The Two Kinds of Decay

The Signet

After I began to understand the difference between public and private schools, and after I knew about the social register, and after I determined that class is determined not by schools or money but by family, and in spite of understanding that nothing I could do would ever deliver me from the middle class, I wanted to join the Signet Society, a social club for Harvard students that wasn’t officially affiliated with Harvard and had a separate endowment and a private clubhouse.

It was a practice club for the exclusive Boston and New York social clubs the men and some of the women would join after graduation.

I came from a public school with GED tutors and auto shop, but I was elected to the Signet Society, and for my initiation, instead of shimmying up the pillar drunk while the officers held it at its wooden base, they laid the pillar on the ground and I stepped over it with my cane.

I wore a lavender gown and a twenty-inch tube that never clogged as long as blood thinner was shot into it every two days. From one direction it went into my right breast, under the collarbone and straight up, just under the skin, then into my jugular, so that halfway up my neck you couldn’t see the shape of it anymore, and then it went into my subclavian vein and reached toward my heart. On the outside it hung like two white drinking straws, six inches long, with one red clamp and one blue one, like a piece of jewelry, and it was nothing like the expensive pendants the other Signet girls wore.

All spring I sat in my wooden chair like the others, and when it was my turn to ladle the soup at lunch I stood up proudly on my legs and did it. One girl wore a gold pendant shaped like a whale’s tail. Her parents kept a summer house on Nantucket. I was proud to be as good as she was.

I already knew I could syringe the blood out of the tube in my chest and pick off the scabs where the tube went into me, and lie still while the doctors took fluid from my spine, or pierced my muscles with electrodes and turned on the juice, and for a long time I would not admit those things had been anything but an interruption in what seemed my life’s larger project, which was to infiltrate the upper class and to be as good as those rich girls, and not once in the next ten years did I consider that the project of my life was not to wonder that I could pick up a ladle at that exclusive table, but that I could pick up a ladle at all.