The Sorority's Baby Dolls

I pledged because I wanted the connections. That is the lie I told myself in the application, and it was still the lie I was telling myself when Margaux opened the door to the house on Aldridge Street and looked at me the way you look at something you already own.

“You’re late, Della.”

I was four minutes early. My phone said so. But her voice did the thing voices are not supposed to do, reached past my ears and pressed somewhere low in my belly, and I heard myself say sorry before I had decided to be sorry. Twenty-eight years old. A master’s almost finished. I had argued down a tenured professor in front of a lecture hall and not blinked. Here I stood apologizing for time I had not wasted.

She stepped back to let me in. The house smelled like warm milk and clean cotton and something underneath that, powder maybe, the kind that coats the back of your throat.

“Shoes off. We don’t track the outside in here.”

The foyer was soft. That is the only word. The lamps were low and gold, the rugs thick enough to swallow my socks, and the quiet had weight to it, like the whole house was holding still and waiting to see what I would do. Two other girls sat on a long couch under a blanket. One had her thumb near her mouth and pulled it away when she saw me looking. Grown women. Older than me, one of them, with crow’s feet and a wedding band on a chain around her neck.

I should turn around, I thought. Not a dramatic thought. A small clean one, the kind that arrives folded and reasonable. There is still a car in the driveway and a road under the car. And underneath that thought, treacherous, came the other one, the one I did not want, which was that I had checked the lock on that car twice on the way in to make sure no one could make me leave.

“Come,” Margaux said.

I came.

She was maybe thirty-four. Tall in a way that made me aware of my own spine. She wore a cream sweater and her hair was pinned up and her face was kind, genuinely kind, which was the part that frightened me most, because cruelty I could have braced against. She put two fingers under my chin and tipped my face up to the light and turned it side to side like she was checking fruit.

“There she is,” she said, almost to herself. “Such a serious little thing. Look at this frown.”

“I’m not little,” I said.

It came out thin. It came out wrong. It came out like the protest is the first crack and we both knew it. Her thumb moved across my bottom lip, slow, and my mouth went stupid and soft under it, and heat dropped through me so fast and so low that I clenched against it standing up, which only made it worse, which only made me feel it more.

No. Not here. Not from this.

But my body had already answered before my pride could file its objection. That is the humiliation I keep coming back to. It did not ask me. It just opened its hand.

“We’ll see,” Margaux said, and let go of my chin, and the loss of her hand was its own small grief.

She led me down a hall to a room I was not ready for. White and rose. A wide low bed with rails on the sides, padded, the kind a careful person installs so a careful person cannot fall. A changing table along one wall, long enough for a woman, with a fresh folded stack of thick white cloth and a tin beside it. A wardrobe open to show rows of soft things, none of them mine. A wing chair by the window where a wand vibrator lay on the cushion like someone had set it down mid-thought and would be right back.

My stomach turned over. Get out, the reasonable voice said again, fainter now, a passenger tapping the glass. And the other thing in me, the thing I had driven across town to feed and would not name even to myself, leaned toward the tin on the table like a plant toward a window.

“Pledges keep their pride in the foyer,” Margaux said. She was already taking the pins out of her hair, businesslike, sleeves pushing to her elbows. “It’s heavy. You’ve been carrying it so long you think it’s part of you. It isn’t. Mommy will hold it for a while. You just have to let go of it.”

“I didn’t agree to,” I started.

“You signed,” she said.

I had. Three pages. I had read maybe one and a half because she had been watching me read and her watching had scrambled the words. I signed to make the watching stop and the signing had only made it worse, had made it specific.

“On the table,” she said.

“Margaux.”

“Mommy.”

The word sat in the air. She did not repeat it. She did not need to. She just looked at me with that terrible patience, a woman who has never once in her life been the one to look away first, and the silence stretched until I could hear the other girls breathing in the next room, until I could hear my own pulse in my ears, until the not-saying-it became so much heavier than the saying-it that the word fell out of me like something I dropped.

“Mommy.”

Shame went through me white-hot and my eyes stung and at the exact same moment my thighs were slick, wet, embarrassingly wet, and the two things were not separate, that is what no one tells you, the burning shame was the wet, they came up the same root. I hated her. I wanted her to do everything. Both. At once. All the way down.

“Good girl,” she said.

I have a degree in not being moved by approval. Two little words and my knees did something disloyal.

She patted the changing table. I climbed onto it. I climbed onto it myself, that is the part I will replay for weeks, she did not lift me, did not force me, I put my own hands on the padded edge and got up and lay back on the paper like I had done it a hundred times, and the back of my head touched the table and the fight went out of my shoulders in one long shudder.

“There,” Margaux murmured. “See how your body knows? Your body’s smarter than you. It stopped arguing ages ago. It’s just been waiting for permission.”

She unbuttoned my jeans. I let her. My hips even lifted to help, a small obscene cooperation I did not order, and she peeled the denim down my legs and dropped it somewhere I would not be getting it back from soon. The air in the room found the wet on my underwear and I felt how cold I was there and how much I was not cold anywhere else.

“Oh,” she said, looking. Not surprised. Pleased. “Look at you. Look how much my serious girl wants to be taken care of.”

“Don’t,” I said, and it had no spine in it, it was a sound a wanting thing makes when it is afraid of getting what it wants.

She hooked her fingers in the waistband and drew my underwear off slow, and the wet fabric clung and then let go of me, and I lay there bare from the waist down on a stranger’s table with my knees pressed together out of a modesty that meant nothing now, and she stood over me calm as morning and put one warm hand flat on my lower belly.

The heat of her palm went straight through to the ache. I made a noise. I bit it back too late.

“None of that,” she said, gentle, pressing just slightly, just enough that my hips chased the pressure before I could stop them. “Mommy decides when. You don’t get to rush. We have all the rules to learn first, and the first rule is you stay still and let me look at what’s mine.”

What’s mine. The words landed in the wet part of me and pulled.

She moved her hand lower, two fingers parting me without hurry, looking down at me with that warm clinical attention, like she was reading something written there, and I was open and slick and clenching around nothing and ashamed of the clenching and the shame only wound me tighter.

“Soaked,” she said softly. “All this fuss out front and you’re soaked. You’ll tell me, won’t you. You’ll learn to ask out loud for what you want, in plain words, like a good girl. We’re going to practice that until you can’t lie to me anymore.”

“I’m not going to,” I whispered, and my hips rolled up into her hand on the word not, called me a liar before the sentence even finished.

She smiled. She reached over to the wing chair without looking, knowing exactly where she had left it, and her fingers closed around the handle of the wand, and the room got very quiet, and I heard the small click of the dial, and the low hum filled the rose-and-white room like the house itself had started to breathe, and Margaux looked down at me spread open on her table and said,

“Now we begin.”