Cannie Shapiro 02 Certain Girls (31 page)

"I came all the way from Philadelphia," I said. I couldn't tell whether she'd heard me, but her back stiffened, just like Tamsin's did when she was mad. "I just want to give him something." The bat mitzvah invitations my mother and I had picked out on the Internet hadn't arrived yet, so, the night before, in Tamsin's bedroom, I'd written out a pair of invitations by hand on Tamsin's stationery. "Here," I said, and shoved one at her. "Here. It's for my bat mitzvah. I invited him already, but this is official. If you hear from him or find out where he's living now, I'd really appreciate it if you could give it to him."

She curled her hands into fists. The invitation fluttered to the concrete. "You don't want him at your party," she said. "You don't want him in your life. Believe me. He's a jerk." She gave a tight, horrible smile. "For a long time, I thought he was just misunderstood. His wife was gay, his kids were brats, whatever. But it wasn't that. It wasn't them. It was him." She bent her head and muttered something that I could tell by reading her lips was
abusive asshole
.

"If you could just--"

"Go home," she repeated, then turned away, a too-thin woman in a too-big pink shirt.

I picked up my invitation as she walked inside the door. I heard the click of the lock turning in place. "You should pick up your oranges!" I called toward the closed door. "They're all rotten!" No answer came. I made myself count to twenty, saying "Mississippi" in between. Then I bent down and slipped the invitation through the mail slot. The brass door of the slot clicked shut, and I imagined I could hear the envelope sliding onto the floor.

"Dr. Shapiro?" The lady behind the reception desk at the Beverly Hills Surgical Centre had glossy black hair pulled into a twist and creamy skin, but when I said my grandfather's name, her almond-shaped eyes looked dubious. "He's not on call this weekend."

Great. Not at home, not even living where I'd thought his home was, not at work. This wasn't going well. "Can you do me a favor?" I asked. "My name is Joy Shapiro. I'm his granddaughter. He isn't expecting me, but I came all the way from Philadelphia to see him."

The woman looked at me with her heavy-lidded eyes. "Do you have his phone number?"

"Not a current one," I said. The only number I'd found was for the house on Linden Lane, and clearly, wherever he was living, it wasn't there.

She looked at me for another minute without blinking. "Hold on," she said. "I'll see if I can reach him." She disappeared behind a door set almost invisibly underneath the word "Centre." I stood in front of her empty desk for a minute, fidgeting, then I wandered through the waiting room. There were fat couches covered in gold fabric, and round tuffets that had fringed skirts, piled high with glossy magazines. The walls were hung with poster-size photographs of the doctors who worked there. I looked until I found my grandfather's picture, the same Santa Claus one that I'd seen on the website. I was standing underneath his picture when the beautiful receptionist came back. "He's on his way."

In person, my grandfather's hair was almost entirely white, and he was short and barrel-chested, with stocky legs in blue jeans that sagged beneath his belly. I watched as he waved an electronic key fob at the door and stomped inside, looking out of place against the pale pink carpet and cream-colored walls. He wore a thick leather belt with a horseshoe-shaped silver buckle and a plaid shirt. His face was lined, and his cheeks were ruddy, and his eyes behind his glasses were watery brown, threaded with red.

He said something to the receptionist before he walked over to me. "Joy?" His voice was low and gravelly, and I felt a thrill of recognition spike my blood. I realized that it was a version of my own voice I was hearing.

"Hi." I ducked my head, shy, unsure what to call him, whether I should hug him or shake his hand. He solved the problem by smiling even more widely. He had beautiful teeth, gleaming and even and white. "Did you get my e-mail?" I asked.

"I did, but I wasn't expecting a visit. What a nice surprise," he said, and I heard the voice from the tape, warm and welcoming, rumbling through his chest. "Welcome to California." He paused while we looked each other over. I was reminded of Frenchelle in the dog park, the way she'd cautiously approach a new dog, sniffing delicately, trying to figure out whether it was friend or foe. "There's a coffee shop downstairs. Can I buy you something to drink?"

"That sounds good," I said, relieved. I hadn't made any plans beyond actually seeing him, and this sounded perfect: We'd be in public, and Kevin and the car would be nearby.

"Your mother with you?" he asked casually as we walked into the hallway.

I shook my head. "Not right now," I said, which was enough of the truth to work for both of us.

He held the door of the coffee shop for me, and we ordered drinks at the counter: something frozen and blended with whipped cream and chocolate syrup for me, an espresso for him. Then we carried our cups to a table by the window. I waved at Kevin, parked in a space up front, while my grandfather poured sugar into his cup.

"So," he began. "What brings you to our fair city?"

"I'm just visiting, but I wanted to make sure you knew about my bat mitzvah. You know. Officially. I left an invitation with your--I guess your ex-wife?"

"Christine," he said shortly. I waited for him to say something else, to maybe apologize for her behavior and say that she'd been sick or she was crazy, but he didn't.

"This was the first time I was ever on a plane by myself," I told him, even though he hadn't asked.

He raised his eyebrows. "Oh yeah?"

"Well, I've been on planes before. Just never by myself. I usually go places with my parents. We go to Florida sometimes, and I've been to California with my mom and with Aunt Elle..."

A crease appeared between his eyes. "Aunt..."

"Oh. That's Lucy. She changed her name."

His teeth gleamed when he smiled. "Did she change her ways, too?"

Huh?

"Probably not," he said, continuing to smile. "There was never much potential there. Now, your mother was a different story."

I stared at him, speechless, then looked down at my drink. How could he say Aunt Elle had no potential? Aunt Elle was beautiful!

I lifted my eyes to look at him. My grandfather had a cell phone and a beeper tucked into his breast pocket, along with a crumpled pack of cigarettes.
Cigarettes?
I thought.
Would a doctor smoke?

He pulled off his glasses and massaged the bridge of his nose with two fingertips. "Big success," he said, "your mother."

"I guess," I said.

"How is she?"

"She's good."

"Just good?" He folded up his glasses and set them on top of the napkin dispenser. "'Good' doesn't tell me anything. A useless word."

My stomach cramped. Was he saying that I was useless? "Busy!" I finally said. "She's very busy."

"Oh yeah?" He sounded bored.

I tried to change the subject. "So...um. I'm almost done with seventh grade. I go to the Philadelphia Academy. Do you know it?"

He didn't answer. "Wait here," he said. I watched through the window as he walked back to his car, pulled a book out of the trunk, and came back, setting the book on the table. I recognized it instantly: It was a photo album, a sibling of all the ones I'd seen in Grandma Ann's bonus room. "I thought you might like seeing this," he said.

I watched as he flipped the book open to the first page, which was a picture of a bald baby with its mouth wide open, wrapped in a pink-and-blue blanket.

"Your mother," he announced. He flipped to the next page, and there was Grandma Ann, her short hair brown instead of silver and her skin unlined, smiling with the bald baby on her shoulder.

I looked at the baby. "That's Aunt Elle. Aunt Lucy, I think."

"Nope. Candace." He tapped the photograph with one finger. "See, Ann hadn't gotten fat yet."

I swallowed hard.

"Thirty pounds with each kid," he said. "If you can believe it. Probably a good thing your mom stopped with one."

I said, "Oh," because I could tell that he expected me to say something. My feet tapped against the floor, faster and faster.

"You've got a genetic tendency to put on weight," he lectured. His bloodshot brown eyes looked me over critically. "You'll have to be careful."

I wanted to tell him that I was careful. I wanted to tell him that my mother was careful: that everything she served me was organic and all-natural and hormone-free, that I had the healthiest lunches and snacks of any kid I'd ever seen, that I hadn't even tasted soda until I was ten years old. Instead, I wiggled my straw around the whipped cream in my drink, then took a big swallow.

He shrugged and turned the page. "Your mother," he said again. There she was, in a bathing suit with a frog appliqued on the tummy. Her hair was wet and curly. She'd been running under a sprinkler set up on the lawn. I could see the strands of water at the far end of the photograph. She was grinning, her sturdy round legs planted on the grass, her belly sticking out proudly. "Four years old, but she could already read. I read to her every night. Poetry. Shakespeare. Every night."

"That's nice," I said quietly, remembering the tape I'd heard. Oh God, I wanted to get out of here so badly. The man who'd made those tapes, who'd sounded so kind, was gone. Coming here had been a huge, huge mistake.

"I taught her to read," he said, and flipped the page. My mother again, with Aunt Elle, the two of them in snowsuits and ice skates on the bumpy, pockmarked surface of a frozen pond. Underneath the ice, I could glimpse the black water. "Taught her to swim." Flick. Grandma Ann again, heavier and tired-looking, her brown hair threaded with gray, another baby in a blanket in her arms. My grandfather quickly flipped past that shot--Uncle Josh, I guessed. "Taught her everything, when you come right down to it." The pictures passed by in a blur: first days of school, birthday parties, and bar mitzvahs. Flick. High school graduation, my mother in a shiny cap and gown, standing behind a podium, her face set in familiar lines, sullen and shy and ashamed. She looked bigger underneath her black cap and gown.

I toyed with my straw. My grandfather pushed the book across the table. "Take a look," he said.

I flipped back to the beginning, then paged through the pictures more slowly, trying to find something that looked familiar, an echo of my own face in these faces. There was Uncle Josh with a buzz cut, holding a fishing pole, and my mother again, stretched out in front of a fireplace, frowning over a book. I shivered, goose-bumpy in the air-conditioning of the coffee shop. There wasn't anything scary about the pictures, except that nobody ever got any older in them. On these pages, under the plastic, the children stayed children. They never grew up.

About halfway through the book, the pictures gave way to clippings. Some were from what looked like a high school newspaper. One or two were poems. Then the real newspaper articles began. The first batch had my mother's byline.
School Board Postpones Budget Hearing,
I read.
Science Fair Instructs, Delights. New School Lunches Cut the Fat.

"You see?" he asked. His voice was half kind, half gloating. "I always knew she'd be a writer."

I flipped slowly through the pages. The stories with my mother's byline ended in 1999. There was a three-year gap, when I was born, in which there was only a handful of columns from
Moxie
magazine, including one she'd written, called, like Bruce's first column had been, "Loving a Larger Woman."
I will whisper in my daughter's ear. Our lives will be extraordinary,
I read. My throat felt like it was closing, and my eyes began to burn.

I turned the page. The next bunch of stories weren't written by my mother anymore; they were about her.
PHILADELPHIA AUTHOR LANDS BIG BOOK DEAL,
I read.
QUEEN OF THE BIG GIRLS: HEFTY GAL CANDACE SHAPIRO PENS TRIUMPHANT TALES FOR HER PLUS-SIZE SISTERS.
There were copies of best-seller lists from around the country, cut out and neatly glued to the blank pages. Then came the one with my picture in it from
People
magazine: me and my mother, jumping on a bed, our feet in the air, hair flying, mouths open, laughing. It was just the picture--the story itself was on the next page--but I remembered what the headline had been, and said it out loud.

"Happy endings."
Oh, Mom,
I thought.

"I ordered it from the magazine," my grandfather said, pulling the cigarettes out of his pocket and thumping them on the table. "They'll send it to you if you pay them. They don't even care who you are."

He spread his hands on the table. He wore a heavy gold watch on one wrist and a chunky gold ring on his pinky. "She never wrote anything else," he said. "No more books."

"Maybe she didn't want to," I said. "Maybe she didn't have to."

"I guess not," he said. His voice sounded loud and angry. "That Philadelphia Academy's a private school?"

I nodded.

"Must be nice," he said. "Never believed in that, myself. Public education was good enough for me. Good enough for all of my kids."