Commencement

by J. Courtney Sullivan

  “Speaking of kids,” she said, “I cannot believe you’re a dad.”

  “Me neither,” Doug said. “I know everyone says this, but in my case it’s the truth—I have the awesomest kids ever.”

  “The awesomest?” Bree laughed.

  “All right, Miss Smith Stanford. Whatever the word is. Kids are amazing. The first few months, they’re just like these loaves of bread that shit. You’re wondering what the hell you got yourself into. But then, they turn into people. It’s the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen.”

  “Loaves of bread that shit,” Bree repeated. “What a beautiful thought.”

  He gave her a playful shove. “Get outta here, you know what I mean.”

  “Honestly, I think you’re remarkable,” she said. “Lara and I wanted to get a puppy last year, but ultimately decided we weren’t ready for the commitment.”

  “That your lady friend?” he asked.

  Bree nodded. “Yeah. I’m surprised you haven’t heard about it all over town.”

  “I may have heard a thing or two,” he said. “There might have been some mention of how I turned you gay. I can’t really remember.”

  She grimaced. “I’m sorry.”

  Doug winked. “Don’t worry about it,” he said.

  “Well, don’t you want to ask me about her?” she said.

  Doug shook his head. “It sure was weird to hear you say it earlier, though. My girlfriend. Wow. I thought Carolyn’s head might pop off. Anyway, back to the baby thing. I think we’re just different sorts of people, me and you. You’re a planner. Everything has to be perfectly aligned before you make a move, or you’re afraid the whole damn world will come crashing down. For me, it’s more like, ‘We’re having a baby. Now what?’”

  Bree laughed. “I envy you that.”

  “Maybe it makes things easier,” he said with a shrug. “Not so much analysis.”

  “I think you’re right,” she said. “Three-quarters of my adult life has been spent analyzing. It gets exhausting.”

  She wondered what might have happened if she had simply demanded that her parents try to adjust to her life. You should have fought us, her mother had said. What if she had insisted on bringing Lara home at the holidays, on making her a part of the family? Would it have worked? She should have let Lara come along this time. Maybe it wasn’t too late. Maybe she could fly out tomorrow. Roger would pick her up at the airport, show her around town.

  Even as she pictured it, Bree knew it wouldn’t happen. She still didn’t have the guts to take the risk.

  “So is Carolyn a planner?” she asked.

  “She’s a cruise director without a boat,” Doug said. “She keeps our house running like a military barracks. With love, of course.” He smiled.

  “Well, of course,” Bree said. “Does she stay home with the kids?”

  He nodded. “She’s great at it.”

  “What did she want to be, you know, before she had them?” Bree asked.

  Doug shrugged. “A mom?” he said.

  He gazed out over the yard. “I drive by here sometimes when I get stressed. Not in a creepy way. I just like to remember how easy it was for us back in high school, how much fun we had. And I think about these big dreams we always talked about. You made them come true for yourself, Bree. I’m proud of you.”

  “No matter what you choose, you have to give something else up,” she said. “You have a wife, kids, a house, a goddamn Volvo. I can’t tell you how far I am from all of that.”

  “Speaking of my goddamn Volvo, I should get going,” Doug said. “Carolyn might think I’ve joined a biker gang or something.”

  Bree laughed. “Before you go, can I ask you a question?” she said.

  “Ask me anything,” he said.

  “Would you let your son play with Barbies?”

  “Hell no,” he said without even thinking. “Would you give your cat a big ol’ bone to chew on?”

  “That’s what I thought,” Bree said.

  He kissed her on the cheek, and they said good-bye, and she thought of how she would probably never see him again, not unless they ran into each other somewhere in town.

  After he drove off, Bree went to her childhood bedroom, still decorated with pink ballet slippers and rosy chiffon curtains. She crawled under her comforter and called Lara. The phone in their apartment rang four times, then five, and Bree wondered if maybe she had gone out with friends.

  But then she heard Lara’s voice at the end of the line.

  “Hi, sweetie,” she said.

  “Hi,” Lara said. “How’s your mom doing?”

  “She’s stable, which is good.”

  “Oh, thank God. Give her my best. Or don’t, if that’s easier,” Lara said. “I was really worried. I wish you had called me sooner.” The edge in her voice surprised Bree.

  “It’s been mayhem here,” Bree said. “Oh my God, guess who I ran into. Doug Anderson! I saw him at the hospital with his wife and kids, and then he stopped by tonight.”

  “He stopped by?” Lara asked. “Huh.” She paused for a moment. “Do you want me to call work for you, or anything? Or I can still come out there if you want.”

  “No, no,” Bree said. “You really don’t have to. I don’t want to trouble you, babe.”

  “Whatever,” Lara said.

  “Are you mad at me?” Bree asked, indignant. She knew things had been rough between them, and maybe she was largely to blame. But her mother had just had a heart attack, for God’s sake. She didn’t need this now.

  “I just don’t know what I mean to you,” Lara said.

  “What are you talking about?” Bree said.

  “Ever since we left Smith, I’ve been waiting for you to come around and be open about us to the people in your life. I kept thinking that if I just stayed patient, you’d get comfortable eventually. But I know now that’s never going to happen.”

  “That is so unfair,” Bree said. “Why are you mentioning this now, of all times?”

  She could hear Lara starting to cry. “I know it’s a terrible time, with your mom being in the hospital. And I would give anything for it not to be this way. But I can’t do this anymore.”

  “Baby!” Bree said. “You don’t mean that.”

  “I do,” Lara said. “This isn’t getting better. I just feel like it’s over. Really over, you know? Your mother has a heart attack and you don’t want me to be with you? You don’t even call me, but you have time to hang out with your former fiancé? That’s not the kind of relationship I want.”

  Bree felt panicked. “Oh come on, my former fiancé? We were just kids. And it’s not like we went out for burgers and beers! He just came by the house for a minute.”

  Lara was silent.

  “After eight years, you’re just going to call it quits like that?” Bree said. “And right when I need you most?”

  “I love you,” Lara said. “I think you’re probably the love of my life. But let’s face it. I’m not the love of yours.”

  She hung up. Bree tried to call her right back, but Lara just let the phone ring and ring. When she arrived home a week later, Lara had moved out.

  CELIA

  Celia was certain that Manhattan in summertime was the closest approximation to hell on earth. The air grew thick and heavy with heat, the streets reeked of garbage, air conditioners dripped their murky water onto her cheeks, and her hair became an untamable disaster.

  It was July, the middle of her fifth New York summer. This one was particularly excruciating because Kayla, her office mate and friend of four years, had gotten engaged over Memorial Day weekend. Overnight, their discussion topics had gone from gossip and politics to centerpieces and flower girls and the virtues of the Kleinfeld bridal superstore over the snooty Vera Wang boutique on Madison Avenue.

  Celia felt proud that the city hadn’t changed her much. Her New York friends did things that she and the Smithies had never done, like snort cocaine, talk seriously about dieting, give the evil eye to people
who brought children into restaurants, follow the lives of celebrities with genuine interest, and buy single items of clothing that cost more than a week’s pay. She now added “get frenzied about weddings” to the list.

  After a week of Kayla’s wedding talk, Celia called Sally to thank her for not being a bridezilla.

  “Oh really?” Sally said playfully. “I thought you all thought I was kind of a bridezilla.”

  “Well, we did,” Celia said. “But that’s because we hadn’t seen the alternative yet.”

  One afternoon, Celia and Kayla ate lunch at the crowded sandwich place downstairs from their office. Behind the counter, fat men in white T-shirts made Philly cheese steaks and chicken parm subs, while sweat dripped down their doughy faces. Young guys in suits dabbed at their foreheads with cheap paper napkins, and women gave up the ghost and tied their hair back in high ponytails. Kayla didn’t seem to notice a bit of it. Her face was radiant and dry; her blonde bob fell neatly against her shoulders, causing Celia to wonder whether engagement was so powerful that it even affected sweat glands.

  “By the way,” Kayla said. “I went to a Mets game with Marc and his boys from the firm last night. There was this one really cute guy. I was thinking maybe we could go on a double date sometime.”

  Celia shrugged, trying to banish the thought that no one had gone on a double date since 1953.

  “Sure,” she said. “Set it up.”

  “I know this probably sounds selfish, but I want you to have a great date for my wedding,” Kayla said.

  She was right, Celia thought. It sounded totally selfish, and stupid as well.

  “And who knows,” Kayla went on. “Maybe you and this guy will hit it off and end up married.”

  “I honestly don’t know if I’ll ever get married,” Celia said, mostly as a means of changing the subject.

  Kayla edited the memoirs of retired right-wing senators and pundits, but she was a die-hard liberal who had majored in political science at Williams and hoped to work on truly important books someday. Celia wanted to ask her what she thought of Nancy Pelosi’s latest speech, one of her first since becoming Speaker of the House, but Kayla went on.

  “Oh sweetie!” she said. “Of course you’ll get married. Girls like us always get married. You’ll find someone, I promise.”

  Celia took in a long, deep breath. “I don’t mean that I won’t find anyone,” she said. “I mean, maybe I don’t want to get married.”

  Kayla’s eyes grew wide for a moment, and then she broke into a smile. “We all have those moments of doubt before we meet the right guy,” she said. “You’ll see.”

  Celia didn’t say so, but she was thinking of how her mother’s friends kept getting left by their husbands for much younger women.

  “Are you ever afraid Daddy would do that?” Celia had once asked her mother.

  “God no,” her mother said. “Because he knows I’d shoot him.”

  Marriage wasn’t security, as Celia had always thought. Nor did it necessarily mean happiness. When her mother and aunts visited New York, they’d ooh and ahh over her studio apartment, and the envy in their eyes looked exactly the same as the way her single friends looked when they saw some girl with a giant engagement ring registering for china at Bloomingdale’s.

  She had met plenty of women in Manhattan who freely admitted that they were only working as a way to pass the time until they got married. It seemed like something from a bad black-and-white movie, something from a million years ago. And yet, there they’d be—at parties and friends’ birthday dinners and in the bathroom line at bars. They were usually tiny and pretty, and almost all of them worked in marketing, so that Celia began to think “marketing” was actually just code for single and seriously looking.

  “My job’s just not the be-all end-all,” they’d say. Or “There’s not really anything I want to do as much as I want a family.”

  Celia remembered a phone conversation she had had with April a few months before Sally’s wedding.

  “These fucking women really piss me off,” April said. “Because instead of being elated by the thought of making their own happiness and chasing some crazy dream, all they want to do is narrow their options and do something safe.”

  “I sort of feel the same way, but wasn’t the women’s movement about choice?” Celia said. “So shouldn’t we respect their decision?”

  “What decision? The decision to make no decision at all?” April seethed. “The decision to play out some bad nineteen-fifties fantasy?”

  “Oh wow,” Celia had said. “I’m gonna need you to recite the Hippocratic oath every day until Sal gets married, and apply it to your role in her wedding.”

  “How so?” April said.

  “First do no harm.”

  As usual when it came to April, Celia saw her point but suspected that for most women it wasn’t all that simple. She occasionally looked at expensive real estate online, fantasizing about writing novels in a Brooklyn brownstone or on a farm in the Catskills. She had known what she wanted to name her children (Ella, Max, Charlie) since she was eleven and had never once wavered in that decision. At Sally’s urging, she opened a 4,01(k) as soon as she started her job, and she had checked its status every Monday morning for the past five years.

  So many aspects of what she wanted out of real life were clear to her, but for some reason it was hard even to imagine having a husband. Celia had never managed to feel as comfortable around a man as she did around her friends, and this seemed a fundamental problem. If she was going to spend her life with someone, shouldn’t he make her feel completely herself? Shouldn’t she be able to bring him home to her crazy, boisterous family and expect him to love them as much as she did? Shouldn’t she be able to share her love of Frank Sinatra and old movies, her extreme clumsiness, or her total aversion to museums, without worrying that he’d find her silly or strange or uncultured?

  It wasn’t their fault, but around men who interested her, she always turned into Celia Version 2.0—similar to the real thing, but not quite as sharp or fully formed. She lost her ability to make a joke or be sarcastic. She couldn’t develop an argument the way she could with the girls, and she was positively undiscerning when it came to whom she found attractive or interesting. She knew that Smith was partly to blame for her troubles in this area. During her four years there it had been virtually impossible to meet a man, and when she did she was not looking for a soul mate or a debate partner—she already had that in her friends. Men were simply for decoration, dissection, and making out.

  The mentality had stuck with her ever since. She had a theory that women’s college grads were like people who had lived through the Depression—even though they now had plenty of food, they still hoarded every last scrap. When she met a guy, any guy, she was too willing to accept his flaws because who knew where her next meal was coming from? But it was one thing to date losers, and another thing entirely to marry one.

  When her friends began to get engaged, instead of feeling jealous or antsy to do the same, Celia realized something: There was a very real possibility that no one was coming to save her. She would have to make her own plan. If she wanted to someday leave her job and write books, then she’d have to write books to do it, not wait around for some hedge fund guy to finance her fantasies. When she felt ready to have kids, she wanted to have them, regardless of whether or not she had found lasting love.

  It was hard for girls like Kayla and Sally to understand this—Celia got the sense that they thought she was just putting on a brave face to mask her disappointment and fear of being alone. But what scared her far more than loneliness was the thought of waking up one day and realizing that she had attached herself to the wrong person, out of fear or pressure or God knows what. As a result, she had decided to view men as fun and nothing more, at least for now.

  The night of her lunch with Kayla, Celia went out with friends and met a film producer named Daryl. He was thirty-two years old and a bit chubby, but not altogether unattract
ive. They were at a trendy bar on the Lower East Side, and he asked her if she wanted to take a walk. Hand in hand, they traversed the streets, and (only slightly drunk) she thought it was actually sort of romantic.

  They stopped somewhere for a game of pool and shots—Jameson for him, and lemon drops for her. He knew a lot of people in publishing. He made her laugh with his pitch-perfect impressions of various writers and editors, and he had great taste in books. She took him home to Brooklyn, where they had brief but enjoyable sex on the sofa. He was gone before she woke up.

  This was what a lot of New York men did. They fucked you and then left before breakfast, which was fine by Celia. She had emerged pretty much unscathed so far. There had been one terribly embarrassing case of chlamydia, which she prayed would stay away for good (while realizing that of all the things one could pray for, this would probably piss God off the most). And then there was the morning she woke up covered in her own blood, horrified for an instant before blurrily remembering what had happened—he was the singer in the band, they made out in a phone booth, she said he could come home with her, but then remembered that she had her period.

  “It’s cool,” he said. “That’s kind of my thing.”

  “He should have at least stayed to help you wash the sheets,” Sally said the next day, when Celia told her the story. Celia could not think of anything more mortifying than washing her bloody sheets with last night’s one-night stand.

  After Daryl had gone, Celia took a long shower and then pulled her hair up into a wet ponytail. He was the fifteenth man she had slept with in her life, though she had stopped her official count at ten, and always reported her number as such when asked. Most of her friends’ numbers topped out at seven. If she didn’t meet the right guy soon, she was in very real danger of hitting twenty. At Smith, they never used words like “slut”—it still shocked Celia to hear people say it. But twenty sex partners. Wowsa. She knew for a fact that her mother had slept with only two men in her life: her father, and a college boyfriend who later became a priest.