Second Summer of the Sisterhood

  She could avert her eyes, but she hadn’t thought to plug her ears. She heard a snuffle from her left. She wished and hoped she had imagined it. She squeezed her eyes shut. If she could ever in her life have transported herself from one place to another, she would have done it then.

  She moved her head ever so slightly to the left and did the rest with her eyeballs. She needed to see her mother, but couldn’t face her, even in the dark. Straining her eyeballs to the far corner of her vision, she could see that her mother’s head was bent.

  Tibby’s hands found her face. What had she done?

  Alex was snickering at something on the screen. Tibby was lost. She was somewhere else. She didn’t look up again until the lights were on and half the people had left.

  “Tibby?” Alex was looking at her.

  “Yes?”

  “You coming?” She was looking into Alex’s face, but she wasn’t seeing it.

  She turned in one direction, and Brian was standing at the end of her row, waiting for her. When she turned in the other direction, she saw that her mother had gone.

  Christina didn’t stray more than five feet from the phone. She actually carried it with her when she went to the bathroom. She waited until two in the afternoon to suck up her pride and ask Carmen if anyone had called while she was out that morning.

  Carmen shrugged, not meeting her eyes. “The machine picked it up,” she said. It wasn’t a lie.

  “The message from Mr. Brattle?” Christina asked.

  Carmen shrugged again.

  Christina nodded, her fragile hopes dashed.

  It was such pathetic female behavior, Carmen felt the anger churning in her stomach again. “Are you waiting for a call in particular?” Carmen asked.

  Christina looked away. “Well, I thought David might …”

  Her voice was faint. Her sentence died off rather than came to a stop.

  Mean things filled Carmen’s mouth. Somewhere up in a lofty part of her mind, she told herself to go into her room and shut the door. Instead, she opened her mouth.

  “Is it impossible for you to go one day without David?” she snapped.

  Christina’s cheeks turned pink. “Of course not. It’s just—”

  “You’re setting a horrible example, you know. Throwing your entire life away for some guy. Mooning over the phone all day, waiting for him to call.”

  “Carmen, that’s not fair. I’m not—”

  “You are!” Carmen insisted. She’d just had that first tantalizing drink, and there was no stopping her now. “You go out every night. You dress like a teenager. You borrow my clothes! You make out in restaurants! It’s embarrassing. You’re making a huge fool of yourself, don’t you know that?”

  For days now Christina’s happiness had lifted her into a state of benevolence in which she had absorbed Carmen’s anger with patience and understanding. Now Carmen could feel her mother sinking back down to earth, and it was satisfying.

  Christina’s cheeks were no longer sweetly pink; they were red and patchy. Her mouth made a grim line. “That is a nasty thing to say, Carmen. And it isn’t true.”

  “It is true! Melanie Foster saw you making out at the Ruby Grill! She’s been telling everybody about it! Do you know how that makes me feel?”

  “We weren’t making out,” Christina defended herself hotly.

  “You were! Do you think I don’t know you’re sleeping around? Doesn’t the church say you’re supposed to get married before you do that? Isn’t that what you’ve always told me?”

  It was a calculated guess, and by the stricken look on Christina’s face, Carmen knew she’d guessed right. It was the equivalent of dropping the H-bomb, and Carmen had done it without preparing for the consequences. She felt nauseated as she stared at Christina. A big part of her wanted her mother to deny it, but she didn’t.

  Christina looked at the floor and kneaded her hands. “I don’t think that is any of your business,” she whispered savagely.

  “It is my business. You’re supposed to be my mother,” Carmen replied. Her mother was now angry enough for both of them.

  “I am your mother,” Christina shot back.

  Carmen felt tears flooding her eyes. She wasn’t ready to be vulnerable to her mother yet. Instead, she took her very full heart into the privacy of her room, where she could consider what was in it.

  “Hey,” Brian said from the aisle just beyond where she was standing. He looked sad. He tried to hold Tibby’s eyes for an extra moment to figure out what was going on with her.

  She dropped her gaze. She didn’t want him to see anything.

  Brian stood there. He was going to wait for her, of course. Alex and Maura were looking at him, obviously wondering who the loser with the Star Wars T-shirt and the bad glasses was.

  Tibby took a breath. She needed to say something.

  “Uh, this is Brian,” she said flatly. Her voice sounded as if it came from a different body than hers.

  She pointed to Alex. “This is Alex.” She pointed to Maura. “This is Maura.”

  Brian didn’t seem to care about Alex and Maura. He was still gazing solemnly at Tibby with his dark brown eyes. She wished he would go away.

  “’Sup,” Alex said fleetingly to Brian, turning his back before he’d even finished greeting him. He faced Tibby. “Let’s go.”

  Numbly she nodded and began to follow Alex and Maura out of the auditorium. She wasn’t thinking. Naturally Brian followed her.

  The four of them somehow ended up in a Mexican restaurant two blocks away. Alex looked annoyed that he hadn’t shaken Brian off. Maura made no secret of rolling her eyes in displeasure.

  This would have been a good moment for Tibby to explain that Brian was not actually a psychotic stalker but one of her very best friends, who not only hung out at her house all the time but was currently living in her dorm room. She didn’t. She couldn’t make herself look at Brian, let alone say his name.

  They stood awkwardly at the noisy bar. Alex successfully ordered three Dos Equis with his fake ID. He leaned in close to Tibby and clinked his bottle against hers.

  “Well, done, Tomko. You stole the show.”

  Tibby knew he was trying to congratulate her, not to make her cry.

  “It was awesome,” Maura agreed.

  “It wasn’t,” Brian said, sticking close to Tibby’s side. “Her mom was in the audience.” Brian seemed to feel that if these were Tibby’s friends, they needed to know this. His hand found Tibby’s elbow. He was suffering for her.

  The bit about her mom didn’t seem to register as Alex drank down most of his beer. “You’re saying her movie wasn’t good? It was freakin’ hilarious.”

  Brian shook his head. “It wasn’t.” He was honest, after all.

  Alex squinted. “What’s your problem?”

  Brian didn’t look at Alex. “I’m worried about Tibby.”

  “You’re worried about Tibby?” The derision was so thick in the air Tibby could practically smell it. “Gosh, what a pal. Why don’t you go worry about her someplace else?”

  Brian looked at Tibby. The look said, Come on, Tibby, come back to me. We’re friends, aren’t we?

  But Tibby just stood there gaping, as though someone had taken a machete to her vocal cords.

  Alex stepped in closer. He was getting puffed up and martial. “What part of ‘Go away’ don’t you understand?”

  Brian saved a last, agonizing look for Tibby; then he left.

  Tibby felt tears fill her eyes. What had she done? She cupped her hand on her thigh. Under her fingers was the denim of the Traveling Pants with the careful stitches she’d made at the end of last summer. She looked down and ran her index finger around the outline of the heart she’d sewn in red yarn. Her eyes were too full to read the words she had embroidered below it. She could feel the weight of her body sitting hour after hour on the back porch in the late-summer swelter, her legs falling asleep as she made thousands and thousands of stitches—pulling them out, putting them in—
with her stubborn, clumsy fingers. The product of all that toil was a shabby heart and three crooked little words. Bailey was here.

  Had Bailey been there? Had she? What evidence was there of that?

  Tibby’s heart felt bereft of her just now.

  She put both hands to her cheeks. She needed to steady her head.

  Alex was still snarling after Brian. He turned to look irritably at Tibby.

  “So, Tibby.” His voice was leaded with criticism. “What’s with the pants?”

  If you scatter thorns, don’t go barefoot.

  —Italian proverb

  Tibby drove Earl, her beloved Pontiac, due north. When she stopped in Front Royal for gas, she took out her address book. She had never been to Brian’s house, strange as that was, but she did have his address. When Nicky turned three, he had insisted upon sending Brian his own invitation for the rodeo party.

  It was almost ten thirty when she reached Bethesda. Brian’s neighborhood was less than a mile from hers, but the houses were smaller and newer. She snaked around for a while before she found his house. It was a redbrick one-story. She had always felt annoyed by the perfectly pruned bushes and bright flower boxes in the windows of her house, but this plain, shabby place didn’t seem preferable. The only light came from a blue TV glow at the side of the house.

  Tibby knocked timidly. It was late, and she was a stranger to his family. She waited a few minutes and knocked again.

  A man opened the door. He was large and balding. He looked half-asleep. “Yeah?”

  “Is, um, Brian here?”

  He was annoyed. “No.”

  “Do you know where he is?”

  “No. Brian hasn’t been around in a few days.”

  Tibby gathered this was his stepfather. “Do you think … his mom might know?”

  His patience was gone. “No. I don’t. Anyway, she isn’t here.”

  “Okay,” Tibby said. “Sorry to bother you.”

  She sat in her car and rested her head on the steering wheel. She felt sad for Brian in more ways than she could name.

  She drove slowly toward his old hangout, the 7-Eleven on Rogers Boulevard. It was closing up, and he wasn’t there. She drove another block to the small park where they sometimes used to hang out after a big afternoon of Dragon Master.

  She saw him, a dark outline sitting on the picnic table. His backpack and sleeping bag sat beside him.

  She crept a little closer. Unfortunately, Earl was in a noisy mood tonight. Brian looked up and saw her car and her in it. He picked up his pack and his sleeping bag and walked away.

  Tibby couldn’t go home. She couldn’t face her mother. It was too late to burst in on Lena or Carmen. Besides, she hated herself too much to face them.

  The heart sewn on the Pants reviled her. It made her cry. She couldn’t face it any longer. She stripped off the Pants and drove to Lena’s house. It was perfectly quiet and dark. She folded up the Pants as flat as they could go and stuffed them through the mail slot. Then she turned around and drove back to Williamston, wearing only her shame and her underwear.

  Lena lay on the wood floor of her room feeling sorry for herself and generally hating everything and everyone she knew.

  If she could have made herself paint, she would have. Painting and drawing always made her feel anchored. But there were times when you felt miserable and you wanted to feel better, and other times when you felt miserable and you figured you would just keep on feeling miserable. Anyway, there was nothing beautiful in the world.

  It was hot as only Washington, D.C., in late July is hot. Lena’s father didn’t believe in central air-conditioning because he was Greek, and her mom loathed the window kind because they were loud. Lena stripped down to her push-up bra (handed down from Carmen, who always bought them too small) and a pair of white boxers. She set up the floor fan so it blew directly on her head.

  Lena liked to annoy, irritate, and provoke her mother, but she hated actually being in a fight with her. She hated blowing up at Tibby. She hated the tension between her mom and Christina and Alice. She hated Kostos and his new girlfriend. She hated Effie for telling her about it. (She liked Grandma for not liking Kostos’s new girlfriend.)

  Lena didn’t like fights. She didn’t like yelling and hanging up. She liked silent treatments okay, but not past the third day.

  Lena was a creature of regularity. She had eaten peanut butter on whole-wheat bread for the past 307 lunches. She didn’t go in for stimulation.

  She heard the doorbell. She refused to get it. Let Effie get it.

  She waited and listened. Of course Effie answered it. Effie loved doorbells and phone rings. Then Lena heard Effie screech excitedly. Lena listened harder. She tried to figure out who it could be. Effie didn’t usually screech at the UPS man, but you never knew. Or maybe it was one of her friends with a new haircut or something. That could elicit a screech from Effie.

  Lena concentrated on the sounds. She strained to hear the visitor, but she couldn’t make out a voice. It didn’t help that Effie talked five times louder than normal people.

  Now they were coming up the stairs. The footsteps didn’t have the rapid-fire artillery sound of Effie and one of her friends. The second set of footsteps was slower and heavier. Was it a boy? Was Effie bringing a boy upstairs in the middle of the afternoon?

  She heard a voice. It was a boy! Effie was going to take a boy to her bedroom and very possibly make out with him!

  Suddenly Lena realized the two sets of footsteps hadn’t taken the turn for Effie’s bedroom as expected. They were coming in the direction of Lena’s bedroom. With a burst of panic it occurred to Lena that her door was open. She was mostly naked and a boy was coming toward her room and her door was open! Well, it wasn’t like she could have seen this coming. She could count the number of times a boy had come up those stairs on one hand. Her parents were strict that way.

  Lena was frozen on the floor. The footsteps were close. If she leaped up to shut the door, they would see her. If she stayed where she was, they would see her. If she got up and grabbed her bathrobe …

  “Lena?”

  At the sound in her sister’s voice—excitement bordering on hysteria—Lena jumped to her feet.

  “Lena!”

  There was Effie. There indeed was a boy. A tall, familiar, and excessively good-looking one.

  Effie had thrown her hand over her mouth at the sight of what Lena was and wasn’t wearing.

  The boy stood there looking captivated and amused. He didn’t avert his eyes as quickly as he should have.

  Lena’s head was fuzzy. Her heart whizzed like a Matchbox racer. Her throat swelled painfully with emotion. She felt heat rising from every part of her body.

  “Kostos,” she said faintly. Then she slammed the door in his face.

  Bridget had memorized Greta’s schedule. Monday evenings she played bingo at church. Wednesdays she played bridge with her neighbors across the street. Today was Thursday, the day Greta went to the Safeway to do her weekly shopping and splurge on a shell steak. On the third Thursday of every month, her son Pervis came from Huntsville to have dinner, and Greta bought two shell steaks. Bridget volunteered to tag along. The real draw for Bridget was the cold of the meat aisle. She’d become a girl of simple pleasures.

  “What’s your son like?” Bridget asked, lazily watching the signs flash by on the interstate.

  “Quiet. Not so social,” Greta said.

  “What’s he do in Huntsville?”

  “Custodial services at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center.” She looked at Bridget in confidence. “That’s a fancy way of saying janitor. He cleans and buffs the floors.”

  “Oh.” She remembered her uncle Pervis always in his bedroom, always at the window looking through his telescope. Once, when she’d been older, he had come to Washington, D.C., and stayed with them overnight. It was the only time she remembered him coming. He’d set up his telescope, got it all set and trained, and let her look through it. Pervis saw a thousand
familiar pictures in the sky, and Bridget saw chaos.

  “His father and I saved up our money and sent him to space camp there the summer he was nine. I don’t think he ever wanted to leave. He’s happy with it.”

  “Did he ever get married?” she asked.

  “No. He’s always been real shy with girls. I don’t see him getting married. He’s got his ham radio friends. That’s about as social as it gets for him.”

  Bridget nodded. Pervis had realized his dream of working at the Space Center, yet he spent his days looking down.

  Thinking of Pervis made her think of Perry, his namesake, who was like him in many ways, minus the ham radio. Bridget had finally spoken to Perry for a few minutes on the phone the night before. He’d been curious about Greta, but guarded. He didn’t want to hear anything about Marly.

  At the Safeway, Greta marched around purposefully with her cart and her coupons, while Bridget drifted through the refrigerated and frozen aisles, letting her mind go to places it had never gone before.

  She wondered about Perry and she wondered about her father. Tragedy brought some families together, maybe, but not hers. Her father never talked about what had happened. He never talked about the things that might lead to talking about what had happened. There were so many things they couldn’t talk about, they had stopped trying to talk about much of anything.

  She pictured her father, when he wasn’t at school, sitting in his den, wearing his earphones tuned to NPR. He never played the radio to the whole room, even when he was alone.

  Perry spent his time in front of the computer. He played elaborate fantasy games on the Internet. He spent more time interacting with strangers than with people he knew. Bridget sometimes forgot she lived in the same house with him, let alone that they were twins.

  It was sad. She knew it was. She wondered if maybe she could have held on to them better, Perry and her dad. Maybe if she’d tried hard enough she could have kept them feeling like a family and kept her home feeling like a home. Instead, they seemed to float out from under the roof, off into the stratosphere, farther and farther apart, orbiting nothing.