Elle grinned and pulled another dress off another rack. This one was shimmering lavender satin with a pleated, ruched top. I’d seen the actress Taryn Tupping in something exactly like it—maybe even this exact dress—in one of Aunt Elle’s magazines. My heartbeat quickened. Taryn Tupping’s exact dress! But Aunt Elle shook her head. Not your color, she mouthed.
“What?” she said incredulously into the telephone. “No. No. A thousand times no. I am not buying your exquisite daughter, quote-unquote, something with a long skirt and maybe ruffles. God, what is the matter with you? How did you turn out this way?” She pressed the phone to her ear, but I could still hear more squawking. “Listen,” she said at last. She waved at a saleslady, who hurried over to help us. “Just because you don’t spend money on your clothes doesn’t mean that Joy shouldn’t. In fact, just because you don’t spend money on your clothes means that Joy can afford something really nice.” I shyly ran my finger over the bodice of one of the dresses. It was made of bands of green satin, pale as new shoots of grass. I lifted the price tag, then dropped it fast, then picked it up again, thinking that I must have counted in an extra zero. When it was clear that I hadn’t, I sidled past the saleswoman, who was practically standing at attention beside Aunt Elle, toward the rack topped with a discreet sign reading SALE.
Elle was listening to my mother, her brow furrowed under the twinkling brim of her cap. When she spoke again, her voice was icy. “Bad values?” she said. I froze, holding my breath. “Because I care about clothing? Because I think Joy should look beautiful on her big day?”
She winked at me again, and I felt myself relax even before she gave me a thumbs-up. “Right. Right. No, no, I hear you. I got it. I’ll do my best. I’ll let her know. Right. ’Kay. What?” She put the phone against her shoulder. “Your mother wants to know if you used the bathroom.”
I rolled my eyes. Aunt Elle rolled hers.
“I’m sure she can take care of herself. Yes. Uh-huh. Call you later. Bye.” She flipped her phone shut and put it back in her purse, looking satisfied. “I got her up to five hundred,” she said.
I gasped. “Aunt Elle, you’re amazing!”
“True,” she agreed. “But you’ve got to pay a hundred dollars of it.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “I’ll do errands or babysitting or something. My friend Tamsin babysits, and she gets fifteen dollars an hour.”
“Fifteen dollars?” Elle shook her head and plucked a dark blue dress off the rack. “Jeez. I was lucky if I got three. Then again, I wasn’t what you’d call attentive. Hey, get away from there!” She grabbed my arm and pulled me past the marked-down dresses with her eyes on the floor. I grinned. I’d forgotten that Aunt Elle believed in the Law of Affinity, which meant that if you wanted nice things, you had to be around them as much as possible. Aunt Elle not only wouldn’t buy clothes on sale, she wouldn’t even touch them.
“We should probably go to Macy’s.” She said the word like it tasted bad. “I think I remember where it is. They’ll have cute knock-offs, and maybe . . .”
I was following her as she jangled her way through the racks when I saw it: pink, sparkling, beads flashing, thin straps draped over a padded silk hanger. “Aunt Elle.”
“What?” she asked. I pointed wordlessly at the dress. “Ooh.” She lifted the gown off the rack and shook it gently, making the beads shimmer and the skirt sway. “Nice.”
I found my voice. “That’s it. That’s the dress I want.”
She held the dress at arm’s length, moving it this way and that. Watching the palettes catch the light, hearing beads on the hem click against each other, I could imagine myself dancing in the dress; could see myself gliding across the floor; could even picture Duncan Brodkey looking at me, his lips pursed in a soundless whistle. Elle’s forehead furrowed when she lifted the price tag.
“Bad?” I gasped.
“Well, let’s not be hasty. We’ll try it on.” She tapped one pink-painted nail against her teeth. “I think I’ve got a gift certificate we can use. And maybe . . .” She slung the dress over her forearm, and I practically skipped after her toward the dressing room.
• • •
“Can I ask you something?”
“Ask away, honeybee,” said Aunt Elle. She shook salt onto the puddle of ketchup she’d squirted on her plate, dipped one french fry, and nibbled it daintily. We were in the Brooklyn Diner, in a booth next to the rotating cheesecake display, Aunt Elle on one side of the table, me on the other with my new pink dress beside me. We’d split the price between my mother’s credit card, Aunt Elle’s debit card, and her gift certificate, and even then we’d gone way over budget, and I didn’t have a dress to wear to Amber’s bat mitzvah, if she really was going to invite me, but I didn’t care. When I’d slid the pink dress over my head and Aunt Elle had pulled up the zipper, I’d never felt so pretty in my life. You look hot, I could imagine someone whispering, and the voice had sounded like Duncan Brodkey’s, and he’d been saying those words not to Amber but to me.
“I . . .” I pulled the lettuce off my turkey burger, then the round pickle slices. “So I guess Bruce wasn’t around much when I was little.”
Aunt Elle smirked. “Doing a little fact-checking after the fact?”
I took a bite of my burger. “How long was he in Amsterdam?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. You were so little . . . and by the time you were three or so, he started coming around again.” She lifted her fork and speared a lettuce leaf. “Your mother was probably trying to protect you.”
“By not telling me that my biological father didn’t even meet me until I was three?”
Aunt Elle looked worried, maybe because she was afraid that my mother would be angry at her for spilling the beans. “Well, is it really such a big deal? Can you remember anything from when you were one or two? I mean, you were probably just stuck in a playpen.”
I was momentarily confused. “What’s a playpen?”
She scowled. “A little baby cage. That’s what your grandmother kept us in.”
Never mind that for now, I thought. “It is a big deal. It’s important. I mean, hello, it’s my father!”
“I had a father,” Aunt Elle said. “It wasn’t such a walk in the park.”
“What do you mean?” I knew the basics of my mother’s family’s story: that her father had left when she’d been a teenager, and married someone much younger and had kids with her, and that my mom and her brother and sister didn’t see him anymore.
Elle pressed her lips together and put her fork down. “Just not nice,” she said. “He was not a very nice guy.”
“What do you mean, not nice? Did he hit you guys?” The father in Big Girls Don’t Cry hadn’t hit his kids; he’d thrown things at them: books, bottles, cordless telephones. “Allie” had a dent in her forehead from the father chucking an ice skate at her when she was nine.
Elle sprinkled more salt into her ketchup. “He never hit us.” She was quiet so long that I thought she wasn’t going to say anything, and then I’d have to start again with the computer or maybe Grandma Ann, when she said, “He called me names.”
“What names?”
Her face was flushed, and her hair, when she raked her hand through it, stood up from her head, making her look disturbingly like my mother. “Dummy. Stupid. Idiot. Moron. You get the idea.”
“Wow.” I didn’t know what to say to that.
“And then he was just . . .” She snapped her hands in the air and exhaled furiously. “Gone. Vanished. Into thin air. He missed Josh’s high school graduation. He missed my college graduation.”
“You graduated from college?” This was news to me.
“Well, maybe I would have if he’d paid my tuition!” Her voice rose. The two white-haired ladies sharing a slice of cheesecake stared. Aunt Elle smacked the bottom of the ketchup bottle so viciously I was surprised I didn’t end up splattered with the stuff. “Anyhow,” she said, putting the bottle back down, “you’ve got a moth
er and a father and, um, Bruce. You’ve got a bunch of people who love you. You’re practically self-actualized! At your age!”
While Aunt Elle chattered about self-actualization and some seminar she’d recently attended, I let my mind wander. Fact: She and my mom had had a bad father—except he hadn’t been bad in exactly the way the father in the book was. I’d already found out the truth of my mother and Bruce. I could find out the truth of this, too. I could continue to play detective, the detective of my life and my whole family’s life, reading the books and the articles, interviewing the witnesses, separating what had really happened from what had been invented, finding out all the stuff that nobody ever wanted to tell me. Maybe the truth was something different from what my mother had written, different from what she’d told me. Maybe the way she behaved was the truth, and what she’d written was the lie, and she really had wanted me, and I hadn’t ruined her life.
The thought of it made my heart lift. I smiled at Aunt Elle, who smiled back almost gratefully, looking like herself again, all glint and flash and shine. I let my hand drift down to the shiny gray bag beside me and rested my fingers on top of the tissue paper tucked over the dress, as if it could give me strength or good luck.
• • •
“No,” said my mom. It was four hours later, that night. The three of us had taken the train home, my mother with her novel, Aunt Elle with her cell phone, and me with the bag in my lap, refusing to let my mom take even a peek, making her wait for what Aunt Elle called “the unveiling.”
I was standing in her bedroom, in front of her full-length mirror, with the pink dress on and my mother walking in slow circles around me. “I’m sorry, Joy. It’s a beautiful, beautiful dress. But it’s just not going to work for your bat mitzvah.”
“But why not?” I moaned. I’d piled my hair on top of my head and worn the one pair of heels I had, left over from last year’s Class Day. The dress fit me perfectly—not too tight on my chest, not too loose on the hips. The skirt brushed softly at the skin just below my knees, and the silver palettes shimmered, making it look as if the dress were actually made of light.
My mom sat down Indian-style on her bed, with her boobs practically resting in her lap. “The synagogue sent guidelines. Nothing strapless or with spaghetti straps.”
“But it came with a wrap!” I ran out of the room to get it. When I came back with the silvery fabric flung around my shoulders, Mom was still frowning.
“It’s lovely, Joy, it really is, but I think it’s just too grown-up for a thirteen-year-old.”
Too grown up. Ha. That was a good one for a woman who’d written about losing her virginity on her parents’ pullout couch when she was fifteen—unless that was a lie, too. “But I am growing up. That’s the whole point of the bat mitzvah! I’m becoming a woman, and I can’t wear a little kid’s dress!” I wished Aunt Elle were there to defend me, but she’d vanished almost as soon as we’d gotten home, tossing a wave over her shoulder and telling my parents not to wait up.
“No,” said my mom.
I looked at her. She looked back at me, her face tense and unreadable. “What are you so worried about? What do you think’s going to happen to me if I wear it? Do you think . . .” I shut my mouth. Do you think I’ll have sex with some guy on a pullout couch? I’d been on the verge of asking. Do you think I’ll get pregnant accidentally, like you?
“I’m sorry,” she said. “But that dress is not going to work for the kind of day your father and I want you to have.”
Which father? I almost said. But I could tell from her face it wouldn’t do me any good. I knew this expression. It was the same one she’d worn when she’d told me that I couldn’t go to an R-rated movie, that I couldn’t go to a party unless she’d talked to the parents beforehand, that she didn’t care how late everyone else stayed up, my bedtime on a school night was ten o’clock.
I pulled off the dress and tossed it onto my mom’s bed, where it lay in a pathetic puddle of pink. “Honey, I’m sorry, but . . .” I didn’t say anything. Hypocrite, I thought, forming the syllables on my lips and teeth and tongue without any breath behind them as I stomped down the hallway lined with family pictures: me as a baby, me as a toddler, me on my first day of nursery school and kindergarten and seventh grade, past the clock my mother was so proud of and the tables with vases of red and pink roses. Hy-po-crite. When she was only a little older than I was, she’d been having sex, actual sex with actual boys, and now she was worried that I was showing my shoulders?
In my bedroom, I yanked on jeans and a sweatshirt and pulled the reply card to Tyler’s bar mitzvah out of my underwear drawer. Downstairs, I hooked Frenchie to her leash, walked out into the clear night and down to the mailbox at the end of our street, and I stood there listening until I heard my card land at the bottom.
THIRTEEN
At ten o’clock that night, Peter came home from the game of Quizzo he played once a month with his fellow diet doctors (Bariatric physicians, he’d say whenever he heard me call him and his colleagues “diet doctors.” Please!). He’d barely made it through the door before I grabbed his arm, put my finger to my lips, and dragged him upstairs. We tiptoed past Joy’s closed bedroom door, and I flung open the door to our bedroom and pointed dramatically at the silvery pink dress spread out on the bed.
“Do you see this?” I demanded.
He looked at the dress, then at me, then at the dress again. “It’s pretty,” he finally said. “Is it for you?”
Oh good God. As if I could get the thing over my hips. Over my hip, singular. “It’s Badgley Mischka. They don’t serve my kind. This,” I said dramatically, “is the dress that our daughter wants to wear to her bat mitzvah.”
Peter peered at the garment cautiously, as if it might spring up from the duvet cover and strangle him. “It’s nice,” he said. Then he saw my face. “It’s not nice?”
I took a deep yoga breath. “It’s all wrong. Completely and totally wrong.”
Peter crossed the room, lifted the dress up by its skinny straps, and spread it over the bench at the foot of the bed. Then he lay down with his head on the pillow and one arm folded behind his head. He used the other one to pat the space beside him. Grudgingly, I lay down next to him. Peter nibbled at my earlobe. “You smell nice,” he said.
“Stay on topic,” I said, shifting so that my head rested on his chest. “We need to discuss this. We need to have a serious . . . adult . . . discussion . . . oh, that tickles!” I started giggling, my breasts quivering against his side, which he didn’t seem to mind. “Can I ask you something? Are we doing this all wrong? I mean, I want the day to have meaning—that’s the most important thing, that it means something—but maybe we’ll look cheap if we just have a DJ. Maybe we should have dancers. Or we could show a movie of Joy’s life. Do you think it’s too late to get a videographer? And a producer? And buy the rights to some songs?”
“We should stick with the plan,” Peter advised, and unfastened all four of my bra’s hooks single-handed, a skill he’d perfected over the years that still never failed to impress me. “A disc jockey, a nice lunch, that photo booth for favors. It’ll be fine.” He curled his fingers under my chin and looked at me. “Now what’s really going on?”
I opened my mouth and found that I couldn’t tell him. I couldn’t say, Honey, the truth is that our daughter looks like a thirty-year-old in that dress. I couldn’t add that if Joy were a grown-up instead of a girl, the world was going to hurt her, the way it hurt all of us. And I couldn’t even whisper the worst part, which was this: If she was a grown-up, then where did that leave me? Sure, I had a career, even if it was a half-assed, mostly hidden one, but my real work for the past ten years had been keeping my daughter safe. Seeing her in that dress was as good as getting a pink slip and a severance check. Your work here is done, the dress said. Too bad, so sad, don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out. I couldn’t tell Peter the specifics of the bargain I’d worked out in my head: Give Joy the kind of party she
wanted, the kind that her friends and relatives were having, and gratitude would keep her my little girl for a little bit longer.
I pulled Tyler’s bar mitzvah invitation out of the drawer of my bedside table, where I’d stashed it for just such a discussion after rescuing it from the recycling bin. “Take a look.”
He picked it up. “Big.”
“Big,” I repeated. “And this is what she thinks is normal. This is what’s normal, in her world. So maybe we . . .” Peter kissed me. My eyes slipped shut as he eased my shirt and bra over my head. Then my eyes flew open again.
“Centerpieces. We need to rethink the centerpieces.”
“Shh,” Peter said, and kissed me again, easing me onto my back and pressing the length of his body against mine. “No talking for ten minutes.”
“Ten minutes?” The giggles were back. “Are we going to do it twice?”
“Pipe down,” he whispered. His mouth was hot against my cheek, then my neck, and I closed my eyes and let my heart, that eternally clenched fist, relax and spread its fingers open to the sky.
• • •
It was actually closer to forty minutes by the time either of us was interested in conversation again. I made my case as we lay together in the dark, a down comforter over our bodies, the sound of passing cars outside our window.
“So let me make sure I understand you,” Peter said in his driest and most sober tone. He was still naked, the lean planes of his chest illuminated by the candle flickering on the bedside table. Post-sex, I’d scrambled into pajama bottoms and a University of Philadelphia T-shirt. I tucked my head into the warm hollow between his neck and shoulder and braced myself for the recap.
“You think,” he began, “that bar mitzvahs like Tyler’s are the reason the world hates America in general, and Jews in particular, and that if we throw Joy a hundred-thousand-dollar party with dancers and video invitations and costume changes, it means that the terrorists have won.”
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