The Raising

  This morning, the flip-flops. Late again.

  It didn’t surprise Shelly. (Why would it? Josie had been a bad work-study student from the start.) But it frightened her. She knew that the sexual relationship meant she was no longer in a position to reprimand Josie, or even gently critique her. That first morning, after that first night, Josie had shimmied her jeans on, zipped up her hoodie, and said, before sliding out Shelly’s front door, “Shelly, I’m going to have to make up tomorrow for missing my Chem Lab yesterday afternoon, ’kay? So, I won’t be in. But I’ll see you soon?”

  Shelly had found herself unable to remind Josie that she had responsibilities related to the St. Crispin Quintet concert the next day. Someone needed to walk them from their hotel to Beech Auditorium (because it was written into their contract that the St. Crispin Quintet did nothing without an escort), and it was the work-study’s job to attend to these details. It was, in fact, the whole reason Shelly had been given a work-study student in the first place, because the experience of rubbing elbows with these professionals was supposed to be so beneficial to the student’s education.

  But that morning Shelly had stood in the doorway holding her robe closed around her and said, “Okay,” to Josie, while any last shred of denial about the new dynamic between them dissolved as Josie cocked her head and blew a kiss in Shelly’s direction. Shelly could feel herself flushing, but also could not stop herself from reaching out the door (in full view of the mailwoman across the street) and taking hold of one of the dangling pompoms on Josie’s pink hoodie, and gently urging her back inside.

  Josie had smiled sleepily, dreamily, allowed herself to be lured back through the screen door and into the foyer, where she kept her eyes open as Shelly pulled her to her and put her hands in the silky black hair and kissed Josie’s lips with as much restraint as she could (and still found herself trembling, making little noises in her throat, her tongue running over those perfect little teeth, her hands, as if they belonged to someone else, traveling up to Josie’s waist to her breasts again, running clumsily over them as Josie sagged passively, pliantly, against the screen door and let it all happen). When Shelly had finally managed to step back, there was what could almost have been a look of triumph on Josie’s face.

  She’d narrowed her eyes and licked her lips, sighed, and reached out to touch Shelly’s throat, and then said, “See you next time,” before turning and leaving (for real this time), swaying down the walk, surely aware that she was being watched, without turning around once to look at Shelly in the doorway.

  In the other office, Shelly could hear her talking on the phone. Every sentence ended with the sound of a question.

  “And then we went to the bar? And Crystal and Stephanie were there? And so anyway I guess tonight we’re supposed meet back at the house and take away their privileges, you know? And after that, we’ll vote? So, like, tell them not to wear any shoes, okay? Everybody else can wear shoes?”

  Jesus, Shelly thought. What could Josie be talking about, or did she even want to know? Was this some sort of hazing? No “privileges”? No shoes?

  Maybe a punishment for having been at the bar when they were supposed to be home making doilies for the Founders’ Tea?

  It was, Shelly thought, possibly Trials Week—which had been renamed Spirit Week by the Pan-Hellenic Association after the scandal a few years ago when a drunken sorority sister had been driven forty miles out of town and left on the side of a rural highway.

  It was, apparently, a common prepledge trial these days. You were taken to a party, where you were prompted to get drunker than you had ever been before in your life, and then your sympathetic older “sisters” pretended to insist on driving you home because of their great concern for you—but, instead, they dropped you off in the middle of nowhere and told you, as their car sped away, to find your way back to the house.

  Maybe most of the girls did make it back to the house, and lived long enough to inflict this trial the next year on a new generation of sisters. But one year, a victim panicked and tried to chase the car that had dropped her off, managing to run fast enough to toss herself against the bumper and hit her head and die.

  The administrators and the parents and the Pan-Hellenic Association swooped in screeching, as if they hadn’t known perfectly well that this kind of thing was taking place on a regular basis. There was a great deal of “shock” and “outrage” among the university community—especially since this was a sorority. “Girls Hazing Girls!” was the headline, as if it were news.

  Not a single woman Shelly knew was surprised by the ruthlessness of girls toward one another—and certainly no one Shelly knew who’d ever been in a sorority could manage much more than the raising of an eyebrow, if not a stifled yawn, at the news that sorority sisters were dropping each other off in the dark, drunk, and laughing as they sped away. Shelly herself had never been dropped off drunk on a highway, but she’d had to go two weeks without brushing her teeth, and was required to arrive every evening on the front porch of the Eta Lambda house to have the scum on her enamel approved.

  Over a cup of tea after their third time in bed together, Shelly had asked Josie if sororities still did things like that, and Josie had laughed pretty hard while recounting how, as a newbie, she’d had to wear the same underpants every day for four weeks—period to period—and take them off in the living room, standing there bottomless in front of the Pledge Board, while they passed her panties around and either sniffed them or screamed about them and threw them from one sister to the next until they were given back, and Josie had to put them back on.

  “I cheated,” Josie said. “I washed my panties out in the sink a few times, and then I put toothpaste on the crotch to make it look really yeasty, so they just freaked when they saw it, and didn’t smell it—luckily, since it smelled like mint!”

  “Jesus,” Shelly had said, rubbing her eyes.

  Although, as a hazing practice, this sort of thing happened only during the prepledge part of sorority life, the spirit of it was part of the very air they had breathed in the Eta Lambda house. Every few weeks some sister would find your hairbrush matted with hair on the bathroom sink, or some clump of something crusty in the shower after you’d just gotten out, and she would scream Ee-w-w-w! for everyone to hear.

  And these little humiliations called up everything:

  The filth of being human, of being female, of being alive, of living in a body, of having the shame of that exposed to prettier, cleaner, better girls.

  Shelly looked up, and was startled to find Josie standing in the threshold, leaning against the doorjamb. One thin strap of her little tank top had slid down her shoulder. Her hips looked so thin that the denim skirt she was wearing seemed to be held up over her pelvic bone by some sort of antigravitational force. Shelly tried to keep her eyes on a spot just over Josie’s shoulder as she said, “Oh, hi, Josie. Did you call the School of Music yet, about Jewett Smith?” Shelly could hear the thinness of her own voice as she spoke, and it made her want to crawl away somewhere to die.

  “No,” Josie said. “But I will.”

  “Thank you,” Shelly said, and turned back to her computer, stared at the blank document on which she’d only managed to type, “Funds Request.”

  “Um, Shelly?”

  Shelly turned and saw that Josie was chewing on the shiny pinkie fingernail of her left hand. What Shelly felt, seeing that pinkie between the girl’s teeth, could only have been described as a sharp pain in her chest—a kind of sexual agony. If she’d been standing up, her knees might have buckled. When she tried to form the word yes, nothing came out of her mouth.

  Was she losing her mind?

  Was this what happened to old dykes? Was this some sort of peri-menopausal insanity? She hadn’t even blinked, but there before her eyes was a flash of Josie on her back, hips propped up on one of Shelly’s flowered pillows, sleek thighs open, and Shelly parting the pink shell between her legs with her fingertips, leaning in with her own lips parted as Josi
e writhed beneath her—and Shelly felt a kind of terror that was so much like ecstasy that, sitting there at her desk in front of her computer, she had to bite her lip to keep from crying out.

  “Shelly, I have to tell you something, and I’m really sorry.”

  38

  Jeff Blackhawk lingered in Mira’s office, touching a few of the little things she kept on her bookshelf, turning them over in his hands—a paperweight that had been a gift from a student (velvety red rose petal floating, without weight or age, inside a glass globe), a Petoskey stone Mira had picked up on the beach during a trip to Lake Michigan the year before, a couple of paperclips. A few minutes earlier he’d stood up as if he were leaving, so Mira had stood as well, but now he seemed reluctant to go, and genuinely charged up about their conversation, which seemed like a strange and not unpleasant turn of events, as Mira couldn’t remember the last time she’d had a conversation about anything other than the weather with any of her colleagues.

  She’d always thought that becoming an academic (especially if she was lucky enough to land a place, as she had, at a major research university, and then in a niche noted for its encouragement of free intellectual exploration like Godwin Honors College) would mean endless conversations in hallways, in offices. Graduate school had been rich with such talk among students, and although Mira had to admit now that she couldn’t remember, looking back, ever having actually seen two or more professors speaking to each other about anything more interesting than whether or not the copier was out of paper—still, somehow, she’d expected that when she became a professor herself she would find herself engaged in passionate daily debates in the lunchroom over the finer points of the most obscure topics.

  But she could not have been more wrong.

  Nightshift factory workers probably spent more time philosophizing with one another than she did with her colleagues at Godwin Honors Hall. In three years, the most passionate discussions she’d had in the lunch room pertained to the best temperature at which to keep the minifridge and who kept stealing the secretary’s Diet Cokes.

  But today Jeff Blackhawk had stopped by to speak with Mira specifically about her new research. Dean Fleming had mentioned it to him in passing one afternoon, and it seemed to have genuinely seized Jeff’s interest.

  Last fall, he’d had Nicole Werner in his first-year seminar, and although he claimed not to have gotten to know her very well, he had clearly been affected by her death. Like everyone else, he blamed the boyfriend. He said, “The guy used to wait for her outside our classroom, like he thought maybe she’d run off with somebody else if he didn’t walk her to and from class.”

  Given Jeff’s reputation for romancing the most beautiful of his undergraduates, Mira ungenerously considered that he might have resented Craig Clements-Rabbitt’s hanging around because that would have made it hard for him to snag Nicole Werner alone. Still, Mira was flattered by his interest in her research. He had a variety of suggestions for her, and although Mira had been trained to pay the least amount of attention to the creative writers in any department (their educations were always lacking), she thought that his ideas were genuinely good ones, his anecdotes interesting.

  Did she know, for instance, that for many years, until the administrators managed to squelch it, there’d been a kind of hysteria in Godwin Honors Hall among groups of students who thought it was haunted?

  “There was an article in the student newspaper. You could look it up. All these reports that a girl was coming around to the rooms, looking for somebody. I mean, the story changes with the teller, but it was more or less reported that this girl was frantic, and half-dressed, and looked like she was from another era, and when they asked her who she was, she’d tell them she was Alice Meyers.”

  He emphasized the name, and paused afterward, as if Mira should recognize it.

  She didn’t.

  “You know. The study room? In the south end of the basement?”

  Mira’d had no idea that there was a study room in the south end of the basement. Despite teaching a fair number of her classes in basement classrooms (an honor given mostly to assistant professors), she’d been on the south side, where there were no classrooms, only once, in search of a student she’d been told was in the ceramics workshop and who’d left her backpack in Mira’s classroom. That side of the basement of Godwin Hall seemed to be just arts and crafts workshops, knocking pipes, and laundry facilities, although there was, she knew, a little student hangout over there somewhere called the Half-Ass, where they sometimes held poetry readings and bad student rock band concerts.

  “Yeah. There’s a study room down there. They’ve quit using it, I think. It was paid for by the parents of Alice Meyers. She was a Godwin Honors College student who disappeared in 1968. She posted her name on a board at the Union for a ride home to some small town in Ohio. The last anyone saw of her she was walking around the Union, looking for her ride.”

  “Jesus,” Mira said. She was used to such stories, but they still gave her goose bumps.

  “Well. Anyway. There’s that. And, you know, the brass isn’t letting it out, but there was another death on campus recently. A girl over in Bryson. A freshman. They just found her dead after somebody noticed the stench outside her room. I think they can’t say for sure it was a suicide, so they’re not saying much at all. This was three weeks ago, and it hasn’t even made the papers. Luckily, I guess, her parents are nobodies from some rural town pretty far from here.”

  Mira nodded. She hadn’t heard about it, but it didn’t surprise her. There was always a student who killed herself, or himself, every year in a single, in a dorm. (An excellent argument for doubles.) Always a stench. Always the possibility left open that it had been an undetected heart defect or an accidental overdose, not a suicide or, God forbid, a murder, so the university could pretend it wasn’t neglecting its young people—their mental health, their safety—although everyone knew that there wasn’t the slightest bit of attention paid in a place this big to any individual’s mental health or safety. The only people on campus with any responsibility for that at all were kids like Lucas, resident advisors, who got free room and board to pretend to be taking responsibility.

  Jeff Blackhawk picked up a paperclip Mira had on the bookshelf and put it in his mouth. He held it for a second, first, between his front teeth, but then it disappeared. Being the mother of two toddlers, Mira had to check her alarm—her first instinct being to pry Jeff’s mouth open and fish it out. But Jeff managed to keep talking with the paperclip in there.

  “And you know there’s that other girl from Nicole Werner’s sorority.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah. See?” He gestured at Mira as if he’d already proven his point. “Nobody’s getting this information. State secrets. Cover-ups all over the place. This place is full of ’em.”

  “What happened? Who?”

  “Denise Something. They’re trying to pass it off as a runaway situation. Supposedly she was dating some older guy, and her parents disapproved, so she disappeared off the face of the earth. It was right around the time Nicole got killed, and her sorority sisters are all saying the last time they saw Denise What’s-Her-Name was at that ghastly cherry tree thing, and then she got in a car with some guy, took her stuff with her, and that was that. The parents can’t even get the cops in this town to investigate—which of course gives the brass around here a great excuse to just toss up their hands and say, ‘Sorry your kid got lost! Not our problem! Even the cops can’t help you!’ ”

  “What year was she?”

  “Sophomore, I think. Music school. She lived in the OTT house, but the year before, she lived in Fairwell—ironically enough.”

  He opened his mouth to laugh, and Mira was relieved to see the paperclip still on his tongue.

  Fairwell was an all-girls dorm, and the campus folklore was that the girls who lived there as freshmen never got to be sophomores, that they all flunked out. Statistically, it wasn’t true. Fairwell girls were no more lik
ely than any other group of freshmen to fail their first years. But it was still a struggle to fill the beds in that dorm. The university allowed students to rank their top choices, and because Fairwell was so unpopular, the dorm was mostly filled with foreign students or girls from such small towns they’d never met anyone from the university to tell them this story. (Of course, with the Internet, it was getting harder and harder to capture the ignorant.) Mira had asked the dean once, at a stiff cocktail party for junior faculty, why they didn’t just change the dorm’s name. Wouldn’t that solve the problem? Clearly, she pointed out, the rumor had started because the dorm’s name, Fairwell, was Farewell.

  “Never thought of that,” he’d said. “But, nope. Marjorie Fairwell was the wife of the university’s first major donor. She’s got scads of descendants still pouring money into the place. They’d rather let it sit empty than change the name. Eventually they’ll make it a charity dorm, I suppose. All the girls there will be on financial aid or academic probation, and just grateful to have a place to sleep, period.”

  Jeff leaned against her office wall, looking down at Mira’s legs. He always got there eventually, it seemed to Mira. She was surprised it had taken him so long. It must have been an indication of his sincere interest in the topic they were discussing. She asked him, “How do you know about it, this runaway, if it’s been kept so quiet?”

  “A friend of mine works in the provost’s office,” Jeff said. “She’s sworn to secrecy about everything that goes on there, but a couple glasses of wine and she’s all tongue.”

  Mira tried not to picture the scene inspired by the choice of words, his female friend’s tongue. Jeff was, himself, an exceptionally sexy man—tall, olive green eyes, a head of shaggy brown hair. But Mira found him as attractive as a catalog model of men’s underwear. Sure, you looked twice, but there was that problem of you existing in the three-dimensional world, and his being just a flat, glossy surface. Plus, there was Jeff’s absolute lack of discernment, it seemed. (“If she’s breathing, he’ll sleep with it,” one of the part-time language teachers had told Mira once in passing. “It’s pretty sad, really. If he were a woman, we’d all feel sorry for him and be worried about his self-esteem.”)