Outer Banks (8 page)

Fig had a way of saying terrible, naked, self-deprecatory things that none of the rest of us would have said to save our immortal souls, and making them sound ingenuous and somehow poignant. My heart squeezed with pity for her.

“Oh, Fig, you don't want to copy me,” I said. “Truly, you don't. I'm too tall and too skinny and I slouch this way because
I'm always trying to look shorter, and I talk this way because I spent a lot of summers up in the East, and I have these clothes because I bought them then and can't afford new ones now. I laugh like that because I'm self-conscious about my laugh; my father always told me it sounded like a hyena. And I'm not an aristocrat. I'm really not. I don't have any money, and I'm just an Alabama girl like you are. People will like you much better if you'll just be yourself.”

“No, they won't,” she said. “They never have.”

“I promise they will,” I said.

“No. They won't. And I don't believe you about the other. You're just being nice to me because you're that way; on top of everything else you're good and kind. Mother says a real lady is never consciously unkind, and you never are.”

I looked at her in despair.

“Your mother was right,” Cecie said, grinning. “Of course, Oscar Wilde also said a gentleman is never
un
consciously unkind, so you can take your pick. But ol' Kate here is an aristocrat, no doubt about it. Did you know they call her Effie, because she's so FFV? That,” she added at Fig's thick look, “stands for First Family of Virginia. Yep, ol' Effie Lee.”

“Oh, shut up, Cecie,” I said crossly.

“You're modest, too. I noticed that about you right away,” Fig went galloping on through her litany of my virtues. I thought I would scream with frustration and annoyance. “I think Effie is cute. I didn't know about that. I do know your whole name, though, I wrote it down from the chapter list the first night, in my diary. Katherine Stewart Lee. I noticed it because of the Stewart. My mother has some Stewarts from Virginia in her family; we're probably related. They almost named me that.” She thumbed through the diary and held the page up for us to see. My name, misspelled, leaped out at me. It gave me a chilly, unpleasant twist in my stomach.

“Kate is one of the ‘U' Stuarts,” Cecie said blandly. “You
know, as in General Jeb Stuart. Those are another matter altogether.”

“Well, we could still be related,” Fig said stubbornly, looking down at her great loafered feet. Dull magenta stained her neck and face. “Mother told me we changed the spelling somewhere along the line.”

I raised my hands and dropped them in surrender.

“Well, maybe we are,” I said. “So be a good little fifth cousin thrice removed or whatever and stop drooping around and talking like Katharine Hepburn. And stop craning your neck back like that when you laugh. You'll choke to death. I like you just the way you are, and I don't want you to change.”

“Okay, if you really feel like that,” Fig said submissively. And then looked up slyly at me under her lashes and added, “Effie.”

And nothing could dissuade her from that. She did stop the ridiculous attempts to slouch and talk and laugh like I did, but until the day I left Randolph Fig Newton never failed to call me, elaborately and with much mock cringing and many little winks, Effie Lee. It drove me nearly mad. Cecie adored it. For an entire quarter she herself called me Effie Lee, and then, unlike Fig, tired of it. Ultimately I was able to laugh about it in the nights; it became a part of the great body of what Cecie called Figiana, that we sorted over nightly for each other's delectation.

I resolutely spent an hour or so each week, in the afternoons, with Fig in her room, drilling her from the Tri O pledge manual and preparing her for initiation that winter. She was an awesomely quick study, but she made a tedious business of it, pretending not to understand so I would have to repeat things over and over, and writing everything I said down laboriously in the by-then-hated diary, her tongue out in concentration, breathing wetly through her nose, giving me conspiratorial little looks.

“Come on, Fig,” I said finally. “You know this stuff backward and forward, better than I do. There's no sense in making me repeat all this.”

She smiled at me, twinkling her bug's eyes.

“I know,” she said. “I just like to hear the sound of your voice.”

There was something intimate in her voice, a damp and familiar emanation, that I shrank away from. Distaste and a vague alarm stirred in me. After that I dropped the lessons. There was nothing, by then, about Tri Omega that she did not know.

I began spending all afternoon until six o'clock in McCandless Hall with the permanent legion of architecture and interior design students who kept drafting tables and did their work there. I found an empty table by the great bank of windows that overlooked the street and a coffee shop and coin laundry and rooming house, and set up my stuff, and found that I liked working in the new, light-flooded white building. In the daytime it was among the coolest spots on campus, and at night the building was like a great aquarium swarming with friendly fish, and the coffee shop was full until very late of students talking design and materials and construction methods. Many were men, older than the norm for Randolph, back in school on the G.I. Bill, worldly and cool-eyed and faintly scornful of the scurry of collegiate life around them. Most were considered by the fraternity and sorority contingent to be “bohemian,” “arty,” and “funny,” and therefore beyond the social pale. I found myself drawn to them, and they seemed to like and accept me, seeing, no doubt, below my Tri Omega pin, the outsider that I was at heart. Often I did interiors and renderings for the budding architects, and just as often they straightened out my faulty perspectives and took me for coffee. It was a soothing and pleasant interval for me. Cecie was in late labs of her own that fall, and Fig could hardly pursue me into my very laboratories. I think I first began to take Interior Design seriously that quarter.

But then Fig began to shadow me like a comic-strip detective.

“Don't look now, but one of the Seven Dwarfs is staking you out,” the married architect at the table next to mine said one day in November. I followed his glance out of the window and saw
Fig, swathed in a raw new yellow polo coat and swaddling scarves down to her ankles, standing on the sidewalk outside, looking in at me. She looked, in her wrappings and layers, like a squat, burlap-wrapped pipe that had been readied for a freeze. She gave me a bright smile and a little waggling wave. I waved back, and waited for her to move on, but she did not. My face and neck began to burn. I bent close over my work.

“Okay, she's gone,” my table neighbor said presently. “Who in God's name is she?”

“One of our new pledges,” I said, not looking at him.

“Christ, she must be worth a fortune,” he said. “Or is Tri O into good works now?”

“She's a very nice girl,” I said stiffly, cursing her silently.

“Sure she is,” he said equably. “How could she be anything else?”

The next day Fig was back at the same time. And the next, and the next. We would go through the same routine: the little finger wiggle and the vivid smile, the ducked head, the silent waiting it out. On the fifth day she came into the building and stood in the open door of my lab, fidgeting and looking for all the world like a pit bull expecting to be kicked, until someone said, “You got company, Kate,” and I looked up and saw her. I went to the door and drew her out into the hall.

“What can I do for you, Fig?” I said crisply, aware that everybody in the room was listening.

“Well, I was just over this way and saw you through the window and thought we might go get some coffee,” she said. “I know you go over there to Harry's in the afternoons. I've seen you. So I thought since I was here anyway…”

“My break isn't for another hour, and I can't let you stand around in the cold waiting for me,” I said. “Dr. McGee is funny about outsiders…you know, people who aren't his students…being in his lab. But thanks anyway. By the way, what are you doing over here? I thought you had P.E. afternoons.”

“Well, I dropped it,” she said, not meeting my eyes. “I get these awful cramps, you know, and they wrote me an excuse at the infirmary. I switched to Music Appreciation right over there in Smythe.”

“Well, anyway, I've got to get back to work,” I said. “See you tonight.”

“Are you coming back for dinner?”

“I…don't know,” I said. “I've got to have this project finished by Thanksgiving holidays. I'll probably be working every night until then…”

“I'll help you,” she said brightly.

“Fig…”

“Okay, okay,” she said, putting her hands up as if to ward off a blow, and chortling merrily. And went scurrying off, not looking back.

After that she stopped appearing on the sidewalk outside McCandless, but then one afternoon, as I sat in a booth at Harry's drinking coffee and laughing with a group of architecture students, I felt, distinctly, eyes on my face, and turned, and there she was, alone in a booth across the room. Even through the still strata of cigarette smoke and the steam from many cups of coffee, I could see that she was staring fixedly at me. But when she caught my glance, she looked down at the book she was reading, and did not look up again. She was there, off and on, for the remainder of that quarter, and she never acknowledged that she saw me, and never spoke of it afterward. I was so outdone that I was determined not to mention it to her, either. So we rocked along, stalker and quarry, neither admitting by so much as a gesture that she was aware of the other. I was tense and jittery and always faintly angry at her, but so long as she kept up her airy pretense of ignoring me, I could not seem to broach it with her. The campus was, after all, open territory.

And then she showed up in my weekly History of Architecture
class, still pointedly not seeing me, seeming to be enraptured with the slides and the mumbled droning of the old German professor, and began to talk glibly at meals of Mies van der Rohe and Florence Knoll and Barcelona chairs and Dudok's City Hall in Hilversum, and I snapped at her one night in utter exasperation.

“Look, Fig,” I said, following her into her lair. “Cut out that silly stuff. You don't know an Eames chair from a toilet, and you couldn't care less. You're an English major, and the best one I ever saw. Interior Design shouldn't matter to you. I don't understand why you're bothering with that stupid class; everybody hates it. And everybody's talking about the way you follow me around. Do you want that?”

“I wasn't aware that I was,” she said prissily. “My goodness, it's a free country, isn't it? If I want to audit a course that isn't in my major, I don't see why anybody should care. Who said I was following you around?”

“Everybody. People,” I said. “Listen. There's something Kahlil Gibran said in
The Prophet,
that I always thought was true and wonderful. He said, ‘Let there be spaces in your togetherness.' So let's do it, Fig. Let's let there be spaces in our togetherness.”

“That's beautiful,” she breathed. “It really is. I'm going to put that in my diary. And”—she looked meltingly at me—“that you quoted it to me. I'll never forget it.”

I stamped out of her room, bested. I was damned if she would goad me into one of these discussions again; it was like Br'er Rabbit and the Tarbaby. To touch Fig was to be ensnared by her.

During the whole insane siege, Cecie, oddly, said very little. I related each of Fig's atrocities to her, indignantly, waiting either for her dry, crisp perspective or her whooping, healing laughter, but she offered neither. It was about that time she began to warn me about Fig, to caution me not to laugh so loudly, to keep my voice down when I spoke of her. Instead of defusing the whole affair with her delicate satire, she cautioned me that Fig was not
what she seemed. “I simply can't believe you can't see…how she is,” she snapped once, exasperated. “You act like a horse with blinders on.”

But she would not speak of it further. I felt vaguely betrayed, and bereft, as if deprived of both my audience and my co-conspirator in laughter. For a while, we did not laugh much at night, Cecie and I, and I realized only then how much of our easy mirth had had its source in Fig Newton.

And then Fig began to leave me poems, on my pillow or under the windshield of my car or on my drafting table in McCandless, and they were so obscure and flowery and exalted and altogether dreadful that I could only laugh helplessly when I read them to Cecie in the nights. This time she did laugh with me. It simply was not possible to do otherwise. I began to read them aloud in Fig's voice, and discovered an arrow-true facility for mimicking her voice and inflections, and used it shamelessly and often. I never failed to reduce Cecie to utter, breathless helplessness with the sorry little imitations, and I gloried in this new power. She was so often the one who had made me laugh until I thought, literally, that I would die.

“Oh, hush, oh, hush,” she would gasp. “Oh, stop! I can't stand it! She'll hear you! Stop, Kate…”

And on I would go, flinging Fig's poor, awful words into the air on a careless flood of laughter and mockery.

And then one morning Cecie came out of the bathroom with a wet snippet of paper in her hand, and passed it to me. She did not look at me.

“It was pinned to the shower curtain,” she said. “You're going to have to do something about this, Kate.”

I read the poem Fig had left for me and reddened, painfully and profoundly. I could actually feel the air beating at my face and hands, as if a silent detonation had taken place. I was giddy and breathless and almost physically sick. The poem was graphic in the
extreme, and spoke of physical love in terms that I had never even imagined before. There was nothing in it of normalcy or grace. I was sure Fig had not composed it herself, but the fact that she had dared to even think about me in those terms left me weak and trembling with anger.