Certain Girls

by Jennifer Weiner

  My official major at the esteemed Larchmont University was English literature, but by the third week of freshman year, it became clear that my real subject of concentration would be Rich Bitches’ Boyfriends. During classes, on tangled sheets where I’d find crumbs and pizza crust (and once an entire slice of stiffened pepperoni), stolen hours that would always end with me traipsing back across Bell Courtyard with a smirk on my face and my XXL panties in my pocket. I was not the kind of girl who slept over. I was not the kind of girl who was even invited over if there was a roommate nearby. I was a guilty pleasure, an indulgence, the girl who’d do anything. Word got around. As did I. I wasn’t in it for the sex itself, which ranged from mediocre to merely okay. What I craved were the precious minutes afterward, cradled in the Rich Bitch’s Boyfriend’s arms, as shafts of dusty sunlight made their way underneath the university-issued green blinds, and I could imagine the words “I love you.” Not that Chas or Trip or Trey or Talbot ever said them. They wouldn’t even say hello to me if we passed in the courtyard, or ended up sitting next to each other in Freshman Seminar. You could shout about sex from the rooftops if you were having it with one of the anorexic, horse-faced blondes who seemed to comprise half of Larchmont’s Class of ’91, but sex with a girl like me was a secret . . . and I plowed through those boys like I’d devoured those long-ago Whitman’s samplers my father would bring home before he decided that candy, and then his marriage and his family, were a bad idea.

  I couldn’t imagine my mother doing things like that: my mother, with her knitting and her committees and her minivan and the three kinds of stain remover standing at the ready in our laundry room. But what I knew of Big Girls Don’t Cry so far had been sort of true. A tweaked version of the truth. True-ish. If my mom had been that much of a slut in college, I figured there was one person who’d be able to tell me about it.

  In the book, my mother’s roommate at “Larchmont” was called “Baldwin.” In real life, her freshman-year roommate was Alden Langley of Richmond, Virginia. I’d found Alden’s new last name (Chernowitz, which seemed like a terrible downgrade) on the Princeton alumni website, which I’d accessed by typing in the code on one of my mother’s Princeton Alumni Weeklys that I’d found in the recycling bin. Alden didn’t list an e-mail address, which would have been my preferred way to communicate, but she did give her telephone number. I let Frenchie sniff around the base of a trash can while I nibbled the edges of a salt bagel. At nine o’clock exactly, I dialed Amber’s phone carefully, rehearsing the words in a whisper, praying I’d sound normal. A man answered on the third ring. “Hello?” I almost lost my nerve and hung up. “Hello-oo?”

  “Is Alden Langley Chernowitz there?” I asked.

  “Who’s calling?” asked the man’s nasal voice. I could hear kids’ voices in the background, which made me feel better. At least I hadn’t woken everybody up.

  “My name is Joy Shapiro. Alden went to college with my mom.”

  The man paused. “Hold on,” he said. There was a click, and silence, then a woman’s voice came on the phone.

  “Hello?” The voice sounded puzzled but not unfriendly.

  “Hi. My name is Joy Shapiro. My mom is—”

  “Cannie,” the voice said instantly. “How is she? I was hoping she’d be at the reunion.”

  “Oh. Oh, I . . . I’m not sure about that.” I’d seen the orange-and-black cards and letters arriving all last year. My mom had tossed them straight into the recycling bin. I’m not ready for that yet, she’d said. “She’s good, I guess.”

  Alden did not have the kind of voice I’d expected, a snotty rich girl’s voice. Instead, her voice was warm and faintly southern, turning my mom’s name into “Cann-eh,” and “hoping” into “hopin’.”

  “So what can I do for you?” she asked.

  “Um.” Just get it out, Joy, I told myself. “I read my mom’s book?”

  Alden didn’t say anything, but I thought I heard her inhale.

  “And I want to know . . .” About the sex, I thought.

  “About the earrings,” Alden said a little sadly. For a minute I didn’t know what she was talking about. Then I remembered page 73 and flipped to it quickly:

  My mother dropped me off at Larchmont University with two of everything—two pairs of jeans, two long-sleeved T-shirts, two pairs of shoes. It was a good thing that was all I had, because my roommate Baldwin Carruther’s clothes took up all of our remaining closet space and filled the antique armoire she’d placed in our common room, next to the stereo system and on top of the Oriental rug she’d brought up with her from Atlanta. Baldwin was a fourth-generation Larchmontian. Baldwin had fine blond hair that she wore gathered into a ponytail thin as a pencil, and thick forearms from years on her prep school’s crew team. While I fussed with my sheets, she set a framed picture next to our bunk beds, a shot of her standing beside her sister in a floor-length gown and elbow-length gloves with a corsage around her wrist. “Was that your prom?” I asked, and she said, “No, my debut.” Baldwin had a jewelry box full of strands of pearls, gold bangles, silver hoop earrings, pendants, and charms. “Take anything,” she said, waving carelessly at the pirate’s chest of treasure.

  I never touched her stuff until second semester. I’d been invited to a costume party—really, my entire dorm had been invited—and I was going as Madonna. Baldwin’s big gold hoops would be perfect, I thought. I took them out and left a note. When I got back, there was a note on my pillow: RETURN MY EARRINGS, it said. THEY ARE HEIRLOOM.

  I felt sick as I pulled them out of my ears and put them back on top of her cluttered pile of jewelry: the pearls, the bracelets, the locket engraved with her name. “The rich are different,” I said out loud. Then I said, “Heirloom.” Baldwin didn’t say much to me for the next two weeks except “good morning” and “good night,” but she clearly hadn’t forgotten my transgression. One Saturday night, she stumbled into the room, giggling, with Jasper Jenkins holding her hand. Jasper, my crush from the school paper, where he was a sports reporter and I was the copy editor who wrote his headlines and changed his every “alright” to “all right.” I lay there, frozen in place, as she pulled him up to the top bunk and gave him what was, from the sound of it, an extremely inept blow job. (“Watch the teeth!” he hissed more than once.) My hands clenched as I lay there, equally horrified and aroused, thinking, Note to self: don’t borrow the rich girl’s jewelry, even if she says you can.

  “It wasn’t earrings,” Alden Langley said. “It was a jacket. A leather jacket. Your mom borrowed it. I got pretty upset.”

  “Oh.”

  “But not because it was expensive! It was because it was my grandfather’s. He’d given it to me in his will. It meant a lot to me. Your mom didn’t have any way of knowing that. We had a fight, but we made up afterward. And I could see . . . I mean, there were girls like that at Princeton. You know, the rich ones who’d make you feel like crap about yourself just because you were breathin’ their air.” She chuckled again. “You should ask your mama about the girl in our hall who came to college with her own horses.”

  “Wow.” No big deal, I wrote on my Post-it as Alden kept talking. I wrote horses. I wrote, for reasons I didn’t understand, Mama. “So did she . . . did she . . .” I couldn’t get the words out. Did she sleep with all those boys? Did she walk around with her underwear in her pocket? Was she really that kind of girl?

  Alden chuckled. “Well, it is fiction, honey.”

  Fiction, I wrote. But just because it was fiction didn’t mean there wasn’t truth in there somewhere, glimmering, like coins at the bottom of a well. Who was she? I wondered as I recapped my pen. Who was my mother, really? And who am I? “Hey, is she there?” asked Alden in her honeyed southern voice. “Could I say hello?”

  “She’s sleeping,” I said.

  Alden laughed. “Lucky duck. Well, you tell her hi from me, honey. You tell her that I think about her.” In the background, a kid whined, “Mo-om,” and Alden laughed again cheerfully and sai
d, “Gotta go,” and hung up.

  FIFTEEN

  “Name,” said Peter. I was propped against one arm of the couch, and he was facing me with the laptop open and his bare feet in my lap.

  “Ooh! Ooh!” I said, waving my hand in the air. “I know that one!”

  He looked at me sternly as his fingers rattled over the keyboard. “Dates of birth.” More typing as he filled them in. “Address, home phone, work phone, cell phone . . .” He paused. “Occupations.”

  “Well, you’re a diet doctor.”

  He made a face. “Bariatric physician.”

  “Yeah, you keep telling yourself that.”

  “And you?”

  I winced. It was Wednesday night. The dishwasher was chugging away, Frenchie was snoozing on her dog bed in the corner, Joy was in her bedroom, and Peter and I were just starting the ten-page application for Open Hearts Surrogate Services. (He’d been the one who’d picked Open Hearts. I, ever the sucker for a good title, had wanted to go with a surrogate and egg-donor business I’d found online called Game Ova.) “Can you just put ‘homemaker’? That’ll sound good.”

  He tapped his fingers against the edge of the laptop. “They want to see ten years of tax returns. ‘Homemaker’ doesn’t explain your income.”

  Good point. “How about ‘well-compensated homemaker’? Or ‘homemaker who won the lottery’?”

  “Candace, it’s a very small box.” He wiggled his feet. I gave his toes a squeeze, after making sure that Joy was still upstairs. The other night we’d been watching a movie, and when she’d seen me rubbing Peter’s feet, she’d given me a look of scorching disgust and walked out of the room.

  “Can you do a footnote?”

  “What am I, David Foster Wallace?” he asked.

  “Can you say former writer? Maybe retired writer?”

  “Writer,” he said, and typed it in, then stared at me defiantly, as if daring me to tell him otherwise.

  • • •

  When the first copies of Big Girls Don’t Cry arrived in my mailbox, the hot-pink covers peeking cheekily out of the sober manila envelope, I believed that my whole life was going to change. Years of being a reader, then a reporter, years of dreaming about being a real writer, had trained me to believe that the moment my book entered the world would be the fulcrum on which my life would shift, profoundly and eternally.

  The Monday night before the official publication date, Peter took me to Le Bec Fin, where I enjoyed great quantities of wine and told everyone from the coat-check girl to the cheese-cart guy my good news. After dessert, I wobbled down the sidewalk to the Barnes & Noble with Peter’s arm around me. I’d stood, swaying and stuffed, in front of the windows, informing uninterested pedestrians, “My book’s in there!” (Unfortunately, I hadn’t counted on the bookstore still being open, or on the security guard telling me he’d call the cops if I didn’t quit smearing the glass.)

  The next morning, slightly hungover and extremely nervous, my sister Lucy and I dragged my giant gray suitcase and my tiny daughter (plus her car seat, diaper bag, and assorted food and toddler paraphernalia) to the Philadelphia International Airport for the start of my book tour. We began in Cleveland, where I sat, all dressed up, behind a huge stack of hardcovers. After two hours, I’d managed to sell a grand total of one book. We proceeded to Chicago, where one person showed up at my reading, and I’m fairly certain she was homeless and had just wandered in out of the cold.

  In Kansas City, a trembling, white-lipped woman approached me at the podium of a fancy independent bookstore, where they’d had a poster of Big Girls Don’t Cry in the window, until one of the regulars had complained. “Your mom said she’d kill me if I didn’t come, so will you please call her and tell her I was here?” the woman begged. In Miami my nanna shocked me by showing up with her entire bridge club and announcing loudly enough to be heard over the wailing kids in the children’s section, “That’s my granddaughter the author.” Sadly, her pride didn’t extend to her urging her friends to pay the $24.95 cover price. “They can take it out of the library,” she assured me before leaving a semi-permanent coral kiss mark on my cheek, telling me that my black skirt was “very slimming,” and asking my sister whether she’d gotten a real job yet.

  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 page 217, 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 à 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 back-seat 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.