Cannie Shapiro 02 Certain Girls (8 page)

In turn, we agreed to a party with music and dancing, and that I wouldn't make her hand-write sixty invitations (nor would I agree to bake platters of sweets for the party). Joy grudgingly consented to the elegant but relatively inexpensive invitations I'd found online, and agreed that a photo booth was a good idea.

"And I want to invite everyone in my Hebrew-school class," she said. "I don't want anyone to feel left out."

"That's really nice," I said, swallowing hard. Here was my good girl, my sweet, serious, considerate Joy who'd tried to give the goldfish crackers left over from her nursery-school lunch to the homeless people we'd pass on our way home from the park. When I smiled at her, she didn't smile back, but she didn't turn away, either. I leaned forward eagerly, thinking this was progress. I could get her talking, get her excited about her bat mitzvah, get past the coldness in her eyes.

I looked around the restaurant--the yellow walls hung with paintings, the dark wood tables--and breathed in the good smells of coffee and bacon and corn bread. "You know, I used to take you here all the time when you were little," I said. "We used to do Mommy and Me yoga right across the street with--"

"Emmett and Zack and Jack," Joy said in a bored voice. "And then we'd go to Whole Foods, and you would get me chickpeas and tofu from the salad bar, because chickpeas and tofu were my favorites."

"Right," I said. I guessed she'd heard that story once or twice before. When she was little, she'd liked nothing better than to hear me tell stories about when she was a baby, a toddler, the first time she'd said the word "Nifkin," the time I'd put her in her baby backpack and taken her for a walk in the snow. "You always liked that stuff. You ate--"

"--like I was born in the parking lot at a Grateful Dead show," Joy said in that same bored voice. She raised her eyes and glared at me with such a smoking look of fury that I almost gasped. Then it was gone, and it was just Joy again, her lovely face, her look of bored disdain. "Maybe I got that from my father."

Beside me, I imagined I could feel Peter flinch. Joy didn't mention Bruce to me too often, and she hardly ever mentioned him in front of Peter. "I don't think you got that much from him," I said. It was equal parts statement and prayer.
Please, God,
I thought,
let the only thing she got from him be her good looks and not his predilection for parental handouts and pot.

"Is he invited?" Joy asked.

I scooped a stack of sugar packets, desperate to have something to do with my hands. "Bruce? Of course Bruce is invited."

"Good." She pushed herself away from the table, stuck her thumbs in the pockets of her jeans, and sauntered off toward the bathroom with her hips and ponytail swinging, drawing appreciative glances from the busboys in her wake.

I looked at Peter helplessly. "What did I do?" I asked, spreading my hands, palms to the sky. "Did I run over her dog? Steal her boyfriend? My God. Did you see the way she looked at me? It was like"--I gulped--"like she hates me."

Peter took my hand and pried the sugar packets free. "She's just thirteen."

"She's not thirteen yet." I ripped off the top of a creamer. "I wasn't like that at thirteen." Cream splashed into my coffee cup. "Maybe sixteen." I searched for my spoon. "Maybe not ever."

"So she's precocious," he said. "Take it easy. Give her time." I poked at my eggs again.
You get what you get
had been one of the refrains at Joy's nursery school. If a kid started crying because the snack was pretzels instead of crackers, or the book at story time was
George and Martha
instead of
Charlie and Lola,
one of the teachers would swoop in and say, "You get what you get, and you don't get upset!" It was true for the three-year-olds, and maybe true for the mothers of thirteen-year-olds, too.
You get what you get,
I thought. I'd learned that, and Joy would, too. I leaned sideways until my weight was resting against Peter, and just for a minute, I closed my eyes.

W
ednesday afternoon is the one day of the week that my mother doesn't pick me up from school. I'm allowed to take the bus down Pine Street, past the boutiques and the galleries and the big brownstones, then walk over one block to Hebrew school at the Center City Synagogue on Spruce Street, along with Tamsin and Todd and Amber Gross and Sasha Swerdlow and the other Jewish kids in our grade.

From four until four-forty-five, we chant prayers and blessings: the one that says we believe in only one God; the ones that promise to love God "with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your being," the prayer for mourners, exalting the name of God. Then we have half an hour for individual work on our Torah and haftorah portions, the ones we'll chant at our bar and bat mitzvahs. The Torah is the Old Testament, only in Hebrew, and the haftorah is from Prophets. The portion you're assigned depends on your bar or bat mitzvah date. Most kids have the cantor sing their portions into their iPods and just learn them phonetically, but because my mom believes in the deep meaning of everything and exists for the purpose of making my life difficult, she wants me to actually learn the words I'm chanting. She thinks this is going to make it easier for me to write my d'var Torah--the speech I'll have to give in which I explain what my portions are about. My Torah portion's about Jacob and Esau and the story of how Jacob stole the birthright of his older brother, Esau, by dressing up like him and fooling their blind, dying father, which is something you learn in first grade. My haftorah is about how many sheaves of wheat the ancient Israelites had to pay for crimes such as livestock theft. I have no idea how I'm supposed to relate these stories to current events and modern times, unless there are people wandering around Philadelphia stealing each other's birthrights. Or goats.

But this Wednesday, normal classes were canceled because of a special presentation: "B'nai Mitzvah and the Blended Family." Parents were invited, so of course my mom was there, dressed in jeans and a long purple sweater she'd knitted herself. My mom has lots of nice clothes, all in dry cleaner's plastic at the back of her closet, left over from her book tours. Even though they're old, they're still pretty. If she'd wear those clothes, do her hair, and get that laser-vision surgery and maybe a breast reduction, she'd be fine. Ordinary. Like every other mom. Or at least she'd look that way.

When I walked into the sanctuary, my mom was talking with Rabbi Grussgott, her body angled toward the door, watching for me, as usual. As soon as she saw me, she started waving, sawing the air with big back-and-forths of her arm. The ruffled sleeves of her sweater fluttered as I made my way over slowly. "Shalom," said the rabbi, and I said hello back, wondering whether she'd read
Big Girls Don't Cry
and what her religious opinion about it was.

"Where's Tamsin?" asked my mom, plopping down in her seat and patting the cushion beside her, the way you would if you were trying to get a puppy to hop onto a couch. Her chest bounced, and I imagined the other parents whispering,
That's her. She's the one who wrote that book;
staring at my mother with her clogs and her tote bag full of knitting and a first-aid kit, a smaller sibling of the one she keeps in our minivan. Phrases from
Big Girls Don't Cry
popped into my head:
blow-job queen
and
sand-scratchy beach-blanket fucking
and
I wept until I thought I'd turn myself inside out.

"Library," I said. That was where the kids who'd had their bar or bat mitzvahs already or whose parents were together had been sent.

"Ah," said my mother. The truth was, things between me and Tamsin had been weird since I'd started sitting with Amber. I split my time: one day at Amber's table, one day with the drama kids and Tamsin and Todd. I thought it was kind of a biblical solution, at least a fair one, except Amber and her friends hardly seemed to notice when I was gone, and Tamsin didn't seem happy when I was with her. For a minute I thought about telling my mother what was going on, seeing if she had any suggestions. Then someone called my name.

"Hey, Joy."

I looked up and smiled. Walking down the aisle toward us, in a suit and a tie, his sandy hair falling over his forehead and his briefcase dangling from one hand, was Bruce Guberman.

"Hi, Bruce!" I said, and slid over to make room. My mother stared at me with a look that clearly said,
What is he doing here?
I pretended I didn't see it. I'd e-mailed Bruce the invitation to the seminar, with a note on top reading
Hope you can come,
and he'd written back saying that he thought he could rearrange his class schedule to be there.

My mother sat up straight with her tote bag in her lap, holding herself stiffly. Bruce sat down and spread his legs wide, cracked his knuckles, then crossed his ankles and leaned forward, while I tried to look cheerful and not picture the dozens and dozens of disgusting sex scenes in which he--or "Drew"--had starred in
Big Girls Don't Cry.

Bruce is a professor of popular culture at Rutgers and, according to the inside flap of his book, one of the world's leading experts on myth and allegory in
Battlestar Galactica
and
Doctor Who.
This means he gets to give lots of speeches to groups of people where at least half of them will be wearing pointy plastic ears or blue body paint. When I was six, he took me to a convention in Philadelphia, only we got separated after his speech, and I had kind of a freak-out after a really tall guy with a plastic sword tried to direct me to the lost-and-found table in Klingon. In the old pictures I've seen, he had a ponytail and a goatee, but they're both gone now. His hair is the same color as mine and his eyes are the same shape.

"Candace," he said coolly to my mother.

She let go of her bag's straps long enough to yank at the hem of her sweater. "Bruce," she said back. The two of them are always super-polite to each other. They say
please
and
thank you
and
oh, of course, that will be fine.
I suppose it could be worse. Last year Tara Carnahan's mother called her father a rat bastard during parent/ teacher conferences, then threw her cell phone at his head, which was a double offense because at the Philadelphia Academy we're supposed to use respectful language at all times, and cell phones aren't allowed.

"Thanks for coming," I said to Bruce loudly enough for my mother to hear.

"Sure thing," he said, and blinked at me. That was the thing about Bruce--he blinked too often and too hard. Especially when he was around my mother.

The rabbi stood at the front of the room and introduced Deirdre Weiss, a national expert on the topic of divorce and b'nai mitzvot.

"What," Deirdre Weiss began, "does 'bar mitzvah' mean?"

Someone--it sounded like Amber Gross--groaned. Deirdre's butt jiggled underneath her tight purple skirt as she wrote on the blackboard. "It means, literally, to become a son or daughter of the Commandments. To be an adult in the eyes of Judaism. To read from the Torah, the Word of God, for the first time...to be counted as part of the minyan, the number of Jewish adults necessary for a prayer service to take place. Becoming a bar or bat mitzvah means participating in a lifetime of Jewish values: to study the Torah, to do deeds of charity and loving-kindness, to strive for
tikkun olam,
the repair of the world." She swept the crowd with her eyes, trying to single out each potential bar or bat mitzvah. "Last but not least, it means that each one of you will be your own responsibility, not your parents' anymore." She looked at us again. We just stared back at her. Did she think we didn't know all of this already?

She turned back to the blackboard and began writing words like "inclusion" and "respectful listening," her charm bracelet rattling with each letter. I sneaked a look sideways and saw that my mother was writing "inclusion" in a notebook that said
Joy's Bat Mitzvah
on the cover.

"When planning the service, and the party, everyone needs to make sure that his or her voice is being heard," said Deirdre.

I gave my mother a significant look that she ignored.

"The beauty of the modern-day ceremony is that there's a role for everyone," Deirdre said cheerfully. "Aliyahs, participating in the candle-lighting, dressing and undressing the Torah..."

While my mother took notes, Bruce stared straight ahead at Deirdre. I let my gaze wander around the sanctuary, with its high-backed wooden pews and the words
KNOW BEFORE WHOM YOU STAND
written in Hebrew above the ark. Amber Gross waved at me. Had I known her parents were divorced? I wasn't sure. I kept scanning the aisles. Boy I didn't know, boy I didn't know, girl I didn't know...and Duncan Brodkey, sitting at the end of an aisle with a woman in red pants and silver hoop earrings. She was probably his mother. I felt my face heat up as I turned away. Maybe he'd gone looking for my mother's book the same way I had. I squirmed in my seat, wishing Bruce hadn't come, because what if Duncan looked at him and saw "Drew"?

"One of the places I've found that can cause the most contention at the party is the candle-lighting ceremony," said Deirdre Weiss. "Frequently, the custodial parents feel that their relatives should have more opportunities to light candles than the noncustodial parent, which gets tricky."

My mother's shoulders stiffened. Bruce blinked four times fast. Deirdre kept scribbling more words on the board: "party" versus "service." "Parity" versus "equity." "
Tikkun olam
" versus "
shalom ha' beit
": healing the world versus peace in the house. "Now I'd like to do an exercise," she said, passing around pencils and blank pieces of paper. "I'd like everyone here to write down the words that come to mind when picturing an ideal bar or bat mitzvah."

I stared at my blank page, thinking.
Everybody happy,
I wrote. Then
Broadway theme.
And
CD favors with music from
Grease. I looked at my mother's paper and saw that she'd written
Judaism
and
tradition
and
God.
Bruce's page had no words. It did have a drawing of a man in a spacesuit firing a gun at a bunch of one-eyed aliens. Splats of blood flew out of the aliens' heads to puddle on the ground underneath them.

I looked up to see my mother staring at Bruce's paper. Bruce looked at her, shrugged, and picked up his pen. The next alien he drew looked a little like my mother. I snorted. Bruce grinned at me. My mother drew herself up straight and pulled her tote bag tight against her chest.

"Now let's compare!" Deirdre sang out. "I think you'll all be pleasantly surprised to find out how much you have in common!"

Bruce ducked his head and folded his page in half. Too late.

"Oh, come on," said my mother. "Who wouldn't want a
Doctor Who
alien invader bloodbath bat mitzvah?"

Bruce blinked, blinked, blinked. "I'm sure whatever Joy wants will be fine," he said.

"I want
Grease,
" I said quickly.

"You're not getting
Grease,
" said my mother.

"What's wrong with
Grease
?" asked Bruce.

"She thinks it promotes teenage delinquency and smoking," I said without looking at Bruce, because at that particular moment I was finding it hard not to picture him naked, rolling around on top of my mother in the backseat of his parents' car.

Bruce smirked. "When did you turn into the church lady?" he asked my mother.

My mother's face turned pink, but she ignored him, taking a deep breath. "If you want a theme, I understand. I'm a fan of narrative, too."

I rolled my eyes. Whatever.

"You could have
Hairspray,
" she said. "What about
Hairspray
?"

I pressed my lips together. Sure, it was a huge leap for her to even suggest that I could have any theme at all, but of course she'd want the theme to be the musical where the fat girl gets the hot guy. Like that ever happens in real life.

"Or
Wicked.
We loved
Wicked,
remember?"

I rolled my eyes again. Obviously, she'd loved
Wicked.
In that one, it's the girl with green skin who gets the guy. If someone were to ever write a musical in which the fat green girl gets the guy, my mother would probably die of happiness on the spot.

"Questions!" called Deirdre.

A woman with short pink nails raised her hand. "My ex-husband is remarried to a woman who isn't Jewish, and they aren't raising their children as Jewish, but they're still Zoe's half sister and half brother. What role should they have in the service?"

Deirdre talked about a blessing for children. My mom leaned forward, hanging on every word. Bruce drew more bullets spraying from the spaceman's gun. I scanned the room again. Amber was fidgeting in her seat, crossing and recrossing her legs, perfect as always in her boots and V-neck and jeans, not too dark and not too light, not too loose and not too tight.