The Bennet Women

by Eden Appiah-Kubi

  “But aren’t you wearing the jumpsuit?”

  “Yes!” Jamie burst out. She’d known EJ would get to the heart of the issue. “I spent literally two months on Rent the Runway trying to get the jumpsuit. I have shoes for the jumpsuit. I planned my hair for the jumpsuit. I even got a gel manicure in matte Orchid Petal for the jumpsuit—you know how picky I am about my nails!” She huffed a sigh. “But my mom wants me to wear that!” Jamie pointed an accusatory finger at the garment bag.

  EJ craned her neck to see her closet door and glanced back at Jamie. “Can I take a look?” she asked.

  Grudgingly, Jamie unzipped the garment bag to reveal the floor-length column dress with an apron neckline. To her dismay, EJ’s eyes widened.

  “What a pretty green! Is it silk?” EJ was a sucker for nice fabric. When they went thrifting, she shopped by feel, running her hand along racks until something made her say “Ooh!”

  Jamie nodded, disappointed that EJ might like the dress. She watched her friend’s face intently and released a breath as she frowned, first thoughtfully, then critically.

  “It’s not your style—at all—though,” EJ added. “This looks like it’s for an Irish debutante.”

  “Thank you!” Jamie interjected.

  EJ gave a quirk of her lips. “I would’ve expected something . . . paisley, to be honest. Your mom is still a bit of a hippie.”

  “Oh, she knows better than that.” Jamie took a step back and EJ followed. They gazed at the dress like a painting in a gallery.

  EJ bit her lip thoughtfully. “So the problem is that you don’t want to wear the dress?” she asked, going to sit on the bed. Jamie settled next to her and rested her head on her friend’s shoulder. They sat like this until Jamie spoke again.

  “It sounds so simple when you say it like that, but . . . Okay, remember the summer after I came out to you and Ma?”

  EJ winced and nodded but didn’t say any more. They both knew the memories still hurt.

  Jamie had been through it with her mom after coming out as trans. Her liberal, feminist, NPR-loving mother had spent a month convinced that Jamie was just “confused.” Then another month being weirdly silent. This was as surprising as it was disappointing. Ma had been a super PFLAG parent in high school and even threw Jamie a RuPaul’s Drag Race–themed birthday at fifteen. But when she wanted to transition, it was like her mother’s reservoirs of support were all used up from back when she came out as gay.

  Jamie sighed heavily, and EJ slid an arm around her waist. Silent encouragement. “Anyway, that summer I had the tutor/nanny gig with the family near Harvard Square. Sometimes walking to the T, I would pass the mothers and daughters with their shopping bags, and I would get so sad.” Jamie swallowed.

  “All I wanted was to get to the point where she could see me as her daughter. That we could, like, do something as simple as going shopping. At the time it seemed like too much to hope for.”

  EJ shifted and wrapped both arms around Jamie. It was still hard to talk about that time. Jamie and her mother had been very close since she was born and became nearly inseparable after her dad left when she was ten. Transition was hard, but what made it nearly unbearable was doing it without her mother’s full-throated support. Thankfully they were beyond that now.

  “Flash forward to this August,” Jamie began again. “The weekend before I come back to campus, I get my wish. We go to the Cambridgeside Macy’s for winter coats. They’re having this nuts sale. Ma has her coupons, and it’s great. It’s her and me laughing and shopping like I’ve always wanted. I don’t think I can explain what it’s like to crave something so ordinary. It was so nice.”

  She sighed deeply but continued at EJ’s encouraging squeeze. “We get our coats and are heading out when we pass the J.Crew. Ma sees this gown on a mannequin and gasps. ‘Jamie, that would be perfect for you! Don’t you have that formal dance in October?’ I say yes, but I already have something in mind. Then I take out my phone and show her the jumpsuit on Rent the Runway. And she’s like, ‘Oh. Isn’t that a little casual?’” She affected her mother’s artificially bright tone.

  EJ choked out a laugh and looked up at Jamie. “Your momma, who doesn’t own shoes that aren’t Crocs or Tevas, said the jumpsuit was too casual?”

  Jamie nodded, annoyed. “Ma insists I try on the green gown. I’m not going to ruin our good day, so I do. It looks good, but thank God it’s a little too expensive because I don’t want the dress.

  “Since then it’s been ‘Isn’t that outfit a little too low cut?’ ‘Will you be able to dance?’ ‘What if one of your boobs falls out?’—every time I call home.” Jamie paused to roll her eyes. “I had no idea why she didn’t drop it, until now. Ma seems to have bided her time, gotten some coupons, and hey, presto.” She gestured weakly to the dress. “Now the green gown is here. I don’t know how she can afford it. Coupons or no, she had to have been saving up.

  “And part of me is like: Why not wear it? It’s a nice dress.” Jamie leaned back against her wall. “It’s just . . .” She knew EJ wouldn’t judge, but this was still hard to say. “I was envisioning tonight as sort of my debut.” She rested against EJ again. “I mean, I only started coming out to people—besides you, Ma, and my roommate—spring of sophomore year. Then I left for junior year abroad.

  “I can’t say what it was: maybe having ID that matched the real me or just getting to be young in Paris, but that year was the freest I’ve ever felt. It was like I stopped trying to convince people of what I already knew and started figuring out my femininity and my style—when I wasn’t camped out in the library or attending seminars on Molière. Point is, I know that beautiful silk dress is not me. The woman who I am, who I’ve been waiting to be on this campus for so long, she wears an ivory jumpsuit with a high ponytail.”

  The declaration took all Jamie’s strength, and she drooped. “But I don’t know how I can reject the gesture. That shopping trip was the first time I felt like her daughter.” She put her head in her hands despondently.

  EJ patted her friend’s knee. After a thoughtful silence, she spoke. “First of all, I don’t think you’re overreacting. Clothes are all about expression, and like you said, you spent a lot of time figuring out what you want to communicate. You get to wear what you want.”

  She squeezed Jamie’s hand and sat up. “Now, I’ve got regular news, bad news, and good news. The regular news is that this sounds like a classic mother-daughter dispute over clothes. The bad news is your mother is a ninja at maternal manipulation. The very good news: there’s an easy solution to this problem.”

  Jamie tilted her head. “Why would she care what I wear? Ma’s never expressed an opinion on anyone’s style in her life—especially mine. Plus, she’s all about women’s agency.”

  EJ responded with a maddening smirk. “Au contraire, ma soeur. Your mother still has a distinct sense of propriety—and a tinge of puritanism that runs through a lot of second-wave feminism. She doesn’t like the idea of women dressing sexily because she thinks it’s for the male gaze. That’s why you’re getting all the neckline comments.”

  Jamie skeptically arched an eyebrow. Uh-uh. Ma is no prude. Back when all the high schools had to go abstinence only, Ma had convinced their rabbi to offer a sex-ed course through the temple. She thankfully had stopped teaching when Jamie came of age, but the class was there. Ma had fought the high school’s PTA on banning The Color Purple. Jamie read it for ninth grade English, lesbian sex and all. Ma was sex-positive before it was a thing. Usually Jamie trusted EJ’s judgment, but this seemed pretty far off base.

  EJ chuckled at her friend’s expression. Then she did some ballet/contortionist shit and ended up facing Jamie from the back of the bed. “Do you remember the first time she came up for Parents’ Weekend? It was late September and a solid sixty degrees. I wore a sweater and those formal shorts you convinced me to buy with sheer black tights. We walked to Cousin Nicky’s for brunch, and your mom asked if I was cold seven times over two hours.” />
  Oh shit. Jamie’s eyes popped open at the memory. “Oh my God. I’m like retroactively mortified.”

  EJ shrugged. “It’s easier to pick up when you’re raised with it. Back when people were shaming you for being too femme, most cis girls were being lectured on how to be modest—or at least not look slutty.”

  Another thing to figure out, Jamie thought, stifling a sigh. It was hard enough just getting people to accept her as a woman.

  “This is . . . exhausting.” She groaned, rubbing her eyes.

  “What?” EJ asked.

  “Misogyny!” Jamie said, waving her arms. “There’s just . . . so many flavors.”

  “Internal, external, cool ranch,” EJ offered sardonically. “Some days being a woman is choosing the cherry for your shit sundae.”

  Jamie laughed, in the grand feminine tradition of laughing to keep from crying. “Well, today I choose the jumpsuit. I just have to tell Ma before I post my pics tomorrow.”

  “Don’t worry, J,” her friend began. “I’ve been working around my mother’s interference for the better part of a decade.” She unfolded her legs, sat up, and put on her best TV announcer voice. “And for only three payments of nineteen ninety-five, I’m willing to share my patented system of wearing what you want—most of the time.”

  Jamie tossed her head back and laughed. EJ waggled her eyebrows, and she laughed some more. It didn’t matter if EJ’s advice was bad—she’d gotten Jamie out of her anxious mood. The big green dress wasn’t a burden; it was a surmountable problem.

  “Okay, friend. Please enlighten me with your hard-won wisdom.”

  EJ held up three fingers. “Step one: say thank you. What your mom wants most is to feel like you appreciate what she got you—are you writing this down?”

  Jamie snorted. “Don’t worry, it’s all going up here.” She tapped her temple and winked.

  Her friend continued. “Step two: provide a plausible excuse for not wearing said thing. Your green gown is easy. The formal is in a tent on the quad; that dress is silk. If you wear it tonight, you’ll only get to wear it once because it rained this week—”

  “And water will ruin it!” Jamie interjected. “That’s brilliant.”

  “I know.” EJ smiled. “Now we come to step three: take the L another day. Think of some point in the future when you could wear the dress and promise to bring it back out then.”

  Jamie thought for a moment. “With my scene presentation for drama and my thesis for French next spring, I think I’ll be too stressed out to shop for Senior Gala next May, so—”

  “The system works, especially for double majors,” EJ confirmed. “Now go call your mom and thank her. Then we can get lunch.”

  Jamie smiled, her good feeling mostly restored. This wasn’t going to be the last time she and Ma fought over her clothes, and developing that mother-daughter relationship was going to be tough. Still, for tonight, this was enough: she was going to be attending the Fall Formal as the truest version of herself Longbourn had ever seen.

  “Thanks, Eej,” Jamie said as they rose. “Oh! And about that Lee kid, you should ask T. She knows everything that happens on this campus.”

  “T” was Tessa Ocampo, Bennet House’s Renaissance woman. The junior was an astrophysics major, a nature photographer, and the biggest gossip on campus. If anyone knew why their floor was going crazy, it would be her.

  EJ slapped her forehead. “Of course! I’ll ask about it when I see her later. She’s going to do something cool with my Senegalese twists.” She patted her messy bun of extensions.

  Just then EJ’s phone buzzed. She glanced at it and rolled her eyes. “Duty calls. Someone may or may not be having an allergic reaction to a face mask. You okay, love?”

  Jamie nodded. “I’m good. I’m gonna call Ma.”

  The friends blew kisses to each other and waved, their standard goodbye. Then Jamie reached for her phone.

  EJ

  It was a truth not universally acknowledged that a black girl at a mostly white college, in an even whiter college town, must befriend someone who can do her hair. EJ’s someone was her very close friend Tessa. You wouldn’t expect it, because Tessa (1) was Asian American (Filipina, specifically), and (2) had had the same bob since freshman year. She said that she got good at styling black hair when she got a younger black stepsister in elementary school. After YouTube taught her how to do cornrows, she kept learning so her baby sis’s style wouldn’t get stale. Tessa said by the time she graduated from high school, she could install box braids, do flat twist updos, and even do finger waves—she’d pulled them off when her sister played Josephine Baker in a school play.

  EJ was very grateful for her friend’s talents and, in exchange for a styling session, would let Tessa tell her, in great detail, about the latest bullshit her boyfriend had pulled without screaming “Just fucking dump him!” She considered it a fair trade.

  That was why EJ was sitting on a fluffy orange rug in Tessa’s single, biting her tongue as she heard another story of Colin’s ridiculous lack of consideration. She looked around her friend’s room and marveled at her ability to stick with a theme: there were butterfly-patterned curtains, a butterfly bedspread, and a photo of Tessa and her stepsister, Zenobia, in a butterfly-shaped picture frame. Even the aforementioned rug was butterfly shaped—Tessa didn’t do anything halfway.

  Eventually, they moved from the subject of Tessa’s crappy boyfriend to war stories from the morning. Tessa’s floor had been going nuts, too.

  “I just don’t understand why, T! No offense, since I know you’re part of the Gordon Campbell Society, but this dance happens every year. I’ve never seen it cause fights. And before you say Lee Gregory, let me say that the name means nothing to me, so I’m going to need a thorough explanation.”

  Tessa took a hairpin out of her mouth and looked down at EJ. “Well I know why you, in particular, don’t know him, but you’re not gonna like it—he’s a cappella famous. He’s the reason the BournTones won their first IVC Northeast Championship—”

  EJ waved her hands in surrender. “You know I can’t deal with this school’s a cappella obsession. It’s so weird!”

  Tessa chuckled. “Okay, okay, anyway, while he’s famous on campus, his family’s famous in the real world. His name isn’t just Lee Gregory; it’s Lee Gregory Engel. His dad is Anders Engel, the music producer.” Tessa paused while EJ figured out the rest.

  “Wait, wait, wait!” EJ straightened with interest. “So is his mom Diana Gregory?”

  “Ding! Ding! Ding!” Tessa confirmed gleefully.

  “Oh. My. God!” EJ twisted around, bouncing with happiness. “His mom is the Diana Gregory—as in the director of Lima and South Bronx Symphony.” EJ let her head be guided to the right as Tessa continued pinning.

  Tessa laughed. “Frankly, I’m shocked that you know who she is. You’re the same person who thought The Office was an actual documentary.”

  “Only until my junior year of high school, and I had never watched it. I merely heard about it.” EJ sniffed. “From age two until twelve, my life was dance, piano, Girl Scouts, and church. After that, it was pretty much ballet, ballet, and more ballet until my junior year. Then robotics team, show choir, spring musical, and piano again, until graduation. And a job. You’ll forgive me if I didn’t have time for reruns of a Bush-era sitcom.”

  How had she been going to school with Diana Gregory’s son and not noticed? EJ shook her head in amazement. “I didn’t know someone with those kinds of connections went here.”

  Tessa paused. “Lee tries to keep a pretty low profile. I’ve known him since my freshman year, and he’s never named his parents or discussed their work. Also, he’s mixed race, but like Halsey or Vin Diesel. Most people can’t tell he’s half-black, let alone see his mom’s face with his freckles and the hazel eyes. I think that’s why he started growing out his hair into an afro. When it’s super short, he could be anything from swarthy Italian to South Asian.”

  Tessa put another
pin in EJ’s hair. “Now, for the reason everyone has been losing it: Lee promised to bring a ‘special celebrity guest’ tonight, someone who is good friends with his mom. Since word got around about that, speculation has been building—especially since a hot guy was spotted parking a new red Tesla near campus on Friday. I think people are trying to look their very best, just in case.”

  EJ’s shoulders slumped. “So this is all about trying to hook up with some rich and/or famous friend of Lee’s? I’m so disappointed. Bennet Women are better than that.”

  EJ was one of the house’s strongest boosters. She maintained its traditions and upheld its commandments—especially the one about supporting her Bennet Sisters. She was also extremely biased in favor of her fellow Bennet Women.

  Tessa tapped the updo she was creating so that EJ looked up. “I love that you believe that.” She chuckled. “But ninety percent of your fellow Bennet Women would not say no to a rich husband if he came along. You gotta pay your student loans any way you can.”

  EJ opened her mouth to object, but Tessa continued. “You’re just hopelessly blind to the ways people show off here. Remember when I had to explain Burberry scarves?”

  That made her groan internally. EJ knew she was solidly middle class, and she liked to think she was pretty sophisticated: she played piano, spoke French, and even embroidered a little—like accomplished ladies in old novels. But every so often someone or something at Longbourn would make her feel like the poor country cousin.

  “All those people started wearing the same ugly plaid scarves that one weekend,” EJ huffed. “I thought they were a gift with purchase from American Eagle or something.”

  Doing elite ballet had shown her how wide the gap between the middle class and the upper-middle class could be, but Longbourn revealed the yawning chasm between someone like her and the very rich. Her deficiency in the language of luxury goods was a particularly sore spot. She knew the designers who got name-dropped in rap lyrics or referenced on Project Runway, but that didn’t count for much. There seemed to be a whole other code of luxury (mostly hideous prints and boring jewelry) that existed to maintain a fence between those who were raised with money and those who found their way to it by other means.