Outer Banks by Anne Rivers Siddons Page A

I knew it was long past noon, and I ought to go inside and shower and make lunch. But I lingered, listening for the roar of the sea that always increases when the tide turns. But it was very still, and I could not hear the ocean, only that great diffuse hum you sometimes hear out here at the end of Long Island when the crowds are gone, that has always seemed to me the voice of the earth itself.
    And over it, unbidden, unwanted, unheard for many years, other voices out of another time. I shook my head, but they would not go away. Finally I sat back on my heels and let them come: Cecie’s voice, and Ginger’s, and Fig’s. And Paul’s…
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    I almost killed Fig Newton the day I first saw her. I came very near to running over her in the MG. I had been down to the littleVictorian Randolph train station to pick up Cecie, who had just come in from Virginia, and we were late for the last chapter meeting before rush started. It promised to be irredeemably awful; everybody was tired from two weeks of non-stop rehearsing skits and songs and polishing silver and cleaning the house until it shone, and we were drained and white-bled from the heat. It was the worst early fall I could remember. The temperatures were still grinding into the very high nineties, and the humidity on Randolph’s fecund plain was nearly that. But it did not rain; day after day dawned white and set gray from heat, and water was restricted, and electric fans droned themselves into smoking, screeching suicide. Nothing on campus was air conditioned then, except the drugstore and the movie house and the Student Union. Those of us who had come back early for pre-rush had slept, if we slept at all, under towels wrung out in tap water, in the tepid rush of the fans. Every other one of us had a summer cold.
    I was thick-nosed and miserable and running sweat in stockings and high heels and a tight-belted cotton dress. Traditionally, the last chapter meeting before rush was a “dress” meeting with the Tri Os; nobody remembered why, since its sole purpose was to review the bids that had gone out and wade through the incendiary matter of legacies, those “must-takes” of whom it was usually said, by the insisting alumna, “She’s a legacy, and a lovely girl, and loves Tri Omega better than life itself.” We would end up bidding all our legacies of course, and in the end would come to accept, if not cherish, most of them. But it never happened without a floor fight that went on until all hours, and the reasons for dressing for that feline fray were lost in the mists of history. It virtually assured that everyone would be miserable and mean, thus prolonging what was at best a bad business. I was in a vicious mood, and jerked the MG squalling around corners. Beside me, Cecie grabbed the seat and grimaced.
    â€œLook, if you think you can do it better, you’re welcome to it,” I snapped. “We’re going to miss the stupid prayer and thestupid roll call because your stupid train was late, and Trish is going to say something sweet and shitty, and I really may kill her this time. God, Cecie, I wish you’d learn to drive.”
    She was silent, and remorse flooded me. Cecie did not have a car, of course; the aunts were far too poor for that. Many girls at Randolph did not, but Cecie was the only one I had ever met who did not know how to drive, and did not want to learn.
    â€œI’d kill everybody in a ten-mile radius,” she said lightly, when one or another of us offered to teach her. “Y’all drive and I’ll pay for the gas.”
    And she did try to do that, though most of us wouldn’t let her. It was a subject of mild annoyance to the chapter and to me, until one day when I was battling a wasp and cried, “Take the wheel, Cecie,” and she did, and when I had ousted the intruder and took it from her again and looked over at her, she was paper-white and shaking all over and wet