Cannie Shapiro 02 Certain Girls (27 page)

She cut me off. "You lied," she repeated calmly.

"Joy..." The word wrenched itself out of me.

"Stop saying that!" she cried.

"Stop saying what?"

"My name! My stupid name!
Joy,
" she spat. "Like I made you so happy. Like you even wanted me in the first place."

"What? What are you talking about?" My voice sounded high and frightened. "Where did you ever get that idea?" I knew the answer. She'd gotten the idea from my book, of course, my angry book, the one that was never meant for my daughter's eyes, the version of the story she was never meant to believe. "Of course I wanted you! You do make me happy!" I reached for her shoulder. She flinched and wriggled away. "Honey, I'm sorry if I--that I--that I lied to you. But the thing about my father--"

"'He's not a very nice guy,'" she recited.

"I know him better than you do. I know what he is. I'm your mother. I just want to keep you safe." My voice was shaking. "That's all I ever wanted. Just to keep you safe." I gulped. "Is this about something you read?" I gulped again. "My book? Because you should know, Joy--"

"Take me home," said my daughter. And that was all she said until we pulled into the garage, at which point she marched past me, up to her bedroom, and closed the door. I heard the lock click into place, and I stood there wringing my hands, wanting to knock, to call her name again, to say something, even though I wasn't sure what I would say that would do either of us any good. "Listen," I said at last, addressing the blank surface of the door. "If you want to meet him--your grandfather--then I'll try to find him. If it's important to you, then that's what we'll do."

I thought that I heard the word "liar" drift out from under the door, but as long as I waited, as hard as I knocked, Joy wouldn't open the door or say another word.

I
ignored my mother until she gave up and clomped back down the stairs. I turned off the lights and lay on my bed with my pillow pressed against my ears, trying to ignore what was outside my door: my mother, my father, the telephone ringing, more knocking. Then silence.

Some time later, there was another knock at the door. "Go away," I yelled, not very nicely.

"Joy?" The sweet, calm voice didn't belong to my mother or my father. It was Grandma Ann. I'd forgotten that she was coming over for dinner. "Can I come in?" she called, loudly enough so that there was no chance of me pretending not to hear.

I rolled out of bed, flicked on the light, unlocked the door, and stood there, glaring at my grandmother, who stared placidly back at me.

"Oh, honey," she said, and reached out to hug me. I jerked away and stalked back to my bed, brushing angrily at my eyes. Grandma Ann sat down at the foot of the bed. I breathed in her smell, a little like sugar cookies, a hint of Bengay. "You heard from your grandfather," she said.

"Mom lied to me," I croaked. Grandma Ann merely nodded. "About everything," I continued. "My father...her father...everything's a lie."

My grandmother sighed and tucked her legs up until she was sitting Indian-style. "Parents make mistakes," she said. "I did, and your mother did, and you will, too. But I can promise you that everything your mother did was with your best interests at heart."

My best interests,
I thought. As if my mom had any idea what those were. As far as I could tell, she'd done everything for her own interests, to make herself look better: the good mother, the pillar of the community, not a slut who'd written a scandalous, embarrassing book, a stupid slut who'd gotten pregnant by accident and never even wanted a baby.

"Your mom didn't have it easy," Grandma Ann said. "After Bruce left, it wasn't easy for her. And as far as her father goes, I think she was just trying to keep you away from someone she felt wasn't the kind of person you'd want in your life."

"Why does she get to be the one to decide who I want in my life? I'm thirteen years old, I'm going to be bat mitzvahed, it's not her choice--"

"Joy, she did the best she could."

"Well, she did a sucky job!" I shouted, loud enough so that my mother could hear me. My face was hot, and my head felt like it was going to burst. "She made my father take off for years. I've got a grandfather who doesn't know me, even though he wanted to."

"I don't fault your mother for that," said Grandma Ann a little coolly. Her voice surprised me. I'd expected her to fall to pieces when she saw that I was crying, to do whatever she could to comfort me. It didn't look as if that would happen. "Your grandfather broke her heart."

I wiped my face. "What do you mean?"

"I mean," she said, "that she was his favorite, from the time she was a little girl until she was maybe twelve or so."

I sat up, blinking. Parents weren't supposed to have favorites, and if they did, they definitely weren't supposed to talk about it.

"So what happened?"

"He loved her because she was smart and sharp, but then, I think, when he saw her struggling with the same things he'd struggled with--"

"Like what?"

The bed shifted as my grandmother rearranged herself, tugging at the cuffs of her loose-legged cotton pants. I could tell from her face that she was thinking hard about what to say and how she'd say it. "Her looks," she said. "Fitting in. Making friends. None of that came as easily to her as schoolwork did, and I think..." She paused and recrossed her legs. "I think that it brought back lots of memories for him. Not good ones."

I winced. If parents never talked about having favorites, they absolutely didn't talk about being ashamed of their kids or being reminded of their younger, unhappier selves.

"And then he left," she said. "Which wasn't a picnic for any of us."

"But she told me he never wanted to meet me..."

"And as far as I know, that's the truth," she said. "As far as I know, the only time he ever tried to get in touch with her was at that reading, and then to ask her for money. Not after you were born, not after she got married, just when he thought your mother might be worth something to him."

I scrubbed at my eyes again and stared at her. Picking favorites among your kids was bad. Being embarrassed by one of them was worse. But ignoring a kid except when you wanted money? That was awful. If it was true. And I couldn't make that behavior line up with the picture of the man holding me in his arms at the bookstore, or the voice I'd heard on the tape, the voice promising his daughters that he'd skip the part about the witch and make French toast in the morning. How did I know who to trust or what was true anymore?

"He's really..."

"...not a nice guy," I finished wearily.

"Oh, he was worse than that," Grandma Ann said.

I sniffled. "Worse how?"

She just looked at me. "That's for your mother to tell you. If she wants to. The only thing I'll say is that no parent is ever perfect, and every mother tries her best. Which is exactly what I did when I had children, and exactly what you'll do, too."

"I'm never having children," I muttered. My grandmother ignored me. She went into my bathroom and came back with a washcloth that she'd wet with cool water. I used it to wipe off my face.

"Mona's downstairs. Oh, and Bruce called."

I sighed. "Tell him I put the credit card in the back pocket of his car seat. It's probably still there."

"I think you need to tell him that yourself." She kept looking at me with her soft blue eyes and her silver hair pulled back into a nubbin of a ponytail that made her look, Aunt Elle said, like George Washington.

"I'll return the dress," I grumbled. "It's not like she was going to let me wear it anyhow."

She nodded again. "Your mother made stew."

As if I could eat. As if I could ever eat again. But I said okay just to say something, and I let her say all the things that any grandmother would say, about how this would blow over and work itself out and everything would turn out fine.

"T
his is nothing," said my mother, draping her towel over the handlebars of the treadmill. "Absolutely nothing. Remember when Elle ran off with that man who had no teeth?"

"He was a hockey player," I said wearily. "He didn't have no teeth, he just had fake teeth."

My mother pressed the buttons to increase speed and incline and started to walk, swinging her arms vigorously with each stride. "Josh didn't speak to me for a year and a half. He said his braces hurt too much for him to talk. And you..."

"Oh, what'd I do?"

"Hmm." She walked and thought it over.

"Nothing, that's what. I never do anything. I just sulk for a few years, then write a book. And I'm not the point! The point is Joy!"

"How can I help?" she asked. It was Saturday morning. I'd sentenced Joy to a day in the company of the ever righteous Mona. They'd go to the bead store, then to Macy's to return the dress, then shopping for art supplies in preparation for a fun afternoon making signs for an upcoming peace march in Washington.

Meanwhile my mother had taken me to the Avondale Jewish Community Center for a restorative workout. We were walking on adjacent treadmills, me in my Philadelphia Academy sweatpants and one of Peter's shirts, my mother in her
LOVE MAKES A FAMILY
tie-dyed tank top with her tufted gray hair sticking up over and under a rainbow-colored sweatband.

"This is motherhood for you," said my own mother. "Going through life with your heart outside your body."

I plodded along, thinking about Elle and how much grief she must have given my mother with the parade of inappropriate guys and temporary jobs, before Be-ism, or simply time, finally calmed her down. "I don't know what to do," I said, thumping along at four miles an hour. "What am I supposed to do?"

"Give her time, Candace," my mother intoned. "Give her space. Give her love."

I snorted.
Give her money
was the only thing missing from the litany, and that, as far as I was concerned, was the only concrete action I'd taken that had actually helped my sister. Then again, Mom had given Elle time and space and love. She'd also turned a studiously blind eye to my sister's more outrageous adventures, including the time Elle had worked as a stripper and tossed her see-through thongs and a bra with cutouts for the nipples into the household hamper (my mom, if I remembered right, had merely washed them, dried them, folded them, and stacked them without comment on Elle's bed).

"Joy is falling apart," I complained, loudly enough to earn me an interested look from the ninety-year-old gentleman turtling along on the treadmill on my other side. "She's falling apart, and I'm just supposed to stand around and watch it happen?" I wiped my sleeve against my forehead. "And what am I supposed to tell her about Dad?"

"Tell her the truth," my mother said calmly. "Tell her your father is still in Los Angeles. Tell her he got divorced again."

I whipped my head around sideways to stare. "How do you know that?"

"My lawyer keeps track."

I sighed. After all these years, my mother still clung to her quixotic, costly hope of someday recovering a portion of the tens of thousands of dollars of alimony and child support my father had never paid her in the 1980s and 1990s. In all that time, she'd been through three lawyers and outlived two judges and hadn't gotten enough money out of her ex-husband to buy a decent purse.

"What happened?"

She shrugged, then went back to pumping her arms. "I have no idea. His second wife had a prenup, though."

Good for her,
I thought, but didn't say.

"Is he in touch with..." It took me a minute to recover the names of my father's second round of children. For years Elle and Josh and I had referred to them exclusively as the Replacements. "Daniel and Rebecca?"

"I don't know," she said.

I shook my head again. "The part I can't figure out," I said, "is why. Why even answer Joy? Why pretend that he's this wonderful grandfather who's been shut out of her life because of..." I quickened my pace and hooked my fingers into air quotes. "'Parental estrangement'? Does he need money?"

"I don't know," said my mother. She shook her head and sighed. "I'm sorry about this."

"Yeah," I said. "Yeah. Me, too." I hopped off the treadmill, red-faced and panting, and bent down to retie my shoe. "And now she's got some kind of reunion all set in her head."

"Maybe you should let her," my mother said.

"What?" I snatched the flimsy towel off the handlebars and wiped my face, hearing my heart beating too hard in my chest, my blood pounding in my ears.

"Let her see him," she said calmly, her Mona-made bead earrings bobbing as she walked. "Joy's not stupid. She'll see him, and she'll see what he really is."

I straightened up, shaking my head. "He can be pretty charming when he wants to be. What if she decides that he's right and we're all wrong?"

"She knows you," said my mother. "She knows us. She's got a good head on her shoulders."

Not lately,
I thought. "She read my book," I said slowly. "And a bunch of articles. She knows..." My voice trailed off.
She knows what I am,
I thought. Or at least she knew what some reporters had made of the old public version of me--or of Allie, who'd been the bastard child of all of my years' worth of rage. I pictured myself twelve years ago, after my father had left and Bruce had left and I'd pushed Peter away, hunched over my notebook in Joy's bedroom, scribbling so hard that I could see the outline of each word on the page below, thinking,
They'll be sorry...they'll pay.
I couldn't blame that girl for what she'd done, but still, what mother would ever want her child to see that version of herself, so fucked up and furious?

My mother had the nerve to sound amused. Her eyes crinkled as she smiled and stopped her own treadmill. "You could just say it was fiction. That's what I've been doing for years!"

I shook my head wordlessly. Allie wasn't entirely made up. The sex was all hers--well, almost all hers--but the anger was all mine, and surely, being that angry was at least as embarrassing as sleeping with strangers.

"But you should probably tell her you never had sex in the parking lot at Emek Shalom," my mother urged. "The rabbi hasn't looked me in the eye since the book came out."

I twisted the towel in my hands and said nothing.

"Well, I'm going to tell her that Tanya and I met at the hardware store instead of in the hot tub," she said, and led me toward the ladies' locker room, where she stood in front of her locker and began the leisurely process of removing her shoes, then her workout wear.

"But you and Tanya did meet in the hot tub. Tanya told me about it."

My mother hung up her T-shirt and looked at me innocently.

"
All
about it," I said.

She shook her head, smiling, wrapped a white towel around her chest, and opened the door to the sauna. Steam whooshed out, obscuring her face. "At least tell her the truth about your father," my mother said as I sat down on a tiled bench beside her. "If you don't, you're only increasing his allure."

"What allure?" I asked. "What's alluring about a man who never wanted the first thing to do with her?"

"The allure of the unknown," my mother said. "It's like with junk food or Disney princesses. The more you tell a kid she can't have something, the more she wants it."

I wiped my forehead again as steam poured out of the vents. My mother smiled serenely and closed her eyes.