Once, in the car with her mother when she was just nine or ten, Celia had asked, not unkindly, “Mom, when I grow up, will I have fat thighs like you?”
Her mother had a shocked look.
“Probably,” she said at last.
They laughed looking back on it now, but Celia thought it was a telling moment: A kid who thinks her mother is just that—hers. A mother who is also a woman, an independent being, who doesn’t want to be reminded by anyone, child or otherwise, of her tree-trunk thighs.
The world made women’s private lives a public affair to people who knew them and even people who didn’t. Back in New York, acquaintances would ask, “So, do you have a boyfriend?” On the rare occasion that the answer was yes, they would immediately demand to know: “When are you getting married?”
If it weren’t for the feeling that everyone was watching, pitying, judging, would she even care that Sally was getting married while she herself was still single?
The next day, for Sally’s sake, they posed for pictures, ate cake, danced in the rain, and gathered in the hotel lobby for a champagne toast and a storm of kisses before sending her off on her honeymoon. But they were smarting from the night before. Their goodbyes were strained and, for the first time ever, not altogether unwelcome.
On the bus back to New York, Celia thought of how, during her junior year at Smith, she had taken a master class in fiction writing with the famed novelist Harold Lance. The whole thing was rather ridiculous. Lance’s career had peaked in the sixties, and he made no secret of the fact that he was only teaching because he needed the money: His latest book had flopped, he said, and recently, after one too many scotches, he had left a cigarette burning in his family’s farmhouse in Sturbridge, which had sent the two-hundred-year-old building toppling to the ground.
His presence was met with much fanfare anyway. Caterers set up trays of cookies and tea sandwiches at the blackboard. A reporter from The Boston Globe came to sit in. The college president even stopped by to tell the class how very honored they all should feel to be studying with a living legend.
Five years later, it was still the sort of ultra-Smith experience that Celia would mention when she wanted to impress a cute former English major over drinks.
“God, Harold Lance changed my life,” he would inevitably say, and Celia would just smile, because she had never really liked his work—it was too masculine, too painstakingly male, the female characters merely victims or martyrs or whores.
There was, however, one vital thing Celia had learned from Harold Lance, something that helped her frame a story whenever she sat down to write: Any good drama or tragedy is like a ball of yarn, made up of so many strands piled one upon another, he had said. You should be able to unwind the ball, to see every bit, right down to the start.
Later, Celia would think back on Sally’s wedding weekend as the start and wish it had all been different. If only they could have changed the beginning, she thought, maybe what happened next would never have come to pass.
PART TWO
SMITH ALUMNAE QUARTERLY
Spring 2007 Class Notes
CLASS OF ’02
Ladies, I hear wedding bells. Chapin House alum Robin Austin writes, “I am engaged to Chase Phillips III! We are trying to plan a winter wedding while also studying for the Bar Exam.” … Noreen Jones gushes, “I’m in love! Mike and I are getting married in May—and we’re also expecting our first daughter in June.” A future Smithie in the making perhaps? … In non-wedding news, Nicole Johnson writes, “Monique Hilsen, Mary Gallagher, Caitlin Block-Rochelle and I all met up for an unforgettable long weekend in Paris! It was great to feel the Gillette House love again!” Oui oui…. Susanna Martinson is putting that doctorate in art history to good use as a professor of Japanese painting in Kyoto…. And my personal hero, April Adams, is working on her fourth documentary with famed artist (and Smith grad!) Ronnie Munro, due out in 2009. Fellow alums, you continue to impress and amaze me. Keep those updates coming!!!
Your class secretary,
Celia Donnelly
([email protected])
SALLY
Sally usually went for a run during her lunch break, but lately every time she broke a sweat she felt exhausted and her head ached. So instead she had taken to sitting at her desk with her boss’s copy of The Boston Globe and reading it over salad and iced tea. The world was an absolute mess, and reading about it made her think of April, out there fighting for change, so genuinely concerned about making women’s lives better—women most people didn’t give a fig about, women April herself didn’t even know. Sally regretted what she had said to April at the wedding, but every time she thought of calling her, she remembered what April had said about Jake and was once again filled with anger. She could not believe that in the year since her wedding, April still hadn’t apologized, that she had never so much as called to see how the honeymoon went.
It was the Tuesday after Memorial Day, and Sally was worn out from the weekend. They had spent it with Jake’s family on the Cape, sailing and swimming and drinking sangria out on the porch. Each evening she had hoped that they might sneak off to her father’s place in Chatham, which she knew would be empty, but Jake was caught up in watching golf on TV with his uncles, or listening to them tell their same old stories, which Sally had heard ten times over, and she imagined Jake had heard hundreds of times. It didn’t seem to matter. He laughed like a madman all the same.
While Jake and his dad and uncles sat around, Rosemary and her sisters gossiped in the kitchen as they made a steady stream of food—onion dip, Swedish meatballs, bacon-wrapped scallops, boxed brownies, and ice cream. It shocked Sally how the women in Jake’s family served the men. Jake’s sister attended grad school out in Colorado, and Sally wondered if she would have joined in if she were around. She realized now that her own mother had been the same way, though Sally had hardly noticed it back then.
She couldn’t win. If she went and sat on the couch with Jake, she would look like a moping princess to his mother. If she stayed in the kitchen and listened to one more story about the best lobster roll Jake’s grandmother ever ate, she predicted she might go outside and drown herself in the Atlantic. Sally settled for volleying back and forth, shuttling the trays of hot food out to the guys, drinking too much wine, and lingering longer than she needed to in the TV room.
Sunday night she drank six glasses of Rosemary’s homemade sangria. On the drive back home the next day, Jake had to pull over four times so she could vomit out the car window. She hadn’t been feeling right for a while. At first, she thought she was just sick and exhausted because she had her period. But then days passed, without any change.
“Do you think you might be pregnant?” Jake said, sounding a little too hopeful at the prospect.
“No,” Sally said. “I haven’t skipped a single pill since my first year of college.”
She didn’t want him to know how terrified she felt. She thought of her mother, misdiagnosed by a doctor she trusted with her life. Bad headaches could mean anything—dehydration or impending blindness, stress or a brain tumor. Sally had gone to the doctor the previous week for blood work and gotten into a fight with Jake in the car afterward, when she asked him whether he thought she ought to call her father and tell him she was sick.
“You know, just in case the results are bad. Maybe I should prepare him,” she said.
“I’m sure it’s nothing,” Jake said. “Don’t worry. You’re going to be fine.”
“You’re not a doctor, honey,” she said.
“Well, I know you, and I know you’re okay.”
Sally sighed. In her own personal religion—a mix of Episcopalian and superstition—telling a sick person that she was just fine was akin to wishing death on her. Right when you decided not to worry, right then, was when everything would unravel. It was far more sensible not to taunt fate and to always always expect the worst.
The lab stood empty today; really, the entire Harvard campus was
like a ghost town. Her boss had taken the whole week off, Jill had gone to Ogunquit with her sorority sisters, and the student interns had gone home for the summer. This meant that Sally alone was there to do the day-to-day lab work: running western blots, making solutions for cell cultures, rinsing old glassware and ordering more. But it also meant she was free to read the paper with her feet up on the desk and The Immaculate Collection in the CD player. Sally opened the paper, scanning page one as she took a bite of her salad. She always wanted to skip right to the “Living/Arts” section, but forced herself to read the real stuff first. The front page was nothing but bad news: Twelve GIs killed by Roadside Bomb Outside Baghdad; As Deadly As Ever, Avian Flu Proves a Persistent Foe; Worn Crosswalks Lead to Deaths.
She sighed. Jake always talked about the importance of keeping up on current events, but she had started to think that the whole endeavor was overrated. She was about to turn the page, when a small teaser at the bottom caught her eye: Noted Smith College Professor Dies at 61.
She flipped to the obituaries, curious. There, on the front page of the section, was a picture of Bill, looking handsome and young. She recognized it as the jacket photo from his first volume of poems.
William Lambert, age 61, gained national notoriety in the midseventies with his fine poetry collection, Five Seasons. Born in Newton, he graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University, earned his master’s degree at Columbia, and published three books of poems before his thirtieth birthday. The New York Times called him “Inquisitive, inspired, and melancholy—the perfect blend for a young poet.” In 1978, he married Janice DuPree (they divorced last year) and moved to Northampton, where he served as a visiting artist at Smith College for two years before joining the staff as a full professor. He never published again, but he was a beloved teacher and mentor. Mr. Lambert died from complications of pneumonia, according to his son, William Lambert Jr. He also leaves behind two other sons, Peter and Christopher.
Sally had to read it twice before she could be sure of what she had seen. Bill was dead. Her Bill. She reached for the phone to call Celia, pressing the receiver to her ear. There was no dial tone.
“Hello?” a man’s voice said. “Hello?”
“Hello?” Sally said, confused. Ridiculously, she wondered if it might be Bill, calling to say that he wasn’t really dead, that it was all part of some elaborate plan for them to be together again.
“Is this Sally Brown?” the man asked.
“Yes,” she said. “Who is this?”
“This is Dr. Phillips from Beth Israel.”
“Oh, Dr. Phillips, I’m so sorry. I’ve just gotten some bad news and the phone didn’t even ring, and—”
He interrupted her, sounding rushed. “Sally, I’m going to need you to come into the office this afternoon,” he said.
She felt a weight drop into her stomach. Suddenly everything came into focus. This was exactly how it had gone with her mother. First the doctor called instead of some receptionist, then he told her to come to the office to hear her results, then the death sentence—cancer.
Sally couldn’t breathe. “Am I going to die?” she said quickly.
“Oh God no, Sally, but we have some test results here that I’d like to discuss with you,” said Dr. Phillips, in a warm, soothing voice. He knew all about her mother, and he wanted to make this news as easy as possible for her, she thought.
She started to cry. Her whole body shook.
“Is it cancer?” she asked softly.
“No. Absolutely not. Sally, just come by. How’s four o’clock? I’ll have Bridget put you into the computer.”
Four o’clock was three hours away.
“Please,” she said. “I’ll come in no matter what, but you have to tell me what’s wrong.”
Her crying turned into a steady sob.
He sighed.
“All right. I wouldn’t normally do this,” he said. “And I still want to see you at four. But you’re perfectly healthy. Stop crying! Sally, you’re not sick. You’re about three months pregnant.”
She felt like she had been shoved hard from behind. The thought had crossed her mind, of course, but she had ruled it out.
“I’m on the Pill,” she said. “And I’ve gotten my period.”
“It may have just been spotting,” he said. “That’s fairly common. As for the Pill, have you skipped any nights?”
“No,” she said. “Absolutely not.”
The doctor chuckled. “Well, I guess this little girl or guy just felt like being born.”
Sally clenched her jaw. Now she wanted to shove him.
As soon as she saw Jake that night, she started to cry.
“Honey!” he said, laughing and wiping the tears from her cheeks. “Why are you crying? This is cause for celebration.”
“I can’t have a baby,” she said. “I just graduated from college for God’s sakes.”
“Sal, you graduated five years ago,” he said.
She calculated this in her head, alarmed as ever by how quickly time had passed.
“But still,” she said. “This wasn’t supposed to happen now. This wasn’t the plan.”
Jake pulled her toward him. “Screw the plan. This is going to be the greatest thing ever. You’ll see.”
“How are you so calm, baby?” she said, feeling slightly annoyed.
She had fallen in love with him partly because he always stayed composed and controlled while she was flipping out. But sometimes his calmness just made her feel crazier. When she had been with Bill, she had always been the sane one. Bill. Her heart felt like it dropped two feet. Bill was dead. She wanted to say something, but it didn’t seem like the right time to tell Jake.
“How else am I going to be?” Jake said. “I know we weren’t expecting this right this minute, but we’ll figure it out. I was an accident, and look how much my mother loves me.”
Sally sniffled, smiling in spite of herself. “You were not,” she said.
“Sure was,” he said. “Rosemary told me once when she was a little tipsy. One too many Nantucket Reds at brunch.”
“What did she say?” Sally said.
“She said, ‘Ellen was planned to the minute. Jakie was a pleasant surprise.’”
Sally couldn’t help but laugh.
Jake leaned down, lifted up her shirt, and kissed her stomach. “If it’s a girl, I think we should name her Eleanor after your mom,” he said softly, and Sally began to cry again, but this time because she had married such a sweet, sweet man, and she felt more grateful for that than anything.
She was supposed to attend a NOW board meeting after dinner, but Sally decided she’d have to cancel. What was she going to tell those women? She had been saying for years that eventually she was going to go to med school. As time passed, it seemed less and less likely, and was less of what she wanted anyway. But the women at NOW always looked so pleased and proud when she said it. Most of them were about the age her mother would have been, and they had fought long and hard so that her generation could do whatever they wanted. What would they think about this? A bright twenty-six-year-old who just happened to be married was one thing, but pregnant? Suddenly it seemed like dozens of doors were slamming in her face, doors she hadn’t even cared about until today. She would never be able to backpack across Europe, not that she really wanted to anyway. She would probably never become a doctor.
Later that night, she called Celia to tell her the news. She was the only one of the girls who had tried to make amends after Sally’s wedding, sending a handwritten note of apology that Sally had saved in a box full of Smith keepsakes in the linen closet. As the phone rang, she put her hand over her belly and felt for a kick. She knew it was still way too early for that, but she wished she could see some sort of sign besides a pink line on a pee-soaked stick. (Between hanging up with the doctor and going to his office three hours later, she had done four home tests in the bathroom at work, all positive.)
“I have big news,” she said when Celia answered. �
�Huge news, in fact.”
“Huge like you got a new outfit on sale at Banana, or huge like your whole freaking world just got turned upside down?” Celia said.
“The latter,” Sally said. “I’m pregnant.”
There was a long pause before Celia spoke again, and Sally tried to picture the facial expression she was making. She imagined Celia standing in front of the mirror in her apartment, mouth open wide, in a sort of oh shit pantomime.
“Okay, Sal, don’t take this the wrong way,” Celia said. “But is this good news or bad news?”
Sally exhaled. “Oh thank you for saying that, sweetpea. I have absolutely no clue. Good news, I guess. Jake seems happy.”
“What about you? Were you trying to get pregnant?” Celia asked.
“God no,” Sally said. “We just got married a year ago! I’m only twenty-six! And I’m on the Pill. I don’t know how the hell this could have happened.”
“Well, what are you going to do?” Celia asked.
“What do you mean?” Sally said, and then realizing what Celia meant, she blurted out, “Oh God, I’m keeping it—I hadn’t even thought.”
“Sorry,” Celia said. “I don’t mean to be unsupportive. If this is what you want, you’ve got an auntie here, ready and waiting. It’s just that you sound scared.”
“I’m terrified,” Sally said.
Suddenly she remembered why the Smithies were her best friends. She knew that in the days to come, she would tell dozens of people that she was having a baby (Jesus Christ, a baby) and that every one of them would coo and ooh with delight, because she was married, and when married women got pregnant it was cause for cooing and oohing. But only the Smithies would have the guts to make sure she was really happy. The girls were the place she could go and always find herself.
Suddenly, Sally remembered. “Bill died,” she said. “Oh my God, with all the craziness of this day, I almost forgot.”
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