Daughters of Eve

Lois Duncan: Daughters of Eve

CHAPTER 1

The calendar placed the first day of fall on the twenty-third of September, and on the afternoon of Friday, the twenty-second, Ruth Grange walked slowly down Locust Street, her schoolbooks gripped by one hand, a brown paper sack by the other. Her head was bent forward beneath the weight of the last load of official summer sunshine.

It had been a long summer for Ruth—"a rotten summer," she told herself resentfully—the kind of summer when anybody with any sense left Modesta, Michigan, and went somewhere else. The heat had begun in the early mornings. She had awakened to it, feeling her body damp and sticky beneath the thin material of her shorty pajamas, and by the time she was dressed in shorts and halter, the droplets were already beginning to collect along her hairline and in the hollows under her arms and behind her knees. By noon the walls of the Grange home had enclosed the sort of heat one might expect to find in a low-turned oven.

"I don't know why you won't let me turn on the air conditioner," she had complained to her mother. "Why do we have the thing if we don't use it? That's just plain crazy."

"Your father's the one who pays the utility bills, not you, Ruthie," Mrs. Grange had said shortly. "You wait and turn it on about four in the afternoon and get the place cooled down for dinner."

Her mother worked all day in the women's wear section of an air-conditioned department store. A lot she knew about Modesta in the summertime. The truck her father drove was also air conditioned, and her brothers, Pete and Niles, spent the whole summer up at the lake sitting on lifeguard towers. As for nine-year-old Eric, he could care less about the heat, or anything else for that matter. Eric would go out and pedal his bicycle for miles under the blazing noonday sun like an utter idiot and come home with heat rash prickling scarlet all over him, and all their mother would say was, "You poor lad. Let's get you into a cool tub," and then to Ruth, "How could you let him do that to himself? You're supposed to be taking care of him."

Yes, it had been a gruesome summer, and the fall would be gruesome also. Oh, it would cool down, of course; already the intensity of the afternoon sun was lessening. Just since school had started, Ruth could feel a marked difference. Two weeks ago she had completed the mile walk from Modesta High School, feeling as limp and exhausted as if she had been running in a marathon. Now the sunlight on her head and the back of her neck felt lighter, and she no longer found it necessary to walk at the edge of the sidewalk in the shade of the maples.

But, summer or autumn, she was still Ruth Grange, the only girl trapped in a family of conceited, overindulged boys.

Her older brothers were standing in the front yard as she came up the walk. They had been laughing about something, and their conversation broke off abruptly as Ruth approached them.

"Well, here's our Little Miss Sunshine," Niles exclaimed in exaggerated welcome. "Our Toothy-Ruthie, beaming and bright, bringing joy to all who know her!" He reached out and gave a lock of her hair a teasing tug. "You're going to crack your face someday with all that smiling, Sis."

Ignoring him, Ruth addressed herself to her oldest brother.

"You went off and left me! You know Dad said you're supposed to give me a ride home on days when you take the car."

"Couldn't find you," Peter said easily.

"You couldn't have looked very hard. I always walk home the same way."

"You do?" Peter said. "Really, honest-to-God, you do?" He turned to Niles in simulated amazement. "Did you hear that? She comes home every time the same way!"

"Yeah—like this." Niles thrust out his lower jaw in a surprisingly good imitation of his sister's sullen expression.

"Oh—you can just—just—go to—" Ruth let the sentence fall away, unfinished. There was nothing to be gained by sparring with her brothers. At eighteen and seventeen, they were so filled with their own self-importance that it was impossible to communicate with them. She often wondered what their girl friends saw in them. There must be something, for Niles dated as often as he wanted to, and Peter for over six months now had been going with Bambi Ellis, the most popular girl in the junior class.

"Our little sister wants us to 'go to,' Pete," Niles said. "Shall we honor her request?"

"By all means. Her slightest wish is our command." Peter gave Ruth a friendly swat on the bottom. "See you later, lad. Oh—check the fridge door—Mom's left a note for you."

"So, what else is new?" Ruth said snappishly. She continued up the walk and let herself into the house.

As she let the screen door slam shut behind her, the engine of Peter's car churned to life in the driveway. She heard the crunch of gravel as he backed out into the street and the sudden shriek of burning rubber as he slammed down the accelerator.

"Go to—and stay there," she mumbled halfheartedly into the silence of the empty house.

Dropping her books on the coffee table, she bent to gather up the letters that lay under the mail slot. She carried them out to the kitchen and tossed them onto the counter while she smoothed out the sack and put it into a drawer. Her mother was undoubtedly the only woman in the world who made her children save their lunch bags for reuse. The note Peter had spoken of was attached to the refrigerator with magnets. As she had known it would be, it was headed, "Things To Do":

When Eric gets home, make him change his clothes

Clean up kitchen

Run laundry

Defrost hamburger

Put potatoes in oven at 5:00

Well, Eric wasn't home yet, since the elementary school let out after the high school. "Clean up kitchen" could, in itself, take the whole afternoon. Ruth glanced about her despairingly. The boys' cereal bowls from the morning sat out on the table with milk soured in their bottoms, and the egg plates were thick with yellow yolk dried onto them like cement. There was a pool of some unidentifiable liquid on the linoleum at the base of the refrigerator, and the lunch makings were still on the counter where she herself had left them when Peter gave his yell that he was leaving and "anybody who wants a ride had better get out here." She had dashed for the door with her hands still gummy with peanut butter, and the jelly jar had somehow overturned onto the stove top where the purple glop had dripped into one of the burners.

Why couldn't their mother stay home and take care of things like other mothers? Ruth asked herself bitterly as she surveyed the mess. She had done that for a while after Eric was born, and it had been great. But when Eric reached school age she had been offered that job at Wards, and their lather had suggested she take it. "We can use the extra income," Mrs. Grange had told them, and now with Peter wanting to attend an out-of-state college and with Niles coming along right behind him, it seemed doubtful that she would ever be able to stop working. Ruth suspected that she didn't really want to. Why would anybody choose to stay home and be a housewife when there was a sixteen-year-old daughter to do the dirty work?

With a sigh of self-pity, Ruth shoved the stopper into the sink and turned on the hot water. She might as well put the egg plates to soak before she rounded up the laundry. The upstairs hamper was always an adventure; eight million smelly socks and a ton of blue jeans were to be expected, but once there had been a three-foot-long blacksnake of Eric's, and on another occasion she had found a container of pot in one of Niles's pants pockets. That had been a worthwhile discovery, for it had led to his being grounded for a week.

The mail lay dangerously close to the grape jelly. Ruth picked up the envelopes and riffled through them. They were mostly advertisements, with one form letter addressed to "The Parents of a High School Senior" from a photographic studio. And there was a square, white envelope—

Ruth stared at it. "Ms. Ruth Anne Grange" was printed above the address in neatly rounded letters. Who in the world would be writing a letter to her?

"Maybe it's a chain letter," Ruth said out loud, but she didn't believe it. The envelope had the look of a formal invitation. Was she really being asked to something—perhaps a party?

Placing the remainder of the mail on a clean spot near the counter's edge, Ruth began to open the envelope. She did it slowly, making the suspense last. It was certainly a surprise to receive a letter.

For the first time since she had gotten up that morning, Ruthie Grange was smiling.

"It's a joke," Laura Snow said shakily. "It's got to be a joke or something."

"My goodness, baby, you look like you're about to keel over." Her mother leaned over her shoulder to read aloud the letter that Laura held clutched in her hand. "'We are pleased to inform you that you have been selected for membership in the Modesta Chapter of Daughters of Eve.'"

"It's a joke," Laura said again.

"Now, why do you say that?" her mother asked her. "It looks real enough to me. What is this dub anyway, some sort of social thing?"

"It's only"—Laura stressed the word sarcastically—"it's only the most exclusive club at Modesta High. They keep a membership of only ten people, and each year they invite just enough new members to join to replace the graduating seniors. Fran Schneider's the president—you know who Fran is, don't you? She's the big wheel in the Senior Honor Society. And there's Bambi Ellis and Ann Whitten and Tammy Carncross." She shook her head firmly. "Somebody put my name on an invitation just to be funny."

"Laura, baby, what will I ever do with you?" Mrs. Snow regarded her daughter with affectionate exasperation. "Most girls would be squealing and jumping around, just ecstatic, and here you sit, saying, 'It's a joke.' Why wouldn't they want you to join their club, for goodness' sake?"

"Oh, Mama, really." How could she answer such a ridiculous question? All her mother had to do was to look at her, just once, with her eyes wide open. If she did she might see her as she was, a 160-pound lump with a bust that looked like twin watermelons and a rear end that looked like twin something-elses. But her mother was blinded by something—love? familiarity? Perhaps the fact that she was overweight herself made bulk seem the norm.

"One reason they wouldn't want me is that I'm a junior," Laura told her as patiently as she could. "The policy is to take in the incoming sophomores. If I was a choice, it would have been last year."

"Well, evidently they missed you then and now they realize what a mistake they made." Her mother looked bewildered. "I don't understand you, baby. Don't you want to join? Clubs are such an important part of student life."

"Don't I want to join?" Oh, Mama, Laura thought, you really are the limit! Tentatively, daringly, she let her imagination reach out and play at the edge of the impossible. She wanted to belong to Daughters of Eve the way she wanted to look like Bambi Ellis—to be Homecoming Queen—to be cheerleader—to be able to lose twenty pounds overnight. She wanted it the way she wanted Peter Grange to fall in love with her. She wanted it the way, as a little girl, she had wanted to be a fairy princess so that she could wave her magic wand and mend all the cracks in her parents' splintering marriage; she wanted it with so much intensity that the mere thought made her dizzy.

Was it possible—could it really be possible?—that the invitation was for real?

Slowly, Laura lowered her eyes to the envelope that lay in her lap. It was her name. It was her address. There was no mistake there. She looked at the card in her hand. "We are pleased to inform you..."

"I could go to the meeting," she said slowly. "The worst that could happen would be that Fran would ask me what I was doing there. I could say I'd walked into the wrong room by mistake when I was looking for a Future Teachers' meeting."

"Fran won't ask you what you're doing there. She'll be thrilled that you want to attend." Mrs. Snow smiled fondly at her daughter. "You little silly, whatever am I going to do with you!"

"Daughters of Eve?" Bart Rheardon frowned thoughtfully. "I've never heard of it. Is it a religious organization?"

"It's a school club, Dad," Jane said. "I don't really know too much about it, except that some really cool girls belong to it. It's a secret society. Nobody's allowed to tell what they do at the meetings."

"I don't much like the sound of that." Mr. Rheardon turned to his wife, who was engrossed in television. "Ellie, have you ever heard of a group called Daughters of Eve?"

"What? Oh, sure," Mrs. Rheardon said, her eyes still glued to the screen where a boyish-looking doctor leaned worriedly over his pale and beautiful patient.

"Hey, turn that thing off. We're trying to talk about something." Mr. Rheardon brought his fist down hard on his knee. "Ellie, do you hear me?"

"Sure. Sure, honey. I'm sorry." His wife leaned forward quickly. Her hand pressed a button below the channel indicator, and the set flickered once, went gray, then died. Quite suddenly the room seemed double its former size and oddly empty.

Glancing back and forth from her father to her mother, Jane felt the tiny muscle at the corner of her left eye tighten suddenly. It was the beginning of the tic she often got when she was nervous. She should never have shown her father that invitation, she told herself miserably. She might have known that something unpleasant would come of it.

Still, when he had come home that evening he had been in one of his jovial moods, laughing and teasing and reaching up playfully to slap his hand against the door frame in a joking attempt to pretend he was taller than the doorway and had forgotten to duck his head.