Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady_A Memoir Page 18

  “I’m working late tonight. One of the professors needs a long article typed. It might take quite a while but he’s going to drive me home afterwards.”

  “Okay,” said Mama. “See you later, alligator.”

  I wanted to rent her to Marjorie Morningstar.

  Dr. Newton—by now Ralph—drove us to our house of assignation with such extreme caution that I felt like a DMV examiner as I sat beside him. We did not speak, but when he braked to a glass-smooth stop at a red light he reached over and gave my knee a squeeze.

  The apartment was an efficiency with a convertible sofa that had not been made up. The sheets were the plain white ones that nice people still preferred in 1957 (“Those color sheets are trashy!”). Ralph pulled me down on them and we messed them up some more with a long rolling embrace.

  “You don’t have to worry,” he murmured. “I’ve got safes.”

  “I’ve got a diaphragm.”

  “You do?”

  “It’s not … I have to go into the bathroom for a minute.”

  He let me up and started unknotting his tie. Feeling like Harriet Mudd, I picked up my loaded-for-bear haversack and beat a retreat. Why did I have to blurt out the news of the diaphragm that way? Now he knew I had planned it all. I couldn’t decide whether I was honest or just dumb.

  The diaphragm went in like greased lightning. I breathed a sigh of relief. Though I had practiced insertion with excellent results, I had been dreading this first real moment, visualizing mishaps involving air shafts and open bathroom windows with Catholic priests standing in range. I put my pants in my purse, washed my hands, and left the bathroom, fully dressed except for pants and carrying my handbag.

  Ralph was in bed naked, the sheet pulled up to his waist. His chest was roped with muscles and covered with a mat of hair much darker than his sandy-blond crewcut.

  “May I watch you undress?” he asked softly.

  I nodded and unzipped my skirt. This was a performance I had orchestrated mentally many times, guided by a cold assessment of my assets and liabilities. Deciding to leave the best for last, I promptly removed my bra. I hated my breasts because they did not look like funnels or collie muzzles. They had when they were still sprouting, but around age fourteen they rounded out and developed a convex line on the undersides that prevented me from passing the pencil test. Years later I would realize that there was nothing much wrong with them, but in the fifties, tits weren’t up to snuff unless they could be used to put out Gloucester’s eyes in King Lear. I was convinced that I looked like a Bolivian wet nurse.

  Next to go was my halfslip. My pants were already off so the first thing he would see was my crotch. Having no basis for comparison, I did not know if I came up to Napoleon’s estimate of Josephine—“She had the most beautiful cunt in the world but she lied too much”—but in my own way I was the soul of honor.

  In any case, when I stepped out of the circle of my halfslip my hour had come, because nothing beats garter belt, stockings, and high heels for showing off legs.

  As I reached down to unfasten the garters, his voice cut through the turgid silence.

  “Leave that on.”

  He pulled me down on the bed. The shoes came off but the whorish prop remained to cast its unique spell over the occasion. It turned into a glorious melee with no real caresses but a lot of leg-wrapping and rolling around on top of each other. His cock was short but very thick, with a tip the size of a tangerine; it was like being hit in the twat with a fist. When it was all the way in I felt very full and not at all big.

  “Remember,” he said as I got out of the car, “tomorrow morning at ten. We’ll spend the whole day together.”

  It was like asking me to remember my own name. Tomorrow was Saturday, his Rehoboth Beach day, but he was not going.

  It was nine when I got home so I could not douche until two A.M. I was too excited to sleep so I had no fear of missing it. I wanted to lie in bed and think about what had happened, but I was destined to be thwarted. Granny wasn’t sleepy, either.

  “What was that woman’s name?”

  “What woman?”

  “You know,” she accused. “The one that had the son with the ears.”

  “Granny, everybody’s got ears.”

  “Not like that. Oh, you know who I’m talking about! They lived next door to that friend of Aunt Nana’s who lost her mind.”

  “Which one?”

  “She used to bake cakes and take them out to the cemetery and put them on her husband’s tombstone. The gravediggers ate them, but when she found the empty plate on the tombstone, she thought her husband did. Oh, what was his name?”

  It went on for over an hour. Every time she remembered a name, it reminded her of some other name that had slipped her mind. My reverie was destroyed. I wanted to think about big fat cocks, but by the time she fell into a querulous, snorting sleep, my mind was crammed with ears, shock treatments, and people who had choked to death on fish bones.

  Two o’clock came at last. I slipped silently out of bed, picked up my carnal valise, and tiptoed into the bathroom. I debated whether or not to lock the door and finally decided against it. None of us ever did, so it would only arouse suspicion, especially at two in the morning.

  My douche bag was the hanging kind. I filled it with water and then looked around for a place to hang it, but of course there wasn’t one. My heart sank. Like the master criminal who forgets one small detail, I had forgotten to put up a nail.

  There was a clothes hook on the back of the bathroom door but it was sagging out of the wood from the weight of all the robes and nightgowns that Mama and Granny put on it. To their way of thinking, it was easier to sling a garment on the hook than to take the trouble of putting it away properly. A sizable part of both their wardrobes resided on the hook at any given time, so there was neither room nor fortitude for a douche bag.

  I would have to remember to put a nail in the wall for future douches. Meanwhile, there was nothing to do but hold the bag over my head with my left hand while I performed the ablutions with my right. I sat down on the toilet.

  “Give me your tard, your poah …”

  It worked fine until the bag was half-empty and it was time to remove the diaphragm. Pressing the clamp to shut off the water, I held the nozzle in my teeth while I probed for the diaphragm. I pulled it out, sat it on the edge of the basin, and stuck the nozzle back in my twat.

  Just then I heard a scuffling sound in the hall. Before I could move, the door flew open, the hook gave up the ghost, all the clothes fell in the bathtub, and I lost my balance and dropped the douche bag.

  “Oh, Law!” Granny screamed.

  The nozzle was still in me. I plucked it out and hauled in the rubber tubing; the douche bag came flapping into my lap like a fish. The gooey diaphragm had fallen into the basin and lay there just out of my reach. Granny had not seen it and probably couldn’t without her glasses, but she would if I stood up and tried to rescue it. I stayed put and hoped for the best.

  Just then a familiar voice rang out.

  “Goddamnit! What the hell’s going on?”

  The Gipper joined us. Granny pointed a Zola-esque finger at me as I sat huddled on the john.

  “The child was taking a douche!”

  Mama looked at the floor. “She missed.”

  “Oh, Louise! I heard a splashing sound and thought she was sick, and when I came in, there she was just as big as life, taking a douche!”

  Mama’s eyes flickered over to the basin and rested for a second on the diaphragm. She turned back to Granny.

  “Well, let her take it. For God’s sake, Mother, do you have to run everything? Go back to bed.”

  “But why was the child taking a douche?”

  “The nurse at the infirmary recommended it,” I said. “I had an itch.”

  Granny’s suspicious expression faded and she perked up.

  “An itch? What kind of itch?”

  “A real bad one,” I said in my best Evelyn voice. “T
here was a discharge with it.”

  “Really? Was it white or yellow?”

  “White.”

  “White. Did it have—”

  “It’s the Upton crud, Mother, now go back to bed.”

  “—little nodules in it like cottage cheese?”

  “No, just mucusy. The nurse said it came from using the swimming pool. A lot of girls had the same thing.”

  “Chlorine!” Granny cried, her curlers quivering with righteous wrath. “They’re putting it in everything! It’s a Communist plot to poison us all! Mrs. Baldwin read a paper on it at our last meeting.”

  “Jesus Christ on rollerskates! To hell with the Russians! Go back to bed!”

  Mama took Granny’s arm and steered her firmly into the bedroom. Just then Herb called up from the foot of the stairs.

  “What are you people up to?”

  “Nothing that concerns you. Just keep on reading John Quincy Shitass.”

  She stalked back to her room and slammed the door. When I had stopped trembling, I mopped the floor, hung the clothes on the shower rack, washed the diaphragm, dried the douche bag, and staggered back to bed with my pocketbook. Now I was sleepy but the night wasn’t over yet.

  “Those Communists will do anything. Look what they did to that poor little girl. Took her down the cellar and blew her brains out! But they say she’s still alive somewhere. They’re holding her money for her in a Swiss bank. The poor, poor little soul … . Oh, what was her name?”

  “Anastasia,” I groaned.

  Already unique in the annals of motherhood, Mama now went herself one better. She never said a word about the diaphragm or the douche, or questioned me about my private life. She gave Ralph a shrewd look when she met him at graduation, but she never mentioned him to me.

  It was a charmed summer in every way. I even had the foresight to get the curse on the weekend that his wife abruptly demanded his presence at the beach. By the following Saturday I was in flat-bellied fucking trim.

  Our assignations were deliciously salacious and occasionally perverse. There were no whips or bondage games but we did everything that he called “the things I’ve always thought about.” (There were as yet no official fantasies, and the word, when it did appear in print, was spelled with ph.) We took a lot of showers, for the practices that require absolute cleanliness, for the ones that require thick slippery soapsuds, and for the one that requires a drain.

  As things turned out, we did have one date after all. The week before I left for Ole Miss, he took me out to dinner. He was in the process of drinking coffee when I glanced out the window and stiffened.

  “Look at that woman. She’s smoking on the street.”

  There was a wheezing sound of bubbles in distress; then a fine spray of coffee rained down on the table and me.

  I never saw him again. Our goodbye that night was like the whole affair—friendly rather than tender. Later on I realized that except for first names and fucking, that summer was no different from the student-teacher friendship that began in my sophomore year when I took my first class with him. We had some good conversations and some good laughs but there was no talk of love and no terms of endearment, even in our most frenzied moments. It was always an affair, never a “relationship,” and that’s what I liked about it and him.

  I knew I was going to miss him sexually, but it did not stop me from feeling a certain relief when I embarked for Memphis a few days later. I still liked “overness” and there was still a part of me that wanted to wave at the railroad men when the train went through.

  »thirteen«

  MY South was a region of narrow red brick Federalist houses and vast rolling acres of cobblestones. I had never seen naked children playing with a dead snake, nor a four-year-old standing up to nurse at the breast of a mother seated on a porch, but these riveting sights were mine from the window of the Memphis-Oxford bus.

  Oxford itself was a pretty town with a courthouse on the square and a Confederate statue in front of it. It was almost dark when the bus pulled into the depot. As I got off, a taxi driver spotted me for a student and jumped forward, tipping his cap.

  “Carry you up to campus, l’il lady?”

  His idiom for “drive” was another first; for a moment I visualized myself arriving in a swoon in his skinny arms. He loaded my luggage and I gave him the name of the dorm the dean had assigned me to.

  “That’s Miz Arvella’s dorm,” he said, referring to the housemother the dean had mentioned. “A fine woman.”

  Proctors had to arrive two days earlier than the other students, so the campus was empty and unlighted when he pulled up before a dimly outlined rectangular house set in a copse of dark overhanging trees. In the tradition of Gothic paperback covers, one light burned in the house. The driver shone his headlights on the walk so I could see and I mounted the porch and rang the bell. I heard footsteps and then the door opened.

  “Hey, Miz Arvellal” the driver cried happily.

  “Hey, Mistuh Reece! How you doin’? How you been? You have a good summuh?” She turned to me. “You must be Flarnz. Are you Flarnz? Are you the proctuh named Flarnz? They said you wuh comin’ tonight. The Dean said to me this mornin’, she said, ‘Flarnz is comin’ tonight.’ Did you get heah awright? How you doin’?”

  Everybody started talking at once; the driver answering his questions, I answering mine, and Miz Arvella asking more. It made walking through the door difficult; other people enter houses but Southerners surge in on wings of speech. Miz Arvella was the same age and shape as every other old lady I had ever known, but there was nonetheless something un-Daughterly about her. The word “askew” came to mind. I was used to rigidly glued gray finger waves and personalities to match, but Miz Arvella looked as if she had been cut out of her own speech pattern.

  I reminded myself that I was getting a free private room out of this. Miz Arvella took me upstairs and showed it to me as the driver followed behind with my bags. It was huge and attractively furnished and sans Granny—my first room-of-one’s-own. I paid the driver and he left me alone with the fine woman.

  “Come on down aftuh you wash up. We’ll have us some coffee and Ah’ll explain your duties,” she said, and waddled out.

  I washed up and looked out the window but could see nothing except an amber patch made by my own light; beyond it lay the wet black velvet of a Southern night. It was as still as death, yet there was something pervasively alive about it, a sense of things unseen moving among the trees on soundless wings. No wonder so many of the early settlers had gone mad. (“One Nathaniel Upton was floggèd for shewing himself in publick unclothèd.”)

  I went downstairs to join Miz Arvella. She led me to a little room with a wall board that contained buzzers and corresponding room numbers. Next to the board was the proctor’s desk and a table containing the sign-out book. According to the dean’s letter, I was to alternate odd and even nights with Miz Arvella, each of us having every other weekend off. There was very little to do and I could study at the desk once the girls were out on their dates. I had to check them in, keep track of late records and grace periods, chase any boys out of the lounge when the witching hour struck, and lock the doors.

  As a woman of legal age, I had no curfew. I could go out after I locked the magnolia blossoms in, and stay out all night if I wished. My job entitled me to a key to the dorm, which Miz Arvella issued me now.

  Next she explained the buzzer system. This is what she said:

  “When a guhl has a phone call, you know what Ah mean, when the telephone rings, when somebody is callin’ huh up. When a guhl has a phone call, you press huh bell once. When she has a calluh, when a boy comes in to get huh, you know what Ah’m tryin’ to say, when they’ve got a date that night and he picks huh up, when he comes in and asks for huh in puhson ‘stead of callin’ on the phone, you unnerstand what Ah mean? When she has a calluh, then you press huh bell twice. That way, she knows whethuh she’s got a phone call or a calluh. ‘Cause see, if she has a calluh and you
press huh bell once ’stead of twice, she’ll think it’s a call ‘stead of a calluh. She’d come downstairs in huh dressin’ gown with huh hair up in cullahs, and there stands huh calluh, just standin’ there right in front of huh just as big as life. She’d just die of embarrassment, you know what Ah mean, she’d just fall down dead is what Ah’m sayin’, she’d just perish!”

  She invited me to dinner in her apartment but I pleaded travel fatigue and escaped to my room. I poured myself a drink from Herb’s Prohibition flask, which he had filled with Scotch and given me for a going-away present. I heard the phone ring in Miz Arvella’s bedroom. A call, not a calluh. I put my hair up in cullahs, had another drink—you know what I mean, I poured some more whiskey out of the flask and drank it is what I’m saying—and fell into bed.

  I slept twelve hours and awoke to the kind of morning that can turn night people into morning people. The warm sunny air was so fresh and sweet that I actually stuck my head out the window and inhaled. Ole Miss had a bona fide campusy look that my city college had striven for and missed. It was enough to make a graduate student feel like a co-ed at last, instead of the strangely haunted, secret-drinking proctor of Miz Arvella.

  No sooner did this thought pass through my mind than I heard a tap at my door.

  “Flarnz? You there, Flarnz? Come on down and have breakfast. Miz Zaviola’s heah. She’s one of the othuh housemothuhs and she’s just dyin’ to meet you.”

  I was starving to death, so with two of us in extremis there was no reason to try and get out of it. I dressed and went downstairs, sniffing appreciatively at the aroma of Miz Arvella’s home-baked biscuits.

  The other housemother looked more like my kind of old lady but she sounded exactly like Miz Arvella. This is what she said over breakfast:

  “When Ah heard they wuh lettin’ the freshmen guhls stay out till midnight on Saddy, Ah saw the handwritin’ on the wall. Ah said to myself Ah said Ah can just see the handwritin’ on the wall if they let those guhls stay out till midnight on Saddy. Ah said the same thing to one of the mothuhs that called me. She asked me what did Ah think about them lettin’ the freshmen guhls stay out till midnight on Saddy and Ah said to huh Ah said Ah can just see the handwritin’ on the wall.”