Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady_A Memoir Read online

  Herb had met with this attitude from the start and then went on to acquire a live-in mother-in-law who exemplified it. Granny could have turned the Duke of Wellington into a beachcomber, so Herb’s subversion was a foregone conclusion. All those years of “my son-in-law the Englishman” had done their burrowing work. Somewhere along the line he had thrown in the towel and adopted as his motto “Britannicus, ergo sum.”

  Now that we lived in a paid-for house there was no longer any need to worry about getting the rent together every month, so Herb simply took the entire summer off. He bought himself a jeweler’s eye and began the task of repairing Mrs. Dabney’s seventeen broken clocks.

  Clocks, of course, are symbols of woman’s monthly rhythms. Having been forced to listen to Granny’s “Ovariad” for so many years, Herb now discovered a way to get even. One morning around three, his delicate instruments with their complex interior mechanisms all started chiming at once:

  Bong! Bling! Screee! Eeep! Eeep! Brrrrrrrr! Gloinnnggg! Cuckoo! Cuckoo!

  “Goddamnit!”

  “Oh, Mr. King, you left the alarms on.”

  “Y’all be awright up dere? What all dat commotion?”

  “Sonofabitch!”

  When we turned on the hall light, Herb was standing in the doorway of his room, wearing his jeweler’s eye and grinning from ear to ear.

  “You did it on purpose!” Mama yelled.

  The clock incident marked a turning point in his life. Not long afterwards he got a Saturday job at a music supply store and spent the rest of his time reading. He never played professionally or tended bar again.

  I don’t know whether Granny realized the part her anglophilism had played in his early retirement, but she backed him to the hilt, telling curious neighbors, “Mr. King is deep,” when they asked her why he did not work, until he acquired a reputation as a mysterious sage. The people next door spread the rumor that he had helped invent the atomic bomb and had to stick close to home because he was “on call” at the Pentagon. Someone else, misinterpreting Jensy’s statement that he was a prince, took him for an Oxford-educated Mittel Europa émigré who had slipped under the Iron Curtain just before it slammed down. The neighborhood being solidly pro-McCarthy, he was looked on as a hero.

  Always the Daughters’ pet, he now became their consultant, helping them with their papers on eighteenth-century pewter, and researching the maiden name of the wife of the nephew of Thomas Jefferson’s bricklayer’s brother so that Mrs. Garrison, who was looking for another ancestor, could add a Monticello pin to her sash. Sitting amid the shards of his broken mold dispensing cultural roots to the Shapely Stout sisterhood, he achieved a kind of Herbish patriarchal dominance.

  At the end of the Summer of the Clocks, Mama received a merit bonus and was promoted to supervisor. To celebrate, she bought herself three new fall suits. One of them was gray flannel.

  »eight«

  BY the time I entered high the time I entered high school my sex education resembled a bureaucratic snafu. Mama thought Granny had taken care of it and Granny thought Mama had.

  In 1950, girls of fourteen were divided into two groups: those who knew a little something and Those Who Knew Too Much. My historical novels had taught me that women always enjoy sex, but the authors were maddeningly vague about what it was that felt so good. I wanted technical facts, not psychological states. I already knew that “ecstasy covered her like the waters of a magic pool.” What I did not know was what exactly happened on all the fictional wedding nights I had devoured.

  All I knew about wedding nights was that “he snuffed out the candle” or “blew out the lamp” or “turned down the gas jet.” These thrifty actions were usually followed by three dots to indicate that something else happened … No matter how nervous the bride was, she never had to go to the bathroom—just as well, since there wasn’t any—and as soon as the bedchamber was “flooded in blackness” or “bathed in darkness,” she did not surface again until “the next morning.”

  These novels created an entire generation of American women who cannot have a sexual fantasy without getting bogged down in details about lights and bathrooms. Our problems started in high school when, saturated in wedding nights but knowing nothing whatsoever about them, we discussed them anyway. Like Franz Josef designing a new button for the Austrian Hussar’s uniform while the Empire crumbled, we did the best we could.

  “Who uses the bathroom first?”

  “The bride. That way, she can come floating out in a white negligée while he’s opening the champagne.”

  “But if she uses the bathroom first, she’ll be left alone while he uses it. That doesn’t seem right.”

  “Yes, but if he uses it first, he’ll be undressed before she is, and that’s not right either.”

  “Why would he open the champagne and then turn around and go in the bathroom?”

  “They drink one glass together and then he goes into the bathroom.”

  “Where are his robe and pajamas?”

  “And the ascot. Don’t forget the ascot.”

  “They’re already unpacked. He did that before he opened the champagne so he could just pick everything up and go into the bathroom.”

  “When he comes out, he picks her up and carries her to the bed and throws her down on it.”

  “How can he turn out the light if he’s holding her?”

  “She reaches out while she’s in his arms and switches it off.”

  “That doesn’t seem right. He should do it.”

  “But then he’d have to put her down, turn out the light, and pick her up again so he can throw her on the bed.”

  “But if he turns it out before he picks her up and throws her on the bed, he might miss.”

  “He leaves one light on so he can see.”

  “That doesn’t seem right.”

  The information Peg had imparted to me when we were eight was: “The man gets on top of the lady and puts his thing on her thing.” It was still just about all I knew. I remained unaware of erection, penetration, and ejaculation; I thought that a dangling participle was placed on a split infinitive and that was that. While this certainly sounded like what the newspapers called “intimate with,” it did not explain the furor over virginity and the tragedies that awaited brides who were not intact.

  “Men can tell,” everyone said darkly. Tell what? That I had been wiping myself all these years? What caused the terrible pain suffered by Frank Yerby’s heroine Denise in The Vixens when she bit through her lip? I asked Granny.

  “Your grandfather was a perfect gentleman.”

  I finally got the word “maidenhead” out of her before she balked. I thought it sounded like one of those peaceful English villages in murder mysteries. Ann Hopkins came up with “hymen” and Helen told us it was Greek for “membrane.” I knew that hymens were connected somehow with the emotional question of who could and could not use Tampax, so I sneaked the brochure out of Mama’s box and read it. I had just gotten to the good part when Jensy snatched it out of my hand and told me to keep myself pure for Jesus, who wanted me for a sunbeam.

  I locked myself in the bathroom with a hand mirror and tried to find my hymen without ruining myself for marriage. I sort of wanted to get married; having just read Turgenev’s On the Eve, I wanted to marry a Bulgarian revolutionary if I could find one who hated children.

  I examined myself. I knew where I menstruated from, but since that was an area concerned with female trouble I did not see what it could possibly have to do with men. I looked elsewhere and found the clitoris. I did not know it was a clitoris; I called it the “bump.” As I studied it, the light dawned. This was the famous maidenhead. It had to be—it was the only thing I could find that looked like a head.

  It was all clear now. Intercourse is when a man presses on the bump until it falls off. When that happens, you aren’t a virgin anymore.

  There was only one thing that bothered me. What did you do with the bump after it fell off? Was there a Bump Fairy?


  A few months later I was deflowered in the doctor’s office. My menstrual cramps had been getting steadily worse since I got my first period. I had already been examined anally by Granny’s doctor, who was the sweetheart of the Daughters, to see if I had any of the exotic maladies that ran in our family, but he had pronounced me “normal down below.” I didn’t feel normal; I was spending the first day of every period curled up in a knot in the high school infirmary, so Granny took me back to him.

  “I can do a regular examination,” he told her, “but I’ll have to break through.”

  Her hand fluttered to her bosom. “What will she say when she gets married?”

  He patted her shoulder. It was his medical specialty.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll give her a certificate of virginity. She can show it to her husband and he’ll know he didn’t get damaged goods.”

  I climbed into the stirrups expecting a clitorodectomy. He froze the vaginal area with a local anasthetic and began snipping. I couldn’t imagine what he was doing way down there in female trouble land when he was supposed to be cutting off the bump.

  “That’s got it,” he said, and inserted his finger.

  The second, correct, light dawned.

  He could find no reason for my cramps, so he patted my foot, told me to use a heating pad and avoid rain.

  “There’s one thing that really cures cramps and that’s having a baby,” he said fondly. “Now you stay as sweet as you are, you hear? Here’s your certificate, honey.”

  It was terribly impressive. It began with To Whom It May Concern and bore a notary’s seal from his nurse. As I read it, I pictured myself floating out of a bathroom in a white negligée saying, “I have something for you to read.” I handed it to Granny, who sighed raggedly and put it in her purse. When we got home she showed it to Mama.

  “He should have put ‘Now hear this.’ Then she could show it to the whole goddamn Navy.”

  “Oh, Louisel”

  Usually Mama was profane rather than bawdy. While she would say anything to shock Granny, in her own way she was sexually restrained. I think the reason she never talked to me about sex was that she felt girl talk was sissy. This probably explains the unique turn her one sex lecture took.

  It happened at the sink while we were washing dishes. Suddenly, out of the blue, she said:

  “If a man ever asks you to do something funny to him, you tell him to go to hell, you hear?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Never mind. Just promise me.”

  Mystified, I promised. We washed a few more dishes, then she spoke again.

  “That’s why the French can’t win a war without our help. It saps their strength. They spend all their time doing something funny to each other, and then we have to go over there and pull their chestnuts out of the firel”

  Before I could frame any more questions, she threw down the dishcloth with a splat and stalked out of the kitchen singing “Over There” at the top of her lungs.

  The awkward age lasted through my first year in high school, but in the second year my fat fell away and I became pleasing to passing strangers again. Soldiers downtown kept asking me for directions to the White House.

  I did not date in high school. I was not forbidden to; like the books I read, it was my choice and I chose not to. My reasons were mixed. The simplest one had to do with the custom of neighborhood schools prevalent at this time. Many of the boys in high school had been my classmates ever since kindergarten; we had thrown up together, farted together, wet our pants together, picked our noses together for so many years that we looked on each other with the dull eyes of the long-married.

  The rezoning that grew out of the Powell and Central transfers had thrown a lot of new boys into my life, but pride kept me from dating them. They had seen me in the first year of high school when I was still in the awkward age, and it gave them an advantage I did not want them to have.

  My biggest reason for not dating was the old one of peer problems. I had physical desires and enormous curiosity about sex; I wanted to neck and pet but I did not want to play knock-knock jokes at marshmallow roasts or sing endless choruses of “Goodnight Irene” on hayrides. I wanted to dispense with the social aspect of dating and get down to brass tacks, but it was impossible. You couldn’t meet a boy one moment and get your tongue sucked the next; you had to go out with him. Not just once either, but several times. I did not see why I had to sit through movies I could just as well see alone, and then adjourn to the Hot Shoppes when I could just as well feed myself, all in order to get what I wanted, which was the same thing the boys wanted. But there was no way out of this conundrum if one wanted to remain a nice girl, and at this point I still did.

  I would not have minded being a bad girl in my own mind, and I certainly had no fear of going to Hell; I shared Herb’s belief in reincarnation and couldn’t wait to see who I was going to be next. What I did mind was the idea of not being treated right by boys. A girl who Went Too Far was considered “fair game.” Once the boys found out about her, they became what Ann Hopkins called “fierce.” Fierce boys wrote a dirty girl’s name and phone number on the bathroom wall. She got a lot of phone calls but no specific invitations, just, “You wanna go out with me?” This euphemism was always accompanied by sounds of snickering in the background as the caller’s friends gathered round the phone and listened in.

  Granny’s songs had accustomed me to the idea of righteous wrath. Her lyrical heroines were a touchy lot, ever ready to snap “Take back your gold!” or “My mother was a lady!” These ostensibly pathetic Nells and Marys wrote the book on assertiveness. They thought nothing of standing outside saloons and singing about empty larders and consumptive babies until Father gave up and came home, and they never hesitated to interrupt a wedding in progress to lay a fatherless child in the arms of a mortified bridgegroom. They caused uproars wherever they went; trains, hansom cabs, and sweatshops were constantly subjected to indignant cries of “Have you a sister, sir?” Even mansions of aching hearts knew no peace. How Gay Nineties whores ever made any money was a mystery. As soon as the customers arrived, the madam started giving them hell for being the cause of it all, until they broke down and started sobbing about Indiana.

  Having been nourished on this musical diet, the idea of being treated as anything less than a queen made me furious, so my sex life took place exclusively in my mind. I fantasized about a room where I could go with a fallen boy. It would contain a couch where we would do the things I wanted to do, and when I was finished, I would turn his picture to the wall and forget about him until the next time. Being easily shamed like all fallen boys, he would permit himself to be forgotten. He would not give me knowing leers when he passed me in the hall, or tell the other fallen boys that I had taken liberties with him. He would be exactly like a genii in a bottle. I would rub the bottle to make him appear, and then he would rub me.

  I became known as “the girl who doesn’t date.” Ironically, it won me my first real popularity.

  “God, you must have strict parents,” Ann Hopkins said in heartfelt tones. The other girls at the lunchroom table nodded and breathed, “Yeah … God.” Everyone was gazing at me with deep sympathy and understanding, obviously thinking that I wasn’t so bad after all. They reminded me of Greer Garson in Blossoms in the Dust, ready to stand up and cry, “There are no peer-problem children, just peer-problem parents.”

  It would have been so easy to keep my mouth shut and let them think what they already thought, but somehow I could not do it.

  “No,” I blurted, “my parents aren’t a bit strict. They’d let me date if I wanted to, but I don’t want to.”

  The sympathy and understanding vanished.

  Under ordinary conditions they would have persecuted me in that subtle way of females; a few of them tried, but it never amounted to more than a giggle behind a hand when I passed. They were intimidated by the cachet I now had. At long last I belonged to a select ingroup, democracy’s version of sixte
en quarterings and a unicorn gules. I was college-bound.

  The term had different meanings depending upon one’s sex. College-bound boys associated freely with their non-academic confrères and looked up to them as avatars of bad-ass masculinity. Cars, sports, and gang showers created a male society that was by and large classless, but no such equality existed among the girls. For us, academic status bestowed an almost unbridgeable social status as well. Some girls were more equal than others, and I was a some. It was the same kind of unavoidable elitism that had plagued the suffragettes and would plague the feminists of the seventies. There is no such thing as a fallen woman; when she steps out of her place, she always steps up.

  Our group was called “the Brains.” It consisted of all the Jewish girls, all the Chinese girls, all the Diplomatic Corps girls, some of the Greek girls, and a tiny minority of straight-A Southern Wasps. Our motivations were as different as we were. The Jewish girls had a tradition that exalted booklearning; the diplomatic girls were the daughters of a foreign intelligentsia who took “taking a degree” for granted (Ranni Das Gupta was a brahmin); and the ethnic girls came from families who cherished the American Dream.

  Southern Wasps stood outside this charmed circle. Our families looked down on the American Dream, muttered about old maids and bluestockings, and were only slightly closer to the intelligentsia than the Jukes and the Kallikaks. Our compensatory advantages were that quality of personality that comes to fullest flower in a Protestant whose mind is made up—“Here I stand, I can do no other”—and one sane relative who supported us against the rest. Mary Jane Magruder (that’s an old Maryland name) had a Brooklyn-born aunt who silenced the impassioned wails of “You think you’re better’n us!” with “Shaddup, ya hicks!” I had Herb.

  If any of us had heard the word “feminist” we would have thought it meant a girl who wore too much makeup, but we were, without knowing it, feminists ourselves, bound together by the freemasonry that exists among intelligent women who know they are intelligent. It is the only kind of female bonding that works, which is why most men do not like intelligent women. They don’t mind one female brain if they can enjoy it privately; it’s the idea of two or more on the loose that upsets them. The girls in the college-bound group might not have been friends in every case—Sharon Cohen and I gave each other the willies—but our instincts told us that we had the same enemies.