In the snow lay the black-rimmed glasses. I picked them up with my gloved hand and had an impulse to snap them in two, in rage. But I didn't. I slipped them into my coat pocket instead.
No one had heard my short breathless little screams. They'd faded immediately, like my steaming breath.
What if he'd hurt me? There was the glint of madness in his eyes. Saliva at the corners of his wormy mouth.
When I entered the brightly lit Kappa house a few minutes later, my heart still pounding, I was two or three minutes late but the proctor on duty, smoking a cigarette, waved me indifferently inside. She took no notice of my flushed, excited face. My dark, dilated eyes. I did not rush to Mrs. Thayer's door, which was closed at this time of night; I did not bring her the gift of my female distress after all. The library books were damp with snow but otherwise undamaged. I knew I was a very lucky girl.
My feelings can't be hurt where I have none.
What I would do: I'd picked up the glasses with gloved hands and I would never touch the glasses without wearing gloves; I would mail them to Syracuse police headquarters with a terse typed note. These belong to a sex offender. He is yours.
Thunderous hooves! Shrieks of laughter. Soap-splattered mirrors in the third-floor communal bathroom. The smell of cigarette smoke everywhere and cigarette butts strewn like confetti. Empty Tab and Coke cans kicked along the corridor, down to the stairway landing, for Geraldine the Negro maid to clean up; Geraldine with no expression on her dark creased face, wordless, dropping trash into her plastic bag. (Passing Geraldine and her bulky vacuum cleaner in the corridor, I lowered my eyes, I was ashamed of my skin. In the Kappa Gamma Pi house that autumn of my sophomore year I knew for the first time what it was to be ashamed of my skin. But Geraldine took no more notice of me than any white-girl Kappa deserved.) Bitch they were incensed Why doesn't she mind her own God-damn business. Mrs. Thayer had dared to scold certain senior girls. Conduct unbecoming ladies and in public rooms! There was Lulu who played repeatedly at a high volume "The Song from Moulin Rouge" to celebrate See look? lifting her left hand where a tiny diamond ring flashed like a naughty wink Engaged before I'm twenty-one. Where a younger girl was crying, there several seniors circled her C'mon, sweetie! Get real. When I approached, one of them cursed me, shoved me aside and away and I retreated in shock never knowing Why? I could not tell myself the old story Once upon a time because the time was now; the story was now; I'd believed I was causing the story to take place, but in fact the story was taking place around me, as a tide rises, brackish and muddy and filthy with debris. My Kappa sisters were fascinating to me as giant, brightly feathered predator birds would be fascinating to a small songbird hiding in the brush. Or trying to hide in the brush.
In my Ethics text I underlined The endeavor to understand is the first and only basis of virtue.
Yet it began to happen: the Guardian, Harper's & Queen, Punch and other British publications were left in disarray on the parlor table, sometimes on the very floor. Smoldering cigarettes left behind to foul the parlor air seeping beneath the door into Mrs. Thayer's private quarters. The laughter of anonymous male persons in the front foyer as the door was slammed, hard enough to make every crystal chandelier in the house shiver. Hyena laughter on the stairs after curfew. Heavy pounding footfalls in the second-floor corridor above Mrs. Thayer's bedroom. On the mahogany banister so fiercely polished by the silent Geraldine, dried threads of—was it human vomit? Mrs. Thayer called, "Gurls! Gurls!" One of her elaborately wrapped food packages was missing from the pantry cupboard. Simply gone. Where? None of the kitchen help could explain. At mealtimes Mrs. Thayer's icy blue eyes were alert, shrewd, darting from face to face. Only the younger Kappas smiled; we wouldn't have known we'd had any choice. "It is very quiet in here. The quiet of guilty consciences," Mrs. Thayer observed. With trembling fingers, at the conclusion of the meal, Mrs. Thayer rang the little silver bell. Summoning the bulky troupe of us into the parlor, except those senior girls who'd defiantly slipped away. "Who has been doing these things?" Mrs. Thayer calmly inquired. "Who has been so—unmannerly? So crude?" You knew Mrs. Thayer wanted to say so American! It might have been the magazines of which she spoke—again scattered about the parlor, shocking to see. And the crossword puzzle page of the local newspaper, on the floor. There was an embarrassed silence. A restless silence. In my nervousness I began to count heads but gave up at beyond twenty-five. Mercy and Trudi exchanged simpering-guilty glances, Bon-Bon and Chris clenched their jaws trying not to laugh aloud. Dawn licked her glossy lips frowning into space. Freddie surreptitiously scratched her left underarm. Deedee suppressed a yawn, or a belch. Daintily the mantel clock chimed the quarter hour. A reminder: Kappas are first and foremost young ladies. But upstairs a phonograph was playing rock and roll. Low-down dirty, thumping white-boy black-blues. From where I was seated on the carpet, I could see beneath the sofa upon which Mrs. Thayer sat stiffly girdled and erect; I saw what appeared to be a sanitary napkin. I was transfixed by the sight. Thinking But it can't have been used, it isn't blood-stained is it? Mrs. Thayer restated her question. But who could remember her question? Ice-eyes darting from face to face but these were innocent big-American-girl faces closed to her. She turned to me, a few feet from her, who was staring at her plump little feet in calfskin shoes; I'd been seeing that Mrs. Thayer's ankles were oddly thick, perhaps swollen. "You"—Mrs. Thayer said suddenly, waking me from my trance—"do you know? I command you to speak." I was so startled, I must have reacted in a way to stir amusement in the other girls; my eyes blinked guiltily of their own accord. A wild desolation touched my heart. I did not want Mrs. Thayer to discover the sanitary napkin, I did not want her to be publicly shocked and humiliated, I did not want the poor woman's trembling to become more visible, how the Kappa girls would giggle, mocking the Brit-bitch behind her back. Without thinking I said, "I—I must have done it, Mrs. Thayer."
There was a shocked pause. Even the mantel clock seemed to cease its minute ticking.
Was it the magazines we were discussing?—I was pointing at them, and pages of the Syracuse paper scattered on the carpet. My voice cracked, nasal and frightened. "I'm the only one who reads your magazines, Mrs. Thayer. I do the crossword puzzle." This was false, I had never "done" a crossword puzzle in my life; never would I waste my intelligence on a mere game. "So I—must have done this." There was another pause, an awkward blank silence. My Kappa sisters did not move yet there was a sense of collective movement away from me; a single indrawn breath. Mrs. Thayer, wholly unprepared for this confession, stared at me, a slow heated flush rising in her face. Almost faltering, she asked, " 'Must have'—or in fact 'did'—?" but her sarcasm lacked force, authority. I was smiling blankly. I heard myself say in a stammer, "I—I did, Mrs. Thayer. I promise it won't happen again." I was shivering suddenly, it must have been the onset of flu. I recalled that the man-in-the-park, my would-be assailant, had seen my face as clearly as I'd seen his. My mistake had been, I hadn't run to Mrs. Thayer in tears. Now my bowels churned hotly. What little I'd managed to consume at dinner, was clenching itself in spasms of revenge. Perhaps Mrs. Thayer knew that I was not even lying purposefully, to any point. Of the Kappas, I was the only girl who wore the same clothes day after day. A rumpled charcoal-gray wool skirt with a waistband so loose, the skirt twisted around, side to front, back to front, without my noticing. A long-sleeved white cotton blouse, much laundered and insufficiently ironed, with pert button-down collar in the style of the day. And an oversized navy blue orlon V-neck sweater, from the Strykersville Sears outlet, going at the elbows. My socks were mismatched but both were white wool. My hair lifted in uncombable clots of frizz, like iron filings stirred by a passing magnet. Whoever I was, seated amid the Kappas, nervously pleating her already creased skirt, I represented a valiant if somewhat smudged variant of the collegiate ideal. Mrs. Thayer, who'd been staring gloomily at me, decided, suddenly, out of spite perhaps, to believe me; she sighed, and struck at the sofa with a vexed little fist. "Oh ver
y well, then! You are careless like all the rest. You gurls! I tell you and tell you." With an airy gesture of her hand Mrs. Thayer dismissed the other girls, only just in time before the boldest drifted away. I remained behind, contrite, biting my lip, busily tidying up the parlor. In disgust Mrs. Thayer said, "I would have expected better behavior from you, you of all these—'Kappas.' " The word Kappa was pronounced as a mild obscenity. I waited for Mrs. Thayer to ask about the other infractions of her rule, the theft of her food for instance, but she said nothing, stalked out of the parlor and slammed the door. By this time no one remained in the parlor except me.
With a folded newspaper I managed to nudge the sanitary napkin out from beneath the sofa. In fact, it had been used: wizened and clotted with dark, caked blood at its center, dazzling gauzy white elsewhere. A Kotex. If Mrs. Thayer had been spared, so had Geraldine. I wrapped the thing in newspaper to throw into the trash. I'd returned the magazines to their original fan-shaped order. Hearing my Kappa sisters overhead, their heavy insolent feet. I'd been reading in a book of ancient mythology of the Harpies, storm-spirits that carried souls to Hades. Their whispers, murmurs, mocking laughter sifting downward, on my head.
Underlining in my philosophy text We endeavor to affirm everything concerning ourselves and concerning the beloved object which we imagine will affect us or the object with joy, and, on the contrary, we endeavor to deny everything that will affect either us or ourselves with sorrow.
So it began to happen that God touched me in unspeakable ways. At first I ignored it, ignored Him. (In whom I did not believe; I was too cerebral for God-games.) A few times, I'd been taken to the Lutheran church in Strykersville. Sleety rain pelting against the windows. The minister with his raw hopeful voice and winking eyeglasses. I was seated between my brother Dietrich and my grandmother. There must have been some reason. A relative's death? A funeral? The muddy cemetery, the forlorn little marker. A ticklish sensation that grew tight, tighter like wires stringing my body together so I wanted suddenly to laugh, I was nineteen years old and living amid strangers in a millionaire's mansion atop a hill. How happy I am, I've escaped you. And lucky. So much more lucky than I deserve.
Yet I could not sleep. I had more or less abandoned my room to Deedee and her friends, returning to it only to change my clothes. When the basement study room emptied out, after midnight usually, I tried to sleep there; on the battered old leather couch smelling of cigarette smoke and laced with burns. In the Kappa house I yearned for the aloneness of my previous life; as, in that previous life, I had yearned for the sisterhood of the Kappas. I was writing a paper titled "Free Will and Determinism in Spinoza" but it was a paper meant to penetrate the actual truth. For each page of my paper, each paragraph, each sentence, I was afflicted by others of equal authority swarming into my head like hornets. In my notes for this paper, there were strips of paper marked A, B, C, etc.; others marked 1, 2, 3, etc. There were vertical scribblings in blue ballpoint, horizontal scribblings in green ballpoint. Some of this was smudged. In an ecstasy of sudden clarity I wrote Spinoza made of his madness, art. I did not believe that my professor would admire this insight so I attributed it to an invented scholar. I could not sleep, yet to my dismay I could not maintain a reliable wakefulness at other times. My eyes open, I felt myself begin to flicker like a candle in a draft. Going out, out. And good riddance. My German-Jew grandmother scolded, shaking a flour-whitened forefinger. Why does flour, grainy and powdery, on human flesh, so appall? My mother, Ida, stood in a doorway staring at me, a hand lifted in greeting, or in farewell. Where her smiling mouth had been there was now a blood-blotch. They were concerned for my health, my sanity; though they did not give that name to it—sanity. A decent girl did not speak of sexual, and a decent girl did not speak of sanity I became worried that the soiled sanitary napkin might be traced back to me because I'd been the one to wrap it in newspaper and throw it into the trash. There was the fatal closeness of sanitary, sanity. I caused a gang of Kappas to laugh raucously by suggesting how the two might be linked. Oh, I was funny! Crazy sense of humor, that one I'd been taken by surprise when four of my sisters came by, one Sunday morning, to rap on my door and ask if I'd like to join them?— they were wearing their good coats, they were wearing hats and gloves; if they'd been out late the night before, their faces were relatively fresh, their eyes sparkly as good Christian eyes. They were going to St. John's, the Episcopalian church, wasn't I Episcopalian, wouldn't I like to join them? I was deeply ashamed, I stammered explaining I would go with them another time, they went away clattering in their high heels denouncing me. My brothers laughed at me, my distress. To them, I'd always been a liar; if you'd asked would they have wanted me born, they would have said in a single voice No! If I needed a Kotex I might steal one from another girl's toiletries for I could not afford to buy Kotex, I hated the look of the very box, the prim medicinal smell. In fact, my menstrual periods had become irregular and would gradually cease. (I feared I might be pregnant: no one would believe I'd never "done it" with a guy.) My brothers would stare at me in greater disgust. Before dawn, I crept upstairs to take a shower in the third-floor bathroom Where in the past I'd never taken more than two or three showers a week, now I took a shower every morning. And sometimes at night for the blood-smell was unmistakable, even if I didn't bleed. It was the blood-smell that had attracted the man in the park to me. I hadn't mailed his glasses to the Syracuse police after all, I'd thrown them away in the trash.) In the shower, I touched my breasts lightly with just my fingertips. You're taught to knead your breasts to search for lumps. The first symptoms are like tiny pebbles. Then they expand I wondered if they sliced your breasts from you, off the chest wall, in a smooth scraping maneuver; or if the breasts were hacked off, in pieces. Raw chicken breasts, the sticky skin still attached.
"You!—what the hell are you doing here?"
I stammered what sounded like Nothing and fled.
Behind the day-old bakery on Mohawk Street a few blocks from the university. Off-campus, another world. I walked with my head lowered in shame, my face burning. It wasn't the first time I'd prowled behind the bakery but it was the first time I'd been caught. If I couldn't eat with my Kappa sisters, I'd discovered other ways of eating, or at least of locating food. (For sometimes I was unable to eat the purloined food, too. Teeming with invisible bacteria, the germs of hepatitis and death.) Unsold poppy seed rolls, broken cookies, smashed pies, rock-hard loaves of bread and coffee cake, stuffed loosely into garbage bags.
Should be ashamed of yourself!
Why? It's delicious.
Beyond the university in the reverse direction was Auburn Hills, a residential neighborhood of large, handsome houses on tree-lined streets, where sometimes on Sunday mornings I would prowl the alleys between Auburn Avenue and Palmer Street, making my way sniffing like a hungry dog, for in this well-to-do neighborhood, no one parked on the street or brought garbage or trash to the curb; there were garages to the rear of houses, opening onto unpaved alleys, it was caterers' cartons that brought my eye in the trash, the aftermath of Saturday night parties, leftover canapes, caviar jars where always some caviar remained, even deviled eggs, or parts of eggs, bread sticks, even, once, a sizable portion of an angel's food wedding cake. Sometimes I devoured these foods where I stood, hardly troubling to glance around to see that no one watched; sometimes I stuffed them into my duffel bag to carry away and eat in private; sometimes, stricken with remorse, or a fear of food poisoning, or a wish to punish myself further, I threw everything away. I saw no contradiction between my ideal self and my animal self. As Spinoza said We yearn to persist in our being.
In terror that tiny cysts were forming in my breasts I dared not touch myself. In terror that I would fall asleep in one of my classes or faint and fall out of my desk, embarrassing myself in front of a professor I adored, I cruelly pinched the insides of my arms or stabbed myself with my pen. On my pale forearms were smears of blue ballpoint ink like broken arteries. In any philosophical system of geni
us the professor pronounced there co-exist contradictions. A hand was raised like a puppet's jerked on a string. I was not one to speak in large classes, this could not be me. Not my voice ringing anxiously amid the banked tiers of old-fashioned desks. Yet if X is not wholly non-Y, how can it be X? Or is it something else? Which we agree to call X? In our cavernous lecture hall on the top floor of the ancient Hall of Languages. The professor mimed applause at the question but said it might best be addressed later in the course, in the study of Hegel. My eyes began to cross with fatigue. There came in quick cartoon flashes the humiliation, but it was comical, of having been chased from the rear of the day-old bakery, the apparition of a startled looking young black man with whom I nearly collided; but I'd had no incriminating evidence on my person, I'd dropped the rolls, the breads, the smashed cherry pie in order to flee. At the Kappa house, I dragged myself to the table. My vacant place at the head table. There, the humiliation, less comical, of a sinewy piece of roast beef quivering at the end of my fork, tumbling to the floor to escape like a living thing. Mrs. Thayer spoke briskly, her Brit accent brittle with sarcasm. The other girls looked upon me with pity; or did not look upon me at all. Perhaps I had mistaken them as predator birds. Mrs. Thayer summoned me into her sitting room. The glare of her impatient gas-blue eyes. I could not keep straight what I'd overheard: Mrs. Thayer had had no children, or Mrs. Thayer had had children and they'd died in the terrible London bombing? What is wrong with you, Janice? Do you behave like that to annoy? To annoy me? 'No, you are Mary Alice, aren't you! How can you be so slovenly? Where is your pride? Your manners? If you are sick why don't you report to the infirmary? They are paid there to treat the sick—aren't they? Sickness is not a housemother's responsibility thank you! A housemother has responsibility and drudgery enough thank you! A housemother already earns her small pittance thank you! Discovered sleeping downstairs in the study room in my cheap cloth coat, barefoot. My legs were sickly pale yet bristled with fine curly brown hairs. The Kappas were indignant, legs require shaving, like underarms, but this was a girl who feared razors and would have to borrow (yet how could you borrow?) a razor blade. Upstairs, two floors of more than forty girls. Their sinewy muscular legs shaved smooth, skin glaring. Their armored breasts. Deodorant, hair spray, mascara, silver eye shadow. Radios, phonographs, the calypso, Ricky Nelson's Travelin' Man," the slamming of doors and the flushing of toilets. Chain-smoking. More not-quite-emptied Tab and Coke cans kicked along the corridor. Kat, Tammy, Trudi, Sandi leaning in the doorway frowning. Without makeup they were the same girl almost. Without makeup their young faces were pale, lumpy, puffy. Without mascara, their eyes were naked. What did they want from me? Help with their term papers? I stole bars of soap, but only the most worn down bars of soap, to wash myself clean. A soapy lather, to wash my hair. I missed meetings and so must be punished: fined: $12, $15, $18. I could not pay for I had no money, unless I stole money, but where could I steal money, pride prevented me where it didn't prevent my stealing food so long as it was garbage, not food. In the infirmary on the far side of the windswept campus when at last a nurse called my name I'd changed my mind, walked out. I couldn't miss my work at the registrar's office (though I was twenty minutes late). There they asked me in that kindly way you can't trust, was something wrong with me? This flu? Asian flu, so-called? I smiled the Kappa smile. I bared my teeth like a cheerleader. I raised my hand to ask the professor a question but when he frowned at me, clearly not wanting me to speak, my throat closed up. The trembling was under control now, it had gone inside. I shampooed my hair digging my nails into my scalp and brushed it with such ferocity it shone and crackled with electricity. And my eyes, people said were so like my father's eyes, all black: all pupil. The clever girls avoided the head table, there were seven of us seated at the head table, Mrs. Thayer refused to glance at me. When she ate, moisture glistened in her eyes. In fact the Brit-bitch is a hog. Watch her eat sometimes. At midterm I'd become popular, as usual. Girls came to see me smiling and pleading. It was strange: I could not complete my own work, yet I was able to glance quickly through others' work and see what was required. Errors leapt to my eye. As punishment for missing meetings, I was assigned proctor duty. Ringing the gong at five minutes before curfew. Ushering the last of the "dates" out the door. Heifer-sized boys, football players of Upsilon Beta, Lambda Alpha Chi. Their faces were covered in smeared lipstick as if they'd been devouring raw meat. They beer-belched in my face, without apology. Intestinal gases floated in their wake. It was the proctor's duty to bolt the front door, switch out the lights, clean the ashtrays, tidy up the disheveled living room where passionate Kappas and their dates of the evening had been "saying good night" sometimes for as long as two hours. (Crusted clumps of tissue wedged between cushions, wads of still-damp gum imprinted with teethmarks on the undersides of tables.) Mrs. Thayer was depending upon me as she could not depend upon the others. Mrs. Thayer had her own bottle of wine, a bitter-smelling red wine we were not supposed to know about. (The Negro house boy, flirty and sexy and of the creamy hue of Harry Belafonte, pals with certain Kappas, reported this startling fact.) I'd been showering in the third-floor bathroom, desperate to wash away the stink of cigarette smoke; the girls stared and spoke of me openly. What's with her? She sick? Oh ignore her, she's nuts. Just wants attention, ignore her. At curfew they returned glassy-eyed and swaying and their clothes haphazardly buttoned. Sometimes they couldn't make it to a bathroom and vomited on the stairs. Chris who'd been puking every day of her life (as her roommate complained) had dropped out of school, her shame-faced parents came to drive her away. Upstairs, the Kappa faces were pale and coarse as uncooked dough. No eyebrows, no lashes, hair twisted onto pink foam-rubber curlers. A smoke haze prevailed. Geraldine was doubled over coughing. I was in awe of the Kappa breasts worn like armor. All the breasts were D-cups jacked up in satin bras, hoisted and (sometimes) padded. Even the pixie-girls' breasts were D-cups. Breasts preceded girls into rooms. Breasts preceded the girls who bore them with shivery female pride and restrained haste, descending the spiral stairs to their staring dates. Their smooth-shaved calves shining like pewter. Underarms doused with deodorant and liberally dabbed with talcum powder. You would not recognize Kappa girls upstairs but downstairs and on campus, at fraternity parties and in taverns they emanated the Kappa look glamorous, sexy, determined. Exuding "personality" like a lighthouse beacon on flashing light. Their rooms were whirlwinds of disorder, pigsties out of which they emerged radiant and avid for romance, like the phoenix out of his flaming nest. Their lives were worn on the outside of their skin like another item of apparel. Their lives in the presence of male persons were fanatically prepared performances, sustained for hours at a stretch. They were such fierce actresses, they might not have known they were acting at all. They were fighting for their lives. Their goal was to become engaged before graduation. They would be married before the age of twenty-two, they would be mothers before the age of twenty-three. Some of them would be divorced before the age of thirty. I adored them. I feared them, and I loathed them, and I adored them. I did not imagine that I knew them. They spoke in code; even their shrieks of laughter were in code. The smoke curling from the sides of their mouths like exhaust from a car's tailpipe. Marble-hard sharpness of their eyes. The Kappa smile beaming Hi! How are ya! Loveya! Like tossing coins at beggars. As if they were worthy of such blessings. As if they were, not Kappa Gamma Pi's, a sorority of the second rank, but Chi Omegas, TriDelts, Pi Phi's, sororities of the first rank. As if they were not mainly elementary ed. majors, struggling for C's, but proudly on the dean's list. As if they weren't party girls with dubious reputations but popular Hellenic council officers, class officers, homecoming queens; as if they were respected, admired, emulated, not pursued as girls who drank, and put out.
I'll Take You There Page 6