The results are back for our exams and our theses.
Tilly: summa cum laude.
Me: magna cum laude.
Tilly says it’s only because I’ve been busy with boys that I didn’t graduate summa like she did.
“You’ve been juggling two of the country’s most eligible bachelors, from opposite ends of the social strata. That’s quite a feat!” she laughs, dragging me out the door so we can go graduate. I take a bow.
White dresses, black robes. Triple strings of pearls around our necks.
We hold onto our mortarboards as we leap into the air, hand in hand, singing our last songs of sisterhood in this shared pursuit of higher education, the path we’ve been on together since the late 1940s.
We sing verses from the chant we’ve sung so many times:
Pallas Athene, Thea:
Mathematos kaisthenous
Par’ hemeieis imen—
Akoue, akoue,
Makar thea, akoue.
We laugh as we catch our breath, impressed we still know it by heart.
“Jesus, can you believe we’ve been together almost every day since 1949?” Tilly says, suddenly struck by it.
“It’s going to be a change for us, this real life business.”
“All this life we will go and live!” She throws her hands up. “Promise we’ll always be close.” There’s no seriousness behind it, only affection.
“I promise,” I answer without thinking.
I dance across the lawn, calling, “I am Spartacus!”—which makes no sense at all, because if there’s someone I am not, it’s Spartacus.
I run into Topper’s arms. He graduated last week, and we’ve been celebrating him until today.
“Hey, old friend,” Tilly says, kissing him on both cheeks. “Where’s Buddy?”
“Parking,” Topper confirms. “He’ll be here in a minute. Cornelia’s with him.”
“Hurrah!” I sing. “The old gang assembled!”
“Ready to go live your lives for real?” Cornelia comes bounding down the lawn, Buddy trotting behind.
“I know I’m not,” I say, hugging her. “You?”
We link arms and head towards the Cloisters. Cornelia clutches her pearls.
“Jesus, no,” she squeals.
“I am so ready,” Tilly says, sounding like an actual adult. She winks at Buddy, kisses him hello, and takes his hand.
“Of course you are, baby,” he says.
They walk ahead, and Topper, Cornelia, and I exchange a look.
Another engagement. Another wedding. And this one needs to be arranged quickly, the slight swell beneath Tilly’s white dress is not built for scrutiny.
“Excuse me for living life to the full and pursuing my passions,” was Tilly’s response to the test. Buddy’s was an impromptu-but-suspiciously-rehearsed and poetic proposal.
“Looks like I’ll be the last spinster in town,” Cornelia says.
“I couldn’t be more delighted. No offence.” She smiles at Topper, then me.
“No honeymoon for you,” I say, tapping her nose. “Boop!”
“Thank God,” she sighs. And also: “eugh.”
A few hours later, none of us is a college student anymore.
We’re graduates.
Adults.
On our way out into a world designed, quite literally, for people like us. A world picking up speed, teetering on the edge of a new dawn.
Everything will be easy for People Like Us.
For us, nothing will ever come at a cost.
That’s what we’ve been told.
***
The boy has moved into Mrs Moore’s old house at Graceland.
I’ve seen photographs of him at the new gate, alone, yet watched by adoring crowds on the other side of the fence. He’s begun filming his next movie. He keeps climbing.
I haven’t spoken to him properly in ages. Not since he called in May, convinced of his impending doom after aspirating a cap from his new Hollywood teeth.
He barely had the energy for the call, phoning from his hospital bed, insisting I rush cross-country to hear the whistle of the cap in his lung with my own ears, before “it was too late.”
I asked to speak to a doctor. The doctor assured me he was fine. No danger. Easily handled.
When I laughed it off, the boy hung up.
Then called back to tell me I obviously didn’t care enough to expressway myself to his bedside.
Then hung up again.
I sent flowers, books, a card. I begged forgiveness. Told him I’d been careless. That I was sorry. Then laughed and sent kisses by post.
For graduation, he sent a telegram and flowers. He said my present was waiting for me in Memphis, at the new house. I should stop by and open it in person. He wrote nothing about himself. Nothing about his life now. He didn’t ask about mine. He only wrote he was proud I finished college, that I’m the cleverest girl he knows, “which doesn’t say a lot.”
That was all.
And I wonder: are we losing our friendship? The connection we swore would last forever? I’m no longer sure.
Still, I feel him in my bones. The way I felt him before I even knew him. Before the feeling had a face.
I open myself to it now. Let him see me there at commencement on a bright June afternoon. I let myself drift into his mind like a light, jolly fog.
And I see him having lunch on set in Los Angeles. I see him sitting on his bed at the Beverly Wilshire.
I hear him sing to no one:
I don’t care if the sun don’t shine…
I feel him thinking of my room, of us as teenagers.
A smile moves across his face, warm, familiar.
He gets up, calls for one of the boys, combs his hair in the mirror.
“Go get ’em, little girl,” he says to no one.
He grabs his jacket, whistles, rushes out into the California sun.
I blow a kiss to the sky.
“I will, baby boy. I will.”
***
Tilly gives the commencement speech, of course she does. She takes the podium with all the confidence of the girl I’ve watched become a woman.
Her speech is perfect. Rousing. Thoughtful. Ambitious. A little pompous, a little luminous, Tilly distilled.
She bows. We cheer.
And then commencement is over.
We pose for photographs. Move our tassels from one side to the other.
“Four years over and a whole lotta learnin’ richer,” Cornelia says.
And in the midst of it all, I know I will always be anchored to the boy, whether near or far, whether we marry other people, whether we live in different worlds. Something between us is fixed.
And I look at Topper, predestined in his own way, steady and warm, good and right. I know with him, too.
The sky is clear and blue above us. Privilege smiles down.
I smile at the boy in my mind, see him eating burgers with the boys, laughing about girls and upcoming dates, knowing he is smiling back at me.
I look around at my core group, Tilly glowing, Cornelia joking, Buddy being witty, Topper at ease, and I think of my emotional backbone: Miss Mary and the boy, and even Mabel. All the people who knew me before these did.
I think of Mr and Mrs P. Of all the people in Memphis who shaped me. The music, the dust, the heat of the mid-South. Sweet tea, porches, passions. Sam Phillips, a bona fide genius. Mr S and Cary. England. America.
The continuity of it all, I don’t want to lose it. Any of it.
I miss the boy so suddenly that I forget to breathe. I let the feeling rush through me. I hug him from where I am; I feel him leaning into the comfort of my shoulder where he sits in a diner out West. I feel him kiss my forehead from afar.
We meet in that moment, away from the crowds, our odd magic at full strength. A magic we never needed before because we were always close enough to touch.
And I think of England, and why I’m here. How my grandfather placed me in Miss Mary’s gentle care, in a place I needed without knowing: Memphis, the liminal gateway to the Deep South, and to this life. A place alive with colour and sound, where the world was about to crack open with possibility.
How lucky I was, delivered from grief and the heaviness of that cold, unhappy childhood in England.
My England now exists mostly in the old gardens of my memory, and the nightmares of the drafty country pile. My parents’ sadness, suffocating everything. And then America. And meeting the boy on my first day of school.
Miss Mary’s protection.
My America.
My direction.
The boy.
Always the boy.
My perfect American Dream boy.
My World of Interiors 