Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood (27 page)

The letter didn’t say no; it said yes. Lena closed her eyes and allowed the pleasure to seep through her. She was strict with herself about feeling joy, but this moment she had earned.

She went into the kitchen and literally sat on the letter, thinking about it for a long time. She would go and she could go. She didn’t need her parents’ money and she didn’t need their permission. She thought about that, too. She didn’t need it, but she wanted it. That’s what she realized.

She put on a neat navy skirt and a pretty linen blouse. She brushed her hair smooth and put pearl earrings in her ears. She borrowed her mother’s car to drive to her father’s office.

Mrs. Jeffords, her father’s secretary, sent Lena in without announcing her.

Her father looked surprised to see her in the doorway. Indeed, he was so surprised, he appeared genuinely happy at the sight of her, like he’d forgotten everything that had happened in the preceding two months and returned instinctively to his old tenderness.

“Come in,” he urged, standing up.

She was still holding the letter when she sat down across from him. “I heard from art school about the scholarship,” she said.

“You got it,” he said evenly.

“How did you know?” she asked.

He looked placid, almost philosophical. “Because I saw your drawings. When I saw them I knew you would get it.”

This was one of the less direct compliments she had ever received. If it even was one.

“Daddy, I don’t want to upset or disappoint you. But I really do want to go. I want you and Mom to want it with me.”

He sighed. He put his elbow on his desk and rested his cheek in his palm in a boyish way. “Lena, I’m afraid I’m the one who’s upset and disappointed you.”

She didn’t hurry up and nod, but she wasn’t going to argue, either.

“You should go to art school. You proved it to me with those drawings just as you proved it to the scholarship people.”

She kept her expression in check. She didn’t trust him yet. “So it’s okay with you, then?”

He thought about this for a while. “I’m honored that you’re asking me when you earned the right not to have to.”

Her chest ached. “I want to ask you,” she said. “It matters to me what you say.”

“The answer is yes.”

“Thanks.”

She got up to go.

“Lena?”

“Yes?”

“When I began to realize, with your mother’s help, the depth of my recent mistakes”—he cleared his throat—“I felt proud of you for not going along with them.”

“You didn’t make it easy,” she told him honestly.

God help me, Rena dear, I am coming home. George has finally seen the sense in it. Effie will fly home with me in one week. Please make arrangements with Pina, if you can spare her, to air out my house?

Dearest Valia, I cry as I read this. How happy we will be to have you home where you belong!

I have tried in my way to be free.
—Leonard Cohen

“H
i, Dad.”

“Carmen? Hi, bun! How are you?”

She felt slightly sheepish, but she couldn’t let this wait any longer. “I’m fine.”

“How’s the baby?”

“He’s great. He kicks like a black belt.”

Albert laughed appreciatively, even though it was the baby of his ex-wife and her new husband they were talking about.

“How’s your mom?” He asked it in a genuine way.

“She’s great, too. She says it’s all coming back to her, even eighteen years later.”

“I’m sure it is,” her dad said a little wistfully.

“So, Dad?”

“Yeah?”

“I’ve been thinking.”

He waited patiently, though she sort of wished he would interrupt.

“Do you think…um…” She pulled her heavy hair off of her sweaty neck. “Do you think Williams might consider taking me back again?”

“Do you think you want to go there?”

Carmen didn’t want to seem like she was making her decisions rashly, so she didn’t belt out her answer, but rather, paused. “I do.”

“What about Maryland?”

Carmen chewed her lip. “I was thinking I might board there, you know, get the college experience and still be close to home. But then I realized I really,
really
want to go to Williams. Do you think they’ll take me back? God, I mean, what are the chances they would keep a spot?” Her voice ended squeaky and she didn’t sound calm anymore.

“I’ll tell you what,” her dad said. “Let me call.”

Carmen made attempts to clean her room while she waited. In truth, she did that spasmodic, surface rearranging, like putting the random AA battery into her sock drawer to get it out of sight, that would only make the job bigger when she got down to real cleaning.

Less than ten minutes later, the phone rang. She pounced at half a ring. So much for calm.

“Hi?”

“Hi.” It was her dad again.

“Did you talk to them?” she blurted out.

“I did. And Williams College says you’re good to go.”

“They’ll take me?”

“Yep.”

“Just like that?”

“Yep.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope.”

“Seriously?” Carmen was afraid to let herself be happy quite so soon.

“I’m happy for you, bun,” her dad said. “I can hear in your voice that it’s really what you want.”

“It’s really what I want,” she echoed.

She shook her head, feeling the nerves sizzle and zing all over her body. “I can’t believe it’s that easy.”

He didn’t respond. “You better start packing,” he said instead. “And you have fun at the beach with your friends this weekend.”

“I will. Thanks.”

After she told him she loved him and hung up the phone, she got another sneaking suspicion. Could this have been a case of parental collusion again? Maybe even deceitful parental intervention?

Had her dad ever called Williams and told them she wasn’t coming? Had he ever gotten his deposit back? Was this another case of her parents knowing her better than she knew herself?

It was really annoying, in a way. But then, it was good to be loved.

Carmabelle:
Will you pack the green tube top, so I can be extremely tricky and steal it the first minute you turn away?

Tibberon:
Sure. But how am I going to figure out who took it?

Carmabelle:
I’m excited.

Tibberon:
I’m excited too.

For three long days, Bridget left Eric alone so his thoughts would go straight. And at the end of the third day, just when she thought she couldn’t stand it anymore, his head, thoughts and all, appeared by her bed, where she lay.

“Would you mind taking a walk with me?” he whispered.

She jumped out of bed. She followed him out of her cabin in her T-shirt and boxers. Suddenly she remembered something Carmen had said in the beginning of the summer. “Can you wait for me for one second?”

She left him outside and went back into the cabin. She found her white halter dress from the senior party still balled up in the bottom of her duffel bag. She hadn’t thought she would be wearing it. She shed her clothes and pulled the dress over her head. Luckily, the silky material didn’t hold its wrinkles.

The Pants would have been her first choice, of course, but she’d had to send them back to Lena. And besides, she didn’t want to be greedy. She’d already gotten what she needed from them.

“Okay,” she said, reappearing beside him in the darkness. Her feet were still bare and her hair was loose.

He blinked and took a step back to get a better look at her. “God, Bee,” he murmured. She wasn’t sure what that meant, but she wasn’t going to press him on it.

They walked side by side down toward the lake. She tried not to bounce on her feet, but she couldn’t really help it. She was happy. Her hand collided with his briefly and it set her nerves singing. After all they had been through together, all the things they’d felt and now spoken, they didn’t even know how to touch each other.

They took their usual spots at the dock. Bridget could practically see the warmth they’d left on the weathered planks from last time. She swung her legs over the water, loving the empty air under her bare toes. Their bodies made no shadows tonight; they were fully contained.

Eric pulled a little closer. His expression was wistful. “You know what?”

“What?”

“When I saw your name on that list of coaches before the summer started, I had a premonition. I knew you were going to turn my life inside out again.” He didn’t sound so sorry about it.

“If I had seen that list, I wonder if I would have come,” Bridget mused.

He let out a breath. “Did you dislike me so much?”

“Uhhhh. Dislike?” She smiled a little. “No. That’s not the word. I was afraid of you. I didn’t want to feel like that again.”

“It was hard, wasn’t it?” He was sorry, she knew.

“I was a little out of control.”

“You’ve grown up since then.”

“Some. I like to think so.”

“You have. You are different. And also not.”

She shrugged. That sounded about right.

“I’m sorry I disappeared,” he said sorrowfully. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. I didn’t know if you felt what I felt. I was worried it was just me.”

“It wasn’t.”

“Now I know.”

They considered these things.

“I’m glad I didn’t read the coach list. I’m glad I did come,” she said after a while.

“Me too. We had to find each other eventually.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. We were meant to be.”

She loved that idea. “You think?”

“I do.”

“Is that what your thoughts told you? When they went straight?” she asked. Her heart was swelling inside her ribs.

He smiled, but he looked serious too. “Yeah. It is. Maybe that doesn’t sound so straight. Maybe that’s not what I was expecting them to tell me. But they did. So there you go.”

“How did they know?”

“Because when I lay with you in my bed, there was a moment when I could feel everything you had been through, and I had this idea that if I could make you happy, then I would be happy, too.”

Bridget was too full to talk. She leaned her head against him. He put his arms around her, and she put hers around him. He’d said them simply, but these were words enough for a lifetime. He could make her happy. He had.

Last time they had started at the end. This time they started at the beginning. You couldn’t erase the past. You couldn’t even change it. But sometimes life offered you the opportunity to put it right.

Maybe tomorrow they would kiss. Maybe in the next weeks and months they would figure out how to touch each other, to translate their feelings into gestures of every kind. Someday, she hoped, they would make love.

But for now, all she wanted was this.

Following the light of the sun, we left the Old World.
—Christopher Columbus

T
he Morgans’ beach house had sandy carpets. The fridge was empty but for one half-loaf of moldy Wonder bread. The pots and pans looked as though they had been washed most recently by Joe, their almost-two-year-old.

It was also staggeringly beautiful, pitched on the sea grass in a low field of dunes set just eighty yards or so back from the Atlantic Ocean.

The first thing they did when they got there was to tear off their clothes (by previous agreement they’d all worn bathing suits under them) and run yelling and screaming straight into the ocean.

The surf was big and rough. It clubbed, tackled, and upended them. It might have seemed scary, Tibby thought, except that they were all holding hands in a chain so the undertow couldn’t drag them down the beach. And that, in addition to all the hollering and taunting and shrieking, made it fun.

The second thing they did was collapse on the warm sand. The afternoon sun dried their backs as they lay there, shoulder to shoulder. Tibby’s heart still pounded from the thrill of the water. She had pebbles in her bathing suit. She loved the feeling of the sand under her cheek. She felt happy.

She wanted to let this happiness be her guide. She wouldn’t look forward with trepidation. She wouldn’t rev her brain like that.

There would be the inescapable good-byes. The nitty-gritty ones. Like when she would watch Lena and Bee drive away to Providence in the U-Haul on Thursday. She could picture Bee laying on the horn for the first five miles away from home. Then there would be the moment on Friday when she’d kiss Carmen and watch her roll off to Massachusetts with her dad and all fifty million of her suitcases. There would be the good-byes at the train station on Saturday morning when she and her mom would board the Metroliner for New York City. Her father would clap her on the back and Katherine’s chin would tremble and Nicky would shuffle and not kiss her back. Tibby could picture it if she tried. And the good-bye to Brian. She knew that one wouldn’t stick for long. Brian was supposed to go to Maryland, because it was almost free, and yet she suspected he hadn’t gotten an 800 on his math SAT for nothing. He would find his way to her. She knew he would. It was a good thing she had scored a single room.

But this moment was for the Septembers and for them alone. This was their weekend out of time. She would live in the happiness of each one of these moments, no matter how finite. Together, the Septembers could just be.