The Second Summer of the Sisterhood (16 page)

Vanessa nodded.

“Really?”

Vanessa shrugged. She was trying to figure out if Tibby was impressed or if Tibby thought she was psychotic.

“They are . . . unbelievable,” Tibby said sincerely. “I mean, they’re great. They’re so beautiful.”

Vanessa smiled, although her arms remained protectively around her middle.

Tibby picked up a vibrant yellow frog with black spots. She wasn’t thinking when she heard herself say, “God, my little brother would love this. He would go nuts.”

Vanessa loosened her arms. She laughed a little. “Really? How old is he?”

“He’s almost three and a half,” Tibby said, beginning to remember where she was and why she was there. She returned the armadillo and the frog to their places and picked up her packages.

“Thanks a lot,” she said, moving toward the door. Her stomach was churning in an uncomfortable way.

“Oh, you’re welcome,” Vanessa said. Tibby’s praise had changed Vanessa’s posture.

“Uh, Tibby,” Vanessa said to her back.

Tibby turned her head. “Yeah?”

“Sorry I haven’t been by your room or anything. I’m . . . not exactly the greatest RA.”

Tibby turned her body too. Looking at Vanessa’s earnest face and her loyal T-shirt, Tibby suddenly felt like crying. She couldn’t stand Vanessa thinking she was a bad RA, even though she was. “No, you’re not. Seriously. You’re great,” Tibby lied. “If I have any questions, I know where to come,” she added lamely.

From her face, Vanessa knew Tibby didn’t mean it, although she appreciated the effort. “It covers part of tuition,” Vanessa explained.

“I love your animals, I really do,” Tibby said as she went out the door.

On her way down the hall, Tibby felt a hollowness under her ribs as she rewound all the snide comments and jokes Maura had made about Vanessa’s toys. Maura, the creative artist, who couldn’t even finish her script, while Vanessa, the dud, had created a world out of bits of fabric. And Maura was the one Tibby had striven to have as a friend?

Back in her room, Tibby remembered her packages. One contained the Traveling Pants. Tibby felt too much shame to look at them right then. The other was from home. She opened it to find a batch of foil-covered brownies and three pictures on construction paper. One was a scribble signed with Katherine’s name. The second was a scribble signed with Nicky’s. The third was a childish self-portrait her mother had drawn with crayons. It showed a frown and a blue tear on her cheek.
We miss you!
it said.

Me too,
Tibby thought. Her mouth trembled as she produced a tear to match the one in the picture.

Paul had told Carmen once that you could distinguish a drunk from a drinker, because a drinker could choose to stop and a drunk couldn’t.

Carmen was a drunk. She could take or leave alcohol; anger was her mode of self-destruction. She couldn’t stop when normal people could.

Her anger the night before had been so big she’d nearly drowned in it. This morning she woke up hungover, in a sweat of remorse. From her bed she listened to her mother making coffee as she always did on Sunday mornings. She heard her mother let herself out of the apartment quietly. Christina would go around the corner to get
The New York Times.
She always did.

Moments after the door clicked shut, the phone rang. Carmen staggered toward the kitchen in a T-shirt and underwear. The machine picked up after the second ring. Carmen’s fingers were poised to grab the receiver when she heard the voice recording onto the tape.

“Tina . . . pick up if you’re there. . . .”

Carmen shrank back from the phone.

“Tina . . . ? Okay, you’re not there. Listen, I was hoping I could pick you up at one and take you over to Mike and Kim’s. Then maybe we could go to Great Falls after, if you’re in the mood for a hike. Call me if you’re free today, okay? Call me as soon as you get home.”

David paused. He made a funny humming noise and dropped his voice.

“I love you. I loved you last night. I think about you every minute, Tina.” He sort of laughed at himself. “Hadn’t mentioned that in a few hours.” He cleared his throat. “Call me. Bye.”

Carmen felt a strange vacuuming sensation under her ribs, sucking away all that was left of her goodwill, pulling in hostility and fear behind it. There were so many alarming, threatening parts to the message her demons hardly knew where to turn.

Mike and Kim? Couple friends. Couple friends for the happy couple. Her mother had never had couple friends before. She’d had her sister and her cousin and her mother and one or two single-mother friends. Mostly she’d had Carmen.

Carmen had never seen her mother’s old life as a consolation prize before. But suddenly, that was how it looked. Now that she had a boyfriend and couple friends. Now that she had the brass ring.

All this time, Carmen had thought her mother had chosen her life. That she’d wanted it. Had she been wishing for something else all along? Had she never had what she wanted? Was Carmen a next-best thing?

I thought we were happy together.

Maybe if she had brothers or sisters and a father around, it wouldn’t matter as much. But she and her mother depended on one another in a deep and unspoken way. It was motivated by love and loyalty, but underneath there was fear and loneliness, too, wasn’t there? Carmen always came home for dinner. She acted as if it were a natural convenience, but she didn’t like her mother to eat alone. What did Christina really feel for Carmen? Was it love? Was it obligation? Was it not having anything better?

Carmen had her friends, and she counted on them, but she never forgot that they had real sisters and brothers. A deeply insecure part of Carmen reminded herself that if there were a fire, they’d have to save their brothers and sisters first. The person who would save Carmen in a fire was Christina, and vice versa. Carmen and her mother could pretend the world was large and varied, but they both knew it came down to the two of them.

Carmen thought back to the night in late June, just about a month ago, when all this trouble had started. The night of her first date with Porter. Carmen was a bluffer, caught in her bluff. She’d made a feint toward breaking an agreement she hadn’t realized existed and had never meant to break.

Carmen didn’t like change, and she certainly didn’t like endings. She kept flowers till they were wilted and sticky and algae grew in the vase water.

I don’t want boyfriends,
she felt like saying.
I want it back how it was.

Standing over the machine, which was now blinking crazily, Carmen pressed her thumb on the Play button. She felt herself loathing David as the spontaneity of his emotion dried up in the replay. Had he forgotten that Christina lived with her daughter? That it was embarrassing and inappropriate to leave intimate, practically X-rated messages blaring through the apartment? Did Carmen matter so little that David had forgotten about her completely? Had Christina forgotten her too?

She stumbled to her room and threw herself facedown onto the messy bed. She heard the phone ring again. She didn’t move.
Click
went the machine. “Uh . . . Christina? Bruce Brattle here. I’m in the office today and had a brief question. Give me a call, if you could.” Long pause followed by a beep.

A few minutes later she heard her mother let herself in. Christina went right for the message machine and hit the Play button. Bruce Brattle’s message played. Only that one. Carmen felt her heart pounding a little. She could have corrected the mistake by telling her mom. Instead, she fell asleep.

A little while later, in a dismally unmysterious nap dream, their apartment sizzled and flamed. David valiantly saved Christina as Carmen burned to a crisp.

S
unday afternoon, Tibby changed into the Traveling Pants before walking to the auditorium in the arts center. Brian wasn’t there, and she was relieved. She planned to go out and celebrate after the festival with Maura and Alex. She’d wavered between inviting Brian along and making some excuse to get out of having to bring him.

She put on the Pants without letting herself look too hard or think too much. These were
the Pants
, after all, and she was lucky, very lucky, to have them for the first-ever public showing of one of her films. If things in her life worked out, it would be the first of many. She stood in front of the long mirror, admiring the fit and ignoring the inscriptions. It was hard to figure out how, but her hair actually looked better when she wore the Pants. Even her breasts looked a little bigger—or at least like they existed.

Her heartbeat sped up when she saw the crowd in the auditorium. Most kids were sitting with their parents. Tibby took a seat by herself in the back with two empty seats next to it. When she saw Alex and Maura in the aisle, she waved them over, feeling slightly guilty about not leaving a seat for Brian. After that she kept her head down. Maybe he wouldn’t see her.

First, Professor Graves, the head of the film program, welcomed everybody; then they got rolling. Among the first six movies were a couple of short family dramas, a long interview of a filmmaker’s grandmother, an adventure story clearly shot on campus but attempting to look like wilderness, and an embarrassing romantic film.

Alex was fidgeting and making wry comments throughout. Tibby was laughing at them at first, but then she realized Maura was also laughing on the other side, so she stopped. It struck her that Maura was a yeah-girl. Pink glasses or no, she was a follower, an inconsequential person, and Tibby felt herself acting just like her.

The lights went up. Tibby knew her movie was coming in the second of three batches.

“Tibby!” She heard a hissing whisper.

She looked around almost frantically.

“Tibby!”

The voice was coming from a middle row on the left side of the auditorium, and it belonged unmistakably to her mother.

Tibby felt a jolt inside her chest. She forgot about breathing.

Her mom was waving madly. She had a huge smile on her face. She was obviously excited to be there, and so pleased that she had pulled off this surprise.

And what a surprise. Tibby made herself smile too. She waved. “That’s my . . . ,” she began numbly. She let her voice peter out. She stood, with the thought that she would somehow go and sit with her mom, but there were no free seats, and the lights were dimming for the next set of movies.

At that moment, Tibby’s eyes also fell upon Brian, sitting on the right side, almost equidistant from her mother. He was looking at her like he’d known exactly where she was the whole time. Did he also know her mother was there?

She’d told Brian it was fine if her mother saw her movie, that she didn’t care. But from the lurch and sprawl of her stomach, it was seeming like maybe she did care.

Her mother had come all this way for a happy surprise. With a sense of doom in her heart, Tibby waited for the next surprise to come.

Two films came before Tibby’s, but she didn’t register one thing about either of them.

Hers began slowly, with a close-up of an innocent cherry red lollipop. Then the music kicked up and the lollipop turned evil. The shot widened to reveal it adhered to the back of a well-coiffed brown head. The audience burst into laughter, just as Tibby had hoped they would. But the laughter fell like shards of glass pelting down upon her.

One after another, each of the segments connected with the audience, just the way any filmmaker would dream they would. The laughter rose to near hysteria when the camera followed the back of the elegant pump-shod heel trailing the diaper wipe through the house.

Tibby couldn’t make herself turn her head in the direction of her mother’s seat until the end, after it was over and a new movie started and, Tibby prayed, began to change the mood. Tibby felt like a pure coward as she stared at the screen ahead.

She could avert her eyes, but she hadn’t thought to plug her ears. She heard a snuffle from her left. She wished and hoped she had imagined it. She squeezed her eyes shut. If she could ever in her life have transported herself from one place to another, she would have done it then.

She moved her head ever so slightly to the left and did the rest with her eyeballs. She needed to see her mother, but couldn’t face her, even in the dark. Straining her eyeballs to the far corner of her vision, she could see that her mother’s head was bent.

Tibby’s hands found her face. What had she done?

Alex was snickering at something on the screen. Tibby was lost. She was somewhere else. She didn’t look up again until the lights were on and half the people had left.

“Tibby?” Alex was looking at her.

“Yes?”

“You coming?” She was looking into Alex’s face, but she wasn’t seeing it.

She turned in one direction, and Brian was standing at the end of her row, waiting for her. When she turned in the other direction, she saw that her mother had gone.

Christina didn’t stray more than five feet from the phone. She actually carried it with her when she went to the bathroom. She waited until two in the afternoon to suck up her pride and ask Carmen if anyone had called while she was out that morning.