Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady_A Memoir Read online

  “Biology,” I said quickly.

  His good nature returned.

  “I thought you’d pick that.” He smiled. “Everybody does because it’s the easiest. Now, let’s get you some electives. Most kids take a little of everything in the first two years. You don’t know what the heck you’re going to be majoring in at this point so—”

  “French.”

  His lips twitched.

  “French?”

  “Yes, sir. I’ve had five years. I want to start sixth year now.”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa!” He reached out and patted my hand. “Flo, take it from me, I’ve seen a lot of freshmen. I’ll bet you dollars to doughnuts you don’t know what your major is going to be yet. Why, most kids change their majors two or three times before they graduate.” He grinned. “Especially girls. You know how it is. You get interested in a guy who’s majoring in Soc, so you switch to that so you’ll have lots of classes with him.”

  “I don’t care what boys major in. I want to major in French.”

  Two bright pinpoints appeared in his eyes.

  “A pretty girl like you doesn’t care what boys do?” he said softly. “Oh, come on, I just don’t believe that.”

  It was like a dream in which a simple destination kept eluding me. He hated me for winning a scholarship, for knowing what I wanted. He was trying to thwart me. Suddenly I was terrified.

  “I have to take French.” My voice shook and his mouth curved into a smirk as he heard it. I forced a shrug and spoke as matter-of-factly as I could. “You can’t let a language drop, you know.”

  The “you know” came out with Herb’s clip. J. Wiley Rudd did not like that, either.

  “Veddy British, aren’t we?”

  “My father is!” I snapped. Now I had sassed a teacher … .

  He shrugged. “Everybody waits till their junior year to start their major. That gives you plenty of time to get all the credits you need. You only need thirty.”

  “I don’t want to take credits, I want to take French.”

  He lifted his hands and let them drop with an air of despair and resignation.

  “Okay, okay, okay, you can take French. Anything to please a lady. I’ll put you down for intermediate grammar and comp. Now are you happy?”

  “We finished grammar in third year.”

  This time his face twisted with raw loathing.

  “Lit courses are junior and senior level! Freshmen can’t take them. Intermediate is for freshmen who’ve had French in high school.” He made it sound like a disease.

  “I’ve had five years. We started literature in fourth year. In fifth year we read Racine.”

  He made a knock-knock joke.

  “Racine with the moon,” he sang in adenoidal imitation of Vaughan Monroe.

  “They gave waiver exams in freshman English and history,” I argued. “Why can’t they give me one in French?”

  “You’ll have to see the French lady about that.”

  “Who?”

  “Paula Hale. She teaches those lit courses.” He handed me my schedule card. “You two gals have a parlay-voo and get her to initial this.”

  I went in search of the French professor. I found her office but there was a note on the door saying she would be back in an hour. My knees were trembling. There were some benches down at the end of the hall but I didn’t dare leave that door. I leaned against it and waited.

  At last I heard light footsteps on the stairs and a woman appeared. She was small and pretty with neat gray hair and an air of tired sweetness. She reminded me of Fay Bainter. She smiled pleasantly when she saw me.

  “Professor Hale?”

  “Mrs.,” she corrected. “What can I do for you, dear?”

  We went into her office. There was a verb chart leaning up against her desk.

  j’ai

  tu as

  il (elle) a

  nous avons

  vous avez

  ils (elles) ont

  I stammered out my story. She nodded and made sympathetic sounds.

  “Five years of French? Oh my, you must be a very good pupil. I see no reason why you can’t take the literature survey course.”

  There was something wrong that I couldn’t put my finger on. She seemed abstracted, like someone trying to be polite to a door-to-door salesman. She made no effort to test me by speaking French, and she gave off an air that made me reluctant to change languages. I had a feeling that if we had been speaking French and someone had come in and caught us at it, she would have been embarrassed. Her kindness was making me almost as uncomfortable as Rudd’s hostility.

  It hit me all of a sudden that she lacked a quality I had cut my teeth on: grandeur. I thought of Granny’s bustling imperiousness, Mama’s swagger, Jensy’s metaphysical certainties. The three women in my life all held facts instead of opinions, but now I was telling my troubles to a woman who was whispering in her own office. She was a malkin. A well-bred one, a well-educated one, but a malkin just the same.

  “I’m afraid we don’t have a French major here, dear. I can’t imagine why your advisor didn’t tell you. The courses we offer add up to only eighteen credits, and some of them are in English. Language people go to Georgetown as a rule. The Foreign Service School, you know. But Georgetown is a man’s school. There—is something wrong, dear?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Perhaps in your junior year you can transfer to another school. Wellesley, perhaps. They have an excellent French Department.”

  “I can’t transfer anywhere. I won a scholarship here. If I don’t go here, I can’t go to college at all.”

  “Oh, I see, I see … Dear, you look so pale. Are you sure you’re feeling well?”

  “Yes, ma’am. It’s just that it’s so hot.”

  “Isn’t it?” she said brightly. “It’s been a frightful summer, hasn’t it?”

  Now that we were discussing the weather, she relaxed for the first time. I thanked her and left.

  While I was crying in the ladies room, a senior girl came in. Her breasts looked like a pair of collie muzzles; grazing on the left one like two roaches on a piece of sugar were a sorority pin and a fraternity pin with chains crossed like the cavalry sabers on my great-grandfather’s uniform hat. She put her arm around me.

  “Are you sick?”

  I shook my head.

  “Did somebody die?”

  I shook it again.

  “Did you break up with your boyfriend?”

  “No.”

  Her catalogue of tragedies exhausted, she went into a stall and peed. When she came out, she washed her hands carefully and thoroughly the way women always do when someone else is in the ladies room, so I would know that she had been raised to wash her hands after she peed.

  As she left, she put a clean hand on my shoulder.

  “You’ll find somebody someday,” she assured me.

  I took the French literature survey to spite Rudd and to supply a French grade to show Herb to keep him from wondering why I had suddenly dropped the subject I loved. I could not tell him what had happened, not yet anyway. It was better to let him go on thinking that a college was a college; it was his sole area of ignorance and I had to use it. Otherwise, he might blame himself for being unable to send me to a better school and perhaps go back to work in order to do so. I did not want him to go back to work; I wanted him there when I got home.

  There was no point in asking Granny for the money to go to a better school. Even if she had not disapproved of higher education for women, there was still her Lady Bountiful complex to contend with. To get her for a patron, you had to be a physically sick stranger about to be evicted, deserted by your ungrateful kin, and constipated. Her philanthropy never rose above the waist, and my needs were above the brow. Hers was both a personal and a group tic. An ethnic woman enjoys telling people she scrubbed floors to put children through college, but a Wasp Lady Bountiful would rather be famed as an angel of mercy who got there just in time with the soup and the bla
nkets. She sees herself as a Seventh Cavalry who arrives quietly; paying college tuition simply doesn’t turn her on because it would inspire no one to say, “They would have died if she hadn’t come.”

  It’s a miracle I managed to get myself home that day without getting run over. I was covered with cold clammy sweat and my legs felt like rubber hoses. I ached everywhere, phantom pains of a body refusing to accept the indignity of amputation. I was in a state of ambulatory shock, as much a member of the walking wounded as Evelyn Cunningham. I had lost my femininity; my elle, my ette, and my euse had gone splat and I had no sense of myself as a female. The Henry Adams problem that I had held in abeyance during the French years closed in on me with an either/or finality. Of its two behests, only one was part of my nature, so I heeded a quintessentially American inner voice that said, “Be your own Venus.”

  »ten«

  SEX is the only American is the only American invention that does not save time and trouble. I still wanted to go to my fantasy debauching room with a faceless fallen boy, but there was simply no way out of the dating game.

  My first project was to get kissed. The mores of the fifties held kissing on the first date to be a device of the Evil One. There being no way to reach the second date without going through the first one, I accepted an invitation to a fraternity party proffered by my biology lab partner as we bent over the formaldehyde vat to fish out our pig.

  His name was Larry. As I sat beside him on the sprung sofa in the frat house drinking beer and wax flakes from a paper cup, I wondered if any of the other girls were putting up with the party in order to get sex? Somehow I doubted it; they just seemed to want to have a good time.

  Suddenly my vision blurred. It was Larry waving his hand in front of my face.

  “Hey, come back!” He laughed nervously.

  I forced a gay smile. It would have made an excellent death mask. Larry looked worried, as well he might. Evelyn Cunningham needed a deserted backyard or a dark road to wander off, but I could do it without leaving the room. I did not want to wander off; I wanted Larry to like me so he would ask me for that all-important second date, otherwise I would have to start the whole hideous business all over again with somebody else. I saw myself condemned to an endless string of first dates, never getting kissed, a celibate Sisyphus pushing my rock up Fraternity Hill. Boy after boy would ask me out once and spend the evening saying, “Hey, come back!” until I became known as the sleepwalker of Sigma Chi.

  I had to say something peppy, fast. It was like being back in elementary school and having to race around the playground in a state of bogus joy, pretending to release restless high spirits I did not have so the huggybears would let me alone. “Harbor Lights” came on the phonograph.

  “Let’s dance!” I cried.

  We walked out on the floor. The state that bad novelists call “as if I were standing outside of myself, watching myself as if in a dream” is a boon to dancing. Spirit-light and unresisting, I followed with spectral grace wherever Larry led.

  “Gee, you’re a terrific dancer,” he said.

  When he took me home, he bade me a kissless goodnight and invited me to the movies the following week. I accepted.

  Movie night came and he held my hand during the show. No one had done that since I learned to cross streets by myself. Afterwards he took me to the Hot Shoppe, where I ordered a hamburger and coffee. His face fell.

  “Don’t you want a shake?”

  “I’d rather have coffee.”

  “You can have a shake if you want, it’s okay.”

  “I like coffee.”

  “You don’t have to get coffee, I can afford a shake.”

  It sounded like a situation in a traveler’s phrase book. I did not want my first kiss ruined by a beating nose bridge so I had to say something peppy, fast.

  “I just love coffee!” It sounded like a stranger. I just don’t talk that way.

  I got the coffee, and later on I got the kiss. It was, of course, a dry one. The first one had to be; it could last indefinitely but the tongue could not enter into it. Since it is impossible to dry-kiss indefinitely, ours lasted about ten seconds. When it was over, Larry asked me to a semi-formal (cocktail dress) dance on the following Saturday and I accepted. I looked forward eagerly to the dance because the second kiss on the third date could be wet. Like the tortoise, I was getting there.

  My first wet kiss was immensely pleasurable. It took place in Larry’s car and lasted several minutes, but officially it was only one kiss because we did not break. Stopping for breath or to rearrange noses marked the beginning of the second kiss, which could lead to a third, which was necking, which was forbidden until the fourth date.

  He asked me for a fourth date and I accepted. We went to another frat party and at some point in the evening we decided to park in the grove near Fraternity Row. Leaving a party to go neck in a car was permissible on the fourth date, but if matters got out of hand it was called “the girl’s fault.” Matters got completely out of hand and it was my fault.

  I failed to “draw the line,” i.e., I let him touch me “up top.” Covered tit was for the fifth date and bare tit was for the sixth date, so when I let him unhook my bra, I was two tits too early. Nor did I stop him when he reached under my skirt and lowered the seventh veil—a terrible mistake because diddling was for couples who were going steady.

  Suddenly the door flew open and I fell out of the car.

  “What’s going on here?” a gravelly voice barked.

  It was Matthew X. Kearny, the campus beadle, who deserved to have in loco parentis carved on his tombstone. A retired cop who looked like a Celtic Agrippa, it was his job to see that things did not go too far. He roamed the grove with a flashlight looking for cars that appeared to be empty. If he saw two heads more or less side by side he did not interfere, but one head, or none, brought him out of the bushes like a wild boar.

  He shone the flashlight on me as I lay sprawled at his feet. Seeing my déshabille he quickly turned his back.

  “Cover yourself, girlie.”

  When I had repaired my dignity, he beckoned me grimly over to the road for a lecture. He was famous for his lectures; having had five daughters of his own, he considered himself the father of us all.

  “Ever a bridesmaid but never a bride,” he sighed, shaking his huge gray head. “That’s what’s gonna happen to you if you don’t straighten up and fly right. How you gonna get a fella to marry you if you let him make free with you like that? Don’t you know that fellas test a girl to see how far she’ll go? If she goes too far, it’s curtains!” Here he drew his finger across his throat. “You’re headed for trouble if you don’t mend your ways, girlie. It’s like the song says, ‘Fallen and forgotten, without a good man’s name …’ Well, I forget the rest, but—”

  “‘She dreams of Indiana while she walks the streets of shame,’” I supplied.

  Kearny dismissed me and I got back into the car. Larry looked unaccountably miserable. He said very little on the way home and did not kiss me goodnight or ask for another date. The following Monday when we fished our pig out of the formaldehyde vat, he looked worse than the pig. I never saw such a tormented face; it would have been perfect for a Gogol dust jacket.

  “Look,” he said in a voice from the lower depths, “I don’t think we should see each other again.”

  “What?”

  “You’re a nice girl. That’s why I don’t think we should see each other again. I don’t want … to hurt you.”

  “Hurt me?”

  “I think you’re getting too serious about me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  As he struggled to articulate his thoughts, his fingers nervously twisted one of the pig’s ears. It came off.

  “You’re a nice girl,” he said again, “so I know you must be in love with me because a nice girl doesn’t let a guy do … that … what you let me do, I mean, unless she’s in love with him.” He took a deep breath and gagged as the formaldehyde fumes went up
his nose. “I’m not ready to fall in love,” he choked.

  His coughing fit gave me time to think, otherwise I would have blurted out what I wanted to say, which was, “I’m not in love with you.” It was the most self-defeating statement a girl could make in those days. He had handed me what he considered a golden rationale for my behavior. If I rejected it, he would scorn me with words fierce and bitter, and laugh at my shame and downfall, and tell all the boys at the frat house that I was the cause of it all … .

  He was forcing me to choose between pity and censure. I wanted to hit him with the pig but I couldn’t do that, either; it would have demolished our already hashlike dissection and made us both flunk lab. My only recourse was dignified passivity.

  “All right,” I said. “We won’t see each other again.”

  Relief flickered over his face when he realized that I was not going to go to pieces. He was so relieved that he had to add something.

  “I want you to know that I still respect you, though.”

  That did it.

  “I respect you, too, Larry. If any other girl lets you do those things to her, you tell me, and I’ll beat her up for you.”

  “Huh?”

  I felt I had won one for Mama the Gipper.

  I don’t know whether Larry told the boys about me or not. Probably he did, but they did not get “fierce” with me. Though I did some pretty heavy stuff with a number of different dates, my reputation remained more or less intact and I was regarded as an official Nice Girl. There were three reasons for this.

  In the first place, sexual respect was the only kind of respect available to women in the fifties, so men bent over backwards to bestow it to keep us from developing a yen for the important kinds. Because they sensed that sexual aggressiveness is the first step to general uppityness, “Keep her respected” replaced “Keep her barefoot and pregnant” as the best way to put women down and neutralize all of our aggressions, sexual and otherwise. It was a maddening attitude but it was also convenient: I could do anything I wanted short of actual fucking and still come out of it as an official Nice Girl.