Commencement

by J. Courtney Sullivan

Celia smiled. At least they had that in common.

  They walked downstairs to the dining room. Celia was relieved to have someone, anyone, to go with. Though her sister was three years younger, and they had different groups of friends, she had always had Violet by her side when she started something new-summer camp, or softball, or even just a stupid snorkeling class at Club Med. Her whole life she had wanted privacy, imagined a Saturday when she wouldn’t have to go along to some boring family party. Now, alone for the first time, Celia had no clue what to do with herself.

  The dining hall was dotted here and there with girls in flannel pajama pants and tank tops, or baggy T-shirts and boxers. Most of the upperclasswomen still hadn’t arrived on campus, and the majority of the tables were empty.

  Celia wore jeans and a red cardigan, with socks and Keds.

  “Do you think it’s a little odd how everyone here dresses like they’re in a mental hospital?” Celia whispered to April, wanting a laugh.

  April just shrugged. She gestured toward her cutoffs. “Not exactly a fashion expert, now, am I?”

  Celia hoped she hadn’t offended her. “I’m trying to fight the power and not wear my pajamas in public for as long as I can,” she said.

  April raised an eyebrow.

  They took plates from the table at the end of the buffet line and surveyed the food. There were platters heaped with doughnuts and bagels and pastries; a huge tureen of steaming oatmeal; and pans full of bacon, sausage, eggs, French toast, waffles, and hash browns. Beside each meat product was a vegan alternative.

  Celia had never heard of such a thing. Had there been any vegans in her high school? No, she decided. Definitely not. The two or three vegetarians she knew just ate the cafeteria pizza every day, so they never really stood out.

  April loaded her plate with a green-hued egg substitute and Fakin’ Bacon that reminded Celia of the rubber food she had had in her Fisher-Price kitchen as a kid.

  “You should try this, it’s good, and no animals had to die gruesome deaths for it to be made,” April said.

  Celia was holding a sausage between tongs in midair. Oh, brother. She put the sausage on her plate and took two Danishes from the pastry tray—one raspberry, one cheese. If there was ever a perfect time for comfort food, this was it.

  They sat down and began to talk about the house meeting the night before.

  “What did you think of the shower hour rules?” Celia asked.

  April shrugged.

  Jeez, this girl was going to make her work for it.

  “Do you have a boyfriend back home?” Celia asked.

  April sputtered a little and said no, as if Celia had asked her whether she had a My Little Pony collection in her purse.

  “A girlfriend?” Celia asked. Oh, what the hell.

  “No,” April said. “Not to sound like an asshole, but I thought the whole meeting was kind of juvenile. I am pretty sure the fact that I was assigned to live in King must have been some big prank on the part of the Housing Office.”

  “What do you mean?” Celia asked.

  “I’m just not really Quad material,” April said. “I’m not into all the sorority bullshit and the keg parties with white-hats. That’s not why I came here. I could have gone to any state school in Illinois if I’d wanted that.”

  “Oh, you’re from Illinois?” Celia said, in a tone that was far too eager for someone who had never actually been there.

  “Chicago,” April said.

  Celia nodded. “So why did you come here anyway?” she asked. “If not for parties and all that normal college stuff.”

  “I came here because it was the alma mater of Gloria Steinem and Molly Ivins. I thought it was the most effective place to fight the patriarchy in this godforsaken country,” April said. Then she took a bite of her Fakin’ Bacon and said, “Also, I like the dining hall food.”

  Celia wondered for a moment whether she was the only normal person at Smith College. At home, she had always been thought of as slightly odd, because unlike her girlfriends she preferred Victorian novels and Dorothy Parker poems to women’s magazines, and Technicolor musicals to any modern movie. But now, she felt like Joe Normal—no teenage wedding, no rage at the establishment—which at Smith apparently meant she was a freak.

  As they bused their dishes, April mentioned that she would be spending the afternoon volunteering with an anti-sweatshop group on campus before attending her Equality Now lecture. It sounded admirable, of course, but Celia just wanted to crawl back into bed and talk to friends from home on the phone for the rest of the day.

  “I think it’s really important to reach out and help people, to realize that it’s not all about our own petty bullshit,” April said. “Most women our age will cry over a guy not calling them back, but they don’t give a flying fuck about real human suffering.”

  Celia told herself that April was just speaking generally, that she hadn’t meant anything about her necessarily. Even so, she felt her cheeks burning red and cursed her stupid pale skin for always betraying her emotions.

  “Sorry,” April said. “I’m working on trying to control my soapbox.”

  Celia smiled. “That’s okay.”

  She wondered what April’s friends back home were like.

  “So what kind of music are you into?” April said.

  “Oh, all kinds. I like old stuff—Billie Holiday and all that. But I’m starting to get really into folk, like Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell.”

  “Now you’re talking,” April said with a grin. “I love both of them. How about Elliott Smith, or Kris Delmhorst?”

  “I don’t know much of their stuff,” Celia said, though the truth was she didn’t know any.

  “Ahh, well then, I’ll burn you a CD that will blow your fucking mind,” April said.

  Later that day, April plastered the outside of her door with bumper stickers that said things like FEMINISM IS THE RADICAL NOTION THAT WOMEN ARE PEOPLE and IN GODDESS WE TRUST. She wrote a quote from Mary Poppins right on the hallway wallpaper in permanent red ink: THOUGH WE ADORE MEN INDIVIDUALLY, WE AGREE THAT AS A GROUP THEY’RE RATHER STUPID.

  Celia slipped another note under Bree’s door: Check out what Crazypants did in the hall.

  A while later, Bree slid a note back: I told you. She’s bonkers!

  The next day, Celia was getting ready to walk to her first class, when April came into her room.

  “Do you have a nine o’clock?” she said.

  Celia nodded.

  “Me too. Want to walk together?”

  “Sure,” Celia said. She picked up her backpack, and they made their way into the hall. As they did this, four moving men carrying enormous boxes burst through the maids’ quarters doors.

  “Sally Werner?” one of them said.

  Celia pointed to Sally’s room at the end of the hall.

  “It looks like she’s moving into a four-bedroom house,” April said.

  Celia smiled. She had chosen her outfit for the first day of classes sometime in mid-August—a black A-line dress with a long-sleeved purple shirt underneath, black tights, and purple ballet flats. April was wearing scrubs and a T-shirt that said IT’S A BLACK THING, YOU WOULDN’T UNDERSTAND. She had let her red hair air-dry, and it fell in unruly waves around her shoulders. Celia couldn’t help it: She wondered what people would think when they saw the two of them crossing campus together.

  As soon as they were out of the Quad, a student with a green mohawk descended the stairs of Chapin House and called out, “April, baby!”

  “Lookin’ good, Miss April,” said another, whom they passed in front of Bass Hall. She planted a big kiss on April’s cheek.

  “Did you guys know each other before you got here?” Celia asked.

  “No, I just met them last night at the Feminists of Smith Unite welcome party,” April said. “You should come with me to the next meeting.”

  Celia smiled weakly. At her high school, those sorts of girls would have held dominion over the smoke-filled ladies’ room
and the drama club, and little else. Her outfit, which had seemed sophisticated and pretty a month earlier, suddenly felt like something you would wear on the first day of second grade. She felt like she ought to be skipping rope and sucking on a giant lollipop.

  After class, Celia made her way back to King House alone. April had invited her to come hear Rebecca Walker speak about the intersection of sexism and racism during the lunch hour, but Celia just wanted to get back to her room—to her familiar bedspread that still smelled like home, to her e-mails from old friends, and to her own private telephone from which she planned to call Liz, who had grown up next door and just started her freshman year at Trinity. The dorm, which had seemed foreign and strange only a day earlier, suddenly felt like a refuge from the campus beyond, full of unknown girls and scarily long reading assignments.

  When she reached their little hallway, there were cardboard boxes outside Sally’s room, overflowing with clothes and books and CDs. A lot of the girls who were from distant states and countries were only receiving their belongings now.

  Celia could hear a Supremes CD playing in Sally’s room, and the door was open, so she went to it. She had wanted to introduce herself ever since the house meeting, but Sally seemed always to be on the phone, talking in hushed tones.

  She stood on a chair, in perfect jeans and a plain gray T-shirt. Behind her, long floral curtains billowed in the breeze. She was hammering a huge picture frame to the wall—it contained ten or so photos, cut into the shapes of ovals or stars, with bright-eyed, preppy types holding up their diplomas at high school graduation or lying in a row in two-piece bathing suits. There were more of these frames lined up on the bed, waiting to be hung, next to neat piles of button-down shirts and sundresses and pressed pants, which made it look as though Sally might be operating a J.Crew franchise out of her room.

  “Hi,” Celia said to get her attention.

  “Oh God, I’m sorry for the mess,” Sally said. “My stuff just arrived today.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Celia said. “Where are you from?”

  It was perhaps the fifty-ninth time she had asked that question in three days. Who really gave a crap where anyone was from anyway? Albuquerque or Tokyo, New Jersey or the moon? What difference did it make?

  “I’m from outside of Boston,” Sally said.

  “Oh, me too,” Celia said. “What town?”

  “Wellesley. You?”

  “Milton.” Celia thought for a moment, and then said, “You didn’t drive out here?”

  Sally shook her head. “Took the train. My father is on a business trip, and my brother is so undependable, I’d sooner rely on a unicorn arriving at my front door, pulling a U-Haul behind it.”

  There was a long beat of silence as Celia took this in and thought about the one thing Sally wasn’t saying. Whose family lived just a two-hour drive from school and didn’t want to bring her there themselves?

  “I’m really sorry about your mother,” Celia said. “If you ever want to talk, my door is always open. And my mom has stocked my closet with more food than I could eat before graduation.”

  She suddenly felt guilty for even mentioning the word “mom,” but Sally smiled and said thank you.

  “Do you need some help unpacking?” Celia asked.

  “Oh, no thanks,” Sally said. “I’m kind of anal. I like my things just so. But if you wanted to keep me company, that would be great.”

  “Sure,” Celia said.

  There wasn’t any room on the bed, and the desk and chair were stacked high with boxes, so Celia took a seat on the floor. She noticed that each of Sally’s boxes had been carefully labeled—BOOKS, HAIRCARE, FILES AND PAPERS, SNEAKERS, HEELS. Had Sally done all this herself? Or was it the last project her mother took on before she died?

  Sally started removing shirts from a box on the desk. Each one was individually wrapped in tissue paper.

  “Nice weather out there today?” she asked.

  Celia nodded. “Still a little hot.”

  “I haven’t been out yet,” Sally said.

  “Have you met the other two on our hall?” Celia asked. “Bree and April.”

  Sally nodded. “April, yeah. We spent the whole first night talking.”

  Even though Celia hadn’t invited them to come join her and Bree, she felt a little sting at knowing she had been excluded from their conversation.

  Sally laughed. “I don’t think I’ve ever had less in common with a person in my life, but I really like her. It’s a cliché, but I just felt like I could say anything to her.”

  You can say anything to me, Celia thought, and then she realized she was competing for closeness in a place where no one had known each other for more than a minute and a half.

  “So do you know what you want to major in?” Sally asked.

  She was much more formal than the other girls Celia had met so far, asking the types of questions one might usually expect from a friend’s great-aunt.

  “English lit,” Celia said. “What about you?”

  “Oh, I’m premed. Or will be anyway,” Sally said. “I’ll be majoring in bio. I took a couple of classes over the summer, just to get a head start. It’s pretty fascinating stuff.”

  She lifted an enormous Chock full o’Nuts can from a pink shopping bag. “My mom’s ashes,” she said, nodding down at the can.

  Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.

  Celia nodded. “Oh. Well, it’s nice that you can have her close.”

  “Yup, that’s exactly what I was thinking,” Sally said.

  She put the coffee can on the floor of her closet and shut the door gently. As she did this, Celia had a horrible vision of herself going in there months later, after all the awkwardness had ended and they’d become friends. She imagined herself looking for a dress, say, and absentmindedly kicking Sally’s mother over, the ashes spreading everywhere—into the cracks in the hard wood and onto Sally’s pristine footwear collection.

  “Do you know Jacob Wolf?” Sally asked. “He went to Milton High.”

  Celia shook her head. “I went to Catholic school my whole life, so—”

  The phone rang. If it had been Celia’s, she would have let it go, but Sally picked up.

  She put her hand over the mouthpiece. “I have to take this,” she said to Celia. “It’s my best friend Monica. Can I catch up with you later?”

  “Oh, of course,” Celia said, awkwardly climbing to her feet.

  “Would you mind shutting the door?” Sally said.

  Celia didn’t see Sally again that day, or that night. When she got up to use the bathroom around 3:00 a.m., she passed Sally’s room and heard her talking.

  Celia knew she shouldn’t, but she pressed her ear to the door.

  “I can’t do this, Mon,” Sally was saying, her voice thick and desperate. “I think coming here so soon after everything was just a huge mistake. Will you stay on the phone with me? Please don’t hang up, sugar. Please.”

  The next day was convocation. The first years had received flyers under their doors reminding them that everyone was to meet in the lobby at four o’clock to process to John M. Greene Hall (JMG, as they of course called it) as a house.

  By then, all the upperclasswomen had moved in, and the halls of King House were jammed with suitcases and bulging garbage bags full of winter clothes hauled up from the storage space in the basement.

  From her bedroom, Celia could hear them. The seniors, many just back from junior year abroad in Geneva or Florence or Sydney, screeched and hollered and kissed each other all over the face, sounding like the year apart had almost killed them. The sophomores were giddy, too. They hugged each other for longer than seemed natural. They left their doors open and played music while they unpacked—the soft sounds of Jeff Buckley and the Beatles and sweet, girlie music that Celia had never heard before.

  She paused as she walked by them in the bathroom, lining up jars of Jolen bleach and boxes of tampons in their cubbies. The older girls hung hand-printed signs above the toil
ets for visitors: WELCOME TO OUR HOUSE, BUT REMEMBER THAT REAL MEN PUT THE SEAT DOWN. Even after an entire lifetime of living with a mother and a sister, Celia had never been anyplace so entirely and unabashedly feminine.

  The weather had turned steamy, a mid-August day at the start of September.

  As Bree had put it over breakfast: “It’s hot as Georgia asphalt.”

  Some of the older girls walked around in just bras on top and panties or boxer shorts on the bottom. A few of them had gorgeous bodies—toned abs and long, lean legs. But most of them did not. They let their guts hang out as they ripped open packing boxes or hung curtains.

  Celia told herself that a year from now, she’d probably be like them: comfortable here, at home. Though she wasn’t sure about the intensity of the bonding, or the extent of the nakedness. Other than at the beach, she had never seen her own mother in less than a floor-length terry-cloth robe and slippers.

  At four o’clock on the dot, a chanting voice boomed up the central staircase and down the fluorescent-lit halls.

  “Everybody do the King House Rumble, Everybody do the King House Rumble. Everybody! Rumble! Everybody! Rumble!”

  The sound got louder and louder, until Jenna the Monster Truck and a gaggle of other girls came to the first-year rooms one by one and pulled them out into the hall.

  Celia saw Sally, Bree, and April getting pulled toward the stairs as she was and laughed as she made eye contact with each of them.

  “What in the Lord’s name is this?” Bree said, as they were shepherded downstairs.

  “It’s convocation,” Sally said. “There’ll be speeches and singing and appearances by famous alums. It’s the first time we’ll get to be with the entire school, all at once.”

  Sally seemed like the sort of girl who would have joined a sorority, if she’d gone to a college that didn’t forbid them completely.

  All seventy-five King House residents were packed into the foyer, and Jenna the Monster Truck was handing out Burger King crowns. Another girl was pulling sparkly purple bedsheets from a giant cardboard box.

  “Okay, girls,” Jenna said. “This is it! Our first chance to show Smith what the new King House is all about.”