Pledged (39 page)

APRIL

Most of all, “Kappa Delta” is the feeling you will now have when you drive down the highway, and see a Kappa Delta decal on the car in the lane next to you and try to speed up so you can wave to your new “sister”!

—Norman Shield of Kappa Delta, July 2003

Practically every girl looks better with some makeup. Just because you didn’t wear any in high school doesn’t mean you shouldn’t now . . . Do not wear bright-colored eye shadow. Do not wear too much dark blush applied in rectangles. Do not affect a tan with a dark makeup base. Do wear mascara, blush, and lip gloss at the least.

—Rush: A Girl’s Guide to Sorority Success, 1985

Rock Bottom

APRIL 7

Amy is not logged on

A FEW WEEKS AFTER
Date Party, Amy was still aglow from what seemed to be a burgeoning relationship with Hunter. This was the first time that a date had wanted to continue seeing Amy after an Alpha Rho function. Hunter showed up at the house every few days and usually joined her at the bars, where once he happened to kiss her passionately right in front of Spencer, her old crush. Amy bloomed, putting her diets and her self-doubt aside. Several other girls had crushes on Hunter, who was increasingly in the campus public eye as a rising-star shortstop. But Hunter had chosen her.

Amy was so excited about the upcoming Alpha Rho Parents’ Weekend that she hardly noticed when Hunter hadn’t called in several days. Alpha Rho annually planned its Parents’ Weekend for the end of the first week of April, when the dogwood trees lining the streets were in full pink-and-white bloom. Amy’s mother had to stay home with Amy’s brothers, but her father was flying in to spend the day with her and escort her to the Alpha Rho Tulip Dinner at an expensive restaurant near campus. Amy, who rarely had the opportunity to spend time alone with her father, was so geared up she was practically bouncing off the walls. She couldn’t remember the last time she had spent a day with him.

Friday morning, Amy’s father picked her up in a rented convertible to take her shopping near campus. In Saks Fifth Avenue, Amy’s father stopped short at a shoe display. “Those are excellent shoes!” he said, pointing to a pair of pastel mules with kitten heels. “If I were a girl, I’m sure I would want those shoes.” Amy thought the shoes were somewhat impractical, and a little too low-heeled for her taste, but they fit and were comfortable. Her father looked so pleased that he had found something to buy her that she graciously accepted them and pecked a thank-you kiss on his cheek.

When they walked into the restaurant lobby, Amy was dismayed to find that of the eighty-five Alpha Rho sisters attending the dinner, Amy and her father were only the third family to arrive—and the first two sisters were Fiona and Whitney. Amy and her father leaned awkwardly against a wall while Fiona and Whitney and their parents studiously ignored them. Every now and then, they eyed Amy’s father up and down, smirked, and returned to their conversation, folding into a circle that excluded Amy and her father. Amy, who was used to funny looks when people first met her dad, stood close to him and put her hand on his arm protectively. While most sorority girls’ fathers, like those attending tonight, wore jackets and ties or sweaters and khakis, Amy’s father, his hair in a ponytail, was dressed in his usual Hawaiian shirt, gold chains, white pants, and loafers without socks.

When the hostess led them to the private party room with two long tables, Fiona and Whitney and their parents sat at one end of one table, while Amy and her father made their way to the opposite end of the other. Eventually, other sisters arrived to fill the uncomfortable gap.

“Daddy, they’re my least favorite two in the house,” Amy whispered, offering her father a mint.

Her father smiled. “I could tell you didn’t like the first two right away, and you get along with everyone. So there must be something wrong with them.”

Amy and her father spent the dinner chatting with Traci and her parents. While the parents inquired about jobs and majors, Traci started talking about Formal. Amy and her father stiffened, deliberately not looking at each other until the topic had passed. She had already informed him that she hadn’t yet asked Hunter to Formal and that she would be Jake’s date for the Mu Zeta Nu Formal two weekends later. Ever since their autumn argument about her inability to keep a boyfriend, Amy and her father had avoided the topic of boys. Amy didn’t understand why her romantic life mattered so much to him in the first place.

That night, after her father dropped Amy off, her mother called. “It meant a lot to your daddy that you invited him to spend time with you tonight,” she said in a velvety voice that matched Amy’s. “Don’t tell him I told you this, but you just need to understand. Honey, the only reason he’s pushing for a boyfriend is because he hates to see you alone. When your sister died, it broke his big heart to see you walking through the world without a partner. He’s just afraid you’re so lonely you’re like the last pea at pea-time.” Touched, Amy resolved to try even harder to find—and keep—a boyfriend.

A FEW NIGHTS LATER, AMY AND HUNTER STOPPED AT Hunter’s
dorm on their way back from bar-hopping. Hunter introduced her to his roommate, who was thumbing through a textbook on the couch. The roommate chatted affably with Amy before turning to Hunter.

“Hey, Hunter, your girlfriend called again,” he said. Hunter’s head jerked up. “So when are you two getting married, anyway?” the roommate teased.

“What?” Amy said. She glanced at Hunter, who wouldn’t meet her eyes.

“Oh yeah, Hunter has fallen really hard for this girl,” the roommate said, evidently assuming that Amy was just a friend.

“Really,” said Amy, trying to mask the shock that pierced her drunken fog. “That’s news to me.” She looked again at Hunter, who couldn’t conceal his embarrassment. Amy left the dorm, already worrying about Formal. At least she had had the forethought to line up Jake as a backup Formal date in case a straight guy didn’t work out.

Back at her room, as soon as Amy took down her IM away message, Nathan, the Mu Zeta Nu brother who had date-raped her, IMed. “Hey, are you staying up for a while? You want to come over?” he wrote.

“No, I’m not coming over,” Amy typed back.

“Can I come to your place? I promise I’ll make it worth your while,” Nathan wrote.

“Try me.” As Amy typed back to him she wondered what on earth she was doing.

Five minutes later, she opened the door to the house and Nathan zoomed in, kissing her hard on the lips the second he was in the entry hall. He rushed her up the stairs and shut the door to her bedroom. Amy, still drunk, let him take off her clothes, still berating herself for letting him come over. She didn’t even like him.

When he was finished, satisfied where Amy wasn’t, she let him out of the house so that none of her sisters would see him. “It was a stupid mistake,” she told herself. “I’m an idiot.” When she woke up the next morning, the evening’s events suddenly hit her, and, disgusted, she buried her head in her pillow and cried.

The Gender Role

OF THE FOUR SISTERS I FOLLOWED, AMY WAS ALWAYS THE
most enthusiastic about the Greek experience. She loved the trimmings of sorority life—songs, rituals, bonding sessions, sorority-themed decorations—and she proudly wore her letters around campus. Unlike the other girls, she attended nearly every event the sorority sponsored throughout the year. For Amy, sorority sisterhood was an opportunity to try to re-create a bond she had lost when her biological sister passed away. She craved the support system that she believed Alpha Rho could provide. As she learned, however, no institutionalized sisterhood could come close to filling the void left by her loss. Sororities do not offer unconditional love. Nonetheless, Amy was grateful for the connection she said she had with her sisters. “There’s a common bond through all of us,” she said at the end of the year. “Even with the girls I don’t get along with, we still share something special. If they heard something really good or really bad about me, even Fiona and Whitney, they’d tell me congratulations or be comforting.” I asked her what she meant by the “something special” they shared. “We all joined the same organization and whether they’re my best friends or not, we all love Alpha Rho,” she replied. “That’s the building of a sisterhood.”

It made sense, then, that Amy participated in so many sorority activities: she thought that the more time she spent with the sisters, the stronger their bond would be. But of the four girls I followed, Amy was also left the most heartbroken. The confidence she might have gained from belonging to a sisterhood was not enough to outweigh rejection from the boys she believed she needed in order to keep up with her sisters.

Therein lies the contradiction of these all-girl groups. As much as sororities extol the value and virtue of a single-sex group, these sisterhoods are not necessarily designed to concentrate on sisters’ relationships with one another. The sisterhoods revolve around men. This was evident at State U, where semesters were divided between Crush Parties, Date Parties, and Formal, all of which required a date, and mixers—which existed essentially to find dates for those other events. This was also obvious at several other chapters, such as the sorority that held a lavish ceremony to celebrate the achievement of a sister who had acquired a steady boyfriend but gave only a bag of chips to the sister with the highest GPA. Lisa Handler, a professor at Temple University who studied sororities in the 1990s, told me that she found that “sisterhood is not as strong as brotherhood.” Sisters told her that “a brother would never give up a brother for a girl, but a sister would give up a sister for a guy. That’s a difference between sisterhood and friendship. A friend doesn’t sleep with your guy, but it was held up as a constant that in the sisterhood, women were going to stab your back. Sisterhood is not more powerful if boys can
pierce
it.”

But what if boys are part of it? In the last thirty years, several national and local coed fraternities have sprung up across the country, groups that model themselves after fraternities rather than sororities. In order to discover whether female members of these groups find sisterhood, I visited Zeta Delta Xi, a coed fraternity at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.

At Zete, Paul, the secretary, ushered me downstairs to a lounge where some undergrads and fraternity alumni—Zete alums return frequently, even years after graduation—were sitting on tables, chairs, and each other, girls on guys and girls on girls. These were friendly, unpretentious students, proud of their alternative status on campus and the way none of them, appearance- or personality-wise, was ever mistaken for a mainstream Greek.

Like all-male fraternities, Zetes have rituals, weekly meetings, social and service activities, and rush. “In the process to decide who gets a bid, unless someone doesn’t seem interested or really pissed us off, they’re considered,” said Faye, Paul’s girlfriend and a Zete brother—both male and female Zetes are called brothers. During Brown’s Spring Weekend in April, the Zetes host “Spag Fest,” an all-you-can-eat-and-drink party for members of the Brown community. The thirty Zetes stay up all night slicing bread, making garlic butter, and cooking more than a hundred pounds of dry spaghetti. The Zetes provide table service for the usual turnout of five hundred people.

Sometimes the girls in Zete have “girls’ nights”: female-only slumber parties to which they each bring a pint of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream. Although they don’t often break off from the rest of the brotherhood, the girls believe that Zete women have “something special,” Faye said. “When I’m with women in Zete, I feel comfortable and relaxed. We have an intense, unique bond in common, along with the same underlying characteristics that made us want to become Zetes.”

On a tour of the house, which is actually a wing of a dormitory building, the brothers pointed out the unisex bathrooms and the “damned” spots in the house. The damned spots were the items on which a brother had had sex (sex defined in Zete terms as “two or more people, one or more orgasms”). So far, the only items that were not damned, meaning nobody thought twice before sitting on them, were the pool table and a cooler. “Incest” is inevitable in a coed fraternity, many Zetes told me; in fact, several of them had experimented sexually with Zetes of the same gender. Faye, who wrote a paper on “fraternity girls” for a class project, said that sexual tolerance is a characteristic of many coed fraternities. When she interviewed female members of seven coed fraternities across the country, she found that many of the groups encouraged experimentation. The Zetes were the first fraternity at Brown to elect as president an openly gay man.

Intrafraternity relationships led to a rumor among Brown’s sororities that in order to be fully initiated into Zete, pledges had to sleep with every brother. The Zetes were hurt by the falsehood but also at the same time seemed to be a little bit proud—there had been half a dozen marriages within the fraternity in the past decade. And some of the activities in the house were games involving nudity or a college version of Spin the Bottle. “We do more after two a.m. than most people do in a day,” a Zete officer told me. “Our motto is ‘Have a good time all the time.’” The officer, a self-described “Zete manwhore” who looked like an exotic, better-looking version of
Sesame Street
’s Ernie, had worked his way through both genders of many of the brothers in Zete. For the entire night he wore an expression of constant, unbridled delight.

With the exception of 1998, the year when Zete females outnumbered the males, the fraternity’s ratio is usually two guys to one girl. This is evident in the Composites hanging on the walls, which blatantly differ from traditional sorority composites. There are few photographs of girls wearing family pearls and obedient smiles. Rather, the Zetes, prioritizing character over composure, wear props and strike poses that one imagines could be captioned the Thinker, Blues Brothers, or Pimp Daddy.

The Zetes originally were affiliated with the national male fraternity Zeta Psi, which organized a chapter at Brown in 1852. In 1982, the Zetes at Brown decided to accept female members. When the national office found out, it sent word that it refused to recognize the female Zetes and that national rules prohibited the women from becoming Zeta Psi officers. Instead, Nationals suggested that the chapter consider the female Zetes only as fraternity little sisters. In response, the Brown chapter rebelled, electing women as fraternity officers in 1986. When Nationals threatened to revoke the chapter’s charter if the women were not removed from office, the chapter voted unanimously to withdraw from the national organization because it refused to recognize all of the chapter members. Nationals promptly declared the chapter defunct and sent over movers, who took most of the house’s furniture and the old Composites.