Commencement

by J. Courtney Sullivan

  By the time a couple of girls came down to forage for food a half hour later, they had finished off the champagne.

  “Excuse me!” Celia called out to them, and Bree shushed her. “Hey, you, how old are you?”

  The girls chuckled nervously. “Nineteen,” one of them said.

  “Jesus, you’re infants!” Celia said.

  “Don’t mind her, she’s shattered,” Bree said.

  The girls came closer and chatted with them for a while. One of them was a bio major, just like Sally had been; the other had something to do with women’s studies, and April wrote down a list of books she should read on a dinner napkin. The girl looked like she might pass out when April told her that she worked for Ronnie Munro, and Celia had to stop herself from saying out loud that Ronnie was really a total asshole as a person, even if she had done good work for womankind.

  Sally told them about her wedding the next day.

  “It’s so romantic to get married in the Quad!” one of the girls said, and Sally immediately invited her to the reception.

  When the students had padded back upstairs, Celia reached into her bag again.

  “I brought a little present for old time’s sake.”

  It was a bottle of Bombay Sapphire gin, Sally’s favorite drink back in college.

  “Who are you, Mary Poppins?” April asked. “Do you have a lamp and a parakeet in that bag, too?”

  Celia stuck out her tongue. “This will be your something blue, Sal,” she joked.

  Sally raised up her hand. “No, pumpkin,” she said, laughing. “I’m too drunk already. I don’t want to be a hungover bride!”

  “Why not?” Celia said. “You’re going to have three hungover bridesmaids.”

  “Good point,” Sally said. She grabbed the bottle, unscrewed the cap, and took a long gulp.

  “You guys, I know I’m young, but I love Jake so much. I just love the stuffing out of him,” she said. “I cannot wait to be his wife.”

  April clapped her hands together, and Celia assumed she was trying to ignore the part about dying to be a wife. “Of all the tools I’ve seen come in and out of our lives, I’d have to say that you finally found yourself an amazing guy,” April said.

  “Remember the jerks I hooked up with in college?” Sally said. “The guy who liked to put staples in his arm when he got loaded? The kid who said he had a landscaping business, and then it turned out he went to Northampton High School and mowed lawns in the summer?”

  They shrieked with laughter.

  “Aren’t you forgetting someone?” Bree asked.

  “Who?” Sally said.

  “Bill!” the other three said in unison, still laughing.

  “I walked by his office this afternoon,” Sally said, drawing out the words and pulling her feet up onto her chair.

  “Why would you do that?” Bree said, sounding shocked, even though earlier she and Celia had made a bet about whether or not Sally would mention him. (Bree was the winner.)

  Sally shrugged. “I’ve been thinking about him a lot. I’ve been having these ridiculous dreams about him, you know, sexual dreams. Part of me just wanted to see him again.”

  “For sex?” Celia said.

  “Maybe,” Sally said. “It wasn’t really a conscious thing. Anyway, I didn’t act on it. It’s perfectly normal. Jill says before she married Jack she fantasized about all her exes.”

  “Now was that before or after they went up the hill to fetch a pail of water?” Celia said. She snorted with laughter, her head light and giddy.

  “Are you having doubts about Jake?” April said.

  “No!” Sally said. “Like I said, nothing happened.”

  They grew silent. Celia had been afraid April might say something like that, even though she had warned her not to. Lately April had been obsessed with whether or not they should try to stop Sally from getting married, stating that she was too young and had no idea what she was getting herself into. It was absurd, Celia thought. Sally wasn’t a child. Only in this little world were women in their midtwenties thought of as too young for marriage. All over the country, unmarried twenty-five-year-olds were considered old enough to be put out to pasture. Christ, by this age, her own mother had been married with a kid.

  Celia picked up one of several pamphlets that had been left on the table, advertisements for upcoming campus events.

  “Watch Straight Eye for the Queer Girl every Tuesday on Smith TV,” she read aloud. “Oh, Lordy, how Smith is that?”

  They all laughed, relaxing a bit.

  Sally crawled into April’s lap and wrapped her arms around her. “You’ve been awful quiet about yourself today, ladybug. What are you and crazy Ronnie up to these days?”

  “We’re about to start a new film. We’re working with underage victims of sexual exploitation in Atlanta,” April said.

  Celia thought she sounded proud. She wished she could sound that way when she talked about her own job, but there wasn’t a lot of pride to be taken in editing How to Hang with a Hamptons Hunk: The Vacation-Crasher’s Guide to Life.

  “You mean prostitutes?” Sally said.

  April raised an eyebrow. “That’s not the preferred word, but yes. We’re making a documentary about the girls and their pimps. Do you know the average age of entrance into prostitution in this country is eleven years old? These fucking pimps recruit little girls in the streets, on the subway, at the mall. But also in places where you’d think kids are safe, like at school, or in shelters, or churches.”

  Sally shook her head. “Awful,” she said.

  “Right,” April said. “So we’re going to be following these girls, chronicling what they go through.”

  “Where will you stay?” Sally asked.

  “Probably somewhere in the vicinity of where the girls live,” April said. “Ronnie will figure out the details.”

  Celia wished they could be sober for this conversation. There were things she wanted to say; yet as soon as one of them landed in her head, she lost it again.

  April went on. “Part of what we want to expose is how corrupt the cops are. Like half the time they arrest a girl, they tell her that she can go free if she’ll give them a blow job.”

  “Half the time?” Bree asked skeptically.

  “But why do you have to go to Atlanta?” Sally asked. “You don’t even know anyone there. Isn’t it just as bad in New York or Chicago?”

  “Yeah, it’s everywhere,” April said. “Atlanta is one of the top places for it, because it’s a hub for conventions and sports events, which, because men are pigs, means that the city has a very lucrative and legal adult entertainment industry: strip clubs, escort services, massage parlors, and all that shit. A lot of underage girls are kept hidden behind closed doors in these places. Or the pimps use Craigslist to sell them, because it’s safer for them than putting the girls on the street.”

  Bree shifted in her seat. “I doubt it’s all that bad,” she said.

  Celia gave her a little smile. She knew Bree felt strangely protective of the South, especially Georgia, as much as she herself sometimes made fun of it. It was almost like the unspoken rule that you can say whatever horrible things you want about your own family, but other people’s families are totally off limits.

  “It’s terrible, actually,” April said. “The sexual exploitation of women and children is the third-largest moneymaker for organized crime in this country, after guns and drugs.”

  “You’re never going to end prostitution,” Bree said. “I mean, hello, the oldest profession in the world and all that.”

  April looked disgusted. “Jesus, Bree.”

  “What?” Bree said. “Show me one country in the world that doesn’t have it.”

  “I can’t, but that doesn’t make it right,” April said.

  “Tell them about that article you sent me on the Swedish model,” Sally said.

  Swedish model? Celia pictured a tall blonde former sex worker who now did Vogue pictorials.

  “In Sweden,
they’ve created a really successful model where the behavior of the pimps and johns is criminalized, but the prostitutes are decriminalized—they see them as victims, which makes it much easier for women to go to the police and all that,” April said.

  “Well, isn’t that a little sexist, provided the women are of age?” Bree said. “I mean, why should the government regulate what women do with their bodies? Isn’t it just a slippery slope to abortion rights and everything else?”

  The lawyer in Bree was getting fired up. Celia held her breath.

  “Jesus fucking Christ, I can’t talk about this anymore right now,” April said. “Anyway, I am going to Atlanta, so that’s that.”

  “It sounds dangerous,” Bree said.

  “I agree,” Sally said. “What does your mother think?”

  “She thinks it sounds great, really interesting,” April said. “I’m doing it. We start next week.”

  “I think it’s a terrible idea,” Sally said.

  “Why? It’s not any more dangerous than anything else we’ve done,” April said.

  “Exactly,” Sally said. “And after some of the shit Ronnie’s made you do, you’re lucky to be alive.”

  “Ronnie never made me do anything,” April said.

  “Honey, open your eyes,” Sally said. “The woman is an extremist.”

  April sighed. “An extremist? She’s not fucking Al Qaeda, okay?”

  Celia could see the hurt on April’s face, so in a lame attempt at smoothing things over, she said, “Well, I’m officially jealous. You have a job that actually makes a difference. Unlike me.”

  “Oh shut up,” Bree said. “You have an awesome job, too. Stop freaking out just because you’re not Danielle Steel yet. You’ll get there.”

  “Thanks,” Celia said. “I hate Danielle Steel, but I appreciate the sentiment.”

  “Maybe you should just quit your job and become a full-time writer,” April said. “Life’s short. You have to chase what matters most.”

  Bree rolled her eyes at this, but Celia smiled. This was the sort of thing that April was always saying, and it sounded lovely in theory. But April never seemed to think about paychecks or savings accounts or retirement funds. She lived her life as though each day might be her last, exactly the way people vowed to live in that brief moment after a near-death experience (right before promptly starting to act like they always had before).

  “I don’t know—I tell myself I don’t write because I’m stifled at work, because I’m surrounded by all these loser wannabe writers and their bad self-help books all day,” Celia said. “But maybe I’m just lazy. Losers or not, if I’m not going to write it now, then when will I ever do it?”

  “Speaking of losers, Celia, I was watching you at dinner tonight with that awful Anthony,” Sally said. “Sorry about him.”

  Celia swatted her away. “I’m fine,” she said. “And he did give me a key to his room for later.” She grinned to say that she was just kidding, but part of her was considering it.

  “Don’t you dare,” Bree said.

  “He was sort of cute,” Celia said. “At least after several glasses of wine.”

  “You really have to watch yourself with the drinking, Cee,” Sally said, in that preachy voice she sometimes got. “Jake and I worry about you!”

  “I’m fine,” Celia said.

  “But really,” Sally said. “Jake and I will be sitting at home some nights just watching TV or whatever, and I’ll think to myself, Oh God, I hope Celia’s not up to something she’ll regret in the morning.”

  Celia felt stunned.

  “Well, excuse me for not wanting to be an old married woman yet,” she said. “Unlike some of us, I’m still young and I still like to go out and have a good time.”

  “So just because I’m getting married, I’m suddenly the girl who killed fun?” Sally said.

  “Yeah basically,” Celia said. She inhaled. “Look, maybe there was a time when we were always together and it was okay for us to have an opinion on one another’s every move, but that time has passed.”

  “I don’t see why it has to be like that,” Sally said. “I feel like all of you have just sort of pulled away from me ever since I met Jake. It’s like you’re punishing me for finally being happy in love because you’re not.”

  Bree snorted. “Sal, that is the most self-satisfied thing you’ve ever said. We’re busy. We have lives.”

  “Besides, Bree’s in love,” Celia said.

  “I know that,” Sally said with a sigh. “I just feel like—oh, never mind.”

  “No, what?” Bree challenged. “You’ve had no problem being honest so far.”

  “I just look at me and Jake. He makes me happy. He makes my life better, easier. Whereas, Lara, well, you know I love her, but …”

  “Bullshit,” Bree said. “You guys have never even liked Lara.”

  “Hey!” April said.

  “I wasn’t talking about you,” Bree said.

  April looked hurt.

  Sally went on. “I like Lara just fine, tulip. What I don’t like is watching one of my best friends ruin her relationship with her family and constantly feel miserable just to make a point.”

  “A point!” Bree sputtered. “What point is that?”

  “That this Lara thing is for real,” Sally said in a whisper.

  Bree shook her head. “What makes you think you can say that to me? We keep our mouths shut about how totally fucked it is that you would go off looking for Bill. We never say a word about how you’re marrying Jake just to make up for what your family doesn’t give you.”

  “Looks like you just did,” Sally said. “Besides, you think I couldn’t feel that coming off of you since I met Jake? I saw that e-mail, you know. The one where you and April said that Jake’s a moron because he hasn’t read Proust. He is the love of my life. And if you’d ever bothered to get to know him, you’d already know that.”

  Celia saw April’s mouth open, and she could feel the words coming in a sort of slow motion: “Sal, we know you love him, we’re just worried he’s not good enough for you.”

  Celia gasped.

  “How dare you?” Sally said.

  “What?” April looked truly befuddled. “You’re allowed to tell me that my whole career is stupid, but I can’t tell you what I honestly think about your boyfriend?”

  “No,” Sally said. “You can’t do that, you idiot. And he’s not my boyfriend. He’s my husband.”

  She got up from her chair. “Thanks for making my wedding so special, guys,” she said. “I can’t tell you how long I’ve been wanting us all to be together again.”

  “Sal, don’t go. We love you,” Celia said.

  She looked at the others for support, but she could see that wedding or not, they had no interest in making up.

  They walked back to the hotel in silence.

  They had had fights before, plenty of them. Theirs was not an easy friendship or a guiltless one. They had high expectations of one another and were sometimes disappointed. But in the past, they could never stay mad for long.

  That night in the dining hall was different. Instead of one feeling hurt by another and venting to the remaining two, this time they had all been wounded.

  Celia stayed up until morning, rolling over the things the others had said, as April snored away in the bed beside her.

  She kept thinking about mothers—Sally’s mother, dead and gone. Bree’s mother, once a dear friend to her and now a virtual stranger. April’s mother, that sad, selfish type, who defied what the rest of them knew. And Celia’s own mother, whom she loved, worshipped, missed every day, even though they talked on the phone most mornings before work. She was so lucky, she thought, to have a mother in her life now, just as she always had. This separated her from the others. She remembered the night she told her mother she’d been raped. Celia was two years out of college then, and it was Thanksgiving. They were drinking gin and tonics in the kitchen after all the relatives had left, picking stuffing out of
a bowl, and her mother was telling her about a teenager from the parish who had been attacked at gunpoint by two grown men in the high school parking lot late one night. She had done everything they said, but they slit her throat anyway, and now she was in critical condition at Mass General.

  “They forced her to have sex,” her mother said, with tears in her eyes. “Oh Celia, can you imagine? The poor girl was just a baby. All of us in the Legion of Mary have been praying for her every day, and we’ll keep praying every day until she goes home.”

  Celia never thought that she would tell her parents what had happened to her at Dartmouth, but the visions came flying back at her then, just as they did when anyone mentioned rape, or sometimes when she tried to have sex—the blue condom, Rob Johann’s dark skin against her pale arms, the heaviness of his body on hers.

  She whispered, “I was raped. Back in college.”

  Her mother pulled Celia toward her and wrapped her arms around her.

  “What happened?” she said.

  Celia told her everything. Her mother held her close and listened without saying a word.

  “Don’t tell Daddy,” Celia said when she was done. “I think it would kill him.”

  Soon after, her sister, Violet, swayed into the room, not yet twenty-one and drunk on Merlot. The conversation came to a halt, but later that night, Celia’s mother crept into her bed and said, “What can I do, baby? What can I do?”

  For so many reasons, none of the others could know their mothers as adults, with honesty. And so, Celia thought, they were searching, always, for something to take the place of that bond. At Smith, they had all tried to mother one another. But what had once seemed like genuine care and concern had now turned ugly—they could not stop judging, comparing.

  Of course, this was true of all women, mothers and daughters, too. What daughter didn’t hold her mother up as a measurement of all she hoped to be, or all she feared? What mother could look at her young daughter without a bit of longing for her own youth, her lost freedom?