Cannie Shapiro 02 Certain Girls (28 page)

"M
other!" I called. It was Friday night. I'd finished my homework and had planned on spending the hour before bedtime doing research for my d'var Torah, the speech I'd give at my bat mitzvah explaining what my Torah portion meant to modern-day Jews in general and me in particular.

"I'll be right down!" she called. "Just give me a second!" She sounded overjoyed to hear my voice. I hadn't been talking to her more than I absolutely had to, which was making her crazy. In the week since I'd gotten my grandfather's e-mail, she'd tried to start about a hundred conversations, offering to take me out for coffee, or a walk, or tea at the Ritz. Once she'd even dropped a fresh copy of her horrible book on my bed.
I guess it's time we talked about this,
she'd said. I'd curled my lip and said,
I don't have time to read anything that's not on the list for school, and believe me, they don't want us reading that.
Her face had gone pale, but she'd just picked up the book and walked out of my room.

"What do you need?" she called from the top of the stairs.

"I need to get online." Reasons I hate my mother, number seventeen: She's put so many blockers and parental controls on the Internet in our house that the only places I can surf are the websites for Nickelodeon shows. I think my mother really believed that if I accidentally wandered onto a porn website, my head would explode.

"Just go to the start-up menu and hit 'disable'!" she called. "I'll be down in a minute!"

Lie. She was picking up my father, and they were going out to dinner, which meant she'd have to spend at least twenty minutes on her makeup, during which time she was guaranteed to practically blind herself with her eyelash curler. "Never mind!" she yelled. "Just log in as me!"

"What's your password?"

"Nifkin!"

Frenchelle, turning in circles in preparation for a nap on her dog bed, raised her head and growled. I typed in
Nifkin
and the screen flashed into life. My mom's screen saver was my most recent school picture. In the upper-right-hand corner, a dancing Thin Mint informed me that there were 243 days until Girl Scout cookies went on sale again.

I rolled my eyes and checked out her favorites. Lyla Dare fan site. Gossip website. A headline reading
GIRLIE BOOK AUTHOR EXPOSED!
and a comment underneath my mom's picture:
I thought the chicks who wrote those books were at least supposed to be good-looking.
I winced and clicked to an online store that sold shoes for people with foot arthritis...then a news story about parents who'd had their newborns implanted with silicon chips in case they got kidnapped or lost. I opened up a Google search and typed in
bat mitzvah
and
Jacob
and
Esau.
Then I glanced upstairs, made sure the water was still running, opened another window, and hit "history." Immediately the computer regurgitated all the websites my mom had visited in the last week.

There were a hundred different Lyla Dare fan sites that my mom had viewed in the last forty-eight hours. I cringed, knowing she must have been looking for her name, still trying to figure out what had happened. At least GrokIt.com had dropped her as a topic for the time being and was instead bashing a TV reporter they'd decided was too fat to be delivering the news. My mom had been browsing on websites about bar mitzvahs and blended families, and she'd been shopping for evening gowns online. But the place where she was spending the most time was the website for the Open Hearts Surrogacy Service.

I squinted at the home page.
Please enter your password,
said the text. I typed in
Nifkin
again. An instant later a smiling, brown-haired woman's face filled the screen. "Hello, CANNIEGIRL70. BETSY82 has posted an update." I clicked on BETSY82, who, according to the website, was a happy, healthy mother of two who was ready, willing, and able to make an infertile couple's dreams come true.

"Joy?" My mom was standing behind me, barefoot, with her hair dripping on the shoulders of her bathrobe. She squinted at the screen. "What are you--"

"What is this?" I asked, pointing at the woman's picture. My voice bounced off the walls and windows, buzzing in my hearing aids. I felt monstrous, enormous, like my feet were too big for my shoes and my body had grown too big for my clothes.

Her hands fumbled at the lapels of her bathrobe. "What are you...how did you..."

I couldn't let her change the subject. "What's going on?" I demanded, and shut off the computer before she could figure out that I'd been looking at her Internet history. "Are you and Dad going to have a baby?"

"I...well..." She sat down in the armchair in the corner of the room. It was piled high with books and papers. She didn't seem to see them or feel the big black Lyla Dare binder underneath her. "Your father and I weren't planning on discussing this with you until we were a little further down the road," she said, and at that moment it was like I could hear something click into place. This was real. It was actually happening. They were going to have a baby together, a baby they'd wished for, a baby they wanted, a baby who would be the exact opposite of me.

"You're getting a surrogate." I felt dizzy and sick. I remembered the first passage I'd inked out in
Big Girls Don't Cry,
in which Allie takes a pregnancy test.
Heads, I win; tails, I lose. One line, please, God, one line. One line, I'm saved; two lines, my life is over.

That was the truth, right there on the screen. No matter what she said and how she called me her joy, she had never wanted me. And now she was going to have another baby, a wanted baby, a baby with the man she loved.

"Nothing's final yet," she said, but I knew that was a lie, one more to pile on top of the rest she'd told me.
Your grandfather never tried to get in touch. Of course I wanted you, Joy.

I got to my feet. My mother blinked at me miserably. She'd curled and put mascara on only one set of eyelashes, and she looked like a lopsided raccoon.

"I don't have to stay here, you know." I said this casually, as if it had just that minute occurred to me.

She looked up at me, shocked. "What?"

"I could go live with my father. Bruce. My real father."

Her eyes got very wide. She twisted her hands in her lap with her head bent. I wished I could take it back, but I couldn't. So I said, "He always says I can stay with him whenever I want to. I could go to the same school as Max and Leo. I'm going to call him right now."

She gave a wry smile. "Don't you think you'll miss peanut butter?" I just stared at her coldly. She sighed. "Joy, I wish I could sit here and explain everything to you. About that website; about my father. But I can't miss this dinner. It's really important. I need to--"

I cut her off. "Fine. Go." I blinked as she bounced up out of her chair and stood there, her hair still dripping. The world seem to blur out of focus. That wasn't supposed to happen, and that wasn't what she was supposed to say. She was supposed to say
No
and
Absolutely not.
She was supposed to say
I won't let you
and
You're grounded
and
We're your parents
and
You belong here.
She was maybe even supposed to cry, to reach for me, to ask me over and over again what was wrong until I told her.

Instead, she twisted her hair around her hand and wiped underneath her made-up eye with one fingertip. "I...I have to go now," she said. "I have to go. I have to meet your father. I have to..." Her eyes, as she looked past me to the clock at the top of the stairs, were almost frantic, and her lips were trembling. "There's food in the fridge. Those spicy string beans you like. Your dad and I will be back by ten, ten-thirty at the absolute latest, I promise, and we can talk. I'll explain everything." She shot another desperate look past me, then started moving, walking fast, taking the stairs two at a time, thighs jiggling underneath the terry cloth.

I stared with my mouth hanging open. I waited for her to come back down and apologize some more, to give me all the details about the baby, if there was one. Instead, twenty minutes later, she hurried back downstairs in a lacy white skirt and a pink top. I watched as she checked her lipstick in the mirror and picked up her purse. Again, she repeated, "Your father and I will be home, and we'll talk about everything."

She bent down to put on her shoes, picked up her purse, gave me one more desperate look, then picked up her keys and practically ran out the door, leaving me sitting there as shocked as I'd ever been. She'd started leaving me alone in the house only when I turned thirteen, but she'd only done it twice before, and before she did, she'd go through about three dozen questions before setting a single foot out the door:
Do you have your cell phone? Are your hearing-aid batteries charged? Are you hungry? Thirsty? All set with your homework?
I went to the window, positive she'd turn around. But she just kept walking, not even turning back to look at me, moving quickly down the sidewalk, then around the corner, until she disappeared.

I stood there in the empty office, in the empty house, hearing nothing but the thunder of my heartbeat in my ears. Then I spun on my heels and ran up the stairs. Grandma Audrey had bought me luggage for my last birthday, a pink zippered suitcase and a little carrying case for makeup. I opened the suitcase on my bed and started throwing stuff inside: jeans, underwear, my copy of
Big Girls Don't Cry,
a picture of me and Tamsin at Sesame Place on my sixth birthday, all the steps of the Jon Carame program, plus my flat iron and my toothbrush. I was panting by the time I zipped the suitcase, and of course Bruce wasn't answering his phone. I didn't leave a message.
Bump bump bump
went the suitcase as I dragged it down the stairs.
I don't care, I don't care, I don't care,
I chanted in my head with each step.

I
power-walked the entire thirty-two blocks from our front door to the Hospital of the University of Philadelphia, so rattled that I barely realized where I was, so miserable that I almost didn't notice when the blister that had risen on my right heel burst and started bleeding, or that I got on a service elevator instead of the regular kind and wound up riding up to my husband's office next to what I was pretty sure was a corpse. The plan was for me to meet up with Peter. We'd spend a few minutes going over our list of questions for the potential surrogate, then head to the restaurant.

"Are you having a medical emergency?" the sweet young thing behind the desk at the weight and eating disorders center asked as I limped through the door with my shoes in my hand. The concern on her face told me better than any mirror just how bad I looked.

"No," I said, twisting my hair into an impromptu bun. "No, no emergency, I'm meeting Dr. Krushelevansky."

She looked dubiously at the schedule spread in front of her. "He's running a little late..."

Great. Figured. "I'll wait," I replied. "Tell him it's Cannie." I asked for a Band-Aid, stuck it over the oozing patch on my heel, and plopped myself into one of the clinic's new chairs (armless, for the plus-size patient's comfort--a sign of progress if ever there was one). There was a limp year-old issue of
Ladies' Home Journal
on the table. I fanned myself a few times, then started reading recipes for cakes that looked like Easter eggs.

The woman spilling over the sides of the chair across from mine frowned at me. "You here to see Dr. K.?"

I nodded.

"He's running late," the woman said.

"He gets busy," I said.

"Oh, sure. I know that." The woman stretched her legs out in front of her, rotating her ankles. "Don't worry, I'm done. Just waiting for my daughter to get me. I wouldn't see anyone else anyhow. Dr. K. saved my life."

"Did he?" The armless chairs were a step in the right direction, but that stupid poster--
TAKING IT OFF, ONE DAY AT A TIME
--was still there, a relic from my own trip through the weight-loss drug trial I'd signed up for all those years ago. The skinny model on the sun-faded poster romping through the field full of wildflowers was looking decidedly dated in her leotard and leg warmers. How many times had I told Peter that fat ladies would not find that image encouraging? No matter how thin one gets, I'd said, one has a hard time imagining a situation in which one would don a leotard and appear in public, and under no circumstances would one run in public unless one were being chased.

"Oh, yes," said the woman. She put down her right foot and lifted her left. "I had that lap-band surgery?" She dropped her voice. "In Mexico? My insurance wouldn't cover it here. They said I wasn't obese enough. Not obese enough," she said, looking ruefully at her belly. "Can you imagine? I told them to give me a month and a few boxes of Krispy Kremes, and then let's talk."

"Uh-huh," I said. I pulled my phone out of my purse to see if I'd missed any calls. I hadn't. I wondered where Joy was. At Thirtieth Street Station? On a train to New Jersey? Knocking on Bruce and Emily's front door?

"So I had the band put in down in Puerto Vallarta, and I'm on a plane back home, and everything's fine, you know. My ankles were swollen a little, but I figured that's just normal..."

I nodded. The GPS locator put Joy in our living room, probably sitting right where I'd left her. Or maybe she was on the phone, pouring her heart out to Bruce, begging him to rescue her from her monstrous mother and reunite her with her no-doubt-loving grandfather who'd been so cruelly kept from her for her entire life. I pressed my eyes shut, willing myself not to cry, willing myself into stillness even though I wanted to spring up from the chair and race down the staircase, out to the street, and back home. But I couldn't. We'd just get dinner as fast as we could without offending our guest. Maybe we'd pick up a quart of lemon water ice from Rita's. That was Joy's favorite. I'd take her to the living room and explain everything calmly, whether she wanted to listen or not: about the surrogate, about the possibility of a baby, about my sex life or lack of same in high school and college; the truth about who Allie was, and who I'd been, the truth about my father. So I'd been a nerd, I thought, and insecure, and unhappy, and bigger than the average mother. So my sister had been to rehab, and my mom had had illicit congress in a hot tub. So my father had hit me up for a six-figure loan and her biological father had dumped us and run off to Amsterdam. We'd all survived. We'd all come through. Surely that had to count for something!

"...I wake up, and I'm in agony. 'Call 911!' I say to my husband. The poor guy's white as a sheet. He never wanted me to get the surgery in the first place. 'Why don't you just eat a little less, exercise a little more?' he says to me. Ha. Like that's gonna work. So he calls 911, and the ambulance comes, and the next thing I know--"

I nodded and sighed in all the right places as she unfurled her story of sepsis, necrotic tissue, and the lifesaving surgery that my husband had performed.

"So it's working now, I guess," she said. "I mean, they say slow and steady, but the band people go to the same support groups as the bypass people, and it looks like they're having a lot more luck. I'm thinking about a revision."

Peter popped his head out of his office door. "Mrs. Lefferts? What are you still doing here?"

The south-of-the-border-surgery-happy Mrs. Lefferts told Peter that she was waiting for her ride. Peter nodded, then smiled at me. "Are we all set?"

"All set." I got to my feet.

Mrs. Lefferts looked from Peter back to me. "You two know each other?"

"In a manner of speaking," I said.

"We're married," said Peter, and looked at me sternly.

Mrs. Lefferts looked me up and down. "Lucky you," she said, and picked up her purse, waving through the window at her daughter.

Five minutes later Peter and I were on a corpse-free elevator, and I was filling him in on the latest with Joy.

"I don't think she's serious about going to the Gubermans'," he said as we hurried down Thirty-fourth Street, surrounded by throngs of disgustingly young students in the beaded leather sandals everyone under thirty was wearing that spring. "I told her she'd miss peanut butter." A cyclist whizzed within inches of us, calling "On your left!" "We need to get her a therapist. Or maybe send her to one of those tough-love boot camps in Wyoming."

"I think those are just for kids with substance-abuse problems." A cab pulled to a halt at the curb in front of us. Peter held the door, and I scooched over toward the window while he gave the driver the restaurant's address.

"Stealing credit cards and leaving the state without your parents' knowing has to count for something. I'm finding her a therapist. First thing in the morning. She should be talking to someone."

The cab bumped and jolted past the Oriental-rug shops and cafes and brick row houses with painted doors and bright flower boxes. When we crossed Twenty-third Street, I made myself ask the question: "Do you think I was wrong to not tell her about the..." I couldn't bring myself to say "baby" yet. "The surrogate? About my father? To say that he'd never seen her? No, I wasn't," I said before Peter had a chance to answer. "I wasn't wrong. My father's nuts. He shouldn't have anything to do with her."

Peter reached for my hand. "If getting her a therapist would make you feel better, then by all means, we should. But this is going to be fine. She's being a teenager. It's what they do."

We zipped across Broad Street, passing beneath the big red University of the Arts sign that curved around a building on the corner. Peter looked at his watch, then squeezed my hand in both of his as, one by one, the streetlights flared to life.

"So what can I tell you?" BETSY82, whose real name was Betsy Bartlett, smiled at us from across the white tablecloth. Candlelight lit her rosy cheeks and gleamed off the thin gold necklace in the hollow of her throat. She had curling brown hair, longer than it had been in the pictures online, a high forehead, and an easy smile.

I lifted my glass of sangria, trying hard to shake the feeling that the two of us were on a date with this easygoing, forthright thirty-two-year-old nurse/surrogate mother. After much discussion, Peter and I had decided to take Betsy to Uno Mas, one of my favorite tapas places in the city. We'd exchanged pictures of our kids (I'd come equipped with an old one of Joy in which she was smiling), and we'd talked about the weather (unsurprisingly humid, with thunder threatening every night), the presidential campaign, and the latest scandal involving a pantyless starlet having sex in public. Then we'd ordered a carafe of white sangria with slices of peach and raspberries floating on top, and half a dozen little plates: deep-fried olives, tiny veal meatballs, warm fava and lima-bean salad, slices of cheese, glistening white and ivory, with spoonfuls of honey and jam. Betsy had nibbled bites of this and that, exclaiming that you couldn't get food like this in Horsham.

I asked the waiter for more flatbread. Betsy smiled, leaning forward. "I bet you have a lot of questions."

I'd come with three typed pages' worth, but the first one that came to mind was, simply, "How'd you get into this?"

"I wanted to give something back," she said. "I've been really lucky--healthy, good marriage, great kids. We don't have a ton of money, and with an eight-year-old and a six-year-old, I don't have a lot of free time to volunteer, so I decided that this would be my contribution."

"And what was it like?" I asked. "How did it feel?"

"It was a little strange," she said. "With the first one--that was Eli--I was never sure how much to tell people, how much of it was their business. Of course, my boys kind of took care of that for me." She smiled and raised her voice to a child's falsetto, and in her expression I could almost glimpse her son's face. "'Mommy's got a baby in her belly that belongs to someone else!'"

"Did people just accept that?" Peter asked.

She shrugged. "If they thought anything about it, they never said so to my face."

"What about after the birth?" I asked. "Was it hard when it was time...I mean, when you had to..."

"Give the baby up," she said, and shook her head. "You know what? I thought it would be, but it wasn't. I felt..." She toyed with an oyster shell on her plate. "I guess I felt more like an aunt than a mother, if that makes any sense. It wasn't quite like being a babysitter, even though I've heard other surrogates describe it that way. It was more like I'd been entrusted with the baby for a finite period of time, and that when that time was over, the baby would go with his parents, and I'd go and be with my kids."

"The fathers must have been very grateful," said Peter.

"They cried," Betsy said. I looked down in my lap, and she reached across the table to grab my hand. "Oh, no. They were happy tears! Everyone in that room was crying! When I saw the look on his dads' faces..."

I dabbed at my own eyes with my napkin. "Sorry," I croaked. I was remembering when the nurses had handed me Joy, how I'd been too foggy and bewildered to do much more than open my arms and hold her, a package I hadn't signed for, a gift I had never expected.

Betsy squeezed my hand. "You know," she said shyly, "I wasn't sure I should tell you this, but I read your book."

That stopped the tears. "You did?"

"Uh-huh. When I was in high school. My parents were going through a divorce, and then my older sister came home from college with a girlfriend. My father didn't handle it very well. I'd never read a book about stuff like that. I thought I was the only one who'd had someone she loved just, you know, wake up one morning and say, 'Hey, guess what? I'm totally different than what you thought!'" She lifted her sangria. "I felt like I couldn't tell anyone. Your book came along at just the right time for me."

"Wow. Thank you. I'm..." I reached for my own glass. I never knew what to say when people wanted to talk about the book. "That's nice to hear."

Sensing my unease, Peter filled Betsy's glass, then mine. "So what can we tell you about us?"

While they talked, I smoothed my napkin back over my lap and thought that if this was like a date, I had a feeling it would turn out to be a successful one, where none of us would be sitting at home fretting and waiting for the phone to ring and knowing that it wouldn't.
A baby,
I thought. A little boy, because somehow, I thought that was what we'd get. My eyes filled again as I remembered the sweet and singular weight of a newborn baby in my arms, the smell of soap and warm cotton, the feather-light touch of a tiny fist against my cheek. One perfect boy to go with my perfect, if troublesome, girl.