Joyce Oates - I’ll Take You There

Except, at the Kappa house, the room was costing me much more.

The price of happiness. Such happiness you crave.

When the first bill for dues came to me from Kappa Gamma Pi, I was puzzled by "social fees" and other surcharges in addition to the monthly dues. Then to my horror I began to accumulate fines: because of my jobs, I had to miss business meetings, committee meetings, a "required" mixer with Kappa's brother fraternity Phi Omega. These were fines of $21 in October, $28 in November. I pleaded with the Kappa treasurer to excuse me: I had to work, had no choice but to work, what could I do? The girl, a junior with a pixie cut and wide-set imperturbable eyes, smiled with her mouth and suggested that I cut back on my academic courses and reschedule my work hours so that I'd have more time for the sorority-"Kappa Gamma Pi is your first obligation, don't forget."

Late that night in the basement study room of the house (to which I'd become habituated to retreating, not wanting to quarrel with my gregarious roommate, Deedee, unable to endure the pounding repetitive beat of calypso music from the room next door, or the shrieks and cries of laughter generally through the upstairs) sometime after 3:00 A.M. drifting into a deranged sleep as my vise-clenched head sank slowly to the paperback Ethics "whose pages swam in my vision as if undersea. Happy ! the voice of Spinoza taunted. The happiness you deserve .

My grandmother spoke English with a heavy German accent that seemed to mock the very language, as the tics and grimaces of her raddled face mocked her smiles. " 'Made your bed, now lay in it'-that's what they say, ja ?" She laughed, though without mirth. She was a guardian of the most banal and self-evident truths; one of those old, sour, but unfailingly energetic fairies in Grimms' tales who oversee disasater out of personal spite; her response to the assiduously argued, painstakingly structured metaphysical system of Baruch Spinoza, that martyr for truth excommunicated from the Jewish community in Holland, in 1656, would have been to take his collected works and fling them into her wood-burning stove-"There!"

I did not call her from Syracuse, ever. I did not call her to beg her forgiveness. I did not call her to say I am in despair, I am lost to myself, what can I do ?

The study of philosophy is the study of the human mind. Though philosophers claim they are studying "reality"-"the world"-"the universe"-"God." Yet to study the human mind up close, to probe into one's own mind, one's own motives, is to be baffled utterly.

My first year at Syracuse, I'd been indifferent to the campus presence of the Greeks, as they pretentiously called themselves. I was immersed in my studies-and in my part-time jobs-and in the vast, intimidating adventure of books, books, books. Never in Strykersville had I imagined a true library: a library like the university library in whose stacks I might wander mesmerized for years. The brightest of students in my high school, yet I saw myself at Syracuse as alone and beleaguered and fighting for my life; I loved the excitement of it, even the anxiety; I was in a perpetual state of agitation; I returned from the library staggering with books; if one of my professors assigned X , I would read, and reread, not only X , but commentary on X; I was writing, parable-like little prose poems; I had little interest in other girls in my residence, and often skipped meals; I had not the slightest interest in joining a sorority, in the time-squandering activities called "rush"-"pledge week"-"initiation." Yet even in my indifference I wasn't unaware (I "would have to confess!) of the sobering fact that the majority of freshman girls, including girls I admired and would have wished to consider friends, the most attractive, the most popular, in many cases the most intelligent, scholarship students like myself, had pledged sororities. These girls would seem to have been plucked by supernatural intervention out of the university residences and would be living, beginning the following fall, in sorority houses; leaving prospects for companionship, let alone friendship, severely diminished. For who would remain in the dreary undergraduate dorms for "independents" as we were flatteringly called?-the left-behind, the losers. Outcasts at life's feast, in a memorable Joycean phrase. In my pride I was hurt; I understood that I would be banished from a glamorous world in which in fact I took no interest; that I would be banished was a spur to my desire. And perhaps out of the corner of my eye I'd been uneasily aware of the cruel and discriminatory Greek world, synonymous with University Place, those absurdly elegant mansions (with dormitories extending at the rears) boasting cryptic Greek letters on their facades which were meant to tease and tantalize and re-huff the uninitiated. I'd walked past the Kappa Gamma Pi house on its craggy hill, I'd stared at the ivy-covered facade, the stately Doric columns, the slate-covered high-pitched roof, and turned away shaken. In my rural background there'd been nothing like this. In Strykersville, a country town of about 10,000 people, nothing like this. A world of ex-plicit and outrageously unapologetic preferences and discriminations indicated by the word cut . For to cut was the privilege of the Greeks, and to be cut was the fate of the unworthy. This was intolerable, this was un-American, you wanted to laugh in derision. Cut from the Deke list, cut from the TriDelt list, cut to ribbons, cut your throat, what a loser . Every year after fall rush there were incidents of attempted suicide among the rejects.

Which only underscored, as some said, the Greek truism: survival of the fittest.

Oh, the Greeks were contemptible, their self-aggrandizement comical, but who could laugh?

Then somehow it happened, remarkable at the time, wholly unexpected and flattering, that a girl in my residence hall began to seek me out. Her name was Dawn; I'd scarcely noticed her in one of my lecture classes; in my fever of concentration upon my work, I scarcely noticed others my own age; my attention was fixed upon professors, whom I admired and feared as minor deities. But there was Dawn entering my life in one might open a door and step inside, uninvited. She was a striking young woman; not pretty, nor even attractive, but glamorous like a film star of the Thirties with a perfect moon face, sleepy hooded eyes, heavily lipsticked lips, and a perpetual cigarette burning in her fingers; smiling at me, squinting through a veil of smoke; one of those compelling young females of whom there were several in my high school, prematurely adult and sexually alluring however young. Her hair was bleached and teased; she wore tight sweaters and painted her fingernails. Her fur-trimmed black cloth coat, her handsome leather boots and other items of apparel suggested that her family was well-to-do, and indulged her. Dawn whose very name came quickly to captivate me: DAWN I'd find myself writing in my notebook or in the margin of a textbook or tracing with my fingernails in the gritty film of ice on the window of my room. DAWN DAWN. She playfully chided me for studying too hard- "You'll have a nervous breakdown! Really. It can happen." At the same time, she was childlike in her appeal for help in writing papers. "If you could just glance through it? Just to tell me is it good enough to hand in." Of course, I would end up doing much more, for I enjoyed such challenges; by sixth grade I was helping friends of mine with their schoolwork, as much for the pleasure of solving another's problems as for helping a friend in distress. When Dawn received high grades on these assignments, she was elated and grateful, and invited me to meet her friends, freshman Kappa pledges who were girls like herself, not-intellectual, not-brainy, but brimming with energy, clever and funny and good-looking in a way to make boys stare after them on the street. But why am I with these strangers? Not my type! Yet there I was. Flattered. Dawn insisted upon "restyling" my hair. Dawn insisted upon lending me clothes, though she was a size eight, and I was several sizes smaller. She invited me to visit the "beautiful, elite" sorority she'd just pledged, Kappa Gamma Pi-"What a terrific bunch of girls! I love them." And soon after this visit, Dawn and the other pledges encouraged me to sign up for the spring semester rush. And I did. I knew that I couldn't afford to live anywhere except in university housing, and that the lowest priced housing, yet I signed up for "rush," and suddenly became another person fixated upon a group of strangers, a sorority of which I knew little except it had a name, it had a campus reputation-for what? "Social life, activities." (That these were things in which I had no interest seemed not to occur to me; if I'd investigated, I would have discovered other sororities far more suited for my situation: a sorority of arts majors, a sorority of scholarship girls, a sorority for girls with limited finances who helped defray the cost of room and board by sharing work-duties in their residence. But I didn't investigate.) Where Dawn had pledged, there also I would pledge, or nowhere. The very Kappa house, the intimidating neo-Classic mansion at the far end of University Place, loomed large in my Imagination like an image in a Technicolor film. I believed I'd seen it before, years ago; not in Strykersville of course where there were no mansions, but-where? In Buffalo? Its lofty portico, the interior illuminated by chandeliers and candlelight, furnished with polished and glittering things, enormous white peonies in tall urns; the Kappa girls smiling like Hollywood starlets and bursting with "personality" and all of them remembering my name. And there was the British housemother Mrs. Thayer with her exotic accent, her brisk impeccable manners, those eyes blue as the ice rimming Lake Ontario well into April. In the giddiness of my delusion it seemed to me that Mrs. Thayer was the very mother of the house, and I liked it that she wasn't American, she spoke with no accent I knew, and would be a harsh, exacting judge. Not for this woman the fate of the merely mortal.