Commencement

by J. Courtney Sullivan

  She tried calling Doug again, but the phone just rang and rang. Back in Georgia, she knew, he was off to the party, probably surrounded by gorgeous Southern college girls with their fine summer dresses and smooth, glossy hair.

  It was only ten-thirty when Bree crawled into bed, intent on crying herself to sleep. As she always did when she was scared or sad, she tried to mentally recall each and every date she and Doug had ever been on. (She usually fell asleep or calmed down by about the fifth or sixth.) First date: They went to the movies with Melissa Fairbanks and Chris Carlson. Doug paid for her ticket; Chris did not pay for Melissa’s. Second date: The Sadie Hawkins dance. She had asked him, as was the custom, and instead of some dopey corsage he had sent roses to the house, something he would continue to do on the first Saturday of every month, right up until the previous day, the last day at home before Bree came to Smith. The third date: Their first kiss, and Doug had said right then and there, “Bree Miller, you’re the girl I’m gonna marry.”

  Thinking on this, Bree began to weep. She stared up at the ceiling, where someone had left behind a constellation of tiny glow-in-the-dark stars. She ran her ring over her lips. Why hadn’t she listened to Doug when he told her to come with him? What was so great about this place that she had left him and all their friends behind? Doug had been talking about wanting to get married and have babies since freshman year of high school. If two people loved each other enough, couldn’t they overcome anything—even distance, even their own goddamn youth?

  After a short while, Celia slid a note under the door.

  They liked each other immediately. In the weeks that followed, Bree taught Celia how to create a smoky eye using just one gray shadow, and Celia taught Bree how to make an Irish car bomb, a drink so potent that it sent Bree into hysterics, and made her drunk dial Doug at 4:00 a.m. to tell him she had a feeling all their babies would be born with freckles.

  She often thought of her auntie Sue and auntie Kitty—not really aunts at all, but her mother’s Smith roommates and lifelong best friends. She knew almost from the start that Celia would be that person for her. The godmother to her children, the maid of honor when she married Doug, although the one thing Celia didn’t seem to understand about her was the engagement.

  “You’ll never have sex with anyone but him as long as you live,” Celia said in wonderment one night in late September. “Doesn’t that scare you?”

  Bree said no, but admitted that she was afraid she might be changing, while Doug was staying just the same. As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she felt guilty and changed the subject.

  Being together from a distance wasn’t as easy as she had imagined it would be. It got harder and harder just to find time to talk on the phone at night. By the time Doug got home from class, she was off to some lecture or a movie with the girls. As she lay down to sleep, he was just heading out to a party.

  On the first Saturday in October, Bree dashed to the front door of King House every time the doorbell rang, but it was never for her.

  “You didn’t send me roses,” she said to Doug on the phone that night.

  “Is it October already?” he said. “Sorry, baby, I didn’t even realize.”

  He was disappointed when she didn’t come home for fall break, but she’d had two midterms that following Tuesday, and she couldn’t afford not to spend the whole weekend studying. She had asked him to fly out to Northampton the next weekend instead. They could go apple picking, she said, take a hayride.

  Doug scoffed a little. “A hayride?” he said. “I can’t, babe. We’ve got tickets for the game on Saturday, and we’re prepartying in my suite.”

  She knew he didn’t mean to be hurtful, but his quick dismissal made Bree burst into tears.

  When she hung up, she went straight to Celia’s room. The door was open, so she walked right in and flopped down on the bed. Celia was sitting at her desk reading The Canterbury Tales for her Chaucer class, her bare feet propped up on the edge of an open drawer.

  “What’s the matter?” she said.

  Bree sniffled. “I just feel like I’m losing him.”

  Celia didn’t look all that surprised, and she didn’t say a word about Doug. Instead, she said, “Put on your jacket, little lady I’m taking you to lunch.”

  Celia never wanted anyone to be left out. Sometimes, Bree selfishly wished that she didn’t always feel the need to invite Sally and April everywhere. But then Bree would remember how Celia had saved her from her loneliness that first night, and grow guilty for not thinking of the others—especially poor Sally, whose mother had died.

  Celia was the one who had reached out to each of them initially, the glue that held them all together. Did that have something to do with the fact that she was Catholic? Bree wondered, though she knew Celia would laugh at the suggestion. Celia rarely talked about religion, except to make a joke about Catholic school every now and then, or to break out her old uniform for a costume party in the Quad. She seemed determined to prove to everyone, maybe even herself, that she was an atheist. Still, Bree believed that Celia’s religion must be in her somewhere, deep down, which accounted for the fact that Celia was so good, so worried about everyone else, so eager to make them all happy. Bree’s own parents were lapsed Baptists. The last time she had been in a church was at her great-aunt’s funeral three years earlier.

  They were discussing this one lazy Sunday afternoon. Sally, Celia, and Bree were lying in Bree’s bed, eating a tin of Savannah lemon cookies that her mother had sent, and Celia was talking about how she didn’t believe in God.

  “How can you not believe in God?” Sally asked, looking mesmerized.

  “I might ask you how you can believe,” Celia said.

  “I guess because if I didn’t, I’d go crazy,” Sally replied.

  Bree imagined that Sally must be thinking about her mother, and so, although she wasn’t sure what she believed, she said, “I agree with Sally. There’s definitely more than this out there somewhere.”

  Sally gave her a little smile.

  Bree watched as she nibbled on her bite-size cookie, eating it at one-millionth the rate of a normal person. This was how Sally stayed so skinny, of course. Bree placed the cookie she was holding back in the tin. After just a couple of months at Smith, her pants were fitting tighter, and she couldn’t even get into the dress she’d worn to her high school graduation. Celia was puffing up too, her cheeks growing full, a soft little roll forming at her belly. Bree had been voted Most Beautiful and Best Dressed in her senior yearbook, and now look at her, plump and decked out in flannel pajama pants and a Smith sweatshirt, with the hood pulled up over her head because she hadn’t washed her hair in two days. She was afraid of what her mother would say when she saw her for the first time at Thanksgiving. Not to mention Doug.

  The phone rang then, and Bree leaned over to pick it up. When she heard Doug’s voice, she laughed.

  “I was just thinking about you,” she said.

  “Bree, we need to talk,” he said, and she felt like someone had dropped a brick into her stomach.

  She asked the girls to leave, and shut the door. She took a long deep breath before picking up the phone again.

  “What’s wrong?” she said, her heart racing.

  His confession came fast. The night before, he said, he had gotten drunk at a party and made out with someone, a girl Bree had never heard of named Laney Price. (“She sounds like a hooker,” Celia said later.) It was a stupid mistake, he said, and it would never happen again.

  Bree sobbed into the phone while Doug apologized over and over.

  “Tell me everything,” she said. “Every detail.”

  “Bree—,” he said in his sweet little baby voice, making her heart ache. “It was nothing, I swear. Just kissing, pretty much.”

  “Pretty much?” She was growing hysterical now. “What is pretty much? Were you in a bed?” She braced herself against his reply: Say no, say no, say no. If they had been standing up at a dark party somewhere, may
be it wasn’t such a big deal.

  He sighed. “Yes, we were in my bed.”

  “Did you have your shoes on?” she asked.

  Doug laughed. “Baby! Come on. It was just a stupid mistake.”

  “Tell me,” she said. “Were there shoes? Were you naked?”

  “Jesus, no,” he said. “She had her top off. That was it.”

  Bree felt like she had been kicked hard in the gut. This was supposed to put her at ease? When he suggested that they talk about something else, she screamed “No!” so loud that April, Sally, and Celia all came running in.

  “He cheated on me,” she said to them, her hand pressed over the receiver.

  The girls left the room, Celia squeezing her hand and whispering, “I’ll be right next door if you need me.”

  They talked for hours. Doug kept saying maybe they should cool off for a while, but Bree didn’t want to hang up the phone. She wanted him to hear what he had done to her, to suffer for his stupid, meaningless mistake the way she would suffer for it. Eventually, she let him go, said she’d call again after dinner. He told her he loved her, and even after what had happened, Bree believed him. She said she loved him, too.

  That night, alone in her room, she stared at her engagement ring for a long time. He had said he wanted her forgiveness, that he still wanted to marry her. Maybe they could find a way to put this behind them. Doug had warned her not to move so far away, but she hadn’t listened. Maybe this was just her punishment for leaving.

  Bree went to the bulletin board and ran her hand over the glossy photos of happy brides in flowing gowns. This life—Doug, marriage—was what she had always wanted, wasn’t it? But if she wanted it that badly, would she really have left?

  The door was cracked open, and she could hear footsteps on the other side.

  April poked her head in, wearing her apron from her shift in the dining hall. She was the only one of them on work-study, and though Bree knew it wasn’t really all that tragic, she still felt sorry for April sometimes.

  “You okay?” April asked from the doorway “Need me to kill anyone?”

  She entered the room and saw what Bree had been staring at.

  “Wedding dresses, huh?” she said.

  Bree nodded.

  “You know what could be therapeutic?” April said, her eyes widening. “If we set them on fire.”

  Bree shook her head, laughing. But then, something shifted in her. The sadness seemed to drop out of her, and in its place was a rage so strong it nearly knocked her down. She had asked him for all the details thinking that knowing would somehow make it better. But now she had this visual—her fiancé making out with some topless girl in his bed, a bed Bree had never even seen. While he was doing that, she had been lying in her own bed with Celia, talking about her wedding. She had always dreamed of going to Smith College. If Doug felt the need to spread his stupid seed all over the University of Georgia just because they’d been apart for two months, there was nothing for her to do.

  Bree reached up toward the board. Her hand gripped the top of a page—her favorite, the Priscilla gown with the six-foot train. Gently, delicately, Bree tore it in two, and then began to rip the pieces into tiny squares, the size of sugar cubes.

  A moment later, she and April were tearing the pages off the board, running to the bathroom, dumping them by the handful into the sink.

  “You should do the honors,” April said, and she handed Bree a book of matches from inside her coat pocket.

  Bree struck a match and dropped it onto the papers, watching all the white gowns burn.

  April’s face glowed with approval. She had never had a boyfriend. She had met her own father only once. Bree suspected that this void was responsible for making April who she was, though April rarely spoke about trouble in her life. Unlike the rest of them, she kept her secrets to herself.

  To April this small fire was probably a statement about the patriarchy, a stab at capitalism, something like that. But to Bree, it was simply surrender—a giving over of herself to this new life. In the days that followed, she tried to listen to Doug, tried to see things from his perspective, tried to imagine her life without him, and wept over the prospect. But she could never quite manage to get the disappointment and doubt out of her head.

  By the time November arrived, her engagement was off.

  By sophomore year, Bree, Celia, April, and Sally had moved out of maids’ quarters and into the main hall, but they still lived next door to one another. They left their doors open during the day, yelling from one room to the next. They lingered on the couches in the living room after dinner, gossiping and reading aloud to one another from The New Yorker and Vogue. Once a week they ordered dumplings and fried rice and lo mein from the takeout place on Main Street and had a feast while they studied, taking sips from a bottle of Boone’s Farm that Celia had gotten with her fake ID. They ate the rest of their meals at the corner table in the dining hall.

  It had felt liberating to leave Doug, but even a year later, it wasn’t easy for Bree to be without him. At Smith, it seemed to her, hearts broke quickly and stayed that way too long. There was no distraction, no rebound guy to speed your recovery. She thought about him all the time—not so much about Doug the individual, but rather about the nature of love, and the shock of learning how quickly it could disappear. About the fact that some girl she had never met, never even seen, had perhaps changed the whole course of her life. She cried about him more than was healthy, despite the fact that the Smith girls kept saying she had dodged a bullet, and despite the support of her family. (Her parents now sent her flowers on the first Saturday of every month, and her brother Roger had offered to have Doug beaten to a pulp by some frat guys he knew. Bree turned him down, but she was grateful for the sentiment.)

  She had always been a happy person, but that year she began to worry that something inside her had changed. Was it her, she wondered, or was it the girls? All of them worried a lot, and all of them cried. Over ex-boyfriends and Sally’s mother and sexism in America and a fear of eventually leaving one another. Sometimes Bree wondered if they all loved crying just a little too much.

  At first, she thought of it as a pure outpouring of emotion. There was something wonderful about living among women and only women, about having your own little family of friends where honesty and true feeling reigned. It was exactly what she had imagined as a little girl. But somewhere along the way she began to feel stifled. Though they were sociable with other girls in the house, the four of them rarely spent time with anyone except one another. Her role in the group was neatly defined as the pretty Southern belle to whom nothing bad had ever happened. The one who was just so darn naïve and adorable that she’d actually arrived at Smith with a diamond ring on her finger.

  The one-year anniversary of Sally’s mother’s death came and went, and as her shrink had predicted, things only got harder. Sally never spoke about her friends from home anymore. During their first year, her friend Monica had come for the weekend once or twice, and called fairly often, but now she seemed to have vanished, and so it was up to the Smithies to care for Sally. They spent so many nights just comforting her. Celia was a natural at this. April, with her matter-of-factness about the terrible ways of the world, was also well equipped to help.

  But Bree found it unbearable. As soon as she offered a single word of counsel, she imagined what life would be like without her own mother, and just wanted to crumble. How on earth could she help Sally?

  Bree had once whispered to Sally late at night that she admired her so much, because losing a parent was her greatest fear in life.

  Sally had snapped at her: “Why would you say that, Bree? My reality is your greatest fear. What am I supposed to do with that information?”

  Bree had also said aloud more than once that she and Sally had lived almost the same life, except for the fact that Sally lost her mother. By this, Bree meant that they had both lived in privilege with mothers who ran their worlds, and so she understood how S
ally must feel. Afterward, when she saw the stung expression on Sally’s face, she knew it was a stupid thing to say. But she could not help saying it—the constant reminder that one cosmic toss of the dice had left Sally in misery and Bree the same as ever was just too much.

  She told her mother all of this over the phone one night, whispering in case any of the girls were outside the door.

  “Maybe you just need a breather,” her mother said. “Join a club the girls would never want to be a part of or something.”

  Sometimes talking to her mother made Bree realize how easy she had it. Her breathy tone seemed to imply that she would kill for silly problems like Bree’s. Then again, her mother did not know the girls. There was no club she could join that Sally or April wasn’t already a member of. Sally had all of the social committees and student government positions wrapped up, and April would join any group with the word “radical” or “unite” in the title.

  Then, in the post office one morning, Bree spotted a flyer listing job openings on campus. She applied to be a clerk in the college bookstore, which was where, on her first day, she met her Lara.

  Celia thought she was crazy for taking a job that ate up her free afternoons, especially when she didn’t really need the money. But Bree loved the steady pace of the work, the sense of accomplishment she got from alphabetizing the stacks or hanging T-shirts in the correct order—smallest to largest starting from the front. Her hours in the bookstore felt controllable because each task had an end point, unlike her classes, where reading a book only led to writing a long paper which led to class discussions which led to exams. And unlike the dorm, where their problems, trivial or enormous, seemed all but unsolvable.

  Lara was what Celia called a conveyor belt lesbian, by which she meant one of the dozens of girls on campus whose sexuality was evidenced through their short, spiky hair, bodies either spindly or massive (never anything in between), and a uniform of white tank tops over cargo shorts, as if they had all been mass-produced in a factory somewhere in New Jersey.