"I’ll Take You There" - читать интересную книгу автора (Oates Joyce Carol)

I. The Penitent

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 amp; 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 amp; 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 amp; 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.