There was something intimate in her voice, a damp and familiar emanation, that I shrank away from. Distaste and a vague alarm stirred in me. After that I dropped the lessons. There was nothing, by then, about Tri Omega that she did not know.

I began spending all afternoon until six o'clock in McCandless Hall with the permanent legion of architecture and interior design students who kept drafting tables and did their work there. I found an empty table by the great bank of windows that overlooked the street and a coffee shop and coin laundry and rooming house, and set up my stuff, and found that I liked working in the new, light-flooded white building. In the daytime it was among the coolest spots on campus, and at night the building was like a great aquarium swarming with friendly fish, and the coffee shop was full until very late of students talking design and materials and construction methods. Many were men, older than the norm for Randolph, back in school on the G.I. Bill, worldly and cool-eyed and faintly scornful of the scurry of collegiate life around them. Most were considered by the fraternity and sorority contingent to be "bohemian," "arty," and "funny," and therefore beyond the social pale. I found myself drawn to them, and they seemed to like and accept me, seeing, no doubt, below my Tri Omega pin, the outsider that I was at heart. Often I did interiors and renderings for the budding architects, and just as often they straightened out my faulty perspectives and took me for coffee. It was a soothing and pleasant interval for me. Cecie was in late labs of her own that fall, and Fig could hardly pursue me into my very laboratories. I think I first began to take Interior Design seriously that quarter.

But then Fig began to shadow me like a comic-strip detective.

"Don't look now, but one of the Seven Dwarfs is staking you out," the married architect at the table next to mine said one day in November. I followed his glance out of the window and saw Fig, swathed in a raw new yellow polo coat and swaddling scarves down to her ankles, standing on the sidewalk outside, looking in at me. She looked, in her wrappings and layers, like a squat, burlap-wrapped pipe that had been readied for a freeze. She gave me a bright smile and a little waggling wave. I waved back, and waited for her to move on, but she did not. My face and neck began to burn. I bent close over my work.

"Okay, she's gone," my table neighbor said presently. "Who in God's name is she?"

"One of our new pledges," I said, not looking at him.

"Christ, she must be worth a fortune," he said. "Or is Tri O into good works now?"

"She's a very nice girl," I said stiffly, cursing her silently.

"Sure she is," he said equably. "How could she be anything else?"

The next day Fig was back at the same time. And the next, and the next. We would go through the same routine: the little finger wiggle and the vivid smile, the ducked head, the silent waiting it out. On the fifth day she came into the building and stood in the open door of my lab, fidgeting and looking for all the world like a pit bull expecting to be kicked, until someone said, "You got company, Kate," and I looked up and saw her. I went to the door and drew her out into the hall.

"What can I do for you, Fig?" I said crisply, aware that everybody in the room was listening.

"Well, I was just over this way and saw you through the window and thought we might go get some coffee," she said. "I know you go over there to Harry's in the afternoons. I've seen you. So I thought since I was here anyway..."

"My break isn't for another hour, and I can't let you stand around in the cold waiting for me," I said. "Dr. McGee is funny about outsiders...you know, people who aren't his students...being in his lab. But thanks anyway. By the way, what are you doing over here? I thought you had P.E. afternoons."

"Well, I dropped it," she said, not meeting my eyes. "I get these awful cramps, you know, and they wrote me an excuse at the infirmary. I switched to Music Appreciation right over there in Smythe."

"Well, anyway, I've got to get back to work," I said. "See you tonight."

"Are you coming back for dinner?"

"I...don't know," I said. "I've got to have this project finished by Thanksgiving holidays. I'll probably be working every night until then..."

"I'll help you," she said brightly.

"Fig..."

"Okay, okay," she said, putting her hands up as if to ward off a blow, and chortling merrily. And went scurrying off, not looking back.

After that she stopped appearing on the sidewalk outside McCandless, but then one afternoon, as I sat in a booth at Harry's drinking coffee and laughing with a group of architecture students, I felt, distinctly, eyes on my face, and turned, and there she was, alone in a booth across the room. Even through the still strata of cigarette smoke and the steam from many cups of coffee, I could see that she was staring fixedly at me. But when she caught my glance, she looked down at the book she was reading, and did not look up again. She was there, off and on, for the remainder of that quarter, and she never acknowledged that she saw me, and never spoke of it afterward. I was so outdone that I was determined not to mention it to her, either. So we rocked along, stalker and quarry, neither admitting by so much as a gesture that she was aware of the other. I was tense and jittery and always faintly angry at her, but so long as she kept up her airy pretense of ignoring me, I could not seem to broach it with her. The campus was, after all, open territory.

And then she showed up in my weekly History of Architecture class, still pointedly not seeing me, seeming to be enraptured with the slides and the mumbled droning of the old German professor, and began to talk glibly at meals of Mies van der Rohe and Florence Knoll and Barcelona chairs and Dudok's City Hall in Hilversum, and I snapped at her one night in utter exasperation.

"Look, Fig," I said, following her into her lair. "Cut out that silly stuff. You don't know an Eames chair from a toilet, and you couldn't care less. You're an English major, and the best one I ever saw. Interior Design shouldn't matter to you. I don't understand why you're bothering with that stupid class; everybody hates it. And everybody's talking about the way you follow me around. Do you want that?"

"I wasn't aware that I was," she said prissily. "My goodness, it's a free country, isn't it? If I want to audit a course that isn't in my major, I don't see why anybody should care. Who said I was following you around?"

"Everybody. People," I said. "Listen. There's something Kahlil Gibran said in The Prophet, that I always thought was true and wonderful. He said, 'Let there be spaces in your togetherness.' So let's do it, Fig. Let's let there be spaces in our togetherness."

"That's beautiful," she breathed. "It really is. I'm going to put that in my diary. And"-she looked meltingly at me-"that you quoted it to me. I'll never forget it."

I stamped out of her room, bested. I was damned if she would goad me into one of these discussions again; it was like Br'er Rabbit and the Tarbaby. To touch Fig was to be ensnared by her.

During the whole insane siege, Cecie, oddly, said very little. I related each of Fig's atrocities to her, indignantly, waiting either for her dry, crisp perspective or her whooping, healing laughter, but she offered neither. It was about that time she began to warn me about Fig, to caution me not to laugh so loudly, to keep my voice down when I spoke of her. Instead of defusing the whole affair with her delicate satire, she cautioned me that Fig was not what she seemed. "I simply can't believe you can't see...how she is," she snapped once, exasperated. "You act like a horse with blinders on."

But she would not speak of it further. I felt vaguely betrayed, and bereft, as if deprived of both my audience and my co-conspirator in laughter. For a while, we did not laugh much at night, Cecie and I, and I realized only then how much of our easy mirth had had its source in Fig Newton.

And then Fig began to leave me poems, on my pillow or under the windshield of my car or on my drafting table in McCandless, and they were so obscure and flowery and exalted and altogether dreadful that I could only laugh helplessly when I read them to Cecie in the nights. This time she did laugh with me. It simply was not possible to do otherwise. I began to read them aloud in Fig's voice, and discovered an arrow-true facility for mimicking her voice and inflections, and used it shamelessly and often. I never failed to reduce Cecie to utter, breathless helplessness with the sorry little imitations, and I gloried in this new power. She was so often the one who had made me laugh until I thought, literally, that I would die.

"Oh, hush, oh, hush," she would gasp. "Oh, stop! I can't stand it! She'll hear you! Stop, Kate..."

And on I would go, flinging Fig's poor, awful words into the air on a careless flood of laughter and mockery.

And then one morning Cecie came out of the bathroom with a wet snippet of paper in her hand, and passed it to me. She did not look at me.

"It was pinned to the shower curtain," she said. "You're going to have to do something about this, Kate."

I read the poem Fig had left for me and reddened, painfully and profoundly. I could actually feel the air beating at my face and hands, as if a silent detonation had taken place. I was giddy and breathless and almost physically sick. The poem was graphic in the extreme, and spoke of physical love in terms that I had never even imagined before. There was nothing in it of normalcy or grace. I was sure Fig had not composed it herself, but the fact that she had dared to even think about me in those terms left me weak and trembling with anger.

I slammed into her room and snatched the covers off her. She pantomimed waking, stretching and smiling languidly. Without her glasses her face looked weak and naked.

"Morning, Effie," she said.

"Don't you ever, ever, leave anything like this lying around where I can see it again," I shouted. "Don't write me any more poems, don't follow me around anymore, and don't pretend you don't know what I'm talking about, because you damned well do!"

She looked at me in exaggerated surprise and injury.

"Well, I don't," she said piteously. "I don't have any idea what you're talking about. Why are you so mad?"

"This," I said, waving it in her face. "This. This is...filthy! This is a whole other thing than those silly things you've been sneaking into my room, and on the car..."

"I only wanted to please you," she whispered, tears starting in her naked eyes. "I thought you loved poetry. You quoted The Prophet to me...I thought you cared about it, and about me...I didn't know that stuff was dirty. I just...copied it out of that book of Cecie's, I thought you all read it to each other, like you do that other stuff...I didn't know what it meant..."

She broke into loud sobs, looking up through her fingers to see my reaction. I knew she meant the Kama Sutra; Cecie and I had, indeed, been reading it, though not to each other, and had found it both shocking and titillating. I thought, also, that she did indeed know what it meant, but I was past caring whether she did or not. The book was one Cecie had gotten from an Oriental friend in one of her classes, and had been in her desk, and the only way Fig could have found it was to go through her things.

"Don't do any of this stuff anymore, Fig," I said coldly. "I've had it with you. Stop it or I'll get you moved out of this suite. I can and I will. I mean it."

"I can't stand for you to be mad at meeee!" Fig wailed as I turned to leave. "You're my big sister! You have to love me! That's what being a big sister means...but now you hate me-e-e-e..."

The rage went out of me abruptly, and I sat down limply on the vacant twin bed that faced hers. She had rooted under the covers, sobbing and snuffling, and I spoke to the lump she made under them.

"Fig, listen," I said. "Listen, because I'm only going to say this once. I don't hate you. I just want you to stop...dogging me. I know I'm your big sister, and I always will be, but that doesn't mean I automatically...you know, love you. I'll try to be a good sorority sister, but you just can't legislate love, it isn't a policy, something you decide. It's a feeling, and it's given to you. It just comes. A real friendship is a light thing. A real friend holds you loosely. Look at Cecie; she the best friend I have in the world, but she doesn't crowd me, or follow me around, or try to imitate me..."

She pulled her swollen red face out of the bundle of covers and looked at me. I have never seen such desolation in a pair of eyes.

"I know I can never be to you what Cecie is!" she said, and began to weep again, nasally and hopelessly.

I looked at her, and then walked out of her room. It had probably been the wrong thing to say, but I was past caring. I thought that at least she would stop now.

"I feel like a heel yelling at her like that," I said to Cecie a couple of weeks later, "but it really does look like the Reign of Terror is over."

"Mmmmm," Cecie said. She had been quiet the past few days, and we did not laugh so much in the nights.

"Well, don't you think?" I said.

"Sure looks like it," Cecie said, and went off to class.

And it did. Fig no longer haunted Harry's or my History of Architecture classes, and the unsought poetry stopped cold. She did not come into our room at night either, as she always had. It was not that she was pouting, or seemed particularly chastened by my outburst. She was cheerful and open, or at least as much as Fig could be, when we met in the halls and at meals, and went home to Fowler for Thanksgiving calling bright goodbyes to us all. When we returned she was still the changed Fig.

"She's really working out okay," the chapter said. "Maybe it's not going to be as bad as we thought. You've done wonders with her, Kate."

"Boy, if they only knew," I said to Cecie. I did not think they did. There had been some good-natured teasing about Fig's copying my clothes, and leaving poems about for me, but it seemed forgotten now. I was sure no one but Cecie and I and Fig knew the extent of the aberration. I was equally sure that none of the three of us would ever speak of it. And we didn't. Fig did not apologize, but I thought perhaps her new, exemplary behavior served, in a way, as her apology. I was still not eager to share her company, but there was no doubt about it: the new Fig was vastly preferable to the old one. If she would only stop calling me "Effie."

A week before our Christmas break, Cecie and I came home from seeing The King and I for the third time at the Tiger Theatre to find the campus fire department just leaving the Tri O house, and the slippered and robed sisterhood just filing back into the living room, chattering like parakeets. No smoke was visible, but we could smell it, faintly, coiling down from upstairs.

"Oh, thank God you're back," Carolanne Gladney shrieked, darting at us. A throng of twittering Tri Os followed her. "There's been a fire in your room, but it's out now and no damage except some smoke. Fig smelled it and called the fire department and rang the alarm, and went in and pulled all y'all's clothes out of your closets. She's a hero, Kate, she got her hands and arms burned a little bit. She's in the infirmary until tomorrow, but she'll be all right..."

My head spun with alarm and confusion, and beside me, Cecie stood on her toes, giving little jumps, trying to see over the crowd and up the stairs.

"My God," I said in shock. "How did it start? We've been gone over three hours..."

"They're not sure," Trish Farr said solemnly, but I thought there was a certain chord of relish in her voice. "But they think somebody might have left a cigarette burning..."

Cecie went white. I actually saw the color drain from her face. I saw, also, the veiled, avid looks the chapter bent on her. Cecie was the only one of us in that suite who smoked. Everyone knew that.

"I didn't leave a cigarette burning," she said, precisely and remotely. "I never have, and I didn't this time."

"I know you didn't," I said, fiercely protective. "I'd have seen it if you had. It had to be something else."

"Well, I said they weren't sure about that," Trish said piously. "It could easily have been something else. Nobody's accusing you of anything, Cecie."

"I should hope not," I said in a bright, hard voice. "I'd really hate to hear anything like that. I think it would be tacky in the extreme if that got around campus. Everyone would know it was one of us who started it."

"Well, talk to Fig," Trish huffed. "She's not saying, but I have an idea she knows."

But Fig professed not to. She came home from the infirmary the next morning, pale and somehow apologetic, pointedly not meeting Cecie's or my eyes, her hands and arms swathed in white bandages.

"I really don't know how it started," she murmured, when we went in to thank her and see how she was. "Nobody could say for sure. The room was already pretty smoky when I got there. It probably wasn't a cigarette at all. Listen, Effie, Cecie, I'm sorry if I got your clothes dirty. I just threw them out the door on the floor; I didn't think..."

"Oh, Fig, don't even think about that," I said. "You saved the house and probably some lives as well as our clothes. None of us will ever be able to thank you."

I knew I was right, but somehow the words did not come easily. I felt, instead of gratitude, the old annoyance. Except to murmur, "Thanks, Fig," Cecie hardly spoke at all.

I have to give Fig credit. She could have made much of her role as wounded heroine, but she did not. She did not speak of the fire at all. But the sisters did. Perversely, they lionized the heretofore plague-ridden Fig, petting and cosseting her, bringing her tidbits of food and even seeing that a small article about her role in averting tragedy appeared in the Randolph Senator. It must have been a time of triumph for her, but she was still modest to near-obsequiousness. No one mentioned the origins of the fire again, but there were some oblique glances thrown at Cecie before the looming holidays claimed our attention. Cecie herself was quiet and remote, staying long in the library and often going down to the chapter room late at night to study. I knew that she had gone through the door deep inside herself and shut it behind her. I could not lure her out.

"You know I don't think you caused that fire," I said once, desperate to penetrate the white shell around her. I missed her good sense, and our late-night camaraderie, and her charming, drypoint foolishness. I missed all of her.

"I know you don't," she said. "The problem is, I've been wondering lately if maybe I did after all. I don't remember it, but I guess it isn't impossible..."

"No," I said. "It is impossible. I know. I really do know. I wish you could forget it. I need somebody to laugh with. Fig as St. Joan isn't very funny."

"No," Cecie said. "She isn't."

After that she seemed to make an effort to be herself again, and we occasionally sat late into the nights once more, listening to music and sharing poems and books, and finding, with only a little forcing, new things to laugh about. But the laughter rang a bit hollow, and didn't last long. Cecie took to sleeping a great deal, and I spent more and more evenings over at McCandless. In the other room, Fig received a modest stream of visitors and enjoyed with becoming modesty her small vogue. She still wore the white bandages. No one mentioned the fire.

On the day we finished our finals I loaded the MG and stopped on my way home to Kenmore to drop Cecie at the train station. Neither of us wanted to go home; my mother was seeing a pious, stupid deacon in the Baptist Church whose idea of a proper Christmas celebration was to attend church three times a day and participate in the Living Nativity on the brown church lawn. I did not like him nor he me; I knew that the scent of the abyss below me was strong in his nostrils. Cecie was, she said, simply not in the mood for the gentle blithering of the grandmother and the aunts.

"I wish we could spend this Christmas somewhere like Monte Carlo or Gstaad," she said, humping her duffle bag out of the MG.

"Well, let's make a note to do it, the first year we're in Europe," I said. "Meanwhile, cheer up. Things will be better after Christmas."

She didn't answer. She bumped the duffle up the wooden steps to the platform and turned to wave at me. I waved back, and slid the MG into gear. Somehow, I did not like to drive away and leave her there.

"Kate..." she called after me.

"What?"

"I didn't leave that cigarette burning."

"I know it," I said. "Merry Christmas, ol' Cece."

"Bah, humbug," she said.

Chapter Five.

WE did not sit down to lunch until two, and I never did eat the crab salad I made. Instead, I did something I have not done since the night I met Alan, close to twenty-eight years ago. I got very, very drunk.

He brought a pitcher of Bloody Marys to the umbrella table on the deck, and put two glasses full of shaved ice and a saucer of kosher salt and sticks of fresh celery, and tilted the umbrella to shield us from the high sun and the salt wind streaming over the dunes, and said, "Booze is the answer. But what is the question?"

And I laughed, because it was precisely the same thing he had said to me that long-ago night when he had found me at my drawing board overlooking Third Avenue, crying. The rich red Bloody Marys looked, suddenly, like the best things I had ever seen, and I drank half of my first one without stopping.

"Since you mention it, I guess there's nothing for it but to repeat history and get kneewalking smashed," I said. "These are wonderful. What's that, horseradish?"

"Sorrel," he said. "There wasn't any dill. What's with you, Tondelayo? You've got that look about you."

I actually blushed. Tondelayo is what he always called me when I wanted to make love; he claims that I had a kind of languid, loose-jointed, half-lidded playfulness about me then that I never had at other times. Pure progesterone, he called it. I had not heard the nickname in a long time. We had not made love in a long time. Somehow it seemed to me a kind of desecration to have Alan inside me along with the Pacmen.

"I'm thirsty is all, you satyr," I said. I drank the rest of the Bloody Mary and held out my glass. "Hit me again, Sam."

I think I had four in all. I never could drink well, and I am still very thin from the long siege of chemo. I was not of ones who sailed through it with just a modicum of easily controlled nausea. I retched and gagged and vomited for the entire four days each course ran, and lost all the flesh that middle age had settled on me, and have not managed to gain it back. So the four drinks literally carried me into a kind of walking oblivion. I remember dimly the passing of time and the gradual lessening of the heat on my face and body, as the sun swung around to the west, and I remember laughing a great deal, and I have a white-lit, frozen flash in my memory of a precise moment, when I stood up and came around the table to Alan and sat in his lap and put my arms around him, and drew his head and face into my breasts.