Friends and Strangers - J. Courtney Sullivan Page 0,159
around it on her birthday.
The idea of it made Sam cry even harder.
Isabella walked in then, and froze in the doorway.
“I’ll kill him,” she said. “What did he do to you?”
Things between them had been strained. But Sam laughed.
“Nothing,” she said. “I did it to him.”
Isabella came and sat beside her on the bed, hugged her tight. She didn’t let go, and she didn’t say a word, which was the perfect thing.
* * *
—
On the Thursday before commencement, Sam arrived at the president’s mansion. Every light was on. The house glowed from within like a jack-o’-lantern. Out front, a banner reading CELEBRATE WOMEN! obscured the second-story windows.
Sam went around to the back.
The dinner was meant to honor the college’s top one hundred alumnae donors and their guests. Events like this were a showcase. The steak would be of the highest quality. The wine would cost fifty dollars a bottle. Five kinds of pie would be served. In a hundred and fifty years, it had never been otherwise.
Usually the best part of working an event like this was getting to eat the food. But tonight Sam wasn’t hungry.
The kitchen was bustling when she entered. Women from dining halls all over campus were busy cooking, preparing, arranging. They spoke to one another in Spanish, moving extra fast. One of them handed Sam a tray and pointed her down a long hallway, where other student waiters were coming and going.
“Smoked salmon and cucumber,” the woman said.
Stepping into the packed living room full of women in neat suits and floral dresses, Sam felt unbalanced. Her hair was tied up in a bun. She wore a white button-down and black dress pants, per the instructions on the job sheet someone from RADS left in her mailbox. The shirt was old, and too tight. It strained open at her breasts. The pants needed ironing, but she didn’t have an iron at school.
She lay in bed the night before, imagining herself confronting President Washington. She wouldn’t, of course. The confidence she possessed when silently delivering a monologue to her pillow seemed to have left her now.
Months ago, she had been so excited to come here, to be in the woman’s presence. Now Sam just wanted to get through it and get paid.
She approached a cluster of blondes in their sixties.
“Smoked salmon and cucumber?” she asked.
They waved her away.
Sam went toward a trio of youngish alums, each with a glass of white wine in hand.
“Smoked salmon and cucumber,” she said.
One of them took a cocktail napkin from the tray and put a single canapé on top.
“Are you a student?” she asked, her voice full of excitement.
“I am.”
“What year are you?”
“A senior.”
“What house are you in?”
“Foss-Lanford.”
“No way! One of my best friends lived there!”
Sam smiled wide, then turned toward the other side of the room. She knew from experience that she would have this exact conversation at least ten more times tonight.
She wished she had gotten the chicken skewers with peanut dipping sauce, or the mini-sliders. Then the women would have approached her, instead of the other way around, and she could have gotten away with making less conversation. She didn’t feel like talking.
Fresh flowers sprayed forth from every surface: cherry blossom branches as tall as she was on the sideboards, white roses cut down to just a few inches stuffed into round white vases on the end tables, and long-stemmed roses, hundreds of them, in larger vases, filling the surface of a table in the center of the room. Sam wondered how much the flowers had cost. How much this whole evening had cost.
The crowd parted. There, by the fireplace, stood President Washington in a navy skirt-suit and pumps, a silk scarf tied around her neck. She seemed to be lost in conversation with two white-haired women beside her. Sam watched as President Washington kissed each of them on the cheek and then excused herself.
The president stood alone for just a second. She looked in Sam’s direction, met her eye. Sam imagined some other, braver reality. She imagined running toward her, making demands that could not be ignored.
While it is impossible for me to address your specific accusations without knowing who you are—
She wished she could say: Here I am. Now you know.
The words she’d recited in bed came back to her.
President Washington, you claim to celebrate women, but there are women who have worked on this campus for decades and have nothing to show for it. Shouldn’t we feel ashamed? Why won’t you