It was the mid-sixties in middle Tennessee, but it was more like the mid-fifties. Perhaps the sixties were happening in America, but they had not yet come to Murfreesboro. The wild and crazy sixties were primarily happening in the larger universities and on both coasts but not here. On other college campuses, there was an awareness of war, of racism, of poverty, of politics, of life beyond college. Here in this small place at this small time, conformity was still the name of the game.
This April Saturday morning had begun early with Kathryn standing in front of a panel of white porcelain sinks brushing her teeth in the large public bathroom. The intercom cracked the silence of the morning, announcing that she had a phone call. Though early morning ones were unusual, the girls loved to get phone calls. The four black wall phones that were in Miss Mary Hall were located downstairs in a alcove on the main floor. Kathryn hurriedly ran down three flights of stairs to the bottom floor, thinking that perhaps her boyfriend Tommy was up early and calling her.
To her surprise, when she picked up the phone, she heard a stranger's voice. Identifying herself as the Dean of Women, Mrs. Elizabeth Frances asked if she were speaking to Laura Kathryn O'Drawdy. To which Kathryn responded that she was. The dean then reminded Kathryn that this was the morning that the sorority bids were going out. Mrs. Frances told her, "None of the three sororities that you have listed have given you a bid to join them." But she quickly continued by saying that the two other sororities on campus had chosen her, "Do you want to join another sorority, other than those you have listed?" Having set her heart on one sorority in particular, which most of her friends also wanted to join, Kathryn too quickly declined and mumbled her thank you and goodbye. Slowly replacing the phone into its cradle, her mind raced, "What do I do now?"
Heading back up the stairs, Kathryn walked slowly, in no hurry to get back to her dorm room, where the brutal light of day was now coursing through its windows. Where else could she go? To whom could she turn? As she trudged down the sterile long hall way with its bare, pale green walls to her dorm room at its end, she was in a painful shock. She flashed back to all of those futile hours in the last few weeks of dressing up for and going to the rush parties, trying always to present her best self, even when she knew no one in the sororities. She had tried to mimic their curly, teased hairstyles and their Villager dresses. She had thought that some of the girls would see her--really see her--and like her.
Humiliation and shame followed her as Kathryn entered into her room. Before she even had time to tell her roommate and best friend Linda about the phone call, three pretty, petite, and perky sorority sisters, dressed all alike in blue sheathes emblazoned with the white Greek letters Alpha Delta Pi, bounced in and gleefully grabbed Linda, telling her that she had been selected to pledge ADPi. Congratulations were pronounced all around as she accepted their bid and was pulled out into the hallway. Linda only had time to throw Kathryn a questioning glance before she was swept away.
She so wanted Linda to tell them, "No! I can't go if you haven't also chosen my best friend Katie, too!" But of course, no such words were forthcoming and out the blue girls danced, giggling and pulling Linda with them as they flew on up the hall to their next room on their list.
Left all alone, Kathryn wanted the earth to open up and swallow her whole, but the little room in which she found herself had no warmth nor softness to enfold her. It was a double dorm room with all the trapping of a 1950s dorm room, matching thin, nubby orange plaid bedspreads on identical twin beds on either side of the room. The only chairs were hard backs, pushed under the built-in dorm desks that each held a blue manual typewriter and college textbooks neatly stacked to the side with yellow pencils and blue Bic pens in a cup on the corner.
Kathryn was just beginning to fully feel the double rejection, which stung like hot nails piercing her chest. Knowing no where else to turn, she backed herself into the closet and heard the soft clanking of the metal hangers. As she sat on her neatly paired shoes on the closet's floor and felt the flutter of clothes on her face, it was finally stone silent. It was then, and only then, that Kathryn let herself weep like the little girl that she knew herself to be, despite all appearances to the contrary.
Emerging from her cave an hour or so later, she literally had no where to turn. She went to the bathroom and splashed cold water on her swollen eyes. She knew that Tommy would not understand her need to have sorority "sisters." She was in no hurry to call her mother. Having gone home at Christmas, she had seen immediately that her mother's plate was already too full with trying to care for her bi-polar husband, her depressed older sister, and her toddler granddaughter. Kathryn couldn't turn to any of her non-sorority friends because in her family, she had learned a few family rules to be kept: not to talk, to keep the secrets. Don't let anyone know about your pain and disappointment. Put on a false face for the world to see.
As Kathryn left her dorm room to walk about campus on this luscious and devastating spring morning, her mind drifted back to this past Christmas at her home in Delaware . . .
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