Commencement (14 page)

Now, in the port-o-potty line, she thought of how her classmates were probably just heading out to recess, and here she was, watching her mother cry before a protest.

“Mom, are you okay?” April asked.

But her mother was still staring at the couple. “Richard?” she said loudly.

The man and woman turned around, as did several others. April’s heart sped up.

“Lydia,” the man said. He had long sideburns and thick black hair. He looked like he might say more, but April’s mother leaned toward him first and whispered something in his ear. He stared at April, his face a knot of confusion.

“April,” he said softly.

The next thing she knew, her mother was yanking her away from the line and back toward her friends.

“You’re hurting me!” April said.

The man called after them, but April couldn’t make out his words. Then the crowd closed up around them like an ocean, and he was gone.

“I have to pee!” she shouted. “Mom, what are you doing?”

Her mother kept crying. “I don’t like that man,” she said. “Now let’s please not talk about it anymore, not until we’re back home.”

April knew better than to argue with her when she got like this. The rest of the day and the drive back to Chicago felt endless. April stayed quiet, buried in her book, while her mother shouted along with the crowds, while she and her friends stopped at a diner for grilled cheese sandwiches and talked about George Bush, that oil-guzzling, money-grubbing motherfucker.

When the two of them finally reached their apartment, April asked, “What did you whisper to that man in the bathroom line? He knew my name.”

Her mother frowned. “I said,
Take a good long look at your daughter
.”

April was confused for a moment. “You mean, that was my father?” she asked.

“I wouldn’t call him a father, would you?” her mother said.

April held her breath, trying not to cry. If she had known, then she could have said something to him; she could have memorized his face, his hands. Something. She said nothing to her mother, though she wanted to know why there had been no introduction, no
exchange of phone numbers. Now how would he ever find her again, if in fact he had been looking?

“I think I’ll go to bed,” April said.

She waited until she was under the covers to let the tears flow. They didn’t believe in God, not really, though her mother sometimes claimed to be a Buddhist. But on that night and what seemed like a million nights that followed, April prayed for her father to come back to her.

She never saw him again.

April had slept with only two men in her life. Her junior year of college, there was Steven, the sweet Hampshire student who had been raised by a pair of Reaganites and rebelled by becoming a Trotskyist. They met at a rally at Smith (she couldn’t remember what the rally was for now). He was tender, the softest kisser in the world, and his mere existence put a spring in Sally’s step. (“You’re going to marry him,” she kept saying. “You’re the kind of girl who sees what she wants and sticks with it.”) Their affair was charming, but it lasted only four months. April still e-mailed with him every now and then. He had given up on becoming a playwright and gone to work in his father’s architectural firm. He was engaged to someone named Bitsy or Betsy or Bunny whom his parents had introduced him to at a country club Easter brunch.

April’s first, when she was just thirteen, was Gabriel. In all the years since, she hadn’t told a soul about him. She didn’t know how the girls would react. But one night, after too much wine, she told Ronnie the story.

He was a poet friend of her mother’s who hung around a lot that summer. He had a long brown ponytail and broad shoulders, and April thought he was the most attractive man she had ever met in real life. One night, he offered to pick up the Chinese food and casually asked April if she wanted to come along for the ride. To her mother, only half listening, it sounded entirely harmless. Kids loved to go along for the ride, after all; they liked the attention.

Gabriel parked his van in the Cathay Pacific lot, and they
climbed into the back. She suddenly longed for the safety of her bed, for the pale blue Care Bear with a picture of a rain cloud on its belly that she kept hidden under her pillow. April was terrified, even though she had been dreaming of this, imagining what he would do.

He had been hinting at it for weeks.

“April, you look good enough to eat,” he said once, running his hand along the small of her back.

When he saw her in her bathing suit on her way to the community pool, he said, “Don’t tell anyone, but I just got hard from looking at you. Face it, April, you’re gorgeous.”

In the back of his van outside of the Chinese place, he told her to lie down. Silently, he pulled down her khaki shorts, her pink cot-ton underpants. He gently spread her legs apart, kissing the insides of her thighs. He proceeded to go down on her until she felt like she might burst. Then he flipped her over onto her hands and knees, and entered her from behind. It hurt, but she pursed her lips together, forcing herself to stay silent, lest he decide to stop.

When they returned home with dinner, her mother had the table set. She sat there, with her bare feet perched on the windowsill, a glass of wine in one hand and a cigarette in the other. She smiled at them, and April knew she was pretending they were a family, father and daughter home from a brief road trip, mom ready to welcome them back.

At the time, April believed that Gabriel was her boyfriend, or at least that he loved her. She understood that nobody must know about them. He was forty years old, her mother’s age. And anyway, the secret was delicious. A part of her that her mother could not own.

They had sex in her bedroom while her mother painted in the kitchen. She gave him a blow job in the mailroom of their apartment building. He stared at her naked body for hours, touching every curve, every bump and hair. He told her she was beautiful.

She hoped they would go on like that forever, but then something happened. April got pregnant. Her mother handled it disturbingly well, taking her to get the abortion, making her Ramen noodles and
Jell-O afterward. She did not know that Gabriel was the father, of course, or if she suspected she didn’t mention it. April never saw him again. Her mother said later that he had gone to Denver in search of his ex-wife and teenage son. It shocked April to hear that he had a child, especially a child who was older than her.

As an adult, April had tried to get her mother to talk about Gabriel, but her mother always changed the subject or just said, “Please, April, I can’t discuss this now.”

The girls said she was too cynical about love, but how could you not be? On the surface, relations between men and women were all soft kisses and white gowns and hand-holding. But underneath they were a scary, complicated, ugly mess, just waiting to rise to the surface.

Of course, she wouldn’t say that now. This was Sally’s wedding, and April loved Sally. She sat back, took a long sip of champagne, and vowed to shut the fuck up.

Back in college, April’s favorite month was November. A chill set in and left the Northampton air smelling clear and crisp. The leaves all fell to the ground so that on cloudy days the campus looked like a black-and-white photograph, with dark buildings and trees set against a pale gray sky. Women on campus started bundling up in gloves and hats, and at the first dusting of snow, trucks from Residence Life poured gallons of soy sauce on the walkways. (The salty liquid melted the ice without polluting the ground, and the entire Quad smelled like a Thai restaurant until February.)

November was also the time for Celebration of Sisterhood, the festival of sexual diversity that was April’s favorite Smith tradition. It had started back in the early 1990s after a group of lesbians were attacked on campus.

Some of the popular Smith customs left her feeling overprivileged and ridiculous. Each fall the president called Mountain Day, which meant that classes were canceled and everyone could go out and enjoy nature (or, more likely, take the shuttle to the Holyoke Mall). Mountain Day was always a surprise, announced in the Quad
by someone blaring Madonna’s “Holiday” out an open window first thing in the morning. Students signaled that they wanted Mountain Day to come by holding Quad Riot—a massive food fight in the middle of the Quad, where women hurled long-stored moldy leftovers and shaving cream and soda and God only knew what else at one another for hours. The next morning, the grounds crew would have to come and clean it all up. April thought the classism in this was simply nauseating, and every year she’d be out there with them, filling her recycling bin with dirty noodles and old toothbrushes and all the remains of the fight, just to prove that not all Smith women were thoughtless ninnies.

Then there was Immorality, the notorious clothing-optional party held in Tyler House every Halloween. Women attended in nothing but lingerie, or body paint, or Saran Wrap. In theory, maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea. But in reality, it was just an excuse for hundreds of fully clothed college boys to swarm the campus and gawk (they were bused in from as far away as Florida). The women on campus didn’t seem to mind being stared at and prodded by fat fratty fingers all night, even though every year at least one woman got assaulted.

When April posted flyers attempting to ban the party, she only got one reply, a voice mail from the freak who led the Smith Christian Fellowship. (Who even knew that group existed?) “Hey April,” the girl said in a voice that sounded like audible sunshine. “I was so glad to see your flyers this morning. All semester, the fellowship has been lifting up the prayer that Immorality will be stopped. Perhaps you’re just the gift from God we needed.” April shuddered at the thought. She erased the message immediately. (This was before she learned about the unholy matrimony between antiporn feminists on the far left and conservative Christians on the far right.)

But Celebration of Sisterhood was purely wonderful. Senior year, April was cochairing the event with her friend Toby Jones, a junior transman who had been taking testosterone for two years and had made a full top transition the previous summer, having his breasts removed entirely. A few weeks before the event, Toby suggested to April and the committee that they change its name to just
Celebration, in an attempt to be more inclusive of Smith’s trans-gender population. Everyone in the meeting thought it was a fantastic idea.

April’s first inkling that others might not agree came while she was working a brunch shift in the King House dining room one Sunday morning. As she scrubbed the tables, she watched a sophomore named Christine Lansky eyeing the plates of the other women in the buffet line, scooping half the scrambled eggs on her plate back into the serving dish.

Celia and Sally were in the corner, and April walked over to their table, wiping her hands on her apron. She bit into a slice of pineapple from Celia’s plate.

“Look at that,” she said, nodding toward Christine. “It’s like if she eats fewer eggs than anyone else, she wins.”

Celia wasn’t paying attention. Instead, she stared in the direction of the doorway. “Oh my Lord,” she said under her breath.

Bree and Lara had come in holding hands, still wearing pajamas with messy make-out hair and big smiles on their faces.

“I cannot deal!” Celia said in a whisper. “It’s too early in the morning for lesbianism.”

“What?” April asked. She was pretending to be washing their tabletop, though if there had been a single crumb on it, Sally would have cleaned it up immediately.

“Oh, come on!” Celia said. “You have to admit it’s weird.”

Even though Bree and Lara had been dating for two years, their relationship still shocked Celia. April thought it was fantastic. It’s hard enough to find a soul mate, she had said to Celia on the night Bree first told them about the relationship. Why limit yourself to only a little sliver of the population?

Of course, Celia disagreed. She could sometimes be unbelievably possessive of Bree, though she said that wasn’t it; she just could not figure out how Bree was straight yet actually dating Lara.

“They have sex?” Celia asked.

“I would assume so,” April said.

“Jesus, I just can’t imagine,” Celia said with a shudder.

“Well, what’s the big deal? You’ve kissed girls.”

“That was different! Anything above the belt is child’s play compared to, well, you know,” Celia said.

“Anything below the belt?” April said.

“Yes!” Celia said, her cheeks growing red.

Celia had never liked the idea of Lara to begin with—she wanted to be the most important woman in Bree’s life, and it was clear that Lara had won that title. April always marveled at how competitive some Smith women could be, over friendships, and boyfriends, and grades, and weight, and pretty much everything else. What the hell was the point?

The two of them sat down, and Lara put her feet in Bree’s lap. April always thought they looked happy together, really happy. She had never felt that way about anyone, male or female.

“Maybe you’re a lesbian, gumdrop,” Sally had said, on one of the countless nights when they were discussing her relationship with Bill, and Sally just had to turn the conversation to April’s lack of a love life.

“What’s a lesbian gumdrop?” April said.

“You know what I mean,” Sally said.

April sighed. “I wish I were a lesbian. That would make life a hell of a lot easier. But distrusting men doesn’t necessarily make you attracted to women, you know?”

Sally nodded. “I’d like to be a lesbian, too,” she said. “Except for the sex part.”

Never having been in love didn’t bother April. When she saw the way her friends let it overtake them—the crying, the obsessing, the analyzing, the endless phone calls—she was glad that no person had ever brought that out in her. Friends were enough, she thought. With friends there was no game playing or power struggle or need to fit into some precise model of womanhood—doting cheerleader, or longing lover, or scolding mommy. You could just be yourself.

“What’s shaking, girls?” Lara said.

“Nada mucho,”
Celia said.