Sisterhood Everlasting

  You are drunk, she informed herself drunkenly, feeling the spin starting in the middle of her head.

  She unbuttoned his shirt so she could see his tattoo, but it seemed to spread all around and she was too close to his chest to be able to tell what it was. He was pushing himself against her and she could feel his hardness through her jeans and his. She meant to ask him about the tattoo, but she forgot the question before she could.

  His hands were on the waistband of her jeans and then he was pulling at the button. Am I really gonna do this? Right here, right now? the least drunk part of her was asking, while the rest of her was barreling along.

  He undid the button and zipper before she could pay attention. She felt his two hands on her bare ass.

  Intoxicated as she was, there was something she needed to know. She pulled her mouth away from his. “Do you have something?” she asked. “A rubber or something?”

  “No. Do we need it?”

  “We need it,” she said.

  “Aw, shit,” he said. He took his hands out of her pants. “You sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “All right.” He looked agonized in his impatience. “I’ll go in there and find one. You stay here.”

  Bridget felt the first tendril of shame as she buttoned her pants, the second as she fastened her bra and closed her shirt. She sat down on the grass. She looked up at the sky to a moon that was barely a sliver. She felt tears running down her face.

  What am I doing?

  Travis came back. He recognized the change in her mood. “Are you okay?”

  “No,” she said. “I’m not.” Beer told the truth.

  She wrapped her arms around her knees. Her body was closed for business.

  “You gonna be sick?” he asked.

  “No, it’s not that.” She paused and considered. “Yes, I guess I am.” She went around to the back of the bar and retched her guts out. She felt better in one way and worse in another. Nausea abated, reality came back.

  She returned to sit on the grass and Travis sat next to her. “Feel better?”

  “Not much,” she said. She put her arms around her knees again. She rested her head on them. God, I hate myself.

  He patted her hair very sweetly. “You’re a beautiful girl and a fine pool player,” he said.

  “Thanks,” she said into her knee.

  “You want to go out sometime? Tomorrow?” he asked. “We can take it slow if you like.”

  She lifted her head and tried to muster a smile for him. If she was going to have a hideously destructive one-night stand, she had at least picked a nice guy for it.

  “I’ve got a boyfriend,” she said.

  “Well.” He nodded. “Of course you do. Lucky guy.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t think he feels so lucky.”

  You have to be someone.

  —Bob Marley

  “I don’t know if we should go forward with the wedding,” Carmen said to Jones.

  She sat at the table in the kitchen of their loft. The kitchen table at home with her mom was pine or cherry wood or something like that, with a million rings and scars on it. It was soft. This table, like everything else in their kitchen, was stainless steel. You could wipe off any marks, but it was hard under her mug, hard and cold under her elbow. Had Jones picked this one? Had she? Probably Annaliese, the designer, had picked it. It turns out I hate this table, Carmen thought.

  Jones looked up from the espresso machine. She could tell he was about to press the button, but that he decided it would be unseemly to start up all the boiling, steaming racket when such a serious statement had been laid down.

  “Carmen.”

  “How can I think about that now? How can I think about flowers and hors d’oeuvres? I can’t.”

  “How can you not? Come on. We’ve talked about this. What are you going to think about? Tibby? Are you going to think about her all day long? About your friendship? How many days or weeks in a row are you going to do that? And do you really think it’s helping, at this point?”

  The tears were so warm in Carmen’s eyes and so cold by the time they got to her chin and dribbled down her neck or dropped onto the table. “I don’t know what else to do.”

  “Move on. Call your agents. Call your manager. Set up some auditions. Look at flowers, visit caterers, buy yourself the most gorgeous, most expensive fucking wedding dress in New York City.”

  Carmen studied a teardrop as it sat pertly on the metal surface of the table as if it were the only one. Well, there were more where that came from. She wiped it into a wet stripe with the tip of her finger. “I don’t know if I can.”

  Jones knew about grief. You couldn’t say he didn’t. His brother had died at eighteen of a drug overdose when Jones was sixteen. “You can’t let it define you,” he’d said at the time he told her about it, maybe three months after they’d met, and then he’d never spoken of it again. He was either very good at grieving or very bad, and Carmen wasn’t sure which.

  “Do you think that sitting here in your sweatpants day after day is some kind of tribute to her?”

  Carmen shook her head.

  “Carmen, I could see it for the first week. Ten days. I get it. But you’re not helping anybody here.”

  Carmen shook her head again.

  “I’m not saying you try to forget about it. Of course you can’t. But you take the sadness with you, you keep moving and you integrate it into your life, and the burden gets lighter over time.”

  Carmen nodded. He’d given this speech before.

  “Okay?” he said, like a coach sending her back onto the field.

  She shrugged. “I don’t know if I can.”

  Jones stood there staring at her for an extra moment. She knew her hair was wild and her face looked sallow. The sweatpants were not attractive. He was probably thinking how ugly she really was. It was probably a relief not to have to get married to her. She thought of the beautiful girls in Jones’s office who were constantly fluttering around him with their straight, silky hair.

  He dropped his coffee cup into the sink with a clang and it startled her.

  “All right, Carmen. If you don’t want to get married, that’s your decision.” He walked to the door, then turned around. “I love you. I want to marry you. I’d marry you today. I want to keep moving forward. You know how I am. But if you don’t want to, that’s for you to decide.”

  Carmen put her hands over her face.

  “But I’m not moving backward,” he said as he put on his coat. He opened the front door to leave. “That’s one thing I’m not going to do.”

  Bridget slept in a field for the third straight night and woke up under a hot, damning sun. This bit of earth was positively the sunniest place in the state of California, and she was not enjoying it.

  She was still nursing the hangover from the night at the bar, and she couldn’t shake it. Too much time had passed to blame the alcohol anymore. Was it the guilt? The self-loathing? She biked into Sacramento to look for something to eat that might settle her stomach. After she ate a sourdough roll and drank a cup of jasmine tea she rode by a Planned Parenthood office and stopped her bike.

  There was a part of her that cringed at what she had almost done that night and a part of her that wished she had done it. She wanted to cross a boundary, not stay on this side of her life anymore. She wanted to tear it all down and dare herself to feel any worse.

  She walked into the office with a long-haired swagger and signed her name on the sheet. As instructed, she went to the bathroom and left a urine sample. She penned a little drawing of the sun on her warm plastic cup. An ancient Earth, Wind & Fire song was playing when she went back to the waiting room, and she found herself dancing to it. She didn’t feel like sitting down.

  She was free. She had that, at least. She had nowhere to be, no one to answer to. She slept under the stars. If she was going to be wrecked, at least she’d be free.

  The nurse came into the waiting room and called her n
ame. “Bridget Vreeland.”

  “Me,” she said. Her name was one thing she was left with, and she had mixed feelings about it. Maybe she could change it. She’d call herself Sunny. Sunny Rollins, like the saxophone player. Or Sunny Tomko. She’d borrowed Tibby’s old name once before when she’d needed to be someone different; Tibby would let her borrow it again.

  She followed the nurse to an examining room. “Should I change into one of those gowns?” she asked. She wasn’t afraid of anything.

  “Let’s just talk to begin with,” the nurse said. She was pretty old. In her sixties at least. She had hopeful eyes, Bridget thought, but sort of sad. It was hard to say which they were more. “What can I do for you?”

  “I need birth control.”

  “Are you using any now?”

  “I had one of the rings you put on your cervix. I think it’s expired. I can’t remember exactly the date when I was supposed to change it, but I think it passed.”

  “Can you give me the date of your last period?”

  Bridget thought back. She had no idea. It wasn’t exactly at the front of her mind these days. “I have no idea,” she said honestly.

  “Are you sexually active?”

  “Now? Today?”

  “Well. Not today necessarily. Over the last two or three months.”

  She hadn’t had sex with Eric since the night before Greece. “Not in the last couple of weeks, but before that, yes.”

  “Are you married? In a relationship?”

  “I have a boyfriend.” She didn’t know why she kept saying that. She had left that alleged boyfriend without a decent explanation. He could probably not reasonably be called her boyfriend anymore.

  “Do you think you want the cervical ring again?”

  “Yeah. I guess.”

  “All right. Is there any chance you are pregnant?”

  “No.”

  “Okay. Go ahead and put the robe on, opening at the front. I’ll do a quick exam and get you on your way.” More hopeful, her eyes, Bridget decided. They were oddly fragile for a person who’d been around so long.

  “Great. Thanks.” This was easy.

  “Did you leave a urine sample?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  The nurse came back in once Bridget had gotten into the robe and her expression was different.

  “Do you think the ring is wrong for me?” Bridget asked chattily. “Maybe the pill would be better? But I might forget to take it. You see, that’s why I got the ring instead.”

  “Bridget.”

  She turned at the sober sound of her name. “Yes?”

  “Sit down.”

  Bridget hopped on the table. She gathered her papery robe in a bunch in front of her and fitted her heels into the stirrups.

  “No, you don’t need to do that yet. Just sit and talk to me for a minute.”

  Bridget sat up. She let her feet dangle.

  “I can’t give you a new cervix ring or any other kind of birth control because you are pregnant.”

  Bridget watched the nurse’s face. She watched her eyes. She looked into them to find some other way of interpreting that word.

  “You think I’m pregnant?”

  “I know you’re pregnant. I had them run the test twice. False positives are extremely rare after four or five weeks.”

  “I don’t think I am. I don’t think I could be. Are you sure you got the right cup of pee?” Bridget’s feet were rattling; her lungs felt shallow. She crossed her arms over her chest.

  “If you want to leave another sample, you can. But I feel almost certain that the result will be the same.”

  “But I have that ring.”

  “The ring emits a hormone that keeps you from conceiving for a certain length of time. You are right that it expired.”

  Her lungs were turning inside out again, not catching any air. The air gave her some hope of deniability and she couldn’t seem to get any. Her breasts felt big and achy and had for many days. Her stomach had felt vaguely unsettled, but she accounted for it with the obvious facts that her heart was broken and her life was in ruins, not to mention her long-running hangover.

  She thought of her stomach, her uterus, where this thing was supposedly happening. Oh, my God. She put her hands over her face. She felt horribly claustrophobic in here. “I have to go,” she said. Her voice didn’t sound right.

  “Bridget.”

  Bridget realized at the door that she was still wearing the paper robe and that her clothes were in a pile in the corner. She froze. She didn’t know what to do. It seemed overwhelming to walk to the corner and put them on.

  She felt the nurse behind her. The nurse took her hand. Bridget felt herself shaking all over. Her hand was frozen and the nurse’s hand was dry and warm. The hand pulled her back to the table and sat her down. The nurse sat down next to her and put her arm around Bridget’s shoulders. The world was too strange for awkwardness anymore. Bridget caught some air, finally, and it helped her think a little bit.

  “Can I just get rid of it?” she asked. She knew those weren’t the kind of words you were supposed to use.

  The nurse nodded slowly. “You can end the pregnancy.”

  “So let’s do that,” Bridget said quickly. “Can we do it right now?”

  “Bridget, it’s a somber choice. I’ve done this a long time and I’ve learned many things in the course of it. You won’t forgive yourself if you do it without thinking it through first.”

  Bridget shook her head. She didn’t want to make a somber choice. She didn’t want to think about anything. She wanted this to be over.

  “Go home. Tell your boyfriend. Let him help you talk it through. Come back if you decide you’re ready and bring him along to hold your hand.”

  Bridget had no choice but to see Eric in her mind. The tears came up from somewhere deep. They weren’t only for Eric but for everything she had lost or ruined or was about to lose or ruin. Because she didn’t deserve anything. She didn’t deserve him or anyone. She deserved to be alone.

  The nurse stroked Bridget’s head patiently and let her cry. After a while she moved to stroking her back. She held Bridget’s hand and passed her Kleenexes. Bridget didn’t deserve this kindness either, but she took it.

  “I don’t think I can tell him,” she finally said.

  “If you love him, then you have to try,” the nurse said soothingly. “Whether or not you’ll ever want to have a baby together, I can almost promise you the relationship won’t survive if you don’t tell him.”

  I don’t think it survived, Bridget thought, but she respected this nurse too much not to walk out of here promising to make a somber choice. And if she needed to do it thoughtlessly, at least she’d go somewhere else.

  The nurse walked her to the front entrance. Bridget realized she was still holding her hand. The nurse took a card out of her pocket. She wrote her cellphone number on the back. “You call me anytime, all right? I mean anytime.”

  “Thanks,” Bridget said. She looked down at the name on the card and up at the little name tag affixed to her breast pocket. For the first time she saw that the nurse’s name was Tabitha.

  The couch where Carmen did her crying was midcentury chrome covered in shiny orange material with a fancy name that was basically plastic. Unlike the one in the apartment where she’d lived with her mother, the old chenille chesterfield that kept a permanent record of every spill and every tear, nothing here stuck.

  When Carmen finally got up and trudged to the bathroom to blow her nose and pee, she looked in the mirror and she was hideous. A hideous hideosity. For the first week after Greece, she had looked in the mirror and felt sorry for herself. Now she despised herself.

  What was she going to do? Was she really going to end this thing with Jones because she was too sad and too crazy and too chicken to get married? Would she say goodbye to him that night? Move out, stay in a hotel for a couple of weeks, find a new place?

  What did she have without him? Without this place? Noth
ing. She’d be alone. Who did she have to cry to? No one. Not Lena. Not Bee. She didn’t even know how to talk to them now.

  She felt the tears starting again. Not Paul. Not her dad. The world was full of death, full of sadness, full of people too broken to lean on.

  There was her mom. Her mom didn’t know what to offer and Carmen didn’t know what to ask for. Her mom had returned to busy mode, redecorating her house and trying to get Ryan into a new school. She was grateful for quick problems like flowers and hors d’oeuvres. She liked Jones. She was scared of Carmen’s despair.

  What about other friends? Her New York friends?

  Her New York friends consisted of her stylist and her makeup artist and her manager and her publicist and the PA who got her lattes. They were people who expected something of her. They were audience members. They were not people you fell apart in front of.

  And actor friends? They were impossible. They had a drink with you, maybe, but you stayed in bullshit cheek-kissing-acquaintance purgatory forever. Like her, they all had their real friends from “before.” Nobody needed any new ones.

  At seven o’clock in the evening, Carmen was wearing her Catherine Malandrino; she put on Billie Holiday and made Jones a martini for when he walked in the door. It was pretty corny, but effective.

  Jones waltzed her around the room. “Are we on for September?” he asked happily.

  “I was thinking more like April.”

  He stopped midwaltz. “This April?”

  “This April.”

  His smile got big. He put up his hand to give her a high five. “Now we’re talkin’, baby.”

  After the high five, he carried her into the bedroom and made love to her without even folding down the fancy bedcover or taking off her dress. His phone bleeped and buzzed and spasmed and for once he ignored it.

  Afterward, they lay for a long time and talked about the venue and the guest list and where was the most beautiful place to go in April on your honeymoon. Carmen was a pretty darned good actress if she did say so herself.

  For a long time after Bridget left the Planned Parenthood office she searched for her bike. She was dazed; her head was pounding and her eyes were stinging. Maybe she’d left it by the bakery.