What about the fact that she was a girl with a boyfriend? That he was…who knew what?
Was having a boyfriend honestly supposed to make you not feel attracted to people? Was it supposed to make you not attractive?
And now she wondered, how did he see her? Was it all in her mind, this tension she felt in the way they reached for things and shared the space?
Oh. She felt like smacking herself. She was incorrigible. Why was she feeling this way?
Hmm. Was she feeling this way?
What way was it, exactly?
The sun was long past set, but they walked along the hillside toward the embankment. She felt the dizziness, the giddiness of the wine. Was his tread a little happier, a little less directed too? They intended to join what was left of the party like they did most nights, but it had mostly scattered. There was some awkwardness about whether to sit down. At least in her mind. He did sit down and she joined him. Was it strange that they should be spending time together like this?
No. If she weren’t incorrigible, it wouldn’t be.
Incorrigibly, she pulled the elastic out of her hair. It was coming out anyway, she told herself, though she didn’t quite buy it. Her hair was unusually long from not having Carmen around to trim it since they’d gone to college. It was down to her elbows, almost, halfway down her back. It had the particular feature of absorbing moonlight. She knew he had to notice it. He was probably wishing he hadn’t sat down with her.
Why was she behaving this way? She was older now. She’d learned her lessons. What was she trying to prove?
Her limbs had that forward tingle. She couldn’t help herself.
Was it all in her mind?
It was, wasn’t it? Maybe that was for the best.
She looked at his eyes to try to gauge the mood of the moment faithfully, but he unexpectedly met her gaze. They stayed there for a moment too long before they both looked away.
Shit.
He fidgeted. He clapped his hands together as if he were summarizing an argument. “So, Bridget,” he said. “Tell me about your family.”
She felt her body bending away from him without actually moving. She had nothing to say about her family at present. “So, Peter,” she said, a little too fierce. “Tell me about yours.”
How much the air had cooled. In a dry place like this the sun left and took all the heat. There was nothing in the air to hold it. “Let’s see. My kids are four and two. Sophie and Miles.”
His kids were four and two. Sophie and Miles. It had seemed to her that this might come at the end of the questioning rather than first thing out. She had somehow thought he’d tell her about his parents or his siblings. Her brain fitfully worked backward. He was a father, which presumably meant he was a husband.
“And your wife?”
“Amanda. She’s thirty-four.”
“Are you thirty-four too?”
“Almost thirty.”
“Older woman.”
“Right.”
She had misread him. She had let her thoughts get away from her. It was time to get them all back.
The Traveling Pants called to Carmen from under her bed. The other times Carmen had gotten them in the last several months, she had carried them from place to place, but she had not actually worn them.
The Pants were outstanding, and Carmen hadn’t been in the mood to stand out very much. She hadn’t been in the mood to answer questions Julia would certainly ask about them. It was again the issue of the compartments. She couldn’t figure a way to introduce that Carmen to this one. Also, she was scared she was too fat.
She pulled her suitcase from under her bed and felt for where she’d stashed them earlier that morning when they’d arrived by FedEx from Lena. There they were, carefully folded into her suitcase like a false bottom.
For some reason, on this day, she had the urge to put them on. Maybe because it was beautiful outside or because she’d had a lot of coffee. Maybe it was because Lena had a crush on a guy named Leo, and that made Carmen happy and also made her think that the world was opening up.
It was a slightly scary urge, because she was worried about what she would discover. Though she had opted not to try on the Pants, they had never opted not to fit her. She didn’t want to force them.
But she also knew that since she’d started working on The Miracle Worker in the spring, she’d almost completely stopped her late-night affair with candy. During the past two months she’d been careful about what she ate, mostly in her efforts to be a more worthy friend for Julia.
Holding her breath, sucking in her stomach, wishing she could suck in her backside, she pulled them up, up, up, and over. They went. Who could doubt their magic now? God, they fit. How good they felt. How happy they made her.
She went to the mirror and really looked at her reflection for the first time in months. She pulled on a pink T-shirt and struck out for the wide world. For the first time in ages she didn’t feel ashamed of herself.
It was certainly because of the Traveling Pants that she wandered into the lobby of the theater where the auditions were taking place.
“You’re in the next group,” a woman with a clipboard told her. “Go ahead in.”
The woman was mistaken, Carmen knew, but she went in anyway because she was curious. Had Julia gone yet?
A guy was up there reading from Richard III. Carmen sat in a seat toward the back and listened. She grew sleepy, enjoying the language if not necessarily absorbing the meaning.
“Carmen?”
She heard her name and she looked around. Had she actually fallen asleep?
She squinted.
“Carmen, is that you?”
She leaned forward. A woman was standing up in the second row. She realized it was Judy, who had pointed her on the path to the canteen the night before.
Carmen waved, feeling self-conscious.
“We’re going to break for the afternoon in a few minutes,” she said, “but we’ll take you now if you’re ready.”
Meaning they would take her now to audition? Judy must have thought she’d come to try out. It certainly looked that way. Otherwise, why was she here?
Carmen meandered toward the stage. She paused at Judy’s aisle, where Judy was sitting with Andrew Kerr and a couple of other people Carmen didn’t know.
“I didn’t really…I didn’t really prepare anything,” Carmen whispered, hoping her voice would reach Judy but not the others. “Do you want me to come back another time?” Like never, she thought.
“Just go ahead,” Judy said. She must have been one of the assistant directors, Carmen thought.
Carmen walked up onto the stage, wondering what in the world she was doing. She did not feel comfortable standing under these lights. She had nothing to say, nothing to read. “I’m more interested in sets,” she said lamely to the assembled group. She thought she heard someone laugh in the back.
The other people in Judy’s row looked annoyed, but Judy was patient. She came up to the stage and handed Carmen some pages. “Just read Perdita. It’s fine. I’ll read Florizel’s lines.”
“Are you sure?” Carmen asked. She felt stupid. Everyone else had memorized parts and prepared them and performed them with a clear sense of intent. Here she was reading from pages she had not even provided.
She did know some of these lines, though. They were from The Winter’s Tale. She’d practiced them with Julia. That spurred her on, because the words, though strange, were familiar and pleasing to her.
Judy started the scene as Florizel, and then gave way to Carmen with an obvious lead-in.
Carmen cleared her throat.
“Sir, my gracious lord,
To chide at your extremes, it not becomes me—
O, pardon, that I name them!—your high self,
The gracious mark o’ the land, you have obscur’d
With a swain’s wearing; and me, poor lowly maid,
Most goddess-like prank’d up.”
She stopped and looked up
.
“Keep going,” Judy said.
So Carmen kept going. She was getting to the part she most liked, and she read it with a certain joy. At the end of the last page she stopped. She looked around. She felt stupid again.
“Okay. Thanks,” she called to them generally, squinting to see Judy in spite of the lights blasting her retinas. “Sorry about that.”
She trundled offstage and let herself out the back door into the sunshine.
She actually laughed aloud when she got outside, because the whole thing was so bad and ridiculous.
Oh, well. Another adventure for the Pants, she thought affectionately.
There were so many odd reversals on the way to growing up.