Commencement

by J. Courtney Sullivan

  She had short, spiky hair, in such a deep shade of red that it looked almost purple. She wore faded jeans and a Smith sweatshirt with a patch on the sleeve, which Sally herself had sewed on.

  “Isn’t that yours?” she whispered to April.

  April shrugged. “Our laundry gets mixed in all the time.”

  Sally grimaced. This wasn’t normal, this relationship of theirs. She had tried many times to say so to April, but April never wanted to hear it.

  “It’s your own fucking department’s report, Gerard,” Ronnie yelled into the phone. “The Department of Defense openly admitted that one-third of female veterans had been raped during service, thirty-seven percent of them raped more than once, fourteen percent of them gang raped. Yet when a woman in your army brings charges, she only has a one-in-ten chance of getting justice. This is fucking documented, Gerard. I didn’t pull these figures out of my ass. What, you think this doesn’t qualify as post-traumatic stress? You’re out of your fucking mind, Gerard, I swear.”

  She glanced in their direction, but she seemed not even to notice Sally. “April baby,” she hissed. “Get me the DOD file from my bedside table. Now.”

  April ran down a corridor, and Sally stood there awkwardly, shuffling from one foot to the other. Farewell, Ethel’s Chocolate Lounge.

  They spent the next three days in the sort of frenzied state Sally imagined one might feel in an emergency room after a forty-car pileup. Ronnie talked on the phone constantly, and April pored over transcripts and videos of all her interviews.

  Sally sat beside her on the couch and watched as these women-girls, really—explained in calm, measured tones what had happened to them in Iraq. One nineteen-year-old from a tiny town in Indiana had gone AWOL, refusing to join her company on their third deployment to Baghdad, because during her first two trips her direct supervisor had sexually assaulted her. It had started just one day after she saw a close friend killed in a car bombing. When she asked the sergeant where she should report for duty the following morning, he said, “Spread-eagle, tied up, in my bed.” That night, he came to her while she lay sleeping and pulled her outside, ordering her to strip naked, then raping her in front of two of her fellow soldiers.

  A mother told how her only daughter had committed suicide on her twenty-first birthday, shooting herself in the head after hearing that the army had dismissed gang-rape charges she had brought against five of her superiors, claiming that the bruises all over her body were not sufficient evidence for a court-martial. She had been given a rape kit in a military hospital the night of the attack, but hospital officials said it had been accidentally misplaced.

  Sally cried as she watched this, texting Jake to tell him how upset she was.

  Wow honey, he wrote back. This sounds like the greatest vacation ever.

  Sally knew that anyone else would probably be annoyed with April, but she just wasn’t. April had been there for her all through college, on those awful, lonely nights when she missed her mother and needed someone by her side.

  Her friends from high school had been supportive the summer after her mother died, especially Monica Harris, her best friend since sixth grade. Monica would come by every day and stay on the phone with Sally for hours in the middle of the night. When she arrived at Smith, Sally assumed this would continue, but almost immediately Monica began to pull away from her—she was settling into college, too, after all. It was April who took her place, April who saved Sally from the humiliation of begging someone not to hang up, leaving her alone with her thoughts.

  It often felt unbalanced because April never talked about pain in her life or asked for advice. Plus, Sally was in awe of April, really, the fact that she could sit across from these people, recording their horrible stories without so much as tearing up. And the way she often convinced Sally that something that seemed ridiculous was in fact incredibly important. After all, it was April who had raised her consciousness about feminism (though April said that the term “consciousness raising” gave her the willies and made her think of a gaggle of 1970s housewives looking at their vaginas in hand mirrors before ripping into a cinnamon Danish).

  She would have made an amazing journalist, Sally thought. If only stupid Ronnie hadn’t gotten her hands on April first.

  “How did you guys end up getting all these secret documents anyway?” Sally asked.

  “Well, some of them aren’t so secret, it’s just that nobody’s looking,” April said, clearly not wanting to get into the details. She never wanted Sally to know about the more dangerous aspects of her work. But Sally pressed her now.

  “And the others?”

  “The others we sort of stole in a raid,” April said with a big, proud smile.

  Sally felt her stomach sink. “You raided a military office?”

  “Yeah, it was awesome. Ronnie got caught, but I didn’t,” April said. Then, seeing the horror on Sally’s face, she said, “Sal, don’t worry about me. I’m fine, and Ronnie would never ask me to do anything seriously dangerous.”

  Sally knew this was a bold-faced lie. Ronnie reminded her a little of April’s mother. She was old, yet not at all parental. She swore more than any person Sally had ever met (except, perhaps, April). She didn’t make Sally feel safe and secure the way most adults did. Instead, she made her uneasy.

  When the three of them sat down for dinner each night—always takeout from the Indian place across the street, or a Thai restaurant April loved—Ronnie downed glasses of wine like a marathoner chugging water after a long run. She talked only about the cause at hand, never once asking Sally where she lived or what she did for work, except on Sunday, the last night of Sally’s trip. Sally was clearing the plates and had just picked up Ronnie’s, when Ronnie grabbed her left hand, nearly sending the china sailing toward the floor.

  “What is this?” Ronnie said, eyeing her engagement ring.

  “I’m getting married!” Sally exclaimed. Even when talking to Ronnie, it was hard to hide how thrilled she felt. And at least someone had noticed her ring.

  “Jesus,” Ronnie said. “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-four,” Sally said.

  “Oh, Christ, just what the world needs,” Ronnie said to April.

  April laughed, and Sally felt hurt by this, even as she told herself that April had no other option. Ronnie was her boss, after all.

  Then, out of nowhere, Ronnie said, “One of every ten U.S. soldiers in Iraq is a woman, you know. There are one hundred sixty thousand of them over there.”

  Sally nodded, not sure how to respond. “Wow” was all she could muster.

  She felt certain that something important was happening here, that April was doing exactly the sort of courageous work she had always dreamed of doing. But Sally was excited to fly home the following afternoon anyway, to see Jake and tell him everything that had gone on during this bizarre weekend.

  On her last day in Chicago, April woke Sally early, before the sun had even come up. She had Sally’s bag over her shoulder, and two travel mugs full of coffee in her hands.

  “Come with me,” she whispered. “Don’t make a sound.”

  Sally followed April out of the apartment and into the elevator, before saying, “What’s going on?”

  “I’m stealing Ronnie’s car for the morning and taking you on the tour of Chicago you deserve,” April said. “I’m sorry it’s so abbreviated.”

  Sally looked at her with a surprised smile. “Will Ronnie be pissed?” she asked.

  “Probably, but she owes you this,” April said.

  “You’re the best, lemon drop,” Sally said. She felt relieved to see a bit of the old, independent pre-Ronnie April shining through.

  In the car, they drank coffee and watched the sun rise and listened to a mix CD that April had made Sally for the plane. They drove past the Sears Tower and along the Magnificent Mile. They strolled down Clark Street, poking into little shops, and went to Wrigley Field so Sally could take a picture for Jake. Then April said, “Come on, we have br
unch reservations.”

  Sally grinned. “Ethel’s?” she said.

  “Where else?” April said with a wink.

  On the drive there, as Sally thought about strawberries dipped in chocolate fondue and how lucky she was to have such a weird and wonderful best friend and how much she wanted to kiss Jake, April said, “I know she’s sort of bizarre and awkward, but isn’t Ronnie fucking incredible?”

  Sally was reminded of the tone women took when describing some terrible boyfriend to their friends. It was the sort of inflection she had once used when defending something embarrassing or conniving that Bill had done. Ronnie was April’s equivalent of a bad boyfriend, and there was nothing Sally could say until April figured it out for herself. So she just smiled and looked out the window, pretending not to hear.

  Later, when she told Celia this, Celia asked her if she thought April was in love with Ronnie, as Bree had long suspected.

  “No,” Sally told her. “Absolutely not. I think in some way she’s like a mother to April.”

  “Not a very good one,” Celia said.

  “Yeah, but neither is her actual mother,” Sally said.

  She felt a little bit mean saying this, but it was the truth. Ronnie didn’t really seem to care about April as anything other than an assistant, despite the weird intimacy of their life together. And April was willing to do anything to get Ronnie’s approval.

  “Their relationship is a little bit cultlike,” Sally said.

  “That’s what I think, too,” Celia said. “And I’m worried that no one’s looking out for April.”

  Sally shot back quickly, “I am.”

  After they’d hung up, she wondered whether or not it was true. If April, willful and stubborn as she was, wanted to follow Ronnie down any and all of her dangerous paths, could anyone really stop her?

  CELIA

  Celia wasn’t at all surprised that four years out of college, Sally still had her King House key on her key chain. They used it to sneak into the dining room for old time’s sake after the rehearsal dinner. Lara, Jack and Jill, and the adults had gone to bed. Jake, his friends, and Sally’s brother went to Packard’s to play darts and drink beer.

  Celia had suggested it as a joke: “Let’s break into King House,” she said, picturing them running up and down the hallways drunk, hugging first years in flannel pajamas and asking if they wanted to be snorkeled. (Snorkeling was a game that straight Quad girls used as a prelude to kissing. The person being snorkeled would lie flat on her back. The snorkeler would blow hard into her nose, so that a burst of air shot from the other girl’s mouth.)

  Sally jingled her keys. “Yes! We can sit at our old table and have some girl talk.”

  Celia had gotten to the point of drunkenness where she wasn’t much interested in girl talk. She hadn’t realized how hammered she was until she found herself in the Pizza Paradiso bathroom, mopping Chianti off her dress and singing “End of the Road” by Boyz II Men at the top of her lungs. Now, all she really wanted to do was go downtown and find some ridiculous townie to make out with, preferably on a pool table. But she reminded herself that this was Sally’s weekend, and if she wanted girl talk in the King House dining hall, that’s what she would get.

  It was exam week. They could tell because the dining hall ladies had left out the usual enormous bowls of treats, each one inscribed with an FK for “Franklin King.” There were M&M’s in one bowl, packages of peanut-butter crackers in another, licorice whips, chocolate-covered pretzels, and a box of Munchkins from Dunkin’ Donuts. It was as though the girls were bulking up for hibernation instead of studying for finals.

  The dining room stood empty. It hadn’t changed one bit since they had left, Celia thought. The gold chandeliers still sparkled, the long oak tables and chairs were the same ones they had carved their initials into the night before graduation, with Sally pointing out that this was rude and disrespectful, something that only twelve-year-old boys would do. (She added her carefully etched SPW all the same.)

  The girls took their usual table in the corner, and Bree placed the box of doughnuts in the center.

  “Looks like we got here just in time,” she said, shoving one into her mouth and licking the cinnamon from her fingers. “The little piglets upstairs don’t know there’s a fresh batch of food here yet.”

  Like most things at Smith, the dining hall experience was extreme. Either you ate everything in sight, or you ate nothing. There were girls you did not want to sit with. They were called EDs, which was short for “eating disorders.” EDs tended to compensate for not eating by talking excessively about food. They would go on all day about the pound cake on the dinner menu, and then take one tiny forkful before pronouncing it too rich. They’d stare at the contents of your plate, commenting that you must have a really fast metabolism if you took too much food, or warning you that you needed more sustenance if you didn’t take enough.

  Senior year someone puked in a second-floor shower stall every evening sometime between six and eight. No one ever heard her throw up, but there it would be, stuck to the tile in little globs, caked around the drain. Sally said she actually felt bad for whoever it was, because she must truly be a mess. Which, in turn, made everyone else think that Sally was probably doing the puking. After all, she had once admitted that she didn’t always keep her food down, a very Sally way of saying that perhaps she was a touch bulimic.

  The puker turned out to be an emaciated sophomore whom they called the Hare, because she kept a live rabbit in her closet and also had the worst Jennifer Aniston shag they’d ever seen.

  “The way they used food as a substitute for sex here,” Celia said now. “It was pretty amazing. No wonder I got so fat.”

  “You were never fat!” Sally protested, though they all knew Celia had gained a lot of weight during their years at Smith.

  “Pleasingly plump, maybe,” Bree said, and Celia burst out laughing.

  It was something only your very best friend, or perhaps your mother, could get away with saying.

  After college, Celia started doing Weight Watchers. She lost fourteen pounds in a month, but she dropped out because she could not stop laughing at the weekly meetings. She had sent the rest of them a long e-mail, detailing how she got scolded for bursting into giggles when the group leader—an Upper East Side woman in spandex—gave a lecture on emotional eating and warned them that the trick was to “Face your stuff, not stuff your face.” After that, Celia just started counting calories on her own and avoided any carbs that did not come from beer.

  “I don’t know if I could have made it through exams without our nightly treat bowls,” Bree said.

  All four of them had graduated Phi Beta Kappa. There was a lot of pressure to succeed, to prepare yourself to be somebody down the line. In their graduating class there were four Fulbright scholars, three Saudi Arabian princesses, a girl who had written a best-selling book on overachieving females at the age of eighteen, and the heiress to the Mrs. Fields cookie fortune, who had already developed a business plan to triple the company’s annual profits. There was a sense that if you were twenty-one and had yet to make a name for yourself, you had better get cracking. The feeling had only gotten stronger with each passing year since. Rhonda Lee, who had lived in their hall senior year, had already become a full professor at Harvard, for God’s sake.

  Celia had always dreamed of writing books. Ever since sixth grade she had fantasized about long days spent sitting in a country house somewhere, drinking tea and writing at the kitchen table, with a big furry dog at her feet. But how could she get there from here? How could you find the time and inspiration to sit down and write when you spent your days reading other people’s crap, sending out rejection letter after rejection letter?

  Whenever she set out to work on her novel, Celia found the task daunting. She wanted to write beautiful prose about characters steeped in tragedy, like the female authors she had always revered. She had already attempted a dozen plotlines, including a literary murder myst
ery set in Austin, a romantic tragedy about a woman who finds out her husband has a dark, criminal past, a historical novel about four mentally unstable sisters living in Victorian England, and so on. On occasion, she could get several pages out in one go and feel like she was flying afterward. But the next day, she would read over what she had written and see it for what it was: amateurish, ridiculous. She’d erase it all and start again from scratch. These days she was lucky if she was able to write the stupid “Class Notes” and get them into the Quarterly on time.

  They all thought it was funny that Celia had ended up as secretary for the class of 2002. It was much more a Sally kind of thing, but in a brief burst of Smithie nostalgia, she had volunteered for the job right after graduation. It appealed to her love of snooping—she got to hear first what everyone in their class was up to. There had been six weddings so far, and already one divorce. It was some girl Celia had never heard of, and when she got the e-mail she wondered who on earth would feel the need to tell her entire college class that her young marriage had fallen apart after just ten months.

  Celia always forwarded any juicy updates from their classmates to the other three, usually with some bitchy editorializing at the bottom. April said she was blown away by the achievements of their fellow alums. Bree confessed to Celia that she was secretly obsessed with finding out who had gotten married and had kids. Sally, in her sometimes morbid way, said she always skipped the class notes and flipped right to the obituaries at the back of the magazine.

  Celia had started giggling at dinner, and now she could not stop. She reached into her oversize purse and pulled out the bottle of good champagne she had snagged from her boss’s office after a Christmas party months earlier.

  “To love!” Celia said, raising the bottle in the air. The rest of them raised imaginary glasses.

  “To love!” Sally said, her face glowing. “And to you, my best friends. The first real loves of my life.”

  They passed the champagne around and competed to tell the best Smith stories—skinny-dipping in Paradise Pond under a full moon, attending the drag ball at the Davis Center in full tuxes and fake facial hair glued on by Bree, going to concerts at the Calvin Theatre, and filling the long walks home with songs and laughter.