Outer Banks (9 page)

I slammed into her room and snatched the covers off her. She pantomimed waking, stretching and smiling languidly. Without her glasses her face looked weak and naked.

“Morning, Effie,” she said.

“Don't you ever, ever, leave anything like this lying around where I can see it again,” I shouted. “Don't write me any more poems, don't follow me around anymore, and don't pretend you don't know what I'm talking about, because you damned well do!”

She looked at me in exaggerated surprise and injury.

“Well, I don't,” she said piteously. “I don't have any idea what you're talking about. Why are you so mad?”

“This,” I said, waving it in her face. “This. This is…filthy! This is a whole other thing than those silly things you've been sneaking into my room, and on the car…”

“I only wanted to please you,” she whispered, tears starting in her naked eyes. “I thought you loved poetry. You quoted
The Prophet
to me…I thought you cared about it, and about me…I didn't know that stuff was dirty. I just…copied it out of that book of Cecie's, I thought you all read it to each other, like you do that other stuff…I didn't know what it meant…”

She broke into loud sobs, looking up through her fingers to see my reaction. I knew she meant the
Kama Sutra;
Cecie and I had, indeed, been reading it, though not to each other, and had found it both shocking and titillating. I thought, also, that she did indeed know what it meant, but I was past caring whether she did or not. The book was one Cecie had gotten from an Oriental friend in one of her classes, and had been in her desk, and the only way Fig could have found it was to go through her things.

“Don't do any of this stuff anymore, Fig,” I said coldly. “I've had it with you. Stop it or I'll get you moved out of this suite. I can and I will. I mean it.”

“I can't stand for you to be mad at meeee!” Fig wailed as I turned to leave. “You're my big sister! You have to love me! That's what being a big sister means…but now you hate me-e-e-e…”

The rage went out of me abruptly, and I sat down limply on the vacant twin bed that faced hers. She had rooted under the covers, sobbing and snuffling, and I spoke to the lump she made under them.

“Fig, listen,” I said. “Listen, because I'm only going to say this once. I don't hate you. I just want you to stop…dogging me. I know I'm your big sister, and I always will be, but that doesn't mean I automatically…you know,
love
you. I'll try to be a good sorority sister, but you just can't legislate love, it isn't a policy, something you decide. It's a feeling, and it's given to you. It just comes. A real friendship is a light thing. A real friend holds you loosely. Look at Cecie; she the best friend I have in the world, but she doesn't crowd me, or follow me around, or try to imitate me…”

She pulled her swollen red face out of the bundle of covers and looked at me. I have never seen such desolation in a pair of eyes.

“I know I can never be to you what Cecie is!” she said, and began to weep again, nasally and hopelessly.

I looked at her, and then walked out of her room. It had probably been the wrong thing to say, but I was past caring. I thought that at least she would stop now.

“I feel like a heel yelling at her like that,” I said to Cecie a couple of weeks later, “but it really does look like the Reign of Terror is over.”

“Mmmmm,” Cecie said. She had been quiet the past few days, and we did not laugh so much in the nights.

“Well, don't you think?” I said.

“Sure looks like it,” Cecie said, and went off to class.

And it did. Fig no longer haunted Harry's or my History of Architecture classes, and the unsought poetry stopped cold. She did not come into our room at night either, as she always had. It was not that she was pouting, or seemed particularly chastened by my outburst. She was cheerful and open, or at least as much as Fig could be, when we met in the halls and at meals, and went home to Fowler for Thanksgiving calling bright goodbyes to us all. When we returned she was still the changed Fig.

“She's really working out okay,” the chapter said. “Maybe it's not going to be as bad as we thought. You've done wonders with her, Kate.”

“Boy, if they only knew,” I said to Cecie. I did not think they did. There had been some good-natured teasing about Fig's copying my clothes, and leaving poems about for me, but it seemed forgotten now. I was sure no one but Cecie and I and Fig knew the extent of the aberration. I was equally sure that none of the three of us would ever speak of it. And we didn't. Fig did not apologize, but I thought perhaps her new, exemplary behavior served, in a way, as her apology. I was still not eager to share her company, but there was no doubt about it: the new Fig was vastly preferable to the old one. If she would only stop calling me “Effie.”

A week before our Christmas break, Cecie and I came home from seeing
The King and I
for the third time at the Tiger Theatre to find the campus fire department just leaving the Tri O house, and the slippered and robed sisterhood just filing back into the living room, chattering like parakeets. No smoke was visible, but we could smell it, faintly, coiling down from upstairs.

“Oh, thank God you're back,” Carolanne Gladney shrieked, darting at us. A throng of twittering Tri Os followed her. “There's been a fire in your room, but it's out now and no damage except some smoke. Fig smelled it and called the fire department and rang
the alarm, and went in and pulled all y'all's clothes out of your closets. She's a hero, Kate, she got her hands and arms burned a little bit. She's in the infirmary until tomorrow, but she'll be all right…”

My head spun with alarm and confusion, and beside me, Cecie stood on her toes, giving little jumps, trying to see over the crowd and up the stairs.

“My God,” I said in shock. “How did it start? We've been gone over three hours…”

“They're not sure,” Trish Farr said solemnly, but I thought there was a certain chord of relish in her voice. “But they think somebody might have left a cigarette burning…”

Cecie went white. I actually saw the color drain from her face. I saw, also, the veiled, avid looks the chapter bent on her. Cecie was the only one of us in that suite who smoked. Everyone knew that.

“I didn't leave a cigarette burning,” she said, precisely and remotely. “I never have, and I didn't this time.”

“I know you didn't,” I said, fiercely protective. “I'd have seen it if you had. It had to be something else.”

“Well, I said they weren't sure about that,” Trish said piously. “It could easily have been something else. Nobody's accusing you of anything, Cecie.”

“I should hope not,” I said in a bright, hard voice. “I'd really hate to hear anything like that. I think it would be tacky in the extreme if that got around campus. Everyone would know it was one of us who started it.”

“Well, talk to Fig,” Trish huffed. “She's not saying, but I have an idea she knows.”

But Fig professed not to. She came home from the infirmary the next morning, pale and somehow apologetic, pointedly not meeting Cecie's or my eyes, her hands and arms swathed in white bandages.

“I really don't know how it started,” she murmured, when we went in to thank her and see how she was. “Nobody could say for sure. The room was already pretty smoky when I got there. It probably wasn't a cigarette at all. Listen, Effie, Cecie, I'm sorry if I got your clothes dirty. I just threw them out the door on the floor; I didn't think…”

“Oh, Fig, don't even think about that,” I said. “You saved the house and probably some lives as well as our clothes. None of us will ever be able to thank you.”

I knew I was right, but somehow the words did not come easily. I felt, instead of gratitude, the old annoyance. Except to murmur, “Thanks, Fig,” Cecie hardly spoke at all.

I have to give Fig credit. She could have made much of her role as wounded heroine, but she did not. She did not speak of the fire at all. But the sisters did. Perversely, they lionized the heretofore plague-ridden Fig, petting and cosseting her, bringing her tidbits of food and even seeing that a small article about her role in averting tragedy appeared in the
Randolph Senator.
It must have been a time of triumph for her, but she was still modest to near-obsequiousness. No one mentioned the origins of the fire again, but there were some oblique glances thrown at Cecie before the looming holidays claimed our attention. Cecie herself was quiet and remote, staying long in the library and often going down to the chapter room late at night to study. I knew that she had gone through the door deep inside herself and shut it behind her. I could not lure her out.

“You know I don't think you caused that fire,” I said once, desperate to penetrate the white shell around her. I missed her good sense, and our late-night camaraderie, and her charming, drypoint foolishness. I missed all of her.

“I know you don't,” she said. “The problem is, I've been wondering lately if maybe I did after all. I don't remember it, but I guess it isn't impossible…”

“No,” I said. “It
is
impossible. I know. I really do know. I wish you could forget it. I need somebody to laugh with. Fig as St. Joan isn't very funny.”

“No,” Cecie said. “She isn't.”

After that she seemed to make an effort to be herself again, and we occasionally sat late into the nights once more, listening to music and sharing poems and books, and finding, with only a little forcing, new things to laugh about. But the laughter rang a bit hollow, and didn't last long. Cecie took to sleeping a great deal, and I spent more and more evenings over at McCandless. In the other room, Fig received a modest stream of visitors and enjoyed with becoming modesty her small vogue. She still wore the white bandages. No one mentioned the fire.

On the day we finished our finals I loaded the MG and stopped on my way home to Kenmore to drop Cecie at the train station. Neither of us wanted to go home; my mother was seeing a pious, stupid deacon in the Baptist Church whose idea of a proper Christmas celebration was to attend church three times a day and participate in the Living Nativity on the brown church lawn. I did not like him nor he me; I knew that the scent of the abyss below me was strong in his nostrils. Cecie was, she said, simply not in the mood for the gentle blithering of the grandmother and the aunts.

“I wish we could spend this Christmas somewhere like Monte Carlo or Gstaad,” she said, humping her duffle bag out of the MG.

“Well, let's make a note to do it, the first year we're in Europe,” I said. “Meanwhile, cheer up. Things will be better after Christmas.”

She didn't answer. She bumped the duffle up the wooden steps to the platform and turned to wave at me. I waved back, and slid the MG into gear. Somehow, I did not like to drive away and leave her there.

“Kate…” she called after me.

“What?”

“I didn't leave that cigarette burning.”

“I know it,” I said. “Merry Christmas, ol' Cece.”

“Bah, humbug,” she said.

W
E
did not sit down to lunch until two, and I never did eat the crab salad I made. Instead, I did something I have not done since the night I met Alan, close to twenty-eight years ago. I got very, very drunk.

He brought a pitcher of Bloody Marys to the umbrella table on the deck, and put two glasses full of shaved ice and a saucer of kosher salt and sticks of fresh celery, and tilted the umbrella to shield us from the high sun and the salt wind streaming over the dunes, and said, “Booze is the answer. But what is the question?”

And I laughed, because it was precisely the same thing he had said to me that long-ago night when he had found me at my drawing board overlooking Third Avenue, crying. The rich red Bloody Marys looked, suddenly, like the best things I had ever seen, and I drank half of my first one without stopping.

“Since you mention it, I guess there's nothing for it but to
repeat history and get kneewalking smashed,” I said. “These are wonderful. What's that, horseradish?”

“Sorrel,” he said. “There wasn't any dill. What's with you, Tondelayo? You've got that look about you.”

I actually blushed. Tondelayo is what he always called me when I wanted to make love; he claims that I had a kind of languid, loose-jointed, half-lidded playfulness about me then that I never had at other times. Pure progesterone, he called it. I had not heard the nickname in a long time. We had not made love in a long time. Somehow it seemed to me a kind of desecration to have Alan inside me along with the Pacmen.

“I'm thirsty is all, you satyr,” I said. I drank the rest of the Bloody Mary and held out my glass. “Hit me again, Sam.”

I think I had four in all. I never could drink well, and I am still very thin from the long siege of chemo. I was not of ones who sailed through it with just a modicum of easily controlled nausea. I retched and gagged and vomited for the entire four days each course ran, and lost all the flesh that middle age had settled on me, and have not managed to gain it back. So the four drinks literally carried me into a kind of walking oblivion. I remember dimly the passing of time and the gradual lessening of the heat on my face and body, as the sun swung around to the west, and I remember laughing a great deal, and I have a white-lit, frozen flash in my memory of a precise moment, when I stood up and came around the table to Alan and sat in his lap and put my arms around him, and drew his head and face into my breasts.

“Come inside now,” I heard my voice saying, fogged and thick with languor and liquor. “I want you to love me.”

The next memory I have is lying in his arms in the tumbled bed of the guest room, my sweat-damp body shivering in the wash of the ceiling fan and the wind off the sea that billowed the sheet muslin curtains, crying as I had not cried since Stephen died, crying the sour, endless, breath-sucking tears of loss. He held me silently and loosely, his breathing still ragged, and I could literally feel the
heat ebbing out of his body against me. I was clutching him as a drowning person might clutch a floating log, my arms and legs locked around him. His small, hard body was cool and slippery with sweat. I remember feeling a great, simple desire to press myself through his skin and into his flesh, to become him. To become…not me. Loss flattened me like the corpse of an animal in the road. It was so strong and terrible that for a moment I thought I was back in those first anguished hours after we heard about Stephen. I must have called Stephen's name, because Alan was murmuring into my wet hair, over and over, “It's all right now, Katie. It was a long time ago, and it's over now.”

I think I slept a little then, because my next clear memory is sitting up in the guest bed to take the cup of scalding hot coffee he brought. The sun was off the deck and the light in the room had cooled from the shadowed red of mid-afternoon to the gray-blue of nearing dusk. I shivered, and he saw it and switched off the overhead fan. It thumped and shuddered to a stop, and the silence was very loud. Even the sea had cooled, with approaching evening, to the gentle husshhhhh that meant the dropping of the wind. In the silence I could hear, as well as feel, the dimly-remembered throbbing in my temples and throat that meant hangover. I sipped the coffee with one hand and scrubbed at my aching temple with the other.

“The wages of sin,” Alan said, sitting down on the bed next to me. He reached over and brushed my tangled hair off my face.

“You feeling better?”

“No,” I said miserably. “I feel just like I should. I feel awful. I don't know what got into me…besides vodka. Did I pick a fight with you, or what? I remember waking up feeling like I'd lost you forever.”

“Not me. You were back with Stephen, I think. Don't worry about it. I still cry for him sometimes.”

“Do you?” I said in surprise, looking at him. His face was just the same as it had been for twenty-eight years: wry and sweet and
faintly simian, and so somehow redolent of health and balance and youth that I used to tease him about having made a deal with the devil. I had not heard him speak of Stephen in a long time, not since the cancer, and it surprised me profoundly to think that he still cried for him. I had not myself, not for a very long time.

“Sure I do,” he said. “It doesn't mean I'm desolate, or that what I have isn't enough, but I do. I love him and I miss him.”

I felt the tears come back into my eyes and throat, and I leaned my head against him.

“It's been awful for you, too, hasn't it? I keep forgeting,” I said against his bare chest. He wore shorts now, but no shirt or shoes, and his skin was cool and sweet-smelling, from the Frenchmilled soap I kept in the guest bath. His hair and beard had droplets in them.

“Not, I imagine, as bad as it has for you,” he said, and there was such a universe of rational perspective in the sentence that some of the pain in my chest eased, and I had a sense of the world shifting forward into another gear, and flowing on. It has always been his best gift to me, that all-healing clarity of vision, that unshakable grounding in the earth. I feel sure it was why I married him, under all the other reasons. For all these years he has been, as well as my friend and my lover, my anchor. No one was ever that before, not even Cecie. It was only then that I had a brief glimmer of what the role has cost him. I had taken it for granted, his constancy, his never-flagging willingness to be present at my pain, but I saw in that moment that it must have been a heavy load to shoulder and carry. He had lost a son, too. He had just missed having two other children, too. His wife had had cancer; his wife had hung for five years over an abyss that was open for him, too.

“I cannot imagine what I would do on this earth without you,” I said.

“Me, neither,” he said, and kissed the top of my head. I wriggled across the bed to come nearer to him, and felt a large
patch of sticky wetness. Like the hangover, it had been a long time since I had felt it.

“Whoa,” I said, grinning up at him. “I must have jumped your bones. I think I remember mentioning something about it, around the tenth drink. Well, what do you know. Did we…was it okay?”

The few times we had tried to make love, after the last chemo series was over, I had not been able to finish. I would want to, and his hands and body would bring me just up to the brink of that long, red fall that I so loved, and I would be crying out and clutching him like a small monkey, as I always had, but then, when he slid into me, a smothering white panic would rise up in my throat and over my head, and I would literally feel inside me the Pacmen boiling up out of my flesh, where they had lain vanquished, and swarming at him as he entered me, mouths gobbling. It was as if, with the act of love, he released death inside me, death both to me and to him. I felt both poisoned and a poisoner. I would wrench away violently and cry, shivering and nauseated, unable to go on and unable to help him finish. I know that he understood, and that he did not blame me, but it had been a very long time since he had approached me, and I had had the soaring thought, when I touched the sheet where he had spilled out, that this time we had done it, and I was healed.

He did not answer for a moment and I knew that it had not been okay.

“Oh, God,” I said hopelessly.

“Don't,” he said, holding me and rocking. “It was a lot closer this time. We got a lot further. We got so close this time that I couldn't…I didn't stop. Sorry about that. We'll make it next time. We really were almost there.”

I started to cry again.

“It's my fault,” I said. “I just plain seduced you, and then I…God. It's not bad enough to be frigid. Now I'm a drunk cockteaser and still frigid…”

He laughed.

“And a pederast and a closet Klansman and didn't vote in the past four elections. Come on, Katie, it isn't your fault. We'll get it next time. We could probably get it now, if you're still interested…”

“No,” I wept. “No. Not now. Soon, I promise, but not now, Alan. I'm sorry, I'm so ashamed…”

“Well, make it soon,” he said mildly, into my hair. “I want to screw you sometime again before we're both dead.”

Before I even thought the words I heard myself saying them.

“It's back, Alan.”

He went perfectly still. I felt him draw a deep breath.

“No it isn't,” he said.

“Yes. This summer. I've known for a while.”

“How?” he said fiercely. “Do you have pain? Are you bleeding? What?”

“No, none of that. I just know…”

“You don't know!” He almost shouted. “You don't know! How can you know if there's no pain and no blood, nothing? How on earth can you know?”

He had pulled away from me and we sat looking at each other in the dim, underwater light. His eyes were very white in his tan, and there was a ridge of white around the base of his nose. He looked scared to death, and angrier than I have ever seen him.

“I just know,” I whispered. “Alan, I just know.”

He pulled me to him again and began to rock me once more. He rocked me back and forth, back and forth, on the bed.

“No, it isn't back, Katie,” he said softly. “No, love. You're upset, and you've got this last checkup coming up, and it's natural for you to be apprehensive. I've known all along you were sweating it out. But you're okay. I'm going to prove to you that you are. I'm going to call John McCracken tonight and get him to see you tomorrow, and then we'll be past and done with this, you'll see…”

I shook my head against him. I must,
must
have the rest of
the summer. If he insisted on taking me to the doctor, I did not know what I would do. I would run away…

“I'm sorry,” I said, as reasonably as I could. “I'm being silly. I knew I was even when I said that. Don't make me humiliate myself in front of John. He already thinks I'm a world-class hysteric. It was just the booze talking. And I guess the letter did upset me a little.”

I felt his chin move and knew he was smiling.

“Did you know that you called me Paul this afternoon?” he said. There was no pain in his voice, only mild amusement. I thought the pain was there, though. I thought I could feel it moving through him in the very conduit of his blood.

“Oh, Alan, oh I never…” I said, appalled. “Oh, shit. I can't believe it. Alan, you
know
I don't think of him anymore. You know I don't, and I haven't, in all these years…it was just Ginger's letter, and the thought of going back to that house after all this time…”

“I know,” he said. His face was calm, his eyes clear again. Alan is certainly not incapable of jealousy, but he would know in an instant when it was warranted and when not.

“I really do know all that, Kate. Of course, it doesn't mean that I shouldn't have killed the bastard back when he first needed it.”

“You didn't have to,” I said. “I killed him myself. Her, too. Dead and buried and out of my life for good and all. That's a promise.”

“I know,” he said again, and kissed me. “Now why don't you finish your nap and then maybe we'll go get a hamburger at Bobby Van's, or something. I'll call you about six.”

I did sleep then, with the sound of the ocean fizzing on the tan sand far below the dunes in my ears, and the cool, fresh-fish smell of the incoming tide in my nostrils. Just before I slid down into it, I thought, I did kill them. I really did.

But the dead do walk.

*   *   *

Three days before that winter quarter began, Tri Omega initiated its pledges in a formal candlelight ceremony in the Chapter Room of the house, and Fig Newton became, officially and for all time, one of us. My sister in Omega Omega Omega.

The Fig who had left Randolph a heroine came back considerably diminished. At our ages, memory, even of heroism, was short, and most of us had forgotten our canonization of her in the flurry of the holidays, and preparations for Initiation. Few of us made a fuss over her anymore, and, understandably reluctant to relinquish the only glimmer of limelight she had ever had, she found ways to remind us.

“Did I tell you all that my church asked me to make a little speech at Youth Appreciation Sunday?” she said to us at our first dinner the first night we were back, modestly looking down at her meatloaf and batting her lashes. The effect, Cecie pointed out
sotto voce,
was that of two centipedes trapped behind portholes.

“No,” I said dutifully. “That's great. What about?”

“Well…about the…you know. About the little fire. And my getting your stuff out…”

“Heroism travels far and fast,” Cecie said.

“The minister's daughter went to Randolph. She gets the
Senator,”
Fig said primly. No one else spoke.

“I haven't seen you wear the blue cashmere,” she said to me in the company of most of the chapter, after breakfast. “Is it ruined? It was at the back of the closet; I couldn't get to it very fast. I think that's how I burned my hands.”