Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood

  “You tried his office?” Carmen appreciated how much he wanted to help her. He was a good person.

  “His secretary was at lunch. I’m going to drive over there,” Carmen muttered. “What else can I do?”

  “Can I come?” Win looked intent.

  “You want to?”

  “Yeah.”

  She was now running toward her car and he was following her, stride for stride. “Can you get out of work?”

  “I’m on lunch break. I’m done with pediatrics for today and the old folks can do without my antics and my pocket change for one afternoon.”

  “You’re sure?”

  He looked at her as seriously as if she’d asked him to plunge to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean with her. “I’m sure. I’m sure I’m sure.”

  Carmen drove. She felt like Starsky and Hutch as they pulled up to the curb and leaped out of the car. He followed her to the elevator and then to the reception desk.

  Mrs. Barrie greeted Carmen warmly, and Carmen explained where she was going without breaking her gait. Christina had worked at this same law firm since Carmen was a toddler. Carmen knew her way around the place.

  Carmen and Win staked out Irene’s desk, and thankfully, she returned from lunch ten minutes later. “What can I do for you, Carmen?” Irene asked, looking confused. Carmen wore a bandana on her head, do-rag style, and her feet were in flip-flops.

  “We need to find David.” Carmen’s intensity was such that Irene seemed to shrink back from her own cubicle. “I think my mom’s gonna have the baby soon,” Carmen explained, “but don’t tell anybody anything yet.”

  Irene, good soul that she was, got right with the program.“Oh, my.” Briskly she pulled up the calendar on her computer. Her long fingernails clickety-clicked on the keys until she got to the right day. “Your poor mother. We’ll find him.”

  Carmen sometimes got the feeling that everybody rooted for her mother. She was probably like a poster girl for legal secretaries. She’d won the respect and ardor of a handsome young lawyer without even meaning to.

  “He has a meeting in Trenton this afternoon. He’s renting a car there and driving to Philadelphia. He’s supposed to stay in a hotel in Philly tonight. He has a meeting scheduled there tomorrow morning and then he comes home. And wait.” She studied her notes a little more closely. “He told me he was hoping to stop off and visit his mother in Downingtown on his way to Philly.”

  Carmen was thinking. “Do you know the number of the meeting place in Trenton?”

  “Yes.” Irene looked it up and called it. She went through several people and several bits and pieces of conversation before she hung up. “He left already.”

  “Oh.” Carmen chewed her thumbnail. “How about the car rental place?”

  “Yes.” Irene called them, too. She listened for a bit and put her hand over the receiver. “He rented the car and left about twenty-five minutes ago.”

  “Shit,” Carmen mumbled. She walked in a small circle. She realized Win was watching her carefully. But she was too preoccupied to be self-conscious or even to consider all the ways in which she was diverging from Good Carmen.

  “Do you have David’s mother’s number?”

  Irene winced. “I don’t think I do.” She riffled through her Rolodex and then scrolled through her computerized version. “No, I’m sorry.”

  “The address?” Carmen asked without much hope.

  Irene shook her head. “I don’t know David’s stepfather’s name, do you?”

  Carmen should have known it. She had certainly heard it before. But in her efforts to tune out most of the things David said, she’d tuned out this potentially helpful bit of information.

  “We should leave a message at the hotel in Philadelphia just in case,” Win suggested.

  Irene nodded and did it. “He hasn’t checked in yet, but they’ll have him call as soon as he does.”

  Carmen’s brain was working fast. “Can you call the rental car company again?” she asked.

  Irene did it without asking questions. Carmen held out her hand for the phone. “Can I talk?”

  “Sure.” Irene handed it over.

  Carmen talked to a representative for a few minutes. As soon as she hung up she looked at Win and Irene brightly. “I have something. They can’t get hold of David in his car, but they can tell us where the car is.”

  “Really?” Win looked impressed.

  “Yeah. And like I always say, thank the Lord for satellite systems.” She laughed at herself. “I don’t really go around saying that.”

  Win smiled at her, also clearly relieved that they had a lead. “How far is Downingtown?” he asked.

  Irene shrugged. “I think about an hour and a half.”

  Win and Carmen looked at each other. “So let’s go,” Win said.

  “You think so?” Carmen asked, suddenly nervous about the extent to which she’d embroiled an innocent guy in her drama. “You sure you want to come with me?”

  His eyes told her she should take this for granted. “I’m sure I want to come with you.”

  Of course she found it in the last place she looked. If she hadn’t found it, she’d still be looking.

  —Susannah Brown

  Lena walked into her father’s study with expectations so low, she would have been happily surprised if he’d taken a paperweight from his desk and thrown it at her.

  He was thumbing through a stack of papers on his desk. He was listening to Paul Simon. It was one of about three CDs he ever listened to, and he always struck Lena as slightly tin-eared and immigrant in his appreciation. The song was perky and polished, something about a camera that took bright color pictures. To Lena the song was like an A-plus paper, a math problem where you showed your work, a form fully filled out. But it didn’t sound to her like music. She liked her colors dingier.

  Her father looked up at her over his half-glasses. He turned the music off.

  “Do you mind if I make a drawing of you?” Lena had practiced saying this in her head so many times, the words had long ago lost their ordinary feel and had begun to taste funny in her mouth.

  He waved her to the empty seat across from his desk. He was prepared for this. Lena’s mother had no doubt warned and mollified him.

  Lena’s paper was already clipped to her drawing board and her charcoal was squeezed into her clammy hand. She hadn’t come in willing to take no for an answer. She sat down. “You don’t need to do anything special.” She’d practiced saying that, too.

  He nodded absently. He didn’t need to be asked twice. He was already back to his papers. But she noticed he kept his face angled straighter now, only his eyes cast down. The lenses of his glasses glinted, but his eyes within them appeared shut from where she sat.

  She watched him for a long time before she began to draw. She made herself do this. She didn’t care if it made him uncomfortable.

  For a while she saw what she expected. She could have drawn his angry face with not only his eyes closed but with hers closed too. This was how she pictured him, and this is how he looked. She saw what she felt, and what she felt was his anger. She had certainly suffered for it. Why else was she here?

  She knew what she felt. But what did she see?

  She began to wonder. With drawing, you were always pitting your feelings and expectations against what the cold light offered your optic nerves. Like the first time you tried to mix colors to paint water. You thought you’d be using a lot of blue and maybe green. But if you made yourself see, you ended up with a lot more gray and brown and white, and even weird unexpected colors like yellow and red. And if you tried to paint it again, it would all be different. You couldn’t paint the same water twice.

  She remembered once standing with her mother on a street corner in Georgetown and watching a painter at work. Her mother let her watch for a long time, and as they were walking away, Lena remembered asking how come he used so much brown.

  As a child, you were taught to see the world in geometric shapes an
d primary colors. It was as if the adults needed to equip you with more accomplishments. (“Lena already knows her colors!”) Then you had to spend the rest of your life unlearning them. That was life, as near as Lena could tell. Making everything simple for the first ten years, which in turn made everything way more complicated for the subsequent seventy.

  And now her feelings about her father made a mask over his actual features. She had thought that her challenge would be to paint his anger, to confront it. But now she knew that wasn’t the challenging thing. The challenging thing was to see past it.

  She stared at him without blinking until her eyeballs dried and her vision blurred. She wished she could turn her father upside down. Sometimes you could see things more truly when you forfeited your normal visual relationship with them. Sometimes your preexisting ideas were so powerful they clubbed the truth dead before you could realize it was there. Sometimes you had to let the truth catch you by surprise.

  Lena looked away and closed her eyes. She opened them and looked back at her father’s face, but only for a second. It could catch you by surprise, or maybe, if you were bold, you could catch it.

  She turned away, and then turned back for a little longer. She was seeing more now. She was holding on to something. She took a deep breath, carefully keeping herself in this other visual dimension. This place where she saw but didn’t feel.

  Her hand was finally connecting charcoal to paper. She let it fly. She didn’t want to bog it down with thinking.

  Her father’s face was no more to her than a topographical map. The mouth was a series of shapes, nothing more. The downturned eyes were shadings of darkness and light. She stayed there a good, long time. She was careful not to blink too hard or too long for fear that this new way of seeing would abandon her.

  She wasn’t afraid of him anymore. The scared part of her was waiting out by the mouth of the cave; the rest of her had gone in.

  She saw something in her father’s mouth. A little tick. Another tick, and then a sag.

  She wasn’t scared anymore, but was he?

  The trick of drawing was leaving your feelings out, giving them the brutal boot. The deeper trick of drawing was inviting them back in, making nice with them at exactly the right moment, after you were sure your eyes really were working. Fighting and making up.

  And so her feelings were coming back in, but they were a different kind this time. They were guided by her eyes, rather than the other way around. Tentatively, she let them come. A good drawing was a record of your visual experience, but a beautiful drawing was a record of your feelings about that visual experience. You had to let them come back.

  She saw her father’s fear, and it so surprised her, she could barely contemplate it. What was he afraid of?

  She could imagine if she tried. He was afraid of her disobedience. He was afraid of her independence. He was afraid of her growing up and not being the kind of girl he could feel proud of—or the kind of girl Bapi would be proud of. He was afraid of being old and powerless. He was afraid she would see his vulnerability. But also, she suspected, he wanted her to see it.

  She felt her fingers softening around the charcoal. Her lines got looser. She felt sad and moved by these things she saw in his face. She didn’t want to make it hard for him to love her. But at the same time, she couldn’t deny who she was to make it easy.

  Her fingers were flying. The muscles in her father’s neck quivered slightly with the great effort of holding still for her. He was trying. He really was.

  That moved her too.

  After almost two hours she set him free. “Thank you,” she said earnestly.

  He pretended he didn’t notice so much.

  She held the drawing board facing out as she left, so he could peek at the results if he wanted to. He didn’t peek.

  But later that night, when she was going to bed, she tiptoed past the kitchen, where she’d left her drawing of him propped on a chair. He stood alone in the quiet room. And even though she just saw his back, she knew he was looking.

  Win offered to take the wheel so Carmen could work the phone. Half an hour into the drive they had to stop for gas. He bought two Cokes and a bag of Corn Nuts. Carmen had never had Corn Nuts before, and she loved them. They could barely hear each other over the crunching, so they found themselves shouting, which they both thought was incredibly funny once they realized it. The laughter made Carmen’s eyes start running again, and the salt made her lips burn.

  She was tired and punchy and worried and also happy that they were driving toward David and doing everything they could.

  By her calculation they had four hours to find David and get back to her mom. He was only an hour away now. It would work. It had to work. She felt confident that Tibby could keep her mom company for the waiting part, and David and Carmen would be there in time for the inducing part, when the real drama started.

  Win was a good driver. He was confident and sharp about it, and yet effortless too. For some reason, the look of his hands on the wheel (at ten and two—Valia would have approved) struck her as masculine and even sexy.

  Furthermore, he had an excellent profile. Not a Ryan Hennessey profile exactly—Win’s nose was a tiny bit crooked, and his upper lip went out a little farther than his bottom one. But on him, it worked. It was fun how you could get away with watching someone when they drove. He concentrated on the road, and she braved a full look at him.

  They barely knew each other, and yet they always had a project together. It was the opposite of most of her romantic relationships, which were all form and no content. Carmen was infamous for writing out talking points to use with the boys she dated. She never searched for things to say to Win.

  “You’re close to your mother, huh?” he asked her thoughtfully.

  “Yes.” It was the Good Carmen answer instead of the Whole Carmen answer. “What about you?”

  “I’m close to both my parents,” he said. “I’m the only one, so it gets intense sometimes.”

  “Me too,” Carmen chimed in. Then she remembered. “Until today, I guess.”

  “Pretty strange, becoming a sister at the age of…how old are you?”

  “Seventeen,” Carmen said.

  “Seventeen,” he echoed.

  “Almost eighteen. And you?” she asked. These were questions they could have gotten out of the way on an awkward date two months ago, but somehow they hadn’t.

  “Nineteen.”

  “And yeah, it is strange. Stranger than I can say.”

  “I had a sibling for a short while.” He tried to say it lightly and conversationally, but it didn’t come out that way.

  “What do you mean?” Carmen wanted to know, but she didn’t want to demand anything. “I mean, if you want to tell me.”

  “I had a little brother. He was born when I was five and he died just before I turned six.”

  “Oh.” Carmen’s tears were so near the surface these days, even a fourteen-year-old tragedy concerning a person she didn’t really know called them up. “I’m so sorry.”

  “It was a long time ago. But he is part of my identity, you know?”

  She didn’t know, but she could try to guess. She nodded.

  “I still think about him sometimes. I dream about him too. I try to remember what he looked like. It’s hard to remember, though, either because of time or because of strong feelings. I sometimes think the stronger you feel about someone, the harder it is to picture their face when you are away from them.”

  Carmen’s tears were falling now, and she tried to hide them from Win. He would interpret her tears as belonging to Good Carmen. He would think she was crying selflessly, for him and his family’s pain. Whereas Bad Carmen was crying because Win had spent a lifetime missing a baby who’d been lost, and she’d spent a summer resenting a baby who hadn’t yet come.

  Tibby was learning something about her future. She was learning that it would not include having children. Not unless she adopted some.

  Christina was in he
ll, and Tibby could barely watch it. With each contraction—and they seemed like they were coming all the time now—Christina seemed to lose some of herself. When she came down she was less focused, less coherent, less recognizable. Tibby glanced at the printout. One line followed the baby’s heartbeat and the other followed the quaking of Christina’s uterus. It reminded Tibby of a seismogram. Christina had gone from a five on the Richter scale to about a twenty. If Christina’s stomach were California, then California would be under the ocean by now.

  Tibby tried calling her mother again, but there was no answer. Alice would know all about this stuff. She would know how to help. She was punching in Carmen’s cell number when a nurse appeared in her face.

  “You have to put that away,” she snapped, pointing at Tibby’s cell phone. “It interferes with the equipment. You could get thrown out of here.”

  Tibby considered that possibility with a certain amount of longing.

  “Can you give her some medicine or something?” Tibby asked Lauren when she popped her head in. Tibby was afraid of this much pain. She didn’t know how to get close to it.

  Lauren came over and put her hands on Christina’s shoulders. “You doing okay, honey?”

  Christina tried to focus. It didn’t look like the question made any sense to her. The answer was so profoundly no that the question hardly applied.

  “In her birth plan she specified natural childbirth. That means, basically, no drugs,” Lauren explained to Tibby. “That’s partly why she’s working with me instead of an OB. Midwives don’t prescribe the heavy stuff.”

  It didn’t seem a good sign that they were talking about Christina rather than to her. “An OB is…a doctor?” Tibby asked, wondering for a moment if a doctor wouldn’t be a good idea right now. If she were Christina she would want the heavy stuff. She would want the heaviest stuff, and every bit of it they had. She would want them to knock her out so completely that she wouldn’t wake up for a week.

  “It seems like you should make that plan when you’re actually giving birth. Then at least you know what it feels like,” Tibby opined, but Lauren wasn’t listening.