A little cold wind breathed up out of the abyss, that I had buried deep these past months in a grave of flowers and solitude.

"Don't push me, Alan," I said. "I want to wait a little while. It hasn't been five years yet."

"Katie, dear love. It's been okay for four and a half years. It's going to be okay this time. Why is it that you can accept bad news so much more easily than you can good?"

"Let's just see what happens," I said, and he left it at that. Alan is one of the other half, the ones who have never walked the bridge over the abyss. He listens with fierce sympathy when I talk of it, and tries with all his good, bright being to impart to me his innate feelings of safety and optimism, but he simply does not know what I know, what the abyss-walkers know.

One thing I have always known, since they found the cancer, is that the Pacmen were ultimately going to get me, and I am fairly sure now that it will be sooner rather than later. It's how I always pictured the cancer cells inside me, like those maniacally teeming, ravenous little round heads in the witless electronic game, all blind gobbling mouths. In the beginning I actually thought I could feel them there, darting and shooting about like terrible reverse sperm, bearing death rather than life, gobbling, gobbling. Even after the surgeries and the rounds of chemo, I fancied that they were still at it in there, down in that fertile red darkness. Then, gradually, I simply stopped feeling them or much of anything else; as the years and the exploratories and the checkups passed and the results came back negative, the garden and the still, suspended white peace claimed me and I had no sense of them at their busywork.

But one morning this July I woke and thought, simply, They're back, and by nightfall I was convinced of it, and I have known it ever since. There are no other symptoms, but it is my body and my abyss, and I know what I know. The Pacmen are on the march, and I do not think I can go through it again. Not another surgery, not another of the terrible, wracking rounds of chemotherapy, not another siege of baldness, not another night spent staring into thick, dead darkness, not another day swinging from hope to despair a hundred times between sunup and nightfall. I can't and I won't.

I have not told Alan. He would not believe me, anyway.

"You have no way of knowing that without seeing McCracken," he would say, and he would have me there, in that airy, elegant office on Madison that still stinks, to me, of that first terror, before I knew what had hit me. So I will not tell him. This way, there are almost two months left before my checkup. Two months of the autumn light that is so magical out here, the clear golds and blues, the high, honey sun and nights literally swarming with stars, and the great sweeps of space and emptiness without the summer crowds. Two months of just the darkening blue of the sea and the bright, hot tan of the sand and the great autumn skies, with the last butterflies teeming in the sun and the migratory birds sweeping over on their way south. Two months of the garden. It will be wonderful; it will be enough.

I finished with the witch grass and started in on the dodder that threatens always to choke the daisies and zinnias. The sun beat down on my head and the tops of my shoulders; from the angle 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...

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 little Victorian 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.

"Look, if you think you can do it better, you're welcome to it," I snapped. "We're going to miss the stupid prayer and the stupid 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.

"I'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 with sweat. Her hair and clothes were sopping with it.

"It's always been that way," she said, not looking at me. "I guess it has something to do with the accident. I don't know why; I can't remember it. But it's the only explanation I can think of."

After that I did not tax her with it. The fear had been a terrible thing to see.

"Sorry," I said, on that blistering day. "It's just been so damned hot, and it won't let up, and I think dressing for this meeting is the silliest..."

"Look out!" Cecie cried, and I wrenched the car to the left and a short, thick figure scuttled back onto the curb. I slammed on brakes and pulled up at the first of Randolph's two traffic lights and glared at my victim. My heart was pounding, and my ears rang.

"Sorry," the girl sang out, and smiled gaily. "That's a pretty car. I wouldn't mind being hit by that car."

Cecie and I simply stared at her. The street corner was momentarily empty. In the merciless white light of afternoon she was grotesque, there was no other word for it. She was very short, almost as short as Cecie, but massive and square. Her head was large and appeared larger because of an appalling permanent that looked as though she had fashioned for herself a helmet of well-worn Brillo; it slid into her shoulders with only a passing nod to a neck. Her face was large and her eyes, behind quarter-inch-thick pink harlequin glasses, swam like a bug's. All her features sat in the middle of her face as though drawn there by a first-grader. Her nose was pugged far past pertness, and her eyebrows almost met over her eyes. She wore, incredibly, a ruffled, off-the-shoulder red peasant blouse and a flowered, ankle-length skirt over many crinolines, and her non-waist was cinched in with a red elastic belt. She wore red high-heeled pumps on feet that, Cecie said later, looked like Alley Oop's, and red earrings that dangled from her lobes to her shoulders. She resembled nothing so much as a dwarf peering out of a heap of clothing tossed on the sidewalk by a Gypsy. Her voice was an affected trill. Looking at her was like looking at something both comic and sad, as clowns have always seemed to me. I wanted to avert my eyes.

"I'm sorry," I muttered. "I was going too fast."

"No, it was all my fault, really," she shrilled merrily. "I'm such a silly. It would serve me right if you had hit me."

I could think of nothing to say to that, and felt my heart swell with gratitude when the light changed. I gunned the MG away from there.

"Bye," I heard the crystal tinkle. "I hope we run into each other again!"

Her hooting laughter followed us like a demented terrier.

"Lordy, I hope not," Cecie breathed. "Did you see that outfit? With my luck she's probably going to be in every class I have from here on out."

"Not a chance," I said, looking uneasily in the mirror. The squat heap of red flowers was still there on the curb, looking after us. "It's predestined that she'll be my lab partner."

"Don't let the sun set on yuh head in Randolph, pahdnuh," Cecie drawled. "This here town ain't big enough for all of us."

The chapter meeting was just as bad as it had promised to be, and lasted just as long. Heat and fatigue and pre-rush jitters made us all whiny and picky and contentious, and we fought over every bid we tendered, and over the costumes for most of the skits, and the refreshments for all the parties, and the allotment of duties. We finished with the preferred bids and started on the legacies. Fortunately there were not many that season; our president, Trish Farr, had only a handful of recommendations and photographs to pass around, and discussion of each was perfunctory. Even the objectors could not work up a full head of outrage. The heat was doing its work. And it seemed that each legacy had some fortuitous asset attached, that would, in the end, benefit the chapter more than her presence would harm it. The extremely fat girl from Bessemer had a voice like an angel and had placed first in the Met's Junior Regional competitions that summer; Step Sing would be a shoo-in with her for a soloist. The one who looked like James Dean, complete with duck's-ass haircut and biceps, was rich as Croesus. A chapter endowment was hinted at when we pledged her. The one with the ghost of a mustache and the coronet of Heidi braids had the only Jaguar XKE any of us had ever seen.

"Shoot, I'll cut that hair and yank those whiskers out myself," Rosemary Bates said.

"I'm glad I'll never know what you all said about me," I said wearily. I meant it, too.

"Not much, really," Rosemary said, matter-of-factly. "You looked pretty classy in your picture, and you had the MG."

Beside me Cecie snorted.

Trish held the last photo up, its back to us.

"Y'all aren't going to like this," she said. "But before you scream and jump all over me, let me tell you that she's a triple...grandmother, mother, and aunt...and that her grades are higher than any we've ever had, and that even if she was an idiot, we wouldn't have any choice, because this rec came straight from Mrs. Claiborne herself, and she says if we don't take her we can do some serious thinking about our charter."

Annabelle Claiborne was our Grand National President, an autocratic bison of a woman who could indeed lift our charter on her discretion alone, and she was already angry with us because we had refused to bid the last unspeakable legacy she had sent us. The girl's father had, unfortunately, been chairman of the board of directors of Mrs. Claiborne's husband's firm, and he had not been at all pleased. By the time we had been persuaded to see the error of our ways he had sent his distraught daughter to a finishing school in Switzerland, and we had been unable to make amends, either to her or Annabelle Claiborne. The jig, for us, was up. We looked apprehensively at Trish.

She made a little wordless sound, and turned the photograph around. There was a collective gasp from the chapter. I gave an involuntary squeak of recognition, and Cecie choked on a mouthful of Pall Mall smoke, and coughed violently. It was the girl from the street corner that afternoon. Even with the soft lighting and fluid black drape of the studio, the camera had been unable to help her in any way.

"NO-O-O-O-O-O!"

A collective roar went up from the chapter, except for Cecie and me.

"Maybe you should have hit her after all," Cecie said, and then, "Oh, shit. Forget I said that. It can't be easy for her."

"No," I said. Under the profound distaste and dismay I felt at the sight of that Toltec face, something else was uncurling. It was the breath of the abyss; I knew with absolute certainty that the grotesque girl in the photograph felt it, as I had until I met Cecie, every day of her life. Too, I hated my sisters' careless venom even as I echoed it. Under it all, pity leaped like a lick of flame.

I waited until the shouting had stopped and the chapter sat staring sullenly at Trish, bested and knowing it, and then I said, "A-we're going to take her and we know we are. So let's do it and save time. B-if we're going to, we ought to do it as well as we can. None of us is so perfect that we can afford to be mean to her. How would you all like to be this girl?"

It was a prissy little speech, and gave them the target they sought. They hooted me down hotly, and when the jeering had stopped, Trish said snippily, "You're right, Kate, and since you were so kind as to point it out to us, I think you ought to be her big sister and take her through rush."

The room exploded with cheers, and my heart tumbled into my stomach. Sponsoring a little sister meant many hours in her company, drilling her on her pledge tests and initiation material, and initiation itself meant six hours of, among other things, embraces and a kiss.

"Of course," I said crisply, in my best Seven Sisters' voice. "Glad to."

"No good deed goes unpunished," Cecie whispered to me.

"Maybe she'll pledge somewhere else," Bird Stanley said. Bird was optimistic to the point of simplemindedness. We simply looked at her.

"Does she have a name?" Carolanne Gladney said. Trish looked into the folder and then back at us.

"It's Helen Georgine Newton," she said. "But everybody calls her Fig."

The chapter howled and screamed and chortled itself, finally, up to bed. As Cecie and I trudged the stairs to our room, she shook her head.

"Fig Newton," she said wonderingly. "Wouldn't she just."

And so Fig came into our lives, that first quarter of our junior year and the first quarter of her freshman, and was moved, in part for expediency and in part for spite's sake, into the vacant room that formed the second one of our suite. Cecie and I had been storing things there.

"It'll make it easier for you to teach her, Kate," Trish Farr said, grinning. I grinned back, fiercely. Trish and I had detested each other on sight, and spent the rest of our years at Randolph pretending we didn't. It was as purely a chemical thing as I have ever seen.

"Good idea," I said.

From the instant we met at the first rush party, when she burbled, "I just knew that day on the corner was fate," Fig attached herself to me like a limpet to a rock. I still don't know precisely why. It may have been the faint breath of otherness, the issue of the abyss, that drew her to me: as I have said, we know each other. But Cecie was an abyss-walker, too, and Fig never clung to her as she did to me. Indeed, if she could be said to avoid any of us, she rather avoided Cecie. But no matter what I said or did, I was to Fig Newton as catnip to kitten. If she had had a roommate things might have been mitigated a little, but five days into her tenure, the new pledge who had been quartered with her went to Dean Parker in hollow-eyed despair, and the beleaguered dean had Fig's snoring monitored at the college infirmary, and after that no one slept in the other twin bed in Fig's room. She did not seem to care.

"It's my adenoids and tonsils," she said complacently to Cecie and me. "Everybody in my family has bad ones. They hold fluid like sponges. It's a Newton family characteristic."

She said it as smugly as if she had said, "Naturally curly hair and blue eyes." I grimaced at the sponge analogy in spite of myself.

"Did you ever consider surgery?" Cecie murmured sweetly. "They're doing wonders these days."

"Oh, no, none of us have ever had surgery," Fig said reprovingly.

"Obviously not," Cecie said that night, when we lay in bed listening to the fusillade of snores that emanated through the two closed bathroom doors. "Or somebody would have had her mother sterilized long before the fabulous Fig appeared."

Fig was the youngest of five children, all the others boys, all of whom, according to the terrifying photograph she kept on her bureau, looked like her.

"I'm the baby of the bunch," she said. "Mama finally decided to quit when she got her little girl."

"To paraphrase what Dorothy Parker said when they told her Calvin Coolidge had died," Cecie said delicately, " 'How could they tell?' "

And we laughed, Cecie and I, until we choked, and pulled the covers over our heads, and then laughed some more. We did not stop for a long time. It was the start of a pattern that stayed with us as long as Fig did: muffled, explosive laughter in the late nights, endless and self-perpetuating laughter, laughter tinged with guilt and despair and the louder for that, probably not as well concealed as it could have been. I think we even knew that at the time. But we could not stop laughing. Fig was simply too dreadful for anything else.

"It's better than being unkind to her," I said more than once. "I think we're the only two in the whole chapter who aren't out and out nasty to her, at least part of the time."

"It's probably just as bad, but there's no way you can be mean to her," Cecie said. "It really would kill her. She's absolutely gone on you. Have you noticed that she's making herself over into you?"

"That's not a bit funny," I said. But in the weeks that followed, I saw that it was true. All that fall, bit by bit and as inexorably as a glacier's movement, Fig Newton appropriated unto herself her version of my looks and mannerisms and clothes.

At first she just watched me. She watched me as I put on makeup in the morning, and watched as I dressed for dates, and watched as I took the makeup off and got ready for bed. Cecie and I took turns dressing and undressing in the bathroom, doors closed; she did not seem to notice. When we came out again, there she was, nestled cozily on my bed like a toad in sunshine. She usually had the diary with her, though by that time both of us would have died rather than ask her what she was writing. We knew that we would get either the sly innuendo or an excruciating speech of gratitude at being one of us. Sometimes she asked questions.

"What kind of shampoo is that?" she would say, and when I told her, she would write it down in the diary. Or, "Can you recommend a good mascara?" Or, "What kind of lipstick do you think would be right with my skin tone?"

"Mud," Cecie said under her breath at the latter. She was vastly exasperated with Fig; it only served to make her politer, and more remote. She watched coolly with her blue eyes as Fig catechized me, and dutifully recorded in her diary what she called her "beauty secrets."

She went after my clothes next. There was no way she could have worn mine, but she did her best to copy them. The ruffles and crinolines and high heels disappeared, and she emerged in the mornings in fuzzy skin-tight tweed skirts that came down to her ankles, skirts with slits that showed coy, dismaying inches of waffled blue-white leg and thigh. Pencil skirts, she called them. She topped them with sweater sets and crew necks that on her neckless barrel torso looked like straitjackets. They were not the creamy cashmeres and hearty shetlands that I had bought under my father's tutelage when I began Randolph Macon, but nylon and wool so flimsy that they pilled dismally after the first washing. She bought thick Fruit of the Loom crew socks and rolled them atop clunking penny loafers, and a few men's oxford-cloth shirts and sweatshirts appeared. Instead of Yale and Princeton and Amherst, the sweatshirts said Randolph and Georgia Tech and Roll Tide.

"I know they're not as good as those Ivy League ones you have," she said. "I'll get some of those, if you'll tell me where you got them."

"I didn't buy them," I said. "They were gifts."

"Oh, sure," she said. "I should have known that."

I don't know where she found the sad clothes, and how she paid for them; she said her parents had sent her the money but I did not think that was true. Most of us knew Fig was on full scholarship from the Rotary Club back in Fowler, Alabama, and that her parents had virtually no money at all. Her mother had disgraced her own family, it was said, by running off and marrying a virile bricklayer, who, after presenting her with five children, threw his back out hauling hods and never worked another day in his life. There could not have been any money from home. Cecie and I, who both knew about scrimping and saving, tried to talk to her tactfully about the clothes she bought. It was the closest I ever saw Cecie come to overt pity for Fig.

"Listen, Fig, I'm poor as a church mouse myself, so it's no disgrace," Cecie said. "I couldn't for the life of me afford a whole new wardrobe, and I don't think you can, either, and it hurts me to see you waste all that money. Your clothes are perfectly fine. You don't need to buy new ones."

"Mine don't have any style," Fig said, looking down at the floor. "I thought they did, until I saw Kate's. Kate's have real style. Yours do, too," she added, looking up at Cecie and smiling her ingratiating smile.

"Yes, but Kate's clothes are Kate's style, not yours," Cecie said kindly. "I'd look just as silly in Kate's clothes as...anybody else. What she wears is right for her, but not for me and you. We're too short. Us shorties have a whole different look."

"I want to have a style like Kate's," Fig said simply. "Kate is a real aristocrat. Anybody can see that. My mother always says blood will tell. Kate looks like an aristocrat, and she walks and talks like one, and she even laughs like one. I'd love to be like that."

Fig had a way of saying terrible, naked, self-deprecatory things that none of the rest of us would have said to save our immortal souls, and making them sound ingenuous and somehow poignant. My heart squeezed with pity for her.

"Oh, Fig, you don't want to copy me," I said. "Truly, you don't. I'm too tall and too skinny and I slouch this way because I'm always trying to look shorter, and I talk this way because I spent a lot of summers up in the East, and I have these clothes because I bought them then and can't afford new ones now. I laugh like that because I'm self-conscious about my laugh; my father always told me it sounded like a hyena. And I'm not an aristocrat. I'm really not. I don't have any money, and I'm just an Alabama girl like you are. People will like you much better if you'll just be yourself."

"No, they won't," she said. "They never have."

"I promise they will," I said.

"No. They won't. And I don't believe you about the other. You're just being nice to me because you're that way; on top of everything else you're good and kind. Mother says a real lady is never consciously unkind, and you never are."

I looked at her in despair.

"Your mother was right," Cecie said, grinning. "Of course, Oscar Wilde also said a gentleman is never unconsciously unkind, so you can take your pick. But ol' Kate here is an aristocrat, no doubt about it. Did you know they call her Effie, because she's so FFV? That," she added at Fig's thick look, "stands for First Family of Virginia. Yep, ol' Effie Lee."

"Oh, shut up, Cecie," I said crossly.

"You're modest, too. I noticed that about you right away," Fig went galloping on through her litany of my virtues. I thought I would scream with frustration and annoyance. "I think Effie is cute. I didn't know about that. I do know your whole name, though, I wrote it down from the chapter list the first night, in my diary. Katherine Stewart Lee. I noticed it because of the Stewart. My mother has some Stewarts from Virginia in her family; we're probably related. They almost named me that." She thumbed through the diary and held the page up for us to see. My name, misspelled, leaped out at me. It gave me a chilly, unpleasant twist in my stomach.

"Kate is one of the 'U' Stuarts," Cecie said blandly. "You know, as in General Jeb Stuart. Those are another matter altogether."

"Well, we could still be related," Fig said stubbornly, looking down at her great loafered feet. Dull magenta stained her neck and face. "Mother told me we changed the spelling somewhere along the line."

I raised my hands and dropped them in surrender.

"Well, maybe we are," I said. "So be a good little fifth cousin thrice removed or whatever and stop drooping around and talking like Katharine Hepburn. And stop craning your neck back like that when you laugh. You'll choke to death. I like you just the way you are, and I don't want you to change."

"Okay, if you really feel like that," Fig said submissively. And then looked up slyly at me under her lashes and added, "Effie."

And nothing could dissuade her from that. She did stop the ridiculous attempts to slouch and talk and laugh like I did, but until the day I left Randolph Fig Newton never failed to call me, elaborately and with much mock cringing and many little winks, Effie Lee. It drove me nearly mad. Cecie adored it. For an entire quarter she herself called me Effie Lee, and then, unlike Fig, tired of it. Ultimately I was able to laugh about it in the nights; it became a part of the great body of what Cecie called Figiana, that we sorted over nightly for each other's delectation.

I resolutely spent an hour or so each week, in the afternoons, with Fig in her room, drilling her from the Tri O pledge manual and preparing her for initiation that winter. She was an awesomely quick study, but she made a tedious business of it, pretending not to understand so I would have to repeat things over and over, and writing everything I said down laboriously in the by-then-hated diary, her tongue out in concentration, breathing wetly through her nose, giving me conspiratorial little looks.

"Come on, Fig," I said finally. "You know this stuff backward and forward, better than I do. There's no sense in making me repeat all this."

She smiled at me, twinkling her bug's eyes.

"I know," she said. "I just like to hear the sound of your voice."