Sorority Sisters

by Claudia Welch

  When the knock hits the side window I jump inches, almost bucking Pete off of me.

  A policeman’s flashlight shines into the car; the light in the car coming through the fogged-up windows looks gray and disjointed, a cold light that makes everything look stark.

  “Are you all right, miss?”

  I nod. I think I nod.

  “License and registration,” he says, stepping away from the car.

  Pete curses, grabbing my blouse from the floor of the car and shoving it against my chest. I pull on my clothes with shaking hands, thankful that the cold light has moved away from me and left me in darkness.

  * * *

  Just drop me in back,” I say.

  Pete doesn’t even look at me as he makes a sharp turn down the alley behind Beta Pi. The Row is busy tonight and it’s late enough that most everyone will be back from the Halloween party. I’d rather not face that.

  He stops the car behind the house and reaches across the seat for my hand. My hands are folded in my lap and I’m sitting on my own side of the car, somewhat stunned that I’m not even wondering at the change in us. Things have changed because I changed them. I thought it would be a change for the better, if I even thought that far ahead, but it’s not for the better. It’s just change. I didn’t expect that.

  “Are you okay?” Pete says, his hand lying heavily over mine. I slide my hands from beneath his and clasp the door handle.

  “Of course,” I say, cracking the door open. “I’ll see you?”

  “I’ll call,” he says, pulling me to him for a kiss. I slide across the seat, losing my grip on the handle, losing myself for a few moments in the heady loveliness of his kiss and his scent and the feel of his hair brushing against my cheek. But I can’t stay lost. “It was great,” he says. “You’re great.”

  Am I?

  I get out of the car and walk though the beam of the headlights, lit up for a few seconds, forcing Pete to see me, if force is required, and I’m not certain it’s not. I don’t want to slow my stride to the narrow open strip between our house and the AGs’; I want to walk with purpose and confidence. As with all things concerning Pete, I do exactly what I swore to never do: I slow my step and look at him. He’s lighting a cigarette, his face lit by a dim red glow, looking mysterious and sexy and dangerous. In essence, looking like Pete.

  He is not looking at me.

  I walk down the dark cement corridor, my shoulder brushing against the Beta Pi house to my right, the sounds coming from the house hushed but consistent. The party is over and most of my sorority sisters are home. I hadn’t planned for that. I hadn’t planned to walk into a brightly lit, noisy, alive house with my virginity so freshly stripped from me, my panties wet and cold against my skin.

  What did Pete do with his rubber? I can’t remember. I think I should know where that is; it seems important. He might have thrown it out the window, or it might be stuck to the underside of the floor mat, or maybe he put it in his pocket.

  “Laurie! Where’ve you been?” Ellen says.

  I’ve wandered into the big second-floor bathroom, having smiled and nodded my way past girls in the trophy room and girls on the stairs and girls in the hallway. They are in various stages of undress. I feel that I am in a stage of undress, some strange stage I can’t define.

  “I was out,” I say.

  “No shit, Sherlock,” Ellen says. “I can see that. Were you at the library?”

  “Yes. I was at the library,” I say, walking into a stall and closing the door, locking it. I can see Ellen through the crack; she starts to wash her face, the whiskers disappearing in the first light touch of soap and water. I pull down my jeans and then my panties. My panties are on inside out. I slip off my shoes and my pants, sliding down my panties, putting it all on again the right way. Panties. Pants. Shoes. Everything is in order again.

  When I come out of the stall, Ellen is brushing her teeth, staring at me in the mirror. “You should have come. It was great.”

  “How was your date?”

  “Oh, okay,” she says.

  “Ask her about James Dean,” Karen says, coming into the bathroom in her robe. Karen wears a fluffy white robe that makes her look like a cute stuffed animal.

  “Shut up,” Ellen says, spitting into the sink.

  “Hey, are you okay?” Karen asks me, testing the water temperature in the faucet with her fingertips. Both Ellen and Karen are staring at me in the mirror. I look at their reflections, not my own. “You look worn-out.”

  “She needed a party and she missed it,” Ellen says. “Go to bed and dream of all you missed.”

  Yes, I think that’s exactly what I’ll do.

  Karen

  – Fall 1976 –

  We took Ellen’s car, and Ellen drove the whole long way up I-5 from LA to San Francisco; her dad said she was the only one insured for the car, but I think that car insurance actually insures the driver, and my dad does work at Aetna so I know a little bit about insurance. Really, just a little bit because insurance, no matter what my dad says, is pretty boring. Anyway, Ellen drove, weaving in and out of traffic until we got into the San Joaquin Valley, because then, except for big trucks, the traffic really faded away. The San Joaquin Valley, which I was very excited to see since it’s the big valley in The Big Valley—that cute western show with Lee Majors and Barbara Stanwyck (I’ve been a fan ever since my mom made me watch The Lady Eve)—is actually flat and hot and boring. It’s nothing but mile after mile of crops. I fell asleep, and when I woke up an hour later, it was still crops. I wasn’t actually sure we’d moved, but Laurie, sitting in the front seat, promised we had.

  Eight hours. It took eight hours of pure driving to get from the sorority house in Los Angeles to Laurie’s house in San Francisco. I’m not counting the hour of potty breaks, one in Bakersfield, planned by Ellen, and one in Fresno, demanded by Diane. Diane has a small bladder and she’s not afraid to use it. Then there was the time we got lost for a half hour trying to get on the I-5, Ellen swearing, Laurie calmly trying to direct her, Diane laughing, and me trying to be as inconspicuous as possible. I don’t do detours well, in life or in traffic.

  “Where do we park?” Ellen asks Laurie.

  “Yeah, ’cause I’ve got to go again,” Diane says.

  “Again? You just went in Fresno!” Ellen snaps.

  “Your point?” Diane says, crossing her legs.

  “She’s crossing her legs,” I say. “Better hurry or you’ll have a wet spot on the seat.”

  “There should be parking on the street,” Laurie says. “There’s a spot!”

  This is San Francisco, the real San Francisco, like in The Streets of San Francisco and Rice-A-Roni commercials. I don’t know San Francisco at all, so I have no idea where we are, but it isn’t the suburbs. Laurie’s house, what I can see of it from the backseat, is slapped down on a city street with wide city sidewalks like a giant blob of beige Play-Doh. It’s tall, imposing, and has no windows on the street level. What it has on the street level is a black-painted door with a brass knocker. That’s it.

  Ellen, muttering swearwords under her breath, tries to parallel park a half a block from Laurie’s house. Diane and I are silent; we don’t want to distract her. Laurie is silent as well, though she looks more pensive than quiet.

  The whole, long drive up, Ellen asked Laurie questions about her home, and Laurie, in the nicest way possible, changed the subject. The end result is that I feel pretty nervous about staying at Laurie’s house, and that was before I saw what it looked like.

  Laurie is rich.

  Sure, I knew that about her already, mostly from all the things she doesn’t say, but seeing her house makes it all very clear. The house, its size and location, practically shouts, “Money lives here!”

  Maybe Laurie is pensive about what we’ll think of her. My heart me
lts a little, thinking that.

  “How close am I to the curb?” Ellen says.

  Diane opens her door a few inches. “Less than a foot. We’re good.”

  “Seriously. Can I get over any farther? Some monster truck is going to sideswipe me. I just know it,” Ellen says.

  “Seriously,” Diane says. “You’re good. Put it in park.”

  “You’re just saying that because you have to pee,” Ellen says, but she puts the car in park.

  “They can both be true, Einstein,” Diane says.

  Laurie remains silent. I can’t stop watching her. She seems so tightly and rigidly still. I’m not like this when I go home. I catapult out of the car, talking nonstop, making my dad laugh and my mom smile. I throw open the door, the smell of home as sweet as warm gingerbread. I run up the stairs to my room, the rightness of it, the pure home of it, pulling me in. Welcoming me.

  Laurie looks at her home from inside the car and does none of that. In fact, we all get out of the car before she does.

  “What am I? Your baggage handler?” Ellen shouts up to Laurie as she opens the trunk. Laurie drops her head a bit, takes a breath so deep that I can actually see it, and gets out of the car.

  “Yeah, but don’t expect a tip,” Diane says, grunting as she pulls out her suitcase. We’re only up for the weekend, a quick trip to watch ULA kill Stanford on the football field, but we’ve each packed the largest suitcase American Tourister makes. Of course, these are the suitcases we moved to college with. It’s not like we have luggage options. It was either this or a paper bag, and, knowing Laurie, a paper bag wasn’t really a luggage option.

  “What did you pack? A set of encyclopedias?” Ellen says to me, hauling out my suitcase and dropping it on the ground.

  “S through Z. I like to educate myself at all times. Even at football games,” I say. “The genius in me just begs to be let loose.”

  “Yeah. Genius,” Ellen says.

  “Hey, I got you to get my luggage, didn’t I?” I say.

  We all laugh with nearly grim determination at that, all except Laurie, who’s smiling distractedly, her gaze on the front door. No one has come out to greet us. Is that what’s bothering her? My mom would have been hanging on the mailbox, counting the minutes until I came home. Ellen, Diane, and I stare at one another in confusion and concern, and then stare at Laurie, who will not stare back at us.

  It’s awkward, and none of us knows what to do to fix it.

  “What are we doing to do—spend the weekend on the sidewalk?” Ellen says, throwing an arm around Laurie’s shoulders. “You can invite us in. I promise, we won’t spill anything on the carpets.”

  “Speak for yourself,” Diane says, pressing her knees together. “My bladder and I will make our own arrangements.”

  “Let Diane sleep near the litter box, okay?” I say. “Give her a stuffed mouse and she’ll be fine.”

  Laurie grins for the first time since Fresno, looking at each of us in turn. It’s a moment that passes in an instant, a quiet, sunny moment of thanks. It’s gone before I can even smile my response to her. Maybe we do know how to fix Laurie. Maybe we’re the only ones who do know how. Or maybe we’re the only ones who care enough to try.

  I look at the front door of her house again, closed and silent against us.

  “Do you have a key or will the butler let us in?” I say.

  “The maid will,” Laurie says softly.

  Not her mom or her dad. The maid. And here I thought I was kidding.

  The maid, a middle-aged woman with graying brown hair and a heavy bosom, lets us in. She has a warm smile for Laurie and a pleasant smile for us. I smile back, not really sure of the protocol; I’m just following Laurie and hoping for the best.

  We follow the maid up the mahogany stairs to the main floor. The mahogany stairs continue up and up, winding regally into the upper reaches of the house; it’s that colossal sort of staircase, the kind with heavy banisters, the kind of staircase that looks completely at home in a Tudor castle, and I base this on years of watching Hollywood movies that have given me a clear picture of old American money with European sensibilities. I was never sure if that was an accurate picture before now. Now I’m sure.

  Beyond the staircase, there’s a view of San Francisco Bay from huge windows along the back of the house. My gaze goes to that instantly; it’s a bolt of light and air in a dark stained wood interior. We’re all standing there, looking out at the view, not moving a muscle because we haven’t been invited to, when Laurie says, “And these are my parents.”

  I turn abruptly away from the view. To my right is a stately library with a big fireplace, and in front of the fireplace are two fat chairs, and in the two fat chairs sit an older man and woman. They do not rise.

  This strikes me as odd, but I don’t know what to do. I stare at them. They stare back at me. They both have gray hair and blue eyes and fair skin, his skin a bit ruddy in the cheeks. They look old, very old to be parents.

  “Mother. Father,” Laurie says. “These are my sorority friends. Diane Ryan. Ellen Olson. Karen Mitchell.”

  I smile. Ellen nods hello. Diane takes a step forward and says, “It’s so nice to meet you. Thank you for having us.”

  Mr. McCormick nods serenely. Mrs. McCormick smiles blandly. And then they look away from us, staring passively into each other’s faces. Diane takes a step back.

  “Yes,” I say. “It’s so kind of you. Thank you.”

  Ellen just stares at them.

  They do not stare at us in return.

  “Come on, you guys,” Laurie says softly, and she leads us into the room with the view. The maid is gone. I didn’t notice her leaving us.

  The view of the bay pulls at my attention, urging me to forget Laurie’s parents in the next room, to ignore the silence coming from them, to resist the lack of warmth and sound and movement. They are still. The house is still. The whitecaps in the distance on the bay, the swiftly moving clouds racing toward the famous red bridge, the boats like wood shavings being blown toward the green shore all call to me of movement and life. The house, Laurie’s house, is silent.

  And because it is silent, so am I.

  “Amazing view,” Ellen says. “Windy, though.”

  Laurie nods.

  We continue to stare at the view, silence burying us.

  “Is everything okay?” Diane asks. “It’s okay that we’re staying here, right?”

  Laurie nods again, trying to smile. The smile dies before it’s even born.

  “We can get a motel,” I say.

  “No, we’re staying here,” Laurie says, still staring out at the bay. “It’s fine. It will all be fine. It’s just that my parents don’t have overnight guests very often.”

  “They’re shy, huh?” Ellen says.

  Laurie smiles briefly and says, “Not so much shy as private. Especially with my friends. Actually, only with my friends.”

  “Really, is this going to be okay?” Diane says.

  “Absolutely,” Laurie says, turning from the window to look at us. “And if it isn’t, they’ll get over it.”

  “Shit, Laurie,” Ellen says, “we don’t want to get you in trouble.”

  “You won’t. There’s not going to be any trouble,” Laurie says.

  “You sound like a gunslinger,” I say. “John Wayne in McLintock!”

  “Do I? Good,” Laurie says. “Though I liked him better in The Searchers.”

  “Except he was always looking for trouble in The Searchers,” I say.

  “He was, wasn’t he?” Laurie says with a big grin. “No wonder I like it so much.”

  “No fair,” Ellen says. “The only John Wayne movie I can remember seeing is The Cowboys, and he died in that one.”

  “Hey, the dog died in Big Jake. I couldn’t b
elieve it,” Diane says.

  “And the Indian,” I say.

  “The two best characters in that movie, and Big Jake’s two best friends. Splat,” Diane says. “What was that line? Everyone keeps thinking Jake is dead, no threat to them, and he keeps saying it when they say, ‘I thought you was dead.’ ”

  “‘Not hardly,’” I say. “He says, ‘Not hardly.’ It’s a great line. They couldn’t get him, could they?”

  “Who couldn’t?” Ellen says.

  “The bad guys,” Laurie says, looking down at the highly polished floor at her feet. “Come on. Let’s go upstairs and get unpacked. We’re going to have a great weekend.”

  It crosses my mind to say not hardly, but I’m afraid it’s true, so I don’t.

  Karen

  – Winter 1977 –

  The 401 Club is on Figueroa and is a complete and total dive. But they don’t card, which is how the owner must be making his multimillions. The Four-O, as it’s universally called, is at one end of The Row. As they say in real estate: location, location, location.

  It’s finals week and I’ve just taken my last final, Oceanography, where I discovered that there was a lab to that class that I didn’t know about and never once attended.

  For the first time in my life, I need a drink.

  The outside of the Four-O looks a lot like the inside; it’s dark, dirty, run-down, and disreputable. Predictably, there’s the slight stench of vomit and urine, both inside and out. Am I imagining that? Maybe. But the ambience of the Four-O is pushing my imagination in that direction.

  “Karen. Over here,” a male voice says from the farthest corner on the left. I know that voice. It’s Gary Robertson, EE Tau, senior, geology major, destined for parts unknown when he graduates, and the guy I’m cheating on Greg with.

  Yeah. I know.

  Of course I feel guilty. Cheating is not something I do lightly, believe me. It’s just that Gary is so . . . not Greg.