“I’m not sure,” Carmen said slowly, honestly. “I couldn’t really tell.”
“Did Judy say anything?” Julia looked impatient, unsatisfied.
“She said ‘Thanks, Carmen.’ ”
“That was it?”
“That was it.”
So cool was the air between them, Carmen figured they’d spend the rest of the meal in punishing silence. But a few minutes later two girls from their hall came up. “Hey, Carmen, I heard you had a great audition,” Alexandra said.
Carmen didn’t try to hide her surprise. “Really?”
“That’s what Benjamin Bolter said. He said that your energy was very fresh.”
Carmen wasn’t sure exactly what that meant. “Thanks. I was nervous.”
“Nervous can be good,” the other girl, Rachel, said.
“Anyway, I really hope you get it. How cool would that be?”
Carmen watched them go, suddenly wishing she were eating dinner with Alexandra and Rachel and not with Julia.
When they were leaving the canteen, Carmen realized that a bunch of kids at the front table were watching her. One of the ones she’d met, Jack something or other, waved at her. “All right, Carmen!” he called out.
She felt herself blushing as she went out the door. She wished she were wearing earrings and some makeup. She felt the drumming of excitement in her chest. It was kind of a responsibility, being visible.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: call me call me call me
* * *
Hey, you girl of urban mystery. Will you call me? I have something cool to tell you and I’m not writing it here. You have to call me. Ha.
And don’t do that thing you do of leaving a message when you know I won’t be there.
By eleven o’clock that night, Lena was relaxed and happy. Her stomach was full. She knew she was in love. If not with Leo, then certainly with his mother.
“So I asked Nora about posing, even though we’re not supposed to hire her,” Leo said as they picked at the last of the raspberries and the shortbread cookies.
“What did she say?” Lena asked, her elbows on the table.
“She said she’d think about it. I’m not too optimistic.”
“The truth,” Lena said, “is I really want to do it, but I probably can’t afford to. Unless I steal my mom’s jewelry. Which I have considered.”
Leo laughed. “It’s only eight bucks an hour if we split it.”
Lena put her hand to her temple. “I know. But I have no money. I’m kind of on my own with school, and it’s…”
“Ludicrously expensive,” Jaclyn filled in. “Did you try for financial aid?”
“I didn’t qualify,” Lena explained. “My parents have the money, but my dad doesn’t really…support the idea of my being an artist.” Lena usually kept this to herself, feeling ashamed of them. But tonight she said it with a note of pride.
“You should apply for a scholarship,” Leo said. “That’s what I did.”
“Did you get full tuition?” she asked.
“Tuition, stipends, everything. It helps being black,” he said. “I qualify for almost every scholarship they’ve got.”
It helps being the best painter in the school, she thought. “I have a partial one,” she explained. “I’m applying for the big one for next year. I’ll find out in August.”
“I’m sure you’ll get it,” Leo said. “But I’ll help you with your portfolio if you want.”
Lena flushed with pleasure. “Thanks,” she said. She wasn’t sure she could let him see all those drawings she used to think were good. “I just need a few finished paintings, you know?”
Jaclyn got up to clear the teacups. “You should do what we used to do when I was in art school.”
“What’s that?” Leo asked, his feet, in faded blue socks, propped on the corner of the table.
“We used to trade poses with each other. We’d do portraits, figures, whatever. It’s free, it’s fair. Most of my drawings and paintings from my art school years are of my friends.”
“I don’t really know that many people in the summer program,” Lena admitted.
Jaclyn gestured to Leo. “You know each other. You two can do it.”
While Leo was getting on board, Lena was realizing what this meant. She stopped being quite as relaxed. “You mean, like, I pose for Leo and he poses for me?” The way they looked at her, she felt both childish and dumb.
Leo was starting to look eager. “We could split it up however we want. Maybe I could pose for you on Saturday and you could pose for me on Sunday. We could work like that for the next bunch of weekends.”
Lena knew she was gaping. She tried to cover a little more of her wide eyes with her eyelids.
“It’s good for an artist to pose, too. I’ve heard that,” Leo was saying, though his voice sounded distant to her. “It’s good to see the process from the other side. It makes you better at working with models.”
Lena felt her head nodding.
“And you know we could each have a finished figure painting by the end of the summer.”
Lena was alone, trapped in her head with her loud, slow-moving thoughts. He was going to pose for her for a figure painting? The dryness of the shortbread was caked and rough in her throat. She was going to pose for him? “Or a portrait,” she choked out nervously.
“You can do a portrait,” he said, not seeming to register what this meant. “If you want.”
Lena simply could not swallow the cookie. It sat there, choking her. She knew that prudishness had no place in the training and career of a figure painter, but still.
She tried once again to swallow. Maybe her father was right after all.
The next morning Carmen unearthed a pair of red flared pants she hadn’t worn since the end of last summer. She’d worn them to Target, where she’d gone shopping for college supplies with Win. She’d also worn a bandana, do-rag style, and he’d kissed her massively in the parking lot.
God, that felt far away.
She put on a sexy black tank top and big silver hoops. She wore a shade of red lipstick that she knew looked good on her. She let her long, unruly hair out of its ordinary clip. She felt like a completely different person as she walked out of the dorm and into the sun. But like a familiar person.
She wanted to make her way slowly to the theater lobby. She wanted to keep the motor running low, to keep her expectations in check. The chances of seeing her name on the cast list were small, she knew. One out of seven under the best of circumstances, and she knew she wasn’t as prepared or as capable as the other six.
Two days ago, she was in Judy’s office trying to get out of it. Now…what?
Now she wanted it. She had stayed up all night working and thinking and studying, and it had culminated in her wanting it.
As she walked into the theater, she felt the mad walloping of her heart in her chest, so strong it seemed to shake her entire body. In some ways it had been easier not wanting it.
But the wanting felt good. Even if she didn’t get it. Wanting was what made you a person, and she was glad to feel like a person again.
The scene in the theater lobby was dreamlike. It seemed that all seventy-five of the apprentices were standing in there. But instead of noise and chaos, Carmen had the strange impression that they were waiting for her.
So strange it was, she thought her imagination must be firing in step with her perceptions, but this was how it seemed to her: It seemed like the crowd parted for her and made a path to the spot on the board where the cast list was posted. And it seemed like they were all urging her forward to look at it. And when she stood in front of it, it seemed that one character and one name were bigger and bolder than all the rest.
Perdita, it read. And next to that it said Carmen Lowell.
She hadn’t said yes, Lena said to herself as she got out of the shower the morning after her dinner at Leo’s loft. Maybe she had indicat
ed assent, but she hadn’t said the word yes.
He would be so disappointed if she backed out.
She looked at her naked self in the steamy mirror. The mirror was too small to see all of herself, which was just as well.
She was a prude. She had to admit it. She was modest. Overly modest. She was Greek. Her parents were traditional. She couldn’t even look at herself without feeling embarrassed.
She tried to imagine Leo seeing her like this. Just the thought flooded and fizzled her circuits. How could she actually do it?
She was uptight. She wished she weren’t so uptight. What was the problem, anyway? Her body was fine. She wasn’t overweight or awkwardly built. There were no major patches of cellulite, as far as she knew. She didn’t have hair in unexpected places. Her nipples went in the right direction. What was the big problem?
She wished she were more like Bee. Bee showered in the staff locker room at soccer camp next to guys she barely even knew. When Lena gawped and stuttered in disbelief at this revelation, Bee just ignored her. “It’s not that big a deal,” she said.
She thought back to Kostos and the swimming episode in Greece the summer they’d met. For a girl who liked to keep covered, fate had played a couple of pretty mean jokes on Lena.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: YAAAAA!!!
* * *
Carma! I screamed so loud when I read your message my co-digger almost called an ambulance.
I am so proud of you!
Set builder turned star. You can’t keep your darn light hidden, can you?
If it didn’t come on Tuesday, Tibby would buy a pregnancy test.
If it didn’t come on Wednesday she would buy a pregnancy test.
If it didn’t come on Thursday.
If not by Friday.
Tibby stood in Duane Reade on Saturday morning. She studied the box as though it were a cobra. Aptly, it was kept behind the counter, behind Plexiglas. You couldn’t just snatch it from the shelf and toss it facedown on the counter. They made you ask for it. How could she ask? She tried the question in her mind. Can I have the blllllllll? One of the rrrrrrr, please? The box with the mmmmm?
If she couldn’t think it, what were the chances she could say it?
The nearest salesperson was a man with extravagant sideburns. She couldn’t ask him. She’d come back.
She touched her belly. Her fingers related to it differently than at other times.
She walked outside. She looked up. The sun carried on its serene business of exploding, unmuffled by a single cloud. She had a free day, a blue sky, but she felt a throttling sense of claustrophobia. There was nowhere to go where the worry wouldn’t go. Not even sleeping gave her respite.
Her legs went along and she found herself in Washington Square Park. Clumps of friends hung by the central fountain. A man and a woman kissed on a bench. Tibby wondered if part of what she felt was loneliness.
She thought of her friends. She felt a melting sensation in her muscles begetting a looser kind of sadness.
Oh, you guys. I had sex! I’m not a virgin! Can you believe that? I did it. We did it!
But then there was the other part of the story, inseparable from the first. Tibby was a natural believer in the other shoe dropping, and this time it had really clobbered her. It had turned happiness into agony, love into umbrage.
Wasn’t that just how the world worked? You had sex for the first time with a person you really loved and the condom broke, leaving you most likely prrrrrr.
Cynicism was a great hedge, of course. When the bad thing came true, at least you had the pleasure of being right. But that pleasure felt cold today. She didn’t want to be right. For the first time in her life, she longed to be wrong.
“Do you know what time it is?” a young man in a corduroy cap asked her.
“I have no idea,” she replied. She could have looked at her cell phone, but she didn’t.
She couldn’t make herself sit down anyplace. She walked past Duane Reade again.
Did she really have to buy the test? She couldn’t. Did she have to find out? Maybe she could just play dumb for the next nine months. How far could she take the denial? She could be one of those girls who gave birth in the bathroom between classes.
She walked downtown. She crossed Houston Street and headed into deepest SoHo, packed as it was with shoppers. Tourists flocked here for the supposed urban grit, but all they found was each other.
She walked all the way to Canal Street, dipped briefly into Chinatown. She passed the stairwell to a second-floor restaurant where she’d once eaten gelatinous, scary, and delicious things with Brian and two of the girls from her hall. They’d sat at a table by the big picture window and watched the snow fall that night. Now it was ninety-five degrees. That night she’d been happy and now she felt miserable. Tibby turned north again. Her legs led her, without asking, back to Duane Reade. She paced in front of the store. She couldn’t go in and buy the thing, but she couldn’t do anything else. Denial could be very absorbing.
She walked past a homeless woman for the third time. She reached into her bag and found a five-dollar bill. As the puffy-faced woman graciously accepted the money, Tibby wondered what had happened to this woman. Why had she ended up like this?
Tibby put her head down and walked on. Probably all started with a teenage pregnancy.
Peter was as crazy about the dirt floor as she was. Usually Bridget was attracted to people who were more solid than she, but in this case it was the feeling of finding a soul mate that really got to her.
It was Sunday. Everyone else had gone to the beach. Bridget and Peter were left at the site, working on their floor.
“You two are crazy,” Alison had commented before she left. They had both nodded acceptingly.
They were more than two-thirds done. They had cleared and exposed a generous square room, a source of excitement to everyone at the site, finding two perfectly beautiful and intact late-sixth-century Attic pots and the pieces to comprise at least five more. It had turned out to be a bigger find, a more prosperous house, than even the director had imagined. Other members of the team had worked on the walls, exposing patches of plaster and the suggestion of a fresco.
“I don’t know what I’ll do with my life after we finish this thing,” Bridget said musingly, her hands alive in the dirt.
“I know what you mean,” Peter said.
“I love it. I’ll miss it. I think my life’s meaning will be gone.”
He nodded. He didn’t act like this was so strange. He was as consumed, moment by moment, as she was.
“This is a satisfying way to dig, you know?” he said. His voice was a bit lazy under the hot sun. “It’s not always like this.”
“I’m spoiled.”
“You’ve had a lucky start,” he agreed.
“I am lucky,” she heard herself say.
“Are you?”
“Yes. In all but the important ways.”
He stopped and sat back. “What does that mean?” For days he’d been disinclined to look right at her, but now he did.
She put both hands flat on her dirt floor. “My mom died when I was pretty young.” It was always clarifying to get that out there. She always knew she was somewhere once she’d said it out loud. It was like her version of scent marking.
“I’m sorry.”
“Yeah. Thanks.” The fact of her mother’s death seemed to connect to her dirt floor, but she wasn’t sure how.
“That’s why you don’t like to talk about your family.”
I don’t have a family to talk about, she was going to say, but she realized that it wasn’t true. She did have a family. They were all under twenty and none of them related to her by blood, but they made her who she was. They represented the best of her. “I have an unconventional family,” she told him.
He left her alone with the digging for a while. She appreciated that.
“These people lived big, I think,
” he said, after the sun had begun to dip. “They painted their pots, they painted their walls, they made their sanctuaries and told their stories on every surface they had.”
“They did, didn’t they?” she said wistfully. She was starting to feel tired.
“That’s why I picked this specialty, instead of something closer to home, as I probably should have done. These people left so much of themselves for us to find.”
She nodded and yawned. She sat back against the wall to rest in the shade. In these long days outside, the sun had turned her skin brown and her hair a whiter yellow.
She thought of her own house, where she lived as small as possible. What could an archaeologist ever find of her? Of her mother? They told their stories nowhere. What about the old photographs, their old things? Where were they now? Had her father thrown them all away?
She crawled back on her hands and knees to where she’d left her love, the floor. She’d go slower. She’d make it last.
“Hey, what are these?” she asked. She rubbed off the dirt and passed the heavy pieces of metal into Peter’s hands.
He studied them carefully. “You know what they are?”
She shook her head, even though it was a biding-time kind of question.
“I think they’re loom weights. I’ve seen pictures, but I’ve never found any before.” He seemed excited about them. “Make sure you record the location.”
She nodded. She wiped her hands on her shorts and took the digital camera out of her pocket. She took out her Sharpie to make the label.
“You know what this makes me think?”
“No,” she said.
“It gives me an idea of this room, what it was. The orientation of it, away from where we think the road was. The kind of pots we’ve found. Now these.”
She waited patiently. She let him think and talk.
“I’m guessing it was the gynaikonitis. We’ll talk to David when he gets back. He’ll be thrilled with this.”
“What do you call it?”
“It means the women’s quarter. Big houses had them. Men didn’t like to let women be seen in public or even in their own homes. Women usually stayed in a remote part of the house where they wouldn’t be seen.”
Forever in Blue: The Fourth Summer of the Sisterhood Page 11
