"I am not Amanda Reilly," I said. I squared my shoulders and straightened the straps of my backpack as we entered the lunchroom. "I'll be back."
First I walked past the table full of the kids who don't really fit in anywhere else, the place I'd sit if I didn't have Tamsin and Todd. Jack Corsey and his dandruff sit there, and so does Sally Cullin, who's fat, and Alice Blankenship, who got sent home from school for a week last year after her English project turned out to be a bunch of poems about suicide.
Next to the misfits are the boy jocks, the soccer and lacrosse players, then the girl jocks, the ones who tie their colored rubber mouth guards to shoelaces and wear them like necklaces around their necks. Then there's a table of drama/music types who wear leg warmers and leotards and act like they're in High School Musical VI and try to dance in the lunch line. Todd and Tamsin and I normally sit at the end of that table: Todd's a legitimate drama type, and Tamsin and I don't really belong anywhere else.
I held my breath as I passed the drama table, then walked by the hippie kids who smell like incense and play Hacky Sack and wear their hair in dreadlocks whether they're black or white. I passed the grinds, the ones who will probably leave the Philadelphia Academy in ninth grade and go to Masterman, the city's magnet high school, and on to the Ivy League.
At the center of the room sit those certain girls, the girls who are jocks, or arty, or hippies, or smart, but first and foremost they are...easy, I guess. Not "easy" like "sex," but as in everything they do comes easily to them, whether it's wearing the right thing or saying the right thing or knowing the right thing to do. Amber Gross is their queen. She can even tease Mr. Shoup about his clothes. "Great tie," she said once. "Did your kid knit it for you?" Which sounded really mean, except Mr. Shoup laughed. I'd said "Great tie" to him once, when he'd been wearing the same tie, but he'd just looked puzzled.
I carried my lunch over to their table, a row of girls in pastel button-downs and low-rise pants and boys in rugby shirts and jeans, holding my breath again, half believing that Amber would laugh and say, "You didn't think I was serious!"
Instead, she smiled at me. "We saved you a seat!" she said, and squinched herself over to make room.
I put my plastic lunch bag on the table, slid my backpack to the floor, and eased myself onto the bench, with Amber on my left side and Duncan Brodkey on my right. I felt myself flush as our shoulders touched. I'd never imagined actually being this close to him, close enough that I could smell his shampoo and see gold hairs glinting on his forearms, above the rolled-up sleeves of his shirt.
I pulled out my sandwich, sneaking little looks: his shaggy brown hair and light gray eyes and ears that are somehow more appealing than everyone else's. Once, in gym class, he wouldn't put his shorts on. "I'm a conscientious objector," he told Mr. Huff, and I'd thought that was the funniest thing I'd ever heard, even though I'd never been able to figure out exactly what made it funny.
"So what's up?" said Amber. She wore a slim silver bracelet on her left wrist, a necklace with a silver heart around her neck, a pink shirt, and jeans. Her hair was dark brown with lighter brown streaks. Highlights, I thought, and wondered if my mom would let me get some, then instantly decided that she wouldn't. "Did you get a date?" she asked.
I knew immediately what she was talking about; she didn't mean "date" as in "boy" but "date" as in "bat mitzvah." "Next October. How about you?"
"June," she said. "Do you have a theme?"
I squirmed on the narrow seat. "I don't think I'm going to have a theme." In fact, I was positive I wouldn't. The one time I'd asked my mother about it, she'd raised her eyebrows and said in a very snotty and unhelpful tone, Um, God?
Amber looked shocked. "No theme?"
I shook my head.
"Huh. Weird. Mine's Hollywood. Hey, do you want to come?"
Did I want to come to Amber Gross's Hollywood-themed bat mitzvah? Was a bean green? "Sure," I blurted.
"Cool," she said. I noticed Manda Reilly squirting her hands with disinfectant gel. My mom puts that in my lunch bag, and I usually ignore it, but today I pulled it out and squirted my hands, too. I ate quietly and watched people's hands and faces as the conversation swirled around me. High, twittery girls' voices talked about homework, soccer tournaments, babysitting jobs, a sweater at Banana Republic that would be on sale soon. Deeper boys' voices rumbled replies. I was polishing my apple on my sleeve, feeling my skin flare every time Duncan shifted or took a bite of his pizza. My own voice sounded so different from these girls' voices. Maybe that was my real problem: No matter how I dressed or how carefully I straightened my hair, I could never sound like them, and everyone would know I was an imposter as soon as I opened my mouth.
Amber tapped my shoulder. "Hey," she said. I wondered how long she'd been talking to me, how long it had taken her to realize that I needed to see her in order to know she was talking to me. I watched her sparkly pink lips form the words "Is Maxi Ryder coming to your bat mitzvah?"
The breath I hadn't realized I was holding whooshed out of me. So this is it. Mystery solved.
"I don't know," I said slowly. "She's busy. She's shooting a TV miniseries this summer, so she might be on location."
"Oh, sure," said Amber, helping herself to one of my blue-cheese olives. (She had a French manicure. I made a note to figure out how to give myself one.) "But she's, like, a friend of the family, right?" I must have looked confused, because she said, "She's in your mom's book. In the acknowledgments." She pursed her lips and stared at me. "You've read it, right?"
Before I could answer, Duncan Brodkey put down his pizza. "Your mom wrote a book?" His body was so close to mine, his mouth so close to my ear, that I could feel the words more than hear them.
I nodded again, then looked down at my apple. The table had gone silent. Every eye was on me. The truth was, my mother had written a bunch of books, science fiction adventures in the StarGirl series, but those were under a pen name. The book that they had to be talking about was the only one written under her own name. It had been published when I was three. "It was a long time ago."
I watched everyone's eyes move across the table as Sasha Swerdlow started talking. "It's called Big Girls Don't Cry," Sasha said. "You guys have all totally seen it. It's got, like, gigantic boobs on the cover." She held her hands out way in front of her own not inconsiderable chest. "And a hot-fudge sundae, and the cherry from the sundae's sliding down the cleavage, and anyway, it's about this girl who's in love with a guy, but he dumps her, and they have all this sex, and she's got this terrible father who's, like, incredibly mean to her, and then she finds out her mom is gay..."
Duncan looked impressed. "Hot stuff." I winced and looked away. Woman with enormous bosom and a gay mom. That certainly sounded familiar.
Sasha kept talking so loudly that I heard every word. "And then," she continued, "she goes on, like, this quest to Los Angeles, and she meets a duchess in a casino and finds out she's pregnant--"
"The duchess?" asked Duncan.
Duchess? I thought. The cramp of panic inside my chest eased a bit. My mom didn't know any duchesses, and as far as I knew she had never been to Los Angeles. Maybe the book was nothing for me to worry about.
Sasha giggled. "No, silly. Allie. The heroine. And she's totally insecure about her weight and how she looks and everything, because the baby's father dumped her when she was pregnant, but then she falls in love with this guy back in Philadelphia..."
I stuffed the rest of my lunch into my plastic bag, forcing myself to smile, trying, even though it was hopeless, to look like the rest of the girls. Dumped her when she was pregnant. That sounded familiar, too. The truth was, I'd never read any of my mother's books--not the StarGirl ones that were published under the name J. N. Locksley, and definitely not Big Girls Don't Cry. I'd seen it, of course. There were different versions of it lined up on the top shelf of my mom's study, hardcovers and paperbacks and versions in foreign languages. It's for adults, my mom had told me once, a long time ago, and I'd n
ever been curious enough to read it. Maybe because Bruce, my biological father, had given me a copy of his book, which was published by an academic press and was all about post-apocalyptic imagery in Doctor Who. It was full of big words like "semiotics" and "synecdoche," with some pages that were one-third filled by footnotes. I'd always figured my mother's book was just as bad.
"Do you see Maxi a lot?" Amber asked.
Part of me wanted to pick up my bag, get up from the table, and go. Tamsin was right. They were using me, and they weren't even being subtle about it.
But another part of me kind of liked sitting there, at the center of the table that might as well have been at the center of the world, with Duncan Brodkey, who had his eyebrows raised, like he was saying, Do go on.
I shook out my hair and turned to Amber. "My mom and I were out in L.A. in December," I said.
Amber grinned at me. There was a piece of olive caught in her braces. "I saw pictures of her house in InStyle. Does she really have eight hundred pairs of shoes?"
I nodded, and when I talked, I concentrated on making my voice sound high and light, just like theirs. "At least. But she keeps most of them in storage."
Tara Carnahan leaned toward me, her eyes sparkling. "Did she really date Brad Pitt?" she asked. "And what about that stunt man?"
Cadence Tallafiero got up from her seat and wedged herself next to Tara. "I heard she had his name tattooed on her arm."
"On her butt." Amber giggled in my ear.
"She's got a tattoo, but it's half lasered off. On her ankle. It used to say Scott, but she changed it to a heart with wings." I sat back, feeling pleased and slightly nauseated as Tara and Sasha and Amber clamored for more details.
When the lunch bell trilled, I realized there wasn't time for me to go back to Todd and Tamsin, the way I'd promised. I swung one leg over the bench, wishing I had twinkly braces, too, forcing myself to smile. "Gotta go!" I said, and hurried across the lunch room, trying to make it to my friends before the bell rang again.
FIVE
At two o'clock on a slushy gray February afternoon, Dr. Stanley Neville's waiting room was full of pregnant women. Pregnant women with their bellies bulging under loose smocked tops or encased in skintight Lycra, pregnant women with their husbands' hands resting on their bumps, pregnant women by themselves, working their BlackBerries while they waited. I could look at them only with fast glances--too long, and I'd find myself staring in a way that had to be a little creepy.
"Do you think they're shills?" I whispered to Peter after we'd taken our seats underneath a reproduction of a Mary Cassatt portrait of a mother and child. If I were a reproductive endocrinologist trying to pique the curiosity and pry open the checkbooks of over-forty hopefuls, I'd stock my waiting room with expectant ladies. Or maybe I'd hire actresses. Stick them in pregnancy pillows, have them sit in the chairs, maybe rub their backs every once in a while and groan convincingly.
I looked away from the knocked-up chorus line and turned my attention to the forms in my lap. Age. Address. Height. Weight. Ugh. Previous pregnancies. I wrote, One. Previous surgeries. I wrote, C-section and hysterectomy, and the date: Joy's birthday.
"Mrs. Krushelevansky?"
I got to my feet and proceeded to the exam room, where I stripped from the waist down, draped myself in three different cotton robes (one to cover my front, one to cover my back, and one on top of those two in case there was any stray flesh peeking out), and arranged myself on the examination table, my legs in stirrups. I lay back, eyes closed, and practiced my pranayama breathing. I breathed in, and Joy appeared before me, eyes averted, face cast down, hands shoved in her pockets and shoulders hunched as if steeled for a blow, hurrying across the school yard. I breathed out, imagining my reaching for her, feeling my hand on the soft wool of her sweater. Baby, what's wrong? Tell me. I'll help you. I'll fix it. Breathe in, and the image dissolved. Breathe out. I should call that child psychologist, the one the synagogue brought in last month to talk about the overscheduled child, the stress of pre-adolescence. Breathe in. If she'd just talk to me. Breathe out. Where had I put my copy of Reviving Ophelia? Breathe in. Maybe there was an explanation for her behavior other than "throes of adolescence." Maybe she actually did have a crush on some boy who'd spurned her. Breathe out. I could help with that. I'd take her out somewhere special: maybe the chocolate buffet at the Ritz-Carlton. I'd sit her down and tell her that having your heart broken is a part of growing up. I'd share with her some of the less lurid examples from my own life, and then I'd point to Peter and tell her that everything happens for a reason, that every heartbreak serves a purpose, and that it all works out in the end.
There was a brisk knock, then the door swung open. "Hello there!" said Dr. Neville, who turned out to be a black man in his sixties, with close-cropped iron-gray hair. Peter wheeled over a stool and sat by my side as Dr. Neville stood at the counter with his back to me, squirting gel from a squeeze bottle onto...oh my God.
"Is that...are you..." I gestured vaguely at the probe in his hands, which bore a disturbing resemblance to the item Sam had given me for my bachelorette party. "Shouldn't you at least buy me dinner first?"
Peter and Dr. Neville shared a collegial chuckle. As they "ho ho ho'd," I closed my eyes and tried to relax. The nurse dimmed the lights and tilted the monitor so that I could see it. I sucked in my breath as the probe slid inside of me.
"And...look! There we are."
I turned my head toward the screen and saw a swirling mass of gray--and then, against it, tiny circles like glowing nickels, like little moons.
"Those are your eggs," Dr. Neville said, all hearty and congratulatory, as if I was personally responsible for their presence. He nodded, satisfied, pulled out the probe, and handed it off to his nurse. Peter squeezed my shoulder as the doctor offered a solemn high five and said, "Congratulations, guys. We're in business!"
After I'd gotten dressed, I met Peter in the doctor's wood-paneled office, where everything from the business-card holder to the mouse pad was emblazoned with the name of a different pharmaceutical company, and the walls were papered with pictures of babies. Dr. Neville led us through the particulars of the process: the half-dozen drugs I'd have to take to override my natural cycle, ripen the largest possible number of eggs, and set the optimal conditions for the harvest--"a simple procedure, really," Dr. Neville assured me, that would be performed in the hospital, under sedation, not even anesthesia.
"And this is all safe? The surgery? All those hormones?" More doctorly chuckling between the men with MDs before I got my answer, which came down to: Yes, we think so, but the technology's relatively new. However, long-term longitudinal studies seem to reveal...
I tuned out the tech-speak and stared at the walls. All those happy families. Moms and dads, siblings and grandparents, and their brand-new babies, pink and serene as miniature Buddhas or screaming from underneath their pink-and-blue caps with their eyes shut and their toothless mouths open wide.
SIX
When I put my hearing aids back in my ears in the locker room after swim practice, I feel like I'm coming up from underwater again. Down in the deep end of the school's swimming pool, or bodysurfing the waves in the summertime on the beach in Avalon, every sound is faint and muffled. You have to work harder than normal to make sense of them, and what you feel is the water itself, heavy against the bones of your face. Breaking the surface of the pool is a relief and a disappointment. For me, it's like leaving a secret world where everyone's equal, where everyone hears the same way as me, and where our coach yells and signs instructions so that I get them at the same time as everyone else.
I slid the little pink knobs inside my ears and took a breath, hearing the sound of my own exhalation, the water dripping from the shower onto the tiled floor, the echo of my teammates' voices. Then I pulled on my coat and fleece hat and walked out to the curb, where my mother was waiting, same as always. "How was school?" she asked, and I said, "Fine," which was what I always said. It's strange, but sh
e had no idea how much everything had changed. She didn't know that I'd had lunch with Amber Gross and her popular friends, that I maybe could be one of those girls.
At home, my mother made me a snack and sat down at the table with me, leaning forward expectantly, as if we were going to have some big heart-to-heart. "I'm going to Tamsin and Todd's to do my homework," I said.
Disappointment flickered across her face, but her voice was chirpy as ever. "Home for dinner, right?"
"Sure," I said. Twenty minutes later, Tamsin and Todd and I were walking down Bainbridge Street, toward the used bookstore on the corner.
"I don't know if this is such a good idea," Todd said. I kept walking. It felt as if all of my senses had gotten sharper since I'd left the house. I could see every bit of grime on the curbs, every piece of trash blowing down the sidewalk, the words FUCK YOU inked across the yellow metal box stuffed full of free newspapers; I could feel the damp breeze on my cheek, could smell frying onions from the cheesesteak place a block away.
"Why is it a bad idea?" I asked. "You guys have read it, haven't you?"
"Um," said Todd. Tamsin shot him a look. Then neither one of them said anything else as the bookstore door swung open. Todd followed me through the stacks, and Tamsin drifted off toward the comics.
It took me only a minute of wandering the dusty aisle to find Big Girls Don't Cry. There were five copies: three big paperbacks and two chunky smaller ones, with the words THE SMASH HIT WORLDWIDE BESTSELLER written in gold foil underneath the title. I picked one of the small paperbacks because it was the cheapest.
"Ah, an oldie but a goodie," said the clerk, sliding the book into a brown paper bag. "You know, the author used to live in Philadelphia."
Cannie Shapiro 02 Certain Girls Page 5
