“This is no way to live! Can’t you see that?” She felt the tears in her throat and behind her eyes, but she wouldn’t cry. He wasn’t safe enough for crying, and hadn’t been in a long time. It’s too lonely this way.
He shook his head. Of course he couldn’t see it. Because it was how he lived too.
“Bridget. You live the way you choose. You let Perry do the same.”
And me. You let me be, he might as well have added.
She wouldn’t sit down. She wouldn’t eat his eggs. But she would live the way she chose. She would do that for him.
She grabbed her duffel bag and her backpack and walked out of the kitchen and out of the house. That was what she chose.
“So when he called, I told him I couldn’t talk,” Julia explained, sitting cross-legged on Carmen’s twin bed in their small dormitory room in Vermont. “I felt bad and everything. I don’t know how to tell him that I’m not going to be into it this summer.”
It was funny. The setting was new—the campus of a performing arts center that housed the theater festival—but the situation was the same—Julia sitting on a dorm-room bed at night telling Carmen the latest episode in her off-again relationship with Noah Markham, scholar and stud.
Carmen nodded. She had finished putting all her stuff away, so she started refolding things.
“I mean, what if I meet someone here, you know? Have you looked around? There are a lot of good-looking guys. Probably half of them are gay, but still.”
Carmen nodded. She hadn’t really looked around yet.
“A place like this, anything can happen. You know how costars are always falling in love on movie sets and ruining their relationships?”
Carmen read Us Weekly often enough to know the truth of this. She put a bottle of the shampoo they both liked on Julia’s dresser. She saw the familiar black-and-white picture of Julia’s mother in the silver frame. Julia kept it in her dorm room at school. It was a glamorous picture taken by some famous photographer whose name Carmen only pretended to know. Julia’s mother had been a model, Julia told her. She was beautiful, certainly, but Carmen also registered that Julia’s mother almost never called.
Carmen didn’t put out any pictures of her family, but taped inside the cover of her binder she kept a small picture of Ryan on the remarkable day that he was born. She’d also taped a picture of the Septembers at Rehoboth Beach, the last time they’d all been together. Sometime during the winter she’d moved it from inside the front cover to inside the back cover, because though the sight of it made her happy, it made her happy in the saddest possible way.
Julia watched Carmen arranging the room. “Hey, did you pick up the Teramax conditioner?”
Carmen raised her eyebrows. “I don’t think so. Was it on the list?”
Julia nodded. “I’m pretty sure I wrote it on there.”
Carmen scoured the pharmacy bags but couldn’t find conditioner of any sort. “I must have missed that somehow.” She felt guilty, though she didn’t even use it.
“Don’t worry about it,” Julia said.
“I’ll pick some up when we go into town,” Carmen said apologetically.
“Seriously, it’s fine,” Julia assured her.
Julia fell asleep at some point, but Carmen lay in her bed. She had to remind herself where she was.
After a while she got up and checked the list that she and Julia had made for her to take to the pharmacy. Teramax conditioner was not on it.
She went out to the hall to call Lena. Lena didn’t answer, so she left a message. Tibby didn’t answer either, and Bridget had already left for Turkey.
Even though it was late, she called her mom.
“Nena, hi. Is everything okay?” her mom asked in a groggy voice.
“Fine. We’re just settling in here.”
“How does it seem?”
“Good,” Carmen said without really thinking about it. “How’s Ryan?”
Her mom laughed. “He threw his shoes out the window.”
“Oh, no. His new walking ones?”
“Yes.”
Carmen pictured Ryan and his tiny sneakers and she pictured her mom racing around trying to locate them.
“Street or courtyard?”
“Street, of course.”
Carmen laughed. “So what else is going on?” she asked, somewhat wistfully.
“We met with the painters today.” Her mother said it as though she’d met with the president.
“Oh, yeah?”
“We’re having them skim coat every wall. We’re starting to choose colors.”
Carmen yawned. She didn’t have much to say about skim coating.
“Okay, Mama, well, sleep tight.”
“You too, nena. I love you.”
Carmen tiptoed back into the room and crawled into bed, careful not to wake Julia, who was a light sleeper.
Carmen knew her mother loved her. That used to provide a certain sufficiency. That alone had been enough to make her feel like somebody.
It used to feel like she and her mother were almost one person, living one life. Now their lives were separate. Her mother’s identity wasn’t one she could tag along with anymore.
It didn’t mean her mother didn’t love her. She’d given Carmen life, but she couldn’t be expected to keep giving it. And yet Carmen wasn’t sure how to live by herself.
She tucked her hands under her pillow, and even though she could hear Julia’s breathing a few feet away, she felt terribly lonely.
When Lena got to her room that night, she called Carmen back, hoping it wasn’t too late. “I have to ask you something and don’t jump all over me,” she said, after giving Carmen a chance to relocate to the hallway.
“As if I would,” Carmen said, too curious to pretend to be hurt for long.
“Am I over Kostos, do you think?”
“Did you meet someone else?” Carmen asked.
Lena gazed at the ceiling. “No.”
“Did you look at someone else?”
Lena felt herself blushing and was glad Carmen couldn’t see. Carmen had always combined an extravagant capacity for near psychic brilliance and total obtuseness, but she rarely used them both at the same time. “Why do you ask?”
“Because I think you will be officially over Kostos when you talk about—even really look at—somebody else.”
“Isn’t that a little simplistic?”
“No,” said Carmen.
Lena laughed.
“One of these days you are going to fall in love and forget about him. Sooner or later it has to happen. I’d hoped it would be sooner.”
Lena crossed her feet under her on the bed. Could she forget Kostos? Was that what she was supposed to be striving for? She’d so far aimed at “getting over” him, whatever that meant, and she often prided herself on making strides toward that goal. But it was hard to imagine forgetting. She wasn’t really the forgetting type.
“I don’t know if that’s possible.”
“I think it is. I think it will happen. And you know what else I think about Kostos?”
Lena sighed. She had reached her limit of saying the name Kostos out loud and far exceeded her limit of hearing it said by others. “No, smarty. What?”
“I have this weird premonition that as soon as you forget about Kostos, you are going to see him again.”
Lena felt activity in her stomach. It had both the heavy quality of sickness and the fizz of excitement. She was glad the bathroom was right there.
“Oh, you do, do you.” Lena tried to calibrate her voice for lighthearted sarcasm, but it sounded dark as mud.
“I really do,” Carmen answered solemnly.
Lena hung up the phone with the suspicion, perhaps even the hope, that Carmen had veered into the obtuse.
She’d had her period on the drive from school home to Bethesda, hadn’t she? Tibby tried to remember the usual accompaniments—the stained underwear, the forgetting to buy tampons or pack them, the needing to stop at a gas stati
on to take care of urgent matters.
“Tibby Rollins?”
She and Bee had driven down together. Bee had borrowed her roommate’s car in Providence and picked her up in New York on the way. Tibby remembered at least two gas station stops. One was for actual gas, the other for more of a personal emergency. But was the emergency bleeding through her pants or was it needing a box of Krispy Kremes? She couldn’t remember. She was a virgin then, and virgins were entitled to blessed ignorance about when their periods came and went.
“Tibby Rollins?”
She turned with irritation toward the sound of her manager’s voice. Charlie always called her by first and last names, as though there were three other Tibbys on the premises.
“Charlie Spondini?” she said back.
He frowned at her. “The return box is so jammed up nothing will fit in the slot. Do you mind?”
“I do mind. That is inconsiderate of our customers and our financial dependence on late fees.” Sometimes she could make him laugh, but today she knew she was just being rude. She almost wished he would fire her.
“Tibby Rollins…” He looked more tired than angry.
“Okay, fine,” she said. She moved to the giant cardboard return box under the counter and began unloading.
She and Bee had driven down on June fourth. If she did have her period then, that meant…What did it mean? Was she supposed to know when she ovulated? She hated that stuff. She’d been through her mom’s fertility treatments, the thermometers and kits. She didn’t want to live in the same world as that.
“Excuse me?”
Tibby looked up. It was a customer. He had tinted glasses and a gray comb-over. “Do you know if you have Striptease?”
“What?” She glared at him with distaste.
“Striptease?”
Ick. “It’s in Drama if we have it.”
“Thanks,” he said, and turned to the aisles.
“It’s a total piece of crap,” she informed his back.
At home her message light was blinking. Usually she found sustenance in Brian’s sweetly romantic messages. Tonight she had to force herself to listen.
“Tib, I found out about the pills you can take.” His voice sounded strained and worried. “I don’t think it’s too late. I’ll come up tonight if you want me to go with you. I have the address of the Planned Parenthood. It’s not far—just on Bleecker Street. I can—”
She jabbed the Erase button and her room was quiet. She didn’t want to know the address of Planned Parenthood. She didn’t want to have that kind of life. She didn’t want to get examined by a gynecologist and fill a prescription. She wanted her sexual experience to be strictly over the counter.
Why had she done it? Why had she let Brian talk her into it? He didn’t really talk you into it, said the voice of Meta-Tibby. There hadn’t been much talking going on at all.
But he was the one who wanted to so badly. He was the one who’d wanted it and pleaded all these months. He was the one who’d carried the shoddy condom around in his wallet. He was the one who’d been so sure that doing it would bring them closer.
Every black thought she had stuck itself to that stupid condom and to Brian for carrying it so eagerly and so long.
Tibby flipped on her tiny TV. The local news was on channel seven. Tibby kept it on this station, because there was an anchorwoman she liked. She was older, probably almost sixty, and her name was Maria Blanquette. She had brown skin and intelligent and imperfect features, and unlike most news talkers, who wore thick masks of makeup, Maria looked like an actual person. She did this “Manhattan Moments” segment where she was supposed to showcase all the celebrity doings in New York City. But instead of adulating the celebrities, as most entertainment spots did, Maria laughed, and she had a laugh unlike anything else on TV. It was loose and raucous and totally unpolished. Tibby sat through hours of news for those moments.
Tibby watched hopefully, but Maria didn’t laugh today. Tibby suspected her producers had probably warned her to can it.
Usually Bridget liked airplane food. She was one of the very few people who did.
If you scarfed it all down while it was steaming hot, it tasted pretty good. It you thought about it too much and let it get cold, she now realized, it wasn’t so appealing. That was true of many things in life.
Tonight it sat on her tray table. Eric was in Baja. She imagined he was diving into the Sea of Cortez. It was almost dinnertime there, and he always used to swim before dinner. And here she was, thirty-five thousand feet over the Atlantic. Both of them suspended over water, neither of them with their feet on the ground.
“Eric acts like I don’t need anything,” she’d said to Tibby on the phone a few days before.
“Maybe you act like you don’t need anything,” Tibby had said. She’d said it gently, but still it cut its way into the center of Bee’s brain.
She felt a tingle of anxiety, being so far from the ground and hurtling so quickly in the opposite direction of Eric and home and the things she needed.
It was dark in the cabin, dark outside her window. She wasn’t completely alone. Interspersed throughout the cabin were lots of people from her program. She’d be spending her summer with them. They were strangers now, but friends theoretically. It was too bad Bridget wasn’t a more theoretical person.
She liked short flights better, where you stayed in the same day. She felt faint discomfort at flying directly away from the sun.
She put her cold hands on the Pants, feeling the comfort of uneven stitches of yarn and the puffiness of the fabric paint Carmen used.
What did she need, really? She needed her friends, but she had the Traveling Pants. It was like having her friends with her. The Pants allowed her to hold on to her friends no matter what.
Greta was in her house in Burgess, where she always was. If Bridget calculated the time there, she could figure out exactly what Greta was doing. Tuesday at seven was bingo. Wednesday morning was shopping. No matter how fast or far Bridget went, Greta stayed still.
And there was Eric. One time in her life she had needed Eric and he had been there. He had known exactly what to do. She never forgot that.
And home. Technically speaking, that meant a dingy clapboard house containing her brother and her father. She swallowed hard. She gave her uneaten tray of food to a passing flight attendant. Did they need her? Did she need them?
These weren’t the right questions. They were N/A. She remembered getting three N/As on her first-grade report card and worrying that she’d failed those subjects. When she told her father, he’d laughed and fiddled with her hair. “That means Not Applicable, Beezy. It doesn’t mean you failed anything.” He’d been able to comfort her back then. Back then she’d tried harder, too.
Now it wasn’t a home where needs were had or met. If Perry or her dad needed her, it didn’t matter, because they wouldn’t accept her help anyway. If she needed them…well, she didn’t. They had nothing to give that she wanted.
She couldn’t help them. She didn’t need them. That was the truth. Not everybody got a close family. Not everybody needed one.
She was flying away from the sun, but it would be there to meet her when she landed. They were just taking different routes to the same place.
She felt herself relaxing into her seat, unsticking her mind from the continent behind, looking to the one ahead. She couldn’t help her dad or Perry. She couldn’t. Her job was to look forward, to make as good a life as she could. She didn’t need to look back anymore.
She pulled off her sneakers and tucked her feet under her. She crossed her arms and held her hands in her armpits to keep them warm. When she woke up, she’d be in Turkey. On another continent, in another hemisphere, on another sea.
She felt the tingle starting. But this was the tingle of excitement instead of fear. The one that made you hungry rather than sick. The one that came from looking ahead and not behind.
In a way it was the same tingle. It just felt a lot better.
br /> Carmen doodled on the handouts while aspiring theater types—known here as apprentices—from all over the country sat listening to the presentations in the main theater building. Julia painted her toenails, which seemed like kind of a ditzy thing to do. But she painted them black, which seemed to Carmen like an actressy thing to do.
Carmen looked around at the number of decked-out kids. Julia wasn’t the only one in layers of vintage clothes and inky black eyeliner. It almost made Carmen laugh to think that though Julia stood apart from all the schlumpy kids at school, Carmen stood apart from the glamour queens here.
The director of the big and coveted Main Stage production, Andrew Kerr, made his presentation first.
“This year we’re putting on The Winter’s Tale. As I’m sure you know, for every decade anniversary of the theater we do an all-Shakespeare summer, and this year is number thirty. We’ve got some wonderful professional actors involved. Here’s the thing.” He cleared his throat to get attention. “This Main Stage mounts a professional, Equity production. But by tradition we open only one role to an apprentice. One role, and it’s typically not a lead. That’s the way it is every year. You are welcome to try out, but callbacks will be minimal. Don’t waste too much energy on it. There are many great roles for you in the Second Stage and community productions. All of you will have some part in one of them.”
Most of the kids knew this already. But it was hard not to be hopeful. Carmen suspected a lot of them were going to waste a lot of energy on it, regardless of what Andrew Kerr said. She was beginning to realize that actors, as a general category, were hopeful, and they also had strong self-esteem.
“All the auditions begin together. Then we’ll follow up with separate callback lists for each of the three productions.”
Was anyone else here going straight to crew? Carmen wondered. Was she the only predefeated theater apprentice in America?
“Auditions begin not tomorrow, but the day after. Sign-up sheets are in the lobby. Good luck to all of you.”
Carmen wondered whether she’d get the chance to work on sets for the big production. She guessed not. There were actual known set designers and builders arriving here. Well, she’d be happy working on one of the other shows.