Rita Will

by Rita Mae Brown

  Jerry Pfeiffer, in his junior year, number two on the men’s varsity tennis team, offered guidance.

  For a start, he winnowed out the good restaurants from the bad. This was a greater service than one might suppose because in 1962 most restaurants were awful. Mashed potatoes to the max.

  He knew where to purchase liquor since the county was dry. One could drink near beer, a brew with a low alcohol content, but you couldn’t drink the real thing. Although I didn’t drink, I appreciated his thirst and everyone else’s around me.

  I learned that the minute you want to make something desirable, outlaw it. Drinking was part of rebellion, part of outsmarting the authorities. All you had to do to throw a great party was smuggle in a keg of beer. The biggest thrill was drinking under the noses of the campus police, who could be relied upon to stop by most parties.

  Jerry threw terrific parties. He knew the best people and the best places. Although he hadn’t the money for a car, he managed to borrow one whenever he needed it.

  The weekend of the Florida State football game, deep in the grape, he bought all the laundry detergent he could find. This bounty he lovingly deposited in every fraternity fountain or pool, city fountain or pool—in fact, any man-made body of water he could find.

  As he poured the white flakes into the water he was transformed into one of Macbeth’s witches—“bubble, bubble, toil and trouble.” He never got over playing that part from the high-school play. That and Charley’s Aunt seemed always to inspire him.

  After Jerry’s cleanliness fit, he wanted to lie down in the middle of Route 441 to see if he could stop traffic. Took everything I had to drag him out of there.

  Finally, he passed out behind the Beta Theta Pi house. I turned him over to his fraternity brothers.

  One of the rites of passage for a sorority or fraternity pledge was being road-tripped. A pledge is a sorority member in the larval state. After existing like a slug for a year, one undergoes tests not of an intellectual nature. Then, wrapped in the chrysalis of sororal conformity, one emerges a resplendent sister with full voting privileges.

  Overpowered from behind, with a bag thrown over my head, I was dragged into a car where two sisters sat on me for good measure. This was better than being tied up, so I endured the hip bones.

  It was early October 1962 and our entire pledge class was being road-tripped, usually in twos. Twenty of us, carried off screaming (but not too loudly), were deposited down back roads.

  If you’re a chicken, it doesn’t bode well for your future and each pledge knew this.

  JoAnn Nokomis and I were dumped on a country road. We ripped our blindfolds off and hoped we’d figure out where the hell we were.

  We walked down the gravelly, sandy road toward lights. A small clapboard house beckoned us. JoAnn and I discussed this and decided the sight of two bedraggled Tri-Deltas would scare the bejesus out of the inhabitants.

  We trudged on.

  Fortunately we wore sneakers, the old white kind, before they looked like space boots. No socks. You couldn’t possibly wear socks and be considered a real person. Since I’d known that sooner or later I’d be road-tripped, I had taken the precaution of taping two dimes to the instep of each foot. Part of the road-tripping ritual was that the sisters removed money, pocket knives, anything helpful.

  We approached a small gas station. It was closed but that good ole blue and white Bell telephone on a pole (no booths out in the boonies) was operating. So was the Coke machine. Cost five cents.

  I called the house. JoAnn and I screamed bloody murder when a sister answered the phone. We told them in gasps that we were dying. We hung up after a particularly wrenching sob.

  Then I called Jerry and told him to get his ass to where I thought we were, southeast of town.

  A half hour and many mosquitoes later, he appeared along with a few other Betas. We informed them of our ruse.

  Stopping at a drugstore in town that was still open, we bought out the Ex-Lax supply. We dropped JoAnn not far from the Delta Delta Delta house. The next night there would be chocolate pudding for dessert. We knew that from the schedule. JoAnn ground up the Ex-Lax and stirred it into the pudding, which had been made that night and put in the fridge. Then she snuck back out and went around to the front. Falling through the front door in her exhausted and disheveled state, she declared that I was lying by the side of the road and she couldn’t revive me.

  Meanwhile, Jerry and I rounded up lots of Betas, made tons of water balloons and returned to the place where JoAnn and I had been dropped. The boys pulled their cars further down the road, then lay flat in the fields. I sprawled by the side of the road. Sure enough, three cars of frightened sisters soon rolled up.

  Now you might ask why none of the sisters called the police. Two reasons: People weren’t as quick to seek outside help then, and, far more important, they could get expelled. If I was dead, I was dead. Nobody could do a thing about that. If they were expelled, that would be a disaster.

  The sisters had correctly suspected that JoAnn and I were pulling their legs with the phone call, but the sight of poor JoAnn sent them back into the night.

  I could barely contain my glee when I heard that first car door slam and a muffled sob as a sister sprinted toward my crumpled form. Within seconds all the sisters were out on the road and whammo, water balloons were flying from all directions.

  The only problem with this plan was that I got soaked, too. It was so much fun, who cared?

  After much scuffling and laughing, everyone gave up and drove down to a greasy spoon to eat hamburgers.

  Dinners at the sorority house were formal affairs. You had to appear promptly at six. You couldn’t wear shorts or slacks. You had to wear a dress, good shoes, and have your hair in place. During this ordeal you sang between courses.

  We had warned the pledges we liked—which is to say most of them—not to eat dessert. Since pledges were scattered throughout the tables, this wasn’t immediately noticeable.

  The sisters had a moving experience.

  Our pledge class quickly gained a reputation for giving as good as we got. We inspired other pledge classes to carry on, too.

  What a silly, wonderful time it was. Innocent, too, in many ways. The worst that anyone did back then was sleep with one another. I sidestepped that because if caught you’d get thrown out of school. They threw us out for such trifles—you could get rapped for violating the dress code.

  I hoped I would make contacts and friends at Florida who would go through life with me. Being a freshman, at the bottom of the barrel, gave me an opportunity to scan those above me. I was and remain a careful person when making friends.

  For me friendship is as sacred as marriage.

  Faye, meanwhile, raised holy hell. I can’t keep track of how many times she changed her major. She dragged me to Jacksonville once for the express purpose of getting me drunk. She succeeded. Sick as a dog, I vowed never to do that again. I haven’t. Anyway, she always waltzed off with the best-looking guy around.

  One night I was up late studying and Faye rolled in around one. Relatively sober, she sat down on her bed. Neither one of us had bothered to decorate our room, unlike most of the girls in Jennings. We spent so little time in there, why bother?

  “Brown, you’ll make A’s.”

  “Gotta nail it. I’ll lose my scholarship if I don’t.” I knew she knew that but I repeated it nonetheless. I didn’t want Faye to think me lacking in joie de vivre.

  “I think you’re a lesbian.”

  “Faye.” I shot her a dirty look.

  “You love Jerry, but—?” She held up her hands.

  The thought of being a lesbian didn’t bother me. But I rarely thought of romantic stuff. By now I’d matured enough to know that being gay killed all chances of material success unless you lied through your teeth. I was poised on indecision—I simply did not know what I was sexually. Nor was I eager to find out.

  “Why aren’t you wearing Jerry’s fraternity pin if he loves
you so much?”

  “I don’t know.” I didn’t … but a swift current of anger picked up my energy.

  Getting pinned was a ceremony as thickly sweet as treacle pudding. The whole damned fraternity house trooped to your window in the sorority house or dorm. They stood in a semicircle and lit candles, then sang songs. The adored one fluttered at her window. A balcony might provide a better backdrop for fluttering but a window would do. The real pros cried. The man standing in the center of the circle of light was your beau. After all this choreographed romance, the fair damsel floated down, kissed her man and was pinned above the heart. If she was wearing an inflatable bra she hissed.

  Inflatable bras, the rage then, felt natural when you squeezed them. Sadly, no one ever developed an inflatable penis for the same purpose.

  I would rather have bled from the throat than put up with being pinned.

  Girls attracted me no more than boys, though. Nothing connected me to a sexual level because I ruthlessly suppressed anything that might intrude on my drive to succeed. The first thing I had to do was make it through college with great grades. And while I loved Jerry in that I accepted him totally, I felt no great attraction for him.

  Without knowing it, I was surrounded by gay kids. No one told. If only they had … but as my experience will soon show, hypocrisy saved them on the outside while destroying them on the inside.

  Faye, the most open-minded soul I ever met except for Dad, truly could have cared less. The idea that she might be sharing close quarters with a lesbian was fine with her. She accepted people for what they were; her patience ran thin with the fakes, the liars and the cowards. Why I’ll never know, but she liked me and I liked her.

  Her circle of girlfriends, all attractive, shared her attitudes. They were good to me.

  Faye saw something in me that I didn’t see myself and it wasn’t just that I might be gay. She saw my focus, my willpower and my tremendous fear of being sucked into poverty. She never made fun of that fear and she never lorded it over me with material possessions.

  Another woman who was kind in this latter respect was Bernadette Castro. The heiress to the Castro Convertible furniture fortune, she attended Pinecrest in Fort Lauderdale while I was at Fort Lauderdale High School. She was also an Anchor Club kid. I knew her a little. Cuban, dark, and with a glorious body, she possessed singing talent. Everyone made fun of her because her dad could afford the backup band. But the truth is, she did have talent.

  This was the first time I perceived the evilness of people toward the rich. They never allow them to succeed, and credit whatever success they do achieve to their money.

  Bernadette ran for the U.S. Senate, on the Republican Party ticket, in New York State in 1994. She couldn’t unseat Moynihan, but brava for the run. I was proud of her.

  I soldiered on, but I worried about Faye. She was going to get thrown out of school if she didn’t work harder.

  Apart from Faye’s insight, my first year seemed typical enough. I adjusted to being one of fourteen thousand students. I raced through my required courses so I could start some electives in my sophomore year. I ran track and found I had a knack for the javelin. Track and field didn’t interfere with tennis.

  I thought about Betty Rinehart. I wondered if the convent was what she hoped it would be. I truly missed her.

  As for Dad, sometimes I’d walk across the campus and music would ring out from the bell towers. My eyes would mist up. I wanted to write and tell him how much I was learning and how lucky I was to be in college. If he had lived, I would have been at an Ivy League school, but now I was fortunate to be at Florida, a state school.

  Mom wrote three letters a week, which floored me. Whence came this maternal burst?

  The absolute shocker occurred when Mom drove the whole way to Gainesville. Jerry, as stunned as I was, took her to dinner. Students have little money but the fact that he spent it on Mother made him a giant in my eyes. Mother loved him. Who didn’t?

  We walked around the campus. I showed her the alligator, sleepy, old, covered in moss and wallowing in a big pond.

  She loved the Delta Delta Delta house, built on three levels.

  “I feel like a coed.” She giggled.

  The next night just the two of us ate at a small restaurant in downtown Gainesville. As dinner ended she pulled out her pack of Chesterfields.

  “Your father smoked three packs of Pall Malls a day. I think if he hadn’t smoked like a chimney he might have survived his heart attack.” She paused. “I don’t know.” Then she ripped up her cigarette pack. “That’s it.”

  Mom, a smoker since she was twelve, quit cold turkey.

  When she left the next day, I waved goodbye as she turned south on Route 441. It occurred to me that Mother loved me.

  She showed it in peculiar ways, if she showed it at all, but I didn’t remember her driving that far for anyone else.

  Then, too, I knew the minute she arrived home she’d call Sis and tell her she had been a coed.

  38

  Mean as Snakeshit

  Camp Hiawatha in Kezar Falls, Maine, redefined the word cold. Summer nights drop into the low fifties, sometimes forties.

  Every moment of the day, crammed with activity, counted. The counselors—I was head tennis counselor—were as regimented as the kids, but we could sometimes go out at night if permission was granted.

  Jerry, a tennis counselor at Camp Wigwam, forty miles away, borrowed a car on a mutual day off. We would drive to Portland, a lovely city, home of Longfellow. I dragged Jer through the poet’s home, we ate lobsters by Penobscot Bay and we window-shopped.

  He would return to Gainesville for his senior year, then apply to other schools for graduate work in chemistry. We talked about an upcoming tennis tournament in Fryeburg, Maine, where we’d be playing mixed doubles. Then after the sunset we drove back to camp.

  The windows open, the smell of the pines drifting into the car, we laughed about our campers, other counselors, each other. We both gave as good as we got.

  “I’ll miss you when I’m gone.”

  “Won’t be for another year,” I answered, unromantic per usual.

  “You could transfer to the University of North Carolina, that’s really where I want to go. Chapel Hill is a great place.”

  “Anything’s bound to be better than Gainesville, the bedpan of the South.”

  He laughed. “Do you still want to go to graduate school?”

  “Yep.”

  “Can’t you sit down and write without it?”

  “Sure I can, but if I can go, I ought to do it. I’m not going to keep up my Latin once I leave school, and I need it.”

  Jerry had studied four years of Latin at Fort Lauderdale High. He knew the importance of Latin. If you don’t know Latin, you don’t know English. I needed Greek also, but I was delaying that as long as possible.

  ‘If we got married, we could live together,” he said. “I’ll get a good job as soon as I graduate and I’ll put you through graduate school.”

  “I don’t want to get married.”

  “You love me, don’t you?”

  “Yes. I always will.”

  “Well?”

  “Your parents are Catholic, we’re Lutheran. I’ve lived with that fight all my life and I will not raise my children Catholic.”

  “That’ll kill Mom,” he mumbled.

  “See what I mean?”

  “She wouldn’t have to know until we had children.”

  “And I won’t get married in the Catholic Church. We marry in my church.”

  “Oh, God,” he moaned.

  “Exactly.”

  We drove back to Camp Hiawatha in silence. I kissed him and walked back to my bunk.

  The next afternoon, he showed up again; he’d snuck off work.

  “We could be atheists,” he greeted me.

  My cherubs were hitting crosscourt forehands to one another.

  I walked over to him. “Jerry, what are you doing here?”

  �
��Asking for your hand in marriage.” He looked as solemn as a heart attack.

  “How about my foot?” I joked.

  “I love you. I don’t want to spend my life with any woman but you.”

  Much as I loved him, I didn’t feel in a nesting mood. All around me engagement rings sparkled as college seniors panicked.

  “Now or never.”

  “No.”

  “Then I’m dating other women,” he threatened.

  Threats don’t work with me. “Go ahead.”

  “Goddamn it.” His face reddened.

  I laughed at him, which made him madder.

  He left, and I returned to my kids.

  Jerry made a show of dating other girls. I didn’t budge.

  The green of the leaves darkened, the sun set a tad earlier. Camp would soon be over. The kids overflowed with tears, they kissed and hugged one another at campfire, at color war, wherever. Today someone would read lesbianism or male homosexuality into their actions. But children from age eight up to sixteen express themselves. They knew they wouldn’t be able to drive to see one another. They could phone one another since they were all rich enough, but still, they had no control over their lives. A camp goodbye was worth a few tears and kisses until next year.

  The ceremony that brought these emotions to a fever pitch was the fire-lighting ceremony.

  A big pile of firewood sat in the center of four smaller piles, east, south, north, west.

  A child chosen from each group would go over to one of the small piles.

  “I light the fire of friendship.” They’d boohoo before she finished the line.

  Then the west girl would light her fire, which stood for courage or whatever.

  As the four fires burned, a counselor or camp director would make a short speech about stellar personal qualities, then put the torch to the big pile.

  The bonfire blazing, Tondelayo, in Indian deerskin, would beat her tom-tom, dancing and singing. The joke was, of course, that Tondelayo was the name of the native girl improbably played by Hedy Lamarr, in White Cargo, a movie set in Africa. Our Tondelayo, bedecked in fringed and beaded deerskin, may well have had Indian blood in her veins, but she didn’t melt into the forest at ceremony’s end. She hopped in her car and buzzed off.