The Drifter(11)

The idea that Betsy would pledge sort of began with her mom. While she didn’t actually come right out and tell her daughter that she wanted her to be a part of the Greek system, because Kathy didn’t come right out and say anything directly, it was strongly implied over the years that Kathy craved a kind of social acceptance for her only daughter, her only child, that she herself had never experienced. Kathy never went to college. She was popular and pretty and met Betsy’s father in high school in Connecticut. She took a job in a typing pool after graduation, passing her time while he was away at Amherst. They married in the summer after his senior year and Betsy was born in the spring. Betsy was barely a year old when Kathy discovered that her husband was having an affair with a girl he’d met in school. Threats were made. Plates were thrown. It went on for years, until Betsy’s durable memory was intact, until he finally made a decision. Later, when Betsy struggled to imagine what had happened between her parents, it occurred to her that he bailed when he realized the “other woman” wouldn’t wait forever. Kathy packed their suitcases, scraped together whatever cash she could, and let Betsy play on the floor of the backseat of their Oldsmobile during their long drive down I-95 to Florida, the land of eternal sunshine and fresh starts. She got a job as an office manager for a hotel chain. It was made clear that Kathy was filled with remorse about her choices, and that, deep down beneath all of that anger, she felt that Betsy’s father had chosen the better woman, the kind of woman who went to college and, she could only assume, was in a sorority. Kathy was the kind of woman who collected the September issues of Vogue and dreamed of a better life. She beamed when Betsy’s rush application arrived in the mail from the National Pan-Hellenic Council. It was a life she wanted her daughter to be a part of, and what Betsy wanted was beside the point.

Yet the more Betsy discovered about herself, the more she found the myth of the only child baffling. Betsy’s experience was different. She was supposed to be competent, self-reliant, and possess life skills acquired from attentive parents that her peers with siblings did not. But she couldn’t shake the loneliness, the connection she was missing with her own detached mother, and the mystery of her father, who would reappear for awkward annual visits during her childhood, but vanished altogether by the time she was fourteen. Betsy understood that the reason she had attached herself to the sorority was because she’d never had a sister. At first, she wanted to be a part of it to please her mother, to prove that she belonged somewhere, that she had a hundred sisters, despite the fact that, even from the beginning, she felt like a fraud.

Once you were inside the system and assigned to one of the three houses you selected as your favorites, ranked in order—assuming that at least one of the three houses wanted you back—the Greek letters you wore emblazoned on your chest determined your entire life. At first, it was just where and with whom you partied and which fraternity socials you would attend, and which ones you considered beneath you. The letters were social shorthand, a way of communicating to everyone else on campus that you had been deemed the most beautiful, the most popular, the most desirable. Betsy didn’t realize it until she was on the other side of the wizard’s curtain, but she learned soon enough that a great many of these women would forever identify themselves by which sorority they’d joined when they were eighteen or nineteen, like Viv, or Ginny’s sister, M.J. When they stood up for the first time to introduce themselves at a school committee or a local charity board, they wouldn’t say, “I’m a marketing manager” or “I’m passionate about ocean conservancy.” They’d say, “I was an ADPi at Florida State,” or a “Tri Delt at Bama,” or a “Kappa at Georgia,” or a “Pi Phi at UT.” That said it all.

But in that moment, the future is unthinkable. As these unsuspecting girls are shuttled through plush, carpeted halls amid all of those beaming smiles, all anyone can worry about is whether she has lipstick on her teeth.

When the ceremonies began, a row of perfectly coiffed smiling girls would trot out on the long sidewalks that led to the imposing front doors to line up and greet their pretty prey with a song, typically a show tune with the words altered slightly to reflect their near-maniacal enthusiasm for their bonds of sisterhood. They’d laugh and wink, because everyone knew it was embarrassing schlock. And when they were finished singing, the sisters would lock eyes with one girl under the tent, make introductions, and offer her a glimpse into her future, showing her the possibilities of what may be awaiting them behind door number one, two, or three, if only they came up with the right answer before the buzzer sounded.

Someone blonde and smiling would lead Jenn (two Ns, recently dropped Y) from Tuscaloosa into the great room and kneel on the pale peach carpet beside her. Jenn would tuck her hands into the folds of her Laura Ashley dress and listen, as Ginny or Betsy or Caroline or any of the other sisters would start the mind-blender, nimbly steering the conversation to a topic, like a recent family vacation to Paris and a visit to the Louvre, that felt like an eerily familiar, nearly Psychic Friends moment.

“That’s so strange,” Jenn would say, astonished, “because I plan to double major in French and Art History!” She never suspected, of course, that the sisters had seen her photo at least a dozen times. It was flashed against a white sheet tacked to the wall in a slideshow of this year’s pledge class dream team, also known as “board girls,” so named because their photos were also glue-sticked onto poster boards hung around the house. All of the rushees had been vetted by their application, which always included a photo, a brief bio, their high school GPA, and three references, or “recs.” The rush committee would spend hours sifting through the paperwork and select the fifty most desirable incoming freshmen for that year. Then they’d run lunchtime drills, quizzing everyone about the details of Jenn’s high school résumé over salads drowned in ranch dressing. Her picture would appear on the screen in the chapter room. “Jenn! Alabama! Dance team captain! Volleyball! French! Painter!”