Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood (4 page)

She stood up and looked at herself in the mirror. Did she look as different as she felt? Hmmm. Same black watch plaid pajama bottoms hanging down around her hips. Same undersized white tank top baring several inches of belly. Maybe not.

Her room was a big, cluttered mess. There was nothing new about that, but she did notice it in a new way as she looked around. Had she ever thrown out anything in her life?

There were layers and layers of Tibby detritus both on the walls and on the floor. You could do an archaeological dig in this room and probably unearth her Fisher-Price farm if you tried hard enough. What was the matter with her?

It was dusty and stuffy and it bothered her. It was always dusty and stuffy. It didn’t always bother her. In an uncharacteristic move, she walked over to the window and forced it open. It was hard going, because she had not opened this room to actual air in as long as she could remember. The paint stuck a bit as she wrenched up the sash. Oh.

The air came in and it did feel good. It was nice, open like this. The breeze blew around some of the papers on her desk, but she didn’t mind.

She heard her mother downstairs in the kitchen. She thought of telling her about Brian. A part of her really wanted her mom to know. Alice would be excited. She would make a big deal about it. She loved Brian. She would love the idea of her daughter telling her about a juicy milestone like this one. It was her mother-daughter fantasy—the very thing Tibby so often denied her.

As Tibby left her room she registered the sound of the rustling leaves of the apple tree, so little heard here, and she liked it.

Tibby watched her mother in her usual morning flurry. Would she be able to slow down for Tibby’s news? Tibby tried to formulate the opening sentence. “Brian and I…Me and Brian…”

Tibby opened her mouth, but Alice got there first.

“Tibby, I need you to stay with Katherine this morning.” Alice already sounded mad and Tibby hadn’t even refused yet.

Tibby’s words dried up.

Alice wouldn’t look in Tibby’s eyes, indicating that she felt guilty somewhere down deep, but the guilt only made her less patient. “Loretta has to take her sister to the doctor and she can’t be back till after lunch.” Alice snatched the juice boxes from the shelf and shoved one at Nicky. “Or that’s what she says, anyway,” she added ungenerously.

“Why does her sister have to go to the doctor?” Nicky asked.

“Sweetie, she has some kind of infection, I don’t know.” Alice gestured the whole issue away with a sweep of her arm, as if it might or might not be true, but she couldn’t spend any more time thinking about it.

Alice was flinging things into and out of her purse. “I have to take Nicky to camp and then go to the office.”

“I’m not doing it,” Tibby said. Not only had she lost all desire to tell her mother about Brian, she never wanted to tell her mother about anything she cared about ever.

Alice gave her a look. “Excuse me?”

“I’m not the babysitter. I’m sick of you dumping the job on me every time it’s convenient.”

“You’re living in this house, and that means you have to help out, just like everybody else.”

Tibby rolled her eyes. This fight was nasty, but it had taken place so many times they might as well have been following lines of a script.

Katherine stirred her Cheerios around in her bowl. She slopped some of the milk onto the kitchen table.

Tibby always felt distantly guilty for refusing to babysit Katherine in Katherine’s presence, but she managed to get over it.

“I can’t wait to go to college,” Tibby muttered, as though to herself, but not really. The statement was untrue, and she said it only to make her mother unhappy.

Half an hour later, Tibby sat on the back deck with a pile of papers and brochures from NYU, while Katherine careened around the backyard. The fight with her mom had shaken all the magic right out of her. She was back on the ground, looking down at the bugs rather than up at the sky.

Eventually Katherine’s appetite for independent play ran out. She appeared in Tibby’s face.

“You want to climb the tree and pick apples?” This currently represented Katherine’s greatest fantasy.

“Katherine, no. Anyway, why do you want those apples so bad? They’re not good. They’re not ripe yet. And even if they were ripe, they’d be hard and sour.” Tibby had fallen into that shameful parent-ennui where you said no before you even listened to what the kid wanted.

“Did you ever eat one?” Katherine asked.

Tibby hadn’t ever eaten one, but she didn’t feel like getting argued to the ropes by a three-year-old. “I’m telling you, they’re gross. If they were good, wouldn’t we all be eating them instead of buying apples from the bin at the A&P?”

Katherine seemed to find this kind of logic depressing. “I still want to try one.”

Tibby sat there, watching Katherine sizing up the apple tree. She was too small to reach even the lowest branch, but she was undeterred. She backed up ten or so yards from the trunk of the tree, ran as fast as she could, and jumped. Her attempt was so meager and ineffective it was almost heartbreaking.

Katherine backed up for another go. She backed up farther this time for optimum speed. She ran with her arms bent tight at her elbows in a caricature of sprinting. It was so cute, objectively speaking, that one part of Tibby longed to get it on camera.

But at the same time, Tibby was annoyed. She indulged herself in pettiness. She did not want to babysit. She was annoyed with her mother. If she were to let herself be absorbed into Katherine’s world, it would be almost like enjoying babysitting. Which she didn’t.

So Tibby watched. Katherine was inexhaustible. Why did she want the damn apples so much? Tibby couldn’t imagine the nature of her desire.

But Tibby could remember being small and wanting to jump, running and jumping just like Katherine, and imagining you were going to practically take flight—thinking you could jump so much higher than you really could.

The first thing Bridget did when she got to soccer camp was find Diana. They’d spoken on the phone and exchanged many e-mails, but Bridget hadn’t seen Diana in two years—not since the day they’d left Baja. And of all the things and people she’d encountered there, Diana stood out as her single happy memory.

When she found her in their cabin, she screamed and hugged Diana so hard she lifted her off the ground.

“God.” Diana examined Bee’s face. She stepped back. “You look great. You grew?”

“You shrunk?” Bee asked back.

“Ha.”

Bridget tossed her gigantic duffel bag onto her bunk. She wasn’t big on folding or sorting. She used to pack in Hefty bags, but Carmen made her stop.

She hugged Diana again and admired her. Diana had kept her hair straightened two summers ago, but now she’d let it collect into long, pretty dreads. It looked unbelievably glamorous to Bee. “Look how you are! You are stunning and fabulous! Do you love Cornell?”

Diana hugged back. “Yeah, except I live and breathe soccer. You’ll see how it is.”

“You had time to find Michael, though, right? Did you bring a picture?”

Bridget exclaimed and swore appreciatively at the picture of Diana’s good-looking soccer-playing boyfriend and also at the pictures of her hilariously hammy younger sisters.

“So who else is here?” Bridget asked, gesturing at the second set of bunk beds in the cramped cabin.

“Two assistant coaches.” Diana got a vague look on her face.

“You met them?” Bridget asked.

“At lunch. Katie and Something,” she said. She closed one eye, trying to remember. “Allison. I think. Katie and Allison.”

Bridget sensed an issue. “And they are…?”

“Fine. Great.”

“Fine and great? Katie and Allison are fine and great?”

Diana smiled. Vaguely.

“So what’s the problem?”

“What problem?”

“Why do you look like that?”

“Like what?” Diana asked, glancing downward.

Bee felt impatient. Diana was an honest person. Why wasn’t she being honest now?

Diana pulled a hair elastic off her wrist and stretched it between her index finger and thumb. “You haven’t…met the other coaches yet. Have you?”

Diana’s words came slow, and Bee’s came very fast. “No. Have you?”

“Uh. Not all of them. But I saw…” Something about Diana’s hair elastic was so fascinating her words trailed off in her deep contemplation of it.

“Who?” Bee shot out.

“You probably already…”

“Who?”

“I’m pretty sure you…”

Bridget huffed in exasperation. She grabbed the arm that wore Diana’s wristwatch and held it up so she could read it. “We have a staff meeting in eight minutes. I’m going to go find out who you’re talking about.”

I don’t have to be careful, I’ve got a gun!
—Homer Simpson

C
armen was sitting at the table in the small kitchen of the apartment later that day, clutching the bottle of prenatal vitamins.

In this time of thinking, certain facts aligned themselves in Carmen’s mind. Her mother had gained weight in the past couple months. Carmen had put it down to happiness, but now she felt silly for not being more observant. Christina’s wardrobe had subtly but certainly shifted toward the roomier stuff in her closet. Had she stopped drinking wine? Carmen tried to think. Had she gone for a lot of doctor’s appointments?

Carmen had once overheard her mom joking with her aunt about how it was easy to hide stuff from teenagers because they were so self-absorbed. She felt the sting of it now, though she’d laughed it off then.

She heard a key in the lock of the front door—her mother, arriving home from work at the usual time. Carmen stayed sitting, knowing her mother would appear in the kitchen moments after she’d put her bags down. Carmen hadn’t planned an ambush, exactly, but it came off a lot like one.

“Hi,
nena
, love.” Christina’s whole body looked tired as she entered the kitchen. She’d always eschewed the practice of wearing sneakers with her suit to and from work, but recently she’d caved on her dignity. Now Carmen understood why.

Wordlessly Carmen held up the bottle.

Wordlessly Christina stared at it, and slowly its significance registered. Her eyes widened, and her expression changed from confusion to surprise to dread to exhaustion and back again.

Carmen decided to skip to the crux of the matter. “How far are you?” she asked in a moderated, matter-of-fact tone, though her heart was pounding. She knew it was true, but still she wanted her mother to deny it.

Christina seemed to stiffen her spine to mount a vivid defense. She seemed to consider several possible angles. And then, before Carmen’s eyes, she deflated again. Her dark red blouse appeared to crumple. “Five months.”

“You’re kidding.” Well, there it was. “When were you planning to tell me?” Carmen’s voice was flatly accusatory.

“Carmen. Darling.” Christina sat down across from her. She wanted to reach for Carmen’s hand, but Carmen was sitting on one, and the other was strangling the neck of the vitamin bottle. Christina withdrew her attempt. She was quiet for a few moments, collecting her breath. “Just let me explain, okay? It’s complicated.”

Carmen offered something between a shrug and a nod.

“David and I have talked and thought a lot about having a baby. He hasn’t had that joy in his life, as I have. We didn’t know if it would be possible. But we agreed, life is too short not to try for something you want.”

Carmen hated the “life is too short” rationalization. She thought it was one of the lamer excuses in the history of excuse-making. Whenever you did something because “life is too short not to,” you could be sure life would be just long enough to punish you for it.

“At the very least we thought it would take me a year or two to conceive, if I did at all,” Christina went on. “We never dreamed it would happen so fast. I’m almost forty-one years old.”

Carmen cocked her head skeptically. With half her mind she was calculating whether they’d conceived this baby before or after their wedding. It was a close call.

“I didn’t even guess I was pregnant until I was almost three months along. I just couldn’t believe it. And then I needed to think about how to talk to you. The timing was not what I had wished. It’s very…complicated.”

Complicated
. What a totally unsatisfying word. It was a politician’s word.

“There were your exams, your senior paper. Then graduation crept up on us,” Christina continued, holding up her hands plaintively. “I didn’t want any of your special things to get overshadowed by this news.”

“Were you going to tell me before it was born?”

Reasonably, Christina looked hurt. “I was going to tell you this weekend.”

“Do you know what kind it is?”

“You mean a boy or a girl?”

Carmen nodded.

“No. We want to wait to find out when the baby is born.”

Carmen nodded again, knowing as she did that this baby would be a girl. It just had to be.

“So I guess it’s due around…” Carmen had already calculated the baby would have to be born near her own birthday, but she left the space open for her mother to fill.

“Around the end of September,” Christina supplied slowly, the look of dread intensifying.

Carmen knew, intellectually, that this was happy news on a lot of levels. Christina had a whole new life ahead of her. From about seventh grade onward, Carmen had feared the day she’d leave for college. She imagined she’d be leaving her single mother alone to defrost food and eat by herself night after night. Instead, this September, she’d be leaving a happy couple bursting with a new baby.

And besides, Carmen was finally getting the sibling she had always professed to want. If she were a big and good person, she would be able to feel and appreciate this happiness. She would be able to congratulate and even hug her mother. But she wasn’t a big or good person. She’d dashed too many such opportunities not to know the truth about herself.

“It’s kind of convenient, in a way,” Carmen stated, sounding robotic, like she didn’t much care. “Because you can just use my room for the nursery, right? I’ll be going just before the baby comes. Good planning.”