Millicent sipped her cold, sweet drink slowly, saving the ice cream to spoon up last. She listened carefully to Louise who was going on, ‘… and then there’s a big meeting, and all the girls’ names are read off and each girl is discussed.’
‘Oh?’ Millicent asked mechanically, her voice sounding strange.
‘Oh, I know what you’re thinking,’ Louise laughed. ‘But it’s really not as bad as all that. They keep it down to a minimum of catting. They just talk over each girl and why or why not they think she’d be good for the club. And then they vote. Three blackballs eliminate a girl.’
‘Do you mind if I ask you what happened to Tracy?’ Millicent said.
Louise laughed a little uneasily. ‘Well, you know how girls are. They notice little things. I mean, some of them thought Tracy was just a bit too different. Maybe you could suggest a few things to her.’
‘Like what?’
‘Oh, like maybe not wearing knee socks to school, or carrying that old bookbag. I know it doesn’t sound like much, but well, it’s things like that which set someone apart. I mean, you know that no girl at Lansing would be seen dead wearing knee socks, no matter how cold it gets, and it’s kiddish and kind of green to carry a bookbag.’
‘I guess so,’ Millicent said.
‘About tomorrow,’ Louise went on. ‘You’ve drawn Beverly Mitchell for a big sister. I wanted to warn you that she’s the toughest, but if you get through all right it’ll be all the more credit for you.’
‘Thanks, Lou,’ Millicent said gratefully, thinking, this is beginning to sound serious. Worse than a loyalty test, this grilling over the coals. What’s it supposed to prove anyway? That I can take orders without flinching? Or does it just make them feel good to see us run around at their beck and call?
‘All you have to do really,’ Louise said, spooning up the last of her sundae, ‘is be very meek and obedient when you’re with Bev and do just what she tells you. Don’t laugh or talk back or try to be funny, or she’ll just make it harder for you, and believe me, she’s a great one for doing that. Be at her house at seven-thirty.’
And she was. She rang the bell and sat down on the steps to wait for Bev. After a few minutes the front door opened and Bev was standing there, her face serious.
‘Get up, gopher,’ Bev ordered.
There was something about her tone that annoyed Millicent. It was almost malicious. And there was an unpleasant anonymity about the label ‘gopher’, even if that was what they always called the girls being initiated. It was degrading, like being given a number. It was a denial of individuality.
Rebellion flooded through her.
‘I said get up. Are you deaf?’
Millicent got up, standing there.
‘Into the house, gopher. There’s a bed to be made and a room to be cleaned at the top of the stairs.’
Millicent went up the stairs mutely. She found Bev’s room and started making the bed. Smiling to herself, she was thinking: How absurdly funny, me taking orders from this girl like a servant.
Bev was suddenly there in the doorway. ‘Wipe that smile off your face,’ she commanded.
There seemed something about this relationship that was not all fun. In Bev’s eyes, Millicent was sure of it, there was a hard, bright spark of exultation.
On the way to school, Millicent had to walk behind Bev at a distance of ten paces, carrying her books. They came up to the drugstore where there already was a crowd of boys and girls from Lansing High waiting for the show.
The other girls being initiated were there, so Millicent felt relieved. It would not be so bad now, being part of the group.
‘What’ll we have them do?’ Betsy Johnson asked Bev. That morning Betsy had made her ‘gopher’ carry an old colored parasol through the square and sing ‘I’m Always Chasing Rainbows’.
‘I know,’ Herb Dalton, the good-looking basketball captain, said.
A remarkable change came over Bev. She was all at once very soft and coquettish.
‘You can’t tell them what to do,’ Bev said sweetly. ‘Men have nothing to say about this little deal.’
‘All right, all right,’ Herb laughed, stepping back and pretending to fend off a blow.
‘It’s getting late,’ Louise had come up. ‘Almost eight-thirty. We’d better get them marching on to school.’
The ‘gophers’ had to do a Charleston step all the way to school, and each one had her own song to sing, trying to drown out the other four. During school, of course, you couldn’t fool around, but even then, there was a rule that you mustn’t talk to boys outside of class or at lunch time … or any time at all after school. So the sorority girls would get the most popular boys to go up to the ‘gophers’ and ask them out, or try to start them talking, and sometimes a ‘gopher’ was taken by surprise and began to say something before she could catch herself. And then the boy reported her and she got a black mark.
Herb Dalton approached Millicent as she was getting an ice cream at the lunch counter that noon. She saw him coming before he spoke to her, and looked down quickly, thinking: He is too princely, too dark and smiling. And I am much too vulnerable. Why must he be the one I have to be careful of?
I won’t say anything, she thought, I’ll just smile very sweetly.
She smiled up at Herb very sweetly and mutely. His return grin was rather miraculous. It was surely more than was called for in the line of duty.
‘I know you can’t talk to me,’ he said, very low. ‘But you’re doing fine, the girls say. I even like your hair straight and all.’
Bev was coming toward them, then, her red mouth set in a bright, calculating smile. She ignored Millicent and sailed up to Herb.
‘Why waste your time with gophers?’ she caroled gaily. ‘Their tongues are tied, but completely.’
Herb managed a parting shot. ‘But that one keeps such an attractive silence.’
Millicent smiled as she ate her sundae at the counter with Tracy. Generally, the girls who were outsiders now, as Millicent had been, scoffed at the initiation antics as childish and absurd to hide their secret envy. But Tracy was understanding, as ever.
‘Tonight’s the worst, I guess, Tracy,’ Millicent told her. ‘I hear that the girls are taking us on a bus over to Lewiston and going to have us performing in the square.’
‘Just keep a poker face outside,’ Tracy advised. ‘But keep laughing like mad inside.’
Millicent and Bev took a bus ahead of the rest of the girls; they had to stand up on the way to Lewiston Square. Bev seemed very cross about something. Finally she said, ‘You were talking with Herb Dalton at lunch today.’
‘No,’ said Millicent honestly.
‘Well, I saw you smile at him. That’s practically as bad as talking. Remember not to do it again.’
Millicent kept silent.
‘It’s fifteen minutes before the bus gets into town,’ Bev was saying then. ‘I want you to go up and down the bus asking people what they eat for breakfast. Remember, you can’t tell them you’re being initiated.’
Millicent looked down the aisle of the crowded bus and felt suddenly quite sick. She thought: How will I ever do it, going up to all those stony-faced people who are staring coldly out of the window….
‘You heard me, gopher.’
‘Excuse me, madam,’ Millicent said politely to the lady in the first seat of the bus, ‘but I’m taking a survey. Could you please tell me what you eat for breakfast?’
‘Why … er … just orange juice, toast and coffee,’ she said.
‘Thank you very much.’ Millicent went on to the next person, a young businessman. He ate eggs sunny side up, toast and coffee.
By the time Millicent got to the back of the bus, most of the people were smiling at her. They obviously know, she thought, that I’m being initiated into something.
Finally, there was only one man left in the corner of the back seat. He was small and jolly, with a ruddy, wrinkled face that spread into a beaming smile as Millicent approach
ed. In his brown suit with the forest-green tie he looked something like a gnome or a cheerful leprechaun.
‘Excuse me, sir,’ Millicent smiled, ‘but I’m taking a survey. What do you eat for breakfast?’
‘Heather birds’ eyebrows on toast,’ the little man rattled off.
‘What?’ Millicent exclaimed.
‘Heather birds’ eyebrows,’ the little man explained. ‘Heather birds live on the mythological moors and fly about all day long, singing wild and sweet in the sun. They’re bright purple and have very tasty eyebrows.’
Millicent broke out into spontaneous laughter. Why, this was wonderful, the way she felt a sudden comradeship with a stranger.
‘Are you mythological, too?’
‘Not exactly,’ he replied, ‘but I certainly hope to be some day. Being mythological does wonders for one’s ego.’
The bus was swinging into the station now; Millicent hated to leave the little man. She wanted to ask him more about the birds.
And from that time on, initiations didn’t bother Millicent at all. She went gaily about Lewiston Square from store to store asking for broken crackers and mangoes, and she just laughed inside when people stared and then brightened, answering her crazy questions as if she were quite serious and really a person of consequence. So many people were shut up tight inside themselves like boxes, yet they would open up, unfolding quite wonderfully, if only you were interested in them. And really, you didn’t have to belong to a club to feel related to other human beings.
One afternoon Millicent had started talking with Liane Morris, another of the girls being initiated, about what it would be like when they were finally in the sorority.
‘Oh, I know pretty much what it’ll be like,’ Liane had said. ‘My sister belonged before she graduated from high school two years ago.’
‘Well, just what do they do as a club?’ Millicent wanted to know.
‘Why, they have a meeting once a week … each girl takes turns entertaining at her house….’
‘You mean it’s just a sort of exclusive social group….’
‘I guess so … though that’s a funny way of putting it. But it sure gives a girl prestige value. My sister started going steady with the captain of the football team after she got in. Not bad, I say.’
No, it wasn’t bad, Millicent had thought, lying in bed on the morning of Rat Court and listening to the sparrows chirping in the gutters. She thought of Herb. Would he ever have been so friendly if she were without the sorority label? Would he ask her out (if he ever did) just for herself, no strings attached?
Then there was another thing that bothered her. Leaving Tracy on the outskirts. Because that is the way it would be; Millicent had seen it happen before.
Outside, the sparrows were still chirping, and as she lay in bed Millicent visualized them, pale gray-brown birds in a flock, one like the other, all exactly alike.
And then, for some reason, Millicent thought of the heather birds. Swooping carefree over the moors, they would go singing and crying out across the great spaces of air, dipping and darting, strong and proud in their freedom and their sometime loneliness. It was then that she made her decision.
Seated now on the woodpile in Betsy Johnson’s cellar, Millicent knew that she had come triumphant through the trial of fire, the searing period of the ego which could end in two kinds of victory for her. The easiest of which would be her coronation as a princess, labeling her conclusively as one of the select flock.
The other victory would be much harder, but she knew that it was what she wanted. It was not that she was being noble or anything. It was just that she had learned there were other ways of getting into the great hall, blazing with lights, of people and of life.
It would be hard to explain to the girls tonight, of course, but she could tell Louise later just how it was. How she had proved something to herself by going through everything, even Rat Court, and then deciding not to join the sorority after all. And how she could still be friends with everybody. Sisters with everybody. Tracy, too.
The door behind her opened and a ray of light sliced across the soft gloom of the basement room.
‘Hey, Millicent, come on out now. This is it.’ There were some of the girls outside.
‘I’m coming,’ she said, getting up and moving out of the soft darkness into the glare of light, thinking: This is it, all right. The worst part, the hardest part, the part of initiation that I figured out myself.
But just then, from somewhere far off, Millicent was sure of it, there came a melodic fluting, quite wild and sweet, and she knew that it must be the song of the heather birds as they went wheeling and gliding against wide blue horizons through vast spaces of air, their wings flashing quick and purple in the bright sun.
Within Millicent another melody soared, strong and exuberant, a triumphant answer to the music of the darting heather birds that sang so clear and lilting over the far lands. And she knew that her own private initiation had just begun.
Sunday at the Mintons
If Henry were only, sighed Elizabeth Minton as she straightened a map on the wall of her brother’s study, not so fastidious. So supremely fastidious. She leaned dreamily aslant his mahogany desk for a moment, her withered, blue-veined fingers spread whitely against the dark, glossy wood.
The late morning sunlight lay in pale squares along the floor, and the dust motes went drifting, sinking in the luminous air. Through the window she could see the flat sheen of the green September ocean that curved far beyond the blurred horizon line.
On a fine day, if the windows were open, she could hear the waves fall. One would crash and go slipping back, and then another and another. On some nights, when she was lingering half-awake about to be engulfed in sleep, she would hear the waves, and then the wind would begin in the trees until she could not tell one sound from the other, so that, for all she knew, the water might be washing in the leaves, or the leaves falling hushed, drifting down into the sea.
‘Elizabeth,’ Henry’s voice echoed deep and ominous down the cavernous hallway.
‘Yes, Henry?’ Elizabeth answered her older brother meekly. Now that they were back together in the old house again, now that she was looking after Henry’s wants once more, she could at times fancy herself a little girl, obedient and yielding, as she had been long ago.
‘Have you finished tidying the study?’ Henry was coming down the hall. His slow, ponderous footstep sounded outside the door. Nervously Elizabeth lifted her slender hand to her throat, fingering, as if for security, her mother’s amethyst brooch, which she always wore pinned to the collar of her dress. She glanced about the dim room. Yes, she had thought to dust the lamp shades. Henry could not tolerate the dust.
She peered at Henry, who was now standing in the doorway. In the vague light she could not see his features clearly, and his face loomed round and somber, his substantial shadow blending with the darkness of the hall behind. Squinting at the indistinct form of her brother, Elizabeth felt an odd pleasure in observing him without her glasses. He was invariably so clear, so precise, and now for once he was quite thoroughly obscured.
‘Daydreaming again, Elizabeth?’ Henry chided sadly, seeing a characteristic far-off look in her eyes. It had always been that way with the two of them, Henry coming out to find her reading in the garden under the rose arbor or building castles in the sand by the sea wall, Henry telling her that Mother needed help in the kitchen or that the silver needed polishing.
‘No, Henry,’ Elizabeth drew herself up to her fragile height. ‘No, Henry, not at all. I was just about to put the chicken in the oven.’ She brushed past her brother with the merest suggestion of an indignant flounce.
Henry stared after his sister as her heels tapped lightly down to the kitchen, her lavender skirts balancing and swaying about her shins with an alarming hint of impertinence. She had never been a practical girl, Elizabeth, but she had at least been docile. And now this … this almost defiant attitude of hers, recurring so often of late. Eve
r since she had come to live with him in his retirement, in fact. Henry shook his head.
Out in the pantry Elizabeth was rattling china plates and silverware, setting out the dishes for the Sunday meal, piling the grapes and apples high in the cut-glass dish for the table centerpiece, pouring ice water into the tall, pale green goblets.
In the dimness of the austere dining room she moved, a soft violet figure in the half-light of the drawn portieres. It was thus that her mother had moved years ago … when was it? How long? Elizabeth had lost track of the time. But Henry could tell her. Henry would remember the exact day, the very hour of Mother’s death. Scrupulously exact Henry was about such things.
Seated at the head of the table at dinner, Henry bowed his head and said grace in his deep voice, letting the words come rolling rich and rhythmic as a Biblical chant. But just as Henry reached the amen, Elizabeth sniffed something burning. Uncomfortably she thought of the potatoes.
‘The potatoes, Henry!’ She jerked up out of her chair and hurried to the kitchen, where the potatoes were slowly blackening in the oven. Turning off the flame, she lifted them out on the counter, dropping one on the floor first as it scalded her thin, sensitive fingers.
‘It’s just the skins, Henry. They’ll be all right,’ she called into the dining room. She heard an annoyed snort. Henry did always look forward so to his buttered potato skins.
‘You haven’t changed in all these years, I see, Elizabeth,’ Henry moralized as she returned to the dining room bearing a dish containing the burned potatoes. Elizabeth sat down, shutting her ears against Henry’s rebuke. She could tell that he was about to begin a long, reproachful oration. His voice oozed sanctimoniousness like plump golden drops of butter.
‘I sometimes wonder at you, Elizabeth,’ Henry went on, cutting laboriously into a particularly stubborn piece of chicken. ‘I wonder how you managed to fend for yourself all these years you’ve worked alone in the library in town, what with your daydreaming and such.’
Elizabeth bent her head over her plate quietly. It was easier to think of something else while Henry was lecturing. When she was small she always used to block her ears to shut out the sound of his voice as he marshalled her to duty, carrying out Mother’s directions with such perseverance. But now she found it quite simple to escape Henry’s censure unobtrusively by drifting off into a private world of her own, dreaming, musing on anything that chanced into her thoughts. She remembered now about how the horizon blurred pleasantly into the blue sky so that, for all she knew, the water might be thinning into air or the air thickening, settling, becoming water.