Bright Young Women(3)

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Outside on the front lawn, two of our sorority sisters were huffing and hauling a blanketed parcel roughly the dimensions of a movie poster, their cheeks chapped pink with cold and exertion, their pupils dilated in a hunted, heart-pounding way.

“Help us,” they were half-laughing, half-panting when Denise and I met them on our short stamp of lawn, edged with pink bursts of muhly grass to dissuade patrons of the bar next door from parking on our property when the lot filled up. It was such a successful trick of landscaping that none of the students crossing paths on the sidewalk, on their way to grab a bite at the Pop Stop before it closed, had stepped over to lend a hand.

I positioned myself in the middle, squatting and lifting the base in an underhand grip, but Denise just rounded her fingers and produced an earsplitting whistle that stopped cold two guys cutting through our alleyway. No amount of landscaping could deter people from pinching our shortcut, and I couldn’t say I blamed them. Tallahassee blocks were as long as New York City avenues, and Denise loved that I knew that.

“We could use a hand.” Denise tossed the dark hair she had spent hours coaxing into silken submission and popped a hip, every man’s fantasy hitchhiker.

I saw bitten-down boy fingernails curl under the base of our illicit delivery, inches from my own, and I was relieved of the weight instantly. I moved to the head of the operation to direct the guys up the three front steps and then—carefully, a little to the left, no, other left!—through the double front doors. We’d just had them repainted cornflower blue to match the striations in the wallpaper in the foyer, where, at that moment, everyone congregated—the girls in the kitchen making popcorn, the girls who had bundled together on the rec room couch to catch up on weekday tapings of As the World Turns, the girls who were going out, hot rollers in their bangs and waving their wet nails dry. They wanted to see what all the commotion was about as much as they wanted to slyly assess our handlers off the street, older than we were by at least eight years but not any older than the professors who routinely asked us out to dinner.

There was some arguing about what to do next. Denise was insisting the guys continue up the stairs, but the only men allowed on the second floor were family members on move-in day and the houseboy when there was a repair to be made.

“Don’t be like this, Pamela,” Denise pleaded. “You know if we leave it here, they’ll steal it back before we can make the trade.” Though the cargo was draped in a bedsheet, we all knew that it was a framed composite from our sweetheart fraternity, every active member unsmiling in a suit and tie, their rattlesnake-and-double-sword coat of arms at the center. We’d been going back and forth for months, each house lifting one of the other’s composites and leaving behind a sooty square that not even a heavy-duty ammonia solution would wipe away.

Denise was staring at me with glittering, kohl-rimmed gotcha! eyes. Over a decade later, when I finally became a mother, I would recognize this trick, this asking for something you knew you weren’t allowed to have in front of a roomful of people who wanted you to have it. There was no saying no unless you didn’t mind everyone thinking you were a mean old hag.

I produced a scoffing sound from the base of my throat. How dare she even ask.

Denise’s lips parted, her features slackening in disappointment. I knew this look too. It was the look Denise got every time she encountered me as chapter president after so long of knowing me as her friend.

“Man on the floor!” I shouted, and Denise seized me by the shoulders, shaking me with playful contention. I’d nearly gotten her. We were swept up then by the other girls moving like a school of fish, one vibrant body thinned by the stairwell and reshaped on the landing, squeezed thin again by our tapered halls. The whole time we were singing “man on the floor,” not in unison, but single voices in gravelly competition with one another. There had been that Paul McCartney song—“Band on the Run”—which to one of my sisters, no one could ever remember who, had always sounded like “Man on the Run,” and with one more modification the inside joke of The House was born. It was so catchy that the next morning, sitting in our dining room in dazed compliance, I heard the hum of the chorus. There were loads of men on the floor at that point, some in blue, some in white lab coats, the ones in charge in street clothes, and they were cutting bloody squares out of our carpets and tweezing back molars from the shag. And then someone else sang it full force—“man on the floor, maaaaan on the floor!”—and we started laughing, real deep-bellied laughs that made some of our uniformed house guests pause on the stairwell and look in at us, only traces of concern on their scowling, reproachful faces.



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The composite was delivered to room four, the room of the girls who had pulled off the heist. Our handlers took in the limited quarters skeptically, before kicking the door shut with their heels and leaning the prized piece against the foot of one of the twin beds. If you wanted to get in that room, you had to turn sideways, and even then I don’t think I could have slipped inside, not with my figure.

“You don’t have an attic or anything?” one of the guys asked.

We did, but having the composite in your room was like hanging a pair of stag antlers on your wall, Denise explained to them. Already, some of the flatter-chested girls were squeezing through the cracked-open door with their cameras to take pictures of the hometown heroes in room four, who posed alongside their kill grinning, air guns drawn and hair tumbling down their backs like Charlie’s Angels. In a few hours, he would try to enter this room but would be met with too much resistance owing to the composite of the 1948 class—I still remember that was the year the girls filched, can still see their oiled hair and horn-rimmed eyeglasses. Today Sharon Selva is an oral surgeon in Austin and Jackie Clurry a tenured professor in the history department of the very university held captive by terror that winter of 1978, all because of some silly Greek prank.