Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady_A Memoir Page 6

  “Aunt Lura said it could!” Evelyn wailed.

  “Mother’s full of shit!”

  Evelyn’s answer was a sob. Putting her fingers in her mouth, she emitted a long steady moan that made everyone turn around and stare at us. She sounded like a smoke detector.

  “I think we’d better go,” said Aunt Charlotte.

  “Bring those crabs,” Mama said to me.

  They paid the check and hauled the weeping Evelyn to her feet. She cried all the way down the pier and across the boardwalk, sagging into Charlotte’s arms while we followed behind with greasy newspapers full of our uneaten supper.

  “Women!” Mama muttered.

  The next night I ran into Evelyn at the cotton candy stand. I tried to escape her frantic company by saying that I had to report to Granny at the Bingo hall, but she grabbed my hand in her clammy grip and said she would go with me.

  It was Saturday. The boardwalk was packed with Marines from Quantico, sailors from Anacostia, soldiers from Fort Belvoir, and defense workers from the shell factory at nearby Dahlgren. As we inched our way to the door of the Bingo hall, Evelyn screamed.

  “Here it comes!”

  Wrenching open her pocketbook, she tore madly through its chaotic contents, throwing combs, cosmetics, and old streetcar transfers in all directions until she found her pickle jar.

  “Please!” she cried. “Please give me room! My womb’s falling out!”

  Her plea was instantly effective. As she squatted down and shoved the jar between her thighs, soldiers, sailors, Marines, brawny workingmen, the whole backbone of our nation moved as if impelled by some primitive religious instinct and formed a circle around her. Terror, disgust, and fascination bounced across their faces like the ball in a sing-along film. Were they Christians shrinking from a succubus, or Dionysian revelers admiring a maenad’s cooch dance? Nobody knew. All certainties had vanished; the world was flat again and simple man was teetering on the abyss.

  Attracted by the uproar, people poured out of the Bingo hall, among them Granny with a toaster and coffeepot clutched to her Daughterly bosom. She took one look at Evelyn and dropped both.

  “Oh, Law!”

  A vacationing doctor pushed his way through the crowd.

  “Is she in labor?”

  “Her womb’s falling out! Her womb’s falling out!” Granny cried, sounding just like Chicken Little. The doctor gave her an incredulous stare.

  A few minutes later the police arrived. At first they thought Evelyn was drunk and exposing herself. Nothing was showing, but her pornographic squat and the position of her hand made one of the cops mutter something about Spanish fly. They called for an ambulance and she was taken to the hospital in Fredericksburg, the rest of us following in several cars. The chief of gynecology examined her and said there was nothing wrong with her womb, but this only made her scream louder. She went on screaming until they had to put her under sedation.

  Billy stayed with her and the rest of us drove back to Colonial Beach. The next day everyone was exhausted and Herb was in a foul mood. No one had ever seen him mad before; his equanimity was a family legend, especially to those who had lived with Granny. He spent most of the morning brooding alone on a sandbar. Later in the afternoon he came and got me and said we were going for a walk. It was not an invitation.

  We walked nearly to Monroe Bay before he said what was on his mind.

  “Don’t you ever get like Evelyn.”

  “But suppose it runs in the family?”

  “Bugger that! I am sick of this pelvic Shintoism.” He pointed a finger in my face. “You decide what runs in you. Don’t ever let anyone or anything else decide for you. Is that clear?”

  I nodded.

  “I’ve made a careful study of this family,” he went on. “Evelyn is the creation of Aunt Nana and your grandmother, and they have created a Frankenstein. One of them wants her to go barmy and the other wants her crankcase to fall out, all for the sake of some outlandish vision of ideal womanhood the two of them have cooked up. They are both wrong! Don’t forget that. Naturally you will continue to respect your grandmother and obey her in everyday matters, but don’t listen to her madcap theories. Is that clear?”

  “Yes. What does Shintoism mean?”

  “Ancestor worship.”

  “What does bugger mean?”

  A sheepish look crossed his face.

  “It’s something like what your mother means when she says ‘shove it.’”

  “You mean ‘bugger’ is British for ‘shove it’?”

  “Well, yes, you might say that.”

  We walked back to our cabin. Herb lapsed into another silence, his brows puckered in thought as if he wanted to say something else but wasn’t sure how to put it. Finally he spoke again.

  “Your grandmother and Aunt Nana really aren’t the kind of women they would like to be, so they use Evelyn as a doppelganger.”

  “What’s that?”

  “German for substitute. You see, as long as Evelyn behaves in a feminine manner, Mrs. Ruding and Aunt Nana don’t have to. All they need do is claim kinship with her, wait for her to collapse or abandon her wits, diagnose the problem as some quintessentially female plague, and then announce that she inherited it from them. That way, they can go on being autocratic without risking exposure. If Evelyn is weak, it follows that they are weak.”

  “What’s autocratic?”

  “Bossy.”

  “What’s quin—quinner—”

  “The highest example of something. As in, your mother is the quintessential baseball fan.”

  “Oh, I get it.”

  “You know,” he said slowly, “this Evelyn business has been hard on your mother. Knowing that Mrs. Ruding would prefer Evelyn for a daughter has hurt her more than she lets on. If she seems brusque at times, try to understand her. Imagine how you would feel if you had a sister that everyone liked best.”

  “I don’t want any goddamn sister.”

  “I believe you have taken the point,” Herb said dryly.

  I had. I was still half-afraid Mama would murder me, but I began, in a childish way, to grasp the basic family picture. And a small relief, like a single bead of sweat, rolled down my mind: I did not have to grow up to be like Evelyn.

  When we got home from the beach it was time for me to start school. I was enrolled in Kindergarten B, or beginning kindergarten, which met from one to three.

  Mama and I walked down a crooked little street called Rock Creek Church Road to Raymond Elementary. The kindergarten classroom was on the ground floor. It had its own toilet, a piano, a bird in a gilded cage, and bulletin boards full of cheery paper cut-outs. Glass front cabinets containing building blocks, pots of paste, and stacks of construction paper lined the walls.

  At one o’clock the teacher clapped her hands, announced that school was in session, and dismissed the mothers with a gracious but pointed nod. They gathered themselves up reluctantly and moved toward the door. That’s when it started. A little boy near me opened his mouth and bawled, and it traveled around the room like a virus. Each time another child broke down, its mother came catapulting through the door with arms outstretched and features shattered. It was a mass engulfment. One child threw up, another held his breath, another hurled himself on the floor and kicked, and one little girl simply collapsed and curled up like a bean. Her mother knelt beside her and burst into tears.

  Mine was standing in the doorway looking disgusted. She caught my eye and mouthed Are you all right? I nodded. It was a lie, I was miserable: I wasn’t used to children and they were getting on my nerves. Worse, it appeared that I was a child, too. I hadn’t known that before; I thought I was just short. Who were these watery moles anyhow? Were they always this noisy? I waved to Mama and she left.

  The janitor came in and mopped up the vomit and the bean was carried out in maternal arms. The rest of the mothers stood outside the door pressing their faces into distorted shapes against the glass and making mist with their heated breaths. I fel
t proud of Mama for being such a brick. The teacher, less tactful now, shooed them away with a desperate two-handed gesture like someone flapping a towel at a clutch of rioting hens, and they departed at last.

  Once they were gone, the class calmed down and grew quiet except for the sounds made by a vigorous thumbsucker. I was dying for a cup of coffee. The teacher seated us at long worktables, passed out drawing paper and crayons, and told us to draw a picture of anything we liked. I picked the Titanic because Herb had just told me about it and shown me photographs from his ship book. I drew an ocean liner and colored it in. Depicting an iceberg on white paper stumped me until I remembered Herb saying that icebergs look blue. When I finished, I printed R.M.S. Titanic on the bow and signed my name in script in the lower right-hand corner, pulling the tail of the g around to underline the whole business the way ancestors did in documents.

  When I handed the drawing to the teacher, she stared at it for a very long time.

  “R.M.S. Titanic,” she said at last. “Do you know what that means?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Royal Mail Steamer.”

  “Why did you make the smokestacks yellow? They’re supposed to be red.”

  “No, ma’am, the Titanic was White Star Line. They had yellow ones. Red is for Cunard.”

  “I see.”

  She reached for a sheet of paper and began writing. A misunderstood feeling stirred in me, destined to be the first of many in a lifetime dappled with this sort of thing. I throbbed with alarm when she folded the note and pinned it to the shoulder of my dress with one of the emergency safety pins she kept on the lapel of her suit.

  “When your mother comes to get you, make sure she reads that.”

  “What did I do?”

  “Nothing. Just tell your mother to read the note.”

  I don’t know why she didn’t wait and tell Mama herself. Maybe her teachers college had taught her never to discuss a child with a parent when the child is present. More likely, she simply couldn’t take any more mothers that day.

  The note said: Florence is too advanced for Kindergarten B. Please bring her to Kindergarten A beginning tomorrow at nine o’clock.

  Translated into Mama it said: “She was the only one that didn’t cry! You should have heard all those goddamn sissies! I swear, they reminded me of Preston Hunt and his ‘daddy,’ except they were carrying on over their mothers.”

  “It was the picture, Louise, and the fact that she signed her name to it,” Herb argued, gazing proudly at my artwork. “That’s what ‘advanced’ means. It was knowledge, not behavior.”

  “No, it was because she was brave!”

  “She’s in school, not the Coldstream Guards.”

  “Be that as it may, she got promoted the first day. That’s what worries me,” Granny said darkly. “It doesn’t do for a girl to be too bright. She might never come unwell—all her blood will go to her brain. She reads too much now. There’s something unrefined about a reading woman, they always reek of the lamp. How can she grow up to be a lady if she’s always got her nose in a book?”

  Herb winced. As much of an anglophile as Granny was, she did not appreciate certain finer points of usage as practiced on the other side of the Big Water.

  “Mrs. Ruding,” he chided, “I am not a duke, a marquess, or an earl. Therefore, Florence can’t be a lady. What you mean is ‘gentlewoman.’”

  “Oh, I don’t like that,” Granny said, wrinkling her nose in distaste. “It sounds masculine.”

  “Oh, shit.”

  Granny took my kindergarten coup as a personal challenge to her ladysmithery. Casting around for an antidote to my burgeoning intellectualism, she forced me to submit to knitting lessons. Under her tutelage I grasped the basic knit-and-purl easily enough, but my needles refused to click or flash or lend themselves to any of the verbs associated with dexterous womanhood. They scraped.

  “You will make your father a scarf for his birthday,” Granny ordered.

  Herb liked conservative colors so I began with slate gray, but I soon tired of looking at it and switched to dark blue. The blue bored me after a few rows so I chose a ball of light gray and knitted on. Pleased by my show of industry, Granny left me to my own devices and went off to Richmond to visit her sister. I had to have the scarf finished by the time she got back. To make the task more bearable I changed colors every day, using maroon, royal blue, magenta, vermilion, yellow, orange, red, and purple. By the time Granny came home, the scarf was four feet long and contained every shade in her knitting basket. She and Jensy were horrified when they saw it.

  “It look lak Joseph’s coat.”

  “It’ll go with anything.” Mama chuckled.

  I had knitted in the privacy of the room Granny and I now shared, so Herb had not seen the insane rainbow that would soon be his. Granny took it off the needle and blocked it, and I wrapped it in conservative dark green paper.

  Granny gave him the usual pajamas and socks. Mama’s gift was even less of a surprise: she took five dollars out of the housekeeping money he had just given her, stuck it in an envelope, and handed it back to him, saying, “Happy birthday, buy yourself a book.”

  He opened my gift last. Only an English face could have resisted a double take on seeing what was inside, but fortunately he had one. Holding up my garish handiwork, he wrapped it around his hand the way a man fashions a mock knot in a tie to see how it will look on.

  “I say, that’s a handsome scarf. I’ll be proud to wear this. Thank you, little one.”

  And he did wear it. That night he stood before the mirror in his tuxedo and wrapped my lumpy gift around his neck as though it were the finest evening silk. When he put on his overcoat, the wool puffed out around his collar like a goiter but the master mold of fashion did not seem to notice. When he came home, he wrapped it carefully in tissue paper and put it away in his bureau with the same care he gave to all his possessions. He wore the scarf all that winter; never in the history of haberdashery was anything so awful so cherished.

  After the scarf birthday I noticed a change in Jensy. Up till then she had always walked a wide circle around Herb. She dealt in stock characters where white people were concerned, and he did not fit any of the stereotypes she felt comfortable with. She knew how to handle good ole boys and Big Daddies, but Herb was neither, nor even a Southerner. Lacking Granny’s reverence for all things English, she knew only that he was a foreigner. This meant what she called “dark-complected,” which Herb was not, and “heathen,” which, technically at least, he wasn’t, either. But what had always disturbed her the most was the way he fell between the slats of her Bible-drenched certainties. To Jensy’s way of thinking, he should have been a sinner: he worked at night, he aided and abetted dancing, and he handled hard liquor when he tended bar, yet he spent his free time reading books. In Jensy’s world, people either came to ruin or they didn’t; being neither Saved nor Damned was not only impossible but intolerable. For years she had been waiting for Herb to go one way or the other; the longer he remained in his incomprehensible limbo, the more her spiritual equilibrium suffered. It was like waiting for someone to drop the other shoe.

  The tact and sensitivity he showed over my birthday gift enlarged her moral scope. “He done right,” she proclaimed, and proceeded to tell the scarf story all over Washington’s black community, using it as the subject of her Sunday School lesson on the Golden Rule and as a parable on The Family Man when she went with her church ladies to harangue the habitués of the Florida Avenue billiard parlors.

  »five«

  HERB’S thirty-ninth birthday fell on December 1, 1941. Flat feet and weak eyesight from years of reading made him safely 4-F, so Mama took up arms in his place.

  She went into a frenzy of patriotism, buying war stamps, saving newspapers, returning empty toothpaste tubes to the drugstore’s “victory counter,” and smashing anything stamped MADE IN JAPAN. She bought a pack of airplane-spotting cards and sat at the window on blackout nights peering through a crack in the shade and hissi
ng, “Bang! Vrroom! Ak-ak-ak-ak-ak! Wouldn’t it be fun if we got invaded? We could take field rations and water canteens and go up in the hills and fight just like Churchill said.”

  “Oh, Louise!”

  We went to the movies every time the picture changed so she could snap to attention when they played “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and took the Marshall Hall ferry so she could salute Mount Vernon. But what really fascinated her were the bulletproof Bibles. Designed to fit the breast pocket of a GI’s battle jacket, Bibles with metal covers were guaranteed to deflect bullets aimed at the heart. According to the newspapers, several of them did just that. From time to time the Daily News ran photos of soldiers holding shattered copies of the Holy Writ sent to them by their loved ones that had reputedly saved their lives.

  “The War Department probably assigned an expert marksman to shoot Bibles,” Herb said.

  “You know what your trouble is?” Mama yelled. “You’re a clinic!”

  She bought herself a bulletproof Bible and wore it in her suit pocket. It was the only Bible we had.

  Though she had ignored the mother-daughter dress craze, it delighted her that I now had “my” war to go with 1917–18, which she called “her” war. She favored me with off-key renditions of “We Don’t Want the Bacon, We Just Want a Piece of the Rhine,” and made me memorize a bloodthirsty anti-Kaiser poem called “The Spike on Willy’s Hat” that she had recited in school; but when she referred to my book bag as my “kit” and tried to get me to wear it on my back, Granny demanded an immediate cease-fire.

  “Louise! The child will grow up warped!”

  Granny’s idea of an unwarped female was one who comforted the sick and afflicted, so to counter Mama’s bellicose influence she made me accompany her and Jensy on their temporal acts of mercy.

  Jensy had a strongly developed sense of Christian charity. Granny had a strongly developed sense of Granny; her good works sprang from a desire to win for herself that Holy Grail of Southern accolades, “great lady.” Her quest took her down paths of righteousness strewn with bedpans and rubber fingers into any sickroom she could lay her hands on. The more necrotic they were, the better she liked it, for the greatest lady is the one who gets somebody who shits through a hole in his stomach or blows snot from a hole in his throat. If she gets somebody who merely has the flu, she might as well smoke on the street.