Jennifer Weiner - Certain Girls

T his book would not have been possible without the hard work and stewardship of my agent, Joanna Pulcini. I am grateful, as ever, for her unflagging enthusiasm, painstaking attention to detail, and for her inadvertently hilarious failure to get the dirty jokes or X-rated references in any of my books.

My editor, Greer Hendricks, is, as ever, worth a price above rubies for her patience, kindness, and good humor.

I'm grateful to Joanna's assistants, Elizabeth Carter and Trinh Truong, and to Greer's assistant, Sarah Walsh, for their attention to detail, and to Suzanne O'Neill and Nancy Inglis for their careful work on the manuscript. I'm also lucky to have found an assistant as fabulous, indefatigable, and good-hearted as Meghan Burnett.

Judith Curr at Atria and Carolyn Reidy at Simon & Schuster have always taken the best care of me and of Cannie, as have all of the people at Atria: Gary Urda, Lisa Keim, Kathleen Schmidt, Christine Duplessis, Craig Dean, and Jeanne Lee.

I'm grateful to Jessica Fee and her team at Greater Talent Network, and to Marcy Engelman, Dana Gidney, and Jordana Tal, my NYC PR miracle workers.

Curtis Sittenfeld was a perceptive and generous reader.

In researching this book, I was lucky enough to be invited to the bar mitzvah of Charlie Sucher and the bat mitzvahs of Samantha Wladis in Cherry Hill and Abby Kalen in Simsbury, Connecticut, where absolutely NOTHING untoward happened. I thank Charlie, Samantha, and Abby and their parents, friends, and families for being so gracious and welcoming.

My friends and family, far and wide, are still supplying me with love, support, and material. Jake and Joe Weiner are not only my brothers, they do an excellent job with my business on the coast. Molly Weiner is a constant source of inspiration and fun. I'm grateful to Faye Frumin, Frances Frumin Weiner, and Clair Kaplan, for all of their help and encouragement, for laughing with me and, occasionally, being willing for me to laugh at them.

Finally, on the home front, Wendell is still the king of all dogs. My husband, Adam, is still my traveling companion and the person I'd most like to watch The Big Lebowski with. My daughter Lucy Jane is the light of my life, and her new little sister Phoebe Pearl demonstrated unflagging courtesy by keeping the kicks and rolls to a minimum while I wrote this book. My love and thanks to all of them...and to all of the readers who've come with me this far.

W hen I was a kid, our small-town paper published wedding announcements, with descriptions of the ceremonies and dresses and pictures of the brides. Two of the disc jockeys at one of the local radio stations would spend Monday morning picking through the photographs and nominating the Bow-Wow Bride, the woman they deemed the ugliest of all the ladies who'd taken their vows in the Philadelphia region over the weekend. The grand prize was a case of Alpo.

I heard the disc jockeys doing this on my way to school one morning--"Uh-oh, bottom of page J-6, and yes... yes, I think we have a contender!" Jockey One said, and his companion snickered and replied, "There's not a veil big enough to hide that mess." "Wide bride! Wide bride!" Jockey One chanted before my mother changed the station back to NPR with an angry flick of her wrist. After that, I became more than a little obsessed with the contest. I would pore over the black-and-white head shots each Sunday morning as if I'd be quizzed on them later. Was the one in the middle ugly? Worse than the one in the upper-right-hand corner? Were the blondes always prettier than the brunettes? Did being fat automatically mean you were ugly? I'd rate the pictures and fume about how unfair it was, how just being born with a certain face or body could turn you into a punch line. Then I'd worry for the winner. Was the dog food actually delivered to the couple's door? Would they return from the honeymoon and find it there, or would a well-meaning parent or friend try to hide it? How would the bride feel when she saw that she'd won? How would her husband feel, knowing that he'd chosen the ugliest girl in Philadelphia on any given weekend, to love and to cherish, until death did them part?

I wasn't sure of much back then, but I knew that when--if--I got married, there was no way I'd put a picture in the paper. I was pretty certain, at thirteen, that I had more in common with the bow-wows than the beautiful brides, and I was positive that the worst thing that could happen to any woman would be winning that contest.

Now, of course, I know better. The worst thing would not be a couple of superannuated pranksters on a ratings-challenged radio station oinking at your picture and depositing dog food at your door. The worst thing would be if they did it to your daughter.

I'm exaggerating, of course. And I'm not really worried. I looked across the room at the dance floor, just beginning to get crowded as the b'nai mitzvah guests dropped off their coats, feeling my heart lift at the sight of my daughter, my beautiful girl, dancing the hora in a circle of her friends. Joy will turn thirteen in May and is, in my own modest and completely unbiased opinion, the loveliest girl ever born. She inherited the best things I had to offer--my olive skin, which stays tan from early spring straight through December, and my green eyes. Then she got my ex-boyfriend's good looks: his straight nose and full lips, his dirty-blond hair, which, on Joy, came out as ringlets the deep gold of clover honey. My chest plus Bruce's skinny hips and lean legs combined to create the kind of body I always figured was available only thanks to divine or surgical intervention.

I walked to one of the three bars set along the edges of the room and ordered a vodka and cranberry juice from the bartender, a handsome young man looking miserable in a ruffled pale blue polyester tuxedo shirt and bell-bottoms. At least he didn't look as tormented as the waitress beside him, in a mermaid costume, with seashells and fake kelp in her hair. Todd had wanted a retro seventies theme for the party celebrating his entry into Jewish adulthood. His twin sister, Tamsin, an aspiring marine biologist, hadn't wanted a theme at all and had grudgingly muttered the word "ocean" the eleventh time her mother had asked her. In between pre-party visits to Dr. Hammermesh to have her breasts enlarged, her thighs reduced, and the millimeters of excess flesh beneath her eyes eliminated, Shari Marmer, the twins' mom, had come up with a compromise. On this icy night in January, Shari and her husband, Scott, were hosting three hundred of their nearest and dearest at the National Constitution Center to celebrate at Studio 54 Under the Sea.

I passed beneath a doorway draped with fake seaweed and strands of dark blue beads and wandered toward the table at the room's entrance. My place card had my name stenciled in elaborate script on the back of a scallop shell. Said shell contained a T&T medallion, for Tamsin and Todd. I squinted at the shell and learned that my husband, Peter, and I would be sitting at Donna Summer. Joy hadn't picked up her shell yet. I peered at the whirling mass of coltish girls until I saw Joy in her knee-length dark blue dress, performing some kind of complicated line dance, hands clapping, hips rocking. As I watched, a boy detached himself from a cluster of his friends, crossed the room with his hands shoved in his pockets, and said something to my daughter. Joy nodded and let him take her hand as he led her underneath the strobe that cast cool bubbles of bluish light.

My Joy, I thought as the boy shifted his weight from foot to foot, looking like he was in desperate need of the bathroom. It isn't politically correct to say so, but in the real world, good looks function as a get-out-of-everything-free card. Beauty clears your path, it smooths the way, it holds the doors open, it makes people forgive you when your homework's late or you bring the car home with the gas gauge on E. Joy's adolescence would be so much easier than mine. Except...except. On her last report card, she'd gotten one A, two B's, and two C's instead of her usual A's and B's (and worlds away from the straight A's I'd gotten when I was her age and had more brains than friends). "She just doesn't seem as engaged, as present," her teacher had said when Peter and I had gone in for our parent-teacher conference. "Is there anything unusual going on at home?"