Jenna leaned in to deliver the coup de grace. “We heard,” she said, “that she’s only twenty-seven.”
Well. So that would explain the gossip. Hallie and Jenna stared at me, and my debate-team friends stared at them staring. I felt like I’d been suddenly thrust onstage, and I didn’t know my lines, or even what I was supposed to be performing.
“So is it true?” Hallie asked impatiently.
“It’s no big deal,” said Jenna, evidently hoping to get me to spill via sympathy. “My parents are divorced.”
Divorced, I thought, tasting the word. Was this really what was happening? Would my Dad do this to us?
I lifted my eyes to the popular girls. “Go away,” I told them. I heard one of my debate friends gasp. Nobody talked to Jenna and Hallie that way. “Leave me alone. Go away!”
Jenna rolled her eyes. Hallie shoved her seat back. “You’re a big fat loser,” she opined, before scurrying back to the popular kids’ tables, where everyone’s shirts had little alligators, and all the girls ever had for lunch was Diet Coke.
I walked home slowly and found my mother in the kitchen, with about ten half-unpacked bags of groceries arrayed on the counters and dining room table. “Is Dad living with someone else?” I blurted. She shoved three packages of chicken breasts into the freezer and sighed, her hands on her hips.
“I didn’t want you to find out like this,” she murmured. “Hallie Cinti told me,” I said.
My mother sighed again.
“But she doesn’t know anything,” I said, hoping my mother would agree.
Instead she sat at the kitchen table and motioned for me to join her. “Mrs. Cinti works at the same hospital as your Dad,” she said.
So it was true.
“You can tell me things. I’m not a little kid.” But at that moment, I wished that I was a little kid – the kind whose parents still read to her in bed and held her hands when she crossed the streets.
My mother sighed. “I think this might be for your father to tell you.”
But that conversation never happened, and two nights later, my father had moved back. Josh and Lucy and I stood in the backyard and watched him pull the suitcase out of the trunk of his little red sports car. Lucy was crying, and Josh was trying not to. My father never even looked at us as he crossed the gravel driveway, the heels of his boots crunching with each step.
“Cannie?” Lucy sniffled. “If he’s back now, that’s good, isn’t it? He won’t leave anymore, right?”
I stared at the door, watching it slowly close behind him. “I don’t know,” I said. I needed answers. My father was unapproachable, my mother was no help. “Don’t worry,” she scolded me. Her own face was etched with lines of sleeplessness. “Everything’s going to be fine, honey.” This from my mother, who never called me honey. As much as I dreaded it, I would have to go right to the source.
I found Hallie Cinti in the girls’ room the next Monday afternoon. She was standing at the mirror, squinted as she reapplied Bonnie Belle lip gloss. I cleared my throat. She ignored me. I tapped her on her shoulder and she turned to face me, her lips pursed in distaste.
“What?” she spat.
I cleared my throat as she glared at me. “Um… that thing… about my father,” I began.
Hallie rolled her eyes and pulled a pink plastic comb out of her purse.
“He moved back,” I said.
“How swell for you,” said Hallie, now combing her bangs.
“I thought maybe you might have heard why. From your mom.”
“Why should I tell you anything?” she sneered.
I’d spent the whole weekend planning for this contingency. What could I, plump and unpopular Cannie Shapiro, offer sleek, beautiful Hallie? I pulled two items out of my backpack. The first was a five-page paper on light and dark imagery in Romeo and Juliet. The other was a fifth of vodka that I’d swiped from my parents’ liquor cabinet that morning. Hallie and her crew might not have been as academically advanced as I was, but they made up for it in other fields of endeavor.
Hallie snatched the bottle out of my hands, checked to see that the seal was unbroken, then reached for the paper. I yanked it back.
“First, tell me.”
She gave a little shrug, slipped the bottle into her purse, and turned back toward the mirror. “I heard my mother talking on the phone. She said that his dental friend told him that she wanted children,” she said. “And I guess your father doesn’t want any more. And looking at you,” she continued, “I can understand why.” She turned to me, smirking, extending her hand for the paper.
I threw it at her. “Just copy it over in your own handwriting. I put in some spelling mistakes, so they’ll know it’s you, not me.”
Hallie took the paper and I went back to class. No more children. Well, the way he treated us, that made sense.
He stayed with us for almost six years after that, but he wasn’t the same. The little moments of kindness and love, the nights he’d read to us in bed, the Saturday afternoon ice- cream cones and the Sunday afternoon drives, were gone. It was as if my father had fallen asleep, alone, on a bus or a train, and woken up twenty years later, surrounded by strangers: my mother, my sister, my brother, and me, all wanting things – help with the dishes, a ride to band practice, $10 for the movies, his approval, his attention, his love. He looked out at us, mild brown eyes swimming with confusion, then hardening with anger. Who are these people? he seemed to be wondering. How long will I have to travel beside them? And why do they think I owe them anything?
He went from being loving, in an absent-minded, occasional way, to being mean. Was it because I knew his secret – that he didn’t want more children, that he’d probably never wanted us? Was it that he missed the other woman, that she was his one true love, forever denied to him? I thought that was some of it. But there were other things, too.
My father was – is, I suppose – a plastic surgeon. He started off in the Army, working with burn victims, wounded soldiers, men who’d come back from the war with their skin pink and puckery from chemicals, or lumpy and disfigured from shrapnel.
But he discovered his true genius after we moved to Pennsylvania. There, the bulk of his practice involved not soldiers but society ladies, women whose only wounds were invisible and who were willing to drop thousands of dollars on a discreet, skilled surgeon who’d make their bellies tight, their eyelids less droopy, who’d eliminate saddlebags and double chins with a few deft strokes of the scalpel.
He was successful. By the time he left us for the first time Larry Shapiro was known as the man to see in the greater Philadelphia area for tummy tucks, chin lifts, nose jobs, boob jobs. We had the requisite big house, the curved driveway, the in-ground swimming pool with hot tub in the back. My father drove a Porsche (although, thankfully, my mother was able to talk him out of the NOSEDOC vanity plates). My mom drove an Audi. We had a maid clean twice a week; my parents threw catered dinner parties every other month, and we went on vacations to Colorado (for skiing) and Florida (for sun).
And then he left, and came back, and our lives fell apart, like a well- loved book that you’d read and read again, until one night you picked it up to read yourself to sleep and the binding collapsed, sending dozens of pages spiraling toward the floor. He didn’t want this life. That much was clear. He was miserable tethered to this suburb, to the never-ending schedule of soccer games and spelling bees and
