The Four Ms. Bradwells (5 page)

The bell rang then, and he called out, “Let’s all thank the four Ms. Bradwells for illustrating ‘the natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex’ the Court talks about here!” Causing the class to laugh yet again, and then to clap.

He called out over the rumble of gathering books that there would be a handout at the distribution center after noon, and we should read pages eight through thirty-three from the casebook, too. And we all shuffled out of that first class: Ms. Ginger Decisis-Bradwell with her unchanging opinions; Sergeant Mia Terrorist-Bradwell, whom Professor Jarrett brought in whenever he introduced violence to a hypothetical; Ms. Betts Drug-Lord-Bradwell, the improbable Drug Lord of Section Four; and me, Ms. Laney Cicero-Bradwell, tapped for every Latin translation the rest of the class whiffed on all year. The names would stick, too. They’d be the way Ginger worked us into her first law school poems at the end of that summer, silly little things that made all of Section Four laugh. It was the way we appeared on “Aristocracy Bingo” at the end of the year. That first morning, though, as Dartmouth took off before Mia could say how do you do, Ginger parked herself at the door and collected us like a kindergarten teacher herding hopscotchers off the blacktop. I see now she was setting out to make us her friends as surely as she’d meant to make her South African playwright love her. That’s the way Ginger is. And if it seems a bit manipulative, well, it’s hard to hold it against her once you realize how enormous her heart truly is, and how often she fails to get what she thinks she wants, or even to recognize that what she thinks she wants is a different thing entirely from what will bring her happiness.

“Well, that’s over for us, isn’t it?” she said as she gathered us. “We’ve all survived our first ‘up.’ You guys want to study together in the Arb after Torts class? I’ll bring champagne.”

So that afternoon we met in one of the Law Quad archways, under a gargoyle with dislocated shoulders and legs twisted in awful angles, who nonetheless smiled underneath his silly stocking cap. “Justice Bradwell,” we nicknamed that contortionist gargoyle, which would become our gathering place for
ex
-Quad activities: Saturday night dinners and movies; that first shopping expedition for navy blue interview suits; even the Cook Island vacation our third year, after we’d moved to the Division
Street house. “Justice Bradwell at three o’clock” we’d say, or later, “
Sub Judice
Bradwell at three,” and although there was another gargoyle meant to represent the law, we weren’t ever confused. That first afternoon of law school, though, we simply headed side by side up South U toward Geddes, the Ms. Bradwells of Section Four.

Mia

ON THE
ROW V. WADE
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 8

W
HEN THE REPORTERS
are specks in the distance, I turn back with my Holga to photograph the roiling lace of wake opening out to the disappearing shore. As I frame the shot, I recall the shiny teak battened-down world of that earlier sailboat, the teenage boy who helped us at this same yacht club saying, “Ought to be smooth sailing to yer island.” To which Laney had said, “
Your
island, Ginge?” Cook Island: Ginger’s middle name that was her mom’s maiden name—Faith Cook Conrad—and also the name on the sitting room in N Section of the Law Quad, the name of the women’s dorm across the street.

Max, a slightly goofy-looking fifty-something guy in jeans that bag at the knees, studies Ginger from behind fashionably nerdy glasses that, on him, are all nerd and not the least bit fashion. He’s my type, I realize with surprise; I’ve always considered my type more like Professor Jarrett—
handsomely
boyish and charming rather than nerdily so—but this guy looks like so many of the men I’ve slept with over the years that it must be true. He looks like the one man I married, not unlike the one I nearly did. He looks, I realize, something like my father—a disturbing thought.

Ginger declines his offer of help and he retreats below deck, leaving me to wonder if he’s the kind of guy Ginger loves or the kind who loves Ginger. Ginger’s taste in men tends toward total dicks, with the single and fortunate exception of her husband, Ted.

I peel back the electrical tape from the red shot counter to manually advance the film, then pan upward to catch a flock of white birds passing overhead. They’ll blur a little but the motion might be interesting. Maybe
the light leak that is characteristic of this particular Holga—a leak that creates a lightning bolt from God himself at the top left of the frame—will appear in the shot. You never quite know what you’ll get with a Holga, which is, I suppose, why I’m drawn to it.

“Ducks?” Laney asks. Ginger always kept a photo by her bedside in law school: she and her dad and brothers in hunting gear after a day of duck hunting, their guns in hand. And “Ducks?” seems a better question than “What the hell do we do now?”

When Ginger doesn’t answer, Laney says her name and repeats, “Ducks?” more loudly, to be heard over the motor and the lapping water, the thump of the boat against the waves.

“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.

B
ETTS 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.