Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood Read online

  Then she’d started to feel sad about saying good-bye to Bee and it reminded her of good-byes generally. So Carmen turned to the most recent issue of CosmoGIRL! for solace, as she often did in moments like these. And voilà, she was swept away by the imperative need to copy the innovative use of fake eyelashes on page 23. Sometimes it paid to be shallow.

  It was so different for Carmen these days, walking into her mother’s room. The reason was obvious: It wasn’t her mother’s room anymore. It was her mom and David’s room. A woman’s room was so different than a woman’s room together with a man. It was utterly different when the woman was your mother and the man was her spanking-new husband, whom you’d met less than a year before.

  Carmen wasn’t grateful for her parents’ divorce. There were so many things she’d lost. But it took David’s presence now to show her what remarkable access and role-defying closeness she’d shared with her mother for all those years when it had been just the two of them.

  When her father had first left, a lot of the usual boundaries had come down. She’d slept in her mother’s bed almost every night for a year. Was it for Carmen’s sake? Or for Christina’s? Once there was no dad coming home after a hard day of work, “we girls,” as her mother called them, had eaten Eggo waffles or scrambled eggs for dinner many nights. Carmen had considered it a treat, not having to saw through some hunk of flank steak and stomach the obligatory vegetables.

  Carmen used to feel an easy ownership of this room. Now she treaded uncertainly. She used to flop at will on her mother’s bed. It was a different bed now. Not literally a different bed, but in every other way different. She steered wide around it now.

  It wasn’t just that the room contained a lot of male stuff. David wasn’t a slob or anything. He was always conscious that this apartment had been Christina and Carmen’s long before he joined up. He commanded one closet, three bookshelves, and a new bureau from Pottery Barn. He didn’t even have pictures yet. The room now testified not so much to him but to them—their intimacy, the things they whispered to each other when they were falling asleep. Even when they weren’t present, Carmen felt like she was invading it.

  The bathroom used to bloom with female stuff—creams, lotions, makeup, tampons, and perfume. Now, in deference to them, Christina kept it all mostly stowed in the cabinet. Even seeing David’s shaving cream can lined up next to Christina’s nail polish remover made Carmen feel like she’d just crawled between them in bed.

  The false eyelashes weren’t in the medicine cabinet, Carmen quickly discovered. When you lived with your daughter, you left things like that in easy view. When you lived with your brand-new husband, you hid the evidence.

  Carmen already knew that most of the stuff Christina didn’t want David to see, she stored in the cabinet above the toilet. Yes, this was the right department, Carmen realized as soon as she’d jiggled open the sticky door. There was wart remover, there was mustache bleach, there was bikini wax and hair straightening balm and a box of Nice ’n Easy in Deep Mahogany. Carmen snaked her hand toward the back, knocking over appetite suppressants and a pack of laxatives. A plastic bottle was set rolling by the falling laxatives. Carmen watched in displeasure as it fell off the shelf and…splash, into the toilet. Damn.

  She watched it bobbing in the toilet water. She could see it contained some kind of vitamins. She really hoped the cap was watertight.

  While she delayed reaching her hand into the toilet—who hurried to do a thing like that?—she absently wondered why her mother kept vitamins in the cabinet of shame. David was all about vitamins. He ate them for breakfast. He talked about various herbal supplements like they were his best friends. What kind of vitamins would Christina keep from her dashing nutrition-man?

  Carmen’s curiosity was always her best motivator. She stuck her hand in the toilet and plucked out the bottle, tossing it directly into the sink and running hot water over it. She added some liquid soap. Once the bottle and her hand were sufficiently clean, she turned it over to satisfy her questioning mind.

  Her head grew chill and fuzzy. The fuzz invaded her chest and expanded in her lower abdomen. The front of the label communicated precisely why this bottle lived between the laxatives and the Preparation H. But it wasn’t David her mom was trying to hide them from. At least, that was what Carmen powerfully suspected.

  They were prenatal vitamins. The kind you took when you were having a baby. And Christina was almost certainly hiding them from Carmen.

  Tibby squinted in the morning sunlight. She was groggy and disoriented, her lips were swollen, and her eyes felt puffy. She felt like she had a hangover, but not because she’d had any alcohol.

  It was one of those mornings when you come to terms with a strange new reality. You ask yourself, Did I dream that? Did I actually do that? Did he really say that? Reality comes back in bits and pieces, and you experience the novelty of it all over again. You wonder, Will this day and this night and tomorrow and all the rest of the days be different because of what happened last night? And in Tibby’s case, she knew the answer.

  She put her fingers on her lips. Could you get a hangover from kissing?

  Was Brian awake yet? She pictured him in his bed. She pictured him in her bed. She got the shivery feeling in the bottom of her stomach, so she stopped picturing him in her bed. Was he regretting anything? Was she regretting anything?

  What would they say when they saw each other again?

  Would he just drop by during pancakes the way he often did? Would he plant a wet one on her lips and wait to see if anyone noticed?

  She stood up and looked at herself in the mirror. Did she look as different as she felt? Hmmm. Same black watch plaid pajama bottoms hanging down around her hips. Same undersized white tank top baring several inches of belly. Maybe not.

  Her room was a big, cluttered mess. There was nothing new about that, but she did notice it in a new way as she looked around. Had she ever thrown out anything in her life?

  There were layers and layers of Tibby detritus both on the walls and on the floor. You could do an archaeological dig in this room and probably unearth her Fisher-Price farm if you tried hard enough. What was the matter with her?

  It was dusty and stuffy and it bothered her. It was always dusty and stuffy. It didn’t always bother her. In an uncharacteristic move, she walked over to the window and forced it open. It was hard going, because she had not opened this room to actual air in as long as she could remember. The paint stuck a bit as she wrenched up the sash. Oh.

  The air came in and it did feel good. It was nice, open like this. The breeze blew around some of the papers on her desk, but she didn’t mind.

  She heard her mother downstairs in the kitchen. She thought of telling her about Brian. A part of her really wanted her mom to know. Alice would be excited. She would make a big deal about it. She loved Brian. She would love the idea of her daughter telling her about a juicy milestone like this one. It was her mother-daughter fantasy—the very thing Tibby so often denied her.

  As Tibby left her room she registered the sound of the rustling leaves of the apple tree, so little heard here, and she liked it.

  Tibby watched her mother in her usual morning flurry. Would she be able to slow down for Tibby’s news? Tibby tried to formulate the opening sentence. “Brian and I…Me and Brian…”

  Tibby opened her mouth, but Alice got there first.

  “Tibby, I need you to stay with Katherine this morning.” Alice already sounded mad and Tibby hadn’t even refused yet.

  Tibby’s words dried up.

  Alice wouldn’t look in Tibby’s eyes, indicating that she felt guilty somewhere down deep, but the guilt only made her less patient. “Loretta has to take her sister to the doctor and she can’t be back till after lunch.” Alice snatched the juice boxes from the shelf and shoved one at Nicky. “Or that’s what she says, anyway,” she added ungenerously.

  “Why does her sister have to go to the doctor?” Nicky asked.

  “Sweetie, she
has some kind of infection, I don’t know.” Alice gestured the whole issue away with a sweep of her arm, as if it might or might not be true, but she couldn’t spend any more time thinking about it.

  Alice was flinging things into and out of her purse. “I have to take Nicky to camp and then go to the office.”

  “I’m not doing it,” Tibby said. Not only had she lost all desire to tell her mother about Brian, she never wanted to tell her mother about anything she cared about ever.

  Alice gave her a look. “Excuse me?”

  “I’m not the babysitter. I’m sick of you dumping the job on me every time it’s convenient.”

  “You’re living in this house, and that means you have to help out, just like everybody else.”

  Tibby rolled her eyes. This fight was nasty, but it had taken place so many times they might as well have been following lines of a script.

  Katherine stirred her Cheerios around in her bowl. She slopped some of the milk onto the kitchen table.

  Tibby always felt distantly guilty for refusing to babysit Katherine in Katherine’s presence, but she managed to get over it.

  “I can’t wait to go to college,” Tibby muttered, as though to herself, but not really. The statement was untrue, and she said it only to make her mother unhappy.

  Half an hour later, Tibby sat on the back deck with a pile of papers and brochures from NYU, while Katherine careened around the backyard. The fight with her mom had shaken all the magic right out of her. She was back on the ground, looking down at the bugs rather than up at the sky.

  Eventually Katherine’s appetite for independent play ran out. She appeared in Tibby’s face.

  “You want to climb the tree and pick apples?” This currently represented Katherine’s greatest fantasy.

  “Katherine, no. Anyway, why do you want those apples so bad? They’re not good. They’re not ripe yet. And even if they were ripe, they’d be hard and sour.” Tibby had fallen into that shameful parent-ennui where you said no before you even listened to what the kid wanted.

  “Did you ever eat one?” Katherine asked.

  Tibby hadn’t ever eaten one, but she didn’t feel like getting argued to the ropes by a three-year-old. “I’m telling you, they’re gross. If they were good, wouldn’t we all be eating them instead of buying apples from the bin at the A&P?”

  Katherine seemed to find this kind of logic depressing. “I still want to try one.”

  Tibby sat there, watching Katherine sizing up the apple tree. She was too small to reach even the lowest branch, but she was undeterred. She backed up ten or so yards from the trunk of the tree, ran as fast as she could, and jumped. Her attempt was so meager and ineffective it was almost heartbreaking.

  Katherine backed up for another go. She backed up farther this time for optimum speed. She ran with her arms bent tight at her elbows in a caricature of sprinting. It was so cute, objectively speaking, that one part of Tibby longed to get it on camera.

  But at the same time, Tibby was annoyed. She indulged herself in pettiness. She did not want to babysit. She was annoyed with her mother. If she were to let herself be absorbed into Katherine’s world, it would be almost like enjoying babysitting. Which she didn’t.

  So Tibby watched. Katherine was inexhaustible. Why did she want the damn apples so much? Tibby couldn’t imagine the nature of her desire.

  But Tibby could remember being small and wanting to jump, running and jumping just like Katherine, and imagining you were going to practically take flight—thinking you could jump so much higher than you really could.

  The first thing Bridget did when she got to soccer camp was find Diana. They’d spoken on the phone and exchanged many e-mails, but Bridget hadn’t seen Diana in two years—not since the day they’d left Baja. And of all the things and people she’d encountered there, Diana stood out as her single happy memory.

  When she found her in their cabin, she screamed and hugged Diana so hard she lifted her off the ground.

  “God.” Diana examined Bee’s face. She stepped back. “You look great. You grew?”

  “You shrunk?” Bee asked back.

  “Ha.”

  Bridget tossed her gigantic duffel bag onto her bunk. She wasn’t big on folding or sorting. She used to pack in Hefty bags, but Carmen made her stop.

  She hugged Diana again and admired her. Diana had kept her hair straightened two summers ago, but now she’d let it collect into long, pretty dreads. It looked unbelievably glamorous to Bee. “Look how you are! You are stunning and fabulous! Do you love Cornell?”

  Diana hugged back. “Yeah, except I live and breathe soccer. You’ll see how it is.”

  “You had time to find Michael, though, right? Did you bring a picture?”

  Bridget exclaimed and swore appreciatively at the picture of Diana’s good-looking soccer-playing boyfriend and also at the pictures of her hilariously hammy younger sisters.

  “So who else is here?” Bridget asked, gesturing at the second set of bunk beds in the cramped cabin.

  “Two assistant coaches.” Diana got a vague look on her face.

  “You met them?” Bridget asked.

  “At lunch. Katie and Something,” she said. She closed one eye, trying to remember. “Allison. I think. Katie and Allison.”

  Bridget sensed an issue. “And they are…?”

  “Fine. Great.”

  “Fine and great? Katie and Allison are fine and great?”

  Diana smiled. Vaguely.

  “So what’s the problem?”

  “What problem?”

  “Why do you look like that?”

  “Like what?” Diana asked, glancing downward.

  Bee felt impatient. Diana was an honest person. Why wasn’t she being honest now?

  Diana pulled a hair elastic off her wrist and stretched it between her index finger and thumb. “You haven’t…met the other coaches yet. Have you?”

  Diana’s words came slow, and Bee’s came very fast. “No. Have you?”

  “Uh. Not all of them. But I saw…” Something about Diana’s hair elastic was so fascinating her words trailed off in her deep contemplation of it.

  “Who?” Bee shot out.

  “You probably already…”

  “Who?”

  “I’m pretty sure you…”

  Bridget huffed in exasperation. She grabbed the arm that wore Diana’s wristwatch and held it up so she could read it. “We have a staff meeting in eight minutes. I’m going to go find out who you’re talking about.”

  I don’t have to be careful, I’ve got a gun!

  —Homer Simpson

  Carmen was sitting at the table in the small kitchen of the apartment later that day, clutching the bottle of prenatal vitamins.

  In this time of thinking, certain facts aligned themselves in Carmen’s mind. Her mother had gained weight in the past couple months. Carmen had put it down to happiness, but now she felt silly for not being more observant. Christina’s wardrobe had subtly but certainly shifted toward the roomier stuff in her closet. Had she stopped drinking wine? Carmen tried to think. Had she gone for a lot of doctor’s appointments?

  Carmen had once overheard her mom joking with her aunt about how it was easy to hide stuff from teenagers because they were so self-absorbed. She felt the sting of it now, though she’d laughed it off then.

  She heard a key in the lock of the front door—her mother, arriving home from work at the usual time. Carmen stayed sitting, knowing her mother would appear in the kitchen moments after she’d put her bags down. Carmen hadn’t planned an ambush, exactly, but it came off a lot like one.

  “Hi, nena, love.” Christina’s whole body looked tired as she entered the kitchen. She’d always eschewed the practice of wearing sneakers with her suit to and from work, but recently she’d caved on her dignity. Now Carmen understood why.

  Wordlessly Carmen held up the bottle.

  Wordlessly Christina stared at it, and slowly its significance registered. Her eyes widened, and her ex
pression changed from confusion to surprise to dread to exhaustion and back again.

  Carmen decided to skip to the crux of the matter. “How far are you?” she asked in a moderated, matter-of-fact tone, though her heart was pounding. She knew it was true, but still she wanted her mother to deny it.

  Christina seemed to stiffen her spine to mount a vivid defense. She seemed to consider several possible angles. And then, before Carmen’s eyes, she deflated again. Her dark red blouse appeared to crumple. “Five months.”

  “You’re kidding.” Well, there it was. “When were you planning to tell me?” Carmen’s voice was flatly accusatory.

  “Carmen. Darling.” Christina sat down across from her. She wanted to reach for Carmen’s hand, but Carmen was sitting on one, and the other was strangling the neck of the vitamin bottle. Christina withdrew her attempt. She was quiet for a few moments, collecting her breath. “Just let me explain, okay? It’s complicated.”

  Carmen offered something between a shrug and a nod.

  “David and I have talked and thought a lot about having a baby. He hasn’t had that joy in his life, as I have. We didn’t know if it would be possible. But we agreed, life is too short not to try for something you want.”

  Carmen hated the “life is too short” rationalization. She thought it was one of the lamer excuses in the history of excuse-making. Whenever you did something because “life is too short not to,” you could be sure life would be just long enough to punish you for it.

  “At the very least we thought it would take me a year or two to conceive, if I did at all,” Christina went on. “We never dreamed it would happen so fast. I’m almost forty-one years old.”

  Carmen cocked her head skeptically. With half her mind she was calculating whether they’d conceived this baby before or after their wedding. It was a close call.

  “I didn’t even guess I was pregnant until I was almost three months along. I just couldn’t believe it. And then I needed to think about how to talk to you. The timing was not what I had wished. It’s very…complicated.”