Sorority

by Genevieve Sly Crane

  —A new dress, Eva said.

  Lisa came out of the back room. She was in her slip, holding her gown in her arms like it was a fainting lady.

  —Everything okay?

  (I tried to say no, I really did.)

  —Ruby’s dress isn’t cooperating, Lisa’s mother said.

  (This would have been the moment to extricate myself. But I was being selfish. I didn’t want to go.) I pictured the dress crumpling into a giant hand, the middle finger extended at all of us.

  We dug through the drawers and searched for safety pins. They began weaving them into my back. Someone looked for a scarf to drape me with. The chapel manager knocked at the door.

  —Ten minutes, she said.

  —I can’t do this, Lisa said. I’m not ready! I can’t do this.

  —You’re going to be fine, I said. Josh is the love of your life.

  —It’s not about Josh. It’s you!

  —Lisa, I begged.

  The others were staring at me. I kept my back to them.

  —Lisa. Get a grip. It’s not that bad. I can wear a shawl or something.

  —You had six months! she cried. You had six months to not treat yourself like human garbage and fit into one fucking outfit.

  —Maybe the dress is the wrong size, Lisa’s mother said.

  —It’s not, Eva said.

  —I can fix it, I said desperately. I can wear something else. I have the outfit I wore to the rehearsal dinner—

  The makeup artist rested a hand on my shoulder. I knew it was over.

  —Everything will be easier to talk about after the ceremony, Lisa’s mother said gently.

  I didn’t wait. I blundered into the parking lot. Guests were hurrying to the chapel now. I recognized Lisa’s grandmother, and her fat aunt, and in the distance I saw Janelle and Corinne walking together in tiny little sundresses, envelopes and directions and clutch purses in hand.

  Corinne began to wave at me and then dropped her arm. I ran to my car, my back exposed, sweating, and sat with my head on the steering wheel.

  Anna had followed me. She slapped at the driver’s-side window with a flat palm. I rolled it down.

  —Can I come with you? she asked.

  —No, I said. Fuck off.

  —I hate them, too, she said.

  —You don’t, I said. And I don’t either.

  Anna waited for me to have an epiphany. She waited for me to unlock the car. Music was playing inside of the chapel.

  —Go, I told her. You have to. And when you’re an adult you can decide if you really want to hate them.

  —I thought you’d get it, she said.

  She walked back to the chapel.

  • • •

  During the ceremony, Josh did that sweet thing that men do when they’re really moved where he stopped blinking in case a tear would slip out of his control. Lisa vowed that she would never make Josh put up Christmas lights by himself, and Josh vowed to move the clothes to the dryer instead of letting them get moldy in the wash. Josh’s grandmother took a hanky out of her old-lady purse and dabbed at the crepey skin around her eyes. The groomsmen smiled warmly at the bridesmaids, admiring their tanned legs, their tiny little waists. Not a zipper, not a hair, not a button was out of place. When Josh and Lisa kissed, as if on cue, the sun burst out from behind a cloud and the chapel was illuminated in a gorgeous warm light.

  At the reception, the sisters gathered together and lit some tapers and sang our sorority’s marriage song to Lisa, a song that included the horrendously cheesy lyrics even though you’ve gone and married / your sisters’ love you’ll always carry. Later, the photos were posted on Facebook: Lisa, Eva, Corinne, and Janelle, a perfect quartet.

  It was, Eva told me, the perfect wedding.

  24

  Ouija

  -CHORUS-

  They say when she died the glass in her class composite shattered.

  • • •

  They say when she died the flower arrangements on the dining room table burst apart, the petals popping off of their stems like corks out of bottles.

  • • •

  They say when she died the Chapter Room doors locked and didn’t open until her body was taken from the house.

  • • •

  We put out a scrapbook of her. It was supposed to be comprised of pictures that represented her different attributes but none of them were appropriate for visitors to see. Here she was sticking her tongue out at the camera, here she was out of focus, here she was, beatific and twisted with half-closed eyelids, hovering over a series of fat white rails cut and ready on the Pledge Room table. Her composite photo was sufficient, but she looked, as Eva put it, like she was trying to remember her own name. So all the scrapbook held was her obituary, and some articles on her death, and one article about a donation her parents had made in her name to a rehab center in Boston. That accounted for six pages. The rest of the book was blank.

  • • •

  Ruby said she could hear Twang talking to herself in her room after she died. They shared a wall, and Ruby, who was fat and never had a reason to go out, sat at home and snooped and stewed.

  —Talking how? we asked. About what?

  —About her, she said. To her. She’s talking to her like she’s still alive in the room.

  —She’s probably on the phone, we said.

  Ruby stared at each of us with withering skepticism.

  —Who would she talk to on the phone? We’re all here.

  —What does she say to her? we asked.

  —Most of it’s just current events, she said. But sometimes Twang starts telling her to ignore the man.

  —What man?

  —That’s the thing. There is no man.

  —That’s some spooky shit, we said, and Ruby melted into the couch and hugged a throw pillow to her chest, pleased that she had finally gotten a desired reaction out of her reporting.

  • • •

  They say, on the one-year anniversary of her death, that the heat shut off in the house and the sisters almost froze to death in their beds while they slept, unaware of hypothermia creeping through the sills.

  • • •

  They say, on the second anniversary, that a sister recognized one of her shoes, a size seven UGG boot with her initials on the sole. It was found standing upright near the end of the upstairs hallway, as if it had been on a journey for its mate. And Jennifer, who had never said a word about what happened, who hadn’t even been that close with her, took the boot into her room and refused to let anyone else see it. We don’t know what she did with it.

  • • •

  On the day that she was supposed to graduate, the sisters of her pledge class took their photos on the front lawn with white stoles denoting our house. Kyra stood off to the side with her baby sleeping in its stroller, its little head tilted to the side in an eerily sharp angle as it slept. Kyra didn’t notice the baby’s lolling head. Instead she directed Marcia and Janie and Shannon and Lucy and Deirdre and Alissa into place, but a gap kept forming between Lucy and Shannon, as if an invisible influence were forcing them apart. There was a lot of scrutiny over the photos later, looking for hints of orbs, or a face in a window, but nothing was found.

  • • •

  And then, one year later, they said that something was found in the photos, but by then the pictures had been lost, or deleted, or burned, depending on who was asked.

  • • •

  One night we yanked the mattresses off of our beds and threw a sleepover in the hallway, trading nips of rum until we all passed out and Pancake and Twinkle woke up at the devil’s hour and said they saw her hovering over them.

  —What did she look like? we asked.

  —Pretty, Pancake said. She wore a white dress and had her hair up.

  —It wasn’t a dress. It was more like a toga, Twinkle said.

  She looked happy, Pancake said. As happy as a ghost could be, anyway.

  —She was sort of overdressed, really, Twinkle said.
It was like a fancy toga. Lots of braided gold sashes.

  —Why wouldn’t a ghost wear loungewear? Pancake asked.

  • • •

  Finally, the last girls who would have known her graduated.

  • • •

  Her class composite went missing.

  • • •

  When our favorite shirts or dresses disappeared from the basement dryers we blamed her. She was cold, or she wanted to stay in style, or maybe she just wanted to punish a sister who spoke badly of her.

  We lost the scrapbook. We blamed the new pledges, who probably threw it out when they were doing spring cleaning.

  • • •

  They said she had black hair.

  They said she had red hair.

  They said she was gay.

  They said the statue of Hestia looked just like her, that it had transformed and adopted her face after she died.

  One sister said she was drugged at a party, and a girl with a long black braid and full red lips grabbed her by the hand and took her out of some creepy guy’s room before he came back from the bathroom. The girl led her outside and called her a cab, and when our sister got into the car the girl disappeared.

  They said she was having an affair with a married professor, a guy in the anthro department, who looked a little bit like Indiana Jones but had soft, flabby man arms that hinted at middle age.

  • • •

  They said she killed herself.

  • • •

  They said it was just weed, or oxy, or she’d bought a little blow from a guy selling at Zeta Sigma, or she had a heart defect and had died stone sober.

  • • •

  They said she died with a dick in her mouth.

  They said the professor killed her, in the dining room, with a candlestick, blunt force trauma to the back of her skull, after she begged him to leave his wife. Better than in the bathroom, by a lezzie sister who’d been stalking her, who burned out her eyes in a jealous rage with a curling iron. Or in the Chapter Room, by the ghosts of our founders, somewhat homely women in inexplicably dirty chemises, who wrapped their hands around her neck and squeezed. And someone said no, she died in Room Epsilon, or maybe it was Kappa.

  • • •

  They said that she was in the room during initiation. That, when all of the pledges were blindfolded and led down the hallway in their red robes, she was the cold hand leading them into the firelight. If an acolyte looked to her right during the ceremony, they’d glimpse the side profile of her pale face, luminous in the dark.

  • • •

  They said we could find her in the back stairwell if we went in there with the lights off and called her name, three times, sotto voce. Her body was half-human, half-snake, and if you were quiet after you called her name, you would hear her slithering over the stairs, seeking you out with her forked tongue.

  • • •

  Then they said we could find her in the back stairwell if we went there with the lights off and called her name, six times, sotto voce, and she would come out from the corner and claw at the caller’s eyes with her long, moldy fingernails, her face once lovely, now putrid, trying to make the sister look just as mutilated as she did in her rot.

  • • •

  Fifteen years after her death a sister brought a Ouija board out of the pledge study closet and gathered a group of us together in the living room. We stacked the logs and lit the fire. Some of us, halfheartedly, rolled a finger in the ash bucket and slipped it in our mouths. We lit candles. Each of us touched a finger to the planchette.

  —Are you here?

  —Y—E—S.

  The log popped and spit an ember onto the hearth.

  —Who’s moving it? we asked.

  —I’m not! we insisted.

  —Are you happy? we asked her.

  —N—O.

  We were more saddened than afraid.

  Some of the fingers on the planchette were cold, some were hot and sweaty, some were delicate, some were forceful.

  —How did you die? one girl asked.

  —G—O—O—G—L—E—I—T—B—I—T—C—H—E—S, the board said.

  One sister admitted that she was pushing the planchette and we banished her laughing into the shadows. But we didn’t google, not then. We pulled closer to the fire.

  —Are you happy? we asked.

  —D—D—D—D—D—D—D, the board said, and someone knocked the boxed wine off of the table and we were done for the night.

  In our respective bedrooms, the rooms of sisters we no longer knew, we typed her name into the search bar and read. We knew the girl, but not as well as the ghost. In each room, we reached the same conclusion: we would not share her earthly story. We would not say her name. We would not alter, perverse or protective, the legend that she had become. She belonged to us now, our dear sister, and we were the keepers of her story.

  25

  The Chapter Room

  -CHORUS-

  May 2009

  In 1864, founders Virginia Wheeler, Lucinda May, and Joanna Howard . . .

  The room was candlelit and overheated.

  bonded together to form a private society of womanly compassion and support . . .

  Necklace clasps dug into the backs of necks, legs were crossed at ankles, toes crammed into pumps.

  These women, in their youthful wisdom . . .

  The girls sat in order of seniority. In the front row, Elina sucked a peppermint down into a wafer, then crunched it on wisdom.

  Sought love and support in a time of hatred . . .

  Janelle stared at Stella’s side profile and wished she’d suffer a brain aneurism. Nothing deadly, just something that would leave one side of her face all droopy.

  While their homeland was torn apart by war . . .

  Upstairs, Deirdre imagined, Margot’s ghost drifted aimlessly down the hall. Ghost Margot was wearing her favorite black clubbing dress with her hair pinned sweetly at the nape. Ghost Margot was not covered in piss or vomit. Ghost Margot had flawless skin and immaculately drawn eyeliner, the battle regalia of the dead. Ghost Margot still knew how to have a good laugh, though, and likely was the reason why Amanda inexplicably had a panty liner stuck to the back of her cardigan.

  These remarkable young women built a sacred sisterhood upon the bedrock of peace.

  The newest sisters sat in the back, still in awe of the pomp of candles and chanting in unison. Bedrock of peace. That’s nice, thought Twinkle. She pictured a mermaid napping on a boulder in the Bahamas. What was the word for a mermaid from the Bahamas? Bahamian? Bahaman? Bahamener? Bahamamaid?

  As president, it was Corinne’s job to intone the final line:

  Let there never be strife among us, she said.

  From this day until our last, they replied, bored.

  Candles were blown out. Fluorescents flipped on. Out of the cover of candlelight, the older girls straightened in their chairs and recrossed their ankles.

  It was happening now, Deirdre knew. Upstairs, Margot’s ghost drifted from Room Alpha, to Beta, to Gamma.

  —Madame Secretary, please review the minutes from last week, Corinne said.

  Minutes were accounted for. Old business was reviewed. New business was offered to the table. It was time.

  —I have new business, Deirdre said.

  Corinne, who had clearly been expecting a seamless, business-free meeting that ended promptly at nine fifteen so she could review tapes of her most recent failure in the Miss Northeast pageant before bed, paused before responding. Ignoring would be impossible. If only she hadn’t sounded so assertive!

  —Yes, sister?

  Twyla, who had been half-asleep throughout the meeting, now sat upright in her chair, stricken. Something was wrong. Something was wrong upstairs.

  —I move that we initiate Margot Glenn into her rightful place within the Omega Chapter this evening.

  —Deirdre, Corinne said, I told you before—

  —I know she’s not eligible. I know.
But she deserves it all the same.

  —Madame Secretary, please read the Omega Chapter Enrollment portion of the guide to our sisterhood, Corinne said.

  THE OMEGA CHAPTER

  A sister, after a lifetime of honorable repute and service to her house, is to be enrolled into the Omega Chapter upon her departure from this earth. A sister may be active or alumna upon the time of her transition. A sister’s enrollment into the Omega Chapter must be performed by her home house at a time deemed appropriate by the executive board. Noninitiates and disaffiliated sisters are (regretfully) not eligible for the passage into the Omega Chapter.

  —Read the last line again, Corinne said.

  Tracy complied.

  All were silent.

  —Margot was an active sister, Deirdre said.

  —She was, Corinne agreed. And she was a damn good sister. For God’s sake, Tracy, stop taking notes on this. Go off book.

  Tracy, who had been frantically recording the minutes of the exchange, closed her notebook and gaped. Hands around the room began to rise, but Corinne ignored them. If one spoke, they all would want to talk and then this would spiral into another night on the repercussions of Margot’s fuckup.

  —None of us will ever forget Margot. Her loss was a devastation to our house. I’ll always remember her sweet smile, her kind words in the hall—(Deirdre remembered, acutely, the time Margot had gotten high with Corinne and proclaimed to her face that she was more boring than a cooked ham). Yet, and I hate the crassness of this statement, if she had survived her suicide—

  —Overdose, Deirdre said.

  —If she had survived her overdose, then she would have suffered consequences at the hands of the executive board for engaging in drug use as an active sister in the sanctity of our home.

  —Bullshit! shouted Eva. Corinne, you were high as shit on the back patio like five hours ago and now you’re talking about drug use like it doesn’t happen. Such bullshit!

  —You’re right, Corinne said. I was high, Twyla was high, and Ruby was high. But the difference here is that none of us almost cost the chapter. None of us made a reason for an army of cops and reporters and those finicky bitches from Nationals to show up. We didn’t risk the value of the house over a stupid—