Certain Girls

by Jennifer Weiner

  • • •

  In person, my grandfather’s hair was almost entirely white, and he was short and barrel-chested, with stocky legs in blue jeans that sagged beneath his belly. I watched as he waved an electronic key fob at the door and stomped inside, looking out of place against the pale pink carpet and cream-colored walls. He wore a thick leather belt with a horseshoe-shaped silver buckle and a plaid shirt. His face was lined, and his cheeks were ruddy, and his eyes behind his glasses were watery brown, threaded with red.

  He said something to the receptionist before he walked over to me. “Joy?” His voice was low and gravelly, and I felt a thrill of recognition spike my blood. I realized that it was a version of my own voice I was hearing.

  “Hi.” I ducked my head, shy, unsure what to call him, whether I should hug him or shake his hand. He solved the problem by smiling even more widely. He had beautiful teeth, gleaming and even and white. “Did you get my e-mail?” I asked.

  “I did, but I wasn’t expecting a visit. What a nice surprise,” he said, and I heard the voice from the tape, warm and welcoming, rumbling through his chest. “Welcome to California.” He paused while we looked each other over. I was reminded of Frenchelle in the dog park, the way she’d cautiously approach a new dog, sniffing delicately, trying to figure out whether it was friend or foe. “There’s a coffee shop downstairs. Can I buy you something to drink?”

  “That sounds good,” I said, relieved. I hadn’t made any plans beyond actually seeing him, and this sounded perfect: We’d be in public, and Kevin and the car would be nearby.

  “Your mother with you?” he asked casually as we walked into the hallway.

  I shook my head. “Not right now,” I said, which was enough of the truth to work for both of us.

  He held the door of the coffee shop for me, and we ordered drinks at the counter: something frozen and blended with whipped cream and chocolate syrup for me, an espresso for him. Then we carried our cups to a table by the window. I waved at Kevin, parked in a space up front, while my grandfather poured sugar into his cup.

  “So,” he began. “What brings you to our fair city?”

  “I’m just visiting, but I wanted to make sure you knew about my bat mitzvah. You know. Officially. I left an invitation with your—I guess your ex-wife?”

  “Christine,” he said shortly. I waited for him to say something else, to maybe apologize for her behavior and say that she’d been sick or she was crazy, but he didn’t.

  “This was the first time I was ever on a plane by myself,” I told him, even though he hadn’t asked.

  He raised his eyebrows. “Oh yeah?”

  “Well, I’ve been on planes before. Just never by myself. I usually go places with my parents. We go to Florida sometimes, and I’ve been to California with my mom and with Aunt Elle . . .”

  A crease appeared between his eyes. “Aunt . . .”

  “Oh. That’s Lucy. She changed her name.”

  His teeth gleamed when he smiled. “Did she change her ways, too?”

  Huh?

  “Probably not,” he said, continuing to smile. “There was never much potential there. Now, your mother was a different story.”

  I stared at him, speechless, then looked down at my drink. How could he say Aunt Elle had no potential? Aunt Elle was beautiful!

  I lifted my eyes to look at him. My grandfather had a cell phone and a beeper tucked into his breast pocket, along with a crumpled pack of cigarettes. Cigarettes? I thought. Would a doctor smoke?

  He pulled off his glasses and massaged the bridge of his nose with two fingertips. “Big success,” he said, “your mother.”

  “I guess,” I said.

  “How is she?”

  “She’s good.”

  “Just good?” He folded up his glasses and set them on top of the napkin dispenser. “‘Good’ doesn’t tell me anything. A useless word.”

  My stomach cramped. Was he saying that I was useless? “Busy!” I finally said. “She’s very busy.”

  “Oh yeah?” He sounded bored.

  I tried to change the subject. “So . . . um. I’m almost done with seventh grade. I go to the Philadelphia Academy. Do you know it?”

  He didn’t answer. “Wait here,” he said. I watched through the window as he walked back to his car, pulled a book out of the trunk, and came back, setting the book on the table. I recognized it instantly: It was a photo album, a sibling of all the ones I’d seen in Grandma Ann’s bonus room. “I thought you might like seeing this,” he said.

  I watched as he flipped the book open to the first page, which was a picture of a bald baby with its mouth wide open, wrapped in a pink-and-blue blanket.

  “Your mother,” he announced. He flipped to the next page, and there was Grandma Ann, her short hair brown instead of silver and her skin unlined, smiling with the bald baby on her shoulder.

  I looked at the baby. “That’s Aunt Elle. Aunt Lucy, I think.”

  “Nope. Candace.” He tapped the photograph with one finger. “See, Ann hadn’t gotten fat yet.”

  I swallowed hard.

  “Thirty pounds with each kid,” he said. “If you can believe it. Probably a good thing your mom stopped with one.”

  I said, “Oh,” because I could tell that he expected me to say something. My feet tapped against the floor, faster and faster.

  “You’ve got a genetic tendency to put on weight,” he lectured. His bloodshot brown eyes looked me over critically. “You’ll have to be careful.”

  I wanted to tell him that I was careful. I wanted to tell him that my mother was careful: that everything she served me was organic and all-natural and hormone-free, that I had the healthiest lunches and snacks of any kid I’d ever seen, that I hadn’t even tasted soda until I was ten years old. Instead, I wiggled my straw around the whipped cream in my drink, then took a big swallow.

  He shrugged and turned the page. “Your mother,” he said again. There she was, in a bathing suit with a frog appliquéd on the tummy. Her hair was wet and curly. She’d been running under a sprinkler set up on the lawn. I could see the strands of water at the far end of the photograph. She was grinning, her sturdy round legs planted on the grass, her belly sticking out proudly. “Four years old, but she could already read. I read to her every night. Poetry. Shakespeare. Every night.”

  “That’s nice,” I said quietly, remembering the tape I’d heard. Oh God, I wanted to get out of here so badly. The man who’d made those tapes, who’d sounded so kind, was gone. Coming here had been a huge, huge mistake.

  “I taught her to read,” he said, and flipped the page. My mother again, with Aunt Elle, the two of them in snowsuits and ice skates on the bumpy, pockmarked surface of a frozen pond. Underneath the ice, I could glimpse the black water. “Taught her to swim.” Flick. Grandma Ann again, heavier and tired-looking, her brown hair threaded with gray, another baby in a blanket in her arms. My grandfather quickly flipped past that shot—Uncle Josh, I guessed. “Taught her everything, when you come right down to it.” The pictures passed by in a blur: first days of school, birthday parties, and bar mitzvahs. Flick. High school graduation, my mother in a shiny cap and gown, standing behind a podium, her face set in familiar lines, sullen and shy and ashamed. She looked bigger underneath her black cap and gown.

  I toyed with my straw. My grandfather pushed the book across the table. “Take a look,” he said.

  I flipped back to the beginning, then paged through the pictures more slowly, trying to find something that looked familiar, an echo of my own face in these faces. There was Uncle Josh with a buzz cut, holding a fishing pole, and my mother again, stretched out in front of a fireplace, frowning over a book. I shivered, goose-bumpy in the air-conditioning of the coffee shop. There wasn’t anything scary about the pictures, except that nobody ever got any older in them. On these pages, under the plastic, the children stayed children. They never grew up.

  About halfway through the book, the pictures gave way to clippings. Some were from what
looked like a high school newspaper. One or two were poems. Then the real newspaper articles began. The first batch had my mother’s byline. School Board Postpones Budget Hearing, I read. Science Fair Instructs, Delights. New School Lunches Cut the Fat.

  “You see?” he asked. His voice was half kind, half gloating. “I always knew she’d be a writer.”

  I flipped slowly through the pages. The stories with my mother’s byline ended in 1999. There was a three-year gap, when I was born, in which there was only a handful of columns from Moxie magazine, including one she’d written, called, like Bruce’s first column had been, “Loving a Larger Woman.” I will whisper in my daughter’s ear. Our lives will be extraordinary, I read. My throat felt like it was closing, and my eyes began to burn.

  I turned the page. The next bunch of stories weren’t written by my mother anymore; they were about her.

  PHILADELPHIA AUTHOR LANDS BIG BOOK DEAL, I read. QUEEN OF THE BIG GIRLS: HEFTY GAL CANDACE SHAPIRO PENS TRIUMPHANT TALES FOR HER PLUS-SIZE SISTERS. There were copies of best-seller lists from around the country, cut out and neatly glued to the blank pages. Then came the one with my picture in it from People magazine: me and my mother, jumping on a bed, our feet in the air, hair flying, mouths open, laughing. It was just the picture—the story itself was on the next page—but I remembered what the headline had been, and said it out loud.

  “Happy endings.” Oh, Mom, I thought.

  “I ordered it from the magazine,” my grandfather said, pulling the cigarettes out of his pocket and thumping them on the table. “They’ll send it to you if you pay them. They don’t even care who you are.”

  He spread his hands on the table. He wore a heavy gold watch on one wrist and a chunky gold ring on his pinky. “She never wrote anything else,” he said. “No more books.”

  “Maybe she didn’t want to,” I said. “Maybe she didn’t have to.”

  “I guess not,” he said. His voice sounded loud and angry. “That Philadelphia Academy’s a private school?”

  I nodded.

  “Must be nice,” he said. “Never believed in that, myself. Public education was good enough for me. Good enough for all of my kids.”

  I nodded.

  “I’ll bet you take nice vacations,” he said.

  “We go to the beach in the summer.”

  “I took my kids to the beach. Your mother probably never mentioned that.” He tapped the pack of cigarettes on the table.

  I nodded and sneaked a look out the window, making sure Kevin was still there.

  “Nice vacations,” he said. “Nice school. Nice life. Well. She never was very generous with family . . .”

  “She is. She takes care of me.” I stuffed my hands in my pockets and lifted my eyes, telling him something that I’d never in a million years tell her. “She’s a good mother.”

  “That’s a surprise. You know, she didn’t have the best example.” I thought he meant himself, but then he started talking about Grandma Ann. “I should have known what she was when I married her,” he said. “Nineteen sixty-eight, though. Who knew what a lesbian was back then? I don’t blame myself.”

  I swallowed hard. My knees were bouncing up and down; my feet were jittering on the floor. “I should probably get going.”

  “I don’t blame myself,” he repeated. “I’ve been the victim. The victim of a fraudulent marriage, then an adulterous one. Have you read any Shakespeare?” he demanded. I didn’t need my hearing aids to tell that his voice had gotten louder. People were staring at the two of us.

  “A little. We did Romeo and Juliet in—”

  “‘How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child,’” he quoted. “That’s your mother. That’s all of them. Thankless.”

  “She’s not.” My tongue felt shriveled; my teeth felt like they’d been coated in sawdust. “She’s not,” I said again. I remembered the pictures from Grandma Ann’s, from when my mother was older, how she’d always looked like she was cringing. I remembered how my mother would take me swimming in the ocean when I was little, staying close to the shore, letting me hold her shoulders as she kicked and paddled, how I’d floated above her back and felt like I was flying. I remembered what she’d said to Hope, the baby she’d had but hadn’t wanted, on the last page of her book. I will love you forever. I will keep you safe.

  “I made her who she is.” My mother’s father gave me a sly, smug smile. “Read to her. Taught her to swim. Gave her all of her material. The story she told. And she made a fortune off it, didn’t she? Where would she have been without me?”

  “Happy?” The word was out of my mouth before I knew it. His face contorted, and for a minute I thought he was going to do something: yell or pick up his coffee cup and hurl it on the floor, or at my face.

  I got to my feet. “I should go.”

  “Why’d you come here?” His voice was cold, mocking. “Did she send you here? Did you come to gloat? Tell her next time she can come and gloat herself. Come see the old man. Get a good look. See if that makes her . . .” His voice filled with spite. “Happy.”

  “I wanted to see you,” I said. “That’s all.” My voice trailed off. “I left an invitation at your house.” Then I was moving, and my chair had fallen to the floor, and I snatched my purse and practically ran out the door, through the parking lot, diving into the backseat of Kevin’s car, where I sat with my head in my hands, shaking so hard that I could barely pull out the telephone, could barely make my fingers press the button that would connect me to home.

  Kevin acted as if this was all perfectly normal. “Back to the hotel?” he asked as the phone started ringing.

  I nodded. My eyes caught a flash of motion in the rearview mirror as the coffee-shop door swung open. “Hello?” said my mother. “Joy?” The car pulled smoothly out of the lot and into the street, but not before I saw my grandfather step, blinking, into the waning light.

  “Joy?” my mother yelled in my ear. “Where are you?”

  “I’m in California,” I said. “I want to come home.”

  THIRTY-THREE

  When Joy was four years old, she started having headaches. She’d sit on the sofa with her head in her hands, pale and drawn, and nothing helped—not cool washcloths or Tylenol, not lying down in a dim room, not chamomile tea. “It hurts,” she’d cry, tears streaking her cheeks. “It hurts and it will never stop hurting!”

  We made the rounds from the pediatrician to the ophthalmologist to the otolaryngologist, ruling out ear infections and sinus infections and run-of-the-mill migraines. Finally, the neurologist proposed a night in the hospital and a series of tests, including an MRI of Joy’s brain. “You think she’s got a brain tumor?” I said, keeping my voice light, waiting for the inevitable Of course not, for the doctor to tell me that there were only so many medical problems one little family and one little girl could be expected to endure. Instead, he’d flipped the pages of her chart and told me that actually, his concern was a tumor in the paranasal sinus.

  I stared at him, waiting for the punch line. None came. Two days later, we checked Joy into the hospital. I sat outside the chamber where the MRI was performed and watched Joy’s prone, gown-clad body slide into the mouth of the machine. Her tiny, pale feet, with the remnants of red polish on the toenails, were almost more than I could stand, but I made myself lean forward, at the technician’s urging, made myself speak into the microphone and say in a voice that did not tremble and did not crack, “Don’t be afraid, baby. Mommy’s right here.”

  “Don’t be afraid,” I said into my cell phone the next morning, remembering how I’d spent those twenty minutes offering God everything I could think of, up to and including years of my life, if only Joy would be safe and well. A few hours later, we had our diagnosis: stress headaches. She’d grow out of them. She’d be fine. “I’m on my way.”

  Joy sighed and said nothing.

  “What were you thinking?” I blurted. I shoved my carry-on into the overhead compartment and buckled myself into
my seat.

  A wordless hum filled my ears. “Joy Leah Shapiro Krushelevansky—” I began.

  “I went to see my grandfather,” she muttered. “It was a big mistake.”

  I felt my breath whoosh out of me even though, at some level, I’d known that was where she’d gone. I’d known as soon as my mother had mentioned it.

  “You were right,” she said. “He isn’t very nice.”

  Oh God. I swallowed hard, with my father’s greatest, hardest hits playing on a loop in my head: calling me ugly, calling Elle stupid, telling Josh that he was a mistake. “What did he say to you?”

  “Not much.” She gave an unhappy giggle. “Nothing, really. I don’t think he wants to come to my bat mitzvah, is all.”

  “Oh, honey.” I remembered the day she came home from kindergarten, closemouthed and red-eyed, and how I’d finally pried it out of her that one of the other girls (Amber Gross? The name rang a bell) had said that Joy couldn’t be her friend because she wore things in her ears. I’d delivered a politically correct speech about tolerance and understanding and how every kid was different, meanwhile entertaining a brief but vivid fantasy of figuring out which girl had hurt my daughter and drop-kicking all thirty-five pounds of her across the Philadelphia Academy’s parking lot.

  Joy sniffled. “I’m okay.”

  “Just hang on. I’ll be there soon,” I said.

  Her voice was tiny. “I took your credit card. Your White Card. Am I in trouble?”

  “Oh. Um.” It took me a minute to recover myself. “Yes. Yes, you are, Joy, you’re in a world of hurt!”

  She giggled, because in a world of hurt was what I said to her, or to Peter, as a joke, something we’d been saying for years. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry about everything. I’m sorry I went to Tyler’s bar mitzvah and that I lied to you.”

  “It’s okay, it’s okay,” I crooned into the receiver, imagining rocking her when she was a baby, twining her curls around my fingers with her sweet weight in my lap. “It’s okay. I’ll be there soon. We’ll figure it out. We’ll be fine.”