Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood (2 page)

Lena was puzzled. “I don’t know. Somebody. Women. Yoga people.”

“Yoga people?” Carmen asked.

“I don’t know,” Lena said again, laughing.

Tibby was the one most capable of emotional detachment, but tonight it all lay right on the surface. Her irrational thoughts about Gilda’s made her feel desperate, like its demise could swallow up their whole existence—like a change in the present could wipe out the past. The past felt fragile to her. But the past was set, right? It couldn’t be changed. Why did she feel such a need to protect it?

“I think it’s Pants time,” Carmen said. The snacks were out. The candles were lit. The egregiously bad dance music played.

Tibby wasn’t sure she wanted it to be Pants time yet. She was having enough trouble maintaining control. She was scared of them noticing what all this meant.

Too late. Out of Carmen’s arms came the artifacts of their ritual. The Pants, slowly unfolding from their winter compression, seeming to gain strength as they mixed with the special air of Gilda’s. Carmen laid them on the ground, and on top of them the manifesto, written on that first night two years before, describing the rules of wearing them. Silently they formed their circle, studying the inscriptions and embroidery that chronicled their summer lives.

“Tonight we say good-bye to high school, and bye to Bee for a while,” Carmen said in her ceremonial voice. “We say hello to summer, and hello to the Traveling Pants.”

Her voice grew less ceremonial. “Tonight we are not worrying about good-bye to each other. We’re saving that for the beach at the end of the summer. That’s the deal, right?”

Tibby felt like kissing Carmen. Brave as she was, even Carmen was daunted by the implications of looking ahead. “That’s the deal,” Tibby agreed heartily.

The last weekend of the summer had already become sacred in their minds. Sacred and feared. The Morgans owned a house right on the beach in Rehoboth. They had offered it to Carmen for that final weekend, in part, Carmen suspected, because they had gotten an au pair from Denmark and felt guilty about not hiring Carmen to babysit this summer as she had done the summer before.

The four of them had promised each other in the spring that it would be their weekend. The four of them and nobody else. They all depended upon it. The future was unfurling fast, but whatever happened this summer, that weekend stood between them and the great unknown.

They all looked ahead to college in different ways, Tibby knew. They all had different amounts to lose. Bee, in her lonely house, had nothing. Carmen did; she dreaded saying good-bye to her mother. Tibby feared leaving the familiarity of her chaos. Lena flipped and flopped—one day she was afraid to cut ties, and the next she was dying to get away.

The thing they feared equally and powerfully was saying good-bye to one another.

After drawing for the Pants (Tibby won), reviewing the rules (unnecessary, but still part of tradition), and taking a brief hiatus to chew down some Gummi Worms, it was at last time for the vow. Like they had the summer before, they said it together.

“To honor the Pants and the Sisterhood

And this moment and this summer and the rest of our lives

Together and apart.”

Only this time, Tibby felt the tears fall when they said “the rest of our lives.” Because in the past that had always seemed like a distant road, and tonight, she knew in her heart, they were already on it.

Somebody already broke my heart.
—Sade

T
hat night Tibby had a dream about taxidermy. In it, her crazy great-grandma Felicia had had the Traveling Pants stuffed as her graduation gift. “It’s just what you wanted!” Felicia shouted at her.

The stuffing job looked totally professional. The Pants were mounted on a polished marble pedestal and inhabited by fake legs to look as if they were jauntily midstep. As animated as they looked, you had to notice that there was no body or head or even any feet. They were connected to the marble base by a brass pipe sticking out of one pant leg.

“But they can’t go anywhere,” Tibby pointed out timidly.

“That’s the point!” Felicia thundered. “It’s just what you wanted!”

“I did?” Tibby asked, confused and guilty for having maybe wanted it. She found herself wondering if they were too heavy to be circulated among their various dorm rooms.

Now we really won’t have to worry about washing them
, she consoled herself in her dream-reality.

When Tibby awoke, Katherine was at her side. Katherine’s head as she stood there loomed one inch from Tibby’s as she lay down. “Brian’s visiting.” Katherine loved trying out words. She was happy with herself that she’d said
visiting
as opposed to just
here
.

Tibby groggily sat up. “What time is it?”

Katherine moved herself in front of Tibby’s clock radio and studied it hopefully.

“God, it’s almost eleven,” Tibby answered herself.

She was about to head directly down the stairs, but then she decided to brush her teeth first. When she arrived in the kitchen, Brian was at the table setting up dominos with Nicky.

“Let’s try to set up a few at once,” Brian counseled patiently, arranging them in a snaking row.

Nicky only wanted to knock them over.

“Hey,” Tibby said.

“Hey.”

“Did you eat breakfast?” she asked.

“Uh-huh. Yeah.” He seemed a bit nervous for some reason, the way his shoulders were rising toward his ears.

“What’s up?” she asked him. She went to the refrigerator to inspect.

“Just, uh…Can I talk to you for a second?”

She closed the refrigerator and stood up straighter. She looked at him. “Sure.”

“In…there?” He gestured toward the living room.

Tibby’s eyebrows nearly joined over her nose. “In there?”

Nobody ever did anything in the living room in her house. Loretta ventured in once a week to clear out the cobwebs. And every few months her parents had a party and acted like they relaxed on those perfect sofas all the time.

Mystified, she followed him. They posed on the sofa like cocktail party guests.

“So…what?” she asked him, a sprout of worry in her chest. It was slightly funny how they were sitting next to each other and both facing forward.

He rubbed both palms against the denim covering his thighs.

Tibby pulled her legs up onto the sofa so she could turn to him. “Everything okay?”

“I wanted to ask you something.”

“Okay. Ask.”

“You know the thing tonight?”

“Uh…you mean the senior party?”

“Will you go with me?”

Her eyebrows compressed even further. “We’re all going. Right? Lena…Bee…”

He waved a hand to acknowledge all that. “But will you go with me?”

She was utterly perplexed. “You mean like a date?” She blurted it out because it sounded so ridiculous.

“Kind of. Yeah.”

Suddenly, it seemed mean to snort or laugh at the preposterousness of this concept. She tilted her head. He was very brave to keep looking at her eyes the way he did.

She clasped her hands. It dawned on her that she was wearing a tank top and her pajama bottoms. Tibby spent an unusual amount of time in her pajamas, so it wasn’t like Brian hadn’t seen her in them hundreds of times. But here, in this stage-set living room, under the glare of this weird question, it only accentuated the weirdness.

“A kind of date?” she asked slowly.

“Kind of.”

She wouldn’t hurt his feelings. She just wouldn’t. It didn’t matter where this would lead them. She nodded. “Okay.”

She felt raw sitting with him on the sofa. When he leaned toward her she had absolutely no idea what was going to happen. His body moved in slow motion, and she seemed to see herself and Brian from some distant spot in the room. He possessed a new kind of confidence, a deliberateness. She was both terrified and eerily calm.

So she sat still, looking into his eyes as he reached toward her face. He didn’t kiss her or anything like that. But what he did felt just as shockingly intimate. The first three fingers of his right hand landed lightly on her warm face and smoothed out the rumple of consternation in the center of her forehead.

“Okay,” he said.

One day in the early spring when Lena stayed home sick from school, she watched a young woman on a daytime talk show who’d written a book about being adopted. This woman had never met or been contacted by her birth mother, and yet she spent her whole life wishing and hoping her birth mother would find her. She talked about how she didn’t want to move from the home where her parents had first adopted her. She didn’t like to take long trips. She always left explicit forwarding instructions when she moved. She made sure her phone was listed under her own name. She left her little trail of bread crumbs. She wanted to make sure she could be found.

Since then, Lena had thought about this woman many times, and she wasn’t sure why. She didn’t dwell on it. Minds worked in weird ways. Like how Lena always thought of Ritz crackers when she shaved her legs. Who knew why? And did it even matter?

But now, as she lay on her bed, filling out forms for school in September, Lena thought about the woman on the talk show again. She filled out a roommate questionnaire and she kept flashing on the woman’s sad gray eyes. She filled out the dorm preference sheet and she saw the woman’s twitching lower lip.

And as Lena lay back on her bed and put her hands over her face, it finally dawned on her. This woman reminded Lena of herself.

Without even realizing it, Lena had subtly resisted the idea of going away this summer. Even a week away from home made her feel slightly unglued. The thought of moving to another city in September, thrilling as it was, was also a source of agony.

Lena wanted to leave home. For one thing, she was ready. For another thing, since her dad had forced Valia, his widowed mother, to leave her beautiful Greek island and relocate to suburban Maryland, the Kaligaris house had been full of tension.

Lena looked forward to RISD. She wanted to be an artist, she was almost sure of it. Her art class this summer was the single joy in her life, apart from her friends.

And yet. And yet Lena didn’t want to go. And the reason was that she didn’t want to leave the place where Kostos could find her. And on a deeper level, she didn’t want to put more distance—in time or in space—between now and the time when he’d loved her. She didn’t want to become a different girl from the one whom he had loved.

The phone rang and Lena snatched it up before Valia could get it and yell at the innocent caller.

“Hello?”

“Hi, it’s me.”

“Carma. Hi. What are you doing?”

“Getting dressed. I had another waxing fiasco. What are you wearing?”

Lena cast her eye at the clock. She was supposed to meet everybody at the senior party in half an hour. She was bringing Effie as her date, because she had no other date and because Effie was spocking on some senior guy or other.

Lena then cast her glance on her open closet. She had no excitement in getting dressed. Her wardrobe had two categories: the clothing she had worn with Kostos—filled with memories—and the clothing she hadn’t—empty. She didn’t want either.

“I don’t know. I didn’t pick yet.”

“Lenny, it’s a big night,” Carmen cajoled. “Get dressed. Wear something great. Put on makeup. Do you need me to come over?”

“No. I’m all right.” She didn’t feel like setting Carmen loose in her closet.

“Don’t wear that khaki skirt,” Carmen warned.

“I’m not,” Lena said defensively, even though it was exactly what she had planned to wear.

Unfortunately, Lena’s wardrobe represented her life. It was binary, like a computer with its universe of zeros and ones. Lena had two settings: 1. Thinking about Kostos. 2. Avoiding thinking about Kostos.

Lena deeply empathized with the adopted woman on the talk show. Lena too had been abandoned by the person she thought loved her best of all. And without meaning to or wanting to, she harbored a passive, unquenchable hope that someday he would come for her.

Where there is great love, there are always miracles.
—Willa cather

“B
rian! Brian’s here!” Katherine threw open the front door and shouted the news to the top of the house.

Brian clearly longed for a real live date. He presented flowers to Tibby and a box of chocolates to Alice for the family. It was as though he’d read about dating in a manual somewhere. Nonetheless, he didn’t seem to mind that his real live date was wearing jeans while he was wearing a suit jacket and tie.

“You look beautiful,” he said, taking in the look of her, from the Traveling Pants, to the filmy iris blouse that showed what cleavage she had to its best possible effect, to the antique rhinestone clip in her hair, to the kohl shading along her upper eyelids. She really had tried to look pretty.

One thing about Brian was, he understood the Pants. Just like Bailey, two summers before, had understood them implicitly. The Pants, in a way, were like the ultimate litmus test, separating the worthy from the unworthy. And no matter how he looked, Brian was the most worthy guy she’d ever known.

Few people in the course of history had ever transformed, even just physically, as much as Brian had since the afternoon two years before when Tibby and Bailey first filmed him at the 7-Eleven.

It was great and all. A supreme dork with a golden heart whom you befriend because you love him grows to six feet two, gets his dental hygiene together, accidentally breaks his hideous glasses, and morphs into a virtual heartthrob before your eyes. It was like dumbly buying a share of stock at one dollar and watching it soar to one hundred. Tibby still observed in stupefaction how girls whispered and flirted around Brian these days.

But on the other hand, it seemed to Tibby like another example of destiny’s strange sense of humor. The single safest guy in Tibby’s life had turned imposing. He didn’t impose on purpose, she knew. He didn’t desire her to be mean to her. He didn’t plant these feelings in her heart to make her sad. But desire was there, his and hers, and as a consequence, it wasn’t a safe relationship anymore.