Forever in Blue: The Fourth Summer of the Sisterhood

  What about the fact that she was a girl with a boyfriend? That he was…who knew what?

  Was having a boyfriend honestly supposed to make you not feel attracted to people? Was it supposed to make you not attractive?

  And now she wondered, how did he see her? Was it all in her mind, this tension she felt in the way they reached for things and shared the space?

  Oh. She felt like smacking herself. She was incorrigible. Why was she feeling this way?

  Hmm. Was she feeling this way?

  What way was it, exactly?

  The sun was long past set, but they walked along the hillside toward the embankment. She felt the dizziness, the giddiness of the wine. Was his tread a little happier, a little less directed too? They intended to join what was left of the party like they did most nights, but it had mostly scattered. There was some awkwardness about whether to sit down. At least in her mind. He did sit down and she joined him. Was it strange that they should be spending time together like this?

  No. If she weren’t incorrigible, it wouldn’t be.

  Incorrigibly, she pulled the elastic out of her hair. It was coming out anyway, she told herself, though she didn’t quite buy it. Her hair was unusually long from not having Carmen around to trim it since they’d gone to college. It was down to her elbows, almost, halfway down her back. It had the particular feature of absorbing moonlight. She knew he had to notice it. He was probably wishing he hadn’t sat down with her.

  Why was she behaving this way? She was older now. She’d learned her lessons. What was she trying to prove?

  Her limbs had that forward tingle. She couldn’t help herself.

  Was it all in her mind?

  It was, wasn’t it? Maybe that was for the best.

  She looked at his eyes to try to gauge the mood of the moment faithfully, but he unexpectedly met her gaze. They stayed there for a moment too long before they both looked away.

  Shit.

  He fidgeted. He clapped his hands together as if he were summarizing an argument. “So, Bridget,” he said. “Tell me about your family.”

  She felt her body bending away from him without actually moving. She had nothing to say about her family at present. “So, Peter,” she said, a little too fierce. “Tell me about yours.”

  How much the air had cooled. In a dry place like this the sun left and took all the heat. There was nothing in the air to hold it. “Let’s see. My kids are four and two. Sophie and Miles.”

  His kids were four and two. Sophie and Miles. It had seemed to her that this might come at the end of the questioning rather than first thing out. She had somehow thought he’d tell her about his parents or his siblings. Her brain fitfully worked backward. He was a father, which presumably meant he was a husband.

  “And your wife?”

  “Amanda. She’s thirty-four.”

  “Are you thirty-four too?”

  “Almost thirty.”

  “Older woman.”

  “Right.”

  She had misread him. She had let her thoughts get away from her. It was time to get them all back.

  The Traveling Pants called to Carmen from under her bed. The other times Carmen had gotten them in the last several months, she had carried them from place to place, but she had not actually worn them.

  The Pants were outstanding, and Carmen hadn’t been in the mood to stand out very much. She hadn’t been in the mood to answer questions Julia would certainly ask about them. It was again the issue of the compartments. She couldn’t figure a way to introduce that Carmen to this one. Also, she was scared she was too fat.

  She pulled her suitcase from under her bed and felt for where she’d stashed them earlier that morning when they’d arrived by FedEx from Lena. There they were, carefully folded into her suitcase like a false bottom.

  For some reason, on this day, she had the urge to put them on. Maybe because it was beautiful outside or because she’d had a lot of coffee. Maybe it was because Lena had a crush on a guy named Leo, and that made Carmen happy and also made her think that the world was opening up.

  It was a slightly scary urge, because she was worried about what she would discover. Though she had opted not to try on the Pants, they had never opted not to fit her. She didn’t want to force them.

  But she also knew that since she’d started working on The Miracle Worker in the spring, she’d almost completely stopped her late-night affair with candy. During the past two months she’d been careful about what she ate, mostly in her efforts to be a more worthy friend for Julia.

  Holding her breath, sucking in her stomach, wishing she could suck in her backside, she pulled them up, up, up, and over. They went. Who could doubt their magic now? God, they fit. How good they felt. How happy they made her.

  She went to the mirror and really looked at her reflection for the first time in months. She pulled on a pink T-shirt and struck out for the wide world. For the first time in ages she didn’t feel ashamed of herself.

  It was certainly because of the Traveling Pants that she wandered into the lobby of the theater where the auditions were taking place.

  “You’re in the next group,” a woman with a clipboard told her. “Go ahead in.”

  The woman was mistaken, Carmen knew, but she went in anyway because she was curious. Had Julia gone yet?

  A guy was up there reading from Richard III. Carmen sat in a seat toward the back and listened. She grew sleepy, enjoying the language if not necessarily absorbing the meaning.

  “Carmen?”

  She heard her name and she looked around. Had she actually fallen asleep?

  She squinted.

  “Carmen, is that you?”

  She leaned forward. A woman was standing up in the second row. She realized it was Judy, who had pointed her on the path to the canteen the night before.

  Carmen waved, feeling self-conscious.

  “We’re going to break for the afternoon in a few minutes,” she said, “but we’ll take you now if you’re ready.”

  Meaning they would take her now to audition? Judy must have thought she’d come to try out. It certainly looked that way. Otherwise, why was she here?

  Carmen meandered toward the stage. She paused at Judy’s aisle, where Judy was sitting with Andrew Kerr and a couple of other people Carmen didn’t know.

  “I didn’t really…I didn’t really prepare anything,” Carmen whispered, hoping her voice would reach Judy but not the others. “Do you want me to come back another time?” Like never, she thought.

  “Just go ahead,” Judy said. She must have been one of the assistant directors, Carmen thought.

  Carmen walked up onto the stage, wondering what in the world she was doing. She did not feel comfortable standing under these lights. She had nothing to say, nothing to read. “I’m more interested in sets,” she said lamely to the assembled group. She thought she heard someone laugh in the back.

  The other people in Judy’s row looked annoyed, but Judy was patient. She came up to the stage and handed Carmen some pages. “Just read Perdita. It’s fine. I’ll read Florizel’s lines.”

  “Are you sure?” Carmen asked. She felt stupid. Everyone else had memorized parts and prepared them and performed them with a clear sense of intent. Here she was reading from pages she had not even provided.

  She did know some of these lines, though. They were from The Winter’s Tale. She’d practiced them with Julia. That spurred her on, because the words, though strange, were familiar and pleasing to her.

  Judy started the scene as Florizel, and then gave way to Carmen with an obvious lead-in.

  Carmen cleared her throat.

  “Sir, my gracious lord,

  To chide at your extremes, it not becomes me—

  O, pardon, that I name them!—your high self,

  The gracious mark o’ the land, you have obscur’d

  With a swain’s wearing; and me, poor lowly maid,

  Most goddess-like prank’d up.”

  She stopped and looked up
.

  “Keep going,” Judy said.

  So Carmen kept going. She was getting to the part she most liked, and she read it with a certain joy. At the end of the last page she stopped. She looked around. She felt stupid again.

  “Okay. Thanks,” she called to them generally, squinting to see Judy in spite of the lights blasting her retinas. “Sorry about that.”

  She trundled offstage and let herself out the back door into the sunshine.

  She actually laughed aloud when she got outside, because the whole thing was so bad and ridiculous.

  Oh, well. Another adventure for the Pants, she thought affectionately.

  There were so many odd reversals on the way to growing up.

  Tibby was fourteen before she got her period for the first time. She was the last of her friends. She wished for it. She imagined how it would be. She bought a box of maxi pads and kept them under her bathroom sink just in case. It stayed there unopened for months. She worried she would never get it. She worried there was something wrong with her. She wished and wished for that first spot of blood to bring her into union with her friends.

  And then it came. The happiness at getting what you want is not usually commensurate with the worry leading up to it. Relief is a short-lived emotion, passive and thin. The agony of doubt disappears, leaving little memory of how it really felt. Life aligns behind the new truth. Her period was always going to come.

  Three months later she had fallen into the convention of hating her period and dreading it just the way everybody else did. She suffered the cramps badly. She lay curled up in her bed for hours. She took Midol. The pads, once prized, became a nuisance. Why had she ever wanted them? She stained all her clothes and washed them herself, because she was embarrassed to have Loretta see.

  And now, almost five years later, she was back to pining for her period. She kept a constant monitor on her abdomen, at work, at home. She watched TV with part of her brain and thought about her uterus with the other. Was that a cramp she felt, that little twinge? Was it? Oh, please?

  She thought about her uterus straight through work Friday and Saturday morning. She thought about it as she walked to Fourteenth Street to buy food and a magazine. She thought about it as she walked past the places that had become meaningful to her over the last year—the place where she’d gotten a terrible haircut with her friend Angela; the Mexican place favored by film students where they served cheap margaritas and almost never carded. She thought about her uterus through the long afternoon and night while she ignored her ringing phone and listened to messages left by people who loved her.

  I’ll just get through this, she thought. Then I’ll call everybody back.

  She worked Sunday. She wore a pad, just in case. She thought she felt a cramp.

  “Tibby Rollins, where are you going?”

  Tibby froze on her way through the Comedy aisle. She cleared her throat. “Uh. Nowhere?”

  She couldn’t say she was going to the bathroom again. She’d already been six times and it wasn’t even noon. Every time, she checked her underwear hopefully. Every time, she returned to the floor in an agony of worry.

  “Do you mind taking register three?”

  “Okay. Fine.”

  If it didn’t come today, was it officially late? Did that mean…? A wave of panic mounted and broke. But maybe her last period hadn’t really ended on the sixth. Maybe it had been the seventh.

  This was her pattern. She talked herself up. She panicked. She talked herself down.

  A customer was waving his hand in her face.

  “Sorry?” she said, blinking.

  “Have you seen this?” he asked. He was in his twenties, she guessed. Yeesh. So strong was his cologne she could practically taste it.

  “Yes,” she said, trying not to breathe in.

  “Is it a good date movie?”

  Tibby didn’t mean to roll her eyes. It just happened.

  He murmured something unfriendly and walked away.

  She watched him go, considering her uterus. Was that a cramp she felt? Or was she just hungry? She made sure Charlie wasn’t looking when she snuck off to the bathroom again.

  Julia was a nervous wreck for callbacks the next day.

  “It’ll be good,” Carmen assured her. “I’m sure you were great.”

  “Let’s hope Judy thought so,” Julia said nervously, chomping on her pinky nail.

  “Judy?”

  “She’s the casting director.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. Why? Do you know her or something?”

  “Not exactly, no.”

  Most of the kids were eating lunch when word went out that the lists were posted. Carmen was waiting in line to get coffee for her and Julia, and she feared she might get trampled like a hapless British soccer fan.

  She watched the stampede. She drank her coffee by herself, enjoying the relative quiet.

  Later, after the hoopla had died down, Carmen did wander by the lobby to check the lists. Why not? She checked the community theater list first, thinking it the least absurd possibility, and then the Second Stage. Her heart did pick up a little speed as her eyes passed from I to J to K to L. To M. Her name was not there.

  Not exactly a surprise, she said to herself as she walked outside, taking the long way back to her room. She was mildly embarrassed that she’d even looked.

  Was she disappointed? She wanted to read her heart honestly.

  No. She felt pretty happy. She was wearing the Traveling Pants and they still fit her, and even on an empty path she felt herself among friends.

  O Tibbeth,

  Wherefore art thou ignoring thy friends?

  I sendeth thou a phone card. Please calleth me backeth.

  And I encloseth the Pants.

  Loveth,

  Thy loving and most theatrical wench,

  Carmen. Eth.

  When Bridget reported for duty the next workday, Peter was not in the grave. She casually waited until around noon to casually ask cabinmate Carolyn why not. “I think he moved over to the house excavation.”

  “Oh,” she said casually.

  He was not the Tuesday lecturer, and she didn’t see him at dinner the following night.

  “A bunch of people went into town for dinner,” Maxine mentioned.

  Town was about thirty-five minutes away and Bridget had not yet been there, but suddenly she felt herself growing curious about it.

  The next day, Alison announced to the team in mortuary that they’d made a big advance in the house dig, and asked for a couple of volunteers to shift. Bridget’s hand shot up.

  “We found a new part of the foundation and a new floor,” Peter explained animatedly to the newly expanded group after lunch.

  Was he surprised to see her there? Did it matter?

  “We’ve cleared the floor in one small area, and we want to keep going. It’s a tamped-earth floor, made of…well, earth. It can be hard to distinguish from the rest of the earth, if you know what I mean.”

  Bridget found herself on her hands and knees with her trowel. They were deep in, the shadows were long. Other members of the crew were carefully lifting off layers of the ground in front of her. Where she knelt there was less than a foot of loose dirt where they’d left off with the coarser tools.

  She felt around with her hands, cupping mounds of it into the nearest bin. Peter had told her what to look for, but she sensed she would do better with her hands. She most urgently did not want to dig through and wreck the integrity of the floor.

  She kept two palms on the edge of the flat and moved them along, feeling with her hands. It was all earth, yes, but some of it had been constructed and maintained purposefully and the rest had poured haphazardly into the negative space. Even after two and a half millennia, she could begin to feel the difference.

  That was the thing with digging, she was starting to understand. You went into it with the instincts of a looter: Dig around, find something valuable and cool, and bring it to a museum. S
he’d fancied herself a wannabe Indiana Jones. But the real thing was finding the effects of the human will. The planning, the wanting, the attempting of these ancient people was what connected you to them. Their effort was the difference between the random, allover, everywhere-including-your-scalp dirt and this precious floor.

  That was what they could learn from the gravesite, Peter had explained to her. You could learn a lot more about a people from how they buried, cared for, and commemorated their dead than from an ancient body randomly struck down by the side of a road.

  “We do not like random,” she’d teased Peter after one of his pep talks.

  “No, we don’t, do we?” he said, laughing, as he was quick to do.

  This floor was not random. She closed her eyes and concentrated all of her self into her palms, almost in a trance as she felt along. She knew she probably looked ridiculous, but she didn’t care. She remembered her grandfather describing how Michelangelo sculpted bodies out of blocks of marble. Her grandpa had been reading a book about the artist during a long-ago summer she’d spent in Alabama with him and Greta. She remembered him saying how Michelangelo looked for the body inside the block. He saw it and sensed it in there, and with his chisel he freed it.

  Well, Bridget thought, a floor was a more prosaic thing, granted, but she was going to free it.

  Her fingers were so sensitized she almost shouted when they ran into something hard and quite purposeful, but not the floor. Carefully she shook it off and held it in the patch of sunlight.

  “Look at this,” she called.

  Peter hopped down into the room, followed by Carolyn and another guy. “Wow. That’s great. That’s most of a lamp. Look, you can see some of the painting on it.”

  She felt the moist terra-cotta against her fingers and followed the smooth, molded shape.

  “That’s where they would pour the oil. Probably olive oil.” Peter pointed to a little well at the top. “They’d float the wick right there.” He nodded at her approvingly. “I bet you can’t find the missing piece.”

  She was such a sucker for a dare. He could obviously tell that.