September 25, 2010
Since traffic had slowed to a halt less than a mile away from the freeway on their way into town, Betsy had plenty of time to get used to the idea that she was back in Gainesville twenty years after the fact. As the bus crept along University Boulevard, the most granular memories and details came flooding back. So much of it was the same, the rolling hills of the golf course, the ornate buildings of the original campus wedged in between the hulking, windowless brick mistakes from the late 1970s. The stadium was imposing as ever, the dominant structure on the landscape, metaphorically and otherwise.
The group plan for the day, as Leslie arranged it, was to stop at the sorority house for a brief tour and make it back to the other side of campus with plenty of time for tailgating. Two years earlier, after a massive capital campaign during which they pried open the heavy purses of dowager alumni sisters of a certain age, and nickel-and-dimed the less moneyed alumni for fifty-dollar donations at every turn, the forty-room house Betsy remembered so vividly had been partially razed and entirely renovated to mimic the kind of cartoonishly regal Southern mansion you picture when you think “sorority.” There were white columns installed where a sort of angular modernist facade once stood. There were wide stairs leading to a stately white painted door. Once inside, Betsy didn’t feel any of the gut-aching dread she’d anticipated. The past had been demo’d, rebuilt, and then finished with dark-stained floors and plush carpets, designed with the kind of neutral and deeply inoffensive style from the Ritz-Carlton school of decorating. Every detail was so strenuously tasteful that it all just kind of disappeared in a not unpleasant way. They had even rebranded rush. It was called “recruitment” now, which sounded vaguely militaristic, and much more accurate.
At first, Betsy tried to linger outside, hesitant to enter the place even though none of the circa-1990 dwelling was intact. After a few minutes on the shadeless, baking sidewalk, it occurred to her that no one on that bus had mentioned how she’d quit the sorority in a huff. It was likely that none of them, save for Caroline, remembered the details. Two decades ago, she struggled to break the rules in a place that didn’t value rebellion, or at least that’s what she’d told herself, and Dr. Hirsch, in therapy for all of those years.
But what was she rebelling against? She knew it must have had something to do with her missing father. Kathy was so afraid of the world after he left that she cautioned her daughter against being different, acting out, against taking up too much space. When she started college, she was just beginning to realize what that meant: that the people in the world in charge of making decisions weren’t capable of or interested in making decisions on her behalf. She just began to realize, like waking up from a dream, that she had other ideas. But there, in that bubble of hair spray and tailgates and white BMWs, everyone embraced the status quo, because that’s what allowed privileged kids to screw around on their parents’ dime.
Betsy wished she had understood her rebellion of 1990, which amounted to wearing Army surplus boots, cutting her own hair, drinking too much, and fairly run-of-the-mill bad behavior, before she bailed on the sorority and left for New York. She wished that she had known some of the other young women around her in the midst of that same transformation and embraced it. In hindsight, it all seemed so clear. She walked up that sidewalk to the now unrecognizable front door, with a flashy brass knocker and a dramatically different view from adulthood. Betsy wondered why the intensity of her youth never led to a more radical adult life, why she wasted that energy on getting wasted and, more recently, endless web searches for ideas for her kitchen remodel. She vowed to stop making granola bars when she got back home.
The question she asked herself, as she walked into that house and plastered a smile on her face, is how did the girl who wanted to be so different grow up? What if she didn’t feel like being vegan, or a subversive crafter, or mastering the art of butchering a pig, or getting a tat sleeve, or doing anything else predictably shocking or edgy? What if she’d rather take a cab than brave traffic on her vintage reproduction bike? What if she now thought secondhand clothes smell terrible, and would rather fill virtual shopping carts on Net-a-Porter, only to abandon them later when she was too lazy to get out of bed to find her credit card?