Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady_A Memoir Read online

  “It’ll sterilize you!” Mama yelled over my shrieks. “It’s so you won’t get lockjaw! Salt’s the purest thing there is! That’s why they say ‘the salt of the earth’!”

  I struck at her and pulled away and ran down the hall to the bathroom, where I tried futilely to reach the cold water faucet on the basin. Mama turned on the water and lifted me up, and I cupped my hands and splashed water in my mouth and eyes. I rinsed and rinsed, spat and spat, until the pain receded and the bleeding stopped. The loose tooth came out and went down the drain. When we were both calmed down, Mama fixed me an icebag (after dropping one tray of cubes on the floor) and put me into her bed, where I lay whimpering until Herb came home at two A.M.

  “Did you take her to the dentist?” he asked, after hearing the story.

  Mama exploded. “If she doesn’t have any goddamn teeth, why does she need a goddamn dentist?”

  He considered this in his imperturbable way—I suppose it did have a certain awful logic—and then suggested aspirin. He fetched the bottle from the medicine chest and Mama began crushing tablets in a cup. They were adult strength and she used four or five, but when Herb objected to the massive dose she replied, “Just for good measure.” She dissolved the crushed aspirin in warm water and I managed to swallow it.

  “Atta girl,” she said approvingly. “You’ll be all right now. That’s enough aspirin to kill a horse.”

  That made me burst into renewed sobs. “I want Granny!”

  Mama’s mouth tightened and she looked away, but I was too young and too sick to realize that I had hurt her, or to care. After all, wasn’t she trying to kill me? That her saline solution to the crisis was a direct outgrowth of Granny’s dictum that whiskey or salt will cure anything also eluded me. All I knew was that my mother had done to me what brutal sea captains did to flogging victims in sailing-ship movies: poured salt on open wounds.

  The next day they called Granny in Richmond and she hurried home. When the question of taking me to a dentist arose, she said, “Dentists don’t know anything,” and then took me to one. It was always the same: she would consult professionals if she had to, but first she had to run them down. “Doctors don’t know anything,” “Lawyers don’t know anything,” “CPAs don’t know anything” were household chants in the dual service of her ego and her anti-intellectualism.

  The dentist performed a mopping-up operation and Granny fed me thick cream and raw oysters until my mouth healed. Not having any teeth was a source of embarrassment to me, but Mama supplied me with a comeback for the curious: “Tell ’em you got in a fight, and if they think you look funny, they ought to see the other girl.”

  “Oh, Louise!”

  A few months later, the hand that rocks the cradle struck again. It happened at my uncle’s house when Mama decided to teach me how to bat.

  “You chop at the ball the way girls do,” she said scornfully. “You’re supposed to put your whole body into it, pull it all the way around in a follow-through swing. Like this! See how—”

  I saw stars and crumpled to the ground. Somewhere amid the buzzing and shrilling sounds in my head I heard a voice cry out, “Oh, Louise! You’ve killed the child!”

  I came to in Aunt Charlotte’s bed with an icebag over my fast-swelling lump. Mama stood at the foot of the bed trying manfully to conceal her terror. She held a cigarette lighter; as my eyes opened, she flicked it on and moved it back and forth in front of my face.

  “She’s not blind!” she yelled. “See? Her eyes are following it!” Flicking the lighter off, she moved swiftly to the head of the bed and bent over me.

  “Boo!” she bellowed in my ear. I jumped and started crying.

  “See? She’s not deaf!”

  “She might go crazy,” Aunt Nana said in a voice full of hope. “Being hit in the head like that … You never can tell what it might do to her mind.”

  Mama had a test for this, too. “What’s two and two?” she fired at me.

  “Four,” I whimpered.

  “See? If she was crazy, she’d say five. Which weighs more, a pound of lead or a pound of feathers?”

  “Chrissake, Louise,” Uncle Botetourt grumbled, “leave the poor kid alone. You’ve done enough for one day.”

  “Shut your goddamn mouth! Don’t go giving me any orders, you turd-faced sonof—”

  “Both of you shut up,” Aunt Charlotte snapped. “She’s got a bad enough headache as it is.”

  They shut up and everyone stood around the bed staring at me. It was like a Russian novel. For the next several weeks I was observed closely for dizzy spells and speech problems, but I never developed either one, or any other physical impairments. Whether or not I went crazy is impossible to say; a maniac could hide in my family as a leaf can hide in the forest. I merely harbored the certainty that Mama was trying to rub me out because I was not a boy.

  I knew she had wanted a boy; she was always careful never to say so outright, but her whole stance proclaimed it from the rooftops. I derived no comfort from the knowledge that Granny had wanted me to be a girl and that Herb was a woman’s man who disliked male companionship. Of the adults in my life, I loved Granny best and enjoyed Herb’s company the most, but these were secondary priorities formed in my conscious mind and based on logical choices. I was concerned with that vital primitive priority: to a small child, especially a female one, it’s the mother who counts, even if she comes in third in a race of three.

  The conviction that I was marked for infanticide remained with me until the second grade, when Mama proved her love for me with two heroic acts, one of them positively hair-raising.

  »four«

  WE were evicted from Park Road early in January of 1941 after a building inspector saw the plumbing pipes that the distraught owner had installed all by himself. The structure was condemned and we were given a month to move.

  Mama and Herb responded with alarm. Their marriage depended upon old houses that had been cut up into apartments by people who did not know what they were doing. As long as there was an extra piece or an accidental cul de sac, Herb could play St. Jerome in the Desert and Mama could litter in peace, but a logical floor plan would lead to divorce or worse.

  It was the only time I ever saw Herb bestir himself. He hurried out with the newspaper and returned an hour later wearing his old serene look. He had signed a lease on a two-bedroom apartment around the corner at 1020 Monroe. We already knew the building. It lay overtop a block of small stores. Some were convenient, like the Chinese laundry and the Greek deli, but the Monroe Bar & Grill was not. Worse, the windows of our new home faced the streetcar tracks, there was no cross-ventilation, and the rent was an exorbitant sixty-five dollars. Never has an apartment boasted so many unwinning features, but Herb insisted that it was a find.

  He meant that it had an alcove. Actually it was a dressing room off the master bedroom and thus more connubial in spirit than his former kitchen hideaway, but even so it was haut Herb. Mama took one look at it and started singing “There’ll Always Be an Alcove.”

  Since we were moving only around the corner, we did not hire a van. Jensy produced three strong nephews named Booker, Kincaid, and Donald to take the furniture, and the rest of us followed with linens, pictures, and clocks. It looked like an integrated looting.

  Granny and the nephews hit it off superbly. Each time they returned from a sprint across the street with a table or a bed, she promised to dance at their weddings. Soon the ambience reached such dizzy heights that they were inspired to make her a bet: they could carry her seated in our heaviest armchair all the way over to Monroe Street without stopping to rest.

  They took our huge leather Morris chair out to the sidewalk and Granny sat down. Hefting her aloft, the nephews got a running start and careened down to the corner just as a streetcar was approaching. Unable to stop their momentum, they dashed across the tracks in front of it as the astonished motorman and all the passengers stared. Seeing their interest, Granny smiled graciously and, remembering to keep her wris
t stiff like Queen Mary in the newsreels, gave them a perfect imitation of the royal wave.

  “The last of the great white goddesses,” Herb said.

  She made friends in the new building at once. To her great joy, our immediate neighbors were all women in their forties or fifties whose menopauses were either in progress or fresh in their minds. She was thrilled to learn that 12B contained a bizarre vibratory condition known at quilting bees as a “singing ovary.” It was the well-nurtured property of Miss Inez Shields, a fluttery, domestically inclined spinster who stayed home and kept house for her capable, efficient sister, Miss Rose Shields, who supported them both with her job at the Bureau of Engraving. Miss Rose made money and Miss Inez made a buzzing sound. Peeking into their kitchen, I saw Granny holding a rolled-up magazine to Miss Inez’s stomach and listening at the other end.

  “I’ll tell you what’s wrong with her ovary,” said Mama. “Those goddamn streetcars did it. We’re all going to have singing brains. They’ll have to carry us out of here in rubber bags and take us to St. Elizabeth’s.”

  The streetcars were the old-fashioned kind with wicker seats and motors front and back. Eleventh and Monroe being the end of the line, the tracks simply stopped at the corner. There was no way to turn the cars around for the trip back downtown, so the motormen made the juice flow in the opposite direction by driving over the switch, which lay directly under our windows. They had to approach it at a certain speed to keep from getting stuck on it; to make sure the tracks were clear of traffic and pedestrians, they rang the bell from Park Road to Monroe Street. When the wheels hit the switch, they exploded with a metallic roar and gave off cascades of sparks, bringing cheers from the drunks leaning up against the Monroe Bar & Grill. The motorman then reversed the seats manually—twenty separate crunching slams—and manned the opposite set of controls. Sometimes, of course, a car got stuck on the switch. When this happened, the motorman had to grind back and forth like someone trying to saw through a knight in full armor, until the car came free.

  Anything for an alcove.

  Having moved to 1020 in the winter, we did not receive the full impact of this procedure until it was time to sleep with the windows open. By August we were as scrambled as Quasimodo, so we took off for a vacation at Colonial Beach.

  Granny always enjoyed the drive down because of all the historical road markers around Fredericksburg. HERE WAS FOUGHT … ONCE STOOD THE HOME OF … BURIED NEARBY … GRANTED BY KING CHARLES II TO … and Herb’s favorite, ON THIS SPOT, all filled her with immense pride.

  “Think of it,” she said to no one in particular.

  When we arrived at the cabin site we found Uncle Botetourt and Aunt Charlotte, Dora Madison with a group of her girlfriends, and the usual assortment of Uptons. These were the people we had expected to find. Also present that year was someone who was destined to make the summer of 1941 a season that would live in imbecility. Charlotte was in the middle of saying “There’s something you should know …” when suddenly a cabin door opened and there stood Evelyn Cunningham in a pink seersucker sunsuit.

  Seeing us, she sprinted down the cabin steps and threw herself into Granny’s arms.

  “Oh, Aunt Lura! Aunt Nana made me go to a new doctor and he’s going to hook my head up to a machine and read my brain!”

  “If he can find it,” Mama muttered under her breath.

  Soap operas at this time were modest radio offerings concerned solely with love affairs, so none of us knew what brain waves and electroencephalograms were, but Evelyn was eager to enlighten us. She followed us into our cabin and recited a year’s worth of medical history as we unpacked, talking faster and faster, higher and higher, gasping for breath, widening her eyes, licking her lips, until at last she crossed wires and had a choking fit.

  “Now you stop this foolishness,” Granny ordered. “There’s nothing wrong with your mind, Aunt Nana’s just talking through her hat. It’s female trouble that’s causing those spells. You’ve got a descending womb. It runs in the family—I had the same trouble myself and I can see all the signs in you.”

  “You think so, Aunt Lura?” Evelyn asked hopefully.

  “I don’t think it, I know it. You’re delicate down below, that’s all. All of us Upton women are.” She sighed. “I’ve told you this over and over, Evelyn. Why do you let Aunt Nana fill your head with nonsense?”

  The answer was easy. Evelyn and Billy had rented Granny’s old house, putting Evelyn in dire propinquity to Aunt Nana, who had jumped at the chance to plump for insanity again. If God was on the side of the strongest battalion, Evelyn was on the side of the nearest.

  Now Granny was the nearest. As she launched into her lecture on the descending womb (known to medical science by the cold name of prolapsed uterus), Evelyn’s strained face relaxed and she returned to the female trouble fold.

  “Oh, Aunt Lura, you’re smarter than that old doctor any day!” she shrieked, rushing over to give Granny a big hug.

  When she scampered out of our cabin, Herb opened a bottle of beer and sank wearily into a chair.

  “That woman has a voice like a castrated Irish tenor.”

  “She’s nuts,” Mama proclaimed flatly.

  “Oh, Louise! You sound just like Aunt Nana with her talk of the Cunningham taint. Evelyn has female trouble.”

  “Mrs. Ruding,” Herb sighed, “Evelyn’s problem has nothing to do with either the Upton womb or the Cunningham taint. She’s suffering from historical displacement brought on by her unsuccessful struggle to be a Southern belle.”

  “Why, she was a belle,” Granny said indignantly. “Men flocked around her.”

  “That’s only one small part of being a belle,” Herb replied. “Many women throughout the world are admired by the opposite sex, but they aren’t Southern belles.”

  “Then what is a Southern belle?” Granny demanded.

  “A state of mind,” Herb said. “One which Evelyn is geographically incapable of achieving. The belle is a product of the Deep South, which is a product of the nineteenth century and the Age of Romanticism. Virginia is a product of the eighteenth century. It’s impossible to extract a belle from the Age of Reason.”

  “Do you mean to say that Virginia has no belles?” Granny asked incredulously.

  “That is correct.”

  “Herb’s right,” Charlotte said pensively. “Look at all those plantation novels and movies about Southern belles. They’re never set in Virginia, it’s always somewhere ’way down South. Scarlett was from Georgia and Jezebel was from New Orleans.”

  Granny scowled at her traitorous daughter-in-law.

  “What about Sally Fairfax?” she huffed.

  “Her fame rests solely on the fact that George Washington fell in love with her,” Herb replied. “But she was a married woman when it happened, so she can hardly be considered a belle, especially since she discouraged him firmly and consistently without indulging in coy games.”

  “No wonder they never made a movie about it,” Dora Madison said, giggling.

  Mama was enjoying Granny’s defeat.

  “Name another Virginia belle, Mother,” she challenged.

  Silence fell. Mama threw Herb a grin and punched him in the ribs. It was her way of saying thank you.

  I was to dine out on Herb’s theory thirty-six years later when “Roots” aired on television and a number of non-Southern friends asked me why the Sandy Duncan character seemed oddly “off.” It’s simple: she brought to the Virginia of Thomas Jefferson a giddy flutter that belonged in the Alabama of Jefferson Davis.

  At our picnic that afternoon, Dora Madison made a beeline for Herb and they fell to discussing the books they had been reading. Her girlfriends gathered round and gazed at him with an awe that hovered on the edge of romantic titillation. Here was the “real honest-to-God Englishman” Dora had promised them; a man who did not call them honey, who crossed his legs at the knee, who looked at a woman’s face when she talked and actually listened to what she was saying. Seated in a row
with their eyes locked on him, they looked as if they were watching a Ronald Colman movie.

  After the picnic we all went down to the boardwalk. Granny bustled into the Bingo hall, bought five cards, and settled down to a serious evening of old-lady vice. She always stayed until they closed the doors so we used her as a rallying point to make sure we didn’t lose any children. The rule was to report back to her at specified intervals, though whether her glassy gambler’s eyes even recognized us remained in doubt.

  Herb and Billy Bosworth went off to play darts and I went with Mama while she had her palm read. When Madame Zenia got to the finger sworls, she had to use a magnifying glass to penetrate the nicotine.

  “I see a strange man,” she rumbled in her whiskey voice.

  “I see him every day.”

  Three hours later we were hungry again, so we found Charlotte and Dora and went to the crab shed. As we were about to enter, we heard a shriek behind us. It was Evelyn, waving frantically, pointing to her mouth and running sideways in imitation of a crab. It was her way of telling us that she was hungry, too.

  She joined us and we took a big table in the middle of the restaurant. The waitress spread newspapers over it and we ordered a mess of softshell. When they came, we all fell to except Evelyn, who was staring at an empty pickle jar on the table.

  “I’m going to steal that jar,” she whispered.

  “Why?” asked Charlotte. “There’s nothing in it except juice.”

  “I know, that’s why I want it. It’s pickle juice.”

  She rolled her popping eyes around the room to make sure no one was watching; then she grabbed the jar, screwed the lid tight, and shoved it in her big straw handbag.

  “It’s so’s I can catch my womb in case it falls out,” she informed us.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake!” Mama exploded. “How the hell can a womb fall out?”