Commencement (21 page)

“Release you into the world!” April had snapped when Sally
showed the letter to the girls. “What are you, a fucking ladybug in a mayonnaise jar?”

“This is typical Bill,” Bree said. “No discussion, just a note. That man makes me sick.”

Sally knew that Bree was partially just feeling stressed over how she herself had ended things with Lara, only to change her mind at the last second. Sally imagined that by August, Bree would come to her senses. This thing with Lara was just Bree trying to hold on to Smith, when she couldn’t, not really. They were all leaving their little bubble of a world, and what lay beyond was anyone’s guess.

Also, the girls had come to dislike Bill a great deal—they found him controlling, manipulative, and slightly ridiculous, with his unpredictable bouts of moodiness and brooding. Celia said he still acted like a teenage boy who writes poems about death and wears a lot of black and hates his parents.

Sally never told them what she had once overheard during a student senate meeting at Seelye Hall.

“Did you know Bill Lambert attacked her and that’s why she transferred to Wellesley?” one girl said to another.

“Well, I heard that they had slept together, but that was it,” the other girl said.

Sally left the auditorium and went straight to the second-floor ladies’ room, where she proceeded to breathe hard into her cupped hands until a janitor came in wanting to scrub the floor.

“Just a minute,” she said, trying to sound calm and cheerful. She told herself that it was just more vicious gossip, and that she must put it from her head. She had heard all kinds of things about professors and students that were simply untrue. Like the rumor April was spreading the previous semester, that a sixty-year-old guy had been fired from his post in the art library after receiving a blow job from a first year in the stacks while a halogen lamp slowly burned the entire D-through-F section to dust. (Sally had gone herself to check it out, and no such fire had ever taken place.)

Bill insisted that there had been no one else, besides Sally and Jan. For a time, she reasoned that if he was honest about Jan, he was honest, period. But as months passed, her doubts only grew. When Sally tried to end things with Bill after junior year, he stuffed
her campus mailbox with love letters and poems, and his much-underlined first edition of W. H. Auden. The girls thought she ought to bring all of it right to the Public Safety office. But Sally still loved him. It amazed her how chemical a feeling love could be, how it could take hold of you even when you had come to despise its object. She kept the letters and the book in a Stride Rite shoe box full of keepsakes that she had had since fourth grade. She went to his office and sat in the old wing chair, and he sat on the floor with his head in her lap, actually crying as she smoothed his hair. Other than Bill, Sally had never seen a grown man cry, not even her father at her mother’s funeral.

In their last year together (and this was something that no one—not even the girls—knew about), Sally had lent him a quarter of a million dollars for various things: home repairs and back taxes and legal fees and God knows what else. He swore up and down that he would pay her back by the end of the semester, though she knew he never would. She was fine with this, too: Bill had fallen in love with her long before she got the money. She knew the girls would say he was using her, but Sally disagreed. Money wasn’t meant to be shut up in some cold box. If you needed it, you hoped someone would give it to you. If you had it, you ought to give it away.

After his letter, she demanded that they talk about the breakup he had simply announced. Bill said there was nothing to talk about. She was leaving Smith and needed to move on with her life. Sally had assumed that they would stay together—she was only moving two hours away, and now that she was no longer a Smith student, they could bring their relationship out into the open. She imagined long dinners in little Italian restaurants in Harvard Square, weekends spent on the Cape. But Bill said he wouldn’t talk about it any longer. He had made up his mind. He was getting old now, he said, and needed to start acting like it. He would convince Jan to give it another try, and they would have their family again.

“And what about me, sweetheart?” Sally said with tears in her eyes.

“I’m not worried about you,” he told her. “Girls like you land on their feet.”

She hated him for putting it like that.
Girls like you
, he had said, as though the specifics of what they shared were irrelevant.

At graduation, she cried as he processed in with all the other professors in his academic regalia. When she shook the president’s hand after accepting her diploma, she gazed over at him to see if he was watching, but he just stared out at the crowd, straight ahead.

Six months later, right after she met Jake, Bill made a bizarre attempt to win her back, flooding her office phone with messages, and even driving out to Cambridge to meet her. When she refused to come see him, he screamed, “Sally, I will throw myself into the Charles if you deny me.” She hung up the phone gently and shut off the ringer for the remainder of the afternoon.

She had thought of it as a romantic gesture, until she told Jake about it. He sputtered with laughter. He nicknamed Bill “Old Man River.”

She realized then that she had found someone a million times better.

Sally loved Jake. He was the kind of guy who, when asked to sum up his thoughts on poetry, would probably call it gay (a word she had tried to get him to stop using roughly one thousand times, without success). He showed his love by patching the window screens in her apartment, installing the air conditioner on his lunch break, or taking her out for a homemade picnic. His moods were predictable. He seemed to wake up happy every day—happy to be with her, happy to be alive. To her surprise, this was everything she needed.

As Sally approached the library in her red dress, she paused for a moment, remembering all that had passed inside that building. She had thought at the time that Bill elevated her, gave her an adultness that would have otherwise taken years to develop. But now she wondered if perhaps he had robbed her of something, and she was grateful for what she shared with Jake, a union in which there was nothing secretive or ugly about being in love.

She was glad that she had decided to break from tradition and spend the night before the wedding with Jake, because sleeping close beside him always calmed her nerves. She took off her heels and walked barefoot back to the inn.

·   ·   ·

Sally had decided to have her wedding at Smith and the rehearsal dinner in the wine cellar at Pizza Paradiso long before she and Jake got engaged. On their fifth date, to be precise. She had been in the wine cellar only once before, at the farewell Rec Council dinner right before graduation. She recalled thinking then that she wished she had some special occasion to commemorate there. After Jake proposed, she had first wanted to do the traditional Smithie thing and get married at Helen Hills Hills. (That was the name of the campus chapel. The story was that Helen Hills had married her cousin, but Sally couldn’t remember now if it was a fact or just a dumb joke.)

But then one night she had the idea of getting married in the Quad, on the very grass she had looked out at from her college dorm room, everything coming back around to this place where her adult life began. She and Jake agreed that a wedding should be simple and small. Without her mother there, she didn’t feel the need to throw some fifty-thousand-dollar parade.

Sally was eager for Jake to spend more time with the girls. They had all met him before, but she wanted them to really
know
Jake, to see in him all the wonderful things she saw. She knew they didn’t quite get him yet—well, maybe Celia, but not the others. He wasn’t any of the things that the girls usually went for—tortured, dramatic, doomed to disappoint. Nor was he particularly complex, something that Sally appreciated, though the others seemed to find this quality suspect. She was self-conscious about talking too much about Jake to any of them, or acting like she had to have him around. In this respect only, she preferred the company of her work friend Jill, who had been married to her husband, Jack, for two years and hardly ever used the word “I.” Instead it was always “We’d love to” or “Sorry, we’re busy.”

“We-speak,” Celia called it with disdain.

But Sally found it comforting to be around a woman who was in a committed relationship and always thought of herself as one half of a pair. She imagined that even if they did get married, her Smith friends would never be that way.

Before dinner, they practiced the ceremony out in the Quad—the girls walked with her brother and two of Jake’s college buddies, and Jake stood at the end of the path, right in front of Wilson House, the same path they had walked when they graduated. As Sally moved toward him on her father’s arm, tears filled her eyes. It finally felt real.

She had thought about walking down the aisle alone, of asking her father to do something else, like hand out programs. He hadn’t been involved at all during the planning process. Plus, eight years of being friends with April had made its mark on Sally, and the thought of having one man hand her over to another was vaguely nauseating, especially when one of them was her father, who could never have laid claim to her in the first place. It would have been different if her mother were there, Sally thought, but then again, so would everything else. Ultimately, Jake said he thought she ought to just bite the bullet and let her father walk her down the aisle, and Sally agreed.

After they rehearsed, Sally and the girls stayed behind in the Quad to take pictures for the
Alumnae Quarterly
. Celia said she wanted shots of them both in and out of their formalwear, so she could show the progression of the weekend. Sally loved the idea, but after a while of posing, she started to get antsy. She never liked arriving late to anything, let alone her own rehearsal dinner, and she couldn’t help but feel a little pulled between past and future—the girls still wanted her to belong to them, but any part of her that could belong to someone was Jake’s now.

Finally she said, “Okay, my loves, let’s go. I’m nervous about leaving my father alone with the in-laws for too long.”

They walked into Pizza Paradiso twenty minutes behind everyone else and saw the familiar wood-burning oven, its flames shooting up around bubbling pies. A family sat in the booth by the door, two mothers and their toddler son.

“It’s good to be back in Northampton,” April said, casting an eye their way.

Sally laughed, but she hoped Jake’s grandparents hadn’t noticed.

When they got downstairs, she started to direct the girls to the
chairs right beside Jake’s, but Celia took April’s hand and said, “Come sit by me!” and they squeezed in beside Anthony, an investment banker who had grown up with Jake, and whom Celia had decided to make out with when they met at the hotel bar the night before.

“April, you didn’t get to meet Morgan Stanley last night,” Celia said, presenting her to Anthony. “Morgan, this is my dear friend April, the hardest-working girl in America. Would you believe her boss had her editing movie footage in her hotel room last night while the rest of us were getting hammered?”

Sally sat down beside Jake, with her eyes still on Celia. Lara came over and kissed Sally’s cheek. She had slicked back her hair, and she was wearing a black pantsuit.

Sally eyed her mother-in-law and wished for the first time ever that her friends could be a little less like themselves, just for one night.

Lara apologized for not being around all day and said she had a headache. Sally smiled. “Not to worry, tulip,” she said, though she was already imagining the conversation she would have with Jake later: What was Bree doing in this ridiculous relationship, where she was always miserable, and someone always had to pretend to have a headache or a big work project, or
something
, because they couldn’t stand to be together in the same room most of the time? They’d had fun together in college, but ever since they had been totally unable to make it work. In Sally’s opinion, Bree was wasting her most beautiful years on a relationship that had been doomed from the start. Whenever she tried to talk to April about it, April immediately accused her of being homophobic, but Sally knew that wasn’t it—Bree wasn’t even gay, for Christ’s sake! Sally had once asked her whether she would date men or women if she ever broke up with Lara, and Bree had said, “Oh men, definitely,” without even having to think.

Sally gave Lara credit, though, for coming all the way from California, for sending flowers when she got engaged, which was more than any of the others had done.

She had to stifle a laugh when she saw Jake’s mother staring at Lara’s getup.

“This crowd loves you, huh?” Sally whispered.

“Oh yeah,” Lara said. “Since I got to the restaurant, I’ve already been asked if I was in a fraternity in college by one guy, and whether I like k.d. lang by another. And Jake’s grandmother asked if I just moved here from Japan. When I said I’m from Virginia, she said, ‘There’s a Virginia in Japan?’”

Sally cringed. “Oh God, I’m so sorry.”

“Not a problem,” Lara said. “I just can’t wait to see you get hitched. Anyway, now that April’s here she’ll probably take some of the heat off.”

“Yeah, those dreads are my mother-in-law’s worst nightmare,” Sally said.

She watched Celia fill a wineglass and hand it to April before filling up her own and downing half of it in one gulp. Just as she started to get annoyed, Jake leaned over and took her hand.

“I’m glad you’re here,” he said.

“Why? Has my father been misbehaving?” she asked.

“Nah,” Jake said. “I just missed you.”

The waiters arrived, carrying trays piled high with Caesar salad, antipasti, and chicken parmigiana over spaghetti. Sally had special-ordered a plate of roasted eggplant over whole wheat ziti for April.

“You have the vegan entrée, right?” a waiter asked her, and April turned to Sally and smiled.

“You’re amazing,” April said.

Out of the corner of her eye, Sally saw Jake’s parents kiss. As annoying as they could often be, Rosemary and Joe clearly still loved each other. Sally knew that, statistically speaking, this probably increased Jake’s odds of being a good husband, but it made her sad when she set them against her own parents and thought of how her mother had never really known love like that. This was something Sally hadn’t realized about weddings until she started planning one—no matter how simple, they were never just about the bride and groom. Those in attendance who were in love felt all the happier; their love strengthened by being in the presence of a new, hopeful marriage. For those who hadn’t been lucky in love,
a wedding was like a bad paper cut—annoying and painful and impossible to ignore.