Commencement (25 page)

Celia gasped.

“How dare you?” Sally said.

“What?” April looked truly befuddled. “You’re allowed to tell me that my whole career is stupid, but I can’t tell you what I honestly think about your boyfriend?”

“No,” Sally said. “You can’t do that, you idiot. And he’s not my boyfriend. He’s my husband.”

She got up from her chair. “Thanks for making my wedding so special, guys,” she said. “I can’t tell you how long I’ve been wanting us all to be together again.”

“Sal, don’t go. We love you,” Celia said.

She looked at the others for support, but she could see that wedding or not, they had no interest in making up.

They walked back to the hotel in silence.

They had had fights before, plenty of them. Theirs was not an easy friendship or a guiltless one. They had high expectations of one another and were sometimes disappointed. But in the past, they could never stay mad for long.

That night in the dining hall was different. Instead of one feeling hurt by another and venting to the remaining two, this time they had all been wounded.

Celia stayed up until morning, rolling over the things the others had said, as April snored away in the bed beside her.

She kept thinking about mothers—Sally’s mother, dead and gone. Bree’s mother, once a dear friend to her and now a virtual stranger. April’s mother, that sad, selfish type, who defied what the rest of them knew. And Celia’s own mother, whom she loved, worshipped, missed every day, even though they talked on the phone most mornings before work. She was so lucky, she thought, to have
a mother in her life now, just as she always had. This separated her from the others. She remembered the night she told her mother she’d been raped. Celia was two years out of college then, and it was Thanksgiving. They were drinking gin and tonics in the kitchen after all the relatives had left, picking stuffing out of a bowl, and her mother was telling her about a teenager from the parish who had been attacked at gunpoint by two grown men in the high school parking lot late one night. She had done everything they said, but they slit her throat anyway, and now she was in critical condition at Mass General.

“They forced her to have sex,” her mother said, with tears in her eyes. “Oh Celia, can you imagine? The poor girl was just a baby. All of us in the Legion of Mary have been praying for her every day, and we’ll keep praying every day until she goes home.”

Celia never thought that she would tell her parents what had happened to her at Dartmouth, but the visions came flying back at her then, just as they did when anyone mentioned rape, or sometimes when she tried to have sex—the blue condom, Rob Johann’s dark skin against her pale arms, the heaviness of his body on hers.

She whispered, “I was raped. Back in college.”

Her mother pulled Celia toward her and wrapped her arms around her.

“What happened?” she said.

Celia told her everything. Her mother held her close and listened without saying a word.

“Don’t tell Daddy,” Celia said when she was done. “I think it would kill him.”

Soon after, her sister, Violet, swayed into the room, not yet twenty-one and drunk on Merlot. The conversation came to a halt, but later that night, Celia’s mother crept into her bed and said, “What can I do, baby? What can I do?”

For so many reasons, none of the others could know their mothers as adults, with honesty. And so, Celia thought, they were searching, always, for something to take the place of that bond. At Smith, they had all tried to mother one another. But what had once seemed like genuine care and concern had now turned ugly—they could not stop judging, comparing.

Of course, this was true of all women, mothers and daughters, too. What daughter didn’t hold her mother up as a measurement of all she hoped to be, or all she feared? What mother could look at her young daughter without a bit of longing for her own youth, her lost freedom?

Once, in the car with her mother when she was just nine or ten, Celia had asked, not unkindly, “Mom, when I grow up, will I have fat thighs like you?”

Her mother had a shocked look.

“Probably,” she said at last.

They laughed looking back on it now, but Celia thought it was a telling moment: A kid who thinks her mother is just that—
hers
. A mother who is also a woman, an independent being, who doesn’t want to be reminded by anyone, child or otherwise, of her tree-trunk thighs.

The world made women’s private lives a public affair to people who knew them and even people who didn’t. Back in New York, acquaintances would ask, “So, do you have a boyfriend?” On the rare occasion that the answer was yes, they would immediately demand to know: “When are you getting married?”

If it weren’t for the feeling that everyone was watching, pitying, judging, would she even care that Sally was getting married while she herself was still single?

The next day, for Sally’s sake, they posed for pictures, ate cake, danced in the rain, and gathered in the hotel lobby for a champagne toast and a storm of kisses before sending her off on her honeymoon. But they were smarting from the night before. Their goodbyes were strained and, for the first time ever, not altogether unwelcome.

On the bus back to New York, Celia thought of how, during her junior year at Smith, she had taken a master class in fiction writing with the famed novelist Harold Lance. The whole thing was rather ridiculous. Lance’s career had peaked in the sixties, and he made no secret of the fact that he was only teaching because he needed the money: His latest book had flopped, he said, and recently, after
one too many scotches, he had left a cigarette burning in his family’s farmhouse in Sturbridge, which had sent the two-hundred-year-old building toppling to the ground.

His presence was met with much fanfare anyway. Caterers set up trays of cookies and tea sandwiches at the blackboard. A reporter from
The Boston Globe
came to sit in. The college president even stopped by to tell the class how very honored they all should feel to be studying with a living legend.

Five years later, it was still the sort of ultra-Smith experience that Celia would mention when she wanted to impress a cute former English major over drinks.

“God, Harold Lance changed my life,” he would inevitably say, and Celia would just smile, because she had never really liked his work—it was too masculine, too painstakingly
male
, the female characters merely victims or martyrs or whores.

There was, however, one vital thing Celia had learned from Harold Lance, something that helped her frame a story whenever she sat down to write:
Any good drama or tragedy is like a ball of yarn, made up of so many strands piled one upon another
, he had said.
You should be able to unwind the ball, to see every bit, right down to the start
.

Later, Celia would think back on Sally’s wedding weekend as the start and wish it had all been different. If only they could have changed the beginning, she thought, maybe what happened next would never have come to pass.

S
ally usually went for a run during her lunch break, but lately every time she broke a sweat she felt exhausted and her head ached. So instead she had taken to sitting at her desk with her boss’s copy of
The Boston Globe
and reading it over salad and iced tea. The world was an absolute mess, and reading about it made her think of April, out there fighting for change, so genuinely concerned about making women’s lives better—women most people didn’t give a fig about, women April herself didn’t even know. Sally regretted what she had said to April at the wedding, but every time she thought of calling her, she remembered what April had said about Jake and was once again filled with anger. She could not believe that in the year since her wedding, April still hadn’t apologized, that she had never so much as called to see how the honeymoon went.

It was the Tuesday after Memorial Day, and Sally was worn out from the weekend. They had spent it with Jake’s family on the Cape, sailing and swimming and drinking sangria out on the porch. Each evening she had hoped that they might sneak off to her father’s place in Chatham, which she knew would be empty, but Jake was caught up in watching golf on TV with his uncles, or listening to them tell their same old stories, which Sally had heard ten times over, and she imagined Jake had heard hundreds of times. It didn’t seem to matter. He laughed like a madman all the same.

While Jake and his dad and uncles sat around, Rosemary and
her sisters gossiped in the kitchen as they made a steady stream of food—onion dip, Swedish meatballs, bacon-wrapped scallops, boxed brownies, and ice cream. It shocked Sally how the women in Jake’s family served the men. Jake’s sister attended grad school out in Colorado, and Sally wondered if she would have joined in if she were around. She realized now that her own mother had been the same way, though Sally had hardly noticed it back then.

She couldn’t win. If she went and sat on the couch with Jake, she would look like a moping princess to his mother. If she stayed in the kitchen and listened to one more story about the best lobster roll Jake’s grandmother ever ate, she predicted she might go outside and drown herself in the Atlantic. Sally settled for volleying back and forth, shuttling the trays of hot food out to the guys, drinking too much wine, and lingering longer than she needed to in the TV room.

Sunday night she drank six glasses of Rosemary’s homemade sangria. On the drive back home the next day, Jake had to pull over four times so she could vomit out the car window. She hadn’t been feeling right for a while. At first, she thought she was just sick and exhausted because she had her period. But then days passed, without any change.

“Do you think you might be pregnant?” Jake said, sounding a little too hopeful at the prospect.

“No,” Sally said. “I haven’t skipped a single pill since my first year of college.”

She didn’t want him to know how terrified she felt. She thought of her mother, misdiagnosed by a doctor she trusted with her life. Bad headaches could mean anything—dehydration or impending blindness, stress or a brain tumor. Sally had gone to the doctor the previous week for blood work and gotten into a fight with Jake in the car afterward, when she asked him whether he thought she ought to call her father and tell him she was sick.

“You know, just in case the results are bad. Maybe I should prepare him,” she said.

“I’m sure it’s nothing,” Jake said. “Don’t worry. You’re going to be fine.”

“You’re not a doctor, honey,” she said.

“Well, I know you, and I know you’re okay.”

Sally sighed. In her own personal religion—a mix of Episcopalian and superstition—telling a sick person that she was just fine was akin to wishing death on her. Right when you decided not to worry,
right then
, was when everything would unravel. It was far more sensible not to taunt fate and to always always expect the worst.

The lab stood empty today; really, the entire Harvard campus was like a ghost town. Her boss had taken the whole week off, Jill had gone to Ogunquit with her sorority sisters, and the student interns had gone home for the summer. This meant that Sally alone was there to do the day-to-day lab work: running western blots, making solutions for cell cultures, rinsing old glassware and ordering more. But it also meant she was free to read the paper with her feet up on the desk and
The Immaculate Collection
in the CD player. Sally opened the paper, scanning page one as she took a bite of her salad. She always wanted to skip right to the “Living/Arts” section, but forced herself to read the real stuff first. The front page was nothing but bad news:
Twelve GIs killed by Roadside Bomb Outside Baghdad; As Deadly As Ever, Avian Flu Proves a Persistent Foe; Worn Crosswalks Lead to Deaths
.