The watcher overhead can remember, with an intense clarity, the swish of red robes in the Chapter Room, the candle wax, the taste of ash in the mouth, the rules about no makeup, no nail polish, no colors to be worn during the process except red, vivid red, and how, after long, tedious hours of chanting and leaning against plywood altars, the newly initiated sisters have their blindfolds removed and can see, for the first time, the artificial solemnity. The bust of Hestia is chipped and grimy. The sisters’ faces, removed of makeup, are plain and long-shadowed under the candlelight. Their bored expressions make them look distantly related. But still, it is a relief to burst out of the room when it’s over and pop cheap champagne together. The red robes are left in a pile on the laundry room floor. The new sisters put on their lettered shirts and do each other’s makeup. Dance music pours out of bedrooms and into the hallways. The housemother suddenly realizes she must visit a relative in the next town. The boys come over. The house is transfigured into a refuge for clumsy euphoria. There are fights and tears in the hallways and long, sloppy hugs and proclamations of eternal friendship, and everyone wakes up in the morning feeling as if something momentous had been accomplished. Parents call and ask about initiation and their daughters are coy and thrilled with their new secrets, the things that belong to them and no one else, no matter how idiotic the secrets actually are.
They’ve made, as the oath says, a gleaming paradise of sisterhood: clumsy in its execution but smoothed by memory until it is something sacred, something pristine.
19
The Putting Green
-CORINNE-
June 2009
Twelve years ago, imagine there was a girl called Corinne who was home from college for the summer. Whether or not the girl is me is irrelevant. There are only two things to know about the girl: she was good-looking, in the way that only twenty-year-olds can be, and she was very protected. She was aware of both fortunes in a vague way, in the way that healthy people are grateful for their vigor, which is to say: the stakes for her gratitude were low.
Corinne’s mother, who was also pretty, but wilting, was studying her daughter’s figure as she stood before the mirror on her armoire. The house was old but updated: Corinne’s parents had gutted it upon its purchase years before and gone to great lengths to install central air. Outside, fireflies and crickets put on a show that none of the family noticed through closed windows.
—Oh, it just looks ridiculous on you, Corinne’s mother said. It’s so boxy.
Corinne’s dress hit halfway down the thigh and was high-necked and sleeveless. It had a pretty pattern that reminded her of lilacs. She admired her legs in the mirror. She had nice legs, nicer than her mother’s.
—I think I look pretty damn good in it, Corinne said.
—It doesn’t do your waist any favors, her mother said.
She stood behind her daughter and yanked at the fabric to demonstrate the young body hidden inside.
—That figure, she said. If only I had that figure.
—You still have it, Corinne offered, albeit absentmindedly. But this is the look now. All the girls will have this, and I’ll stick out in a different cut. You’ll see.
Her mother’s cocktail dress pleated close around her waist, and the hairs on her arms were almost white against her tan.
—Whatever became of the little black dress?
—Black is over, period, Corinne said.
She reached behind her neck and yanked off the tag to demonstrate her commitment.
—It’s your loss, her mother said.
Technically, it was Corinne’s father’s loss. He hid in a nook in the house, likely the sunroom, and drank Dewar’s with his bare feet resting on the coffee table, listening to people with exotic names and perfect mid-Atlantic accents hum out the news on NPR. Meanwhile, a floor above him, mother and daughter picked up their drinks from the bureau and sipped. It was Corinne’s first summer where she could say damn and drink wine away from the dinner table without admonishment. These leniencies, and the quietness with which they happened, made her feel unusually generous toward her mother.
—You look really young, Mom.
—It’s all smoke and mirrors, she said. I went to the stylist this morning with a photo of myself at Duke and asked her to make me look like the girl in the picture. This was the best they could do.
It was not true. She’d said this line before, fishing for a compliment that others had already let her catch.
—Where’s Yvette? Corinne asked.
—Probably in the kitchen.
Now she was pacing her daughter’s room with her hands on her hips, examining the crowns and sashes that had been carefully arranged on white shelves along the western wall. She frowned, but didn’t say anything.
• • •
Hard to believe now that the summerhouse had been so beautiful, and maybe twelve-year-old memories make it more stately than what it was: a tall yawning thing with gray shingles and tall boxwoods on the corner of Astor’s Neck and Hodgeman Lane. The family could see the inlet from the second floor. When they arrived in late May they had ordered tulips in vases throughout the house. June brought the peonies. July was hydrangeas. August was something imported because Corinne’s mother thought sunflowers were vulgar.
Yvette spent most of her time in the kitchen, working or watching her stories on the tiny plasma television that had been installed for her beside the microwave. She would spend hours leaning her elbows on the counter, butt jutting out, gaping. She’d been with the family for so long that even her sloth seemed charming, and in memories she was easily reduced to a stereotype: the chubby black housekeeper with a mushroom haircut and a face like a walnut. This time Corinne found her making a Caprese salad. Tomatoes slipped off the cutting board and bled onto the marble.
—Look at you! she said. Just like Ingrid Bergman.
Corinne always wanted to ask her why she didn’t say Grace Kelly, who was clearly more beautiful and memorable, but at the time she didn’t think Yvette was smart enough to administer such a backhanded compliment on purpose.
—Can you pick me up from the country club tonight?
Yvette’s lips thinned but she didn’t disapprove.
—How late’ll you be?
—Not very. Maybe ten?
They both knew it would be twelve, and she would wait. She hemmed and hawed and oversalted the tomatoes.
—As long as it’s ten, Yvette said. My sister’s visiting tomorrow. I took the day off to see her and I can’t have you keeping me up.
Corinne remembered she had a sister who sent the family Christmas cards every year but she could not recall her name. She lingered at the counter.
—Are you nervous, sweet pea?
—What if they know about the pageant?
—They don’t know, Yvette said. She smoothed Corinne’s long, pale hair, tucking a piece behind her left ear.
—How do you know they don’t know?
Yvette ran a tongue over her teeth and turned back to her tomatoes.
—They might know, she allowed. But if they do they won’t care enough about you to talk.
—You’re out of line, Corinne said.
Yvette turned and stared at the girl, now taller than her, with her mother’s almost-crooked nose and her almost-arrow eyes that looked, nonetheless, wholly ethereal, the girl whom she’d cared for since she was a toddler, who used to sleep in her bed during thunderstorms and who had asked her Montessori schoolteacher why other families didn’t have an Yvette, too.
—I didn’t mean anything by it, Yvette said.
• • •
The families with children were already at the country club: young mothers in floral sundresses with scoops of cleavage, fathers in salmon-colored shorts, with offspring all varying shades of blond. Corinne watched the younger children scatter onto the putting green, their saddle shoes pressing indents into the wet grass, their soft hands grabbing up the red metal flagsticks and brandishing them like swords. The adults were lazy with thei
r admonishments because they had done the same when they were small, on the same green. Music, jazzy and forgettable, poured over the ballroom and out of the open doors. She admired the square lines of her father’s retreating dinner jacket as he strode into the ballroom with her mother and noticed with satisfaction how the other fathers in his age group were using blazers to hide old-man potbellies. She ordered a drink and walked purposefully upstairs, acutely aware of the flex of her calf muscles and how the older ladies glanced and looked away as she ascended.
Her summer friends were at the upstairs deck overlooking the putting green, a group of young people with identical tans and white teeth that she had known since infancy. This was the debut year where they had stopped hugging or waving hello and had started kissing each other on the cheeks instead. It was the first real weekend of the summer, and more of them were home from college now. Dina was there (with ten extra pounds), and so was Sophie, who wore the same espadrilles from last summer, and so was Adam, who’d had his ears pinned back. They looked much better.
—So good to see you! Adam said. His upper lip left a damp impression on her cheek and when he turned to pick up his glass from the railing she dabbed carefully at the mark, not wanting to upset her foundation.
—Did Dartmouth keep you late this summer? she asked.
—No, but a girl did, he said.
—Congratulations! she said, and felt a little, inexplicable stab even though she’d never wanted Adam, ears pinned or no.
—Where are you again?
—Up in Massachusetts, she said.
—Harvard?
—No, she said. The minutes seemed to slow in the gravitational pull of her awkwardness. She did what her coach had taught her in pageants and clenched her buttocks—(put all the stress in your ass! she’d said)—and asked, How are your parents?
They all seemed so civilized. Adam switched to talking about his parents, his weak-chinned sisters, and their boat.
It was a relief for her to be with this crowd again instead of back at the college, running the sorority house, monitoring each of her sisters for signs of slovenly attire or unmade faces before they left for class. They were just so casual at school, so oblivious to their reputation. You don’t just represent you, you represent your sisterhood, she’d tell them, but still some of them would slouch off to class without straightened hair if she didn’t stop them on their way out the door. At home, these people understood. There was pride in the order of things. Even if her friends here were ugly, they at least tried to be stately.
Now Roman appeared, with his square head and wolfish incisors and wide, asymmetrical grin. She hadn’t seen him since New Year’s. She became very aware of what she was doing with her arms and let one rest on a wicker chair. She pulled her cheeks ever so slightly between her teeth. She angled her face toward the porch lights. They exchanged platitudes. Cheek kissing ceremony commenced. She had a flash memory of him striding toward her in the pool room last winter, the shadows predicting where the wrinkles on his face would eventually lie, his teeth clumsily clicking against her own in the dark.
—That’s a nice color on you, he said, and his eyes flicked down her dress and up again.
—I wore the same color in my last pageant, she blurted.
—My mom heard that you did well, he said. And she said you’re president at your sorority? Not a bad year for you!
Corinne had learned to swat compliments away as if they were mosquitoes. It was the right thing to do. It was especially easy in this case, because what he claimed his mother said was likely a lie.
Roman leaned over the edge of the deck and yelled to his little brother on the putting green—Sebastian, don’t mess with the hydrangeas or I will take you home!
She excused herself and ordered a second vodka tonic with lime. Couples were dancing in the ballroom now, repeating the same cha-cha step over and over. Hands on waists, hands on shoulders. The women’s hairs were already curling on the backs of their necks and the men were wiping their foreheads but refused to relinquish their blazers to chairs yet. The ceiling fans ran at full speed, high above, useless. Corinne’s parents minced little steps near the band. Two more songs, just to make an appearance, and then they would leave. In ten years, she knew, she would be in their place, with her husband, hopefully the right type of man. All day she’d wanted to come here and now she wanted to disappear. Instead she returned to the deck and laughed at someone’s punch line, something about the way old Jeanine Wilder looked on the tennis court, something about her varicose veins. Down on the putting green, Sebastian had found a stray golf ball hidden under the hydrangea bushes and lobbed it at a little girl in a seersucker dress.
• • •
Mr. Cline materialized in her line of vision, frighteningly close, so close that she could see the gray in his eyebrows, and he said in a voice so unctuous it could have oiled a squeaky wheelbarrow,
—Corinne, you look beautiful, just beautiful! I’m so sorry to hear about your last pageant.
—Thank you, she said.
—It could have happened to anyone, he said.
She was doing a frantic equation as he spoke, trying to derive who had found out, and who had gossiped, and how many people in that moment could overhear. These people had taught her everything: how to disguise all expressions into pleasant amusement. How to cheat and ignore others cheating. How to drink scotch and soda and do the twist without a bellyache. She smiled at him.
—You are so considerate, she said. Thank you for your kind words.
Roman intervened as soon as he disappeared.
—What a dick, he said.
—It’s too early for you to talk like that.
—I’ve had two drinks, I can call him a dick. What a dick. But what happened at your pageant?
—See, asking that makes you a dick, too, she said.
—I’m sick of this fraudulent mire of societal nicety, he said. Is that better?
—Oh, I love the fakery, Corinne said. It’s just the people I can’t stand.
The Von Wooten couple, who had been standing within earshot, shot nasty looks in their direction.
The night was almost full-mooned and shimmering; the putting green was still overrun with children. Some lay flat on their backs, looking up at the stars. Others still were pinwheeling around the green, chasing one another, shrieking and tripping over their own shoes. Corinne’s group was on their third round of drinks now, and the band downstairs had transitioned to playing pop hits in a jazz style. It was the club’s way of appearing contemporary without sacrificing much. Downstairs, she knew, older couples were leaving. Newly marrieds stayed on and danced a little spasmodically, without rhythm but with plenty of fervor.
—Let’s take a walk, Roman said. Corinne felt a little dab of adrenaline and looped her arm through his. They walked outside the pool of light framing the clubhouse and up the fairway of the first hole.
—You smoke? he asked, and shook two cigarettes from a pack and lit hers first, like they did in the black-and-white movies Yvette watched when she ironed. She stood on one foot, then lost her balance, tried standing on the other, lost her balance. Finished her drink. Took off her shoes. She hadn’t had much dinner and the drinks were melting her blood. They stood in the full dark of the fairway. Trees stood in indistinct blots of darkness on either side, and moonlit grass gleamed before them, and thin skeins of clouds stretched over the sky. She lay down.
—What are you doing?
—It feels nice, she said.
—If you knew how many pesticides they put on that grass, you wouldn’t be lying on it. The golf pros can’t have kids because of it.
She flung an arm over her eyes, as if she’d just fainted in a Victorian novel and the fairway was now her chaise lounge. It occurred to her, as it occasionally did with some people, that she could easily dislike Roman if he wasn’t so handsome. He was too dramatic. Who was he fooling with the whole I’m-tired-of-the-fakes act? He’d probably taken her out here to pull h
er pageant fuckup out of her, then sleep with her and leave. They all still acted like they’d never left high school; they were just getting a little more artful. She could predict the next hour with perfect accuracy, but she wanted it all the same. He kept standing, scanning the fairway.
—What would people think if they saw this? he asked.
—They wouldn’t call it fraudulent, she said.
He sat beside her.
She traced a finger over his mouth, running into the divot of his upper lip, and he lay still, watching her, waiting to see what she would do next.
—People might know what we’re up to, he said.
—They might know, she said. But even if they know they won’t care.
He followed her into the trees dividing the first and ninth hole. She needed his help with her zipper, but she didn’t let the dress fall off her shoulders. She studied him as he shook out of his blazer and shirt and tie and belt and shoes and socks and finally pants, underwear.
—Women are so lucky in the summer, he whispered.
She let her dress fall in the grass and they stared at one another, tense, until he moved toward her, his teeth shining in the moonlight, his face joyful in the way she had seen in him when he was a small boy, tussling with her in a sand trap at a party not unlike this one, his asymmetrical smile still the same, whispering childhood myths into her ear.
• • •
She let him put an arm around her waist on the walk back to the clubhouse. Her new dress had grass stains. She had sobered somewhat; she walked in a straighter line.
—I lost my shoes, she said, placidly.
—Should we go back and look for them?
The lights loomed before them.
—No, she said. I want another drink.
—Will you tell me about the pageant now? he said.
—It was awful, she said flatly. It’s on YouTube. It was awful.
—Will you show me?
—No, she said. Google it if you care. You’ll hear soon enough.
—What did you do?
—I tripped during swimwear, she said.
They were near the party now. She noticed, dimly, that the music had stopped.
Sorority Page 19
