Two years later, when it came time to consider college, I mentioned FSU. “That’s pretty far,” she said, her voice jumping an octave. Interesting, I thought, and decided to press harder on this rickety key of parental concern, long out of tune.
“They offer something called an externship!” I exclaimed with legitimate enthusiasm, paging through the new brochure I’d requested. Even as a prelaw undergrad, you could earn credit by working in the courts at the Capitol Building, just a few blocks from campus.
“Why would you go to ‘the Berkeley of the South’ when you have the grades to go to Berkeley?” my mother pushed back. My mother never pushed back on me. Anything I wanted to do was fine by her.
It was a salient point, but I flicked my hair off my shoulder as if it weren’t.
“You’re too smart for a state school,” my mother added a little desperately.
That got me to lower the brochure, examine my mother, wonder if she had been body snatched sometime in the night. I’d always considered myself an intuitive person, but you could be dull as a doornail and still see there was something about Florida that was deeply agitating to Marion Young. I might never have learned what, if Denise’s death hadn’t broken the proverbial seal on our vesicle of family secrets.
I arranged a visit to campus, using money I’d earned bookkeeping at my father’s law firm, not because I needed to—my father made a lot of money, and my mother came from even more—but because my mother was so dead set against FSU that she refused to pay for the trip. I relished every second of fighting about my first choice for college with my beautiful, busy mother, who often seemed too wrapped up in her functions and hobbies and various women’s clubs to pay attention to what was going on in my life. My sister was eight years older and moved out of the house for good when I was in the fourth grade. I was often alone and terminally bored, and I do not say that facetiously. Idle, my mind goes to places that scare me.
But when I saw the Gothic towers of the Westcott Building, when I stood in the damp shade of the moss-hung oaks older than the university itself, a funny thing happened, a sort of clarity of the senses. It was like someone had been twisting my radio dial all my life, trying to find reception, and all the fuzz cleared the moment we crossed the border into Leon County. I was simply in tune with this place. That may sound like the cozy sentiment of a painted wood kitchen sign a certain kind of woman impulse-buys at Home Goods, but the stillness of my mind felt eerie and unnatural, reminiscent of the way birds stop chattering in a forest when a predator is crouching in the brush. At the time, I chalked it up to nerves. Choosing where to spend the next four years of my life was a big decision, after all.
Choosing where to rush, less so. The House, we called it, as though it were the original artifact, had the reputation for being the smartest sorority on campus, and Denise and I showed up for rush week expecting Southern grandeur in the form of a Georgian colonial, white columns holding up the gabled roof, petticoat-shaped ghosts in the attic. But the L-shaped building on West Jefferson Street could have been an office space or a warehouse. Some drunk geezer was smoking outside the bar next door, swaying side to side and yelling belligerently at the girls to be careful as they filed into The House.
“Thank you, sir!” Denise called back. He shaded his eyes and smiled when he saw it was the prettiest girl who had finally acknowledged him.
“Don’t encourage him!” hissed one of the girls walking ahead of us.
Denise held me back by the elbow. “Watch,” she said, and like clockwork, the hissing girl miscalculated the height of the riser and stumbled gracelessly through the double front doors, propped open to welcome the class of ’78. We’d later learn the front steps were installed improperly and varied in rise by a full inch. The drunk geezer had been watching freshman girls trip over their high heels all day and destroy their chances of getting a bid.
Despite its lack of curb appeal, I’d warmed to The House instantly once I was inside. Other sororities had offered us lemonade; here it was coffee so strong I left with lockjaw. The sisters wore name tags affixed to their blouses with owl and skull pins, and they were tactual, affectionate, out to change the world. They held hands and sat on laps as they spoke about their experiences in The House, the bonds they’d formed, the leadership and money management skills they’d acquired, the community that would get them jobs and admittance into competitive graduate programs, male-dominated arenas that brave alumnae had started infiltrating in the fifties, weaving an intricate network for us to call on once we’d graduated too. I could feel Denise trembling beside me as they spoke. I wanted it that bad too.
They sent us away with reading material—an article called “How to Discriminate Against Women Without Really Trying” by a researcher named Jo Freeman. Food for thought, they called it. Denise and I went back to the dorms and devoured every word.
The author’s argument was based on research collected from graduate students at the University of Chicago, but I recognized shades of my own experience in her conclusion, which was that women who wish to advance in their career face an insidious kind of discrimination, one that is not active, in-your-face sexism but, rather, no response at all. It was subtle discouragement by neglect, what the author called “motivational malnutrition.”
I thought about that phrase—motivational malnutrition—as I stared at the telephone, cradled in its receiver, for a good while after I’d spoken to everyone else’s parents, who had all picked up by the second ring. After I tried my own again and still, there was no answer.
* * *
When that big, nervous officer came to my room and told us that the girls had made it to the hospital, when Sheriff Cruso echoed the statement to me, technically, neither man had lied. There was a morgue in the basement of Tallahassee Memorial.
Robbie had died in her bed. Denise, on her way to the hospital. I can’t say that the police conspired to keep their deaths from us—a conspiracy by nature suggests malevolence, a coordinated effort at play. I can’t even call what they did negligence, because how can something be negligent when it’s not anyone’s responsibility? It was not the job of the Tallahassee PD to tend to a bunch of mewling sorority girls in their jammies and winter coats. Their job was to find the person who’d done this before anyone else got hurt, and that’s where, much like their predecessors back west, they dropped the ball, and instead of picking it up, they watched, whistling through the gaps in their two front teeth, while it rolled off the face of the earth. All of this should have stopped in the state of Colorado years earlier. But I was a long way from understanding any of that.
* * *
It was eight in the morning, the sun thawing the frost on the grass and the police rummaging through the upstairs rooms like mutant rats in the walls, when I stood at the head of one of the two long tables in the dining hall and told The House that Denise and Robbie were dead.
“Why?” someone asked straightaway, her eyes dry. It was a gritted-teeth why, the outraged kind that demands an answer.