Commencement (11 page)

Bree had always told the girls that commencement would mark the end of her relationship with Lara. She had told Lara this, too, but Lara never seemed to believe her, or if she did, she didn’t want to think about it. Some women came to Smith and realized that they had been lesbians all along. Bree was not one of them. There was a name for girls like her: SLUG. It stood for Smith Lesbian Until Graduation. She wasn’t the only straight woman on campus in a full-fledged relationship with a gay woman. Most straight Smithies had kissed women, but that didn’t count. SLUGs went on dates and held hands and had sex with women—
they took it a step beyond
, as Sally put it. But they did not take it beyond the college gates.

Celia seemed comforted by the thought that Bree would soon return to the world of men. Bree knew it was hard for Celia to understand that she was not a lesbian, but that she had fallen in love with a woman. It was hard for her, too. The thought of ever trying to make her parents understand this seemed impossible. She had taken Lara to the family beach house off the coast of Charleston two summers in a row for the Fourth of July, and they had shared her bed. Bree knew her family liked Lara fine, but when she pictured them realizing what this had meant, she feared they would never forgive her.

She broke up with Lara as planned, late one night in May. They sat on the edge of Paradise Pond in the dark and wept into each other’s hair, and Lara kept begging Bree to change her mind.

“I know you’re afraid, but we can do this,” she said. “We’ve done it here, and these have been the best years of our lives.”

“I know,” Bree said. “But that was here, Northampton. Not the real world.”

“You think I’ll ever find someone as great as you, B.?” Lara shook her head, and in an imitation of her father’s Southern drawl, she said, “I’m sorry, baby, but that dog just won’t hunt.”

Bree laughed weakly.

“I love you,” Lara said. “I can’t lose you because you’re afraid of what other people will think.”

“It’s not just any old people,” she said. “It’s my parents, my grandparents. The people who love me the most.”

“Will we still be friends?” Lara asked.

“We will always be best friends,” Bree said, though in truth she did not know.

“Can I still kiss you?” Lara said.

Bree shook her head. She thought of seeing Lara and not being able to kiss her or touch her soft skin. Bree sobbed into her hands, the hot tears puddling in her palms. Eventually, she got up, brushed the dirt from her pants, and said she had to go.

“I think you did the right thing,” Celia said when Bree returned to the dorm.

Bree gulped. “I can fall in love again, but I’ll never find another family.”

As soon as she said it, she realized that she didn’t believe herself. She would never fall in love like this again. And so, she went to Lara’s dorm, dialed up from downstairs, and screamed “I’m an idiot! I was wrong!” into the intercom, as a trio of baffled first years looked on, smoking their cigarettes with wide eyes.

They were briefly elated, but then graduation came. The most stinging memory of all was the look on her mother’s face when, just after the ceremony, Bree pulled her aside and told her the truth.

“I don’t understand,” her mother said. She looked like she might faint. “Not you, Bree.”

Not you
. It was, Bree thought, as if she had admitted to being a serial killer.

“It’s my own fault,” her mother whispered. “Why did I insist on you coming here? You could be home safe and married to Doug Anderson by now.”

Bree had hardly thought of him since she met Lara. It shocked her to hear his name. And how many times had her mother told her that she had made the best decision of her life letting him go?

“Please, Mama,” Bree said. “Try to understand.”

The rest of the family joined them then, the boys whooping and hollering over Bree’s diploma. Her mother smiled in the pictures her father insisted on taking, but afterward she sent Bree’s brothers away and said, “Tell your father what you’ve done.”

Bree could feel herself turning red. She recited the words she had practiced with Lara the night before. “Daddy, I’m in a committed relationship with Lara and we’re in love,” she said.

Her father looked baffled. “What do you mean?” he said.

“They’re a couple!” her mother shouted, hysterical. “She’s telling us she’s a lesbian! She’s telling us that her little Chinese friend is her
girlfriend
!”

All around them, people stared.
Her little Chinese friend
, Bree thought, and she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Did it bother her mother more that she was in love with a woman or that she was in love with an Asian?

Bree graduated magna cum laude from Smith College that day and received her diploma and her Phi Beta Kappa key. But in her parents’ eyes, it would always be the day she had broken their hearts in a sea of folding chairs, right in the middle of the Quad.

Things had been strained between them ever since.

Lara followed her to Stanford, taking a job as a coordinator at the local Boys & Girls Club while Bree finished law school. Lara’s patience always amazed Bree. When she stressed over an exam or a paper, Lara would say, “You need carbs,” then busy herself in the kitchen making banana bread or pasta in a thick, creamy Parmesan sauce. She quizzed Bree every morning, reading questions off of note cards and sitting on Bree’s feet as she did her sit-ups. If Bree expressed a moment’s doubt over whether she could handle the workload, Lara would smooth her hair and say, “Come on now,
cowgirl, you can do this. You were born to be a lawyer. Look how you argue me into submission all the time.”

After Bree passed the bar, they moved down to San Francisco where they could both find better jobs. Bree knew it was thanks to the Old Girls Network that she landed her fantasy gig as an associate at Morris & White (White being Katherine White, Smith Class of ’68, who loved hiring smart women’s college grads).

At first, it was wonderful, being with Lara in the wide world, making a life together. But as years passed, her parents’ disapproval took a greater and greater toll on Bree. Each time she was asked to declare their relationship for what it was, she hesitated. It made Lara livid that Bree’s coworkers didn’t know she had a girlfriend and that, a year after college graduation, she had faked food poisoning to get out of going to her high school reunion, picturing the looks on the faces of her former classmates when she strolled through the doors of the high school gymnasium with Lara on her arm.

Lately they were lucky if they could go twenty-four hours without a fight, despite the fact that Lara still made Bree laugh more than anyone; despite the fact that the sex was amazing as ever; despite the fact that they fell asleep each night pressed together, with Lara’s hand on her belly, whispering nonstop about politics and books and celebrities and their days until they were too tired to say one more word.

In theory, Bree thought, it was bold and brave and right to choose love and fight for it. But how could love survive when it necessitated giving up so much? Since telling them about Lara, Bree spoke to her parents once every month or so, instead of four or five times a week like she used to. Her brothers e-mailed her and sent drunken text messages, but that was about it. She did not go home for holidays. She knew this hurt her parents, but she also knew that they wouldn’t want Lara in their house. So they spent holidays with Lara’s parents in Virginia, eating fried shrimp wontons and playing mah-jongg around a card table, with Lara’s mother and aunts lapsing into Mandarin every so often, and Lara whispering, “They’re talking about you.”

Lara’s mother went to Catholic Mass every morning, and on Christmas she insisted that they all go with her, even her husband, who had fought in Vietnam and was a staunch atheist, and Lara’s brother, who was in some sort of cult, though they really never talked about it. Bree would get lost in the sound of organ music and the sight of sunlight passing through a stained-glass window behind the altar and the strange, funny feeling that you just never knew what the hell life was going to bring. She tried to ignore how much she missed being home with her own family.

Lara’s mom would squeeze her hand as they walked out of church, and say, “Next year, you’ll bring your parents with you, okay?”

It embarrassed Bree that her family wanted nothing to do with these people, that her own mother had no interest in meeting Lara’s parents. When Lara had come out in high school, she said, her mother had been devastated, saying Hail Marys and lighting candles, trying to undo what had been done. For a year, they hardly spoke. But then, Lara said, one day her mother returned home from church and said, “When I was twenty-five, I met your father. And I brought him to my parents, and they said if you marry this man, we will disown you. He was white, a non-Catholic. I married him anyway. My father died without ever speaking to me again, my mother missed my wedding, and your birth. We don’t always do the things our parents want us to do, but it is their mistake if they can’t find a way to love us anyway.”

Bree only wished her own parents would realize this.

“They’ll come around,” Lara said. “You just have to let them in a little.”

Bree was ashamed to tell her that she suspected they didn’t want to be let in.

April had been supportive of their relationship. She sent cards addressed to both Bree and Lara; she always asked after Lara when she called or e-mailed. But Bree could tell that Celia—and Sally, too, to some extent—felt mystified. They had never really taken to Lara, never quite understood why Bree was willing to risk everything to be with her.

Sometimes just knowing this felt as real and painful as a dog
bite. She was in love, but hers was a relationship that would always require explanation, that few people—even her dearest friends, even she herself—could really understand. After all this time, she still wished for a normal life, for the kind of love that would please her parents, for a moment like she’d had with Doug Anderson in Forsyth Park all those years ago, but with the person she actually loved. Part of her wanted to break away and find what Sally had found—normal, understandable love. She knew she could never have that, as long as she and Lara were together.

The alarm went off in the bedroom—a jarring, moaning sound. There was a grunt of protest, and then the noise stopped. A moment later, Lara emerged in her cotton bra and panties, her short, spiky hair sticking up in the back like Dennis the Menace’s. Her soccer player’s body—all muscle and curve—looked golden in the morning light.

She rubbed her eyes, walked over to the back of Bree’s chair, and wrapped her arms around her from behind.

“You okay, baby?” she asked, and Bree shrugged.

“You were tossing and turning all night, and then you got up before the alarm even went off,” Lara said, crouching down and kissing Bree’s neck. “This can only mean one thing: We’re about to see Sally get married.”

“Yup,” Bree said. “Buckle up.”

“Oh, I’m ready for it,” Lara said. In a sudden burst of energy, she started moving around the kitchen, hopping from one foot to the other, arms outstretched as if she were on the soccer field, trying to block a goal.

“Hit me with your best shot,” Lara said, still moving. “I’m ready for the Bree Miller supersize emotional roller coaster, to be endured and dealt with by yours truly, and made up for by you with hours of mind-blowing sex when we get home.”

Bree couldn’t help it. She burst out laughing.

“Do you know that I love you?” she said.

“Why yes,” Lara answered. “As a matter of fact, I do.”

I
n her entire life, April had been to only one wedding, on her mother’s friend’s emu farm in Colorado. They had called it a Cherish Ceremony, and—not wanting to adhere to any patriarchal customs—they’d done away with rings, a white dress, attendants, and all of that. Really it was just a bunch of hippies out in a damp field, smoking joints and dancing circles around a couple who were blissfully in love and six months pregnant. April was only seven at the time, but she still remembered parts of it—her mother’s long, tangled red hair, a strapping guy with a beard who scooped her up and put her on his shoulders, a cake covered in honey and sunflower seeds.

When she’d e-mailed Sally about it in an effort to explain why she had no business being a bridesmaid, Sally had written back just one short line, a classic Sallyism:
Sweetums, I need you there
.

April had to hand it to her—she would have envisioned Sally as a Princess Diana sort of bride, all done up in a meringuelike dress and veil, a church full of people, bagpipers on the front steps. But Sally had told her that the wedding was to be a simple, small outdoor ceremony and reception with absolutely no meringue.

April was glad for that, at least, though she still could not believe that after all their Smith training in independence and self-reliance Sally had decided to get married at twenty-five.

She arrived at the hotel slightly on edge. In the cab from the airport she had popped a Xanax Ronnie had given her, washing it
down with the last of the bottled water she’d gotten on her flight. It wasn’t helping. Despite all the crazy things she had done without fear in the past four years—hiding out in African villages, watching little girls endure the agony of genital mutilation in Indonesia, going to a maximum-security prison in Mississippi to interview a serial rapist—being her best friend’s bridesmaid was still threatening to give her a full-blown panic attack.

She had felt this way for weeks, but now, having been punched in the stomach by a military guard two days earlier and forced to sit in a hospital waiting room for five hours just to learn that her arm was not, in fact, broken, April wanted nothing more than to spend the weekend lying in bed. She knew it was the jackass’s job to protect government files, but he seemed to recognize her and Ronnie, and took genuine pleasure in beating her up, when he could have just escorted them off the premises. It was exciting, in a way, because it meant that the army was scared of what they knew was about to be exposed.