Sorority Sisters

by Claudia Welch

  “Cool. When will you know?”

  “I heard. Yesterday, in fact.”

  “Is it a secret or something?” Missy asks with a smirk.

  “No, I just . . . I don’t know. I guess I don’t want to think about it until I have to. I have a lot to do. I’m putting it off.”

  “Good plan.”

  “Do you really think so?” I ask. Because it doesn’t sound like it to me; it feels like a fall back to the trenches, a cover my ears and hide under the covers move.

  I have a trust fund. I have nowhere I need to be, nowhere I need to go, no one who needs me to be with them or to go where they go. I’m just making it all up as I go along.

  “Sure. That’s what I do,” Missy says, stabbing out her cigarette. “What else can you do?”

  “No life plan? No great strategy?” I ask.

  “Life laughs at plans, McCormick. Haven’t you figured that out yet?”

  I guess I haven’t.

  Diane

  – Spring 1978 –

  The theme of this party, the last party for the seniors, is to dress as what you’re going to be doing five years from now. I’m wearing fatigues. I look so pretty. I can’t wait to see the photographs.

  For this party, I brought Dave York for two reasons: he’s adorable and he’s funny. I can relax with him. We’ve spent a lot of shared hours in the Four-O together, swapping drinks and stories. Oh, and another plus for Dave: he’s not ROTC.

  I guess it goes without saying that all the ROTC guys know about Doug and me, and what happened, and then what didn’t happen—namely, us becoming a couple. It was awkward for a really long time, which was hardly surprising, but the guys were cool about it for the most part. I got through it, but I don’t want to go through it again. Ever. Navy guys and my love life have got to stay separate, just like they’ve stayed separate since Doug kicked me out of bed.

  Yes, that’s how I think of it. And, yes, it still hurts like hell.

  Something’s going on between Laurie and Doug, something that she wants to keep a secret but isn’t quite a secret. They’ve probably gone out already, knowing Doug. I should tell her she should avoid Doug like the plague, but she won’t listen to me because Doug has that effect on girls. They just don’t want to say no. Trust me, I’m an expert.

  The party, the final Beta Pi party for me, is at Stephanie Haynes’ house. Her house is in the hilly part of Beverly Hills, so parking is a bear, but the house is gorgeous. It doesn’t look that big from the street, big enough, but not huge, but when you go inside, the house just opens up and there’s a big pool overlooking what looks like an endless forest, which we all know is impossible in LA. Stephanie’s dad is a big name at one of the studios and her mom was an actress in the forties. They probably bought this house for forty thousand dollars in 1950.

  “They’re running low on vodka,” Dave says, bringing me my drink as I sit on the diving board. “If you want more, you’d better hurry.”

  “Is this some sort of male thing? How to get a girl drunk in twelve easy lessons?” I say.

  “Are you telling me you’d need twelve lessons to learn how to get drunk?” Dave says.

  “Dave, that is not even close to what I said. I think I just got you drunk in one easy lesson.”

  “I didn’t pay tuition for this class.”

  “You can take it pass/fail.”

  “You are not making any sense at all.”

  “That must mean it’s time to switch to scotch.”

  “Diane, that part I understood,” Dave says, chuckling.

  He’s a fun guy. Why couldn’t I have fallen in love with him?

  Okay, no. No. No. No. I’m not going to think that, not anymore. And especially not here, with Laurie just across the pool from me, sitting on the edge of the pool, her feet on the steps in the shallow end, Matt Carlson at her side. You can do that when you’re wearing shorts and a cute Hawaiian shirt and Jap flaps. Me, I’m wearing combat boots. They’re black. I look like a mushy G.I. Joe doll.

  “You’re a brave man, coming out with me looking like this,” I say to Dave.

  “You’re nuts,” he says, shaking his head and looking around at the crowd.

  “What? You had a thing for G.I. Joe when you were a kid?” I say.

  “Nah,” Dave says, looking down at me. “I was all about Barbie. Taking her clothes off . . . watching her stiff-leg it around, naked . . .”

  “God, you are one sick puppy,” I say, laughing.

  “Hey, a guy’s got to get experience somewhere.”

  “Poor Barbie, so defenseless.”

  “Yeah. That’s what made her so perfect.”

  “I am officially throwing up now,” I say, standing up to shove him away from me. I’m laughing, so it kind of spoils my harsh and highly justified rejection of his Barbie mangling.

  “You’re throwing up? Already?” Karen says, walking toward the diving board across the pool deck.

  “It’s not what you think,” I say. “It’s Dave and his sick Barbie fascination. It literally made me sick. Well, almost. Give me a minute and I’ll make it literal.”

  “Anything I can do to help?” Dave says. “Barbie had this red velvet cape and I—”

  “It was velveteen, you moron,” I say. “God, why am I helping him? Stop. Just stop with the Barbie debauchery.”

  “Wait,” Drew, Karen’s date, says. “A red cape. I’m seeing it. What else?”

  “Okay, that’s it,” I say. “We are officially entering Barf City.”

  “What is it with you? Did you get a job at Mattel or something?” Karen asks Drew.

  Drew is a senior, not in a fraternity, and is nice-looking in a scruffy, Italian sort of way. “No, but as the home of Barbie . . .” Drew says, his voice trailing off suggestively.

  “Why don’t you two get a room so you can have privacy to play with your Barbies,” I say.

  “You make it sound so dirty,” Dave said with an offended look.

  “What sounds dirty?” Cindy Gabrielle says, joining us at the diving board. Cindy, since she’s not a senior, can wear whatever she wants. She apparently wanted to wear white pants, a pale gold silk shirt tucked in, and a gold braided belt. She looks great, I have to say. She got a Dorothy Hamill cut a year or so ago and it really suits her. Her eyes look enormous and her neck is about as thick as a number two pencil.

  Cindy is working her way back from being an Omega. It’s a beautiful thing to see. Joan Collier has been working on her, and since Joan is hanging with us more, the Exclusives, we’ve been working on her, too. Oh, yeah. We’ve taken that set-down about being an exclusive group of friends and run with it. We’re now calling ourselves the Exclusives. It’s pretty funny. Not what Colleen expected, I’m sure.

  “Barbie,” Karen says.

  “Barbie’s not dirty. I played Barbies all the time and there’s nothing dirty about it,” Cindy says, a puzzled look on her face.

  “Play it with Dave,” I say. “You’ll be scarred for life.”

  “You played Barbies?” Cindy’s date asks Dave.

  Cindy’s date has longish, blondish hair and a nice tan. That’s all I know about him.

  “This is Rob Gottschalk,” Cindy says, introducing him. “We’re in the same accounting class.”

  We all nod or say mumbled hellos, eager not to get in the way of Dave’s response to Rob. This should be good.

  “I played with Barbie, if you get what I mean,” Dave says, grinning.

  We all look at Rob to see if he’ll get it.

  Rob grins and nods. He gets it.

  “I vote for an official change of topic. Before I hurl. Who’s with me?” I say.

  I raise my hand. Karen raises her hand. Cindy hesitates, looking at Rob, then at Dave.

  “Cindy,
you’re with us,” I say. “Raise your hand.”

  She raises her hand, laughing.

  “Okay, that passed. No more Barbie talk,” I say.

  “It was three to three!” Dave says.

  “Beta Pi party, Beta Pi home-court advantage. You lose. Try not to be a baby about it,” I say, grinning at Dave. He’s such a fun guy to party with.

  “Fine,” he says, shaking his head. “I need a refill to buoy my incredible grace in losing. Anyone else?”

  “I have always heard that Rho Delts were great at losing. All that practice, I guess,” I say, deadpan.

  It goes on as parties do, mixing and mingling, talking and teasing, drinking and laughing. Stephanie’s parents had greeted us all at the door, but they’ve made themselves scarce since. Her mom looks like an aging movie star, still pretty and casting a glamorous shadow.

  Everyone is here tonight, every Beta Pi, and I find I can’t stop looking at them all, memorizing faces, remembering moments between us. It’s over. This is the last party, the last Beta Pi event.

  The music changes.

  “Oh, my God!” I say. “They’re playing ‘Brick House’! Let’s go!”

  “Brick House” is one of the best dance songs of all time. It’s way better than “Stairway to Heaven,” with all those weird tempo changes. If the Beta Pis have a theme song, and we actually do but it’s too sweet to be our real theme song, it’s “Brick House.” Whenever it’s played, we go nuts and dance like we’re on American Bandstand mixed with Soul Train.

  Every Beta Pi is already dancing, arms up, hips moving to the beat, laughing and dancing with one another, for one another. I jump right in, howling my happiness, pulling Karen along with me. We’re laughing and dancing to the most chauvinistic song ever recorded, but who cares? You hear it and you’ve got to dance.

  The guys are dancing with us, sort of. But really, it’s just us, just the Beta Pis, dancing to our favorite song at the last sorority party we’ll ever attend.

  “Photog! Photog! Take our picture!” I yell. The photographer dutifully obeys and the flash lights us up for a second, the moment captured.

  The only thing left to do, to end the night perfectly, is to hit Sammy’s and throw Sammy’s burgers at the side of the AG house. We’ll take Joan’s car.

  Laurie

  – Summer 1978 –

  “So, what do you think? I know it’s just a card table, but with the tablecloth on it, you barely tell, right?” Karen says, standing across the room, her hands on her hips, her expression both critical and hopeful.

  “It’s wonderful,” I say. “I don’t know how you did it, but the whole apartment looks charming.”

  “Well, we were starting out with standard Hollywood 1950s style. It’s hard to go wrong from there,” Karen says.

  I could have gone wrong from that start, but I leave it at that. Karen and I rented an apartment on Riverside Drive in North Hollywood. It’s a two-story apartment building with all the apartment doors on one side of the building, the second-floor balcony walkway providing an overhang for the first-floor apartments below. We got a first-floor apartment, which is a good thing since I’m positive we couldn’t have carried our mattresses up a flight of stairs, let alone a couch.

  “I can’t understand how you made maroon-and-peach tile look cute,” I say. There is peach tile with maroon trim tiles in the kitchen and the bathroom. The walls in the apartment are painted cream and the only air conditioner is a unit hanging out the bedroom window. The carpet is brown shag with the shag so tired at this point that not a single strand is sitting up at attention. The apartment was old, tired, a little grim, and small, but it was the right price at $245 a month, and it’s a half a mile from the 101.

  “I just didn’t fight it,” she says, straightening the tablecloth that was perfectly straight to begin with. “Go with the flow, you know?”

  “If you say so,” I say.

  “With that attitude, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship,” Karen says.

  “Casablanca,” I say. “See? I’m learning.”

  “I’m so glad we’re still rooming together; aren’t you? It makes it seem almost like we haven’t graduated. I still can’t get used to not living in the house. It’s so quiet with just the two of us!”

  It is, and I’m not sure how long it’s going to take me to get used to that, or if I ever will. I’ve lived for so many years in the midst of a throng of women, hiding in plain sight, able to become a part of something bigger than I am, even if it’s only for a year or so. Now it’s just the two of us in a one-bedroom apartment on the edge of the Valley. It is very quiet.

  “I’ll try to talk more loudly. Will that help?” I say.

  “Give it a try. We’ll see how it goes,” she says. “So, really, you like what I’m doing with the apartment? You didn’t have much say in it.”

  “I had no say in it, but that’s fine with me. I think it looks great. I don’t know how you did so much with a card table and two twin beds, but I’m impressed.”

  “Don’t forget the white Naugahyde couch,” she says, grinning. She got it at a consignment shop on Sunset, and it was vile, but after scrubbing it with cleanser and piling it with pillows from Nepal, it looks almost chic.

  “You got a couch? I’ll take it for a test flight.”

  We’d left the door open because of the heat, and there, crossing the threshold and walking into my apartment, is Doug Anderson. My heart shivers as he enfolds me in his arms for a quick hug.

  “You found it!” I say. “Isn’t this the cutest apartment? Karen gets all the credit.”

  “Hi, Karen,” Doug says.

  “Hi,” she says. “I need to get the closet in order. You guys don’t mind me.”

  With that, she walks into the bedroom and closes the door.

  Doug walks over to the couch and sits down, spreading his arms across the back, grinning at me. One of the pillows slips to the floor. “It’s a nice apartment. I’m glad you and Karen are living together again. She’s always been your closest sorority friend—am I right?”

  “Yes. I guess so,” I say. “Can I get you something to drink? We have sodas and milk. We still need to buy a coffeemaker. Sorry.”

  The sound of the cars on Riverside can be heard inside the apartment. From the bedroom, I can hear the faint clink of hangers being pushed together. Above us, someone walks across his apartment and turns on a faucet.

  “It’s a little noisy, isn’t it?” Doug says with a smile. “I’m sure you’ll get used to it.”

  “I can’t get you anything?”

  “Nothing from the fridge,” he says, patting the spot next to him.

  I settle down next to him, leaning into his shoulder, smiling from my heart. I don’t know how I ended up with Doug, with Diane’s Doug, but I did. It all happened very fast, and it’s still happening, in a way; we’re still getting to know each other, finding our way into a relationship that was born as the college years were dying. Diane is gone now, stationed in Virginia, a continent between us, and Doug, at least for now, is here with me. It won’t last. He’s only going to be here for another week, leaving just before Ellen’s wedding, which is probably ideal timing. I wouldn’t want to face Ellen with Doug at my side, not at her wedding when she’s supposed to be a blissful bride, though I can’t imagine Ellen ever being blissful about anything, at least not for very long. It’s easier with Karen. Karen has the knack for making everything easier, even my dating Doug.

  “I thought I’d take you both out to dinner,” Doug says, his hand stroking the back of my neck, kissing my temple. “I’d like to make up for not helping you move in.”

  “You couldn’t help that, though we would have loved some muscle for the heavy lifting.”

  “How’d you manage it?”

  “Karen ran into a gu
y getting out of his car in the parking lot, had him laughing in about a minute, and, presto chango, he held one end of the couch while we held the other.”

  Doug smiles. “Strategic strike. Well-done, Karen.”

  “I’ll ask her if she’s up for dinner,” I say, kissing him quickly on the mouth before I get up. He pulls me back down and kisses me harder, a passionate kiss that makes my knees weak. “Or not,” I say on a breath of air.

  “No, go ahead,” he says. “I’ll behave myself. That’s a promise.”

  “Hey,” I say, opening the bedroom door to see Karen with a pile of clothes on her twin bed about two feet tall. “Doug would like to take us to dinner.”

  “Oh, no, you go ahead. I’ve got to get this organized before I can relax and even think about eating. By the time you get home we should be able to sleep in these beds.”

  “Really?” I say, looking around the room. It’s a complete disaster, and half of the disaster is mine, but Doug is here and I want to go. It’s as cold-blooded as that.

  “Well, don’t ask me to sign in blood, but yeah, it’s possible you might actually be able to sleep in your bed tonight.”

  “I can’t wait.”

  “Hey, would you mind if I hung some pictures without you? I just want to get everything set up the way I want it. Unless you wanted to do it?”

  “No, go ahead. Whatever you want to do, I’m fine with it.”

  “Okay, thanks. And have fun.”

  She’s back to tossing clothes around her bed before I can close the door behind me, grabbing some up by their hangers, moving others to the foot of the bed, making sense of it, obviously, though I can’t see her method. I’m not even sure why I’m bothering to close the door to the living room, but she did it first, and so I do it.

  Doug is standing right behind me, just barely on the living room side of the doorway, and I almost step on his foot as I turn around and face the living room. He catches me with a grin.

  “Sorry. I just wanted to see how big the bedroom was,” he says.