Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood (14 page)

“Win.” She realized she said it in the same slightly argumentative tone he did. She was already taking his side.

“Win?” they both asked.

“Yeah. Short for Winthrop. What can he do? He didn’t name himself.”

“I like it,” Lena stated.

Tibby studied Carmen for a long minute. “Oh, my God. Carma Carmeena Carmabelle. You like this guy, don’t you?”

Carmen was blushing.

“This is amazing. This is new,” Tibby continued. “You do like him.”

“But he doesn’t like me. That’s the problem. He is a good person. He’s premed. He volunteers at the hospital all day long. He likes Good Carmen.”

“So why not set him straight?” Lena asked.

“Because he won’t like me anymore.”

“Why don’t you try it?”

“Because I’m scared to. I don’t want to ruin it for him. I’d rather he have his idealized version of me than introduce him to the real thing. I like the way he thinks of me—I mean Good Carmen.”

Lena lifted her sunglasses. She was resolute. “Carmen, that’s just sad. Be yourself. If he doesn’t like you for yourself, then he ain’t worth it.”

“Hallelujah,” said Tibby.

Carmen studied them suspiciously. “What’s with you two?”

Bridget sat with her clipboard on her lap at the side of the soccer field, chewing on a piece of grass. She didn’t even bother to lace up her cleats these days. She went around barefoot. She even played barefoot. It was unorthodox, she knew, but who really cared?

Eric was pacing a few yards away. He was watching his team doing dribbling exercises. She didn’t get that screaming feeling in her cells quite so much now when she saw him. She was getting used to him.

“Blye at forward,” she said to no one in particular. She’d put Lundgren, the Swede, on defense. He was versatile. The European kids always had the best fundamentals. Naughton, her special favorite, she put in the goal. He was completely uncoordinated, but he had a weird, seemingly dumb magnetism for the ball. At the moment she had her team carrying out an elaborate pattern of sprints. She wanted to get her roster in order before they got back.

Suddenly her clipboard was in shadow. “Away. No spying,” she ordered without looking up.

Eric stepped back about one foot. “You’re crazy to put Naughton in the goal.”

“I’m crazy to put him anywhere. No spying. No peeking. No Peking. No Beijing.”

“It’s friendly advice.”

“All friendly till we beat you soundly.”

“Ooooh. I’m scared.”

She looked up at him finally. He pretended he was going to step on her feet. She put her hand over her eyes, squinting in the sun. She smiled at him, and a nice thought passed through her mind.
I think we’re really friends.

Eric had joined her and Diana for dinner the past two nights. At first Diana seemed alarmed, but she got used to him. You could get used to almost anything. They spent three hours sitting at a table in the cafeteria discussing the relative merits of each of their teams like the three big soccer dorks they were.

Bridget and Eric hung out now even when they didn’t have to. He joined her for her evening runs sometimes. They ate their lunch on the field together (except Mondays, when they pretended to chaperone in the dining hall) and talked strategy. They didn’t make a big deal of it or anything.

She could do this. She could. It wasn’t that hard. She loved him, maybe so, but she also loved being with him. She could be happy with just that. She didn’t need any more.

Finally, finally, at last the strange air of their encounter was dissipating. Her new relationship with him had almost entirely eclipsed the old one. She felt like she could trust herself with him now.

Bridget watched her breathless team streaming back toward her across the field. She stood waiting for them like a proud mama. Naughton was the first one in her face. She frankly suspected he’d cheated a corner or two, because he wasn’t all that fast. “Hey, Naughty, how’d you do?”

“Good.” He was trying to catch his breath.

“You all get water,” she ordered the group. “Then we’ll get to work.”

Naughton continued to hang around her, not quite balanced on his bumpy knees, while the others got water. He was always asking her stuff. He was her project, and he knew it. “You running tonight?” he asked her.

“Probably. Maybe a short one.”

“Can I come?”

This was new. “Uh…I guess. If you have anything left after I finish with you all today.”

He looked eager. “I’ll keep up. Don’t worry.”

This made her remember things that had happened two years ago. How she would foist herself upon Eric when he tried to lead runs in Mexico. She would bother him and show off and flirt outrageously. God, had she really done that?

She was still thinking about this as she and Eric walked to the dining hall for lunch a couple of hours later.

He noticed she was quiet, but he didn’t bug her.

Joe Warshaw intercepted them at the front of the room. “Just the two I need,” he said, pulling them off to the side. He sort of winked at Bridget as if to say, “See, your partner’s not so bad, is he?”

Bridget looked down at her toes.

“We’ve planned a rafting trip this weekend,” Joe explained. “It’s an overnight down the Schuylkill. It’s an easy stretch, one portage. We’ve got eight kids signed up. Esmer was supposed to do it, but he has to take off this weekend, and you two are both on. Do you mind?”

“Does it matter if we mind?” Eric asked. He knew the way of Joe.

Joe smiled brightly. “No, actually.”

“Well, then,” Eric said.

“I’ll tell the kitchen guys to get all the tents and stuff packed into the van. I’ll make it easy for you, how’s that?”

Eric and Joe talked logistics while Bridget’s mind raced around the place. She was going on an overnight camping trip with Eric. Oh, God. She trusted herself to stick to the friendly banter during meals and even lake duty. She had mastered that subtle art. But sleeping close to him in a sleeping bag under the stars? She wasn’t sure she trusted herself to be able to do that.

Hey, girlies,

41 days!!!! Do you know where your bikinis are?

Bee

It came to her in a dream. It really did.

Lena was dreaming about Valia and her mother and Effie and all kinds of incongruent bits and pieces. And in her dream she went into the dining room—or a place that she knew was the dining room even though it looked kind of different. And instead of her family members sitting in the chairs, there were drawings of them—big wide sheets of paper with charcoal drawings propped on the chairs. Lena not only liked these drawings, in her dream, but she knew that she had made them.

And when she woke up, she knew what her portfolio project was going to be. It wasn’t so much that she wanted to draw a series of portraits of her family. It was that she knew it was the right thing to do.

She decided to start with her mother, the source of all things. Besides, she knew she could make her mother agree to it. After dinner, she scouted the house for the right place to pose her.

“Sit there.” Lena pointed to the living room couch, green velvet, with pillows carefully arranged. She studied her mother. No. She didn’t really repose in the living room very often.

“Let’s try the kitchen,” Lena said, and her mother followed her there. She sat Ari down at the kitchen table. Better. But her mother was never really sitting down.

“Stand, okay?” Lena said. She let her mother gravitate to her own spot at the counter. That made sense. Without thinking, her mother put her chin in her hands, her elbows resting on the granite counter, waiting for Lena to pick.

“Don’t move,” Lena said. “That’s good.” She brought a stool opposite her mother and propped her drawing board on her lap. Lena made herself look for a long time before she started. She wanted to see all that was real and also what was there. She didn’t want to let herself shy away.

She started. She liked the softness of her mother’s skin contrasting with the gleaming granite countertop, the way the skin of her elbows puddled a bit upon it. Her mother eschewed softness, longed for hardness, but softness was what she had.

Lena wanted to capture her mother’s worn, slightly bagging knuckles with the hard permanence of her wedding ring pressing as it now did into her mother’s cheek. She considered her mother’s severely glinting diamond studs, a twentieth anniversary gift from Lena’s father, sitting in her soft, tired earlobes.

Drawing wasn’t a passive exercise, Annik liked to say. You had to find the information; you had to go in after it.

Lena pushed herself to look deeper into the tentative set of her mother’s eyes, the lines burrowing toward her lips, made more pronounced by the careful, deliberate way she held them.

Ari wanted to support Lena in some way. She would sit for this drawing until every one of her limbs went to sleep. But she needed to stay allied with her husband, too. She’d made too many compromises already this year to pull out. She was an appeaser, maybe, but by now she was accountable herself.

Lena saw these conflicts fighting in each quadrant of her mother’s face. She saw the tiny fault lines betraying the feelings that pulled her mother apart. Ari was so placid in some ways, her smooth hair, her plucked brows, her elegant clothes in every soft shade of beige. And in other ways, Lena could see she was waging an internal war.

Lena imagined herself a field marshal, overseeing the hostilities between her mother’s eyebrows. Then she imagined herself a cartographer, mapping out each curve and concavity between Ari’s cheekbone and her jaw. She imagined herself a blind person, feeling her way around her mother’s neck and collarbone with her charcoal. She pictured herself the size of a mite, crawling over the canyonlike hollows of her mother’s shoulders.

When Lena brought the drawing in to Annik the next day, Annik was plainly excited. She was near speechless.

“Do you think I got the chair?” Lena asked timidly.

Annik hugged her, knocking Lena’s legs into her wheels. “I really do.”

Should we have stayed home and thought of here?
—Elizabeth Bishop

“H
ey, Naughty.”

Bridget hadn’t told Naughton exactly the time of her run that evening, but he was there nonetheless. She wondered how long he’d been waiting by the road at the foot of the hill. Eric, this evening, had not come.

They ran in silence for quite some time. The air was so heavy you could practically feel the water squishing around in it. Bridget had to hand it to Naughty. The uphill stretch was fairly brutal—she liked to start a run tough—and he kept right with her even when he looked like he was going to die.

He was fourteen. He seemed infinitely younger than she, but she realized with some mortification that he was no more distant from her age than she was from Eric’s.

He kept turning his head to look at her. He was nervous.

She paused briefly at the top of the mountain to enjoy the view. It was part of her ritual. The silence was punctuated by Naughton, who was breathing so hard she was afraid he might blow out a lung.

She waited until they were headed downhill to get conversational. “How’s it going?” she asked him.

“G-g-ood.” He worked hard for the word.

He waited until they had finished the four-mile loop and begun walking to unburden his heart. “Um, Bridget?”

“Yeah?”

“Do you like Bridget or Bee?”

“Either. Both.”

“Okay, uh, Bee?”

“Yeah?”

“I wanted to tell you something.”

“Okay.”

Silence.

“Uh…never mind.” Sweat made his whole face shine.

“Okay.”

He couldn’t bear to leave it at that. “I, uh, think you’re…pretty amazing.”

“I like you, too, Naughty.”

He cleared his throat. “I think I’m talking about a different kind of like.”

“Like a girlfriend?” She cut to the chase. This could take all night.

He was surprised. “Yes.”

“I’m your coach, Naughty. You know I can’t be your girlfriend.” That hadn’t been good enough for her, back in Baja, had it? Why did she think it was good enough for him?

“Do you have a boyfriend?” he asked.

This would have been an easy out, but she didn’t feel like lying. “No. Not really.”

“Maybe after camp?” he proposed. “I could wait.”

He was so much sweeter and more rational than she had been. Why seal off all hope? “Maybe someday. Who knows what will happen?”

A few hours later, she was sitting next to Eric on the dock. The sun was setting behind the trees and she was feeling thoughtful.

“Can I apologize to you for something?” she asked him, kicking her bare feet back and forth in the warm air.

“What do you have to apologize for?” he asked lazily. His hair was messed up from drying with the lake water in it. His face was stubbly and relaxed in a way it had never been with her that first summer.

“Two summers ago.”

He winced a little, but he let her go on.

“That kid Jack Naughton wants to be my boyfriend. He’s sweet, but it made me think of myself. It made me remember how I behaved to you, and I felt so ashamed.” She cracked a piece of wood off the dock and threw it into the water. She let out a breath. “I’m sorry I did that. You must have thought I was so ridiculous.”

Eric’s face was pained. He was silent for a long time.

She brought her feet up onto the dock and hugged her knees to her chest. She pressed her chin against one brown knee, afraid to look at him. She could feel the weight of her loose hair drying against her back.

They hadn’t talked about this before. In all their many hours spent together, they hadn’t mentioned the fact that they’d known each other—much less
known
each other. They never talked about “us.” There wasn’t any “us.”

But now, she was raising the specter of “us,” wasn’t she? Not to reawaken it, she promised herself. That was not it. Her mind supplied a funny version of the famous
Julius Caesar
line:
I come not to praise us, but to bury us.

Eric rubbed a hand through his hair. “I didn’t think you were ridiculous,” he said at last, a little defensively. “It was more complicated than that.”