“Yes, ma’am, Pam Perfect, ma’am.” Denise clicked her heels with a militant clang. Pam Perfect was her not-entirely-affectionate nickname for me, cribbed from the popular prime-time commercials featuring the woman with the feathered bangs, talking about the pure vegetable spray that saves her time, money, and calories. With PAM cooking, she trumpets while sliding a silver-skinned fish from frying pan to plate, dinner always turns out PAM perfect.
Denise was the first friend I’d made at Florida State University, but recently we’d found ourselves at an impasse. The rot at the core of Panhellenic leadership had always been favoritism, with former presidents hewing close to the rule book for some of their sisters while allowing their friends to get away with murder. When I ran for the position and won, I knew Denise had expected leniency with my name at the top of the executive board. Instead, I was so determined to do better than those who had come before me, to be remembered as a fair and impartial leader, that Denise had more strikes against her than any other sister that quarter. Every time she blew off Monday’s chapter meeting or postponed a service trip, it was like she was daring me to kick her out. The other girls watched us like two whitetail bucks who had put our heads down and locked antlers. Our treasurer, an auburn-haired Miss Florida finalist who’d grown up hunting in Franklin County, was always saying that one of us better submit before we got stuck and had to be sawed apart. She’d seen it happen in the wild.
“You can wear the coat,” I relented.
Denise capered to my closet with childlike glee that made me feel like an awful shrew. Her eyes rolled back as she slipped her arms into the silk-lined coat. I had beautiful clothes that fit like a second, softer skin, thanks to a mother who devoted her life to caring about such things. Maybe I would care too if I wore half my wardrobe as well as Denise. As it was, I had a round Irish face that contradicted my figure. That’s what I had—not a body but a figure. The disconnect between my freckled apple cheeks and pinup proportions was extreme enough that I often felt the need to apologize for it. I should be prettier or less, depending on who was looking and where.
“Can you shut my window before you go?” I slapped my desk with an open palm as a gust of wind blew into the room, threatening to spirit away my color-coordinated calendar pages.
Denise went over to the window and staged a hammy show, pressing down on the rail and grunting like she was giving it her all. “It’s stuck,” Denise said. “You better come with me so you don’t freeze to death planning the thirty-third annual blood drive. What a way to go.”
I sighed, not because I longed to attend a shouty fraternity party and couldn’t because I did in fact have to organize the thirty-third annual blood drive; my sigh was because I did not know how to make Denise understand that I did not want to go, that I was never more content than I was sitting at my pencil-scratched desk on a Saturday night, my door open to the din and the drama of thirty-eight girls getting ready to go out, feeling like I’d done the job I was elected to do if, by the end of the week, everyone could put on music and mascara and taunt one another from across the hall. The things I heard from my room. The absolute hell we gave one another. Who needed to shave her big toes and who should never dance in public if she had any desire to eventually procreate.
“You’ll have more fun without me,” I demurred lamely.
“You know, one day,” Denise said, turning to close the window for real this time, her long dark hair flapping behind her like a hero’s cape, “those cans of yours are gonna be in your lap, and you’re going to look back and wish—”
Denise broke off with a scream that my nervous system barely registered. We were twenty-one-year-old sorority girls; we screamed not because something was heinously, improbably wrong but because Saturday nights made us excitable and slaphappy. I have since come to loathe the day most people look forward to all week, its false sense of security, its disingenuous promise of freedom and fun.
* * *
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.