Forever in Blue: The Fourth Summer of the Sisterhood (Sisterhood 4)

Tibby was fourteen before she got her period for the first time. She was the last of her friends. She wished for it. She imagined how it would be. She bought a box of maxi pads and kept them under her bathroom sink just in case. It stayed there unopened for months. She worried she would never get it. She worried there was something wrong with her. She wished and wished for that first spot of blood to bring her into union with her friends.

And then it came. The happiness at getting what you want is not usually commensurate with the worry leading up to it. Relief is a short-lived emotion, passive and thin. The agony of doubt disappears, leaving little memory of how it really felt. Life aligns behind the new truth. Her period was always going to come.

Three months later she had fallen into the convention of hating her period and dreading it just the way everybody else did. She suffered the cramps badly. She lay curled up in her bed for hours. She took Midol. The pads, once prized, became a nuisance. Why had she ever wanted them? She stained all her clothes and washed them herself, because she was embarrassed to have Loretta see.

And now, almost five years later, she was back to pining for her period. She kept a constant monitor on her abdomen, at work, at home. She watched TV with part of her brain and thought about her uterus with the other. Was that a cramp she felt, that little twinge? Was it? Oh, please?

She thought about her uterus straight through work Friday and Saturday morning. She thought about it as she walked to Fourteenth Street to buy food and a magazine. She thought about it as she walked past the places that had become meaningful to her over the last year—the place where she’d gotten a terrible haircut with her friend Angela; the Mexican place favored by film students where they served cheap margaritas and almost never carded. She thought about her uterus through the long afternoon and night while she ignored her ringing phone and listened to messages left by people who loved her.

I’ll just get through this, she thought. Then I’ll call everybody back.

She worked Sunday. She wore a pad, just in case. She thought she felt a cramp.

“Tibby Rollins, where are you going?”

Tibby froze on her way through the Comedy aisle. She cleared her throat. “Uh. Nowhere?”

She couldn’t say she was going to the bathroom again. She’d already been six times and it wasn’t even noon. Every time, she checked her underwear hopefully. Every time, she returned to the floor in an agony of worry.

“Do you mind taking register three?”

“Okay. Fine.”

If it didn’t come today, was it officially late? Did that mean…? A wave of panic mounted and broke. But maybe her last period hadn’t really ended on the sixth. Maybe it had been the seventh.

This was her pattern. She talked herself up. She panicked. She talked herself down.

A customer was waving his hand in her face.

“Sorry?” she said, blinking.

“Have you seen this?” he asked. He was in his twenties, she guessed. Yeesh. So strong was his cologne she could practically taste it.

“Yes,” she said, trying not to breathe in.

“Is it a good date movie?”

Tibby didn’t mean to roll her eyes. It just happened.

He murmured something unfriendly and walked away.

She watched him go, considering her uterus. Was that a cramp she felt? Or was she just hungry? She made sure Charlie wasn’t looking when she snuck off to the bathroom again.

Julia was a nervous wreck for callbacks the next day.

“It’ll be good,” Carmen assured her. “I’m sure you were great.”

“Let’s hope Judy thought so,” Julia said nervously, chomping on her pinky nail.

“Judy?”

“She’s the casting director.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Why? Do you know her or something?”

“Not exactly, no.”

Most of the kids were eating lunch when word went out that the lists were posted. Carmen was waiting in line to get coffee for her and Julia, and she feared she might get trampled like a hapless British soccer fan.

She watched the stampede. She drank her coffee by herself, enjoying the relative quiet.

Later, after the hoopla had died down, Carmen did wander by the lobby to check the lists. Why not? She checked the community theater list first, thinking it the least absurd possibility, and then the Second Stage. Her heart did pick up a little speed as her eyes passed from I to J to K to L. To M. Her name was not there.

Not exactly a surprise, she said to herself as she walked outside, taking the long way back to her room. She was mildly embarrassed that she’d even looked.

Was she disappointed? She wanted to read her heart honestly.

No. She felt pretty happy. She was wearing the Traveling Pants and they still fit her, and even on an empty path she felt herself among friends.

O Tibbeth,

Wherefore art thou ignoring thy friends?

I sendeth thou a phone card. Please calleth me backeth.

And I encloseth the Pants.

Loveth,

Thy loving and most theatrical wench,

Carmen. Eth.

When Bridget reported for duty the next workday, Peter was not in the grave. She casually waited until around noon to casually ask cabinmate Carolyn why not. “I think he moved over to the house excavation.”

“Oh,” she said casually.

He was not the Tuesday lecturer, and she didn’t see him at dinner the following night.

“A bunch of people went into town for dinner,” Maxine mentioned.

Town was about thirty-five minutes away and Bridget had not yet been there, but suddenly she felt herself growing curious about it.

The next day, Alison announced to the team in mortuary that they’d made a big advance in the house dig, and asked for a couple of volunteers to shift. Bridget’s hand shot up.

“We found a new part of the foundation and a new floor,” Peter explained animatedly to the newly expanded group after lunch.

Was he surprised to see her there? Did it matter?

“We’ve cleared the floor in one small area, and we want to keep going. It’s a tamped-earth floor, made of…well, earth. It can be hard to distinguish from the rest of the earth, if you know what I mean.”

Bridget found herself on her hands and knees with her trowel. They were deep in, the shadows were long. Other members of the crew were carefully lifting off layers of the ground in front of her. Where she knelt there was less than a foot of loose dirt where they’d left off with the coarser tools.

She felt around with her hands, cupping mounds of it into the nearest bin. Peter had told her what to look for, but she sensed she would do better with her hands. She most urgently did not want to dig through and wreck the integrity of the floor.

She kept two palms on the edge of the flat and moved them along, feeling with her hands. It was all earth, yes, but some of it had been constructed and maintained purposefully and the rest had poured haphazardly into the negative space. Even after two and a half millennia, she could begin to feel the difference.

That was the thing with digging, she was starting to understand. You went into it with the instincts of a looter: Dig around, find something valuable and cool, and bring it to a museum. S

he’d fancied herself a wannabe Indiana Jones. But the real thing was finding the effects of the human will. The planning, the wanting, the attempting of these ancient people was what connected you to them. Their effort was the difference between the random, allover, everywhere-including-your-scalp dirt and this precious floor.

That was what they could learn from the gravesite, Peter had explained to her. You could learn a lot more about a people from how they buried, cared for, and commemorated their dead than from an ancient body randomly struck down by the side of a road.

“We do not like random,” she’d teased Peter after one of his pep talks.

“No, we don’t, do we?” he said, laughing, as he was quick to do.

This floor was not random. She closed her eyes and concentrated all of her self into her palms, almost in a trance as she felt along. She knew she probably looked ridiculous, but she didn’t care. She remembered her grandfather describing how Michelangelo sculpted bodies out of blocks of marble. Her grandpa had been reading a book about the artist during a long-ago summer she’d spent in Alabama with him and Greta. She remembered him saying how Michelangelo looked for the body inside the block. He saw it and sensed it in there, and with his chisel he freed it.

Well, Bridget thought, a floor was a more prosaic thing, granted, but she was going to free it.

Her fingers were so sensitized she almost shouted when they ran into something hard and quite purposeful, but not the floor. Carefully she shook it off and held it in the patch of sunlight.

“Look at this,” she called.

Peter hopped down into the room, followed by Carolyn and another guy. “Wow. That’s great. That’s most of a lamp. Look, you can see some of the painting on it.”

She felt the moist terra-cotta against her fingers and followed the smooth, molded shape.

“That’s where they would pour the oil. Probably olive oil.” Peter pointed to a little well at the top. “They’d float the wick right there.” He nodded at her approvingly. “I bet you can’t find the missing piece.”

She was such a sucker for a dare. He could obviously tell that.