It didn’t dawn on Carmen until they were gathered around Tibby’s duffel bag and the bag was open and they were surrounded by the boxes of frosted strawberry Pop-Tarts, bags of Cheetos, and Ziplocs of sour gummy worms and unlit candles what thing this was meant to be and what perverse thing it actually was.
It was the last night—Carmen and Bridget were leaving the next day. They couldn’t have left it any longer. The suitcase was in the middle of them. How else could they have looked at it all at once? These were the things in the suitcase. There wasn’t much choice about taking them out. Carmen took out the CD, a relic of sorts, and it was all she could do to look at the names of the songs in Tibby’s boyish handwriting. The terrible, ritual-sweet, late-eighties dance stylings of Paula Abdul, Janet Jackson, and George Michael.
It must have taken some doing to get real American Pop-Tarts all the way to Australia and then here.
Tibby, who had smirked, mugged, and grimaced her way through the Traveling Pants ritual, had come here to stage a Traveling Pants ritual, even with no pants. Under the first layer of snacks and atmospherics, Carmen’s hand came upon a stratum of papers, envelopes, and packages. The first was a true artifact. “Oh, my God,” Carmen murmured, her heart trying to beat its way out of a thick sludge. “I didn’t know Tibby had this.” She could hear the same kind of wetness at the bottom of Bridget’s breathing. For a moment they were tricked out of their stupor.
There it was. Lena’s careful fifteen-year-old handwriting on Gilda’s Aerobics Studio letterhead.
We, the Sisterhood, hereby instate the following rules to govern the use of the Traveling Pants.
It was not right. It was a cruel trick to have to see this and remember. Carmen wanted to scrabble back into the stupor as fast as she could. They couldn’t look at one another. She anchored the piece of paper under a box of Pop-Tarts. She couldn’t stand to see it any longer.
There was a second sheet of paper. It was covered in Tibby’s writing, looser and messier than it had once been. Carmen saw all of their names written at the top. She handed it directly to Lena without reading anything else.
Lena read for a moment. Her face turned a deeper red and then went to no color at all. She looked up. “I don’t know what this means.” Something about the way she said it made Carmen feel scared.
Bridget got to her feet and started pacing in a tight loop behind the sofa. “What does it say?”
Lena glanced away. She put the paper down and her hands were shaking.
“Can you tell us what it says?” Carmen pressed, not wanting to know but needing to know.
“I can’t. I don’t understand it.” Lena’s hands looked like skeleton hands grasping at her own face.
“Then just read it.” Carmen felt panicked. She needed to get this over with.
Lena turned to her with a glare she’d never seen. “I don’t want to.” Her voice was biting and cold, as Carmen had never heard it.
Bridget stuck her arm in and took it. She walked back behind the sofa, jiggling on the balls of her feet as she looked at the paper. She began reading aloud in a deliberate way, as though she weren’t even listening to what she was saying.
“I’m writing this down, because it is going to be hard for me to say it. Because this is probably our last time just us. See, I can write that down, but I don’t think I can say it. I’m not doing this to say goodbye, though I know that has to be part of it. I’m doing it to say thank you for all we have had and done and been for one another, to say I love you for making this life of mine what it is. Leaving you is the hardest thing I have to do. But the thing is, the best parts of me are in you, all three of you. You are who I am, and what I cherish in myself stays on in you.”
Bridget’s voice shook and broke and then stopped. She put the paper down on the coffee table. Carmen watched her walk up the stairs. She watched Lena grimly put the contents of the suitcase back inside and close it. Carmen put her head on the table. No one made a sound.
After that, as far as Bridget was concerned, Lena had disappeared. Even as she stood in the middle of the room, holding the phone to call the cab to take them from the bottom of the hill to the airport, she was gone. She had become a black hole of a person, but not the kind that pulled you in.
In a completely unfair way, Bridget wanted Lena to drop all that and help her. She’d gotten used to Lena’s coming to her when she was in distress. Fate had been kind to them before this, doling out traumas not all at once but one at a time, so that whenever something awful was happening to one, the others were there to help. The explosions came at them from the outside while they huddled together for protection.
This explosion came from the middle of the huddle. This was an inside job.
After the letter, Bridget saw Carmen as a stranger. Her voice a little too loud, her teeth a little too white, her collarbones jutting out too far. Was this what she really looked like now? How powerfully memories could soften a face. How beautiful love could make a friend’s face. You could recognize its power when it was gone.
For some reason Bridget thought numbly of the old apartment on Avenue C. For two and a half years they had paid rent below the market rate. It had crept up only slowly, by tiny increments, thanks to three decades of rent stabilization enjoyed by dozens of impoverished hipster tenants before them.
And one day the landlord sent in two Nicaraguans in weight-lifting belts to tear out their perfectly shabby little kitchen. For three weeks they were left with a dank cavity and a bunch of chopped-off pipes and wires stumped like snakes looking for their heads. Eventually the grumpy superintendent sealed up the hole with cheap new appliances and cupboards, all plastic and composite board. For that honor, they got their rent doubled all at once, a so-called fair market rent.
The next month they’d moved out. It was the end of an era. Tibby had moved in with Brian in Long Island City. Bridget spent an itinerant year on couches or floors or house-sitting or sub-subletting before she began her slow trek to San Francisco. Carmen roomed with the bulimic paralegal uptown. Lena got a better teaching job and mostly stayed in Providence. The thing you had had and loved and taken for granted caught up with you all at once and for no sensible reason suddenly cost more than you could afford.
Bridget paced the living room of Lena’s grandparents’ house, waiting for it to be time to pace somewhere else. She couldn’t stand the hurt and disappointment she would see on Carmen’s face if she looked at her. She’d rather jump into the cauldron after Tibby than have to look at the things Carmen needed from her. Please let’s all love one another. Please let us act like it’s the same. Please let’s act like we still believe in us.
There was one time at the end of that terrible last day when Bridget’s eyes did drag across Carmen’s, but she didn’t see what she was expecting to see. It was a different blow. Carmen’s eyes were as dead as Bridget’s; they weren’t asking for anything at all. And maybe not seeing Carmen’s neediness was even worse than seeing it and disappointing it. Maybe Carmen didn’t believe in them anymore either.
Tibby, who was not fond of change, had once told Bridget that the present, no matter what it brought, couldn’t change the past. The past was set and sealed.
But that wasn’t true. Now every time Bridget glanced behind her, the past, whether near or distant, opened and morphed and reset into images and uncertainties she’d never even thought of. If this could happen to Tibby, then nothing about their friendship, about their past, could be trusted. It seemed ironic to disagree with Tibby at such a time, but she didn’t believe their past anymore and was extra sorry that Tibby herself had been the one to prove its frailty.
Carmen stared out the window of the taxicab, chewing through an expensive manicure and absently spitting out bits of fingernail as she hadn’t done since middle school. The taxi took them along the coast road, delivering them to the plane that would take them away from here. For the first day she could remember on this island, the sun wasn’t shining. The clouds came down low and t
he wind blew hard and erratically. She tried to orient herself with a glimpse of the Caldera—she knew it should be just outside her window—but she couldn’t see it.
Instead she pictured the heavy envelope now sitting in her bag with her name written across the front in Tibby’s scrawl. It had been in Tibby’s duffel bag. There had been one for each of them, with a few words of instruction written on the backs, including dates on which the envelopes were supposed to be opened. Lena had distributed them before she’d closed up the suitcase for good, as mystified as Carmen and Bridget were. She said she was going to take the bag back to her parents’ house and leave it in the basement unless anybody had another idea, which no one did.
As she thought of the suitcase, Carmen’s inner eye turned to another paper in there; the famous rules of the pants—the Manifesto, they had grandly called it. How splendid they thought they were. With an uncharacteristic feeling of scorn, she couldn’t help but consider now: how many of those rules had she broken? They had never enumerated the consequences of breaking the rules, but maybe they should have.
Were four fifteen-year-old girls so powerful that they got to make the rules? Was it because of the broken rules that the pants had been lost, and the sisterhood along with them? Was it because Carmen had taken a wet washcloth to the pants several times in defiance of rule #1? Was it because she’d thought I am fat in the pants many, many times, in defiance of rule #3? She’d certainly picked her nose in them, who was she kidding, and a couple of times at least, she had worn them with a tucked-in shirt and a belt. So much for rules #5 and #9.
But it was rule #10 that genuinely burned in front of her eyes as she imagined it. It was #10 where she had truly failed. They had all failed. And that was the one that actually mattered, the unforgivable, unthinkable root of their loss.
10. Remember: Pants = love. Love your pals. Love yourself.
But why would you wanna break
a perfectly good heart?
—Taylor Swift
After Carmen and Bridget left in the taxi, Lena sat at the little white Formica table in the kitchen of her grandparents’ house. This was where she’d sat eating cereal with Bapi the summer she’d turned sixteen. He’d sat in the chair across from this one, day after day, and quietly eaten his Cheerios.
It didn’t look the same as it had back then. Not this room or any other part of the house. It was faded and indistinct. She could barely make herself think of it as the same house. But everything was like that now. Even her own wrists and feet seemed strangely foreign to her. Maybe it was her eyes where the problem lodged.
Sometimes she would sink so deeply into her mind—no particular thoughts, no particular narrative, just mud and murk—that it would take her a bewilderingly long time to remember where she was and why. It was almost like she was falling asleep and waking up so many times a day, forgetting and remembering, that she was starting to live in between.
The phone rang and she picked it up. It was the woman from the coroner’s office again. The woman talked rapidly about paperwork and signatures and schedules, and though Lena listened as carefully as she could, she kept getting lost. She heard the words and knew the words and forgot them and tried to remember them, and by then the woman had already leapt ahead by dozens more words.
Over the past few days, Lena had tried, she really had. She knew the Rollinses, Bridget, and Carmen were counting on her. It was her place where this had happened. But her Greek wasn’t up to it. She wasn’t up to it. It was possible her brain wouldn’t process what had happened in any language.
“Do you understand? Do you understand?” the woman kept saying.
Lena held the phone with both hands. “I really don’t,” she said.
Lena found the number through the operator and called it that afternoon. Once she thought of it, she didn’t hesitate. It was a local number, picked up by voice mail after a few rings.
She listened to his voice, his outgoing message, which was in Greek. “Kostos, this is Lena Kaligaris,” she said in English, in a voice she hardly recognized. “I am in Santorini and I’m sorry to bother you, but if you are in town I need your help. Please call me at my grandparents’ house if you get this message.” She left the number in case he had forgotten it.
She hung up the phone. Her heart kept on with its same heavy thud. She listened for the sounds of Carmen’s and Bee’s footsteps even though they were gone and had been since that morning.
They hadn’t been able to look at one another to say goodbye. Between them was a seething, putrid mess of blame and fear and recrimination: What have we done? How did we let this happen? What did you know? What did I know? What didn’t you tell me? What didn’t I tell myself?
They had let Tibby slip away from them into complete darkness and not even known.
What does this mean about us? Who are we now? Who have we become?
When Bridget called Eric from the airport in Athens to let him know when she was getting in, he told her he’d take the afternoon off work to pick her up from the airport and to spend some time with her. She landed at SFO and saw his anxious face the moment she passed through the doors from the terminal into the baggage claim.
He took her in his arms right away. “I’m so sorry,” he murmured in her ear. He rocked her, saying it over and over.
But no matter how many times he said it, no matter how much she knew he meant it, the words stirred around in her ear but didn’t get into her brain. Sometimes he could comfort her. Sometimes he said what she needed, but today he couldn’t reach her. Nothing could.
She stared out the car window on the way home. She watched the brown hills, wondering when they would be green again. Eric didn’t try to make her talk.
As they headed into the Mission she experienced a stretch of time when she couldn’t remember where she lived. She kept picturing the place they’d had when Eric had first moved out here, when they’d first moved in together, the little place on Oak Street. She couldn’t remember anything of what her life was after that.
When she stepped into the apartment, it didn’t seem to belong to her, though she’d picked it—even forced Eric into it. She saw that Eric had laid the table with things she loved: a black bean burrito from Pancho’s, a sliced ripe avocado, a bowl of cubed mango, a plate of oatmeal cookies, and a pitcher of lemonade made with seltzer. She turned to him and thanked him by putting her arms around him. She was grateful, she really was. Even if none of it seemed to relate to her anymore. Even if she couldn’t eat any of it.
“Okay, here’s the big surprise,” he announced, throwing open the bedroom door.
Bridget stared into the little room in disbelief. There was a bed. A big wooden four-poster job riding high with its box spring and mattress, its fluffy comforter and pile of pillows.
“Brand-new sheets and everything,” Eric declared proudly. He walked toward it and she followed, slowly.
“I realized we’ve never had a bed,” he said, admiring it, patting it with his open hand. “We always sleep on a mattress on the floor or a futon or something. I feel like it’s time for us to have a real bed, you know? I took a while picking it out. There were a lot of different kinds. I hope you like it.”
He turned to look at her. She couldn’t say anything. She sat on the floor in the doorway and burst into tears.
“Bee, what?” Eric asked, kneeling down next to her. “What is it?”
She couldn’t catch her breath. He put his arms around her, but she couldn’t settle her gasping.
“Please. Tell me what’s wrong.”
“I—I don’t want that b-bed,” she sobbed.
“Why not? What’s wrong with it? I thought you’d like it.”
She looked up at it. “It’s n-not a b-bad bed. B-but do you have any i-idea—” She stopped and again she tried to catch her breath. “H-how hard it will be to m-move?”
“I don’t want to move. I want to stay here. I want to settle down with you. I can take care of you, Bee.”
She felt
like her lungs had turned inside out. They wouldn’t fill with air. It was urgent, what she felt, but she couldn’t explain it. She could never make him understand.
Lena believed it was the afternoon after the day Carmen and Bridget had left for the airport. She calculated it was the day after she’d spoken to the coroner and left a message for Kostos. She’d sat for a long time at the kitchen table and then she lay on the couch in the dark while some amount of time passed. It was probably the next day, but an extra day could have slouched away and a new day could have slipped under the door, and she might not have noticed it.
She believed, though, it was the day after they’d left that Kostos arrived.
She heard the knock on the door, and she gathered herself up off the couch and opened it. She didn’t expect it would be him. She didn’t expect it would be anybody. It used to be that a knock on the door indicated someone was almost definitely there, but just as time had gone haywire, her mind had shrunken away from most matters of cause and effect. Occurrences just kind of bubbled up in front of her eyes and either stayed there for a while or disappeared again. The occurrence, in this case, was Kostos.
He opened his arms to her, and she walked into them. He wrapped her tightly and she felt her face pressing into his cotton shirt. The smell in his collar was very familiar. He’d somehow fallen back down into the world where she lived. She sensed the emotions, the surprise and strangeness of this, but she couldn’t quite feel them.
“Come in,” she said, and she led the way to the couch. She’d forgotten how dark it was, that all the shutters were closed, until he was sitting next to her and she couldn’t see his face.
“I guess it’s dark in here,” she said wanly, walking to a front window and unlatching it. The sunshine crashed through, more of it than had been invited.
His face was sad, she realized. He picked up her hand and held it. She thought to ask him what was wrong. She was confused, forgetting where she was again. And then she remembered. On the whole, forgetting was easier, but it never stayed away long.