Commencement (16 page)

Celia felt her head spinning. “I’d like to go to sleep now. I’m exhausted,” she said, still flirting, not wanting to upset him. Even as her fear rose, she thought about that damn girdle, and willed him not to see it.

“Oh come on,” he said. He reached for a drawer in his bedside table and pulled out a blue condom in a clear wrapper, the kind they give away at safe sex lectures and AIDS Action rallies. He climbed on top of her.

“No,” Celia said sweetly. “Not tonight. Next time, okay?”

“Come on,” he said in a whisper. He was still on top of her, but she could feel his hand putting the condom on.

“No, Rob,” she said. “I’m so sleepy.”

He held her arms against the mattress. Celia tried to pull out
from under him, but he pinned her knee down hard with his leg. A moment later, he yanked her girdle and panties over with one hand, stinging the inside of her leg. He entered her, the pain of it like nothing she had ever felt, not even her first time. She told the girls that at that point she thought to herself, This isn’t happening, and for the rest of it she just lay there with her eyes closed, not fighting him, not making a sound. When it was over, he kissed her cheek lightly, rolled into the space beside her, put his arm around her, and fell asleep.

She lay awake until morning. His alarm clock sounded at nine, and he reached up to turn it off without even opening his eyes.

“Rob, I want to go now,” she said.

He squinted at her. “Okay,” he said. “Get home safe.”

“I thought you were going to drive me,” she said.

“I forgot I have soccer practice today. There’s a bus schedule in the drawer under the microwave.”

She got up silently and put her shoes on, straightened her dress.

“Good-bye,” she said, starting to cry.

“Hey,” he said. “I had a great time last night.”

After she finished telling them the story, Celia looked up from her glass of wine. Bree, Sally, and April were all crying.

“Oh, you guys,” she said, wiping away her own tears. “I was so fucking stupid. There were three other people there, and I didn’t even scream. I didn’t fight him. I just sort of left my body and floated up to the ceiling. And I stayed all night in his goddamn bed! Why didn’t I run? And then he sent me that e-mail the next day and I felt happy! Can you believe it? Happy. I thought to myself, Maybe it was just a misunderstanding. We were both drunk. Maybe we’ll laugh at this later, after we’ve been dating for years. I am so fucked up.”

“You are not fucked up,” Bree said plainly. “Celia, you were raped. I think we need to get in Sally’s car right now and go chop this guy’s balls off.”

Celia smiled faintly. “But don’t you see? I was partly to blame. I went home with him, I didn’t scream for help.”

April took Celia’s hands, which were clammy and cold. “You did not do anything wrong,” she said. She couldn’t help but think of the
statistic they’d heard in her Women and Sexuality class—one out of every four American women has been raped. Here it was, painted clearly in her own group of dear friends.

“Do you want to press charges?” April asked gently. “You know we’d stand behind you.”

“No, no,” Celia said. “I couldn’t put my parents through that. I never want my father to know that this happened to me.”

They were all silent for a moment. Finally, Sally piped up. “The sickest part of it is that this dirtbag looks like a catch on paper-good education, self-made fortune. In two years he will probably be married to a supermodel, and she’ll never know her husband is a rapist.”

Celia nodded. “I doubt he even thinks of himself that way. I just wish that I had never gone to Dartmouth, or that you guys had been with me. You wouldn’t have let me just take off like that. Not that I should need someone else to watch me, but you know.”

It was true. They all took care of one another around men and alcohol, which said something when you thought about it. It was sad that they needed to do it in the first place. April thought about what Sally had said. How many other men like Rob Johann were out there? Most rapists probably seemed like upstanding guys, they had jobs and families and friends. They couldn’t all be psychos in ski masks lingering in dark alleys.

Ultimately, April and Toby changed the name of the event to just Celebration. There was a minor protest on campus, people chanting things like “Keep the women in a women’s college.” But everyone came out for it anyway, just like always.

April wore a long-sleeved red wrap dress that had belonged to her mother in the sixties. Toby was dressed in a full tuxedo, his boy-short hair frizzing around his face. It was spitting rain when they took the stage that had been erected at the front of the Quad.

“Welcome to Celebration!” April said into the microphone. Two thousand Smithies stood before her, cheering.

She felt a lump in her throat. This would be her last Celebration
as a Smith student. For the first time, she had no idea what she’d be doing at this time next year.

That night was still one of April’s happiest memories. Watching the house skits that she and Toby had chosen, seeing the faces of her fellow students laughing in the crowd. Celebration was meant to observe all different types of sexual freedom, but most of the skits (all performed by straight Quad girls) took a similar form: A few girls would dress up in khakis and popped collars, pretending to be Amherst frat boys. A few others would play the Smithies who meet them, date them, and then decide to dump them and date one another instead. The crowd would whoop with glee when the dejected frat boys walked offstage and the newly minted lesbians embraced.

After the skits, everyone walked through campus, holding candles, sipping cider, and admiring the twinkling lights that lit the pathways. Each house made a contribution to the event-some had set up trays of baked goods outside; some had gotten one of the campus a cappella groups to gather on the front porch and sing; others had made art or keepsakes or staged elaborate performances.

April walked arm in arm with Toby, savoring every second. The King House girls had gone ahead, hearing that Chapin was offering a Smith-themed mix CD but probably hadn’t made enough for everyone.

“I’m proud of us,” Toby said.

“Me too,” April said. “I’m going to miss all this so much.”

Toby squeezed her arm. “You have no idea. I’m really scared to think about what comes next.”

Outside of Duckett House, they had set up a head-shaving booth, meant to look like an old-fashioned barbershop, with a red-and-white pole and everything.

Toby looked at April. “What do you say? Something to remember this night by?”

April’s heart sped up. Maybe she’d regret it tomorrow, but right at that moment it seemed like the perfect thing. She thought of Toby as a child, cutting off his golden locks in secret. Now, in a way,
maybe he could reclaim that memory and turn it into something good.

They sat in dining hall chairs out on the sidewalk, holding hands as two first years took out electric razors and set to work. A crowd gathered around and everyone cheered. April closed her eyes, feeling the buzz of the razor against her scalp, as her long red hair fell to the ground in chunks. When she got back to King House, the girls would surely make a fuss, screaming at her that she had lost her mind, but totally enjoying the shock of it all. April felt at peace.

Something to remember this night by
, Toby had said. As if she could ever forget.

S
ally listened from inside the closet, covering her face in Jake’s suit so his mother wouldn’t hear her breathing. She had gotten slightly tipsy during afternoon drinks with the girls, and they had all decided to part ways for a nap. But Sally couldn’t sleep. She had been in the closet, drunkenly steaming Jake’s clothes for the wedding, when she heard a key in the hotel room door. She knew it couldn’t be Jake—he was out golfing in Amherst with his father all day. For a moment, Sally wondered if it might be Bill, but that was ridiculous. He had no idea she was even in town. She had been thinking too much about Bill in the month or so leading up to the wedding. Those long hours spent making love in his office in Neil-son Library, his silver hair and itchy sweaters. His favorite poem repeated over and over in her head, Auden’s “Brussels in Winter.”
Ridges of rich apartments loom tonight / Where isolated windows glow like farms, / A phrase goes packed with meaning like a van, / A look contains the history of man
.

When Rosemary came into the room and yelled out, “Anyone home?” Sally slid the closet door shut, closing herself inside without thinking. A moment later, it felt ridiculous and childish, but she couldn’t very well emerge from the closet now.

Who did Rosemary think she was, anyway, just walking right in without even knocking? That was Jake’s family—they had no concept of doors or walls or personal space. Sally hoped she’d find whatever it was she wanted and get out. She wasn’t in the mood for
Rosemary right now. But instead, Rosemary sat down on the bed, started poking through Jake’s suitcase, and called her sister Anna on the telephone.

“The maid’s in our room, and I don’t want to be in there while she’s cleaning,” Rosemary said into the phone. “I don’t know. I just don’t feel comfortable going for a walk downtown without Joe. Wait until you get here, Anna. There are lesbians everywhere you look—I am telling you, everywhere!”

There was a pause, and then Rosemary said, “No, I am
not
afraid they’re going to try and convert me.”

Sally had to bite down on the sleeve of Jake’s suit to keep from laughing.

“I told Jake he should put his foot down about this idiotic outdoor wedding idea six months ago. And now look—it’s going to rain on Sunday!” Rosemary was screaming into the telephone as if the receiver itself had defied her. She took a deep breath, composing herself.

“You know I love Sally, but she’s not very bridely, is all. First, she didn’t want a proper wedding gown. Then she ruled out the church ceremony. And then she announced that she was having the wedding here. What kind of girl wants to get married at her college, anyway? What’s wrong with her hometown—or ours, for that matter? Two perfectly nice Boston suburbs to choose from, and she makes us all schlep out here to the boonies. Lord knows she could afford a big wedding with all that money of hers. And so could Jake. You marry a boy who’s made a little fortune in banking, and then you don’t let him show it off? I mean, it’s not five million, but it’s something.”

Sally’s hands formed two tight fists. The last thing Jake cared about was showing off by having a big wedding. They were spending their money on more practical things—the new house in Cam-bridge, their car payments, their kids’ college funds. Rosemary knew all that.
It’s not five million
, she had said. Five million, Sally’s cut of the blood money. The number that had followed her around like a ghost ever since her father settled with the oncologist at Mass General. Five million dollars that made people think she was the luckiest twenty-five-year-old on earth, when of course she would
give it all back and then some if she had the choice of seeing her mother for one more day, one more hour.

After all the legal fees had been paid, there was ten million left. Her father said that she and her brother should split it down the middle. She had told him that she didn’t want it, but he refused to take no for an answer, talking at her about investment options for far longer than he’d ever bothered to talk to her about her mother’s death. (“Men are emotional fuckwits,” April had said. “He doesn’t know how to help you, but he wants you to know that he wishes he could.”) The money felt like a bribe. Sally tried her hardest always to act as though she didn’t even have it—until a month ago, she had lived in a shabby apartment in Central Square with three roommates. And here was Rosemary, rubbing it in her face.

She had tried many times to consider things from Rosemary’s point of view, really tried. A woman has a son and loves him and raises him up and thinks he’s a prince, and then one day another woman comes along to steal him away. That must feel awful. But shouldn’t Rosemary want Jake to find happiness? Shouldn’t she have pushed him out of the nest a bit more to begin with? He was thirty years old, and when he and Sally met four years earlier, his mother was still filling his fridge with seven homemade meals every Sunday night when she came over to drop off his laundry, folded neatly with double fabric softener on the sheets. If that part wasn’t Freudian, Sally thought, she didn’t know what was.

The first time she and Jake had a fight, it was because Rosemary had gone into his room while he was at work and actually made his bed for him, then mentioned that it was a bit unseemly for one of Sally’s bras to be hanging on the headboard where everyone could see it. When Jake related this story to Sally the next time they were alone in his room, he didn’t roll his eyes or look embarrassed by his mother’s intrusion. Instead, he meant it as an actual word of warning:
Don’t hang your unseemly bra on my pristine, handpicked-by-Mommy headboard
.

“What is your mother even doing in here?” Sally had snapped. “Does she have a key to your apartment?”

“What’s wrong with that?” Jake’s face always crumpled when he felt hurt, like a child in the sandbox in that instant right after
the shovel has been snatched from his hand, and right before he begins to wail. His expression made Sally want to drop the whole issue, but she couldn’t.

“I’m surprised she doesn’t just jump right into the goddamn bed after she makes it,” she shouted. “I’m surprised
her
bra’s not hanging on the headboard.”

She knew that she had taken it too far. Any other guy might have stormed right out of there, but Jake just laughed and pulled her onto the bed with his big bear arms, and rolled her body into the sheets. “Admit it,” he said. “You like these sheets as much as I do. You’re just using me for my double fabric softener.”

Sometimes Sally wondered if she found Rosemary so unbearable because she herself would never again experience that smothering, safe brand of love that only comes from the woman who has known you since the beginning of you, since even before the beginning.