Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood (10 page)

Not all of that spirit was gone. She still had it, but she had a more tempered version. That time with Eric in Baja had been both the height of that magic and its calamitous end. He had managed to inspire both.

She was a bit more fragile now. Or no. Maybe she was less fragile. Maybe she had come to terms with her injuries and knew how to protect them. She was more self-protective, that was true. But she was a girl without a mother. She had to protect herself.

Bridget had the sense that she was already popular among her constituency. The boys assigned to her made a big thing about it among themselves. As they gathered around her now, some looked boldly admiring and others just looked terrified. She had several capable, well-muscled kids. One of them, a blond, spoke English with an accent. For some reason, the face that drew her belonged to a broad-faced, freckled, sharp-featured kid with long, gangly legs and extremely large feet. He had a great face—all eagerness—but even just standing still made him look uncoordinated. He was going to be a project, she could tell.

While their teams put on their jerseys (Bridget’s team was sky blue), she found herself standing near Eric again. “You’re popular, aren’t you? I’ve never felt like such a letdown,” Eric said, laughing, and she was pleased if he meant what she thought he meant.

“So how’s it going?” she asked him coolly. She wanted him to know she was different now. “You look tan.”

“I just got back from two weeks in Mexico.”

Bridget felt her face strain. What was he trying to say to her? She’d never been the kind of person who’d overthought people’s motives, and she didn’t feel like starting now.

From his face, he seemed to recognize that he had already shoved them into slightly awkward territory.

She cleared her throat. “How was it?”

He was uncomfortable. “We stayed with my grandmother in Mulege. And then we traveled down to Los Cabos and ended up in Mexico City for a few days.”

Bridget heard one word louder than the others. He was doing that
we
thing. What was we? Who was we? She wasn’t going to stand here wondering.

“Who is we?”

He paused. He wasn’t looking at her anymore. “We? Oh, uh, me and Kaya. My girlfriend.”

Bridget nodded. His girlfriend. Kaya. “Wow. Good for you.”

Had he wanted to tell her this? Had he not wanted to tell her?

“See you,” Bridget said numbly, walking away to stake a place for her team to gather. She wished she could have blasted those buzzing, swarming expectations with a can of bug spray.

You had hopes, admit it.
She hated dishonesty, especially in herself.
You know you did.

Lena stared out the window of the bus. It was empty, so she pulled her legs up onto the seat and hugged them, loving the feeling of the Traveling Pants against her skin. It had been a wonderful afternoon of drawing, almost magical. Partly because of wearing the Pants, partly because she felt she was really making progress.

She pictured the last pose of the day—twenty minutes. She loved the long pose best. They had a new model now, Michelle. She had round hips and long, hyperextending arms. Lena had no thought of assessing the model in terms of beauty. Michelle represented a series of drawing challenges. Lena looked out the window of the bus, but she saw Michelle’s elbows.

Lena liked her time on the bus, and the slow walk from the bus stop to her house in the sweet end-of-day light. It gave her a transition between the meditation of her class and the sharpness of home.

This night she was greeted sharply. Her father was yelling before she could put her bag down.

“Where have you been?” He hadn’t changed out of his suit yet. He did not look relaxed.

She kept her mouth shut. She had a feeling he knew where she hadn’t been.

“I dropped by the restaurant on my way home from work to say hello and you were not there,” he rumbled.

She shook her head. She felt the dull thud starting in her chest. She would wait to find the extent of his knowledge before trying any damage control.

“You don’t work the dinner shift, do you?”

She shook her head again.

“You were at that art class, weren’t you?”

Was there any point in denying it? There were many stated rules of the Pants, but she realized there was an unstated one too: You couldn’t lie in the Pants. At least, she couldn’t.

She needed to start breathing again. “Yeah.”

His face moved and twitched in anger. His eyes bulged. That was the thing she always dreaded. She and Effie knew that when his eyes went like that they were in serious trouble. It had happened very rarely throughout their childhood. But in these long months since he’d brought his unwilling mother to live with them, it happened a lot more often.

Lena’s mother appeared in the front hall behind him. She was distressed. “Let’s talk about this in a calm way. George, why don’t you change before dinner. Lena, get yourself settled.” She had to pull George away like a coach walking a prizefighter back to his corner.

Lena ran upstairs and closed her door. She waited to see if she needed to cry. She endured a couple heaves. A tear soaked into the knee of the Pants. Her cheeks were blazing and her pulse was throbbing all around her body.

Dinner was a quiet, tense affair. Effie was at a friend’s house. Valia’s complaints—freshened by her knee injury—actually broke the tension rather than added to it, so thick was the air. At least someone was talking.

Afterward, Lena and her mother and father closed themselves up in the den.

Her father’s anger wasn’t as hot, but it seemed to have gotten deeper. “I’ve done some thinking, Lena.”

She was sitting on her hands.

“I am deeply troubled that you’ve lied to us.”

Breathe in. Breathe out.

“You know I’ve never been happy with the idea of art school for you,” he went on. “It’s impractical, it’s expensive, and at the end of four years, you’ll have no job prospects. You can’t seriously think you’ll make a living as an artist.”

Lena looked at her mother. She knew Ari was stuck. She didn’t disagree with her husband, but she didn’t agree with him either.

“After seeing that class, I felt it was wrong for you in other ways too. It’s not a good atmosphere for a young girl. Some parents may accept that kind of environment for their daughters, but I can’t.” At least he wasn’t yelling. “I’ve told your mother this already. I can’t support your decision. We will not pay for you to go to RISD. We will pay for a regular university, but we won’t pay for that.”

Lena was stunned. “Isn’t it a little late for this decision?” Her voice sounded raw.

“You can find a program, I think. Your grades are good. Some universities are still taking applications. If not, you can apply for next fall and stay home and work to make money.”

I’d rather die
, she felt like shouting at him. But she didn’t. She said nothing. What could she say? What would matter to him? Certainly not her feelings.

He was punishing her for disobeying him. He was dressing up his punishment in clothing of practicality, pretending he was being a good father, but she knew what it was.

She pulled her hands out from under her. They felt as cold as marble. Her blood had stopped circulating through her body.

She got up slowly and walked out of the room. He wouldn’t hear her words. She doubted he’d hear her silence, either.

Patrick: I’m mad.
SpongeBob: What’s the matter, Patrick?
Patrick: I can’t see my forehead.

T
here was a funny thing about Carmen, and she knew it all too well: She could understand and analyze and predict the exact outcome of her crazy, self-destructive behavior and then go ahead and do it anyway. It was called premeditation, and it caused people to have to go to jail for their whole lives as opposed to just a few years.

What made a person like that?

As Carmen once again lay in wait for her tired mother, pretending to flip casually through a magazine in the living room, she was full of guilty premeditation.

She kindly waited to pounce, though, until her mom had taken off her shoes and lain down on the living room couch. Now that the truth was out about the baby, Christina’s stomach was expanding remarkably.

“I got a call from the admissions director of University of Maryland today,” Carmen said conversationally, flipping the pages of the magazine a little too fast.

The truth was, Carmen wasn’t excited about the prospect of spending her freshman year at the University of Maryland. It was a decent school, but it wasn’t a fantastic one, like Williams. It was huge and anonymous where Williams was small and personal.

What Carmen was excited about, in some perverse way, was telling her mother.

Christina was too tired even to express the extent of her confusion.
“Why?”

“Because I applied there, and the admissions lady wanted to tell me they were making a special allowance and letting me in.”

Christina tried to sit up a bit. “
Nena
, I have no idea what you are talking about.”

“I’m thinking about going to UM instead of Williams.”

Now Christina sat the whole way up. “Why in the world would you do that?”

“Because maybe I’m not ready to leave home just now. Maybe I want to stay and help out and be part of the baby’s life.” Carmen tossed this off as though she were describing her plans to get a manicure.

“Carmen?” Her mother’s look was satisfying. She was definitely and certainly paying attention to Carmen’s future and nobody else’s at this particular moment.

“What?” Carmen blinked innocently.

Christina inhaled and exhaled yoga style a few times. She settled back onto the cushions and thought awhile before she opened her mouth to talk. “Darling. In my selfish heart, I want nothing more than for you to stay home. I hate the thought of you leaving. I’ll miss you terribly. You know that. I want you to stay with me and David and the baby. In my selfish heart, that is my fantasy.”

Carmen felt tears bulging out of her lids. She’d swung from pure insouciance to tears in under twenty seconds.

Christina’s voice was soft as she continued. “But a good mother doesn’t just obey the wishes of her selfish heart. A good mother does what she believes is the best thing for her child. Sometimes they are the same. This time they are different.”

Carmen pawed at her cheeks with the back of her hand. What kind of tears were these, exactly? Tears of joy? Agony? Fear? Confusion? Maybe a few of each?

“How do you know that?” Carmen’s voice was full and high with emotion. “How do you know they aren’t the same?”

“Because Williams is the right place for a girl as smart and capable as you,
nena
. You belong there.”

“I belong at home.”

“You’ll always belong at home. Going to Williams doesn’t mean you won’t belong at home.”

“Maybe it will,” Carmen said.

“It won’t.”

Carmen shrugged and wiped her eyes again with the back of her hand. “I feel like it will.”

Lenny,

You sounded so sad on the phone earlier, we thought these might cheer you up. The lady at the candy store said she never knew a person who only liked root beer–flavored jelly beans, and to be honest, the all-brown bag doesn’t look quite as attractive as the tropical fruit mix, for example. But you are you, Lenny, and we love you like that.

XXXXXXXXXXX OOOOOOOOO,

Tib + Carma

Tibby was outside her window. She was looking up at it, clutching the sill with her hands, feeling the emptiness under her feet. Inside was warm yellow light, and outside, where she was, it was dark. She could feel the apple tree somewhere behind her, but she couldn’t see it. Her hands hurt, her arms were lifeless. She wanted to get back into her room so badly. How had she gotten here? Why had she done it? She couldn’t drop down into dark emptiness, but she couldn’t get back inside, either.

“Tibby? Tibby?”

Tibby opened her eyes and took a moment to orient herself. She was slumped in a movie theater chair. The lights were on. The screen in front of her was blank. Margaret was ever so gently waking her.

“Hi, Margaret. Hi. I fell asleep, didn’t I?”

“You did. Don’t worry. Your shift is over. I jis took care of the garbage for you, so that’s all sit.”

Tibby looked at her gratefully. “Thanks so much. I’ll get yours next time, okay?” Groggily she sat up and let the dream ebb away. She didn’t used to fall asleep in movies. But working in a theater could do that to you. Once she’d taken the tickets for the four o’clock show and made sure everyone was in their seats and vacuumed the lobby, she was allowed to watch. That was the whole reason she’d asked for Margaret’s help to get her this job.

But now she’d seen
The Actress
fourteen times. The first three or four were pretty good. But slowly after that, the suspense drained out of the suspense. The spontaneity of the love affair shriveled to nothing. By the tenth or twelfth time, Tibby could practically see the gears working in the actors’ heads. She could practically see the cheap manipulations of the camera work. By the fourteenth time…well, she fell asleep.

As a lifelong movie lover, it was sad, in a way, for her to watch the magic of the illusion dry up like a piece of macaroni left overnight in Katherine’s booster seat. It made Tibby feel dull and flat. And watching the excitement on the faces of the audience just made her feel worse. She knew that every audience member was taken in by the big swelling climax, with the cellos and violins and gigantic close-ups of earnest, rapturous faces. They felt it was all happening magically and powerfully for them alone. Of course they didn’t consider that they were clutched in the fist of this elaborate fraud. It didn’t matter.

Tibby had gotten accepted to the film program at NYU on the strength of the movie she’d made about Bailey the summer before. She was about to spend four years learning how to make films. She’d thought it was what she wanted more than anything. But now Tibby was beginning to wonder.

She imagined, depressingly, what it must feel like to be a wedding officiator or a doctor who delivered babies. You’d watch these people in the middle of their personal wonders, imagining for themselves a pure, unique once-in-a-lifetime experience. And then an hour or two later you’d watch somebody else do the same thing. What they thought were miracles were your breakfast, lunch, and dinner.