Outer Banks (12 page)

“Don't even say it,” Cecie said.

All during that winter, Ginger toiled valiantly to get her grades up so that she could be initiated at the beginning of spring quarter. She gave up her nightly dates and her bridge games and stayed doggedly at the library or in her room, buried in books. Her major was elementary education and there was nothing in the textbooks on basic English, civics and sociology that demanded much of her, but her attention span was short, and sustained concentration was agony for her. We would find her in tears of frustration and hopelessness often, her freckled face red and screwed up like a child's, her cottony thatch of hair wet with sweat. It was a sight to wring the heart, for she was making a heroic effort, and so Cecie and I and Fig took turns drilling and tutoring her, from the time our last class was over until far into the nights.

On the day of her last final that quarter she came into our room with her broad face suffused with joy.

“I think I did it,” she said. “There haven't been more than three or four questions on any exam that I haven't known. I think I made my grades, and it's because of y'all, and we are all going to get drunk as skunks tonight.”

Fig's mouth dropped open, but Cecie and I looked at each other with speculation as well as apprehension. On the one hand, drinking at Randolph was, for women students, an offense punishable
by dismissal; but on the other, I knew very few women students who had not at least had a covert beer or two on a fraternity houseparty weekend. Cecie and I did not drink much, and I knew Fig had never even tasted what she called, piously, spirits. But abstinence was not a policy with Cecie and me, and we could see, in each other's eyes, speculation winning out over apprehension. It was unusually hot for March, and we were exhausted, and finals were over. Ginger's success was a real triumph.

“Oh, why not?” Cecie said.

“Why, indeed?” I said.

“I'm not going to do anything that would get me thrown out of Tri O,” Fig mewled. “Y'all can if you want to. I won't tell. But
I'm
not.”

That clinched it.

“Let the good times roll,” Cecie chanted. Then she stopped. “Where are we going to get the booze?”

“Already got it,” Ginger grinned. “It's in the bottom of my laundry bag. A fifth of gin and a fifth of bourbon. I got Snake Clinkscales to get it for me at the ABC store over in Montgomery. I thought tonight could either be a celebration or a wake. Thank God and y'all it's not the latter.”

“When?” I said.

“After last curfew. And I have another surprise. I got the key to the roof door. We can take pillows up there and get cold drinks for mixers and nobody on earth can hear us.”

“How did you get the key?” Fig asked, clearly horrified. The door that led up a short stairway to the flat, Greek revival roof of the Tri Omega house had only one known key, and that was kept on a peg in our housemother's suite. Too many sisters, over the years, had had the same idea Ginger had.

“I got it off her peg last week when she went to get me an aspirin,” Ginger said, wrinkling her nose. “I told her I had awful cramps. I got a copy made at the hardware store and put it back when she went to Montgomery last Sunday. She never missed it.”

We burst into laughter. She was so clearly and ingenuously pleased with herself, and so blithely unconcerned with the morality of the thing, that any lingering doubts we had faded like smoke. There could be no more serious repercussions to our night of sin than to a child's prank, for Ginger's authorship of it made it just that.

“You have a great career in crime ahead of you,” I told her. “You could be a coldblooded murderer and you'd still look like Huckleberry Finn stealing apples. No jury on earth would find you guilty.”

Fig abruptly abandoned temperance.

“You talked me into it,” she chortled, though no one had. “I can't wait to see Effie Lee drunk. That'll be something to tell my grandchildren.” And she rolled her eyes at me.

“Please don't be swayed on my account,” I said acidly. “I wouldn't corrupt you for the world.”

“Oh, no. I know if you do it, it's okay,” she said. “I'm looking forward to it. You all will have to show me how, though. I'm really an awful square.”

“You could have fooled me,” Cecie said.

That night, after all the other lights on the top floor of the house had darkened, we took pillows and towels and sweating bottles of Coca Cola and Seven Up and Ginger's clinking laundry bag and stole up the stairs to the roof. We were already laughing so hard, and shushing each other so loudly, that I am sure we would have been apprehended except that most others in the house were sleeping the dead sleep of post-exam exhaustion. We may have been seen anyway; if so, nothing ever came of it. But I can imagine what we must have looked like: four furtive shapes in shortie pajamas and pin curls, with Noxema dots shining fluorescently in the dark, bent over with laughter, legs crossed to keep from wetting our pants, gasping with fright and glee. It makes me smile even now, to think of it. Even with Alan, one of
the world's great, gifted laughers, I have not laughed as we did that night.

We did get drunk. It did not take long. We lay on our towels and pillows on the gritty, cinder-strewn roof, with only a fretted white wooden railing around us, and resolutely drank our foultasting, warm drinks, and reveled in the wash of air on our nearnaked bodies. The outside air was not much cooler than that inside, but it seemed so; there was such an amplitude of empty space around us, three stories up, looking down into the lacy treetops. Over us stars swam, and fireflies made a storm of tiny lights below us. There was an enchantment abroad that night, star-silvered and airborne, that was not entirely the work of the liquor. Below us, the dark campus slept.

I think we sang a little, in low, cracking voices, to the faulty strain of Ginger's birthday guitar. We did not dare raise our voices high. I know that we laughed a great deal, but softly, holding our hands over our mouths and snuffling. Fig snorted and gargled through her poor, afflicted nose, and giggled so hysterically that we fell to shushing her fiercely, which only spurred her on. Finally the laughter feathered out, and we lay back and watched the skies wheel over us, the liquor seeming to bear us up to meet the very swimming stars.

We talked a little about what we would do after graduation, or rather, Cecie and I did. By this time of night and level of the two bottles our already splendid careers in design and law bloomed into singular magnificence. I would be designing rooms and houses and furniture that defined and named decades; she would structure and defend legislation that would ensure prosperity and justice for those same decades. Medals, prizes, international honors rolled around the Tri Omega roof like fireballs. Glory burst in the heavens and spilled down on us. Tears of exaltation and humility stood in our eyes.

“It's important to use your gifts for mankind,” I remember saying carefully, unaware that I was slurring very slightly.

“Oh, it is,” Fig said, tears husking her voice. “You're so right, Effie. I'm going to remember that when I'm a famous author. I'm only going to write profound, uplifting, beautiful things. And I'm going to start with what you said tonight. I'm going to put it in my diary right now.”

And she reached for the diary, which lay under her towel.

“If you write one word in that thing I'm going to throw it off this roof,” Ginger said. But she was smiling. She had been lying back listening to us, her head pillowed on her crossed arms, chugging steadily on her Bourbon-spiked Coke. Her white-blond hair gleamed eerily in the dark. She had not joined our talk of the future.

“What will you do when you graduate, Ginger?” Cecie said.

“Go back to Fowler and teach school, I guess,” she said comfortably. “Get married. Have children. You know.”

“Well, sure, eventually, but I mean right after?” Cecie pursued. “You could do anything in the world you want to. Go to New York with Kate. Come to Europe with us and bum around for a year. Join the Peace Corps, if you want to teach. But you really ought to live a little before you settle down. Set the world on fire.”

“Oh, I couldn't,” Ginger said. “I'm not smart like you and Kate and Fig. I'm not exactly stupid, but I know I ain't much in the brains department. My dad has always told me that. He laughs and says I'll need a keeper all my life. And I guess he's right; I couldn't even make my grades without you all.”

“That's ridiculous,” I said. “Next time you'll do it by yourself. Who does he think is going to be your keeper when you're out and on your own?”

“I don't think he thinks I ever will be,” Ginger said. “He'll have somebody picked out for me, when the time comes. There are lots of boys my age in Fowler. Not bad ones, either. I don't think it'll be a problem. I'll inherit the mills, you know.”

There was no hint of boasting or rancor in the words, not even of resignation. Her voice was light and level and rich, as
always. The appalling scenario seemed not to bother her.

“That's awful,” Cecie said heatedly. “You deserve better than that, Ginger. You can't just let somebody else decide your whole future for you. What about what you want?”

“Well, see, there's not anything I really want, except what I have now,” Ginger said, and suddenly there was something in her voice. Sadness lay under it, and something that I thought was fear.

I looked over at her, and she smiled at me. There was a gleam of wetness in her eyes.

“Sometimes I think I can't stand for all this to end,” she said. “Sometimes I think school and singing and laughing and you all are the best there is in the world. I really can't bear to think about graduating.”

“Well, you have a way to go yet,” I said, unable to think of anything else that might comfort her. I could not imagine thinking of school that way. To me, the best that there ever was was always around the next bend.

We lay silent for a while, looking at the night. On the hill above the Tri Omega house the edge of the national forest that housed Lake Randolph rose up against the sky. It was black and deep, and above it the sky was milky with stars. Behind the trees, a late moon climbed, and as we looked, it rode out and above them into the sky, like a galleon on fire. I felt tears of liquor and profound exaltation fill my eyes. My heart felt as if it would burst out of my chest at the sheer beauty of the night around me. It is easy, these years later, to appreciate how much of the drama and profundity of that night, that time, was melodrama and sentimentality. But I would still give much to recapture the totality of those feelings.

“That's the very bulk of God,” I said lugubriously, pointing at the line of the trees. “That makes me believe in all of it. Everything.”

“Well, not me,” Fig said. Her voice was, suddenly, very faraway and cold, and her words were singsong and as precise as
flint. I had never heard that voice before. We all looked over at her.

“It makes me believe nothing,” she said. “It makes me see it's all a lie. There isn't going to be anything for us when we die. Look at those stars. Do you realize that those stars are going to be burning up there in that empty sky long after we and everybody else are dead and in the ground? There we'll be, just lost in blackness, and those stupid stars will shine on, and on…and for us it will be…black. Nothing. Black nothing. Black forever and ever and ever…”

We were silent. Cold crept along my spine and into my blood. Cold and emptiness. The abyss whispered below me like a snake. Beside me, I felt Cecie stir uneasily.

“Just black,” Fig said.

Suddenly Ginger was weeping. She cried like a child, her mouth open and square, her fist scrubbing her eyes.

“I don't want to die,” she sobbed. “I don't. Oh, God, I don't…”

“Well, you will,” Fig said in the new, eerie voice. “You will. All your money won't stop you from dying, and you know it.”

“I don't know it,” Ginger wailed. “I don't have to know it, and I won't. I won't.”

“You do have to. You do and you will. You can't ever not know it again.”

“Shut up, Fig,” Cecie hissed suddenly, furiously. “Shut up or I'll shut you up…”

Fig lay still for a moment, breathing hard and wetly, her eyes screwed shut behind the glasses. Then she rolled over and was sick over the roof railing. We could hear it hit the brick walkway far below.

We slept late the next morning, all of us, and when we woke, it was to rueful laughter, and much ceremony about the taking of aspirin for our aching heads. We seemed, in our sleep, to have come to some agreement not to speak of the sad, sorry end to the evening, and no one did. Fig was fully back to herself, and so was
Ginger. But I knew something new about Ginger now. I knew that she was, like me, like Cecie, a walker over the abyss, and that she would never allow herself to acknowledge it. I knew, without being able to articulate it, that she would die, literally die, in order to remain a good child, one who would always be shielded by others from that waiting emptiness. It was not a knowledge that I could bear, and so I put it away from me. But after that, it was always there.

 

Grades were posted the next day and Ginger passed all her exams, though admittedly in some instances by a hair. That night at dinner we gave her a standing ovation, and she cried and went around the table, hugging us one by one.

“I don't think there'll ever be a happier night in my life,” she said mistily. “Not even my wedding night.”

“Oh, how can you say that?” trilled Francine Powers, who had recently become ostentatiously engaged to her porcine SAE, Grunt. We all groaned. Everyone was getting a little tired of Francine's exalted carryings on.

“Well, see, I've
done
the Black Act,” Ginger grinned at her. “I've never made my grades before.”