Tabby, Delta thought. Perfect. The girl almost purred.
She knew of Tabitha Austin, of course, although they’d never met. Everyone had heard about Tabby—wealthy, smart, and immensely popular, she was already involved in a dozen campus organizations and was a shoo-in for freshman class president. The golden child. The perfect W girl.
“And you are?”
Delta realized she was staring and gave herself a little shake. “Deborah Fox, from Stone Mountain, Georgia. People call me Delta.”
“You live in Castlebury Hall, right?” Tabby said with a laugh. “I heard what some of your cronies did to you last weekend. Wish I had seen it.”
“It wasn’t a pretty sight.”
“A friend of mine told me they lathered up your sheets pretty well. Used two cans of shaving cream.”
Delta nodded. “I had been up until one in the morning, down in the common room writing a paper, and I was exhausted. Believe me, when I slid into bed and felt that stuff all over my sheets, I was not amused.” She chuckled. “I made them clean it all up, but not before we’d had a shaving cream fight and made so much noise the house mother came up and gave us five reps each.”
“Five reprimands? For a shaving cream fight?”
“Not for the fight. For waking her up at that hour.” Delta grinned. “My revenge is coming. Don’t know what I’m going to do just yet, but I’ll think of something. We’ll probably all get campused.”
Tabby smiled broadly. “Sounds like you’ve had quite a welcome to the W.”
“Yeah.” Delta shifted from one leg to another. “So, if you’re a freshman, how come you know so much about what’s going on?”
“Third generation. My mother and my grandmother are both alumnae. Also two aunts, three cousins, and my older sister.”
Tabby leaned across the table. “Getting involved—that’s the key to making your college years memorable,” she said, putting a hand to her heart. “The W is rich in heritage and tradition—”
Tabby’s well-rehearsed tribute was interrupted by the appearance of an upperclassman who bent over the table and scrutinized the list for the Talent Extravaganza. “Where’s the football sign-up?”
“Down at the end.”
“Great.” She straightened up and smiled. “Don’t miss the game. We’re going to kick some senior butt this year.”
Delta watched as the woman made her way down the line.
“So, do you want to sign up for an act in the talent show?” Tabby repeated. “It’s going to be loads of fun. Last chance.”
Delta started to refuse, and then an idea dropped into her head. A perfectly brilliant, evil idea.
“You bet I do,” she said. “Let me have that clipboard.”
“YOU DID whatl” Rae Dawn DuChamp sat cross-legged on the bed with a thick American history book open on her lap.
“You heard me.” Delta looked across the room with satisfaction. Lined up on the bed were the girls she already thought of as her best friends, the three coconspirators in the shaving cream incident: Rae Dawn, dark-eyed and olive-skinned, with her low sexy voice and exotic New Orleans ways; and the small towheaded Cantrell twins from North Carolina, Lauren and Lacy.
“You signed the three of us up for the Harvest Fest talent show?” Lauren said.
“Without our knowledge or permission?” Lacy’s voice cracked like an adolescent boy’s, screeching to a panicked crescendo on the final word.
Delta nodded vehemently. “Yes, I did.”
“Forget it,” Lacy said. “We’ll go back on Monday and take our names off the list.”
“Too late. Today was the last day to sign up. By Monday the list will be at the printers. If you renege now, everybody will know you chickened out.”
“But we have no talent!”
“Speak for yourself,” said Rae Dawn in her low, husky voice. “I’ve been playing piano since I was twelve years old.”
Lauren turned to Rae Dawn. “You play the piano? I thought you were an elementary ed major. Why didn’t you—”
“It doesn’t matter,” Lacy protested, talking over her sister as if she’d been doing it all her life—which she probably had. “We’ll make fools of ourselves!”
“Exactly.” Delta grinned. It was a wickedly ingenious idea, to put them up onstage with guitars and straight blonde wigs, looking like clones of Mary Travers. They would bring the house down simply because they were so bad. “And in case you’re curious, you’re billed as the Delta Belles All-Girl Folk Band. Call it payback, for the Burma-Shave incident.”
For a minute no one moved. Then Rae Dawn responded. “I think it sounds like a hoot,” she said. “Let’s go for it.”
They all stared at her as if she’d lost her mind, but no one objected. Not even Lacy.
“On one condition,” Rae Dawn continued. She pointed a long brown finger in Delta’s direction. “The Delta Belles will be a quartet, not a trio. If we’re going to make idiots of ourselves in front of the whole school, you’re going to be onstage too.”
“Oh, no—” Delta began, but any misgivings she might have expressed were drowned out by the laughter of the others and by the pillow that sailed across the room into her face.
“ALL RIGHT,” DELTA SAID the next evening as the four of them waited for the doors of the dining hall to open for supper. “I’ve been thinking about this, and we need a plan.”
The crowd around them jostled and pushed, edging them nearer to the entry. Meals at the college were all home-cooked and served family-style in an elegant antebellum hall, with work-study students as servers. The logic, Delta thought, was to teach them to behave as proper young ladies—chandeliers overhead, napkins in laps, elbows off the table, quiet conversation with the table monitors serving from the left, removing from the right (or vice versa—she could never quite remember). But the result proved far different from the intent. When the dinner whistle blew and the doors opened, there was a wild stampede for tables, pigs to the trough. The servers were so eager to get their jobs done and get out of the kitchen that they’d take your plate out from under your nose if you didn’t hold onto it with one hand for the duration of the meal.
Sunday suppers tended to be sparsely attended, so there wasn’t the usual crush tonight. Sunday dinner, at twelve thirty after church got out, was another matter altogether. It was an elaborate affair. By college mandate, all the students dressed up—skirts, heels, and hose—whether they had attended services or not. There were white tablecloths and linen napkins and lots of visitors, and the tables were decked with fried chicken and homemade yeast rolls and four or five kinds of vegetables. Where most college students faced the Freshman Ten—those inevitable ten pounds that appeared like magic during their first semester away from home—W girls had to contend with the Freshman Twenty. Or Thirty.
The six o’clock whistle blew, and the crowd moved forward as the doors opened. Delta led them toward a table on the left side of the hall, behind one of the high Corinthian columns.
“Good,” she said when everyone was settled and grace had been sung. “We’ve got the table to ourselves. Now, about my plan—”
Delta was interrupted twice more as their server arrived, first bringing iced tea and then setting steaming bowls of vegetables and platters of cornbread and sliced ham in the middle of the table.
“Your plan for what?” Rae Dawn asked as she helped herself to fried okra and collard greens and passed the bowls on.
“For the Delta Belles, of course. For our act.”
Lacy scowled. “Since when did this become an act ?” she asked, spearing a chunk of ham and sandwiching it inside a triangular wedge of cornbread. “It was just a joke, right?”
“Well, it kind of started out as a joke,” Delta said. “But since you’re determined to make me do it too, we’re going to do it right.”
Lauren raised her eyebrows. “If you’ve got a plan, Delta, let’s hear it.”
“Can I leave?” Lacy asked irritably, rising from her seat.
Lacy shrugged. “I don’t know. I just don’t like the idea of… of being laughed at.”
“Who’s laughing at you?” Rae Dawn motioned toward Lauren to pass her the butter.
“Well, nobody… yet,” Lacy hedged. “But if we do this talent show thing, we’re going to be the laughingstock of the whole school.”
“And why is that?” Delta asked calmly.
“Because when she was in kindergarten,” Lauren volunteered, “she was asked to sing in a Thanksgiving pageant, forgot the words, then peed in her pants and had to be carried dripping offstage.”
Lacy shot her twin a venomous look. “Will you shut up? You don’t have to tell everything you know.”
Delta leaned forward, grinning. “Is that true, Lace? You peed in your pants onstage?”
“I was five years old,” Lacy said between gritted teeth.
“Yeah,” Lauren jibed. “But you never set foot on a stage again, did you? Come on, admit it. You don’t want to do this talent show because you can still feel that warm pee running down your leg—”
“For God’s sake, can you quit talking about pee?” Rae Dawn snapped. “I’m trying to eat here.” She lifted her fork and sniffed at the collards.
“I don’t want to do this talent show because we’ve got no talent!” Lacy slammed a fist against the table, rattling the ice in her glass. “I devoutly wish we’d never even thought of that shaving cream.” She looked around at the others. “Don’t you get it? She’s out for revenge, just to make us look like fools. And now you’re all acting as if this is some great career opportunity. As if— as if we’re not going to be booed off the stage and totally humiliated.”
Delta sat with her chin in her hand, waiting for Lacy’s tirade to wind down.
“Okay,” she said when Lacy fell silent. “First of all, this is a college talent show, not the Met. Second, there are going to be lots of stupid acts designed simply to make the audience laugh.”
Lacy glared at her darkly.
“And third, we are not going to be one of those acts.”
Lauren picked a corner off her cornbread, shredded it to bits between her fingers, and smiled slyly. “Lacy s teaching herself to play the guitar.”
Lacy exploded. “Lauren, what kind of sister are you? Why’d you tell them? Whose side are you on, anyway?”
“We’re all on the same side,” Delta said as Lauren gave Lacy a shut-up-and-listen look. She turned to Rae Dawn. “You play the piano, right?”
“Right.”
“So you know music.” Delta smiled triumphantly. “Lacy can play the guitar, and you can teach us—chords, harmonies, stuff like that.”
“In less than three weeks?” Rae Dawn shook her head.
“Haven’t you seen The Sound of Music?” Delta rushed on. “You know: ‘Do, a deer, a fe-male deer; Re, a drop of golden sun.’ It’s easy. If Julie Andrews could teach seven kids in three minutes, you can teach us in three weeks.”
“I don’t know, Delta.”
“Come on, Rae. It’ll be fun. A challenge.”
“Hold it!” Lacy was boiling now; Delta could see the fury building in her eyes. “No one’s bothered to ask, but I am not going to play the guitar in front of a thousand people. I’m just starting to learn; I only know a few chords. I—”
“Folk music only uses a few chords, Lacy. It’s simple.” Rae Dawn chewed her lower lip. “Let’s see. We could do ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’—that’s easy, and everybody knows it. And then for an encore—”
“Encore?” Lacy jerked an arm convulsively, and the remains of her cornbread sandwich shot off her plate onto the center of the table. Lauren smiled sweetly, retrieved the cornbread, and set it back on her sister’s plate.
“We’ll have to practice a lot.” Rae Dawn went on, ignoring Lacy’s outburst. “I’ll track down some sheet music and book a rehearsal room in the music department. I use their pianos all the time.” She pulled an appointment book out of her bag and jotted down a note to herself. “All in favor of Deltas idea?” she said.
Three hands went up. Lacy sat frowning with her arms crossed and her elbow in the butter dish.
“Then it’s settled. Rae Dawn, let us know when we start practice.”
“Isn’t anyone listening to me?” Lacy demanded.
“Oh, lighten up, Lace,” Lauren said. “We’re all in this, and you’re going to have fun, whether you like it or not.”
THREE
OLD FRIENDS
DECATUR, Georgia
SEPTEMBER 1994
Delta had fully intended to craft a polite response, send her regrets, and inform Tabitha Austin that she would not be attending the reunion. Or at the very least promise to think about it and then call back and tell her no.
It was a ploy she had often used as a pastors wife, when someone wanted to volunteer her for a job she didn’t want to do. Most of the time she didn’t need to think about it—or, in religious terms, pray about it—but inexorable personalities could, on occasion, be mollified by this semblance of consideration.
Delta, however, made the mistake of telling her sister about Tabby’s invitation.
“Well, you should do it, of course,” Cassie said with a determined nod. “It sounds like a great idea, getting the old group together. I remember how much fun you all had. And you haven’t seen them in ages. Go visit them, Delta. Go for it.”
“Visit them?” Delta balked. “Don’t you mean call them? Write to them?”
Cassie sat down on the bed next to Delta. “If you really want to reconnect with these friends of yours, you need to do it in person.”
“You’re assuming this is a good idea, reuniting the Delta Belles.” Delta shook her head. “I don’t know, Cass. It sounds like a lot of effort. Makes me feel overwhelmed just thinking about it.”
“What else do you have to do? Since Rankin’s death you’ve been holed up here like some sort of hermit. Remind me again where they are.”
“Lauren and Lacy are in Durham and Hillsborough. Rae Dawn’s in New Orleans.”
“Give me their addresses. I’ll get online and plan a route for you.” Cassie got to her feet. “You can pack. Clean clothes are in the basket in the laundry room.”
“What, you mean go now ? I can’t just drop everything and go off on a road trip.”
Cassie sat down again. “Drop what, Sis? Exactly what is it you’re going to miss so desperately if you take a few days to go visit your friends? Besides, you need some time away.”
An icy chill crept into Delta’s gut, an inner paralysis that came all too frequently since Rankin’s death. “I can’t do this.”
Cassie tilted her head and looked intently at Delta. “Well, then, call them at least. Ask them if they’re going to the reunion. Spend a little time catching up with them. You can manage that, can’t you?”
“I suppose,” Delta said reluctantly.
THAT EVENING AFTER DINNER, Delta sat in her room with her address book in one hand and the telephone in the other, battling with a nagging suspicion that she had been hoodwinked by her little sister.
Cassie hadn’t believed for a minute that Delta would jump up and go visit her old friends at such short notice. But given the choice between a road trip and a telephone call—
Delta exhaled a sigh and flipped through the address book. Lauren lived in Durham, North Carolina, and her sister Lacy in Hillsborough, only a few miles apart. The last time she had seen them had been five or six years ago, when she and Rankin had driven from Asheville to Raleigh for a church conference, and the dinner they had shared had seemed strained and uncomfortable. Afterward, Rankin had questioned her about the twins.
“What’s going on with those two?” he asked. “I thought they had a pretty good relationship in college.”
“They did. I mean, they had the typical sibling rivalries and picked at each other sometimes, but mostly it was all in fun
. We laughed a lot.” Delta shrugged. “Something happened during our last year, though. Lacy had been dating this guy named Trip Jenkins, and then later on, after graduation, we found out he had married Lauren.”
“Ouch,” Rankin said. “That’s got to hurt.”
“I’m sure it did. But Lacy and Lauren were far too close to let that get in the way of their relationship.”
Now, thinking about the twins, Delta wondered. That night at dinner, they had all skated around the issue as if on wafer-thin ice. Lacy had become a high school history teacher and seemed to love her work, but she had never married. Lauren had raised a son—a handsome boy if the pictures were any indication. He would be grown now, in his twenties. Lauren might even be a grandmother by now.
Delta turned forward a few pages from the C ’s to the D ’s and found Rae Dawn DuChamp’s number. New Orleans, on Dau-phine Street in the Quarter.
Only once since graduation had Delta managed to get together with Rae Dawn. Three years into their marriage Rankin had accepted a call to a new church in Asheville, and during a two-week hiatus between pastoral duties, they had taken a few days to drive down to the Big Easy.
She remembered Rae Dawn just as she had been in college— dark and exotic-looking, with a deep smoky voice and a musical laugh. Delta and Rankin had sat in the club and listened to Rae sing, and at the memory a bittersweet longing rose up in Delta. She hadn’t realized until this moment how much she missed Rae Dawn and how much her friendship had meant.
Over the years they had written only sporadically—Christmas cards, mostly, a hasty note now and then. Much as Delta hated to admit it, Cassie was right. It would do her good to talk to her old friends again.
She picked up the receiver and dialed Rae Dawns number. It rang six times before anyone picked up.
“Maison Dauphine,” a male voice answered.
“Oh—” Delta stammered. “I may have the wrong number. I was trying to reach Rae Dawn DuChamp.”
The man on the other end hesitated, and Delta heard noises in the background—a vacuum cleaner running, she thought, and the clinking of glassware. “Uh—yes,” he said at last, “this is the correct number. But I’m afraid she isn’t available at the moment. May I take a message?”
Delta Belles Page 2
