Cannie Shapiro 02 Certain Girls

by Jennifer Weiner

  "I'll be okay," she said.

  She went to school, and we went to services together for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, sitting side by side in the Center City Synagogue, chanting the words of the Ashamnu, the recitation of sins.

  Ashamnu, we sang. We have been guilty. Bagadnu. We have betrayed. We curled our hands into fists and joined the rest of the congregation in striking our chests symbolically with each word. Gazalnu, we have stolen. Dibarnu dofi, we have lied.

  Peter, I thought, holding on tightly to the back of the seat in front of me with my free hand, dizzy with hunger from the daylong fast, dizzy with grief. What had he done? What had he stolen? Whom had he betrayed? Why did God take him before he could even see Joy's bat mitzvah, let alone his own biological child? I looked up toward the bimah and the Torahs and Rabbi Grussgott, dressed in white. No answers came, only the ancient words of the chant, the melody in a minor key, the sounds of hundreds of fists thumping hundreds of chests as we prayed to be inscribed in the Book of Life for another year, please God.

  Ni'atznu. We have been scornful. Well, God only knew I had. Maybe it was all my fault. Saranu. We have been disobedient. Maybe Peter had been right. I'd been running from my divine purpose. I was supposed to...What had he said? Write something real. And I hadn't. I'd been too afraid.

  Ta'inu. We have gone astray. Ti'tanu. We have misled others. Sarnu. We have turned away from You.

  "Forgive us, pardon us, grant us atonement," Joy said beside me. I bent my head and prayed for the two of us, that things would work out, that I'd find the courage I needed to do the things that had to be done.

  We broke our fast at Samantha's, and once we'd cleared away the blintzes and the bagels, she'd offered to come over and spend the night, but I told her I thought we'd be fine. After we got home and Joy was asleep, I went through our closet, spreading Peter's ties out on the bed. I'd give a few of the nicer ones to Josh and keep my favorites--the orange-and-gold one with frogs that I'd bought him for his birthday, the cream-and-gold one he'd worn to our wedding. Maybe I'd sew them into a quilt someday, or use them to line a little purse for Joy, something she could carry at her own wedding. The suits I'd already sent to Goodwill, along with his good wool winter coat, but I'd kept some things: the Penn sweatshirt he'd worn on the weekends, the mug Joy had made for him in nursery school that read WORLD'S GREATEST DAD, where he'd kept his dry-cleaning receipts and movie-ticket stubs and spare change.

  I sat cross-legged and leaned against the headboard in the big, empty bedroom that would, I feared, always feel big and empty to me now. I rolled the ties into tie-balls and put them in a paper shopping bag. Then I got off the bed and sat down at the small wooden desk against the wall. Peter had used the desk for his work and to pay the bills. I'd never written a word there, not even my signature on a check. You remember how, Lyla had told me, but at that moment, in the darkness, with the empty bed stretched out beside me and the empty years looming before me, I wasn't sure.

  Okay, I thought. You can do this. I turned on the light, retied the belt of Peter's bathrobe, and took out a notebook and a pen. Once upon a time, I wrote, just to get myself started, and then the world fell away as I leaned into the pool of lamplight over the desk and began again.

  FORTY

  "Honey?" My mother was standing at the bottom of the stairs, wearing the red dress I remembered from pictures of Maxi's movie's premiere, the dress that my father had loved. "What do you think?" she asked, smoothing the skirt, tugging at the sleeves. "Too much?"

  I shook my head. "It's pretty," I managed. "Where'd you find it?"

  "Closet." She pulled at the top uneasily. The dress was cut to leave her shoulders bare, and her skin was tan and gleaming. You look beautiful, my father would have said if he'd been there, and maybe he would have kissed her, too, if he thought I couldn't see. And if she thought I wasn't listening, she would have said, You know, you don't have to flatter me. I'm a sure thing. Then he'd whisper something in her ear, and she'd duck her head, blushing, pleased.

  "Well, at least it still fits," she said, and watched me carefully, poised to grab me and catch me as I wobbled down the stairs. With me in my new not-too-high heels, my mom and I were exactly the same height. I'd overheard her on the phone with Rabbi Grussgott about three weeks after the funeral. "Do we reschedule?" she was asking. I'd stood at the kitchen door, holding my breath. I knew what the rabbi would tell her, which was that in Jewish tradition, you don't cancel a simcha because of a tragedy. Not a wedding, not a bris or baby naming, not a bar or bat mitzvah. You don't cancel, because in the midst of life we are in death, and we find joy in the midst of sorrow.

  "Joy in the midst of sorrow," I said. She reached out and smoothed my hair, tucking a curl behind my ear, giving my hearing aid a friendly tweak (or maybe just making sure it was still there). "No black suit?" I asked her.

  She shook her head. "I've worn that black suit enough for the rest of my life, and I thought..." Her eyes filled with tears, but she blinked fast, so they didn't ruin her makeup. "I thought I'd wear something that I'd worn with your father. I don't know. Maybe it's silly."

  I hugged her, careful not to wrinkle her dress or mess her hair. "It's not," I said. "I like it. It's good."

  Two hours later I stood in the synagogue lobby in my pink dress with the thin straps and the silvery beaded skirt; the dress that I'd bought with Elle, then returned, and bought with Bruce's credit card, then returned, and finally bought with my mother and Maxi, after I'd lit out for the territories, after I'd been lost, then found again. I wore pearl earrings that had belonged to my great-grandmother, silver sandals I'd found with Tamsin and Todd, and a pink-and-silver shoulder-covering tallis that Emily had made for me. Aunt Elle had taken me to get my hair and makeup done that morning. ("Subtle!" she kept saying. "Sheer! Clean!" Meanwhile, she'd pulled up a chair right beside me and used the makeup lady's tweezers and glue to affix gigantic long fake eyelashes to both her upper and lower lids.)

  I stood in the lobby, watching as my friends walked in: Tamsin and Todd, Amber and Martin, Sasha and Audrey and Tara and Duncan Brodkey, and Cara with her parents, looking grown-up in a black dress. My family gathered in the little foyer by the front door, by the blue prayer books stacked on a table next to the programs. Beams of sunlight made their way through the high windows, and the wooden floors shifted and creaked underneath us as Rabbi Grussgott gave us last-minute instructions, going over the order of the aliyahs and where everyone would stand when we passed the Torah down through the generations, from my grandparents to my parents then to me. My mom stood on my left side, and Bruce was on my right, in a dark blue suit and a blue-and-white tallis. For a minute the thought jumped into my head that this was what I'd wanted, this was normal: a mom and a dad, and not some weird, confusing, hard-to-explain situation, just a regular mom and dad who loved each other, or could at least look that way in synagogue on a Saturday morning. I'd wanted that so badly, and now, of course, I'd give anything to have my old, freakish family back again, anything in the world to have my father standing there with me.

  The rabbi smiled at me and slipped into the sanctuary, leaving just the immediate family in the foyer: my mom and Aunt Elle and Uncle Josh and Grandma Ann and Bruce. "Please join me in reading responsively," I whispered. I heard "responsibly" in my head, and I smiled a little. Tyler was in the audience. He'd grown about six inches since his bar mitzvah and had done something to tame his hair. I thought I'd noticed Tamsin looking at him appreciatively on her way in, and I reminded myself to introduce them at the party. Then I flipped through my prayer book, glancing at the passages I'd highlighted, the pages I'd dog-eared: Baruch atah adonai, elohainu melech ha'olam...Blessed are you, oh Lord our God, ruler of the universe, who sustains us and has brought us to this joyous day.

  "Are you ready?" my mother whispered, and just as I nodded, the front door eased open, and a man with close-cropped white curls, in an immaculate black suit, shining black shoes, and black sunglasses, slipped inside.

/>   "Joy," he said.

  My mouth fell open. Behind me, Elle whispered something you are definitely not supposed to say in synagogue.

  My grandfather smiled as he walked toward me. "I hope I'm not too late." He reached into his pocket and pulled out a soft zippered bag of blue velvet. A tallis bag, holding the traditional blue-and-white fringed prayer shawl. "This was my father's," he said, and handed it to me.

  "Th-thank you," I stammered. My numb fingers worked at the zipper. My mother stood behind me, her hands still on my shoulders. I could imagine her glaring at him, or trying to drag me out of his sight, but instead, she said, so softly I almost couldn't hear her, "Thank you."

  "All set?" asked Rabbi Grussgott, sticking her head back through the door. "It's time."

  "One more thing." My grandfather reached into his pocket and pulled out something round and silver. I heard my mother suck in her breath. I remembered the silver dollars from her book. Her father would toss them into the deep end of the swimming pool, and Allie and her sister would dive for them. They got to keep the money after. Dorrie would spend hers on candy and magazines, but Allie--my mother--had saved every one.

  "For you," my grandfather said, and pressed the silver dollar into my hand. "For luck." He pulled off his glasses and looked at all of us: Grandma Ann and Mona, Uncle Josh and Aunt Elle, and then, finally, me and my mother. "I'm proud of you," he said. My mother started to cry. I remembered after Tyler's bar mitzvah, when I was sick in the bathroom and my father had said the same thing to me. It was weird to think of my mother being a daughter the same way that I was, and how she might have been comforted by those words the same way I had been.

  "Joy?" Rabbi Grussgott stared at me, then at my grandfather, looking puzzled. I nodded.

  As we filed into the sanctuary, down the aisle toward the bimah, I looked over my shoulder for my grandfather, thinking that he'd slip into a seat toward the back, and I could call him up for an aliyah, let him drape the tallis over my shoulders...But by the time I'd climbed the stairs, stood behind the podium, and opened my prayer book, the faces in the audience seemed miles away, and no matter how hard I looked, I couldn't find him anywhere.

  "For my first aliyah, I'd like to call Grandma Ann and Grandma Audrey." I read their Hebrew names, then stood back and waited as they climbed the three steps onto the bimah, touched the spines of their prayer books to the Torah, and kissed them. For one endless, horrible moment, I couldn't remember the words to the blessing, or the tune, even though I'd been singing it for six years of Hebrew school. Barchu et adonai h'am vorach...And there it was, like a piece of candy tucked under my tongue. I opened my mouth and started to sing.

  Baruch atah adonai le'olam va'yed, the crowd--or at least the Jewish people in the crowd--chanted back. Tamsin was in the front row, with her glasses off and her hair down around her shoulders, her features less pointed than delicate, her face a pale oval above her dress. Todd was sitting next to her, perfect and elegant in his suit and pink-and-silver tie.

  I picked up the silver pointer, in the shape of a small hand with the index finger extended. I touched it to the parchment gently, like Rabbi Grussgott had told me. The words were in my head--I'd listened to them so many times on my iPod that I knew every sound, every syllable--and as I chanted and slid the pointer over the Hebrew, my nervousness fell away.

  By the end, there was a crowd gathered around me of everyone who'd been called to the Torah for an aliyah: both of my grandmothers, Aunt Elle and Uncle Josh, Samantha and Maxi, my mother and Bruce. Now it was time for my speech, my message, the thing that I wanted to tell them.

  "We read today from Genesis," I began. "Abraham was Isaac's father. When Isaac was forty years old, he married Rebecca. His wife was barren, and Isaac pleaded with God for her sake."

  Behind me, I felt my mother stiffen.

  "God granted his plea, and Rebecca became pregnant. But the children clashed inside her, and when this occurred, she asked, 'Why is this happening to me?' She went to seek a message from God. God's word to her was 'Two nations are in your womb. Two governments will separate from inside you. The upper hand will go from one government to the other. The greater one will serve the younger.' When the time came for her to give birth, there were twins in her womb. The first one came out reddish and as hairy as a fur coat." Someone--maybe Todd or Duncan Brodkey--snorted. I kept reading. "They named him Esau. His brother then emerged, and his hand was grasping Esau's heel. Isaac named him Jacob. Isaac was sixty years old when Rebecca gave birth to them." I paused, then said, "Which, in my opinion, was totally unfair. I mean, he'd be, like, seventy-eight when they finished high school."

  My mom laughed. I bent my head back over my typed pages. "The boys grew up. Esau became a skilled trapper, a man of the field. Jacob was a scholarly man who remained with the tents. Isaac enjoyed eating Esau's game and favored him, but Rebecca favored Jacob. Jacob was once simmering a stew, when Esau came home exhausted from the field. Esau said to Jacob, 'Give me a mouthful of that stew! I'm starving!' Jacob said, 'I will, if you sell me your birthright first.'

  "'Here I'm about to die!' said Esau. 'What good is a birthright to me?' 'Make an oath to me right now,' said Jacob. Esau made the oath, and sold his birthright to Jacob."

  I looked down at the three pages spread in front of me on the dark red velvet covering the bimah. The words swam in front of my eyes. What had I meant to say? What did any of it mean? I blinked and could make out individual words: "obligation" and "responsibility" and "traditions of our people." I felt my mother's hand on my shoulder, and I knew that people were staring, but all I could think, all I wanted to say, was I miss my dad.

  I blinked again, hard, and looked at the pages. "I'm supposed to tell you about what I've learned this year as I got ready to become a bat mitzvah," I said. "And I had a speech like that all written. It was about my Torah portion, and the idea of obligation, and how if you do something wrong then you have to make it right, but really, the truth is, what I learned this year is that life is hard."

  My mother's hand tightened on my shoulder.

  "Good people die for no reason. Little kids get sick. The people who are supposed to love you end up leaving." A lump grew in my throat. I swallowed hard and kept going. "I imagine how Esau must have felt. It wasn't his fault he was hairy, and it wasn't his fault he was hungry, and it probably wasn't his fault that his mother liked Jacob better. Jacob was sneaky, but he's the one who got his father's blessings. He's the one whose descendants are supposed to be numbered as the stars in the sky." I looked down and managed another breath. "But Esau kept going," I said. "He didn't get his father's blessing. He had to live by the sword. But he at least got to live. Isaac told him that the fat places of the earth could be his dwelling, and he could still have the dew of heaven to drink."

  I folded up my pages and pressed my hands on top of them. "When you don't get what you want, you take what's left and make the best of it. The Torah tells us that Esau had two wives, and maybe they helped him out. I know that my mom and my grandmothers have helped me a lot this year. And my aunt Elle and uncle Josh, and my...and Bruce. Even when I did the wrong thing or made the wrong choice, my family stood with me. What I learned this year is probably what Esau learned, even though in Jewish history, he's just the other brother, the one nobody talks about much. Bad things happen. Stuff doesn't work out." I looked down at the sheet of paper, the important words I'd written down. "Everyone has sorrow. Everyone has obligations. Everyone keeps going. You lean on the people who love you. You do the best you can, and you keep going."

  I folded up the pages again and tried to stuff them in my pocket before I remembered that my fancy dress didn't have one. Rabbi Grussgott raised her eyebrows with a look that very clearly said, What happened to the speech we worked on? Then she gave a little nod and gestured to my mother, who looked like she was going to start bawling as she stepped up to the microphone with her red dress rustling.

  "Joy, my daughter, my darling," she began. Behind me,
I heard Grandma Ann start to cry. "I am so very proud of you today, as you stand here before us, reading so beautifully, looking so beautiful and so grown-up."

  My mom wasn't crying. Her eyes were sparkling, and I thought it was because she was happy, even impressed with me, as if I'd turned out to be just as special, just like she'd always said I was.

  "I know how proud your father would be, too. I know how proud you always made him. You were--you are--the most wonderful daughter anyone could ever ask for, and even if you drive me crazy sometimes..." I smiled a little, and she did, too. "And I drive you crazy a lot of the time..." She wiped underneath her eyes carefully, with just the pad of her forefinger, like Elle had shown her. "You're the best thing I've ever done. You're the best thing I could have ever hoped for. And I know that you will be, as the Torah says, a woman of valor, like Sarah and Rachel and Rebecca and Leah, your namesake. I know that even if you don't get exactly what you want exactly when you want it, you'll be strong and you'll be smart and you're already beautiful, and I know that you're going to have a wonderful life, because I know you've already learned one of the most important lessons of all."

  "Close your eyes," I said as we walked into the ballroom of the College of Physicians, and I held my hands over my mother's face to make sure she couldn't see. I walked behind her, guiding her into the ballroom. "Okay...now!"

  For a minute she didn't say anything, and then she started to cry. "Oh, Joy," she said, and clapped her hands. "You didn't!"

  I did. All of my years building scenery for a dozen different Philadelphia Academy plays and musicals had finally come in handy, and my friends had helped. We'd been able to transform the big ballroom into a Sound of Music wonderland in celebration of the sappiest musical of all time, which of course was my mother's favorite. Each of the tables was one of "My Favorite Things." There were raindrops on roses (Tamsin and I had worked for an entire Sunday making papier-mache flowers, then gluing round crystals to them) and whiskers on kittens (that was the kids' table; we'd bought a pile of stuffed animals, and each kid could take one home). There were bright copper kettles (Aunt Sam knew a party planner who'd gotten a bunch of them on loan from Fante's in the Italian Market) and warm woolen mittens (Grandma Ann and Mona had spent the last three weeks speed-knitting). The favors were in brown paper packages tied up with string, and for dessert there were crisp apple strudels, even though I'd drawn the line at serving schnitzel with noodles for lunch, because I didn't know what it was and thought it sounded disgusting.