WHEN I WAS a freshman in college back in 1966, I used to spend a lot of time comparing. The girl across the hall, for example, Teale, was my social reference. She was pretty much a sure thing to pledge Kappa, generally considered the top sorority at Franklin State. I didn`t like the way Teale sneered at my roommate, Karen, but I was flattered by the attention she paid me. I had a certain amount of loyalty to Karen, who lived for her math books, but I didn`t like to be with her too much. I had secret hopes that Teale would introduce me to some new people–boyfriends were what I had in mind. I had a vision of a passionate fraternity man I would have to fend off because our values didn`t harmonize. From time to time Teale would hint to me that there were sororities eyeing me favorably. I professed, and I believe I meant, that I had no interest in pledging, but at the same time I very much enjoyed sitting around Teale`s room and talking about it.
One cold Saturday black clouds blew evening in earlier than usual, and I went and sat in Teale`s room while she got ready for Saturday night. I lay on my stomach on her bed, overlooking the nook at the foot where she sat on a pillow and propped her sleek legs on the bureau. She was wearing her Saturday night special Lauren Bacall gold robe with shoulder pads and resting a cafeteria saucer on her flat belly for an ashtray.
”Obviously it isn`t that I despise sisterhood!” I shouted over the hum of her hairdryer and her roommate`s. ”It`s the idea of cutting people out. That`s what the sororities are really for. To cut certain people. All the people in sororities and fraternities want to be in the right clump, facing the right direction. They`re like the little trout fry at the fish hatchery, lined up where the water comes in.”
SHE WAS staring at me, but not paying attention to the business about the fish. She squinted and leaned closer to my face. ”Why don`t you ever wear makeup?”
”I do. I put on lipstick every morning.”
”I`m going to make you up,” she said. ”I want to do a little experiment.”
”No white lipstick,” I said.
She made a face and unfastened herself from the hairdryer. Her roommate had been reading a tattered copy of the ”Illiad,” which she had carried with her for a semester already. She tossed it across the room now, and it missed the desk, lost its cover falling to the floor. She propped her head on her hand to watch the making up.
I said, ”Make me look like a Kappa, Teale.” That was one of our ongoing arguments–whether or not Kappa had a typical type. Teale maintained that each Kappa was unique, but since she agreed with me that all the other sororities did have types, you would think she would eventually have seen the
implication. I had an uneasy feeling that I could have convinced her if there hadn`t been some strain of hypocrisy in my own arguments. The truth was that I would have liked to be chosen, and then to reject them.
SHE MADE ME sit in her chair and brushed my hair straight back with long, strong strokes. I felt the air moving across my forehead with a little charge of pleasure. Teale had slim arms and wrists, but the brushing seemed to require all the strength of my neck muscles to hold my head on.
”More,” I said. ”Don`t stop,” but she was getting onto the main business now, slipping a pink headband over my hair, getting the bangs off my face. Then she went to work with her fingertips, spreading Covergirl liquid over my cheeks. I smelled the sweet and sour of her hair conditioner and her acrid, smoky breath. I felt the muscular heat of her hand on my cheekbone as she penciled my brows.
”Look,” she said to her roommate. ”Blair`s got beautiful brows. You better never pluck your eyebrows, Blair.”
Eyelash curler now, and eyeliner and mascara. This was the serious part. She only breathed when she pulled back for a look. As she worked, she made grunts so soft that they were not sounds so much as tiny touches. Her skin was the same color as her hair and eyes; she had been to Florida over semester break. I wanted that tan and honey to spill over me and paint me into a Teale. ”Don`t look yet,” she said. ”I`ve got to rat your hair a little.” She finally pulled back, examined me and then turned my face firmly out to the roommate. ”Look,” she said. ”What do you see?”
SOLEMNLY THE roommate nodded. ”My God. Tri Delt. Tri Delt all the way.”
I jumped for the mirror. Tri Delts dated athletes and student body presidents. I supposed if I`d had to join a sorority it would have been a more well-rounded one like Kappa, but there was no question that Tri Delts went out with Phi Delts, and the Tri Delts were always cheerleaders and homecoming queens and anything else that required blondness and wide smiles. I didn`t have the blondness, but everything else I saw in the mirror was right: the light makeup had flattened my face to a disc, a setting for the eyes blackly outlined, heavily lashed. Had the hair been pale, it would have been the mask of beauty. Everyone`s ideal girl.
Teale stood in the doorway and screamed, ”Hey you all! Come and see!”
And portable hair dryers, paperback textbooks, robes, jeans and slips emerged, came running. ”Is that a Tri Delt or is that a Tri Delt?”
All of them were trying to decide if I looked more like the homecoming queen or the head cheerleader. I put a hand on my hip, made a fashion model runway turn, made them laugh. Teale demanded the loan of a Villager outfit in my size. Pink, she said. It had to be pink. ”No,” I said, ”I`ll spill pea soup on it.” But they brought it anyhow, pleated skirt, sweater, even the knee socks in the same color. I let them do it, I might even, had it been earlier in the day, have let them lighten my hair. I was in the mood for a change.
WE WERE GOING to go to dinner, and I was wondering if I should wait for Karen, when Karen herself came thundering down the hall, books clutched to her bosom, hair flopping against her cheeks like cocker spaniel ears. She didn`t see the Tri Delt enamel over my face, and I had a moment of disappointment, but then realized that something big had happened to Karen. She dumped the books on her bed, let them lie there instead of setting them neatly on their proper shelves. I followed her into our room, and Teale stood in the doorway, waiting. Karen`s breathing made her shoulders rise and fall, and her eyes widened with each gasp.
”I have to get dressed,” she said, unfastening her skirt and letting it fall around her ankles. ”I have a date.” Another deep shuddering breath. ”I was working in the library,” she said, ”and I saw this boy from my calculus class sitting over there with some other boys. He sits in front of me because of the alphabet, but he never said a word to me before. I never even thought he noticed me.
”He`s a sophomore or junior. He`s in Sigma Chi.” I glanced at Teale, who lifted an eyebrow. ”After a while he got up and left, and so did the other boys, but then one of them came back and sat down beside me and said there was a phone call for me on the pay phone. I couldn`t believe it, but it was him, and he asked me to meet him for a date, tonight, at Sigma Chi house. And, oh Blair, I didn`t even ask him what kind of a date. If I should dress up or what.”
TEALE`S MOUTH was closed firmly, her jaw fixed, giving me no help, no help to Karen.
I said, ”Well, call him back and ask.”
Karen shook her head. ”I can`t believe how stupid I was. I don`t even know his name. I`ll have to wear my blue dress, I suppose. It`s probably what I`d wear anyhow, one way or the other.” It was what she usually wore to church, jewel neck, princess cut. I hoped the date wasn`t for a real fraternity party.
Teale said, ”Did you know the guy who came over and said there was a phone call?”
She emerged through the neck of the dress. ”He`s some freshman. I`ve seen him around.” She put on her good black pumps, started moving her things to the matching pocketbook. ”I`ve never been so scared in my life.”
”You`ll have fun. Won`t she, Teale?” Teale shrugged. I said, ”But Karen, I don`t think you should wear white gloves. They don`t go with Sigma Chi somehow.”
She laid them back on her chest of drawers and stood stiffly in front of us. ”I can`t think of one thing to say to him. Can you give me a subject to talk about?”
”How about your professor? Professors are always good to talk about.”
KAREN NODDED, big-eyed, color in her cheeks, the rest of her face almost transparent. She had a nudging look without her glasses, as if she had to feel her way with her face. Something about her was embarrassing: she revealed how much she wanted something. Wanted love. I was half angry at her; I had thought she was dedicated, wanted nothing in her life but math.
She started down the hall at a near run, calling back, ”I don`t think I could take this every week.”
Teale and I didn`t try to keep up with her. We went toward the dining hall in silence until Karen was out of sight. Then I said, ”I hope she at least gets dinner.”
”She won`t,” said Teale.
”Do you think it`s a party? Why didn`t you say so? She shouldn`t have dressed like that for a party at Sigma Chi.”
”There`s no party at Sigma Chi tonight. And no dinner either.” Teale moving along beside me with strides longer than mine, more graceful than mine, her hair not brushed out and teased yet, but gathered back, a bouquet of dark honey loops. She sounded a little tired of me, as if I was being willfully obtuse. ”Don`t you get it? It`s a joke, a pledge prank.”
THE ELEGANT elongation of Teale`s body seemed to stretch out of shape, to bend and loom over me out of the shadows. ”I don`t believe it. You`re prejudiced. You just don`t believe a Sigma Chi would ask out Karen.”
”Think about it, Blair. She doesn`t even know the guy`s voice. She doesn`t know who called her.”
”She must have heard him talk in class.”
”The pledges have to do things like that to get points for initiation. Sometimes they talk professors into letting them into courses without prerequisites or they put up signs on the water tower . . . .”
”I don`t believe they would do that to Karen. It would be cruel.”
”They dig up rosebushes from the dean`s garden . . . .”
”But she`s not a rosebush!”
”Who`s not a rosebush?” said Teale`s roommate. We had just caught up to the line outside the dining hall.
Teale told the whole thing, cooly, her mouth twisted a little to one side with cultivated gun-moll cynicism. The other ones various clicked their tongues or made disgusted faces or laughed. But no one did anything. I didn`t do anything. All of us, that mass of girls, twisted and distorted, body merged into body, arm grafted to shoulder, knee attached backwards, hair poured and puddled, and I did nothing. Why am I still here? I thought. Why haven`t I gone to do something? Why hadn`t I seen what Teale saw, and why hadn`t Teale done anything to stop it? Would I have fallen for the trick, if I had been the one they picked to try it on?
THE DINNER line started to move, and Teale gave me a glance. ”Well, I might be wrong,” she said, and then went back to talking to the others, about something else. I sat with them and ate half of a grilled cheese sandwich, but then felt I couldn`t stay and walked out without saying goodbye to any of them, feeling betrayal on all sides. Betrayed by Teale, mostly, after all my admiring of her, that she would be so hard, wouldn`t have tried to stop Karen. By Karen`s stupidity too, that she should be my roommate. That I should be as stupid as Karen and at the same time not brave enough to tell Teale what I thought of her.
I caught a glimpse of my face in the mirror at the top of the stairs, and was going to go and wash, but the phone was ringing. Someone picked it up, spoke briefly, stuck her head out of the booth. ”Oh Blair, there you are. Phone call, but don`t get excited; it`s only a girl.”
On the telephone was a whisper with a strangely varying pitch. ”Blair?” it said. ”Blair?”
”Karen? Where are you? What happened?”
”I waited almost an hour, Blair, and he didn`t come.”
”Where are you? Why are you whispering?”
”Because I`m in their phone booth.”
”Oh Karen, don`t stay there. Get out, come right home.”
”I CAN`T LEAVE. I was in the living room waiting for him and I waited and waited and he still didn`t come and then all these other boys started walking by. They walked by one at a time and looked at me. There was nobody here but me, and all these boys just coming by one by one and after a while the same ones started coming past again . . . .”
”Jut leave, Karen, tell me about it later. He`s not coming, it`s a joke, it was a nasty trick.”
”But I can`t leave because they started taking their clothes off. One came by in his underwear and then another one came by in his underwear, and then I realized they were all going to come out in their underwear and I ran in here . . . .”
”Just get out and come home.”
”I can`t.” I could hear her studdering breaths again. ”Will you come and get me?”
I closed my eyes; I didn`t want to go. I felt humiliated for our whole sex, but it was, of course, a chance to redeem myself. They were walking past Karen in their jockey shorts with their hairy thighs. I checked myself once more in the mirror–the clothes, the Tri Delt mask. The hair was still full and smooth. I was glad. I wanted to give them as little as possible to laugh at.
I WENT, WITHOUT a coat, into the raw evening, not running so I wouldn`t sweat on my makeup or make the hair come unteased. I saw two boys I knew a little and walked the other way to avoid them. Would they expose themselves to get pledge points? The Sigma Chis wouldn`t hurt her physically, of course, I thought. They wouldn`t really do anything to her physically.
But I began to doubt even that as I came up to their house, half hidden behind two dark fir trees, with a steep pitched roof and leaded glass windows. Something Black Forest and fascistic about it. Two aluminum beer kegs in the yard. I didn`t knock, but dragged the heavy door open, expecting Doberman dogs, and imagining how I would grab for their throats if they attacked me.
There was a staircase to my left and ahead, a baronial living room with exposed beams and a fireplace. To my right, a little cloak room and a cubicle, with the door open and a light inside: the phone booth. As if someone had hastily left. I could smell dinner somewhere, rich and meaty, and I heard a distant stereo, the Rolling Stones getting no satisfaction, and I hoped none of them ever would again.
From behind me someone said, ”Oh Lord, not another one.”
I LEAPED FOR the staircase, an instinctive move for the high ground. With the balustrade between me and him, I turned to look. He was big enough to be a football player, but a little too soft, holding extended a pewter beer stein.
”I can`t believe it,” he said. ”Listen, it was a pledge prank, he`s not coming, whomever it was who got you over here. Go home now.”
The terror that had pricked me onto the stairs turned to fury. ”Oh, don`t think I fell for your despicable trick,” I said. I really shouted, to get the tearful tremble out of my voice. I wanted the voice to go at him like a horizontal pile driver. ”My friend called me from here in the middle of a nervous breakdown, and I came to help her. What did you do with my friend?”
”The tall skinny one?” he said. ”I sent her home. We don`t have permission for women in the house tonight.” A couple more with beer steins came in. They formed a half circle of bulky sweaters over solid chests.
”Listen,” he said. ”Do you get it? It was a pledge prank, a dirty trick, and I want to apologize on behalf of Sigma Chi house. Okay?”
My fingers itched for their pink throats, warbling around their adam`s apples as they sipped beer. ”It is not okay. It was unbelievably cruel. My friend is from a small town and she doesn`t know any better than to believe what people say. She had no inkling that anyone in a million years would do a putrid thing like this and as far as I`m concerned, you and your disgusting little brothers seduced her.”
”Hey,” said one of them. ”She`s talking dirty.”
THEIR FACES all tipped to one side, listening to me with great interest, and I realized that my speech was probably as entertaining to them as Karen and the underwear parade. I said, ”If I had a gun, I would shoot your faces off.”
I scared myself when I said that. It was not the way I talked. I made a plunge for the door, feeling I had gone too far, and I seized the wrought iron handle and couldn`t budge it. The one who made the apology said, ”That door sticks, let me.” A nubby woolen arm edged me aside and opened it, one-handed. ”Wait,” he said. ”Your friend left something,” and I had to wait for him to retrieve a royal blue scarf with pale yellow butterflies
transmorgifying into yellow roses or some such optimistic idiocy. I snatched it away, lurched out the door.
I look crazy to them, I thought, pounding my feet into the pavement. Making speeches to Sigma Chis. As if they spoke English. Their leader or whatever he was–had he been genuinely sorry? Halfway across the quadrangle, I had a fantasy that he would call me up, attracted to a more humane way of living and ask to get to know me. To be instructed. I would, I realized sadly, be afraid to see him. Be afraid of another trick.
When I got back to the room, Karen`s side had been made neat; the books she dropped on the bed were back on the shelf, the clothes hung up, the desk clear of everything but her pencil cup. She came in a few minutes after me with her hair wet, wrapped in a towel. She didn`t have her glasses on, and she smiled.
I WAS IMMEDIATELY furious at her. ”What happened? Why didn`t you wait for me?”
”I`m sorry,” she said. ”This guy came and told me I couldn`t sit in the phone booth because they weren`t open to women tonight.”
”Don`t say you`re sorry! I don`t mean you should have stayed there. Don`t apologize. Did you apologize to him, too?”
”He was very polite. I`m sorry you had to go all the way over there. I thought I`d meet you on the way back.”
She took down the wet towel, let it sit a moment in her lap, then folded it square by square into a small, soggy packet and got her bobby pins out of the drawer. I watched her closely; I thought her hands were shaking but I couldn`t be sure. I gave her the scarf, and she folded it up, too, into a tiny cube.
She began to make enormous pin curls. ”As soon as I knew you were coming, Blair, I felt better. You were a real friend. I was a fool to go over there.”
”That`s for sure. I would have died.”
I WAS SURE her hands were shaking, and the curls she was making were much too large. She was already almost done, three enormous curls on each side of her head. She said, ”You never would have gone, though. You wouldn`t have fallen for it. It was my fault for being so dumb.”
”But you didn`t do it, they did.”
She pursed her lips and shook her head, just a little shake. ”Dumb, dumb, dumb,” she murmured, and unfolded the scarf, wrapped it around her head. She put away her pins, got down her calculus book and opened it in dead center of her desk, pressed the spine with all her weight.
I said, ”Well you can`t leave that towel knotted up that way. It`ll never dry. I`ll hang it up for you.”
”You really are a friend, Blair,” she said, already sitting down, lowering her face to the book.
I found myself with no words to reach Karen either. Her curls were too loose, the book placed too precisely on her desk, and I could see she had put these events away. And for the moment, I was equally unheard by Karen, Teale or Sigma Chis.
