Gospel (147 page)

Given the neighboring piles of tacky turrets and mansard roofs, faux antebellum columns and sentry gates bearing coats of arms, the Johnston compound appeared modest. It was part of the architect's genius—it advertised to the world an unassuming, comfortable two-story home from the outside, but it was spacious as any rambling mansion inside. Cushioned by ancient oak trees, the house sat back contentedly, hiding even its best feature, a large columned side porch, and its second best, a brick verandah and a perfectly enclosed backyard with its whisperings of a country estate: a small birdbath fountain that had not burbled since her childhood, a rose garden which needed much tending, and an arbor and trellis which needed none at all, dependably covered in wisteria or morning glories no matter the neglect. The upstairs of the house contained the six bedrooms. The downstairs had been featured once in
Southern Living
magazine: the long elegant dining room with the imitation Adam plaster-work on the ceiling, a kitchen large enough to provide hospitality to parties of a hundred or more, several beautifully realized sitting rooms—a classic American room, perfect for one of her mother's high teas; a blue French sitting room for solitude on gray afternoons, for reading and not being disturbed, avoided inexplicably by every male in the family; an off-to-the-side warren of parquet floors and custom cherrywood cabinetry that picked up a Frank Lloyd Wright flavor for the TV room and entertainment center.

The main attraction, of course, was her father's Civil War Study, which might have been directly swiped from the mid-nineteenth century. You had to take a small step down in order to enter it; Jerilyn imagined this small difference of elevation to be part of the magic spell that allowed you to leave the publicity and bustle of the rest of the house for the rarefied sense of the past. Like a carnival barker, Jerilyn had offered peeks to the neighborhood children, sometimes sneaking in illegally with her schoolmates—invariably boys—who would beg to take a closer look at the swords, dueling pistols, old maps of battle plans, engravings and parchments of the period, a cannonball. Every book on the Study's shelves was a first edition from the Civil War era (Dad kept his more modern history books upstairs in the bedroom). Prohibitions against entering, let alone touching anything, haunted all secret reconnaissance missions—and Alma, if she saw any signs of trespass, would tattle on her or any of her siblings, so all forays had to be timed for when Alma was out in the laundry room attached to the garage. Jerilyn loved to have an excuse to visit her father there amid the smell of pipe smoke, burnished leather, book mold, and the aromatic hickory wood in the fireplace; it smelled of an ever-welcoming past, of lost causes and unvanquished honor.

She heard her father's car in the driveway. So now it really was goodbye to the house. What do you know, she sniffed: one tear, after all.

NOTHING COULD BE FINER
By Joshua Johnston

Your best introduction to Chapel Hill would be to make your way to the hill where the chapel used to be. Saunter into the Carolina Inn for a proper mint julep by the fireplace in the Crossroads Bar before going into the big overdone dining room. It looks like half a dozen plantation drawing rooms exploded in there. Chow down on an eight-course creole-Piedmont gastric blowout, before stumbling to the nearby corner of Franklin and Columbia Streets with all the bars. Try negotiating the balcony at Top of the Hill when Carolina beats Duke in basketball some Saturday night. The scene rivals something out of Ancient Rome, except with lots more vomiting.

This is, indeed, the top of the hill that had the chapel. Even before the university was established, in 1790, as the first state-funded university of the United States,' locals had already given up on the local church. So it was knocked down so taverns and public houses could take their rightful place. We have our priorities here.

In 1980,
Playboy
magazine determined that the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill led the nation in student alcoholism, followed by Ohio State and Alabama.' This was based on the high freshman-year flunk-out rate for which drink was to blame

Jerilyn stopped reading there and nervously began twisting her hair. She reached for her cell phone to call her brother.

“Josh. Thanks for the essay, but—”

“But nothing you can use? I mean, I wrote it when I was a senior but I don't think UNC has changed that much.”

Jerilyn didn't want to sound ungrateful. “Who let you write a paper like this? It's so opinionated.”

In Jerilyn's ENG 101 Rhet-Comp class all the students picked names of North Carolina towns out of a hat. She got Chapel Hill. “We're supposed to write a factual historical paper. I don't think Brandon would want us to write it like this.”

“You get to call your instructor by his first name? God, Chapel Hill. Whoa, a customer. Looking at the five-hundred-dollar silk ties, too.”

“Go make a commission,” she directed. Her brother with his two degrees from the University of North Carolina, for years now, working retail in an upscale men's clothing store. Jerilyn was hoping for a better future, but for the moment she was hoping, with the aid of an online encyclopedia, and by semi-plagiarizing her brother's old essay, to knock out her first comp assignment so she could be free and clear of any schoolwork by the weekend. She had to keep that totally open. You never know which of North Carolina's storied sorority houses might summon her to appear.

Jerilyn did not want to spend much more time in stately lonely-making McIver Residence Hall. Of course, her randomly assigned roommate, Becca, was really really nice. Jerilyn wondered if she'd hurt Becca's feelings when the subject of rushing sororities came up.

“Sounds sort of fun,” Becca said. “Lots of free cookies, I guess. We can laugh at any of the houses that are too hoity-toity.”

“Oh Becca … They say it's bad to go in pairs because they won't remember anything about you individually.”

Jerilyn then said nothing about rush registration to Becca, so the date deadline for her to participate came and went. And what Jerilyn truly couldn't explain was that Becca was a jeans-and-T-shirt, dykey-haircut kind of girl, and sure, those kinds of casual sororities existed, but among the top powerhouse sororities, you showed up stylish and sharp … just not so sharp that it looked like you went to the store and bought the most expensive thing they had.

Jerilyn was recommitted as ever to Operation Sorority; her future husband was not to be found in McIver Residence Hall. But at this point in the secret plan, Jerilyn was losing sleep over her mother. Someone just saying the word “mother” caused her heart to race. The closer she got to her goal the more she feared the Wrath of Jerene (a well-established family concept). Maybe no sorority would take her, she thought darkly, and that would be that.

She liked the girls at Sigma Sigma Sigma; they had a Carrie Underwood CD playing the whole time in the background—Carrie was a TriSig made good. Jerilyn figured the social committee must have heard that CD repeat itself fifty times this week, which represented a seriousness of purpose. At Delta Delta Delta (on a repeat visit), Jerilyn politely enthused over the historical plates on display (God only knows how they famously partied without breaking the whole collection). If she got accepted there—which wasn't going to happen—she contemplated the long sophomore exile to the lesser TriDelt houses, probably three or four to a bunkroom in some lightless basement, something like where hostages were held, until one day, as a junior, as a senior, she would be summoned to the mother ship and the glorious upper rooms of the big white mansion with the wraparound porch. Bethany and Mallory, from Mecklenburg Country Day, were rushing these same houses; they were crossing their fingers that they'd all get an invitation to the monied Pi Beta Phi … but would one sorority accept three girls who had been to the same high school? Wouldn't some naysayer stand up at the meeting and say that they shouldn't accept a ready-made clique?

Oh dear God, she was wasting her time! What delusion, what folly! Jerilyn, get real! These elite sororities could smell her desperation, they could tell she was a party-girl fraud …

No, no, her best bet was to run, crawl, abase herself before her mom's house, Theta Kappa Theta, and hope for a legacy bid. She had a paper due but this was now or never! Her mind was made up … and this new plan had the added tactic of possibly pleasing her mother. Mother would be officially furious, of course, but she'd be a little proud too, just a tiny bit, and would probably relent and pay her dues for her. Oh God, there she was, stressing out about her mother again.

Jerilyn grabbed her handbag. She wore a sleeveless Carolina Blue linen dress, formfitting and flattering, Stuart Weitzman sandals. She would wow them at Theta Kappa Theta; she resignedly marched out to West Cameron Avenue. Soon Theta House rose into view, a brown-brick box with narrow horizontal upper windows which made the structure look like it was squinting. She glanced across the street at the legendary Sigma Kappa Nu and thought how much more grand their old mansion was, despite their torn-up front yard, repair trucks and construction cones. She saw a laughing band of girls emerge, happy, thrilled to be there …

Nope, Theta it is.

Ó¨KÓ¨was a hyper-preppy sorority, retro add-a-beads and sweaters, men's dress shirts and khaki shorts for crazy casual wear, Italian wool hunter-green peacoats, pearls with little black dresses for evening events. Jerilyn breathed deeply and strode inside with false confidence for what was now the belated second visit. It looked like a furniture showroom, Jerilyn thought again, overstuffed with love seats and china cabinets full of plaques and trophies. Jerilyn was asked her name (and to spell it out) while a smiling older girl wrote it out in lovely penmanship on a peel-off name tag and gently affixed it between breast and shoulder. “Now we'll all get to know you, Jerilyn,” she chirped.

Margaret, a homeroom acquaintance from Mecklenburg Country Day, spotted her from the stairs and sped down to hug her. “I'm so excited you're here! I've talked you up to so many of our women … I didn't see you for the first part of rush and I thought about calling you which is dirty rushing and wrong wrong wrong, but … oh I know I shouldn't ask, but are you aiming for any other houses? Naughty me!”

“Well, of course, Theta's my mom's sorority, so this is my priority.”

Margaret squealed and squeezed her arm.

“Though I had a good time at Alpha Delta Phi.”

“Oh yeah, well, they're nice girls over there,” said Margaret, powerless to berate them.

“I haven't been in Sigma Kappa Nu yet—been scared off by the mud, I guess.”

“They've become the big drug-and-party sorority, you know,” Margaret said with real sorrow, not able congenitally to savage anyone, even if they needed savaging. “It's sure not our style,” she added.

Yep. That was the settled, empirical truth about unexciting, under-dated, good-girl Jerilyn Johnston: being wild was simply not her style, not her scene. Two-beer maximum. Politeness and manners and good breeding, associating with the right people who did the right things—that was her summary, Young Ladyhood's Southern poster child, halfway to some law firm's partners' wives' charity's annual luncheon—non-alcoholic of course. She winced a bit as she sipped from her crystal punch cup; someone had put in way too much unsweetened citrus. Next thing she knew, there was a
tink-tink-tink
of a spoon against a teacup.

“If I could … Each even-numbered hour on the hour, we ladies at Theta Kappa Theta want to introduce ourselves to you and let you know what we're all about. Each of us, with the red name tags—you, the visitors, have the blue name tags—will be happy to tell you about life here at Cozy House. In truth, the house is named for our chapter's founder, Sarabeth Scarples Cosy, C-O-S-Y, but through the years we've just stopped fighting its being constantly misspelled and gone with Cozy House, C-O-Z-Y, because, you know … it IS cozy here.” Hums of assents from the red-name-tagged girls. “This is a great house for you to pursue your dreams of being all that you can be. We have the highest grade point average at Carolina of any of the houses, male or female…” A slight pause for some of the redname-tags to let out a mild whoop, some dry hand claps. “… and our sisters have gone on to so many impressive walks of life.”

Jerilyn subtly abandoned the punch cup on a windowsill, and sat on the arm of a sofa while the roll of the immortals was declaimed. The wife of the state attorney general, the assistant to the agricultural commissioner, the CEO of a Durham-based company that manufactures cruelty-free lipsticks. Plus, scads, just scads of prominent communications majors!

“But,” the young woman was saying, “who really can give y'all the rundown is Mary Jean Krisp, who is our president, and oh so many more things.”

Jerilyn saw, presumably, Mary Jean, with her immobile blond hair-helmet and foundation-heavy makeup, smiling to each corner of the large living room like a lighthouse beaming into every cranny of the coast. She wore a peach turtleneck whose collar nearly swallowed her chin—the old hide-the-double-chin trick, thought Jerilyn—and below that hung a small gold chain with a pendant with a gold Greek theta and a cross.

“… during Greek Idol 2002, Mary Jean was named Most Talented Female Singer, and that's just … why, I'll read my dum notecard. President of the Panhellenic Council, junior Panhel delegate. The 2001 Theta Kappa Theta State Convention Delegate; 2001 National Convention Delegate, Rush Chairman, co-Chairman of the All-Greek Council, Chairman of the 2002 Homecoming Activities Committee, Director of the Sorority Presidents' Council—I mean, I don't know how she does so much important work!—Assistant to the Student Representative on the Chancellor's Task Force on Greek Issues, an Adopt-a-Grandparent volunteer, a Big Little Sister, a volunteer at the Chapel Hill Animal Shelter, and … phew…” She playacted being winded. “… most importantly, the 2003 Outstanding Greek Woman for her work in the community and on campus. Here she is, Mary Jean Krisp!”