Commencement (5 page)

“I want everyone to grab a cape, grab a crown, and meet us back down here in five,” Jenna the Monster Truck said.

“We’re supposed to go all the way back upstairs just to put on a cape?” April asked.

Some of the older girls started to laugh.

“You left out the best part, Monster Truck!” someone yelled.

“Oh yeah,” Jenna said. “We do it in our underwear.”

A few of the first years squealed with delight. A few others uttered concerned murmurs.

April said, “You’re fucking kidding me.”

“Nope, baby, it’s true,” Jenna said, walking over to April and draping an arm over her shoulder. “Of course, you don’t have to, but most of us think it’s more fun that way.”

Everyone started rushing back up the stairs. Celia felt like her blood was coursing faster than usual. She was supposed to get into her underwear around hundreds of women she didn’t even know? She grabbed Bree’s hand, hoping maybe she had Southern modesty on her side—if someone other than April refused, Celia would, too. She really didn’t care on what grounds.

“Are you gonna do it?” she asked Bree.

“Not in my skivvies.” Bree smiled. “I think I’ll just wear a bikini.”

Well sure, why not, when you look like a freaking movie star?

“Sally?” Celia said, as the four of them followed the crowd upstairs.

“I guess so,” Sally said. “Yeah, why not. When in Rome, right?”

Celia faked a smile. “Right.”

When she got to her room and opened up the top drawer of her dresser, Celia thought she might pass out. She owned a couple pairs of sexy, tiny underwear, suitable only for the eyes of teenage boys
who were so happy to see a girl undressed that they simply did not notice her fat thighs or stretch marks. Other than that, she wore cotton granny panties, covered in little-girl prints. She sighed, and then dropped her clothes. She was wearing a red cotton bra and the Friday pair of panties from her days-of-the-week underwear collection, even though it was Wednesday. She looked stupid, but no worse than she would in anything else she owned.

Celia glanced down in horror to see a tiny little tuft of black hair poking out against her white leg. Did she have time to shave? Why the fuck hadn’t the older girls warned them?

A moment later, Sally stood in the doorway with a bottle of tequila in one hand and a digital camera in the other. She wore a perfect black satin bra and matching panties. Behind her was Bree in a pale pink bikini, and April dressed exactly as she had been, in khaki shorts and a black T-shirt, with the purple cape draped over the top.

Celia quickly grabbed her cape and wrapped it around herself.

“I think we should each take a swig,” Sally said.

“I second that,” Bree said.

They passed the bottle among the four of them, quickly gulping down the burning liquid.

“Let me get a picture!” Sally said.

“No, no,” Celia said with a laugh.

“I’ll take it,” April said.

“No, you won’t,” Sally said. “I want all four of us in it.”

So they stood in a huddle, and Sally held the camera out far in front of them with her outstretched arm.

“Say ‘naked’!” she said, and they all screamed, “Naked!”

Downstairs, girls fat and thin stood shuffling around in their underwear, not even bothering to cover themselves up. Jenna the Monster Truck taught all the first years the words to the King House Rumble, and they practiced out in the driveway four or five times.

Finally, it was time to go to JMG, and they marched along the side-walks two by two: Celia arm in arm with Bree, and Sally and April close behind. Men driving along Elm Street beeped their horns, and from every corner of campus, other girls from other houses
could be heard chanting their own house cheers, the collective sound getting louder and louder, until they filled the auditorium.

Banners for each house on campus hung from the rafters, and all you could see and hear were girls—their screaming voices, their flesh everywhere. Some wore just pasties and thongs (Celia thanked God himself for not placing her in whatever house that was). Others wore gold bras and underpants, with angel wings stuck to their backs. The soccer team wore Smith thongs, sports bras, and sliced soccer balls on their heads. Compared with most women in the room, the King House girls were overdressed.

“Don’t stop the Rumble!” Jenna shouted.

They kept going, as the girls to the left cheered for Jordan House, and the girls to the right cheered for Morrow. Even April was getting into it.

The room shook and echoed, the energy like nothing Celia had ever felt before. She let it smother her for a moment. Twenty-four hundred young things, all of them energized, all of them proud, joined together by this place.

Bree grabbed her arm and pointed at Sally, who was trying to tell them something. Celia struggled to make out her words.

“What?” she shouted, leaning in to listen along with Bree and April.

“I said I think we’re officially Smithies now,” Sally called over the din.

Their first few weeks at Smith were full of parties, teas, lectures, plays, and concerts, just for the first years. Celia wondered if the school did this by design to make them forget their collective loneliness.

She was pleased to have been placed in maids’ quarters, because there was something much more manageable about having to learn the ways of only three hall mates. Also, they had their very own bathroom, instead of having to share the big bathroom down the hall with everyone else. Celia was endlessly relieved by this. In high school, she couldn’t even use the ladies’ room at Saint Catherine’s
if there was someone else in there. Celia would sit silent in the stall, willing the other person to leave, then peeing quickly and yanking up her tights before anyone came in. She had always been outgoing and friendly, but there were some things that just seemed wrong any place but home.

The maids’ quarters bathroom had two stalls, two showers, and two sinks, all crowded with beauty products of Bree’s. (None of the others complained about this, because they enjoyed using her expensive avocado scrubs and lavender conditioning treatments and hot-oil hair masks.)

One night in early December, Bree and April had both come down with colds, and Celia could hear them hacking away in their rooms. She grabbed her first-aid kit and knocked on their doors.

“Into the bathroom with you,” she commanded, feeling like her mother, and both girls followed, looking pathetic and splotchy. Sally came, too, though she wasn’t sick and made a great show of popping a vitamin C pill to indicate that she intended to stay healthy.

“What are we doing?” April said.

“Sit down,” Celia said. The girls sat on the windowsill and watched as she turned the shower taps to the highest setting and poured eucalyptus oil into the streams of hot water. She turned the sinks on, too.

“Close the window,” she told Sally.

“What are we doing?” April said again.

Celia blinked. “I’m steaming your colds away. Didn’t your mom ever do that when you were a kid?”

April laughed. “Umm, no. My mother’s not exactly that type.”

They sat in the bathroom for one full hour. Celia made the girls take a tablespoon each of the cough syrup her mother bought on trips to Ireland—it tasted foul, but it had codeine in it. She read to them from a paper she was writing about Edna St. Vincent Millay, her all-time favorite poet, whose poems she had copied furiously into her journal in high school, alongside song lyrics from the Indigo Girls and Sarah McLachlan, hoping that inspiration might strike if she filled her brain with enough beautiful words written by other people.

“Listen to this,” she said now. “It’s from an essay written about Millay in 1937 by this guy named John Crowe Ransom, and here’s why he says she’s not truly talented: ‘A woman lives for love … Man distinguishes himself by intellect … If I must express it in a word, I feel still obliged to say it is her lack of intellectual interest … which the male reader misses in her poetry … I used a conventional symbol, which I hope was not objectionable, when I phrased this lack of hers: deficiency in masculinity.’”

“So not much has changed since 1937, I guess,” April said.

“What do you mean?” Bree said.

“Well, when a woman writes a book that has anything to do with feelings or relationships, it’s either called chick lit or women’s fiction, right? But look at Updike, or Irving. Imagine if they’d been women. Just imagine. Someone would have slapped a pink cover onto
Rabbit at Rest
, and poof, there goes the fucking Pulitzer.”

Sally laughed. “Okay, but I think you’re forgetting Jane Smiley and Marilynne Robinson and a whole host of women writers who have gotten every bit as much attention as men.”

April threw up her hands. “You must be joking!”

Celia smiled. These girls were smart, she thought, much smarter than she was. They weren’t even planning to be English majors, yet here they stood, on the linoleum in socked feet, discussing the state of American literature.

“What were your high schools like?” Celia asked, when what she really meant was
How do you know all this? Should I know the nuances of your worlds—of science and politics? Because I don’t
.

“I’m a public school girl,” April said.

“Me, too!” Bree piped up. “But it was a really nice public school, right on the main street in Savannah, and just the nicest teachers, and almost everyone in my group took only AP classes.”

Even when she had a fever of 102, Bree’s skin was lovely, her eyes stayed bright. Celia would sell her soul to the devil to look like Bree on even her ugliest day. No man passed by her without staring, and though there was something predictable and gross in this (April always screamed out, “Take a fucking picture, it’ll last longer!”), Celia understood why they couldn’t look away. Bree was funny and kind and happy, so much happier than most intelligent people
Celia knew. She loved her parents and her brothers and—for a time, anyway—her fiancé. She loved Savannah and dancing and blasting country music in her room. (She often quoted old Dolly Parton songs in casual conversation, though hardly anyone ever realized she was doing it.) Her room always smelled like strawberry lip balm and lilacs, and each time Celia entered it and saw the pale pink carpet, the rows of glass perfume bottles on the dresser, the framed antique black-and-white photos, she was struck with a grade-school-like urge to be just like Bree in every way.

“My high school was one of those dingy Chicago schools with gum stuck to every surface and two-hundred-year-old textbooks,” April said. “The teachers were either spiteful old lifers or, worse, perky little Teach For America volunteers who thought they could lift us out of our miserable existences in nine months or less.”

Sally sputtered. “You’re exaggerating.”

“I’m not,” April said.

“Did you grow up in a bad neighborhood?” Bree said, in a tone that made it sound as though she herself had never even set foot in one, the term “bad neighborhood” merely something she had heard about on the evening news.

“No,” April said. “But my mother thought it was important for me to experience real life and not be so fucking pampered. I was probably the only kid in Chicago who was bused out of a good neighborhood and into a bad one.”

Celia was always riveted when April spoke of her single mother, who took her to protests in her baby stroller, smoked joints all day long, and believed that the government had been listening in on her phone calls ever since she was arrested at a demonstration in 1973.

While the other girls in King House were still breaking apart from their high school boyfriends, or trying desperately to avoid gaining weight from all the carbs in the dining hall, April was working two campus jobs, because she was putting herself through Smith and needed the money. Celia believed, perhaps naïvely, that class was indistinguishable at Smith—it wasn’t like in high school when you could tell whose parents had money based on the size of
their house, or the cars they drove. Here, most people didn’t drive, and everyone dressed in tattered jeans and Nikes. But when she told April this, April just laughed and said, “Everyone here goes to Smith. Therefore, their parents have money. Other than the five of us who are paying our own way.”

“What about you, Sal?” Bree asked now.

“Oh, I went to a school called Patterson,” Sally said.

“Private?” Bree said.

“Yeah.”

Celia knew a few girls who had gone there. They came from the wealthiest families in Milton. They wore uniforms made by some fancy-pants designer and were forced to play a sport each semester—lacrosse or tennis or soccer or golf. Celia made a mental note to tell her parents this bit of information. It only confirmed what she had suspected from the beginning: Sally’s dad was loaded.

In some ways, it seemed like Sally had been raised to coexist. If she ran into town for shampoo, she asked the other girls if they needed anything, and she’d gladly lug back huge bottles of detergent and Poland Springs for them all to share. (“Good exercise!” she would say with a smile.) Every Sunday, she knocked on their doors to check and see whether their carpets needed cleaning, since she had the vacuum out and was going to do hers anyway. She spoke in what April called Sallyisms, always adding a ridiculous “sweetpea” or “lemon drop” or “sugarplum” at the end of every sentence, addressing them as if she were their friendly cookie-baking grandma. (For every time Sally said “sweetpea,” April said “fuck.” It was her favorite word, used to emphasize anger, enthusiasm, and any other emotion possible.)

Of all of them, Sally was the most serious about her work. She logged in countless morning hours in the biology lab and studied alone in her room at night with the door closed, while the others engaged in a combination of reading and gossip out in the hall. She was going to be a doctor someday, she said, and she needed to focus.

But Sally was peculiar. She did not go home for Thanksgiving, choosing instead to pay the two-hundred-dollar boarding fee to
stay alone in her dorm room, drinking red wine and watching
Golden Girls
reruns on Lifetime. She called her father Fred to his face, though one got the impression it hadn’t always been that way.