Commencement (7 page)

As the bus turned onto Route 9, Celia pulled a fat slice of sour cream coffee cake from her purse. She was almost there. She took a big bite and closed her eyes. She had a blurry memory of buying the
cake at the little corner store by her apartment just before heading upstairs with What’s-His-Name. She never ate that sort of crap anymore, but she had figured that you’d really have to hate yourself to ride the bus hungover for four hours without some kind of indulgence. Or, for that matter, to be even remotely food deprived for the wedding of a friend whose birthday was six months after yours when you didn’t even have a date.

There had been pretty slim pickings on the New York dating scene lately. There was the guy she met at the movies, who referred to her vagina as her “cave of pleasure” (not okay). And the candidate for a doctorate in English at Columbia, who could not help but reference the names of modern novelists in every casual conversation. (Example: “Whatcha doin’, Ian McEwan?” Blech.) In a cabinet in his apartment, hidden behind his Fassbinder video collection, Celia had found dozens of pornos with literary names—
A Midsummer Night’s Cream, A Tale of Two Titties
. The porn itself didn’t bother her, but the titles were simply too much. She decided to break up with him then and there.

Celia looked at the trees that lined the road leading into town. She took another bite of cake and reminded herself to ask Bree how she’d thought of it, the freshman-year-of-life idea. Especially since at Smith they were never allowed to use the term “freshman.”

It was the kind of subtle distinction that made outsiders groan.

When the topic of Smith came up at a family Christmas party her sophomore year, Celia’s uncle Monty said, “You can always tell a Smith student because she’s the one who refers to it as a
women’s college
instead of a girls’ school.”

“Whenever I picture Celia there, I think of the proper ladies from my old parish who went to Smith in the forties,” her grandmother said. “Cee, is it still that way? Tea parties and pearls and pinkies up and all that?”

Her least-favorite cousin, Al, piped up, likening attending a women’s college in the twenty-first century to reenacting Civil War battles on Sunday afternoons: “It’s outdated,” he said. “But it’s sort of kooky and quaint, so let them have it.”

“We’re so glad you approve,” Celia said. She turned and walked into the dining room in a rage.

In high school, Celia excelled in English without really trying and filled countless notebooks with short stories and poems. But she maintained a solid C average in most of her math and science classes, in some cases only after begging and flirting and crying her way up from a D.

Celia lacks focus
, her senior-year biology teacher had written in a note to her parents.
If only Celia could put the energy she puts into boys into her studies, she’d no doubt be an A student
, wrote that little hobbit of a geometry teacher, who probably lived in his mother’s basement and would most likely die a virgin.

Still, somehow, miraculously, she had gotten into Smith. Her mother told everyone that it was because Celia had written an admissions essay that had made the review board cry, and it was true that they had said this in her acceptance letter. But Celia always suspected that the real reason she got into Smith was that it had snowed on the day of her interview with the head of admissions. The woman had to bring her two little daughters to work with her, and when Celia arrived, they were sitting in the waiting area, looking bored. Instinctually, she got down on her knees beside them, right on the floor, dug some pens out of her purse, and started drawing with them, much to their delight. She honestly hadn’t meant it as a kiss-ass move, but when their mother came out of her office, she beamed and said, “Tell me, Celia, do you babysit?”

Celia realized then that years of taking care of her sister and little cousins had served her better than an SAT prep course ever could.

The all-women aspect of Smith had freaked her out in the beginning, but she reasoned that there were Amherst men to be found nearby. This had proven to be wildly untrue, but she came to love the place anyway, and defending it to the members of her extended family—who had all attended Trinity and Holy Cross and were no doubt wondering if she was a lesbian—sometimes got exhausting.

In the four years since she left Northampton, she had met all sorts of women who raised their eyebrows when they heard she’d gone to Smith; and she had been on dates with dozens of men who
seemed to think she was joking when she told them that she had attended one of the Seven Sisters.

They’d say things like, “Oh my God, it’s
still
all girls?” or “How sweet. I didn’t even know Smith existed anymore!” Or worse. Just last month, out for drinks with some friend of a friend, a balding guy who wrote for
Sports Illustrated
, she had talked wistfully about her college days. Halfway through the story of how she and the girls had gotten caught in a thunderstorm during Celebration of Sisterhood, she felt his hand touch her thigh under the table as he said, “Aww, don’t tell me this! You’re way too hot to be a feminazi.”

After that, she ignored his calls. Men like that were not to be tolerated, according to April. Celia agreed, but sometimes she thought to herself that between Smith and Women in Peril, Inc., April had had so little contact with real, red-blooded American men that perhaps she wasn’t exactly an authority on the topic of what one could expect from them.

Outside the bus window, Celia began to recognize buildings—Fitzwilly’s restaurant with its bright green awning, the Calvin Theatre, where she had once made out with a Hampshire film student in the balcony during a Lucinda Williams concert.

The bus rolled into the depot. As passengers began to disembark, Celia sat back for a minute, looking at the crowd gathered outside—there were a few Smithies, chubby cheeked and dressed in sweatshirts and jeans. Probably headed to the mall in Holyoke, she thought. Beside them were the Springfield-bound hippies who came to play sidewalk music in town or worked at the organic cafés on Main Street. She inhaled, steadying herself as she stood up, and pulled her duffel bag from the overhead rack.

Celia got off the bus and made her way up the hill toward campus. The air smelled different here. It was cleaner, more alive than in Manhattan. She had remembered everything about the look of the place—the lush New England mountains that circled the valley; the smooth, glassy perfection of Paradise Pond. But the once familiar smell was a startling surprise, like a forgotten love letter peeking out from under a mattress.

When she reached campus, she walked around the Grecourt
Gates. It was superstition that if you went through them before graduation you would never get married. She had graduated now, and she wasn’t even sure she wanted to get married, but, still, better to be safe than sorry. She walked by the old art museum and the new student center and John M. Greene Hall, past Haven House with its wide yellow front porch, and Park Annex, with its neat red bricks and white trim. Each house on campus was from a different time period in American history, and a girl could usually be described by whichever one she lived in—the houses on Green Street were home to the vegan/lesbian/armpit-hair crowd. Chapin, Capen, and Sessions housed a lot of left-wing party girls who smoked weed and dated each other, though they’d only ever slept with men before college. The big dykes on campus (BDOCs) usually lived in Haven-Wesley. These were the women whom even the straightest of Smithies fantasized about and blushed over when they saw them walk by.

Celia and Bree were typical Quad bunnies—the type who loved boys, kissed girls only when they’d had a lot of tequila, and might go to a frat party if such a thing existed at Smith, and if the men were not utter pigs.

Celia crossed Paradise Road, walked past Scales House, and, finally, there she stood, in front of King, staring at the door she had gone in and out of so many times that she could feel its exact weight just by looking at it. The back of King House opened out to the Quad—wide green lawns and ivy-covered brick buildings. But she stood now at the front of the house, facing Elm Street, where two lanes of traffic separated the campus from the world and seemed to provide a sort of force field to adulthood. On the other side of Elm Street, there were people pushing baby strollers; lawn mowers and dog toys left in yards; houses with two-car garages—all the trappings of real life that had seemed so trivial and distant in college, and that seemed distant still.

In the midst of it all, directly across from King and wedged oddly between two houses, was the Autumn Inn, where they’d be staying for the wedding. A few months earlier, Sally had announced that she would be putting them all up at the Hotel Northampton. Even though Sal could clearly afford it, the other girls had said no. It
wasn’t right for her to pay for them to come to her wedding. So Sally settled on the Autumn Inn, reasoning that a three-night stay at the Hotel Northampton was too expensive for Celia and April even if they shared a room, and that every other place in town was a dump.

When Sally suggested the inn, April and Bree had both immediately pointed out to Celia, who was already thinking the same, how inappropriate it was: In college, the Autumn Inn was where Sally would go with Bill Lambert when the Neilson Library offices were too crowded, and the two of them just had to see each other. And now she was staying there with poor Jake on their wedding night. Leave it to Sally.

Celia had never been inside the inn, but she had had a view of it both first year and senior year, when she lived in street-facing rooms. Some nights she would look across Elm Street and imagine the people who were staying there—married couples in town to enjoy the foliage, Smith parents visiting their daughters, lovers like Sally and Bill hiding away. Tonight, Celia thought, she would do just the opposite: check into the Autumn Inn, and gaze over at King House, imagining the students who filled those rooms, no longer hers now.

For the next three days, the girls would envelop her.

Of the four of them, only Celia had made several close girlfriends since leaving Smith. Sometimes she thought New York resembled a women’s college in the way that it brought women together, in part because of a lack of decent men. In the last four years, she had spent more happy nights drinking wine at the Temple Bar with Lila Bonner and Laura Friedman, or out dancing in Chelsea with Kayla from the office, than she had with all the men she had dated combined.

But although she had made plenty of friends in the city, it still felt like each of them was alone, their lives running parallel, but never quite touching. With the Smithies, it was different. There was sometimes no telling where one of them began and the others left off.

T
he bridesmaid dress hung on the back of a kitchen chair, pale pink cotton with a halter neck, and a skirt that fell limp to the floor like one of Bree’s mother’s old nightgowns. She ran her palm over the light fabric as she waited for the water to boil. It wasn’t really appropriate for a wedding, even an outdoor wedding in May.

“My money’s on pouffy peach taffeta with shoulder bows,” Bree had joked when Celia called her to say that Sally had gotten engaged, and that she was asking them as well as April to be her bridesmaids, and that Bree needed to sound utterly surprised upon pain of death when Sally called, because Sally had sworn Celia to secrecy.

“I have a plan,” Bree went on. “I’m going to get married after everyone else I know, and then make each of my bridesmaids wear the exact dress they made me wear in their wedding. That way if they were fair, they’ll get to look good. If they made me wear pouffy peach, well then, now they get to wear pouffy peach.”

Bree was trying to sound breezy and happy, but she wondered why Sally hadn’t called her yet.

She didn’t call for two more days. Bree thought it was strange and sad, but she knew things had changed between them since college. And maybe it was foolish to think she was still Sally’s priority the way she had been at Smith, when there was so little to distract them. Back then, they had expanses of time in which to memorize
one another’s routines and favorite songs and worst heartaches and greatest days. It felt something like being in love, but without the weight of having to choose just one heart to hold on to, and without the fear of ever losing it. They had spent so many evenings together on the front porch of King House with the world all before them. Maybe it was just impossible to re-create that sort of closeness in real life.

Or maybe Sally had been afraid to tell Bree about the wedding because she knew how much it would hurt. Whatever the reason, when she called with the news, she said it in a rush, like a confession or an apology, instead of an announcement.

Everyone knew that once upon a time Bree thought she’d be first. But now it looked like she’d never get married, at least not in the way she had planned—no white dress and long aisle strewn with a flower girl’s rose petals. Her father wouldn’t give her away in a big Savannah chapel, her mother wouldn’t stand by in a pale suit, like she had always imagined. Bree knew that the surprise of it shouldn’t be so surprising—who ever imagined herself into a life?

She lifted the kettle from the stove and poured water into twin red mugs in two even streams.

Lately, whenever she felt confused or depressed, she would compare her life with Sally’s—
Here I am, lying on the couch stressing out about my relationship. I bet Sally’s looking at wedding gowns. Here I am making yet another pro-and-con list on a Sunday morning. Sally is probably serving Jake French toast in bed, to be followed by hours of mind-numbing sex
. No matter what the imagined comparison, Sally always came out ahead.

Bree plopped a peppermint tea bag and honey into one cup, and the regular old Lipton with milk and sugar in the other for herself. Their bedroom was just off the kitchen, and from the tone of the snoring—gentle, morning gurgles, instead of those late-night blasts that required her to sleep with earplugs—Bree knew she had a while to go before she’d be disturbed. She looked at the clock on the microwave. Their flight wasn’t for a few more hours.