The Four Ms. Bradwells Read Online Free PDF Page B

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 DivisionStreet 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. Maybethe 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