Certain Girls

by Jennifer Weiner

  “My lawyer,” said Bruce, “will be in touch.”

  Two months later, we met at a diner in Cherry Hill, where, over the most uncomfortable plate of pancakes I’d ever endured, we hammered out an arrangement: Every other Sunday, he’d pick Joy up at my house and bring her back two hours later. Over the years, the restrictions have loosened a little. We both attended Joy’s sixth-grade graduation, albeit on opposite sides of a large auditorium. It’s progress, of a sort.

  As for me, the Candace Shapiro who gave interviews and readings, and who posted breezy updates to her website about the time her daughter tried to eat gravel at the playground, is gone. I don’t update my website. I don’t answer fan mail. I don’t do blurbs or book-club visits. Last year I was an answer on Jeopardy! (“This author had a plus-size hit on her hands with Big Girls Don’t Cry.” The contestant got it wrong.) I still grow my own herbs and bake my own muffins. I do the laundry and find comfort in the rote motions of ironing shirts and sheets. While Joy’s at school, I write about Lyla, out there in the stars. In the afternoons, I’m always available to drive a carpool or sign for a package, to pick up the dry cleaning or peel thirty pounds of potatoes for the synagogue’s Chanukah Happening. I don’t answer the telephone unless I recognize the number. I don’t answer the door unless I’m expecting guests. And I try, with all my heart, to keep my daughter safe from what I wrote, what I did, all those years ago.

  PART TWO

  Amsterdam

  SIXTEEN

  At ten o’clock Saturday morning, my grandma Ann pulled up to the curb in her little hybrid car, which is so covered in political stickers that the bumper’s just a red, white, and blue antiwar, pro-environment blur. She honked the horn, waved at my mother through the window, and kissed my cheek after I’d climbed in.

  “To what do I owe this privilege?” she asked as I fastened my seat belt.

  The real answer was my investigation. What I said was “I miss you . . . and I love your house.” My grandmother smiled, turned the radio to NPR, and started to drive.

  Grandma Ann used to live in Avondale, a suburb twenty minutes outside of the city, in a big four-bedroom colonial set back from the road by an emerald-green lawn. She lived there with her husband and her kids. Then she got a divorce and the kids moved out, and she was by herself for a while, and then she hooked up with Tanya. They were together for seven years, and even had a commitment ceremony, before Tanya left her for a male plumber she’d met at a weekend retreat for mindful eating. (“Tanya still had food issues?” I’d heard my mom ask Aunt Elle, who’d come over in person to deliver the news. “She couldn’t stop eating . . .” Aunt Elle had said solemnly, “. . . cock.” My mother had thrown a dish towel at her sister’s head. “Little pitchers! Big ears!” she’d hissed, pointing her chin at me.)

  Two years ago Grandma Ann met Mona at a Dykes for Peace rally in front of the Liberty Bell. Mona is a law professor at Temple. Grandma Ann used to be a gym teacher (“And now she’s gay,” Uncle Josh had said at one of the family seders, “which shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone”). Last year Grandma Ann and Mona both sold their houses and bought a brand-new “accessible living” ranch in a development in Bryn Mawr. In the new house, everything is on one level, the doorways are wide, the countertops are low, and all of the bathrooms have steel grab bars around the toilets. (“Your grandmother is settling in for her dotage,” my mother told me. “I think we should just put her on an ice floe and be done with it,” said Aunt Elle.) Grandma Ann and Mona have dinner parties and go to book clubs, and almost every week they attend a rally or protest somewhere in the tristate area. Mona is very political, and my grandmother is happy to keep her company, even though she usually gets bored at some point during the demonstration and calls to talk to me and my mom while the speeches are still going on. (“What’s the demonstration for?” I’d asked during the last phone call. “Hang on, let me check the banners!” my grandmother yelled back.)

  The good news is, when I’m at the Accessible Ranch, I can do whatever I want. Grandma Ann is what my mother calls “laissezfaire” and what my aunt Elle just calls “lazy.” Usually, when I’m over, she’s puttering around in her garden or the kitchen or paying bills on her computer or talking on the telephone to Mona, who has an awful lot of free time to make telephone calls for someone who’s constantly telling you how busy she is. I can eat whatever I want for a snack, do my homework while there’s music on, and once I rode my mother’s old bike without a helmet and my grandmother never said a word.

  That Saturday I got out of my grandmother’s little car and followed her to the kitchen, where she was making a kosher-for-Passover casserole with matzoh meal, raisins, and goat cheese. “‘Roast, skin, and finely chop one handful of chipotle peppers,’” she read from the cookbook. Her bifocals slid down her nose, and she tossed her head to get them back into position. Grandma Ann has short gray hair that she doesn’t dye and that usually stands up around her head in haphazard spikes. Her skin is ruddy. Her eyes are the same green as my mother’s, and she’s plump, but with skinny legs and arms, which gives her body the appearance of an apple with four toothpicks sticking out. “Do you think I could just use a red pepper?” she asked.

  “I guess,” I said, thinking that the casserole—which Mona, for some reason, always pronounced “cazzerole”—sounded disgusting and that the bell-versus-chipotle-pepper issue was the least of its problems.

  “Do I have a red pepper?”

  I looked in the refrigerator. “Nope.”

  “Green pepper?” she asked without much hope. I shook my head. “Hmm. Well, hand me an onion.”

  I gave her the onion and watched while she chopped and hummed along to Holly Near.

  “Hey,” I began. I’d been thinking about this for weeks: what to ask, who to ask. Finding Alden Langley Chernowitz had been good. Talking to Aunt Elle had been useful, too, but Aunt Elle, I’d decided, was what my English teacher would call “an unreliable narrator.”

  I started with a question. “Did my mom have a lot of boyfriends when she was in high school?”

  “Oh, sure,” she said. She scraped the chopped onion onto the cooked brown rice in the baking dish. “Football players, soccer players . . .” She squinted at the cookbook, then looked at me. “Hold on. No, actually, that was Lucy.”

  Figured. “Well, did my mom have any boyfriends?”

  “In high school? Just one that I remember.” She looked at me sharply through her bifocals. “Do you have a boyfriend?”

  For a minute I thought about Duncan Brodkey and how his green shirt had made his eyes look greeny-gold that day in the computer lab, the way he’d pause before answering a teacher’s question, like he’d been thinking of something better than algebra or French verbs. “No boyfriends,” I said. “I was just wondering about my mom.”

  “I know she had one who was older,” she said. She turned her back, opened the spice cabinet, and started murmuring the word “oregano.” “He was someone she met in high school when she was auditing a class at community college. What was his name? Brian? Ryan? Something like that. Either Brian or Ryan.”

  “Oh.” I scanned through my memories of Big Girls Don’t Cry, but I couldn’t remember “Allie” ever being with an older boy in high school. She’d been with an older professor when she was in college, and then she’d had an “encounter” with a police officer who’d pulled her over for driving with a broken taillight, and she’d had lots of boyfriends in college, although “boyfriends” was probably the wrong word for guys she just had sex with.

  “They went out for years and years. Her last year of high school, all through college.” She flipped her head again. “Or maybe his name was Colin. For some reason, that’s ringing a bell.”

  “She dated him all through college?” That did not line up at all with the book, in which Allie spent four years majoring in Rich Bitches’ Boyfriends. That part made me feel sorry for my mother, so I used my Sharpie to scribble over it. I didn’t want to feel sorry
for her. It was easier when I could just be angry.

  “As far as I know,” my grandmother said, and held an opened jar out for me to sniff, “he was her first love. Before Bruce. I wish I could remember his name!” Grandma Ann ran one hand through her spiky hair, turned back to her pantry, and pulled out another jar. She held it at arm’s length, squinting. “Is this oregano?”

  I looked at the label. “Cilantro.”

  “Close enough,” she said cheerfully, and sprinkled it over the chopped onion. I wanted to ask more—about my mother’s first boyfriend and about Bruce—but figured it would better to back off and do a little detecting on my own.

  I wandered upstairs to the “bonus room,” a mostly empty rectangular space with a dusty TV set up in one corner, beige carpets and white walls (in the Accessible Ranch, all of the carpets are beige and the walls are white because Grandma Ann and Mona couldn’t agree on any other colors). Heavy-duty plastic shelves lined one long wall, filled with bins of things my grandmother and Mona had brought from their old houses and old lives. There were boxes of report cards and Halloween costumes, photo albums and record albums and even wedding albums from both of their long-ago marriages to men.

  I found a cardboard box filled with folded sweaters with blocks of cedar shoved in the sleeves, then a box of tapes labeled TOP 40 COUNT-DOWN in Aunt Elle’s handwriting. That was good. I liked oldies. I found a dusty radio that played cassettes, plugged it in, popped a tape into the slot, and smiled when I heard my aunt’s voice, younger but still the same. “This is Lucy Beth Shapiro, presenting the Top 40 tunes for 1982!” Then Elle announced a Quarterflash song. “I’m gonna harden my heart / I’m gonna swallow my tears,” the singer wailed. I turned up the volume and flipped open an album, looking for evidence of what my mom had really been like.

  The first book was full of baby pictures, and since my mom and her sister and brother had looked basically the same as babies, I put it aside. In the next book, I found my mother at twelve or thirteen dressed in a flouncy sundress for what must have been a party. A bat mitzvah? I wondered, and turned the page to a first-day-of-school shot, with my mom and her brother and sister standing stiffly in front of their old house in brand-new dark blue jeans and striped shirts. Aunt Elle, I saw, had braided her hair into clumsy cornrows. My mom’s hair was loose around her shoulders, and when she smiled, she had a gap between her teeth that braces must have erased.

  There were pictures from Rosh Hashanah, with my mom and Aunt Elle in pleated skirts and tan panty hose and Uncle Josh in a crooked striped tie. There were Thanksgiving pictures with the five of them gathered around a roast turkey; Chanukah pictures (same table, with a menorah replacing the poultry). Ice skating and ice hockey, Pee Wee Little League and Shooting Stars soccer. My grandfather had curly dark hair that silvered at his temples as the years went on. In most pictures, his eyes were hidden behind dark glasses, and sometimes he clenched a stump of a cigar between his square teeth. He rarely smiled in the pictures, and when he did, it was a hard kind of grin that didn’t look happy at all.

  I remembered the first time I’d seen his picture, maybe even in this same album, at Thanksgiving at my grandmother’s, when I was little. Who’s that? I’d asked, and pointed. The three of them—my mom and her brother and sister—had come to look over my shoulder. Dr. Evil, said Aunt Elle. Lord Voldemort, said Uncle Josh. That’s our father, my mom said, and then she leaned over, her hair brushing my cheek, and turned the page.

  I turned up the music and picked up another album, watching time pass. Grandma Ann got bigger, and her hair got shorter and blonder and feathered, then layered, then frosted and straight again, as her kids grew up, but her husband, my grandfather, didn’t change much. His beard got a little longer, and his lapels and collars narrowed, and he shaved his mustache once, then grew it back. That was about it.

  “Chicago!” Elle’s voice squealed through the speakers. “‘Hard to Say I’m Sorry’! Oh God, I love this song!”

  I grinned, turning the pages slowly, watching my mother’s hair go from a ponytail to a Farrah Fawcett feathered ’do that someone should have told her was a mistake. I watched her boobs and nose grow as Chicago turned to John Cougar, which gave way to the J. Geils Band. Finally, I got to the page I was hoping for—my mother at her bat mitzvah, with her hair cut short and a mouthful of metal, standing in front of the synagogue doors. She wore a long dress—black, sprinkled with pink flowers, with a pink sash and a ruffle on the hem and the sleeves. Tan panty hose again (such a mistake, Amber Gross said in my head), black flats, plain gold studs in her ears, and no other jewelry. She looked awful—so bad that I couldn’t believe her mother had let her go out of the house like that, let alone to her own bat mitzvah. No wonder she hadn’t had a party. Looking like that, she probably hadn’t wanted to show her face in public at all.

  When the tape ended, I popped it out of the slot, then poked around in the shoe box for more music. There were half a dozen Top 40 tapes from 1982, and then one labeled READING 1974 in narrow, slanting letters, a handwriting I’d never seen before. Curious, I plugged it into the cassette player and pushed play.

  “‘Once upon a time, a beautiful but wicked queen was ruler of the land,’” came a deep man’s voice. For a minute I thought it was my father I was hearing.

  “Don’t read the part about the witch!” came a little kid’s voice. My mother? I wondered.

  “How’s Snow White supposed to get the poisoned apple if there’s no witch?” asked another little kid’s voice. I smiled in recognition. That was my mother. “If she doesn’t meet the witch, she doesn’t get to go into the glass box, and then she can’t meet the prince!”

  “I’ll skip that part,” the man’s voice said soothingly. A thrill ran up my spine as I realized who I was hearing: my grandfather.

  “But then it won’t make sense!”

  “Well, I’ll read it quickly.”

  “Very quickly,” said Elle.

  “Baby,” said my mother under her breath.

  “Shh,” said the man, and he started to read again. “‘The queen had an enchanted mirror, and every night she would gaze into the mirror and ask, “Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?” ’”

  “Not ‘fair’ like ‘fair’ but ‘fair’ like ‘pretty,’” said my mother in her bossy, self-important way.

  “Am I pretty?” asked Aunt Elle.

  “Of course you are,” their father said, his voice practically a croon. “Both of my girls are beautiful.”

  I listened to the whole tape, Snow White and Little Red Riding Hood and Where the Wild Things Are, all of the little girls’ interruptions. Aunt Elle had lots of questions about whether she’d continue to be pretty as she grew up; my mother seemed more concerned with whether they could have French toast for breakfast. Through it all, the man never lost his patience. He answered every question calmly and kindly. He sounded nice. More than nice. He sounded wonderful.

  When the tape ran out, I popped it out of the player and stuck it in my backpack. It was a clue—to what, I wasn’t sure yet.

  • • •

  My mother and Grandma Ann were sitting at the table when I came downstairs, their heads together, talking quietly.

  “Stay for dinner,” Grandma Ann urged, sliding her casserole out of the oven at five o’clock.

  “No thanks,” my mom and I said at the exact same time. She smiled at me, and for just a second, things felt the way they had when I was little, before I’d kissed a boy and changed lunch tables and looked my mom up on the Internet—before I’d read Big Girls Don’t Cry.

  Then I turned away and my mother said, “Seriously, Ma, it smells like something crawled inside your oven and died.”

  “Must you be vulgar?” Grandma Ann said. “Mona loves my casseroles.”

  “Too much information,” said my mom. “I’ll see you tomorrow.” I zipped up my backpack, making sure the tape was still snug inside the front pocket, kissed my grandmother, and walked outside to
where the minivan was waiting.

  “Seat belt,” said my mother, backing down the Accessible Ranch’s brand-new extra-wide driveway, lined with stubby little pine trees.

  I slid the straps over my shoulders and clicked them closed, sneaking sideways looks at her. What had happened to the man who’d read her bedtime stories? Had my mother ever hated her parents, or stolen some skin cream, or felt ashamed of who she was and who she’d come from? Who are you? I wondered as she gripped the wheel in the ten and two o’clock positions with her eyes steady on the road. Who are you, and who am I?

  “Can we stop at the bookstore?” I asked when we were back in the city.

  “Sure. What do you need?”

  “Lord of the Flies.”

  “We’ve got that at home. I read that one when I was your age.” She smiled, obviously hoping I’d smile back. “You know, when dinosaurs walked the earth.”

  “Ha.” When you were my age, I thought, you were already letting the sixteen-year-old at the end of the cul-de-sac stick his hand down your bathing suit bottom—or at least the you in your book was. “Yours is all marked up,” I said. I turned on the radio so I wouldn’t have to talk with her, and she didn’t say anything until she dropped me off in front of the Barnes & Noble on Walnut Street.

  “I’ll just pull up in front of the Rittenhouse. Call my cell when you’re ready.”

  I said I would, and I went into the bookstore. Lord of the Flies was easy to find, and once I’d paid, I looked out the window. The minivan was nowhere in sight. I tucked the bag under my arm and ran across the street to Kiehl’s. The bells on the door jingled, and all three ladies in lab coats looked up. “Can we help you?” one of them asked with a friendly smile. She was young, with pale hair in a bob just brushing the shoulders of her lab coat, and streaks of different shades of pink across the back of her hand.