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It was a shock to me that I was invited back to the Kappa house in the second week of rush; an even greater shock, that I was invited back in the third week. Was it possible that I was surviving the rush? (I had dropped out of or had been cut from other sororities without taking much notice.) I cared only for Kappa Gamma Pi.
In secret, I could not comprehend why anyone, let alone so sophisticated and glamorous a group of girls as the Kappas, would want me to join them. I knew that, if they knew me as I truly was, they wouldn't like me at all. Yet it became my obsession to convince them, a challenge like achieving high grades, a perfect or near-perfect academic record. The less worthy I believed I was of being a Kappa, the more ardent my desire to be a Kappa. Now in the ice-crust of my window I scratched
On a Kappa questio
Whoever awaited me back in my book-strewn room in my freshman residence was increasingly a stranger, and a boring stranger at that. I had yet to discover Nietzsche's cruel aphorism To seduce their neighbor into thinking well of them, and then to believe in this opinion of their neighbor: who has greater skill in this than a woman? Yet such efforts of seduction were all I had to shore up against the terrible loneliness of my life. Or so I believed.
When at last on the evening of the official end of spring rush when the sealed Kappa "bid" was ceremoniously delivered to my room, by Dawn and several other pledges, I stared at these beaming strangers and burst into tears.
My Kappa self.
How proud Ida would have been of her daughter! Becoming a Kappa was but the first of many achievements, I promised.
Not that I was worth your death. But your giving birth to me?
Away at Syracuse where I rarely thought of home, I thought of my mother often. In the late night, I felt that my loneliness drew me to hers: aren't the dead lonely? My brothers would have laughed at me, pointing out that I was remembering, not a living woman, but old snap-shots. Yet at such times I felt my mother's nearness; if I glanced up from my desk, to see an indistinct face reflected in the windowpane beside my lamp, I could imagine that the face was hers. There were exciting half-conscious dreams in which I returned to Strykersville. Or these were vivid memories. In the cemetery behind the Lutheran church where she was buried. In life, I had not visited this grave many times. If my father had visited it, he went alone and never spoke of it. Yet in my memory I could smell freshly mown grass and feel the stubble beneath my feet. Beyond the church's squat steeple and dully gleaming cross the northern sky was darkening over Lake Ontario. The Strykersville Lutheran church had been founded in 1873, built of crude fieldstone and stucco. The cemetery was only a meadow behind the church, of small rocky hills and ridges that in rainy weather filled with water; in winter, angry-looking dunes of snow covered half the graves' markers. The earliest markers, dating back to the 1870's, were worn thin as playing cards and tilted in the earth; these were closest to the church; more recent graves like my mother's were farther away, fa
My mother hadn't been a frequent churchgoer. She and my father had been married in a civil ceremony in Buffalo. The family legend was, the minister of this country church had allowed my mother's body burial in the cemetery with the understanding that my father would now attend church, and bring his family. How eagerly the minister must have anticipated new members to his congregation, a father and four children, and maybe the father's parents, too? Of course, nothing had come of it.
For Ida's sake I was uneasy that her body lay in sanctified ground through a lie. Otherwise, I smiled to think of it.
It was an era when such words as sex, sexual were never uttered even by those who routinely engaged in sexual practices. Sexy was a word that might be murmured in an undertone, with a sly movement of the eyes, a knowing smile.
Mrs. Thayer, whose delicate task it was as housemother to allude to certain things without ever naming them, like most mothers of the day, spoke of ladylike behavior at all times, standards of decorum, and maintaining a reputation beyond reproach. She used such expressions as male visitor and male person as if speaking of a distasteful and untrustworthy species. You would not have believed that Agnes Thayer had ever been married, despite the conspicuous rings she wore on her left hand; you would not have believed that this woman had been married to any male person. Mrs. Thayer lectured us at mealtimes and at formal house-meetings (not Kappa ritual meetings) held on Sunday evenings in the parlor. "Our house rules regarding male persons are simple. They are set by the Dean of Women and they are not to be violated under any circumstances." It was forbidden to allow any male person (other than an approved workman) to ascend to the upper floors of the house; it was forbidden, in fact, to allow any male person to sit on the first few steps of the sweeping staircase to the second floor, or to enter the basement stairway for any purpose whatsoever. Of course it was forbidden to hide, or to attempt to hide, any male person on the premises before or after the house was officially locked for the night; it was forbidden to "carry on" in any ma