Commencement

by J. Courtney Sullivan

  She crept into April’s room. The shades were drawn, and the heavy smell of sleeping breath hung in the air. Sally slipped off her flip-flops and crawled under the covers. A moment later, she felt April roll over and nestle in beside her.

  “What time is it?” she whispered.

  “Seven-thirty,” Sally said.

  “And are you still in love, even at this early hour?” April asked.

  “Mmm-hmm,” she said.

  “Have you been out having a big lovers’ quarrel and amazing makeup sex?”

  “Yes.”

  “Fabulous,” April said, pressing her face into Sally’s hair. “Can we discuss it after ten-thirty?”

  “We don’t need to discuss it at all,” Sally said.

  “Like hell we’re not gonna discuss it,” April said. “I suspect we’ll discuss nothing but for some time.”

  She reached over and wrapped her arm around Sally.

  “Do you think Celia hates me now?” Sally asked.

  “She’ll get over it,” April said. Soon after, her breathing grew steady, and Sally knew she had fallen back to sleep.

  Sally closed her eyes, but she couldn’t help saying one more thing. “They’re separated,” she whispered. “It’s not what Celia thinks.”

  The morning before her wedding day, Sally awoke from a dream covered in sweat. Jake’s arms were wrapped around her, his chest pressed to her back, and something in this sweet, unknowing gesture made her want to cry. How on earth could she let herself dream about Bill with Jake lying right there beside her? She closed her eyes and tried to think about tomorrow—she was marrying Jake, at last. The wedding itself seemed less exciting than what would come after, and Sally took this as a good sign. One more day and they’d be in the car on their way to Maine, holding hands and singing songs like they did on any road trip, but this time would be different. This time they would check into the bed-and-breakfast as Mr. and Mrs. Jake Brown.

  Sally had always known she would take her husband’s last name. She couldn’t stand it when women made their children walk around using clunky hyphenates just out of some misguided nod to feminism. She considered herself a feminist, but why did it matter to anyone—how did it further the cause?—for her to distance herself from the person to whom she felt the closest? A few of the older women she volunteered with at NOW had even told her that trying to keep your maiden name was more trouble than it was worth-people were always going to call you Mrs. So-and-So anyway, so why not just make it official? Everyone had to have some man’s last name, and Sally reasoned that she would far prefer to have Jake’s over her father’s.

  She knew April would be mortified by the thought of her taking Jake’s name. But then, April had never really agreed with Sally’s brand of feminism. “That’s great, but you need to think bigger!” she said, when Sally told her that she was volunteering at NOW and, more recently, in a domestic violence shelter. “Those sorts of solutions are just Band-Aids. We have to attack this thing from the roots up.”

  Sally said she realized this, but in the meantime women needed a safe place to call home. They needed warm meals and clean blankets and someone to talk to late at night. The women’s movement couldn’t be all about radical action and immediate change. That just wasn’t how the world worked.

  Her ultimate hero was Gloria Steinem. She had improved countless lives, with actions as simple as setting up networks of women who would have otherwise never found one another and starting a magazine devoted to feminism. She always stood up for what was right and never compromised her principles, but she also didn’t offend the average person’s sensibilities and wasn’t afraid to highlight her hair. She liked men! She dated. She got married, though it ended tragically. She was a real woman who believed in equality. Wasn’t that a hundred times more powerful than the contributions of someone divisive and scary like Ronnie Munro?

  Sally sat on the edge of the bed now, her clammy palms facing upward in her lap. She wasn’t going to be able to fall back to sleep. She walked quietly to the bathroom and turned on the shower, stepping into the stream of water before it even had a chance to warm up.

  The problem with her memory was that it was always too sharp, too clear. It seemed proper to recall an old lover’s scent, maybe, or the sound of his laugh. But Sally could not stop thinking about the precision of Bill’s teeth, two perfectly even rows tinged gray from tobacco. She remembered his penis, the exact width of it, and the long blue vein that rose above the pink flesh when she stroked it with her tongue. It wasn’t that she missed him exactly, only that she could not forget.

  She had known for a long while what the other girls were just beginning to find out—that ideologies were nice, but they didn’t serve you very well when it came to having a real life. Perhaps when a person found lasting love, she was supposed to forget all about the men who had come before. But being engaged had only made Sally think more about Bill, and now, being here at the Autumn Inn, she remembered the nights they had spent together under this roof, making love in secret while her housemates were watching The Real World across the street.

  After her shower, Sally blew her hair out straight and applied a coat of red lipstick and some mascara. She slid into the red sundress and sandals she had gotten for the rehearsal dinner later that night, knowing that it was far too early to be primping for dinner, and that she was really doing all this in case she ran into him.

  As she picked up her purse from the nightstand, Jake stirred.

  “Where you going?” he said, his eyes still closed.

  “To take a walk around campus,” she said, suddenly feeling guilty.

  “I’ll come if you want company,” Jake said. He rolled over so he was facedown in the pillow.

  “No, no, you sleep,” she said.

  Finally, Jake turned his head and opened his eyes. He whistled, taking her in. “You’re a knockout. I can’t believe I get to marry you tomorrow.”

  Sally went to him and kissed his cheek. He tried to pull her down into the bed, but she resisted. “I’ll be back in a bit,” she said with a laugh.

  “I love you,” she said as she opened the door to the hall.

  “To the moon and back?” Jake mumbled, his smile audible.

  “You know it, babe,” she said.

  Outside, the air was just turning warm, and clouds were giving way to clear blue sky. Sally crossed the street toward King House and thought of all the students still asleep in their twin beds.

  In college, half of what they had talked about was what came next—what would they do for work, where would they live, whom would they fall in love with? They recognized that they were the first generation of women whose struggle with choice had nothing to do with getting it and everything to do with having too much of it—there were so many options that it felt impossible and exhausting to pick the right ones. She almost wanted to rouse those new King House girls from sleep and let them know that, most of the time, the choices just made themselves. She had gone back to Boston because of the offer of work in a cancer research lab at Harvard. And so she had met Jake, standing in line for a tuna sandwich at Au Bon Pain.

  She always brought her lunch from home, but that morning on the bus she had been reading a sign above the heads of other passengers: SICK OF THE BAY STATE DATING SCENE? WANT TO MEET FABULOUS MEN WHO ARE LOOKING FOR A COMMITMENT? THEN LOOK NO FURTHER THAN dateboston.com. Sally was considering this, thinking of how Celia had met a couple of guys on Match.com, and maybe it wouldn’t hurt to try something new and get her mind off Bill. She fished for a pen in her purse and wrote the name of the site on her palm. Then she looked up and saw two high school kids snickering at her. She felt her cheeks grow red. She was officially pathetic and would most definitely die alone. When the bus pulled over, she quickly got off, even though they were still three stops away from her office. Later, after e-mailing the girls about the whole mortifying ordeal, she realized that she must have left her salad on the seat beside her. She decided to treat herself to a big fat
tening sandwich and a lemonade, and because of that, she had found Jake.

  The Smith campus had not changed a bit since Sally had last been there. The grass was neatly trimmed, the pond sparkled, the ivy-covered brick buildings stood proud and tall. Making her way toward the library, she wondered whether she would see him.

  The affair had lasted three years. Since they couldn’t be together every night, Sally filled her free time with parties and concerts, growing wilder than she ever had been, or might have otherwise become. She streaked across the Quad in the snow with a group of King House first years, she danced until dawn at every campus party, flirting with the townies and the Hampshire boys without consequence—now that she had someone, it was all just for fun and didn’t seem half as bleak as it had when she was looking for love.

  “It’s called the Absentee Boyfriend Theory,” April said. “Having a guy in your life at a distance allows you to be free to explore who you are without the fear or the stigma of being alone.”

  “But Bill’s not at a distance,” Sally said.

  “Well, you know—a distance,” April said, as if that cleared things up.

  In the beginning, their hours together were exhilarating. They’d make love in his office, at the Autumn Inn, and once, recklessly, in her dorm room. They would go for beers at a dark, smoke-filled bar out by the car dealerships in Florence and play darts, his hand up under her dress as she aimed for the bull’s-eye.

  But Bill was also prone to long, dark periods of sadness, during which he would ignore Sally altogether or tell her that she was just a foolish, twitty little girl who couldn’t understand his pain. Sometimes he said that he wanted his wife back more than anything, that Jan was brilliant and beautiful, and that someone like Sally could never compare with her. He attempted three or four times during their relationship to reconcile with his wife, and each time Jan refused him, leading him to call Sally sobbing in the middle of the night, begging her to meet him at the Autumn Inn. (When she did, he would apologize over and over, holding her close to his chest until she promised to forgive him.)

  When she set their time together against the years she had spent with Jake, it seemed absurd. Three years of sneaking around like criminals. She never met Bill’s friends, and when they ran into his oldest son walking home from high school one day, Bill introduced her as “Sally, one of my students.” She searched the kid’s face for some sign that he had heard her name before, but of course he had not, and he only said, “Hey.”

  Their relationship ended just before graduation. Bill handed her a fat envelope as she left his office one day during finals. Inside was a letter, written in that self-important tone he took whenever she asked anything of him. He wrote about how he would remember her forever—the young beauty who had captured his heart. It hurt him to have to release her into the world, which was sometimes cruel and cold.

  “Release you into the world!” April had snapped when Sally showed the letter to the girls. “What are you, a fucking ladybug in a mayonnaise jar?”

  “This is typical Bill,” Bree said. “No discussion, just a note. That man makes me sick.”

  Sally knew that Bree was partially just feeling stressed over how she herself had ended things with Lara, only to change her mind at the last second. Sally imagined that by August, Bree would come to her senses. This thing with Lara was just Bree trying to hold on to Smith, when she couldn’t, not really. They were all leaving their little bubble of a world, and what lay beyond was anyone’s guess.

  Also, the girls had come to dislike Bill a great deal—they found him controlling, manipulative, and slightly ridiculous, with his unpredictable bouts of moodiness and brooding. Celia said he still acted like a teenage boy who writes poems about death and wears a lot of black and hates his parents.

  Sally never told them what she had once overheard during a student senate meeting at Seelye Hall.

  “Did you know Bill Lambert attacked her and that’s why she transferred to Wellesley?” one girl said to another.

  “Well, I heard that they had slept together, but that was it,” the other girl said.

  Sally left the auditorium and went straight to the second-floor ladies’ room, where she proceeded to breathe hard into her cupped hands until a janitor came in wanting to scrub the floor.

  “Just a minute,” she said, trying to sound calm and cheerful. She told herself that it was just more vicious gossip, and that she must put it from her head. She had heard all kinds of things about professors and students that were simply untrue. Like the rumor April was spreading the previous semester, that a sixty-year-old guy had been fired from his post in the art library after receiving a blow job from a first year in the stacks while a halogen lamp slowly burned the entire D-through-F section to dust. (Sally had gone herself to check it out, and no such fire had ever taken place.)

  Bill insisted that there had been no one else, besides Sally and Jan. For a time, she reasoned that if he was honest about Jan, he was honest, period. But as months passed, her doubts only grew. When Sally tried to end things with Bill after junior year, he stuffed her campus mailbox with love letters and poems, and his much-underlined first edition of W. H. Auden. The girls thought she ought to bring all of it right to the Public Safety office. But Sally still loved him. It amazed her how chemical a feeling love could be, how it could take hold of you even when you had come to despise its object. She kept the letters and the book in a Stride Rite shoe box full of keepsakes that she had had since fourth grade. She went to his office and sat in the old wing chair, and he sat on the floor with his head in her lap, actually crying as she smoothed his hair. Other than Bill, Sally had never seen a grown man cry, not even her father at her mother’s funeral.

  In their last year together (and this was something that no one—not even the girls—knew about), Sally had lent him a quarter of a million dollars for various things: home repairs and back taxes and legal fees and God knows what else. He swore up and down that he would pay her back by the end of the semester, though she knew he never would. She was fine with this, too: Bill had fallen in love with her long before she got the money. She knew the girls would say he was using her, but Sally disagreed. Money wasn’t meant to be shut up in some cold box. If you needed it, you hoped someone would give it to you. If you had it, you ought to give it away.

  After his letter, she demanded that they talk about the breakup he had simply announced. Bill said there was nothing to talk about. She was leaving Smith and needed to move on with her life. Sally had assumed that they would stay together—she was only moving two hours away, and now that she was no longer a Smith student, they could bring their relationship out into the open. She imagined long dinners in little Italian restaurants in Harvard Square, weekends spent on the Cape. But Bill said he wouldn’t talk about it any longer. He had made up his mind. He was getting old now, he said, and needed to start acting like it. He would convince Jan to give it another try, and they would have their family again.

  “And what about me, sweetheart?” Sally said with tears in her eyes.

  “I’m not worried about you,” he told her. “Girls like you land on their feet.”

  She hated him for putting it like that. Girls like you, he had said, as though the specifics of what they shared were irrelevant.

  At graduation, she cried as he processed in with all the other professors in his academic regalia. When she shook the president’s hand after accepting her diploma, she gazed over at him to see if he was watching, but he just stared out at the crowd, straight ahead.

  Six months later, right after she met Jake, Bill made a bizarre attempt to win her back, flooding her office phone with messages, and even driving out to Cambridge to meet her. When she refused to come see him, he screamed, “Sally, I will throw myself into the Charles if you deny me.” She hung up the phone gently and shut off the ringer for the remainder of the afternoon.

  She had thought of it as a romantic gesture, until she told Jake about it. He sputtered with laughter. He
nicknamed Bill “Old Man River.”

  She realized then that she had found someone a million times better.

  Sally loved Jake. He was the kind of guy who, when asked to sum up his thoughts on poetry, would probably call it gay (a word she had tried to get him to stop using roughly one thousand times, without success). He showed his love by patching the window screens in her apartment, installing the air conditioner on his lunch break, or taking her out for a homemade picnic. His moods were predictable. He seemed to wake up happy every day—happy to be with her, happy to be alive. To her surprise, this was everything she needed.

  As Sally approached the library in her red dress, she paused for a moment, remembering all that had passed inside that building. She had thought at the time that Bill elevated her, gave her an adultness that would have otherwise taken years to develop. But now she wondered if perhaps he had robbed her of something, and she was grateful for what she shared with Jake, a union in which there was nothing secretive or ugly about being in love.

  She was glad that she had decided to break from tradition and spend the night before the wedding with Jake, because sleeping close beside him always calmed her nerves. She took off her heels and walked barefoot back to the inn.

  · · ·

  Sally had decided to have her wedding at Smith and the rehearsal dinner in the wine cellar at Pizza Paradiso long before she and Jake got engaged. On their fifth date, to be precise. She had been in the wine cellar only once before, at the farewell Rec Council dinner right before graduation. She recalled thinking then that she wished she had some special occasion to commemorate there. After Jake proposed, she had first wanted to do the traditional Smithie thing and get married at Helen Hills Hills. (That was the name of the campus chapel. The story was that Helen Hills had married her cousin, but Sally couldn’t remember now if it was a fact or just a dumb joke.)

  But then one night she had the idea of getting married in the Quad, on the very grass she had looked out at from her college dorm room, everything coming back around to this place where her adult life began. She and Jake agreed that a wedding should be simple and small. Without her mother there, she didn’t feel the need to throw some fifty-thousand-dollar parade.