Outer Banks (7 page)

“I'm sorry,” I muttered. “I was going too fast.”

“No, it was all my fault, really,” she shrilled merrily. “I'm such a silly. It would serve me right if you
had
hit me.”

I could think of nothing to say to that, and felt my heart swell with gratitude when the light changed. I gunned the MG away from there.

“Bye,” I heard the crystal tinkle. “I hope we run into each other again!”

Her hooting laughter followed us like a demented terrier.

“Lordy, I hope not,” Cecie breathed. “Did you
see
that outfit? With my luck she's probably going to be in every class I have from here on out.”

“Not a chance,” I said, looking uneasily in the mirror. The squat heap of red flowers was still there on the curb, looking after us. “It's predestined that she'll be my lab partner.”

“Don't let the sun set on yuh head in Randolph, pahdnuh,”
Cecie drawled. “This here town ain't big enough for all of us.”

The chapter meeting was just as bad as it had promised to be, and lasted just as long. Heat and fatigue and pre-rush jitters made us all whiny and picky and contentious, and we fought over every bid we tendered, and over the costumes for most of the skits, and the refreshments for all the parties, and the allotment of duties. We finished with the preferred bids and started on the legacies. Fortunately there were not many that season; our president, Trish Farr, had only a handful of recommendations and photographs to pass around, and discussion of each was perfunctory. Even the objectors could not work up a full head of outrage. The heat was doing its work. And it seemed that each legacy had some fortuitous asset attached, that would, in the end, benefit the chapter more than her presence would harm it. The extremely fat girl from Bessemer had a voice like an angel and had placed first in the Met's Junior Regional competitions that summer; Step Sing would be a shoo-in with her for a soloist. The one who looked like James Dean, complete with duck's-ass haircut and biceps, was rich as Croesus. A chapter endowment was hinted at when we pledged her. The one with the ghost of a mustache and the coronet of Heidi braids had the only Jaguar XKE any of us had ever seen.

“Shoot, I'll cut that hair and yank those whiskers out myself,” Rosemary Bates said.

“I'm glad I'll never know what you all said about me,” I said wearily. I meant it, too.

“Not much, really,” Rosemary said, matter-of-factly. “You looked pretty classy in your picture, and you had the MG.”

Beside me Cecie snorted.

Trish held the last photo up, its back to us.

“Y'all aren't going to like this,” she said. “But before you scream and jump all over me, let me tell you that she's a triple…grandmother, mother, and aunt…and that her grades are higher than any we've ever had, and that even if she was an idiot, we wouldn't have any choice, because this rec came straight from
Mrs. Claiborne herself, and she says if we don't take her we can do some serious thinking about our charter.”

Annabelle Claiborne was our Grand National President, an autocratic bison of a woman who could indeed lift our charter on her discretion alone, and she was already angry with us because we had refused to bid the last unspeakable legacy she had sent us. The girl's father had, unfortunately, been chairman of the board of directors of Mrs. Claiborne's husband's firm, and he had not been at all pleased. By the time we had been persuaded to see the error of our ways he had sent his distraught daughter to a finishing school in Switzerland, and we had been unable to make amends, either to her or Annabelle Claiborne. The jig, for us, was up. We looked apprehensively at Trish.

She made a little wordless sound, and turned the photograph around. There was a collective gasp from the chapter. I gave an involuntary squeak of recognition, and Cecie choked on a mouthful of Pall Mall smoke, and coughed violently. It was the girl from the street corner that afternoon. Even with the soft lighting and fluid black drape of the studio, the camera had been unable to help her in any way.

“NO-O-O-O-O-O!”

A collective roar went up from the chapter, except for Cecie and me.

“Maybe you should have hit her after all,” Cecie said, and then, “Oh, shit. Forget I said that. It can't be easy for her.”

“No,” I said. Under the profound distaste and dismay I felt at the sight of that Toltec face, something else was uncurling. It was the breath of the abyss; I knew with absolute certainty that the grotesque girl in the photograph felt it, as I had until I met Cecie, every day of her life. Too, I hated my sisters' careless venom even as I echoed it. Under it all, pity leaped like a lick of flame.

I waited until the shouting had stopped and the chapter sat staring sullenly at Trish, bested and knowing it, and then I said, “A—we're going to take her and we know we are. So let's do it
and save time. B—if we're going to, we ought to do it as well as we can. None of us is so perfect that we can afford to be mean to her. How would you all like to be this girl?”

It was a prissy little speech, and gave them the target they sought. They hooted me down hotly, and when the jeering had stopped, Trish said snippily, “You're right, Kate, and since you were so kind as to point it out to us, I think you ought to be her big sister and take her through rush.”

The room exploded with cheers, and my heart tumbled into my stomach. Sponsoring a little sister meant many hours in her company, drilling her on her pledge tests and initiation material, and initiation itself meant six hours of, among other things, embraces and a kiss.

“Of course,” I said crisply, in my best Seven Sisters' voice. “Glad to.”

“No good deed goes unpunished,” Cecie whispered to me.

“Maybe she'll pledge somewhere else,” Bird Stanley said. Bird was optimistic to the point of simplemindedness. We simply looked at her.

“Does she have a name?” Carolanne Gladney said. Trish looked into the folder and then back at us.

“It's Helen Georgine Newton,” she said. “But everybody calls her Fig.”

The chapter howled and screamed and chortled itself, finally, up to bed. As Cecie and I trudged the stairs to our room, she shook her head.

“Fig Newton,” she said wonderingly. “Wouldn't she just.”

And so Fig came into our lives, that first quarter of our junior year and the first quarter of her freshman, and was moved, in part for expediency and in part for spite's sake, into the vacant room that formed the second one of our suite. Cecie and I had been storing things there.

“It'll make it easier for you to teach her, Kate,” Trish Farr said, grinning. I grinned back, fiercely. Trish and I had detested each
other on sight, and spent the rest of our years at Randolph pretending we didn't. It was as purely a chemical thing as I have ever seen.

“Good idea,” I said.

From the instant we met at the first rush party, when she burbled, “I just knew that day on the corner was fate,” Fig attached herself to me like a limpet to a rock. I still don't know precisely why. It may have been the faint breath of otherness, the issue of the abyss, that drew her to me: as I have said, we know each other. But Cecie was an abyss-walker, too, and Fig never clung to her as she did to me. Indeed, if she could be said to avoid any of us, she rather avoided Cecie. But no matter what I said or did, I was to Fig Newton as catnip to kitten. If she had had a roommate things might have been mitigated a little, but five days into her tenure, the new pledge who had been quartered with her went to Dean Parker in hollow-eyed despair, and the beleaguered dean had Fig's snoring monitored at the college infirmary, and after that no one slept in the other twin bed in Fig's room. She did not seem to care.

“It's my adenoids and tonsils,” she said complacently to Cecie and me. “Everybody in my family has bad ones. They hold fluid like sponges. It's a Newton family characteristic.”

She said it as smugly as if she had said, “Naturally curly hair and blue eyes.” I grimaced at the sponge analogy in spite of myself.

“Did you ever consider surgery?” Cecie murmured sweetly. “They're doing wonders these days.”

“Oh, no, none of us have ever had surgery,” Fig said reprovingly.

“Obviously not,” Cecie said that night, when we lay in bed listening to the fusillade of snores that emanated through the two closed bathroom doors. “Or somebody would have had her mother sterilized long before the fabulous Fig appeared.”

Fig was the youngest of five children, all the others boys, all
of whom, according to the terrifying photograph she kept on her bureau, looked like her.

“I'm the baby of the bunch,” she said. “Mama finally decided to quit when she got her little girl.”

“To paraphrase what Dorothy Parker said when they told her Calvin Coolidge had died,” Cecie said delicately, “ ‘How could they tell?' ”

And we laughed, Cecie and I, until we choked, and pulled the covers over our heads, and then laughed some more. We did not stop for a long time. It was the start of a pattern that stayed with us as long as Fig did: muffled, explosive laughter in the late nights, endless and self-perpetuating laughter, laughter tinged with guilt and despair and the louder for that, probably not as well concealed as it could have been. I think we even knew that at the time. But we could not stop laughing. Fig was simply too dreadful for anything else.

“It's better than being unkind to her,” I said more than once. “I think we're the only two in the whole chapter who aren't out and out nasty to her, at least part of the time.”

“It's probably just as bad, but there's no way you can be mean to her,” Cecie said. “It really would kill her. She's absolutely gone on you. Have you noticed that she's making herself over into you?”

“That's not a bit funny,” I said. But in the weeks that followed, I saw that it was true. All that fall, bit by bit and as inexorably as a glacier's movement, Fig Newton appropriated unto herself her version of my looks and mannerisms and clothes.

At first she just watched me. She watched me as I put on makeup in the morning, and watched as I dressed for dates, and watched as I took the makeup off and got ready for bed. Cecie and I took turns dressing and undressing in the bathroom, doors closed; she did not seem to notice. When we came out again, there she was, nestled cozily on my bed like a toad in sunshine. She usually had the diary with her, though by that time both of us
would have died rather than ask her what she was writing. We knew that we would get either the sly innuendo or an excruciating speech of gratitude at being one of us. Sometimes she asked questions.

“What kind of shampoo is that?” she would say, and when I told her, she would write it down in the diary. Or, “Can you recommend a good mascara?” Or, “What kind of lipstick do you think would be right with my skin tone?”

“Mud,” Cecie said under her breath at the latter. She was vastly exasperated with Fig; it only served to make her politer, and more remote. She watched coolly with her blue eyes as Fig catechized me, and dutifully recorded in her diary what she called her “beauty secrets.”

She went after my clothes next. There was no way she could have worn mine, but she did her best to copy them. The ruffles and crinolines and high heels disappeared, and she emerged in the mornings in fuzzy skin-tight tweed skirts that came down to her ankles, skirts with slits that showed coy, dismaying inches of waffled blue-white leg and thigh. Pencil skirts, she called them. She topped them with sweater sets and crew necks that on her neckless barrel torso looked like straitjackets. They were not the creamy cashmeres and hearty shetlands that I had bought under my father's tutelage when I began Randolph Macon, but nylon and wool so flimsy that they pilled dismally after the first washing. She bought thick Fruit of the Loom crew socks and rolled them atop clunking penny loafers, and a few men's oxford-cloth shirts and sweatshirts appeared. Instead of Yale and Princeton and Amherst, the sweatshirts said Randolph and Georgia Tech and Roll Tide.

“I know they're not as good as those Ivy League ones you have,” she said. “I'll get some of those, if you'll tell me where you got them.”

“I didn't buy them,” I said. “They were gifts.”

“Oh, sure,” she said. “I should have known that.”

I don't know where she found the sad clothes, and how she
paid for them; she said her parents had sent her the money but I did not think that was true. Most of us knew Fig was on full scholarship from the Rotary Club back in Fowler, Alabama, and that her parents had virtually no money at all. Her mother had disgraced her own family, it was said, by running off and marrying a virile bricklayer, who, after presenting her with five children, threw his back out hauling hods and never worked another day in his life. There could not have been any money from home. Cecie and I, who both knew about scrimping and saving, tried to talk to her tactfully about the clothes she bought. It was the closest I ever saw Cecie come to overt pity for Fig.

“Listen, Fig, I'm poor as a church mouse myself, so it's no disgrace,” Cecie said. “I couldn't for the life of me afford a whole new wardrobe, and I don't think you can, either, and it hurts me to see you waste all that money. Your clothes are perfectly fine. You don't need to buy new ones.”

“Mine don't have any style,” Fig said, looking down at the floor. “I thought they did, until I saw Kate's. Kate's have real style. Yours do, too,” she added, looking up at Cecie and smiling her ingratiating smile.

“Yes, but Kate's clothes are Kate's style, not yours,” Cecie said kindly. “I'd look just as silly in Kate's clothes as…anybody else. What she wears is right for her, but not for me and you. We're too short. Us shorties have a whole different look.”

“I want to have a style like Kate's,” Fig said simply. “Kate is a real aristocrat. Anybody can see that. My mother always says blood will tell. Kate looks like an aristocrat, and she walks and talks like one, and she even laughs like one. I'd love to be like that.”