Commencement (26 page)

She sighed. Jake always talked about the importance of keeping up on current events, but she had started to think that the whole endeavor was overrated. She was about to turn the page, when a small teaser at the bottom caught her eye:
Noted Smith College Professor Dies at 61
.

She flipped to the obituaries, curious. There, on the front page of the section, was a picture of Bill, looking handsome and young. She recognized it as the jacket photo from his first volume of poems.

Sally had to read it twice before she could be sure of what she had seen. Bill was dead. Her Bill. She reached for the phone to call Celia, pressing the receiver to her ear. There was no dial tone.

“Hello?” a man’s voice said. “Hello?”

“Hello?” Sally said, confused. Ridiculously, she wondered if it might be Bill, calling to say that he wasn’t really dead, that it was all part of some elaborate plan for them to be together again.

“Is this Sally Brown?” the man asked.

“Yes,” she said. “Who is this?”

“This is Dr. Phillips from Beth Israel.”

“Oh, Dr. Phillips, I’m so sorry. I’ve just gotten some bad news and the phone didn’t even ring, and—”

He interrupted her, sounding rushed. “Sally, I’m going to need you to come into the office this afternoon,” he said.

She felt a weight drop into her stomach. Suddenly everything came into focus. This was exactly how it had gone with her mother. First the doctor called instead of some receptionist, then he told her to come to the office to hear her results, then the death sentence—cancer.

Sally couldn’t breathe. “Am I going to die?” she said quickly.

“Oh God no, Sally, but we have some test results here that I’d like to discuss with you,” said Dr. Phillips, in a warm, soothing voice. He knew all about her mother, and he wanted to make this news as easy as possible for her, she thought.

She started to cry. Her whole body shook.

“Is it cancer?” she asked softly.

“No. Absolutely not. Sally, just come by. How’s four o’clock? I’ll have Bridget put you into the computer.”

Four o’clock was three hours away.

“Please,” she said. “I’ll come in no matter what, but you have to tell me what’s wrong.”

Her crying turned into a steady sob.

He sighed.

“All right. I wouldn’t normally do this,” he said. “And I still want to see you at four. But you’re perfectly healthy. Stop crying! Sally, you’re not sick. You’re about three months pregnant.”

She felt like she had been shoved hard from behind. The thought had crossed her mind, of course, but she had ruled it out.

“I’m on the Pill,” she said. “And I’ve gotten my period.”

“It may have just been spotting,” he said. “That’s fairly common. As for the Pill, have you skipped any nights?”

“No,” she said. “Absolutely not.”

The doctor chuckled. “Well, I guess this little girl or guy just felt like being born.”

Sally clenched her jaw. Now she wanted to shove him.

As soon as she saw Jake that night, she started to cry.

“Honey!” he said, laughing and wiping the tears from her cheeks. “Why are you crying? This is cause for celebration.”

“I can’t have a baby,” she said. “I just graduated from college for God’s sakes.”

“Sal, you graduated five years ago,” he said.

She calculated this in her head, alarmed as ever by how quickly time had passed.

“But still,” she said. “This wasn’t supposed to happen now. This wasn’t the plan.”

Jake pulled her toward him. “Screw the plan. This is going to be the greatest thing ever. You’ll see.”

“How are you so calm, baby?” she said, feeling slightly annoyed.

She had fallen in love with him partly because he always stayed composed and controlled while she was flipping out. But sometimes
his calmness just made her feel crazier. When she had been with Bill, she had always been the sane one. Bill. Her heart felt like it dropped two feet. Bill was dead. She wanted to say something, but it didn’t seem like the right time to tell Jake.

“How else am I going to be?” Jake said. “I know we weren’t expecting this right this minute, but we’ll figure it out. I was an accident, and look how much my mother loves me.”

Sally sniffled, smiling in spite of herself. “You were not,” she said.

“Sure was,” he said. “Rosemary told me once when she was a little tipsy. One too many Nantucket Reds at brunch.”

“What did she say?” Sally said.

“She said, ‘Ellen was planned to the minute. Jakie was a pleasant surprise.’”

Sally couldn’t help but laugh.

Jake leaned down, lifted up her shirt, and kissed her stomach. “If it’s a girl, I think we should name her Eleanor after your mom,” he said softly, and Sally began to cry again, but this time because she had married such a sweet, sweet man, and she felt more grateful for that than anything.

She was supposed to attend a NOW board meeting after dinner, but Sally decided she’d have to cancel. What was she going to tell those women? She had been saying for years that eventually she was going to go to med school. As time passed, it seemed less and less likely, and was less of what she wanted anyway. But the women at NOW always looked so pleased and proud when she said it. Most of them were about the age her mother would have been, and they had fought long and hard so that her generation could do whatever they wanted. What would they think about this? A bright twenty-six-year-old who just happened to be married was one thing, but pregnant? Suddenly it seemed like dozens of doors were slamming in her face, doors she hadn’t even cared about until today. She would never be able to backpack across Europe, not that she really wanted to anyway. She would probably never become a doctor.

Later that night, she called Celia to tell her the news. She was the
only one of the girls who had tried to make amends after Sally’s wedding, sending a handwritten note of apology that Sally had saved in a box full of Smith keepsakes in the linen closet. As the phone rang, she put her hand over her belly and felt for a kick. She knew it was still way too early for that, but she wished she could see some sort of sign besides a pink line on a pee-soaked stick. (Between hanging up with the doctor and going to his office three hours later, she had done four home tests in the bathroom at work, all positive.)

“I have big news,” she said when Celia answered. “Huge news, in fact.”

“Huge like you got a new outfit on sale at Banana, or huge like your whole freaking world just got turned upside down?” Celia said.

“The latter,” Sally said. “I’m pregnant.”

There was a long pause before Celia spoke again, and Sally tried to picture the facial expression she was making. She imagined Celia standing in front of the mirror in her apartment, mouth open wide, in a sort of
oh shit
pantomime.

“Okay, Sal, don’t take this the wrong way,” Celia said. “But is this good news or bad news?”

Sally exhaled. “Oh thank you for saying that, sweetpea. I have absolutely no clue. Good news, I guess. Jake seems happy.”

“What about you? Were you trying to get pregnant?” Celia asked.

“God no,” Sally said. “We just got married a year ago! I’m only twenty-six! And I’m on the Pill. I don’t know how the hell this could have happened.”

“Well, what are you going to do?” Celia asked.

“What do you mean?” Sally said, and then realizing what Celia meant, she blurted out, “Oh God, I’m keeping it—I hadn’t even thought.”

“Sorry,” Celia said. “I don’t mean to be unsupportive. If this is what you want, you’ve got an auntie here, ready and waiting. It’s just that you sound scared.”

“I’m terrified,” Sally said.

Suddenly she remembered why the Smithies were her best friends. She knew that in the days to come, she would tell dozens of
people that she was having a baby (Jesus Christ, a baby) and that every one of them would coo and ooh with delight, because she was married, and when married women got pregnant it was cause for cooing and oohing. But only the Smithies would have the guts to make sure she was really happy. The girls were the place she could go and always find herself.

Suddenly, Sally remembered. “Bill died,” she said. “Oh my God, with all the craziness of this day, I almost forgot.”

“What?!” Celia gasped. “Jesus, Sal, first you tell me you’re pregnant and now this? Are you just conducting an experiment to see how quickly I can go into shock?”

Sally laughed. “It’s true. What a day, huh?”

After they hung up, she closed the bedroom door and decided to call April. She tried twice, but April’s cell phone went straight to voice mail. Sally didn’t leave a message.

Since her wedding, she had wondered if she would ever speak to Bree or April again. That night in the King House dining hall had driven home the realization that perhaps they had all grown so far apart that their friendships no longer existed, simple as that. It felt strange, like leaving a lover whom you had shared everything with. It was an active falling away, not accidental or situational like the end of most friendships. Even if they saw each other on the street years later or caught one another’s eye across the room at a party, they might just look away as if the moment had never passed.

But now Sally realized that she couldn’t leave it like that, especially with April. She needed her friends too much to let them slip away. Sally knew they could mend things if they tried.

That night, she dreamed of April. In Sally’s dream, the two of them coasted dangerously down a mountainside in Capri (she and Jake had been there once, and ever since she often dreamed of the island’s gorgeous villas and lush lemon trees) in a tiny car, with no doors, and Sally told April that they had to jump out or they would crash. But April refused. She wanted to see the fish at the bottom of the ocean, and she said this car could take her there. Sally didn’t want to leave her, but at the very last moment, she jumped. Then she watched the car, falling down down down through the air and into the sea. April waved from beneath the water, and beside her
Bill floated along, waving also, looking young—dark haired and bearded just like in the picture that accompanied his obituary.

Sally called April before work the next day and then again on her lunch break. Both times she got a recording, and when she tried to leave a message, a mechanical voice told her that April’s mailbox was full.

L
ara had been wanting them to have dinner at her boss’s house all summer, but Bree kept coming up with reasons why she couldn’t make it. She knew they were hanging by a thread these days, and that an evening with Nora and Roseanna could lead to the kind of fight that might do them in completely. But in July there came a Sunday night when nothing else was going on—no soccer games or late meetings or season finales on TV. Bree had no choice but to go.

Nora ran an after-school program for low-income kids, where Lara was the program director. Her partner Roseanna had made tons of money in Silicon Valley in her twenties and gotten out just in time. She now stayed at home with their six-year-old son, Dylan, who was currently enrolled in a summer day camp for tap dancing.

They lived in a ridiculous house in the suburbs—seven bedrooms and four baths, with a flagstone patio and a swimming pool out back, lined with a huge fresco of a lounging naked woman. They hung the rainbow flag from a pole in the front yard and drove matching hers-and-hers Priuses.

It was July, and lilacs bloomed in the back garden. The smell reminded Bree of her mother.

Over dinner, when Lara asked Dylan what he wanted to be when he grew up, Dylan looked thoughtful. “A fireperson,” he said. “Or an astronaut, or an aesthetician or a doctor.”

Fireperson?
Bree thought.
Aesthetician?
Jesus. When her little brothers were six they had wanted to be dinosaurs.

“Why not all four?” Lara asked.

“Nooo!” he said, dissolving into giggles.

“No? Why not?” Lara asked.

“When would I sleep?” Dylan slapped his palm against his forehead, making the rest of them laugh.

After coffee and dessert, they brought their glasses of wine into the playroom while Dylan prepared to put on a show for them. Bree glanced around at his toys—a Barbie Dream House and matching pink minivan, a kitchen set with a pretend dishwasher, and a dress-up corner.

“It’s really important to us that he be exposed to gender-neutral toys,” Roseanna said.

Nora patted her knee. “Someday his future wife will thank us for raising a man who washes the dishes and knows how to cook a soufflé—a plastic soufflé, at least.”

“I think that’s great,” Lara said. “Don’t you think so, B.?”

“Huh?” Bree was pretending to be intrigued by an Angelina Ballerina book, and just then Dylan saved her from having to answer by jumping out from behind the door in a spangled purple cape. “The show’s starting!” he said. “Mama, present me to the audience!”

On the train back to San Francisco, Bree gazed out the window, thinking about the night they’d just spent. She suddenly sputtered with laughter.

Lara looked up from her book. “What’s funny?” she asked, brushing a strand of hair out of Bree’s face.

“I was just thinking about Nora and Roseanna. They’re such über-Smithies and they didn’t even go to Smith. San Francisco really is Northampton West, isn’t it?”