Commencement (13 page)

Though she complained about having to live in the Quad, April knew she’d gotten the best of both worlds on the Smith campus—at meetings and in class she had met rebellious feminists who wanted
to help her take down the patriarchy, and back home at the dorm she had three friends who offered safety and laughter and concern, the sort of family she had never known.

But ever since graduation, the girls’ indifference to the world beyond their own love lives rankled her. She had imagined that four years out of college they’d be saving the world, not planning a fucking wedding. All over the planet women were being tormented, yet if you took sexism seriously, you were a bore, an idiot, or a pain in the ass. How the hell could anyone keep quiet? Why did so many women do nothing?

A feminist anthropologist friend of Ronnie’s had come to their place for dinner one night while she was in Chicago for a conference. She told them about her research on rape in the animal kingdom. Nearly every species had some form of rape, she said, except for the bonobos, a group of primates similar to chimpanzees. Somewhere along the line, the female bonobos decided that they would no longer tolerate sexual violence. So when a male attacked one of them, she emitted a sound to draw attention to herself. The other female bonobos would drop what they were doing, rush toward the sound, and together they would tear the offending male limb from limb. She knew Sally would roll her eyes if she ever said so out loud, but that sounded perfect to April. Why couldn’t women be more like that?

At the front desk of the Autumn Inn, she picked up the spare key to the room she’d be sharing with Celia and made her way to the elevator. The bellhop looked past her, out at the circular driveway, as if her steamer trunks might be stacked up on the curb.

“It’s just this,” she said, patting her backpack. She had managed to cram in video equipment, two pairs of jeans, and her bridesmaid dress and shoes, though the dress was now in a ball at the bottom of the bag. Did cotton wrinkle? That was one of those things that people like Sally and Bree knew off the top of their heads, and that she herself would never make room for in her memory bank.

She had e-mailed Sally earlier that week, asking who was coming. Sally said it would just be Jake’s parents, grandparents, aunts,
uncles, and sister; a few of his friends and cousins and fraternity brothers from Georgetown; Sally’s father (Fred, as Sally called him) and brother; and a young married couple Jake and Sally had befriended in Boston. The young married couple was actually named Jack and Jill. April snorted when she read this, and she could almost feel Sally’s eyes on her, begging her to shut up.

She inhaled deeply now.
Behave
, she told herself. She knew it wouldn’t be easy.

Sally was what always kept her from hollering inappropriate things at strangers—just the mere thought of Sally’s face were she there to witness it. Every morning in the coffee shop at the end of the block, April overheard the old men at the counter talking politics. They weren’t enraged or even unhappy with the state of the country. Instead, they worried about a Democrat being elected in 2008; they talked loudly about how some antitorture pansy-ass wasn’t going to protect the country from another terrorist attack. April wanted to scream,
Don’t you know our evil president is eavesdropping on your phone calls and monitoring every library book you take out and killing thousands of your sons and daughters in a war that serves no earthly fucking purpose?
But because of Sally, she settled for just slamming the door as hard as she could when she left.

The elevator opened, and April made her way toward room 4,93. She could hear the girls laughing from five doors away. When she stepped into the room, all three of them were there, lying in bed, watching
Golden Girls
on TV.

“I see you three are as wild as ever,” April said with a smile. “Some things never change.”

Sally ran to her first, and then the others. April’s ribs throbbed as they hugged her, and she had to pull away.

Celia wore a pale blue tank top and jeans. She had probably lost twenty pounds since college. She looked thinner every time April saw her. Her cheeks and collarbone were dramatically sharp, so different from the soft, cloud face she had had at Smith. The two of them exchanged a look, and April knew that Celia had not said anything about the fight she had been in. April gave her a grateful smile.

Bree still had the look of someone’s trophy wife—long blonde hair
and a tiny waist, full lips, and bright blue eyes. April found it satisfying, in a way, that no man would ever have her.

“Where’s Lara?” April asked.

“We had a fight,” Bree said. “But I know she’ll be thrilled to see you.”

“And Jake’s golfing with his dad,” Sal said. “Why do men always feel the need to golf before they get married?”

April shrugged. “Don’t ask me.”

The four of them crawled back under the covers for a bit, and the girls asked her about her flight, about Ronnie.

“We’ve been waiting for you to get here so we can all go down to the bar in the lobby and drink champagne,” Celia said. “Are you ready yet?”

“I’m always ready for champagne with my ladies,” April said.

“Good. I’ll get Lara,” Bree said, as they climbed out of bed. “She could use a drink.”

A few minutes later, April sat between Sally and Celia at the hotel bar. It was two o’clock, and they were the only people in the room besides the balding bartender. He looked about forty-five years old. Celia befriended him immediately, and they started talking about life in New York City. He asked her who the last famous person she’d seen was, and Celia shrugged. “I saw Joan Rivers at the movies this past weekend. Does she count?”

He said that yes, indeed, Joan Rivers qualified as famous. Celia laughed, throwing her head back as if they were having the funniest exchange in the history of funny exchanges. The girl could flirt with an oak tree, April thought, though she was grateful to have a few moments alone with Sally.

“How’s work?” Sally asked.

“Forget work. How are you feeling about everything?” April said.

Sally beamed. “Honestly? The fact that I get to marry Jake and see you guys—it’s like I’m on
The Price Is Right
and I just won the Showcase Showdown.”

April remembered long hours back in college spent listening to Sally talk about how much she loved Bill. That had always been a bittersweet union, a love that caused Sal more pain than joy. This one was different, but still, April was not sure that Jake could really
make Sally happy in the long run. Would she wake up one morning fifteen years from now and be mad that April hadn’t stopped her?

“I can’t believe you are getting married in two days,” she said, kissing Sally on the forehead.

“Me neither,” Sally said. “I’m so glad you guys are here.”

A moment later, Sally’s face turned sad, and April leaned in, preparing to hear the confession she’d been waiting for all year-Sally wanted out. But instead, she said, “I really miss my mom.”

“Of course you do,” April said.

“The thought of stupid Rosemary being my kids’ only grandmother is so upsetting,” Sally said. “My mother would have been the absolute best.”

April nodded sympathetically.

“It just feels totally wrong that my mother never knew Jake, or any of you. The woman kept every macaroni collage I made in preschool, but she never got to meet my best friends or have a conversation with my husband.”

April squeezed her hand. “It feels totally wrong because it is totally wrong,” she said.

A while later, Bree joined them, alone. Her eyes looked puffy.

“She’s pissed,” she said, before ordering an extra-strong gin and tonic.

They moved to a tiny table, with last night’s bowl of nuts still sitting on it.

For the past six months, April and Ronnie had been busy tying up loose ends on their latest documentary. She realized now that it had been forever since she last spoke to Bree. April had no idea things had gotten so bad.

“Lara wants Bree to marry her,” Sally whispered, loudly.

April laughed. Sally, ever the lightweight, was already way beyond tipsy.

“Sal, that was more of a stage whisper than an actual whisper, just FYI,” Bree said.

“Well, I’m sorry,” Sally said. “But it’s just—is that a great idea for you guys right now? You seem to be fighting all the time.”

Bree sighed. “I don’t know.”

April wondered if Sally still secretly found the idea of Bree and
Lara hard to comprehend: She was constantly telling Bree that maybe it was time to move on. April thought it strange that Sally had no problem saying so, though she saw her own relationship as beyond reproach. It was as if having a ring on her finger had elevated her above the level of critique, even though Bree and Lara had been together far longer than Sally and Jake.

“What more does Lara want?” Sally said. “You live together, you’re out to your family and friends.”

“It’s more complicated than that,” Bree said. “It’s like she thinks I resent her for putting me in this position in the first place. And maybe I kind of do. I love her, but I wish it could just be easy.”

“Love’s never easy,” Sally said.

“Easier
then,” Bree said. “Why do relationships have to be so damn complicated?”

Back in college, they had talked about marriage so many times that April could almost recite the conversation she knew they were about to have. Of course, as with most things in life, everything always came back to their parents. Sally’s had had a sad, strained marriage. Her mother was ten years younger than her father, and he had always been a cold, removed sort of man. He’d had affairs, too, and never really bothered to keep them quiet.

In her mother’s last days, Sally had asked her why she ever married him in the first place. She didn’t really expect her to respond, but her mother had answered quickly, without having to think.

“I loved the idea of him,” she said. “The wisdom he had, the life he could give me. By the time I realized what he was made of inside, it was too late.”

April had always wondered why she didn’t just leave him, but even she knew that wasn’t the sort of question you could ask some-one about her dead mother.

Bree and Celia both had happily married parents. Celia’s had met in the stands at a Boston College football game their junior year, and Bree’s had known each other since grade school. It seemed to make the two of them believe in some sort of guaranteed, endless human connection, though since moving to New York, Celia claimed not to anymore. If April knew anything for sure, it
was that bonds like that didn’t exist. Your husband could walk out of work one day after twenty years of marriage and an air conditioner could fall on his head from the fifty-second story, and you’d be alone again. Or, more likely, he could walk out of work, bump into a twenty-two-year-old dental hygienist, and the next thing you knew you’d be standing at your front door exposed in your mom jeans and your homemade Christmas sweater, as you were served with divorce papers.

Even as a little girl, April had had no illusions about a big white wedding. Other girls’ mothers had told them about Prince Charming, so as adults they still searched for salvation in the form of some man. April’s mother had told her about self-sufficient princesses who wore painter’s pants and had adventures on the high seas. The story never included men, though she knew that her mother craved male approval, male companionship, even as she railed on about misogyny. In the years since college, she had grown further and further from her mother, so that now, even though they both lived in Chicago, they no longer spoke. The girls did not know this, and April thought it was for the best: It would scare them to have to think of her as parentless, though April had long since thought of herself that way.

All that April had ever heard about her father was that he was an artist who had shown at the Saatchi Gallery and the Guggenheim. Her mother had loved him terribly, “like a sickness,” she said. He left her anyway when she was eight months pregnant with April, for some art student.

Like all little girls whose mothers refused to talk much about their fathers, April imagined that hers wasn’t quite so bad. Perhaps he’d had that silly, selfish artist phase for a while, but then he’d had a change of heart. She imagined him living in a warm cottage somewhere in France, jammed full of old teapots and copper pans and dried flowers hanging from the rafters. He had married a fat French painter, and they did watercolors together for hours and baked bread and played with their seven children. April imagined that he thought of her every day, that he longed f or her, searched f o r her. And that one day, he would find her.

“Don’t take my April away,” her mother would scream, but he would say softly, “I must, Lydia. I’ve missed her too much all these years to let her go now.”

And April would go with him, to sleep in a big bed the size of their whole apartment in Chicago, alongside her brothers and sisters and ten or twenty dogs.

When she was in fifth grade, her mother called school one day to say that April was home sick, and then dragged her to a no-grapes rally in Madison. She spent the entire car ride smoking a joint with her friends while April read in the backseat.

When they got there, April was hungry and needed to pee.

Her mother told her to go ahead and go, but April was scared she might get lost in the crowd.

“Please, Momma,” she whined over and over, shifting from one leg to the other.

“In a minute,” her mother kept saying. “Hold your horses.”

Finally, she took April to the port-o-potties by the road.

There was a couple in front of them in line, holding hands. The woman had long black hair and wore a tiny dress. April’s mother kept staring at them with squinty eyes. At first, April thought it was just because she was stoned, but then her mother began to cry.

April felt embarrassed. Her mother was known for silly, weed-induced moodiness among her hippie friends. It was a joke to them, but to April it was increasingly mortifying. No one else had a mother like hers. When she was very small, this had seemed like a wonderful gift—her mother pulled her out of school to drive to the lake and watch lightning storms. She served frozen waffles with Reddi-wip for dinner. She sometimes stayed out until dawn painting with friends and decorated their apartment with her homemade artwork. But April had begun to long for a normal mother, the type who checked your math homework and made you eat your vegetables.