Outer Banks (10 page)

“No, it's fine,” I said, though in fact the sweater smelled horribly of smoke and always would, and I had left it in Kenmore. “I just haven't worn it yet.”

“I wonder if my lashes will come back dark and long?” she said, peering into the hall console mirror as we gathered one evening for a pledge swap. “I read somewhere that they usually do when they've been burned off.”

“Oh, Fig, enough about that stupid fire,” Jeanine Sefton said irritably. “Your eyelashes don't look any different. You didn't burn a one of them.”

“Well, I did, too,” Fig said indignantly. “Right off. This is just mascara.”

But we could not be wooed back, and she soon became as fully and dismally Fig as she had ever been.

“The reason I know there's a God is that it's you who have to take her through initiation and kiss her, and not me,” Cecie said. She had come back seemingly herself, and a weight had slipped off my heart. The Cecie who had left for Virginia before Christmas had haunted my days at home.

“I lie awake at night thinking about it,” I said. “I'd kill myself now, but I figure it's going to be my good deed for the century. Who else is ever going to kiss her?”

“I bet she's been practicing on her arm for weeks,” Cecie said. “Did you used to do that? Kiss your forearm passionately, with your eyes closed like they did it in the movies, so you'd know how when the time came? Every one of us in the convent had big red hickeys on our arms. The sisters thought it was impetigo.”

“Oh, God, yes…I'd forgotten,” I cried, convulsed with laughter. “All over America at any given time you can hear the piggy, snorty little sounds of ten-year-old girls kissing their arms.”

We were off into one of the late-night gales of glee, laughing until we could not speak and clutching our sides, keeping it going out of sheer relief and joy at having each other back.

“Listen!” Cecie hissed. “Hear that? She's in there now, getting ready for the one she's going to lay on you. Listen!”

And she made a hideous noise with her mouth on the back of her forearm.

“Oh, stop, I'll throw up in her face, I'll be sick on her shoes!” I cried. “I'd rather kiss a frog!”

“And you will,” Cecie howled. “When you kiss Fig that's what she turns into!”

“Shhhh! She'll hear us!” I gasped.

But it was a long time before we could stop the laughter.

Three nights later we stood in a semicircle in the darkened chapter room, dressed in white robes over white formal gowns, the air dense and funereal with the smell of banked pine boughs and carnations, our twenty-seven new pledges in a semicircle before us. They wore white formals like us, but not the robes, and all were blindfolded. The room was silent except for the sound of a triangle being struck softly and monotonously in the back of the room by our Music Master, and the quick, shallow breathing of the pledges. The room was darkened by thick, heavy drapes and hot from the sucking tongues of many white candles, and our waists were all girt into breathlessness by Merry Widow waist cinches. I knew that before the five hours were over at least one of the pledges would have fainted. A pledge always did, at a Tri O initiation. It was as much a matter of exaltation as airlessness. Tri Omega brought you into its body on a tide of mystery bordering on the Eleusinian. Even though I had been through it twice now on the other side, I could remember vividly my own initiation far away in Virginia.

I cannot remember now a single secret and holy vow that I took, but I knew them all then, and I could recall in stark lunar detail the terror, exaltation, and sense of life-changing import I had felt when I became a sister. I had a craven, fleshly urge to go to the bathroom, but over that was the tremulous conviction that when the blindfold was removed and “the scales fell from my eyes,” as the ritual had it, my life would forevermore be changed. I would be enhanced, enfolded, accepted; I would be given substance and purpose and definition.

I would know who I was, and what.

It had not happened so far, but I knew that our pledges felt the same. The developing hyperventilation told me, and the tears that slipped from behind several blindfolds. I felt a great surge of sisterly love, looking at them. I had wept, too. Even Fig, whose
nose rattled with mucus, seemed at that moment vulnerable and dear, blood of my blood. They were all roughly eighteen years old, and as featureless and malleable as tablets of clay. That night began the process of their formation. We, the full members, were the sculptors. We loved them, in that moment, as the artist does the dream of creation before the actuality of it has sullied his canvas.

“This is going to be fine,” I thought to myself. “I'm not going to have a bit of trouble kissing her.” Beside me, Cecie cut her eyes over at me and grinned slightly.

“Piece of cake,” I mouthed silently at her.

The ceremony began; candles were lit and extinguished, bells and the triangle rung, chimes chimed and songs sung. Solemn, binding Greek phrases, rendered doubly exotic by our Southern accents, were chanted and our pledges parroted responses like young cockatoos. The room heated and seemed to shimmer in the wash of candlelight and the miasma of nervous young bodies; the droning and the bells and chimes were both hypnotic and faintly nauseating, like the onset of seasickness. I saw a couple of pledges start to sway.

We were nearing the end of the fifth hour when the first one went over and was neatly and quickly dragged out to the anteroom. We habitually had a second, shortened ceremony for those who fainted and missed the entirety of the first one, but it was matter-of-fact and sparse, somehow shameful. A moment later another pale white form was ushered out, head bobbling. The sound of sobbing rose over the chanting, and I could hear Fig in full cry, blubbering like a giant toddler. I hoped wearily that she could get herself in hand before kissing time came round.

It was time then for the vows, and the pinning on of the golden pins, that lay in a row on a length of velvet at the altar. Each pledge was led forward by her big sister, and together the two repeated the vows of Tri Omega, and the Big Sister pinned the pin on her pledge and gave her the secret handshake and
whispered in her ear the most holy Greek words of all, words that must never be said aloud. And then we untied the blindfold and kissed our new sisters, and the service was over. For reasons known only to our original founders, three pallid, bookish young women at Temple University circa 1894, this kiss was bestowed on the mouth. Many jokes were made about the founders' proclivities and the extracurricular activities at Temple but the kiss was really not a laughing matter. In those days of passionate homophobia, everyone dreaded it as if it were an act of Babylonian perversion.

I felt the first coil of nausea when the pledge just ahead of Fig was drawn forward from the semicircle by her big sister and placed before the altar. The tuna casserole we had had for dinner gave a greasy wallow in my stomach, and rose up into my throat. It stung in my nose. I shook my head, hard. I had never been sick at my stomach before in my life, or fainted. Panic rose behind the tuna fish.

I looked at Fig, and another wave broke. She was holding her arms out before her, her fingers grasping and ungrasping air, and her thick lips were working as if she were trying not to spit, or perhaps mumbling to herself. Tears spurted out below her blindfold; it was totally sodden, and the top of her skimpy white formal was as wet as if it had been rained upon. Her chest and shoulders were wet with tears, too. Her tongue flicked out and claimed one, like a lizard's a fly. She gave a great, rattling sniff. I shut my eyes and half turned away.

“Dearest God, just get me through this,” I prayed. “Just do this one thing.”

Somehow I found myself standing in front of Trish Farr at the altar, my hands on Fig's shoulders as she stood in front of me halfway through the vows of sisterhood. Rote took me through them. Nausea and dizziness howled around me like a storm. Fig cried loudly and openly, but she managed to repeat her vows, and I pinned the pin on her flat chest and gripped her icy hand in my
icier one, and whispered the unspeakable words into her ear, and fairly jerked the blindfold off her. One more obstacle, just one, and then I could escape to the kitchen, where there was light and cold water and cool air. One more…

I shut my eyes and leaned in for the kiss, and then opened them. It was fatal. Fig's face was truly hideous: mottled and wet and mucus-tracked, her eyes screwed shut until they almost disappeared behind the scummed glasses. Her nose was completely sealed, and bubbled. But her mouth was slightly open, lips parted so that she could breathe through them. I could see the veining of blue on the underside of her lower lip. And I could see her pink tongue as it slipped in and out of her mouth after a stray tear, like a hummingbird darting, like a snake's. Ecstasy played around her face like heat lightning. I thought, suddenly, that when I put my mouth to hers she was going to put her tongue into it.

“I can't,” I whispered. “Oh, I can't.” And I turned and ran past Trish into the kitchen and slammed the door and was sick in the aluminum sink. I was still there, retching miserably, a cold dishcloth on my forehead, when the service ended and Cecie came into the kitchen to see what was the matter with me. Fig was behind her, her face blind and rapt.

“I'm so sorry,” I said weakly. “I've never done that before. It was just so hot, and I felt sick…”

“Please don't apologize,” Fig said, putting her arms around me and hugging me. I stiffened, afraid that I would vomit on her. She stepped back.

“I was deeply touched and honored,” she said, her voice trembling. “I felt it, too. It was the most wonderful and powerful emotion I have ever felt. We're sisters forever, now.”

Cecie and I looked wordlessly after her as she scuttled out of the room, fresh tears starting behind the thick glasses.

“Dear Jesus, God and Holy Mary,” Cecie said.

I was sick in the sink once more.

*   *   *

Fig lost no time in exercising her powers as a Tri Omega in good standing. She was entitled to, of course, but tacit chapter etiquette held that new initiates eased into it gradually, observing a kind of seemly apprenticeship, keeping silent in meetings until opinions were invited, voting with the majority, volunteering for the most onerous tasks, like kitchen detail and pouring for coffees and teas. By the second quarter of full membership they might begin to voice opinions, and by the second year had full shouting, disagreeing, and policy-setting privileges. But Fig, being Fig, waded right in at her first chapter meeting, the one held to discuss winter rush.

This rush was far less elaborate than the big fall one, and far less favored. It was widely agreed among the Greeks that the best pledges had been snatched off in fall rush, and pickings in winter were dreary, but we went through the motions nevertheless. The dean of women had long since decreed that winter rush be held to “give those thoughtful girls who had held back in the fall a chance to make their decision.” We all knew what that meant, but there was no circumventing this small official stab at humanity. We held the rush, gracelessly and flatfootedly. As Trish Farr said grumpily, “Nothing good ever came out of winter rush.”

But that year Ginger Fowler did, and it was Fig who brought her to us.

At first, we simply stared at her when she rose at the end of the meeting and said, “I've found a really super way to pay you all back for letting me be a Tri Omega. I've got us a new pledge you're all going to just love, and she's already said she'd pledge the second we bid her. She's already left Montevallo and she gets in tomorrow.”

She flashed her gummy grin around the circle of sisters. Her new gold pin rode astride an astonishing left breast wrought by a new, fiercely stitched Peter Pan bra, and her eyes, behind the harlequins, shed benevolence on us like the morning sun.

I am absolutely sure that the same thought ricocheted in ninety-four other minds as it did in mine in that moment: any
candidate Fig Newton might bring us would be a disaster of irremediable proportions. I could not even imagine who or what this phantom rushee might be. As far as I knew, Fig had no friends outside Tri Omega, and had never given any indication that she had them at home in Fowler. I did not dare look at Cecie.

“Let me get this straight, Fig,” Trish said levelly. “You've already told this…person…that we'd pledge her, and she's dropped out of Montevallo to come to Randolph and join right up. Is that right?”

Fig could read the tone, if not the words.

“Well, I guess so,” she said, cutting her eyes around the room. If she had been a puppy she would have wriggled and wet the rug. “I know it was a sort of a big step to take, but you know what an impulsive old silly I am. And there's just not any doubt you're going to love her. I knew there wouldn't be. This saves us a lot of time. We could just have her over some night and give her the pledge pin then…”

“She will come through rush like everybody else,” Trish said icily, “and we will pledge her if, and only if, this full chapter decides that she's Tri O material. If she's not, you're going to have to be the one to tell her we can't take her. What you did is against every rule we have. We could lift your pin for that.”

Fig's hand flew to her pin. Her face flushed the dull magenta that, with her, meant overweening emotion.

“Well, you don't have to snap at me,” she said, tears trembling in her voice. “I was only trying to do Tri O a favor. I love you all so much. And I'm right, I know I am. She's awfully rich. My home town is named for her family.”

“My home town is named for a family who's given the world nine generations of albino idiots,” Cecie said sweetly. “Rich doesn't always follow.”

Fig looked stubbornly down at the rug. She would not meet our eyes.

“Everybody loves Ginger,” she said. “And she really is rich.
Her family owns all kinds of textile mills. She's got a trust fund of her own worth five million dollars. Everybody in Fowler knows that. Everybody loves her.”