Sorority

by Genevieve Sly Crane

  I wondered if they’d died where we were sitting. On her bed? In her bathroom? At college we practically swim in immortality. In my grandmother’s nursing home, the river Styx laps up and down the hallway.

  —You didn’t kill them to get this place, did you?

  She didn’t answer. I don’t know if she missed the joke or if she felt partly responsible for wishing them into oblivion.

  —How’s school?

  —Good, I said. I switched my major to classics.

  —Dear Lord, she said. What on earth are you going to do with that?

  —I’m not sure. But I enjoy the coursework.

  —Why not a business major? Or accounting? The men in those majors are so handsome.

  THE THESAURUS OF MONA GEORGETTE CLARK

  Handsome (adjective): attractive, composed, virile, striking, stately, dignified. Wealthy.

  —How is your house this year? she asked me. What is the reputation on campus?

  —It’s fine, I said. We have a good pledge class.

  —Be sure to network. You never know who will marry a senator. I still keep in touch with my sisters. Those of us that are alive, anyway.

  How satisfying it would be, I thought, to drag her over to our house and make her see the dining room at two in the morning on Friday: Marcia, asleep and hunched over the table with her face in her arms, her stubby ponytail askew on the back of her head, reeking of fake cherries and rum. Ruby, gobbling tortilla chips and hummus and slices of cheddar, yapping with her mouth open, laughing too loud and too long. Amanda, pale and sober, frowning like we’d gotten wasted just to personally affront her. Deirdre and Margot singing a bastardization of a rush song off-key, their voices like cracked plates.

  Balzac emerged from under the bed and studied me with twitching whiskers. I snapped my fingers at him, beckoning for some contact. I wanted so badly for him to love me. He took refuge behind some dresses in the armoire.

  —Balzac doesn’t like anyone but me, Mona said. Do not take it personally.

  Amazing, the things she had in common with a feline.

  —You look pretty, Grandma.

  She smoothed the arm of her mink coat carefully, almost petting it.

  —I look composed, at least, and that’s all one can hope for as they age. And you look—she squinted at me through a cataract fog—you look well, but you better not gain another pound over vacation.

  —I know, I said.

  I tried to imagine the fetus. I couldn’t. I could only picture a seahorse. I felt it back flip, and then I thought: impossible. All of it too early, too insubstantial to feel.

  —Dinner is in twenty minutes, she said. You may help me with my preparations. She gestured to her glass-topped dresser and I wordlessly took the brush as I had done since my childhood. I unpinned her hair and brushed slowly, as if she were a horse that could scare easily and kick me.

  Family myth dictates that the first full sentence out of my mouth was directed at Mona on one of her visits. Is this my memory, or my mother’s? Does it matter? We were standing in the foyer of my parents’ house. My father still lived with us. My mother answered the door, and her voice arced above me in an octave of nervousness that I felt but couldn’t define, and I studied this woman, this glamorous doorstep relative who carried a hatbox and left her bags on the floor for my mother to retrieve. And I pronounced:

  —I like your panty hose.

  Mona was thrilled with the content of the sentence.

  My mother was thrilled with the syllables.

  • • •

  I offered my arm on our shuffle down the hallway to the dining room, but Mona refused.

  —What are you, a man?

  Instead, she leaned on her walker, not really needing it, but not certain enough with her own footing to slip and risk embarrassment.

  —Do not call it a walker, she said. The word lacks dignity.

  —What should I call it, then?

  —A vehicle. This is my vehicle.

  —Are you licensed?

  Her face soured.

  —Sometimes I admire your wit, she told me. But sometimes you are unbearably proletariat.

  When we entered the dining room, her voice shifted and she curled a cold hand over my forearm and announced to no one in particular, Has everyone made the acquaintance of my beautiful granddaughter?

  • • •

  Orphics believed that one drink from the river Lethe in the underworld would eviscerate the memory of mortal life. Unfortunately for them, the Lethe was tempting, and whenever a recently dead human encountered it the urge to drink would be irresistible. To combat this, the Orphics limited their water on this worldly plane. They trained themselves daily to maintain their memories and resist the Lethe, so that when they were reborn they would have the knowledge of their past lives intact.

  I want the Lethe.

  Just a small dose.

  It would take only a thimbleful to forget that I have a father.

  • • •

  I always hated the predictability of Mona’s nursing home dinners. I sat at a table with eight slurping geriatrics. Seven were women. Four were conversational. Edward—I knew him from previous visits—Edward sat at the head of the table, silent and morose, while I watched Mona spar with other women for his attention.

  —Edward, she twittered, Edward, did you see the new aide yet? She has tattoos on her wrists. Both wrists!

  Edward, deaf either by choice or ailment, didn’t respond.

  Somebody farted but nobody commented.

  Mona shifted over to the women.

  —My granddaughter just declared her new major.

  Squints were cast upon me.

  —What’s your major? someone rattled.

  —Classics.

  —Classics, as in Dickens?

  —Classics, as in Greeks. Romans. History, I said.

  —That is rather impractical, Edward said.

  All of us jumped at his voice.

  —I have a soft spot for old things, I said.

  Mona laughed and simultaneously dug her claws deep into my thigh. I crossed my legs away from her.

  —What’s your name? Edward asked me. A jewel of soup clung to this chin.

  —Kyra Clark.

  —Ah, you must be Jim’s girl, he said. And then he said to Mona: When will your boy visit again?

  Jim’s girl. Jim’s girl. Jim’s girl.

  —Soon, I’m sure, Mona said.

  Edward studied my face, trying to extract my father’s eyes and nose and mouth from the genetic jigsaw puzzle.

  —Do you play bridge? he asked me.

  —No.

  —Your father is a crackerjack bridge player, he said. You should have him teach you.

  • • •

  For years, my mother tried to snag him back into our family. Begging phone calls, and long nights spent in his driveway before the restraining order, and weepy letters. Many weepy letters. And when that didn’t work, she asked for child support. And when he slipped behind on that, but she couldn’t bring herself to press charges against the man she still loved, my mother turned to positive visualization. And aphorisms. And white sage. And crystals. And witch hazel instead of Band-Aids. And hugs before bed. And, after I went to bed, a little bit of weed. On weekends, LSD.

  He never visited after he left. Instead, he sent me books. His handwriting on the mailing labels: slanted, tight, cursive. I traced a finger over every word he ever wrote me. I imitated the loop of his y in my name, the deep curve on the leg of the letter K.

  His packages were always addressed from P.O. Box 446 in Weymouth. Inside each parcel I found a Hawthorne or a Bradbury or a Tolkien or a Hemingway. Always inscribed on the title page,

  For my brilliant girl.

  With affection, Your father

  The books stopped coming my freshman year of high school. I don’t know why.

  One year later, on the day that I got my license, I drove to the Weymouth post office. It was only a twenty-minute dr
ive. The whole afternoon I sat in the parking lot, watching people come and go, half-afraid of seeing his face, half-afraid that I wouldn’t. I never left the car.

  • • •

  Mona wouldn’t acknowledge me on the walk back to her room. Her vehicle’s tennis ball feet snagged on the rug. I heard a tiny rattle in her exhale, the vapor of a ghost on her furious breath.

  —Shut the door, she hissed at me.

  She shuffled over to her bedside table, extracted her wine and glass from the drawer, and poured liberally.

  —Did you come here simply to exercise your impertinence in front of my companions? she asked.

  I didn’t answer.

  —Thank the Lord Edward liked you. Thank the Lord.

  She took an unladylike swig and gulp. The noise—God! The noise of old people! It’s as if they carry a bullhorn around for their bodies—the sound was unbearable, the mechanism of throat and mouth revolted me to the marrow. Her coat silhouetted wildly by lamplight. Her shadow could have belonged to a shaman.

  —Is it your mission to ruin my reputation?

  —No.

  —Why, for once, why can’t you just keep your tongue in your mouth?

  Sometimes, on a train platform, I get the itch to know what it would be like to jump in front of the tracks at the last moment. I’m not suicidal. It’s just a doom itch, a what-if itch. I felt the same itch then. It could have been so easy to kamikaze announce: I’m pregnant, you old crone. Then watch her crumple.

  —Why did you come here? she asked me.

  —To visit you.

  —Horse feathers. Why do you visit if you only want to upset me?

  —I wasn’t trying to embarrass you, I said.

  —You want something, she said. You only visit when you want something.

  How badly I wanted to tell her she was wrong.

  • • •

  At three months, a fetus has a throat. The head is half the length of its body. A whorl of a hair pattern emerges. It bobs and pulses with the mother, amphibious and parasitic and focused only on its genetic perfection. It has no interest in its father.

  • • •

  —I want Dad’s phone number, I told her.

  I followed Mona’s eyes to the framed picture of him on her dresser. I have the photograph memorized. He’s standing on a golf course. Perfect hills ebb behind him. A trophy glints fiercely in his hand. In another hand, a driver. A woman is in the corner of the frame, composed only of hair and an elbow. The woman is not my mother.

  —Why do you do this to yourself? she asked me. You’re nearly grown. He gives you what he can.

  —He gives me nothing, I told her.

  —I hardly knew my father, she said. He worked long hours. He had his own life. I let him be. He sent me to a good school. He paid for my wedding.

  —Please. I need his number. Then I’ll leave you alone.

  The coat slithered off her shoulders and pooled on the floor. Spike of memory: when I was a child, Mona would take me to the Anglican church on her visits, and when she did, she was sure to drape the mink coat over the pew, label carefully angled so that those behind her could see, upside down, the quiet declaration, Le Vison de la France.

  —He’s my child, she said. I have to support his choices.

  —I’m your grandchild.

  —It’s not the same. He’s a good son to me. A good son.

  —I don’t want to bother him, I lied. I just want him to know how I’m doing.

  She looked so insubstantial without the coat. Practically avian. Had I been a better person, I would have wrapped her in a blanket even if she’d protested. Instead, I stood over her, waiting.

  —You are so very like your mother, she spat.

  —Because I want him in my life?

  —No. Because you are relentless. Get me a pen.

  What was she when she was my age? Her mouth is so rumpled, so expressive still, that surely it must have had the fluctuations of a coquette. Puckered one minute, corner-curved the next. She must have worn cardigans, and oxford shirts, skirts breeze-tousled and hinting, and maybe on dates she’d flick open the top button of a blouse, and maybe in her father’s absence she had left the house quietly, in slithering high style, running through the town at night on light feet, finding what she needed from other boys, deep in the stacks of a library near her finishing school, maybe, or in the bathroom of an art gallery, or on an empty night-lit tennis court while others danced in a country club ballroom. Maybe she’d filled a different kind of dance card, and maybe she’d done as I had done, throwing the insubstantial core of her teenage body at anyone she wanted, not caring if it was Blake or Alfred or Reuben or Kent, because, she knew, it was the only time that in relinquishing her control that she could gain some in turn, burning through each of them with a reckless quiet rage. So many parts of her were unlovable, but this part, this buried part, was mine. I felt entitled to her past. I was overcome with an urge to reach for her, to pluck that girlish ghost out of her wretched old body and take her home to the sorority house.

  Her penmanship was so governed by quivers that it was nearly illegible.

  —Is that a three or an eight? I asked.

  —Eight, she spat. I want you to leave now.

  —I will. I’m sorry I upset you.

  —You are a terrible, insolent child. You are no child of Jim’s.

  —Yes I am.

  Balzac mewled from under the bed.

  —You don’t even know him, she hissed.

  —I take only what I need from people, and give nothing in return, I said. If that isn’t Jim I don’t know what is.

  Tears were beading on her eyelids, I could see them.

  I took the coat from the floor and draped it over her armchair. When I went to kiss her cheek, she clutched hard at a hank of my hair and pulled until my face was an inch from hers, her breath overwhelming.

  —With a disrespect such as yours, you are destined for disaster.

  —I know, I said.

  Why didn’t I say, I already am?

  When I opened the door Balzac skittered toward the exit as if it was his last chance for survival, and I crushed his tail with my foot and the trajectory of fur changed course and darted under the bed, followed by a comet of screeching. I shut the door on the pair of them yowling in unison.

  Of course the cute orderly was at the end of the hall.

  —Everything okay in there? he asked me.

  I could see a chain snaked under the neck of his scrubs. St. Michael, dangling on the pendant underneath?

  —She always makes a scene, I told him. And she was pissy with me.

  —Did you wear too much makeup after all?

  I thought of lying, but didn’t, because I knew I would never come back to her hovel and I would never see him again either.

  —I came to get my dad’s number from her.

  —You mean Jim?

  —Jim, I said.

  His name prickled my mouth. I licked my lips to numb the feeling.

  —You don’t talk to your dad?

  —No.

  —Why do you want him now?

  —He should know how I’m doing. What about you? You talk to your dad?

  The orderly itched at the back of his neck. I liked the way the muscles in his arm moved, pulsing with the beat of his scratch.

  —My old man’s in construction, he said, and I nodded, as if the two statements were in any way related.

  —I’ll see you around, I said.

  On the walk away, I didn’t count past two and a half sways before he said, My shift ends in ten minutes.

  —I’ll wait in the parking lot, I said.

  —What’s your name?

  —Kyra.

  —Aren’t you going to ask mine?

  —I think I’ll call you Scott, I said.

  Out in the parking lot the wind blew thick and night heavy and I marveled at how, in the soon unspooling of our bodies, in the dark of my car or his apartment, he would never be able to d
etect the truth in mine.

  12

  Endings, Bright and Ugly

  -CHORUS-

  April 2008

  There are thousands of ways Margot could have ended.

  Start with the easy.

  It’s a four-hour drive to the Canadian border, dark and snowy and charming, where she landed a job at a titty bar in a scenario without malice: pink pasties, round-faced customers with cold noses, and she renamed herself something demure and kicky all at once. Candice, or Lorenna. And one night (of course it’s a late hour, and of course the roads are snow clotted and empty) she leaves work a little toasted and drives dreamily into a white ravine, tapped unconscious. Sleeping Beauty in a bikini and parka and yoga pants, hemorrhaging gently into an exhale. Her pristine blue face and ashy dye job are beautiful in the sunlight when the Mounties find her in the morning.

  • • •

  Or maybe, she dissolves far into another future that never happened, where she is reduced to an unflattering oil painting on the wall of her third great-grandniece, who removes it because it is an ugly portrait, anyway, and there’s something morose and clumsy in it. The mouth is too flat, and the nose is too squashy, and that just doesn’t jive with the upholstery.

  • • •

  And then there’s the easy option, the headstone cleaved in two after years of rain and sun, hauled off unceremoniously by a maintenance worker in a dirty polo shirt and a wheelbarrow, for even in the future, surely, there are wheelbarrows.

  • • •

  A novice hacker in search of something profitable accidentally wipes the courthouse holding the last existing scan of her birth certificate.

  • • •

  A daughter and son-in-law, standing on the dock of a beautiful fake lake in Arkansas that she’d always found detestable in life, dissolve her ashes in water.

  —She would have liked that, her daughter will say. And her son-in-law, a nice man who never felt he could stare her old wilted face down at the breakfast table, will squeeze his wife’s hand three times, their secret grip.

  • • •

  All of the hairs on her head that have drifted out the window on long car trips or been left behind in airplane seats, on hotel pillows, in the water filter of a pool in Thailand, swept in the corner of a restaurant in Barcelona, wrapped around the squeegee handle in the bucket beside pump nine at the Sunoco in Tennessee: all of them will burst into dust—some of them well before their creator does—and some, frail and gray, not long after.