Commencement (2 page)

Downstairs in the living room a few minutes later, they sat in a circle on the floor, and Celia took stock of the other new girls. There were fifteen of them in all, and they mostly looked like the girls she’d known in high school. They wore jeans or cotton sundresses; they had touches of lip gloss and mascara on their faces, and smooth, long hair. Then there were the girls leading the meeting: Jenna the Monster Truck; two other seniors about her size, both named Lisa, both with cropped boy haircuts; and a junior named Becky, who looked like she might be positively gorgeous if only she gave a damn about her appearance. Her shoulder-length hair lay flat, clumped with grease, and her face was so shiny that, for the first time ever, Celia envisioned herself taking a little witch hazel to a stranger’s skin. With the exception of Jenna, they all wore flannel pajamas.

Is this what she and the others would become? Celia wondered. Did attending a women’s college make you relinquish all grooming products and embrace carbohydrates like you only had a week left to live? (Later she would learn that if you weren’t careful, the answers to these questions were yes and yes. After one semester, about a quarter of the girls would be going crazy, filling out transfer applications to Wesleyan or Swarthmore or any coed school that would take them midway through the year.)

Jenna the Monster Truck started the meeting off by making introductions. She was HP, the Lisas were HONS (heads of new students), and Becky was an SAA (student academic adviser). Everything had an acronym, even in cases where it probably would have been easier to just use the words. Jenna ran down the list of new names, pointing out after she did so, “You’re the
first years
by the way. Never let me hear you calling yourself freshmen—there are clearly no men here.”

A thin girl with a sleek brown ponytail and a Lilly Pulitzer dress raised her hand. Celia recognized her from earlier in the day. Her room was just three doors down from Celia’s, and she had arrived alone, lugging an oversize trunk, which Celia’s father had quickly swooped in to help her carry.

“You didn’t call my name,” the girl said. “It’s Sally Werner.”

Jenna the Monster Truck checked her sheet. “It says here you withdrew.”

“I did, but then I unwithdrew,” Sally said, with a sad smile. “It’s a long story.”

Celia wanted to know it immediately. Her mother always said she had a novelist’s fascination with other people’s tragic tales. A year earlier, she had had to stop accompanying her family to the soup kitchen where they volunteered because with each person who walked by, she would imagine a more terrible and heartbreaking scenario: A man in a tattered Ralph Lauren jacket was a former banker who had lost his family and his fortune in a house fire (in fact, her mother said, he was just a mean old drunk). A young woman with a sorrowful smile had a sick child somewhere out there, whom she supported by selling her body (no, her mother said, that was
Les Miserables)
.

“The thing is,” Sally said, “my mom died, so my plans sort of changed at the last minute.”

“When did it happen?” Celia blurted out.

Everyone turned to look at her for a moment, and then all eyes were on Sally.

“Almost four months ago. May seventeenth. That’s why I withdrew. She was sick, and we thought she had about nine more
months, so I decided I’d just start college a year late. But then she died, and there really wasn’t anything for me to do at home, so …” she trailed off.

“I’m so sorry,” Jenna the Monster Truck said, and several girls in the circle echoed her.

“Thanks,” Sally said meekly, and Celia wondered what on earth one was supposed to say at a time like this that didn’t sound completely stupid.

Celia wished she were brave enough to stand up and give this stranger a hug. She should go to Sally later, sit beside her on her narrow bed, and become her friend, a shoulder to cry on.

The meeting went on, with a discussion of dining hall hours and information on where to get the morning-after pill and birth control and dental dams. (What the hell were dental dams? Celia wondered. She made a mental note to look them up online when she got back to her room.) Jenna distributed what seemed like hundreds of brightly colored pamphlets for campus clubs and teams and stores and publications, all of which Celia knew she would throw away as soon as she went back upstairs.

Her legs began to fall asleep beneath her. She stretched them out and glanced around the room. It was full of ritzy-looking couches and a huge Oriental rug, with a real working fireplace and an enormous chandelier. It looked like one of the mansions in Newport that her mother loved to tour, oohing and aahing over ottomans and armoires, before returning to their modest suburban house, where the beat-up Crate and Barrel couches were covered in paw prints and the oily traces of decade-old peanut-butter stains.

“Oh, I forgot to mention shower hours,” Jenna said, just as it seemed things were drawing to an end. “Basically, don’t shower with your significant other during prime traffic flow—usually about eight to ten a.m. It’s really disrespectful, and, honestly, who wants to hear two dykes going at it first thing in the morning?”

Some of the first years began to squirm a little, and Celia wondered if this was just a seniority tactic—they’d all heard the lore about Smith lesbians, but was girl-on-girl shower sex really such an issue that it necessitated a house rule?

A beautiful, movie-star blonde across the circle seemed startled,
her body jolting upright. Celia looked her over and noticed a small, sparkly diamond ring wrapped around one of her delicate fingers. Jesus, what was she, some sort of child bride? An eighteen-year-old girl, engaged. That was going to work out great.

The girl caught Celia’s eye, and Celia shot her a huge smile and even, regrettably, gave her a little wave. She always overcompensated when she got nervous or had just been caught snooping.

As they climbed the stairs back up to their rooms after the meeting, Celia watched the three girls with whom she’d be sharing a hallway: Bree, the beautiful engaged blonde; Sally, whose mother had just died; and a third girl named April, with an eyebrow ring and a T-shirt that said
RIOT: DON’T DIET
across the front.

The four of them were assigned to the worst rooms in King House—third-floor maids’ quarters. Everyone in King had a single, and most of the rooms were huge, big enough for a king-size bed, with two or three windows each. But a few unlucky first years had to sleep in the dim corridors of four rooms off the main floors, where students had once housed their live-in servants.

That first night, each of them went to her room and closed the door, a mystery.

Later, around eleven o’clock, Celia could hear Bree sobbing through the wall that separated their rooms. She put on an Indigo Girls CD to block out the noise and told herself not to be nosy, but halfway through the first song, she could no longer take the sound of a stranger in pain, and also, she was dying to know if Bree and her fiancé had broken up. She scribbled a note on the back of one of the house meeting flyers
(Join the Radical Cheerleaders and Pummel the Patriarchy with Pep!)
and slid it under Bree’s door:
I feel your pain. Want to come next door for vodka and Oreos?—Celia B. Room 323

The crying stopped. Ten minutes later, there was a knock at Celia’s door.

Bree poked her blonde head in and waved Celia’s note in the air. “Thanks for this,” she said in a sweet Southern drawl. “Is the offer still good?”

Celia smiled. “Of course.”

She wondered whether Bree felt the same way she did about the house meeting. Celia had stayed dressed in her dark jeans and
emerald green wrap dress on principle: Just because there were no guys around did not mean she was going to become a total slob. Bree wore pink flannel pajama pants and a plain white tank top, but Celia could tell that she had just applied a fresh coat of eye shadow and lip gloss, and something about that struck her as both funny and touching.

“I’m sorry I was crying so loud,” Bree said. “My brothers call me the Drama Queen of Rosewood Court. That’s the street we live on back home.”

“No worries,” Celia said. “I think I’ve cried more since I got here this morning than I have in the last year. So are you homesick or boy sick?”

“A bit of both,” Bree said, walking to the desk and taking a seat.

“Can I get you some vodka or Oreos?” Celia said.

“A bit of both,” Bree said again, and Celia laughed for the first time all day.

They drank their vodka out of paper cups Celia’s mother had tucked into a grocery bag, along with plastic cutlery and paper napkins and Tupperware containers, as if Celia were going off on a picnic instead of to college.

Bree downed the contents of her cup, and then refilled it to the brim.

Was this girl a big drinker, or just nervous? Celia figured the latter—big drinkers didn’t tend to swig straight vodka by the gulpful. They knew it was all about pacing yourself. She thought back to the parties she had attended senior year—red plastic cups and vodka that felt warm in her throat, consumed in countless musty basements while someone’s unwitting parents watched
20/20
upstairs; tequila shots taken in Reggie Yablonski’s mother’s hot tub when she was visiting her sister in Kittery; and a bottle of champagne with the girls from the neighborhood on prom night.

“What about you?” Bree asked. “Did you leave someone back home?”

“I broke up with a guy right after graduation,” Celia said. “We’d been seeing each other for like four months. He was going off to be a camp counselor for the summer, and I just knew that that whole long-distance thing was a disaster waiting to happen.”

She instantly regretted saying it.

“For me,” she stumbled. “A disaster for me. I’m just not cut out for all that.”

“Why a disaster?” Bree said with wide eyes, like Celia was an oracle who could predict the fate of her engagement.

At Celia’s high school, girls called September 1 “D-day,” as in the day your boyfriend went off to college and dumped you. She had always sympathized when this happened to friends, secretly reminding herself to never let it happen to her.

And so she had ended it with Matt Dougherty at the graduation night lock-in at St. Catherine’s. In the gym, everyone was dancing and drinking punch and sneaking beers, giddy with excitement. Celia and Matt sat just outside the fray on an old treadmill in the weight room. They had lost their virginity to each other right there in that sweaty, windowless space between lunch and fourth period, just one month earlier. He was captain of the wrestling team, and as such, he had a key. They had snuck in during the lock-in to fool around, but Celia thought she saw something in his eyes: She knew this would not last. And wasn’t it better to end something while it was still in your control than to have it yanked out from under you when you weren’t expecting it?

“Can’t we even give it a chance?” he had asked.

“What’s the point?” Celia said. He was going all the way to Berkeley, and who knew when they’d see each other again.

They spent the rest of the lock-in apart, talking to their respective friends, with Celia crying into Molly Sweeney’s jean jacket in the bleachers at one point, knowing all the while that it wasn’t really about Matt, at least not entirely. It was the fear of the new and the unfamiliar, the surprising sorrow of knowing that she would probably never stand in this gym again, even though she had always hated gym class and skipped it at least twice a month, either hiding out with Sharon Oliver in the handicap stall or telling the teacher—a balding guy in a polyester tracksuit—that she had cramps. (This always seemed to gross him out sufficiently, and she would get to spend the hour napping on a cot in the nurse’s office, sipping Tropicana from a tiny carton and reading pamphlets on abstinence and the proper way to use an inhaler.)

“Do you miss him?” Bree asked now.

“Not really,” Celia said. “Maybe just the thought of him. I have this problem where when I’m single, I am really happy, but I feel like something’s missing. Then when I’m coupled up, nothing’s missing, but I’m just sort of sad and insane. It’s fucked up, right?”

For a split second, Bree looked taken aback, and Celia wished that she hadn’t said “fuck.”

Then Bree said, “Yes, I’ve never heard it put that way, but I know exactly what you mean.”

“I’ve always been a little boy crazy,” Celia confessed. “But then once I get the boy I’m never quite sure what to do with him.”

Bree laughed. “If you’re so boy crazy, can I ask what in God’s name brought you to Smith?”

Celia took a little sip of her vodka. “I’m from just outside of Boston, and I knew that I wanted to go to school close to home. Basically, Smith was the best place I got into. I guess the all-women’s thing kind of freaked me out at first, but as long as there are parties with men in attendance, I’ll be fine here. Truth be told, I’ve never really understood women who want to be friends with men. I only have a sister, and I grew up with a bunch of girls on my street, and I don’t know—female friendships have always been my thing.”

Bree nodded her head. “Mine, too.”

She ran her finger over her engagement ring.

“Anyway, what about you?” Celia asked. “Why Smith?”

“My mom and my grandmother both went here,” Bree said. “When I was little, every summer my mother and I would fly to Boston for a long weekend, and then we’d rent a car and drive out here to Northampton. My mom was always telling me about ball gowns and fancy dress dances with the Amherst boys and candlelit dinners in the dining hall. I’ve been in love with the idea of Smith ever since.”

“Huh,” Celia said. “I have to admit, I was almost scared off by all the tea parties and formals and stuff.”

Bree laughed. “They were a big selling point for me.”

“Isn’t it a bit odd that the same school that has a weekly tea party
in every house also has rules about lesbian shower hours?” Celia said.

“Yeah, I don’t think that was part of Mom’s and Nana’s experience,” Bree said.

“What do they do now?” Celia asked.

“Do?” Bree said.