April’s heart sped up. Maybe she’d regret it tomorrow, but right at that moment it seemed like the perfect thing. She thought of Toby as a child, cutting off his golden locks in secret. Now, in a way, maybe he could reclaim that memory and turn it into something good.
They sat in dining hall chairs out on the sidewalk, holding hands as two first years took out electric razors and set to work. A crowd gathered around and everyone cheered. April closed her eyes, feeling the buzz of the razor against her scalp, as her long red hair fell to the ground in chunks. When she got back to King House, the girls would surely make a fuss, screaming at her that she had lost her mind, but totally enjoying the shock of it all. April felt at peace.
Something to remember this night by, Toby had said. As if she could ever forget.
SALLY
Sally listened from inside the closet, covering her face in Jake’s suit so his mother wouldn’t hear her breathing. She had gotten slightly tipsy during afternoon drinks with the girls, and they had all decided to part ways for a nap. But Sally couldn’t sleep. She had been in the closet, drunkenly steaming Jake’s clothes for the wedding, when she heard a key in the hotel room door. She knew it couldn’t be Jake—he was out golfing in Amherst with his father all day. For a moment, Sally wondered if it might be Bill, but that was ridiculous. He had no idea she was even in town. She had been thinking too much about Bill in the month or so leading up to the wedding. Those long hours spent making love in his office in Neil-son Library, his silver hair and itchy sweaters. His favorite poem repeated over and over in her head, Auden’s “Brussels in Winter.” Ridges of rich apartments loom tonight / Where isolated windows glow like farms, / A phrase goes packed with meaning like a van, / A look contains the history of man.
When Rosemary came into the room and yelled out, “Anyone home?” Sally slid the closet door shut, closing herself inside without thinking. A moment later, it felt ridiculous and childish, but she couldn’t very well emerge from the closet now.
Who did Rosemary think she was, anyway, just walking right in without even knocking? That was Jake’s family—they had no concept of doors or walls or personal space. Sally hoped she’d find whatever it was she wanted and get out. She wasn’t in the mood for Rosemary right now. But instead, Rosemary sat down on the bed, started poking through Jake’s suitcase, and called her sister Anna on the telephone.
“The maid’s in our room, and I don’t want to be in there while she’s cleaning,” Rosemary said into the phone. “I don’t know. I just don’t feel comfortable going for a walk downtown without Joe. Wait until you get here, Anna. There are lesbians everywhere you look—I am telling you, everywhere!”
There was a pause, and then Rosemary said, “No, I am not afraid they’re going to try and convert me.”
Sally had to bite down on the sleeve of Jake’s suit to keep from laughing.
“I told Jake he should put his foot down about this idiotic outdoor wedding idea six months ago. And now look—it’s going to rain on Sunday!” Rosemary was screaming into the telephone as if the receiver itself had defied her. She took a deep breath, composing herself.
“You know I love Sally, but she’s not very bridely, is all. First, she didn’t want a proper wedding gown. Then she ruled out the church ceremony. And then she announced that she was having the wedding here. What kind of girl wants to get married at her college, anyway? What’s wrong with her hometown—or ours, for that matter? Two perfectly nice Boston suburbs to choose from, and she makes us all schlep out here to the boonies. Lord knows she could afford a big wedding with all that money of hers. And so could Jake. You marry a boy who’s made a little fortune in banking, and then you don’t let him show it off? I mean, it’s not five million, but it’s something.”
Sally’s hands formed two tight fists. The last thing Jake cared about was showing off by having a big wedding. They were spending their money on more practical things—the new house in Cam-bridge, their car payments, their kids’ college funds. Rosemary knew all that. It’s not five million, she had said. Five million, Sally’s cut of the blood money. The number that had followed her around like a ghost ever since her father settled with the oncologist at Mass General. Five million dollars that made people think she was the luckiest twenty-five-year-old on earth, when of course she would give it all back and then some if she had the choice of seeing her mother for one more day, one more hour.
After all the legal fees had been paid, there was ten million left. Her father said that she and her brother should split it down the middle. She had told him that she didn’t want it, but he refused to take no for an answer, talking at her about investment options for far longer than he’d ever bothered to talk to her about her mother’s death. (“Men are emotional fuckwits,” April had said. “He doesn’t know how to help you, but he wants you to know that he wishes he could.”) The money felt like a bribe. Sally tried her hardest always to act as though she didn’t even have it—until a month ago, she had lived in a shabby apartment in Central Square with three roommates. And here was Rosemary, rubbing it in her face.
She had tried many times to consider things from Rosemary’s point of view, really tried. A woman has a son and loves him and raises him up and thinks he’s a prince, and then one day another woman comes along to steal him away. That must feel awful. But shouldn’t Rosemary want Jake to find happiness? Shouldn’t she have pushed him out of the nest a bit more to begin with? He was thirty years old, and when he and Sally met four years earlier, his mother was still filling his fridge with seven homemade meals every Sunday night when she came over to drop off his laundry, folded neatly with double fabric softener on the sheets. If that part wasn’t Freudian, Sally thought, she didn’t know what was.
The first time she and Jake had a fight, it was because Rosemary had gone into his room while he was at work and actually made his bed for him, then mentioned that it was a bit unseemly for one of Sally’s bras to be hanging on the headboard where everyone could see it. When Jake related this story to Sally the next time they were alone in his room, he didn’t roll his eyes or look embarrassed by his mother’s intrusion. Instead, he meant it as an actual word of warning: Don’t hang your unseemly bra on my pristine, handpicked-by-Mommy headboard.
“What is your mother even doing in here?” Sally had snapped. “Does she have a key to your apartment?”
“What’s wrong with that?” Jake’s face always crumpled when he felt hurt, like a child in the sandbox in that instant right after the shovel has been snatched from his hand, and right before he begins to wail. His expression made Sally want to drop the whole issue, but she couldn’t.
“I’m surprised she doesn’t just jump right into the goddamn bed after she makes it,” she shouted. “I’m surprised her bra’s not hanging on the headboard.”
She knew that she had taken it too far. Any other guy might have stormed right out of there, but Jake just laughed and pulled her onto the bed with his big bear arms, and rolled her body into the sheets. “Admit it,” he said. “You like these sheets as much as I do. You’re just using me for my double fabric softener.”
Sometimes Sally wondered if she found Rosemary so unbearable because she herself would never again experience that smothering, safe brand of love that only comes from the woman who has known you since the beginning of you, since even before the beginning.
She missed everything about her mother. The brown waves she pushed back with a plain tortoiseshell headband; the rows of pressed cardigans and cable knits that hung in her closet; her perfume, something discontinued called Creation that she had to buy in a little specialty shop in Harvard Square. She ran eight miles every morning before breakfast and had what Sally considered the perfect figure for a mother—trim and strong with a tiny soft belly where her babies had grown. When Sally and her brother were kids, she used to drive them out to the beach in Cohasset for a picnic on sunny Saturdays. Their father was usually at work, or flying to some conference or other. “Wave hello to Daddy!” t
heir mother would shout when a plane flew overhead, and they would wave, all three of them pumping their arms as if he really could see them. To Sally, even now, her mother’s body seemed like a place where cancer would not dare to dwell.
The fall of Sally’s junior year of high school, her mother had been losing weight.
“You look good,” Sally said before dinner one night, as they were chopping vegetables for a salad and watching the evening news.
“Really?” her mother said.
“Yeah, you look thin,” Sally said.
Her mother said she hadn’t noticed, but she seemed pleased, and Sally assumed that she was back on one of her crazy lemon juice or cabbage soup diets.
In November, she found a lump, a hard, round, pea-size nuisance, between her armpit and her breast. The doctor said it was nothing, a benign cyst. He told her that the blood work showed she was anemic, and so she and Sally started taking iron pills, which they agreed tasted like sucking on a penny.
For a while, her mother felt better. But the lump remained, and finally, months later, she had another round of tests with another doctor. It was breast cancer, this second doctor said, and it had spread to the lymph nodes and bone. He was sorry, so very sorry, that the first doctor had missed it, because her chances of survival now were small. Had they caught it sooner, well—why wonder?
During her year of chemo, she insisted on wearing lipstick and taking a long walk every morning. She wore a designer wig that cost a fortune and looked almost like her real hair. Afterward, though the treatments weren’t successful, the doctors said they were impressed by her stamina. Perhaps she had longer than they had first predicted—possibly nine months, instead of three. But then things seemed to backslide. She was in and out of the hospital. Still, she stayed cheerful and brave. On good mornings, she made casseroles, which she froze “for later,” she said.
“You mean when you’re dead,” Sally’s brother had said once, starting to cry, and even though Sally knew he was hurting and that he was probably right, she hated him for saying it. (No one ever ate those casseroles. As far as Sally knew, they were still in her father’s freezer, an icy monument that none of them could bear to throw away.) Her mother took out old shoe boxes full of photographs and pasted the best ones into albums. She wrote long letters to family and friends. Her spark did not die until the moment the rest of her gave out, two days before Sally’s high school graduation.
Had her mother lived, Sally thought, she would probably have been one of those Smith girls who wears pearls and keeps her own horse at the campus stables and goes home every other Sunday for family dinner. She recognized much of what she had done since her mother’s death as an attempt to shock her back to life—the affair with Bill, not applying to medical school, even this bare-bones wedding in the Smith College Quad, were all actions that her mother would have protested and eventually nixed. And then there were the things Sally knew her mother would have loved. Those, too, made it easy to imagine how she might come back to life, since nothing good seemed quite real without her there to approve of it.
She would have loved Jake.
“He’s not good enough for you” had been her rally cry all through Sally’s high school years whenever she brought home another cocky football player or debate team captain. Jake was good enough for her. He was the kindest man Sally had ever known. He wanted kids, lots of them, and he wanted to be there for every day. Not like Sally’s father, who always boasted that he was in China signing his first million-dollar deal the moment Sally took her first steps, on the front lawn back home. Jake laughed at her when anyone else might get frustrated and walk away, which was good, because Sally knew that she could be exasperating sometimes.
Jake always remembered when it was her mother’s birthday and how old she would have been. He understood Sally’s rituals, which anyone else but April would probably find creepy—some of her mother’s ashes were in a coffee can under her bed, and Sally still had one voice-mail message from her left on her cell phone, which she saved each month and listened to all the time.
“Hey,” her mother said. “Hope you guys are having fun. Can you bring home a quart of milk? Oh, and wear your seat belt. Love you.” In the background, you could hear the opening strains of the nightly news theme song. This message was Sally’s most treasured possession, and she planned to carry her outdated cell phone as long as she possibly could, so that she would never lose it.
No matter how many times Sally woke up sobbing over missing her, Jake just smoothed her hair and drew her close. He would never ask, When are you going to move on? In the years to come, he would help Sally keep her mother’s memory alive, even when it seemed like her father and brother were intent on erasing it. They refused to speak about her mother now, as if she had simply never existed. Ever since her death, Sally felt like she had no family at all.
Rosemary’s heated voice interrupted Sally’s thoughts.
“Yes, Anna, I understand that, but what I’m saying is you just don’t serve prime rib at a ninetieth birthday party—half the people couldn’t even chew. It was an embarrassment. And Dottie paid eighty-five dollars a plate. Oh? She told you seventy? She told me eighty-five.”
At least they had moved on from the wedding, Sally thought. She looked at her watch in the dim light of the closet. Rosemary had been out there for twelve minutes.
“Okay, I’m gonna scoot,” she said after a while. “We’ll see you tomorrow for the rehearsal dinner, if not before. What? Oh wear whatever you want—Lord knows the bride will probably be sporting a tie-dye T-shirt.”
Sally watched through the slits in the door as Rosemary went to the dresser and looked long and hard at herself in the mirror. She spotted Jake’s roll of Life Savers, untwirled the silver wrapping, and popped one into her mouth. Then she slipped out into the hall, the door closing with a thud behind her.
Sally opened the closet and fell onto the bed. A tie-dye T-shirt? She was tempted to run right out and buy one to wear tomorrow. She sighed. She was less and less like her old self every day—years ago, she would have been horrified by the mere idea of insulting her mother-in-law. Now it gave her a little thrill.
Oh well. She was marrying Jake, not his family. That’s what Celia reminded her whenever Sally called her to complain after a long dinner with Rosemary and Joe. She knew it wasn’t strictly true, but still, the thought was comforting.
Sally switched on the TV and started flipping through the channels. By this time on Sunday, she would be married. Just forty-eight hours and everything would be different. A shiver went through her—equal parts panic and excitement.
Suddenly the door opened again, and Rosemary stepped back into the room. Sally held her breath. She watched Rosemary’s expression change when she saw her there, lying on the bed. It had only been thirty seconds or so since Rosemary left, and she looked horrified.
“Hi, Sal,” she said, glancing around the room as if trying to find a clue about where Sally had come from. “I left my reading glasses on your nightstand earlier. I just wanted to come get them.”
“Oh,” Sally said calmly, reaching for the red-framed glasses and handing them to her. “Here you go.”
“Thanks.” Rosemary walked toward the door, and then paused for a long moment, perhaps debating whether or not to say something. She smiled over her shoulder instead. “See you later, honey.”
Sally waved. She could barely manage to hold in her laughter until Rosemary was back in the hall. She thought of calling one of the girls in their rooms to tell the story, but decided to wait until dinner. It would be better to see the looks on their faces. She got to do that so rarely now. It had been two years since they were all together in one place. She remembered telling Celia once how Jake and his friends from Georgetown had shared an apartment after graduation.
“Why didn’t we ever think to do that?” Sally asked.
It had broken their hearts to be apart, she thought, and she still hadn’t found a single friend besides Jake who coul
d compare with any one of them. So why had they been so intent on going their own ways?
“We could have all moved into a big house and taken turns cooking dinner,” Sally said. “Why couldn’t we be those kind of people?”
“Because people like that never grow,” Celia said quickly, which made Sally think she had probably asked herself the same question in the past.
“Sometimes I think growth is overrated,” Sally said then.
“Me too,” Celia said.
Sally knew that splitting up had been hardest for her. The first year out of school, the four of them had talked on the phone to one another almost every night. They had a mini-reunion in Vegas the summer after graduation, and another the following year at her father’s new six-bedroom estate on the Cape. (He called it a cottage, which just made the place all the more ridiculous.) She saw Celia every time she came home to Massachusetts to visit her family, and she went out to Chicago once to spend time with April. But lately, they had begun to fall away from one another. Sally had listened to Celia’s outgoing voice-mail message so many times that she sometimes heard the whole thing, note for note, in her head as she was dialing. She knew that Celia spent too many hours at work, and that that was just the nature of the book publishing business. She knew that Celia’s social life was different from her own. While she and Jake spent most nights going to the gym, cooking dinner, and watching ESPN, Celia lived the life of a Manhattan chick-lit heroine-cocktail parties, long dinners in trendy restaurants she couldn’t really afford, and date after date after date with the wrong guys.
But still, Sally often remarked to Jake, doesn’t everyone have a few minutes a night to just pick up the phone? Sally suspected that the girls had distanced themselves from her because she was in love and about to get married. April disapproved of marriage in general. The others, Sally assumed, were jealous. Bree had Lara, of course, but ever since graduation she seemed to cause Bree more misery than anything else. And Celia was alone. Neither of them wanted to hear about how good things were with Jake.
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