Shelly’s sorority, Eta Lambda, had been nothing like that. Hers had been known as the Friendly Girl’s Sorority. In other words, it was not as cool as the other houses; its sisters not as popular, not as pretty.
You might think that would have made it an easier house to live in—with more laid-back sisters, less pressure of all varieties—but you would be wrong. Being on the lower rung of the Greek ladder made the Eta Lambda sisters even more competitive, even more ruthless, crueler. Shelly’s most vivid memory of those days was of coming down the stairs in her formal gown on Pledge Night, and watching as the girls already assembled below in their own gowns made eye contact with one another and then, in unison, it seemed, rushed their hands to their mouths to stifle their laughter.
Shelly’s heart had begun to pound so hard she was afraid she would pass out. To this day she had no idea what they were laughing about. Maybe she looked fat, or her gown was too revealing. It could have been her hair, her makeup, her shoes, her little sequined purse. She would never know. She wasn’t intended to know. There was not a single girl among all those sisters who would have been kind enough to tell her, or to reassure her. So Shelly simply continued to descend the stairs (what else could she do?) and then to move through Pledge Night in a cloud of shame, dashing away from the activities every chance she got to check herself in the bathroom mirror: Her teeth, the blond hair over her lip, her eyebrows. She sniffed her underarms. She sniffed her underpants. She checked the front of her dress, the back of her dress, her bra straps, and the worst thing of all was that she couldn’t find it. Whatever it was, this thing they could all see on her, she was blind to it.
Shelly had moved through the next two years as an Eta Lambda trying to find it, to see it, to figure it out, unable to and determined, at the same time, to stay and face it, whatever it was, day after day after day.
A complete waste of youthful energy and time, she knew now—although, in truth, she’d made a couple of lifelong friends through Eta Lambda, friends who’d seen her through her graduation, graduate school, an abusive marriage, and a divorce, and who had then accepted her into the new life she’d taken on as a lesbian.
There was a special kind of loyalty born of that strange sisterhood. It wasn’t blood. But it was like some kind of precious body fluid, spent and shared between them.
The butterfly seemed stuck to the windowsill by the force of the breeze now.
Really, it was unbearable to watch. The breeze, which would have been nearly undetectable to anything not made of tissue paper and thread, as that butterfly was, was crushing it into the bricks. Shelly watched for a few more seconds and then decided she had no choice but to open the window and let it in. Luckily she worked in one of the few buildings left on campus that had windows that could actually be opened, although she rarely did so, and she had to push hard and then hold the heavy pane up with one hand while attempting to gently pluck the butterfly up with the other.
She got it. She could have sworn she felt its heart beat (atomic whispering, and dusty little particles of time and terror) and she felt terrified, too, trying to shake it off her fingers and onto her desk, where it lay motionless (had she killed it, had she killed it?)
She was certain, then, that she’d crushed it, scared it to death, injured it past fixing, but after a few seconds the butterfly fluttered its wings, and then it rose into the air, and Shelly stood back, out of its way, as it flew past her and through her office to the door, and then into the outer offices, where it zigzagged from wall to wall, until she opened the office door, and it flew down the stairwell, to the propped-open front door, and disappeared back into the world.
19
It was Putrefaction Day. As they filed into the room, Mira wrote on the board:
Perry Edwards was the first one in, already with his notebook open, jotting down the quote from the board (which was really intended more as a joke than something to include in one’s notes).
He was wearing a somber-looking pair of black trousers and a white button-down shirt, as if he’d just come from a Glee Club concert, or a funeral.
“Perry,” Mira said before the others were in their places, “would you mind working the slide projector?”
“No, Professor Polson.” He rose from his seat and moved to the chair next to the projector.
“Okay,” Mira said. “Today’s the big day. I’m assigning you your first essay, which will be due next week. I didn’t assign it earlier because I don’t believe in giving students, as some professors do, a month to write a paper. The longer you have, in my experience, the longer you’ll put it off. But, at the same time, as I state in the syllabus, I accept no late papers, so my suggestion is that you start working on this assignment today. It can be as long as you need it to be to make your points, but it will be no shorter than ten pages.”
“Ten pages!” Karess Flanagan blurted, and then blushed and looked around as if trying to pretend someone else had said it.
Under what circumstances, Mira wondered, would a parent consider naming a child Karess? Of course, they’d had no way of knowing that their infant daughter would turn into a stunningly sexy dark-haired beauty with C cups and glossy pink lips, did they? Mira could only begin to imagine the jokes and riffs the name and the girl had inspired in boys’ locker rooms over the years.
Karess continued to look shocked, whether by the number of pages of the assignment or by her own outburst, or both.
“Didn’t you read the syllabus?” Mira asked. “Under ‘Requirements’”—she whipped a syllabus out of the folder on her desk—“it says pretty clearly, ‘five papers, ten pages double-spaced or longer, must receive a grade of C or higher to pass the course.’”
Karess managed to nod and shake her head at the same time.
“So, here’s your paper topic,” Mira said.
Out of the same folder, she took her stack of Xeroxed assignments and handed them to Karess to pass out to the class. As the girl stood up with them, every guy in the class except Perry (who was studying the slide projector) looked from her ankles to her breasts, and lingered there until she sat back down.
“I’ll let you read this on your own,” Mira said, “but let me go over the basics. In this essay, which is a Personal Reflection piece, you are to examine your own superstitions—personal and cultural—related to death. You might start with why it is you signed up for this class, but you might also examine your preconceptions regarding burial, cremation, funeral rites, and the other rituals practiced by your family and community. What is your experience with the dead? Have you been in the presence of a dead body, and if so, what was your reaction? What are your fears related to the dead? What are your attractions?”