Certain Girls

by Jennifer Weiner

  “Oh?” Maxi, I figured. My movie-star friend had told me she’d be away on a reshoot in Vancouver (which, she swore, could be made to look an awful lot like New York), but maybe she’d made a special trip back. I scanned the crowd hopefully. Twenty people. Not bad. “Hi,” I said cheerfully, pushing away my weariness, putting on my meet-the-public smile. “Thanks so much for coming tonight. I’m going to read a little bit from the very beginning of Big Girls Don’t Cry.” I held up the book, per Larissa’s instructions, so that everyone could get a good look at the cover. Not that anyone could miss it, given that it featured big, barely clad breasts on either side of a whipped-cream-topped sundae, with a maraschino cherry sliding suggestively into the cleavage. Not exactly an understated literary look. Daniel Furstmann Friedlander’s book had featured a grainy black-and-white shot of a Czechoslovakian castle. Oh, well, I thought. Maybe next time. “Then, if you have any questions . . .” My voice trailed off as I caught sight of the man hovering by the back row without taking a seat. He wore a dark blue suit and his curly dark hair was shot with silver. Everything about him seemed to gleam: his gold watch and wedding band, his glasses and his teeth. My heart stopped as my father raised his hand.

  “Cannie,” he said, his voice low and intimate, as if we were the only two people in the bookstore.

  I swallowed hard, forcing my tongue to move, my mouth to open. “Hi, Dad.”

  A murmur moved through the room, probably driven by the people who’d read the book, who’d remembered the horrible father it had described. I forced myself to flip open the cover and began to read, from memory, the words I’d started with long ago.

  Of all the men who’ve fucked me up and let me down, my father was the first and worst. Drew Blankenship was a close second. When I opened my copy of Cosmo, sucked in, as always, by the promise of dropping a fast ten pounds, mastering the makeup tricks of the stars, and learning some exotic new position that would make him moan and whine and beg like a dog for more, I was astonished to see Drew’s byline at the top of a piece titled “Big Big Love.” Drew wrote an article? I thought. I was the one who hustled freelance assignments. I was the one who’d kill to have my byline in a national magazine. Up until that moment, I’d thought that Drew’s fondest dream was to someday grow a marijuana plant that would appear in High Times. It seemed, I realized, scanning the article as my heartbeat sped up and my hands went icy, that I’d gotten it wrong.

  The crowd laughed in all the right places, gasped appreciatively when it was revealed that “Big Big Love” was about Allie’s plus-size figure (God knows it couldn’t have been referring to Drew’s equipment, I’d written. Poetic license will only get you so far.) As I read, I sneaked glances at my father, who was still standing in the back row, his hands in his pockets, his face unreadable. If that line about being fucked up by a father had bothered him at all, I didn’t see it. I turned my eyes back to the page and concentrated, as hard as I could, on my little sister and Joy, safe in an oversize armchair with their backs to the reading. Keep her away, keep her away, keep her away from him. Blood roared in my ears, and my hands were slick with sweat. “Questions?” I managed.

  A woman in the front row raised her hand. “I’ve been working on a novel,” she began. My mouth moved without my having to think about it as I answered the questions about writing a book and finding an agent and twisting truth until it was fiction. My breath caught in my throat as Joy toddled down the aisle with Eloise in her hands, heading right for me. “Excuse me,” I murmured. “Lucy?” I said into the microphone. My sister hurried out of the children’s section. Fast—but not fast enough. As the crowd murmured, my father bent down and scooped Joy into his arms, and Joy, who usually shrieked at the sight of a strange man—assuming, often correctly, that the strange man was yet another doctor who’d want to stick her with a needle—snuggled against him and flung her arms around his neck. My heart stopped.

  “Hi, kitten,” my father said.

  “Kitten!” Joy repeated, and clapped her hands in delight. I stood there, frozen and numb, unable to move or believe what I was seeing as my father pulled a little silver camera from his pocket and, with a smile, handed it off to another patron who happily snapped their picture. Finally, I got my legs moving. “Joy,” I said, holding out my arms.

  “Kitten!” Joy chortled.

  “Congratulations,” my father said. He set Joy gently on the ground. By the time I’d blinked away my tears and picked up my daughter, he was gone, and I was left standing there, heart pounding, legs numb, equal parts furious and bewildered. After all these years, why would my father show up now? I sat down in an armchair and closed my eyes. Never mind. We were leaving first thing in the morning. I could figure it out at home.

  The next day we made it back to Philadelphia, to my cozy row house and to Peter, whom I’d missed with a pain that, by the last week on the road, had felt like a permanent stitch in my side. Two of the wheels had fallen off my suitcase. My sister was limping after an injury sustained when she’d tried to climb into Joy’s Pack ’n’ Play (“I wanted,” she explained, with a certain tipsy dignity, “to see if I could fit”). The garden I’d planted before I’d left was choked with weeds; my baskets of pansies and petunias were dying from lack of water. The book had erased an entire season.

  But as the in-print flavor of the week, not to mention the de facto poster girl for every woman size fourteen and up, I did come home to a nice consolation prize: a stack of offers for my consideration, each one weirder than the next. Did I want, for example, to be the new face of Weight Watchers? “But I’m fat!” I spluttered to Larissa, who replied, “I suspect that once they’re done with you, you won’t be.” Did I want to endorse low-calorie cookies, fat-free ice cream, plus-size maternity wear? (No, no, and, tempting, but no.)

  My credit-card company upgraded me to the White Card, the rare and fabled instrument that had no spending limits and offered all manner of upgrades and perks. A doctor in Illinois offered me a free gastric bypass. A plastic surgeon in Pittsburgh pledged a gratis nose job. A third cousin whom I’d met twice asked for a loan to start a combination personal training business/smoothie bar. (I told him no but added that if he was interested in having either his nose or his stomach bobbed, I’d be happy to hook him up.)

  The strangest pitch came from a company asking if I’d be their on-campus spokesperson for tampons.

  “Would I have to visit colleges dressed up as a giant tampon?” I asked Larissa.

  I could imagine her behind her antique maple desk, sitting in her padded pink chair, flipping the pages. “I don’t think so,” she said crisply.

  I persisted. “Could I dress up as a giant tampon if I wanted to?”

  “Um . . .”

  “Does this offer have strings attached?”

  Larissa sighed. “Any more period-related humor?”

  “Well,” I said meekly, “it is a lot to absorb.”

  And there wasn’t much time to absorb it. My publisher had arranged for another half-dozen interviews once I was home. Prior to selling my book, before I’d had my baby, I’d spent years covering entertainment for The Philadelphia Examiner. I’d figured that almost a decade of making sausage might have prepared me for my own trip through the grinder. I was sadly mistaken. I’d open the door to my house to my former colleagues—fresh-faced or zit-smattered; harried working mothers with their cell phones buzzing; ambling, long-in-the-tooth good ol’ boys who’d bounced from paper to paper and magazine to magazine. I’d show them around my house, tell them stories about the book tour, let them meet Joy. Most of the time it worked out well, even if Publishing Today was unimpressed by the contents of my refrigerator (too much butter and not enough fresh fruit for the reporter’s taste), and the Chicago weekly’s headline had been the regrettable HEFTY GAL IS QUEEN OF MODERN ROMANCE. (“Hefty?” I’d railed to Peter, waving the clipping for emphasis. “Hefty? For the record, ‘Hefty’ is a trash bag. I am festively plump.”)

  Then one Sunday morning I
’d opened my door and found that the Examiner wasn’t there. “Did you get the paper?” I called.

  Peter shook his head without meeting my eyes. “No paper today,” he said. My heart sank. The paper always came, which meant that he must have gotten up early and disposed of it. And I knew why. The week before I’d sat down with the reporter the Examiner had hired to replace me, a meek-voiced girl who’d shown up with a grocery-store bouquet of carnations. “I love kids,” she’d announced upon meeting my daughter. “You know, if you ever need a sitter . . .” I’d thanked her while quietly arriving at the conclusion that the Examiner wasn’t paying her as much as they’d paid me. The interview had lasted all of half an hour and had consisted mostly of questions about how I’d found the time to write a book while working for the paper, how I’d found an agent for the book, and whether my agent might have time to read her book, now that I’d told her how to find time to write one.

  Peter stood behind me, his hands warm on my shoulders. I took a deep breath, bracing myself. “How bad?” I asked.

  “You probably shouldn’t read it.”

  “Come on. My ex-boyfriend called me fat in Moxie. What could be worse than that?”

  There was an agonizing pause. “I don’t think—” Peter began.

  The telephone rang, and I snatched it. “Hello?”

  “Why did you tell the Examiner that I went to rehab?” my sister shrieked.

  My mouth fell open. “Why did I what?”

  “Why . . . did . . . you . . . tell . . . the . . . Examiner . . . that I went to REHAB?” She sounded angrier than I’d ever heard her. “And if you had to mention it, how come you didn’t say that I just did it to meet guys?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I never told that reporter anything about you!”

  My sister’s voice got even louder. “Why not? Don’t you know I need the press?”

  “Hang on,” I said, plugging my laptop into the outlet on the kitchen wall and ignoring Peter’s urgent head shakes. “I haven’t read the story yet.” I loaded the page while my sister continued to shriek in my ear. Then I gulped. SPILLING SECRETS, read the headline. HOW FORMER EXAMINER REPORTER CANDACE SHAPIRO TURNED HER FAMILY’S DIRTY LAUNDRY INTO GOLD.

  “Spilling secrets?” I said out loud. “Dirty laundry?” The call waiting beeped. “Hang on,” I said. “Hello?”

  “Candace,” barked my brother.

  “Josh,” I replied as the story loaded. “Are you calling to ask why I told the paper about Lucy going to rehab?”

  “No,” he said. “I just want to know why you told them I got arrested for violating the city’s open-container law when I was fifteen.”

  “I didn’t.” I scanned the article. Candace Shapiro sits on the couch of her posh Center City row house, plump legs not quite crossed, a grin creasing her fleshy face, as if she can’t quite believe the good fortune that’s fallen into her lap. “Oh, good God.” I kept reading, and there it was: Josh’s arrest (he’d been busted on a friend’s front lawn with a Merry Berry wine cooler), and my sister’s brief stint in rehab. The piece not only reported the amount of my advance, it also printed our street address and the price of our house, something I’d done to only one of my subjects, an Eagles quarterback embroiled in a particularly bitter divorce. “‘A rumpled sundress—size sixteen, Lane Bryant—lies on top of Shapiro’s unmade bed, the $399.99 price tag still attached,’” I read out loud. “Okay, first of all, that sundress was $39.99!”

  The doorbell rang. “I’ll get that,” Peter said as my call waiting beeped again.

  “Lucy?”

  “This would be your mother,” said my mother in her sweet, placid voice. “Now, Cannie, you know that I’m happy to provide you with material, but I have to ask whether it was really necessary to tell the reading public that I met Tanya in the hot tub at the JCC?”

  “Oh, God,” I groaned. “Mom, I didn’t—”

  Joy’s bedroom door swung open, and my daughter, naked except for a tricornered hat and a pair of Ariel underwear with a toothbrush stuck in the waistband, made her way down the stairs. “Pirate Joy!”

  “Let me call you back,” I told my mother. I hung up the phone and gave Joy a kiss. “Go get dressed, boots. Pants and shirt.”

  “Scurvy dogs,” she said sadly, and padded back to her bedroom.

  Peter came back into the kitchen with a wrapped brown-paper package in his hands. “Someone baked you cookies,” he said, swiftly dumping the package into the trash can and washing his hands. “I don’t think we should eat them.”

  “Ya think?” I replied, reading the article in cringing snatches, feeling, with each word, a little bit more as if I’d been hit in the midsection by a Septa bus. “‘Neurotic and bitter’? ‘Compulsively confessional’? She wasn’t around me long enough to know how crazy I really am. And she got Joy’s name wrong! It’s not Joyce!”

  Joy’s bedroom door swung open again and she proceeded slowly down the stairs. She’d swapped her pirate’s hat for a cowboy hat and had a belt and two plastic six-shooters slung around her naked belly. “Cowgirl Joy!”

  “Pants,” I said firmly. “Shirt.” Usually, we started our Sunday mornings with a walk to Old City for coffee and croissants at the Metropolitan Bakery. Unlikely now, I realized. No way would I be showing my fleshy, possibly crazy face in public.

  “Tarnation,” Joy said, and wandered back upstairs. I stared at the page, then read out loud, “‘Shapiro’s house is crammed with evidence of a three-year-old, from crushed crackers ground into the carpet to a half-assembled plastic shopping cart in the living room. On our afternoon together, her dog, Nifkin, is shedding on the couch, and daughter Joyce is nowhere in sight. Shapiro explained that her mother has been picking up the slack during the publicity explosion. “Sitters, my sister, my mom’s girlfriend, the barista at Starbucks, whoever I can get,” she laughed, launching into a story about how her fresh-out-of-rehab sister managed to lock Joyce in a hotel room during her book tour.’”

  I slammed the laptop shut. Turned out there actually was something that hurt worse than being called fat in print. “I’m a bad mother?” I buried my face in my hands. “I don’t get it. She seemed so nice! And how did she find out about my mother and the hot tub?”

  “Cannie,” Peter said gently, “didn’t you tell that story to everyone in the newsroom?”

  I hung my head. It was true. I had told the story to everyone in the newsroom. I’d usually accompanied it with sound effects I’d make with a straw and a can of Diet Coke. “It wasn’t for public consumption.” I slumped into a kitchen chair, wincing as something squished underneath me. Best-case scenario: Play-Doh. Worst-case scenario: leftover grape. “And all this stuff about my family!” I squirmed in shame. “She didn’t even ask me about them! All she wanted to know was whether I wrote in longhand or on a laptop.” I blinked back tears. “Why did she do this?” I asked. “I would never have done this.”

  Peter raised an eyebrow.

  “I wouldn’t have,” I insisted. “If I had to interview a reporter who’d sold a book, I would have come back, done the story, seethed quietly at my desk, and then gotten drunk to ease the pain.”

  Peter lifted both eyebrows.

  “Well, okay, maybe I would have done this to Bruce,” I grumbled. “But he left me! He abandoned me! Pregnant and alone! The man turned my life into a bad country-and-western song, and I deserved to . . . you know . . .” Have my revenge, my mind whispered. “Tell my story,” I said instead.

  “Fair enough,” he said. “But then I don’t think you get to be angry when people tell stories about you.”

  “Yes, I do! What did I ever do that was so bad? Who did I knock up and then ditch? When did I ever . . .” I pressed my fists against my eyes. The doorbell rang. Nifkin barked shrilly. “You should get that,” I said. “It’s probably DFS.” I’d said it as a joke, but I could picture it happening—a couple of stern-faced social workers with clipboards and questions and perhaps even a police officer
standing at a discreet distance behind them: Had I really entrusted the care of my medically fragile child to my sister, who was no stranger to a late-night raid on a minibar? Had I actually left Joy with a barista? With a stranger? And if I was such a vengeful, ugly monster, how could Peter love me? I groaned out loud, reopened the laptop, and looked down at the picture they’d run in lieu of my author photo: a snapshot from some Examiner staffer’s going-away party, in which I was standing in front of my cubicle with my mouth wide open, breasts bulging in an ill-advised ribbed sweater, double chin on display, lifting a forkful of frosting to my lips. The Girl with the Most Cake, the caption read.

  Peter pressed one warm hand to the back of my neck, pulling me close. “Don’t worry,” he said. “Sticks and stones.”

  I nodded wordlessly, knowing there was nothing I could do. Sure, I could call up the reporter or the editor who’d handled the piece—one of the legions of short, pasty-pale middle-aged men who comprised the Examiner’s middle management, the kind of guy who gave the impression of having spent decades of his life getting sand kicked in his face before rising high enough in the ranks to work out his insecurities on a generation of rookie reporters. I could call him up yelling. I could appeal to his better nature. I could even cry. But it wouldn’t matter. I knew what he’d say. Of course we put in that stuff, he’d tell me a little impatiently. It’s juicy. It’s a good story. That was what I was now. A good story. All I’d wanted to do was write them. Now, without any intention, it seemed that I’d become one.

  • • •

  “Ignore it,” said Maxi, who’d become my counselor on all things fame-related.

  “How?” I asked. “My brother’s not speaking to me. My sister wants ten thousand dollars for bigger breast implants before she’ll forgive me. And when I looked myself up on the Internet this morning, some alternative weekly called Joy my crotch dropping.”