"She's had an awful time, Kate," Ginger said. "She married an Italian policeman in Boston; she was there visiting some relative or other right after you left school, and met him then, and fell for him like a ton of bricks. Vinnie Fiori. Vicente Fiori. I met him once, early on, when we were up there for a convention, a big, blackeyed, good-looking guy with more charm than you ever saw, and just idolized Cecie...anyway, they had two little boys, and then when the kids were still small, he got shot in a bank robbery and paralyzed from the waist down, and she stopped work to take care of him, and did that, almost completely, for twenty years, and the old lady for ten, so far. I don't even know when she moved in with them. Vinnie died about two years ago, and the kids left as soon as they could get out of there, and she's been looking after that old harridan ever since, in that miserable little house in Quincy. She never went back to the Tidewater. I don't think she's had one vacation since Vinnie was shot. God knows what she's lived on. They've never had anything. It's been just terrible. I thought maybe you knew."

"Oh, Cecie," I breathed silently. "No, I didn't know," I said.

"Well, she said she'd walk every step of the way if you were going to be here, and I said I'd see that you were," Ginger said. "You know she doesn't drive; she's still scared to death of cars. So Fig's sending the stupid-ass plane for her, and Fig and I are driving in Fig's new Rolls to pick her up at the Currituck airport. I was afraid maybe she wouldn't want to come...you know Fig and I are awfully comfortable, and somehow I figured you probably were, too, and she...but she said herself she couldn't wait to rub elbows with some success, for a change. And she wasn't being sarcastic. In all this time, in all the times I've called her, or gotten a letter from her, I've never heard her sound in the least bit sorry for herself..."

Grief for Cecie flooded me. Cecie, who like me, had once seen the world as Halliburton did, The Royal Road to Romance. Cecie, who was to have traveled the world like a migratory swallow and come to rest in a house by the great river, whose light would dance on her ceiling and whose water would sing under her dock. Unworldly little flamehaired Cecie, who lived on wings, all these years a drudge, making life go on for her wounded family, away from the water...

I won't think about that, I thought to myself. Not yet.

"I'll be glad to see her," I said. "You too, Gingerrooney. Fig too. Most especially Fig."

"Then hurry on," Ginger Fowler Sibley said, with joy and love in her gruff voice. "Eight more days to Nag's Head!"

"I'm on my way," I said.

I came to the Chesapeake Bridge at mid-afternoon, when traffic was light, so that I could slow down and look about me and get the feel of that great arch into space. Halfway up it, when I could no longer see the land behind me or the glittering water below me, but only the endless vault of the sky, it struck me suddenly that this was it, this was what had waited for me all my life, this was the abyss. Low to the road, with the top down and only warm, high air around me, I could feel it with all my senses; there was nothing, now, between me and it. I slowed almost to stopping and listened: there it was. From far below me came the very voice of the abyss, the breath of it: the formless wind that sang up from far below, seeming to say many things, among them my name. Kate. Kate. Sweat broke out at my hairline and dried in the wind, but my mouth smiled. I had been wrong, then, all those years; it was the abyss that waited for me. Not the Pacmen. Not gobbling mouths, but space, clean and blue and receiving. It would be all right. I could do this.

Not in the car, though; I could see that. The guard rails were too dense and high. The Alfa would never break through. All right, then, just me. I would leave the car and go out into that blueness alone. With nothing wrapping me, not even the fragile red skin of the little car. Just me; just my own skin, clean and still taut and unadorned. I would hold out my arms like a lover, laugh, sing...I shook my head and drove on. The spell of space and glittering water was strong; it would have been easy on this transcendent afternoon. Well, it would be easier still in a week. No strings, then, no loose, flying remnants of Kate Lee to catch on the sun, snag on the edges of the world. The last weight flew off my heart and I drove on into Virginia, singing.

The last hundred miles did not go so fast. I left the highway and threaded my way over toward the coast on small blacktop roads, choked with resort traffic. At Barco I picked up 158, that would take me on into Nag's Head, and there got my first glimpse of ocean water: Currituck Sound, off to my left, just beginning to go silver-pink with the westering sun. Parallel to it, further left, was, I knew, the wild, tawny necklace of the Outer Banks themselves. My heart began to beat faster. The palms of my hands were wet on the wheel. Thirty years, almost thirty years, it had been...

I crossed the Wright Memorial Bridge at Point Harbor and I was there. I was on the Banks. The great, heaving, dark blue ocean that I remembered stood off my left; I could see it, fleetingly, between tight-packed, stilted beach houses and shops and hotels and restaurants. But I could not get the sense of it. This was not the coast road I remembered. This was not the country of that long-ago idyll. This was a place of condominiums, RVs, antennas, neon, souvenir shacks, motels, shrimp and pizza takeouts. Even in the twilight of a September midweek, the coast road was thronged with traffic, blaring horns and farting exhaust fumes. This might be anywhere too many people come to the sea: Ocean City, Daytona, Myrtle Beach. Disappointment was so sharp in my heart that I could taste it, like the thin, sour reflux of vomitus.

I passed the great hulks of Jockeys Ridge on my right. On the highest ridge, antlike people lined up black against the setting sun. Great, prehistoric shapes like pterodactyls flew black against the orange sky, and I realized that the people of the Banks still sailed their kites, but such kites as I had never seen or imagined. I ground through Kill Devil Hills behind an RV from Portland that said on its bumper, "Hell, Yes, I Do Own the Whole Damned Road." I passed the fishing pier, clotted with people, and went through Nag's Head, as bad as Kill Devil Hills. The air was thick and warm now, the fresh, streaming salt cut off by beetling condos and highrise motels, and I violated one of my own strictest rules and switched on the car's air conditioner, even while the top was down. It did little good. I hesitated, and then smiled grimly. Why not? What did it matter now? I turned the air on full blast.

Past the Coast Guard Station I turned left onto the narrow sand road that led over to the dune line, bumping between dreadful new raw wood condos and chalets on stilts, and saw, ahead of me, the half-remembered, viscerally known, haglike line of the Unpainted Aristocracy black against the evening sky. My heart soared out of my stomach, where it had fallen, and rode up singing like a lark. Familiarity, deja vu, snatches of pure memory and sensation and images, wisps of long-dead sounds and smells and tastes, all crashed down over me like a tidal wave.

"Yeah," I whispered aloud. "Oh, yeah."

At the end of the line of great cottages stood Ginger's. Ginger and Paul's, I amended, looking up at the sweet swoop of gray shingle that rode the tallest dune straight out to sea. Sunset light dazzled off its windows, and inside, warm yellow light glowed. Otherwise Ginger's house was just as I remembered it. Unlike most of the colossi of one's youth, it had not diminished one iota. It still stopped the breath and heart with its grace and substance and wild old beauty. Tears stung in my nose, but they were not tears of loss. I whipped the Alfa into the sandy, burred little backyard and got out.

For a moment I simply stood there, drinking it in, feeling that peculiar peace and stillness that I remembered stealing over me. I could not see the ocean, but as always before, I could hear it, booming hollowly on the sand below the dunes. The rightness of the place and the moment moved me; even Paul's studio wing, even the big Land Rover and the beach tractor underneath the first floor, that I knew must be his, did not intrude. I remembered that it was here, in this place, that I had first been given that great gift from the sea: timelessness. The thought bloomed in my mind, whole and finished: this place could heal you.

"Almost, anyway," I thought to myself, and started up the sandy path to the back deck.

From the open windows of the studio I heard laughter. General female laughter, at first, and then, magically, wonderfully, a laugh unlike any other in the world. A silvery spiral, that wound up and up and up, hung on the very border of affectation, and then rolled richly down into a bawdy, froggy whoop, and started up again. I began to run, stumbling in the sand.

" 'Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song, a medley of extemporanea,' " I half-laughed, half-wept, as I ran.

From inside the studio came, on the wings of the laughter, "'And love is a thing that can never go wrong...' "

" 'AND I AM MARIE OF RUMANIA!' " we shouted together, and met on the outside spiral staircase.

And we stood in each other's arms again, Cecie Hart and I, after a very, very long time, and both of us cried.

The first thing I thought was how little she had changed. I would have known her anywhere on the earth; I would have known her if I had seen her in a group of nuns, of holy women, chanting in a temple in Himalayan Nepal. I could have found her in the throng outside St. Peter's on Easter morning.

The second thing I thought was how small she was. It had been many, many years since I had thought of Cecie in terms of size, but I remembered, in that moment, how her diminutiveness had surprised and charmed me in the first days of our friendship.

The first thing I said to her, stupidly, was, "Cecie, you're so little." I had planned what I would say to her all the way down the Atlantic Coast, trying and discarding this pleasantry and that. But I could remember none of them. Idiocy prevailed.

"Yeah, well, what can you do," she said, in the precise, dry Virginia drawl that was as familiar to me, all of a sudden, as my own voice.

We looked at one another for a long time, smiling through the drying tears; we dropped our arms from around each other, and I know that my hands felt huge and clumsy. I did not know where to put them. I think she felt it, too. Her small hands flexed and unflexed. They were rough and red now, but then, so were mine, with wind and salt and the earth of my garden.

All of a sudden we began to laugh again. I don't think either of us could have said why. It simply felt good and right, and was better than silence. It was one of the things that we did together, Cecie and I. We laughed.

"You look exactly, precisely, totally like you used to," she said, grinning. "Still skinny. Still got the famous Lee nose; nobody's put it out of joint in all this time, I see. Even still got the celebrated French twist. And the steaks. Do you still put lemon juice on it and sit in the sun?"

"It's gray, you numbskull," I said. "Now I put white wine on it and sit in the sun. But you, Cecie...if it weren't for your hair, you still couldn't get a drink in any bar in America. I swear you've sold your soul to the devil."

"Blind, too," she said. "Ah, age, c'est tragique."

It was true, though not literally. The profound and prevailing sense of Cecie was that she was still the redhaired, ardent friend and companion of my college years; that and that alone, whole-hearted, unchanged. It may have been solely in my eyes that she was, but nevertheless that truth remained. But the world's truth was that the riotous tangle of Orphan-Annie curls were pure white now, and her watercolor blue eyes were webbed with tiny lines, and deeper lines of pain and endurance cut her kitten-shaped face. She was very thin, as thin as she had been during the terrible siege of mononucleosis, at the end of my college days, and I saw that her small shoulders were stooped a bit. There was no sagging flesh on her face or neck; it was as tight and firm as it had been as a girl, but the soft rose color that seemed to flicker just beneath it was gone. Cecie was pale to transparency. Blue shadows stained the thin skin beneath her eyes. She wore, instead of the horn-rims I remembered, large, round glasses with thin, silvery gray rims. They were very becoming; somehow, even with the lines of pain and exhaustion and the white hair, Cecie was beautiful as a woman as she had not been...or as I had not seen...as a girl.

"You look beautiful," I said. "You really do. I hope your children look just like you."

"Nope. Just exactly like Vinnie. Which is great for boys, and makes me thankful every day of my life that we didn't have girls. They'd have had mustaches."

"I have missed you so much," I said.

"Me, too," she said, in the formal little way she had when she felt shy. "I have, too."

There was a great whoop and thumping flurry of legs and arms and Ginger was with us on the stairs, capering and squealing, trying to gather both of us into her arms at once.

"Lord, just look at you two," she bubbled, hugging and patting. "You could be hugging hello after spring break. Neither one of you has changed one single bit. It's not fair; I'm the only one who's gotten old and fat. Oh, Kate, God, it's just so good to see you! We've been guzzling gin and counting the minutes till you got here! Come on up; we'll get your bags later. You're way behind."

She turned and loped up the weathered gray stairs to the studio, chattering over her shoulder. Cecie and I followed. Unlike Cecie, it was hard, at first, for me to find the Ginger I had known and loved in the woman who went ahead of us. This woman was very fat, and moved heavily, without the long, vigorous, hip-slung stride that had been young Ginger Fowler's. This woman's flesh was plushy and wattled, though still the deep mahogany that Ginger's went in the summers, and her hair, though still the white-blonde of the girl's, was whorled and carved on her head and spongy in texture, and sprayed into immobility in the vast river of wind flowing off the ocean. This woman wore an elaborate yellow-flowered cotton caftan with wide, loose sleeves and a deep V neck; her great bronze-speckled breasts bobbled in the V. On her brown feet were strappy bronze sandals, and her toenails were painted platinum. Ginger Fowler would never in her life have worn such getup. She would have hooted out of the room anyone who did.

But the warm blue eyes, crinkled with sun and laughter, were the same, though half-buried in flesh, and the sweet, snub puppy face, under layers of makeup, and the freckles and wide white grin, and the endearingly graceless gait and posture. I noticed that, though she wore several large, rather dingy diamonds on her big, shapely hands, the nails were still bitten short. I grinned at her back. The shy colt of a girl who had lost her fingernail in the ADPi's punchbowl and burned a hole in the Tri Omega's sofa was still under there.

"Shit," Ginger said, tripping on the doorsill, and my grin widened. Still under there, and not so far, either.

I stood in the doorway of Paul's studio and looked in. I had been almost afraid to do it; afraid, I suppose, that some lingering essence, not of him, but of me in the days of him, would remain to pierce and diminish me. It had, after all, been my room on the inside. My gift to him, his austere white room. But I need not have worried. There was nothing of me here, and nothing of Paul. There was hardly anything of the sky and sea. I blinked, trying to take it in. But it was not possible to do that in one glance, or even two or three.

The vast room was indeed open to the pink and silver sea and sky, just as he had envisioned, but aside from the great, curved sweep of seamless glass and the panorama beyond it, Paul Sibley's white room no longer existed. This room crawled and teemed and shimmered and writhed with color and form and texture and objects. Many, many objects, so many that you had to concentrate on them one by one to get the sense of them. The white floor had been covered with blue and white vinyl tile, dotted with bright throw rugs like islands in the Gulf Stream. Fat-stuffed furniture, also covered with rugs and throws, stood in groups everywhere: before the great fireplace, in front of the seaward window wall, in corners and nooks and bays. Most of it was plaid or striped or print chintz. Two sets of bunk beds stood against a wall where I had designed bookcases, and boxes and bins and trunks and baskets spilled out children's toys everywhere. Child-sized furniture, tables and chairs and dollhouses and stoves and refrigerators and rocking horses, clustered at the landward end of the room. At the seaward end, before the fireplace, a huge sofa and flanking chairs and a coffee table made a grouping, and a huge built-in bar and a complicated sound system flanked the stone fireplace itself. The lights I had seen from outside came from this end, from great bronze lamps on low tables.

"Well...wow," I said faintly. The room inundated and drowned every sense at once.

Ginger looked at me oddly, and then laughed.

"Oh, Kate, I completely and totally forgot;" she said. "This was your room; you designed the first one. The pretty white one. Oh, poor baby, no wonder.... This has been my place, mine and the children's and the grandchildren's, for so long that I'd forgotten it was ever Paul's. But of course it was...well. You can see that it's had a lot of living and a lot of love over the years. The kids adored it, still do, and the grandchildren just live out here. Literally. I do too, when Paul's gone, and he is, an awful lot of the time."

"Where is his studio?" I said, still stunned by the metamorphosis of this room that had been the first fruit of my first love.

She shook her head ruefully.

"He hasn't practiced architecture in almost twenty-five years," she said. "He did for a couple of years, right here, but for some reason he was having a hard time with it...he said the view was so sensational he couldn't concentrate...and then Daddy got sick and he started filling in at the mill, and that happened more and more often, and when Daddy died he took over. I don't think he's been unhappy with it; he's tripled the business. There are two more mills now. But sometimes I think it's a shame; he was just so gifted.... He's at the Norfolk house, or the one in Alabama, far more often than he is here. So he couldn't very well object when the children and I took this fantastic room over. And he didn't; he says himself it's the answer to a grandparent's prayer. Get them out of the main house. Don't think he doesn't dote, though. He did on our girls, and he does on their kids. I'll be glad when he can retire and spend most of his time with us. I'll bet he hasn't been in this room twice in the past year..."

"You have girls..." It was not a question. Their photographs were everywhere in the big room, dark, slender, long-limbed girls with brilliant anonymous white smiles and a great deal of hair, caught in cheerleader uniforms and debutante dresses and wedding gowns, posing demurely with small children.

"Three. All of them with two or more children, all of them less than a hundred miles away. This place in the summer is worse than a juvenile and female house of detention. And the oldest, Genie, is pregnant again. Another girl; she's had ultrasound. Paul says one more and he's going to put out on a freighter for three years."

One of the daughters uncurled herself from the depths of the vast sofa and came toward me, smiling. I put on my automatic social smile, but disappointment and faint resentment flared inside me. I had thought it was going to be just the four of us.

"Effie, dear love," the girl said, and threw her arms around me. In a ringing moment of shock I realized that it was Fig Newton. Ginger, looking at my face over Fig's head, laughed aloud, and so did Cecie, behind me.

"My God," I said, putting my arms around her and patting her numbly. "Fig, my God."

"Never," Fig said, "underestimate the power of a woman with a buck or two and a good plastic surgeon."

Even her voice was different, low and throaty and with something like laughter in it, only, not quite. She almost whispered, like Jackie Kennedy Onassis, with the same result: you leaned close in order to hear her.

I put her away from me, and she laughed, and held her arms over her head, and turned around like a mannequin. She wore skin-tight stone-washed blue jeans tucked into high-heeled fawn suede boots, and a meltingly beautiful russet cashmere tunic, outsized and hanging down to her knees. Under it, perfect bare breasts pushed at the fabric; I could see her nipples plainly. She wore no jewelry but a wide hammered gold cuff and gold hoops in her ears, and she smelled of something musky and bitter and Oriental. She was still as short as I remembered, but so slender and perfectly proportioned now that she looked like a life-sized doll, and the skin of her face and arms and neck and bosom was flawless and satiny, the color of very pale cafa au lait. Her face was high-planed and hollow-cheeked and full-lipped; her eyes were green and slanted, and her nose was...my nose. Mine to the last dimple, the last curve of nostril. Her teeth were white and there seemed to be a great many of them, and around her face a mass of tawny hair fell, full and leonine and glowing with strands of gold and bronze and platinum. She did not look real, and of course she was not: she was Barbie and Tina Turner and Lena Horne and Michelle Pfeiffer and...yes, more than a little...Kate Lee. She looked about twenty-five years old.

"Is there any Fig in there?" I said.

"Not so's you'd know it," she laughed again, and hugged me a second time. "Everybody calls me Gina now, or Georgina, of course. You know perfectly well where the Stuart came from. I haven't been Fig since my first book came out, and that's more years ago than I want to remember. But as a special dispensation, just for you all, I'll be Fig this week. In fact, I want to be. That's why I called this meeting, in case you wondered. So we could all be us again."

"I don't know if I can even think of you as Fig," I said. "It's so...you're so...it's just incredible. I'm going to be tongue-tied by your fame and your looks all this week. I never saw such a difference in anybody. Oh, not that you were bad before; it's just that..."

She laughed again.

"I was bad before," she said. "I was awful. Don't worry about it. I always meant to reinvent myself the minute I had the money for it, and that's just what I did. I had the works, the minute the first book got on the New York Times list. Diet, teeth, face lift, nose and chin job, cheekbone implants, boob implants, contacts, liposuction, collagen, chemical peel...there isn't anything you can do to the human form I haven't had done. It took two years. I've never been sorry for a minute of it. You'll never know how much I wanted to be you at school, and by God, I've even gone you one or two better."

"Ten or twelve better," I said. "Lord, Fig, I never looked even remotely like that in college. You must know that."

"I thought you did," she smiled. "That was enough."

We sank into the great soft chairs and the sofa and watched the light go out of the sky and sea, and drank the drinks Ginger brought us. They were outsized and strong, and I thought, from the glitter in her blue eyes and the slight slur in her voice, that she had had several. Her cheeks burned and she chattered. Fig drank white wine and Cecie sipped at bourbon in a balloon snifter, and we talked as if we had broken off this same conversation only a day or two ago. We talked and talked, and the sea went from grape to gray and finally to black, and the fire burned low, and still we talked. We talked of what we talked of when we last sat together: of people we all knew, and things we all remembered, and songs we had all sung, and movies we had seen, and professors we had had, and the clothes we had worn; and we laughed, and we drank some more, and we sang a little, and the years fell away and we were not women remembering the girls we had been, but somehow, those girls themselves. We were nineteen and twenty, and all that was closed to us reopened, and all things seemed once more possible. The pain and disappointments and flaws of our lives since vanished; a strange foreshortening of time took place. It happened over and over that week. We could not seem to dwell long in the present. From that first twilight, we all seemed to know that at some point we must speak of our lives as women, acquaint each other with the roads we had walked to mid-life, catch up with each other...but not now. Not yet. We all seemed to want to put off the moment of growing up. When Ginger started to ask about husbands and children and careers, we shouted her down.

"Okay, let's just go around the circle and say who-what-when-where-how," she said, "and then we can go back to libeling our Tri O sisters. I'll start. Ginger Fowler Sibley. Married twenty-eight years to Paul Sibley, mill owner. Housewife, mother, and grandmother. Three daughters, seven grandchildren, winter address Norfolk, summer address Nag's Head, Outer Banks, North Carolina."

She pointed at Fig.

"Georgina Stuart, aka Fig Newton," Fig said. "Novelist. Bestselling novelist. Five husbands, legion lovers, no children, four movies, two mini-series, three hundred million talk shows and tabloid interviews. Houses in Manhattan, Aspen, Malibu, and Puerto Vallarta. Current lover, but he's a secret."

There was a pause, and then Cecie said, smiling, "Cecelia Rushton Hart Fiori. Widow of Vinnie Fiori, Boston Municipal Police Sergeant. Mother of two boys, Leo and Robert, one for each side of the family. Grandmother of Susannah Fiori, age two. Living now in the same house I married into, in Boston, with my mother-in-law, Cosima, who is an invalid. Housewife, nurse, cook, cleaning lady, and medieval herbalist."

We all laughed at that. She did, too.

"I am, though," she said. "I've been studying medieval herbalists and herb garden for years and years. I have a herb garden of my own, in my backyard, and I've been working on a book about them off and on since Vinnie died. It's almost done now."

I looked at her, charmed and intrigued.

"Cece, that's wonderful," I said. "Knowing you, I'll bet it's an incredible book. I'll bet you anything somebody would love to publish it. How far away from finishing it are you?"

"My time's up. Your turn now," she said, and the others chimed in.

"Well...Kate Lee Abrams," I said. "Married twenty-eight years to Alan Abrams, architect. I'm his partner in a design business and we live in a gray-shingled house sort of like this one, on the beach at Sagaponack, Long Island. I'm a gardener and...I guess that's it. Designer and gardener."

"Children?" Ginger said.

"No," I said.

Ginger started to bring out photographs of her children and grandchildren, and again we protested.

"We'll get to all that," Cecie said comfortably from the sofa.

"Better still, let's not get to it at all," I said.

Fig looked over at me. In the firelight her face looked like that of a movie star, or a department store mannequin. The strangeness of it brushed me again. She was simply so...not Fig...

"Oh, but I want to know," she said in her soft purr. "I want to know everything about you, Effie. I want to know every single detail."

"I'm not going to have you put me in one of those books, Fig," I smiled.

"I wouldn't do that," she smiled back. "I'm off duty. Besides, we're all just plain too boring for one of my books. It would never sell in the supermarket."

"You, boring, after all those husbands and things?" Ginger said. She pronounced it "hushbands."

"Oh, God, Ginger, I made all that stuff up," Fig said, grinning. "Well, almost all of it. It's good PR, that's all. What kind of writer would I be if I couldn't invent a glamorous life for myself? You all know I've been writing my life ever since I was eighteen."

"The diary!" the three of us shouted together.

"The diary. And guess what. I brought it with me. The one I kept then. And as a special treat, if you're very good, I'm going to read the chapters about us to you every night, after dinner. Us in the flesh, the way we were. Would you like that?"

"Oh, yes," Ginger cried. "God, what fun!"

"Just like Scheherazade," I said. Somehow the thought of it made me uneasy.

"I hope not," Fig said. "She was all set to die if she ever got finished telling her stories. So, you guys, look out! When I'm all done...it's death!"

"Whose?" Cecie said interestedly.

"All of us, I guess," Fig said, smiling at her. It was a sweet smile, full and natural. I could not get over it, or her. "Us the way we were, anyway."

"I'd rather think that it would be just the opposite," Cecie said. "That it would keep us alive...the way we were."

"Let's don't talk about it," Ginger said, getting up clumsily out of her chair and stumbling a little. "Let's do it."

And so, that first night, after we had cooked and eaten a mess of spaghetti in the kitchen of the big shingle house, we came back out to the studio and built up the fire, and Ginger poured a round of brandies, and Fig sat down on the rug in front of the fire and opened the familiar, battered old fake crocodile book, and read from it. And in the firelight of the house on the Outer Banks, we all went back.

She read the passage about her initiation into Tri Omega in the new, intimate voice, and I was there, there in every aspect and in all my senses, in that dark, hot, candle-and-carnation-smelling room at Randolph, with the bells and the incense, and the sweat of all those tightly-packed young bodies, and the effluvia of their terror, and the droning on and on of the Latin, and then more bells, and more incense...My head swam, and my stomach contracted. I closed my eyes and across the miles and the years Fig's face flickered in close, the face of that other Fig, heavy and fleshy and crazily rapt, great eyes swimming behind the glasses, lips loose and wet, tongue playing in and out...those lips, that dreadful hair, the thick waist and nonexistent neck...

"...and at the very moment of the kiss that would make me her sister, she was so overcome with emotion that she fainted, and we had to revive her," Fig read. "My heart sang like a lark within me. I knew that we would be bound together forever, sisters in Tri Omega, and even more than sisters. I knew in that moment that she felt it, too, that great bond between us. Oh, Effie, my sister, I will love you always, and will strive all my life and with all my might to be worthy of you. I will make you proud of me. I will never let you forget me, just as I will never forget this holy night."

There was more in the same vein, and then she fell silent. I could not think what to say. Surely she had seen me vomiting into the sink in the Tri Omega kitchen. She could not have escaped seeing that. Had she really thought, all these years, that I had been overcome with sacred love for her?