The Four Ms. Bradwells Page 4

  “The rare Long-Necked Honking Ms. Cicero-Bradwell Duck?” Ginger smiles—a little smugly maybe, but maybe not; maybe that’s just me remembering how Ginger used to be. “Tundra swans,” she says. “Coming from Alaska for the winter, like Mia’s mom.”

  I blink up at the birds: their long, graceful necks, their widespread wings. This is the way all the Ms. Bradwells imagine my mom even still. Maybe I’ve told them about the summer the car overheated in Death Valley, the many flat tires on the many roads to nowhere, the dusty pavement through the grimy car window always slipping over the horizon, always leading home again at the end of August, just in time for school. Or maybe I haven’t ever told the Ms. Bradwells any of that; I don’t even know anymore. But I know they hold this unreasonably glamorous image of my mother: in a convertible with the top down, a scarf blowing behind her like Beryl Markham in her airplane as we set out from Chicago to Alaska, me in the passenger seat, my brother, Bobby, in the back, Dad calling, “Drive carefully, Ellen!” as we leave him behind with three months of frozen dinners and a lonely trek back and forth to the office every day. Except the Ms. Bradwells don’t see Dad, they only see Mom. She has Alzheimer’s now, Mom does. She refers to Dad as “that nice man who takes care of me.” Ginger and Laney and Betts would be appalled at how unswanlike her thin neck looks, how frail.

  Betts frowns at her cellphone, then asks to see mine. I flip it open but have no reception either. We’re too far out on the water.

  “Remind me to call Isabelle when we get to the island,” she says.

  I’m godmother to all the Baby Girl Bradwells: Izzy, who is in law school herself now, and Ginger’s Annie and Laney’s Gem, freshmen at Princeton and Stanford. Half the reason I came back from Madagascar was to see Iz and Annie in New York this weekend. But an express train from Princeton or New Haven to Manhattan for a dinner is one thing; a train to a car to a boat to Cook Island would be nearly as ridiculous a trip as Gem flying to New York from Palo Alto for the evening. Ginger left Annie a message while she and Laney got the car, telling her daughter not to come.

  “What’s with that camera, Mi?” Laney asks. “It looks like the kind of thing only you could love.”

  “Like Dartmouth!” Betts suggests.

  “But we all loved Andy,” Laney protests. “Maybe he wasn’t such a good husband choice for Mia, but …”

  The Law Quadrangle note Andy and I submitted the spring we married:

  Mary Ellen (“Mia”) Porter (JD ’82) and Andrew (“Dartmouth”) Cooper IV (JD ’82) were married in Chicago, and will be making their home together in San Francisco. The former Ms. Porter has taken the name Mary Porter Cooper in defiance of the wishes of her friend Ms. Ginger Conrad (JD ’82), who has vowed hereinafter to refer to all future issue of the couple as “the Babies Terrorist-Bradwell.”

  It had seemed so funny at the time, that whole name business, Ginger insisting Andy should become a Porter rather than me taking his name. (“Porter-Cooper?” Betts had suggested. “Cooper-Porter? I know! Coopporter! You can start a business transporting chicken coops!”) But I’d gladly tucked Porter aside and abandoned Ellen altogether, shrugging off my mom’s name and all her expectations for me with it, claiming the person I was rather than abandoning any part of me. After six months of wedded unbliss, though, Andy started coming home far too late at night—which might have been work or might have been another woman but wasn’t either. We split after less than a year, and I took the apartment and I took my name back, and he quietly moved into his new lover’s house in Pacific Heights.

  “So,” I say, hoping the film isn’t scratching as I turn the plastic knob to advance it, seeing that even Laney’s neck is starting to go. I position the wrinkling skin under her jaw in the center of the plastic lens, where the focus is sharpest. She’s too close, though, and the Holga is just a cheap toy camera: the focal length doesn’t adjust. “So, I’m thinking this return to Cook Island might be as bad a move as Andy’s and my marriage was.”

  Laney, running unbitten fingers through her spring of loose curls, says, “I expect a roll of film costs nearly as much as that camera, does it, Mi?”

  “She says the camera creates a mood,” Betts says quickly, with a warning glance in my direction: where else is there to go?

  “Foreign?” Laney says.

  “Remote,” Ginger says.

  I turn the camera first to one, then to the other, wondering how we are ever going to face this if we can’t even talk. “Nostalgic,” I say. “The camera creates a nostalgic mood.”

  “Nostalgic!” Betts snorts. “We’d best be careful or Ms. Terrorist-Bradwell here will have us wanting those awful navy blue suits back from the Goodwill. And those goofy silk scarves we used to bow at our throats, too—like we belonged under a Christmas tree!”

  “Remember all those conversations on the couch on the Division Street porch?” I ask.

  “That place surely was a dump,” Laney says.

  “It wasn’t,” I say.

  “That place made the Hamtramck apartment I grew up in look spiffy,” Betts says.

  “Definitely a dump,” Ginger says.

  “Ugly is in the eye of the beholder,” I say.

  Ginger puts me at the helm for a minute while she removes the blue casing over the sail. She’s completely at home on the water, even in her fancy suit, which, as perfect as it is for our planned New York theater evening, is exactly the wrong thing to wear sailing. One splash of bay water and that gorgeous jacket is trashed.

  “Pooley’s cocktail party first year,” Laney says. “Manhattans or Martinis, and not a drop of water.”

  “Plenty of water in that hot tub,” Betts says, and we all laugh at that memory.

  “That was the first time we got naked together,” Laney says.

  BETTS AND I had been rooming together only a few weeks the night of the hot tub party. We were all taking a Thursday night wine tasting class held, improbably, in one of the law school lecture rooms, and a classmate had invited eight Section Four women to a private tasting at her vacationing parents’ house. I can still see Laney and Ginger standing to strip off their suits in that hot tub, their nipples hard against the unseasonably cold September night before they sank back into the water. Laney’s nipples almost black to Ginger’s pink, her breasts dark to Ginger’s milk-water white. Salt and pepper, such different spices, but always passed together. They’d stretched their long legs out, side by side, allowing their feet to float up to the surface, Laney’s long and narrow without being fragile while Ginger’s were sturdy and calloused, inelegant. Their toenails were painted an identical red, where Betts’s and mine were bare. Just the four of us in the hot tub, our other friends already gone back inside the house.

  They seemed so comfortable in their nakedness, Laney lanky and easy, Ginger more aggressive, wielding her body as if it were one of her much-loved guns. I imagined a girl had to be tall and thin like they were to be comfortable naked, even just with friends, with no guys around. I imagined every girl who was tall and thin was comfortable with herself.

  “You know what I hate?” Ginger asked as she played footsie with Betts, kicking up the smell of chlorine. “I hate waking up in the morning and having no idea what the name of the guy in bed next to me is.”

  She fixed her gaze on Betts as if she somehow knew Betts was still a virgin, the only one of the Ms. Bradwells who was. As if she already knew Betts would beat her out for law review. I’d slept only with the college boyfriend I broke up with just before starting law school, and Laney only with her medical student, Carl. I don’t suppose Betts or Laney ever imagined climbing in bed with a boy they didn’t love, any more than I had, much less one whose name they didn’t know.

  Betts, though, simply met Ginger’s look in that very frank Betts way and said, “But think of the possibilities for the morning. Twenty questions: Does your name start with a letter in the first half of the alphabet?” She laughed then, and we all laughed with her.

  Ginger sank completely
underwater, her long hair drifting toward me before she reemerged with it slicked back from her pale forehead.

  “So what’s your future, everyone?” she asked.

  And when that evening was over, I still had no idea that Betts was a virgin, that Ginger had indeed once woken next to a guy whose name she didn’t know, that she’d dropped out of college a week later to move to South Africa with him. But I did know more about the Ms. Bradwells than I would have imagined learning in just those few hours.

  Laney meant to return to Atlanta after law school, maybe after a few years in D.C. with a politically connected firm, she said, to which Ginger said she ought to run for the Senate someday.

  “Not president?” Betts offered, palming a spray of water in Ginger’s direction. “If Margaret bloody Thatcher can do it, can’t we?”

  I admitted no real idea what I was doing in law school. My childhood dreams had included becoming a guitarist, movie star, news reporter, and Catholic priest. My mom had convinced me to take the LSAT, though, and I’d done well—a perfect 800, I found myself admitting in response to their inquisition.

  “Mia, the Savant,” Ginger said, reaching for the wine bottle at the edge of the hot tub and refilling my glass.

  She, unlike me, had her whole future laid out and she wasn’t afraid to admit it. She meant to join a Wall Street firm, make partner on an accelerated basis, have a weekend place in the Hamptons where she would race sailboats, and marry someone with a fortune to match the one she meant to make herself.

  “The Prince of Wales is still available,” Betts suggested. “The Crown Princess Ginger? Ginger of Wales? Haven’t you always wanted to be ‘of’ somewhere, really? And you wouldn’t have to worry about recognizing him when you woke up. Then you could be beheaded or burned at the stake when you got caught waking up next to one of those guys whose name you didn’t know!”

  “A handsome millionaire,” Ginger insisted. “I don’t care if he’s royalty, although I’m not opposed. And a flat in Paris—I forgot the flat in Paris.”

  “I, on the other hand, just want my head on a coin,” Betts declared.

  We talked for a minute about the Susan B. Anthony coin just out, the first U. S. tender ever to sport a woman’s face. Progress, I said, to which Ginger scoffed, “A dead woman’s head on a coin is progress?”

  “It is a dollar,” Laney said.

  A dollar that would be forever mistaken for a quarter—what does that say?

  “Progressio advenit sensim,” Laney said. “Progress comes slowly.”

  Ginger thrust her hands toward Laney, index fingers crossed at right angles as she juggled her wineglass. “In manus tuas, Domine!”

  “Into your hands, Lord?” Laney said.

  “From Dracula,” Ginger said. “You know—when they’re about to finish off poor Vlad? In manus tuas, Domine! It’s the phrase the professor uses to ward off evil spirits, evil like Latin spoken outside the classroom. We’ll have none of that in this hot tub.”

  Betts made a finger cross too, then, her Speedo swimsuit puckering over her flat chest, and I followed, both of us mangling the Latin verbal shield, saying something that sounded, between us, like “In manners, too, dominate.”

  “In manus tuas, Domine,” Ginger repeated more slowly, as if she knew at least as much Latin as Laney did.

  “In manners, too, dominate!” Betts and I insisted, laughing as much from the abundance of wine as anything.

  “So your turn, Betts,” Ginger said. “What’s your dream?”

  “My head on a coin isn’t ambition enough?” Betts floated onto her back in the water, looking up into the fuzzy dark sky. “I have humble ambitions, really,” she said. “I’d just like to be called ‘Judge Zoo’!”

  The truth was that Betts dreamed of being on the Supreme Court even back then. Thirty years, that’s what she figured it would take to get there. No woman had ever been admitted to the Court at the time, and part of her hoped to God it wouldn’t be another thirty years until one was appointed, but another part of her—maybe the bigger part—hoped the opportunity to be the first would wait for her. That much truth, though, would roll out gradually, the way most of the truths about the Ms. Bradwells have.

  “You should get a D.C. Circuit Court clerkship if you can, it’s the most influential appellate court,” Ginger said—a clerkship being a one- or two-year position working for a judge, not for the shabby paycheck but for the experience and prestige. “My mother has connections, that might help.”

  “And then a Supreme Court clerkship,” Laney suggested, and Ginger said, “Right.”

  No one said anything like, “Gosh, you need to graduate at the top of your class and be some kind of freaky genius to get a Supreme Court clerkship.” No one pointed out that Nixon and Ford together had appointed exactly two women to the federal courts in their combined twelve years in office, two out of almost three hundred appointments. No one said that Caruthers, Smythe & Morgan, the law firm Ginger meant to join, had no women partners—much less that it would still have none the year our class would come up for partnership. And none of us uttered a word suggesting that Laney should plan on being a widow or facing a short term in office if she wanted to be a senator, even though half the fourteen women who’d sat in the U. S. Senate by then had filled their late husbands’ seats and none of the others had served longer than nine months.

  That was one of the things we Ms. Bradwells had in common pretty much from the start: we might laugh at ourselves or at our own chances, but even when we didn’t know each other very well yet—when we might have mistaken light tones for lack of seriousness—we never did laugh at each other’s dreams.

  Mia

  ON THE ROW V. WADE

  FRIDAY, OCTOBER 8

  GINGER HOISTS THE sail on her mom’s boat, calling out to me, “Hold that helm tight and straight for a minute, Mi!”

  “Lordy, how did we get back to the Law Quad, as drunk as we were?” Laney asks, and I can almost hear her voice saying “Lordy, Lordy” in that hot tub all those years ago, after confessing to claiming an A at the grade wall when she’d actually missed it by two points that would cost her law review. I’d confessed to the opposite: pretending the grade beside my student number wasn’t an A when it was so that Andy wouldn’t think I’d done better than he had. And Ginger, much later that night, after the drugs had come out, had confessed that the man in the portrait in the Cook Room, the man who donated all that money to build the Law Quad, was her great-great-uncle—in response to which Betts had demanded, “Why in the world is that any kind of confession?” Ginger had said she didn’t know, but it was.

  Ginger takes the helm back from me, the sail billowing gracefully in the afternoon breeze, the boom swinging out to accommodate the power of a wind we can’t otherwise see as I remember Betts waking to the coffee I’d made her the morning after the hot tub party, the two cups I’d carried across the Quad and up the stairs to Ginger and Laney’s room. Despite my efforts, we were all late for class.

  “Makes you worry about what our daughters might be doing right this minute,” Betts says.

  “I can’t imagine Annie is anything like I was,” Ginger replies with a hint of melancholy that suggests sadness, or relief, or both.

  “Gemmy doesn’t want to be like me,” Laney says. “She’d like to be not-me. She’d like to be reborn a Baby Terrorist-Bradwell.”

  I shoot a frame of her dark eyes looking directly at me as I imagine that: me taking Laney’s place in her annual holiday photo-cards—Laney and her picture-perfect family with their picture-perfect needlepointed Christmas stockings hanging from the mantel behind them. William, Laney, Willy J, Manny, Gem, and Little Joe. I send holiday photo-cards too these days: Mia with birds swarming overhead outside the Wazir Khan Mosque in Lahore, Pakistan, where I was researching a piece on honor killings; Mia at a school in Angola, with too-thin children and something that passes for a chalkboard; Mia in Kenya, helping plant indigenous trees. But I don’t have a Christmas stockin
g or a fireplace, much less a family.

  “I loved the expression on that Washington Post fella’s face at the yacht club when your friend Max said he was calling the police, Ginge,” Laney says. “It was even funnier than when he told them there wasn’t a boat within fifty miles that would take them anywhere.”

  I shoot another frame, Betts’s face in the upper right corner so her gray hair will bleed off into the vignetting.

  “We’re not exactly in for a quiet weekend on the island,” I say. “The press is going to catch up with us.”

  “You say that like you’re not one of them, Mia!”

  Betts means it in good fun, but I’m left wondering if she really thinks I’m like the journalists who had conniptions when Max in his pale-kneed jeans informed them the yacht club was members-only, and pulled his phone from his pocket lest they think he’d hesitate to call the police. The headlines tomorrow will be wicked, but the papers will be reduced to running a photo of our backs entering the club, or perhaps a long-lens shot of the boat disappearing into the bay. And I suppose Ginger is right that it will take them some time to find us, since Cook Island is only a small dot of unnamed land on navigational maps, and nonexistent on your average visitor map of the Chesapeake.

  “How does this mess surface in a blog?” Betts says.

  She looks at me, I’m sure she does. My roommate, and then my housemate, who knows me better than anyone in the world.

  “Half of D.C. was there for Mr. Conrad’s party, Betts,” I say. “A hundred guests. Someone shows up with …” With their guts blown out. “Someone turns up dead like that, anyone at that party might have doubts.”

  Or anyone on the whole island. Any of the “slutty island girls.”

  I turn the camera to Ginger, remembering her words: Tessie McKee? She was just a slutty little island girl everyone seems to think popped Beau’s cherry. Remembering how fiercely loyal Ginger was to her brother Beau, and he to her. How fiercely loyal they still are, I’m sure. I focus on the soft white of Ginger’s jacket, her ebony buttons. The contrast unsettles me. I raise the camera higher, to her pale gray-blue eyes, her wide mouth, which is not smiling, not even trying to hide the bare sorrow as she looks ahead, guiding her dead mother’s boat toward her dead mother’s home.