By the end of their first year, April had been arrested for disorderly conduct twice—once during a protest in Boston, and once for starting a fight with the right-wing crazies outside a clinic in Amherst. Each time, Sally drove to wherever April was and paid the fifty-dollar fee to get her out. Hours later, they would return to the dorm holding hands, like they’d been off at some ice-cream social.
“The odd couple’s at it again,” Bree would whisper to Celia.
There was something magnetic between April and Sally. Maybe they were so perfect for each other because both of them were strange, and neither ever seemed to notice the other’s strangeness, or at least never seemed bothered by it. Or maybe, as Bree said, it was because they mothered each other. Sally often got terrified by nightmares, or even pleasant dreams, about her mother. She said it was unbearable to dream of her mother doing something mundane—taking a run, say, or picking her up at school—only to wake up and realize that what she had dreamed of was impossible now. Bree told Celia that all Sally’s talk about death made her insanely uncomfortable, but April spent whole nights lying next to Sally in bed, softly singing Bob Dylan songs, holding Sally’s hand while she slept so that if she woke up scared, it wouldn’t last for long. She said she had seen her mother through “Many a bad trip,” and compared with that, Sally was nothing.
“What kind of a bad trip?” Bree had hissed at Celia after April said it.
Celia just shrugged.
There was something unsettling about having to take a Greyhound bus to a close friend’s wedding. It was a concrete reminder of how much Sally had changed in these past four years, and how much Celia had stayed the same. The train would have been far more dignified, but Celia couldn’t bring herself to pay a hundred dollars each way just to prove she was a grown-up.
The bus stopped at a Roy Rogers somewhere outside Hartford. She had no idea that Roy Rogers even existed anymore. Celia bought a Diet Coke and reluctantly climbed back onto the bus, newly awash in the smell of fried food. The woman in front of her had bought a fish sandwich. A goddamn fish sandwich! Was there anything more offensive to eat on a bus full of people at eleven-thirty in the morning?
As they turned back onto the road, the kid beside her took a notebook from his backpack, with the words “Freshman English” printed on the front in droopy letters.
Celia remembered how Bree used to refer to their first year out of college as their freshman year of life. Celia might call her crying from a bathroom stall at work, complaining about her boss, or she might send a pained text message from yet another ill-fated first date, and Bree would soothe her gently, saying, “You’re only a freshman. It’s going to get better. I swear.”
Celia’s freshman year of life had amounted to nothing much besides going on a string of comically bad dates, forging a stormy yet intense bond with New York that she knew would last for decades, and taking a job as an assistant at a mass-market book publisher that was far from the novel-writing career she really wanted. Circus Books published mostly self-help guides and pink anthologies about shoes and breakups. It was the sort of place where, when you told someone at a cocktail party that you worked there, you had to roll your eyes. (At the recommendation of the Smith Career Development Office, Celia had asked in her first interview whether her predecessors had been promoted—the girl before her, they said, was backpacking through Nepal, and the one before that had joined the Peace Corps. Celia now thought she should have taken it as a sign that the place would suck the soul out of anyone who dared to work there, driving the dreamers out to the farthest corners of the earth for some sort of fulfillment.)
They would remember Bree’s freshman year of life as the time when she left for Stanford Law and threw herself into her studies. That was the same year that she became more or less estranged from her Southern family. “She’s lost her sparkle,” April said to Celia on the phone one night, and Celia agreed.
For Sally, freshman year of life had meant meeting Jake, falling in love, and planning her world around their relationship, so that she even forestalled applying to med school, the one thing she had always planned to do. Bree and April thought Sally was trying too hard to replace her lost mother, convincing herself that what was comfortable must be right. They feared she would be disappointed if she hoped to get a real commitment out of such a young guy. Even three years later, Jake’s proposal shocked them all—all but Sally, who had never doubted it for an instant. Sally was the head fundraiser for their class and a volunteer at the Boston chapter of the National Organization for Women. Twice a week after work, she organized mailings and set up lectures and served as the youngest board member in New England. She helped write the group’s monthly newsletter, updating members on women’s issues around the globe. (April gave her most of the ideas, and Sally toned them down so the sixty-year-old women of Brookline, Massachusetts, wouldn’t have a collective heart attack while reading about fistulas in developing nations.)
Celia thought of how NOW and other groups like it were the perfect logical next step for Smithies so accustomed to acronyms. And she was proud of Sally for actually getting out there and doing something positive in her free time. But April rolled her eyes at this. “Could she be any more of an establishment feminist?” she had once said to Celia, who wasn’t quite sure what that even meant.
April’s freshman year of life was about joining forces with the legendary Ronnie Munro to form Women in Peril, Inc. Ronnie was one of Smith’s most talked about alums, right alongside Julia Child and Gloria Steinem, but unlike them, she was something of a villain in the eyes of most Smithies. Ronnie was a militant feminist and a filmmaker who had dedicated her life to social activism and women’s rights. She was also slightly insane.
Once, she had been a pioneer—she was a major player in the early fight against domestic violence and a big proponent of equal pay for equal work. But at some point in the late seventies, she was at the center of a scandal. She had convinced some horrible wife beater in Indiana to let her make a film about his life, including footage from a hidden camera of him punching, hitting, and whip-ping his wife. From the interviews she did with him, it seemed like Ronnie was in love with the guy. She egged him on on camera, asking him to describe the thrill he got from keeping his woman in her place. Then one day, Ronnie told him a secret: His wife was planning to leave. That night, he murdered her. He stabbed her through the heart right on the kitchen floor. Ronnie wasn’t there, but she got the whole thing on tape and used it as the opening scene of her movie.
Her supporters said she was drawing attention to the issue, and that she did—with articles in every major paper and secret screenings of the film on college campuses after it had been banned and even a few lawmakers trying to initiate legislation to protect women in the transition out of abusive homes. But most people inside the movement thought Ronnie’s methods were dangerous and sucked credibility out of the whole debate. If she had seen this man beating his wife, if she even had it all on tape, why hadn’t she gone to the police sooner? Why had she told him of his wife’s plan to leave him when she knew it might cost the woman her life?
After that, most mainstream feminists broke ties with Ronnie; some even called her a murderer. Ever since, her tactics had grown stranger and riskier. She had fewer allies and an increasing number of critics. During their first year at Smith, she had come to campus to give a talk on female genital mutilation, and three hundred girls turned out to protest. Still, April spoke about her as if she were a goddess.
It was obvious why Ronnie had hired April to be her assistant. She took advantage of April, asking her to do all sorts of dangerous and stupid things in the name of women’s liberation. The two of them made films about misogyny and sexual violence all over the world—important films that explored the lives of women who were victims of previously untold horrors. Ronnie made April live with her and seemed to be April’s only friend in Chicago.
The rest of the girls were proud of April. They knew that this was her life’s w
ork, and that it was endlessly important, but they worried about her, too. Especially Celia, who knew the most about April’s exploits and the lengths she was willing to go to to make Ronnie happy.
The latest scare had come just two days earlier, when April called from some army base in Illinois to say that a military guard had beaten the shit out of her when he caught her stealing classified files. She thought her arm might be broken, she said, and there was blood in her eyes, blurring her sight.
Celia had felt paralyzed, listening to April cry on the phone like that. Before she picked up, she had been sitting at her desk drinking an iced tea and reading Us Weekly online, trying to block out the guilt she felt over the stack of unread manuscripts on the floor by her side.
“Where was Ronnie while all this was going on?” she asked in a rush.
“She ran,” April said.
“She left you?”
“She didn’t leave me,” April said. “She just needed to protect herself. But anyway, she’s driven off now and I don’t know how the fuck I’m gonna get home.”
“What can I do?” Celia said.
“I don’t know. Just stay on the phone with me for a minute, okay? You should see me, I’m all bloody and gross and I need to get to the hospital so someone can check out my arm.”
Celia was silent, shocked. She did not know what to say.
“Please don’t tell Sally about any of this,” April said at last. “She’ll flip.”
Celia thought of the wedding, of April walking down the aisle with bruises all over her face. Sally was bound to find out what had happened. Still, Celia promised that she would keep April’s secret, just as she always kept April’s secrets.
Bree never referred to them as sophomores or juniors in life, but even so, Celia had thought of their second and third years away from Smith in exactly that way. And now it was May of their fourth year, and Sally was getting married. Married. Celia could hardly believe the word applied to one of them. It was only fitting that Sally had decided to have the wedding right on campus, because if this was the end of their senior year of life, then the weekend would be a sort of commencement, a beginning and an end.
As the bus turned onto Route 9, Celia pulled a fat slice of sour cream coffee cake from her purse. She was almost there. She took a big bite and closed her eyes. She had a blurry memory of buying the cake at the little corner store by her apartment just before heading upstairs with What’s-His-Name. She never ate that sort of crap anymore, but she had figured that you’d really have to hate yourself to ride the bus hungover for four hours without some kind of indulgence. Or, for that matter, to be even remotely food deprived for the wedding of a friend whose birthday was six months after yours when you didn’t even have a date.
There had been pretty slim pickings on the New York dating scene lately. There was the guy she met at the movies, who referred to her vagina as her “cave of pleasure” (not okay). And the candidate for a doctorate in English at Columbia, who could not help but reference the names of modern novelists in every casual conversation. (Example: “Whatcha doin’, Ian McEwan?” Blech.) In a cabinet in his apartment, hidden behind his Fassbinder video collection, Celia had found dozens of pornos with literary names—A Midsummer Night’s Cream, A Tale of Two Titties. The porn itself didn’t bother her, but the titles were simply too much. She decided to break up with him then and there.
Celia looked at the trees that lined the road leading into town. She took another bite of cake and reminded herself to ask Bree how she’d thought of it, the freshman-year-of-life idea. Especially since at Smith they were never allowed to use the term “freshman.”
It was the kind of subtle distinction that made outsiders groan.
When the topic of Smith came up at a family Christmas party her sophomore year, Celia’s uncle Monty said, “You can always tell a Smith student because she’s the one who refers to it as a women’s college instead of a girls’ school.”
“Whenever I picture Celia there, I think of the proper ladies from my old parish who went to Smith in the forties,” her grandmother said. “Cee, is it still that way? Tea parties and pearls and pinkies up and all that?”
Her least-favorite cousin, Al, piped up, likening attending a women’s college in the twenty-first century to reenacting Civil War battles on Sunday afternoons: “It’s outdated,” he said. “But it’s sort of kooky and quaint, so let them have it.”
“We’re so glad you approve,” Celia said. She turned and walked into the dining room in a rage.
In high school, Celia excelled in English without really trying and filled countless notebooks with short stories and poems. But she maintained a solid C average in most of her math and science classes, in some cases only after begging and flirting and crying her way up from a D.
Celia lacks focus, her senior-year biology teacher had written in a note to her parents. If only Celia could put the energy she puts into boys into her studies, she’d no doubt be an A student, wrote that little hobbit of a geometry teacher, who probably lived in his mother’s basement and would most likely die a virgin.
Still, somehow, miraculously, she had gotten into Smith. Her mother told everyone that it was because Celia had written an admissions essay that had made the review board cry, and it was true that they had said this in her acceptance letter. But Celia always suspected that the real reason she got into Smith was that it had snowed on the day of her interview with the head of admissions. The woman had to bring her two little daughters to work with her, and when Celia arrived, they were sitting in the waiting area, looking bored. Instinctually, she got down on her knees beside them, right on the floor, dug some pens out of her purse, and started drawing with them, much to their delight. She honestly hadn’t meant it as a kiss-ass move, but when their mother came out of her office, she beamed and said, “Tell me, Celia, do you babysit?”
Celia realized then that years of taking care of her sister and little cousins had served her better than an SAT prep course ever could.
The all-women aspect of Smith had freaked her out in the beginning, but she reasoned that there were Amherst men to be found nearby. This had proven to be wildly untrue, but she came to love the place anyway, and defending it to the members of her extended family—who had all attended Trinity and Holy Cross and were no doubt wondering if she was a lesbian—sometimes got exhausting.
In the four years since she left Northampton, she had met all sorts of women who raised their eyebrows when they heard she’d gone to Smith; and she had been on dates with dozens of men who seemed to think she was joking when she told them that she had attended one of the Seven Sisters.
They’d say things like, “Oh my God, it’s still all girls?” or “How sweet. I didn’t even know Smith existed anymore!” Or worse. Just last month, out for drinks with some friend of a friend, a balding guy who wrote for Sports Illustrated, she had talked wistfully about her college days. Halfway through the story of how she and the girls had gotten caught in a thunderstorm during Celebration of Sisterhood, she felt his hand touch her thigh under the table as he said, “Aww, don’t tell me this! You’re way too hot to be a feminazi.”
After that, she ignored his calls. Men like that were not to be tolerated, according to April. Celia agreed, but sometimes she thought to herself that between Smith and Women in Peril, Inc., April had had so little contact with real, red-blooded American men that perhaps she wasn’t exactly an authority on the topic of what one could expect from them.
Outside the bus window, Celia began to recognize buildings—Fitzwilly’s restaurant with its bright green awning, the Calvin Theatre, where she had once made out with a Hampshire film student in the balcony during a Lucinda Williams concert.
The bus rolled into the depot. As passengers began to disembark, Celia sat back for a minute, looking at the crowd gathered outside—there were a few Smithies, chubby cheeked and dressed in sweatshirts and jeans. Probably headed to the mall in Holyoke, she thought. Beside them were the Springfield-bound
hippies who came to play sidewalk music in town or worked at the organic cafés on Main Street. She inhaled, steadying herself as she stood up, and pulled her duffel bag from the overhead rack.
Celia got off the bus and made her way up the hill toward campus. The air smelled different here. It was cleaner, more alive than in Manhattan. She had remembered everything about the look of the place—the lush New England mountains that circled the valley; the smooth, glassy perfection of Paradise Pond. But the once familiar smell was a startling surprise, like a forgotten love letter peeking out from under a mattress.
When she reached campus, she walked around the Grecourt Gates. It was superstition that if you went through them before graduation you would never get married. She had graduated now, and she wasn’t even sure she wanted to get married, but, still, better to be safe than sorry. She walked by the old art museum and the new student center and John M. Greene Hall, past Haven House with its wide yellow front porch, and Park Annex, with its neat red bricks and white trim. Each house on campus was from a different time period in American history, and a girl could usually be described by whichever one she lived in—the houses on Green Street were home to the vegan/lesbian/armpit-hair crowd. Chapin, Capen, and Sessions housed a lot of left-wing party girls who smoked weed and dated each other, though they’d only ever slept with men before college. The big dykes on campus (BDOCs) usually lived in Haven-Wesley. These were the women whom even the straightest of Smithies fantasized about and blushed over when they saw them walk by.
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