Certain Girls

by Jennifer Weiner

  THIRTY-FOUR

  “Joy!”

  I ran down the driveway in front of Maxi’s white-shingled beach cottage (she called it a cottage even though it had five bedrooms, two additions, and a cook’s kitchen as big as the one at the Ronald McDonald House) as my mother got out of the taxi and let her sweep me into her arms.

  “Don’t ever do that again,” my mom whispered into my hair. I could tell that she was crying, and for a minute I thought I’d start crying, too.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. She ran her hands over my hair, touching my ears lightly, then my cheeks, inspecting me the way she used to when I was little to make sure I wasn’t hurt.

  “Are you all right?”

  I nodded, then hung my head.

  “Come on,” she said as the taxi turned around in the driveway and pulled back onto Maxi’s steep street. She pulled a sheaf of tickets out of her purse. “We’ll fly back tomorrow morning.” She raised her eyes to Maxi, who was waiting by the white-painted gate, thick with ruby-colored roses, in a polka-dotted sundress and matching wide-brimmed hat. “If that’s okay?”

  “Fine,” Maxi said, and smiled. “I’m glad for the company.”

  My mom turned back to me. “Do you still have that credit card?”

  I pulled it out of my purse and shamefacedly handed it over. “Good,” she said, sliding it into her wallet. “I thought that maybe we’d do a little shopping.”

  My eyes widened. I’d been expecting any number of things: getting yelled at, getting grounded, having my bat mitzvah party canceled. A shopping trip wasn’t one of them.

  My mom smiled at my expression. “You’re still in trouble, though. When you get home, you’re grounded, and no TV privileges for a month, and you have to give me your cell phone when you’re not at school.”

  I nodded, probably too eagerly, because her forehead wrinkled. “No allowance, either.”

  “Fine.” And then, because no one was looking, I reached up and hugged her again.

  • • •

  Forty-five minutes later, my mom and Maxi and I walked into the Badgley Mischka boutique on Rodeo Drive, a street that I recognized from many viewings of Pretty Woman with my mother. “Thank your father for this,” my mother said as a man in a uniform held the door open. “This was his idea, not mine.” We stepped onto the thick ivory carpet, into the icy air-conditioned room, where the dresses were displayed like exhibits in a museum, ten of them hung on mannequins. I looked at each dress, gold and cream and silver and bronze, getting more and more panicky, until my mother tapped my shoulder and I turned around to find a salesgirl smiling at me with the pink-and-silver gown in her arms.

  I followed as she hung the dress in a mirrored cubicle, along with the matching wrap, and a shoe box with a pair of silver sandals. “Thanks,” I said. Then I looked at my mom. “Are you sure?”

  “If it’s what you want,” she said, only a little reluctantly. “I still think it’s very adult.”

  “I,” said Maxi, “think it’s lovely.”

  “And you’re not being rewarded for running away,” said my mom as she sat down on a stool in the dressing room opposite mine. “Just so we’re clear on that. Your father thinks you should have the kind of dress you want. And on his head be it,” she muttered as I shimmied the dress up over my hips, then stepped out of the dressing room with my back to my mom so she could zip me. She rested her hands on my shoulders, and for a moment we stood in front of the mirror: her with her eternal ponytail (neat, at least, today), me with my curls, her in her black shirt and khaki pants, me in that dream of a dress. My mother sighed and wrapped her arms around me. “Is it what you want? Does it make you happy?”

  I nodded. She draped the wrap over my shoulders and turned to the manager, who was waiting behind us with his hands clasped. “We’ll take it,” she said.

  • • •

  The next morning, we were on an eight o’clock flight back home. After takeoff, my mom pulled out a book. I lifted the Badgley Mischka dress bag out from under the seat in front of me, where I’d tucked it, then slid it back. We’d reached our cruising altitude of thirty-two thousand feet when my mother stuck her book into the seat-back pocket, turned to me, and said, “I think we should talk.”

  “About what?”

  She smiled. “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe what made you decide to go to Los Angeles and hunt down your long-lost grandfather?”

  I shrugged. “He was . . . pretty awful.” There weren’t words for what he was, I realized. Maybe that was why my mom and Aunt Elle and Grandma Ann all used the same ones. Not a nice guy didn’t even begin to cover it. Scary was a better word. Pathetic worked, too. And old. He was an old, mean man with a book full of pictures of kids who’d grown up and didn’t know him anymore. “He showed me all of these pictures from when you guys were kids,” I said.

  My mom seemed surprised. “Really?”

  “You and Aunt Elle and Uncle Josh, and his other kids, too, I guess. And reviews of your book. And stories about you.”

  She didn’t seem happy to hear it. “I wonder why.”

  “I found a tape of him at Grandma Ann’s.”

  “A videotape?” She looked even more puzzled.

  “No, a tape recording. You guys were kids. He was reading to you.”

  She nodded slowly. “He did that. When Aunt Elle and I were little girls.” Her face softened at the memory.

  “I don’t know. He sounded so nice on that tape . . .” A lump was growing in my throat. “He sounded like my dad. But you were right. I should have listened. He wasn’t very nice.”

  “He used to be,” my mother said. She pressed her lips together, maybe remembering something tender: her father taking her ice skating, or teaching her to swim. “He used to be fantastic. That was the worst part of it,” she said slowly. Her voice was shy, soft, even girlish. “He wasn’t always awful, you know? He was a wonderful father for the first little while. He’d read to us and take us places. He’d teach us things.”

  “How to skate,” I said. “How to swim.”

  “Yep. And he loved us . . .” She blinked and turned her face away. “He loved us so much before . . . Well, I don’t know. Maybe what happened was chemical, or just a really bad midlife crisis. But I remember when he’d tell me that he was proud of me, it was the best feeling in the world. Because it was so rare, you know?” I could tell she was having a hard time finding words for this—my mother, who had something to say about everything, who’d tell me that words were her tools. “Grandma Ann was always proud of us, and we always knew she loved us, but with him, you didn’t always know. So when he said it . . .” She crumpled an airplane napkin in her fist. I looked at her, then looked away. Peter told me how proud of me they were all the time. He read me books, he took me places. I never doubted for a minute that he loved me, or that my mother did, even if her love sometimes felt like a straitjacket. Even Bruce loved me, I thought. Even though he’d run away to Amsterdam. He’d come back, and done the best he could.

  “I shouldn’t have lied about him,” she said heavily. “I’m sorry for that. It wasn’t a good decision, but I thought it would be better for you to think he didn’t care than to think that he cared for the wrong reasons. I thought that maybe later, when you were older, I could tell you the whole story. If you were interested.”

  I thought for a minute. Then I figured, In for a penny, in for a pound, which is something else my mother always says. I bent over and pulled my copy of Big Girls Don’t Cry out of Mrs. Marmer’s purse.

  “Oh God,” my mom said miserably. “That. Okay,” she began, taking a deep breath. “Before you say anything, in my own defense, I wrote it when I was twenty-eight, and I’d been through a very bad breakup. Things in there were exaggerated for comic effect.”

  “Like how many guys Allie slept with?”

  She winced. “Especially that. And, um, the angry and insecure thing. And thin-skinned and petty. All of that. All made up.” Her lips curled upward, almost in spite of herse
lf. “Except the fat part. That, sadly, is true.” She thought about it. “Also thin-skinned. But as far as you’re concerned, I was a virgin until the day I got married.” She thought it over. “Well, until the day I met Bruce. Which, by the way, was when I was much, much older than you are.” She sighed and bent down, reaching for her book. “What else?” she asked.

  “You’re a good mom,” I said.

  Her hands froze on her tote bag. “You think so?”

  “The best,” I assured her. From the way her shoulders were shaking, I thought she might be crying, but she pulled herself together and opened her book. “Can I just ask about one thing?”

  “Sure.” Her voice was a little wobbly.

  “When you went to Los Angeles, in the book.”

  “When Allie went to Los Angeles,” she corrected with a little smile.

  “‘To escape,’” I quoted. “‘To escape and be reborn.’”

  My mother rolled her eyes. “Boy, didn’t I think I was the writer.”

  I ignored her. “The thing she was running away from . . .” And here it was, the root of it, the heart of my journey. “It was me, wasn’t it?” I whispered. “You didn’t want to have a baby.”

  Her eyes filled with tears. “Oh, Joy.” She pulled me close to her, rubbing her hand against my curls. I rested my head against her chest, close enough so her breath rustled my hair when she whispered, “You were the thing I was running to. I just didn’t know it yet.”

  • • •

  Somewhere over Virginia, I told her about Tamsin, how she’d been the one to spill the beans on my mother’s career writing Lyla Dare. She was just as shocked as I’d been. “Tamsin?” she said. “Tamsin Marmer? Your BFF?”

  “She was mad at me,” I admitted. “That’s why she did it.”

  “Great,” my mother muttered, and heaved a long, bosom-shifting sigh. “Oh well. Nothing to do about it now, I guess. Cat’s out of the bag. Water under the bridge. When God closes a window, he opens a marriage.”

  “Huh?”

  “Door,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s actually ‘When God closes a window, He opens a door.’”

  “Why would God open a marriage?”

  Her cheeks were pink. “It’s a joke,” she said. “Old joke. There was this rabbi in Cherry Hill who had his wife murdered, and then he told his mistress that when God closes a window, He opens a door, only Peter and I would always say that when God closes a window, He opens a marriage. Anyhow. If it wasn’t Tamsin, it probably would have been someone else eventually. It’ll work out.”

  “So . . .” It seemed impossible, but I asked it anyway: “Are you grateful to Tamsin?”

  She gave me a crooked smile and a shrug—not a yes, but not a no, either.

  “Are you grateful to your dad?” I asked.

  The captain came on the loudspeaker to announce that we were beginning our descent into Philadelphia. My mother was quiet for so long I wasn’t sure that she was going to answer. Finally, she said, “The thing is, I got everything I wanted, you know? Eventually, I did. A husband and a wonderful daughter, and a beautiful home, and friends I love, and work . . .” Her voice trailed off. “When you get everything you wanted, I think maybe you do have to be a little grateful for the people who got you there . . . whether or not they thought they were doing you any favors at the time.”

  I must have winced, because she squeezed my shoulder. “Don’t worry,” she said. “Oh, and before we land, there’s something else we need to discuss.” She pulled open her tote bag. Underneath her book and her wallet and her bottle of water was a folder with a stack of printed pages and a photograph of Betsy, the woman from the website. “So listen,” said my mom. “How would you feel about being a big sister?”

  THIRTY-FIVE

  “I don’t know.” I stared down at my lap, draped in a white hospital gown with a blue pattern of snowflakes, and stretched my legs toward the bottom of the bed. “I feel weird that I don’t feel any weirder. Does that make sense?”

  Peter shrugged. He was sitting in a chair beside my bed, where he’d been since I came out of the procedure room. There was a pitcher of ice water on the bedside table, and an arrangement of flowers that he’d brought, tulips and daffodils. “I don’t think there’s any one way to feel,” he said.

  I yawned. The harvest had been scheduled for the revolting hour of six A.M., which meant we’d been up since four. Outside, the sky was hazy and gray, with dark thunderclouds massed in the distance. I was glad my doctor had ordered me to spend the rest of the day in bed. Back at home, the central air would be keeping things delightfully chilly. “Nine eggs. That’s pretty good, right?” I said. In fact, nine eggs struck me as a kind of middling total. I’d read online about women my age who’d gone through the regimen of hormones shot and swallowed and wound up with only two eggs. I’d also read about egg donors in their twenties who’d produced a whopping twenty-four eggs in a single cycle.

  “Nine should be plenty,” Peter said.

  “Then my work here is done,” I said, and shifted my weight, wincing at a cramp. My nine eggs would be whisked off to a laboratory, where they’d be combined with the best contenders from my husband’s early-morning sample of washed and spun sperm. The best-looking sperm plus the best-looking eggs would, with any luck, equal a few nice-looking eight-celled embryos, which would be threaded through a catheter and injected into Betsy’s chemically primed uterus. Then we’d wait.

  Peter lifted my hand and kissed it. “Are you feeling all right? You’re not uncomfortable at all?”

  “I feel fine. It’s just a little unnerving. Brave new world, right?”

  He squeezed my hand. “So what now?”

  I shrugged. “We wait, I guess.”

  “And what about you?”

  I looked at him curiously. “What about me? I’m going back to bed.”

  “Have you thought about your writing? That other novel Valor’s been after you for?”

  I turned my face away and sighed. The Monday after I’d gotten back from L.A., I’d gotten the call from Larissa I’d been dreading. After careful review of the salient facts, Valor had decided that I could no longer function effectively in Lyla Dare’s universe. “But that’s not such a bad thing,” Larissa had told me. “Now you can clear your plate for your next novel!” “Sure,” I’d said softly, and hung up the phone.

  “Honestly, I haven’t been thinking about books. I’ve been thinking about how fast my eggs are deteriorating, and how to keep my daughter from leaving the country without my knowledge.”

  “I’m serious,” Peter said. He looked at me steadily. “You wrote StarGirl for how long?”

  “A while,” I allowed. It had been nine years, and I would have written those books forever, I thought, if things had worked out differently. Lyla’s world had been such a comfortable hiding place. By the end, her skin had been so easy for me to slip into, her body and her emotions so easy for me to inhabit, even if both were worlds away from my own.

  “Maybe what happened was a good thing,” he said. I bit my lip and said nothing. He put his hand on the back of my neck and rubbed. “I just wish you weren’t so afraid.”

  “What am I afraid of?” I demanded. “I’m not afraid. I’m fine.”

  He wasn’t giving up. “You should write another book. A real one.”

  “I liked my fake ones,” I said.

  Peter was undeterred. “I think,” he continued, “that you have a purpose, and you need to live up to it.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Did you hit your head, then watch Oprah? Can I have some pain pills now?”

  “Are you in pain?”

  I looked at his face in the too-bright hospital light, the planes of his cheeks, his straight dark brows and warm brown eyes, and remembered how, the first time I’d met him, I hadn’t thought that he was handsome—all I’d been able to see was that he wasn’t Bruce, and I’d overlooked the kindness in his expression; the way, more than anyone else, he saw me, really saw me, and was
not fooled by all my sass and poses or the names the world had called me.

  “I do have a purpose,” I said. “I take care of Joy.”

  “Joy’s thirteen,” he pointed out. “She’ll be in high school soon. You’ve done your job, as well as any parent can.”

  “Some job,” I said, looking down at my lap. “Except for her running three thousand miles away, I’ve done just great.”

  He ignored me. “I think there’s something else you’re supposed to be doing.”

  “My purpose,” I repeated. “Like a divine purpose? From God?”

  Peter didn’t smile. “Maybe,” he said. “And if it is, you shouldn’t ignore it. Remember what happened to Moses when he ignored God?”

  I struggled to recall my Hebrew-school lessons. “Are you saying that my editor’s going to appear to me as a burning bush? Because that would be cool.” I thought it over. “Different, anyhow.”

  “You should write another novel.”

  “You,” I said, “should lay off. Anyhow, if we have a baby, don’t you think I’ll have my hands full? What with the diapers and the middle-of-the-night feedings and the sleep deprivation and the cracked nipples and all?”

  “You won’t be breast-feeding.”

  “I’ll have sympathy cracked nipples,” I explained.

  “You wrote the first one when you had Joy,” he pointed out.

  “I was young!” I said. “I was young and I needed the money and nobody wanted to take naked pictures of me! I didn’t know what was going to happen.” I looked back into my lap and said, half to myself, “I can’t go through that again. I can’t put you guys through it again.”

  “We all came out fine,” he said patiently. “People survive worse things than having a writer in the family.”

  “I won’t,” I began. He looked at me calmly. “I can’t,” I said. He continued to watch me with a smile on his face. I flopped back onto the pillow. “Agh. Go harass one of the doctors about her divine purpose. Or go see how our embryos are doing. Do you think it’s too early to give them names?”