Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady_A Memoir Read online

  The non-academic girls, a much larger and more homogeneous group, did not have a name. This struck me as odd, so I told Herb about them and asked him to think of something to call them. He came up with “malkin,” a Shakespearean word meaning a woman of the lower orders.

  I felt it was too strong. A few of the girls in this group were trashy and some were common (never mind the difference, it would take another whole book to explain it), but the rest were neither. I had lost Peg to this group but I knew she wasn’t trashy or common; nor, I had to admit, was Ann Hopkins. Certainly they were not all stupid; quite a few of them had been tracked to 7A3 with me, so we must have had about the same IQ. Therefore, it was something else that made a girl a … Oh, hell, a malkin.

  Ann was their undisputed leader, so I used her to construct a profile. First, there was the purple ink. Next, the circled i dot. Third, whenever someone asked a malkin what she was going to be, she always answered with her steady boyfriend’s name: “Mrs. John J. Smith.” She spent her study hall scrawling Mrs. John J. Smith over and over in her notebook.

  Malkins did the most dating but they were also the most puritanical, seeming compelled to explain their dates with “I just like to have a good time,” as if denying all interest in necking and petting. Yet they were obsessed with going steady, and if a boy did not suggest it after a certain number of dates, they accused him of “wasting a girl’s time.”

  Malkins cared more for appearance than appearances, arriving at school with their hair in pincurls under kerchiefs and going immediately to the restroom to comb it out. They all seemed to have a Rapunzel complex; not only was their hair much longer than ours, but presumably much cleaner, because they were always saying, “I’ve got to wash my hair.” They continued their grooming operations in homeroom, picking and pulling at themselves and each other like baboons. Ann used her eyelash curler while all heads were bowed for the Lord’s Prayer, and thrust her hand inside her blouse to dab perfume on her breasts during the pledge to the flag.

  Malkins were always having intense feuds, and leaned heavily on the verb “to cuss out” when they related details of their confrontations. “I really cussed her out,” they would say, yet their cussing never exceeded “damn” and they invariably mouthed “shit” or said “shh …” substituting raised eyebrows for the second syllable. It paled beside Mama’s muleskinner glories.

  It occurred to me that Mama, academically anyhow, would have assayed out to malkin in her schooldays, yet I knew she wasn’t one. What was it, then, that made the difference? I consulted Herb again.

  “Malkins leave nothing to chance, but your mother leaves no stone unturned.”

  When I frowned in confusion he began one of his Socratic dialogues.

  “Would a malkin have stolen Charlie’s lamb?”

  “No,” I said promptly.

  “Why not?”

  “They’d be afraid of getting in trouble or being talked about.” I paused, reviewing everything I knew about Ann Hopkins. “They’d be afraid of not being like everybody else.”

  “So the key word is?”

  “Afraid.”

  He nodded.

  “That’s why your mother is a gentlewoman.”

  I took three more years of French in high school. In third year we read that unsurpassed satire on machismo, Tartarin de Tarascon by Alphonse Daudet. Next came Le Livre de Mon Ami by Anatole France, which brought me up against the realities of translation. We had to do the “O ma génie et ma fée” passage from the chapter Marcelle aux Yeux d’Or in a literary rather than a literal rendering—i. e., we could not say, “Oh, my genuis and my fairy.” The narrator is an adult man recalling his boyhood crush on his mother’s beautiful friend, so I settled on “graceful sylph.”

  Fourth year was taken up with a line-by-line study of Cyrano. I found the story ridiculous but the speeches rang like deep resonant bells and the title role seemed made for Mama. It would have been just like her to call somebody a jackass and get into a swordfight.

  Fifth year was the happiest interlude of my life. I might have been attending an expensive private academy instead of a public school; there were only eight of us in the class—the minimum for forming a class—and all of us were girls. We began each class with a pep rally. “Mesdemoiselles, levez-vous!” the teacher would say, and we would rise and sing “La Marseillaise”. It gave me a delicious frisson; even francophobic Mama liked it (“I’ll say one thing for ‘em, they’ve got a good ‘Star-Spangled Banner’”).

  As we sang, we raised our eyes to the steel engraving of bare-breasted Marianne hoisting the tricolor and walking over dead bodies as she urged her male comrades to the fray. We made a strange sight, eight little honor students all in a row, singing lustily of bloody standards and cutthroats. We did not know it, and there was no name for it in 1953, but we were into consciousness-raising.

  In fifth year we read the verse plays of Jean Racine. For once I was studying something that stirred Granny’s interest. When I told her about Phèdre’s tirades, she perked up and asked, “Is she having the Change?”

  My favorite Racine play was Bérénice, based on a true story, whose plot turns on a situation that was dear to Herb’s heart. When I translated Titus’s refusal to abdicate and become

  Un indigne empéreur, sans empire, sans cour

  Vil spectacle aux humains des faiblesses d’amour

  into “A disgraced emperor, without an empire, without a court, a vile example of love’s weakness in the eyes of all mankind,” he said, “Sounds like that bloody Duke of Windsor.”

  The messy passions of Phèdre reminded me of humid summer, but Bérénice was crisp autumn, full of the clean cool air of passion renounced and dignity preserved. I loved autumn because it symbolized school, but I did not love passion, I merely had it. I did not even like it because I did not really like boys, I merely needed them. Once exposed to the neo-classical restraints of Bérénice, I began to resent males for their power to distract me from the life of the mind I craved.

  Bérénice replaced Dominique Francon as my ideal role model. Henry Adams’s theory was now my yardstick for measuring all women, but when I tried to fit Bérénice into it she eluded definition as either Virgin or Venus. The Virgin was not yet generally known or revered in A.D. 70 when the events of the play took place, but Venus was everywhere in the Roman-dominated world Bérénice inhabited. She should have drawn her strong sense of identity from the goddess of love, but it was obvious she did not. She was a surprisingly masculine woman who put duty before love. Queen of Palestine in her own right, she was able to understand the political reasons why Titus, being Emperor of Rome, could not marry her. Instead of collapsing and having to be carried to the infirmary like Ann Hopkins when her boyfriend asked for his ring back, Bérénice walked off stage with dry eyes and full honors.

  I was thrilled by her exit lines.

  Je vivrai, je suivrai vos ordres absolus

  Adieu, Seigneur, régnez; je ne vous verrai plus

  “What’s that mean?” asked Mama.

  “‘I will follow your wishes to the letter, but I will survive. Farewell, my lord, keep your crown; I will never see you again.’”

  “Good for her! She should’ve shot the sonofabitch!”

  “Oh, Louise! I think it would make a nice sad movie with Barbara Stanwyck. She goes away real good.”

  Herb put his head in his hands.

  My French teacher recommended that I become a translator.

  “You’d work for a book publisher, or several of them,” she explained. “When they bought the American rights to a French book, they’d pay you to translate it. You could work at home, at your own pace.”

  The idea appealed to me and I made it my ambition. I would be like the lady named Constance Garnett whose name appeared on all the Russian novels. Herb was full of enthusiasm for my plans. Once, when I kept fiddling with a sentence because “It just doesn’t sound right,” his eyes lit with empathy.

  “You have an ear for musi
c gone awry,” he said, smiling.

  Now that I had a clear picture of my future, my tepid interest in marriage faded. I would be a career woman and have affairs, like George Sand. This decision brought me up against a double-barreled problem. I wanted no babies growing out of these future affairs and I was tired of losing valuable study time because of menstrual cramps. Since both problems could be solved with a sweep of the surgeon’s knife, I decided I wanted a hysterectomy.

  Knowing better than to broach the subject to our family expert, I looked around for a woman of detached scientific bent to consult. The school nurse was a Yankee so I assumed she was free of womb-lust. I was wrong.

  “You want to have an operation?” she gasped, eyes popping. “Oh, but—but—that’s against the law! A young girl like you … no doctor would ever … Where did you get such an idea?”

  My heart sank, as it always would whenever I put my faith in a woman and she turned out to be a malkin. But it was too late now; I was already up Mama’s favorite creek without a paddle and there was no turning back. I plunged on with as much calm assurance as I could muster.

  “I want to be a career woman. My periods interfere with my work.”

  “But you wouldn’t even be you without your … er … the part you want removed. That’s the part that makes you a woman.” Her hand fluttered to her breast, a gesture I knew well. “Without your … er … that part of yourself, you’d be nothing but an empty shell!” She put a suitably hollow ring in her voice.

  “Why?”

  “Because an operation would mean that you could never have children!”

  “I don’t want any.”

  She looked as if she’d been stabbed. She did some lip-licking, then pulled herself together and gave me that confident puckish smile people use when they are getting ready to utter a cliché.

  “You’ll change your mind when you have some,” she said softly. “When you hold your first baby in your arms, you’ll know.”

  Suddenly she tilted her head to one side like an inquisitive terrier and winked.

  “Now don’t let me hear any more of this silly talk. Remember,” she added, sobering suddenly, “when a woman has an operation, hair grows on her chin. You don’t want a beard, do you?”

  “No, ma’am. Those who study Greek must take pains with their dress.”

  She frowned. “I thought you were the one who was so good at French?”

  As good as my school was academically, its guidance counseling was almost nonexistent. Most counselors at this time were teachers who had caved in; unable to cope with the rigors of classroom life, they sat out their pensions in the guidance office. Actually, there was very little for them to do. Most of the students in the school were the first members of our families to go to college. We and our parents believed that a college was a college; one was as good as the other, and a degree was a degree. As long as we went to some college, we felt we would have a passport to what was then called the “Good Life,” and would earn, as Mr. Koustopolous said to Helen, “a million dollars a year.”

  Everyone was so firmly convinced of this that we had no need of guidance counselors, nor would we have listened if a good counselor had told us otherwise. Familiar with these lower-middle-class attitudes, the counselors, such as they were, made life easy for themselves and let us think what we wished. It was a conspiracy between battle fatigue and ignorance.

  I knew about Ivy League schools, but I thought their superiority lay in social rather than academic areas. I didn’t care about going to the “right” school, I just wanted to go on studying French. Thus, when I won a four-year scholarship to a Washington college, it seemed to be a perfect solution to my academic aspirations and my family’s limited finances. I could live at home, and there would be nothing to pay for except my textbooks.

  It sounded so good that I did not even bother to apply for any other scholarships, but took the first one I was offered.

  »nine«

  ON a hot September day I sat in the college’s auditorium with the sweating, exhausted Class of ’57. It was Orientation Day and the president was giving us a welcoming address.

  “Now some people ask, why bother to send a girl to college? A woman’s place is in the home, they’ll tell you. Educate a woman and you’ll ruin a good wife and mother. Well, I have an answer for people who say that—an educated woman makes a better wife and mother!”

  He flashed a smile and went on with energetic enthusiasm. The newspapers called him a “dynamic, progressive educator.”

  “A wife has to entertain her husband’s business associates,” he went on. “How is she going to do that if she isn’t well educated? She’s got to be able to talk to her husband intelligently, to meet him on his own level. She can’t do that without a college education. So you girls here, don’t you let anybody say to you, ‘What good is it to send a girl to college?’ Tell them that as a future wife, you’ve got to help your husband get ahead. You girls get your degrees so that your marriages will be equal partnerships!”

  He grinned and winked.

  “Now don’t misunderstand me. I’m not saying that I don’t like a woman to be a real woman.”

  A titter of approval went over the audience. He looked immensely pleased.

  “Don’t you agree with that, fellas?” he boomed.

  A dull roar of enthusiasm rumbled through the muggy room. The sound had the loutish quality of still-young male voices.

  “I’m not saying that I want you girls to go out and become hard, aggressive career women, because no man likes women who compete with him. You know the old saying: ‘A smart woman is one who’s smart enough to know when to be dumb!’”

  The loutish sound rose again but this time it was matched by the fluttery giggles of the girls.

  “But suppose a woman doesn’t marry?” the president demanded. He held up his hand like a policeman directing traffic. “Now I know that’s a horrible thought to you ladies and I don’t mean to imply that anybody here is going to be an old maid—not as pretty as you girls are. But suppose that you don’t marry …” He dropped his voice to an ominous pitch. “ … Ever.”

  Several girls groaned and the boys guffawed.

  “There’s where your college education will come in handy, because for a woman, a degree is something to fall back on. But don’t you worry,” he went on, all Edmund Gwenn again, “the ratio here is four to one! Now how about that, girls? You can get your M-R-S degree here, can’t you?”

  He left the subject of marriage and started talking about the sororities and fraternities on campus.

  “I’m glad we have Greeks here. It makes for a good campus social life. Each of our frats has a sister sorority. That means that the boys in that frat date the girls in that sorority. Of course, you don’t have to,” he said with a grin, “it’s just a custom. I recommend the Greek life to all of you. It’s the best way to meet people and have lots of dates, and I know all of you—especially you girls—want lots of dates. Maybe that’s why some of you ladies came here, eh? Ha-ha-ha.”

  He took off his glasses, polished them on his tie, and waved them merrily.

  “I want to say that I’ve never seen a prettier collection of females in all my days. You’ve got a fine supply of heifers for the barbecue tomorrow, fellas. Ha-ha-ha. Now I don’t want to hear about anybody missing the barbecue,” he added with mock truculence. “We need all the girls there that we can get, thanks to our four-to-one ratio.”

  The speech over, I went to my advisor’s office to register for classes. The name plate on the door said: J. WILEY RUDD, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF SOCIOLOGY. I knocked and a hearty voice yelled, “Come in!”

  I opened the door. A man of about forty-five spun around in his swivel chair and grinned. He had a moon-round face, dimples, a skullcap of curly black hair, and twinkling blue eyes. It was the most open, friendly face I had ever seen.

  “How do you do, sir. My name is—”

  “What, what, what? No formality allowed around here, honey.
And you don’t have to knock, either. Just march right in, I’m happy to see you anytime.”

  He seemed to be shouting through a megaphone. I handed him my registration card. As he read it, something in his face changed and his beaming smile receded a little.

  “So you won a scholarship, huh? Very nice, sweetie, very nice. Well! We gotta plan your schedule, don’t we?”

  “Yes, sir,” I replied automatically.

  “Ruddy,” he corrected. “All the kids call me Ruddy.”

  I said nothing. He waited, his teeth set in a smile. The way the top and bottom rows met made him look as if a dentist had just said, “Do this.” As our eyes held, his gaze hardened in a way that made me remember Miss Tanner. He was a huggybear. I didn’t know they had them in college.

  Suddenly he clapped his palms on his knees.

  “Well, Flo! What we usually do in freshman year is get those nasty required subjects out of the way. First, English Comp.”

  “I waived it,” I said, handing him an exam slip.

  He looked at it a long time.

  “You know,” he said at last, rubbing his chin, “it’s a good idea to go ahead and take it anyhow. A good brushup never hurt anybody.”

  “The test was easy. I don’t think I need it.”

  “All right,” he said tersely. “Now, freshman history.”

  “I waived that, too,” I said, handing him another exam slip. This time he did not argue.

  “Science,” he said, going down the list. “You have to have six credits in either physics, chemistry, or biology.”