“When I was pregnant with Joy, this was the only thing I had a craving for,” I remembered. “I thought I’d want sweet or salty, or pickles and ice cream. Something like that. I just wanted grapefruit juice, though.”
“You make it sound so romantic.” Elle’s face was still faintly flushed from the sauna, and her expression was troubled.
“That wasn’t a hint. I was just remembering. It wasn’t so bad,” I mused, putting the grapefruit juice into a bag. “Once I got through feeling pukey all the time, some days I didn’t even notice I was pregnant. And I made some really good friends.”
“I have friends,” my sister said. “And I think I’d notice if I was covered in stretch marks and waddling instead of walking. Remember how big you got?” She shuddered. “You were like a truck.”
I grimaced. I didn’t think I had gotten that big, but it was entirely possible that hindsight and nostalgia had improved the view. “A small truck?”
Elle ignored me. “I’d need an entire new wardrobe,” she continued. Her face brightened, possibly at the thought of cute maternity outfits. “Pregnancy is actually very hip. All the movie stars are spawning.”
I nodded. I was trying to remember how Elle had been when Joy was a baby. She’d stop by every week or two and sit on the floor, amusing my daughter by constructing brown Play-Doh models of bowel movements and leaving them perched on the rim of the toilet seat, taking Joy to Johnny Rockets with a fistful of nickels for the jukebox, or reading her Us or In Touch. (“Stars,” Joy would announce sleepily after I’d sing her “Twinkle Twinkle.” “They’re just like us.”)
“It’s a big decision,” I said before Elle could start listing which movie stars’ bumps had been most vigorously chronicled by the tabloids. “I just wanted to put it out there so you can think about it.”
Elle bagged the bread and salad greens. “I couldn’t drink, I couldn’t smoke . . .”
“You smoke?” asked Mom, who’d reappeared at the foot of the conveyer belt.
Elle scowled. “No, Mother. I’ve never had a cigarette, Josh has never tried a beer, and Cannie didn’t just spend seventeen dollars on cherries.”
My mother staggered away again. Elle tapped her finger against her glossy lips, perhaps thinking of the other illicit activities that pregnancy would preclude. The three of us wheeled the groceries outside. I clicked my keys, raised the minivan’s trunk door, and played my final card. “We’d pay you.”
My sister had been adjusting her hair underneath the cowboy hat. When I said the magic words, her hands froze. “How much?”
“If you’re interested—if you’re willing to seriously consider it—there are organizations for surrogate mothers, and I’m sure they could tell you what you could expect in terms of compensation.”
Elle’s tone was casual. “What’s the going rate for having a baby?”
I plucked a number out of the air. “Fifty thousand dollars?”
Elle’s eyes gleamed. “You know what? I’ve got this friend, Sarah. She’s really nice—I think you met her once, and she loves babies, and I bet she’d be totally into it. Maybe I could call her.” She paused and lifted another pair of bags into the trunk. “Maybe I could get, like, a finder’s fee.”
I leaned against the car. “Elle, I mean, the thing is, if we just wanted to find someone, we could find someone. I was kind of hoping you’d be interested.”
She sighed. “I just can’t see it.” I watched as she shimmied past my mother and hoisted herself into the passenger’s seat. “It would be my baby, right? That’s how it would feel.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know how it would feel.”
“My baby,” my sister said. “So wouldn’t I feel like its mother?”
“I don’t know.” I didn’t. How could I ask her, or any other woman, to carry a baby and go through labor and then just give it away, when it wasn’t something I’d been able to do myself? I got into the car, put the key in the ignition, and backed out of the parking space. Elle’s bracelets rattled as she put her hand on top of mine.
EIGHTEEN
I put the question to Amber’s table at lunch the first day after spring break. “Does anyone know how I could get to South Orange, New Jersey, by myself?”
“Steal a car,” said Tamsin without raising her eyes from her Earth Sciences book. Unlike the rest of the girls, in pinks and pale blues, Tamsin wore her customary gray hooded sweatshirt. As usual, her hair was hanging in her face, covering everything but the tip of her nose.
“Ha ha,” I said. Tamsin had been cool to me ever since my birthday sleepover. I guessed things hadn’t gone well when she and Amber woke up in my room together and I wasn’t there, but whenever I asked Tamsin about it, she shrugged and said things were fine.
“Why are you going by yourself?” asked Duncan Brodkey.
“It’s my cousin’s bar mitzvah.”
Duncan tilted his head. “Can’t your parents take you?”
“It’s the other side of the family.”
I watched as he considered this, rolling a green apple from one long-fingered hand to the other. “It’s the other side of the family for both of them?”
“You could take a train,” Tamsin said quickly. That was the great thing about Tamsin: Even when you didn’t think she was paying attention, she was. She pulled her laptop out of her backpack. “Let’s see . . . SEPTA from Thirtieth Street Station to Trenton, then New Jersey Transit to Metro Park, then a bus to South Orange . . .”
She worked out the times, and I scribbled down everything she told me. If I left Philadelphia by eight o’clock in the morning, I could be there by eleven o’clock, and if I left the bar mitzvah by five, I could easily make it home by eight. I’d just tell my mother I was at Tamsin’s. Perfect! Except . . .
I cleared my throat. When that didn’t work, I tapped Amber on the shoulder. “Hey,” I said when she’d turned around. “What would you wear to an afternoon bar mitzvah in New Jersey?”
On Saturday morning at eight o’clock, I pulled my schoolbooks out of my backpack, slid them under the bed, and replaced them with the navy blue spaghetti-strapped dress Amber had lent me, along with her black ballet slippers, a pair of white athletic socks (“for dancing,” she’d explained), and a small canister of glitter-flecked hair mousse.
I walked out the front door, but instead of turning left toward Bella Vista, I turned right, crossing South Street, then Lombard, then Pine. The bus I caught on Spruce Street took me all the way to Thirtieth Street Station. Feeling very small under the soaring ceilings, among the crowds of people pulling wheeled suitcases or pushing strollers over the marble floors, I slid my cash card into the machine and paid for a round-trip fare. Then I ducked into the bathroom and wriggled into Amber’s dress and sat on a high-backed curved wooden bench with my backpack in my lap and my eyes fixed on the giant blackboard that hung over the information desk, waiting for the flickering letters to tell me it was time to go.
“Joy?”
I turned around and saw Duncan Brodkey leaning over the back of the bench.
“Hey, were you asleep or something? I was calling your name. Are you listening to music?” He brushed playfully at my hair, looking for earbuds. I felt my whole body flush as I leaned backward, hoping he hadn’t seen my hearing aids.
“N-no,” I stammered. “Just thinking.”
“Deep thoughts,” he said, looking impressed, so I tried to look as though I had been thinking deep thoughts instead of wondering whether I had time to get a juice and whether the coffee stand had the kind that I liked. “Are you going to that bar mitzvah?” he asked.
I nodded, tugging my jean jacket closed across my chest, feeling self-conscious in Amber’s dress. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m going to see my dad in New York,” he said, hopping over the bench and sitting down next to me. He wore khakis with a loose thread trailing from the cuff, unlaced sneakers, and a baseball cap. “Gonna see the Yankees lose.” He reached into his
pocket. “Mento?”
“Oh, um. Sure!” I took a mint. “So you’re going all by yourself?” As soon as that was out of my mouth, I realized how babyish it sounded. After all, I was going by myself, too.
Duncan just nodded. “I do it all the time,” he said. “Well, since this year. Hey, you’re smart, right?”
I used to be, I thought, but I just nodded as he bent down and pulled out his algebra book. We worked on his homework together until the information board fluttered into life again, and Duncan picked up his backpack, and mine, and led me down the escalator to the train.
• • •
An hour and a half later, flushed and flustered, I stepped off the bus, my mascara and lipstick freshly applied, my hair in a chic twist I’d copied from Allure (I’d done it with tendrils hanging over my ears to cover my hearing aids), and onto the corner of Gilman Avenue in South Orange. Duncan Brodkey, I thought, and then, because there was no one there to hear me, I said it out loud. “Duncan Brodkey likes me.” This was going to be the best day. The air was bright and busy with gold pollen and the sound of traffic. There was a gas station to my left and a bakery on the corner across the street. My heart was pounding hard, and I felt exhilarated and a little scared. What if I couldn’t find the synagogue? What if I missed the bus, or the train, and I couldn’t get home? It took me a minute to figure out which way I was supposed to go, but almost immediately, I saw Beth Israel Synagogue (“A Community of Caring”), resembling nothing more than a gigantic white concrete rowboat sticking halfway out of an invisible ocean.
I was walking through the parking lot when a green station wagon slowed down next to me and the passenger-side window rolled down. “Hi, Joy,” said Emily, Bruce’s wife, waving one tiny hand out the window. “How’d you get here?”
The hair at the back of my neck prickled. “I got dropped off.” Emily nodded. Our Lady of the EpiPen, my mother calls Emily, because she’s allergic to so many things. Panic in Peanut Park is another name, because the thing that Emily and her kids are most allergic to is peanuts. Trust-fund Trixie is name number three, because Emily comes from money. Of course, none of these names is ever said out loud when I’m around—I’ve gotten them from Aunt Elle and from Samantha, listening carefully, reading lips when they don’t know I’m nearby. In public, my mother and Emily are polite, the same way my mother is to Bruce. I never would have suspected that Emily might have a more interesting story before reading my mother’s book.
In Big Girls, “Drew” dumps “Allie,” then gets a new girlfriend named “Eva” (whom, of course, Allie instantly nicknames Evil, which is what she’s called for the book’s last hundred pages). Eva starts dating Drew even though he has a pregnant girlfriend, and when the two of them bump into the pregnant girlfriend, aka Allie, aka my mom, at a Phillies game, Eva trips Allie as she’s twisting sideways to go through a turnstile, sending her falling down on the concrete floor, after which Allie’s baby, Hope, is born premature, just like me.
Though I’d turned that part of the story over in my mind again and again, I just couldn’t imagine Emily pushing anyone in real life. For one thing, she was so tiny and so timid that I couldn’t see her working up the nerve—let alone the strength—to go after my mother, who is not tiny or timid. More than one of the reviews of Big Girls that I’d downloaded at school had complained about the book’s far-fetched, fanciful plot twists—“Allie’s life moves from the implausible to the impossible,” one of them said. I figured that the confrontation at the stadium turnstile was one of those instances. Still, it made me look at Bruce’s wife differently, the way I’d been looking at everyone differently these days.
I stood awkwardly in front of the station wagon while Emily unfastened Max from his car seat and Bruce and his oldest son, Leo, slammed their doors. Leo’s nine. Max is four. (My mother calls them “the producers” when she thinks I can’t hear.) Both of them have Bruce’s sandy hair, which is my hair, too, but Max’s is straight and Leo’s is curly. Both of them are pale, like their mother, but Leo is skinny and stern-looking and wears glasses, while Max is round and sweet as a powdered-sugar doughnut. “Joy!” he sang, dancing around me (like his big brother, he wore khaki pants and a button-down shirt, and he’d already spilled apple juice on his tie). “Joy’s here! Hi, Joy! Hi there! Hi!”
“Hi, Max,” I said, and kissed his sticky cheek.
“How are you doing?” Emily asked, smiling at me.
“Fine.” I looked her over, in her floral dress and low-heeled shoes with bows on the toes, her hair held back from her forehead with a matching headband. I think that after he and my mother split, Bruce decided to find someone who was exactly her opposite. My mom is big and tall and busty. Emily is short and small and wears floral dresses with lacy collars, or T-shirts she buys in the boys’ department. My mom has brown hair and green eyes and olive skin. Emily has light brown hair and blue eyes. When she laughs, she puts her fingers over her thin lips and coughs out a nervous giggle, as opposed to my mother, who throws her head back and laughs a big honking “ha ha ha” that you can hear across a street or a parking lot.
Then there are Emily’s allergies, which earned her most of her nicknames. Nuts. Dairy. Wheat. Gluten. Latex (she can’t wear normal Band-Aids). Zinc (she has to wear a special kind of sunscreen). Eggs (no cakes, no pies, no baked goods from the supermarket). Mica (no makeup). Smoke (“It’s God’s revenge on Bruce,” I overheard my mom tell Samantha, who said, “Not really. He’ll probably just get high in the basement. Stoners are crazy resourceful that way”).
Emily’s father is some kind of hedge-fund manager who, according to Aunt Elle, “lives in a palace in Greenwich.” Emily’s mother does charity work (“She runs the Eye Ball,” said Aunt Elle) and grows prize-winning hydrangeas when she’s not raising money to battle blindness. Emily doesn’t have to work, but she teaches kindergarten at Leo and Max’s school. I think she decided to work there so she could personally make sure nobody slipped either of them a peanut or some zinc. Both of them are allergic to everything she is, plus mold and pet dander.
“How’s school?” Emily asked me as we started walking across the parking lot.
“School’s good.”
“I’m in school,” said Max, waving his juice box in the air. “My teachers are Miss Meghan and Miss Shannon, and we have easels for painting and a sand table. I like your ball gown! You look like Belle from Beauty and the Beast! Belle who likes to read!” Then he started singing in his low, snuffly voice (Max has terrible hay fever all through the spring and summer, straight through the fall, when his mold allergies kick in). “‘Tale as old as time . . .’”
I held Max’s hand and led him, still singing, through the synagogue’s towering front doors. As soon as we were inside, Emily held out her own hand for Leo’s video game, and he grumbled and handed it over. I perched on a bench just inside the foyer to take off my sneakers and jacket, stuff them into my backpack, and slide my feet into Amber’s ballet flats.
When I stood up, Bruce kissed my cheek. He smelled like soap and cinnamon gum and was, as usual, blinking too fast. “I’m glad you’re here,” he said.
“Me, too,” I said. Even though I was still nervous, it was true. I had my train and bus tickets in my backpack, and twenty dollars to buy whatever I needed, and the right kind of socks for dancing. Best of all, only a few people here knew me, or my mother, or my history. Maybe this really was another chance to do what I hadn’t done back home—to be somebody else. People would look at me and Max and Leo, at how much we resembled one another, and they would think, Normal family. I stood up straight in my ballet flats with my head just reaching Bruce’s chin, feeling pretty and very grown-up.
The five of us made our way toward the sanctuary behind a mother in a pink tweed skirt and jacket, a father in a dark suit, and a skinny, bird-boned blond girl who looked like she was my age, in a chocolate-brown party dress almost the same as Amber’s, and ballet flats. How did Amber know these things? I wondered. Then I smiled becau
se, as far as everyone here was concerned, I was the kind of girl who knew them, too.
Bruce shook hands with the man and kissed the wife’s cheek. “This is my daughter, Joy,” he said. I thought I saw surprise flicker across their faces.
“This is Jessica,” the father said. The mother gave Jessica a little push, and the girl stepped forward, smoothing the ends of her blond bob.
“Hi,” she said. Her mother and father stared at her expectantly. “Do you want to sit with me?” Jessica asked me.
“That would be great,” I said.
Jessica grabbed my arm, said, “See ya!” to her parents, and pulled me through the sanctuary doors without stopping to get a program or a prayer book (I picked them up for both of us).
“There they are,” Jessica breathed, and race-walked down to the aisle where there were about thirty kids sitting. “The party’s going to be crazy,” she said. “I heard there’s, like, an entire sushi bar made of ice, and all the kids are getting personalized chocolate gold Amex cards as favors.”
“Chocolate gold?”
“Well, chocolate cards in gold foil. They were trying to get platinum foil, but then his mother thought it looked like regular tinfoil. Hi, everyone!” she said. “This is . . .” She looked at me, mouth open in a perfect round O of surprise. “Oh, God, I’m sorry, what’s your name again?”
“Don’t say ‘God’ in synagogue,” one of the other girls whispered.
“I’m Joy,” I said. The other kids slid over to make room, and I took my seat, one more girl in a dark, tight dress in a row of girls in dark, tight dresses. The sanctuary ceiling soared as high as the one in the train station. The only bar and bat mitzvahs I’d attended had been at the Center City Synagogue, which made this by far the biggest, fanciest synagogue I’d ever been in. There must have been two hundred people in the room, and we barely filled a quarter of the seats. Oh well, I thought. At least the prayer books were the same. “Page sixty-two,” said the rabbi, a tall man whose silver hair matched the silver thread on his tallis and went nicely with the silver fringe on the bimah, the podium where Tyler would read from the Torah. I wondered whether they’d hired the rabbi because he matched the building so well.
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