Certain Girls

by Jennifer Weiner

  “I’m sorry,” she said through the door.

  “You don’t listen to me,” I said. “You never listen.”

  “Okay,” she said quietly. “Let’s go to the designer dresses. Or maybe we should try another store? Nordstrom, Neiman’s—”

  “Forget it,” I said without opening the door, or looking up, or moving. And then it hit me: my revenge. “You know what? Let’s go shopping for you.”

  There was silence from the other side of the door.

  “Come on! Neiman’s, Nordstrom . . .” I pulled on my pants and yanked my shirt over my head.

  “I’ve already got something.”

  I didn’t even have to fake being horrified. “You were going to wear something you already have to your only child’s bat mitzvah?”

  “Well, there’s my black dress. You know, the one I wore to Tamsin and Todd’s.”

  I made a face.

  “And I have a really nice suit.”

  “A suit,” I said sarcastically. “You’re going to wear a suit to my bat mitzvah.”

  “It’s a beautiful suit, and it’s practically new. I only wore it once.”

  “Where?” I shoved my feet into my shoes and opened the door.

  She dropped her gaze. “The Today show.”

  “So it’s ten years old, and everyone in the world’s already seen it? I bet it’s black. Is it black? It’s black, isn’t it?” I glared at her until she gave a sheepish nod. “Save it for a funeral. Come on.” I dragged my mom toward Nordstrom, where the plus-size department was called Encore (why, I have no idea).

  My mother headed immediately toward the back wall, which was covered with an array of black suits. “I don’t think—” she began.

  I ignored her and flagged down a saleslady just the way Aunt Elle had in New York. “Hi, there. I’m becoming a woman. My mom needs a dress.”

  “Oh, how nice,” said the saleslady, who was short and plump, with a broad, rosy face and bright red lipstick to match it. Was it a law that salespeople in the fat-lady department had to be fat ladies themselves? “What were you thinking?” she asked my mother.

  “I don’t know.” My mom picked up the sleeve of the dress closest to her and ran her fingers over the sequins like she was blind and they were braille and were going to tell her something important.

  “Let me take a peek,” the woman said, and disappeared around a corner.

  My mother pulled the horrible red-and-gold sequined dress off the rack and held it up against her. “What do you think?”

  I studied her carefully. “It looks like God ate Mexican food, then threw up on you.”

  “Thank you, Joy.” She hung the dress up without looking at me. “That’s delightful.”

  The saleslady came bustling back with her arms full of clothes. I saw something that looked like black satin with a big glittering rhinestone belt, and a black jersey dress with a jacket attached. Black. All black. Black with shoulder pads. Like my mother needs shoulder pads. Like anyone my mother’s size needs shoulder pads. “Here we are!” she said.

  My mother snatched the outfits out of the woman’s hand and disappeared into the dressing room, leaving the saleslady and me to stare at each other for about three seconds, until she spotted some other clueless large lady wandering through the sportswear and bustled off to help her. I knocked on my mother’s dressing-room door. “How’s it going in there?” I asked sweetly.

  “Fine,” my mother called. Her voice was muffled. Probably she was pulling one of the dresses over her head, slipping the shoulder pads into place.

  “Are you going to come out, or stay in there all day?”

  “I don’t know, Joy. I think the suit I have is perfectly—”

  I twisted the door handle. Locked. “Cut that out!” my mother said sharply.

  I leaned against her door, examining my fingernails. “You know what you should wear? That red dress you wore to the premiere of Maxi’s movie.” I’d seen pictures of the red dress. It had long, full sleeves and a gathered neckline, and my mother had had her hair curled and piled on top of her head, and she’d looked—not beautiful, exactly, but radiant and happy.

  “I don’t have it anymore,” my mother said.

  “You don’t?” She was lying, I bet. She never threw anything out. The dress was probably still zipped up in a garment bag and stuck in the back of her closet, somewhere near the perfect silvery-pink dress she’d taken away from me. “That’s too bad. It was pretty.”

  She opened the door and stood there, dressed the way she had been when we’d first walked through the door. “No keepers.”

  I smirked. “Maybe you need a different bra.”

  She shook her head again, then squared her shoulders, heaved another epic sigh, and led me back toward Macy’s. Over the next two hours in the designer-dress department, she turned down a beautiful ivory dress (too short) and the perfect purple dress (too revealing), and we couldn’t find a single thing to agree on except that she was probably just as sick of me as I was sick of her.

  We rode home without a single word. My mom pulled into the garage and closed the door behind us, and we sat there in the dim space that smelled like motor oil. Our bicycles leaned against one wall, alongside an old sled that had been my mother’s when she was little, and had her name written in Magic Marker on one of the wooden slats. It was propped up in the corner, with cobwebs hanging like lace off its rusted runners. I thought I recognized the sled from the pictures I’d seen at Grandma Ann’s: my mother and Aunt Elle in matching snowsuits at the top of a hill; their father behind them, waiting to push. I remembered his voice on the tape, crooning, Both of my girls are beautiful.

  I followed my mother into the kitchen, watching as she pulled things out of the refrigerator: a cut-up kosher chicken, carrots and celery and fresh dill, all the ingredients for chicken in a pot. It was one of my favorites. I imagined her spending the afternoon shopping, planning a special meal to celebrate the purchase of my special dress, thinking about how happy I’d be.

  I swallowed hard. “Mom.” It was hard to push the word out of my mouth. I hadn’t been calling her “Mom” much lately, not even in my head. I’d been thinking of her just as “She.” She said. She did. She won’t let me. She embarrasses me every time she opens her mouth.

  She pulled the blue-and-white Dutch oven from its drawer next to the stove, then took onions and garlic out of the pantry. “The way I see it,” she said without looking at me, “you get to hate me for three years. Four years, tops. And I’d seriously recommend you saving some of them for high school and college.”

  I blinked at her. “What?”

  “Four years,” she repeated.

  “Did you hate your mother?”

  She gave me a tight smile. “Two years in high school, about a year and a half in college, a year in my twenties, and then for about three weeks when I was twenty-eight.”

  I did the math. “That’s over four years.”

  “You get extra time if your mother falls in love with a woman she meets in a hot tub at the JCC.” She bent down beside me and pulled her chopping board out of its drawer. “Don’t get your hopes up.”

  She put the carrots on the chopping board and began peeling an onion. “Do you hate your father?” I asked.

  She handed me a bowl of pistachios and paused for a long time. “I don’t really think about him,” she said. “He wasn’t a very nice guy.”

  I pulled a pistachio shell apart, thinking that this was exactly what Elle had said, and how it didn’t line up with the kind voice I’d heard on the tape in the bonus room of the Accessible Ranch. “Did he ever want to meet me?”

  She paused again. I chewed the pistachio into paste, watching as she spooned matzoh meal on top of the eggs, whisked in oil, then covered the bowl with waxed paper and set it in the refrigerator.

  “I used to think that he would,” she finally said. The late-afternoon sunshine came through the window, casting squares of the kitchen floor in shadow and light. My
mother looked tired as she adjusted the flame underneath the pot.

  “But he never did?”

  I watched her as she thought about it, her face soft and unguarded, the way it usually was at night. She put the lid back on the pot, wiped her hands, and shook her head. “No, honey. He never did.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  There is something wrong with me. Seriously wrong. But isn’t recognizing that you have a problem the first step toward solving it? I admit that I have a problem. I can recognize my behavior as aberrant, even compulsive. In the clear light of day, I can look at the situation objectively, acknowledge that what I’m doing is unhealthy, and promise that I’ll stop.

  I just can’t quite manage that last part. The stopping.

  The night after Joy and I had our disastrous shopping trip—the night I’d lied to her about my father, figuring it was a white lie, a lie told to protect her, and a mother’s lie, born out of love, was hardly a lie at all, was something more akin to a prayer or a blessing—I woke up at one-fifteen in the morning and eased myself noiselessly out of bed. I tiptoed down the hall and paused in front of Joy’s room. I wanted to go in and straighten her covers, reassure myself that she was still breathing, but I dug deep for some unknown reserve of restraint and settled for just looking at her—her hair spilling over the pillow, one foot sticking out from under the quilt, pale and perfect in the glow of the streetlamp. I stared for a long moment, wishing her secrets would reveal themselves: that there was a diary I could read, that I could snoop through her e-mail and find out whom she’d been talking to and what she’d been saying.

  “I think Joy read my book,” I’d whispered to Peter the night Samantha found the Examiner article underneath her mattress.

  “Did you ask her about it?” he asked. I bit my lip and confessed that I hadn’t. “It shouldn’t surprise you. You had to know that someday she’d want to read it.”

  I shook my head in frustration, unwilling to give him my Erica Jong story, because he’d probably laugh at me, too. “She’s probably got a million questions. About the book . . . and Bruce . . . and my family.”

  “So tell her what she wants to know,” he said, which sounded like a perfectly rational response, except I didn’t know what Joy wanted to know. I didn’t know what she was looking for. For the first time in her life, she was in trouble, and I couldn’t fix it.

  I bent down and brushed her hair away from the curve of her cheek. “I love you,” I whispered. “I love you so much.” Joy sighed in her sleep and rolled onto her back, and I crept out of the room. Maybe it would seep into her subconscious, and she’d wake up happy.

  Then I eased myself down the stairs, retrieved my bar of dark chocolate with raspberries from the cabinet where I’d stashed it behind the flaxseed and soy-fortified oatmeal, and sat down at my desk in front of my laptop. I began with the big-girl news. None of it was good. Here was an AP story about a sorority in Indiana that had pared its membership from twenty-five girls down to two. The national chapter president insisted that it was mere coincidence that all of the girls who got the boot were fat, bespectacled, and/or minorities. Here was a brief about a girl who hanged herself after being teased by her classmates about her weight. Police arrested her mother. The girl weighed 325 pounds at the time of her death. Her mother was being charged with neglect for, presumably, not putting her on a diet.

  I shook my head, minimized the screen, leaned forward in anticipation, and pointed and clicked to the surrogacy website. This is what I do at night while my husband and my daughter are sleeping. I sneak downstairs in my bathrobe and bare feet, eat dark chocolate, and stare at pictures of young women on the Internet. I am sure there is some significant way in which that makes me different from your run-of-the-mill male porn addict; I just haven’t quite figured out what it is yet, unless it’s that the women I look at are, for the most part, fully clothed, except for a small and surprising minority whose members have decided that posing in bikinis will somehow improve their chances of being picked as a potential parent.

  I began with BETSY82, one of the first women I’d seen, the one with two boys who I’d claimed looked like me. Betsy lives in Horsham, which is close but not too close. She’s been married for seven years, and she and her husband both work. Betsy has a nursing degree, works part-time, has already gone through one successful surrogacy for a married male couple (gay-friendly! open-minded!). I loved being pregnant. I loved how I felt and how the world responded to me. I felt as if I were in bloom. (Me, too, I thought, taking a bite of chocolate and absently wiping my eyes. Oh, Betsy, me, too.) I even loved my hideous maternity clothes! LOL. Those three little letters might be a deal-breaker. Could I entrust my genetic material—not to mention Peter’s—to someone who used cutesy abbreviations on the Internet? We’ll see. I’d already nixed all the candidates who had animated emoticons in their profiles or referred to frozen embryos as “snow babies.” A girl’s got to draw the line somewhere.

  I’d read Betsy’s profile so many times that I knew each word by heart, had stared at her pictures for so long that I could probably draw each one from memory. In one shot, she and her boys were at a pumpkin farm. They were dressed in jeans and jackets, and each one was holding a pumpkin—small, medium, and large. Betsy’s dark-brown hair was pulled back in a clip. She wasn’t a knockout, but she was pretty in her plum-colored cords and tan coat, with her husband standing beside her and her skin glowing with good health. Or maybe her skin was glowing from the pint of cheap vodka she’d chugged before getting behind the wheel, and she’d mowed down an entire kindergarten class on her way to the pumpkin patch. How was I supposed to know?

  It was the second picture that broke my heart. In that one, Betsy was in a hospital bed, looking pale and drained and exultant. There was a plastic bracelet around her wrist and a baby bundled in her arms with his eyes closed and a pink-and-blue knitted cap pulled down to his eyebrows. On either side of the bed, framing her and the newborn, were two beaming men. They wore matching platinum wedding bands, and each of them had stretched out a pinky for the baby to grasp.

  She had done it once. She wanted to do it again. I will work with you and your partner to make your dreams come true was the last line of her profile, and for the last month I’d been a perpetual ten seconds away from writing to her and asking whether we could meet.

  But not tonight. My e-mail chirped: There was a letter from my editor, Peyson, who didn’t normally write in the middle of the night. DID YOU SEE THIS? read the memo line, and the missive had been marked with a red “urgent” flag. Curious, I clicked on the link, which led me to one of the Internet’s most lively gossip websites, then jerked back in my chair as if I’d been slapped.

  IS CANDACE SHAPIRO J. N. LOCKSLEY? screamed the headline on Groklt.com. My heart jumped into my throat when the cover of Big Girls Don’t Cry appeared above my old head shot—my hair longer and lighter and more elaborately styled than it had been in years, the corners of my eyes crow’s-foot-free. An anonymous—but very convincing—source tells us that the author of Big Girls Don’t Cry has been writing Lyla’s adventures for Valor Press for the last nine years. Calls to Valor and Lyla Dare Enterprises for confirmation have so far gone unanswered.

  “Holy shit!” I blurted, then shot a panicked glance toward the stairs. All quiet. I turned back to the computer, staring at the screen as if expecting it to start talking. “Guberman?” I muttered, before rejecting it instantly. Bruce had no idea what I did for a living. No interest, either, as far as I knew. But if not Bruce, then who’d done this? There were only a handful of people who knew that I was J. N. Locksley: my husband, my daughter, my mother and my siblings, my agent, of course, and my editor and publisher in New York. Could Peyson have leaked my name, or Patsy Philippi herself, as a way of yanking my comfortable carpet out from underneath me so that I’d have to give the people at Valor Press the novel they wanted?

  I groaned and shoved myself away from the computer, knowing I’d never get back to sleep, trying to figu
re out how this had happened, whether I’d lose my job, my livelihood, and whether I could get it back again.

  TWENTY-TWO

  On Thursday morning, I got up as usual, took my shower, styled my hair, got back into my nightgown, and lay in bed, waiting for my mother to show up. I waited until seven-twenty, then got dressed and went down to the kitchen, where my mother was sitting at the table, staring at her laptop.

  “Hey, Mom? How come you didn’t wake me up?”

  She didn’t say a word. She was still in her pajamas, with bruised circles under her eyes, looking like she hadn’t slept at all. My dad was standing behind her with his hands on her shoulders, staring over her head at the screen. “It’s not the worst thing,” he said, his voice a low, comforting rumble.

  “I’m going to lose my job,” my mother said bleakly.

  “So you’ll be free to do other things,” he said.

  “What?” I said. “What’s going on?”

  My dad pointed wordlessly at the computer screen. I leaned over my mother’s shoulder. STARGIRL SCANDAL! read the headline of the page she’d pulled up. Wondering why StarGirl Lyla Dare’s been obsessed with the size of her thighs? Wonder no more! GrokIt can EXCLUSIVELY report that the Philadelphia-based author CANDACE SHAPIRO (Big Girls Don’t Cry) has been writing as J. N. Locksley for years.

  I could hear the click in my throat as I swallowed. “What happened?”

  “Somebody leaked the story,” said my mom. Her cheeks were pink, her lips were white, and it hit me that she didn’t look angry. She looked scared.

  Which made me scared, too. “Who?”

  She looked at me for so long that I started to squirm and feel guilty, even though I wasn’t. Finally she shrugged. “I honestly have no idea. But I think this is the end of the road for me and Lyla.”