Good in Bed (53 page)

Peter draped another blanket over my shoulders and let his hands linger there for a few seconds.

“Cannie,” he began. “I want to tell you something.”

I gave him what I hoped was an encouraging smile.

“That day on Kelly Drive, when you and Samantha were walking,” he said, and cleared his throat.

“Right,” I said. “Go on.”

“Well,” he said. “I, um … I'm not actually a jogger.”

I looked at him, confused.

“I just … well, I remember how in class you used to say you went on bike rides there, and you'd go for walks, and I didn't feel that I could call you …”

“So you started jogging?”

“Every day,” he confessed. “Morning and night, and sometimes on my lunch hour. Until I saw you.”

I sat back, surprised by the extent of his dedication, knowing that if it were me, no matter how much I felt that I wanted to see the other person, it probably wouldn't be enough to get me to jog. “I, um, have shin splints now,” he mumbled, and I burst out laughing.

“It serves you right!” I said. “You could've just called me …”

“But I couldn't,” he said. “First of all, you were a patient …”

“Was a patient,” I said.

“And you were, um …”

“Pregnant with another man's child,” I supplied.

“You were oblivious!” he exclaimed. “Completely oblivious! That was the worst part! There I was, mooning after you, giving myself shin splints …”

I giggled some more.

“And first you were sad about Bruce, who even I could tell wasn't right for you …”

“You were hardly objective,” I told him, but he wasn't through.

“And then you were in California, and that wasn't right for you, either. …”

“California's very nice,” I said, in California's defense.

He sat down next to me and wrapped his arms around my shoulders, pulling me and Joy tightly against him. “I thought you were never coming home,” he said. “I couldn't stand it. I thought I'd never see you again, and I didn't know what to do with myself.”

I smiled at him, turning so I could look him in the eye. The sun was setting over us, and seagulls swooped and squawked above the waves.

“But I did come home,” I said. “See? No shin splints necessary.”

“I'm glad,” he said, and I leaned against him, letting him support me, with the setting sun glowing in his hair and the warm sand cradling my feet, and my baby, my Joy, safe in my arms.

“So I guess the question is,” I began, in his car on the way home, “what do I do with my life now?”

He smiled at me quickly before turning his eyes back to the road. “I was actually thinking more along the lines of whether you wanted to stop for dinner.”

“Sure,” I said. Joy was asleep in her infant seat. We'd lost her pink ribbon somewhere, but I could see sand glittering on her bare feet. “So now that we've got that settled …”

“Do you want to go back to work?” he asked me.

I thought about it. “I think so,” I said. “Eventually. I miss it,” I said. Knowing, as soon as I said it, that it was the truth. “I don't think I've ever gone this long without writing something. God help me, I even miss my brides.”

“So what do you want to write?” he asked. “What do you want to write about?”

I considered the question.

“Newspaper articles?” he prompted. “Another screenplay? A book?”

“A book,” I scoffed. “As if!”

“It could happen,” he said.

“I don't think I've got a book in me,” I said.

“If you did,” he said seriously, “I'd devote all of my medical training to getting it out.”

I laughed. Joy woke up and made a questioning noise. I looked back and waved at her. She stared at me, then yawned and went back to sleep.

“Maybe not a book,” I said, “but I would like to write something about this.”

“Magazine article?” he suggested.

“Maybe,” I said.

“Good,” he said, sounding like it had been settled once and for all. “I can't wait to see it.”

The next morning, after I'd walked with Joy, had breakfast with Tanya, talked to Samantha on the phone, and made plans to see Peter the next night, I went down to the basement and fetched the dusty little Apple that had gotten me through four years of Princeton. I wasn't expecting much, but when I plugged it in, it chugged and bleeped and lit up obligingly. And even though the keyboard felt strange under my hands, I took a deep breath, wiped the dust from the screen, and started writing.

When I was five I learned to read. Books were a miracle to me—white pages, black ink, and new worlds and different friends in each one. To this day, I relish the feeling of cracking a binding for the first time, the anticipation of where I'll go and whom I'll meet inside.

When I was eight I learned to ride a bike. And this, too, opened my eyes to a new world that I could explore on my
own—the brook that burbled through a vacant lot two streets over, the ice-cream store that sold homemade cones for a dollar, the orchard that bordered a golf course and that smelled tangy, like cider, from the apples that rolled to the ground in the fall.

When I was twelve I learned that I was fat. My father told me, pointing at the insides of my thighs and the undersides of my arms with the handle of his tennis racquet. We'd been playing, I remember, and I was flushed and sweaty, glowing with the joy of movement. “You'll need to watch that,” he told me, poking me with the handle so that the extra flesh jiggled. Men don't like fat women.

And even though this would turn out not to be absolutely true—there would be men who would love me, and there would be people who'd respect me—I carried his words into my adulthood like a prophecy, viewing the world through the prism of my body, and my father's prediction.

I learned how to diet—and, of course, how to cheat on diets. I learned how to feel miserable and ashamed, how to cringe away from mirrors and men's glances, how to tense myself for the insults that I always thought were coming: the Girl Scout troop leader who'd offer me carrot sticks while the other girls got milk and cookies; the well-meaning teacher who'd ask if I'd thought about aerobics. I learned a dozen tricks for making myself invisible—how to keep a towel wrapped around my midsection at the beach (but never swim), how to fade to the back row of any group photograph (and never smile), how to dress in shades of gray, black, and brown, how to avoid seeing my own reflection in windows or in mirrors, how to think of myself exclusively as a body—more than that, as a body that had fallen short of the mark, that had become something horrifying, unlovely, unlovable.

There were a thousand words that could have described me—smart, funny, kind, generous. But the word I picked—
the word that I believed the world had picked for me—was
fat.

When I was twenty-two I went out into the world in a suit of invisible armor, fully expecting to be shot at, but determined that I wouldn't get shot down. I got a wonderful job, and eventually fell in love with a man I thought would love me for the rest of my life. He didn't. And then—by accident—I got pregnant. And when my daughter was born almost two months too soon, I learned that there are worse things than not liking your thighs or your butt. There are more terryifing things than trying on bathing suits in front of three-way department-store mirrors. There is the fear of watching your child struggling for breath, in the center of a glass crib where you can't touch her. There is the terror of imagining a future where she won't be healthy or strong.

And, ultimately, I learned, there is comfort. Comfort in reaching out to the people who love you, comfort in asking for help, and in realizing, finally, that I am valued, treasured, loved, even if I am never going to be smaller than a size sixteen, even if my story doesn't have the Hollywood-perfect happy ending where I lose sixty pounds and Prince Charming decides that he loves me after all.

The truth is this—I'm all right the way I am. I was all right, all along. I will never be thin, but I will be happy. I will love myself, and my body, for what it can do—because it is strong enough to lift, to walk, to ride a bicycle up a hill, to embrace the people I love and hold them fully, and to nurture a new life. I will love myself because I am sturdy. Because I did not—will not—break.

I will savor the taste of my food and I will savor my life, and if Prince Charming never shows up—or, worse yet, if he drives by, casts a cool and appraising glance at me, and tells me I've got a beautiful face and have I ever considered OPTIFAST?—I will make my peace with that.

And most importantly, I will love my daughter whether she's
big or little. I will tell her that she's beautiful. I will teach her to swim and read and ride a bike. And I will tell her that whether she's a size eight or a size eighteen, she can be happy, and strong, and secure that she will find friends, and success, and even love. I will whisper it in her ear when she's sleeping. I will say, “Our lives—your life—will be extraordinary.”

I read through it twice, cleaning up the punctuation, fixing the numerous typos. Then I stood up and stretched, placing my palms flat against the small of my back. I looked at my baby, who was beginning to resemble an actual infant of the human species, rather than some miniaturized, prickly fruit-human hybrid. And I looked at myself: hips, breasts, butt, belly, all of the problem areas I'd once despaired of, the body that had caused me such shame, and smiled. In spite of everything, I was going to be fine.

“We both are,” I said to Joy, who did not stir.

I called information, then dialed the number in New York. “Hello;
Moxie
,” said a chirpy subteen-sounding secretary. My voice didn't tremble even slightly when I asked for the managing editor.

“May I ask what this is in reference to?” the secretary singsonged.

“My name is Candace Shapiro,” I began. “I'm the ex-girlfriend of your ‘Good in Bed' columnist.”

I heard a sharp intake of breath on the other end of the line. “You're C.?” she gasped.

“Cannie,” I corrected.

“Ohmygod! You're, like, real!”

“Very much so,” I said. This was turning out to be very amusing.

“Did you have the baby?” asked the girl.

“I did,” I said. “She's right here, sleeping.”

“Oh. Oh, wow,” she said. “You know, we were wondering how that turned out.”

“Well, that's why I'm calling,” I said.

The good thing about naming ceremonies for Jewish baby girls is that they're not tied to a specific time. With a boy, you've got to do the bris within seven days. A girl, you can do it in six weeks, three months, whenever. It's a newer service, a little bit free-form, and the rabbis who do namings tend to be accommodating, New Age-ish types.

Joy's naming was on December 31, on a crisp, perfect winter morning in Philadelphia. Eleven o'clock in the morning, with brunch to follow.

My mother was among the first wave of arrivals. “Who's my big girl?” she cooed, lifting Joy from her crib. “Who's my bundle of joy?” Joy chuckled and waved her arms. My beautiful daughter, I thought, feeling my throat catch at the sight of her. She was almost eight months old, and still it felt like every time I saw her, she was a miracle.

And even strangers said she was a miraculously beautiful baby, with peachy skin, wide eyes, sturdy limbs pillowed with cushiony rolls of fat, and a wonderfully happy way about her. I'd named her perfectly. Unless she was hungry, or her diaper was wet, Joy was always smiling, always laughing, observing the world closely through her wide, watchful eyes. She was the happiest baby I knew.

My mother handed her over, then impulsively reached and hugged us both. “I am so proud of you,” she said.

I hugged her hard. “Thank you,” I whispered, wishing that I could tell her what I really wanted to, that I could thank her for loving me when I was a girl, and for letting me go now that I was a woman. “Thank you,” I said again. My mother gave me a final squeeze and kissed Joy on top of her head.

I filled Joy's white tub with warm water and gave her a bath. She cooed and clucked as I poured the water over her, washing her legs, her feet, her fingers, her sweet little baby behind. I rubbed on lotion, dusted her with powder, snapped her into a white knitted dress and put a white hat with roses embroidered around the edges on her head. “Baby,” I whispered in her ear, “baby Joy.” Joy waved her fists in the air like the world's tiniest triumphant athlete and gurgled a liquid string of syllables, like she was having a conversation in a language none of us had learned.

“Can you say ‘mama'?” I asked.

“Ahh!” Joy announced.

“Not even close,” I said.

“Oo,” she said, looking at me with her big, clear eyes, as if she understood every word.

Then I handed her off to Lucy and went to take my own shower, to do my hair and face, to practice the speech I'd been writing for days.

I could hear the doorbell chiming, the door opening and closing, people coming inside. The caterers had come first, and Peter had come second, with two boxes wrapped in silver paper and a bouquet of roses. “For you,” he'd said, and put the flowers in a vase. Then he took Nifkin for a walk and emptied the dishwasher while I finished getting things in order.

“What a sweetheart,” said one of the caterer's assistants. “I don't think my husband even knows where the dishwasher is.”

I smiled my thanks without bothering to correct her. It was all too confusing to explain to strangers … like telling them I'd gone through the day with all my clothes on backward. First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in a baby carriage. Even little kids knew how it was supposed to go. But what could I do? I reasoned.
What happened happened. I couldn't undo my history. And if it had given me Joy, there was no way I would want to.