Sister Wolf Read online

  “You love hiding, don’t you? What you really love is fooling people. Poor dim old Mrs. Gilliam, trying to fix you up and marry you off. Who do you think you are, a double agent?”

  Lola bared her teeth. “If I were a Jew, I gather you’d want it branded on my arm?”

  “I expect you to recognize that you’re acting like a hypocrite.”

  “You backwards bigot,” said Lola, scraping the polish on her thumbnail. “I like dances and pretty clothes. I’m not a man, Marit. I will not wear pants and chop off my hair to suit your scruples.”

  Marit eased up and took a safer tack. She and Lola had a peppery friendship, which allowed for a good portion of strenuous wrangling. Most of the time she admired Lola ungrudgingly for the way she juggled her public and private lives.

  “I don’t approve of débutante mills. I think they are lowering.”

  “Pooh,” said Lola, accepting Marit’s peace offering. “You’re just sour because Luba sent you to France instead.”

  The season that Lola made her bow to society she was chosen Girl of the Year. In Cathorne, Virginia, mothers of belles still took their daughters down a peg or two by reminding them of Lola Paige Brevard. “She wore an ivy wreath on her head, and you’re bothering your daddy for orchids.” “Lola Paige never hung by the phone all day long.” “Serves you right. Lola Paige wouldn’t break a date for a better bid; if she did, she surely never got caught at it!” “There’s slouching and slouching, missy; Lola Paige stood just like a willow.”

  Some part of the local myth was Lola’s beauty, which was not the regular classical kind, but much more vivid. She had short blonde hair that curled like a crown of light, and coal-black eyes that needed no definition from paints or shadows. She was tall, two inches under six feet, and as flat in front as she was behind, but she rustled and floated when she moved, and she was constantly in motion. Her profile made a straight unbroken line from her forehead to the tip of her nose. Her mouth was wide and thin, but she was always talking, so its lack of symmetry went unnoticed. When she talked, she used her hands like a Latin; they fluttered around her face like mating birds.

  Some part of the myth was purely tactics. Lola made her Aunt Fanchon Pickett dress all in black and be her chaperone at big dances in Cathorne and Richmond. Lola broke the rule and wore white her whole coming-out year, even before her official bow at the Seventh Regiment. She made every entrance heavily veiled, in a white mantilla that completely covered her face, foiled by Aunt Fan, in shiny black, who carried Lola’s evening bag and dance card. The chaperone and the dance card were choice anachronisms, which got her equal marks for virtue among the parents and for affectation among her fellow débutantes. Neither opinion mattered to Lola; she knew that no Girl of the Year is ever well liked.

  The chaperone was a dandy fake, had they but known it. Lola was wild, and Aunt Fan was the perfect cover. After the dances, Lola sent her aunt home in a hired car. Then she herded the timorous girls and swaggering boys into their cars, and led the caravan to the honky-tonks in nearby Gadsden. (She claimed she had once won an amateur striptease contest, and Marit believed her.) Back at home, Aunt Fan would knock on the Brevards’ bedroom door. They propped themselves up on pillows and tried to read until Lola got in, no matter how late. “Our baby is sound asleep,” Aunt Fan would whisper. “She could hardly stay awake to get undressed.”

  Fanchon Pickett, grand-niece of General George, was as false as brass and as tart as a crabapple. There was nobody she liked, and only one thing in the world that she cared about. That year Lola paid all of Fan’s bridge debts (out of an allowance that had tripled when Lola was elected Valedictorian), and sent her spinster aunt off to Las Vegas, where she spent a week under the green light at the poker tables, sleeping two hours a night, waiting to retire until the Texas oilmen had packed it in.

  Lola’s wildness was of the coltish or tomboy variety: breaking curfew; outdrinking boys on boilermakers; driving on the wrong side of route 46; not being too careful of her skirts when she got out of cars or taught the Lindy. She had a dirty mouth, and ran an uncatalogued course in sex education, but she was as safe from scandal as Christopher Robin. It got noised around that Maddie Blanton was two months pregnant. “Isn’t that just about the tackiest,” sighed Lola when she heard it; and sexual experiments in their group lost all prestige, at least for that season. Boys never tried anything with Lola, not since she had kissed Tilden Chace in the ninth grade and scared him blue by asking him kindly why he never used tongues. The boys figured that she had picked up all that sexual lore somewhere, and credited her with experience, rather than a talent for library research. Her knowledge kept them from taking liberties, or mooning at her, which was the way she wanted it.

  As further insurance, she went to dances with two escorts, and put to use her little old-fashioned dance card. It made a nice, competitive effect; the young men lined up between sets, signing its ivory leaves with a tiny pencil as thin as a knitting needle. During the fad for cutting in, Lola set herself apart by dancing each dance through with one partner. “Cutting in makes you all feel popular? Why, I’d feel like a sexual beanbag!” she had declared to a peevish delegation in the powder room. She had them there, and they hated her for it, but not one of them ventured to copy her. Pre-emptive was Lola’s middle name. She had the edge on all those frilly, het-up bunnies, who could feel an erection through six layers of crinoline and tulle, and traded “stiff scores” at the end of an evening. What kept her head clear and her wits sharp was that she did not feel anything.

  When she did feel something, it was her own power that she felt, the excitement of her power over Taylor Blackwell. Lola had promised her parents that she would stay interned the full two years at the Meade Institute, one of Virginia’s first “early colleges.” The fancy term annoyed Lola, since Meade had yet to send a girl to “later college”; but she had a certain interest in the journalism courses. Lola relaxed in that isolated setting like a retired general who had never lost a battle. Campaign memories were sweet and sufficient to her, and she rode bareback, let her hair grow, and refused invitations.

  One weekend she had Gray House all to herself—or thought she did, until she passed Taylor Blackwell’s suite. Tallie’s girlhood bedroom had been moved to Gray House intact, with yellow gingham curtains and white eyelet valances run up specially, because the windows in the residence hall were longer than the windows at home. Tallie was hot with fever, and coughing into a French silk scarf. She was so weak that Lola had to hold a cup of mint tea up to her mouth while she lapped it with her pointed pink kitten’s tongue. Lola stayed to warm her bare feet between her hands and pet her like a kitten; and stayed on to make her melt and sigh, and to tell her that her whole person looked like a crushed rose, and one part of her in particular. Tallie had covered her face with her baby hands, and when Lola paused at the door and looked back, her dark red hair was falling over her face and hands, which she still would not take down.

  Tallie fell as lovesick as a clown, and just as mute. Lola might have been keeping a pet in her room, one of those tiny silky dogs that are easy to step on. She found Tallie curled up day and night in her armchair, or nesting on the quilt at the foot of her bed, raising her head and arching her body for petting when she heard Lola turning the doorknob. In Lola’s arms, Tallie felt so limp and fine-boned that she could be snuffed out on the spot, or snapped in two. She would not press back, she would only yield and yield; she felt viscous, or fluid, to Lola. During one strong embrace, Lola pulled up her eyelids and found that her eyes had rolled back in her head, showing the whites, as if she were in a faint. After that, Lola took to marking her, anything to rouse her, raising bloodblisters by pinching her, setting bruises on her neck and thighs with her knuckles or teeth. She pulled ten long auburn hairs out of her head, from a patch that grew over her ear, working very carefully, setting her sharp nails right at the scalp. Tallie only opened her mouth, fluttered her fingers, and fell back into Lola’s lap. Lola picked her up and s
lung her over one shoulder, like a rug. She carried her into her suite and dumped her on the bed. It took Lola no time to pack a bag and sign out. At home she told her parents that she had the grippe. She stayed away two weeks. When she got back, she heard that Taylor Blackwell had been taken out of school for good.

  “Oof, that’s revolting,” said Marit, the first time Lola had told her the story. “The worst thing is the part about the crushed rose. Wlagh. I can hardly bear to look at you.”

  They were sitting in the back of a bus, coming home from the Regional Cat Show in Pittsfield, making a real teenage scene. They laughed so hard that the driver chewed them out over the loudspeaker: “… if those two young ladies would act like young ladies.” Best friends laugh like that, as if they owned the world, a kind of laughter that is better than sex or back-rubs, and puts heartbreaks and rude awakenings in a long perspective.

  That same evening they made sandwiches in Marit’s kitchen, and drank the good bourbon. They discussed a certain champion Rex kitten, and joked about turning Marit’s acres into a cattery instead of a wildlife preserve. Marit got up to carve more slices of ham. She decided to ask the question that had been on her mind all evening. She kept her tone offhanded, as if she were inquiring whether Lola would like the bread spread with mustard or mayonnaise.

  “I have to know. What is interesting about what two girls do without their clothes on? All that nursing and snuffling. How can you like it? A lot of flaps and folds and creases and empty spaces. Ladies are sewers.”

  Lola got a look on her face like Magellan rounding Patagonia. She stood at the prow of her argument, the wind in her hair, eyes narrowed to pierce the landmass. Marit stopped carving, arrested by so much intellectual rapture enlisted in the cause of lesbian sex. Was Lola implying that lesbian sex was a perfect circle? Her hand was tracing circles in the air. No beginning and no end, she was saying; it goes on and on; I am ready as soon as I am finished; she is ready as soon as she is finished. Every pore is an appetite. Men don’t touch; they grab and they probe. There are only three good places on you, for a man—on your chest and between your legs. How can you like yourself if you see yourself the way a man sees you? Do you happen to know that you have two blue veins framing your cunt? Do you know when those veins have a pulse? (Are you talking to me? said Marit, lifting her upper lip. She looked mulish and threatened and idiotic. Lola made fun of her. Oh, pardon me, please; I should have said your “area”) Lola was sawing her hands back and forth, making parallel lines. Heterosexual sex was like a railroad line. You get on the tracks and there is one destination. You can even take the milk route, a long ride with a lot of station stops, but the trip is over when the man gets off.

  There were depths of prudery in Marit, and this was ugly talk. She wanted to curl halfway around on herself, like a possum hiding. She wanted to drop the knife or throw a tantrum, if that would change the subject. There was no matching Lola in this mood. Why couldn’t Marit hoist her own legs up on the table, inhale deeply and let the cigarette hang off her lip, and trade theory and anecdote like a professional? Lola was a master seducer, but Marit had spent her maturity avoiding seduction. Her public face was a scowl. She took seats next to children and ancients on the bus or airplane. On city streets her head was like a beacon rotating on its shaft. If she felt a presence behind her on an un-crowded block, she slipped into the nearest shop or building. She was proud of her alertness; rape victims did not have her peripheral vision or her marginal attention.

  The face she presented to her masculine peers was bristly and sarcastic. The boasters were mimicked; the pompous got punctured. Hunks and clubmen would back right off, with only their fur singed. There were times when her sharp tongue had failed her. The king of the stag line, voted Mr. Thinks He Is by his senior class, called her up one night after midnight to tell her that she had starred in one of his dreams. He was lying on the examining table in a doctor’s office; she came in, dressed like a nurse, in a very short uniform. Marit cut him off, but the hand that replaced the receiver was trembling. She felt as if her soul had been stolen, like a Navajo Indian who is frightened of tourists with cameras. The incident gave proof to her budding opinion that all boys were like her caller under the skin.

  Young men carry their self-esteem like novice waiters learning to balance a full tray on one bent palm. Marit threatened their poise, except in the case of Sandy Egmont, who had never learned to fake self-confidence where he had none. When Marit was twenty-two, Sandy had come to Niles to study owls, especially the little owl, because it had some degree of color vision. Sandy’s own eyes were freakish; one was blue and one half-blue, half-brown. They had emptied the spare-parts bin when they made him, and had given him ears like a flying fox, along with great veined hands and feet like Michelangelo’s David. Any sentiment that Marit possessed was reserved for Sandy, who had no vanity, who said “O.K.,” like a child being brave, when she refused to kiss him, and kept right on asking her on owl walks, wanting her help in wording proposals for foundation grants, and making up packets of herbs for her to take when she had a cold. When they did go to bed, it was because they liked each other so much and they were both late virgins. It turned out that Sandy also had a great veined penis. “My, that’s a nice one,” said Marit, who was as curious as an ape, watching it. “I don’t know much about this,” said Sandy. “I’m the bell,” said Marit, “you’re supposed to be the clapper.” They managed, because they had waited so long, and they had no nasty experiences to inhibit them.

  By the time Sandy got his grant, which took him to a wilderness laboratory in Montana, Marit had decided that there should be more to sex than cuddling. If Sandy liked sex to be an extension of the nursery, a cozy, down-filled puff and a musical night-light, she wanted acts that were strenuous and athletic. It was not enough to nuzzle and suck and be soaped in the bath; she wanted to sweat and get worn out. At the train station she said goodbye fondly, and gave Sandy a quilted parka for winter duty. She went back on the defensive, sexually; it did not occur to her to go out and stalk her ultimate athlete.

  A sweat bee looped across the terrace like a stunt pilot. It landed on Marit and sent electric charges into her bicep. She blamed Lola. She would have seen or heard him coming if Lola had not been drawling on, flourishing her hands, about junior committees, floral swags, supper menus, and whether the modified curtsy had gained acceptance over the deep curtsy. It seemed that all ten débutantes, with their knobby elbows and turned-in toes, were going to have to perform a mazurka. There would be branches of pale pink candles, and waiters in livery. The bee-sting angered Marit less than this drivel. She had refused to put herself forward, all white and hopeful, in her eighteenth year or since, to see who would choose her and who would pass her by. She would not stand like a patient white bullock while prize ribbons were attached to her harness. She hated fairy stories, except for ones in which princesses set their suitors hard tasks (taking a pearl out of a frog’s belly without killing the frog), then harder tasks (running through a field sown with knife blades), then impossible ones, like climbing a sleeping giant and putting his eyes out. She would rather dry up inside her husk then lay her neck under the guillotine of male approval. Her sense of humor had abandoned her for the time being or she would have seen Lola in a comic or seditious light, pimping for herself among all those new-blown débutantes, boring through the System from within. Nothing allied her with Lola at the moment. She thought it might be nice to start a fight.

  “You’re like a bloated sheik with a harem. Do something useful for a change.”

  “Oh, you are so saintly.” Lola arched her chest toward the sun. “Fixated on your animals, like my horse-crazy cousin, Pie. We heard her galloping up in her room, for hours on end. She was nearly twenty.”

  When Lola fought dirty, Marit gulped air. Sooner or later it made her sick to her stomach.

  “I won’t be on any committees. I won’t even go. I may go and throw rocks through the window.”

  Marit had scrunched u
p her face and raised her fists, like a child about to fly into a pet. She looked so foolish that Lola whooped and laughed until her sunglasses bounced off her nose and into her lap.

  Marit got out fast. She ran into the house and climbed up to the battlements, out of Lola’s line of vision. She had blood in her eye. She scanned the lower meadow and the birch grove. There was the lone male backpacker, sacked out full-length under a tree, with one arm covering his face. Wouldn’t I like to pick him off, thought Marit; I’d give him a scare. Her old BB gun was in the broom closet, for some reason, and so were two fencing masks, both rusty, and one with the wire mesh torn. BB-gun wars had been good sport when she was twelve. She had made up teams with the Browers, three rough boys whose father ran the hardware store and issued the hunting and fishing licenses. The fencing masks protected their faces, and they had worn two layers of winter clothing on their bodies, in spite of the heat. The BB shot raised blue welts right through the woolen layers, and smarted fiercely. She was good at standing pain, and could fight at closer range than the three boys. Her specialty was the suicide rush. She scattered nests of Browers by barreling straight at them, making Japanese noises, and taking fire from all three guns without falling back. The blue welts got ulcerated. Naked, under her mother’s angry eye, Marit looked like St. Sebastian after his arrows had been pulled out. The wars ended, the sores dried up, but those tiny bruises had taken a year to fade away.