Commencement

by J. Courtney Sullivan

  Celia and Bree were typical Quad bunnies—the type who loved boys, kissed girls only when they’d had a lot of tequila, and might go to a frat party if such a thing existed at Smith, and if the men were not utter pigs.

  Celia crossed Paradise Road, walked past Scales House, and, finally, there she stood, in front of King, staring at the door she had gone in and out of so many times that she could feel its exact weight just by looking at it. The back of King House opened out to the Quad—wide green lawns and ivy-covered brick buildings. But she stood now at the front of the house, facing Elm Street, where two lanes of traffic separated the campus from the world and seemed to provide a sort of force field to adulthood. On the other side of Elm Street, there were people pushing baby strollers; lawn mowers and dog toys left in yards; houses with two-car garages—all the trappings of real life that had seemed so trivial and distant in college, and that seemed distant still.

  In the midst of it all, directly across from King and wedged oddly between two houses, was the Autumn Inn, where they’d be staying for the wedding. A few months earlier, Sally had announced that she would be putting them all up at the Hotel Northampton. Even though Sal could clearly afford it, the other girls had said no. It wasn’t right for her to pay for them to come to her wedding. So Sally settled on the Autumn Inn, reasoning that a three-night stay at the Hotel Northampton was too expensive for Celia and April even if they shared a room, and that every other place in town was a dump.

  When Sally suggested the inn, April and Bree had both immediately pointed out to Celia, who was already thinking the same, how inappropriate it was: In college, the Autumn Inn was where Sally would go with Bill Lambert when the Neilson Library offices were too crowded, and the two of them just had to see each other. And now she was staying there with poor Jake on their wedding night. Leave it to Sally.

  Celia had never been inside the inn, but she had had a view of it both first year and senior year, when she lived in street-facing rooms. Some nights she would look across Elm Street and imagine the people who were staying there—married couples in town to enjoy the foliage, Smith parents visiting their daughters, lovers like Sally and Bill hiding away. Tonight, Celia thought, she would do just the opposite: check into the Autumn Inn, and gaze over at King House, imagining the students who filled those rooms, no longer hers now.

  For the next three days, the girls would envelop her.

  Of the four of them, only Celia had made several close girlfriends since leaving Smith. Sometimes she thought New York resembled a women’s college in the way that it brought women together, in part because of a lack of decent men. In the last four years, she had spent more happy nights drinking wine at the Temple Bar with Lila Bonner and Laura Friedman, or out dancing in Chelsea with Kayla from the office, than she had with all the men she had dated combined.

  But although she had made plenty of friends in the city, it still felt like each of them was alone, their lives running parallel, but never quite touching. With the Smithies, it was different. There was sometimes no telling where one of them began and the others left off.

  BREE

  The bridesmaid dress hung on the back of a kitchen chair, pale pink cotton with a halter neck, and a skirt that fell limp to the floor like one of Bree’s mother’s old nightgowns. She ran her palm over the light fabric as she waited for the water to boil. It wasn’t really appropriate for a wedding, even an outdoor wedding in May.

  “My money’s on pouffy peach taffeta with shoulder bows,” Bree had joked when Celia called her to say that Sally had gotten engaged, and that she was asking them as well as April to be her bridesmaids, and that Bree needed to sound utterly surprised upon pain of death when Sally called, because Sally had sworn Celia to secrecy.

  “I have a plan,” Bree went on. “I’m going to get married after everyone else I know, and then make each of my bridesmaids wear the exact dress they made me wear in their wedding. That way if they were fair, they’ll get to look good. If they made me wear pouffy peach, well then, now they get to wear pouffy peach.”

  Bree was trying to sound breezy and happy, but she wondered why Sally hadn’t called her yet.

  She didn’t call for two more days. Bree thought it was strange and sad, but she knew things had changed between them since college. And maybe it was foolish to think she was still Sally’s priority the way she had been at Smith, when there was so little to distract them. Back then, they had expanses of time in which to memorize one another’s routines and favorite songs and worst heartaches and greatest days. It felt something like being in love, but without the weight of having to choose just one heart to hold on to, and without the fear of ever losing it. They had spent so many evenings together on the front porch of King House with the world all before them. Maybe it was just impossible to re-create that sort of closeness in real life.

  Or maybe Sally had been afraid to tell Bree about the wedding because she knew how much it would hurt. Whatever the reason, when she called with the news, she said it in a rush, like a confession or an apology, instead of an announcement.

  Everyone knew that once upon a time Bree thought she’d be first. But now it looked like she’d never get married, at least not in the way she had planned—no white dress and long aisle strewn with a flower girl’s rose petals. Her father wouldn’t give her away in a big Savannah chapel, her mother wouldn’t stand by in a pale suit, like she had always imagined. Bree knew that the surprise of it shouldn’t be so surprising—who ever imagined herself into a life?

  She lifted the kettle from the stove and poured water into twin red mugs in two even streams.

  Lately, whenever she felt confused or depressed, she would compare her life with Sally’s—Here I am, lying on the couch stressing out about my relationship. I bet Sally’s looking at wedding gowns. Here I am making yet another pro-and-con list on a Sunday morning. Sally is probably serving Jake French toast in bed, to be followed by hours of mind-numbing sex. No matter what the imagined comparison, Sally always came out ahead.

  Bree plopped a peppermint tea bag and honey into one cup, and the regular old Lipton with milk and sugar in the other for herself. Their bedroom was just off the kitchen, and from the tone of the snoring—gentle, morning gurgles, instead of those late-night blasts that required her to sleep with earplugs—Bree knew she had a while to go before she’d be disturbed. She looked at the clock on the microwave. Their flight wasn’t for a few more hours.

  Her BlackBerry buzzed on the table. Bree tried to resist the urge, but opened the frantic e-mail from her boss, asking about a brief she’d filed the day before. She dashed off a quick reply. It was the first time she’d taken any vacation since she started at the firm a year earlier, and the way they were freaking out about it, you would have thought she was taking a month off instead of two lousy days.

  Bree pulled out a chair and sat down, gathering her long blonde hair into a knot.

  Sally was getting married. Sally, who had always somehow been both the most sensible and the craziest of them all, the girl who set a record for streaking across the Quad; who carried on an affair with a professor who was more than twice her age; who drank so much at winter formal junior year that she had to be rushed to Cooley Dickinson in an ambulance to have her stomach pumped. It had only been four years since all of that. How could so much have changed so quickly?

  Bree realized it was nasty to think anything but wonderful thoughts about the marriage of one of her best friends. She never wanted to be the sort of woman who measured everyone else’s happiness against her own. And of course, in some ways, she could picture Sally married—she was, after all, the only woman in America under sixty who had voluntarily enrolled in a flower-arranging class. In college, she had taken the role of neat freak to levels Bree never knew existed. She laundered her sheets and comforter every Sunday morning, flipping her mattress while they dried. She regularly cleaned the tub with bleach, even though the housekeeper did the same. She occasionally washed her keys in boiling, soapy water. Sh
e decorated her room for every holiday: red paper hearts on the windows in February, a tiny Christmas tree with working lights and a shining gold star. And it was more than just that. Sally had lost her mother, and she’d been aching for a family ever since. Unlike the rest of them, Sally wanted to start having kids by the time she was thirty. Overplanner that she was, she had decided long ago that she wanted a few years alone with Jake before her babies came along.

  Bree genuinely liked Jake; they all did, although she and April agreed he wasn’t exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer. They had been e-mailing back and forth with Celia, all three of them trying to decide what to get Sally for a wedding present, when April sent a message saying, Not to be an asshole, but remember when Sal and Jake were first dating and she went to his place, and she told us he only owned two books—the Bible and something by John Grisham? Should we be worried about that?

  Bree had responded immediately: Well that depends on whether you think there’s cause for concern when our best friend is about to marry someone whose favorite author is Dr. Seuss.

  April shot back: Maybe we should get them his complete works as a wedding gift? Or a first edition of Green Eggs and Ham.

  Bree laughed as she read this, but just as she hit REPLY she got an e-mail from Celia, ever the den mother.

  Stop it, you two, she wrote. How dumb can he be? He went to Georgetown for Christ’s sake! Jake is a great guy. He’s just … uncomplicated. And Sally loves him, so he’s off-limits for mocking now.

  April replied: Uncomplicated? And that’s a good thing?

  Celia wrote back: For Sally, yes.

  The correspondence turned to other topics then—Celia’s date the night before, the fact that April had been arrested again and Ronnie had had to bail her out. Then they began to discuss boring wedding details—how they’d wear their hair, whether Sally had a preference about shoes. Without thinking, Bree forwarded the entire exchange on to Sally, and wrote: See below … your thoughts on shoes?

  As soon as she hit SEND she clapped a hand over her mouth.

  “Shit,” she said. She hoped Sally wouldn’t read farther than the first message. Bree assumed she hadn’t, because two days later, Sally just wrote back: Sweetpea, sorry for the delayed response. Work has been CRAZY. You guys should wear whatever you want, unless you want to wear Doc Martens. XO

  Celia, who had minored in psych in college and seemed to think that made her an authority on human behavior, said she thought Bree had done it on purpose.

  “Why would I do that?” Bree asked.

  “Maybe because you want her to know how you feel, but you’re afraid to tell her.”

  “Why would I want her to know that I think Jake is stupid?”

  “That’s not what I meant,” Celia said.

  It was true that for some reason Bree couldn’t make it through a conversation with Sally about Jake without snapping at her. Sally just acted so smug about it all, so over the top when she described how happy they were together. The extent of Bree’s disappointment shocked her. It felt almost physical, like a broken rib poking through the skin, so that every time her thoughts twisted this way or that, a horrible pain spread through her whole body.

  When she was fifteen years old, Bree bought a two-foot stack of bridal magazines at the A&P and hid them under her bed like porn, so her brothers wouldn’t make fun. At night, she folded down the edges of each page that featured a dress like the one she wanted—ivory, with a full-on Bo Peep skirt and a row of silk-covered buttons from the base of her spine to the top of her neck.

  She and Doug Anderson got engaged right after high school graduation. All through the ceremony, across the rows of bleachers, she could see that he was sweating. Anyone else might have thought it was from wearing a black cap and gown in the Savannah heat, but Bree knew better—something had him terrified. A few hours later, at the picnic their fathers threw at Forsyth Park, Doug took her over to a row of oak trees and propped her up against one as though she might lose control of her bones. He still looked afraid, even after drinking two beers.

  “You okay?” she asked him, and just as the words came out of her mouth, he fell to one knee. He didn’t have the ring in a velvet box, the way she had pictured. Instead, he uncurled his fingers and the diamond band sat right in the palm of his hand. He reminded Bree of a little boy bringing his mama a treasure from the garden, a lady-bug or a double-headed acorn.

  She said yes before he could even ask. Doug jumped to his feet and squeezed her tight. He kissed her until she felt like the sun was shining out from inside of her and she might actually burst into a thousand glittering shards of light. And then their families gathered around them, and everyone toasted with good champagne, and Bree realized that they had all known. This was meant to be her engagement party. She could still remember the proud look on her daddy’s face, her grandmother’s giddy chatter about whether Bree ought to carry red roses or calla lilies when she walked down the aisle. Only her mother stood back from the crowd, her lips pressed tightly together, a gesture that she had once told Bree was the true secret to a happy marriage. Later though, when plans were being ironed out, she spoke up. While Doug thought Bree ought to transfer to the University of Georgia so that they could be married within the year, her mother insisted that she give Smith a fair shot, and that they make the engagement a long one.

  When Bree was in grade school, she and her mother would go to Northampton for a few days every summer. They’d walk around campus, eat fancy dinners downtown, get manicures and blowouts, buy tiny soaps in the shape of fish or hearts or elephants at the Cedar Chest on Main Street. Her brothers would have to stay behind.

  Bree had been romanticizing the Smith Sisterhood ever since. She loved the idea of living in a land of women, rich in tradition. Tea parties and candlelight dinners and friends you’d keep for a lifetime. When it came time to think about college, she applied only to Smith, early decision, and was accepted within a week.

  Doug and Bree both wanted to be lawyers, someday going into practice together. Her secret wish was to go to Stanford Law, and not wanting to jinx herself, she had told no one but Doug.

  He teased her, saying over and over, “No trusting Southerner is gonna want a lawyer who ran off to some Yankee college and then got a law degree in hippie-dippy California.”

  Bree knew he was scared. He didn’t want her to go so far away. She tried to reassure him, even though all summer long she felt like a pioneer: She was the only person they knew who was leaving the South for college.

  But when it came time to say good-bye, Bree suddenly grew terrified. She held his hands so tight that her fingernails left ten perfect moons on his palms when she let go.

  Her parents had the car all loaded up and were sitting in the front seat trying to give them their privacy. Eventually, her father beeped the horn, and she and Doug embraced long and hard. He kissed the diamond on her hand as a sort of seal on the promise they’d made. They had already planned their reunion over Bree’s fall break, imagining out loud how they would run to each other in the airport, just like characters in an old movie (her vision), and have sex in his dad’s Oldsmobile before even leaving the parking garage (his).

  Bree had seen him almost every day of her life since kindergarten. They had been a couple for more than three years.

  “I can’t believe I have to wait until October to be with you again,” she said.

  “Well, if you stay here with me, you won’t have to,” he said.

  Two flights and several hours later, Bree arrived in Northampton, just in time to register and run to the first house meeting. It was time enough to determine that this was not her mother’s Smith College and that she wanted out. Back in the seventies, good Southern parents sent their girls off to the Seven Sisters to stay out of trouble and away from men. Bree would bet anything that her mother had never heard about shower hours, and if she did now, she’d yank Bree right out of this place.

  On her way into registration, Bree had seen someone�
�s dad point at a group of shaved-headed lesbians sitting in the grass. He said to his daughter, “I don’t think you’ll have trouble meeting boys around here. They’re everywhere.”

  “Those are women!” the girl hissed.

  The father looked like he’d been shot.

  Bree skipped dinner that night and called her parents, and then Doug, from her room.

  “Jacobson and Jones are having a kegger in their suite tonight,” Doug said excitedly. “All the guys from home will be there, and Kathleen said to tell you we’ll give you a good drunk dialing later.”

  “Oh,” Bree said. “Sounds fun.”

  She had watched these boys drink beers on countless nights, in parking lots, and at the drive-in, and out at the old stone quarry. Would their next four years be any different from their last? She felt jealous of and sorry for them all at once.

  “I miss you,” she said.

  “Hey,” he said. “Me too, babydoll. I hate hearing you so sad.”

  Doug tried to sound soothing, but in the background people were laughing and yelling and shouting his name, and he had to keep asking her to repeat herself.

  Eventually Bree said, “I’m fine, baby. Go have fun.”

  He didn’t argue.

  Bree went to the bathroom with a towel slung over her shoulder, and her little pink shower caddy in her hand. She stood alone before a row of sinks, bathed in fluorescent light, and scrubbed off her eye makeup, her blush. She flossed her teeth and thought—she couldn’t help it—about how fat all the older girls at the house meeting had been.

  Down the hall, someone let out a squeal of recognition, the sound you make when you see a familiar face that you haven’t seen in ages. Bree’s loneliness was so strong that she half expected it to take the form of another person and materialize there beside her, perched on the ugly Formica countertop in a fuzzy bathrobe and hot rollers.

  She walked back to her room and shut the door. Before leaving home she had ripped dozens of pages out of her bridal magazines and placed them in an envelope marked Wedding Inspiration. She pulled them out now, lovingly smoothing the pages as if they were photographs of old friends. She tacked them to her bulletin board, one by one.