Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood (21 page)

Tibby loitered in the hallway until Lauren appeared at the door. “She’s at three centimeters,” Lauren announced.

“I don’t know what that means,” Tibby said.

“It means her cervix is opening. That’s what happens when you’re in labor. When her cervix is all the way open—that’s ten centimeters—she’ll be ready to push the baby out.”

Tibby had one more question and Lauren couldn’t very well answer it for her:
How did I get here?

“How long will that take?” Tibby asked.

“Hard to say for sure, but it’s still early labor. It’ll probably be a few hours at least.”

Tibby hoped, really and truly hoped, that Carmen and David would be back by then.

Lauren was looking at Tibby seriously. She actually had very pretty brown eyes. Her no-nonsense look was countered by a streak of dark purple liner under her eyelashes.

“Tibby, you need to get in there with her. She’s a little freaked out. She could use some support.” Lauren turned to go.

“Um, excuse me,” Tibby said politely, “but I am, uh, Christina’s daughter’s friend, if you see what I mean?”

Lauren shrugged. “Yeah. But you’re who she’s got right now.”

Frantically Carmen called David’s cell phone again and got his voice mail again. She paced up and down the sidewalk at the entrance to the hospital. She called Irene, David’s secretary, and got
her
voice mail. Why did important things have to happen at lunchtime? She called the family number at Lena’s house and barked out a message that she couldn’t come for Valia today. Somewhat hopelessly, she called David’s cell phone again and hung up on his voice mail. She threw her bag on the sidewalk.

“Carmen?”

She turned around and saw Win. Of course it was him. He took in her general dishevelment and her teary eyes. “Are you okay?”

“My mom’s about to have a baby and I can’t find her husband,” Carmen burst forth. “Her water broke and the baby isn’t supposed to be born for a month. But now they want her to have the baby tonight so she doesn’t get some kind of an infection.”

Carmen couldn’t quite believe she was talking particulars about her mother’s amniotic fluid with a boy on whom she had a crush. But she was scared and she wanted to do the right thing and she didn’t even know how to do it. Win’s concern was so apparent it was heartrending. “I promised her I’d find David.”

“Her husband?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you have any idea where he is?” Win asked.

“He’s been traveling a lot for work,” Carmen explained balefully. She was walking in a tighter and tighter circle until she was basically spinning on the sidewalk. “We weren’t on high alert yet, because the baby wasn’t due yet. I have to find him right now!” Her voice was climbing, tinged with hysteria.

“Okay. Okay. Does he have a cell phone?”

“It’s not even ringing! He might be on a plane or something.” Or it might have run out of batteries, and someone who offered to lend him her recharger might not have done so, she added miserably to herself.

“You tried his office?” Carmen appreciated how much he wanted to help her. He was a good person.

“His secretary was at lunch. I’m going to drive over there,” Carmen muttered. “What else can I do?”

“Can I come?” Win looked intent.

“You want to?”

“Yeah.”

She was now running toward her car and he was following her, stride for stride. “Can you get out of work?”

“I’m on lunch break. I’m done with pediatrics for today and the old folks can do without my antics and my pocket change for one afternoon.”

“You’re sure?”

He looked at her as seriously as if she’d asked him to plunge to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean with her. “I’m sure. I’m sure I’m sure.”

Carmen drove. She felt like Starsky and Hutch as they pulled up to the curb and leaped out of the car. He followed her to the elevator and then to the reception desk.

Mrs. Barrie greeted Carmen warmly, and Carmen explained where she was going without breaking her gait. Christina had worked at this same law firm since Carmen was a toddler. Carmen knew her way around the place.

Carmen and Win staked out Irene’s desk, and thankfully, she returned from lunch ten minutes later. “What can I do for you, Carmen?” Irene asked, looking confused. Carmen wore a bandana on her head, do-rag style, and her feet were in flip-flops.

“We need to find David.” Carmen’s intensity was such that Irene seemed to shrink back from her own cubicle. “I think my mom’s gonna have the baby soon,” Carmen explained, “but don’t tell anybody anything yet.”

Irene, good soul that she was, got right with the program.“Oh, my.” Briskly she pulled up the calendar on her computer. Her long fingernails clickety-clicked on the keys until she got to the right day. “Your poor mother. We’ll find him.”

Carmen sometimes got the feeling that everybody rooted for her mother. She was probably like a poster girl for legal secretaries. She’d won the respect and ardor of a handsome young lawyer without even meaning to.

“He has a meeting in Trenton this afternoon. He’s renting a car there and driving to Philadelphia. He’s supposed to stay in a hotel in Philly tonight. He has a meeting scheduled there tomorrow morning and then he comes home. And wait.” She studied her notes a little more closely. “He told me he was hoping to stop off and visit his mother in Downingtown on his way to Philly.”

Carmen was thinking. “Do you know the number of the meeting place in Trenton?”

“Yes.” Irene looked it up and called it. She went through several people and several bits and pieces of conversation before she hung up. “He left already.”

“Oh.” Carmen chewed her thumbnail. “How about the car rental place?”

“Yes.” Irene called them, too. She listened for a bit and put her hand over the receiver. “He rented the car and left about twenty-five minutes ago.”

“Shit,” Carmen mumbled. She walked in a small circle. She realized Win was watching her carefully. But she was too preoccupied to be self-conscious or even to consider all the ways in which she was diverging from Good Carmen.

“Do you have David’s mother’s number?”

Irene winced. “I don’t think I do.” She riffled through her Rolodex and then scrolled through her computerized version. “No, I’m sorry.”

“The address?” Carmen asked without much hope.

Irene shook her head. “I don’t know David’s stepfather’s name, do you?”

Carmen should have known it. She had certainly heard it before. But in her efforts to tune out most of the things David said, she’d tuned out this potentially helpful bit of information.

“We should leave a message at the hotel in Philadelphia just in case,” Win suggested.

Irene nodded and did it. “He hasn’t checked in yet, but they’ll have him call as soon as he does.”

Carmen’s brain was working fast. “Can you call the rental car company again?” she asked.

Irene did it without asking questions. Carmen held out her hand for the phone. “Can I talk?”

“Sure.” Irene handed it over.

Carmen talked to a representative for a few minutes. As soon as she hung up she looked at Win and Irene brightly. “I have something. They can’t get hold of David in his car, but they can tell us where the car is.”

“Really?” Win looked impressed.

“Yeah. And like I always say, thank the Lord for satellite systems.” She laughed at herself. “I don’t really go around saying that.”

Win smiled at her, also clearly relieved that they had a lead. “How far is Downingtown?” he asked.

Irene shrugged. “I think about an hour and a half.”

Win and Carmen looked at each other. “So let’s go,” Win said.

“You think so?” Carmen asked, suddenly nervous about the extent to which she’d embroiled an innocent guy in her drama. “You sure you want to come with me?”

His eyes told her she should take this for granted. “I’m sure I want to come with you.”

Of course she found it in the last place she looked. If she hadn’t found it, she’d still be looking.
—Susannah Brown

L
ena walked into her father’s study with expectations so low, she would have been happily surprised if he’d taken a paperweight from his desk and thrown it at her.

He was thumbing through a stack of papers on his desk. He was listening to Paul Simon. It was one of about three CDs he ever listened to, and he always struck Lena as slightly tin-eared and immigrant in his appreciation. The song was perky and polished, something about a camera that took bright color pictures. To Lena the song was like an A-plus paper, a math problem where you showed your work, a form fully filled out. But it didn’t sound to her like music. She liked her colors dingier.

Her father looked up at her over his half-glasses. He turned the music off.

“Do you mind if I make a drawing of you?” Lena had practiced saying this in her head so many times, the words had long ago lost their ordinary feel and had begun to taste funny in her mouth.

He waved her to the empty seat across from his desk. He was prepared for this. Lena’s mother had no doubt warned and mollified him.

Lena’s paper was already clipped to her drawing board and her charcoal was squeezed into her clammy hand. She hadn’t come in willing to take no for an answer. She sat down. “You don’t need to do anything special.” She’d practiced saying that, too.

He nodded absently. He didn’t need to be asked twice. He was already back to his papers. But she noticed he kept his face angled straighter now, only his eyes cast down. The lenses of his glasses glinted, but his eyes within them appeared shut from where she sat.

She watched him for a long time before she began to draw. She made herself do this. She didn’t care if it made him uncomfortable.

For a while she saw what she expected. She could have drawn his angry face with not only his eyes closed but with hers closed too. This was how she pictured him, and this is how he looked. She saw what she felt, and what she felt was his anger. She had certainly suffered for it. Why else was she here?

She knew what she felt. But what did she see?

She began to wonder. With drawing, you were always pitting your feelings and expectations against what the cold light offered your optic nerves. Like the first time you tried to mix colors to paint water. You thought you’d be using a lot of blue and maybe green. But if you made yourself see, you ended up with a lot more gray and brown and white, and even weird unexpected colors like yellow and red. And if you tried to paint it again, it would all be different. You couldn’t paint the same water twice.

She remembered once standing with her mother on a street corner in Georgetown and watching a painter at work. Her mother let her watch for a long time, and as they were walking away, Lena remembered asking how come he used so much brown.

As a child, you were taught to see the world in geometric shapes and primary colors. It was as if the adults needed to equip you with more accomplishments. (“Lena already knows her colors!”) Then you had to spend the rest of your life unlearning them. That was life, as near as Lena could tell. Making everything simple for the first ten years, which in turn made everything way more complicated for the subsequent seventy.

And now her feelings about her father made a mask over his actual features. She had thought that her challenge would be to paint his anger, to confront it. But now she knew that wasn’t the challenging thing. The challenging thing was to see past it.

She stared at him without blinking until her eyeballs dried and her vision blurred. She wished she could turn her father upside down. Sometimes you could see things more truly when you forfeited your normal visual relationship with them. Sometimes your preexisting ideas were so powerful they clubbed the truth dead before you could realize it was there. Sometimes you had to let the truth catch you by surprise.

Lena looked away and closed her eyes. She opened them and looked back at her father’s face, but only for a second. It could catch you by surprise, or maybe, if you were bold, you could catch it.

She turned away, and then turned back for a little longer. She was seeing more now. She was holding on to something. She took a deep breath, carefully keeping herself in this other visual dimension. This place where she saw but didn’t feel.

Her hand was finally connecting charcoal to paper. She let it fly. She didn’t want to bog it down with thinking.

Her father’s face was no more to her than a topographical map. The mouth was a series of shapes, nothing more. The downturned eyes were shadings of darkness and light. She stayed there a good, long time. She was careful not to blink too hard or too long for fear that this new way of seeing would abandon her.

She wasn’t afraid of him anymore. The scared part of her was waiting out by the mouth of the cave; the rest of her had gone in.

She saw something in her father’s mouth. A little tick. Another tick, and then a sag.

She wasn’t scared anymore, but was he?

The trick of drawing was leaving your feelings out, giving them the brutal boot. The deeper trick of drawing was inviting them back in, making nice with them at exactly the right moment, after you were sure your eyes really were working. Fighting and making up.

And so her feelings were coming back in, but they were a different kind this time. They were guided by her eyes, rather than the other way around. Tentatively, she let them come. A good drawing was a record of your visual experience, but a beautiful drawing was a record of your feelings about that visual experience. You had to let them come back.

She saw her father’s fear, and it so surprised her, she could barely contemplate it. What was he afraid of?

She could imagine if she tried. He was afraid of her disobedience. He was afraid of her independence. He was afraid of her growing up and not being the kind of girl he could feel proud of—or the kind of girl Bapi would be proud of. He was afraid of being old and powerless. He was afraid she would see his vulnerability. But also, she suspected, he wanted her to see it.

She felt her fingers softening around the charcoal. Her lines got looser. She felt sad and moved by these things she saw in his face. She didn’t want to make it hard for him to love her. But at the same time, she couldn’t deny who she was to make it easy.