Commencement (8 page)

Her BlackBerry buzzed on the table. Bree tried to resist the urge, but opened the frantic e-mail from her boss, asking about a brief she’d filed the day before. She dashed off a quick reply. It was the
first time she’d taken any vacation since she started at the firm a year earlier, and the way they were freaking out about it, you would have thought she was taking a month off instead of two lousy days.

Bree pulled out a chair and sat down, gathering her long blonde hair into a knot.

Sally was getting married. Sally, who had always somehow been both the most sensible and the craziest of them all, the girl who set a record for streaking across the Quad; who carried on an affair with a professor who was more than twice her age; who drank so much at winter formal junior year that she had to be rushed to Cooley Dickinson in an ambulance to have her stomach pumped. It had only been four years since all of that. How could so much have changed so quickly?

Bree realized it was nasty to think anything but wonderful thoughts about the marriage of one of her best friends. She never wanted to be the sort of woman who measured everyone else’s happiness against her own. And of course, in some ways, she could picture Sally married—she was, after all, the only woman in America under sixty who had voluntarily enrolled in a flower-arranging class. In college, she had taken the role of neat freak to levels Bree never knew existed. She laundered her sheets and comforter every Sunday morning, flipping her mattress while they dried. She regularly cleaned the tub with bleach, even though the housekeeper did the same. She occasionally washed her keys in boiling, soapy water. She decorated her room for every holiday: red paper hearts on the windows in February, a tiny Christmas tree with working lights and a shining gold star. And it was more than just that. Sally had lost her mother, and she’d been aching for a family ever since. Unlike the rest of them, Sally wanted to start having kids by the time she was thirty. Overplanner that she was, she had decided long ago that she wanted a few years alone with Jake before her babies came along.

Bree genuinely liked Jake; they all did, although she and April agreed he wasn’t exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer. They had been e-mailing back and forth with Celia, all three of them trying to decide what to get Sally for a wedding present, when April sent a message saying,
Not to be an asshole, but remember when Sal and Jake were first dating and she went to his place, and she told us he only
owned two books—the Bible and something by John Grisham? Should we be worried about that?

Bree had responded immediately:
Well that depends on whether you think there’s cause for concern when our best friend is about to marry someone whose favorite author is Dr. Seuss
.

April shot back:
Maybe we should get them his complete works as a wedding gift? Or a first edition of
Green Eggs and Ham.

Bree laughed as she read this, but just as she hit
REPLY
she got an e-mail from Celia, ever the den mother.

Stop it, you two
, she wrote.
How dumb can he be? He went to Georgetown for Christ’s sake! Jake is a great guy. He’s just … uncomplicated. And Sally loves him, so he’s off-limits for mocking now
.

April replied:
Uncomplicated? And that’s a good thing?

Celia wrote back:
For Sally, yes
.

The correspondence turned to other topics then—Celia’s date the night before, the fact that April had been arrested again and Ronnie had had to bail her out. Then they began to discuss boring wedding details—how they’d wear their hair, whether Sally had a preference about shoes. Without thinking, Bree forwarded the entire exchange on to Sally, and wrote:
See below … your thoughts on shoes?

As soon as she hit
SEND
she clapped a hand over her mouth.

“Shit,” she said. She hoped Sally wouldn’t read farther than the first message. Bree assumed she hadn’t, because two days later, Sally just wrote back:
Sweetpea, sorry for the delayed response. Work has been CRAZY. You guys should wear whatever you want, unless you want to wear Doc Martens. XO

Celia, who had minored in psych in college and seemed to think that made her an authority on human behavior, said she thought Bree had done it on purpose.

“Why would I do that?” Bree asked.

“Maybe because you want her to know how you feel, but you’re afraid to tell her.”

“Why would I want her to know that I think Jake is stupid?”

“That’s not what I meant,” Celia said.

It was true that for some reason Bree couldn’t make it through a conversation with Sally about Jake without snapping at her. Sally
just acted so smug about it all, so over the top when she described how happy they were together. The extent of Bree’s disappointment shocked her. It felt almost physical, like a broken rib poking through the skin, so that every time her thoughts twisted this way or that, a horrible pain spread through her whole body.

When she was fifteen years old, Bree bought a two-foot stack of bridal magazines at the A&P and hid them under her bed like porn, so her brothers wouldn’t make fun. At night, she folded down the edges of each page that featured a dress like the one she wanted—ivory, with a full-on Bo Peep skirt and a row of silk-covered buttons from the base of her spine to the top of her neck.

She and Doug Anderson got engaged right after high school graduation. All through the ceremony, across the rows of bleachers, she could see that he was sweating. Anyone else might have thought it was from wearing a black cap and gown in the Savannah heat, but Bree knew better—something had him terrified. A few hours later, at the picnic their fathers threw at Forsyth Park, Doug took her over to a row of oak trees and propped her up against one as though she might lose control of her bones. He still looked afraid, even after drinking two beers.

“You okay?” she asked him, and just as the words came out of her mouth, he fell to one knee. He didn’t have the ring in a velvet box, the way she had pictured. Instead, he uncurled his fingers and the diamond band sat right in the palm of his hand. He reminded Bree of a little boy bringing his mama a treasure from the garden, a lady-bug or a double-headed acorn.

She said yes before he could even ask. Doug jumped to his feet and squeezed her tight. He kissed her until she felt like the sun was shining out from inside of her and she might actually burst into a thousand glittering shards of light. And then their families gathered around them, and everyone toasted with good champagne, and Bree realized that they had all known. This was meant to be her engagement party. She could still remember the proud look on her daddy’s face, her grandmother’s giddy chatter about whether Bree ought to carry red roses or calla lilies when she walked down the aisle. Only her mother stood back from the crowd, her lips pressed
tightly together, a gesture that she had once told Bree was the true secret to a happy marriage. Later though, when plans were being ironed out, she spoke up. While Doug thought Bree ought to transfer to the University of Georgia so that they could be married within the year, her mother insisted that she give Smith a fair shot, and that they make the engagement a long one.

When Bree was in grade school, she and her mother would go to Northampton for a few days every summer. They’d walk around campus, eat fancy dinners downtown, get manicures and blowouts, buy tiny soaps in the shape of fish or hearts or elephants at the Cedar Chest on Main Street. Her brothers would have to stay behind.

Bree had been romanticizing the Smith Sisterhood ever since. She loved the idea of living in a land of women, rich in tradition. Tea parties and candlelight dinners and friends you’d keep for a lifetime. When it came time to think about college, she applied only to Smith, early decision, and was accepted within a week.

Doug and Bree both wanted to be lawyers, someday going into practice together. Her secret wish was to go to Stanford Law, and not wanting to jinx herself, she had told no one but Doug.

He teased her, saying over and over, “No trusting Southerner is gonna want a lawyer who ran off to some Yankee college and then got a law degree in hippie-dippy California.”

Bree knew he was scared. He didn’t want her to go so far away. She tried to reassure him, even though all summer long she felt like a pioneer: She was the only person they knew who was leaving the South for college.

But when it came time to say good-bye, Bree suddenly grew terrified. She held his hands so tight that her fingernails left ten perfect moons on his palms when she let go.

Her parents had the car all loaded up and were sitting in the front seat trying to give them their privacy. Eventually, her father beeped the horn, and she and Doug embraced long and hard. He kissed the diamond on her hand as a sort of seal on the promise they’d made. They had already planned their reunion over Bree’s fall break, imagining out loud how they would run to each other in
the airport, just like characters in an old movie (her vision), and have sex in his dad’s Oldsmobile before even leaving the parking garage (his).

Bree had seen him almost every day of her life since kindergarten. They had been a couple for more than three years.

“I can’t believe I have to wait until October to be with you again,” she said.

“Well, if you stay here with me, you won’t have to,” he said.

Two flights and several hours later, Bree arrived in Northampton, just in time to register and run to the first house meeting. It was time enough to determine that this was not her mother’s Smith College and that she wanted out. Back in the seventies, good Southern parents sent their girls off to the Seven Sisters to stay out of trouble and away from men. Bree would bet anything that her mother had never heard about shower hours, and if she did now, she’d yank Bree right out of this place.

On her way into registration, Bree had seen someone’s dad point at a group of shaved-headed lesbians sitting in the grass. He said to his daughter, “I don’t think you’ll have trouble meeting boys around here. They’re everywhere.”

“Those are women!” the girl hissed.

The father looked like he’d been shot.

Bree skipped dinner that night and called her parents, and then Doug, from her room.

“Jacobson and Jones are having a kegger in their suite tonight,” Doug said excitedly. “All the guys from home will be there, and Kathleen said to tell you we’ll give you a good drunk dialing later.”

“Oh,” Bree said. “Sounds fun.”

She had watched these boys drink beers on countless nights, in parking lots, and at the drive-in, and out at the old stone quarry. Would their next four years be any different from their last? She felt jealous of and sorry for them all at once.

“I miss you,” she said.

“Hey,” he said. “Me too, babydoll. I hate hearing you so sad.”

Doug tried to sound soothing, but in the background people were laughing and yelling and shouting his name, and he had to keep asking her to repeat herself.

Eventually Bree said, “I’m fine, baby. Go have fun.”

He didn’t argue.

Bree went to the bathroom with a towel slung over her shoulder, and her little pink shower caddy in her hand. She stood alone before a row of sinks, bathed in fluorescent light, and scrubbed off her eye makeup, her blush. She flossed her teeth and thought—she couldn’t help it—about how fat all the older girls at the house meeting had been.

Down the hall, someone let out a squeal of recognition, the sound you make when you see a familiar face that you haven’t seen in ages. Bree’s loneliness was so strong that she half expected it to take the form of another person and materialize there beside her, perched on the ugly Formica countertop in a fuzzy bathrobe and hot rollers.

She walked back to her room and shut the door. Before leaving home she had ripped dozens of pages out of her bridal magazines and placed them in an envelope marked
Wedding Inspiration
. She pulled them out now, lovingly smoothing the pages as if they were photographs of old friends. She tacked them to her bulletin board, one by one.

She tried calling Doug again, but the phone just rang and rang. Back in Georgia, she knew, he was off to the party, probably surrounded by gorgeous Southern college girls with their fine summer dresses and smooth, glossy hair.

It was only ten-thirty when Bree crawled into bed, intent on crying herself to sleep. As she always did when she was scared or sad, she tried to mentally recall each and every date she and Doug had ever been on. (She usually fell asleep or calmed down by about the fifth or sixth.) First date: They went to the movies with Melissa Fairbanks and Chris Carlson. Doug paid for her ticket; Chris did not pay for Melissa’s. Second date: The Sadie Hawkins dance. She had asked him, as was the custom, and instead of some dopey corsage he had sent roses to the house, something he would continue to do on the first Saturday of every month, right up until the previous day, the last day at home before Bree came to Smith. The third date: Their first kiss, and Doug had said right then and there, “Bree Miller, you’re the girl I’m gonna marry.”

Thinking on this, Bree began to weep. She stared up at the ceiling, where someone had left behind a constellation of tiny glow-in-the-dark stars. She ran her ring over her lips. Why hadn’t she listened to Doug when he told her to come with him? What was so great about this place that she had left him and all their friends behind? Doug had been talking about wanting to get married and have babies since freshman year of high school. If two people loved each other enough, couldn’t they overcome anything—even distance, even their own goddamn youth?

After a short while, Celia slid a note under the door.

They liked each other immediately. In the weeks that followed, Bree taught Celia how to create a smoky eye using just one gray shadow, and Celia taught Bree how to make an Irish car bomb, a drink so potent that it sent Bree into hysterics, and made her drunk dial Doug at 4:00 a.m. to tell him she had a feeling all their babies would be born with freckles.

She often thought of her auntie Sue and auntie Kitty—not really aunts at all, but her mother’s Smith roommates and lifelong best friends. She knew almost from the start that Celia would be that person for her. The godmother to her children, the maid of honor when she married Doug, although the one thing Celia didn’t seem to understand about her was the engagement.