Joyce Oates - I’ll Take You There

Mrs. Thayer's arch, overbearing accent made her speech irresistible to mimic. In this way, her speech pervaded every room of the thirty-bedroom house.

You thought of sex continuously. Even if, like me, you had few sexual feelings, and no desire to translate those feelings into relationships with male persons . Sex was a tide, vast and virulent and unspeakable. A tide that could wash over any girl at any time, and destroy us. Male persons were primed to discharge this tide, in hot little spurts: semen . (Yet semen was never named.) Male persons were the natural predators of girls .

"What Thayer's scared of, like all the housemothers," it was remarked slightingly of our vigilant housemother, "is one of us getting knocked up. She figures she'd be blamed, and fired."

Forbidden for undergraduate girls to ascend to the upper floors of male residences or to slip from their public rooms at any time. Forbidden for undergraduate girls to visit the rooms or apartments of men living off-campus, and so not under the jurisdiction of any university authority. Especially it was crucial for girls to avoid being alone with one or more male persons at fraternity parties where unfortunate incidents were rumored to occur, occasionally. When a girl drank too much, and became careless. Got passed around upstairs, from "date" to "date." But there were no male equivalents of housemothers like Mrs. Thayer at fraternities, only house managers or advisors, and when Kappa girls went to fraternity parties on campus or at Cornell as they did every weekend, they did as they pleased. Or as their dates pleased. C'mon! You'll like this guy, he's a great guy, you can't be working all the time ! I made up my face like the other faces, I brushed my snarled hair till it shone. I was given a pink taffeta dress to wear, a skirt to mid-calf and a big bow tied at my back to make the waist fit. I was given sparkly earrings. Smiling and blinking like a nocturnal animal prodded out into the sunshine. In the fraternity house the din was deafening. The young men, en masse, were tall . Laughter, music. Beer. Paper cups, beer. The sacrament was beer. In the rest room reserved for LADIES (a poster in smeary red paint taped to the outside of the door) there was a giant blue box of Kotex prominently in view. Some wag had put, in each of the toilets, goldfish. Were you supposed to laugh? Flush the beautiful golden little fish down down the toilet, and laugh? I lacked an appropriate sense of humor, I lacked an appreciation of beer. And mouths tasting of beer. Was I expected to dance in this din, in a crush of grinning strangers, in a grinding embrace? Expected to kiss a stranger? Some boy who didn't know me, had forgotten my name? What was the purpose of drinking to get drunk? My Kappa sister Chris, vomiting off the back steps onto garbage cans marked

.

Chris, come on. Chris, please . I was begging but she refused to listen. Back to the party! I was trying to explain to Dawn, Jill, Donna, Trudi, who were impatient with me, eyes hotly shining, skin heated, arms slung around their grinning dates' necks. She'll be fine, Chris can take care of herself, she's been at these parties before . I provoked embarrassment and disgust among those Kappas sober enough to notice how I left drunken Eddy my "date" walking out of the music-blare running across the snowy spiky-grassed park in ridiculous high heels, my borrowed pink taffeta dress swishing like ice against my stockinged legs, breathless, cursing, tears leaking out of my eyes though God damn I wasn't crying, why cry? My feelings can't be hurt where I have none .

Next day around noon, Trudi looking coarse-faced and homely without makeup brought the black cloth coat I'd left on the crammed coat-rack at the fraternity house, tossed it onto my bed with a look of pity and contempt. "Here. You forgot something."

What happened to Chris?

Hey if she doesn't remember, so what?

Whose business? Yours?

No memory, nothing to forgive.

Her date took precautions, probably. He isn't a complete asshole.

Was it just him?

Returning from the library along University Place, just before 11:00 p.m. Crossing the snowy park. I was carrying books in my arms as you might cradle a baby. One of them was eight hundred pages, a history of European philosophy. I was walking swiftly, my breath steaming in the freezing air. I'd been working in the library stacks and was almost late for curfew. My mind was empty of all thoughts except the urgent need to get up the steep hill to the Kappa house, to get inside before 11:00 p.m. For Mrs. Thayer would not be sympathetic, Mrs. Thayer would not even listen to my stammered excuse. You American gurls ! Suddenly I heard whispering-"Missy? Mis-sy?" The figure appeared from behind a tree as a child might, out of a hiding place. In the dim light of a street lamp on University Place I saw his face: a stranger's: fattish jowls, clean-shaven jaws, thin wormy mouth stretched in a leering grin, black-rimmed glasses like a schoolteacher's, that magnified his eyes like minnows. He's letting me see his face. Wants me to see his face. "Mis-sy," he was saying, the tip of his tongue protruding between his lips, " -gonna hurt your titties runnin'! Take care." He might have been any age between thirty-five and fifty. There was a singsong mock-solicitude to his rather high-pitched voice. I knew him at once as the man who'd accosted Freddie and other girls; but I was not one of these girls; I was a Strykersville girl; without hesitation I threw my heavy books at him, directly at his face, knocking his glasses off. He cried out in surprise and pain. No girl or woman this crude bastard had ever approached had behaved like this, he wasn't prepared, his fantasies hadn't prepared him for me. I was screaming at him, short yipping breathless cries like a dog.

Watching him then limp across the park, along a side street, out of my vision. Like liquid fire adrenaline coursed through my veins. I was thrilled, I was buoyant. This incident, I would have liked to tell my father.

In the snow lay the black-rimmed glasses. I picked them up with my gloved hand and had an impulse to snap them in two, in rage. But I didn't. I slipped them into my coat pocket instead.

No one had heard my short breathless little screams. They'd faded immediately, like my steaming breath.

What if he'd hurt me? There was the glint of madness in his eyes. Saliva at the corners of his wormy mouth.

When I entered the brightly lit Kappa house a few minutes later, my heart still pounding, I was two or three minutes late but the proctor on duty, smoking a cigarette, waved me indifferently inside. She took no notice of my flushed, excited face. My dark, dilated eyes. I did not rush to Mrs. Thayer's door, which was closed at this time of night; I did not bring her the gift of my female distress after all. The library books were damp with snow but otherwise undamaged. I knew I was a very lucky girl.

My feelings can't be hurt where I have none.

What I would do: I'd picked up the glasses with gloved hands and I would never touch the glasses without wearing gloves; I would mail them to Syracuse police headquarters with a terse typed note. These belong to a sex offender. He is yours .

Thunderous hooves! Shrieks of laughter. Soap-splattered mirrors in the third-floor communal bathroom. The smell of cigarette smoke everywhere and cigarette butts strewn like confetti. Empty Tab and Coke cans kicked along the corridor, down to the stairway landing, for Geraldine the Negro maid to clean up; Geraldine with no expression on her dark creased face, wordless, dropping trash into her plastic bag. (Passing Geraldine and her bulky vacuum cleaner in the corridor, I lowered my eyes, I was ashamed of my skin. In the Kappa Gamma Pi house that autumn of my sophomore year I knew for the first time what it was to be ashamed of my skin. But Geraldine took no more notice of me than any white-girl Kappa deserved.) Bitch they were incensed Why doesn't she mind her own God-damn business . Mrs. Thayer had dared to scold certain senior girls. Conduct unbecoming ladies and in public rooms ! There was Lulu who played repeatedly at a high volume "The Song from Moulin Rouge" to celebrate See look ? lifting her left hand where a tiny diamond ring flashed like a naughty wink Engaged before I'm twenty-one . Where a younger girl was crying, there several seniors circled her C'mon, sweetie! Get real . When I approached, one of them cursed me, shoved me aside and away and I retreated in shock never knowing Why ? I could not tell myself the old story Once upon a time because the time was now; the story was now; I'd believed I was causing the story to take place, but in fact the story was taking place around me, as a tide rises, brackish and muddy and filthy with debris. My Kappa sisters were fascinating to me as giant, brightly feathered predator birds would be fascinating to a small songbird hiding in the brush. Or trying to hide in the brush.