Sorority Sisters

by Claudia Welch

  “Who? Pete?” Ellen asks, grabbing a fry off Laurie’s plate before the waitress snags it. “Isn’t he still with Malibu Barbie?”

  Karen looks out the window at the parking lot, the sunlight blazing off the windshields of the cars like search beams. Karen drops her gaze to her lap, refolding her napkin. Karen doesn’t ask about Pete. Karen probably knows something I don’t know, and I should, therefore, probably shut up about Pete.

  “So, what did you do all summer, Mitchell?” I ask.

  “No, no, no,” Ellen says. “I want to hear about Laurie’s summer first. Come on. What’s going on with Pete? Do you still like him, even though he’s a lying piece of shit?”

  “He was there,” Laurie says under her breath, jabbing her straw through the crushed ice. “They never go to the same place twice, according to what his mom told my mom. It was all Pete’s idea,” she says, lifting her gaze to me briefly, her eyes wistful. “He insisted they go back to Mackinac.”

  “He knew you’d be there,” I say.

  “So they broke up?” Ellen asks.

  “I didn’t ask,” Laurie says. “I guess I don’t really want to know.”

  “Oh, come on, McCormick,” Ellen says. “You’ve got to know.”

  “What you don’t know can’t hurt you,” Karen says.

  “Oh, that’s a great life philosophy,” Ellen says.

  “Hey. It works okay,” Karen says. “At least you know he wanted to see you, to be with you. You know that, Laurie. That’s a lot.”

  “It’s more than I’ve got,” I say, “and it’s more than you’ve got, Olson, so shut up and let Karen tell us about her summer. I want details.”

  “Well,” Karen says, “there was no Dilbert Dunker, but I had some fun.”

  “Who the hell is Dilbert Dunker?” Ellen says, letting Laurie off the hook. Ellen is like a rabid dog with a bone on most things, but, unlike a rabid dog, she’ll allow herself to be distracted, which is more like a fluffy domesticated dog, and Ellen is nothing like that. But you get my drift.

  “Crashed helicopter, deep water, lungs bursting, noise, disorientation, fight for your life. General mayhem,” I say. “It’s a navy thing.”

  “It sounds like Rush,” Laurie says.

  Rush. We’re on the other side of it this time, our first time from behind enemy lines, not that that’s really the situation, but sometimes, hearing the stories, it seems like there might be the tiniest bit of truth to that.

  * * *

  Who met her?”

  Six hands rise in the air.

  “How many want to keep her?”

  Three hands remain up. It’s a tie. That usually means a discussion, either lengthy and ugly or short and sweet.

  “Discussion?”

  “Her father is in insurance,” Jenny says. Jenny is one of the two who dropped her hand. She doesn’t want Tracy Zimmerman, one of the hundreds of girls rushing the twelve sororities at ULA this year.

  “Is that a capital offense now?” Candy says.

  Jenny rolls her eyes. Candy files her nails and crosses her legs lazily.

  Lengthy and ugly it is.

  Rush is not the nicest place on earth. It’s not the most relaxing place either. Rush lasts a week, and in that week each sorority house hosts parties that last all day and sometimes into the night. We put on skits while in costume, dance and sing songs in three-part harmony, hold incisive five-minute conversations with the girls who have been herded into the house and out again according to a rigid schedule. You grab a girl, sit her down, talk to her, introduce her to another chapter member with some sort of conversation-starter opening line, and then float gracefully to the door that leads to the town girl room where you hurriedly score the poor kid on an index card. Why does anyone think women are the gentle sex? After roughly an hour, the first batch troop out and the next batch of hopeful victims troop in.

  It’s a Dilbert Dunker, all the way.

  In the night, between rehearsing songs and choreography, we meet in the library on the third floor to review the girls, one index card at a time. It gets monotonous after the first forty or so. After the hundredth name, you don’t have the strength to care much anymore. They’re not people; they’re names on a grimy card. That’s the worst thing about Rush, the reduction of people to a one- or two-word description. Funny! Shy! Boring! Cute! How was I described? ROTC! Big ears! Dad in navy! I can just imagine the responses to that. Did the girl sitting across from me now, my sister Beta Pi, try to keep me out?

  There’s a happy thought.

  “I liked her,” Ellen says stiffly, taking out her ponytail and redoing it. It’s monstrously hot in the library; the sun has been slamming into the sundeck right outside the huge windows all day before careening into the library. The air conditioner is groaning. “She’s cute. We talked about our shared affliction: freckles. I thought she was funny.”

  “Which one was she?” Missy asks.

  “Dark brown wavy hair, brown eyes, petite,” Candy says.

  “Freckles,” Ellen adds, grinning. “She’s a freshman.”

  “She was a little chunky,” Andi Mills says. “Do we really want another chunky Beta Pi?”

  “Another chunky Beta Pi?” Ellen says, leaning forward in her chair.

  Andi shrugs and smiles.

  “She was cute,” Candy says. “Nice, funny, and sweet.”

  “We don’t want to be known as the house with the funny fat girls, do we?” Andi says.

  “Now she’s fat? What happened to chunky?” Ellen snaps. “God, this chick is blowing up like a blimp.”

  “Let’s vote again,” the president says.

  We vote, and Tracy Zimmerman can come back tomorrow, and then we’re on to the next name.

  “I guess this isn’t the time to admit my dad works at Aetna,” Karen whispers at my side.

  I snort and shake my head. “Keep your dirty laundry to yourself, Mitchell. You’re in now.”

  “Lucky me,” Karen says dryly as she raises her hand to the question of “Who met her.” At “Who wants to keep her,” Karen’s hand drops. “This is brutal. I feel like I’m in the SS, rounding up undesirables.”

  “Don’t think about it,” I say softly. “You’ll go insane if you think about it.” We’re not supposed to be talking, but after a few hours of this, how can you stay quiet? You can’t say what you’re really thinking, so you say anything else, just to keep from screaming that they’re all a bunch of harpies and that an old-fashioned stoning doesn’t seem out of the question. But are they “me,” and does that mean I should say we? God. “How long have we been up here? Ten hours? Twelve?”

  “Two,” Karen says. “Days,” she adds on a snicker of laughter.

  The president looks gloomily in our direction. “Can we all focus and just get through this, please?”

  Karen and I look innocently around the room for the offenders. The next name is read.

  The thing is this: every sorority wants to be the sorority on The Row. The way you become the top sorority is by having the best-looking girls. The reason you become a top sorority, the sorority, is because all the guys decide you have the best-looking girls. Don’t ask me how this voting, which has to be unofficial, becomes public and quasi-official, but it does. What the frat guys think of you becomes what you are. It’s weird, but at the same time, it makes sense. It feels normal, anyway. As of now, the top sorority is either the Zetas or the Xi Pis or the Sigmas, depending on the month or maybe even the semester. It’s not an absolute science, this ranking stuff, but it’s still accurate. The Zetas are thin and coolly sophisticated, every last one of them. The Xi Pis are all blond—okay, not actually all, but statistically, and we all know how great I am at math, they are more blond than not. Anyway, Xi Pis are blond and giggly. And thin. With healthy racks. Sigmas are usually blon
d and usually rich and always gorgeous in that rich, blond, American, you-wish-I-was-the-girl-next-door way. Is it any surprise that the frats rank those sororities as number one?

  Beta Pis are a mixed bag. This is our curse, apparently. We suffer from too much diversity. We therefore can’t be classified as a type, at least not a type a guy can easily tag and bag.

  And it’s all about what works for the guys, isn’t it? I mean, how else to explain Presents and those damn placards floating above our heads?

  Our reputations live and die by what a bunch of frat guys think of us. It sounds horrible when you say it, which explains why nobody ever says it.

  How do I know all this stuff? Mom told me. She was in a sorority in Mississippi back in the early fifties, remember? She explained it all to me before I rushed last year. The fact that Beta Pi couldn’t be categorized easily was a major part of its charm for me. Let’s face it: since I’m still in my good-looking phase, I could have gone with any house, but the Beta Pis are a mixed bag, like I said, and I like that. I like that we’re not this one thing and everything else not that one thing is tossed overboard.

  Like I said, it’s a real Dilbert Dunker.

  Ellen

  – Fall 1976 –

  I lost six pounds over the summer, and I’ve kept it off. If I lie on my back and skip a meal, I can feel the sharp ridge of my hip bones. That’s progress. I’m still wearing the same size pants, but they’re baggier than they used to be. My bra size hasn’t changed a bit. My younger sister called me Jugs once over the summer, but I called her Zits and that ended that. Thank God Ed wasn’t around to hear her. We were at the beach so of course he wasn’t around to hear.

  Ah, summer.

  “Here’s your tail,” Diane says, handing me a lumpy, crooked length of black fabric. “Where do you want it?”

  “Not on my butt, but what choice do I have?”

  “None,” Diane says. “We’re going as black cats. Try to be graceful about it. Think of all I’ve invested in this outfit: the wire hanger, the cotton balls, the scrap of fabric. I’m out a thousand bucks, easy.”

  “What are you, a loan shark? You can’t have more than five hundred sunk into this outfit. I’m being ripped off.”

  “Just don’t rip off your tail. Now, where do you want it?” Diane asks, holding the end of the tail over my black-leotard-covered butt.

  We’re in the bathroom, the big one on the second floor. There are no mirrors in our rooms, or nothing bigger than a portable makeup mirror, which isn’t sufficient to the task. I look over my shoulder, standing on tiptoe, to see exactly where Diane is holding my tail.

  “Too far down and I won’t be able to sit,” I say.

  “How about here?” She holds the open end of the tail to the top of my butt. Do I know where I should have a tail sticking out of my butt? I do not.

  “Go for it,” I say. Diane sticks a straight pin though the fabric of my black leotard on that spot.

  I start to shimmy out of my leotard. “You want me to do you?” I ask.

  “I’ll wing it,” she says. “Watch me sew it to the front. I could wear a trench coat and go as a flasher with a super-long dick.”

  “I’d dare you except I know you’d do it.”

  “Damn straight I’d do it,” Diane says with a laugh, brushing her dark hair behind her shoulders. “It would sure get the party started faster.”

  “So, what’s the word on this guy you set me up with?” I ask.

  “Great guy. Rob Thompson,” Diane says. “You’ll have fun.”

  Sure I will. A blind date is never much fun. I’ve been on five since I pledged the house and I’m still not a fan. It’s forced spontaneity, forced cheer, forced conviviality, forced proximity. And it feels forced. Until a nice alcoholic buzz sets in and then it’s not so bad.

  But you can say that about anything.

  “What do you think of Karen not going with Greg?” I ask Diane.

  “Hey, she wants to go to the party and he’s at a family wedding. Why not go for it?”

  “But what do you think of her not telling Greg?” I say, drawing whiskers on my face with black eyeliner.

  Diane looks at me in the mirror. “What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him,” she says.

  “That’s what she said.”

  “Yeah. I’m quoting. But it’s true. And it’s one date. What’s the harm?”

  “She’s cheating on him.”

  “It’s a date. It’s one date. She’s in love with Greg. This is just a—”

  “Yeah, got it. It’s one date,” I say, working on my mascara. It’s still cheating and it still bugs me. I hate to say it, but I don’t think much of Karen for doing it.

  “Where’d she meet him, anyway?”

  “I think at the EE Tau exchange.”

  “Damn exchanges are going to kill us,” I say, almost meaning it. “I wish Laurie were going tonight.”

  “How she could pick doing a paper over a party is beyond me, but that’s the difference in our GPAs talking,” Diane says, arranging her hair around her cat-ear headband. “She’s not the party animals we are.”

  “You’re a lot funnier when I’m drunk.”

  “Then let’s fix that.”

  Two hours later, I’m in my makeshift Halloween costume with my makeshift date, in the living room of Holly Clark’s parents’ house in Palos Verdes. Rob Thompson is standing out on the patio by the pool, talking with some ROTC guys.

  We haven’t hit it off. It’s probably because I wouldn’t make out with him in the car on the way here. Diane and her date, some guy she met at a football game when he spilled his beer all over her, are also on the patio. Diane looks like she wants to hit Rob. Diane has my blessings.

  “Uh-oh, there she is, the girl who drank me under the table last year.”

  I turn to my left and there’s Matt Carlson, beer-meister. I held back at the fall Rho Delt exchange last year, but by the spring exchange I figured chivalry was dead and so I beat him cold. I think I left him leaning against a doorjamb, his shirt untucked and his eyes crossed. C’est la guerre.

  I’m in my sixth year of French. I’ve learned a few phrases.

  Matt looks better this year. He’s lost some weight, or maybe just moved it around, and his hair looks better. Of course, all this improvement could be the lighting. It’s a half a shade from being pitch-black. I don’t mind a bit since it hides me wearing a black leotard, black tights, black ballet slippers, and a headband with black felt “ears” glued to it.

  “Care for a rematch?” I ask.

  Matt looks me up and down. I return the favor. He’s wearing plaid pants and a golf shirt and carrying a golf club like it’s a cane.

  “You’re on,” he says. “But no using your tail as a hollow leg.”

  “You’re on,” I say. “As long as you don’t beat me with your long, scary stick.”

  “Deal,” he says, grinning.

  I didn’t remember Matt being this cute, and I’m not even buzzed yet.

  Two drinks later, and I still haven’t danced a single dance, Matt says, “You make a cute black cat.”

  “I’d say you make a cute pro golfer but we both know that’s an oxymoron. Nice outfit. The only clean clothes left in your closet?”

  “You calling me a moron?”

  “If the golf shoes fit.”

  Matt grins again.

  “Matt, you gonna dance with this girl or what?” a male voice says from behind me.

  “Do you want to dance?” Matt asks me.

  The voice slides from behind me to stand next to me. He’s tall, dark, and handsome, a pure cliché, wearing a white undershirt and worn blue jeans, and he has a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. The curl of gray smoke twirling up from the end of his cigarette has his eyes
squinting, but even through the squint I can see that his eyes are light, light blue. Black hair and those pale blue eyes and the white T-shirt shows off a very nice build. I know this guy. I met him at an exchange once.

  “Sure she does,” he answers for me. “I’ve been watching her tail twitch for five minutes.”

  I hate guys like this. He’s so full of himself he’s overflowing. I’ll bet my dad was like this in his day, minus the cigarette and the undershirt.

  “I’m fine, Matt,” I say with a smile; then I turn to Blue Eyes and say, “Who are you supposed to be? Marlon Brando?”

  “His T-shirt was ripped. I’m James Dean,” he says.

  “He’s dead,” I say.

  Blue Eyes scowls and smirks at the same time. He pulls his cigarette out of his mouth with his thumb and forefinger.

  “Mike Dunn,” Matt says with a slight movement of his hand. “Ellen Olson, champion beer drinker.”

  “Champion, huh?” Mike says, smirking some more.

  “We all have our talents. What’s yours?”

  “Fast ball,” he says, looking meaningfully down at me.

  “Is that a metaphor for something?” I say.

  There’s a moment of stunned silence. I love it.

  “Mike’s a pitcher. Baseball team,” Matt says.

  “Not the pitcher?” I ask. I take a long, deep swallow of my beer. It’s warm and tastes horrible. That’s never stopped me before and it’s not going to stop me now. “Bummer for you.”

  “Excuse me,” Matt says. “I see Holly signaling me.” Matt leaves me alone with Mike. Great.

  Mike chuckles and looks me over, not even bothering to be subtle about it. “Come on. Let’s dance.”

  “Where’s your date?” I ask Mike.

  “She excused herself.”

  I’ll bet she did. Matt’s date is Holly Clark, and Holly has been talking to her parents for the last half hour, and it hasn’t looked like a very happy conversation. I guess the Clarks aren’t loving the fact that two people have already thrown up in their junipers.