Commencement (30 page)

“I sort of feel the same way, but wasn’t the women’s movement about choice?” Celia said. “So shouldn’t we respect their decision?”

“What decision? The decision to make no decision at all?” April seethed. “The decision to play out some bad nineteen-fifties fantasy?”

“Oh wow,” Celia had said. “I’m gonna need you to recite the Hippocratic oath every day until Sal gets married, and apply it to your role in her wedding.”

“How so?” April said.

“First do no harm.”

As usual when it came to April, Celia saw her point but suspected that for most women it wasn’t all that simple. She occasionally looked at expensive real estate online, fantasizing about writing novels in a Brooklyn brownstone or on a farm in the Catskills. She had known what she wanted to name her children (Ella, Max, Charlie) since she was eleven and had never once wavered in that decision. At Sally’s urging, she opened a 4,01(k) as soon as she started her job, and she had checked its status every Monday morning for the past five years.

So many aspects of what she wanted out of real life were clear to her, but for some reason it was hard even to imagine having a husband. Celia had never managed to feel as comfortable around a man as she did around her friends, and this seemed a fundamental problem. If she was going to spend her life with someone, shouldn’t he make her feel completely herself? Shouldn’t she be able to bring him home to her crazy, boisterous family and expect him to love them as much as she did? Shouldn’t she be able to share her love of Frank Sinatra and old movies, her extreme clumsiness, or her total aversion to museums, without worrying that he’d find her silly or strange or uncultured?

It wasn’t their fault, but around men who interested her, she always turned into Celia Version 2.0—similar to the real thing, but not quite as sharp or fully formed. She lost her ability to make a joke or be sarcastic. She couldn’t develop an argument the way she could with the girls, and she was positively undiscerning when it came to whom she found attractive or interesting. She knew that Smith was partly to blame for her troubles in this area. During her four years there it had been virtually impossible to meet a man, and when she did she was not looking for a soul mate or a debate partner—she already had that in her friends. Men were simply for decoration, dissection, and making out.

The mentality had stuck with her ever since. She had a theory
that women’s college grads were like people who had lived through the Depression—even though they now had plenty of food, they still hoarded every last scrap. When she met a guy, any guy, she was too willing to accept his flaws because who knew where her next meal was coming from? But it was one thing to date losers, and another thing entirely to marry one.

When her friends began to get engaged, instead of feeling jealous or antsy to do the same, Celia realized something: There was a very real possibility that no one was coming to save her. She would have to make her own plan. If she wanted to someday leave her job and write books, then she’d have to write books to do it, not wait around for some hedge fund guy to finance her fantasies. When she felt ready to have kids, she wanted to have them, regardless of whether or not she had found lasting love.

It was hard for girls like Kayla and Sally to understand this—Celia got the sense that they thought she was just putting on a brave face to mask her disappointment and fear of being alone. But what scared her far more than loneliness was the thought of waking up one day and realizing that she had attached herself to the wrong person, out of fear or pressure or God knows what. As a result, she had decided to view men as fun and nothing more, at least for now.

The night of her lunch with Kayla, Celia went out with friends and met a film producer named Daryl. He was thirty-two years old and a bit chubby, but not altogether unattractive. They were at a trendy bar on the Lower East Side, and he asked her if she wanted to take a walk. Hand in hand, they traversed the streets, and (only slightly drunk) she thought it was actually sort of romantic.

They stopped somewhere for a game of pool and shots—Jameson for him, and lemon drops for her. He knew a lot of people in publishing. He made her laugh with his pitch-perfect impressions of various writers and editors, and he had great taste in books. She took him home to Brooklyn, where they had brief but enjoyable sex on the sofa. He was gone before she woke up.

This was what a lot of New York men did. They fucked you and then left before breakfast, which was fine by Celia. She had
emerged pretty much unscathed so far. There had been one terribly embarrassing case of chlamydia, which she prayed would stay away for good (while realizing that of all the things one could pray for, this would probably piss God off the most). And then there was the morning she woke up covered in her own blood, horrified for an instant before blurrily remembering what had happened—he was the singer in the band, they made out in a phone booth, she said he could come home with her, but then remembered that she had her period.

“It’s cool,” he said. “That’s kind of my thing.”

“He should have at least stayed to help you wash the sheets,” Sally said the next day, when Celia told her the story. Celia could not think of anything more mortifying than washing her bloody sheets with last night’s one-night stand.

After Daryl had gone, Celia took a long shower and then pulled her hair up into a wet ponytail. He was the fifteenth man she had slept with in her life, though she had stopped her official count at ten, and always reported her number as such when asked. Most of her friends’ numbers topped out at seven. If she didn’t meet the right guy soon, she was in very real danger of hitting twenty. At Smith, they never used words like “slut”—it still shocked Celia to hear people say it. But twenty sex partners. Wowsa. She knew for a fact that her mother had slept with only two men in her life: her father, and a college boyfriend who later became a priest.

Celia dressed, drank a cup of coffee standing up at the window, and then made her way to the subway. Her head throbbed. She could have done without the shots.

High Street station felt like a brick oven. She was already beginning to sweat through her linen top.

The A train came quickly, as it always did at rush hour. Celia stepped into the crowded car and sucked in the burst of air-conditioning. She closed her eyes as the train screeched to its next stop. Outwardly she was a very peaceful person. But the rage she felt daily on the New York City subway hinted at the possibility that the only difference between her and those raving-mad homeless people in the car was that she knew enough to keep quiet. All types
of train behavior bugged her, and she liked to fling silent insults at passengers accordingly.

To the sleazoids who unabashedly stared at her breasts:
You’re sweeping me off my feet here. Wanna get off the train and screw?

To the Wall Street douche bags in pinstripes who sat down and then hid behind their copies of the
Financial Times
, so as not to see the standing pregnant women and old ladies with canes and young assistants teetering in stilettos:
Attention, passengers! Is every able-bodied man sitting comfortably? Well thank fuck for that
.

Today she had managed to get a seat on her own, leaving her relatively unannoyed. Celia watched a very Brooklyn mother (long straight hair with bits of gray mixed in, toned calves and arms, Birkenstocks) trying to negotiate with her two-year-old, coaxing him to sit down as he writhed about, nearly knocking out his teeth on the metal arm rail.

“How can I help you, Luca?” his mother kept saying in a loud, breathy voice.

How can I help you
, as if she were his waitress at T.G.I. Friday’s instead of his goddamn parent. This was one of a million reasons why Celia would never raise children in the city: parenthood as performance art. She wanted to reserve the right to tell little Luca to sit his butt down if he ever cared to see the Teletubbies again, without the fear that twenty-nine strangers might call Child Protective Services.

The train rolled past Thirty-fourth Street, where tourist families with fanny packs and matching smiles piled into the car. Their blond children held on to the poles, swaying this way and that, thrilled by every jolt and bump of the train. Celia thought for a moment of how strange it felt to simply live—to work, and go to the gym, and buy groceries, and wait for trains—in a place where so many people were visiting and in awe of their surroundings.

She got off at Forty-second Street, smiling at a pair of twins in a double stroller boarding the train with an older black woman, probably the nanny.

Most people who lived in New York hated Times Square, but she loved watching strangers discover the bright lights and larger-than-life
everything. It gave her a little thrill to see them having the time of their lives while she was just trying to get to her desk before ten.

Celia made her way through the crowds on Eighth Avenue. Her heels were killing her. She wished she had thought to bring flip-flops.

She was twenty minutes late. Inside her building, the air-conditioning roared. She walked past the security desk, saying good morning to the guards, and then pressed the elevator button repeatedly.

The doors opened, and she rode up to the seventeenth floor, praying that her boss had remembered his nine o’clock eye doctor’s appointment and was still reading the
National Review
in a waiting room somewhere uptown.
(Hail Mary, full of grace …)
He had warned her about being late too often, even though he himself regularly rolled in after lunch.

She poked her head into his office. The lights were still off. She breathed a sigh of relief, and went to her cubicle.

Kayla hadn’t arrived yet. Her desk was covered in little swatches
of lace—Veil possibilities!

Celia rolled her eyes at the sight of them.

Her phone was already ringing, and she picked it up in a rush.

“Celia Donnelly,” she said.

At the other end of the line, Bree struggled to get words out.

Celia’s stomach flipped. Bree’s mother had died; she was sure of it.

“Honey,” she said weakly. “What’s wrong? Is it—”

“I called you twenty times last night,” Bree snapped. “Why don’t you ever pick up your goddamn cell phone?”

“I’m so sorry,” Celia said. “My battery died.”

In truth, she had seen Bree’s calls come in and ignored them. She was out at a noisy bar and figured she could call back later. Now, thinking clearly, she realized how selfish that had been. But Bree had told her that her mother was fine. The surgery had gone well, and Bree was supposed to have flown home to California the night before.

“Is it your mom?” Celia whispered.

“No.” Bree gulped. “Lara left me.”

“What do you mean, she left you?”

“I mean she’s gone. All her stuff is gone. She took the sheets off the bed and everything. Her toothbrush. All of it.”

Bree had told Celia a few days earlier that they had been fighting and that Lara was ignoring her calls. Celia thought it was selfish of Lara considering the situation with Bree’s mom, but she had never imagined this.

“Did she leave a note?” she asked.

“No,” Bree said. “She left a check for this next month’s rent and that’s it.”

“Jesus,” Celia said. “Well, have you called any of her friends?”

“Her stupid schmuckie work friend Jasmine, who, by the way, is totally in love with her, told me she’s safe and happy but just can’t be near me right now. Can you imagine? My mother could have died and I’d have no way of telling her.”

“Oh, baby,” Celia said.

“I can’t handle this,” Bree said. “First my mother and now Lara. I called work this morning. I told them I’m taking three more weeks off.”

“Can you do that?” Celia asked.

“No, but I’ve worked my ass off for that firm, and I deserve it. Plus, I told them it’s for my mother. They think I’m still in Savannah.”

“Isn’t that bad luck?” Celia said. She would never dream of telling a lie that involved the health of a loved one. In her mind that was just asking for tragedy, begging for it, in fact.

“I love my mother, but right now I’m so mad at my parents I could scream,” Bree said. “They’re the reason I’m in this position in the first place.”

“Well, what if someone from work sees you?” Celia asked.

“I’m not planning on staying around here,” Bree said. “Would you mind if I came and stayed with you?”

“Of course not,” Celia said.

She adored having her own space in her small two-room apartment in Brooklyn Heights. The thought of sharing it with almost
anyone horrified her. But Bree was different. She could move right in with her insanely huge shoe collection, and Celia would be happy to have her, luggage and all.

“But you hate New York and it’s two hundred degrees here right now,” Celia said.

“Yeah, but I need to see you. Oh, Celia. Why the hell did I treat her so badly?”

Celia paused, unsure what to say. She had always thought that if they ever broke up it would be because Bree had finally caved to her parents, or met some guy. She never pictured it this way, with Lara leaving Bree and breaking her heart.

“Just get here,” Celia said. “We’ll figure it all out.”

Bree arrived the following afternoon.

They ate an early dinner at a tiny Italian place on Cranberry Street and drank a bottle of red wine. Afterward, they got into Celia’s bed and talked.

“I know you’re not her biggest fan, but I should call Sally,” Celia said after a while. “I think this whole pregnancy thing has her really scared. I’ve been meaning to go visit her up in Boston, and she’s called me a few times recently, but I haven’t called back. Suddenly I’m having major Catholic guilt about screening phone calls.”

“Didn’t I tell you? We made up,” Bree said.

The day they flew home from Sally’s wedding, Celia called Bree and said, “Wow, that was kind of a disaster. Let’s analyze it to death.” They laughed. Celia said she felt terrible for adding that sour note to the occasion, and Bree said she hoped Sally choked on a piece of leftover wedding cake.