, whose real name was Betsy Bartlett, smiled at us from across the white tablecloth. Candlelight lit her rosy cheeks and gleamed off the thin gold necklace in the hollow of her throat. She had curling brown hair, longer than it had been in the pictures online, a high forehead, and an easy smile.
I lifted my glass of sangria, trying hard to shake the feeling that the two of us were on a date with this easygoing, forthright thirty-two-year-old nurse/surrogate mother. After much discussion, Peter and I had decided to take Betsy to Uno Mas, one of my favorite tapas places in the city. We'd exchanged pictures of our kids (I'd come equipped with an old one of Joy in which she was smiling), and we'd talked about the weather (unsurprisingly humid, with thunder threatening every night), the presidential campaign, and the latest scandal involving a pantyless starlet having sex in public. Then we'd ordered a carafe of white sangria with slices of peach and raspberries floating on top, and half a dozen little plates: deep-fried ol
ives, tiny veal meatballs, warm fava and lima-bean salad, slices of cheese, glistening white and ivory, with spoonfuls of honey and jam. Betsy had nibbled bites of this and that, exclaiming that you couldn't get food like this in Horsham.
I asked the waiter for more flatbread. Betsy smiled, leaning forward. "I bet you have a lot of questions."
I'd come with three typed pages' worth, but the first one that came to mind was, simply, "How'd you get into this?"
"I wanted to give something back," she said. "I've been really lucky--healthy, good marriage, great kids. We don't have a ton of money, and with an eight-year-old and a six-year-old, I don't have a lot of free time to volunteer, so I decided that this would be my contribution."
"And what was it like?" I asked. "How did it feel?"
"It was a little strange," she said. "With the first one--that was Eli--I was never sure how much to tell people, how much of it was their business. Of course, my boys kind of took care of that for me." She smiled and raised her voice to a child's falsetto, and in her expression I could almost glimpse her son's face. "'Mommy's got a baby in her belly that belongs to someone else!'"
"Did people just accept that?" Peter asked.
She shrugged. "If they thought anything about it, they never said so to my face."
"What about after the birth?" I asked. "Was it hard when it was time...I mean, when you had to..."
"Give the baby up," she said, and shook her head. "You know what? I thought it would be, but it wasn't. I felt..." She toyed with an oyster shell on her plate. "I guess I felt more like an aunt than a mother, if that makes any sense. It wasn't quite like being a babysitter, even though I've heard other surrogates describe it that way. It was more like I'd been entrusted with the baby for a finite period of time, and that when that time was over, the baby would go with his parents, and I'd go and be with my kids."
"The fathers must have been very grateful," said Peter.
"They cried," Betsy said. I looked down in my lap, and she reached across the table to grab my hand. "Oh, no. They were happy tears! Everyone in that room was crying! When I saw the look on his dads' faces..."
I dabbed at my own eyes with my napkin. "Sorry," I croaked. I was remembering when the nurses had handed me Joy, how I'd been too foggy and bewildered to do much more than open my arms and hold her, a package I hadn't signed for, a gift I had never expected.
Betsy squeezed my hand. "You know," she said shyly, "I wasn't sure I should tell you this, but I read your book."
That stopped the tears. "You did?"
"Uh-huh. When I was in high school. My parents were going through a divorce, and then my older sister came home from college with a girlfriend. My father didn't handle it very well. I'd never read a book about stuff like that. I thought I was the only one who'd had someone she loved just, you know, wake up one morning and say, 'Hey, guess what? I'm totally different than what you thought!'" She lifted her sangria. "I felt like I couldn't tell anyone. Your book came along at just the right time for me."
"Wow. Thank you. I'm..." I reached for my own glass. I never knew what to say when people wanted to talk about the book. "That's nice to hear."
Sensing my unease, Peter filled Betsy's glass, then mine. "So what can we tell you about us?"
While they talked, I smoothed my napkin back over my lap and thought that if this was like a date, I had a feeling it would turn out to be a successful one, where none of us would be sitting at home fretting and waiting for the phone to ring and knowing that it wouldn't. A baby, I thought. A little boy, because somehow, I thought that was what we'd get. My eyes filled again as I remembered the sweet and singular weight of a newborn baby in my arms, the smell of soap and warm cotton, the feather-light touch of a tiny fist against my cheek. One perfect boy to go with my perfect, if troublesome, girl.
THIRTY
I sat on the couch with my suitcase between my feet and my cell phone in my hands. It was eight-twenty-seven. My mother had left two hours before.
I could have just taken a taxi to the train station and gone to Bruce's house, the way I'd threatened, except Bruce wasn't answering his phone and I wasn't about to show up in New Jersey in the middle of the night with nowhere to sleep. I groaned and flipped my phone open. There was no one I could call. My life was ruined. My mother was a liar, my parents were secretly plotting to have another baby, and Amber Gross's bat mitzvah was the very next morning and I didn't even have a dress to wear.
I stared at the telephone's blank screen. Aunt Elle? Samantha? My grandmother? None of them seemed right. "I want to run away," I said out loud to the empty room. "I want to run away and join the circus." My telephone buzzed in my palm. I looked down and saw MOM on the screen and stuck the phone in my pocket without answering. My father had taken me to the circus once. I could remember the smell of popcorn and sawdust, the beautiful aerialist in her spangled pink-and-silver leotard hanging over us, glittering like an angel as she twisted and spun.
A plan--hazy, confused, maybe completely impossible, but a plan anyhow--was starting to form in my mind. I walked to the foot of the stairs, then back to the couch. I'd need money...plane ticket...but oh, if it worked, I could make my mother so scared. I could make her sorry. Maybe I could even get some answers on my own, right from the source, the story that nobody wanted to tell me. You will be your own responsibility, the blended-family bar mitzvah lady had said, and if I could pull it off, this would be the ultimate example of being an adult, going out in the world and getting what I needed for myself. Plus, it would be in the family tradition. My mother, or "Allie," had run away to Los Angeles. Bruce had run to Amsterdam. I could run, too.
I ran into my mother's office, rummaging through her desk until I found what I needed. I grabbed my suitcase, locked the door behind me, and walked fast down the sidewalk toward South Street, where I could get a cab.
Ten minutes later I held my breath and pressed my finger against the Marmers' doorbell. If it was Mrs. Marmer, that would be bad. If it was Tamsin, that would be even worse. But luck was with me, because Todd was the one who opened the door and looked at me.
"Avon lady?" he inquired.
"Can I come in?" I whispered.
He raised his finely arched eyebrows. "Are you on the lam?"
"I don't know what that means," I said. "Is Tamsin home?"
Todd opened the door, lifted my suitcase, and gestured toward the staircase, which felt about a mile long as I made my way to the top. Tamsin's room was at the end of the hall. The door was closed. I held my breath and knocked. "It's Joy," I said before she could answer. "Can I come in?"
For a minute there was silence, and I was sure she was going to say no, or nothing. But after a minute I heard the squeak of bedsprings, then the door opened up and Tamsin stood there staring at me.
"Hi," I said. She was wearing an old white shirt and pajama bottoms. I looked down and saw pink polish glittering on her toenails. When had she done that? I wondered. Was she trying to look like Amber, secretly, in a way nobody would notice? Those pink toes shining above her long white feet made my heart feel like it was breaking.
"What do you want?" Tamsin asked.
I looked at her, trying to think of how to answer, when she sighed, opened the door wide, and plodded back to her bed.
Tamsin's room is small, and it feels even smaller because every inch of the wall is plastered with pictures: blow-ups from her graphic novels, drawings of regular girls mixed with superheroes. Some of them I recognized from the books she read: Summer Blonde and Plain J.A.N.E., Fun Home, and Ghost World. Some of them she'd drawn herself. There was a drawing of her and me and Todd, sitting in a row on a bench with our lunch bags in our laps, and one of me and Amber Gross, looking like twins, walking down the Philadelphia Academy hallway with our flat-ironed hair flying out behind us, twice as big as we were in real life.
Tamsin saw where I was staring and tried to stand in front of the picture. I pointed at it. "I look like Lyla Dare or something." I wasn't quite sure how t
o say what I was thinking, which was that Amber and I looked almost menacing, tall and strong and pitiless, like we'd stomp on anyone who stood in our way.
Tamsin tilted her head sideways in a gesture that wasn't quite a shrug. "What's with the suitcase?"
"I'm running away," I said. I hadn't known it was true until the words were out of my mouth, and once I'd said them out loud, there was no going back.
"You're going to miss Amber's bat mitzvah."
"I don't care," I said.
Tamsin turned toward the wall, toward her drawings. "What's wrong?" she finally asked. "Why are you here?" Her voice did not sound very best-friendly. "Did Amber break up with you?"
"No," I snapped. "You know what? Never mind." I reached for my suitcase handle. "I shouldn't have come here," I muttered, and I was almost out the door when Tamsin said, "What do you need?"
She sat down on her bed. Last summer we'd sewn different-colored patches to the pink-and-red-patterned quilt, trimmings from jeans we'd outgrown, pieces of our old show-choir robes.
"A favor. A big one." I sat down on the bed across from her.
"What?" She yanked up her sweatshirt zipper and flipped her hair back over her shoulders, all business.
"If I wanted to get to Los Angeles by myself, without my parents knowing, do you think I could?"
"Did you get invited to another bar mitzvah?" she asked.
"No, it's...It's something else. It's my grandfather. My mother's father. I e-mailed him, and I want to go and meet him."
Her laptop was folded on her bedside table, next to the lamp that she'd decorated with red and gold bottle caps, glued in rows to its base. She reached for it and opened it up. "Where will you stay? With Maxi Ryder?"
Cannie Shapiro 02 Certain Girls Page 28