Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady_A Memoir Read online

  Jensy found her projects through her church, which kept a list of people born in slavery who needed nursing care. Granny found her projects through the Daughters, but otherwise they were the Bobsy twins of coprophilia. Their cases were well into their eighties and nineties and all were known as “poor souls.”

  We traveled by streetcar and I was the Gunga Din, toting urinals, enema bags, shopping bags full of old clothes, and Thermos jars full of sloshing broth. When we reached our destination, I had to stay out of the way but not too far, and think good thoughts while listening to the squirty cascades of impacted bowels coming loose. The first time it happened I threw up out the window. After that I sneaked a book along and read with my fingers stuck in my ears, turning the pages with an elbow.

  They also called on shut-ins who were trying to support themselves with cottage industries, like old Mrs. Ramsey, who crocheted rugs. Granny and Jensy raffled them off for her, which is how it came to pass that we almost got arrested in the zoo.

  Armed with a chance card, Granny buttonholed prospects in the Saturday crowds while Jensy and I followed behind and held up the dubious prize. Things were going well until a policeman stopped her.

  “Ma’am, you can’t do this. No gambling allowed here, it’s federal property, you know.”

  I looked fearfully at Jensy but she shook her head. “Uh-uh,” she grunted. “Let yo’ big momma do the talkin’.” She pulled me over by the fence and we watched the legal battle from the sidelines.

  A new Granny crystallized before me. As she gazed up into the policeman’s face, I saw her lashes flutter behind her bifocals. Her gray head tossed with sprightly promise and her wrinkled mouth took on a pert simper, until she seemed all aquiver with gentle girlish passion. This stage of the counterattack lasted several minutes, then her face fell into tragic lines. Stepping closer, I heard snatches of the conversation. “Poor soul … the doctor cut out … eaten up with … going all through her system … she lost her … no one in the world … only a matter of time.”

  The next thing I knew, the policeman was digging into his pocket for a dime while Granny removed a hairpin and punched out his choice.

  And then there were the funerals. Death has no sting to a child who sees old ladies listening eagerly for the thump of a newspaper at the door so they can “find out who died.” The high priestess of Granny’s circle of necrophiles was a Mrs. Bell, whose favorite expression was, “She doesn’t look like herself.” No final display was good enough for Mrs. Bell; either the embalming was faulty (“She started to go”) or else the cosmetician had compromised someone’s postmortem reputation. The latter was on her mind the day she met us at the door of the funeral parlor in a mood of high dudgeon.

  “Miz Ruding, I want you to see this.” She dragged us into a viewing room and pointed into the open coffin. “Now you know and I know that she never wore anything except a little powder on her forehead and nose. Now look, just look at what they’ve done to her! Lipstick, rouge, eye paint! Eye paint, Miz Ruding!”

  “Oh, that’s terrible, truly it is. She’d have a fit if she could see herself.”

  “They’ve got her all gussied up like a lady of the evening. I told them and told them but they wouldn’t listen. They don’t lay people out the way they used to, let me tell you. They’ve got the prayer book up too high—why, it’s almost under her chin! And look at the way they’ve got her turned to the right. She’s almost on her side!”

  “They do that nowadays.” Granny sighed. “It’s supposed to make them look more lifelike but I don’t like it one bit.”

  “We’ve got to wipe that paint off and straighten her out, Miz Ruding. She’d never forgive us if we let her cross over looking like this.”

  “You’re absolutely right, Miz Bell.” Granny put down her handbag and gave me a nudge toward the door. “You go over there and stand where you can see if anybody’s coming.”

  As I took up my sentry duty, an organ somewhere in the establishment began playing “Whispering Hope.” I tried to figure out why standing guard over this covert operation was different from playing war games with Mama. The answer came to me when I glanced back at Granny and Mrs. Bell pulling and tugging at the helpless corpse like a couple of ghouls: this was “feminine.”

  Our do-gooding involved complex streetcar rides all over town. Fortunately Washington’s public transit was not segregated, so we could all sit together, but Jensy still worried that we would get separated at some crowded transfer point and I would get lost. To make sure I realized the seriousness of the matter, she told me a story.

  “I knowed dis l’il gal dat strayed off from home an’ fell in a ditch. She didden have nothin’ to eat, so she ate her arm, den she ate d’other arm, den she ate her laig, den d’other laig. ’Fore long, she ate herself all up an’ dey didden find nothin’ left ’cept a pile of bones in de ditch.”

  “I’m glad,” I said. “I hate children.”

  Granny’s mouth fell open.

  Watery moles have no gender. Mama and Herb scorned their own sex and got on famously with the opposite one, but I transcended such earthling bigotries and dwelled in that 14th Amendment of the human spirit known as “Everybody stinks.”

  Recess was the bane of my existence because I had to play—yes, play—with the watery moles; otherwise one of the Life Adjustment teachers would spray me with friendly fire. It was a transitional period in education: the traditionalists were on their way out and the huggybears were on their way in. Huggybears loved playground duty because it gave them a golden opportunity to smoke out introverts. When they saw one, they came bounding up like lovelorn fascists, shrilling, “What are you doing here all alone?”

  I wasn’t always alone. Like Jonathan Swift, I found something to like in the occasional Tom, Dick, or Harry. My exceptions were named Peg Jennings and Helen Koustopolous; both lived at 1020 and Helen’s father ran the Greek deli downstairs. I spent a fair amount of time in their company but the grand viziers of other-direction had trouble counting in small numbers. They were not happy unless everybody was engaged in an activity big enough to require what they called “give and take,” like marching on the Tuileries with equal parts of the Princesse de Lamballe’s dismembered corpse on our pikes.

  My nemesis was my 2B teacher, Miss Tanner, who always squatted down when she talked to her students so we would feel she was one of us. It was like conversing with a troll on a heath.

  “Don’t you want to be popular, Florence?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Now, I just don’t believe that. I bet you can be the nicest, friendliest little girl ever! Aren’t there times when you feel warm and friendly toward people?”

  “Yes, ma’am, there’s one time.”

  “Will you tell me about it?” she whispered. “It’ll be our secret.”

  “When we go out to the country to visit my uncle …”

  “Yes? Go on.”

  “When the train goes through, and the men who work on the train wave to people.”

  “And you wave back?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And give them a big friendly smile?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And you feel all happy inside?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “There! I told you so! Now if you can be warm and friendly with the train men, why can’t you be warm and friendly with the other children?”

  “Because the train men keep on going.”

  Miss Tanner’s favorite way of teaching history was a game she invented called “My Name Is …” We had to pretend to be a famous person from the past and recite our life stories as if we were on radio’s popular problem show, “Help Me, Mr. Anthony.”

  Mr. Anthony chose for his raconteurs the members of his studio audience who led the most hellish lives. Stiff upper lips were out. Announcing, “I have a broken home in the balcony,” he drew forth abysmal, tear-drenched tales of infidelity, beatings, knife fights, drunkenness, wages lost to gambling, desertions,
and wondrous rare diseases that held Granny and Jensy spellbound. Herb called the show “the common man’s Agamemnon.”

  Miss Tanner had a grand time on “My Name Is” day. Seated in a little chair just like ours, she frowned, shook her head, and winced in disgust as a little Magellan told of having to eat rats and boiled leather on his world cruise, and beamed with delight when a little Martha Washington detailed the housekeeping tasks at Mount Vernon.

  Then my turn came.

  “My name is Lizzie Borden—”

  “Stop!”

  I tried to explain that I had chosen Lizzie because her domestic problems were more suited to Mr. Anthony’s show than the exalted cares of kings and queens, but she refused to listen.

  “Where did you learn about Lizzie Borden?”

  “My father told me about her.”

  “Your father?”

  I saw her point, but it had not occurred to me before. Herb told stories with such dry detachment that no one would have guessed that he shared paternal status with the minced Andrew Borden.

  Miss Tanner did not believe in punishment so she reasoned with me instead.

  “There are so many nice women you could pretend to be. Why don’t you put on your thinking cap and see how many you can come up with?” Here she pantomimed putting on a cap, and then held her finger to her temple in the thinking position. Brightening, she held it aloft in the eureka position. “I know one! I’ll give you a hint: her first name was the same as yours. Do you know who I mean? Florence Nightingale!”

  The watery moles thought that was funny and laughed. I wanted to drain their blood like the medieval Hungarian countess Herb had told me about.

  “Do you know who Florence Nightingale was?” Miss Tanner prompted.

  “Yes, ma’am. She was a nurse in the Crimean War. The English soldiers called her ‘the lady with the lamp.’”

  Something passed across her eyes, swimmingly at first, before it found its focus and hardened. I knew then that she disliked me. Not the normal feeling teachers have for troublesome students, but a full-blown adult dislike.

  After that she had it in for me, but not in the classroom. Her natural habitat being the playground, she tried to make it mine, too. She forced me into the co-ed baseball game between the boys and the tomboys, who both jeered, “You bat like a girl!” It was an academic point; I jumped rope like a paraplegic. It was more than just being unathletic. I had such a visceral hatred of groups that it caused a kind of paralysis that struck during recess. Resistance to team play seemed to pour like wet cement through my bones, displacing supple marrow, until I was ballasted with my own contempt.

  My ineptness made me the last hired, first fired on the playground, and hence more than ever likely to be alone. Miss Tanner’s genial hounding continued, so I conceived the idea of “taking an end for good” in jumprope. This way I could seem to be participating while remaining outside the fray. The girls who liked—yes, liked—to jump rope hated having to take their turn at turning, so for a while I was popular in a windmillish sort of way. While I turned I fantasized murdering watery moles and huggybears by walking into their midst with a hand grenade concealed in my undershirt, like Veronica Lake blowing the Japs to bits with her loaded bra in So Proudly We Hail. It did not help. The thought of dying in a group only made me feel worse.

  I learned the futility of appeasement when I tried to cope with Miss Tanner according to the rules for honeymoon etiquette that Granny issued when Dora Madison got married: “Be as pleasant and cheerful as possible, and remember to exclaim over special treats.” It didn’t work. I was as maladroit an actress as I was an athlete; my exclamations turned to ashes in my mouth and my face invariably gave me away.

  I sensed that my face was part of the problem. I didn’t look like a loner; I looked like a straight-haired Shirley Temple, or more sickeningly, a blond Margaret O’Brien. Strangers on the street murmured, “What a sweet little girl,” to each other as I went by, which always made Jensy hoot, “Babe, you sho can pass.” Something told me that if I had been plug-ugly or a boy, no one would have cared what I was like, but a pretty girl was supposed to be a melody, not a misanthrope.

  Miss Tanner carried her Life Adjustment campaign over into my next report card: Florence displays an unfriendly attitude and does not mix with her peer group.

  “Her what?” Mama said.

  Herb defined the word.

  “Oh. Well, that’s a crock of shit. What the hell do they think they’re running, a popularity contest? I poured ink all over Irene Upton when I was in the second grade and there wasn’t a word on my report card about it—and she was my cousin, not my peer. You remember that, Mother?” she asked proudly.

  “I do indeed.” Granny sighed.

  Usually vocal in all matters concerning me, Granny said little during the peer-problem controversy. Unable to conceive of a human being who did not want to “know everybody,” she was simply and plainly at a loss for words. Mama was not.

  “Do the other kids pick on you? Don’t let ’em get away with it—wipe the floor with ’em! Knock ’em into the middle of next week! Break their goddamn—”

  “Hold yo’ hosses, Miss Louise! It ain’t a question of fightin’ wid ’em. Sound to me lak she doan eben know ’em.”

  “Jensy’s right,” I said. “Nobody picked on me like you mean. I just don’t like them.”

  “Why not?” Granny asked incredulously.

  “I don’t know … just because. Anyhow,” I added, “I do like Peg and Helen.”

  But liking Peg and Helen was not enough for Miss Tanner, or perhaps it was too much. Her next written report said: Florence sets up exclusive cliques and makes it clear to the other children that they are not welcome to join.

  “That bitch doesn’t know her ass from titwillow!”

  Plucking Herb’s fountain pen from his pocket, Mama turned the report card sideways in the southpaw manner and wrote in her backhand script: What do you want, egg in your beer? Everybody’s friend is everybody’s fool. You’re a Friday turd at a Saturday market. Yours truly, Mrs. King.

  Mama’s note came to the attention of the principal, Miss Ballinger, a tall, lanky spinster whose pince-nez took the dimmest of views on Life Adjustment. All of the teachers, traditionalist and huggybear alike, were terrified of her. She phoned Mama and talked glowingly of my reading and spelling. Very little was said about my peer problems, and when Herb took his turn at the phone, even less. In fact, they did not discuss me at all. The moment Miss Ballinger heard his accent, all pedagogical thoughts flew out of her head. “Why, you’re English!” we heard her carol as we clustered around with our ears cocked. Somehow they got on the subject of the Celtic burial cairns she had seen on a long-ago walking tour through Scotland. When Herb said, “They buried them standing up in their chariots, you know,” Mama walked away waving her hands in the air. Granny left when the subject turned to Druids. I stuck it out to the end but my name was never mentioned.

  Granny nearly had a stroke when Miss Ballinger announced her decision: I was to skip the 3A.

  “She’s going to be an old maid!”

  I liked the 3B and got along famously with my new teacher, Mrs. Otter, who gave off a weary cynicism that inspired trust. She did not care who played with whom and confined her written reports to serious breaches of discipline.

  It made me happy that it was Mama instead of Granny who rescued me from Miss Tanner. I took Granny’s love for granted because I had won it at birth merely by being a girl, but Mama’s love was more precious because my sex had been a disappointment to her. But it was precisely because I was a girl that there had been a Tanner affair at all. Miss Tanner would never have hounded a boy in the same openly gleeful way, and Mama would not have sprung to a boy’s defense; she would have delivered a philippic on sissies and told him to fight his own battles. For that matter, no son of Mama’s would have been in school in the first place; he would have been in the children’s ward at St. Elizabeth’s, confined in a plastic bubbl
e and hooked up to a twenty-four-hour phenobarbitol dispenser. Having a daughter, on the other hand, brought out the best in her, and at last she seemed to realize it.

  She surpassed herself a few months later when I became the focal point in a family fight over our plot in Congressional Cemetery.

  “Botetourt phoned me today,” Granny said one night at dinner. “He wants to replace the old tombstones with one big marker.”

  “No!” I screamed.

  Everyone jumped. I looked wildly into their eyes and burst into tears. “He can’t take Charlie’s lamb! Don’t let him!”

  Granny stirred uncomfortably. This was my uncle’s decision, and imperious as she was in all other ways, she did not believe women should contradict men or try to dominate them—at least not openly. A true woman, she frequently said, got her way by using indirection and feminine wiles. She called Uncle Bud and essayed a few simpering cajoleries on my behalf, but they had no effect on him.

  Mama shot out of her chair and grabbed the phone.

  “Listen, you goddamn sonofabitch, Florence loves that lamb! You lay a finger on it and I’ll put you in the plot!”

  “It’s Mother’s decision,” Uncle Bud said confidently, “and she just told me to go ahead.” He hung up.

  I was so upset I stayed home from school the next day. There were several more phone calls and Mama did all of the talking at our end. Granny was reduced to wringing her hands.

  “Charlie’s marker isn’t marble, Louise,” she pleaded. “Just porous stone. The caretaker told Botetourt that the lamb could break off at any time. The stone is so old that it’s beginning to come loose from the ground because of all the moisture and shifting. Porous stone does that, Louise.”

  “To hell with the pores! They can fix whatever’s wrong with it and hammer it back down again.”