Commencement (31 page)

Celia had been overcome with guilt, and at her mother’s suggestion, she had written long letters to Sally and to April, asking for forgiveness, saying that she loved them more than anything in the world. Bree had chastised her for making amends with April and Sally, but Celia knew that eventually they would all come back to one another in their own ways. And in the meantime, she got to hear each of them trash the others.

“Should I tell her you say hi?” Celia asked now.

“Of course,” Bree said.

Celia smirked. “I knew you two would get back together eventually.”

“She’s a judgmental little weirdo sometimes, but she’s my judgmental little weirdo,” Bree said. “Sally was right about me and Lara, wasn’t she?”

Celia started to respond, but stopped herself. It seemed too late to say that, more and more lately, she had been remembering how in love they were in college, and thinking that Lara was good for Bree, that she still loved her, and maybe Bree just needed to take that leap.

“She wasn’t right about that, but I think we need to love her anyway,” Celia said finally.

Sally picked up on the first ring.

“How are you feeling, babe?” Celia asked, without saying hello.

“Awful,” Sally moaned. “I can’t stop throwing up. Everything hurts. Even my gums and my eyes are sore. I had to stop wearing my contacts and put on my hideous glasses from college. I look like a fat Harry Potter. And I’m peeing like every five seconds.”

“Is that normal?” Celia said.

“I guess so. The doctor says it’s all just part of pregnancy,” Sally said. “Have you heard from April recently? I’ve been calling her for weeks. She doesn’t even know about the baby.”

Celia thought about this. It had been months since they had spoken.

“I only talked to her once, in the spring sometime,” Celia said. “It’s weird. I get the impression that freaker Ronnie doesn’t really let her talk on the phone.”

They talked about Celia’s job and dates and Sally’s new kitchen furniture, and Celia thought of how vastly different their lives had become. Sally and Jake had built a goddamn deck the previous fall, while Celia pondered whether or not to waste money on a new dish rack after finding mold all over the bottom of her old one.

Finally, Celia said, “I have a mystery guest here who wants to say hi.”

Bree took the phone from Celia. “Sal?” she said. “It’s me.”

·   ·   ·

That night, before they fell asleep, Celia whispered to Bree, “We need another reunion. Just the four of us.”

Bree yawned. “I’m game,” she said. “I guess we can’t stay mad forever. We’re Smithies, after all, and Smith is thicker than water.”

Celia snorted. “That is so dorky,” she said.

“I should e-mail April,” Bree said. “I guess I could have been more supportive about that crazy project of hers.”

Celia laughed. “That doesn’t sound very supportive.”

“Oh, you know what I mean,” Bree said. “How is she anyway?”

“I honestly get nervous that she’s going to crack,” Celia said. “She’s just around all this awful stuff all the time now. Pimps and prostitutes and God knows what. I really don’t understand why she has to live among these people to make a film, you know?”

“I know,” Bree said.

Changing the subject, Celia said, “Are you friends with anyone in California who just wants to get married and then sort of drop out of life?”

“What do you mean?” Bree said. “Like move to a commune or something?”

Celia laughed. “Uhh, no. Like quit their jobs and just be married.”

Bree paused for a moment, thinking this over. “I went to high school with tons of girls like that,” she said. “But everyone I know in California is a lawyer or a lesbian. Neither one of those groups tends toward the stay-at-home-mom thing. I remember the night I first met you at Smith, and you told me what your mom does. You sounded so proud of her. I wanted my kids to talk about me like that someday.”

A phone vibrated for a moment on the dresser, a text message coming in. Bree sprung up, probably because she expected it to be Lara.

She sounded crestfallen. “It was your phone,” she said.

Bree handed it to Celia. The message was from Daryl, her vanishing hookup from two nights before. Celia had already forgotten about him, which of course was why he had gotten in touch. If she
had spent forty-eight hours thinking of him, she never would have heard from him again. That was just how these things went.

She read it:
Sorry for running out. I had an early meeting. Thanks for the sleepover. I’d love to have dinner with you next weekend—slumber party optional
.

“Who’s it from?” Bree said sleepily, crawling back under the covers.

“Just my sister,” Celia said. “She got a new pair of shoes. Pretty gripping, huh?”

“Riveting,” Bree said. “Thank you for taking me in, lover.”

“Anytime.”

After Celia lay down, Bree whispered, “Can you believe Sal’s pregnant?”

“It’s kind of crazy, right?” Celia said. “She’s really freaking out. When I told my mother that the doctor told Sally she was three months along, my mom said a woman only finds out about her own pregnancy that late in the game if she’s in major denial.”

“I don’t blame her,” Bree said. “Hey, do you remember what April said to us at graduation, right after we went up to get our diplomas?”

Celia smiled into the darkness. “Of course. She leaned over and said, ‘Congratulations. You can officially never get pregnant in college.’”

T
he little house Ronnie rented for them was teeming with roaches the size of tea saucers. Ronnie called them water bugs, but April had seen enough roaches in her life to know what they looked like. Usually, bugs and mice didn’t bother her. But Georgia roaches were bold. They perched on her coffee mug and didn’t scamper away when she lifted it to her lips. They climbed right into the sheets, so that she might wake up to the sound and feeling of one of them inching across her leg—when she swatted at it, it just stayed put for a minute, taunting her, then flew up toward the ceiling.

April thought it strange that Bree had never mentioned such a thing when she talked about Savannah, since surely this would be enough to make her throw herself from a rooftop. But then again, she would wager that Bree had never seen this side of Georgia. April had decided there were two Georgias. The polite, peach-eating Georgia, and the bigoted, misogynistic, revolting Georgia. Their place was right smack in the middle of the latter.

Ronnie said it was crucial to the whole project that they live on English Avenue, in a neighborhood called the Bluff, where lots of the girls and their pimps lived. As white women, they already stood out, and they couldn’t risk raising any more suspicion. Luckily, Ronnie’s friend Alexa lived in the neighborhood and knew about their plan. She was a sometimes prostitute who had left her pimp
but still worked the streets now and then. (April had no idea how these two women had met, but anyway.) Alexa introduced them to some people. Their story was that Ronnie had been in the life since she was twelve, and that April (her daughter) had followed in her footsteps. Since this was a fairly common tale, everyone seemed to believe them. They spent a year just trying to blend in—Ronnie made April cut off her dreads and grow her hair into a ridiculous bob that made her feel like a spy in a James Bond movie. She had to stop wearing the faded corduroys and slogan T-shirts that Ronnie called “your hipster uniform.” Instead, April wore tight, low-cut shirts and dresses for the first time in her life, and tried not to think about how much she missed her familiar flannel. She hung out with the girls on the corner, knowing all the pimps by name but pretending that she chose to work alone. She even stood beside them on Metropolitan Parkway, driving off in cars with men Ronnie had hired so the girls would believe she was working. This was the sort of information that Ronnie had forbidden her from sharing with the Smithies, because she knew how much they would disapprove.

The neighborhood was dangerous, and Ronnie kept a handgun in her nightstand for protection. She told April that if any of the pimps ever tried to mess with her or break into the house, she should shoot without hesitation. April wondered silently how she might manage to get to Ronnie’s room before the guy shot her first, but that was another story.

It was much harder living with Ronnie this way than April had imagined. In Chicago, their place was huge, and they stayed out of each other’s way when they wanted to. But here, the quarters were much too close—they fought, bickered, got bored, and drank too much. Ronnie had grown more watchful than ever. She took April’s cell phone away. She followed her around the house, and at times April could feel someone watching her as she moved along the sidewalk—when she turned around, Ronnie would be there, trailing her unapologetically.

Ronnie’s doubts about April’s loyalty had never been so intense. This annoyed April because here she was, willing to risk everything
for a project that Ronnie had claimed they would have equal say in, a project that April herself believed in with all her heart, and yet Ronnie still acted as though she couldn’t completely trust April.

April had told Ronnie time and again that she understood why she couldn’t tell the girls. Besides, she hadn’t even spoken to Sally or Bree in more than a year. In part, she knew, she was doing all of this to prove something to them—that her mission with Ronnie was crucial, a matter of life and death. When the time came, they would know what she had done and why.

Ronnie and April kept mostly to themselves, though occasionally April would walk to the market at the end of the block and talk to the girls working the street—or the track, as they called it—out front. They stayed there almost all day and all night, vanishing only between 4:00 and 6:00 a.m. They dressed in short shorts and strappy tops and heels. Businessmen would pull up in cars without looking at all ashamed, and the girls would get in and go off to God knows where. Sometimes cabs full of tourists in town for a basketball game or a bachelor party would swing by—the girls told her how cabdrivers took kickbacks from pimps to bring guys over to this side of town.

The girls told April everything. They were dying to tell. And besides, they thought of her as one of them. An older one, of course, because these girls were mostly thirteen, fourteen, seventeen years old. They had all gotten here through roughly the same route. Poverty, bad family life, probably some sexual abuse, absent parents. Then suddenly, a knight in shining armor appeared—a nice guy with a car who would take them out to dinner, tell them he loved them, shower them with compliments, then ask for a tiny favor.

He needed some money, he’d say, and if she would sleep with his best friend, the friend would give them five thousand bucks. Just this once, the girl would think. We’re in this together. He loves me. So she’d sleep with the friend, who of course didn’t really have five thousand dollars. But the girl would think, How easy. When her man asked her to do it again, more often, and sometimes with strangers, even if it made her feel wrong, she’d say yes. When he told her to dance topless in a club, and take strange men into the back room and do whatever they said, she’d obey.

Then would come the admission: “Baby, I’m a pimp. But I do love you.” Some of them didn’t even know what the word “pimp” meant. He would explain and reveal that he had other girls. He might bring her to live with them and, as an initiation, invite ten friends over to gang rape her in a bedroom, then have the more senior girls beat the shit out of her. But it didn’t really matter what he did. By now, she was complicit in all of it, a criminal whom no one wanted to help. And she loved him. That was the real kick in the ass about it, April thought. Once a woman fell in love, a man could set her on fire and she’d refuse to see the bad in him.

At night, April would lie in bed staring at the cracked ceiling, thinking about everything the girls on English Avenue had said. Their words haunted her. In the past, she and Ronnie had traveled for a week or a month at a time to gather research for a film. But this time, they were living in the midst of their subjects. April had come to know and care about the girls at the corner store—Linette and Rochelle, a pair of teenage sisters who had turned to the street when their single mother died. Angelika, a sweet, deep-voiced girl who looked about thirteen years old. Shaliqua, tough and foul-mouthed. On the day April met her, a john had broken her jaw, but she reported for duty all the same, fearing even worse treatment from her pimp if she went to the hospital or the police.

For the first time, April understood Sally’s version of feminism, and why she went to the domestic violence shelter week after week, helping new women each time but never even making a dent in the larger problem. Because when the individual women looked you in the face, you couldn’t help but want to make them safe immediately. When two sisters, just fifteen and seventeen, explained calmly that their mother died of a highly curable cancer because she had no health insurance, and then you had to watch those sisters get into cars with strange men day in and day out, you couldn’t help but want to rip the whole ugly, unjust world apart and start over from scratch.

One afternoon, when it began to pour, April invited the girls inside for coffee. All but Angelika declined.

Angelika walked next to April, smiling, talking about her life as if it were a happy tale. She was seventeen, born and raised in Baltimore,
sold to Redd, her pimp, by a strip club owner back home when she was just fourteen.

When Ronnie saw the two of them come through the front door, she took April aside and hissed, “Too close, April. Get rid of her.”

April invited the girl over three or four times after that, always when Ronnie was away. The two of them would sit at the kitchen table, exchanging stories. Everything April said about her childhood was true, but she still felt guilty for lying to Angelika about who she was. Angelika told her she had been using crack, and sometimes heroin, since she was fourteen.

People tended to think that girls turned to prostitution to pay for drugs. They had that backward—most of the girls April met hadn’t touched drugs before they entered the life. But now they needed them to numb the pain, to keep themselves together. Ronnie said that post-traumatic stress disorder was more common among prostitutes than among veterans returning from combat.