Commencement (12 page)

She was lucky that none of her bruises showed. Most were hidden by her T-shirt. Her dreadlocks, which she had once feared might anger Sally, actually covered a welt on her neck quite nicely.

It annoyed her that Sally and Jake were getting married in Northampton, because it hinted at the fact that Sally knew she was losing herself, and so she was grasping for their Smith days; for the last time in her entire life she would get to be an individual. And then there was the wastefulness of making all those people trek out to the middle of nowhere, increasing their collective carbon footprint and decreasing April’s personal bank account.

All through college, April had marveled at the way her fellow students threw their—or, more accurately, their parents’—money around. She did ten shifts a week in the dining hall, washing dishes, peeling seemingly endless bags of potatoes, listening to the full-time staff talk about car payments or their kids’ ear infections. She worked mornings in the admissions office, sorting through applications. She was the only one of the girls who paid for school entirely through work-study and loans in her own name. (Sally and Bree’s fathers had paid their tuition in full. Celia had loans, but April knew for a fact that her parents made all the payments.)

Not much had changed since. The other girls still received financial help of some sort or another from their parents, though as open as they were about everything else, this was one area in which specifics never came up. She knew that Bree and Celia paid their own rent. And she was proud of Sally, because even though she could live comfortably off her mother’s malpractice money for the rest of her life, she went to work every day just the same.

April knew it wasn’t the money that was bothering her. In fact, the girls had been incredibly generous and thoughtful when it came to this weekend. Celia and Bree knew that Ronnie wasn’t paying her much, so they had insisted on covering her third of the costs for Sally’s presents—which, by the way, were a goddamn Cuisinart and a KitchenAid mixer,
hello 1952
.

The simple fact was, weddings were just not her thing, and this one was going to be particularly strange. She liked Jake, but she didn’t think he was smart enough for her Sally, and she couldn’t stand his frat-boy friends.

Plus, Ronnie had made her swear not to tell the girls the full extent of their next project, which would be hard, if not impossible.

“People like that don’t understand,” Ronnie said. “They’ll try to talk you out of it, and I need you to be in it with me, one hundred percent.”

“I’m in it,” April said, annoyed because as long as she had worked for Ronnie, as many sacrifices as she had made, Ronnie never quite seemed to think she was dedicated enough.

For months after she graduated from Smith, April was working in the Chicago headquarters of Senator Dick Durbin, answering phones, fetching sandwiches, sorting mail. She told herself that these little tasks were an essential part of getting the greater work done, but she was dying to do something more radical, more real. Then came the phone call that changed her life. Ronnie Munro—whose picture April had had taped to her bedroom wall since middle school—called her up and asked her to meet for a drink.

April’s mother had always talked about Ronnie Munro’s true devotion to the cause. They kept her book,
Woman Scorned
, in an exalted position in the center of the mantel.

Months before she even graduated, April had sent Ronnie her
résumé and a heartfelt letter, in the hopes that she might at least keep it on file until the next time she needed an assistant. But job searching had led her to the conclusion that no one actually kept anything on file—they just threw résumés in the trash, until the day they happened to be hiring. She had long ago given up on the idea of hearing from Ronnie, so when she suddenly did, April felt elated.

She went to meet Ronnie at a dark wine bar two days after getting the call. Ronnie ordered them a bottle of Cabernet and laid out her plan, step by step. She was starting a Chicago-based company called Women in Peril, Inc. They would make films about misogyny all over the world—covering honor killings in Pakistan; genital mutilation in Africa; sex tourism in Asia and Eastern Europe; and the epidemics of rape and eating disorders right here in the United States—culminating in something huge, explosive, a few years down the road, once they had established a reputation.

“You don’t have as much experience as I usually like in an assistant,” Ronnie said. “But your letter really stayed with me.”

Then Ronnie Munro actually quoted April to herself:
“There’s nothing I wouldn’t do to help girls and women who are suffering in this world.”

She looked April in the eye and said, “I couldn’t have put it better myself. Tell me, April, do you really mean it?”

“Of course,” April said, feeling giddy with excitement. She had never been this close to one of her role models, and for the first time in her semi-adult life, she couldn’t think of a thing to say.

“You’re bright as hell, that’s clear,” Ronnie said. “And I like that you’re a Smithie, even though there are Smithies and there are
Smithies
.”

April laughed. “Right,” she said.

“But I can tell which kind you are already,” Ronnie said. “This isn’t going to be a job like any job you’ve ever had. You’re going to be right in the thick of it, all wrapped up in it. It might be scary some-times. Hell, even I get scared, and I’ve been doing this for years.”

“I’m not scared,” April said. “It sounds really exciting.”

“And I’ll admit I can be a pain in the ass,” Ronnie said with a smile. “I’m not what you would call an agreeable lady, as you might have heard.” She took a sip of wine. “But I can promise you that
working with me on this project will change your life and accelerate your role as a revolutionary.”

April grinned, not sure whether or not Ronnie was being serious.

But Ronnie went on. “I mean that quite literally, April. When we are done, everyone who matters will know your name.”

April was thrilled, calling Sally as soon as she got home, telling her the entire story.

“Do you get benefits?” Sally had asked.

April sputtered,
“That’s
your first question?”

“Well. Do you?” Sally asked.

“I have no fucking clue,” April said.

“What is she paying you?” Sally said.

“Sal, why aren’t you happy for me?” April said, though of course she knew why.

All young feminists studied and revered the work of Gloria Steinem and Susan Faludi and women like that. They were beyond reproach. But most of the feminists who had made a real impact—Dworkin, MacKinnon, Brownmiller, Munro—were divisive figures.

“I’m a member of NOW, even though its milksop politics deeply offend me,” Dworkin had written in an essay about attending a conference in the eighties and trying to get support for antipornography laws. “Guts were sorely lacking even back then.” April had had this quote written on a scrap of paper and tucked into her wallet since her junior year at Smith.

All anyone ever thought about when they heard Ronnie Munro’s name was the damn movie she’d made in which a woman ended up being killed by her husband. But that was thirty years ago, and in the meantime she had done so much good. People April’s age, having heard the story secondhand, acted like Ronnie herself had killed that Indiana housewife, for fuck’s sake. Anytime some Smith girl said bad things about Ronnie, April thought of how, when they were just babies, Ronnie was in China, raising awareness of female infanticide and trying to keep little girls alive, even though no one in the press gave a shit or did a thing.

April suspected that the real reason Ronnie had been cut out of most popular feminist circles was that her views and her methods
were considered too extreme. It sickened her that to feminists like Sally, “extreme” meant that you didn’t want women to be forced to have sex, forced to have their genitals carved up, forced to starve themselves in the name of beauty. If it was radical to think that all women should be free and safe in the world, then why have a women’s movement in the first place?

Despite Sally’s trepidation, April accepted the job the very next day. She sometimes joked to the Smithies that in her entire time working for Ronnie, that first night in the bar constituted the wooing phase. Ever since, it had been all-consuming, heart-wrenching, and often dangerous work. Ronnie wanted their minds to be in sync, for the two of them to share not only a job but a life. So much of their work was a secret, she said, that having an office away from home made no sense at all. They should have their projects with them always. April moved into Ronnie’s apartment at her request shortly after they started working together. She knew the girls thought this was crazy.

“What do you two do after work?” Sally said. “Do you play Scrabble and watch
Entertainment Tonight
at the end of the day, or what?”

She was joking, of course, but it wasn’t so far from the truth. Ronnie was rich, and they each had an enormous bedroom at opposite ends of an enormous apartment. But they did tend to spend their free time together, drinking wine on the couch, watching PBS, and shouting at the television set. While they were working, Ronnie was all business, and she was nuts about her work—sometimes she would shake April awake at four in the morning because she had a brilliant idea and wanted them to get started on it right away. But most of their free time was spent pleasantly enough, eating alone together or else with Ronnie’s incredible friends, who were all scholars and activists April had long admired. She often thought that if she were working for some Hollywood starlet and getting to mingle with famous actors, the girls wouldn’t bat an eye at her boss’s odd behavior. Ronnie and her friends were April’s icons, and having the chance to live among them was an honor.

As Ronnie had envisioned, Women in Peril, Inc. was their whole life now. It wasn’t the big company it sounded like. Instead, it was just April and Ronnie, and the occasional contracted film crew
or editor. Ronnie didn’t trust anyone but April and herself to do the real work of interviewing women who’d been beaten or who had starved themselves nearly to death; of photographing the frightening aftermath of botched vaginal mutilation; of wooing brutal rapists into telling their stories; of stealing—Ronnie said “liberating”—files from government offices to get to the bottom of exactly how many female soldiers in Iraq had been raped by their own and then made to shut up about it.

Their work had been mentioned in
Ms
. magazine and praised by a handful of prominent radical feminists. Now it was finally time for the big, explosive project Ronnie had hinted at that night, more than three years earlier. She told April that this was her moment to shine, the point at which her name would be mentioned right alongside Ronnie’s, a cocreator instead of an assistant, which she had never really been in the first place.

April knew the girls would disapprove, find the whole idea of it dangerous and risky. But what the hell was the point of life without a little danger and risk?

She was different from the others. They had all known it from the start. The summer before first year, they had had to fill out a form stating their preferences on dozens of questions—
Do you smoke? What kind of music do you like? What are your politics? Do you have a significant other?

April had described herself as a vegan, an anarchist, a lover of sixties folk music. She wrote that she identified as an F-to-M transgendered person. That last part wasn’t true, but she had added it for good measure, thinking that it would assure her a single on Green Street with a window seat and radicals all around.

April knew after taking just one look at Sally, Celia, and Bree on the first day of college that all three of them had been popular in high school. Maybe not the most popular girls in the class, certainly not the bitchy ones who made fun of the nerds. But she could tell they had been invited to dances and sleepovers. That they had the sort of mothers who always picked out the perfect birthday presents for their friends and braided their hair before school.

Sally hung Monet and Renoir posters on every wall of her dorm room: pretty, benign images of crowded cafés and blooming water
lilies. All of the girls had framed photos of classmates and friends in their rooms—shots of boys grilling burgers on the beach; prom pictures, posed and stiff, their hair shellacked into what looked to April like cotton candy on a stick. When they asked April why she never put pictures up, she just shrugged and said she had been a loner in high school. It seemed a very James Dean–like alternative to saying that she had no friends, that she had longed for someone to talk to but no one ever invited her out, that other parents found her mother inappropriate, and so most of her Friday nights were spent reading tattered copies of
Backlash
and
The Feminine Mystique
at home on the couch.
(Cry me a river, Mrs. Astor!
her mother had written in the margins of the latter. April had no idea what it meant at the time, but she adopted the phrase as her own, and still used it to this day.)

April had convinced herself as a kid that she didn’t need anyone, and she was standoffish with the girls at first, assuming that the three of them would form a little clique, leaving her to be the outcast on the hall. She was drawn instead to the radicals on campus, who accepted her as one of their own from the start. But to her surprise, the King House girls treated her like a true friend. Even more surprising to April was the way she took to this—loving it when they confided in her or knocked on her door each night at six for dinner. She had imagined, rightly so, that she would be able to bond with the good lefties on campus over social issues. But now, for the first time in her life, she had three friends who liked her, just because.

April had to work hard to catch up to the girls socially. She studied them—the way they interacted with ease, their ability to feel out one another’s needs. She carved places for herself where she could: She was the one who listened to Sally cry, the one who made mistakes but always tried to repair things with cookie dough. And sometimes, she could even get them excited about her causes and convictions, especially Sally, who it seemed had never thought much about feminism or racism, or any ism besides maybe Impressionism, before coming to Smith.