5
Tend to My Fire and I Will Tend to Your Own
-MARGOT-
October 2007
I like to predict my sorority sisters’ futures. Do it all the time. Right now I’m watching them over dinner, shuffling tilapia around on their plates with their forks.
How many will be mothers? All? Mothers are strange women, with their round faces always turned down to their children à la sunflowers too fat with the weight of their own heads. Pre-me, my mother was an interesting person. She wore a bikini and drove a boxy green Barbie-ish convertible. Now she’s my mother and she says standard-issue banalities about any event (grocery store shopping, nephew’s baptism, lunch at Rita’s), such as, Oh, what a riot! and We had a lot of laughs! In a dark moment in high school I asked her why we were all alive. What was the point, etc. She said, Oh, Margot, if you think about it too much it loses all the shine. Then she laughed like she was at a banquet and I’d just told her a joke about a priest in a bar. Mothers come in a few species. That’s just hers.
Marcia would make a good mother. She’s calm, and she already keeps her hair short in a tiny blond ponytail that sticks straight out the back of her head like a sprig of straw.
And Lisa, too, with those long legs. Easy to picture little children looped around her calves, their arms lassoing her as their own.
Eva would be crap at it. She’s leading her third pledge class now. Can’t hide her contempt this time around. She could eat her young and then mewl about how they weren’t fatty enough.
—They’re a shit show, she says to me over dinner. One of them doesn’t even have eyelashes. I think she rips them out.
—Who cares, as long as she doesn’t rip out anyone else’s eyelashes?
—It looks hellish, she says.
—We’ll get her some fakes.
—Listen, Margot, she says, I need you to take a little.
—I can’t afford it, I say. And I don’t know any of them. And I have a research paper on—
—And your dad’s best friend’s dog has hip surgery, and global warming is an issue. Shut up and take a little, Eva says. You’ve got to keep your line going, so you may as well do it this semester.
The line. As a pledge, hours were wasted memorizing my big sister’s line. It was like learning the most boring parts of the Bible:
Ruby Townsend,
little of
Tiffany Wall,
grand-little of
Sarah Lehigh,
great-grand little of
Deanna Escobar . . .
Upside: If I take a little, when I graduate my name will be another in the forced memorization of others. My life could be completely forgettable, but some haggard future pledges will still have to remember me all the same.
—Ruby’ll kill you if you don’t take one, Eva says.
True. Ruby loves everything about being Greek. Fat complex, I think. Thought no one would take her, but our house did. They called her Baby Ruth. Her face gets dewy when she reminisces about the days of her pledging, when they drove her to the tennis courts on the edge of campus and made her run laps under the moon until she collapsed. Punishment was to eat the clay off the courts. I picked grit out of my teeth for weeks! she told me, grinning. Found myself thinking, do you not floss? But still. Sad, thinking of her running and sweating for devotion under the boulder of the moon.
—I don’t know any of the new pledges, I say again.
—Then stalk them, Eva says. I have a lesson with them later. Just sit on the other side of the living room.
Don’t want a little.
Do, however, want an excuse to spy.
• • •
They arrive at exactly 7:45 and leave their black North Faces teetering on the coatrack in the foyer. They all wear tights and high heels and a mix of skirts and cardigans from Saks Off 5th. Their pledge pins are on the left breast of their cardigans, and they glance down at them often, making sure the faulty made-in-China back clasps didn’t break. Not yet allowed to wear the sorority’s Greek letters until they’re initiated, but the pins have some of our symbols to make them feel peripherally included: two white roses crossed in front of a hearth. They don’t know what it means but they know it’s something Greek/vaguely Christian/smidgeon occult. They scoop ash out of the hearth and deposit it in a bucket by the poker. They load logs. They open the flue and light the fatwood. Looking squirrely. Four have already quit pledging. They arrange their chairs in a horseshoe around the fire. I sit on a couch to the side pretending to pick at split ends, though it’s too mood-lighty to really do it right.
I was in their place eight months ago, but somehow watching them makes me feel wistful-smug. By now they are thinking of leaving with the four that just quit. By now Eva is a bitch, and no one is feeding them cake, and their initiation date isn’t set until February, when Nationals gets a record of their fall semester GPA. They can’t predict what sort of hazing rituals we have, so they’re imagining what it entails, and the rumors are worse than the reality. On the walks up to the house for their meetings, they say, What is the point of this?/It’s just a stupid fucking house./This is like a cult./ I don’t want to buy my friends. All of them feel ballsy when they say this stuff. They don’t know they’re already bonded with each other, and what they will never say out loud is that they cling to the possibility of being accepted by the women that scare them, and then, as they age up, of becoming the women that scare.
• • •
Most of them stay quiet during the meeting.
Eva goes for the weak ones by pelting them with questions they likely won’t know the answer to. It’s familiar.
—Tracy, she says. Recite the first stanza of the pledge poem.
Tracy must be the lashless one. I can’t imagine her future; she is a girl too nervous to imagine her present. All I can do when I look at her from across the room is picture a rabbit, shivering out in a field. Maybe in a field with a tennis court in the corner and fat Ruby running laps/eating clay. Tracy begins:
A good sister is decent and honor-bound,
Vibrant and composed.
She has the heart of an opal,
The face of a rose.
—Stop, Eva says. Stand up.
Tracy’s perfection is in itself an act of insolence. She obeys Eva and watches her carefully, almost ardently. I wonder if she plucks her leg hair, too, one blade at a time.
—Face the fire, Eva says.
Tracy puts her back to the horseshoe and faces the fire.
—Stare into the flames, Eva says.
—I am, Pledge Mistress.
—Tracy, who wrote this poem?
—Lucinda May wrote this poem in 1864.
—Wrong! Eva says, triumphant. It was 1862!
Tracy, who has been nervously swaying from side to side before the fire, goes rigid in the same way a rabbit does when it realizes it’s being stalked by a cat. She may as well be roasting on a spit.
—I’m sorry, sister, Tracy says.
Her voice is thinned with tears. Not worth crying over this. Easy to think that, though, outside of the theatrics of pledging, away from the fire, the anxious preening, the rote memorization and quizzes, no longer fighting each minute to prove something. Pledging is like sprinting in the dark without a flashlight.
—It’s a shame, Eva says. You have such potential.
—Excuse me, a pledge says from the circle of chairs, but Tracy is right. It was written in 1864. It’s in the binders, on page thirty-one.
The pledges begin frenziedly flipping through their Acolyte Sisterhood Membership Binders™, courtesy of Nationals, pages turning so fast they make the candlelight shimmy on the mantel.
—Good catch! Eva exclaims. Well done! Tracy, sit down.
The dispensation of praise is killing her.
—Now, who found the error?
—I did, says a voice at the end. Her hair is dyed Little Mermaid red, and even though the room is sweltering from the heat of the fire, her cardigan
’s fully buttoned from neck to wrist. She’ll have to dye her hair before initiation and cut down on the eye shadow, I think. She’s a lip ring away from becoming a scene girl, one of those girls that wears stripes and uses safety pins as a fashion statement.
—Twyla, right? That’s your name?
—Do you want it to be? Twyla asks, but there is a wry edge in the question and Eva doesn’t miss it. Twyla’s voice is flecked with an accent.
—Where are you from, Twyla?
—The Midwest.
—Where in the Midwest?
—Oklahoma. Broken Arrow.
—Broken Arrow! Weird name, Eva says. That’s quite the accent.
The corners of Twyla’s mouth turn upward, but in firelight it’s hard to tell if she’s smiling or smirking.
—Is it really called Broken Arrow?
—Last time I checked, Pledge Mistress.
—Do the pledge poem, Twang, Eva demands.
Twyla-now-Twang stands and faces the fire. She says, in a voice slow and careful:
A good sister is decent and honor-bound,
Vibrant and composed.
She has the heart of an opal,
The face of a rose.
While brothers engage in acts bellicose,
She keeps the hearth
And holds children close.
O! my sister of patience,
Too demure for a throne,
Please tend to my fire,
And I will tend to your own.
—Good, Eva says. Now, what does it mean?
—It has to do with the Civil War and holding down the fort at home.
—Go deeper than that, Eva says.
—I’m not an English major, she says. It’s like a metaphor for sacrifice and safety? It’s not a poem that really grabs me. She pauses. —It sounds a little homoerotic, she adds.
Fifteen heads snap in Twang’s direction.
—I think you mean Sapphic, one pledge offers. Homoerotic is for gay guys.
—Sure. Sapphic, Twang says.
—It’s not Sapphic, Eva says. Our founders were not gay.
—Lesbian, another pledge offers.
—How do you know? Twang asks.
—Because they don’t look gay in the daguerreotypes, Eva says with great authority.
What the hell does Eva think lesbian women looked like in 1864? Did they have artful pixie cuts and wear sensible sandals under their crinolines?
—It doesn’t matter to me if they were gay, Twang says.
—Sapphic slash lesbian, says the girl beside her. Several girls nod.
—Sure. Love is love, and stuff, Twang says.
• • •
Twyla/Twang’s future: customer service manager for a high-speed Internet/cable provider. The lady that they have you talk to after you’ve gone ballistic on the first two service reps and need someone to tell you in an even, drawly voice that you are going to have to pay the bill, but then she’ll placate you with a complimentary twenty-dollar credit on your account that makes it feel like you’ve at least done something productive with your hold time. You, idiot customer, will feel too soothed by her to assume that she’s sketching the word bitch in calligraphic script on a Post-it note while she talks.
• • •
When the meeting ends, I tell Eva I want Twang to be my little.
—She’s not going to last, Eva says.
—I can get her to stay.
Thought I’d start liking Eva after initiation but I just don’t. Can’t help but remember, as a pledge, the night she and the older girls blindfolded us and stuffed us in trunks and drove. Curled up in the dark with anorexic-steely Shannon, her bony knees hitting me in the back, the two of us conspiring to quit pledging the whole time, then getting hauled out into a clearing in ass-nowhere, hit with birch switches and given shots of plastic-bottle-vodka when we got our facts wrong. At least there was vodka. Belligerent drunk at the end—vodka always puts a mouth on me—and woke up with pine needles in my bed the next morning. Heart of an opal, face of a rose. But didn’t quit. Deirdre happened. And Ruby. And they were too fun to leave.
• • •
Eva’s future: will marry a chumpy guy named Warren. Warren will let her get a horde of French bulldogs and they’ll live in a duplex in Boston. Warren will make enough money for her to focus on monopolizing the board of a philanthropy program dedicated to raising money to allow underprivileged (whispered—children of color—) access to lacrosse. Those poor ladies. Years spent leaving no impact other than the lipstick on the rims of their wineglasses during luncheons, talking about the best menu options—quiche, or salmon?—all of it ruined by Eva, who interrupts Mrs. Payne’s discussion of her son Charlie’s most recent adventure with the robotics team at his starchy charter school to push her agenda for the next benefit.
Not the future Eva has in mind for herself, though. My sisters don’t get the futures they want. Just the futures I imagine for them. Almost all of their outcomes are mediocre, but none of them suffer. Ask Eva now what her plans are, and she’ll say architect, but we can all see that she means architect-that-overshadows-Frank Lloyd Wright, her legacy forever drilled into buildings around the world.
Narcissists, all of us. Lots of click-bait articles about our age group, how we’re all the product of participation trophies and helicopter parents and you-can-do-anything preschool teachers and peanut allergies and toys with microchips in them: blame Furby, who told me he loved me, I was important, I needed to give him love like no other person could. Old people say: You think it’ll all be handed to you, don’t you? Well, yes, old people. We do. We deserve it. We are special. Except now I know I’m not, I don’t delude myself with that anymore, and I really wish I didn’t know how unextraordinary I am. Still, I feel weirdly superior toward the sisters that have maintained the delusion that they’re going to be something significant.
• • •
Deirdre is waiting for me in my room. She’s wearing her bid-day T-shirt, already ratty, and she’s got a bowl packed for me.
—Did you find a little? she asks.
I tell her yes, and by the way, our founding sisters were definitely not lesbian.
—What?
—According to Eva, our founding sisters can’t be lesbian because they didn’t look the part.
We push open my window and I flick the lighter over the bowl. It sizzles and immediately turns into a fat cherry of ember. I inhale as deep and hard as I can.
—Slow down, you’re toasting the hell out of it, she says. Which little do you want to take?
—Her name’s Twyla. We’re calling her Twang now.
—What made you pick her?
—She pissed Eva off.
Sitting knee to knee on my bed, turning our heads to the window on our exhales, then facing each other, then window, then back; my heart rate climbs, but time slows and soon it’s not so bad that I’m nobody because at least I’m somebody to this person, this specific wonderful person.
I ask Deirdre, Do you ever want kids? and she says What? and I say again, slower, Do. You. Ever. Want. Kids? and she says With you? and I say, Doesn’t have to be. Whatever. She rolls on her side to better study me. Slice of her face on the pillow is gorgeous. Tiny threads of white wound in the blue of her irises. Curve of her ear like a bass clef. Some days when she pisses me off all I can see is the misalignment of her bottom teeth. I don’t see them now. Lips cover. She’s always so serious, like someone took something from her. I want to make her smile. Maybe she’s planned a future that’ll make her smile.
—I’m not sure, she says.
—Weird. Most girls seem to know for sure either way by now.
—That’s comforting.
—I didn’t mean it like that, I say.
—I worry I’m a little too flakey to do it. Like, what if I wake up one day and don’t want them? Then what?
—That doesn’t happen though, I say. All those chemicals in the brain make you stay. It’s biological mind contr
ol.
—Do you want kids? she asks.
—Yes, I say, but for the wrong reasons.
What I like about Deirdre is that I don’t need to explain.
I take her hand in mine and trace the lines on her palm like I can read them. There is a geometric riddle in their creases and I want to pretend that I can find the answers.
—Please don’t do it, she says. Don’t do the future-game thing. Not tonight.
I fall asleep thinking of her at a hearth, cannons booming outside, children pressing their faces into her damask skirt.
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