Certain Girls

by Jennifer Weiner

  At night, when I couldn’t sleep, I wrote, imagining that I was a young mother again, with a mug of tea cooling next to my laptop and Frenchie snoozing on a pillow by my side, dressed in my husband’s sweatshirt, the one that still held a hint of his smell. Sometimes, when I woke up, I would imagine that I could smell him, that he was still there, that I would open my eyes and see him, his head on the pillow, eyes open, lips curved into a smile, saying my name.

  Betsy called every week or so. She e-mailed pictures from the twenty-week ultrasound, pictures of her belly and her boys patting it proudly (but not, I noticed, pictures of her husband—maybe it was just that he was always the one behind the camera, or maybe there were more deliberate editorial choices going on).

  By the end of January, I had a rough draft of the book I’d started the week of Peter’s funeral, and I shyly presented it to Larissa. It was called The Family Way, about a man in the suburbs, a judge, wealthy and stable and secure, who at fifty fell in love with a much younger woman, married her and started a family, in spite of being married with children already. It was told from the perspective of the dead man, in heaven; the first wife; and the first wife’s oldest daughter, who referred to her mother as Original Style and his father’s young bride as Extra Crispy. It was, I supposed, an attempt to make sense of a version of my own father’s life, to take a man like him and crack him open like an oyster, solve his puzzles, make him both similar to and different from my own father, to make sense of things.

  Maybe it was a real book, or maybe it was just 350 pages of throat-clearing, the gunk I needed to get out of my system before I could do the real work again. I couldn’t be objective. I’d have to wait and see. Either way, no matter what the pages turned out to be, they had comforted and sustained me, had given me something to think about other than how much I missed Peter, something to do besides cry. For that, I would always be grateful.

  On the Friday night before Valentine’s Day, at ten o’clock at night, the telephone rang. I talked to Betsy, then sat cross-legged on my big empty bed, the telephone in my hand and the silence of the house pressing down around me. “We did it,” I said softly, and sat there and hoped for an answer. When none came, I cried for a few minutes, clutching a pillow to my midsection, wishing that for once I could have gotten things in the right order: a husband and then a baby. You get what you get, I told myself, the way I used to tell it to Joy when she was little, when I’d cut her grilled cheese into rectangles instead of the preferred triangles, when I put on her sneakers instead of her beloved green rubber rainboots, and she’d cry. You get what you get, and you don’t get upset. Soon, I supposed, I’d be saying it again.

  I washed my face, combed my hair. I walked down the hallway, imagining I could see Peter standing in front of the linen closet, looking for his wool blanket, carrying a basket of laundry to the washing machine. Then I tapped on my daughter’s bedroom door. “It’s a boy,” I said.

  FORTY-TWO

  My mother steered the minivan down South Second Street, where the bare tree branches arched above our heads, turning the pavement into a tunnel of flickering shadows. We drove past the Wawa, and the little Chinese take-out place that had caused such a stir when it opened and some of the neighbors had passed out leaflets complaining that the restaurant would attract the wrong element. “Which is what, exactly?” Samantha had demanded, tossing the flyer onto the kitchen counter for my mom to see. “Jews?” I smiled at the memory.

  My mom turned onto Delaware Avenue, then onto the highway. The day had been warm and breezy, a hint of spring in the air. Now the night sky was cloudless, illuminated by the moon. The car seat was snug in the backseat, and I’d double-checked the diaper bag for everything the baby book said we would need: diapers and wipes and ointment, burp clothes, bottles and formula, a change of clothes, a soft fabric ball lined with snippets of ribbon, each one a different color and different texture, which was a good developmental toy. I’d found it in a box in the attic. I think it used to be mine.

  “Are you doing all right?” my mother asked. It was only a two-hour drive, but she’d packed a cooler with snacks for us: string cheese and crackers and apples and juice.

  “Do we have a name yet?” I replied.

  “It will come to me,” she said with her eyes on the road. “That’s how I named you. The name just came to me.”

  I didn’t say anything to that, but I thought I saw a smile flicker across her face when I pulled the 1001 Baby Names book out of my backpack. “Not Peter,” I said, half to myself. My mom shook her head. I read down the list of P names. “Pablo. Pace. Padriac. Patrick. Paul. Pax. Paz.”

  “Pace?”

  “‘From the Latin word for peace,’” I read.

  “Then it would be Pah-chay.”

  “Okay,” I said. Thinking, No way will I let her name an innocent child Pahchay.

  “What do you think of Charles? With Peter as maybe a middle name?”

  “That’s good, I guess.”

  “We could call him Charlie. His Hebrew name could be Chaim. Life.”

  “Charlie Krushelevansky,” I said, trying it out. “It sounds good. We’ll see. Maybe he won’t look like a Charlie.” I ran my finger down my list again. “Maybe he’ll look like a Padriac.”

  My mother snorted. I rested the top of my head against the cool glass of the window, and I must have dozed off because when I opened my eyes, she was parking the car underneath a haloed streetlamp in a big parking lot. Then we were inside, smelling that familiar hospital smell.

  “Maternity?” she asked at the front desk.

  “Fifth floor,” said the woman, and she gave us both VISITOR stickers (I stuck mine on the leg of my jeans; my mother, of course, put hers proudly on the uppermost swell of her bosom).

  We rode up in the elevator, and as the nurse at the desk on the fifth floor buzzed open the heavy swinging doors. You could smell urine and vomit, eye-watering disinfectant, and fear—but on this floor, you could also smell flowers. Every room we passed, I glimpsed a bouquet out of the corner of my eye, lilies or roses or a bunch of pink or blue balloons bumping against the ceiling.

  At 514, my mother stopped so abruptly that if I’d been behind her instead of at her side, I would have walked right into her back. “Oh,” she said softly. “Oh.”

  Betsy was in bed in a striped cotton bathrobe, smiling at us. “Hey, guys!” There was a plastic bracelet around her wrist, a blue-and-white-wrapped bundle in her arms. The baby had a dusting of dark hair underneath a knitted blue-and-white cap, a crooked little nose, skin so pale that I could see blue veins tracing their way on his eyelids and his cheeks. I tiptoed closer to the bed. I thought I recognized the shape of my mother’s eyebrows, my father’s forehead and chin. One of the baby’s tiny hands was tucked into the blanket. The other hand was doing a kind of spazzy wave in the air. His fingers opened and closed, opened and closed, and it seemed like the most natural thing in the world for me to stretch out my hand and give him my pinkie to grab. He held it tight.

  “Charlie,” I said. “He looks like a Charlie.”

  “Want to hold him?” Betsy asked. She looked exhausted, as drained as if she’d been up all night running on a treadmill, but she also looked happy.

  “Is it okay?” I asked.

  “Sure, big sister,” said Betsy. I crouched down, and she shifted the baby into my arms without his letting go of my finger.

  My mom stood with one hand against the doorway, like she was afraid to come inside. Betsy looked at her. “Are you all right?”

  “Fine,” she said faintly. Then she shook her head and seemed to collect herself. “Better question: How are you?”

  My mother pulled up a chair, and the two of them talked about labor and Apgar scores and episiotomies. As soon as I heard the word “placenta,” I closed my ears and walked the baby over to the window, thinking that he didn’t need to hear about any of that. “Check it out,” I said, bouncing him lightly in my arms, aiming his face so he could look out at the n
ight sky. He looked at me with eyes that were a muddy grayish-brown. “Charlie,” I said experimentally, and cuddled him close to my chest. I felt my mother’s hand on my shoulder and saw her face reflected in the window, her expression tender as she looked at the baby in my arms, her eyes shining as she kissed me and then the baby’s forehead; her secret face, the one she’s only ever shown to me.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book would not have been possible without the hard work and stewardship of my agent, Joanna Pulcini. I am grateful, as ever, for her unflagging enthusiasm, painstaking attention to detail, and for her inadvertently hilarious failure to get the dirty jokes or X-rated references in any of my books.

  My editor, Greer Hendricks, is, as ever, worth a price above rubies for her patience, kindness, and good humor.

  I’m grateful to Joanna’s assistants, Elizabeth Carter and Trinh Truong, and to Greer’s assistant, Sarah Walsh, for their attention to detail, and to Suzanne O’Neill and Nancy Inglis for their careful work on the manuscript. I’m also lucky to have found an assistant as fabulous, indefatigable, and good-hearted as Meghan Burnett.

  Judith Curr at Atria and Carolyn Reidy at Simon & Schuster have always taken the best care of me and of Cannie, as have all of the people at Atria: Gary Urda, Lisa Keim, Kathleen Schmidt, Christine Duplessis, Craig Dean, and Jeanne Lee.

  I’m grateful to Jessica Fee and her team at Greater Talent Network, and to Marcy Engelman, Dana Gidney, and Jordana Tal, my NYC PR miracle workers.

  Curtis Sittenfeld was a perceptive and generous reader.

  In researching this book, I was lucky enough to be invited to the bar mitzvah of Charlie Sucher and the bat mitzvahs of Samantha Wladis in Cherry Hill and Abby Kalen in Simsbury, Connecticut, where absolutely NOTHING untoward happened. I thank Charlie, Samantha, and Abby and their parents, friends, and families for being so gracious and welcoming.

  My friends and family, far and wide, are still supplying me with love, support, and material. Jake and Joe Weiner are not only my brothers, they do an excellent job with my business on the coast. Molly Weiner is a constant source of inspiration and fun. I’m grateful to Faye Frumin, Frances Frumin Weiner, and Clair Kaplan, for all of their help and encouragement, for laughing with me and, occasionally, being willing for me to laugh at them.

  Finally, on the home front, Wendell is still the king of all dogs. My husband, Adam, is still my traveling companion and the person I’d most like to watch The Big Lebowski with. My daughter Lucy Jane is the light of my life, and her new little sister Phoebe Pearl demonstrated unflagging courtesy by keeping the kicks and rolls to a minimum while I wrote this book. My love and thanks to all of them . . . and to all of the readers who’ve come with me this far.

  A CONVERSATION WITH JENNIFER WEINER

  Q: It’s been seven years since you published your bestselling debut, Good in Bed. Had you always planned to write a sequel? Why did you decide to write Certain Girls now?

  A: I had always planned to write a sequel, and I always knew that I wanted it to be as much about Joy as about Cannie (and, yes, I always knew the book was going to end the way it ended. Don’t ask me how! I just knew).

  What interests me as a writer are the moments in characters’ lives where there’s the most potential for rupture, for change: a single woman on the verge of marriage, a married woman in the first weeks of motherhood, a girl on the verge of womanhood (if that doesn’t sound too horribly like a Britney Spears song title), or a woman who’s stuck in one place contemplating, with hope and with terror, the prospect of getting unstuck.

  And then there was the personal issue. When I wrote Good in Bed I was twenty-eight and single. In the intervening years I’ve gotten married and had two daughters, and had occasion to think about what it might be like for a child to have a parent who’s done something even vaguely scandalous. The book in Certain Girls isn’t the book that I wrote—Big Girls Don’t Cry is a lot steamier than Good in Bed, in spite of its title, ever was—but I’ve become very interested in what happens to a child when her parent is somehow notorious, and I wanted to play with that idea, through Joy’s eyes.

  Q: This is your fifth novel. How do you think your writing style and thematic choices have changed from one project to the next? What influences you most in your work?

  A: After five books, I hope that there are certain things I’ve gotten better at understanding and executing. (Plot: you need one! Blond hair: not all female characters should have it! Pop-culture references: get dated very quickly!) However, I think that, in general, my writing style and the things that interest me have stayed the same. I try to write in a clear, readable, conversational style. (One of my friends once said that reading one of my books was like having me sitting there talking to her, which I think was a compliment.) In terms of topics, I’ve always been interested in body-image issues, in family dynamics, in relationships between mothers and children and husbands and wives. The way my life has changed since I wrote my first book has definitely informed my fiction—the issues that come up during a marriage, or when children arrive, for example, or the stories I’ve heard from my friends as those issues have arisen in their own lives, have all influenced the stories I’ve told.

  Q: Your second novel, In Her Shoes, was made into a film featuring several of Hollywood’s biggest stars. Were you involved in this production at all? What was it like to see your characters brought to life on the big screen?

  A: In one of the rare instances of mental health in my life, I decided very early on to be as hands-off as possible with the film version of In Her Shoes. I decided that I’d told the story I wanted to tell in the book; that whatever happened with the film, nobody would change a word of the story; and that the best thing I could do would be to stand on the sidelines and wish everyone well. So that’s what I did, and I would recommend it to any other writer lucky enough to have a novel adapted, because it worked out really well. I was thrilled with the film . . . and I was lucky enough to get my sister and my nana roles as extras, which only added to the fun.

  Q: Many first-time authors write semiautobiographical novels. Now that you’ve written several books, how much of your own life still ends up in your novels? What in Certain Girls is autobiographical?

  A: Do you mean, after five books am I running out of real life to exploit? Heh. Just kidding, nameless interlocutor!

  Good in Bed was, indeed, semiautobiographical . . . it was kind of a hybrid of this-really-happened with I-sure-wish-this-would-happen. Since then, I’d say that what I’ve done has been to take elements from my own life—having a sister, getting married, having a baby—and spinning them into fiction. Real life, in other words, was the irritating grain of sand, and the books were the pearls.

  But there are always bits and pieces of my real life that make it into the stories. The Philadelphia of my books is very much like the Philadelphia where I live, and certain things that happen are just too funny, or too weird, not to make it into the book. For instance, I actually was asked whether I’d be interested in being a college campus spokesperson for a brand of feminine protection . . . so the exchange that Cannie has with her agent (“Does this offer have strings attached?”) is pretty much a verbatim recreation of the conversation I had with my agent.

  Q: While the novel is a very entertaining read, there is also some serious social commentary sprinkled throughout. As a writer of fiction, what role do such weighty topics play in your work?

  A: My characters live in the real world (or at least a fictional facsimile), and so they deal with real-world issues. As a semi-obsessive mother of a vulnerable teenage girl, and with her own body-image and self-esteem issues in her not-so-distant past, it made sense to me that Cannie would worry about the messages that the culture sends to young girls and would try to protect Joy as much as possible from what she’d see as the most pernicious of them. (As the hopefully nonobsessive mother of very young girls, I worry about them, too). The challenge, I think, is to write books that consider these issues
without banging the reader over the head with my own opinions . . . because being banged over the head is not much fun, and I do want my books to be entertaining.

  Q: Your previous book was a critically acclaimed collection of short stories called The Guy Not Taken. What prompted you to write this collection? How is writing a collection of stories different for you than writing a novel?

  A: Like any good little wannabe writer, I’d written, and tried to sell, short stories for years, so when my publisher asked if I’d consider publishing a collection, I definitely had more than enough. I love short stories—done right, they can have as much impact, and be every bit as memorable, as a four-hundred-page novel. Writing short stories pushes me to be economical, to make every scene and every sentence earn its place on the page. I think naturally I gravitate toward the longer form, and the larger canvas, that a four-hundred-page novel provides, but I think that short stories are good exercise.

  Q: Cannie is the author of both mainstream fiction and young-adult science fiction. What types of books do you most enjoy reading?

  A: You name it, I’ll read it. I read a ton of YA to get ready to try to write from Joy’s perspective, including books like Speak and Looking for Alaska, plus old favorites like Jacob Have I Loved and Homecoming. I’m a fan of contemporary fiction, especially books that have a great voice or a great sense of humor. Recently, I really enjoyed Ruth Ozeki’s All Over Creation and Marc Acito’s Attack of the Theater People. Waiting on the nightstand: Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Kate Christensen’s The Epicure’s Lament.

  And my husband jokes that I never, ever, ever read nonfiction, but that’s just not true. I like Atul Gawande’s stuff because it reads like medical mysteries, and, right after my daughter was born, I officially became the last person in America to discover David Sedaris.

  Q: One of the things Cannie loves best about writing the Lyla Dare series is that she does it anonymously. Do you ever think about writing under a pseudonym? Under what conditions might you try it (assuming, of course, that you haven’t already)? And what would your pseudonym be?