DEBBI JACKSON raised her voice to be heard over the din asking me in girlish complicity did I just love living in the Kappa house, what a great weird old house it is, fond memories of "saying good night" for hours in the living room, how'd I like being a Kappa active, and my smile deepened, I raised my voice to say Yes, I liked my life here very much, I was very happy here except, and DEBBI JACKSON leaned forward inquiring Yes, what? and I heard myself murmur that I wasn't certain that I belonged in Kappa Gamma Pi, I thought it was "maybe morally wrong of me." DEBBI JACKSON and a sister alum smiled at me perplexed asking Why? Whyever? and I stammered, "Because I'm- I have-I think I have-Jewish blood."

There. It was said.

Yet DEBBI JACKSON and JOAN "FAX" FAXLANGER '52 continued to smile, somewhat perplexed. There were but two modes of social-Kappa expression: the happy smile and the look of vague perplexity. DEBBI, or JOAN, asked me what I'd said, can hardly hear yourself think in here, and I said, louder than I meant, "-Jew, I think. I am Jewish. I think." Now a cascade of words tumbled from my lips like soapy-dirty water from a broken, overflowing clothes washer: I explained to these older, adult Kappa sisters that I had reason to believe that I might be one-quarter Jewish; I had reason to believe that my father's parents were German Jews who'd craftily changed their name to disguise their background, and to throw off their pursuers, and-"Kappa Gamma Pi blackballs Jews on the first ballot, don't we?" DEBBI JACKSON and JOAN "FAX" FAXLANGER stared at me as if I'd shouted obscenities into their attractive powdered faces; blushing, they shook their heads in a tactful pretense of deafness, refused to meet my eye or even each other's eyes in their haste to escape; teetering in their pointy-toed high-heeled pumps they bore cups, plates, linen napkins to another part of the crowded room as if indeed they hadn't heard my outburst, and the bizarre exchange had never occurred. A vigilant senior fiercely waved me back to my duty as a tea-pourer at the head table.

There, I was badly needed. Even with my clumsy skills, pasteboard face and distraught manner. Even perspiring beneath the arms of the "good" wool dress not my own, not adorned with the Kappa pin lot new guests were arriving, a flood of more Kappa alums, more faces, smiles, name tags. As the reception progressed, alums were becoming conspicuously stouter, ruddier-faced, with jutting breasts and watermelon hips, piercing brass voices and blinding jewelry; some wore fashionable suits adorned with fur trim like living, captive creatures. The din of their voices and laughter rose to a fever pitch, yet continued to rise. I saw Mrs. Thayer covertly observing me from her position of honor at the table, as she was observing all the younger Kappas; she must have been deceived by my neon smile, and my mimicry of "proper behavior"; I had programmed myself like a windup doll, with only a single (unheard, unreported) outburst to my discredit; it was a principle of the Spinozan universe that all was predetermined; predestined; no swerve of chance or free will was possible, or perhaps desirable. If I kept my thoughts in order, like a beekeeper delivering bees to the hive, I could perform brilliantly, I would not be stung to death. And yet: the tick-tick-ticking somewhere inside my ear canals. My shaky hands, with not-entirely-clean fingernails. The rashes on my knuckles some whispered was a symptom of leprosy. The bedraggled gray muffler dangling about my neck like a useless noose; why? I refused to consider that morning's philosophy class, I cringed in shame wondering at my behavior; for it had not been "proper" behavior; it had not been "sane"-"sanitary"-behavior. Through my lifetime, I would recall the look of alarm, pity, dismay in the professor's eyes; his realization that he had a mad girl in his tutelage, which was the last thing he wanted; he was a professor of words, and not human beings; he'd collided with his own briefcase in his haste to leave the lecture hall. And yet I adored him. Or I wished to believe I adored him. Frontally, the man had a stolid, noble head given further dignity by a neatly trimmed pewter beard; in profile, the man hat! a chin that melted away, and the beard was a pasted-on wisp you could sec through.

Were Plato's eternal forms transparent, or solid? No commentator in more than twenty centuries had taken up this query.

I was distracted by the happy din of female voices. I saw with alarm that the crystal chandeliers, sheer Venetian glass, quivered. My arms ached (pleasantly, normally) as I continued to lift the surprisingly heavy teapot to pour, pour, pour. To pour Earl Grey tea (Mrs. Thayer's choice) without dribbling it, as Mrs. Thayer had sternly cautioned, onto the "heirloom" Irish linen tablecloth so rarely unfurled from storage in the mahogany sideboard. I was having to introduce alums to actives; actives to alums; no one especially sought me out for this honor, which happened more or less by chance; yet, like an understudy in a play, called upon suddenly to perform, I found myself performing, to a degree. The proper motions of the hands, the proper words to be uttered in the proper tone, "polite but not obsequious, gurls!" Mrs. Thayer had tirelessly rehearsed us in the "nearly forgotten art" of introductions. Never did one say carelessly, like most Americans, I'd like you to meet ____________________; instead one said May I present ____________________? Always, a gentleman is presented to a lady; a younger woman to an elder woman. (The very same principle that determined who preceded whom through a doorway.) Each of us murmured numerous times May I present ____________________? and May I present ____________________? Of course, Mrs. Thayer's clipped Brit accent was beyond our powers of emulation, like the flash of her wonderful blue eyes. We spoke only American English, a degraded, bastardized dialect; many of us had flat, nasal, upstate New York accents, hideous to Mrs. Thayer's refined ear as fingernails scraped on a blackboard. The poor woman had winced innumerable times hearing my speech and making everyone (including me) laugh, by saying she supposed we gurls didn't speak so barbarically on purpose.

This past week there'd been sly hints in Mrs. Thayer's hearing that one day "soon" the chapter would vote her an "honorary Kappa." This great honor visited upon a few, but only a few, of sorority housemothers on campus: the girls in their charge would thank them for being wonderful by voting them "honorary members" of their respective sororities. Of course, this was not going to happen at Kappa Gamma Pi. The rumor had been cruelly started by Kat and her friends to raise Mrs. Thayer's expectations and to inflate her sense of herself.

That Brit-bitch. She's gonna get what she deserves.

Unsuspecting how every undergraduate Kappa, with the helpless exception of one, despised her, Mrs. Thayer had dressed splendidly for the reception in her electric-blue nubby woollen suit that fitted her tight as sausage casing at the hips, the most desperately frilly of her silk blouses, a pearl stickpin, pearl earrings and that brave enamelled smile. Did the woman sense that, despite the rumor that she would "soon" be an honorary Kappa, time was rapidly running out for her? Tick-tick-ticking like the mantel clock? Blindly I smiled in her direction and saw her eyes go opaque in a pretense of unseeing. In a corner of the room, bearing replenished plates of pastries, DEBBI JACKSON and JOAN "FAX" FAXLANGER and an older, plumper alum sister regarded me broodingly. This was not a Kappa expression: brooding. I saw their sticky lips move, I saw their offended eyes.

Jew? Who?

Jew? Here?

Where?

Her?

I shivered, sweating under my arms. An aphorism of Nietzsche's I had thought exaggerated and melodramatic now coursed through my brain like an electric current. Not their love, but the impotence of their love keeps today's Christians from-burning us at the stake. Yet I continued undaunted to pour Earl Grey tea skillfully into an infinity of delicate china cups. If my philosophy professor, doubting my sanity, could see me now! Had the glacier-tormented New York State landscape shifted, and the entire female half of the population begun to funnel through this room, in an unbroken line past this table, I would have continued to pour, pour. I had decided that life is probably mostly a matter of memorized words in sequence; words, gestures, smiles and handshakes, in a certain sequence; life is not as the great philosophers taught in their loneliness, not a matter of essences pared back to theorems, propositions, syllogisms and conclusions, but instead a matter of mouthing the correct word-formulae in the correct setting. Maybe it wasn't so serious, after all: life? Maybe it wasn't worth dying for.