“They got the facts wrong,” Shelly said. “I was there when they took the kids away.”
“Oh. Wow. Okay. Well, this is a bummer. Would you mind, can I ask you, you know—”
“If you can leave early?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah,” Shelly said, and in less than a second, the girl was gone. Shelly stood, looking at the threshold, empty now, and listening to the sound of the front door of the Chamber Music Society opening, then closing, and then the sound of Josie tapping down the stairwell in her black flats. Then, she sat back down, opened one of her desk drawers, and pulled out the file with Josie’s name on it.
Her résumé, her application—Shelly scanned them for Omega Theta Tau. These girls never left their sorority affiliations off their applications. They were so impressed with themselves that they assumed everyone else would be, too.
But it wasn’t on any of the paperwork, and Josie had given only her home address in Grosse Isle as her contact information.
Grosse Isle?
How had Shelly missed that detail?
The girl was getting financial aid for the “work” she was doing at the Chamber Music Society. Was there anybody in Grosse Isle who needed work-study funds to attend college? When Shelly herself had been at the university, one of her sorority sisters from Grosse Isle had invited her home for a weekend. The house the girl had grown up in had a helicopter landing pad, and her father’s helicopter, on its roof.
Well, of course, Shelly had no way of knowing the Reillys’ situation, even if they were from the wealthiest suburb in the state. A bitter divorce could have accounted for the need, or a family illness, or parental job loss. It wasn’t Shelly’s job to assess the candidate’s financial situation. That assessment was sent over from the Financial Aid Office to the dean of the music school, who gave it his stamp of approval.
Shelly put the file back in her drawer and looked out the window. A white butterfly, seeming to try to land on the windowsill, was being jostled around by the breeze, buffeted away from the ledge each time it got close.
Shelly watched, feeling nervous for it—unable to look away and hating the spectacle of it. Her eyes focused on it, as her thoughts fluttered around:
Omega Theta Tau.
Those were the Virgin Sisters. Theirs was the house on campus that supposedly advocated chastity and sobriety. The press had made a big deal of that with Nicole Werner. It was another stratum of the tragedy, that she’d been such a good girl.
Back in Shelly’s day, the eighties, there’d been a bit more cynicism than that—strange as it was to think that Americans were getting more innocent as time passed.
Back then, Omega Theta Tau had been the sorority of choice for the girls who wanted to go into politics, or marry into politics. It was the keep-your-record-clean sorority. Shelly was fairly certain the governor’s wife had been an OTT here. And who knew who else? These more powerful houses had connections that crisscrossed the nation’s most important people like telephone lines. Maybe every female judge in the nation had been one. Probably half the female lawyers with ambitions to be judges—or senators, or congresswomen—had been. Most likely some huge percentage of the senators’ and congressmen’s wives in the country could claim Omega Theta Tau sisterhood, and who knew how many First Ladies.
Shelly’s sorority, Eta Lambda, had been nothing like that. Hers had been known as the Friendly Girl’s Sorority. In other words, it was not as cool as the other houses; its sisters not as popular, not as pretty.
You might think that would have made it an easier house to live in—with more laid-back sisters, less pressure of all varieties—but you would be wrong. Being on the lower rung of the Greek ladder made the Eta Lambda sisters even more competitive, even more ruthless, crueler. Shelly’s most vivid memory of those days was of coming down the stairs in her formal gown on Pledge Night, and watching as the girls already assembled below in their own gowns made eye contact with one another and then, in unison, it seemed, rushed their hands to their mouths to stifle their laughter.
Shelly’s heart had begun to pound so hard she was afraid she would pass out. To this day she had no idea what they were laughing about. Maybe she looked fat, or her gown was too revealing. It could have been her hair, her makeup, her shoes, her little sequined purse. She would never know. She wasn’t intended to know. There was not a single girl among all those sisters who would have been kind enough to tell her, or to reassure her. So Shelly simply continued to descend the stairs (what else could she do?) and then to move through Pledge Night in a cloud of shame, dashing away from the activities every chance she got to check herself in the bathroom mirror: Her teeth, the blond hair over her lip, her eyebrows. She sniffed her underarms. She sniffed her underpants. She checked the front of her dress, the back of her dress, her bra straps, and the worst thing of all was that she couldn’t find it. Whatever it was, this thing they could all see on her, she was blind to it.
Shelly had moved through the next two years as an Eta Lambda trying to find it, to see it, to figure it out, unable to and determined, at the same time, to stay and face it, whatever it was, day after day after day.
A complete waste of youthful energy and time, she knew now—although, in truth, she’d made a couple of lifelong friends through Eta Lambda, friends who’d seen her through her graduation, graduate school, an abusive marriage, and a divorce, and who had then accepted her into the new life she’d taken on as a lesbian.
There was a special kind of loyalty born of that strange sisterhood. It wasn’t blood. But it was like some kind of precious body fluid, spent and shared between them.
The butterfly seemed stuck to the windowsill by the force of the breeze now.
Really, it was unbearable to watch. The breeze, which would have been nearly undetectable to anything not made of tissue paper and thread, as that butterfly was, was crushing it into the bricks. Shelly watched for a few more seconds and then decided she had no choice but to open the window and let it in. Luckily she worked in one of the few buildings left on campus that had windows that could actually be opened, although she rarely did so, and she had to push hard and then hold the heavy pane up with one hand while attempting to gently pluck the butterfly up with the other.
She got it. She could have sworn she felt its heart beat (atomic whispering, and dusty little particles of time and terror) and she felt terrified, too, trying to shake it off her fingers and onto her desk, where it lay motionless (had she killed it, had she killed it?)
She was certain, then, that she’d crushed it, scared it to death, injured it past fixing, but after a few seconds the butterfly fluttered its wings, and then it rose into the air, and Shelly stood back, out of its way, as it flew past her and through her office to the door, and then into the outer offices, where it zigzagged from wall to wall, until she opened the office door, and it flew down the stairwell, to the propped-open front door, and disappeared back into the world.
19
It was Putrefaction Day. As they filed into the room, Mira wrote on the board:
He looks like he’s asleep.
It’s a shame that he won’t keep,
But it’s summer and we’re runnin’ out of ice . . .
—“Pore Jud Is Daid,” Oklahoma!
Perry Edwards was the first one in, already with his notebook open, jotting down the quote from the board (which was really intended more as a joke than something to include in one’s notes).
He was wearing a somber-looking pair of black trousers and a white button-down shirt, as if he’d just come from a Glee Club concert, or a funeral.
“Perry,” Mira said before the others were in their places, “would you mind working the slide projector?”
“No, Professor Polson.” He rose from his seat and moved to the chair next to the projector.
“Okay,” Mira said. “Today’s the big day. I’m assigning you your first essay, which will be due next week. I didn’t assign it earlier because I don’t believe in giving
students, as some professors do, a month to write a paper. The longer you have, in my experience, the longer you’ll put it off. But, at the same time, as I state in the syllabus, I accept no late papers, so my suggestion is that you start working on this assignment today. It can be as long as you need it to be to make your points, but it will be no shorter than ten pages.”
“Ten pages!” Karess Flanagan blurted, and then blushed and looked around as if trying to pretend someone else had said it.
Under what circumstances, Mira wondered, would a parent consider naming a child Karess? Of course, they’d had no way of knowing that their infant daughter would turn into a stunningly sexy dark-haired beauty with C cups and glossy pink lips, did they? Mira could only begin to imagine the jokes and riffs the name and the girl had inspired in boys’ locker rooms over the years.
Karess continued to look shocked, whether by the number of pages of the assignment or by her own outburst, or both.
“Didn’t you read the syllabus?” Mira asked. “Under ‘Requirements’ ”—she whipped a syllabus out of the folder on her desk—“it says pretty clearly, ‘five papers, ten pages double-spaced or longer, must receive a grade of C or higher to pass the course.’ ”
Karess managed to nod and shake her head at the same time.
“So, here’s your paper topic,” Mira said.
Out of the same folder, she took her stack of Xeroxed assignments and handed them to Karess to pass out to the class. As the girl stood up with them, every guy in the class except Perry (who was studying the slide projector) looked from her ankles to her breasts, and lingered there until she sat back down.
“I’ll let you read this on your own,” Mira said, “but let me go over the basics. In this essay, which is a Personal Reflection piece, you are to examine your own superstitions—personal and cultural—related to death. You might start with why it is you signed up for this class, but you might also examine your preconceptions regarding burial, cremation, funeral rites, and the other rituals practiced by your family and community. What is your experience with the dead? Have you been in the presence of a dead body, and if so, what was your reaction? What are your fears related to the dead? What are your attractions?”
There was a snort here and there, and a baffled huff. It was the same every year.
“Because,” Mira said, without missing a beat, “you, of all people, can’t tell me there’s no such thing as an attraction to this subject matter, since you have, yourselves, enrolled in a class about death and the dead. You had twenty other classes to choose from. Although I’d like to flatter myself that it’s my reputation as a stellar educator that makes this the most popular class at Godwin Honors College every year, I rather doubt it. There are other reasons, perhaps related to the fascination that, for instance, young women with almost no interest in poetry beyond Hallmark cards have for Sylvia Plath, and why Kurt Cobain, who barely lived long enough to write and sing more than a handful of decent songs, commands so many fans among teenage boys.
“These are the subjects,” Mira continued, looking around, catching the eyes of the students who looked the least impressed, “that I want you to explore, in as much depth, with as much critical analysis and personal reflection as you’re capable of, in this essay.”
She turned and sat back down behind her desk, and said, in a less impassioned tone, “On the class website you’ll find papers from previous years. Questions?”
The students were either looking at Mira or staring at their assignment sheets, some with their mouths hanging open. There were questions regarding font, and quotes, and the width of margins. Mira made it clear that ten pages meant ten pages. The frantic questions subsided when it became obvious that there would be no way around this, whether or not their high school teachers had counted the title page as a page, or allowed them to use two-inch margins and eighteen-point font.
“Okay,” Mira said, exhaling. “Finally. Putrefaction.”
There were titters, and a groan.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “but I’m afraid we can’t begin to understand the folklore and superstitions surrounding the dead until we understand the reality of death and decay. In our particular time and place, it’s the rare person who encounters putrefied human remains, but it has been less than a century that the technology and professional services allowing us to avoid this nasty reality have been around, and in most places on earth, they still don’t exist. So, the decay of the dead body remains a powerful psychic and cultural memory.
“I’m assuming you’ve all read the selection in your course packs from W.E.B. Evans’s The Chemistry of Death?”
A few heads nodded. Mira flipped the lights and pulled the screen down over the blackboard. “Okay. Perry, can you turn on the slide projector? First slide.”
The first image was a still from Dawn of the Dead. A “corpse” in ragged clothing was chasing a beautiful young girl across an emerald green lawn.
“You’re probably familiar with this movie. I imagine most of you also know the story ‘The Monkey’s Paw,’ in which a husband comes home to his wife with a monkey’s paw he’s been told will grant him three wishes. The first wish, which is for a sum of cash, results in their son’s death in a mining accident, and a life insurance payoff of that exact sum.
“The wife, several days after the son’s burial, in a state of unbearable grief, makes the second wish: for his return.
“She’s about given up hope when, late at night, the couple hears something slow and heavy and scraping coming up the walk. The wife rushes for the door, but the husband stops her. He seems to understand, in a way his wife doesn’t, what their son, returning after a few days spent in the grave, will be—so he uses the last wish to make his son go away.
“Now, let me ask you—this is your beloved only son, and you are responsible for his death. Would you open the door?”
There was a collective “No!” Karess Flanagan actually put her hands to her rosy cheeks, shaking her head.
“Well, why not?” Mira asked, pretending to be shocked by their callousness. “He’s your son. Your loving child. What are you afraid of?”
“He’s dead!”
“So? He’s back!” Mira imitated their tones, and they laughed.
“He won’t be the same,” Miriam Mason said. “He’s been buried.”
“He’ll be pissed as hell,” Tony Barnstone said.
“Maybe not.” Mira shrugged. “He’d probably understand that you just screwed up with that first wish, and then, after all, you used the next one to get him out of the grave.”
“Dead people are always pissed,” Tony said.
“Well, here’s a question then—why?” Mira asked. “What would turn someone who has been, say, kind and shy before death into this kind of monster after?” She used her pencil to point to the raging zombie in the movie still.
There was no answer.
“Perry? Next slide?”
The next slide was a photograph Mira had taken herself in Bosnia during her Fulbright year. In it, an old woman in a black dress was walking backward out of the doorway of her little cottage on a hillside. She was sweeping the threshold.
“This is a Bosnian woman whose only daughter had died of pneumonia a few days before I took this photo. I’d been in the village and was invited to the funeral, where I saw this woman throw herself onto the casket of her daughter, clawing at it. She eventually had to be pulled away by her sons. During the funeral procession and service, the woman collapsed to her knees in grief five or six times. But what she’s doing here”—Mira pointed with her pencil to the broom—“is sweeping the doorway while walking backward, exactly forty-eight hours after her daughter’s death, to ensure that the girl won’t come back.”
Some of the students were chewing on their pencils.
“Perry?”
He flipped to the next slide, which was as provocative as Mira allowed herself to get this early in the semester—a black-and-white morgue photo of Marilyn Monroe, laid out on
a gurney, covered to the neck with a sheet. Her face was completely slack, her cheeks sunken and discolored, mottled along the cheekbones and forehead and nose, her hair combed back straight behind her head, her lips a thin grimace.
“This is Marilyn Monroe’s last photo,” Mira said.
There were the expected oh my gods and muffled cries of horror as the students started to recognize in the corpse’s distorted features the icon of sex and beauty with which they were familiar. Several students sat up and leaned over their desks to get a closer look. No one turned away.
“Perry?”
The next image was the famous shot of Marilyn Monroe standing over the subway grate, pretending to try to hold down the pleated skirt of her white dress.
“Thanks, Perry. You can turn the projector off,” Mira said. “So, as you now know from your reading, within twelve to fifteen hours of death, if the corpse is left untreated and unrefrigerated, the following changes take place:
“The corpse changes in color, usually to a kind of pinkish-purple. This is called hypostasis.”
Mira wrote the word on the board.
“Even earlier than twelve hours, depending on the weather, there will be massive swelling due to the build-up of gases in the body, which renders the facial features unrecognizable. Blisters rise on the surface of the skin, and burst, due to the shedding of the epidermis. This is called skin slippage.”
She wrote the word sacromenos on the board.
“This,” she told them, pointing, “is the Greek word for ‘vampire.’ Literally, it means ‘flesh made by the moon.’ You can imagine such flesh on the dead, can’t you, after skin slippage?”
There were dazed-looking nods all around.
“So,” Mira went on, “a few hours after skin slippage, there begins the escape of bloodstained fluids from the orifices and the liquefaction of the eyeballs. Within twenty-four hours—again, depending on the weather—there will be the presence of maggots, and in another twenty-four hours, the shedding of nails and hair, and then the conversion of tissue into a semi-fluid mass, which, along with the buildup of gasses, will cause the abdomen to burst, often in a noisy explosion.
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