Commencement (39 page)

“When this all started, way back when you were home with your mom, Nora and I had this long talk one night. She said she and Roseanna went through something really similar years ago. She said the best thing for both of us was for me to cut off all ties.”

“Why would that be good for me?” Bree said. She had started to cry, realizing all at once how much she had missed this.

“Good for you because we both know how I feel, but you still needed to figure out your own feelings, without any help from me,” Lara said.

Bree swallowed. Had she figured anything out? Was she wrong to have come?

Lara got dressed, and they took the train back into the city, holding hands and catching up the entire way, confessing to each other like little girls: Roseanna had set Lara up on a date with a woman who looked just like Bree, in the hopes of helping her move on, but Lara just wanted to cry each time she looked at her. Bree talked about how her mother had wanted her to get back together with her married high school boyfriend. Lara laughed, the entire ugly story underneath going unspoken, at least for now. They spent the day together curled up on the couch and went for a long dinner at a new Thai restaurant in the Trocadero.

It wasn’t until late that night, when they were lying naked in their old familiar bed, that Lara said, “What happens now?”

“I’m flying back to New York in the morning,” Bree whispered.

“Do you have to?” Lara said. She sounded stricken, and Bree thought of Nora’s words to her earlier that day:
Don’t do this to her if you’re not sure
.

“I want you to come home,” Lara said. “I want us both to come home.”

“I think I need some time to sort this out,” Bree said finally. “Yesterday I didn’t know if I would ever even see you again.”

“Well, here I am,” Lara said, not unkindly. “I’m here now, Bree.”

A
s usual, Sally was awakened by Jake singing in the shower. It was only the first week of November, but already he was singing Christmas carols with operatic gusto.

“We
wish
you a merry Christmas! We
wish
you a merry Christmas! We
wish
you a merry Christmas, and a happy New Year!”

His voice echoed through the master bath and into their bedroom, where Sally lay on her back in bed, with a pillow over her face.

“Honey!” she called, laughing. “I’m begging you to stop.”

He went on, launching into the midpoint of “Jingle Bells”: “Dashing through the snow, in a one horse open sleigh, o’er the fields we go, laughing all the way—ha! ha! ha!”

Sally groaned, but she couldn’t help but smile. How on earth had she managed to attract a man who loved life and never seemed to worry? A man who started each day off with glee, as if he were a kindergartener on his way to the poster-paints table rather than a banker and a husband and a soon-to-be-father.

Early on in their dating life, when it had seemed like Jake might just be another one in a long line of men they talked about and nicknamed and then forgot, Celia had said he sounded like a golden retriever—always happy, friendly to everyone. Cee had meant it as a joke, but Sally thought it was actually a fairly apt description. She hoped she never forced that purity out of him.

Sally still had fifteen minutes left before her alarm went off, but she rolled out of bed and got to her feet—no small task, as her belly seemed roughly the size of a three-year-old child. She padded downstairs and started the coffee. Jake was drinking decaf with her in solidarity these days.

Sally opened the fridge and considered making him a big breakfast—eggs and bacon and toast and orange juice. But a second later, she felt exhausted from the mere thought of it, and unwrapped two of his Pop-Tarts instead.

When he came into the kitchen and saw what she’d done, Jake beamed. “You made me Pop-Tarts!” he said. “Thank you, baby.”

This made Sally wish she had gone for the big breakfast. It was so easy to make Jake happy. Too easy. Sometimes she wanted to tell him that if he just complained a bit more, he could probably get a hell of a lot more out of this whole marriage situation.

Twenty minutes later he left the house, as usual kissing her first on her lips: “Good-bye, baby,” he said. Then he kissed her belly: “And good-bye, baby,” he said again.

“Have a good day at work, sweetpea,” Sally said.

A month from now, she would be sending him off with an infant in her arms. She was only planning on taking a three-month maternity leave. Then she’d go right back to work. Jake’s mother could not stop pointing out the obvious. “You don’t need the money,” she said again and again, as if Sally should quit her job and stay home sterilizing bottles and memorizing storybooks all day, just because she could afford to.

“You have a good day at work, too,” Jake said now, and Sally held the door open for him with a smile.

Today would have been Bill’s sixty-second birthday. Sally had been thinking about it, vaguely, for weeks. She wasn’t going to work. She had asked her boss for the time off a full week earlier. She wanted to return—even just for a day—to the time when her love for him was the only thing she had to worry about, an exciting secret instead of a burden. In the weeks to come, everything would change. She would give birth, that petrifying, almost unbelievable prospect, the aftermath of which was even harder to picture. She
had never missed her mother so much before. So perhaps that, too, was reason to have one more day alone, one more secret.

Sally remembered an afternoon, years ago; she must have been in middle school. Her mother and brother arrived in the station wagon to pick her up at a friend’s house, and when Sally climbed into the backseat, her brother blurted out, “Guess what I just discovered?”

“What?” Sally pulled her heavy book bag in behind her and slammed the door.

“Mom has a dark secret,” her brother said, dangling it, loving the power of knowing something that she did not.

“What?” Sally said. “What’s he talking about?”

Her mother shrugged as she pulled the car out onto the street and past the rows of neat Colonials perched on sprawling green lawns.

“What
is
it?” Sally persisted. She was dying to know.

“What will you give me?” her brother said.

“How good is it?” Sally said.

“It’s
good
,” her brother said. “I mean, really good.”

Sally looked at her mother, who burst out laughing. “He’s not lying,” she said.

“Well, what do you want for it?” Sally asked her brother impatiently.

“You wash the dishes on my nights for a week,” he said.

“Deal,” Sally said, her heart speeding up.

“Mom drinks Dr Pepper,” her brother said. “Like, a lot of it.”

“You
drink Dr Pepper?” Sally said with a gasp. It was as if she’d just learned that her mother was a heroin addict.

She had never let them have soda, not even their father was allowed it. When they protested in restaurants or at birthday parties, she would rattle off a long list of its dangers—everything from brown teeth to bone disease. The sugary substance had passed Sally’s lips only three or four times in her life, and on each occasion she was struck with the sort of guilt that she imagined usually afflicted unfaithful husbands or first-time bank robbers.

“When I put my hockey stuff in the trunk after practice, I saw a
whole garbage bag full of empty bottles,” her brother said with glee. “She came clean pretty quick.”

“I meant to take them to the recycling center today, but it slipped my mind,” her mother said. She shrugged again, as if they might just let the whole thing go.

“Mom!” Sally said. “I am shocked.”

“Every woman needs secrets,” her mother said with a smile then, her eyes meeting Sally’s in the rearview mirror. “Remember that when you’re old like me, pumpkin, because the world has a way of making a woman’s life everyone else’s business—you have to dig out a little place that’s only yours.”

Sally was proud of her mother for this one tiny secret, for being something other than exactly what they always expected her to be. She pictured her mother waiting for them in the wagon outside of school, sneaking sips from a red-and-white straw. She imagined her buying the week’s groceries, her cart piled high with vegetables and chicken breasts and American cheese and apple juice and whole wheat bread. She would stop in the soda aisle, glance around to make sure no one was looking, and slip a six-pack under the rest of her purchases.

They fell silent as she slowed to let an elderly couple cross the street. The couple looked up and waved, and Sally’s mother waved back, though Sally was certain she didn’t know them. In that moment, a switch flipped inside of her, and the mother she knew returned.

“You both need to do your homework right away when we get home, because I have a meeting at the school tonight, and your father will be babysitting you, and I want everything to be settled,” she said, almost absent-mindedly. “Speaking of Daddy, let’s not mention this little discovery of yours, okay?”

Sally had never forgotten her mother’s words:
Every woman needs secrets
, she had said, though of course she meant something benign, like drinking soda, rather than sneaking off and lying to your husband about it when you were about to drop a baby at any moment.

Secrecy was the thing she most wanted to ask April about now. At Smith, Sally had believed that they shared everything. But April had never told her about being molested as a child—Sally had had to
hear it from Bree, who heard it from Ronnie. Why had April kept this to herself? Sally wondered. And what more had she kept? She imagined a young, teenage April learning she was pregnant. Had she taken tests alone at home? Thrown up in gym class? Who besides awful Lydia did she share the news with? Sally imagined going back in time and putting her arms around April, scared and alone. The fact of being pregnant was almost too much to handle now, at the age of twenty-six. How had April made it through?

She spent the morning getting ready: applying a deep-conditioning treatment to her hair, reading
Vanity Fair
while she let it set in. She shaved her legs slowly, and rubbed cocoa butter into her skin, which she had read eliminated stretch marks. She put on makeup for the first time in weeks.

Sally left for Northampton that afternoon, with Bill’s copy of the
Collected Poems of W. H. Auden
beside her on the passenger seat. There was a black-and-white photo of the poet on the book’s cover. His face was lined with wrinkles; his eyes were small and sad. He had the look of a man who had seen much, felt much, said much. How different it was from Bill’s jacket photo—that handsome, vain smile, betraying nothing.

In the car, she sang along to the oldies station, belting out songs by the Beatles and Elton John. She thought of their Smith days, when a gentle knock on her dorm-room door might turn into Celia sliding across the floor in her underwear, singing Cher into a hairbrush microphone and starting a ridiculous sing-a-long that would usually draw in a few other girls from the hall. Sally never sang like that anymore, unless she was alone. Why not? It wasn’t that Jake would have discouraged such behavior but rather that she was unable to behave that way in front of him. Wives didn’t do hairbrush serenades or jump up and down in bed in their underwear singing “If I Could Turn Back Time.” Sally ran a palm over her belly and smiled. Mothers could be like that, though, she thought. Goofy and silly and bizarre, doing barnyard impressions and renditions of Broadway musicals, setting their children’s heads tipping backward in delighted laughter. Whom had she ever laughed with the way she laughed with the Smithies? Her mother, and that was all.

Since feeling the baby’s first kick, Sally had fallen in love. It
seemed real; she was actually going to have a child. Her fears now centered on the agony of giving birth, and on who her child would be. There was something thrilling about the idea of a person made up of half of her stuff and half of Jake’s. Sally hoped their baby would get the best of them both—Jake’s sunny disposition and good sense and athletic ability. Her dark hair and cleanliness and that weird wild-card quality that made her who she was. But sometimes, especially when she was alone in the car like this, Sally imagined horrifying scenarios. What if their kid became a criminal, or a teen mother, or a Scientologist? What if she wanted to join the military?

Though Jake begged her not to, Sally had watched a rerun of Stone Phillips interviewing Jeffrey Dahmer’s mother on TV a few nights earlier.

“What was he like as a boy?” Stone asked, in his concerned, rugged voice.

“Just like any other boy,” she said. “I thought he was wonderful.”

That was the problem, Sally told Jake. You would never know your own child was a cannibalistic serial killer until it was too late.

When she reached exit 18 and saw the familiar sign for Smith College, she rolled down her window. The mountain air was cool and sharp. She had come to think about Bill, and to remember April, not
one last time
, she decided, because
one last time
was bullshit. No one could ever say for sure whether they were doing something for the last time, unless they were dead. The day her mother died, they had stood in the hospital hall, by a too-familiar window that overlooked the Jamaicaway. Sally’s brother was huddled up on the floor by the windowsill, his headphones blaring. Her father was talking to the doctor in hushed tones, signing papers on a clipboard. All of a sudden, a nurse with string-thin lips approached. Sally eyed her as she glanced from one of them to the next. When her eyes met Sally’s, she smiled sadly and held out a plastic Baggie.

“Her effects,” the nurse said in a thick Irish accent.

Sally gasped as she glanced down at her mother’s engagement ring and watch, her house keys on that ugly Cape Cod key chain, her red wallet still bulging with Stop & Shop coupons. How many times
had Sally looked at all this junk without a second thought? And now it was all she had left of her.

How could a person have and do all these stupid things—clip coupons and double lock the front door—and then one day just cease to exist? If April was dead, who would be the one to get her belongings? What on earth would she even have to show for her short, brave life?