Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady_A Memoir Read online

“Do you wish to comment on Miss King’s statement, Miss Parker?”

  El clasped her hands and pressed them to her heart. “I just want to say that it’s not things like power and clout, it’s love. Griselda was right to be so patient and loyal because that’s the way women are supposed to be. I don’t say her husband was right to beat her or to set fire to her … her … to her thing, but if he needed proof of her love that much, she must have done something to make him think she didn’t love him. They should have sat down and talked it over. I mean, marriage is a partnership.”

  “Patient Griselda, always spin-drying,” I said.

  That summer I worked for a State Department annex called the Human Relations Area Files, where I filed information sheets on the sort of countries Granny lumped under the collective name of “Timbuctu,” inhabited by the sort of people she called “foreign foreigners.” The files were open to State Department personnel, which is how I met Lloyd, who ate me, proposed to me, and taught me how to drive. Of these three proofs of love, the last shall always be the first.

  He was five years my senior and lived with his well-fixed widowed mother in a Maryland suburb. She was away much of the time tending her late husband’s business interests, so Lloyd and I used his bedroom for my ultimate venture into Everything But. I had heard about oral sex—known in the fifties by the sweeping name of “69”—and that summer I got hooked on it. I did not go down on him, nor did he ask me to. Nor did he ask me to fuck. He seemed content with a humble hand job. I have never figured out whether he was what was then called “weird” and what is now called “kinky,” or whether he actually did love me in the old-fashioned honorable way, which was not entirely old-fashioned at the time. As I say, he taught me to drive on his brand-new 1955 Buick, so you figure it out.

  I was not, to put it mildly, very lovable. Lloyd belonged to that breed of hesitating men who keep clearing their throats. His passivity brought out the most unattractive aspects of my personality and I treated him the way Mama treated Preston. The very name Lloyd irritated me beyond all reason; his habits pushed me to the brink. The way he dunked his shrimp into the little paper cup of tartar sauce enraged me so much that I longed to wreck the restaurant. I lay awake nights contemplating his pointed earlobes until my stomach was a mass of trembling knots. In short, I behaved like Mildred in Of Human Bondage.

  I reduced him to a mouth and a rapidly circling tongue. When he invited me out during my period, I sneered, “What’s the point?” One day when I was feeling especially horny, I insisted we leave a movie he was enjoying and go home and muff. Occasionally I suffered guilt pangs and tried to be kind to him, but the slightest decency on my part invariably encouraged his smarmy, masochistic gratitude, which made me mad again.

  “What did I do?”

  “Oh, shut up!”

  “I love you.”

  “Oh, damn you!”

  Granny, of course, was crazy about him. I didn’t dare tell her he proposed, but he told her, and so she helped him press his case. “You’ll die on the vine if you don’t marry Lloyd” went on all summer, and I kept finding women’s magazine inspirational verse tucked into my current book. They were the kind of “pomes” whose lines all ended with a repetition of the title: Who is the rock in the stormy sea? My Husband!

  “Anybody want to hear ‘Casey at the Bat’?”

  “Oh, Louise!”

  Ironically, I liked Lloyd’s mother as much as he liked Granny. She told me all about her real estate deals and took me with her one day when she made her rounds: threatening contractors, bullying bricklayers, and eyeing virginal stands of Maryland timber in a way that would chill an environmentalist’s blood. Afterwards, she took me to lunch.

  “Lloyd will never be anything but a bureaucrat,” she said contemptuously. “But you’ll amount to something—you’re like me. The idea of leaving my business to Lloyd when I die gives me the willies, but if I knew that a sharp gal was around to keep an eye on things, I could rest easy, you know what I mean?”

  She looked up from her martini and gave me a wink. I was positive she and Granny had gotten together.

  Soon it was time for me to return to college for my junior year. I did not know what to do about Lloyd. He was driving me insane with his lovesick gazes and perfect patience, but I wanted to keep him around so I could go on enjoying what he did so well. I wished there had been some way to keep only his head and carry it around with me under my arm like St. Denis coming down from the Mont des Martyrs. Having spent the better part of the summer with a tongue in my twat, I could not now conceive of a life without cunnilingus. On the other hand, I could not conceive of a life with Lloyd.

  Meanwhile, classes started and I had to choose a major. I chose history and promptly tumbled into bittersweet memories of French like the heroine of one of Granny’s fallen women songs remembering her first beau. My sex drive vanished and I constructed a pristine fantasy, imagining myself on the faculty of a girls’ boarding school, dressed in a tweed suit and walking shoes and having tea with intellectual spinsters similarly attired. There were no students in my imaginary grove of academe, just a school and a female faculty who took walks together arm in arm along paths strewn with crackly red and yellow leaves.

  It was easy enough to analyze. Fall was coming, school was starting, and I wanted to be back in that select, all-girl, fifth-year French class where I had known perfect happiness. The spinster teachers were my classmates grown to womanhood and the school without students represented a world without males. Adieu, Seigneur, régnez; je ne vous verrai plus.

  I broke up with Lloyd and all hell broke loose at home. Granny sighed and surged, wept and wailed, spoke in choked tones of great-grandchildren, and made a Sarah Bernhardt production out of calling for her digitalis.

  “You killin’ yo’ big momma!”

  “It’s all that education! A whistling woman and a crowing hen always come to a tragic end!”

  “Lor’ blimey …”

  “Everybody shut up! The Pride of the Yankees is coming on!”

  Granny continued talking about whistling women and crowing hens, and I continued having my fantasy. The image of myself in a severe tweed suit filled me with a strange, private happiness at whose core lay an even stranger sensation of sly mischief, as if I had a secret that I was keeping even from myself. I was caught up in a mood of sexless sensuality that revolved around attractively unattractive clothes.

  I had no trouble finding an excuse for what I wanted to do. Everyone goes shopping when school starts, so I did, too. The frilly fifties were no time to outfit the new spinsterish me, however; the kind of tweed suit I wanted—herringbone with a single-breasted man-tailored jacket and a straight skirt—simply did not exist. The closest approximation would be today’s dress-for-success suits, but nobody was dressing for success in 1955. All the suits I saw had flared skirts, and jackets with Peter Pan velvet collars and gathered panels, something like a cross between a valance and a mudguard, to emphasize the waist and hips.

  Even more discouraging, I looked great in a 1955 suit. I had a tiny waist—three motherly salesladies tried to span it with their hands—a long neck, and a statistically average bust that fit exactly into the spaces made by all the darts and tucks and gathers that graced the jacket. It was like putting hands in mittens.

  Next I tried to put something together from separates, but that was impossible in the fifties, too. The only jackets around were blazers in red, navy, or green, and every co-ed in America had one. Without the suit I wanted there was no point in shopping for walking shoes, and in any case there weren’t any. In 1955, people thought nothing of driving two blocks to the drugstore. There were styles called “sporty” shoes (“cute ‘n’ comfortable classics!”) but they looked like ballet slippers. In an era that would have needed very little encouragement to design spike-heeled sneakers, the kind of ground-grippers I craved were found only in orthopedic stores.

  I bought a new pair of loafers exactly like my old pair and strolled down F
Street in a resentful mood. Coming to a tailor shop, I stopped and gazed hungrily into the window at the sumptuous English tweeds spilling artfully from arranged bolts. For a moment I thought of having a suit made, then dismissed the idea as impossibly expensive. Still, I continued to think about it, enjoying my thoughts with the same sensations of happy sadness that memories of French days gave me.

  My tailored suit would have an inside breast pocket made of thick satin. I would not be able to carry anything in it because it would give me a lopsided bust, but that was unimportant. It was not a question of using the pocket but of having it; just knowing it was there would be enough.

  My enchantment with inside breast pockets seemed to be a new idiosyncrasy growing out of my fantasy, but it was not new at all. I had merely forgotten about it for a long time. Now, looking into the tailor shop window, I remembered how I used to try on Herb’s tuxedo jackets when I was little. I was fascinated by the smooth satin lapels because they felt like “a lady’s clothes,” yet they were part of a man’s suit. I liked to stroke them, and one day while I was stroking them I reached inside and found the strange, hidden pocket. It was satin like the lapels and felt huge as I buried my small hand in it. I asked Granny what it was and she explained. “I want one in my coat,” I said eagerly.

  “Ladies’ coats don’t have them, they’re for men.”

  “But it’s satin,” I argued.

  “Be that as it may.”

  Suddenly a simple solution came to me. Why couldn’t I buy a man’s ready-made sports jacket in a small size, or a boy’s? I crossed the street and headed for a haberdashery, working on an excuse to give the salesman as I walked. I could claim a puny brother with a birthday coming up, or I could tell the truth and say the jacket was for myself. But what reason could I give for wanting a man’s jacket? (It never occurred to me that I was not obligated to give a reason, but remember this was 1955.)

  “For horseback riding,” I said. “Something very tailored that’ll go with my breeches.”

  The salesman nodded without surprise and showed me a rack of small sizes. The smallest jacket would not button across the chest, and the one that did was far too long in the sleeves and too big in the shoulders. I was attracting attention and starting to blush, so I gave it up as a bad job. The salesman recommended a riding apparel store. I knew that no woman’s jacket was constructed with an inside pocket, but I went to the equestrian store anyway and promptly collided with that us-against-the-world psychology of the horsey set.

  My first mistake was asking for a riding jacket. It’s called a riding coat. My second mistake was buttoning the third button. The third button is never buttoned; they will throw you off the field if you button your third button. My third mistake was complaining about the long length and odd flair that all the riding coats shared. This was the traditional cut, the style that hunt matrons had always worn, but now there were some people who wanted to change it!

  It was like talking to the Daughters. I left.

  It was while I was in the dimestore buying school supplies that I finally found something that took my eye, but it was not wearing apparel. It was a blue willow cup and saucer. The sight of it sent a shimmering yearning through me. It made no sense; I had spent the day longing for mannish tweed suits and inside breast pockets, but now I was responding to the “nice things” instinct that women are supposed to feel when they look at china and silver. The cup was not china, and at ninety-eight cents it was not at all nice, yet I had to have it.

  My desire for the cup was actually the other side of the suit coin, but I did not realize it, nor the precise significance of blue willow, until that night at dinner when Mama inadvertently analyzed it for me. She had been having a grand time all summer tormenting Granny about Lloyd. Now, seeing the cup, she picked it up, thrust it under Granny’s nose, and said, “See, Mother? She’s buying old maid dishes now.”

  It was only to be expected that El would get engaged while I was experimenting with celibacy. She came back to school that September with a frat pin over her heart and a gift album of Ravel’s Bolero, which she called “passionate.” It was “their” song. She played it over and over again on the sorority phonograph and went around humming “DOOP-doopy-doop-doop da-da DOOP doopy-doop-doop” until a curious springiness marked her walk.

  In recognition of the greater intimacy of betrothal over going steady, she now washed his underwear as well as his socks. She also washed, starched, and ironed his shirts, folding them into perfect rectangles over cardboard and sticking pins in various locations to hold her coolie creations neatly in place.

  Every time I saw him he was handing her a bundle of dirty laundry. She explained that they were saving money for their marriage and showed me a spiral notebook marked Marriage Fund to prove how big a portion of his former laundry bills was now going into their joint savings account. She said she had learned how to keep such records in Preparation for Marriage. It was a remarkably neat notebook with none of the chaotic scrawls and scribbles that marred her academic notes, and the pride she took in it touched me in spite of myself.

  I made an oblique contribution to the Marriage Fund when she asked me to lend her fiancé my two-volume text for Survey of English Literature. They cost six dollars each, a fabulous sum for books in those days, and being a business major, he was trying to avoid buying books he did not need to keep. Because I felt sorry for her, and also because I felt superior to her, I gave her the lit books and she passed them on to the beloved.

  Her own reading matter that year was the 1955 bestseller, Making the Most of Your Marriage by Paul H. Landis.

  “Listen!” she said. “Oh, this is so true. ‘Except for the sick, the badly crippled, the deformed, the emotionally warped and mentally defective, almost everyone has an opportunity to marry.’”

  Suddenly her smile vanished and she looked up from the page with stricken eyes.

  “What do you suppose he means by ‘almost’?”

  “Don’t worry, you’re home safe. He means me.”

  “Oh, Flo! That’s not true. You’ll find somebody.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  Her eyes bugged out. “You don’t want to get married?”

  “No. I want to be an Almost.”

  I meant I wanted to be an independent woman, but there was no name for it. It’s a chilling tribute to the thoroughness of fifties propaganda that I, with my vast reading, had never seen the word “feminist” in print, much less heard it spoken. There were two or three lines in a history text about Susan B. Anthony and the 19th Amendment, but the word used was “suffragette.” Basically, what I was going through proved the truth of the Yiddish proverb, “What the daughter does, the mother did,” though in this case mother and daughter had such different styles that the core resemblance eluded most people. One of us used a sledgehammer and the other a stiletto, but both of us had declared war on femininity and now my fight was beginning in earnest.

  As long as my sex drive was quiescent there was no reason to date, so I stopped. My absence from Greek social functions caused consternation on Sorority Row; peer pressure mounted, everyone took me aside for talks, and once again I found myself playing my old familiar role of Horatius at the bridge.

  It was worth it. The benefits of having no social life were immediate and startling. I already knew I hated dating on general principles, but now I compiled a dossier of specific resentments that I had never articulated before. I saw how dating chipped away tiny pieces of a woman’s self-confidence; piece by piece, date by date, she was diminished by some form of unnatural behavior forced on her by social usage. The most hateful custom was sitting serenely in the front seat of the car while the boy ran around to open the door. It made me feel like a cripple. Staring into space with an air of utter detachment while he paid the check made me feel like a schizophrenic deadbeat. Crossing a street and having a boy make a quick run behind my back to get on the outside again reminded me of the switcheroo tricks Charles Boyer played on Ingrid Bergm
an in Gaslight, and when a boy gripped my arm just above the elbow as we walked, it felt like a citizen’s arrest.

  Not the least of my reasons for hating to date was the diminishment that social usage forced on Mama when boys called for me at home. Herb was naturally polished, and Granny and Jensy were naturally charming and gregarious, so all they had to do was be themselves; but Mama had to step totally out of character to get through the amenities. Seeing her on her good behavior and hearing her speak in a normal tone of voice destroyed my security and sent me forth into the night in a state of nervous collapse. Ten minutes without a single reference to assholes, sonsofbitches, and Our Lord Jesus Christ made me feel like a motherless child.

  Keep dating and you will become so sick, so badly crippled, so deformed, so emotionally warped and mentally defective that you will marry anybody.

  El’s fiancé did not return my lit books after spring finals, so I asked him for them.

  “What books?” he said innocently.

  “The books that El asked me to lend you. I gave them to her to give to you. She said she did.”

  “She didn’t give me any books from you, Flo.”

  “You know damn well she did. Where are they?”

  “Flo,” he said with infuriating emphasis, “I didn’t borrow any books from you.” His mouth twisted into a confident smirk. “Ask El if you don’t believe me.”

  I found El and told her what he had said. She wrinkled her brow melodramatically.

  “Gee, Flo, I kind of remember something about books, but …”

  “You asked me for them and I gave them to you. I saw him carrying them plenty of times. Now he won’t give them back to me.”

  She gave her forehead a little self-deprecatory slap.

  “It’s been such a long time. You know me.” She laughed. “I just can’t remember.”

  “He sold my books! What are you going to do about it?”

  “Me?”