Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady_A Memoir Read online

  She turned to me with the barest inquisitive glance. I had difficulty swallowing, but this time it had nothing to do with the wine.

  “Actually, they’re right for once,” she went on. “It is unfeminine. It’s ideal for writing military reports, which is what Caesar’s Gallic War is. The g’s and c’s are hard—the Church has ruined the real Roman pronunciation, you know?—and then there’s that marvelous brevity. Southern women like to put things in, but Latin takes things out. Like ‘Where is the mirror?’ Ubi speculum est? You don’t need ‘the.’”

  Once again she looked at me. Her glance was wry at first, but as I held it her eyes widened with unmistakable meaning. Suddenly she put down her wineglass and raised graceful arms to her hair and began to reorder it in that half-abstracted, half-automatic way of women who wear their hair up, swiping at the nape of her neck to catch loose strands and tucking them into the chignon at the crown. As I continued to watch her, she removed a bobby pin and opened it with her teeth. There is no gesture more womanly, yet it has all the carelessness of a little girl who loses her sweaters and breaks her Thermos jars. Something melted inside of me, a hard tight ball in whose center lay a tenderness I had never acknowledged or expressed. I wanted to hug her, to pull her into my lap and rock her. When she smiled shyly up at me from under the bow of her bent arms, it was all I could do not to cry.

  The ghastly wine was nearly gone. I had drunk only one glass but my tongue tasted like a Croatian army sock. I shuddered as the others drained their glasses in one gulp and smacked their lips appreciatively; evidently Mississippians would drink anything. Sorella suggested that we turn our afternoon into a night of serious drinking, and the Grope started discussing a gas station near Water Valley where, it was rumored, you could buy a pint of applejack. Not whiskey, applejack; not gin, applejack. It being impossible to telephone ahead and ask point blank if the gas station sold illegal hooch, they were willing to drive all the way down to Water Valley on the strength of this uncertain gossip.

  Reluctantly, I looked at my watch. “I’m on the desk tonight.”

  “We’ll make a hooch run when Florence can go with us,” Bres ruled, and the argument subsided at once.

  We all went to the cafeteria instead. I should have been hungry but I could barely finish a hamburger. I had fallen in love at last.

  »fourteen«

  A HOOCH run to Memphis was planned for the following Saturday. Meanwhile, all of us were busy with a new school year, so I did not see Bres alone for the rest of that week. I think she was letting it build up, and in a way I was glad. I had never known real yearning before and I had to admit there was nothing quite like it. It was completely different from the brutal anticipation I had felt with men. That was directly carnal but this was carnality once removed, lust’s distant cousin whose genealogy keeps getting lost in the dense foliage of a tree chart. I daydreamed about her long fingers rising out of her fist primo, secundo, tertio; my mind took imaginary darts in her baggy shirtwaists like a little French dressmaker enjoying the occasional accidental pass. Not that I did not imagine her naked breasts and myself kissing them—that picture was constantly in my mind—but because we were both women, my thoughts kept returning to darts and tucks and loving exasperation: why in the hell did she buy blouses that were too big for her?

  I did my best to concentrate on other things. Working as a dorm proctor gave me an ideal chance to study the classic Southern belle. My education began the night Tulaplee told me she wanted to be an actress and I asked her what role she would most like to play.

  “Mildred Pierce’s daughter. Ah think it’s right for me.”

  Her name was actually Tulip Lee, a fact I discovered when I saw the picture she drew in the sign-out book. It looked like a yellow twat with a green Tampax string hanging out of it. She liked to make her mark rather than write her name and had a four-color, twenty-four-carat gold mechanical pencil for this purpose—a gift from her daddy, she told me, who had taught her to sign herself this way back when she wasn’t hardly old enough to hold a crayon.

  Most of the space in the storage room was taken up by her trunks, and Daddy had paid for a triple room so she would have enough closet space. She had what looked like a Dickensian strongbox that turned out to be a portable file containing records of all her clothes on five-by-seven pastel index cards—when they were sent to the cleaners, when and where she had worn them last, comments received, and so forth. She used blue cards for dresses, green for skirts, yellow for coats, lavender for sweaters, and pink for evening gowns. The dress file, rather than homework, took up most of her study time. Seeing her at this massive labor was like coming upon Erasmus in drag.

  Handling her calluhs made me feel like a maternity ward nurse saddled with expectant fathers. A boy would come in, ask me to “please ma’am ring Tulaplee,” and the countdown would begin. The pendulum of the grandfather clock in the visitors’ lounge ticked off ten minutes but no Tulaplee appeared. I gave her another ring. Ten more minutes passed but still no sign of her. Boy starts to sweat. The crunch of a breath mint. Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock. Adam’s apple bobs in small spasm. Wristwatch synchronized with grandfather clock. Diffident attempt to thumb through a magazine does not come off; magazine is upside down. Bony knee begins to jerk. Another breath mint. Boy accidentally crunches down on inside of cheek. Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock.

  At last, as the moon crept over the yardarm, there came Tulaplee, flicking the lead buttons on her pencil. She was half an hour late right on the nose but her calluh had to wait still longer while she created her signature. Choking on silent screams of torment, he took surreptitious peeks at his watch while he listened for the click of her pencil that meant she had changed colors and started on the stem.

  I had to hand it to her. The malkins I had known all lacked the courage to treat males so brutally. They were too afraid of being stood up or losing a boy’s love, but Tulaplee had none of their insecurities. The idea of not being loved clearly had never occurred to her.

  One night she came in ten minutes early and agreed to sit in the lounge with her date. It meant that she had agreed to neck, but as the boy lowered himself onto the sofa beside her she gave a cry of despair.

  “Oh! Ah left my scarf in the car! Would you be a sugarplum and run out and get it for me right quick?”

  The boy hurried out the door. When he was gone, Tulaplee stuck her head around the office wall and gave me a conspiratorial wink.

  “Ah didn’t really forget it. Ah stuffed it down unda the seat on purpose. Ah wonda how long it’ll take him to find it?” Suddenly she blew out her cheeks and made a squirty sound of repressed laughter through her stretched lips. “Ah just love to send ’em on air-runds, don’t you?”

  It took me a second to realize she meant “errands.” Her magnificent chocolate brown eyes glittered with sadistic joy. She looked so maniacal that I decided it was the better part of wisdom to agree with her.

  “Keep ’em on the run,” I said.

  She circled thumb and index finger and winked again. The boy returned too late to neck.

  By the end of my first week at Ole Miss I could state with certainty that Tulaplee was not a malkin in any way, shape, or form. She was a cuddly barracuda; mad, bad, and dangerous to know, but she commanded respect. It’s not often one meets a woman who is honest enough to compare herself to Veda Pierce.

  I called home late Friday night. The three ladies of the house were getting ready for bed but Herb was entering his owl stage so I told him about the echolalia.

  “Hmm. Compulsive repetition, eh? Most interesting.”

  “What do you think causes it?”

  In the background I heard Mama bellow, “I don’t own the phone company, I just work there!”

  “My ancestry is about to be defined in no uncertain terms,” he said quickly. “We mustn’t dally any longer. Besides, it’s better if you piece these things out for yourself. I’ll give you two hints. Do you remember the clipping Mrs. Ruding gave you ab
out how God made the Southern woman?”

  “Who could forget it?”

  “Righto. Now the second hint: do you remember the time I took you over to the Franciscan monastery and we heard the monks chanting?”

  “ …Yes, sort of. That was a long time ago. What do monks and monasteries have to do with Baptist women?”

  “Just think about it. Cheerio.”

  I tried to figure it out as I lay in bed but I could not concentrate. All I could think of was the whiskey run planned for the next day. The Grope was going, too, of course, but I knew Bres could get rid of them later if she wanted to, and I was sure she wanted to. So sure that I told Miz Arvella I might be away “visitin’” for the whole weekend. She beamed with extroverted Southern joy and told me—three times—that she was glad I had made friends so quickly.

  We left at eleven in the morning, the four girls in Bres’s car and Augustus and Lucius following behind. Most of the campus population must have decided to go to Memphis that day, too; the first familiar face I saw was Tulaplee’s when she passed us on the road in her brand-new white T-Bird doing about seventy-five.

  “She’s goin’ shoppin’,” Sorella said. “Dudden have a thang to wear.”

  “You know who she is, don’t you?” Bres asked me. “Her daddy owns half the Delta. They say he still owns slaves.”

  When we got to Memphis, Bres headed straight for the city’s biggest liquor store. It was a drive-in but the parking lot was full, so we had to leave the cars several blocks away. In the store I saw the chairman of the History Department, the coach, a couple of clerks from the bursar’s office, the public relations director, and the taxi driver who had carried me up to the dorm. The air was thick with familiar greetings and unabashed ecstatic smiles.

  It was obvious that most of the Mississippi customers either knew nothing about liquor or, what was more likely, did not care what they bought as long as it had alcohol in it. As a bartender’s daughter I knew, for example, that Dewar’s Scotch, while not the most expensive, has the truest Highland flavor—i.e., smoky. I bought two fifths and tried to convince the Grope, but they would not listen. The idea was to get as much hooch as possible for the least amount of money; if it was light brown and under four dollars they would buy it even if the label said Auld Eagle Piss. The conversations I overheard were beyond belief. “Ah lak to mix me some Morgan Davis wine in a l‘il Sebben-Up … .” “My wife is a churchgoah so Ah put sloe gin in strawberry Kool-Aid and she don’t know the difference … .” “You evva taste thet ’air cream dee coco? Sure beats vanilla extract.”

  We left the store laden with brown bags. The worry set in at once. “If we drop it, I’ll just die,” Sorella moaned. “Imagine what you’d feel like if you dropped it. Oh, I can’t stand to think about it!” Other exiting customers were evidently in the throes of the same dread, clutching their bags like Roman mothers protecting their babes from Alaric’s Goths and walking with their eyes on their feet. It was the Mississippi version of “Step on a crack, break your mother’s back.”

  We put all of the purchases in Bres’s car because it was well known that the state troopers waiting behind the border signs rarely stopped women. Next we wadded old blankets around the bags to keep them from breaking in the trunk. When that was done, Sorella began worrying that somebody would break into the parked car and steal the cache while we were eating lunch. Lest you are wondering, as I was, why we did not wait and go to the liquor store at the end of our Memphis excursion instead of at the beginning, the answer is simple: my new friends were afraid that Something Would Happen to keep us from getting to the store before it closed. As Vanny put it: “Suppose we got run ovah and had to go to the hospital!”

  Sorella’s fear of hooch thieves infected Bres, so we un-parked both cars and drove around town looking for a restaurant with big picture windows and parking spaces out front so we could watch the car while we ate. Passing Lowenstein’s department store, we saw Tulaplee coming out the door with her arms full of dress boxes. When we stopped for a light, the occupants of the car beside us emitted a football cheer: “Hotty-totty, gosh aw-mighty, who the hell are we? Ram! Bam! Grand! Slam! OLE MISS BY DAMN!” A cab driver leaned out his window and yelled, “Bust ’Bama!” and the students responded with a chorus of “Dixie.”

  We finally found a restaurant that met our security requirements. After lunch we walked up to Confederate Park on the bluff and looked across the Mississippi River to Arkansas. I would have liked to stay longer and enjoy this breathtaking view, but they were all worried about the hooch, so we hurried back to the cars and set off on the seventy-five-mile drive back to Oxford.

  As we approached the WELCOME TO MISSISSIPPI sign, conversation ceased and the atmosphere in the car grew tense. Bres, who was inclined to speed, slowed down, and Sorella began chewing on her thumbnail. Vanny alone showed true courage. Leaning forward over the back of the front seat, she offered us a piece of advice which proved that the gentle breast of Southern womanhood is the repository not only of hope, but of eternally springing resourcefulness.

  “I heard about this girl who was stopped. They say she sucked his peckah, so he let her go without confiscatin’ her hooch.”

  “Ah oughta be a state troopah,” Bres murmured in an exaggerated drawl.

  She got rid of the Grope. As we pulled into Faculty Shacks, she turned to the back seat and said, “Florence and I have to discuss her thesis on Titus.” Finis. It proved that Kant gave us excellent advice when he said, “Never complain, never explain.” Sorella and Vanny fairly leaped out of the car and signaled the boys behind us. Bres opened the trunk, the hooch was unswaddled and distributed, and the girls climbed in with Augustus and Lucius. The latter lived in a garage apartment on the edge of town so they decided to do their drinking there. As they drove off, I wondered how much they knew. One thing was certain: bohemian honor required them to be blasé about everything and Bres took full advantage of it.

  We entered her house and went at once to the kitchen with the bags. This, I discovered, was standard Mississippi practice regardless of weather: after the hooch was comfortably settled, she went back and closed the front door. She had bought a plenteous if miscellaneous supply of potables, so we discussed what we would have. I offered my Dewar’s.

  She shook her head. “You’re in my house.”

  I knew she would say it; I would have said it, too. A polite Northerner would have made the same refusal, but not with “You’re in my house.” The idiom forged a pleasant Southern bond, and lowered the sexual tension that had throbbed between us in the car. We were hostess and guest now, temporarily caught up in the minuet of hospitality to the exclusion of all else. I had to admit it was convenient; ritual behavior soothes the nerves.

  “How about martinis?” she suggested.

  “Fine.” I paused, remembering the overheard conversations in the liquor store. “Would you like me to mix them?” I asked casually.

  “No, you just go on in and sit down.”

  That was Southern, too, but it forged no bond, just triggered visions of Kool-Aid, leftover coffee, and Vicks cough syrup. I went into the living room and sat down on one of the mattress-and-door couches. In a moment Bres came in with the ice bucket—a steel scrub bucket that was saved from being the one she used to scrub the floor only because she never scrubbed the floor—and a sloshing plastic picnic jug full of martinis. There was a little spigot on the jug like an appointment on a miniature sink. The two glasses she held pinched between thumb and forefinger were what were then called lowballs and are known now as on-the-rocks. They were big enough for triple Old Fashioneds, and still showed traces of peeling marmalade labels. In Mississippi the important thing is hooch, not bar equipment.

  She shoveled her hand in the ice bucket and scooped out some cubes, dumped them in the glasses, and held each glass under the spigot until it was full to the rim. There were no olives, lemon peel, or pearl onions. She handed me my drink and we clicked glasses and drank.

  “How is
it?”

  Not like Father used to make. “Perfect.”

  Soon, very soon, my lie became the truth. Martinis are like that, especially when shared with someone whose name you have whispered to yourself just for the magic of its sound. We had executed the requisite hospitality step and now the tension rose again. Her slate green eyes were the strangest color and, I was certain, twice as big as mine; optically speaking, I was an A cup and she was a C.

  “How do you like living in a freshman dorm?”

  “It sounds like Mr. Rochester’s attic.”

  She grinned and I was pathetically grateful. It was wonderful to make a casual literary reference and know that she would pick up on it. My life with my own sex had been an endless parade of puzzled, frowning faces saying, “Huh? What do you mean?”

  Suddenly I thought of the arcane clues Herb had scattered over the echolalia mystery. Bres would be an ideal detective to assign to the case. I described the thrice-told tales. She hooted with laughter and delivered a perfect imitation of Miz Arvella that was nonetheless uniquely Bres.

  “Ah said to Cataline, Ah said Cataline Ah said, you got to stop messin’ with our mores, ’deed you have, that’s what Ah tole him.” She took a big swig of martini and shook her head. “They all do it. My mother does it, too. Ashley Montagu said it was hysteria caused by racial tension, but there must be a few things down here that are caused by something else. What does your father think?”

  I repeated Herb’s clues. Her eyes sharpened when I mentioned Granny’s clipping.

  “Is that the piece that goes ‘ … all heaven veiled its face, for lo, He had wrought the Southern girl’?”

  “Yes! Do you know it?”

  “Know it? Honey, it was one of our boys that wrote it. Some stump politician back when I was in high school. He put it in a speech he made and it caused a sensation. Everybody wanted a copy, so he had batches printed up and gave ’em out all over the state. Lord, every picture framer in Jackson was going crazy! All the girls in my school got one for Christmas—my mother hung mine over my bed just like a crucifix. Then the wallet-sized copies turned up and all the fathers started carrying them around next to their hearts. I’m not surprised that it ended up in the Daughters’ magazine, it was reprinted everywhere. It even got in The Mississippi Hog Farmer.”