“What?!” Celia gasped. “Jesus, Sal, first you tell me you’re pregnant and now this? Are you just conducting an experiment to see how quickly I can go into shock?”
Sally laughed. “It’s true. What a day, huh?”
After they hung up, she closed the bedroom door and decided to call April. She tried twice, but April’s cell phone went straight to voice mail. Sally didn’t leave a message.
Since her wedding, she had wondered if she would ever speak to Bree or April again. That night in the King House dining hall had driven home the realization that perhaps they had all grown so far apart that their friendships no longer existed, simple as that. It felt strange, like leaving a lover whom you had shared everything with. It was an active falling away, not accidental or situational like the end of most friendships. Even if they saw each other on the street years later or caught one another’s eye across the room at a party, they might just look away as if the moment had never passed.
But now Sally realized that she couldn’t leave it like that, especially with April. She needed her friends too much to let them slip away. Sally knew they could mend things if they tried.
That night, she dreamed of April. In Sally’s dream, the two of them coasted dangerously down a mountainside in Capri (she and Jake had been there once, and ever since she often dreamed of the island’s gorgeous villas and lush lemon trees) in a tiny car, with no doors, and Sally told April that they had to jump out or they would crash. But April refused. She wanted to see the fish at the bottom of the ocean, and she said this car could take her there. Sally didn’t want to leave her, but at the very last moment, she jumped. Then she watched the car, falling down down down through the air and into the sea. April waved from beneath the water, and beside her Bill floated along, waving also, looking young—dark haired and bearded just like in the picture that accompanied his obituary.
Sally called April before work the next day and then again on her lunch break. Both times she got a recording, and when she tried to leave a message, a mechanical voice told her that April’s mailbox was full.
BREE
Lara had been wanting them to have dinner at her boss’s house all summer, but Bree kept coming up with reasons why she couldn’t make it. She knew they were hanging by a thread these days, and that an evening with Nora and Roseanna could lead to the kind of fight that might do them in completely. But in July there came a Sunday night when nothing else was going on—no soccer games or late meetings or season finales on TV. Bree had no choice but to go.
Nora ran an after-school program for low-income kids, where Lara was the program director. Her partner Roseanna had made tons of money in Silicon Valley in her twenties and gotten out just in time. She now stayed at home with their six-year-old son, Dylan, who was currently enrolled in a summer day camp for tap dancing.
They lived in a ridiculous house in the suburbs—seven bedrooms and four baths, with a flagstone patio and a swimming pool out back, lined with a huge fresco of a lounging naked woman. They hung the rainbow flag from a pole in the front yard and drove matching hers-and-hers Priuses.
It was July, and lilacs bloomed in the back garden. The smell reminded Bree of her mother.
Over dinner, when Lara asked Dylan what he wanted to be when he grew up, Dylan looked thoughtful. “A fireperson,” he said. “Or an astronaut, or an aesthetician or a doctor.”
Fireperson? Bree thought. Aesthetician? Jesus. When her little brothers were six they had wanted to be dinosaurs.
“Why not all four?” Lara asked.
“Nooo!” he said, dissolving into giggles.
“No? Why not?” Lara asked.
“When would I sleep?” Dylan slapped his palm against his forehead, making the rest of them laugh.
After coffee and dessert, they brought their glasses of wine into the playroom while Dylan prepared to put on a show for them. Bree glanced around at his toys—a Barbie Dream House and matching pink minivan, a kitchen set with a pretend dishwasher, and a dress-up corner.
“It’s really important to us that he be exposed to gender-neutral toys,” Roseanna said.
Nora patted her knee. “Someday his future wife will thank us for raising a man who washes the dishes and knows how to cook a soufflé—a plastic soufflé, at least.”
“I think that’s great,” Lara said. “Don’t you think so, B.?”
“Huh?” Bree was pretending to be intrigued by an Angelina Ballerina book, and just then Dylan saved her from having to answer by jumping out from behind the door in a spangled purple cape. “The show’s starting!” he said. “Mama, present me to the audience!”
On the train back to San Francisco, Bree gazed out the window, thinking about the night they’d just spent. She suddenly sputtered with laughter.
Lara looked up from her book. “What’s funny?” she asked, brushing a strand of hair out of Bree’s face.
“I was just thinking about Nora and Roseanna. They’re such über-Smithies and they didn’t even go to Smith. San Francisco really is Northampton West, isn’t it?”
“What do you mean?” Lara asked.
“I mean, could they be any more gay?” Bree shook her head, laughing. “Gender-neutral toys? They’re like a parody of themselves. And that hideous fresco. And the rainbow flag!”
“We have a rainbow flag in our kitchen,” Lara pointed out.
“I know, but that’s totally different. Ours is a wall hanging that we’ve had since college. Theirs is roughly the size of the Goodyear blimp.”
“What’s wrong with gender-neutral toys?” Lara asked.
“Nothing! But that kid’s toys weren’t gender neutral—it was all girl stuff! I bet you if they had a daughter, they wouldn’t let her play with Barbies in a million years, you know? But here’s poor Dylan, and it seems like a swell idea to load him up with pink plastic. His future wife will thank them? There ain’t gonna be a future wife if he stays on this track.”
“I think he’s a really bright kid,” Lara said.
“So do I.” Bree laughed. “It’s just—”
“Are you trying to pick a fight?” Lara said.
“No!” Bree said. “God, I thought you’d think it was funny too.”
Bree knew there was a time when Lara would have laughed along with her. They had often joked over the years that they both came from the sort of Southern homes where political correctness goes to die. But lately things had gotten tenser than ever. It had started with Sally’s wedding more than a year earlier and grown worse with every passing month.
“You know, you’re so critical of my boss, but I’ve never even met anyone from your office,” Lara said after a long pause.
She said it as if she had just thought of it, when in fact this complaint recurred on a near-weekly basis.
“The people I work with aren’t like that,” Bree said for perhaps the six-hundredth time.
“What do you mean? You all go out drinking together every week.”
“Yeah, but people don’t bring their significant others along. It’s more for stress relief than bonding. It’s like parallel play for adults.”
“Do they even have significant others?” Lara asked.
Bree’s coworkers at the firm were mostly single guys in their twenties and thirties, something she knew irked Lara.
“The partners are all married. But otherwise, I don’t really know,” Bree said.
“You don’t know? How is that possible? You’ve worked there for two years!”
Bree shrugged. “Because we just don’t talk about our personal lives.”
Lara bit her lower lip. “So you’re saying it’s normal that none of them knows about me,” she said.
Bree instantly felt terrible. “Like I told you, sweetie, that kind of stuff hardly ever comes up.”
“I feel like you don’t want me to meet them,” Lara said. After a long pause, she added, “When are we ever just going to have a normal relationship?”
“Never,” Bree snapped.
The
y rode in silence the rest of the way home.
In truth, she didn’t really want her coworkers to know about Lara. When they all went out for beers after work on Thursdays, Bree actually put on makeup and flirted with her office mate Chris and their boss, Peter. She enjoyed feeling the appreciation of men once in a while. One night after too many margaritas, Chris told her he thought he had fallen for her. They ended up kissing in his car, though she never told anyone, not even Celia, because telling someone would make it real.
Bree had no idea why she had done it, and the guilt weighed heavily on her. When things with Lara were at their worst, she often thought back to their easy, happy days at Smith. Why couldn’t they get back there again?
Some parts of their world accepted them as a couple—Lara’s family and most of their college friends and the girls from their soccer team and book club. And some people just didn’t get it—Bree’s family and Celia to some extent, and, Bree assumed, the guys from work. She saw no point in shoving the relationship in their faces. Lara was out and proud of it wherever she went. But for Bree, it never felt that simple. She was in a lesbian relationship, but she was not a lesbian. She loved Lara, but could she really live in a house with a rainbow flag out front and raise sons who slept in canopy beds and played with baby dolls?
She realized that Nora and Roseanna were extreme—most lesbians they knew were pretty normal parents. She knew Lara wasn’t asking her for a naked lady fresco, just for her commitment. But the older Bree got, the more conservative she felt, the more she understood and valued the very heteronormative (as April would say) way in which her parents had raised her. She had gone off to Smith and become a lawyer and found this person she loved, and yet a huge part of her just wanted to be home at night, cooking dinner while her husband read the paper at the kitchen table and the little boys played Tonka trucks at his feet.
On the Saturday following their dinner with Nora and Roseanna, Bree and Lara woke up early to go for a run. The night before they had had sex for the first time in two weeks, and they’d gone for a long dinner at a little French place in their neighborhood, drinking wine and holding hands, laughing at old stories, and flirting with the pretty Parisian waitress. These bursts of happiness never seemed to last very long, but each time they both hoped that maybe some spell had been broken and they would just be happy now, like old times.
As they headed out the door, the phone rang.
“Let it ring,” Bree said, but Lara answered it, and then, looking puzzled, handed the receiver to Bree.
“It’s Tim,” she said.
Bree’s brother was about to start his senior year of college. He had never gotten up before ten on a Saturday in his life. Besides that, they rarely corresponded except through e-mails—he would send Bree some inappropriate joke or a link to a disgusting video of a guy having sex with a horse, and she would write back telling him that he was probably going to get her fired if he didn’t quit it.
“Timmy?” she said into the phone. He was breathing hard.
“Mom’s in the hospital,” her brother said.
He told her that their mother had had a heart attack while tending to her garden in the front yard. A neighbor saw her lift an enormous clay pot of tulips, and then suddenly collapse.
“Is she going to be okay?” Bree asked.
“We don’t know yet,” Tim said, his voice wavering. “She’ll have to have surgery in a few days, once she’s stable. I think you should come home.”
Bree thought of how young he was. She should be making calls like this, not him.
“Of course,” she said. “Tell Daddy I’ll catch the first plane I can get. And tell everyone I love them. And Timmy, I love you.”
He sort of grunted at that, and Bree smiled for a moment, thinking of him, goofy and unsentimental as ever. It felt vaguely comforting for some reason.
When she hung up the phone, she turned to Lara.
“My mom had a heart attack,” she said.
“Oh sweetie!” Lara said. “How is she?”
Bree shook her head. “Tim said they don’t know yet. I’ve got to get there.”
She ran into the bedroom, pulled out Lara’s old soccer bag from under the bed, and began filling it with clothes. Lara followed close behind.
“I’ll book a flight right now,” she said, and she wrapped her arms around Bree. “It’s going to be okay,” Lara whispered. “Honey, it’s okay.”
“A heart attack,” Bree said. “My mother? This is the kind of thing that should be happening twenty years from now. She’s still so young.”
“It’s awful,” Lara said.
A while later, Lara kissed her, then left the room and went to the computer to buy tickets. Bree sat down on the bed and thought of her father. He had met her mother in grade school and never spent a day away from her since. He couldn’t do anything without her—tie a tie, or write a letter, or make a sandwich, or talk to one of his children about something important.
“Do you think we can make it to the airport for the nine o’ clock?” Lara called from the den.
“We have to,” Bree said, and just then she was struck by an image of her mother waking up to see the two of them standing over her together. She might have another heart attack right then and there.
On holidays and other occasions, Bree took a stand. She knew she couldn’t be with both Lara and her parents, so she chose Lara. But this was different. Her mother needed her, the version of her that the family loved. She pulled her long hair over her shoulder, and then went to Lara. She knew this wasn’t going to go over well, but what choice did she have?
“Baby, I think I need to do this solo,” she said.
“What do you mean?” Lara said.
“I think I should go home alone. You know how they feel about us, and—”
Lara looked stricken. “You shouldn’t have to be alone right now,” she said.
“I won’t be, I’ll have my family there,” Bree said.
“What if I just come and stay in a hotel by myself?” Lara said. “That way we wouldn’t be sleeping in sin under their roof or anything.”
Sleeping in sin. She had meant it sarcastically, and Bree found this enraging given the circumstances.
“I’m sorry, but I’m going alone,” Bree said before she turned back into their room and finished packing.
Lara went into the bathroom and slammed the door.
Bree knew this habit of hers rankled Lara more than any other—her ability to make a decision and announce that there would be no further discussion was, in Lara’s opinion, “Cruel and selfish behavior, the type usually enacted by men with small penises.”
At the airport, Bree watched families pass through security and thought of how she had become an outcast in her own family five years earlier. The separation had been heartbreaking, and yet it had never seemed quite real to Bree. Now she was going home for the first time since leaving for law school. She wished it could be for any other reason.
Bree bought an enormous Hershey bar in the duty-free shop and started eating it square by square. This made her think of the way Sally used to nibble cookies like a mouse and, in turn, of how Sally had lost her mother at such a young age. If her own mother died, Bree thought, she would never forgive herself for these years of virtual silence they had wasted. For a moment, she wished Sally were there with her. They hadn’t spoken in a year. Bree had not heard from April either, but she heard of them through Celia, ever the peacekeeper. Bree kept meaning to call Sally, but she wanted to do it when she had good news to share, when she knew she could prove Sally wrong about Lara. Sally was pregnant now, five months along. Another mother born, Bree thought. She was hurt that Sally hadn’t called her, that she had had to hear the news from Celia.
Bree felt tears forming in her eyes. She hated crying in public. She dug her cell phone out of her purse and called Celia, who always said the right thing. True to form, she sounded soothing but not patronizing. She didn’t tell Bree not to cry or worry. She offere
d to come down to Savannah right away.
“Thank you, but I’ll be okay,” Bree said.
“Are you guys going to stay at your parents’ house?” Celia asked.
“It’s just me,” Bree said. “Lara didn’t come.”
“Why not?”
“She wanted to, but I said no,” Bree said. “I just thought it would be best to avoid all that family drama.”
Celia grew silent.
“You think that’s fucked?” Bree said.
“It’s a really tough situation, and you should do whatever you need, sweetie,” Celia said.
“But am I being awful to Lara here?” Bree said. “Come on, brutal honesty, please.”
Celia sighed. “Look, you’re my best friend, you’re my priority. I’m not really concerned about whether you’re being awful to Lara. I’m just thinking that one of the only reasons to have a significant other in the first place is so you don’t have to be alone at times like this. If you’re shutting her out now, well, then, what’s the point?”
Bree didn’t know how to respond.
“Listen, my plane’s boarding,” she said at last. “I’ll call you when I land.”
She hung up the phone and knew right away who she needed to call. Despite how long it had been, she dialed the number and listened to six rings, then seven. Finally, the machine picked up.
“You’ve reached the Browns!” Sally’s recorded voice sounded tinny, but so so happy. “Leave a message for Sally or Jake after the tone.”
Bree hung up.
A moment later, her cell phone rang.
“Bree?!” Sally said. “I was bringing in the groceries. I just missed you! What’s going on?”
“It’s my mom,” Bree said, starting to cry.
She told Sally about her mother, about Lara. She asked about Sally’s pregnancy, and Sally surprised her by sounding utterly unsentimental about the whole thing—she said that every morning she woke up feeling like she had thrown back a bottle of cheap tequila the night before.
Twenty minutes later, before she hung up the phone, Bree whispered, “I’m sorry for what happened at the wedding. And I’m sorry for not calling sooner.”
Commencement Page 21