Certain Girls

by Jennifer Weiner

  “Ignore, ignore, ignore,” Maxi chanted in her elegant accent. “Step away from the computer. It’s the devil’s tool. One, nobody reads past the headlines; two, the people who do don’t remember what they read; and three, newspapers don’t really matter anymore.”

  I plopped down on the couch and closed my eyes. Given that I used to work for a newspaper, that wasn’t especially comforting.

  “Did you happen to see the Akron paper?” I asked.

  “Seeing as how I don’t live in Akron,” Maxi began.

  “The reviewer called me frivolous! And ditzy! This from a man who wrote a social history of the Sno-Kone!”

  “Honestly, what did you think they’d write?” Maxi asked. “Good things happen to good person? Excellent book is wonderful read? How’s that going to sell any newspapers? You should just be glad they think you’re worth writing about at all.”

  I agreed, knowing that she was right. Cynical, but right.

  “Water under the bridge,” Maxi continued. “Look forward, not back.”

  “But it’s crazy!” I said. “This website’s saying that I’m . . . Wait, let me find it.” I scrolled through the paragraphs of dense, punctuation-free text (punctuation, I supposed, being just one more tool of the patriarchy). “‘A writer of dangerous sexist piffle a lipsticked proponent of right-wing family values.’ What does that mean? How am I right wing?”

  “That is strange,” Maxi agreed. “You rarely wear lipstick. Did you get the stuff I sent you?”

  “Yes. Yes, I did. Thank you.” After one of the Los Angeles weeklies had run my picture at a reading, Maxi had sent me a care package that was embarrassingly heavy on the concealer cream. “I just don’t get this. My book is ‘hurting America’?” I quoted. “How am I hurting America? I drive a minivan!”

  Maxi considered. “Well, you could drive your minivan into someone.”

  I laughed in spite of myself. “Don’t think I haven’t considered it.”

  “Just stop reading it,” Maxi said. “Go swimming or something. You have a life, and a beautiful little girl, and a man who loves you. You’ll be fine.”

  • • •

  I didn’t go swimming. I did throw myself into homemaking with a fervor that would have shamed Martha Stewart. I cleaned and scrubbed and sorted; I baked muffins and made cheese from scratch. I planted clematis and roses, chosen as much for their names as their perfume or their blossoms: Silver Star and Double Delights, Day Breakers and Paradise, Golden Showers and Rambling Red, Funny Face and Kiss Me. I wasn’t writing, mostly because I wasn’t letting Joy out of my sight. I’d load her diaper bag with string cheese and sandwiches and sippie cups each morning, and make the rounds of the zoo, the parks, the playgrounds and spraygrounds, the kiddie concerts and the aquarium and the Please Touch Museum all day long. Maxi’s prediction had come true: Nobody I saw ever mentioned the story. Then again, my friends were all too kind to bring it up, and most of the mothers I knew were too busy to even glance at anything besides the headlines, assuming they picked up a paper at all.

  One Sunday morning in August, while Peter was sleeping late, Joy and I were in the living room. Joy was crouched in front of her dollhouse, and Nifkin was curled into his dog bed, keeping watch, when the telephone rang. NUMBER UNAVAILABLE, read the display. I grimaced. Lately I’d been letting Peter answer the phone and the door, and sift through my e-mail, but I didn’t want to wake him. Stop being a wimp, I told myself, and lifted the receiver. “Hello?”

  “Cannie.” My father’s voice on the telephone was a wondrous thing, rich and silky and resonant. I recognized it instantly, just by the sound of my name.

  My own voice was high and wavering. I sounded like a silly girl who’d gotten called on in math class and couldn’t begin to guess at the right answer. “Yes?”

  “I’m calling to congratulate you.” He paused. “Best-selling author,” he intoned.

  I tried to sound businesslike. “What can I do for you?”

  “I’m glad you asked. We didn’t really get a chance to talk at your reading.” True enough, given the speed with which he’d vanished, along with the added precaution I’d taken of having the manager whisk me out the service entrance.

  I got off the couch and started to pace from the front door to the back, with Nifkin clicking along behind me like a tiny, anxious, black-and-white-spotted stenographer, while my father explained. An opportunity had come his way, a chance to increase his income exponentially by joining a partnership with a few other surgeons who were launching their own practice . . .

  “How much?” My voice had gone straight past businesslike to flat.

  His laughter was startled. “I always did admire that about you,” he said. He laughed some more, then the laughter sputtered off into coughing. “You cut right to the chase. Cut right to the quick.”

  No, that was you, I thought. “How much?” I repeated.

  “Now, Cannie,” he cajoled. “Is that any way to talk to your old man?”

  I said nothing.

  “A hundred thousand ought to do it,” he said easily, as if asking for change for the parking meter.

  I shook my head incredulously. “I don’t have a hundred thousand dollars!”

  His voice grew truculent. “That’s not what I hear. Didn’t the Examiner say something about a six-figure advance? Didn’t your house cost—”

  I cut him off. “My advance was split into five chunks. My agent takes a commission, and I pay taxes, and I’m responsible for a child.” I shook my head. Never mind the bookkeeping. I didn’t owe him anything, least of all an explanation.

  As if reading my mind, he said, “You might want to consider where you got your story from. The heroine’s life . . . the things she experienced . . .”

  “Dad.” The word sat like a dead bug in my mouth. “Do not tell me that you think you deserve to be rewarded for abandoning your wife and kids.”

  “It’s hardly far-fetched,” he said, as pompous as a professor. “I gave you a voice. I gave you a story to tell.”

  “You . . . You actually think . . .” I sucked in a deep breath. Joy was staring at me. I forced myself to smile, carrying the phone into the kitchen, away from the couch and the coffee table, spread with the Sunday paper, a slice of toast cut into Joy’s preferred triangles, her doll tucked tenderly into its cradle. “You gave me nothing. When I came to see you in Los Angeles, when I was pregnant, you didn’t want to know me. And now that I’ve got money, you want it, because you think you deserve credit for what I’ve written?”

  There was a brief, curdled pause. “Maybe I’ll come and see you someday,” he said, his voice casual, musing, and not—to the casual listener, to a stranger—threatening at all. But I could hear the menace underneath the silky tone. “Maybe I’ll come visit your little girl.”

  My breath gusted out of me. My courage went with it. “Please,” I said. “Please just leave us alone.”

  I put the phone back in its cradle and sat on the couch with my head in my hands. “Mama?” said Joy. She patted my knees with her hand. “Dolls now?”

  “Dolls now,” I said, and slid onto the floor, forcing my fingers to move and my lips to curve into a smile for my daughter.

  Ten minutes later, Peter came downstairs in his weekend jeans, smelling of soap and the cologne Joy and I had picked out for Father’s Day.

  “Good morning,” he said, rifling through the stack of papers for the crossword puzzle. “Who called?”

  I went to him. I wrapped my arms around his waist and leaned against him, my ear to his chest. Then I said, in the inimitable words of boxer Roberto Duran after he’d been beaten to the consistency of steak tartare, “No más.”

  “What?”

  “No más. No more. I’m done.” It wasn’t Bruce writing about me in Moxie, telling the world that I was fat. It wasn’t the piece in the Examiner telling the world that I was the bitter, neurotic product of a dysfunctional family who’d grown up into a bad mother (and was still fat, in case anyone ne
eded reminding). I could survive public humiliation. I’d done it before. A few weeks of carbohydrates and stiff drinks, long walks with friends or my mother, and I’d stop feeling like the whole world was laughing at me. The truth, as I’d learned post-Moxie, post-Bruce, was that most people were too caught up in their own humiliation and heartache to spend too much time worrying about a stranger’s. It was Joy: Joy, and Peter, and the idea that I’d put them at risk. I’d been angry. I’d written the book because I was angry, because I’d wanted revenge—but it was revenge out of all proportion. It was as if Bruce had lobbed a rock through my window, and I’d responded by dropping a bomb on his entire town, killing everything that lived there, and then, just for fun, salted the earth so that nothing would ever grow again. I’d set out to hurt him, the way he’d hurt me. I’d behaved badly (like my father, a voice inside of me whispered) and now I was reaping the consequences. Plus, I knew how to get over public shaming . . . but how did any daughter survive a long-estranged parent reappearing to treat her like an ATM and threatening to come visit her little girl?

  The doorbell rang and I stiffened, thinking again that it would be the social workers from DFS, or maybe just some random crazy who’d gotten my address from the paper, or maybe my father in a black suit, reaching for Joy. What was to stop him from showing up at Joy’s summer camp or her nursery school, carrying the photograph he’d snapped, producing his driver’s license, showing that he had the same last name that I did? I’m Dr. Shapiro, he’d say. He’d call her “kitten,” and she’d laugh, leaping into his arms, and then . . . I buried my face in Peter’s neck and squeezed my eyes shut. No more. No más. I’d risked enough. I was done.

  • • •

  After six weeks of ignoring my agent’s telephone calls and e-mails, I finally locked my bedroom door, sat cross-legged on top of my favorite quilt, picked up the telephone, and, with Nifkin curled on the pillow beside me, told Larissa that I was now an ex-writer.

  She didn’t believe me. “Cannie,” she said. “A writer writes. It’s what you do. What are you going to do with yourself? Be class mother every day?”

  I bit my up. Just lately, I had been spending a lot of time at Joy’s summer camp. Last week, the delivery guy had asked me to sign for the paychecks. “Actually,” I said, “I have another idea.” And just like that, as if I’d reached into the pocket of the winter coat I hadn’t worn in months and found a folded fifty-dollar bill, I did.

  “Please tell me it’s a book,” my agent pleaded.

  “Sort of,” I said, and I laid it out for her. In addition to contemporary fiction, serious nonfiction, and the diet books that typically supported Categories One and Two, my publisher was home to the StarGirl series.

  Once upon a time—1978, to be exact—StarGirl had been a blockbuster movie. Since then it had spawned an empire of sequels, prequels, comic books, action figures, lunch boxes, board games, bedsheets, birthday party favors, and X-rated fan fiction on the Internet. Valor Press published a line of paperbacks detailing the continuing adventures of the characters the movie had introduced all those years ago.

  StarGirl, whose real name was Lyla Dare, had been born between planets on a long-haul cruiser. Her scientist mother had been impregnated the last time her ship had made planetfall—by whom, or by what, and in what manner, Lyla never knew. Her star cruiser was plundered by pirates and crash-landed on a hostile planet (icecaps on one end, desert on the other, plenty of dinosaur-like predators in between). Her mother perished instantly. Baby Lyla was adopted by a tribe of lycanthropes (wolves who could talk and who were, in 1978, truly a triumph of costume and makeup) and raised as one of theirs. When she was twelve, a landing party came to chart her planet and discovered little Lyla, naked except for a loincloth of lion skin, a necklace of teeth, and a rat’s skeleton braided in her hair. She’d been tranq’d after she kicked two members of the landing party and bit the pinkie finger off a third. She was cleaned up, given clothing, and taken to an institution on a nameless planet known only as the Academy, where her minders quickly discovered her telepathic abilities and formidable strength. They trained her as an assassin and set her loose to police the galaxy.

  Lyla Dare was six feet tall, with blond hair like spun gold that cascaded down to the firm curves of her bottom. She had wide-set violet eyes, a lush mouth, cheekbones that could cut glass, and a body that could start wars (and, in at least three separate adventures, had). She was a telepath who could read minds with a touch and could heal with a kiss. Better still, Lyla took shit from no one. She flew a custom-fitted space cruiser called Angel (named after her departed mother) and, for years, had been hopelessly in love with a man who’d taken a vow of celibacy to save his brother’s life, a man who loved her desperately but couldn’t even kiss her.

  It was all very Heathcliff and Cathy on the moors, very Meggie and Father Ralph on Drogheda. Teenagers ate it up, and Lyla Dare, intergalactic ass-kicker, remained a guilty pleasure for a number of grown women who should have been old enough to know better, women who should have, according to the critics, been occupying their minds with some improving piece of literature but preferred Lyla’s adventures. When I was a kid, I’d lived for those books, riding my bike to the chain bookstore in the mall the day they were published, retreating to my bedroom to spend a few happy afternoons lost in Lyla’s world, where the bad things that happened were completely unlike any bad things that happened to me.

  “I want to write StarGirl books,” I said.

  There was a humming on the other end of the line. When Larissa spoke, her voice was faint. “Please tell me you’re kidding.”

  “Not kidding. Do you think they’d let me?”

  “Candace.” I could hear the effort it was taking her not to scream, or fly to Philadelphia and hire a pair of strong men who’d hold me upside down by my ankles and shake me until another book fell out. “It’s not a question of whether they’d let you. The StarGirl books are all written pseudonymously.”

  “I know.” As far as I was concerned, that was half of the appeal.

  “And do you know what Valor pays per book? It’s peanuts!” Larissa squeaked. “Do you want your dog to have to go back to eating generic kibble?”

  “I’ll take it,” I told her. “If they’ll let me.”

  Silence ensued. “I’ll see,” she said at last, “if I can get them to publish them under your name.”

  “No! I want to be J. N. Locksley,” I said, kicking my quilt to the floor and getting to my feet. For the first time in weeks, I could imagine a future that didn’t leave me terrified or dizzy with guilt. I could write StarGirl novels. I could work, contribute, keep busy, and do it all without the world finding out, or paying any attention. I scooped up three half-empty mugs of tea and carried them to the kitchen with Larissa sighing in my ear.

  “Let me make some calls,” she said.

  By the next morning, I had a deal. Larissa had even gotten the publisher to pay me the princely sum of fifteen thousand bucks per book, and to extend the normal six-week turnaround time to three months. “Just promise me this isn’t forever.”

  “Of course not!” I said. “It’s just until things calm down a little bit.”

  “Promise,” she repeated.

  I promised. And so what if I had my fingers crossed behind my back? Just because I’d promised myself—not to mention my husband and my daughter—that I would never put them or me through the experience of publishing a novel under the name of Cannie Shapiro ever again, there was no reason to tell Larissa that very minute. In a few years, or maybe even a few months, she’d find other clients and make them big-money deals. Other books would move to the best-seller list. My father wouldn’t bother us. The world would pass me by. We would be safe.

  The very next week, a six-hundred-page concordance with background information on all things StarGirl arrived via FedEx, along with a black binder containing a typed two-page outline for the book I was going to write. Beginning, middle, end. How I got from one to the other was
entirely up to me.

  • • •

  And that’s how it’s been for the last ten years. I write four Star-Girl novels a year, books that never get written up, never get reviewed, and sell only a sliver of what Big Girls Don’t Cry did—but, judging from the letters and e-mails my editor forwards, they keep the fans happy. They keep me happy, too.

  Six months after the publication of Big Girls, Bruce Guberman returned to the shores of America, and shocked the world (or me, at least) by finishing his doctoral dissertation and marrying the Pusher, whom I eventually learned to call by her real name, which is Emily. Emily Guberman. Goes trippingly off the tongue, I always say.

  My father disappeared again. I didn’t hear from him again after that August, and I never tried to find him—not online, not in real time. Let the dead bury their dead was what I thought, which didn’t make sense when I said it any more than it had when Jesus did, given that neither my father nor I was dead, but still, it was what I thought, and it comforted me somehow.

  Nifkin, my constant companion all through my twenties and into my thirties, had an easy death when Joy was four. One cold night in November, when the wind blew so hard it rattled the bedroom blinds, he permitted me to carry him up the stairs and feed him a spoonful of cream cheese with his nightly pills buried inside. He curled up on his dog bed by the fireplace, closed his eyes, sighed, and gave one great quiver. His small, spotted body went stiff, and his nails rattled briefly on the floorboards. I sat beside him with tears streaming down my face, patting his head, saying, Good boy, good boy, that’s my good boy.

  When Bruce had been back for a few months, I asked Audrey for a number, screwed up my courage, and called him.

  “I think you should see your daughter,” I told him.

  “That’s generous of you,” Bruce said coldly.

  “I think she’d like that,” I said. I took a deep breath and a fast, longing glance at the wine bottle. “I want to apologize,” I blurted. “For my book.” He didn’t answer. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I . . . I didn’t mean . . . Well, I shouldn’t say I never meant to hurt you, because I did at the time, but I guess I never thought, you know, that things would get so crazy.”