The Four Ms. Bradwells

by Meg Waite Clayton

  “The curse of the naked feminist!” Betts says as she flips over a J (eight points), winning the right to play first.

  We flip the tiles back over and mix them around, then pull our seven. When Betts plays her first word, “jargon,” I eye the J with suspicion, sure she kept an eye on it after she flipped it back over. But I don’t challenge her because even as I think it I know it isn’t true. Betts would never cheat at anything, much less at something that doesn’t matter. I’m the one of us who would cheat at a Scrabble game.

  “ ‘Jargon’ with the J on the double letter score. And the whole word doubled!” she says. “That, friends, is forty-four points.”

  If she can set aside that awful senator and his awful questions, surely I can ignore the looming presence of the shelves and shelves of Mother’s books.

  “I think Ted wants to retire and move here,” I say.

  Laney looks around the library as if I might intend to move our king-sized bed into this very room. “He’s only, what? Fifty-five?”

  “Work isn’t fun for him anymore, if it ever was.”

  “Could you live out here, do you think?” Laney asks.

  Mia plays “raw” on the R, the four-point W on a triple letter square giving her fourteen points for what really is a pathetic effort, but I don’t complain because I play next. I’ve got “ember” with the E next to her W so I get “we” as well. A pretty nice play even if does only get me one point more than Mia’s “raw.” And the placement will make it hard for anyone to use the triple word box that falls below and to the right of my R for more than a two-letter word.

  “Shit,” I say when Laney lays out “choose” with the S falling at the end of “ember,” the E on the triple word score. I look around at the books as if they might be as appalled at my language as Mother forever was. Never mind that I learned to swear from her.

  “Shit,” I repeat. The word feels as good as it ever has in my mouth, here in her library.

  “Ten for ‘embers’ plus fifteen tripled to forty-five for ‘choose.’ ” Laney grins at Betts. “Fifty-five makes your forty-four look awful shabby, doesn’t it?”

  Betts settles for “teeth” and Mia plays “anger,” leaving me gleefully close to the bottom left triple word score space. I sink into the warmth of the fire as I work like hell for something that uses my ten-point Z on the double letter space above the A in Mia’s “anger.” “Zap” is a word, but I need four letters to get to the triple word space. I have another P, but “zapp” with two Ps isn’t a word, much as I want it to be. Zape? Zaep? Zare? If I had an F, I could play “faze,” but I don’t. I consider playing “zap,” taking the twenty-four points, but then if Betts has an S she can play “zaps,” which would be forty-five points for a single tile, a play she would gloat about for the rest of her life.

  The sand is falling fast as I give up on the Z and look for another way to use the triple word score. I focus on the P which, at three points, is the next-highest-point tile I have.

  “Tick, tick, tick,” Mia says.

  I see it then: a word I can’t possibly play.

  I pull the tiles, set them on the board in a different order: “pear.” Six points. Which is fine. I’m fine with six points.

  Laney counts the points, adding the six to my fifteen for twenty-one, but Mia is watching me, her little mind spinning, wondering how I missed snagging the damned triple word score, if only as a defensive move. She sees the better play too, then. She hesitates, looking from me to Betts, then to Laney. She has never been a good bluffer, at least not with us.

  “Your go, Laney,” I say.

  Mia’s expression makes Laney and Betts study my play again, too. Maybe they see it or maybe they don’t; I’m distracted because I see now what I ought to have played: “Pare!” Like with a knife. With the three-point P on the double letter space and the E on the triple word.

  Mia begins rearranging the tiles, though, forming the word I simply could not play. “We’ve managed to stick our heads in the sand for almost thirty years, but the nasty little grains are filling our lungs now,” she says. “We need to talk about this.”

  “We weren’t ever going to talk about it,” I say quietly.

  “We didn’t start the conversation,” Mia says as we all sit staring at the tiles, which now read R-A-P-E.

  PART II

  The sexual assault exam began at 6:30 a.m.… Two clean sheets were spread on the floor.… Patty stood over these and removed her clothes … provided a urine sample … was asked to lie naked on a table for a head to toe examination. Her knees were up high, her legs spread apart, her feet in stirrups.… Patty’s pubic hair was combed, and pubic hair samples collected.

  Poarch examined Patty’s vagina with a Wood’s lamp, which casts ultraviolet light to detect body fluids like semen. She did a “wet mount exam,” which involved taking a swab from Patty’s vagina … inserted a medium speculum into Patty’s vagina to search for evidence of internal injury. Lastly, she used a colposcope—a kind of sophisticated magnifying glass attached to a video camera—to probe Patty’s vagina and rectal areas.

  —from Cry Rape: The True Story of One Woman’s Harrowing Quest for Justice, by Bill Lueders

  GINGER

  LAW QUADRANGLE NOTES, Winter 1993: Virginia (“Ginger”) Cook Conrad (JD ’82) and Edward Hudson are delighted to announce the birth of Annie Hudson-Conrad. Little Ms. Hudson-Conrad’s brother, B.J., is working hard to get his nose back in joint, as is grandmother Faith Cook Conrad (JD ’53), who calls the baby “little Faith.” Annie’s Aunt Betts (Elsbieta Zhukovski, JD ’82) has nicknamed the child “Ye-Of,” which her Aunt Laney (Helen Weils, JD ’82) insists is Latin for “Princess Annie of Manhattan Island.” Ms. Conrad, a senior associate at the New York firm of Caruthers, Smythe & Morgan, was back in her office billing time within just a few six-minute increments of her daughter’s birth. Mr. Hudson, a partner at Caruthers, is on leave for two months, a sabbatical he would describe as “paternity leave” if his firm offered such a thing.

  IN RETROSPECT, I wish I’d never told the Ms. Bradwells about Daddy’s damned sixtieth birthday party. I wish I’d rented a villa on a tropical beach and claimed it was a friend’s place so it wouldn’t have cost Betts or Mia anything. I can’t imagine hearing even our conversation at the Lightkeeper’s Cottage about crab fishing described to the Senate Judiciary Committee, although I fear that’s what we have to look forward to. It’s only hindsight that’s twenty-twenty, though, and we were young and single and on the last spring break we would ever share.

  You had “such fun,” you said, that classic summer.

  That week started out with the best two days we Ms. Bradwells ever spent together. The afternoon we set off for Cook Island, we were as excited as schoolgirls (which, okay, we were, but we thought of ourselves as school women, so you take my point). Betts was more than a little embarrassed about the state of her mother’s car we were borrowing for the week, but as she pulled up to the curb and peered through the windshield wipers at us, Laney and Mia and I literally jumped up and down under Justice Bradwell folded in his contortionist pose. It was 4:05, because I’d refused to cut Ross’s Corporate Tax class, a class the rest of those pathetic little clucker Bradwells refused to take, afraid for their grade point averages although the excuse they gave was that it met at three on Friday afternoons.

  The dark settled on us well before we hit the Ohio-Pennsylvania border, but we amused each other with extravagant stories of where our classmates might end up (as television game show hosts, truly incompetent parents, inmates at a maximum security prison in upstate New York). We sang along with every song on the only eight-track we had, Carole King’s Tapestry. (Even Betts, who, as Laney would say, “can’t carry a tune in a bucket with a lid on it,” doesn’t sound dreadful singing along with Carole King.) And we had a long discussion about Andy, to whom Mia was engaged by then.

  “He’s great, he’s great, I know he is,” she said. “I know I’m the luckiest person in the w
orld, but …”

  She hesitated for such a long time that Betts finally joked that Andy was into kinky sex.

  “Conservative Episcopalian Dartmouth-sweatshirted son of a prominent banker Andrew Cooper IV,” she said (Andy, who sported a conservative haircut even before all the guys cut their hair for interview season), “prefers handcuffs and whips?”

  “No, of course not!” Mia protested while the rest of us were all still laughing. “But when we lived together last summer, phwutt. New York City. Greenwich Village. It should have been fun, but when he wasn’t working late, which he always was, or playing softball with his firm or doing some other summer clerk thing, he was tired. And even in Paris at the end of the summer …”

  “Blame that on jet lag, there’s always too much pressure on those romantic getaways, they always disappoint,” I said.

  I sometimes wonder how different Mia’s life might have been if we’d taken her seriously as we drove eastward from Ann Arbor. But it never occurred even to me that Andy might have been seeing a man in New York that summer, or perhaps several men, that when he proposed to Mia in Paris that August it had more to do with not wanting to disappoint his father than with wanting to spend his life with her. That whole thing with Andy was probably the real reason the rest of us kept our names when we married. I like to take credit for it, but the fact is when Andy, who is basically the nicest guy in the world, the kind of guy who would never leave you, did leave Mia, it made us all nervous. How do you give up your identity for something you can’t be sure will last?

  We had champagne on the pier that first night on Cook Island. I shot the cork and we wished on it, and Betts remembered the bottle I’d brought to the Arb the first day of law school, which I’d neglected to tell the newly minted Ms. Bradwells was my birthday champagne. That first day of law school had been my twenty-first fucking birthday, but Mother had an important meeting back in Washington, something about the Equal Rights Amendment, which, okay, was on life support at the time, but it was my twenty-first birthday and she’d just dumped me the night before in that skanky little basement apartment I’d sublet for the summer term. Left me alone to wonder whether to change my mind and enroll in Georgetown, where she taught, knowing she’d hate having her failure of a daughter splashing in her pool as much as I’d hate drowning under her watchful gaze. Then she showed up at my door the next morning, saying she’d be late for her meeting but they wouldn’t get to anything important before lunch. And she took me for birthday fragels, deep-fried bagels dipped in cinnamon, an Ann Arbor delicacy. It was hard enough to say goodbye once, but she made me do it twice on the excuse of bringing me a bottle of birthday champagne. “A new day, a new year, a new life,” she said. “An opportunity to leave the sordid past behind.”

  The sordid past: my turbulent teenaged years, which included a slew of cut classes; a suspension from school; a drunk driving arrest Daddy arranged to have stricken; my sketchy performance at the University of Virginia; and of course my year in South Africa. Now that I’m a parent, I have to admit that would have alarmed me as much as it alarmed Mother and Daddy, me taking off to a place as far away from them as I could get with a playwright who called himself “Scratch.” Love at first sight. That’s the way I always presented that relationship, the way the Ms. Bradwells and everyone else heard it because that was what I wanted them to hear.

  That night skinny-dipping in the bay though, I admitted, “I had no idea Scratch was writing a character that was me into his play.” And my heart, old hunger motor, with its sins / revved up like an engine that would not stop.

  I’d been living in South Africa with Scratch for almost a year by then, waiting tables and playing housewife, all in support of the cause of great art. His art, not mine. Mother would have been appalled. I went to the market and made fancy dinners, washed clothes, waited tables at night, flirting with customers for the bigger tips. All while Scratch scribbled away day and night on a play I wasn’t allowed to see, not even after a local playhouse offered to do a staged reading.

  I told everyone I knew about that, of course. Extra flirting at my tables, a subtle line dropped about this staged reading perhaps they’d enjoy. I twisted arms to get friends to come, afraid Scratch, who was moody to start with, would be devastated if he failed to draw an audience. “Not even a real play? Just some actors reading a play?” they asked. To which I promised champagne. Champagne is always good for drawing a crowd.

  The first shock came when the curtain opened. A single actress stood with her back to the audience, her long hair looping down her back and upward again, caught in a clip at her neck. The dark hair of a woman named Abigail, whom Scratch had slept with. He slept with lots of other women, I knew that. He was an artist, he needed a variety of experiences from which to create. I was free to sleep with others, too. But Abigail was the only one we’d ever argued over, the only one with whom he spent the night.

  “I won’t see Abby if you don’t want me to. If you need that limit on my life,” he’d pleaded to my threat to return to the States. “What would I do without you as my muse?”

  He hadn’t told me he’d cast her in his play. That he’d spent late nights rehearsing with her. Abigail, who wore her hair long and loose. I was the one who wore my hair looped into a clip.

  The character Abigail played, which Scratch had the nerve to name Ginny, was a child in a young woman’s body, a spoiled rich girl, a promiscuous slut who, despite the fact she had everything anyone could possibly want, remained hungry for approval and desperate for love. All of that was apparent in the words, in the non-movement of the non-actors, the readers who were only Abigail and Scratch.

  I sat there in the darkness, growing smaller, shrinking into a tiny atom, a black hole of anger sucking in whole constellations of hurt. Watching the pathetic Abigail-Ginny with her long loop of hair beg and cry for the loss of Scratch. Scratch, who was reading a character named Beau, my brother’s name.

  When I did stand, finally, I didn’t say a word to defend myself. I slipped quietly from my seat before the lights went back up, walked out of the theater, hailed a cab.

  “I couldn’t bear to go back to the apartment even to collect my things,” I told the Ms. Bradwells that first night on Cook Island, as we drank champagne on the pier. “I called Beau from the airport. Beau called Mother, Mother arranged a ticket, and I flew home.”

  I dumped my jeans and top onto the rough wood of the pier and dove off, regretting, suddenly, having told the Ms. Bradwells about Scratch. They stripped, too, though, down to the swimsuits under their clothes and then, without thinking much longer, down to bare skin. We all swam naked in the bone-cold water, Mia screaming bloody damned murder that some sea monster was devouring her when it was only seaweed twisted on her leg. Shit, how we laughed at that. Teeth-chattering laughter. That water was cold as hell.

  Laney

  LAW QUADRANGLE NOTES, Fall 1994: Ms. Helen (“Laney”) Weils (JD ’82) has been appointed Special Assistant to Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young, in charge of interface with the Olympic Committee in preparation for the 1996 Summer Olympics. She will hereinafter be known as Special Assistant Cicero-Bradwell. The line for tickets forms behind the other Ms. Bradwells, and you’ll have to be nice to her for two full years. Is it really worth it?

  THE BAY WATER off the wood pier that first night on Cook Island was as cold as Aunt Frieda’s freezer, but not half so cold as when we found we had no towels. We left every little thing on the pier except the champagne, and we ran bare naked up the path, laughing so hard it nearly kept us warm. Inside, Mia and Betts and I collected the bay in little puddles on the marble floor while Ginger fetched us towels, her hair still unloading bucketsful when she returned to the landing above us. She slipped at the top step, and we all started or gasped or held our breaths, whatever expression you like for “were scared to death she’d tumble headfirst over the rail and splat on the marble floor.” The only thing that flew over that banister, though, was a pile of pure white towels.


  Ginger laughed as she regained her balance, while huge, baby-soft bath blankets smelling of cedar and bleach landed with a flooop right in front of me. As we wrapped ourselves up in them, I thought if Chawterley were mine, never mind just one of my several homes, I wouldn’t have a friend in the world who didn’t know all about it. Bigmouthed as Ginger was about so many things, though, she never did like to talk about her family wealth.

  The thing I best recall about that first night at Chawterley, the thing I best like to recall, is taking the Scrabble board and the rest of the champagne into the Sun Room, still wrapped in fluffy-soft towels. Ginger set a match to the fire, forgetting the flue at first, and the four of us curled up on the couch and chairs to choose seven letter tiles each. We weren’t sleepy. We were on that second-wind kind of day-after energy that would carry Mia and Ginger and me through all-nighters at work. Betts never did pull an all-nighter even clerking for the Supreme Court, which says something, that deals to buy grocery stores require Herculean efforts of sleep deprivation while the highest law of the land does not.

  Maybe it was the fact that we’d brought no casebooks, that we had a whole long week ahead of us with nothing we much needed to do. Maybe it was that we were about to go separate ways in just a short while, that this would be the last time we ever would have to say this is who I really am to friends who wouldn’t be elbowing us in the ribs for the best assignments and bonuses, and partnership. Or maybe it was Chawterley itself.

  The house had been shut up all winter, but it was as welcoming as if Faith had just run out for some something, never you mind that she was still deep into the Idaho v. Freeman appeal to the Supreme Court back in Washington. Ginger liked to call Faith’s efforts to save the Equal Rights Amendment back then “hours and hours of time wasted on a case that is going to be moot before it’s decided.” But Faith always did believe the ends aren’t the only things that matter, that process is important, too. “Losing a fight is better than never coming into the ring,” she liked to say.