Commencement (6 page)

“So two public school kids, a private school snoot, and our little Celia went to Catholic school,” April said. “I do believe it turned her into the gin-swilling saint she is today.”

Celia batted her eyelashes and did a dramatic sign of the cross.

“Peace be with you all,” she said, and they laughed.

That’s what Catholic school was good for—self-deprecation and nun jokes and not much else.

“I can’t believe you’d call me a snoot!” Sally said, with fake indignation.

After a while, Sally crept out and brewed tea in her hot pot, and brought them each a cup.

April had a strange, almost sad look on her face.

“Are you okay?” Celia asked.

“Yeah,” April said. “It’s just I’ve never had the kind of friends who would actually steam up a bathroom for me before.”

Celia could not wait to tell her mother. Despite April’s frequent complaints that she didn’t belong in the Quad, Celia noticed, she never applied for a room change.

Celia gave her a hug, holding on tight even though April stiffened.

“I’m glad we all found our way to each other,” she said.

(Later, April would blame her uncharacteristic mushiness on the codeine.)

April was a die-hard MacKinnonite, an association Celia had never even heard of before her Smith days. Even most Smith feminists thought she was too strident, which was really saying something. She believed that porn and strip clubs were bad for women and men alike—degrading to those who took part in them, and for those who watched. She thought the women’s movement was run by a bunch of rich, white ladies who cried about being tethered to domestic lives of dinner parties and tennis lessons while most of the world’s women were struggling to make minimum wage and feed their children.

During that first year, along with some of her more radical
friends from outside the dorm, April led the transpositive campus movement. In her opinion, there was discrimination against women who came to Smith and then underwent gender reassignment surgery. These transgendered men, she said, should be acknowledged as such. She started a petition to change the wording of the student constitution from “she” to “the student” and got so many signatures that the school senate agreed to vote on it.

After much debate, Sally said she agreed with April’s point, but Bree and Celia just couldn’t. It was a person’s right to change his or her gender, they said (though Celia wasn’t totally sure what she really thought about this), but Smith was
a women’s
college, and if you were born a woman and chose to become a man, you should pick another school. Once they said it, April acted aloof around them for two full weeks, until her bill got passed without their support.

Soon after, April joined in with the vegan club on campus and went around the dining hall during Parents’ Weekend affixing PETA stickers onto the mink coats of four mothers, including Bree’s, while everyone was eating grasshopper pie. (Bree didn’t want to forgive April, but then April appeared at her door with a bouquet of daisies stolen from the president’s garden and a roll of Toll House cookie dough. The two of them devoured the dough, and April told Bree dirty jokes until she nearly choked from laughing, and forgot why she had been angry in the first place.)

Sally never got mad at April. She seemed thrilled by April’s enthusiasm for causes that she herself had never even thought about. April took her to rallies and lectures; she put piles of books outside Sally’s bedroom door, with private notes attached—
The Beauty Myth
and
Backlash, Only Words
, and
Sisterhood Is Powerful
. Sally studied each one of them, growing ever more incensed by the sexism all around, which she said she had hardly ever noticed before. April saw sexism everywhere—in the movies, on the radio, in TV ads for dish soap and fast food, in political elections and toys and corporations and elementary schools, in packages of red meat wrapped in cellophane at the grocery store.

By the end of their first year, April had been arrested for disorderly conduct twice—once during a protest in Boston, and once for
starting a fight with the right-wing crazies outside a clinic in Amherst. Each time, Sally drove to wherever April was and paid the fifty-dollar fee to get her out. Hours later, they would return to the dorm holding hands, like they’d been off at some ice-cream social.

“The odd couple’s at it again,” Bree would whisper to Celia.

There was something magnetic between April and Sally. Maybe they were so perfect for each other because both of them were strange, and neither ever seemed to notice the other’s strangeness, or at least never seemed bothered by it. Or maybe, as Bree said, it was because they mothered each other. Sally often got terrified by nightmares, or even pleasant dreams, about her mother. She said it was unbearable to dream of her mother doing something mundane—taking a run, say, or picking her up at school—only to wake up and realize that what she had dreamed of was impossible now. Bree told Celia that all Sally’s talk about death made her insanely uncomfortable, but April spent whole nights lying next to Sally in bed, softly singing Bob Dylan songs, holding Sally’s hand while she slept so that if she woke up scared, it wouldn’t last for long. She said she had seen her mother through “Many a bad trip,” and compared with that, Sally was nothing.

“What kind of a bad trip?” Bree had hissed at Celia after April said it.

Celia just shrugged.

There was something unsettling about having to take a Greyhound bus to a close friend’s wedding. It was a concrete reminder of how much Sally had changed in these past four years, and how much Celia had stayed the same. The train would have been far more dignified, but Celia couldn’t bring herself to pay a hundred dollars each way just to prove she was a grown-up.

The bus stopped at a Roy Rogers somewhere outside Hartford. She had no idea that Roy Rogers even existed anymore. Celia bought a Diet Coke and reluctantly climbed back onto the bus, newly awash in the smell of fried food. The woman in front of her had bought a fish sandwich. A goddamn fish sandwich! Was there
anything more offensive to eat on a bus full of people at eleven-thirty in the morning?

As they turned back onto the road, the kid beside her took a notebook from his backpack, with the words “Freshman English” printed on the front in droopy letters.

Celia remembered how Bree used to refer to their first year out of college as their freshman year of life. Celia might call her crying from a bathroom stall at work, complaining about her boss, or she might send a pained text message from yet another ill-fated first date, and Bree would soothe her gently, saying, “You’re only a freshman. It’s going to get better. I swear.”

Celia’s freshman year of life had amounted to nothing much besides going on a string of comically bad dates, forging a stormy yet intense bond with New York that she knew would last for decades, and taking a job as an assistant at a mass-market book publisher that was far from the novel-writing career she really wanted. Circus Books published mostly self-help guides and pink anthologies about shoes and breakups. It was the sort of place where, when you told someone at a cocktail party that you worked there, you had to roll your eyes. (At the recommendation of the Smith Career Development Office, Celia had asked in her first interview whether her predecessors had been promoted—the girl before her, they said, was backpacking through Nepal, and the one before that had joined the Peace Corps. Celia now thought she should have taken it as a sign that the place would suck the soul out of anyone who dared to work there, driving the dreamers out to the farthest corners of the earth for some sort of fulfillment.)

They would remember Bree’s freshman year of life as the time when she left for Stanford Law and threw herself into her studies. That was the same year that she became more or less estranged from her Southern family. “She’s lost her sparkle,” April said to Celia on the phone one night, and Celia agreed.

For Sally, freshman year of life had meant meeting Jake, falling in love, and planning her world around their relationship, so that she even forestalled applying to med school, the one thing she had always planned to do. Bree and April thought Sally was trying too
hard to replace her lost mother, convincing herself that what was comfortable must be right. They feared she would be disappointed if she hoped to get a real commitment out of such a young guy. Even three years later, Jake’s proposal shocked them all—all but Sally, who had never doubted it for an instant. Sally was the head fundraiser for their class and a volunteer at the Boston chapter of the National Organization for Women. Twice a week after work, she organized mailings and set up lectures and served as the youngest board member in New England. She helped write the group’s monthly newsletter, updating members on women’s issues around the globe. (April gave her most of the ideas, and Sally toned them down so the sixty-year-old women of Brookline, Massachusetts, wouldn’t have a collective heart attack while reading about fistulas in developing nations.)

Celia thought of how NOW and other groups like it were the perfect logical next step for Smithies so accustomed to acronyms. And she was proud of Sally for actually getting out there and doing something positive in her free time. But April rolled her eyes at this. “Could she
be
any more of an establishment feminist?” she had once said to Celia, who wasn’t quite sure what that even meant.

April’s freshman year of life was about joining forces with the legendary Ronnie Munro to form Women in Peril, Inc. Ronnie was one of Smith’s most talked about alums, right alongside Julia Child and Gloria Steinem, but unlike them, she was something of a villain in the eyes of most Smithies. Ronnie was a militant feminist and a filmmaker who had dedicated her life to social activism and women’s rights. She was also slightly insane.

Once, she had been a pioneer—she was a major player in the early fight against domestic violence and a big proponent of equal pay for equal work. But at some point in the late seventies, she was at the center of a scandal. She had convinced some horrible wife beater in Indiana to let her make a film about his life, including footage from a hidden camera of him punching, hitting, and whip-ping his wife. From the interviews she did with him, it seemed like Ronnie was in love with the guy. She egged him on on camera, asking him to describe the thrill he got from keeping his woman in her
place. Then one day, Ronnie told him a secret: His wife was planning to leave. That night, he murdered her. He stabbed her through the heart right on the kitchen floor. Ronnie wasn’t there, but she got the whole thing on tape and used it as the opening scene of her movie.

Her supporters said she was drawing attention to the issue, and that she did—with articles in every major paper and secret screenings of the film on college campuses after it had been banned and even a few lawmakers trying to initiate legislation to protect women in the transition out of abusive homes. But most people inside the movement thought Ronnie’s methods were dangerous and sucked credibility out of the whole debate. If she had seen this man beating his wife, if she even had it all on tape, why hadn’t she gone to the police sooner? Why had she told him of his wife’s plan to leave him when she knew it might cost the woman her life?

After that, most mainstream feminists broke ties with Ronnie; some even called her a murderer. Ever since, her tactics had grown stranger and riskier. She had fewer allies and an increasing number of critics. During their first year at Smith, she had come to campus to give a talk on female genital mutilation, and three hundred girls turned out to protest. Still, April spoke about her as if she were a goddess.

It was obvious why Ronnie had hired April to be her assistant. She took advantage of April, asking her to do all sorts of dangerous and stupid things in the name of women’s liberation. The two of them made films about misogyny and sexual violence all over the world—important films that explored the lives of women who were victims of previously untold horrors. Ronnie made April live with her and seemed to be April’s only friend in Chicago.

The rest of the girls were proud of April. They knew that this was her life’s work, and that it was endlessly important, but they worried about her, too. Especially Celia, who knew the most about April’s exploits and the lengths she was willing to go to to make Ronnie happy.

The latest scare had come just two days earlier, when April called from some army base in Illinois to say that a military guard had
beaten the shit out of her when he caught her stealing classified files. She thought her arm might be broken, she said, and there was blood in her eyes, blurring her sight.

Celia had felt paralyzed, listening to April cry on the phone like that. Before she picked up, she had been sitting at her desk drinking an iced tea and reading
Us Weekly
online, trying to block out the guilt she felt over the stack of unread manuscripts on the floor by her side.

“Where was Ronnie while all this was going on?” she asked in a rush.

“She ran,” April said.

“She left you?”

“She didn’t leave me,” April said. “She just needed to protect herself. But anyway, she’s driven off now and I don’t know how the fuck I’m gonna get home.”

“What can I do?” Celia said.

“I don’t know. Just stay on the phone with me for a minute, okay? You should see me, I’m all bloody and gross and I need to get to the hospital so someone can check out my arm.”

Celia was silent, shocked. She did not know what to say.

“Please don’t tell Sally about any of this,” April said at last. “She’ll flip.”

Celia thought of the wedding, of April walking down the aisle with bruises all over her face. Sally was bound to find out what had happened. Still, Celia promised that she would keep April’s secret, just as she always kept April’s secrets.

Bree never referred to them as sophomores or juniors in life, but even so, Celia had thought of their second and third years away from Smith in exactly that way. And now it was May of their fourth year, and Sally was getting married. Married. Celia could hardly believe the word applied to one of them. It was only fitting that Sally had decided to have the wedding right on campus, because if this was the end of their senior year of life, then the weekend would be a sort of commencement, a beginning and an end.