Chapter 4
Refreshment Rites
"Maxine du Pre." A broadly boned, freckled farm girl gave Nora a forthright handshake.
"I'm Gerry Vestry." Silver spectacles sporting the Sigma initials danced on the heart-shaped face. The blonde reminded Nora somehow of Theresa Russell, but chummier.
She showed them both into her compact apartment. A silver tray held china cups and a fragrant pot on the flat-topped, iron-bound antique chest she used as a coffee table. The two sorority girls deposited themselves on her sofabed, now in its couch mode.
"Coffee? I have water on the boil for tea. Darjeeling, Oolong, or herbal guck? I have cream, honey, or fructose."
"Coffee's fine, thanks." Maxine appraised the snug r studio. "That's really unusual. Is it stone?"
"Incised marble, with an acid wash to give that chalky background inside the design. I bought it from Noori Gallery when Rasul had a show of Sufi art from Dervish International."
The stone panel hung on her wall, imbedded in a glossy black plastic backing. The raised beige marble traced delicate geometric swirls, leaves, and tendrils.
"Miss Vestry?" Nora held up the pot after pouring Maxine's cup.
"I'd really enjoy some Darjeeling. It's frigid out there, compared to Orinda. Straight is fine."
The woman eased into her kitchen and returned with a porcelain tea pot steaming with fresh brewing smells. She set it by Gerry Vestry's cup.
Pouring herself some coffee, she occupied a slant-backed Morris chair upholstered in a quiet green paisley. She leaned forward attentively.
"You told me to keep this confidential."
"We're violating the national Panhellenic Conference's rules by talking to you, as you know from the St. Cloud Greek handbook," Maxine began.
"At your age you should know better than to consort with sneaks like us," the blonde laughed pleasantly.
"I'm afraid I do." Nora sipped her Kona blend. "You're worried that I'm too old for a sorority."
Maxine shook her head emphatically. "Wrong."
"We're petrified that we're too young for you," the Sigma vice-president explained. "It's not the same."
Nora had to agree. "That occurred to me when I wrestled over the whole idea."
"Also, you've suicided for Sigma House. To put no other choice on your final pref card usually means a rushee's so arrogant she figures she can't lose-"
"Or, she's so particular she'd only be good in a snob house, or one of the clone chapters where everyone carries the same couturier label, down to their ice cream cones."
Nora nodded. "Vanilla by Gucci."
"Exactly." Gerry Vestry surveyed the apartment. "You're not visibly that type. That Rutgers set of the Lincoln papers looks like it's been read."
"I got it used for thirty-five dollars from Writers Book Store." She lifted a shoulder. "Horace owned it. He shed a lot of books when he retired."
"But it's not Jackie Collins-or Shirley MacLaine."
"It's a hideous violation of rush rules." Maxine's voice dropped. "We had to know, however. Why a sorority at all-and why Sigma?"
Nora felt the moment of truth gallop, snorting, upon them. She inhaled calmly. "Outside convent walls, a sorority is the only feminist collective ..."
"Those goddamn girls whipped my ass!" Delinda stood on the platform at the Bay Area Rapid Transit station in Walnut Creek. She'd stood all the way.
Tears crawled from her eyelids and ran along her cheekbones as Ken Gormish touched her arm softly. His sandy eyebrows crinkled in concern. She crushed against him, arms like a vise around his broad chest.
"Those g-g-goddamn girls-" He massaged her teak-rigid back muscles. She cried against him, ignoring everyone else around. His hand dropped down to touch her skirt's seat. She twisted.
"Those goddamn girls! They whipped my ass! Whipped my ass!"
He closed both arms about her and rocked gently back and forth. "Not the first time it happened, Delinda. Just make it the last time."
She pushed him away, salt-eyed and angry. "Those goddamn girls whipped my ass!"
His head bobbed slowly. "My mother used to do that, with a narrow, hardwood lathe. 'Just make it the last time,' she'd say."
"Those-" Her voice cracked in a lost, frightened mewling. "Th-those god-d-damn girls ..."
She grabbed at her purse for a handful of tissue. A couple of minutes passed. When she'd finished, she glared up at his face, a few inches above hers.
"They whipped my ass-my ass."
"You know the best thing for that?" He enfolded her in his arms. She felt comfort, solidity in him. "The very, very best prescription is a good, thorough orgasm. A teeth-grinding come you can feel down to your pink-painted toe nails."
He kept one arm protectively around her as he led her out toward the street. She walked stiffly, the ache jolting up from her bruised leg and rump muscles.
"Those goddamn girls ..." She blotted at her nose with the tissue wad. "... whipped my ass ..."
She felt light and helpless. His arm supported her, guarded her, directed her. She dropped her head against-his raised shoulder.
". . . whipped my ass . . ."
Cold water trickled in the shower, coating her backside with a chill drizzle.
Delinda's mouth curved down in a hot, tight bow. She sucked the cool, damp air as Ken kissed her breasts. His fingers wandered lovingly over her thigh fronts and curly haired loins. He crouched on bent legs, lips and tongue roaming like cleansing fire over her taut love gourds, teasing her straining nipples.
Her forehead throbbed, furrowed tightly as she gasped and moaned, eyes shut. Bright lights flashed behind her lids.
"Uhhhnnnhhh . . .uhhhnnnhhh . . . uhhhnnnhhh . . ."
She stood spread-legged, an oread bathing her nymphine tail in her mountain's bubbling waterfall while a satyr tongue-rasped her tits. Cold water whirled around her feet before gurgling away down moss-slick granite. Fiery lips roamed her mountain-proud breasts. Fingers worshipped at her demi-divine flesh, her portal of Aphrodite slick with the goddess's wine.
"More . . ." she murmured. "Do more."
"You want jumping jacks?" A hand reached behind, touching her chilled, aching rear. "Shall I fondle your fan?"
Her lids peeled up. She stared beyond his wet hair, at the blind serpent in the Eden, the fat worm rising between his spread, bent legs.
"That gets you off, doesn't it?" Electric ripples from his kisses ran into her scalp, into her spine, into her cunt. She winced as his fingertips glided into her cleft.
"Don't take this so seriously, Dee. You know I dig bottom."
He parted the sore buttocks, the shower-numbed skin a thin veneer over seething coals of deep, prickling pain. One hand played with her love dart. The other made whorls against her anus. Lips suckled at her.
An energy surged and discharged, violently.
"UHHHNNNHHH . . . UHHHNNNHHH ..."
She shuddered in a fit. Cold water crested her shoulders, attacking her breasts with high-voltage stabs. She shrieked, her vaginal muscles in spasm.
Her upper lip ground down on her canines till she tasted hot, thick salty nectar. Vulva and anus pulsed wildly. Her fingers and throbbing buttocks knotted as she rode out the ecstatic seizure.
"Uhhhnnnhhh . . . uhhhnnnhhh . . . uhhhnnnhhh ..."
She gasped for oxygen. So good, so blindingly good that she forgot who she was, what she was. A current pulsed through her-pain, rapture, warmth all mingled in a tidal, flowing release.
"You all right?" Cold hands touched her blazing, radiant face.
She whimpered something. Her eyes began to clear, focusing on his hair, matted over his forehead. A raised finger near her chin had a ruby spot that dissolved and vanished as shower drops battered it.
"Don't forget me, now."
He rose up, legs straight in front of her. The impatient male meatus stretched, the crown mottled as a Chinese tea egg-She fingered it listlessly. "Condom?"
"For a hand job?" she murmured, the chill damp getting down into her lungs. She averted her head and sneezed.
"Hand job? Oh no, oh, my heavens, not with all this wet, wonderful natural transplanted Indiana beauty to romp in." He reached under her battered hams, hoisting her with a grip just back of each knee.
She squealed, throwing her arms around him for support. Her hands made scuffing noises along his wet back. He jiggled her, the blunt prick poking at her thatched belly.
"Let me-here, just a min-ute." One arm over his shoulder, she used a hand to guide his blind thing into position. Her legs wrapped around his hips as he eased her down, her well-juiced vagina taking the impalement smoothly.
Soothing water misted her corrugated bottom as his strong hands buttressed her behind her knees. She wiggled her pelvis tentatively, then in a steady undulation.
He kissed her stinging lip, her cheeks, her wet and dripping ears. She got into the simple rhythm. Her lust rekindled, and the slow driving throb in her whipped hinds added fuel.
Her face felt his mouth. Her panged mind saw petite, dimple-bottomed Donna Nobis. Her sob sister. Her ex-sob sister. Pliant, round-duffed Donna. That paddle had felt soooo fine whacking against that pert, bare seat.
Hands on knees, Donna, panties down and tail to the sunset. Oh, see the sunset grow in your rosy cheeks, swat after swat. That had been wonderful, worth the battering today. Sure, thoroughly worth every lick and stab of exotic pain.
She rocked against his cock, legs crushing and holding him to her. He grunted in regular satisfaction. She wanted his flesh, his warm, living body. Her hunger, her aching muscles . . . Donna's scarlet buttocks, clenched tightly and shivering . . . her own voluptuously nude rump receiving the girl's kisses . . . whipped rounds yearning for relief ... a clutching cunt-tunnel trying to absorb her man, to stuff him up into her belly, her soul, her brain- She fucked him shrilly, yipping and crying as he laughed and aided her rockings. The cold water danced down her sweating back, tingling her ribs as they rose and fell at her wanton vixen yelps.
He snorted, eyes stupid with delight as he spurted inside her. She rotated her belly against him. Her sex tunnel grasped greedily for its own come.
She got it-incandescent sheets, pure sensation slamming through her-her body contracted into a white-hot star, seething endlessly in nuclear discharge, joy and the anguish of protracted ecstasy.
Her nails dug into his flesh and held him, held him, held him till he finally, gently lowered her to her feet in the chill drizzling stream.
"That used a hell of a lot of water in this drought." He shut off the shower. "I'm glad this building is all on one meter. I wouldn't be able to flush for a month, to meet the rationing quota, otherwise."
His lips brushed her numb, dumb mouth. "It was worth it for me, Dee."
The hormones ebbed in her veins. A long, gentle march toward normalcy began to quiet her body.
"Don't call me Dee," she whispered.
"Sure thing. Towel?" He stepped onto the bathmat.
She coughed, the damp air deep inside her. "You still got that rum?"
"120-proof Cruzan Clipper coming up," he dried himself briskly. "From the Virgin Islands to your lovely lips, without delay."
He padded from his bathroom into the rest of his apartment. Delinda stared at her angular face in the medicine cabinet mirror. Her lower lip had puffed up. Hair hung like seaweed around her skull.
She felt the sex fever abate slowly. Virgin Islands rum . . . she needed to get warm again.
"I can't walk." She felt the muscles in her behind tighten and lock. Her legs stumbled. She wrapped herself in a towel and rubbed.
The pain flared in her punished hide.
"I can barely move," she told him when he stepped through the door, still naked, his stocky chest water beaded.
He put a tall glass in her hand. "Cruzan Clipper can make the dead get up and fuck."
The first long sip cleared the phlegm from her throat. A fiery, buttery aftertaste permeated her mouth. She inhaled the fumes and drank more.
His mouth flirted with a smile as he studied her heavily marked netherglobes. "Dinner off the side-board for my bad girl."
"Not funny, Ken." She stood and felt the rum percolate through her while he used a second towel to dry her straggling hair.
"I'll call out. This gourmet place delivers. Chicken Kiev, spinach with nutmeg, spaetzle, Chocolate Decadence with fresh raspberry puree."
He ruffled her hair and kissed her Virgin Islands-flavored lips.
"... so I'm about to be out of a job. It's my own choice, since I won't lie and keep people in the field in e conditions and do some really illegal things my iployer wants." The sharp-nosed middle-aged woman glanced around at the other ten people sitting cross-legged on the living room floor. She inhaled, but didn't speak for another two minutes.
"We're so . . . defined by our jobs and our roles that to be without one is almost to be nothing. It's a funny time for me."
They all sat silently for a while. Then the Reverend Caledonia Roundsong smiled around the group. "Thank you all for sharing your thoughts."
She sat in front of a Maxfield Parish poster. The Errant Pan piped his lonely syrinx on a mountain crag above the broad, Earth-motherly minister. Directly behind her, rising tendrils of incense dissipated from a candle set in a holder shaped to resemble a startled troll.
"Zara has volunteered to host us here again next week. For that meeting, I'd like you to read the Krishnamurti quotes on that Xerox I gave you."
She held up a metallic grey trade paperback. "I'm glad Shambala reissued this book, Talks with American Students. It comes from the time of the keenest student upheavals and re-evaluations since the 1930's.
"By the late Sixties, I already had a child entering school. I was in my late twenties, with my life getting together. I saw the whole consciousness revolution from a different, more secure perspective."
She thumbed to page thirty-two. "Be prepared to share those personal experiences of yours which relate to Jshna-ji's statement 'to live implies to live with "what is" bring about a radical change in what is. And that is not ssible if you have a principle, a goal, an image of perfection.' " She tapped a pile of photocopied material. "Everyone has a quote sheet? Good. Judy, could you read the second selection for us?"
Judy Latimer ducked her head over the Xeroxed page of typescript. "Uh, 'To find out what you are then you have to die to the past and to the future. Then you will find out for yourself what it is, in that region where thought doesn't pervade, in that state which is something totally new instant.' " The subdued light made her face insubstantial under jer cascading hair.
"Thank you. Thais, you wrote us a prayer to end the evening." Caledonia caught one group member's eye.
The eleven young and middle-yeared women joined hands around the circle.
"Oh, Lady Most Sacred, do not show us your way. Any path undertaken as an obligation or through routine deprives the journey of meaning.
"Rather, sharpen our wills so that we may test and struggle and carve for ourselves the path that traces out unique, individual contributions to the infinite design of our Universe.
"May we be co-creators with you, co-inheritors of the sacredness you so brightly mirror."
As the thin woman in red velvet fell silent, the others let their hands drop.
"Our remaining duty for the evening," Caledonia concluded, "involves some poppyseed cake and brownies."
The hostess jumped up, her grey-streaked hair bobbing. "Thanks for a great group meeting, Cal. The plates are there. I'll get some cranapple juice from the fridge and some plastic cups."
She clicked on the ceiling light fixture as she left her living room. The other circle members rose gradually.
Judy Latimer crept to a worn, overstuffed brown and green couch. She sat, her auburn and gold hair making her features pale as milk.
"How did you like your first group?" Caledonia sat down beside her. The minister's big, matronly body nestled into the wide, friendly pillows on the couch. One thick braid fell over her dark Hindu medallion.
"Dr. Roundsong ... I mean, Reverend Roundsong . . . uh . . ." The girl's eyes moved everywhere but to the woman's face.
"Both are proper, dear, but call me Caledonia."
She took the limp hand. Confusion, anxiety, and sharp indecision radiated from Judy's flesh. The minister held the palm warmly between both of hers, trying to pour some confidence back along the circuit between them.
The girl focused her eyes around the woman's knees, where the light emerald ecclesiastical robes billowed.
"I went to that-you and Professor Porter and that lacchus Crusade at St. Cloud had that . . . that ..."
"We thought of it as an interfaith event, between my Church of Spiritual Liberation people and the Campus Crusade for lacchus."
"Yeah." Judy bit her lip. "All that naked dancing and whipping that guy with switches and . . . and him running around with that dong in his hands ..."
"Cake!" An elfin platinum blonde shoved a paper plate at each of them. "He didn't catch me, either," she reminded Judy in a diaphragm-strong soprano.
"Thanks. What he carried was a phallic substitute, dear. In technical parleyance, a solar-phallic wand, emblematic of male life force."
Caledonia still had one palm on Judy's hand. She caught the fierce image from the girl's mind of the bearded boy squirting his milk-charged dildo at the prancing pixy who had just forced poppyseed cake on them.
"We ... we don't do stuff like that in my church." Judy barely breathed. "There's been a lot of stuff about those TV guys and the Pentacostal crowd, but . . . we're just Lutherans. I mean, Dr. Scott isn't like that . . . he's so-so responsible."
She pulled her hand loose and fiddled with the plastic fork on the cake plate. "He doesn't want us to call him 'pastor' since he says he's not a sheep-herder, and he doesn't like 'reverend' since he tells us only God should be reverenced."
"Your parents must be very responsible people, too, I'd imagine." Caledonia ate some cake, to encourage Judy to relax.
"Yeah, completely. Grammy-she's so level-headed that she thinks Catholics shouldn't vote." The girl finally inhaled deeply. "It's not constitutional."
"I'll bet you learned a lot about self-respect from them. Did they ever learn anything from you?"
"Ma'am-Dr. Round-" Her fork dented the poppyseed slice, making some crumbs. "I mean, Caledonia?"
"Did they ever listen to your desires and hopes and hear your dreams and understand your abilities so that they could enjoy the kind of person you are?" The minister put all she had behind a motherly, open look. "Or did they just build a nice white box around your life and tell you to live in it?"
Judy looked her straight in the eye with an uneasy wonderment. "That's-it's the same image I have everytime Dr. Scott reads that Gospel with the whitened sepulchres in it." Caledonia ate more cake, giving the girl time to absorb the notion. "There's a psychological syndrome called the Madonna-Whore Complex. A lot of guys grow up thinking of their mother as pristine and untouchable, just like those alabaster statues in the Catholic churches your grandmother probably wouldn't care for."
The girl nodded vigorously. "Yeah, so they see women and want to kiss them and go to bed, but they think anyone they can neck with or sleep with is some kind of slut. Dr. Brothers talked about that on TV."
"Biology and our society tell them to rumple up some dresses when the sap starts to run at puberty. Their mental censors short-circuit that impulse." The minister touched a thick bronze pendant she wore, depicting Mayadevi flourishing a lotus and dancing, heavy-breasted and slender-waisted.
"The same thing happens in religion. A lot of women come to goddess worship thinking it's a creed they can put on, like a robe, so they can fuck, fuck, fuck without Christian patriarchal guilt mudstaining their plaster statue images of themselves."
Judy's face pinched and turned away.
"Was that a little too rapid? Or did the 'fuck, fuck, fuck' disturb you? That's how good Lutheran wives produced nice, scrubbed Lutheran families."
"I guess so." The girl's lips trembled toward a smile. "Mom and dad don't call it that."
Caledonia tapped her pendant's wise Hindu face.
"Mayadevi is goddess of the illusion of the world in India. I wear her to these faith-sharing groups to emphasize that we're trying to strip away the nice whitened sepulchres, and kick the plaster statues in their pristine asses."
This time they shared a full grin, nervous on Judy's side. "I guess Grammy would approve, if they're Catholic statues."
"I don't discriminate. Somewhere behind the safe white box, maybe meeping timidly in a hole in the ground, or maybe striding like a giantess through the trees, too tall to be seen without some perspective-somewhere each of us has a real self."
Caledonia gestured around the room. "These home groups aim at releasing that truer, more essential person. On the other hand, my classes at St. Cloud get into ideas- discussion, writing, debate, and try for the whole thesis-antithesis-synthesis Hegel schtick."
The girl looked suddenly shy. "I'd-I thought about registering for one, since I still have to fill a Humanities class for Fall, and Reg is next week."
"Give it a try. If you don't like this very personal, self-oriented setting, a classroom can be a more intellectually fulfilling experience. Or do both."
Judy gave a kitten-quick nod.
"Caledonia." The woman in red velvet approached, her arm around their blushing hostess. "I just asked Zara to marry me. She accepted. Would you officiate, once we've made some firm plans?"