Commencement (17 page)

She missed everything about her mother. The brown waves she pushed back with a plain tortoiseshell headband; the rows of pressed cardigans and cable knits that hung in her closet; her perfume, something discontinued called Creation that she had to buy in a little specialty shop in Harvard Square. She ran eight miles every morning before breakfast and had what Sally considered the perfect figure for a mother—trim and strong with a tiny soft belly where her babies had grown. When Sally and her brother were kids, she used to drive them out to the beach in Cohasset for a picnic on sunny Saturdays. Their father was usually at work, or flying to some conference or other. “Wave hello to Daddy!” their mother would shout when a plane flew overhead, and they would wave, all three of them pumping their arms as if he really could see them. To Sally, even now, her mother’s body seemed like a place where cancer would not dare to dwell.

The fall of Sally’s junior year of high school, her mother had been losing weight.

“You look good,” Sally said before dinner one night, as they were chopping vegetables for a salad and watching the evening news.

“Really?” her mother said.

“Yeah, you look thin,” Sally said.

Her mother said she hadn’t noticed, but she seemed pleased,
and Sally assumed that she was back on one of her crazy lemon juice or cabbage soup diets.

In November, she found a lump, a hard, round, pea-size nuisance, between her armpit and her breast. The doctor said it was nothing, a benign cyst. He told her that the blood work showed she was anemic, and so she and Sally started taking iron pills, which they agreed tasted like sucking on a penny.

For a while, her mother felt better. But the lump remained, and finally, months later, she had another round of tests with another doctor. It was breast cancer, this second doctor said, and it had spread to the lymph nodes and bone. He was sorry, so very sorry, that the first doctor had missed it, because her chances of survival now were small. Had they caught it sooner, well—why wonder?

During her year of chemo, she insisted on wearing lipstick and taking a long walk every morning. She wore a designer wig that cost a fortune and looked almost like her real hair. Afterward, though the treatments weren’t successful, the doctors said they were impressed by her stamina. Perhaps she had longer than they had first predicted—possibly nine months, instead of three. But then things seemed to backslide. She was in and out of the hospital. Still, she stayed cheerful and brave. On good mornings, she made casseroles, which she froze “for later,” she said.

“You mean when you’re dead,” Sally’s brother had said once, starting to cry, and even though Sally knew he was hurting and that he was probably right, she hated him for saying it. (No one ever ate those casseroles. As far as Sally knew, they were still in her father’s freezer, an icy monument that none of them could bear to throw away.) Her mother took out old shoe boxes full of photographs and pasted the best ones into albums. She wrote long letters to family and friends. Her spark did not die until the moment the rest of her gave out, two days before Sally’s high school graduation.

Had her mother lived, Sally thought, she would probably have been one of those Smith girls who wears pearls and keeps her own horse at the campus stables and goes home every other Sunday for family dinner. She recognized much of what she had done since her mother’s death as an attempt to shock her back to life—the affair with Bill, not applying to medical school, even this bare-bones
wedding in the Smith College Quad, were all actions that her mother would have protested and eventually nixed. And then there were the things Sally knew her mother would have loved. Those, too, made it easy to imagine how she might come back to life, since nothing good seemed quite real without her there to approve of it.

She would have loved Jake.

“He’s not good enough for you” had been her rally cry all through Sally’s high school years whenever she brought home another cocky football player or debate team captain. Jake was good enough for her. He was the kindest man Sally had ever known. He wanted kids, lots of them, and he wanted to be there for every day. Not like Sally’s father, who always boasted that he was in China signing his first million-dollar deal the moment Sally took her first steps, on the front lawn back home. Jake laughed at her when anyone else might get frustrated and walk away, which was good, because Sally knew that she could be exasperating sometimes.

Jake always remembered when it was her mother’s birthday and how old she would have been. He understood Sally’s rituals, which anyone else but April would probably find creepy—some of her mother’s ashes were in a coffee can under her bed, and Sally still had one voice-mail message from her left on her cell phone, which she saved each month and listened to all the time.

“Hey,” her mother said. “Hope you guys are having fun. Can you bring home a quart of milk? Oh, and wear your seat belt. Love you.” In the background, you could hear the opening strains of the nightly news theme song. This message was Sally’s most treasured possession, and she planned to carry her outdated cell phone as long as she possibly could, so that she would never lose it.

No matter how many times Sally woke up sobbing over missing her, Jake just smoothed her hair and drew her close. He would never ask,
When are you going to move on?
In the years to come, he would help Sally keep her mother’s memory alive, even when it seemed like her father and brother were intent on erasing it. They refused to speak about her mother now, as if she had simply never existed. Ever since her death, Sally felt like she had no family at all.

Rosemary’s heated voice interrupted Sally’s thoughts.

“Yes, Anna, I understand that, but what I’m saying is you just
don’t serve prime rib at a ninetieth birthday party—half the people couldn’t even chew. It was an embarrassment. And Dottie paid eighty-five dollars a plate. Oh? She told you seventy? She told me eighty-five.”

At least they had moved on from the wedding, Sally thought. She looked at her watch in the dim light of the closet. Rosemary had been out there for twelve minutes.

“Okay, I’m gonna scoot,” she said after a while. “We’ll see you tomorrow for the rehearsal dinner, if not before. What? Oh wear whatever you want—Lord knows the bride will probably be sporting a tie-dye T-shirt.”

Sally watched through the slits in the door as Rosemary went to the dresser and looked long and hard at herself in the mirror. She spotted Jake’s roll of Life Savers, untwirled the silver wrapping, and popped one into her mouth. Then she slipped out into the hall, the door closing with a thud behind her.

Sally opened the closet and fell onto the bed. A tie-dye T-shirt? She was tempted to run right out and buy one to wear tomorrow. She sighed. She was less and less like her old self every day—years ago, she would have been horrified by the mere idea of insulting her mother-in-law. Now it gave her a little thrill.

Oh well. She was marrying Jake, not his family. That’s what Celia reminded her whenever Sally called her to complain after a long dinner with Rosemary and Joe. She knew it wasn’t strictly true, but still, the thought was comforting.

Sally switched on the TV and started flipping through the channels. By this time on Sunday, she would be married. Just forty-eight hours and everything would be different. A shiver went through her—equal parts panic and excitement.

Suddenly the door opened again, and Rosemary stepped back into the room. Sally held her breath. She watched Rosemary’s expression change when she saw her there, lying on the bed. It had only been thirty seconds or so since Rosemary left, and she looked horrified.

“Hi, Sal,” she said, glancing around the room as if trying to find a clue about where Sally had come from. “I left my reading glasses on your nightstand earlier. I just wanted to come get them.”

“Oh,” Sally said calmly, reaching for the red-framed glasses and handing them to her. “Here you go.”

“Thanks.” Rosemary walked toward the door, and then paused for a long moment, perhaps debating whether or not to say something. She smiled over her shoulder instead. “See you later, honey.”

Sally waved. She could barely manage to hold in her laughter until Rosemary was back in the hall. She thought of calling one of the girls in their rooms to tell the story, but decided to wait until dinner. It would be better to see the looks on their faces. She got to do that so rarely now. It had been two years since they were all together in one place. She remembered telling Celia once how Jake and his friends from Georgetown had shared an apartment after graduation.

“Why didn’t we ever think to do that?” Sally asked.

It had broken their hearts to be apart, she thought, and she still hadn’t found a single friend besides Jake who could compare with any one of them. So why had they been so intent on going their own ways?

“We could have all moved into a big house and taken turns cooking dinner,” Sally said. “Why couldn’t we be those kind of people?”

“Because people like that never grow,” Celia said quickly, which made Sally think she had probably asked herself the same question in the past.

“Sometimes I think growth is overrated,” Sally said then.

“Me too,” Celia said.

Sally knew that splitting up had been hardest for her. The first year out of school, the four of them had talked on the phone to one another almost every night. They had a mini-reunion in Vegas the summer after graduation, and another the following year at her father’s new six-bedroom estate on the Cape. (He called it a cottage, which just made the place all the more ridiculous.) She saw Celia every time she came home to Massachusetts to visit her family, and she went out to Chicago once to spend time with April. But lately, they had begun to fall away from one another. Sally had listened to Celia’s outgoing voice-mail message so many times that she sometimes heard the whole thing, note for note, in her head as she was dialing. She knew that Celia spent too many hours at work, and that that was
just the nature of the book publishing business. She knew that Celia’s social life was different from her own. While she and Jake spent most nights going to the gym, cooking dinner, and watching ESPN, Celia lived the life of a Manhattan chick-lit heroine-cocktail parties, long dinners in trendy restaurants she couldn’t really afford, and date after date after date with the wrong guys.

But still, Sally often remarked to Jake, doesn’t
everyone
have a few minutes a night to just pick up the phone? Sally suspected that the girls had distanced themselves from her because she was in love and about to get married. April disapproved of marriage in general. The others, Sally assumed, were jealous. Bree had Lara, of course, but ever since graduation she seemed to cause Bree more misery than anything else. And Celia was alone. Neither of them wanted to hear about how good things were with Jake.

Once, as she recounted to Bree the story of a trip they’d taken to Maine for their six-month anniversary, Bree had snapped: “I get it, Sal. You’re perfect.”

After Jake proposed, she had dialed the first few digits of Bree’s number twelve times before finally making the call.

The real sting in it came from the fact that the same women who had counseled her through her grief for four years at college wanted nothing to do with her joy. Perhaps it took more to feel truly happy for a friend than it did to feel sympathy for her. She remembered how many times in college Bree had pointed out that, until her mother died, they had been the same, as though in the lottery of life, Bree had won out, and needed to mention it.

All of the girls had gotten a bit of a thrill out of her relationship with Bill. They had hours and hours to talk about
that
, to advise her against it and tell her what a terrible cliché it was, but then also to devour the stories like candy. She knew that if she told them how much she’d been thinking about him lately, they would suddenly have plenty to say.

Then again, they probably already knew.

Three weeks into the second semester of her sophomore year, Sally had a C average in Modern British Poetry. She had never gotten
a grade lower than an A-minus in any class she’d ever taken in her life.

She had already aced Molecular Physics and Chemistry 206 and Advanced Biology with Lauder, a course/professor combo that other premed Smithies considered a death wish. So when Celia suggested that they take a class together for fun, Sally enrolled in the only poetry course Celia still needed to complete her major. Five minutes into the first class session, she knew it was a mistake. Celia had failed to mention that she and every other English department nerd had memorized all of Yeats in second grade. Of course, Sally should have known better: After all, Celia often spent hours copying poems into her journal, and she actually read poetry for fun on many a rainy Sunday.

The class was a lark for Celia and the others, one of those “put your feet up and discuss what you already know” deals. For Sally, who had always loved novels but found poetry sort of goofy, looking at words clumped together in that way was as incomprehensible as calculus would have been to Celia. For a few days, she considered dropping the class. But all the science courses she wanted were already full, and the only other English class she could take was a seminar on Milton. She would have to stick with it, but she could at least take the course pass-fail if Professor Lambert would sign the form.

It was a Tuesday morning when she first knocked on his office door—
Neilson B106
, she had written on her hand so she wouldn’t forget. Later, she’d wonder how she had ever not known where he sat and studied and, sometimes, lived.

He called out, “Come in!” and when Sally entered the room, he sat there looking like a professor in a school play, a perfect portrait of the intellectual would-be poet. He held a thick leather book and wore a heavy cardigan over a button-down shirt. His shaggy, silver hair looked wet and disheveled, and he probably hadn’t shaved in a week—not to make a statement, Sally thought, but just because it hadn’t crossed his mind. She glanced at his ring finger and noticed that he was married. How on earth could his wife let him out of the house looking so messy? Unless she was an academic, too, one of those women who stuck a pencil into her hair to keep it out of her
eyes while she was reading and then, hours later as she lay down to sleep, found the pencil again with great bewilderment. Celia told Sally that Professor Lambert had been published three times by small university presses back in the seventies, and that he was something of a legend in the literary community. Sally had her doubts. Those who can do, and all that, she had said to Celia the night before. Celia had pointed out that some of the world’s greatest poets probably lived on less money than the average fourteen-year-old with a paper route. From the look of Bill Lambert, this seemed about right.