Outer Banks (11 page)

“Fig, she better be good as well as rich, because let me tell you, there's not enough money in the world to buy a…drip…into this chapter,” Trish said righteously. I knew that she had barely restrained herself from saying, “another drip,” and I knew from the deepening of the magenta flood on her neck and face that Fig knew it, too.

“She is good,” she said sullenly. “You'll see.”

And surprisingly we did, and she was. Ginger Fowler came to our first party that rush with a hot pink Jackie Kennedy pillbox on her cropped, tow-white head and pink cuban heeled pumps on her big, clumsy feet and burned a hole in our white sofa with a Menthol Kent and fell out of her pumps and over an end table, and said “Oh, shit,” in such obvious anguish that laughter exploded, spontaneous and healing, and by the time we stopped we were hugging her and assuring her that we had hated the sofa anyway.

“Y'all were lucky,” she said in her rich molasses voice, that always sounded as though she was just about to break into laughter. “I spilled scalding hot coffee on the Tri Delts' housemother. And one of my fingernails fell off in the ADPis' punch. At least I think it was the ADPis. They passed me through there so fast I didn't get a good look at their pins.”

Her blue eyes were crinkled to slits with laughter. There were faint white lines at their corners, in the still-tanned skin. But her round, freckled cheeks were scarlet with embarrassment, and behind the white lashes I caught a glimmer of tears. I did not think she was kidding about the housemother and the fingernail.

“Your fingernail fell off?” Cecie said, her voice bright with enchantment.

Ginger Fowler peeled off the white gloves she wore, that gave her something of the look of a traffic policeman in a dress, and held up a freckled hand. Four of the big fingers ended in
perfect, gleaming, ruby-red ovals. The fifth, the middle finger, had ragged cuticles and a nail bitten down to the quick.

“It would have to be that finger, wouldn't it?” she said mournfully. The room exploded in laughter again. I knew then that rich or not, she would be one of us. Ginger Fowler remains the single most lovable and endearing person I have ever known.

The chapter spent a lot of time that winter, after we had pledged her and she toiled away in Fig's room trying desperately to make her grades for initiation, attempting to lay fingers on just what it was that made Ginger so irresistible. The closest most of us could come was “cute.” “She's just so cute,” one or the other of us would say helplessly, knowing it was not the right word. And it wasn't; cute, in that time and place, meant fragile, perky, fluffy, helpless, adorable, chaste as a baby chick. Ginger was none of those things. She was both tall and large-boned, with big hands and feet and the shoulders and calves of an athlete, and deep, full breasts. She had, she said, played intramural softball at Montevallo State Teacher's College, where she had started the fall before, and been on the swim team. She was square and solid instead of fragile, clumsy instead of perky, slapdash and plainly dressed instead of fluffy (the pink pillbox and pumps disappeared after rush, never to be seen again), and about as helpless as a mechanic in a small-town garage. Instead of adorable she was profoundly and naturally funny, as opposed to clever or witty or flirtatious, and instead of being dainty and chaste she was as overflowing physical as anyone I have ever known. She touched, patted, hugged, romped, ruffled hair, slapped rumps. And she loved being touched. She had an enormous warm vitality that was like catnip to the boys: from the first night she spent under the Tri Omega roof the telephones rang off the hook for her, and she dated every night her faltering grades would allow, and never failed to come back into the house arm in arm with some rumpled, happy suitor, disheveled and smeared and grinning her exuberant white grin. It was simply not possible not to grin back at Ginger when that smile lit her chipmunk face, even
when you were lecturing her despairingly about her behavior on dates, or her teetering grades.

“You just can't
do
that with everybody you go out with,” I heard Trish or Sister or someone whose business it was to keep the chapter's reputation lustrous admonish her, time after time. “You come in looking like you've been in a motel. What if you got pregnant?”

“If I got pregnant a star would rise in the East,” Ginger laughed. “What do you think I could possibly be doing with an eight o'clock curfew?”

And she would come in again the next evening with another boy, laughing and rumpled and chapped with beard burn.

“Oh, Ginger, you're such a child,” Trish snapped once.

“I know. I never pretended to be anything else,” Ginger said contritely.

“That's just what she is, you know,” Cecie said to me later that night. “A child. A big, simple child in love with the world, just delighted with it, who hasn't learned yet that the world can hurt you. That's the attraction, that innocence. It's as sweet and plain and appetizing as pancakes.”

“I wouldn't call her simple, exactly,” I said, looking at her in surprise. “She's quick and smart as a whip, and she's awfully intuitive. She knows what you mean without your having to spell it out. She's really got a lot of sensitivity. I don't think her grades have much to do with how she really is.”

“I didn't mean simpleminded,” Cecie said impatiently. “I meant…direct. Uncomplicated. Head on. She says whatever comes into her head and does whatever feels good. You know, she plays when she wants to and drinks beer when she thinks it will taste good and necks when she likes the guy and laughs at whatever tickles her. She'd give you the shirt off her back; you don't dare admire anything she's got, or she'll give it to you. And there isn't a female-mean bone in her body. She's like a man that way. She's even good to Fig. But she isn't mannish; in a way she's one
of the most feminine people I've ever known. She's like…she's like…some kind of Mayan fertility goddess in gym shorts, or something…”

“Wow. I gather you approve.”

“Oh, yes. I really like her an awful lot. Something about her scares me a little, though,” Cecie said.

“Lord, what on earth about Ginger could possibly scare you?” I said. “She's one of the most…oh, vulnerable…people I've ever known. Like a big puppy.”

“That's what,” said Cecie.

She was right about Ginger's sweet nature. Ginger was the only one of us I never heard say a single malevolent thing about Fig, even though I know that Fig's cloying, Uriah-Heep obsequiousness often irritated and puzzled her. Ginger's directness could find no ken in Fig's oblique affectations, and I have seen her, time after time, look at Fig in a kind of uncomprehending dismay. All that was missing, at those times, was the cocked head; she would have looked, then, uncannily like Nana in
Peter Pan.

But she was devoted to Fig. Even when one of Fig's excesses prompted the rest of us to groan or snap with annoyance, Ginger would only smile indulgently at her, like an adult at an obstreperous child. The gargantuan, gargling snores that erupted from their room did not seem to bother her; we knew about her deaf ear, and assumed that she simply did not hear them. But she must have, for she heard other things. She heard Cecie and me laughing in the nights, and she often put her head into our room in the mornings to tease us about the late night meetings of the Randolph Intellectual Society. If she heard what we said, what we laughed at, she never said. I think she would have spoken of it, if she had. She would not have stood by and let us slander Fig.

Her patience was monumental. Fig told the story of how she brought Ginger into the bosom of Tri Omega so often that the rest of us stuck our fingers into our ears when she began it again, but
Ginger heard it out every time, with only a hint of wryness in her smile.

“She was in the congregation the day I spoke at the Youth Appreciation Day service,” Fig would say, “and I noticed her face looking up at me, with this kind of yearning look on it, and I knew then that rich or not, this was a lonely girl who needed friends, because you know, money doesn't always mean you'll have lots of friends, and so after the speech I went down and talked to her and told her about Randolph and Tri Omega, and before that day was over I knew she would be one of us…”

“Hallelujah, praise the Lord,” someone would shout. “Another sinner brought into the fold!”

“Well, if it hadn't been for me you'd never have had her for a sister,” Fig would say sullenly, and even though this was true, we could not seem to stop jeering at the self-serving little story. And she could not seem to stop telling it.

Finally she did, and I could not resist remarking upon it to Ginger.

“I haven't heard the story of your conversion on the road to Damascus lately,” I smiled at her one night, after dinner. Fig was not about.

“My…? Oh. No. I finally just told her to stop it,” Ginger said.

“We are eternally grateful,” I said. “I think somebody would have throttled her the next time she trotted it out.”

“Well, I don't care if she tells it every day,” Ginger said. “She's right. If it hadn't been for her, I wouldn't be in Tri O. But I didn't want y'all mad at her. She really doesn't know how she sounds sometimes.”

I went back to my room, chastened.

“Ginger Fowler really is too nice for the likes of us. I'm glad to be back with catty, comfy old you,” I said to Cecie. She looked up over the horn-rims, which had slipped down on her nose.

“Glad to hear it,” she said. “Fig is foiled once more.”

“What?” I looked at her.

“Haven't you caught on yet that Fig lured Ginger to Randolph to be the friend of your bosom?” Cecie said. “What do you think all that business about compatibility is? Why do you think she pushes Ginger down your throat every time you turn around?”

“Cecie, what on earth is the matter with you?” I said, honestly puzzled.

“Think about it,” Cecie said, and went back to her paper on Disraeli.

I lay in bed that night staring at the pattern of light from the outside floods on our ceiling, and I did think about it. And I saw what she meant. Or at least, I saw what might have brought her to say it. I did not, then, see that it was true. For the longest time I thought, simply, that Cecie might be the slightest bit jealous of Ginger Fowler. Later I apologized to her for the thought when I came to see that she was right, but it put, that quarter, a tiny distance between Cecie and me, and I can only speculate what that cost her. She did not speak of it again.

From the night Ginger pledged, Fig had told me over and over that I was going to love her.

“You're going to be just so compatible, you two,” she would say. “You're so alike, and you have so much in common…you know, your background and all.” She did not say money, but I knew what she meant. No matter what I said, I could not disabuse Fig of the notion that I was rich and attempting to appear not to be.

“She's just like you, you'd never know she was…you know, special. She's just as everyday and down to earth as you are, Effie. But you can tell, oh, yes. Blood will tell. My mother says that. Blood will tell.”

“Let's spill a little and see,” Cecie said once. Fig did not hear her.

As the days went on, it was apparent that Ginger was as unlike me as it was possible to be; she was all the things I was not:
open, direct, earthy, uncomplicated, unlettered and uninterested in being so. The affection between us was warm and real, but it never was grounded in likeness. But Fig went on all that quarter, in full cry about our compatibility.

“Did you ever see two people as compatible as Effie and Ginger?” she would say to whoever was around us in a group. “Just as alike as two peas in a pod. They might be twins.”

The others would look at Ginger and me in puzzlement, and politely let it drop. But it began to bother me, especially in light of what Cecie had said. I think it did Ginger, too. Sometimes she gave Fig a long, unreadable look.

Fig did not stop with her observations of compatibility. She pressed us together as if she had been a professional Jewish match-maker.

“Are you going to the drugstore?” she would say, as I left the house jingling my car keys. “Wait a minute and let me tell Ginger. She needs some Tampax.”

“Let's go to Bernie's and get some hot chocolate,” she would say. “I heard Ginger say she wanted some.”

And: “If you're taking your car over to McCandless, would you drop Ginger off at the library? She's got a cold, and it's starting to sleet out.”

And: “Come in our room and listen to Ginger do ‘Streets of Laredo.' Her daddy sent her a guitar for her birthday.”

For a while I went or did not go as the spirit moved me; I noticed nothing odd about the invitations until Cecie's calm statement that night. And then I noticed their deviousness and frequency, and became so self-conscious and annoyed with Fig for issuing them and even Cecie for remarking on them that I stopped going into Ginger's presence altogether for a time. And then one night at supper Ginger herself said, in as much annoyance as I had ever heard in her voice, “Fig, I don't want to go to the drugstore with Kate and she doesn't want to hear me do ‘Streets of Laredo' again, and nobody gives a shit who's compatible with who. Will
you please lay off it? What's the matter with you?”

After that Fig stopped her Kate-Ginger campaign. But I knew then that Cecie had been right, and I told her so.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “She's such a toad, she even had me thinking you might be jealous of Ginger. What do you think she thought, that Ginger and I would be queer for each other?”

“I rather think she thought that you and I already were,” Cecie said dryly. “And she couldn't abide that. Poor old Ginger got brought in as a stalking horse.”

“God,” I said, my cheeks burning. “Sometimes I think I'm going to spend the rest of my life in the shadow of Fig Newton.”