2
In the mind there is no absolute or free will, but the mind is determined to this or that volition by a cause, which is also determined by another cause, and this again by another, and so on ad inflnitum.
Spinoza, Ethics
How happy I am here, I love my Kappa sisters and my new life as a sorority girl, I am breathless so busy every minute almost! so I wrote to girlfriends from high school who'd gone to other colleges or to a few selected girl cousins This is certainly a change from my old life, I'm a KAPPA GAMMA PI sometimes I have to pinch myself or give myself a little stab with my pin.
There was no one to whom I might tell an obvious fact: Kappa Gamma Pi was too expensive for me.
I was a scholarship student, I had virtually no "spending money" as it's called. Of course I knew this before pledging yet somehow had ignored the fact like a diver who suspects that the water into which she wants to dive is freezing, and lethal, yet she dives into it just the same. As if behaving in the manner of X without acknowledging your perversity will have the magical effect of bending X to Y, which you can endure.
Often in my freshman year, before pledging the sorority, I had to work ten hours a week to supplement my scholarship; for I'd been overwhelmed by unexpected fees, expenses, the cost of hardcover textbooks and of living even a meager, modest life wearing discount-store apparel brought from home; in the autumn of my sophomore year when I'd moved into the Kappa residence, I had to work a minimum of twenty hours a week. These were long afternoons in the registrar's office typing and evenings and Saturdays in the university library stacks shelving books, in probable violation of university regulations into which I didn't dare inquire; I would have applied to Mrs. Thayer for kitchen work in our house but there was a Kappa bylaw forbidding Kappas from working in any sorority houses on campus and I saw the wisdom of this, I suppose. We are being taught elegant manners. What a lady I am being turned into (you would laugh at me maybe!) I am happy happy HAPPY. And now in my sophomore year I was in terror of losing my ability to reason, I was in terror of losing my scholarship for poor grades, I was in terror of being dropped from the university and made to return home to my grandparents' farm on that desolate rural wedge of land in Niagara County. (My brothers had long since departed the farmhouse, though they lived in the area.) Never enough time for so many activities once you're a sorority girl and Kappas are among the most competitive I've discovered. So BREATHLESS! The fact of time, the swift and irremediable passage of time, was making me desperate; sometimes I was aware of my heart racing, in actual fact I was often breathless; climbing a flight of stairs or one of the campus's notorious hills left me breathless, as if I'd ascended a great height; these were not stairs and hills I was climbing, but mountains; mountains made of glass down whose sides I was sliding, helplessly; never enough time! never enough time! even if I rationed my sleep to four or five hours a night there was never enough time! Though I worked twenty hours a week, my paychecks were painfully small; at the outset, I believed there must be some mistake, and with tears brimming in my eyes I'd gone to make inquiries. Ninety cents an hour? Ninety cents an hour? Can that be right? Federal and state taxes. Social Security deductions. One of the women librarians said frowning it's the same for everyone if you have no dependents. She meant well; she meant to be kindly, if a little curt; I glanced at her lined, stoic face and suppressed a shudder. Still I could not give up my jobs, poorly paying as they were. Alone of my sorority sisters I was obliged-literally-to count pennies. I counted them in neat piles of ten; I would have been ashamed to have been seen (by my sisters) for I would have embarrassed them. They'd taken me on, I supposed, out of charity. They looked upon me as one might look upon a poor relation. This is the Kappa house! I wrote on the backs of postcard-sized reproductions of the house to send to my friends and cousins, even to my brothers and grandparents. Even larger than it appears from the front. So many rooms. In the cloud-massed sky beyond the jutting roof I made an X to indicate the approximate location of my room on the third floor; though in fact my room was at the very back of the house, a cubbyhole not much larger than the room I'd been assigned in my freshman residence. Except, at the Kappa house, I had to share the room with another girl.
Except, at the Kappa house, the room was costing me much more.
The price of happiness. Such happiness you crave.
When the first bill for dues came to me from Kappa Gamma Pi, I was puzzled by "social fees" and other surcharges in addition to the monthly dues. Then to my horror I began to accumulate fines: because of my jobs, I had to miss business meetings, committee meetings, a "required" mixer with Kappa's brother fraternity Phi Omega. These were fines of $21 in October, $28 in November. I pleaded with the Kappa treasurer to excuse me: I had to work, had no choice but to work, what could I do? The girl, a junior with a pixie cut and wide-set imperturbable eyes, smiled with her mouth and suggested that I cut back on my academic courses and reschedule my work hours so that I'd have more time for the sorority-"Kappa Gamma Pi is your first obligation, don't forget."
Late that night in the basement study room of the house (to which I'd become habituated to retreating, not wanting to quarrel with my gregarious roommate, Deedee, unable to endure the pounding repetitive beat of calypso music from the room next door, or the shrieks and cries of laughter generally through the upstairs) sometime after 3:00 A.M. drifting into a deranged sleep as my vise-clenched head sank slowly to the paperback Ethics "whose pages swam in my vision as if undersea. Happy! the voice of Spinoza taunted. The happiness you deserve.
My grandmother spoke English with a heavy German accent that seemed to mock the very language, as the tics and grimaces of her raddled face mocked her smiles. " 'Made your bed, now lay in it'-that's what they say, ja?" She laughed, though without mirth. She was a guardian of the most banal and self-evident truths; one of those old, sour, but unfailingly energetic fairies in Grimms' tales who oversee disasater out of personal spite; her response to the assiduously argued, painstakingly structured metaphysical system of Baruch Spinoza, that martyr for truth excommunicated from the Jewish community in Holland, in 1656, would have been to take his collected works and fling them into her wood-burning stove-"There!"
I did not call her from Syracuse, ever. I did not call her to beg her forgiveness. I did not call her to say I am in despair, I am lost to myself, what can I do?
The study of philosophy is the study of the human mind. Though philosophers claim they are studying "reality"-"the world"-"the universe"-"God." Yet to study the human mind up close, to probe into one's own mind, one's own motives, is to be baffled utterly.
My first year at Syracuse, I'd been indifferent to the campus presence of the Greeks, as they pretentiously called themselves. I was immersed in my studies-and in my part-time jobs-and in the vast, intimidating adventure of books, books, books. Never in Strykersville had I imagined a true library: a library like the university library in whose stacks I might wander mesmerized for years. The brightest of students in my high school, yet I saw myself at Syracuse as alone and beleaguered and fighting for my life; I loved the excitement of it, even the anxiety; I was in a perpetual state of agitation; I returned from the library staggering with books; if one of my professors assigned X, I would read, and reread, not only X, but commentary on X; I was writing, parable-like little prose poems; I had little interest in other girls in my residence, and often skipped meals; I had not the slightest interest in joining a sorority, in the time-squandering activities called "rush"-"pledge week"-"initiation." Yet even in my indifference I wasn't unaware (I "would have to confess!) of the sobering fact that the majority of freshman girls, including girls I admired and would have wished to consider friends, the most attractive, the most popular, in many cases the most intelligent, scholarship students like myself, had pledged sororities. These girls would seem to have been plucked by supernatural intervention out of the university residences and would be living, beginning the following fall, in sorority houses; leaving prospects for companionship, let alone friendship, severely diminished. For who would remain in the dreary undergraduate dorms for "independents" as we were flatteringly called?-the left-behind, the losers. Outcasts at life's feast, in a memorable Joycean phrase. In my pride I was hurt; I understood that I would be banished from a glamorous world in which in fact I took no interest; that I would be banished was a spur to my desire. And perhaps out of the corner of my eye I'd been uneasily aware of the cruel and discriminatory Greek world, synonymous with University Place, those absurdly elegant mansions (with dormitories extending at the rears) boasting cryptic Greek letters on their facades which were meant to tease and tantalize and re-huff the uninitiated. I'd walked past the Kappa Gamma Pi house on its craggy hill, I'd stared at the ivy-covered facade, the stately Doric columns, the slate-covered high-pitched roof, and turned away shaken. In my rural background there'd been nothing like this. In Strykersville, a country town of about 10,000 people, nothing like this. A world of ex-plicit and outrageously unapologetic preferences and discriminations indicated by the word cut. For to cut was the privilege of the Greeks, and to be cut was the fate of the unworthy. This was intolerable, this was un-American, you wanted to laugh in derision. Cut from the Deke list, cut from the TriDelt list, cut to ribbons, cut your throat, what a loser. Every year after fall rush there were incidents of attempted suicide among the rejects.
Which only underscored, as some said, the Greek truism: survival of the fittest.
Oh, the Greeks were contemptible, their self-aggrandizement comical, but who could laugh?
Then somehow it happened, remarkable at the time, wholly unexpected and flattering, that a girl in my residence hall began to seek me out. Her name was Dawn; I'd scarcely noticed her in one of my lecture classes; in my fever of concentration upon my work, I scarcely noticed others my own age; my attention was fixed upon professors, whom I admired and feared as minor deities. But there was Dawn entering my life in one might open a door and step inside, uninvited. She was a striking young woman; not pretty, nor even attractive, but glamorous like a film star of the Thirties with a perfect moon face, sleepy hooded eyes, heavily lipsticked lips, and a perpetual cigarette burning in her fingers; smiling at me, squinting through a veil of smoke; one of those compelling young females of whom there were several in my high school, prematurely adult and sexually alluring however young. Her hair was bleached and teased; she wore tight sweaters and painted her fingernails. Her fur-trimmed black cloth coat, her handsome leather boots and other items of apparel suggested that her family was well-to-do, and indulged her. Dawn whose very name came quickly to captivate me: DAWN I'd find myself writing in my notebook or in the margin of a textbook or tracing with my fingernails in the gritty film of ice on the window of my room. DAWN DAWN. She playfully chided me for studying too hard- "You'll have a nervous breakdown! Really. It can happen." At the same time, she was childlike in her appeal for help in writing papers. "If you could just glance through it? Just to tell me is it good enough to hand in." Of course, I would end up doing much more, for I enjoyed such challenges; by sixth grade I was helping friends of mine with their schoolwork, as much for the pleasure of solving another's problems as for helping a friend in distress. When Dawn received high grades on these assignments, she was elated and grateful, and invited me to meet her friends, freshman Kappa pledges who were girls like herself, not-intellectual, not-brainy, but brimming with energy, clever and funny and good-looking in a way to make boys stare after them on the street. But why am I with these strangers? Not my type! Yet there I was. Flattered. Dawn insisted upon "restyling" my hair. Dawn insisted upon lending me clothes, though she was a size eight, and I was several sizes smaller. She invited me to visit the "beautiful, elite" sorority she'd just pledged, Kappa Gamma Pi-"What a terrific bunch of girls! I love them." And soon after this visit, Dawn and the other pledges encouraged me to sign up for the spring semester rush. And I did. I knew that I couldn't afford to live anywhere except in university housing, and that the lowest priced housing, yet I signed up for "rush," and suddenly became another person fixated upon a group of strangers, a sorority of which I knew little except it had a name, it had a campus reputation-for what? "Social life, activities." (That these were things in which I had no interest seemed not to occur to me; if I'd investigated, I would have discovered other sororities far more suited for my situation: a sorority of arts majors, a sorority of scholarship girls, a sorority for girls with limited finances who helped defray the cost of room and board by sharing work-duties in their residence. But I didn't investigate.) Where Dawn had pledged, there also I would pledge, or nowhere. The very Kappa house, the intimidating neo-Classic mansion at the far end of University Place, loomed large in my Imagination like an image in a Technicolor film. I believed I'd seen it before, years ago; not in Strykersville of course where there were no mansions, but-where? In Buffalo? Its lofty portico, the interior illuminated by chandeliers and candlelight, furnished with polished and glittering things, enormous white peonies in tall urns; the Kappa girls smiling like Hollywood starlets and bursting with "personality" and all of them remembering my name. And there was the British housemother Mrs. Thayer with her exotic accent, her brisk impeccable manners, those eyes blue as the ice rimming Lake Ontario well into April. In the giddiness of my delusion it seemed to me that Mrs. Thayer was the very mother of the house, and I liked it that she wasn't American, she spoke with no accent I knew, and would be a harsh, exacting judge. Not for this woman the fate of the merely mortal.
It was a shock to me that I was invited back to the Kappa house in the second week of rush; an even greater shock, that I was invited back in the third week. Was it possible that I was surviving the rush? (I had dropped out of or had been cut from other sororities without taking much notice.) I cared only for Kappa Gamma Pi.
In secret, I could not comprehend why anyone, let alone so sophisticated and glamorous a group of girls as the Kappas, would want me to join them. I knew that, if they knew me as I truly was, they wouldn't like me at all. Yet it became my obsession to convince them, a challenge like achieving high grades, a perfect or near-perfect academic record. The less worthy I believed I was of being a Kappa, the more ardent my desire to be a Kappa. Now in the ice-crust of my window I scratched
On a Kappa questionnaire passed over to perspective pledges I'd lied freely, desperately. It was believed by some of my relatives that the family was partly Jewish: that my father's grandparents were German Jews who'd changed their name to a German-sounding name when they'd moved from a village in western Germany to Antwerp, Belgium; before the outbreak of World War I, my father's mother, the daughter of this couple, and her German-born husband emigrated to America, to settle as dairy farmers in the volatile climate of upstate New York; the family's vague, not-much-practiced religion was Lutheran; my mother, Ida, may have been a truer Lutheran, for she was buried in the church cemetery in Strykersville. (You could not ask my grandparents personal questions. Asked about Europe, her own parents, my grandmother would grimace in contempt. "Why you want to know, that old dead time?" and make a spitting gesture.) Yet on the questionnaire I unhesitatingly indicated Episcopalian. My father's employment?-independent contractor. My life goal?-to help in the betterment of mankind. I told myself that this was not lying; it was my Kappa self speaking. I had noticed how in conversations with Kappas I'd overcome my natural inclination toward skepticism to emerge as open, uncomplicated, easygoing, warm, with a dimpled smile and high ringing girlish laughter. My Kappa self did not brood, was never melancholy. If she wrote parable-like prose poems in the style of Franz Kafka, she showed no one among the Kappas. She had clear skin, shining eyes, a glossy pageboy, and lipsticked lips. She was no one I knew personally but an inspired composite of a dozen Kappa girls, including Dawn, whom I greatly admired. The more poised Kappas had a way of hugging and kissing you on the cheek-"Loveya, sweetie!" when saying good-bye, and while I was never able to emulate this extravagant display of feeling, there were times when I came close.
Whoever awaited me back in my book-strewn room in my freshman residence was increasingly a stranger, and a boring stranger at that. I had yet to discover Nietzsche's cruel aphorism To seduce their neighbor into thinking well of them, and then to believe in this opinion of their neighbor: who has greater skill in this than a woman? Yet such efforts of seduction were all I had to shore up against the terrible loneliness of my life. Or so I believed.
When at last on the evening of the official end of spring rush when the sealed Kappa "bid" was ceremoniously delivered to my room, by Dawn and several other pledges, I stared at these beaming strangers and burst into tears.
My Kappa self.
How proud Ida would have been of her daughter! Becoming a Kappa was but the first of many achievements, I promised.
Not that I was worth your death. But your giving birth to me?
Away at Syracuse where I rarely thought of home, I thought of my mother often. In the late night, I felt that my loneliness drew me to hers: aren't the dead lonely? My brothers would have laughed at me, pointing out that I was remembering, not a living woman, but old snap-shots. Yet at such times I felt my mother's nearness; if I glanced up from my desk, to see an indistinct face reflected in the windowpane beside my lamp, I could imagine that the face was hers. There were exciting half-conscious dreams in which I returned to Strykersville. Or these were vivid memories. In the cemetery behind the Lutheran church where she was buried. In life, I had not visited this grave many times. If my father had visited it, he went alone and never spoke of it. Yet in my memory I could smell freshly mown grass and feel the stubble beneath my feet. Beyond the church's squat steeple and dully gleaming cross the northern sky was darkening over Lake Ontario. The Strykersville Lutheran church had been founded in 1873, built of crude fieldstone and stucco. The cemetery was only a meadow behind the church, of small rocky hills and ridges that in rainy weather filled with water; in winter, angry-looking dunes of snow covered half the graves' markers. The earliest markers, dating back to the 1870's, were worn thin as playing cards and tilted in the earth; these were closest to the church; more recent graves like my mother's were farther away, fanning up a partly cleared hill. It swept over me that no one really expects the future, no one truly believes it can happen. All that is, is now. The modest gray-granite marker engraved with my mother's name, birth, and death dates, was at the far end of a row; close by was an uncultivated field; how of the earth is death, which Spinoza never acknowledged; none of the philosophers spoke of smells, damp earthy leaf-rot mingled with woodsmoke (in the distance, a farmer was burning stumps: the worst smoke-stink you can imagine). I drew my fingers across the rough stone. Freezing stone. I'm a Kappa, I'm so happy, Mother! Sometimes I think my heart will burst.
My mother hadn't been a frequent churchgoer. She and my father had been married in a civil ceremony in Buffalo. The family legend was, the minister of this country church had allowed my mother's body burial in the cemetery with the understanding that my father would now attend church, and bring his family. How eagerly the minister must have anticipated new members to his congregation, a father and four children, and maybe the father's parents, too? Of course, nothing had come of it.
For Ida's sake I was uneasy that her body lay in sanctified ground through a lie. Otherwise, I smiled to think of it.
It was an era when such words as sex, sexual were never uttered even by those who routinely engaged in sexual practices. Sexy was a word that might be murmured in an undertone, with a sly movement of the eyes, a knowing smile.
Mrs. Thayer, whose delicate task it was as housemother to allude to certain things without ever naming them, like most mothers of the day, spoke of ladylike behavior at all times, standards of decorum, and maintaining a reputation beyond reproach. She used such expressions as male visitor and male person as if speaking of a distasteful and untrustworthy species. You would not have believed that Agnes Thayer had ever been married, despite the conspicuous rings she wore on her left hand; you would not have believed that this woman had been married to any male person. Mrs. Thayer lectured us at mealtimes and at formal house-meetings (not Kappa ritual meetings) held on Sunday evenings in the parlor. "Our house rules regarding male persons are simple. They are set by the Dean of Women and they are not to be violated under any circumstances." It was forbidden to allow any male person (other than an approved workman) to ascend to the upper floors of the house; it was forbidden, in fact, to allow any male person to sit on the first few steps of the sweeping staircase to the second floor, or to enter the basement stairway for any purpose whatsoever. Of course it was forbidden to hide, or to attempt to hide, any male person on the premises before or after the house was officially locked for the night; it was forbidden to "carry on" in any manner unbecoming to a lady with any male person in any of the public rooms or elsewhere technically under Mrs. Thayer's jurisdiction. In the public rooms of the Kappa house, where male persons were admitted as guests, the rule was classic in its simplicity: "All feet on the floor, gurls, at all times."
Mrs. Thayer's arch, overbearing accent made her speech irresistible to mimic. In this way, her speech pervaded every room of the thirty-bedroom house.
You thought of sex continuously. Even if, like me, you had few sexual feelings, and no desire to translate those feelings into relationships with male persons. Sex was a tide, vast and virulent and unspeakable. A tide that could wash over any girl at any time, and destroy us. Male persons were primed to discharge this tide, in hot little spurts: semen. (Yet semen was never named.) Male persons were the natural predators of girls.
"What Thayer's scared of, like all the housemothers," it was remarked slightingly of our vigilant housemother, "is one of us getting knocked up. She figures she'd be blamed, and fired."
Forbidden for undergraduate girls to ascend to the upper floors of male residences or to slip from their public rooms at any time. Forbidden for undergraduate girls to visit the rooms or apartments of men living off-campus, and so not under the jurisdiction of any university authority. Especially it was crucial for girls to avoid being alone with one or more male persons at fraternity parties where unfortunate incidents were rumored to occur, occasionally. When a girl drank too much, and became careless. Got passed around upstairs, from "date" to "date." But there were no male equivalents of housemothers like Mrs. Thayer at fraternities, only house managers or advisors, and when Kappa girls went to fraternity parties on campus or at Cornell as they did every weekend, they did as they pleased. Or as their dates pleased. C'mon! You'll like this guy, he's a great guy, you can't be working all the time! I made up my face like the other faces, I brushed my snarled hair till it shone. I was given a pink taffeta dress to wear, a skirt to mid-calf and a big bow tied at my back to make the waist fit. I was given sparkly earrings. Smiling and blinking like a nocturnal animal prodded out into the sunshine. In the fraternity house the din was deafening. The young men, en masse, were tall. Laughter, music. Beer. Paper cups, beer. The sacrament was beer. In the rest room reserved for LADIES (a poster in smeary red paint taped to the outside of the door) there was a giant blue box of Kotex prominently in view. Some wag had put, in each of the toilets, goldfish. Were you supposed to laugh? Flush the beautiful golden little fish down down the toilet, and laugh? I lacked an appropriate sense of humor, I lacked an appreciation of beer. And mouths tasting of beer. Was I expected to dance in this din, in a crush of grinning strangers, in a grinding embrace? Expected to kiss a stranger? Some boy who didn't know me, had forgotten my name? What was the purpose of drinking to get drunk? My Kappa sister Chris, vomiting off the back steps onto garbage cans marked
.
Chris, come on. Chris, please. I was begging but she refused to listen. Back to the party! I was trying to explain to Dawn, Jill, Donna, Trudi, who were impatient with me, eyes hotly shining, skin heated, arms slung around their grinning dates' necks. She'll be fine, Chris can take care of herself, she's been at these parties before. I provoked embarrassment and disgust among those Kappas sober enough to notice how I left drunken Eddy my "date" walking out of the music-blare running across the snowy spiky-grassed park in ridiculous high heels, my borrowed pink taffeta dress swishing like ice against my stockinged legs, breathless, cursing, tears leaking out of my eyes though God damn I wasn't crying, why cry? My feelings can't be hurt where I have none.
Next day around noon, Trudi looking coarse-faced and homely without makeup brought the black cloth coat I'd left on the crammed coat-rack at the fraternity house, tossed it onto my bed with a look of pity and contempt. "Here. You forgot something."
What happened to Chris?
Hey if she doesn't remember, so what?
Whose business? Yours?
No memory, nothing to forgive.
Her date took precautions, probably. He isn't a complete asshole.
Was it just him?
Returning from the library along University Place, just before 11:00 p.m. Crossing the snowy park. I was carrying books in my arms as you might cradle a baby. One of them was eight hundred pages, a history of European philosophy. I was walking swiftly, my breath steaming in the freezing air. I'd been working in the library stacks and was almost late for curfew. My mind was empty of all thoughts except the urgent need to get up the steep hill to the Kappa house, to get inside before 11:00 p.m. For Mrs. Thayer would not be sympathetic, Mrs. Thayer would not even listen to my stammered excuse. You American gurls! Suddenly I heard whispering-"Missy? Mis-sy?" The figure appeared from behind a tree as a child might, out of a hiding place. In the dim light of a street lamp on University Place I saw his face: a stranger's: fattish jowls, clean-shaven jaws, thin wormy mouth stretched in a leering grin, black-rimmed glasses like a schoolteacher's, that magnified his eyes like minnows. He's letting me see his face. Wants me to see his face. "Mis-sy," he was saying, the tip of his tongue protruding between his lips, " -gonna hurt your titties runnin'! Take care." He might have been any age between thirty-five and fifty. There was a singsong mock-solicitude to his rather high-pitched voice. I knew him at once as the man who'd accosted Freddie and other girls; but I was not one of these girls; I was a Strykersville girl; without hesitation I threw my heavy books at him, directly at his face, knocking his glasses off. He cried out in surprise and pain. No girl or woman this crude bastard had ever approached had behaved like this, he wasn't prepared, his fantasies hadn't prepared him for me. I was screaming at him, short yipping breathless cries like a dog.
Watching him then limp across the park, along a side street, out of my vision. Like liquid fire adrenaline coursed through my veins. I was thrilled, I was buoyant. This incident, I would have liked to tell my father.
In the snow lay the black-rimmed glasses. I picked them up with my gloved hand and had an impulse to snap them in two, in rage. But I didn't. I slipped them into my coat pocket instead.
No one had heard my short breathless little screams. They'd faded immediately, like my steaming breath.
What if he'd hurt me? There was the glint of madness in his eyes. Saliva at the corners of his wormy mouth.
When I entered the brightly lit Kappa house a few minutes later, my heart still pounding, I was two or three minutes late but the proctor on duty, smoking a cigarette, waved me indifferently inside. She took no notice of my flushed, excited face. My dark, dilated eyes. I did not rush to Mrs. Thayer's door, which was closed at this time of night; I did not bring her the gift of my female distress after all. The library books were damp with snow but otherwise undamaged. I knew I was a very lucky girl.
My feelings can't be hurt where I have none.
What I would do: I'd picked up the glasses with gloved hands and I would never touch the glasses without wearing gloves; I would mail them to Syracuse police headquarters with a terse typed note. These belong to a sex offender. He is yours.
Thunderous hooves! Shrieks of laughter. Soap-splattered mirrors in the third-floor communal bathroom. The smell of cigarette smoke everywhere and cigarette butts strewn like confetti. Empty Tab and Coke cans kicked along the corridor, down to the stairway landing, for Geraldine the Negro maid to clean up; Geraldine with no expression on her dark creased face, wordless, dropping trash into her plastic bag. (Passing Geraldine and her bulky vacuum cleaner in the corridor, I lowered my eyes, I was ashamed of my skin. In the Kappa Gamma Pi house that autumn of my sophomore year I knew for the first time what it was to be ashamed of my skin. But Geraldine took no more notice of me than any white-girl Kappa deserved.) Bitch they were incensed Why doesn't she mind her own God-damn business. Mrs. Thayer had dared to scold certain senior girls. Conduct unbecoming ladies and in public rooms! There was Lulu who played repeatedly at a high volume "The Song from Moulin Rouge" to celebrate See look? lifting her left hand where a tiny diamond ring flashed like a naughty wink Engaged before I'm twenty-one. Where a younger girl was crying, there several seniors circled her C'mon, sweetie! Get real. When I approached, one of them cursed me, shoved me aside and away and I retreated in shock never knowing Why? I could not tell myself the old story Once upon a time because the time was now; the story was now; I'd believed I was causing the story to take place, but in fact the story was taking place around me, as a tide rises, brackish and muddy and filthy with debris. My Kappa sisters were fascinating to me as giant, brightly feathered predator birds would be fascinating to a small songbird hiding in the brush. Or trying to hide in the brush.
In my Ethics text I underlined The endeavor to understand is the first and only basis of virtue.
Yet it began to happen: the Guardian, Harper's & Queen, Punch and other British publications were left in disarray on the parlor table, sometimes on the very floor. Smoldering cigarettes left behind to foul the parlor air seeping beneath the door into Mrs. Thayer's private quarters. The laughter of anonymous male persons in the front foyer as the door was slammed, hard enough to make every crystal chandelier in the house shiver. Hyena laughter on the stairs after curfew. Heavy pounding footfalls in the second-floor corridor above Mrs. Thayer's bedroom. On the mahogany banister so fiercely polished by the silent Geraldine, dried threads of-was it human vomit? Mrs. Thayer called, "Gurls! Gurls!" One of her elaborately wrapped food packages was missing from the pantry cupboard. Simply gone. Where? None of the kitchen help could explain. At mealtimes Mrs. Thayer's icy blue eyes were alert, shrewd, darting from face to face. Only the younger Kappas smiled; we wouldn't have known we'd had any choice. "It is very quiet in here. The quiet of guilty consciences," Mrs. Thayer observed. With trembling fingers, at the conclusion of the meal, Mrs. Thayer rang the little silver bell. Summoning the bulky troupe of us into the parlor, except those senior girls who'd defiantly slipped away. "Who has been doing these things?" Mrs. Thayer calmly inquired. "Who has been so-unmannerly? So crude?" You knew Mrs. Thayer wanted to say so American! It might have been the magazines of which she spoke-again scattered about the parlor, shocking to see. And the crossword puzzle page of the local newspaper, on the floor. There was an embarrassed silence. A restless silence. In my nervousness I began to count heads but gave up at beyond twenty-five. Mercy and Trudi exchanged simpering-guilty glances, Bon-Bon and Chris clenched their jaws trying not to laugh aloud. Dawn licked her glossy lips frowning into space. Freddie surreptitiously scratched her left underarm. Deedee suppressed a yawn, or a belch. Daintily the mantel clock chimed the quarter hour. A reminder: Kappas are first and foremost young ladies. But upstairs a phonograph was playing rock and roll. Low-down dirty, thumping white-boy black-blues. From where I was seated on the carpet, I could see beneath the sofa upon which Mrs. Thayer sat stiffly girdled and erect; I saw what appeared to be a sanitary napkin. I was transfixed by the sight. Thinking But it can't have been used, it isn't blood-stained is it? Mrs. Thayer restated her question. But who could remember her question? Ice-eyes darting from face to face but these were innocent big-American-girl faces closed to her. She turned to me, a few feet from her, who was staring at her plump little feet in calfskin shoes; I'd been seeing that Mrs. Thayer's ankles were oddly thick, perhaps swollen. "You"-Mrs. Thayer said suddenly, waking me from my trance-"do you know? I command you to speak." I was so startled, I must have reacted in a way to stir amusement in the other girls; my eyes blinked guiltily of their own accord. A wild desolation touched my heart. I did not want Mrs. Thayer to discover the sanitary napkin, I did not want her to be publicly shocked and humiliated, I did not want the poor woman's trembling to become more visible, how the Kappa girls would giggle, mocking the Brit-bitch behind her back. Without thinking I said, "I-I must have done it, Mrs. Thayer."
There was a shocked pause. Even the mantel clock seemed to cease its minute ticking.
Was it the magazines we were discussing?-I was pointing at them, and pages of the Syracuse paper scattered on the carpet. My voice cracked, nasal and frightened. "I'm the only one who reads your magazines, Mrs. Thayer. I do the crossword puzzle." This was false, I had never "done" a crossword puzzle in my life; never would I waste my intelligence on a mere game. "So I-must have done this." There was another pause, an awkward blank silence. My Kappa sisters did not move yet there was a sense of collective movement away from me; a single indrawn breath. Mrs. Thayer, wholly unprepared for this confession, stared at me, a slow heated flush rising in her face. Almost faltering, she asked, " 'Must have'-or in fact 'did'-?" but her sarcasm lacked force, authority. I was smiling blankly. I heard myself say in a stammer, "I-I did, Mrs. Thayer. I promise it won't happen again." I was shivering suddenly, it must have been the onset of flu. I recalled that the man-in-the-park, my would-be assailant, had seen my face as clearly as I'd seen his. My mistake had been, I hadn't run to Mrs. Thayer in tears. Now my bowels churned hotly. What little I'd managed to consume at dinner, was clenching itself in spasms of revenge. Perhaps Mrs. Thayer knew that I was not even lying purposefully, to any point. Of the Kappas, I was the only girl who wore the same clothes day after day. A rumpled charcoal-gray wool skirt with a waistband so loose, the skirt twisted around, side to front, back to front, without my noticing. A long-sleeved white cotton blouse, much laundered and insufficiently ironed, with pert button-down collar in the style of the day. And an oversized navy blue orlon V-neck sweater, from the Strykersville Sears outlet, going at the elbows. My socks were mismatched but both were white wool. My hair lifted in uncombable clots of frizz, like iron filings stirred by a passing magnet. Whoever I was, seated amid the Kappas, nervously pleating her already creased skirt, I represented a valiant if somewhat smudged variant of the collegiate ideal. Mrs. Thayer, who'd been staring gloomily at me, decided, suddenly, out of spite perhaps, to believe me; she sighed, and struck at the sofa with a vexed little fist. "Oh very well, then! You are careless like all the rest. You gurls! I tell you and tell you." With an airy gesture of her hand Mrs. Thayer dismissed the other girls, only just in time before the boldest drifted away. I remained behind, contrite, biting my lip, busily tidying up the parlor. In disgust Mrs. Thayer said, "I would have expected better behavior from you, you of all these-'Kappas.' " The word Kappa was pronounced as a mild obscenity. I waited for Mrs. Thayer to ask about the other infractions of her rule, the theft of her food for instance, but she said nothing, stalked out of the parlor and slammed the door. By this time no one remained in the parlor except me.
With a folded newspaper I managed to nudge the sanitary napkin out from beneath the sofa. In fact, it had been used: wizened and clotted with dark, caked blood at its center, dazzling gauzy white elsewhere. A Kotex. If Mrs. Thayer had been spared, so had Geraldine. I wrapped the thing in newspaper to throw into the trash. I'd returned the magazines to their original fan-shaped order. Hearing my Kappa sisters overhead, their heavy insolent feet. I'd been reading in a book of ancient mythology of the Harpies, storm-spirits that carried souls to Hades. Their whispers, murmurs, mocking laughter sifting downward, on my head.