Sorority Sisters (24 page)

“They're beautiful together, aren't they?” I say to Ellen, looking at Karen and Jim. The band is playing “It Only Takes a Moment”
from
Hello, Dolly
. It's an unapologetically romantic song, and it seems exactly like Karen to choose it.

“She looks amazing,” Ellen says, swirling the melting ice in her water glass, her legs crossed, one leg swinging under the table. “I like her hair like that; don't you? I like it short, too, but this is nice.”

“I do,” I say, thinking again of Mrs. Mitchell, and then refusing to think about Mrs. Mitchell. “Are you going to stay much longer?”

Ellen looks at me sideways. “I'm staying until they run out of booze. What's the matter with you, McCormick? Do you have the flu or something?”

I laugh and shake my head, looking around the room. Doug is standing in a nearly empty corner of the room, talking to one of the Broadway girls, the one with the blond Farrah Fawcett hair, like twin sausages rolled next to her cheeks. It's not that I hate the hairdo; it's that, if you're going to do it, do it right. Mike Dunn is standing with a couple of guys I don't recognize at a table three over from us. He's drinking a beer out of the bottle.

It's tacky. This is a wedding, after all, with tablecloths and centerpieces, not a backyard barbecue or a fire pit at the beach.

“I'm just tired,” I say.

“All that book learning will do that to you,” Ellen says sharply, setting down her glass and crossing her arms. I know this isn't about me. The last few times I've been with Ellen, she's been like this; as cutting as a knife, honed down to razor sharpness. She's like this with everyone lately, and I know that because we've all been comparing notes, sharing our impressions of Ellen and discussing possible causes and corrections. We've all come to the same conclusion: Mike.

“How's it going with Mike?”

“Same old, same old,” she says, picking at her cuticles, her modest wedding ring winking dully.

I reach over and put my hand over hers, stilling her fingers. “Are you okay?” I say softly.

“He's still in school, Laurie,” she says on a rasp of congealed fury. “He can't seem to find a way to get a job. I never planned to work for the rest of my life; that was his job. He works. I stop work to have a baby. Then I stay home and play mommy. How the hell did I wind up the breadwinner?”

I shake my head, afraid to speak, afraid my dislike of Mike will show no matter how carefully I choose my words. A woman can rant and rail about her husband all day long, but let another woman join the chorus and that friendship is over. Mrs. Mitchell told me that, via Karen. I have a few issues with Mrs. Mitchell, but on the whole, I think her motherly advice is sound.

“Are you trying to have a baby?” I ask.

Ellen snorts. “On my salary? Sorry,” she says, the result of my unintentional cringe.

“No, go ahead. What?” I say.

Ellen shakes her head and licks her lips, hesitating. “I want a baby. I want to get pregnant, but I can't. Not when it's like this. What if he never gets a job? What if nothing ever changes?”

“He will get a job eventually. You just have to hang on,” I say, wanting it to be true.

“Oh, believe me, I'm hanging on,” she says, looking across the room to where Mike is standing. He seems to feel her gaze because he looks at her then, his gaze both smoldering and arrogant, as if he's daring her to do something—what, I can't imagine. Then he drinks another swig from his beer, staring at Ellen the whole time. “But, hey, don't worry about it. I'm just tired and in need of some fun. Which is why I'm not leaving this party until they lock the doors. Are you leaving soon?”

She doesn't ask about Doug. No one asks about Doug, nothing beyond the barest polite question, quickly dismissed once I answer. Is this the same tactic as the one I use when talking to Ellen about Mike?

The dancing continues, Karen dancing with her father, Jim's father, Jim again. Other couples find their way to the small dance floor next to the long wall of French doors. Doug finds his way back to me and Mike finds his way to Ellen's side, and there we sit, Ellen and I listening to Doug and Mike talk about the traffic and the price of gas and the state of ULA football. Listening to the sounds of male bonding when no bond actually exists. Ellen and I, we have a bond. Our bond is so firm that we don't need to talk our way to it, finding it, reaffirming it through words. I feel her lingering depression, the aura of hopelessness that she is fighting off with both hands, and I sit beside her so that she will know that I am there with her, willing to fight if she will only tell me how.

What she feels in me, I don't want to know.

In a sudden burst of energy, Ellen pushes back from the table, saying, “Enough of this!” She slides around the side of the dance floor as I watch her; the men stopped their conversation for only a few seconds at her outburst and are now back to whatever they were saying before, which was the cost of fuel for an F-14. I don't care about that. I don't need to know about that.

Ellen says something to the bandleader, he grins and nods, and then she's coming back toward me, flashing the ULA victory sign, two fingers in a V. Yes, the same two fingers held in the same position make the peace sign, a staple of our childhoods, but the ULA victory sign is aggressive; the arm is extended, the fingers pointing toward the “enemy,” the wrist making a well-timed nodding motion. Victory. Victory for us, it mutely shouts. We will be victorious. There will be no peace. There will be only victory.

When the song finishes, the opening chords of “Brick House” waft over the room and Ellen starts laughing, pulling me by the hand up out of my seat, toward the dance floor.

“Not ‘Brick House'! Not at my wedding!” Karen wails, a smile splitting her face.

“Stop whining, Mitchell!” Ellen yells, moving her hips to the beat, dragging me with her. “Come on, Laurie. Let's go,” she says, dancing in front of me.

I look around the room. Jim has taken a seat, his arms crossed behind his head. He is grinning from ear to ear. Mr. Mitchell is laughing. Mrs. Mitchell is shaking her head and smiling. Pi and Cindy and the other Beta Pis get up, laughing, running to the dance floor, their hair a wild tumble, their arms raised as the singer wails, “She's mighty mighty at letting it all hang out.” Karen's wedding dress is lifted into a ball in her hands, holding the white silk in front of her like a wadded-up towel, dancing wildly to our song at her wedding to Jim Nelson.

Some of the other Beta Pi husbands sit around Jim at his table, watching us, laughing, urging us on. Doug sits where I left him. As I dance, he gets up and leaves the room.

 * * *

I
t is on the drive home when things that I didn't even know were connected, connect. Maybe it was the wedding or the fact that I have a shiny new law degree. I don't know, but suddenly, certain things, unwelcome things, drop into place.

We're on the 405 going south toward my place in Marina del Rey, when Doug says, “You know I asked Karen out, right? I told you that.”

“Uh-huh,” I say, staring out the front window at the traffic in front of us.

“Why wouldn't she go out with me?” Doug asks. I can see him out of the corner of my eye, glancing at me as he brakes.

“I don't know.”

Right after Doug and I started dating, Karen told me that Doug had asked her out. I suppose it was an effort at full disclosure on her part, but there was also the thread of warning in what she said so long ago. She told me that Doug had asked her out, and that he'd kept asking. She told me that she'd never gone out with him and that she'd never even been tempted to go out with him. I heard that as a clear sign that he was mine for the taking, not that she could have had him and didn't want him.

How many times do I hear what I want to hear? See what I want to see?

I didn't hear that he wasn't worth taking.

Right now, at this moment, stuck in traffic, I'm starting to realize that Doug doesn't want to believe that someone rejected him. Worse, he doesn't seem to understand how someone
could
reject him.

Does he love Karen? Does he suffer from unrequited love for Karen?

My mind swirls back to all the images I have of Doug and Karen, all the strange, focused looks he gave her, and her reactions to him. The time I came home early to our apartment in North Hollywood and Doug was there with Karen, and Karen looked harried. I thought she'd had a hard day at work, and I said as much, and she didn't deny it. But what had they been doing? Back then, I couldn't have suspected Doug of anything remotely suspicious. In the years since, my imagination has given birth to various, typical suspicions that I have ruthlessly killed in embryo.

“She never talked to you about it?” Doug asks. His voice is urgent. This is not a casual question. Why isn't it a casual question?

“No, not really,” I say, staring at the lights, willing my brain to stop. My brain disobeys me flagrantly; I will my thoughts elsewhere. The traffic is moving fairly well, not in fits and starts, but at a steady forty or forty-five miles per hour. It's not very fast for a freeway, but you take what you can get on the 405.

You take what you can
get.

“She never told you why she wouldn't go out with me?” Doug says. “She never gave you a reason?”

The same question, though put in a slightly different form. Badgering the witness.

“Didn't she give you a reason?” I ask, still staring at the lights. I close my eyes and shift in my seat.

Closing my eyes so I won't be hurt—how long have I been doing that?

“Yeah,” he says, changing lanes in one sharp swerve of the wheel so that we're now behind an eighteen-wheeler, the view to the front completely blocked by diesel-streaked metal and tattered mud flaps with a silver metallic girl showing off her large metal breasts and flowing silver hair. “She said she didn't want to go out with me. But there has to be a reason. She never told you why? You never talked about it?”

Asked and answered, my new legal mind says dispassionately.

I can't see in front of me anymore; all I can see is the truck and the image of huge metal bosoms.

“Laurie?” Doug asks, prompting me.

“No, we never talked about it,” I say. “I don't know why she wouldn't go out with you. The next time you see her, you should ask.”

But he won't see her again.

All the little pieces, falling into place. A thousand conversations, a hundred things unsaid, every expression analyzed, every event of my life since Doug waltzed into it peered at with new eyes, with Mrs. Mitchell's unwelcome counsel and Karen's stiff wordlessness covering it all like cheap, waxy frosting.

Doug doesn't love me. He doesn't want me. I'm convenient, at best. I ask no questions and I apply no pressure. I don't need him financially, and I have been too carefully reared to push for what I want.

The girl with the metal bosom flashes reflected light into my eyes, agreeing with me.

D
iane

–
Fall 1981
–

Mom's dead.

I say it, but it doesn't mean anything; it doesn't seem real. It came out of nowhere, just nowhere. We just didn't see it coming. Dad is a shell, just a washed-out, messy shell of himself. He can hardly dress himself, and I have to call every day and ask him if he's bathed, eaten, taken the trash out. I'm stationed in San Diego now, as of September, so that helps—at least I'm closer—but Camarillo is a long drive from San Diego. Still, I drive up every weekend. He talks about her all the time. “Diane, Mom wouldn't want her dish towels hung like that.” “Diane, Mom wanted the photo albums arranged
this
way.” “Diane, no, we have to keep that; Mom and I bought that in Tijuana in 1955.”

She's been gone five weeks.

I don't know what we're going to do without her. I don't know how I'm going to take care of Dad and do the navy shit. I don't know what to do now. Mom's gone.

“Dad? I'm home! Where are you?” I say, opening the door and walking into the foyer of my house, the house I grew up in, the house my mom made brownies in, the house where Mom and I decorated the Christmas tree, Bing Crosby always singing “White Christmas” when we hung the ornaments, Dean Martin singing “Baby, It's Cold Outside”
when Dad strung the lights (it muffled the sound of his swearing). My house. This is my house. This is my dad's house. Even though my mom is gone, it has to still be our house. If it's not, then where are we supposed to go? This has to be home, and I have to make sure Dad knows it's home. But who's going to remind me?

I need this to be home. I don't have anyplace else to call home.

“In here,” Dad says from the living room.

I walk up the short flight of stairs and see him sitting on one end of the beige couch, his end, the TV turned on low to some football game. He's got a drink sitting on the end table, on a coaster. Mom was fanatical about coasters. I don't think Dad leaves this spot. He's here every time I see him, whether I'm coming or going. I think he sleeps here.

“You'd better be watching ULA,” I say. “And we'd better be winning.”

He smiles briefly and says, “UCLA versus Cal. UCLA is getting their ass handed to them in a bucket.”

“Couldn't happen to a more deserving ass,” I say. “Though I feel for the bucket.”

It crosses my mind that, in some families, the daughter would give her grieving dad a hug or a kiss in greeting, but we're not a Hallmark kind of family—never have been—and it's too late or too weird to start that kind of thing now. It would only make us both feel uncomfortable, our grief exposed for all to see, even if it's just the two of us.

Just the two of us. God, what are we going to do without Mom here to hold us together?

“What do we got?” I say as I walk into the kitchen.

“Pabst, Coors, Johnny Walker, some cheap vodka Irene Inhulsen brought over.”

I look in the fridge and see the bread I bought last weekend, half-gone, the cheese I bought last weekend, one-quarter gone, a jar of strawberry jam, almost full, an unopened half gallon of milk, and the container of orange juice I made him just before I left last Sunday. Oh, and a rotten head of lettuce.

“Dad? What are you living on? Peanut butter? I'm going to run to the store, get some eggs, make us an omelet.” I throw out the lettuce. The garbage is overflowing. “Dad? Empty the trash, will ya? We'll get roaches.”

“I haven't been hungry. I'm fine.”

Yeah, you're fine. We're both fine. I feel like I'm going to cry. Worse, I feel like I might as well sit and cry and just give in to all of it, the hopelessness, the exhaustion, because why the hell not? It doesn't make any difference what I do. Mom will still be dead. Dad will still be grieving. And I'll still have to drive back down to San Diego tomorrow and have to get up for work at oh-dark-thirty. What's going to change? So the trash overflows? So what?

I grab a Coors, pop it, and walk back into the living room. I don't sit on the other end of the couch—that's Mom's spot—but I sit in the green chair closest to the window. That's my spot. We're each in our spots, everything in place, except it's all blown to hell.

“What quarter is it?” I ask.

Before he can answer, a car toots its horn out front. I ignore it. Another toot. I lift myself up by my elbows and look out the front window. A car is in our driveway. Then another. Another pulls up on the street.

It's them, the Exclusives. Karen, Ellen, Laurie, Pi, Missy: the local Beta Pis. Candy's in Hawaii and Cindy's in San Diego, pregnant and hovering over a toilet fifteen hours a day, to hear her tell it. I saw her two weeks ago; I believe every word. She looked like death—happy, but like death.

Karen sees me peering out the window at them, waves, big grin on her face.

I crank open the window. “What are you guys doing here?”

Ellen looks up and shouts, “Open the door! We come bearing gifts!”

“You know what they say about Greeks bearing gifts,” Laurie says, waving a hand at me while she opens her trunk and lifts out bags of groceries.

“The Spartans were the crazy Greeks,” Missy says, “so be careful, but open the damned door.”

“What's going on, Diane?” Dad says, barely bothering to glance over his shoulder, hypnotized by the TV and the grief that is holding us both in its slimy grasp.

“It's the Exclusives, Dad. I think we're hosting a party.”

I run down the stairs, let them in, and they surge in like freshwater into a stagnant pool, sweeping the grim reaper out of the house, pushing silence away from them, gathering me in on a tide of laughter and bitching.

“Get out of my way, Ryan; the ice cream's melting all over my hands,” Pi says, pushing past me and rushing up the stairs into the kitchen. “Hi, Diane's dad!” she says to Dad as he sits, dumbfounded, on the couch. The sound is hitting him, I think, all these female voices, washing over him. He's missed this. Mom and I must have sounded like this, on a smaller scale, of course.

“They had this fantastic sale on bread,” Karen says, holding four bags at once. “So, I bought a few loaves. You can freeze it.”

“She bought every loaf they had,” Missy says. “It was embarrassing.”

“Hey, they want to sell bread, two for a dollar, I'm going to buy bread,” Karen says. “It's all wheat. I hope your dad likes wheat.”

“After ten loaves, he'll develop a taste for it,” Ellen says. “I was in charge of fruit. I got your dad bananas and apples. If he doesn't eat them, the fruit flies will hound him from room to room, so he'd better eat them. Hi, Mr. Ryan! How about a banana?” Ellen says as she rushes through the living room to the kitchen.

Laurie comes in last, carrying three bags that look heavy. I reach out through my shocked delight and take one. “I was in charge of drinks,” she says. We both stare into each other's eyes and burst out laughing at the same moment.

It's been weird with Laurie ever since the Doug thing. I mean, she went out with him for three years, and then she broke up with him right after Karen's wedding. I haven't seen her much since we graduated, mostly just heard from everyone else what she'd been up to, and I know she's gotten the word on me through the grapevine, but it's been weird. Awkward. I guess there was no way it couldn't have been, but I appreciate this moment so much, this quick slide into the relationship I used to have with her. I've missed her.

“I bought the stuff I didn't think he'd have, like milk and cranberry juice and V8. Cranberry juice is supposed to be really good for the urinary tract, you know,” she says.

“Geez, no, Doctor, I had no idea,” I say as we climb the stairs together and head to the kitchen. Dad has turned off the TV. He's starting to get up off the couch; I almost expect to hear creaking, like a bridge being raised.

“She's been talking about the urinary tract for an hour,” Ellen says. “I tried to shove a loaf of wheat bread in her mouth, but Karen wouldn't let me waste it.”

“Two for a dollar!” Karen says over her shoulder.

The kitchen is jammed with girls, cupboards being opened and slammed shut, the fridge being reorganized. They're talking over one another, reaching over one another, arguing and laughing and
living
. Bringing life. Bringing food and life.

“What were you in charge of, Missy?” I ask.

Missy turns to look at me, leaning her butt against the sink, getting shoved aside by Karen, who is looking under the sink for something. Karen comes up with a can of Comet and a new sponge and starts attacking the kitchen sink.

“Paper goods,” Missy says. “I bought a lot of toilet paper. I figure we can TP somebody on your street later. Who deserves it?”

“Irene Inhulsen,” Dad says, standing just outside the kitchen, taking it all in, a smile just starting to life on his face. “She gave me cheap vodka.”

“God, what a whore,” Pi says. “Does she have no shame?”

“Clearly, we have to get rid of it,” Ellen says. “Oh, you have orange juice! Already made!”

“I insist we wait until five before we start drinking,” Karen says over the sound of the tap.

“Prude,” Ellen says under her breath. Pi laughs.

Laurie looks at me, then at Dad. Dad looks so weak, so weary, so fuzzy around the edges, and on the face. When was the last time he shaved? Laurie looks back at me and says, “Got any laundry? I bought some new detergent that I'd love to try. On someone else's clothes first. You know, test run.”

“I thought you were in charge of drinks?” I say, looking at Dad's clothes. He has stains on his pants and his shirt looks greasy.

“It only took a minute to do drinks, and I got bored, so I broadened my base to include all liquids,” Laurie says, a wry smile on her face. “So, clothes?”

“Roger that,” I say, tears starting to fill my eyes. I turn to Dad and say, “Come on, Dad. Let them do their worst. We're having a party. Go grab a shower and make yourself pretty for the ruffians.”

“Go on, Diane's dad,” Pi yells. “Doll yourself up for the TP party at the Inhulsens' later tonight!”

“After we can drink and get in the proper frame of mind,” Ellen says, looking daggers at Karen. Karen squirts Ellen with dry Comet as a reply and, with a grin, starts on the stovetop.

I love these girls.

 * * *

I
t is at twenty-three hundred, after Dad is in bed, in clean sheets that smelled April fresh, and the kitchen cleaned (again), and the toilet paper put away in the linen cupboard, only one roll having been tossed over Irene Inhulsen's massive juniper next to her mailbox . . . Reformed? Us? Come on. Yes, I'm an officer in the navy, but I still know how to toss a roll. Anyway, at twenty-three hundred, sitting around the coffee table in the living room, Missy tells us she's getting a divorce.

“What happened?” I ask.

“Who's doing it? Are you divorcing him or is he divorcing you?” Laurie asks, running over my question.

“Yeah,” Ellen says. “Who started it?”

“It's not a playground fight,” Karen says.

“It might be,” Laurie says.

Laurie is a lawyer fresh out of law school; I keep forgetting that.

Missy takes a drag of her cigarette, blowing smoke rings at the ceiling. When she lowers her gaze back to us again, her eyes look shiny. She blinks a couple of times, looking down as she taps ash off her cigarette, and then looks at us. Her eyes look fine now, but I know the drill. I know all the ways to hide that you're crying when you're really and truly crying inside, and that one little bit leaks out and you have to kill that leak so you don't humiliate yourself.

“He did,” Missy says, “but he's right. It's over. Time to move on.”

We all look at Missy, at the tough, hard chick that Missy is and always has been. I've loved it about her. We all have. But now I wonder how much of tough-chick Missy is from necessity and not nature.

“What happened?” Karen asks.

Karen is the only one who can ask, who has the clean romantic history that allows her to ask. Laurie had Doug, and that ended badly. I can say that because I had Doug and it ended badly. Experience is the mother of all teachers. Ellen has Mike, but something is going wrong there; you can hear it in everything she doesn't say. Pi dated a guy for about two years, her senior year of college and then the year after college, but it didn't go anywhere. He just drifted off . . . and married the next girl he dated eight months after he took her out. Pi hasn't had a real boyfriend since. I should talk. I've had dates because, come on, I can always find a date, but I haven't been in love. I can't seem to fall in love. Sometimes I wonder if Doug burned me up and left me in ashes. Mostly, I try not to think about it.

“He wants kids,” Missy says. “I can't do kids, not with the diabetes. Too risky.”

“He knew that going in,” Ellen says.

“Yeah, but it means more now,” Missy says, crushing out her cigarette.

“What are you going to do?” Karen says.

Missy gets up from the floor, collecting our dirty glasses from the table, walking toward the kitchen. “I'm going to get divorced.”