I’ll Take You There

1

In those days in the early Sixties we were not women yet but girls. This was, without irony, perceived as our advantage.

I am thinking of the house on a prominent hill of a hilly and wind-ravaged university campus in upstate New York in which I lived for five wretched months when I was nineteen years old, unraveling among strangers like one of my cheap orlon sweaters. I am thinking of how in this house there were forbidden areas and forbidden acts pertaining to these areas. Some had to do with the sacred rituals of Kappa Gamma Pi (these very words a sacred utterance, once you were initiated into their meaning) and some had to do with the sorority's British-born housemother, Mrs. Agnes Thayer.

They would claim that I destroyed Mrs. Thayer. Pushed her over the edge which makes me think of an actual cliff, a precipice, and Mrs. Thayer falling by some ghostly action of my flailing arms. Yet others would claim that Mrs. Thayer destroyed me.

The Kappa Gamma Pi house! The address was 91 University Place, Syracuse, New York. It was a massive cube of three floors in that long-ago architectural style known as neo-Classic; made of heavy dusky-pink-pewter limestone like ancient treasure hauled from the depths of the sea. Oh, if you could see it! If you could see it with my eyes. The looming ivy-covered facade and in the perpetual Syracuse wind the individual ivy leaves shivering and rippling like thought Insatiable questions. Why? why? why? The lofty portico and four till graceful white columns of the kind called Doric, smooth and featureless as telephone poles. The house was located at the far, northern end of University Place, a quarter-mile from Erie Hall, the granite administration building that was the oldest building on the university campus University Place itself was a wide boulevard with parkland as a median, slowly dying yet still elegant elms. Walking from the Kappa house to the university campus on the worst winter mornings was like climbing the side of a mountain, the incline was so steep in places, sidewalks icy and treacherous so you were better off trudging across the brittle grass of lawns instead. Returning, mostly downhill, was less of a physical effort but could be treacherous, too. A half-block from the northern end of University Place the earth shifted as if in a cruel whim and there was a final steep hill to be climbed, an upward-jutting spit of land, at the top of which was the stately Kappa house with, above its portico, these mysterious symbols-

The Kappa Gamma Pi house, unlike most of the local fraternity and sorority houses, had a history. It was, in fact, "historic": it hadn't been constructed for the mere utilitarian purpose of being a Greek residence, but had once been a millionaire's home, a mansion, built in 1841 (as a plaque proudly noted) by a prominent Syracuse clockworks manufacturer and deeded to the newborn local chapter of the national sorority Kappa Gamma Pi at the death of an elderly-widow alumna in 1938. Her name sacred in our memories as Kappa alums would solemnly instruct us but her name has vanished from my memory, it's only the house I recall.

Before I was initiated into Kappa Gamma Pi in the second semester of my freshman year at the university, I would often walk far out of my way to pass the house from below; I was a pledge by this time, yet not a "sister"; I drifted lovesick and yearning gazing up at the somber, ivy-covered facade, at the tall white columns in my imagination so many more than four columns, five, six, ten columns! The floating letters

filled me with wonder, awe. For I did not yet know what they meant. Will I be a Kappa? I thought. I-I!-will be a Kappa. It didn't seem possible, yet it had to be possible, for how otherwise would I continue? I was possessed by the wayward passion of one to whom passion is unknown; denied, and thwarted; if falling in love had been a game, the object of the game would have been, to me, to resist; as in chess, you might sacrifice pawns in the service of your queen; your queen was your truest self, your virgin-self, inviolable; never would you give away your queen! And so I was one whose immune system had become defenseless before the assault of a virulent micro-organism invader. My eyes, misted with emotion, purposefully failed to take in the patina of grime on the limestone walls and on the columns, or the just perceptibly rotting, mossy slates of the roof, which, iridescent when wet, in rare, blinding sunshine, were so beautiful. Nor did I see the rust-tinctured network like veins or fossil trails imprinted in the limestone by English ivy that was dying in places, had been dying for years, and was withering away. There were more than twenty Greek houses on or near University Place, and Kappa Gamma Pi was neither the largest nor the most attractive. You could argue that it was the most dour, possibly even the ugliest of the houses, but, to me, such qualities suggested aristocratic hauteur, authority. To live in such a mansion and to be an initiate, a sister of Kappa Gamma Pi, would be, I knew, to be transformed.

I wondered if, at initiation, I would be given a secret Kappa name.

I didn't believe in fairy tales or in those ridiculous romances beginning Once upon a time. A fairy tale of a kind had prevailed at my birth and during my infancy but it had been a cruel, crude fairy tale in which the newborn baby isn't blessed but cursed. Yet I believed in Kappa Gamma Pi without question. I believed that such transformations were not only possible, but common. I believed that such transformations were not only possible, but inevitable. Not I, not I exactly, but another girl with my name and face, a girl initiate-an active-would one day soon live in that house; with tremulous pride she would wear the Kappa pin, gleaming ebony with gold letters and a tiny gold chain above her left breast, where all the privileged sorority girls wore their sacred pins, in the proverbial region of the heart.

The Way In. Climbing to the house on wedges of stone that looked aged, ancient. Stone that had begun to crack, crumble; stone worn smooth by many feet, over many years. If the steps were icy or there was a wind (in all but the stale, stagnant air of summer, there was always a wind) you might take hold of the old, ornate, not entirely steady wrought iron railing. This hill, above the city-owned sidewalk, was so steep that there couldn't have been a lawn in the conventional sense, no grass to be mowed, only a craggy outcropping of granite, in the interstices of which grew dwarf shrubs and hardy ferns of the dark, bitter-green variety and Rosa rugosa in bright splotches of color; such a formidable fronting on the street was characteristic of most of the properties at the northern end of University Place, and may have assured the outsider's sense of their dignity, inaccessibility, and high worth. From the top of the steps (I'd counted them many times: eighteen) you might pause breathless to look back, to contemplate the view behind you, which was startling as a scene in an old woodcut: there was gothic dark-granite Erie Hall floating atop its hill, a higher hill than the Kappa hill, its bell gleaming (in memory, at least) in a perpetual fading yet golden-sepia, hauntingly beautiful light.

So often, the Syracuse sky "was overcast and glowering, as if with withheld secrets, passions. Clouds were never two-dimensional like painted scenery but massed, massive, bulging, tumescent, pocked and pitted and creviced and boiling, rarely white, rarely of a single hue, but infinitely varied shades of gray, dark-gray, powder-gray, bruise-gray, iron-gray, purple-gray, shot with a mysteriously advancing, and abruptly fading, sunlight. Rain was falling, or had recently fallen leaving everything slick, wet, shining, washed-clean; sullen, punished-looking; or gleaming with optimism, hope. Unless it was snow imminent-"Oh God, smell it? Like iron filings. That's snow."

The large, stately front door of the Kappa house was made of oak with an iron knocker; there was a doorbell that, when rung, emitted delicate, melodic chimes deep in the interior of the house. This "feminine" doorbell contrasted with the heavy masculine architecture and may have suggested something of the atmosphere within that was sly, subversive. The downstairs public rooms (as they were grandly called) were impressively formal, dark, high-ceilinged and gloomy even with their filigree gold-gilt French wallpaper; the heavy old furniture was "Victorian antiques." A legacy the local chapter of the Kappa alums assured us solemnly of priceless things, irreplaceable. Take care! We were made to feel like overgrown blundering children in a sacred space.

Yet it was sacred, I suppose. In its way. In its time. Who could resist the tasteful glitter of crystal chandeliers, dust-encrusted by day perhaps but, by night, iridescent and sparkling; the lavish carpets-"heirloom Oriental antiques"-vividly colored, jewel-like in certain areas if, in other, more trodden areas, worn thin as much-used woollen blankets. In several downstairs rooms there were imposing marble fireplaces like altars (rarely used, as it turned out, since they smoked badly); everywhere were filigree-framed mirrors with singed-looking glass that enhanced the plainest face if you tiptoed to stare into them, like Alice approaching the Looking-Glass World; these mirrors seemed to double, even treble, the proportions of the somber rooms as in a dream of fanatic clarity that leaves the dreamer exhausted and strangely demoralized, as if emptied of personality. Confused by these mirrors in my first visits to the house (during second-semester sorority rush week) I staggered away from the Kappas with a misleading sense of the house's grandeur, as if I'd been in a cathedral.

In a corner of the stately living room, near an oil portrait of the house's first owner, was a Steinway grand piano of dark, dully gleaming mahogany, with stained ivory keys, several of which stuck; it was a beautiful piano, but somehow melancholy, exuding a dark, rich odor, that quickened my heart to know the piano's secrets, to be able to play. Unfortunately the Kappa housemother had declared the piano off-limits even to those two or three skilled pianists among the Kappas, except for a single hour following dinner and Sunday afternoon between the arbitrary hours of 4:30 p.m. and 6:00 p.m. when the more aggressive Kappas banged out old favorites like "Chopsticks" and "Begin the Beguine."

Several times when I found myself alone in the living room, I dared to sit at the Steinway grand and fitted my shy fingers to the keys; gently I depressed the keys, calling up a faint, quavering, undersea sound deep inside the piano. (The piano was always kept closed, lid shut like a coffin.) I knew very little of pianos; I'd tried to play in imitation of a friend who took lessons, when I was twelve; I'd grown up with my grandparents who were farm people, German immigrants, with no time for music, still less classical music. Yet the fact of the piano in the Kappa living room was a consolation. As if in some way it were a sign of home. Even if I couldn't play it, and would not have been allowed to play it in any case. Still the piano exists. As the world-in-itself-I'd begun, in my sophomore year, to study Immanuel Kant-exists, unattached to us. The physical solidity seemed to argue for a reality beyond my own; more valuable than the fleeting, always unsatisfying moment through which I, a sophomore, a lonely girl amid a clamor of "sisters," was passing. For what was my mood except reluctance to return upstairs to the crowded smoky third-floor room to which I'd been assigned because my roommate, who chain-smoked Chesterfields and lived in a giddy clutter of clothes, nail polish (and nail polish remover that smelled virulent as a chemical defoliant), tubes of greasy lipstick, makeup in jars, and mimeographed course outlines from her education courses, would be there, and other Kappas would be lounging in the doorway or sprawled across my bed, exhaling smoke with the luxurious abandon of girls away from adult scrutiny, tapping ashes in the vague direction of a communal ashtray with a plastic hula girl at its center. Reluctant to return upstairs because to my dismay I was finding myself as isolated as I'd been before I had become a sister-an "active"-of Kappa Gamma Pi with no recourse except to conclude You! It's your own fault. You, always dissatisfied.

This was my curse. I would bear it through my life. As if a wicked troll had baptized me, in infancy, as my mother wasted away to Death, unknowing; a flick of the troll's fingers, poisonous water splashed onto my forehead. I baptize thee in the name of ceaseless yearning, ceaseless seeking and ceaseless dissatisfaction. Amen!

Once when I'd sat at the piano too long, lost in a reverie, depressing keys with both hands in near-inaudible chords that reverberated like ghost music heard at a distance, the harsh overhead lights of the living room were suddenly switched on (it was a late afternoon in November, dark as midnight outside) and there stood our housemother Mrs. Thayer staring at me from beneath the dramatic arch of the doorway. She had a regal figure and a powdered face that glowed pinkly moist and meaty as a canned ham; her expression was one of hauteur tinged with disbelief. "You! Is it-Mary Alice? What are you doing here? Have I not explained-and explained-that our piano is to be kept shut? Otherwise it will be clogged with dust, it will go out of tune, an expensive and irreplaceable musical instrument, an antique, a Sternway, an irreplaceable Sternway, for goodness's sake, you gurls! Have you no memory? Have you no mind? Have to be told, told, told! Again, again, again! "As if a spring had been tripped in her brain, Mrs. Thayer began to scold; this was her preferred way of scolding, in a bright, crisp, corrosive British accent. Like gas jets her close-set blue eyes flashed; she drew her tightly girdled, fattish little figure to its full height of perhaps five feet three inches, and regarded me for a long devastating moment. This was the look, the Brit glare, for which our housemother was famous. Girls belonging to rival sororities knew of Kappa's Mrs. Thayer; boys dating Kappas came away with accounts of her, shaking their heads in reluctant admiration. I cringed before the woman's contempt like a guilty child, my face burning, stammering, "Mrs. Thayer, I'm s-sorry. I actually wasn't-" Mrs. Thayer interrupted impatiently, loftily, for this too was a pet annoyance of hers, the way in which American gurls will apologize yet in the same breath try to deny that for which they are apologizing- "No excuses, please! I have heard, heard, heard these excuses all, already!" Airily Mrs. Thayer laughed to show she wasn't angry, of course; such trifles couldn't make her angry; she who'd survived what she spoke of proudly as the London Blitz. Except of course she was bemused, amused-"Oh, you American gurls." It was a dramatic gesture of Mrs. Thayer's to switch off the light to leave me in a gloomy darkness alleviated only by the hall light, to turn adroitly on her heel and stride away.

My first glimpse of Agnes Thayer was at an open house during sorority rush the previous February. Not a member of Kappa Gamma Pi herself, Mrs. Thayer wasn't involved in the ritual of "rushing"; but she was an impressive presence among the Kappas, overseeing the pouring of tea with a look of benign, smiling confidence. I'd never met anyone who spoke like Mrs. Thayer, with so distinctly British an accent, thrilling to my ears. "Mrs. Thayer, our housemother, is British, you know. She's from London." So it was several times explained to me. When I advanced to the head of the line, taking a cup of tea in a slightly shaky hand, taking a small gold-rimmed plate with cookies on it, I smiled nervously at this woman of youthful middle age who smiled serenely toward me. I murmured, "Thank you," as others were doing, and Mrs. Thayer murmured in reply, her blue gaze passing through me as it's said those infinitesimal sub-atomic particles called neutrinos pass through solid matter continuously, "My dear, you are welcome."

My dear! No one had ever spoken to me, even in jest, in such a way.

Once I became a Kappa initiate, and moved into the Kappa residence, I became one of Mrs. Thayer's girl-subjects. Mrs. Thayer was our "house-mother": our adult-in-authority. Mrs. Thayer's dominion was supreme.

Like royalty, or what I might have guessed of royalty, Mrs. Thayer could not be approached casually. A ritual of a kind had to be observed, before one could speak with Mrs. Thayer in private. (But what would one speak about with Mrs. Thayer, in private? I could not imagine.) Her quarters, a small suite of rooms on the ground floor of the Kappa house, were otherwise taboo.

The suite opened out onto an inner parlor, a library, and ran parallel to the large dining room, to the rear of the house; this parlor, though a public room, was tinctured to some degree by Mrs. Thayer's proximity. Sometimes Mrs. Thayer's door was open, sometimes ajar; most of the time, snugly closed. If the door was open and you stepped into the library, you were immediately aware of Mrs. Thayer's inner quarters; you were immediately alert to the possibility of her presence. I recall standing in the parlor staring at the open door with a vague fixed smile and hearing, though not listening to, murmurous voices within, and even laughter; Mrs. Thayer was talking with one of the senior girls, a favorite. What are they talking about? Laughing about? When at last the girl appeared, and Mrs. Thayer behind her, they glanced toward me indifferently; Mrs. Thayer may have called over, in her brisk, brusque way that meant no reply was expected, "Ah, Mary Alice! How are you."

I had not the audacity to tell Mrs. Thayer that my name was not "Mary Alice"; nor did it sound anything like "Mary Alice"; I knew Mrs. Thayer would be offended.

The parlor was much smaller than the rather grand living room, papered in ebony and gilt in ingenious two-inch-square replicas of the Kappa pin, which gave to the interior a dizzying perspective such as one might experience swirling down a drain. Its fourth wall was floor-to-ceiling bookshelves crammed with aged, respectable books including sets of leather-bound classics, the Complete Works of William Shakespeare, the Complete Works of Sir Walter Scott, the Complete Works of Edward Gibbon among others, which had the embalmed look of books unopened for decades. On the fiercely patterned walls were dozens of framed photographs of Kappa officers and members dating from 1933 when the local chapter of the sorority was first established on the university campus, consisting of only eleven determined-looking girls. (How does a sorority "begin"? I could not guess. Parmenides' famous question Why is there something, and not rather nothing? did not seem to me, in this context, more profound.) Everywhere in the room were brass-and-mahogany trophies, plaques, medals, congratulatory certificates in gilt lettering dating back to the mid-Thirties; mementos of long-ago formal dances, teas, one or two softball teams, picnics, and ceremonial occasions at which Kappas received awards from other, elder Kappas at national assemblies. So fleetingly did the proposition cross my mind, it wasn't a true revelation-These are all what's called white: to be among them, I too must be white.

Prominent in this room was a large glass-topped piece of furniture-the proctor's desk. On this, affixed by an actual chain, was the official "sign in/sign out" ledger of the residence. Every evening at 8:00 p.m. the Kappa house, like all university residences, was locked; the rear door was not only locked but bolted; the designated proctor for the evening would sit at this desk; her task would be to answer incoming telephone calls, buzzing girls in their rooms (for individual telephones were forbidden), and above all making certain that girls did not slip out the front door without signing the ledger. "Under my roof curfew will be strictly enforced," Mrs. Thayer gravely warned. This meant 11:00 p.m. weeknights, 12:00 a.m. Fridays, 1:00 a.m. Saturdays, and 10:00 p.m. Sundays, university regulations that applied solely to undergraduate women. (No curfews at all were imposed upon men, who might be absent from their residence for days without being reported to authorities.) Since the parlor was adjacent to Mrs. Thayer's quarters, loud talk, laughter, and "carrying on" of any kind were forbidden. On elected tables were arranged Kappa yearbooks and other publications adorned with the Kappa insignia, and on a coffee table newspapers and magazines were arranged in a fan-like spread, mainly back issues of Mrs. Thayer's Harper's & Queen, Punch, Manchester Guardian, and other British publications she received in the mail. The very paper, thin as tissue, exuded an air of the elite. It had to be conceded by anyone acquainted with Mrs. Agnes Thayer that anything British in origin was of a higher quality than its American equivalent. No doubt the Kappa alums who had hired her, impressed with her accent and bearing, had this in mind. Yet virtually no one apart from me so much as glanced into, let alone read, these publications, apart from glossy Harper's & Queen, which was occasionally leafed through and tossed back down. None of these publications was to be removed from the parlor, nor were they to be left in a "disordered" state. Even the daily Syracuse newspaper, which a few girls glanced into, had to be replaced on the table pristine in appearance, each page in alignment with the others, and in the exact arrangement which Mrs. Thayer favored.

Eagerly I read the British publications, exotic as no other printed matter of my acquaintance. I was from a remote wedge of rural upstate, western New York. I scrutinized the Guardian, especially its arts and culture sections, I tried to decipher the obscure codified cartoons in Punch. It was amazing to me that the English language into which I'd been born was yet a foreign language, and its truest culture a foreign culture. In Harper's & Queen I contemplated photographs of "home county estates"-enormous manor houses such as Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte had written of, acres of radiantly green grass, enormous beds of daffodils, iris, and tulips rippling in the wind; elegantly if absurdly costumed men and women on horseback, "riding to hounds." (Hunting foxes? Such small, beautiful creatures? These were not photographed.) I contemplated stiffly posed photographs of the Queen and the Royal Family adorned in heraldic regalia and looking like ordinary, rather plain people at a costume party. Something twisted in my heart: I felt suddenly that I despised such pomp and pretension, I was an American to my fingertips and did not believe in inherited privilege. Yet I was careful to replace the British publications exactly as Mrs. Thayer had positioned them.

The parlor, the proctor's desk, the nearness of Mrs. Thayer's private quarters-this was a space soon fraught with anxiety for me. To envision it now, years later, is to feel my temples ache with the dizzying pressure of the Kappa insignia-wallpaper. As a sophomore I was required to do proctor duty every ten or twelve days, and I was so intimidated by my elder "sisters" that when they boldly left the house, laughing and waving at me, or blowing kisses, or ignoring me altogether as they ignored the official ledger book, I didn't dare call after them, let alone run outside after them; nor did I report them to our housemother as I was required to do. Under my roof curfew will be strictly enforced Mrs. Thayer warned repeatedly, yet out of cowardice and a yearning to be liked, I could not bring myself to enforce it. The first night of proctor duty, which set precedent for months to follow, a half-dozen girls blithely ignored the ledger book, and, yet more defiantly, trailed in after 11:00 p.m. curfew, delivered giggling and swaying-drunk to the door by their dates; to disguise the situation, I turned out the parlor lights so that Mrs. Thayer would have no suspicion, and assume that everyone was safely inside for the night; in fact I crouched on the foyer steps by the front door trying desperately to read, in weak light, fifty pages of Spinoza's Ethics for my European philosophy class the next morning. Again and again reading without comprehension By cause of itself, I understand that, whose nature cannot be conceived unless existing. I had no idea what in do: suppose some of my Kappa sisters stayed out all night? Suppose something "happened" to them? I understood that I would be partly to blame; I would have accepted this blame; in a way I was more guilty than the absent girls for I'd failed to report them to Mrs. Thayer, endangering her authority as well. But the girls returned. At 1:15 a.m., at 1:40 a.m., at 2:05 a.m., and the last at 2:20 a.m., none of them ringing the doorbell (which would have wakened Mrs. Thayer immediately) but stealthily rapping on the leaded-glass panel beside the door, for they seemed to know that I would be waiting for them, uncomplaining and compliant as a handmaid. The last girl to return was a glamorous, popular senior named Mercy (for Mercedes), a sorority officer whom I'd admired for her brash good looks, infectious laughter and "personality." Mercy was delivered on shaky legs to the door by a football player Deke to whom she was "pinned"; this hefty blond boy squinted at me like a dazed, good-natured ox as I opened the door quietly-"Thass a goo' girl." Mercy's blond hair was disheveled and her elaborate makeup smeared; she looked as if she'd hurriedly thrown on her clothes in the dark, or had been thrown hurriedly into her clothes by another; she reeked of perfume, beer, and vomit. As she shakily ascended the stairs she tripped and giggled, "Damn!" and I caught her, for I'd come up close behind her, and dared to touch her hot, humid body; she drew away from my cold fingers with a look of dazed dignity and said in a slurred, contemptuous voice, "You?-who in hell're you? Take y'r goddam handsoff me!"

And did it begin then, the unraveling.

Or had it begun months and even years before and at this late, exhausted hour the clarity of it: the absurdity: waking to discover yourself in this place among strangers indifferent and impervious to you who wished only to adore them, in desperation clutching a textbook of ethics set forth in seventeenth-century theorems and propositions like geometry. And trying not to cry. For you are not a child. Nineteen years old, an adult. Yet so hurt! heartbroken! fated to recall the sting of that rude drunken rebuff for a lifetime.

Sisters! Always I'd yearned for sisters of my own. From first grade contemplating with undisguised envy and wonderment the large farm families of most of my classmates. For even when sisters quarreled-and sisters were always quarreling!-the fact remained they were sisters. The fact remained: they lived together, ate meals together, shared rooms, often beds. They wore one another's clothing. Mittens, scarves, and boots freely mingled. They shared facial features, ways of moving their eyes and heads, ways of gesturing. They shared a last name. And I had no sister, and would never have a sister. Except in my memory, which others derided, I had no mother. I was pitied as a freak, without a mother. My brothers were much older than I and took no interest in me except sometimes to tease and taunt, as big dogs might play with small dogs, injuring them occasionally but without rancor or intention; my father who was "in construction" was often absent from home for weeks, even months-it wasn't clear where he went, or wasn't clear to me. My brothers and I lived with my father's parents on their twelve-acre dairy farm near Strykersville, in Niagara County, New York, thirty miles northeast of Buffalo and three miles south of Lake Ontario.

The Snow Belt as it's called.

A childhood of snow. Blank amnesiac patches of snow. Beside the window of my small room beneath the eaves, a cave-like opening in snow formed by the drooping limbs of a juniper tree; after the fiercest snowstorms, there was yet this sheltered space outside the window, I could look out and see, beyond, a blinding expanse of white like a frozen sea transforming the familiar terrain of our farm.

My mother died when I was eighteen months old. I would be told Your mother has gone away. In time, I would be told that my mother had wanted a daughter so badly she'd "kept trying" after three sons-and two miscarriages-and at last had had a baby at the age of forty-one, and never recovered. This would be told to me with an air of disapproval, reproach. For in those years, forty-one was a repugnant and even obscene age for a mother. It seemed fitting then that my mother had not been able to give birth "normally" but had had a caesarian that failed to heal; her milk-laden breasts developed cysts like tiny pebbles; the gossamer-thin web of nerves that constituted her mysterious and unknowable self grew tight, tighter, tighter until one day it broke and could never be mended; the way a spider's delicate web, once broken, can never be mended. When I was eight, having annoyed my grandmother in some childish way, she told me in a bitter yet gloating voice that my mother had died of something eating her up: cancer. My grandmother gestured clumsily, shamefacedly, at her own big, sunken bosom, saying, "They had to cut off her…" She fell silent. I was speechless with horror. Her breasts? My mother I loved so much, and missed so badly, her breasts had been… cut off?

I ran from the house and hid in a field. It was not winter then: I hid in a cornfield. I ignored them calling for me. I hated them all, I would never forgive them.

After that day my grandmother seemed to have forgotten what she'd told me. Or behaved as if she'd forgotten. Yet it was tacitly assumed that I knew this shameful secret about my mother, and must take responsibility for knowing. Sometimes I'd overhear my grandmother speaking to relatives or neighbors, careless of whether I might be within earshot, in her dour, dogged voice, "He blames her, you know-the little one. For Ida dying." Even as a small child I understood the fatal juxtaposition of that he (my father) and that her (the "little one" who was myself).

Yes but I remember her. I am the only one who remembers.

"Ida"-the name was magical to me. In whispers, in the dark. Beneath bedcovers. Forehead pressed to a windowpane coated with frost. "Ida." What a strange, beautiful name: I could not say it often enough: it was easy to confuse "Ida" with "I"-the sharp simple sound I learned to make with my mouth and tongue when I meant myself.

In the interests of truth, with the rapacity of an invading army, my brothers belittled my childish claim of remembering my mother. "You! You were too little, only a baby when she died. We knew her." They hated me for having been born; having been born, I caused our mother's death; yet they could see I was just a little girl; I wasn't a worthy enemy. They argued it was only in snapshots of my mother that I knew" her, not in my own true memory; confusing the sallow-faced mature woman with the younger, much prettier woman of the snapshots in the family album, dark hair bobbed in the sexy-boyish style of the Twenties, hands on her hips, knuckles inward. A brash smile flying to the camera like a bird flying toward a window. I did not wish to consider that this striking young woman was not, precisely speaking, my mother. But these early snapshots were the ones I adored. Others, taken in the Thirties, my mother with my brother Dietrich who was eleven years my senior, my mother with my brother Fritz who was ten years my senior, my mother with my brother Hendrick who was seven years my senior-these engaged me far less, though they were nearer in time to my own birth. For I couldn't bear to see my mother with babies not myself. Young children in her lap, clambering about her legs. She was beginning to look tired, drawn, her smile had become forced, in the later snapshots. Her chic bobbed hair was gone, now flyaway hair, or skinned back severely from her face and knotted at the nape of her neck. Her body had thickened, grown shapeless. After my birth, my mother's health was so poor that no snapshots of her with me were ever taken. No snapshots of the little one at all. Yet I claimed to remember my mother and held firm in my obstinacy against all detractors. My German grandparents who were old, old, old all my life like trolls peering at me in pity and reproach. It was clear that they hadn't liked my mother yet they liked me less for killing her and for making their only son deeply unhappy. Muttering together in that language I could not comprehend, and had no wish to comprehend, would never study in college, though sometimes they spoke in heavily accented English for me to overhear-"That one! Where does she get her ideas!" Inwardly I answered, "Not from you. None of you."

Rarely did my father speak of such personal matters to anyone. He was hurt, sullen, angry, and baffled. He was a big man, well over six feet, weighing perhaps two hundred twenty pounds. His footsteps made the house vibrate. A deep inhalation of his breath could suck most of the oxygen out of a room's air. My mother's death was a livid wound in his flesh. He would not have wished it healed, though it maddened him. He would seem to forget my name; never would he call me by name; "you" would have to do; "you" was as much as I could hope for; "you" was much more desirous than "I" for "I" was uttered only by me, and "you" might be uttered, if only in a slurred, negligent voice, by my father. "You!-didn't see you in here." Or, "You?-not in bed?" My eagerness to be with my father, even if he collided with me in a darkened hallway, or stepped on my feet entering a room, was not matched by a corresponding eagerness on his part to be with me. It was not just (I believed) that I had killed my mother but, without my mother, a woman, to mediate between him and me, there was no way for him to comprehend me. A girl? A little girl? And those eyes! He was wary of me as one might be wary of a puppy that might leap against legs and dribble saliva onto hands and whine piteously when abandoned. If my father discovered himself alone in my presence his startled eyes would shift a few inches above my head as if seeking out-who? (Our vanished Ida?) My father smoked Camels, lighting them with kitchen matches scraped noisily against the iron stove; I can see still, always in my mind's eye I will see the sudden leaping bluish flame that turned at once transparent orange, the mysterious and indefinable color of fire. At such times my father was obliged to squint against the smoke he himself exhaled; it was a curious ceremony, hurtful, yet profound, the way my father squinted, coughed, sometimes coughed at some length, as a result of this smoke. (My youngest brother would claim he'd never smoked, never wanted to light a single cigarette, having heard my father "cough his lungs out" every morning he'd been at home, but I had only a vague memory of such protracted coughing; my relationship to my father's cigarettes, like my relationship to my father, was hopeful, never critical.) If I dared to squint or cough myself or wave weakly against the drifting smoke, my father would say at once, flatly, "You don't like smoke, better go somewhere else." It was not a command, still less a threat: it was a statement of fact.

Don't like smoke, go somewhere else.

This remark I would pretend not to hear. Children are so resourcefully deaf, blind. We smile in the face of hostility, that hostility will turn into love. I was fascinated by my father's left hand that had been injured in what he called a work accident; the knuckles were grotesquely bunched as if they'd been squeezed together in a vise, and most of the nails were ridged and discolored; the smallest finger had been amputated to the first joint, and it was this hand he used to smoke with, bringing it repeatedly to his mouth.

I imagined this hand touching me. Caressing my small head.

My mother I knew didn't I? But not this man. Father.

He never kissed me. Never touched me (even with the disfigured hand) if he could avoid it. My brothers he might punch-lightly, yet hard enough to make them wince-on their biceps, in greeting or in farewell. ("O.K., kid. See ya.") For always our father was going away. His car was backing out of the driveway, more swiftly and purposefully than It had turned in. Cinders flew behind its spinning wheels, in rainy Weather the windshield wipers were already on. It came to seem only logical-I mean to a child's primitive, wishful way of thinking-that my father would have to return to the farm in Strykersville if he wanted to leave it. The zest in leaving it depended upon the reluctance in returning, didn't it? You could not have the one without the other, could you? It was something of a joke, the degree to which my father hated farm life. The dairy cows. Since the age of six he'd been made to milk their long rubbery udders. Not a task for a boy. Well, yes: it was a task for a farm boy. But my father didn't want to be a farm boy. Those slippery teats, tits. And the smell of the cow manure, so much stronger when fresh and liquidy, than it was after it had settled, solidified. My father had infuriated his father by hurting the cows, yanking the udders, causing these large placid beasts to bawl and kick; some of this would be preserved in family legend, for even families deprived of warm, happy times, mythic significance, cherish some legends, however threadbare. "Hurting the cows" as my father had done would be a way of indicating, decades later, that my father was "independent in his mind." For at the young age of seventeen he left the farm to work at Lackawanna Steel, a notorious mill that paid high wages for that time and place but was known to be dangerous, especially for unskilled workers. He'd driven a truck. He'd joined unions. He'd made money gambling and he'd spent money and he'd married a city girl who knew not a word of German. He had something of a reputation among men of his generation in the Strykersville area. He was a "fighter"-"a tough son of a bitch"-he "took no shit from anybody." By the time I was in high school my father was older, ravaged; he had "problems" of some ambiguous kind, no doubt associated with drinking and its consequences-tavern fights, vehicular accidents, arrests, brief stays in county jails. Hospitalizations in cities too far for any of us to visit. In a drawer I collected each of the postcards my father sent us: from California, a cartoon of loggers sawing down redwoods subtly shaped like women; a card from Anchorage, Alaska, depicting cartoon salmon leaping into a fishing boat; cards from British Columbia, Manitoba, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. (From Saskatoon my father sent six one-hundred-dollar bills in Canadian currency which my brother Dietrich took to a bank in Buffalo where, it turned out, they were worth 10 percent more than American dollars.) Yet there were times when my father called home after 11:00 p.m., collect. My grandmother whose heart was a dry root vegetable hardy as a turnip burst into tears when she spoke with my father at such times: he was her only son. My grandfather would snarl over the phone in elderly impotent fury Ja? What? What tricks of yours? If my brothers were home they would speak with my father one by one; Dietrich spoke for the longest time, in the most somber voice; Fritz was slow and inarticulate; Hendrick, the youngest, murmured in a dazed boyish way Geez Dad, you are? Gal-ves-ton? On the Gulf of Mexico? No kidding! Anxiously I would wait beside Hendrick for my turn to speak with my father but often it happened that my father "ran out of coins"-"was cut off by the operator"-before I could take the receiver.

I was saving up surprises for my father, though. Straight A's in school, shiny red stars after my name (which included his name) on the class bulletin board, even my picture now and then in the Strykersville weekly newspaper. He couldn't help but be impressed and proud of his daughter. Could he?

I'd become shrewd speaking of him. Never asked questions about him of my grandmother. A clumsy question could set the old woman clutching at her hair that was like wire filings, half-sobbing, grimacing and muttering in German-prayers or curses, who knew? Among the oldest snapshots in my grandmother's keeping was my father as a young man, dark, brawny, good-looking with thick tufted hair and a roguish smile, by degrees this young man aged into a sullen, slack-faced stranger with a perpetual two- or three-day growth of beard. The man who was my father. The red-veined eyes, the nose swollen as if stung by a bee. Teeth discolored like stained ivory. He gave off an odor associated in my mind with threat, dread, yet a kind of swaggering glamor-tobacco, whisky, stale sweat, agitation. My father spoke little to any of us but worked words in his mouth as if chewing a wad of tobacco he badly wanted to spit out, yet did not. Sometimes I caught him staring at me by lamplight, drinking a pungent, colorless liquid from a glass, smoking one of his Camels. The veil of smoke shielding his gaze. That's her, is it? The one to blame. There must have come a time in my father's life when he forgot what I was to be blamed for, but so ingrained was the habit of blaming the little one, so much was it part of my father's character as racial bigotry or left-handedness might be in others, he could not have wished to change. Just as Dietrich the eldest son was always his favorite son, no matter what.

I tried to imagine my father and my mother as lovers. How did a man and a woman love? What had brought them together, why had they married? Their lives were vanished from me almost with no trace like fossil remnants worn smooth and bleached in the sun. It made me feel faint to realize how I could have entered the world only through a conjunction of these strangers' bodies; no other pathway was possible; the great question that underlies all philosophical inquiry applied to the mystery of my conception and birth. Why is there something, and not rather nothing?

"How easy, never to have been born."

I spoke aloud in the wonder of it. In a mirror I saw, where my diminutive face might have been, a hazy glow like phosphorescence.

During my last two years of high school my father was away most of the time in the Midwest and I had a recurring nightmare of a cinder block prison wall and a stench of stopped-up drains, but probably this was my overwrought imagination, I didn't dare inquire of my grandparents or my brothers what it might mean. And there was a time my father was in a "drying out" hospital in Erie, Pennsylvania. Unexpectedly, he turned up for my high school graduation, my valedictory speech which was tremulous at the outset but gathered strength as I continued, my eyes misting over so that I was spared seeing individual faces in the audience, including my father's. He was there in a white shirt and pressed jacket to witness my receiving several awards and being named as the sole graduate of Strykersville High School that year to receive a New York State regents scholarship for college. My father, returned to me at last!-jaws stubbled and eyes gleaming bloodshot, his broad smile showing missing teeth like a jack-o'-lantern. His formerly thick, tangled dark hair had receded unevenly, exposing a dented-looking dome of a head; his jowls sagged, a collar of flesh. Yet his eyes shone fierce with pride. He'd been drinking (that was hardly a secret) hut he wasn't drunk. As others observed us, staring in wonderment, my classmates in their caps and gowns and their decent, sober parents, my lather strode up to hug me after the graduation ceremony, this man who hadn't touched me in years, and then only inadvertently, saying boastfully, "Helluva speech you gave, eh? I always knew you had it in you. Like her, you are. Smart as a whip. But you can do something with it. Don't let no fuckers out there sell you short."

A reporter for the Strykersville paper took several flash photos of us, without asking. In the one that would appear in the paper my father was scowling, his right hand lifted toward the camera as if to block the view; I stood just beyond his arm, smiling uncertainly, my face overexposed in the camera's flash so that I looked like an ink drawing by Matisse.

Three days later, my father was gone.

Gone again from Strykersville, and the old farm. And would not return, this time.

He'd told my grandmother he was headed west-"Some place you can breathe." His work was construction of a kind involving heavy earth-moving equipment, and dynamite. He never wrote, or in any case I never heard he'd written. (After her death years later, I would discover among my grandmother's things two carelessly scrawled postcards, one sent from Colorado and the other from Utah, addressed to the family, undated by my father but postmarked at about this time.) And I was in my freshman residence at the university when, one evening in October, my brother Dietrich telephoned to inform me in a curt, dazed voice that "word had come" that our father was dead. He'd died, evidently, in a "work-related accident" involving one or two other men as well, in Utah. There would never be a death certificate mailed to us and if there'd been a body, or the remains of a body, it had been buried in Utah -"In the Uinta Mountains." Dietrich's voice was stunned yet embarrassed; there was no warmth in it, for me; no effort to console me, or even to acknowledge that there was extraordinary news here, only rather the kind of news, considering our father, we might have expected. Neither Dietrich nor I had heard of the Uinta Mountains. I looked the area up on a map, it was in northeastern Utah; not a single place but several, it seemed, scattered over hundreds of square, unpopulated miles.

And so-I yearned for sisters: I reasoned that I'd had the others: mother, father, brothers, grandparents. If Ida had left me a sister. Two sisters! I would be happy forever, I think.

In the Kappa Gamma Pi house where I had gone to live in search of sisterhood there were numerous acts that were "forbidden." Under the predator vigilance of Mrs. Agnes Thayer, these forbidden acts exerted a certain attraction.

It was forbidden, for instance, for any girl to slip into the kitchen when "help" was on the premises. A middle-aged female cook, several busboys (of whom one was a rare Negro undergraduate), occasional delivery men. It was forbidden to enter the dining room after the sonorous gong had sounded for the second time and Mrs. Thayer had taken her seat at the head of the head table, regal and watchful. Nothing less than "ladylike"-"gracious"-"well-bred" behavior was required of Kappa girls at all times in the public rooms. It was taboo to appear in the dining room in slacks or jeans for evening meals; on Sunday, a full-course, heavy dinner was served at 1 p.m., and for this "good" dresses and high heels were required, though many of the girls, especially the more popular girls, would have only just staggered from bed at the sound of the first gong, throwing on dresses with little or no underwear beneath, dragging a brush through matted hair and smearing on lipstick, shoving bare feet into high-heeled shoes and rushing downstairs with unwashed faces, reddened eyes, heads throbbing with hangover headaches-yet these canny girls managed to be seated at the favored table, farthest from Mrs. Thayer, while luckless girls like me invariably wound up at the head table where impeccable manners and stilted and stiff conversation were required. There, it was forbidden to lift your fork before Mrs. Thayer lifted hers, and it was much frowned upon, though not openly forbidden, to continue to eat beyond the point at which Mrs. Thayer crossed her fork and knife primly on her plate, for the busboy to clear. It was forbidden to speak of disturbing, scandalous, controversial, or "needlessly negative" subjects at mealtimes, at least in Mrs. Thayer's hearing; it was forbidden to address the busboys in any casual, let alone flirtatious manner-"The very worst of bad breeding," as Mrs. Thayer described, with a shudder, such behavior known to occur at other, less rigorously maintained sorority houses on campus. Except for emergencies, it was forbidden to rise from your seat at any time before

Mrs. Thayer, who lingered over coffee and dessert, rose from hers. It was forbidden to rush from the dining room when the meal finally ended though by that time you might have so gnawed at your lower lip as to have drawn blood. It was forbidden to weep, or to scream.

"Mary Alice, what is that" -Mrs. Thayer paused, with bemused perplexity, provoking others at the table to turn to me, to scrutinize my blushing face-"curious facial expression of yours?" Mrs. Thayer laughed easily. Her wide smile suggested only good humor, not fury at my seeming indifference to her conversation. "You are all frowns and creases like one whose head is being squeezed by a vise."

My Kappa sisters giggled appreciatively, as much at Mrs. Thayer's continued muddling of my name as by her wit.

Mine was not the sole name Mrs. Thayer muddled. New girls, sophomores, were somehow not quite real to her and must prove themselves, in some manner not known to us, and not to be revealed by our older sisters.

(Was I meant to apologize for my rudeness at the table? I lingered behind hoping to catch Mrs. Thayer's eye, and judge by her expression whether an apology was wished, or would only exacerbate her annoyance, but Mrs. Thayer did not so much as glance at me, as she left the dining room.)

Of course, it was forbidden to enter Mrs. Thayer's private quarters at any time, for any reason, unless Mrs. Thayer invited you inside. (As she did occasionally with her favored girls-ironically, these were girls who didn't especially like her.) It was forbidden to peer into Mrs. Thayer's private quarters from either the front entrance in the parlor, or the rear, near the side door. Even if the doors were invitingly open, and the Negro cleaning woman vacuuming inside.

It was forbidden to touch, still less examine or sniff Mrs. Thayer's "special dietary foods" in the pantry refrigerator or cupboard. These were often bulky, wrapped in aluminum foil, taped with adhesive. It was suspected that there might be a code in the fussy crisscrossings of the adhesive, or shrewd Mrs. Thayer had affixed a hair or thread in such a way that would signal intrusion if it were missing. The smells of these mysterious foods varied considerably, ranging from briny-sour to cinnamony-sweet.

Of course it was taboo to examine Mrs. Thayer's mail. As much of an affront as touching her person. You were not to have an early peek at her English publications, you were not to hold to the light her airmail letters from England in their tissue-thin blue envelopes adorned with exotic stamps. (Mrs. Thayer was known to have been a war bride whose American officer-husband had brought her back to the United States to live after the end of World War II, and who, after his eventual death, had decided pluckily to stay on in the States because she could support herself here; but clearly her heart was attached to England. Her sole correspondent was a sister who lived in Leeds and whose handwriting was elegantly spidery, as I imagined a ghost's handwriting might be, with three dramatic strokes of the pen beneath the letters USA.) However, if it happened that Mrs. Thayer was close by, in her sitting room for instance, you were allowed to bring her mail in a forthright fashion, holding it in such a way to indicate that you hadn't examined it except to ascertain that it was hers; knocking quietly on her door with the back of your hand (as Mrs. Thayer had demonstrated was the way in which ladies knocked on doors), even if the door was open and you could see her inside. "Yes, dear?" Mrs. Thayer would say, peering over her reading glasses, and you would say, "Mrs. Thayer, may I bring you your mail" and Mrs. Thayer would say, with an air of being pleasantly surprised, like a child offered candy, "Why, is the mail here already? Thank you, dear." Having delivered the mail to Mrs. Thayer's plump beringed fingers you were not to linger in her cozily cluttered sitting room with its myriad glints and glistens of old silver, china, gilt-threaded fabrics and reproductions of English landscapes and framed photographs of presumed family members; yet it was bad manners to back away too quickly as if eager to escape. Precisely how you should behave at this delicate social moment was a matter of the elder woman's discretion, whether out of housemotherly duty or personal whim or a surge of genuine emotion she might wish you to remain, or whether in fact she had other things on her mind and wished you gone; yet it was bad manners to stare at her inscrutably pinkly smiling face in an effort to decipher her thoughts, still more was it unacceptable to blush, stammer and stare at your feet like "an American farm gurl."

Why did I persist in volunteering to bring Mrs. Thayer her mail? She could have gotten it for herself. I didn't think of myself as a particularly shy girl; I hadn't been shy in high school, in Strykersville; my diminutive, sloe-eyed appearance suggested shyness, but I knew that this was deceptive and often traded upon it. Yet under our housemother's icy blue gaze I became tongue-tied and clumsy. I felt my face prickle with heat. Still I was drawn to the woman as one might be drawn to the most exacting of judges. Perhaps it was her mail that fascinated me, as well. The British postal stamps with their look of being "historic"; the exotic promise of the blue-tissue airmail letter; the British publications in their tight-rolled tubes, not yet opened. Documents from another world. Let me be their bearer! More urgently I felt an obligation to be "good"-or to be so perceived by Mrs. Thayer and by others. I was too poor and plain not to be "good"; my sorority sisters with indulgent, well-to-do parents, and numerous boyfriends, could be as careless as they wished without a thought of being "good." I didn't want to think that I was desperately lonely in the company of more than forty aggressively well-adjusted, outgoing girls; perversely hungry for the company of a woman of Mrs. Thayer's approximate age, somewhere in her forties and stolidly maternal. However Agnes Thayer coolly declined to play that role beneath the Kappa Gamma Pi roof.

Once, having given Mrs. Thayer her mail, having received her bright, indifferent thank-you, I hovered in the vicinity of her doorway waiting to be summoned inside, or dismissed with an airy smile, and there came one of my older Kappa sisters rushing toward us red-faced, tearful, and panting. Before the girl could speak Mrs. Thayer said with a sharp intake of breath, "Winifred! I can hear you breathing." Freddie, as the girl was called, a pretty, fox-faced girl with fluorescent-pink lips, stammered that she'd been "accosted" in the park, she was sure it was the same man who'd been reported harassing other girls in the neighborhood, he'd brushed against her and said "nasty, filthy things" to her; and Mrs. Thayer quickly interrupted, backing away with a look of repugnance, "My dear, that is no excuse for such a public demeanor, such a heated, head-on approach, such a display of yourself. You needn't advertise your encounter for all the world to see, need you?"

Yet Mrs. Thayer invited Freddie inside her sitting room, and shut the door; they would report the incident to university security, for such incidents, however vulgar and demeaning, were required to be reported. I was summarily dismissed and crept away with a tinge of regret, I hadn't been the one to rush to Mrs. Thayer in distress, I hadn't been the one invited inside, and the door shut quietly behind me.

Here was a surprise, I belatedly learned: for all her authority over the Kappa residence, Agnes Thayer was not a Kappa. She would have been forbidden to attend meetings of the sorority, should she have wished to attend; she would have been banned from the ritual meeting room, should she have wished to step inside it. She knew nothing of the "sacred sisterhood"-the letters Kappa Gamma Pi held no secret, luminous meaning for her. Mrs. Thayer's responsibility had solely to do with the social behavior of the girls in the residence; she was accountable to the university's Dean of Women and to the local Kappa Gamma Pi association that paid her salary. When I revealed my surprise at this fact, saying naively, "Mrs. Thayer isn't one of us?" my Kappa sisters laughed at me saying, "God, who'd want that ugly old Brit-bitch snooping on us any more than she does? Use your head."

I hereby consecrate myself heart, soul, and intellect to the ideals of Kappa Gamma Pi and the promise of sacred sisterhood. United in our bond, so long as I shall live. None of the aforesaid secrets will I reveal. This bond I shall never forsake. I pledge my heart.

In the basement of the imposing old house at 91 University Place was a consecrated space: the ritual meeting room.

Each sorority and fraternity surely had its consecrated space, probably in the basement of their houses, but it was the ritual meeting room of the Kappa Gamma Pi house that seemed to me so very special.

In 1938, this room had been sanctified for Kappa ritual by national Kappa officers, and meetings of the sorority involving "ritual" could take place only here, according to the bylaws "under strictly confidential and private circumstances."A locked door, absolute secrecy, and no outsiders anywhere near.

Even for Kappas it was forbidden to enter the ritual meeting room except at such times as the room was officially opened by the doorkeeper. Only this elected officer and the president and vice-president of the chapter had keys to the room which was kept locked at all times; Mrs. Thayer, of course, had no key. This is a room, a space, no ordinary individuals can enter. It was strikingly decorated in Kappa ebony-and-gold wallpaper; its low, soundproofed ceiling was a somber slate blue. At the front of the rectangular room was an altar on a raised platform; the altar was draped in cream-colored silk embossed with

in gold. Many-pronged silver candelabra were placed on the altar. At the tops of three of the walls were small square windows covered in opaque gauze (to prevent anyone from looking in) like bandages over empty eye sockets. The ritual meeting room spanned the length of the cavernous living room overhead, but not all of the space was used. Folding chairs were set in rows at the front; the rear of the space was used for storage. And it didn't seem very clean or tidy at the rear. The aura of romance ended at about the halfway point. During ritual ceremonies (pledging, initiation) which were sacred events in the Kappa calendar, the meeting room was softly lit by thirty-six candles; at other times, for business meetings, it was lit by practical overhead lights that cast shadows beneath our eyes and chins, and made the most glamorous Kappas look haggard.

You did not simply walk into the meeting room: you had to be, following the bylaws, "granted entrance." This meant lining up in silence on the basement stairs outside the room, seniors first, then juniors, and underclasswomen; at the shut door you gave the ritual Kappa knock (rap, pause, two quick raps and a pause, a final rap); when the doorkeeper opened the door you gave her the ritual handshake (crossed hands, twined fingers squeezed in a code replicating the knock) which I would invariably fumble out of nervousness and embarrassment at such intimacy with a girl I scarcely knew; you then whispered in the doorkeeper's ear the password (a Greek phrase of which I was never certain and always murmured softly: it sounded like Hie-ros minosa or minoosa); the doorkeeper then granted you entrance, quietly you slipped into the room and took your place amid the rows of seated girls.

My initiation ceremony passed in a haze of anxiety and light-headedness tinged with nausea. Like most of the pledges I hadn't been allowed to sleep for forty-eight hours; I'd had to fast, and follow Hell Week instructions scrupulously. Though I was the most obedient and craven of pledges, dreading a last-minute dismissal, the initiates seemed to see in my very complicity the seeds of rebellion, even treason; they were hard on me, and I acquiesced in every particular. Physical hazing in fraternities and sororities was supposed to have been banned from campus since deaths and disfigurements and serious injuries had occurred not many years before; my Kappa sisters did not lay hands on us, except to steady us, and "walk" us blindfolded along mysterious corridors and up and down flights of stairs. Inside the meeting room, however, our blindfolds were removed. Why am I here? What is this place? These strangers? Who are they to me, who am I to them? I blinked like a nocturnal animal blinded by light. I tasted panic, nausea. I was frightened of becoming hysterical. Bursting into laughter, rushing to the door, slapping and kicking at anyone who tried to stop me. I knew myself in the presence of individuals capricious and arbitrary in their cruelty as the ancient Greek gods. I'd meant to make my family proud of me, initiated into a national sorority. But my mother and father were dead. I began to cry softly, helplessly. No no no this is a mistake. This is a he this ridiculous ritual you yourself are a he. The president and another officer were solemnly intoning Greek words at the altar and burning parchment paper on which had been written secret words "too sacred to be uttered aloud except at this time and in this place" in a silver bowl, amid rose petals; someone tugged at my arm, I glanced up partly blinded and allowed myself to be led on trembling legs to the altar to make my "final vow."

I was both fully conscious of my surroundings, yet unconscious as an infant. I seemed to be floating against the acoustic-tile ceiling. I saw that my face was streaked with tears and my forehead and nose greasy. I understood that my mother who was Ida was one of the gowned officers, a beautiful senior at whose glowing face I scarcely dared to look; I was aware of sanity slipping from me like ice melting beneath my feet; my father too was grinning at me gap-toothed, with an air of angry satisfaction Don't let no fuckers out there sell you short and I vowed I would not, my hand pressed against my pounding heart as I vowed my life as the ceremony concluded and I stood with my dazed sister pledges weeping like newborn infants in the realization I am a Kappa Gamma Pi for life.

And then I fainted. Softly limp as a bundle of laundry, onto the chilly and not-very-clean concrete floor.

2

How happy I am here, I love my Kappa sisters and my new life as a sorority girl, I am breathless so busy every minute almost! so I wrote to girlfriends from high school who'd gone to other colleges or to a few selected girl cousins This is certainly a change from my old life, I'm a KAPPA GAMMA PI sometimes I have to pinch myself or give myself a little stab with my pin.

There was no one to whom I might tell an obvious fact: Kappa Gamma Pi was too expensive for me.

I was a scholarship student, I had virtually no "spending money" as it's called. Of course I knew this before pledging yet somehow had ignored the fact like a diver who suspects that the water into which she wants to dive is freezing, and lethal, yet she dives into it just the same. As if behaving in the manner of X without acknowledging your perversity will have the magical effect of bending X to Y, which you can endure.

Often in my freshman year, before pledging the sorority, I had to work ten hours a week to supplement my scholarship; for I'd been overwhelmed by unexpected fees, expenses, the cost of hardcover textbooks and of living even a meager, modest life wearing discount-store apparel brought from home; in the autumn of my sophomore year when I'd moved into the Kappa residence, I had to work a minimum of twenty hours a week. These were long afternoons in the registrar's office typing and evenings and Saturdays in the university library stacks shelving books, in probable violation of university regulations into which I didn't dare inquire; I would have applied to Mrs. Thayer for kitchen work in our house but there was a Kappa bylaw forbidding Kappas from working in any sorority houses on campus and I saw the wisdom of this, I suppose. We are being taught elegant manners. What a lady I am being turned into (you would laugh at me maybe!) I am happy happy HAPPY. And now in my sophomore year I was in terror of losing my ability to reason, I was in terror of losing my scholarship for poor grades, I was in terror of being dropped from the university and made to return home to my grandparents' farm on that desolate rural wedge of land in Niagara County. (My brothers had long since departed the farmhouse, though they lived in the area.) Never enough time for so many activities once you're a sorority girl and Kappas are among the most competitive I've discovered. So BREATHLESS! The fact of time, the swift and irremediable passage of time, was making me desperate; sometimes I was aware of my heart racing, in actual fact I was often breathless; climbing a flight of stairs or one of the campus's notorious hills left me breathless, as if I'd ascended a great height; these were not stairs and hills I was climbing, but mountains; mountains made of glass down whose sides I was sliding, helplessly; never enough time! never enough time! even if I rationed my sleep to four or five hours a night there was never enough time! Though I worked twenty hours a week, my paychecks were painfully small; at the outset, I believed there must be some mistake, and with tears brimming in my eyes I'd gone to make inquiries. Ninety cents an hour? Ninety cents an hour? Can that be right? Federal and state taxes. Social Security deductions. One of the women librarians said frowning it's the same for everyone if you have no dependents. She meant well; she meant to be kindly, if a little curt; I glanced at her lined, stoic face and suppressed a shudder. Still I could not give up my jobs, poorly paying as they were. Alone of my sorority sisters I was obliged-literally-to count pennies. I counted them in neat piles of ten; I would have been ashamed to have been seen (by my sisters) for I would have embarrassed them. They'd taken me on, I supposed, out of charity. They looked upon me as one might look upon a poor relation. This is the Kappa house! I wrote on the backs of postcard-sized reproductions of the house to send to my friends and cousins, even to my brothers and grandparents. Even larger than it appears from the front. So many rooms. In the cloud-massed sky beyond the jutting roof I made an X to indicate the approximate location of my room on the third floor; though in fact my room was at the very back of the house, a cubbyhole not much larger than the room I'd been assigned in my freshman residence. Except, at the Kappa house, I had to share the room with another girl.

Except, at the Kappa house, the room was costing me much more.

The price of happiness. Such happiness you crave.

When the first bill for dues came to me from Kappa Gamma Pi, I was puzzled by "social fees" and other surcharges in addition to the monthly dues. Then to my horror I began to accumulate fines: because of my jobs, I had to miss business meetings, committee meetings, a "required" mixer with Kappa's brother fraternity Phi Omega. These were fines of $21 in October, $28 in November. I pleaded with the Kappa treasurer to excuse me: I had to work, had no choice but to work, what could I do? The girl, a junior with a pixie cut and wide-set imperturbable eyes, smiled with her mouth and suggested that I cut back on my academic courses and reschedule my work hours so that I'd have more time for the sorority-"Kappa Gamma Pi is your first obligation, don't forget."

Late that night in the basement study room of the house (to which I'd become habituated to retreating, not wanting to quarrel with my gregarious roommate, Deedee, unable to endure the pounding repetitive beat of calypso music from the room next door, or the shrieks and cries of laughter generally through the upstairs) sometime after 3:00 A.M. drifting into a deranged sleep as my vise-clenched head sank slowly to the paperback Ethics "whose pages swam in my vision as if undersea. Happy! the voice of Spinoza taunted. The happiness you deserve.

My grandmother spoke English with a heavy German accent that seemed to mock the very language, as the tics and grimaces of her raddled face mocked her smiles. " 'Made your bed, now lay in it'-that's what they say, ja?" She laughed, though without mirth. She was a guardian of the most banal and self-evident truths; one of those old, sour, but unfailingly energetic fairies in Grimms' tales who oversee disasater out of personal spite; her response to the assiduously argued, painstakingly structured metaphysical system of Baruch Spinoza, that martyr for truth excommunicated from the Jewish community in Holland, in 1656, would have been to take his collected works and fling them into her wood-burning stove-"There!"

I did not call her from Syracuse, ever. I did not call her to beg her forgiveness. I did not call her to say I am in despair, I am lost to myself, what can I do?

The study of philosophy is the study of the human mind. Though philosophers claim they are studying "reality"-"the world"-"the universe"-"God." Yet to study the human mind up close, to probe into one's own mind, one's own motives, is to be baffled utterly.

My first year at Syracuse, I'd been indifferent to the campus presence of the Greeks, as they pretentiously called themselves. I was immersed in my studies-and in my part-time jobs-and in the vast, intimidating adventure of books, books, books. Never in Strykersville had I imagined a true library: a library like the university library in whose stacks I might wander mesmerized for years. The brightest of students in my high school, yet I saw myself at Syracuse as alone and beleaguered and fighting for my life; I loved the excitement of it, even the anxiety; I was in a perpetual state of agitation; I returned from the library staggering with books; if one of my professors assigned X, I would read, and reread, not only X, but commentary on X; I was writing, parable-like little prose poems; I had little interest in other girls in my residence, and often skipped meals; I had not the slightest interest in joining a sorority, in the time-squandering activities called "rush"-"pledge week"-"initiation." Yet even in my indifference I wasn't unaware (I "would have to confess!) of the sobering fact that the majority of freshman girls, including girls I admired and would have wished to consider friends, the most attractive, the most popular, in many cases the most intelligent, scholarship students like myself, had pledged sororities. These girls would seem to have been plucked by supernatural intervention out of the university residences and would be living, beginning the following fall, in sorority houses; leaving prospects for companionship, let alone friendship, severely diminished. For who would remain in the dreary undergraduate dorms for "independents" as we were flatteringly called?-the left-behind, the losers. Outcasts at life's feast, in a memorable Joycean phrase. In my pride I was hurt; I understood that I would be banished from a glamorous world in which in fact I took no interest; that I would be banished was a spur to my desire. And perhaps out of the corner of my eye I'd been uneasily aware of the cruel and discriminatory Greek world, synonymous with University Place, those absurdly elegant mansions (with dormitories extending at the rears) boasting cryptic Greek letters on their facades which were meant to tease and tantalize and re-huff the uninitiated. I'd walked past the Kappa Gamma Pi house on its craggy hill, I'd stared at the ivy-covered facade, the stately Doric columns, the slate-covered high-pitched roof, and turned away shaken. In my rural background there'd been nothing like this. In Strykersville, a country town of about 10,000 people, nothing like this. A world of ex-plicit and outrageously unapologetic preferences and discriminations indicated by the word cut. For to cut was the privilege of the Greeks, and to be cut was the fate of the unworthy. This was intolerable, this was un-American, you wanted to laugh in derision. Cut from the Deke list, cut from the TriDelt list, cut to ribbons, cut your throat, what a loser. Every year after fall rush there were incidents of attempted suicide among the rejects.

Which only underscored, as some said, the Greek truism: survival of the fittest.

Oh, the Greeks were contemptible, their self-aggrandizement comical, but who could laugh?

Then somehow it happened, remarkable at the time, wholly unexpected and flattering, that a girl in my residence hall began to seek me out. Her name was Dawn; I'd scarcely noticed her in one of my lecture classes; in my fever of concentration upon my work, I scarcely noticed others my own age; my attention was fixed upon professors, whom I admired and feared as minor deities. But there was Dawn entering my life in one might open a door and step inside, uninvited. She was a striking young woman; not pretty, nor even attractive, but glamorous like a film star of the Thirties with a perfect moon face, sleepy hooded eyes, heavily lipsticked lips, and a perpetual cigarette burning in her fingers; smiling at me, squinting through a veil of smoke; one of those compelling young females of whom there were several in my high school, prematurely adult and sexually alluring however young. Her hair was bleached and teased; she wore tight sweaters and painted her fingernails. Her fur-trimmed black cloth coat, her handsome leather boots and other items of apparel suggested that her family was well-to-do, and indulged her. Dawn whose very name came quickly to captivate me: DAWN I'd find myself writing in my notebook or in the margin of a textbook or tracing with my fingernails in the gritty film of ice on the window of my room. DAWN DAWN. She playfully chided me for studying too hard- "You'll have a nervous breakdown! Really. It can happen." At the same time, she was childlike in her appeal for help in writing papers. "If you could just glance through it? Just to tell me is it good enough to hand in." Of course, I would end up doing much more, for I enjoyed such challenges; by sixth grade I was helping friends of mine with their schoolwork, as much for the pleasure of solving another's problems as for helping a friend in distress. When Dawn received high grades on these assignments, she was elated and grateful, and invited me to meet her friends, freshman Kappa pledges who were girls like herself, not-intellectual, not-brainy, but brimming with energy, clever and funny and good-looking in a way to make boys stare after them on the street. But why am I with these strangers? Not my type! Yet there I was. Flattered. Dawn insisted upon "restyling" my hair. Dawn insisted upon lending me clothes, though she was a size eight, and I was several sizes smaller. She invited me to visit the "beautiful, elite" sorority she'd just pledged, Kappa Gamma Pi-"What a terrific bunch of girls! I love them." And soon after this visit, Dawn and the other pledges encouraged me to sign up for the spring semester rush. And I did. I knew that I couldn't afford to live anywhere except in university housing, and that the lowest priced housing, yet I signed up for "rush," and suddenly became another person fixated upon a group of strangers, a sorority of which I knew little except it had a name, it had a campus reputation-for what? "Social life, activities." (That these were things in which I had no interest seemed not to occur to me; if I'd investigated, I would have discovered other sororities far more suited for my situation: a sorority of arts majors, a sorority of scholarship girls, a sorority for girls with limited finances who helped defray the cost of room and board by sharing work-duties in their residence. But I didn't investigate.) Where Dawn had pledged, there also I would pledge, or nowhere. The very Kappa house, the intimidating neo-Classic mansion at the far end of University Place, loomed large in my Imagination like an image in a Technicolor film. I believed I'd seen it before, years ago; not in Strykersville of course where there were no mansions, but-where? In Buffalo? Its lofty portico, the interior illuminated by chandeliers and candlelight, furnished with polished and glittering things, enormous white peonies in tall urns; the Kappa girls smiling like Hollywood starlets and bursting with "personality" and all of them remembering my name. And there was the British housemother Mrs. Thayer with her exotic accent, her brisk impeccable manners, those eyes blue as the ice rimming Lake Ontario well into April. In the giddiness of my delusion it seemed to me that Mrs. Thayer was the very mother of the house, and I liked it that she wasn't American, she spoke with no accent I knew, and would be a harsh, exacting judge. Not for this woman the fate of the merely mortal.

It was a shock to me that I was invited back to the Kappa house in the second week of rush; an even greater shock, that I was invited back in the third week. Was it possible that I was surviving the rush? (I had dropped out of or had been cut from other sororities without taking much notice.) I cared only for Kappa Gamma Pi.

In secret, I could not comprehend why anyone, let alone so sophisticated and glamorous a group of girls as the Kappas, would want me to join them. I knew that, if they knew me as I truly was, they wouldn't like me at all. Yet it became my obsession to convince them, a challenge like achieving high grades, a perfect or near-perfect academic record. The less worthy I believed I was of being a Kappa, the more ardent my desire to be a Kappa. Now in the ice-crust of my window I scratched

On a Kappa questionnaire passed over to perspective pledges I'd lied freely, desperately. It was believed by some of my relatives that the family was partly Jewish: that my father's grandparents were German Jews who'd changed their name to a German-sounding name when they'd moved from a village in western Germany to Antwerp, Belgium; before the outbreak of World War I, my father's mother, the daughter of this couple, and her German-born husband emigrated to America, to settle as dairy farmers in the volatile climate of upstate New York; the family's vague, not-much-practiced religion was Lutheran; my mother, Ida, may have been a truer Lutheran, for she was buried in the church cemetery in Strykersville. (You could not ask my grandparents personal questions. Asked about Europe, her own parents, my grandmother would grimace in contempt. "Why you want to know, that old dead time?" and make a spitting gesture.) Yet on the questionnaire I unhesitatingly indicated Episcopalian. My father's employment?-independent contractor. My life goal?-to help in the betterment of mankind. I told myself that this was not lying; it was my Kappa self speaking. I had noticed how in conversations with Kappas I'd overcome my natural inclination toward skepticism to emerge as open, uncomplicated, easygoing, warm, with a dimpled smile and high ringing girlish laughter. My Kappa self did not brood, was never melancholy. If she wrote parable-like prose poems in the style of Franz Kafka, she showed no one among the Kappas. She had clear skin, shining eyes, a glossy pageboy, and lipsticked lips. She was no one I knew personally but an inspired composite of a dozen Kappa girls, including Dawn, whom I greatly admired. The more poised Kappas had a way of hugging and kissing you on the cheek-"Loveya, sweetie!" when saying good-bye, and while I was never able to emulate this extravagant display of feeling, there were times when I came close.

Whoever awaited me back in my book-strewn room in my freshman residence was increasingly a stranger, and a boring stranger at that. I had yet to discover Nietzsche's cruel aphorism To seduce their neighbor into thinking well of them, and then to believe in this opinion of their neighbor: who has greater skill in this than a woman? Yet such efforts of seduction were all I had to shore up against the terrible loneliness of my life. Or so I believed.

When at last on the evening of the official end of spring rush when the sealed Kappa "bid" was ceremoniously delivered to my room, by Dawn and several other pledges, I stared at these beaming strangers and burst into tears.

My Kappa self.

How proud Ida would have been of her daughter! Becoming a Kappa was but the first of many achievements, I promised.

Not that I was worth your death. But your giving birth to me?

Away at Syracuse where I rarely thought of home, I thought of my mother often. In the late night, I felt that my loneliness drew me to hers: aren't the dead lonely? My brothers would have laughed at me, pointing out that I was remembering, not a living woman, but old snap-shots. Yet at such times I felt my mother's nearness; if I glanced up from my desk, to see an indistinct face reflected in the windowpane beside my lamp, I could imagine that the face was hers. There were exciting half-conscious dreams in which I returned to Strykersville. Or these were vivid memories. In the cemetery behind the Lutheran church where she was buried. In life, I had not visited this grave many times. If my father had visited it, he went alone and never spoke of it. Yet in my memory I could smell freshly mown grass and feel the stubble beneath my feet. Beyond the church's squat steeple and dully gleaming cross the northern sky was darkening over Lake Ontario. The Strykersville Lutheran church had been founded in 1873, built of crude fieldstone and stucco. The cemetery was only a meadow behind the church, of small rocky hills and ridges that in rainy weather filled with water; in winter, angry-looking dunes of snow covered half the graves' markers. The earliest markers, dating back to the 1870's, were worn thin as playing cards and tilted in the earth; these were closest to the church; more recent graves like my mother's were farther away, fanning up a partly cleared hill. It swept over me that no one really expects the future, no one truly believes it can happen. All that is, is now. The modest gray-granite marker engraved with my mother's name, birth, and death dates, was at the far end of a row; close by was an uncultivated field; how of the earth is death, which Spinoza never acknowledged; none of the philosophers spoke of smells, damp earthy leaf-rot mingled with woodsmoke (in the distance, a farmer was burning stumps: the worst smoke-stink you can imagine). I drew my fingers across the rough stone. Freezing stone. I'm a Kappa, I'm so happy, Mother! Sometimes I think my heart will burst.

My mother hadn't been a frequent churchgoer. She and my father had been married in a civil ceremony in Buffalo. The family legend was, the minister of this country church had allowed my mother's body burial in the cemetery with the understanding that my father would now attend church, and bring his family. How eagerly the minister must have anticipated new members to his congregation, a father and four children, and maybe the father's parents, too? Of course, nothing had come of it.

For Ida's sake I was uneasy that her body lay in sanctified ground through a lie. Otherwise, I smiled to think of it.

It was an era when such words as sex, sexual were never uttered even by those who routinely engaged in sexual practices. Sexy was a word that might be murmured in an undertone, with a sly movement of the eyes, a knowing smile.

Mrs. Thayer, whose delicate task it was as housemother to allude to certain things without ever naming them, like most mothers of the day, spoke of ladylike behavior at all times, standards of decorum, and maintaining a reputation beyond reproach. She used such expressions as male visitor and male person as if speaking of a distasteful and untrustworthy species. You would not have believed that Agnes Thayer had ever been married, despite the conspicuous rings she wore on her left hand; you would not have believed that this woman had been married to any male person. Mrs. Thayer lectured us at mealtimes and at formal house-meetings (not Kappa ritual meetings) held on Sunday evenings in the parlor. "Our house rules regarding male persons are simple. They are set by the Dean of Women and they are not to be violated under any circumstances." It was forbidden to allow any male person (other than an approved workman) to ascend to the upper floors of the house; it was forbidden, in fact, to allow any male person to sit on the first few steps of the sweeping staircase to the second floor, or to enter the basement stairway for any purpose whatsoever. Of course it was forbidden to hide, or to attempt to hide, any male person on the premises before or after the house was officially locked for the night; it was forbidden to "carry on" in any manner unbecoming to a lady with any male person in any of the public rooms or elsewhere technically under Mrs. Thayer's jurisdiction. In the public rooms of the Kappa house, where male persons were admitted as guests, the rule was classic in its simplicity: "All feet on the floor, gurls, at all times."

Mrs. Thayer's arch, overbearing accent made her speech irresistible to mimic. In this way, her speech pervaded every room of the thirty-bedroom house.

You thought of sex continuously. Even if, like me, you had few sexual feelings, and no desire to translate those feelings into relationships with male persons. Sex was a tide, vast and virulent and unspeakable. A tide that could wash over any girl at any time, and destroy us. Male persons were primed to discharge this tide, in hot little spurts: semen. (Yet semen was never named.) Male persons were the natural predators of girls.

"What Thayer's scared of, like all the housemothers," it was remarked slightingly of our vigilant housemother, "is one of us getting knocked up. She figures she'd be blamed, and fired."

Forbidden for undergraduate girls to ascend to the upper floors of male residences or to slip from their public rooms at any time. Forbidden for undergraduate girls to visit the rooms or apartments of men living off-campus, and so not under the jurisdiction of any university authority. Especially it was crucial for girls to avoid being alone with one or more male persons at fraternity parties where unfortunate incidents were rumored to occur, occasionally. When a girl drank too much, and became careless. Got passed around upstairs, from "date" to "date." But there were no male equivalents of housemothers like Mrs. Thayer at fraternities, only house managers or advisors, and when Kappa girls went to fraternity parties on campus or at Cornell as they did every weekend, they did as they pleased. Or as their dates pleased. C'mon! You'll like this guy, he's a great guy, you can't be working all the time! I made up my face like the other faces, I brushed my snarled hair till it shone. I was given a pink taffeta dress to wear, a skirt to mid-calf and a big bow tied at my back to make the waist fit. I was given sparkly earrings. Smiling and blinking like a nocturnal animal prodded out into the sunshine. In the fraternity house the din was deafening. The young men, en masse, were tall. Laughter, music. Beer. Paper cups, beer. The sacrament was beer. In the rest room reserved for LADIES (a poster in smeary red paint taped to the outside of the door) there was a giant blue box of Kotex prominently in view. Some wag had put, in each of the toilets, goldfish. Were you supposed to laugh? Flush the beautiful golden little fish down down the toilet, and laugh? I lacked an appropriate sense of humor, I lacked an appreciation of beer. And mouths tasting of beer. Was I expected to dance in this din, in a crush of grinning strangers, in a grinding embrace? Expected to kiss a stranger? Some boy who didn't know me, had forgotten my name? What was the purpose of drinking to get drunk? My Kappa sister Chris, vomiting off the back steps onto garbage cans marked

.

Chris, come on. Chris, please. I was begging but she refused to listen. Back to the party! I was trying to explain to Dawn, Jill, Donna, Trudi, who were impatient with me, eyes hotly shining, skin heated, arms slung around their grinning dates' necks. She'll be fine, Chris can take care of herself, she's been at these parties before. I provoked embarrassment and disgust among those Kappas sober enough to notice how I left drunken Eddy my "date" walking out of the music-blare running across the snowy spiky-grassed park in ridiculous high heels, my borrowed pink taffeta dress swishing like ice against my stockinged legs, breathless, cursing, tears leaking out of my eyes though God damn I wasn't crying, why cry? My feelings can't be hurt where I have none.

Next day around noon, Trudi looking coarse-faced and homely without makeup brought the black cloth coat I'd left on the crammed coat-rack at the fraternity house, tossed it onto my bed with a look of pity and contempt. "Here. You forgot something."

What happened to Chris?

Hey if she doesn't remember, so what?

Whose business? Yours?

No memory, nothing to forgive.

Her date took precautions, probably. He isn't a complete asshole.

Was it just him?

Returning from the library along University Place, just before 11:00 p.m. Crossing the snowy park. I was carrying books in my arms as you might cradle a baby. One of them was eight hundred pages, a history of European philosophy. I was walking swiftly, my breath steaming in the freezing air. I'd been working in the library stacks and was almost late for curfew. My mind was empty of all thoughts except the urgent need to get up the steep hill to the Kappa house, to get inside before 11:00 p.m. For Mrs. Thayer would not be sympathetic, Mrs. Thayer would not even listen to my stammered excuse. You American gurls! Suddenly I heard whispering-"Missy? Mis-sy?" The figure appeared from behind a tree as a child might, out of a hiding place. In the dim light of a street lamp on University Place I saw his face: a stranger's: fattish jowls, clean-shaven jaws, thin wormy mouth stretched in a leering grin, black-rimmed glasses like a schoolteacher's, that magnified his eyes like minnows. He's letting me see his face. Wants me to see his face. "Mis-sy," he was saying, the tip of his tongue protruding between his lips, " -gonna hurt your titties runnin'! Take care." He might have been any age between thirty-five and fifty. There was a singsong mock-solicitude to his rather high-pitched voice. I knew him at once as the man who'd accosted Freddie and other girls; but I was not one of these girls; I was a Strykersville girl; without hesitation I threw my heavy books at him, directly at his face, knocking his glasses off. He cried out in surprise and pain. No girl or woman this crude bastard had ever approached had behaved like this, he wasn't prepared, his fantasies hadn't prepared him for me. I was screaming at him, short yipping breathless cries like a dog.

Watching him then limp across the park, along a side street, out of my vision. Like liquid fire adrenaline coursed through my veins. I was thrilled, I was buoyant. This incident, I would have liked to tell my father.

In the snow lay the black-rimmed glasses. I picked them up with my gloved hand and had an impulse to snap them in two, in rage. But I didn't. I slipped them into my coat pocket instead.

No one had heard my short breathless little screams. They'd faded immediately, like my steaming breath.

What if he'd hurt me? There was the glint of madness in his eyes. Saliva at the corners of his wormy mouth.

When I entered the brightly lit Kappa house a few minutes later, my heart still pounding, I was two or three minutes late but the proctor on duty, smoking a cigarette, waved me indifferently inside. She took no notice of my flushed, excited face. My dark, dilated eyes. I did not rush to Mrs. Thayer's door, which was closed at this time of night; I did not bring her the gift of my female distress after all. The library books were damp with snow but otherwise undamaged. I knew I was a very lucky girl.

My feelings can't be hurt where I have none.

What I would do: I'd picked up the glasses with gloved hands and I would never touch the glasses without wearing gloves; I would mail them to Syracuse police headquarters with a terse typed note. These belong to a sex offender. He is yours.

Thunderous hooves! Shrieks of laughter. Soap-splattered mirrors in the third-floor communal bathroom. The smell of cigarette smoke everywhere and cigarette butts strewn like confetti. Empty Tab and Coke cans kicked along the corridor, down to the stairway landing, for Geraldine the Negro maid to clean up; Geraldine with no expression on her dark creased face, wordless, dropping trash into her plastic bag. (Passing Geraldine and her bulky vacuum cleaner in the corridor, I lowered my eyes, I was ashamed of my skin. In the Kappa Gamma Pi house that autumn of my sophomore year I knew for the first time what it was to be ashamed of my skin. But Geraldine took no more notice of me than any white-girl Kappa deserved.) Bitch they were incensed Why doesn't she mind her own God-damn business. Mrs. Thayer had dared to scold certain senior girls. Conduct unbecoming ladies and in public rooms! There was Lulu who played repeatedly at a high volume "The Song from Moulin Rouge" to celebrate See look? lifting her left hand where a tiny diamond ring flashed like a naughty wink Engaged before I'm twenty-one. Where a younger girl was crying, there several seniors circled her C'mon, sweetie! Get real. When I approached, one of them cursed me, shoved me aside and away and I retreated in shock never knowing Why? I could not tell myself the old story Once upon a time because the time was now; the story was now; I'd believed I was causing the story to take place, but in fact the story was taking place around me, as a tide rises, brackish and muddy and filthy with debris. My Kappa sisters were fascinating to me as giant, brightly feathered predator birds would be fascinating to a small songbird hiding in the brush. Or trying to hide in the brush.

In my Ethics text I underlined The endeavor to understand is the first and only basis of virtue.

Yet it began to happen: the Guardian, Harper's & Queen, Punch and other British publications were left in disarray on the parlor table, sometimes on the very floor. Smoldering cigarettes left behind to foul the parlor air seeping beneath the door into Mrs. Thayer's private quarters. The laughter of anonymous male persons in the front foyer as the door was slammed, hard enough to make every crystal chandelier in the house shiver. Hyena laughter on the stairs after curfew. Heavy pounding footfalls in the second-floor corridor above Mrs. Thayer's bedroom. On the mahogany banister so fiercely polished by the silent Geraldine, dried threads of-was it human vomit? Mrs. Thayer called, "Gurls! Gurls!" One of her elaborately wrapped food packages was missing from the pantry cupboard. Simply gone. Where? None of the kitchen help could explain. At mealtimes Mrs. Thayer's icy blue eyes were alert, shrewd, darting from face to face. Only the younger Kappas smiled; we wouldn't have known we'd had any choice. "It is very quiet in here. The quiet of guilty consciences," Mrs. Thayer observed. With trembling fingers, at the conclusion of the meal, Mrs. Thayer rang the little silver bell. Summoning the bulky troupe of us into the parlor, except those senior girls who'd defiantly slipped away. "Who has been doing these things?" Mrs. Thayer calmly inquired. "Who has been so-unmannerly? So crude?" You knew Mrs. Thayer wanted to say so American! It might have been the magazines of which she spoke-again scattered about the parlor, shocking to see. And the crossword puzzle page of the local newspaper, on the floor. There was an embarrassed silence. A restless silence. In my nervousness I began to count heads but gave up at beyond twenty-five. Mercy and Trudi exchanged simpering-guilty glances, Bon-Bon and Chris clenched their jaws trying not to laugh aloud. Dawn licked her glossy lips frowning into space. Freddie surreptitiously scratched her left underarm. Deedee suppressed a yawn, or a belch. Daintily the mantel clock chimed the quarter hour. A reminder: Kappas are first and foremost young ladies. But upstairs a phonograph was playing rock and roll. Low-down dirty, thumping white-boy black-blues. From where I was seated on the carpet, I could see beneath the sofa upon which Mrs. Thayer sat stiffly girdled and erect; I saw what appeared to be a sanitary napkin. I was transfixed by the sight. Thinking But it can't have been used, it isn't blood-stained is it? Mrs. Thayer restated her question. But who could remember her question? Ice-eyes darting from face to face but these were innocent big-American-girl faces closed to her. She turned to me, a few feet from her, who was staring at her plump little feet in calfskin shoes; I'd been seeing that Mrs. Thayer's ankles were oddly thick, perhaps swollen. "You"-Mrs. Thayer said suddenly, waking me from my trance-"do you know? I command you to speak." I was so startled, I must have reacted in a way to stir amusement in the other girls; my eyes blinked guiltily of their own accord. A wild desolation touched my heart. I did not want Mrs. Thayer to discover the sanitary napkin, I did not want her to be publicly shocked and humiliated, I did not want the poor woman's trembling to become more visible, how the Kappa girls would giggle, mocking the Brit-bitch behind her back. Without thinking I said, "I-I must have done it, Mrs. Thayer."

There was a shocked pause. Even the mantel clock seemed to cease its minute ticking.

Was it the magazines we were discussing?-I was pointing at them, and pages of the Syracuse paper scattered on the carpet. My voice cracked, nasal and frightened. "I'm the only one who reads your magazines, Mrs. Thayer. I do the crossword puzzle." This was false, I had never "done" a crossword puzzle in my life; never would I waste my intelligence on a mere game. "So I-must have done this." There was another pause, an awkward blank silence. My Kappa sisters did not move yet there was a sense of collective movement away from me; a single indrawn breath. Mrs. Thayer, wholly unprepared for this confession, stared at me, a slow heated flush rising in her face. Almost faltering, she asked, " 'Must have'-or in fact 'did'-?" but her sarcasm lacked force, authority. I was smiling blankly. I heard myself say in a stammer, "I-I did, Mrs. Thayer. I promise it won't happen again." I was shivering suddenly, it must have been the onset of flu. I recalled that the man-in-the-park, my would-be assailant, had seen my face as clearly as I'd seen his. My mistake had been, I hadn't run to Mrs. Thayer in tears. Now my bowels churned hotly. What little I'd managed to consume at dinner, was clenching itself in spasms of revenge. Perhaps Mrs. Thayer knew that I was not even lying purposefully, to any point. Of the Kappas, I was the only girl who wore the same clothes day after day. A rumpled charcoal-gray wool skirt with a waistband so loose, the skirt twisted around, side to front, back to front, without my noticing. A long-sleeved white cotton blouse, much laundered and insufficiently ironed, with pert button-down collar in the style of the day. And an oversized navy blue orlon V-neck sweater, from the Strykersville Sears outlet, going at the elbows. My socks were mismatched but both were white wool. My hair lifted in uncombable clots of frizz, like iron filings stirred by a passing magnet. Whoever I was, seated amid the Kappas, nervously pleating her already creased skirt, I represented a valiant if somewhat smudged variant of the collegiate ideal. Mrs. Thayer, who'd been staring gloomily at me, decided, suddenly, out of spite perhaps, to believe me; she sighed, and struck at the sofa with a vexed little fist. "Oh very well, then! You are careless like all the rest. You gurls! I tell you and tell you." With an airy gesture of her hand Mrs. Thayer dismissed the other girls, only just in time before the boldest drifted away. I remained behind, contrite, biting my lip, busily tidying up the parlor. In disgust Mrs. Thayer said, "I would have expected better behavior from you, you of all these-'Kappas.' " The word Kappa was pronounced as a mild obscenity. I waited for Mrs. Thayer to ask about the other infractions of her rule, the theft of her food for instance, but she said nothing, stalked out of the parlor and slammed the door. By this time no one remained in the parlor except me.

With a folded newspaper I managed to nudge the sanitary napkin out from beneath the sofa. In fact, it had been used: wizened and clotted with dark, caked blood at its center, dazzling gauzy white elsewhere. A Kotex. If Mrs. Thayer had been spared, so had Geraldine. I wrapped the thing in newspaper to throw into the trash. I'd returned the magazines to their original fan-shaped order. Hearing my Kappa sisters overhead, their heavy insolent feet. I'd been reading in a book of ancient mythology of the Harpies, storm-spirits that carried souls to Hades. Their whispers, murmurs, mocking laughter sifting downward, on my head.

Underlining in my philosophy text We endeavor to affirm everything concerning ourselves and concerning the beloved object which we imagine will affect us or the object with joy, and, on the contrary, we endeavor to deny everything that will affect either us or ourselves with sorrow.

So it began to happen that God touched me in unspeakable ways. At first I ignored it, ignored Him. (In whom I did not believe; I was too cerebral for God-games.) A few times, I'd been taken to the Lutheran church in Strykersville. Sleety rain pelting against the windows. The minister with his raw hopeful voice and winking eyeglasses. I was seated between my brother Dietrich and my grandmother. There must have been some reason. A relative's death? A funeral? The muddy cemetery, the forlorn little marker. A ticklish sensation that grew tight, tighter like wires stringing my body together so I wanted suddenly to laugh, I was nineteen years old and living amid strangers in a millionaire's mansion atop a hill. How happy I am, I've escaped you. And lucky. So much more lucky than I deserve.

Yet I could not sleep. I had more or less abandoned my room to Deedee and her friends, returning to it only to change my clothes. When the basement study room emptied out, after midnight usually, I tried to sleep there; on the battered old leather couch smelling of cigarette smoke and laced with burns. In the Kappa house I yearned for the aloneness of my previous life; as, in that previous life, I had yearned for the sisterhood of the Kappas. I was writing a paper titled "Free Will and Determinism in Spinoza" but it was a paper meant to penetrate the actual truth. For each page of my paper, each paragraph, each sentence, I was afflicted by others of equal authority swarming into my head like hornets. In my notes for this paper, there were strips of paper marked A, B, C, etc.; others marked 1, 2, 3, etc. There were vertical scribblings in blue ballpoint, horizontal scribblings in green ballpoint. Some of this was smudged. In an ecstasy of sudden clarity I wrote Spinoza made of his madness, art. I did not believe that my professor would admire this insight so I attributed it to an invented scholar. I could not sleep, yet to my dismay I could not maintain a reliable wakefulness at other times. My eyes open, I felt myself begin to flicker like a candle in a draft. Going out, out. And good riddance. My German-Jew grandmother scolded, shaking a flour-whitened forefinger. Why does flour, grainy and powdery, on human flesh, so appall? My mother, Ida, stood in a doorway staring at me, a hand lifted in greeting, or in farewell. Where her smiling mouth had been there was now a blood-blotch. They were concerned for my health, my sanity; though they did not give that name to it-sanity. A decent girl did not speak of sexual, and a decent girl did not speak of sanity I became worried that the soiled sanitary napkin might be traced back to me because I'd been the one to wrap it in newspaper and throw it into the trash. There was the fatal closeness of sanitary, sanity. I caused a gang of Kappas to laugh raucously by suggesting how the two might be linked. Oh, I was funny! Crazy sense of humor, that one I'd been taken by surprise when four of my sisters came by, one Sunday morning, to rap on my door and ask if I'd like to join them?- they were wearing their good coats, they were wearing hats and gloves; if they'd been out late the night before, their faces were relatively fresh, their eyes sparkly as good Christian eyes. They were going to St. John's, the Episcopalian church, wasn't I Episcopalian, wouldn't I like to join them? I was deeply ashamed, I stammered explaining I would go with them another time, they went away clattering in their high heels denouncing me. My brothers laughed at me, my distress. To them, I'd always been a liar; if you'd asked would they have wanted me born, they would have said in a single voice No! If I needed a Kotex I might steal one from another girl's toiletries for I could not afford to buy Kotex, I hated the look of the very box, the prim medicinal smell. In fact, my menstrual periods had become irregular and would gradually cease. (I feared I might be pregnant: no one would believe I'd never "done it" with a guy.) My brothers would stare at me in greater disgust. Before dawn, I crept upstairs to take a shower in the third-floor bathroom Where in the past I'd never taken more than two or three showers a week, now I took a shower every morning. And sometimes at night for the blood-smell was unmistakable, even if I didn't bleed. It was the blood-smell that had attracted the man in the park to me. I hadn't mailed his glasses to the Syracuse police after all, I'd thrown them away in the trash.) In the shower, I touched my breasts lightly with just my fingertips. You're taught to knead your breasts to search for lumps. The first symptoms are like tiny pebbles. Then they expand I wondered if they sliced your breasts from you, off the chest wall, in a smooth scraping maneuver; or if the breasts were hacked off, in pieces. Raw chicken breasts, the sticky skin still attached.

"You!-what the hell are you doing here?"

I stammered what sounded like Nothing and fled.

Behind the day-old bakery on Mohawk Street a few blocks from the university. Off-campus, another world. I walked with my head lowered in shame, my face burning. It wasn't the first time I'd prowled behind the bakery but it was the first time I'd been caught. If I couldn't eat with my Kappa sisters, I'd discovered other ways of eating, or at least of locating food. (For sometimes I was unable to eat the purloined food, too. Teeming with invisible bacteria, the germs of hepatitis and death.) Unsold poppy seed rolls, broken cookies, smashed pies, rock-hard loaves of bread and coffee cake, stuffed loosely into garbage bags.

Should be ashamed of yourself!

Why? It's delicious.

Beyond the university in the reverse direction was Auburn Hills, a residential neighborhood of large, handsome houses on tree-lined streets, where sometimes on Sunday mornings I would prowl the alleys between Auburn Avenue and Palmer Street, making my way sniffing like a hungry dog, for in this well-to-do neighborhood, no one parked on the street or brought garbage or trash to the curb; there were garages to the rear of houses, opening onto unpaved alleys, it was caterers' cartons that brought my eye in the trash, the aftermath of Saturday night parties, leftover canapes, caviar jars where always some caviar remained, even deviled eggs, or parts of eggs, bread sticks, even, once, a sizable portion of an angel's food wedding cake. Sometimes I devoured these foods where I stood, hardly troubling to glance around to see that no one watched; sometimes I stuffed them into my duffel bag to carry away and eat in private; sometimes, stricken with remorse, or a fear of food poisoning, or a wish to punish myself further, I threw everything away. I saw no contradiction between my ideal self and my animal self. As Spinoza said We yearn to persist in our being.

In terror that tiny cysts were forming in my breasts I dared not touch myself. In terror that I would fall asleep in one of my classes or faint and fall out of my desk, embarrassing myself in front of a professor I adored, I cruelly pinched the insides of my arms or stabbed myself with my pen. On my pale forearms were smears of blue ballpoint ink like broken arteries. In any philosophical system of genius the professor pronounced there co-exist contradictions. A hand was raised like a puppet's jerked on a string. I was not one to speak in large classes, this could not be me. Not my voice ringing anxiously amid the banked tiers of old-fashioned desks. Yet if X is not wholly non-Y, how can it be X? Or is it something else? Which we agree to call X? In our cavernous lecture hall on the top floor of the ancient Hall of Languages. The professor mimed applause at the question but said it might best be addressed later in the course, in the study of Hegel. My eyes began to cross with fatigue. There came in quick cartoon flashes the humiliation, but it was comical, of having been chased from the rear of the day-old bakery, the apparition of a startled looking young black man with whom I nearly collided; but I'd had no incriminating evidence on my person, I'd dropped the rolls, the breads, the smashed cherry pie in order to flee. At the Kappa house, I dragged myself to the table. My vacant place at the head table. There, the humiliation, less comical, of a sinewy piece of roast beef quivering at the end of my fork, tumbling to the floor to escape like a living thing. Mrs. Thayer spoke briskly, her Brit accent brittle with sarcasm. The other girls looked upon me with pity; or did not look upon me at all. Perhaps I had mistaken them as predator birds. Mrs. Thayer summoned me into her sitting room. The glare of her impatient gas-blue eyes. I could not keep straight what I'd overheard: Mrs. Thayer had had no children, or Mrs. Thayer had had children and they'd died in the terrible London bombing? What is wrong with you, Janice? Do you behave like that to annoy? To annoy me? 'No, you are Mary Alice, aren't you! How can you be so slovenly? Where is your pride? Your manners? If you are sick why don't you report to the infirmary? They are paid there to treat the sick-aren't they? Sickness is not a housemother's responsibility thank you! A housemother has responsibility and drudgery enough thank you! A housemother already earns her small pittance thank you! Discovered sleeping downstairs in the study room in my cheap cloth coat, barefoot. My legs were sickly pale yet bristled with fine curly brown hairs. The Kappas were indignant, legs require shaving, like underarms, but this was a girl who feared razors and would have to borrow (yet how could you borrow?) a razor blade. Upstairs, two floors of more than forty girls. Their sinewy muscular legs shaved smooth, skin glaring. Their armored breasts. Deodorant, hair spray, mascara, silver eye shadow. Radios, phonographs, the calypso, Ricky Nelson's Travelin' Man," the slamming of doors and the flushing of toilets. Chain-smoking. More not-quite-emptied Tab and Coke cans kicked along the corridor. Kat, Tammy, Trudi, Sandi leaning in the doorway frowning. Without makeup they were the same girl almost. Without makeup their young faces were pale, lumpy, puffy. Without mascara, their eyes were naked. What did they want from me? Help with their term papers? I stole bars of soap, but only the most worn down bars of soap, to wash myself clean. A soapy lather, to wash my hair. I missed meetings and so must be punished: fined: $12, $15, $18. I could not pay for I had no money, unless I stole money, but where could I steal money, pride prevented me where it didn't prevent my stealing food so long as it was garbage, not food. In the infirmary on the far side of the windswept campus when at last a nurse called my name I'd changed my mind, walked out. I couldn't miss my work at the registrar's office (though I was twenty minutes late). There they asked me in that kindly way you can't trust, was something wrong with me? This flu? Asian flu, so-called? I smiled the Kappa smile. I bared my teeth like a cheerleader. I raised my hand to ask the professor a question but when he frowned at me, clearly not wanting me to speak, my throat closed up. The trembling was under control now, it had gone inside. I shampooed my hair digging my nails into my scalp and brushed it with such ferocity it shone and crackled with electricity. And my eyes, people said were so like my father's eyes, all black: all pupil. The clever girls avoided the head table, there were seven of us seated at the head table, Mrs. Thayer refused to glance at me. When she ate, moisture glistened in her eyes. In fact the Brit-bitch is a hog. Watch her eat sometimes. At midterm I'd become popular, as usual. Girls came to see me smiling and pleading. It was strange: I could not complete my own work, yet I was able to glance quickly through others' work and see what was required. Errors leapt to my eye. As punishment for missing meetings, I was assigned proctor duty. Ringing the gong at five minutes before curfew. Ushering the last of the "dates" out the door. Heifer-sized boys, football players of Upsilon Beta, Lambda Alpha Chi. Their faces were covered in smeared lipstick as if they'd been devouring raw meat. They beer-belched in my face, without apology. Intestinal gases floated in their wake. It was the proctor's duty to bolt the front door, switch out the lights, clean the ashtrays, tidy up the disheveled living room where passionate Kappas and their dates of the evening had been "saying good night" sometimes for as long as two hours. (Crusted clumps of tissue wedged between cushions, wads of still-damp gum imprinted with teethmarks on the undersides of tables.) Mrs. Thayer was depending upon me as she could not depend upon the others. Mrs. Thayer had her own bottle of wine, a bitter-smelling red wine we were not supposed to know about. (The Negro house boy, flirty and sexy and of the creamy hue of Harry Belafonte, pals with certain Kappas, reported this startling fact.) I'd been showering in the third-floor bathroom, desperate to wash away the stink of cigarette smoke; the girls stared and spoke of me openly. What's with her? She sick? Oh ignore her, she's nuts. Just wants attention, ignore her. At curfew they returned glassy-eyed and swaying and their clothes haphazardly buttoned. Sometimes they couldn't make it to a bathroom and vomited on the stairs. Chris who'd been puking every day of her life (as her roommate complained) had dropped out of school, her shame-faced parents came to drive her away. Upstairs, the Kappa faces were pale and coarse as uncooked dough. No eyebrows, no lashes, hair twisted onto pink foam-rubber curlers. A smoke haze prevailed. Geraldine was doubled over coughing. I was in awe of the Kappa breasts worn like armor. All the breasts were D-cups jacked up in satin bras, hoisted and (sometimes) padded. Even the pixie-girls' breasts were D-cups. Breasts preceded girls into rooms. Breasts preceded the girls who bore them with shivery female pride and restrained haste, descending the spiral stairs to their staring dates. Their smooth-shaved calves shining like pewter. Underarms doused with deodorant and liberally dabbed with talcum powder. You would not recognize Kappa girls upstairs but downstairs and on campus, at fraternity parties and in taverns they emanated the Kappa look glamorous, sexy, determined. Exuding "personality" like a lighthouse beacon on flashing light. Their rooms were whirlwinds of disorder, pigsties out of which they emerged radiant and avid for romance, like the phoenix out of his flaming nest. Their lives were worn on the outside of their skin like another item of apparel. Their lives in the presence of male persons were fanatically prepared performances, sustained for hours at a stretch. They were such fierce actresses, they might not have known they were acting at all. They were fighting for their lives. Their goal was to become engaged before graduation. They would be married before the age of twenty-two, they would be mothers before the age of twenty-three. Some of them would be divorced before the age of thirty. I adored them. I feared them, and I loathed them, and I adored them. I did not imagine that I knew them. They spoke in code; even their shrieks of laughter were in code. The smoke curling from the sides of their mouths like exhaust from a car's tailpipe. Marble-hard sharpness of their eyes. The Kappa smile beaming Hi! How are ya! Loveya! Like tossing coins at beggars. As if they were worthy of such blessings. As if they were, not Kappa Gamma Pi's, a sorority of the second rank, but Chi Omegas, TriDelts, Pi Phi's, sororities of the first rank. As if they were not mainly elementary ed. majors, struggling for C's, but proudly on the dean's list. As if they weren't party girls with dubious reputations but popular Hellenic council officers, class officers, homecoming queens; as if they were respected, admired, emulated, not pursued as girls who drank, and put out.

I knew none of this, how could I know. Scarcely did I know what the ugly term put out meant.

My date Eddy sneering Think you're hot shit, eh? You're a Kappa you put out.

I wept when I lost my Kappa pin. My beautiful ebony-and-gilt Kappa pin. My Kappa pin that had cost me $75. My Kappa pin I could not afford. My Kappa pin with my initials engraved on it. My Kappa pin lost in the library stacks where I'd been shelving books, pushing a creaking cart for miles of poorly lit corridors as in a nightmare of comic repetition. It might have fallen off as my fingertips half-consciously caressed my A-cup breasts in terror of what they might discover. I wept for the loss of the pin; I could not replace it; my Kappa sisters were angry with me; no one ever loses her pin. And Mrs. Thayer staring, frowning. A sagging of her powdered jowls. She took note in silence of my reddened fingers, a scaly rash across the backs of my hands from washing them too often in the winter, in the harsh soap available in university lavatories. Deedee gave me her Jergen's lotion to rub on them but the perfumy liquid made the rash worse. Maybe I have leprosy I joked. There's leprosy in my family. Deedee's look of alarm was a warning yet my mouth continued. My mother died of it. In classes I took to wearing my coat and kept my scaly hands inside the sleeves. For Descartes the universe is essentially irrational while for Spinoza the universe is essentially rational and it is the nature of the human mind to know. And looked up to see several of my Kappa sisters in the doorway smiling at me, having forgiven me? Sweetly pleading: could I help them with their term papers? These were confused, incoherent papers interlarded with pristine passages copied from "sources" without footnote attribution. Some I would remedy piecemeal, others I would rewrite completely. It was a bonus for my Kappa sisters, as Dawn had discovered the previous year, that I could type so well. I could "think with my fingers" the girls marveled. But something happened overnight, I could not think with my fingers after all, nor even type with my fingers; I could not think with my brain; my thoughts lurched, skidded, leapt and were derailed; I couldn't concentrate; even speech became a feat, with my deadened tongue. Ideas slid away like melting snow. Please forgive me, I can't. I haven't been able to sleep. I'm behind in my work too. I'm so afraid sometimes… And there was Dawn staring coldly at me, twisting her fluorescent mouth, cursing God damn why else d' you think you're here? Your good looks? Stomping away in her grimy white wool socks.

Night following night the calypso music penetrating the walls. Mechanical-moronic downbeat reverberating through the floorboards. The girls sang along with the mildly pornographic lyrics, swinging their hips and breasts as they'd seen in the movies. Like spikes in the brain these words I could not escape when curfew locked me inside the Kappa house at the northern end of University Place.

In such unspeakable ways, God touched me.

3

In the end, Agnes Thayer and I left Kappa Gamma Pi within a few days of each other, in February 1963. In the end the end comes swiftly!

Our housemother had received a call from the Dean of Men alerting her to the "reckless behavior" and "disregard for their own safety" of certain of the girls under her charge, at the Winter Weekend fraternity parties at Cornell; the exact identities of the girls were not known, except they were Kappas from Syracuse-"Girls with a certain reputation." Mrs. Thayer promptly summoned the most likely candidates into her sitting room, each in turn, and spoke sternly to them; and may have thought that the issue was resolved for the girls were subdued, sullen and quiet, and made no serious attempt to defend themselves. ("How the hell did I know what to say?" Mercy said. "I was so wasted all weekend, I didn't remember a thing.") It was reported through the house that Kat, a red-haired senior with a reputation for quick tantrums and crying jags, began to cry as Mrs. Thayer scolded; Mrs. Thayer took pity on her, for Kat was a very pretty, sweet-seeming girl when she made the effort; she allowed Mrs. Thayer to take her hand, and squeeze it, and gently admonish her, "My dear, our little talk today may save you! You may look back upon this hour, many years from now, as a mother, or indeed a grandmother, and-" Mrs. Thayer's icy eyes suddenly brimmed with tears. "Remember Agnes Thayer kindly!" And Kat whispered, her eyelids quivering, "Ohhhh, Mrs. Thayer. I promise I will."

Next day Kat and her roommates took delicious revenge upon Mrs. Thayer by creeping into the parlor and tossing magazines and newspapers onto the floor; when the mail was delivered, they snatched up Mrs. Thayer's mail, including one of the airmail letters, and mutilated it, leaving the evidence on the carpet outside Mrs. Thayer's door. Other girls observed, but no one tried to stop them. If I'd been present maybe I would have… said something? Pleaded with them? Or would I have laughed nervously and giddily with the others? "This Brit-bitch needs to get the message," Kat said thrillingly, "-she is not one of us." And another time, less forcibly now, Mrs. Thayer rang her little silver bell at dinner, trembling with indignation and her eyes bluely bright with fear. Had she been drinking?-a flush in her already ruddy cheeks, a just-perceptible slurring of her words. Yet how brave the woman's tight-girdled posture, there on the sofa: "Gurls, gurls! What is this-anarchy! I demand an explanation." And there was silence; an air of resentment, verging upon mutiny; a few of the bolder girls exchanged droll glances, smirking; some girls were openly smoking, or noisily chewing gum; a number of girls hadn't obeyed Mrs. Thayer's summons at all; Kat had gone out drinking with her Deke boyfriend, and her roommates were playing rock music upstairs. Mrs. Thayer looked pleadingly at those girls she imagined were allies: kewpie-doll Lulu who was one of her favorites, big blinking innocent eyes and a mouth Mrs. Thayer could not have guessed was riotously foul, often at Mrs Thayer's expense. But Lulu, unaccountably, was staring blankly past Mrs Thayer's head. Again, as if on cue, as in a movie in which mere repetition is an element of comedy, the mantel clock chimed. At the back of the house the busboys laughed a little too loudly. And girls' giggles-someone must have been in the kitchen with them, a taboo zone at this hour. I hoped that Mrs. Thayer wouldn't notice me. I'd come reluctantly into the parlor, sensing disaster; I had not been feeling very well, though I'd smeared bright crimson grease onto my mouth, Deedee's lipstick, at Deedee's suggestion; I'd even allowed Deedee to smear silver-green eye shadow on my eyelids; it was being urged upon my roommate that she "do something" about me, for I was looking, my Kappa sisters thought, in their blunt, helpful way, "like shit." I was wearing my coat, however; though it was forbidden, Mrs. Thayer seemed not to have noticed; but I was very cold even indoors, and susceptible to fits of shivering; and I did not want to provoke my Kappa sisters into more disgust with me than they already felt, exposing my flat sweater front where no Kappa pin glittered. In her agitation Mrs. Thayer locked eyes with me and I understood that I had no choice. I raised my hand and said in a soft, penitent voice, "Mrs. Thayer, I-I did it." Mrs. Thayer stared at me incredulously. "You? You did not." Her response was unhesitating. But I persisted, softly, "I did, Mrs. Thayer. I'm truly sorry." Perplexed, Mrs. Thayer said, "But-why?" To this reasonable question I could think of no reasonable reply. I was aware of my Kappa sisters murmuring to one another; my mind was functioning slowly, in large windmill arcs. Hadn't I already confessed, a few weeks before? Why was it so unexpected that I would confess again? I heard myself say, "I-I guess I don't know why, Mrs. Thayer. An urge came over me." "An urge! To destroy mail? My mail? It's a federal offense in this country, I believe, to destroy another's mail." Mrs. Thayer was trying to speak with a vengeful air; Mrs. Thayer was trying to convince herself that I was indeed the criminal; on all sides the Kappas were regarding me with dread, embarrassment, the behavior of Kat and her roommates was widely known; it could make no sense, that I was confessing; Lulu, boldly lighting up a cigarette, her diamond engagement ring flashing, glanced at me disapproving, as if she'd never seen such a pathetic specimen in her life. Who the hell are you? Why are you here? What are you doing among sane people? Feeling the need to seem more convincing, I began to cry; I was unpracticed in crying, for I'd always resisted my brothers' efforts to make me cry; to make me into a girl; a weeping girl, and inferior to boys; yet I cried now sincerely, and felt my face contort like an infant's. A girl passed me a slightly used Kleenex without looking at me. At the back of the house, an eruption of laughter and a sound of breaking plates. Yet Mrs. Thayer did not seem to hear. She was staring at me, a plump hand pressed against her bosom. She wore, most days, boxy woollen suits with frilly blouses beneath. Today there was a faint stain on her white silk blouse. "Well, then. Gurls-the remainder of you, seeing that you are innocent," Mrs. Thayer puffed out her cheeks, possibly trying for sarcasm but lacking the confidence, "-are dismissed." And within seconds the pack of them was gone, thundering up the stairs, laughing.

There remained the stoutish woman breathing audibly, brooding upon me as I sat, penitent and stubborn, on the carpet a few feet away. At last she said, exasperated, "Elise-no, Alicia?-if you are telling the truth, and not simply protecting another girl or girls, you will have to cease this-unnatural behavior. At once! Or I will notify the Dean of Women! And if you are not telling the truth-if you are lying to me, at this moment, I-I will have to notify the Dean of Women." I was staring at Mrs. Thayer's swollen ankles. I could not bring myself to contradict her, to point out that my name was neither "Elise" nor "Alicia" nor was it a name that resembled these names. I could only repeat, quietly, "But I am telling the truth, Mrs. Thayer-what would be my motive in lying?"

The question was an appeal; yet not an appeal Mrs. Thayer could have answered. It was a question put to the Void.

Mrs. Thayer was trying to push herself up from the sofa, leaning on the armrest; her breath came short, her fleshy face was raddled and drawn with fatigue. I sprang up quickly to help her. Her weight on my arm was warm and livid. Once Mrs. Thayer had regained her feet, however, she pushed from me; her eyes shone with indignation. Turning to leave, fluttering her beringed hands, making a snorting sound of bemused disgust-"You may tidy up in here, you strange, perverse gurl. I accept your apology. But if ever you repeat such behavior, I shall notify the Dean of Women, I shall demand your expulsion from this house."

I murmured in her wake, "Yes, Mrs. Thayer."

Following that hour, neither my Kappa sisters nor Mrs. Thayer ever trusted me again.

For how could I explain to Mrs. Thayer Better to think that there is only one responsible, and not many. Better to think that the universe is rational and you might come to know a tiny portion of its truth, however false that truth.

Next morning I wakened in the winter dark before dawn. I was out of the prison-house before 7:00 a.m. The kitchen help was arriving but would not take notice of me. Nor would I speak to anyone. I'd avoided the upstairs of the house in order to avoid my sisters' averted eyes. I understood that my roommate, who'd lent me her makeup, who'd offered to put up my hair in rollers, had been shamed by my behavior. And she toys she has leprosy! I want another roommate. I hate her. I'd lain on the tattered couch in the basement study room planning the remainder of my life. Or did the remainder of my life come spinning past me like a comet trailing flame. I was panicked to have lost Ida: when I tried to recall my mother, I could see only the dog-eared snapshots. I did not see a living woman, I saw the black-and-white two-dimensional snapshots my grandmother had begrudgingly allowed me to examine as a little girl. No sticky fingers! my grandmother had cautioned me. Yet the snapshots collected loose in the album often stuck together.

At the registrar's office in Erie Hall I was told I'd come too early. "But can't I work now? Isn't my work ready for me now?" The urgency in my voice might have alarmed the administrative assistant, a youthful middle-aged woman who'd taken an interest in me as a scholarship student, and who'd always seemed fond of me; the bond between us had been broken like a cobweb, for I'd come to work in the morning and not in the afternoon, and there was no place for me. And my hair was uncombed, my eyes unnaturally dilated, and the lids were inflamed and smeared with greasy silver-green eye shadow. Where I went next, in the sub-freezing air, as a glaring opalescent sky gradually lightened overhead, I wouldn't clearly remember. To Auburn Heights, possibly. Where a German shepherd barked excitedly at me as I stood hesitantly at the mouth of the alley lined with trash cans. A gritty snow-crust lay over everything, like hardened plastic. I did not believe I was hungry, yet I knew I should eat; yet the dog barked, barked; he was Cerberus barking me away, I had no choice but to retreat. My breath came in steaming pants and ice rivulets hardened beneath my eyes where tears ran down my cheeks. Around my head, tied like a scarf, I wore a soiled gray woollen muffler; it was of good quality, I'd found it in a carton of curb-side trash on Genesee Street a few blocks from the sorority. As I walked, hiking across snowy stretches of the hilly campus, my lips moved silently. Don't hate me! All I wanted was for both of you to be proud of me. Not only my mother's face was fading from my memory, my father's face was fading, too. He'd been dead more than a year. Strength is required to retain the faces of the dead and my strength which I'd always taken for granted, a frantic nervous strength like a rat rushing through a maze, was draining from me. I'd written to my grandmother asking her to send me one or two snapshots of my father, but my grandmother never replied. My father's body had never been recovered; no death certificate had been sent to Strykersville, that I knew of; when one of my sorority sisters asked, as if suddenly suspicious, maybe Deedee had primed her, where my father lived, I'd said he'd gone to Smithereens. She'd asked What? as if she hadn't heard right and I said He's gone to Smithereens, it's a town in the Rocky Mountains. Maybe someday your father will go there, too.

In European Philosophy there was a girl hunched in her coat, seated in an outermost row beneath tall glaring windows. Where other students took dutiful notes, the girl stared avidly at the professor lecturing in a calm, droning voice on the problem of God's existence. Plato and Aristotle, St. Augustine, Francis Bacon and Spinoza, Voltaire, Kant and German Idealism… The girl's skin was luridly pale and her dark, sunken eyes unnaturally alert. She'd shoved both her fists deep into her coat pockets. She searched for a pen, the pen flew from her fingers and rolled along the worn, varnished floor. Oh, ignore her. She's nuts. She's pathetic. Takes it all so seriously. Just wants attention. Other students glanced at the girl warily. No one was seated near her. The lecture room was a place of abstract thought and bodiless speculation; it was not an appropriate place to bring a body, still less a body quivering with emotion. Near the end of the class when the professor invited questions, you could see his crafty eyes avoiding the girl seated beneath the window, a trembling hand raised. These were academic questions, please! No emotion, please! In a nasal, urgent, quavering but stubborn voice the girl asked what sounded like If there is God in a book why are there so many books? Why would He manifest Himself in so many? There was a respectful silence. The professor frowned as if he were seriously considering this question and not calculating how many more minutes before the bell rang to end the class. The girl laughed nervously. Wiped at her eyes. No one wished to look at her. Instead of addressing the class in his customary manner, while answering an individual's question, the professor stood silent regarding the girl with somber eyes; at last he said he'd speak with her after class. You could see how he'd slipped the class list out of his manila folder to glance rapidly through it; he meant to ascertain the girl's name, for in the discomfort of the moment he'd forgotten her name. One of his most brilliant, vexing undergraduates, whose papers were three times as long as papers written by her classmates, invariably A's, and-he'd forgotten her name? Not on the list. Not on any list. Not registered at the university. Not registered in the Universe. Class ended, at last. Relief! The sickly pale girl remained seated, no she was managing to stand, in the aisle beneath a tall glaring window like a deranged eye of God smiling uncertainly to herself; a girl in an overcoat, so you wouldn't see her small girl-breasts lacking a Kappa pin to redeem their smallness; a girl rumored to put out; yet hardly knowing what put out must be, except something very ugly. An action involving, afterward, stiff crusted wads of tissue. The professor was waiting at the front of the room to speak quietly with her, his worried eyes drifting on and about her, but the girl failed to come forward; she moved her lips, silently, and she smiled; she was a quarrelsome girl, and too damned smart for her own good; everyone in her family, plus farm neighbors, relatives said this of her Too damned smart for her own good; the professor, placing his papers in his briefcase, snapping the briefcase shut, was pretending now not to notice the girl at the edge of his vision; possibly, in the exigency of the moment, for another student was coming forward to speak with him, he'd actually ceased to be aware of her.

Biting my lip to keep from shouting my name. But suddenly I didn't know my name.

Dunes of windswept snow. The dying elms barren of leaves now in continual contorted motion, their upper branches especially, in the wind. In overcoats and hooded jackets we hurried. We were young: herded by our elders like cattle. The weakest of us would stagger and fall and be forgotten. At dusk the parkland median of University Place continued to emit a dull glowering magical snow-light while the sky, massed as usual with clouds, identical clouds I'd seen the previous day, was heavy as a ceiling about to collapse. Fraternity row. The professor would never have understood. (Or would he have understood?) Even at this time of defeat and disintegration I felt the old thrill of romance, helpless romance, seeing the large houses, and lights in every window, from a distance. And the Kappa house at the far, northern end with its stately ghost-white Doric columns illuminated by a floodlight, its high-pitched roof like an illustration in a child's storybook, the promise of warmth within. Even now.

Though I had passed many times by the spot where the man with the black-rimmed glasses had approached me with a juvenile taunt of titties, the man had never reappeared. His pale ghost lingered, at a distance. I looked for him, the abrupt surprise of him, his poky little tongue and steaming breath, I was both fearful and hopeful of seeing him, as one takes a perverse comfort in repetition, an affirmation of identity at least; but the fierce, cold weather had banked his ardor; my unfeminine behavior had discouraged his sentimental notion of girl. I'd been thinking of him as near-blind and groping without his glasses but of course he'd gotten new glasses long ago.

Will you have sugar? Cream? Dreaming with open, dry eyes I smiled until my mouth ached pouring tea into heirloom Wedgwood cups reserved for such special occasions; I was but one of several tea- and coffee -pourers; with my scaly nail-bitten fingers I handed out small silver teaspoons and small linen napkins monogrammed

.

The public rooms of the Kappa house were transformed: tall urns of white flowers, roses, carnations, gardenias, even tulips; at the Steinway piano, an older Kappa alum named Marilynne was playing stormy Liszt alternating with Broadway show tunes. It was the annual WELCOME BACK KAPPAS! reception. The guests were alums, some of whom had driven or flown long distances, as well as a number of selected university women designated as honorary Kappas for the evening; there were only a few of these, for few women were on the university faculty; predominant among them was the Dean of Women, a friend of Agnes Thayer's, or at least an ally in the ceaseless struggle to maintain standards of ladylike behavior in the face of determined assaults by male persons. The Dean of Women was a heavy-set individual with slabs of chin, pancake cheeks and merry, suspicious eyes; she wore a heather-colored tweed suit with a jacket that barely contained her sloping shelf of a bosom. The Dean of Women was the threat Mrs. Thayer and other residence housemothers wielded, for the Dean of Women had the power to expel female students from the university "for cause." Rumors were rife of her harsh judgments, which were cloaked in smiles, and a concern for "proper procedure." When the Dean of Women came through the line, given tea, cream and sugar, it seemed to me that she fixed her gaze upon me with a knowing little twitch of her mouth. Are we acquainted, my dear? Yes? Before the reception, I'd quickly showered upstairs, for my body exuded an odor of something damp, like toadstools; I had not had time to wash my thick, snarled hair, but it was partly damp, or perhaps I was perspiring, tendrils stuck to my forehead like deranged commas. Of course I'd had to remove my coat: my Kappa sisters were heartily tired of that ugly coat: I was wearing a "good" wool dress someone had lent me, and around my neck to disguise my thinness and the absence of my Kappa pin the woollen muffler which in the bustle of the reception and the flickering candlelight might have been mistaken for an elegant silk-woollen scarf.

So many women! So many names! Faces! And most of these Kappas. Many of the alums were young, stylish, good-looking women who'd graduated from the university within the past ten years; others were well into their thirties, and others were well into middle age but all were bonded: the Kappa pin, ebony and gilt, with the tiny gold chain, proudly worn above their left breasts like a jeweled nipple. How inadequate I felt: a freak among normal females. Some of the women had maintained youthful, even voluptuous figures but many had grown plump, stout, fattish, fat. My older Kappa sisters, skilled at such receptions, moved among the women smiling happily and shaking hands vigorously. The purpose of our annual alumni tea: to Jorge strong links between alums and actives, to renew our bond of sisterhood, and TO HAVE A TERRIFIC TIME! We younger Kappas were not to be trusted to mingle with the well-to-do alums; the most charming, good-looking Kappas had been unsigned to these women, whose names were sacrosanct in the Syracuse chapter for their generous donations in past years. There was Mrs. K____________________ whose husband was chairman of the board of G____________________; there was Mrs. T____________________ whose husband was an investment banker with ____________________ Trust; there was Mrs. H ____________________ whose husband owned T____________________ Realtors; there, seated on a settee in a corner of the festive living room, a half-dozen beaming young Kappas paying court to her, was the legendary Mrs. D____________________ whose daughter had been a Kappa Class of '45 who'd died shortly after graduation and so in honor of the girl Mrs. D____________________ had established a million-dollar legacy for the Syracuse chapter of Kappa Gamma Pi. It was understood that Mrs. D____________________ would remember the chapter in her will, but Mrs. D____________________ would not be the only alum, and we'd been warned not to "underestimate" any of the older women no matter how ordinary they might appear to the untrained eye. None of these scruples were my concern at the present, for sophomores exclusively were serving; we'd been drilled at length in "proper behavior" by our social director Judi as well as the ubiquitous Mrs. Thayer, who had also supervised an exhausting five-hour bout of silver polishing by our overworked housekeeper Geraldine, the day before.

Remember, we were grimly warned, you are a Kappa. At all times.

We were instructed to move about gracefully with heavy silver trays bearing Wedgwood plates of petit fours, hot buttered scones and other delicate pastries; uncertain of ourselves as waitresses, we smiled without pause. Especially, I smiled. I would not think of my terrifying near-breakdown in philosophy class but of exalted, abstract philosophical queries. If there is God are we in God? If there is God how can we not be in God? Yet in God now? Here, in the Kappa house at 91 University Place? In the belly of the beast? Distinguished elders from Plato to Spinoza, from Aristotle to Nietzsche would have paled at these shrieks of female laughter like ripping silk. The humming buzzing confusion of William James's universe would be drowned out by these raised ecstatic Kappa voices. The air was porous and intoxicating with perfume, powder, hair spray. We lived in a robust era of American military vigilance abroad, the ceaseless scrutiny of "atheistic communism" that would soon erupt in a cataclysmic war with a remote Far East nation allegedly

Communist-threatened, about which no one in this gathering knew the most elementary facts; it was a heady macho era, and yet an era of voluptuous female figures and bouffant hairstyles teased and tormented and lacquered to the sheen of hornets' nests, like those heraldic heads on ancient scrolls and on the walls of ancient tombs. Little wonder that dainty pastries and cups of sweetened tea and coffee were being consumed with appetite on all sides. To reproduce the species, one must be fertile; to be fertile, one must eat. Only I, at the center of my attenuated universe, had no appetite. It was Spinoza who seemed to wish to believe Things could have been produced by God in no other manner and in no other order than they have been produced. I saw in a flash that I might revolutionize all of philosophy by daring to ask Why do you wish to believe what you claim to believe? Breathing open-mouthed, dazed by my sudden brilliance, I foresaw that such an inquiry would meet with hostility from (male) philosophers; and all philosophers were (male); though never once in all of classic philosophy is a penis acknowledged, let alone the concept penis. My inquiry would meet with hostility because it presupposed that there were purely contingent factors in life having little, or nothing, to do with philosophical speculation, only to do with the haphazard motions of individuals desperately seeking to survive. Only survive! I doubted that I would have Spinoza's stubborn integrity: offered a "decent" winter coat in place of my old, shamefully worn coat, would I have declined, as Spinoza famously declined such an offer? My hand shook, offering a Wedgwood teacup to DEBBI JACKSON '49 TROY NY.

DEBBI JACKSON raised her voice to be heard over the din asking me in girlish complicity did I just love living in the Kappa house, what a great weird old house it is, fond memories of "saying good night" for hours in the living room, how'd I like being a Kappa active, and my smile deepened, I raised my voice to say Yes, I liked my life here very much, I was very happy here except, and DEBBI JACKSON leaned forward inquiring Yes, what? and I heard myself murmur that I wasn't certain that I belonged in Kappa Gamma Pi, I thought it was "maybe morally wrong of me." DEBBI JACKSON and a sister alum smiled at me perplexed asking Why? Whyever? and I stammered, "Because I'm- I have-I think I have-Jewish blood."

There. It was said.

Yet DEBBI JACKSON and JOAN "FAX" FAXLANGER '52 continued to smile, somewhat perplexed. There were but two modes of social-Kappa expression: the happy smile and the look of vague perplexity. DEBBI, or JOAN, asked me what I'd said, can hardly hear yourself think in here, and I said, louder than I meant, "-Jew, I think. I am Jewish. I think." Now a cascade of words tumbled from my lips like soapy-dirty water from a broken, overflowing clothes washer: I explained to these older, adult Kappa sisters that I had reason to believe that I might be one-quarter Jewish; I had reason to believe that my father's parents were German Jews who'd craftily changed their name to disguise their background, and to throw off their pursuers, and-"Kappa Gamma Pi blackballs Jews on the first ballot, don't we?" DEBBI JACKSON and JOAN "FAX" FAXLANGER stared at me as if I'd shouted obscenities into their attractive powdered faces; blushing, they shook their heads in a tactful pretense of deafness, refused to meet my eye or even each other's eyes in their haste to escape; teetering in their pointy-toed high-heeled pumps they bore cups, plates, linen napkins to another part of the crowded room as if indeed they hadn't heard my outburst, and the bizarre exchange had never occurred. A vigilant senior fiercely waved me back to my duty as a tea-pourer at the head table.

There, I was badly needed. Even with my clumsy skills, pasteboard face and distraught manner. Even perspiring beneath the arms of the "good" wool dress not my own, not adorned with the Kappa pin lot new guests were arriving, a flood of more Kappa alums, more faces, smiles, name tags. As the reception progressed, alums were becoming conspicuously stouter, ruddier-faced, with jutting breasts and watermelon hips, piercing brass voices and blinding jewelry; some wore fashionable suits adorned with fur trim like living, captive creatures. The din of their voices and laughter rose to a fever pitch, yet continued to rise. I saw Mrs. Thayer covertly observing me from her position of honor at the table, as she was observing all the younger Kappas; she must have been deceived by my neon smile, and my mimicry of "proper behavior"; I had programmed myself like a windup doll, with only a single (unheard, unreported) outburst to my discredit; it was a principle of the Spinozan universe that all was predetermined; predestined; no swerve of chance or free will was possible, or perhaps desirable. If I kept my thoughts in order, like a beekeeper delivering bees to the hive, I could perform brilliantly, I would not be stung to death. And yet: the tick-tick-ticking somewhere inside my ear canals. My shaky hands, with not-entirely-clean fingernails. The rashes on my knuckles some whispered was a symptom of leprosy. The bedraggled gray muffler dangling about my neck like a useless noose; why? I refused to consider that morning's philosophy class, I cringed in shame wondering at my behavior; for it had not been "proper" behavior; it had not been "sane"-"sanitary"-behavior. Through my lifetime, I would recall the look of alarm, pity, dismay in the professor's eyes; his realization that he had a mad girl in his tutelage, which was the last thing he wanted; he was a professor of words, and not human beings; he'd collided with his own briefcase in his haste to leave the lecture hall. And yet I adored him. Or I wished to believe I adored him. Frontally, the man had a stolid, noble head given further dignity by a neatly trimmed pewter beard; in profile, the man hat! a chin that melted away, and the beard was a pasted-on wisp you could sec through.

Were Plato's eternal forms transparent, or solid? No commentator in more than twenty centuries had taken up this query.

I was distracted by the happy din of female voices. I saw with alarm that the crystal chandeliers, sheer Venetian glass, quivered. My arms ached (pleasantly, normally) as I continued to lift the surprisingly heavy teapot to pour, pour, pour. To pour Earl Grey tea (Mrs. Thayer's choice) without dribbling it, as Mrs. Thayer had sternly cautioned, onto the "heirloom" Irish linen tablecloth so rarely unfurled from storage in the mahogany sideboard. I was having to introduce alums to actives; actives to alums; no one especially sought me out for this honor, which happened more or less by chance; yet, like an understudy in a play, called upon suddenly to perform, I found myself performing, to a degree. The proper motions of the hands, the proper words to be uttered in the proper tone, "polite but not obsequious, gurls!" Mrs. Thayer had tirelessly rehearsed us in the "nearly forgotten art" of introductions. Never did one say carelessly, like most Americans, I'd like you to meet ____________________; instead one said May I present ____________________? Always, a gentleman is presented to a lady; a younger woman to an elder woman. (The very same principle that determined who preceded whom through a doorway.) Each of us murmured numerous times May I present ____________________? and May I present ____________________? Of course, Mrs. Thayer's clipped Brit accent was beyond our powers of emulation, like the flash of her wonderful blue eyes. We spoke only American English, a degraded, bastardized dialect; many of us had flat, nasal, upstate New York accents, hideous to Mrs. Thayer's refined ear as fingernails scraped on a blackboard. The poor woman had winced innumerable times hearing my speech and making everyone (including me) laugh, by saying she supposed we gurls didn't speak so barbarically on purpose.

This past week there'd been sly hints in Mrs. Thayer's hearing that one day "soon" the chapter would vote her an "honorary Kappa." This great honor visited upon a few, but only a few, of sorority housemothers on campus: the girls in their charge would thank them for being wonderful by voting them "honorary members" of their respective sororities. Of course, this was not going to happen at Kappa Gamma Pi. The rumor had been cruelly started by Kat and her friends to raise Mrs. Thayer's expectations and to inflate her sense of herself.

That Brit-bitch. She's gonna get what she deserves.

Unsuspecting how every undergraduate Kappa, with the helpless exception of one, despised her, Mrs. Thayer had dressed splendidly for the reception in her electric-blue nubby woollen suit that fitted her tight as sausage casing at the hips, the most desperately frilly of her silk blouses, a pearl stickpin, pearl earrings and that brave enamelled smile. Did the woman sense that, despite the rumor that she would "soon" be an honorary Kappa, time was rapidly running out for her? Tick-tick-ticking like the mantel clock? Blindly I smiled in her direction and saw her eyes go opaque in a pretense of unseeing. In a corner of the room, bearing replenished plates of pastries, DEBBI JACKSON and JOAN "FAX" FAXLANGER and an older, plumper alum sister regarded me broodingly. This was not a Kappa expression: brooding. I saw their sticky lips move, I saw their offended eyes.

Jew? Who?

Jew? Here?

Where?

Her?

I shivered, sweating under my arms. An aphorism of Nietzsche's I had thought exaggerated and melodramatic now coursed through my brain like an electric current. Not their love, but the impotence of their love keeps today's Christians from-burning us at the stake. Yet I continued undaunted to pour Earl Grey tea skillfully into an infinity of delicate china cups. If my philosophy professor, doubting my sanity, could see me now! Had the glacier-tormented New York State landscape shifted, and the entire female half of the population begun to funnel through this room, in an unbroken line past this table, I would have continued to pour, pour. I had decided that life is probably mostly a matter of memorized words in sequence; words, gestures, smiles and handshakes, in a certain sequence; life is not as the great philosophers taught in their loneliness, not a matter of essences pared back to theorems, propositions, syllogisms and conclusions, but instead a matter of mouthing the correct word-formulae in the correct setting. Maybe it wasn't so serious, after all: life? Maybe it wasn't worth dying for.

Traded your life for a daughter. Am I that daughter?

There came Mrs. Thayer like a listing ship. The older the Kappa sisters, the more genuinely they seemed to like Mrs. Thayer. The younger were less demonstrative. These were the women who paid Mrs. Thayer's salary. These were the women upon whose whimsical goodwill her employment depended. As the reception swelled, Mrs. Thayer had been observed greedily drinking tea laced with sugar and cream, and devouring pastries with unseemly avidity; strands of crumbs gathered like beads on her bosom. Though she mingled with the guests, taking care to appear to recall old, beloved faces, her true attention was on the food and drink; her eyes glistened. Here was a woman who loved sweets, that was Mrs. Thayer's secret. One of her secrets. She was a greedy, anxious woman, tightly girdled to constrain and deny her greed. And a secret drinker, it was more and more openly rumored. Smell Thayer's breath! Thinks she can hide it chewing mints.

More pointedly now Mrs. Thayer was moving in my direction. Under the pretext of carrying a tray into the kitchen I turned from her, collided with a large warm body and nearly dropped the tray, rallied quickly, though losing a cup that tumbled to the door; a senior Kappa deftly snatched the tray from my weakening hands, with a hard smile, I moved off, reasoning that my Kappa duty was over for the day. I would slip away upstairs. I would hide in the third-floor bathroom. I would shower frantically to remove all smells from my body, I would shave my body with a borrowed razor, I would slash my carotid artery neatly and without sentiment, I would shampoo my shameful hair. I would stuff tiny wads of tissue into my ears and read, for the third or fourth time, David Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding with the conviction that it would change my life. But at the foot of the stairs there stood our vigilant chapter president who wheeled me about by the elbow and marched me into the deafening hive of the living room where an alum was playing a simplified rendition of "Rhapsody in Blue." I was led to meet several smiling alums defined by "a love of poetry"-or was it "a love of pottery"-and I shook hands with them, a giddy smiling little group uncertain of our subject until pert five-foot D-cup blond-bouffant TONI ELLIS '52 PLATTSBURG NY inquired of me how did I like living in the sorority house, isn't it a great old house, so much tradition, ever seen the ghost?-and I wasn't sure I'd heard correctly so I smiled and nodded. Other questions were pitched to me, for some confused minutes we spoke of the "Kappa ghost" (of which possibly I'd heard but had discounted immediately for there was no place in my fiercely rational imagination for such nonsense) who was believed to be the millionaire's elderly widow who'd once lived in the house and had died in 1938, and somehow I heard myself say that with my background I could not believe in superstition, I was biting my thumbnail confessing that I did not believe I belonged in Kappa Gamma Pi, a Christian sorority, I was an imposter in this gathering; and these older Kappa sisters laughed thrilled as if I'd said something witty, it might have been my face, people wished to believe that I was being witty and not something else. TONI ELLIS asked, Why? Whyever did I think I was an imposter? and I said, "I'm not a Christian and Kappa Gamma Pi is for just Christian girls-no Jews-but no Negroes either-isn't it?" I faltered, the women stared so blankly at me. "But-of course-a Negro girl might be Christian, but-that wouldn't be sufficient cause for her to be pledged a Kappa-I guess?" By this time I was pleading to be understood, it little mattered what I'd said or had tried to say. LUCI ANNE REEVES '59 AMHERST NY was so startled, she'd spilled milky tea on the bosomy front of her dusty-rose cashmere suit.

We were an island of consternation amid a sea of innocently festive voices and laughter. I could not think of an apology. For in truth I didn't feel apologetic but defiant. I was defiant! I'd been wiping my eyes with the back of my hand and had smeared silvery green eye shadow onto my cheeks. I turned and left the Kappa alums gaping in my wake, my heart was pounding as it had when I'd been chased out of the alley behind the day-old bakery, or barked away by the German shepherd protecting his master's turf. I stumbled in high heels, I panted through my mouth like a broken, defeated boxer whose legs unaccountably have kept him erect through an infinity of rounds, I foresaw that I would shortly be expelled from Kappa Gamma Pi-within the week, in fact-my scandalized sisters would call an emergency meeting in the ritual room downstairs, one by one they would stand and denounce me in tremulous, valiant voices, they would cast their ballots, unprecedented in the chapter's rocky history a sophomore Kappa would be de-activated.

This I foresaw clearly. Almost, I could hear the Kappa whispers rising to a din of loathing. She was never one of us! Lied to get pledged, and lacks even the decency to sustain the lie. I foresaw that I would be de-activated not because I was part Jewish (if in fact I was "part Jewish") but because the Kappas, masters of deceit, would not want a clumsily deceitful girl in their sorority. They would not want a girl whose mother was not only deceased but disfigured. They would not want a farm girl from Strykersville, New York, a girl who had somehow managed to receive a scholarship and whose grade-point average was A and yet who had failed to help as many of her Kappa sisters academically as she might have done if she hadn't had a breakdown. They would not want so selfish a girl. They would not want a girl with a leper's rash. A girl $322 in debt to the sorority (dues, fees, fines) and only barely able to pay the monthly bill for room and board. A girl with clothing from Sears, and an A-cup bosom. Yet in my distraught state I seemed to know (for always, however agitated, debased, distraught I have been, I've been shrewd enough to calculate how to turn my predicament to my advantage) that, formally de-activated by Kappa Gamma Pi, I would be eligible to re-enter an undergraduate women's residence; the Dean of Women might take pity on me, and make arrangements. I would move into one of the modest residence halls, fit for financially disadvantaged scholarship students; at the far end of the campus from the fraternity and sorority houses; I would be happy; if not happy, I would be free of deceit, which is perhaps the same thing. Then, this happened.

I could not escape upstairs to an Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding for my way was blocked by a bevy of Kappa sisters on the stairs, I found myself in the parlor blindly pushing open the door to Mrs. Thayer's private quarters as if, in the midst of this confusion, our Brit housemother was there beckoning me inside. Come in, dear! You can hide with me. Quickly I shut the door. I had not been seen-had I? This action of mine was so reckless, so unprecedented in my prescribed behavior, I could not believe at first that I was where I was, in taboo territory. I may have smiled, as a child smiles in treacherous circumstances. Deeply I bathed in Mrs. Thayer's unique scent: that odor of lavender, hair spray, underarm deodorant, and something yeasty-sweet like bakery. I was very excited. I was having difficulty breathing. I understood that never

In his lifetime had the saintly Spinoza behaved so rashly; so without reason; so without concern for consequences. And yet: this reckless behavior of mine was predetermined, as the conclusion of a syllogism is predetermined given its terms. All of human life is tautological, an organic syllogism. This astonishing insight, like others I'd had since philosophy class that morning, flashed through my mind like an electric current, and was gone.

Like an enthralled child I was gazing about Mrs. Thayer's sitting room, as she called it. Disappointingly small it seemed, in the woman's absence. And not so attractive: fussily oppressive, with a fecundity of "feminine" objects. There, the rose-velvet settee (upon which I'd never been invited to sit, like Freddie, Lulu, Kat, and others); there, a pair of plushed, faded Queen Anne chairs; Wedgwood figurines, embroidered pillows, a lacquered Chinese screen leaning against a wall, reproductions of Constable landscapes misty, or fading, in the half-light. Eagerly I examined what I took to be photographs of Mrs. Thayer's family, on a bureau. These were photographs of an era that preceded my mother's, in stark black and white and with a look of the grave about them; sad hopeful doomed individuals of a bygone world. Was there something distinctly English-"Brit"-about these people? I could not see it. Most were fair-skinned, ordinary-looking; two or three specimens were dark-haired, dark-complected, reminding me uneasily of myself. ("Jewish blood"?) I examined a photograph (dated 1919) in which a child of about six (Agnes Thayer?) stood stiffly posed outdoors between a plump, rumpled woman and a rail-thin man with drooping whiskers and shoulders (Mrs. Thayer's parents?). Long dead now. And little Agnes herself prematurely adult-looking in layers of dour clothing, frowning worriedly at the camera. Another, more lively snapshot showed Agnes as a girl of about sixteen, not a girl one would call pretty (at least in America, in the Sixties), but good-looking; with a busty figure, hands on her solid hips, regarding the camera at a cocky angle. Here I am, look at me. This is my season to bloom. A girl in a rakish costume, long flared skirt, bolero jacket, a man's cap on her head, a girl who thought well of herself or wished to be so perceived. And yet: this girl had not realized she was posing before a dingy, crumbling brick wall, in the background laundry on a line. Puddles on the ground shone as if after a spring shower. How many decades ago those puddles had evaporated! I'd picked up the framed photograph to stare and my vision blurred with moisture. We might have been friends. My older sister. Even more intriguing was a pastel-colored wedding photograph framed in mother-of-pearl of Agnes Thayer as a bride, a mature bride in her thirties, wearing an oddly shiny white satin suit with boxy shoulders and a pert little hat and veil; close beside her, standing with an arm around her waist, was a tall spindly-limbed boyish man in a dark suit plain as an undertaker's, white carnation in his lapel like a protruding bone. This was Mr. Thayer, the "American army officer" to whom Mrs. Thayer so often alluded, with an air of self-importance-he'd been younger than Agnes! He had a narrow horsey face, thinning hair, prominent ears, and a tucked-in charming smile. A boy who may have stammered at times but who was sweet, "witty." What could these two have possibly had in common? Generally it was believed among the contemptuous Kappas that our housemother had had no children. So this couple was fated not to have children? Yet they didn't know, in the photograph. I felt a tinge of melancholy, regarding the photograph. Agnes Thayer and her young husband had loved each other, enough to be married; even if their love wore out, or was revealed as delusion, yet it had been love at the time of this photograph; and this love had ended with his death. And now it was years later and the smiling bride was a widow, a housemother in an American sorority the majority of whose members hated her, and were gleefully conspiring to get her fired. If only you'd known, Agnes! Never to come to America Carefully I replaced the photographs on the bureau. On the very spaces, defined by outlines of faint dust, they'd been resting. I intended now to leave this risky place, yet-I pushed open the door to Mrs. Thayer's bedroom instead. Perhaps I reasoned I might escape by the rear, where no one was likely to see me except the kitchen help. Here, the talcumy lavender smell was more concentrated, underlaid by a more powerful odor of stale food, sweetness. What a small, cramped room this was! The size of my room back in Strykersville. It was dominated by a high double bed with a vibrant blue satin quilt and a mirrored bureau and more framed photographs, several of Mr. Thayer in a more mature, jowly mode. The man was nearly bald and wore rimless glasses and his smile for the camera was strained. Leave me be, can't you? I'm perfectly content, dead. I knew that I should leave this place, I was trembling with the audacity of what I did; yet, so strangely, I switched on a light, opened the closet door, inhaled a briny-sweet fragrance of perfume and sachet. I marveled at Mrs. Thayer's clothes on their wire hangers, how familiar each of them was, familiar to me as my own. And she had few clothes, crowded into the narrow closet; yet she'd costumed herself for us with such flair, such bravery, with an assortment of scarves and other "accessories." I touched the sleeve of a beige jersey dress with a pleated bodice, lifted it to my face. A dread, thrilling sensation ran through me as if Mrs. Thayer herself had lifted her hand to touch me. I pleaded Why did you never like me? Why did you repel me? Wasn't I the one who read Punch? Did you never see how I adored you? Had you always seen through me, an imposter?

Next, I rummaged through bureau drawers. Stockings, undergarments, a flesh-colored latex corset that squirmed at my touch as if alive. The scent of lavender was suffocating. In a bottom drawer I discovered a cache of airmail letters: fascinating to one so naive, to see how the small sheet of tissue-thin blue paper opened out into a rectangle, as in a child's game. The spidery hand of the sister in Reeds, the lading blue ink. Dearest Agnes I squinted to read, lifting the letter to the light. You will want to-I couldn't decipher the maddeningly small, cramped words-as of last month-another indecipherable phrase-her final days were serene after the Hell of years & will it please you never once did she speak of you? These words penetrated my heart, quickly I refolded the letter as if it were precious, and hid it away in the drawer. I was trembling badly now but could not seem to stop what I was doing. You American gurl! I yanked open a cupboard drawer and an empty bottle rolled-Gordon's Gin. I saw a colorfully decorated tin marked FORTNAM & MASON: I pried off the lid to discover a half-dozen wrapped toffees. Also in the cupboard was a wedge of chocolate nut fudge wrapped in aluminum foil. I broke off a piece of this fudge and tasted it and the concentration of sugar made my mouth ache. Though I would have said of myself, now I was grown up, I'd lost my taste for sweet things, yet I broke off another piece of the stale fudge, and another. My mouth watered with saliva like rushing churning ants. I opened another cupboard-here was Mrs. Thayer's cache of gin, wine, bourbon. There were a half-dozen bottles, most of them about half-full. I recalled, with the force of an old, bittersweet dream, my lonely father sitting at the kitchen table late into the night, in my grandparents' farmhouse; every room was darkened, except this room; he was still youngish, though with thinning hair and downturned eyes and the disfigured hand; unshaven, in an undershirt and soiled work trousers; elbows on the faded oilcloth, a bottle of whisky and a glass beside him; a Camel burning in his stained fingers; the overhead light casting crevice-like shadows downward onto his brooding yet somehow peaceful face. I saw that Where he is, no one can follow. And there was a kind of peace, too, in this realization. For there was no point in trying to follow my father-or my mother-to wherever they'd gone. A child stood in a darkened doorway in a flannel nightgown, barefoot. Watching, yearning. A childhood of yearning. And thinking now, in Agnes Thayer's bedroom smelling of lavender and gin, what solace must be in drink, drunkenness, utter secrecy, solitude. I had never understood that alcoholism is a condition of the soul: a hiding place, a shelter beneath evergreen boughs heavy with snow. You crawled inside, and no one could follow.

"You!-what are you doing here? How dare you?"

I turned in terror to see Mrs. Thayer in the doorway behind me, staring with widened incredulous eyes. She too had escaped the Kappa festivities. She'd entered her suite from the rear. For a long moment I was paralyzed; a wave of horror passed over me, like filthy water; yet I felt too a kind of relief; for now it was over between us, or nearly. Mrs. Thayer strode to the cupboard and shoved in the drawers with such force that the bottles clattered together. In her bulging eyes I saw fury. Loathing and fear. "Bloody beastly gurl! Sick disgusting gurl! Out of my room, out! Out!" Yet when I moved to ease past her, Mrs. Thayer struck at me; grabbed at me; clung to both my arms, beginning to cry. I could smell the fumes of her labored breath. Her powdered face was streaked with tears, rivulets like acid in the caked powder. I tried to speak, but my throat had shut tight. I was helpless as a child trapped in terror; in desperation trying to escape by crawling across Mrs. Thayer's bed but the older woman seized me in her arms that, though fattish and flaccid, were surprisingly strong, and she held me fast, sobbing angrily,"-of all the gurls! These demon gurls! Only you I could trust! In this hellish place only you! And now! How could you! Betray me! You are a pawn, a pawn in their bloody game! Run, run for your life!" Mrs. Thayer's voice rose in hysteria, her words were senseless for even as she cried for me to run for my life she was clutching me against her, we were two swimmers drowning together; her arms so tight around me, I was in tenor of suffocating. Sobbing, cursing, so terribly strong for a woman of her age, I struggled against her crazed and yet unable to break her grip, in that instant I felt the madness rush out of me like dirty water and into Mrs. Thayer. I could not have named her: only she was she, the female, smelling of talcum, sweet wine, sweaty desperation, this person clutching at me. Uncontrollably she wept, knocking her head against my head, suddenly I was too weak to struggle, I ceased to resist. My face was contorted like an infant's though I could not cry, I had no tears left, I was a child, penitent, a child who has been punished, my heart broken. Beyond the bed as in a nightmare scenario faces had gathered aghast and avid in the doorway-my Kappa sisters. At first there were only a few, then more faces crowded in, and yet more. Astonished glittering eyes, bouffant heads bobbing like cobras' heads. Moist parted scandalized lipsticked lips. Behind these, yet more pushed forward eager to see. Kappas! Their thrilled sibilant voices lifted like the winds that blow across our glacier-tortured hills. What is it? What has happened? What are those two doing? Who is that girl-the Jew?