Lookaway, Lookaway (20 page)

“There was a Colonel Pisscock?” Annie shrieked.

“No, darling: P. S. Cocke,” Duke enunciated.

“I thought he said Pierced Cock,” Joshua whispered.

“Cocke at Ball’s Ford?” Annie asked delightedly.

Joshua put on an exaggerated Southern accent: “Whah, yes, Miss Johnston, Cocke valiantly made his stand at Ball’s—erect before the men. Who else but Cocke to defend Ball’s? Does not historuh still praise the glories of Cocke and Ball’s Ford?”

Annie: “Cocke could be depended on, sir, to attack the rear!”

Duke smiled, breathing, “Now really, you two.”

Joshua: “The Northern aggressors hoped to go straight for Ball’s, but first they had to contend with Cocke!”

From somewhere high in the house, impossibly, their mother sang: “That’s
quite
enough!”

This doubled their hysteria, both Joshua and Annie eventually becoming short of breath from laughing. Her father, her dear aging father, was hiding a smile, too.

So, at the end of freshman year, the issue of the debut resurfaced but her fight had drained away. Annie had earlier imagined she might be on a full ride at Stanford, which would have provided an easy excuse for not coming home to participate … but instead she was still in-state, waitressing in a greasy spoon on Spring Garden Street, poor as a field mouse at UNC-G. Frankly, free-spending Annie could use some cash, some jewels, some plate and gilt, lucre, rapine, to be handed down, and the good opinion of Grandmother Jeannette Jarvis (her namesake!), with recurring cancer, on her way to a retirement home to finish out her years, who was always musing pointedly about her will …

She didn’t tell her middle-class friends about debuting; it might as well have been a satanic black mass for all she acknowledged it. Once, when back in Charlotte over a pre-debut weekend, she ran into old Mecklenburg Country Day acolytes Tara Brindley and Lesha Bridgewater, slumming at the Gourmet Gardens in the Eastland Mall, and they all floated the notion of bailing out on it, what nonsense, what bullshit … but in the end her would-be conspirators awkwardly shrugged, said they were knuckling under, there’d be lots of cool presents and gifts, and recited “You know my nana, it would break her heart” type excuses.

So in the end Annie did it, too.

Of course, her mother made sure everyone who cared about these things knew Annie was participating, which resulted in a major materialistic haul. Annie couldn’t believe the loot! Good Lord, who knew the Johnstons and Jarvises had this kind of mammon tucked away? And she did, quietly, without any complaint, write thank-you notes in a single Sunday morning while everyone was at church so she wouldn’t be observed performing this graciousness.

But it was every bit the hell she knew it would be, every bit the farce. There was the dull-as-if-designed-to-be drive to Raleigh imprisoned in a limo with Mom, Dad, Jerilyn, Josh, and Grandmother Jarvis. (Aunt Dillard, who ponied up an array of Wedgwood urns, gravy boats, tureens and chafing dishes, was suffering from her fibromyalgia and excused herself from festivities.) There was an interminable fancy dinner with extended family at Second Empire, and then a retreat to a hotel room for the dressing and fixing up. This was the female-only time, the investiture, where one generation of matriarchs injected the poison into the next generation.

Her little sister Jerilyn looked on in envy. After dinner Grandmother Jarvis looked like death warmed over and begged to go lie down. Josh and her father were banished to the limo. Jerene was calm despite knowing her rebellious daughter could storm out at any minute—and I just might, Annie thought at the time. But no … not with this much female authority and Nietzschean superwoman Will in the room. The collective conformist mass of all the Southern matriarchy, of all the debutantes current and former, made for an inescapable gravity; no mere girl could make a run for it without being pulled back powerlessly into the high-society singularity, now strengthening itself at the Raleigh Convention Center, sucking in all known objects, buildings, trees, moons …

Before the limo was to take them over to the Convention Center, Annie’s great-aunts fussed and hovered in the Capital Sheraton hotel room, circling like sharp-billed birds of carrion. Aunt Gert had brought a small sewing kit. This was her thing, to tsk-tsk about the gown and go to work on it—she had done this for her three daughters and every other Johnston girl “back before the War of Northern Aggression.” This allowed her a chance to condemn the excessive cleavage display and tsk-tsk about Annie’s weight. “Certainly the largest Johnston girl we’ve ever seen,” she mumbled with pins in her mouth, adding under her breath so Jerene wouldn’t hear: “Must be the Jarvis blood.”

Aunt Mamie Mae had a terrible overbite to which she drew attention by the most lurid orange-red lipstick: “Ooh honey, you’ve let yourself get so fat! That’s for
after
the marriage, isn’t it, Elaine? You take yourself out of the running, if you let yourself get too big. All those skinny little bitches—”

“Coarseness,” said Aunt Gert.

“Skinny little snakes-in-the-grass from jumped-up no-account families who were living up North twenty years ago selling metal
scrap
or some such—they’ll steal your beau faster’n a New York taxicab! Now
I’m
three dress sizes too big, I’ll admit it, but Dennis doesn’t double-dare trade me in for Miss North Carolina because I’d take him to the cleaners and hang him out to dry next to my size-eight bloomers on a
very
public clothesline.” She threw her head back for the inimitable cackle. “Oh goodness, he’s up to so much financial shenanigans, I figure, he won’t want his books gone into very closely—and that goes for what they’re doing in Charlotte at Bank of America too, from what I hear. And Jerene, I’ve heard Duke is throwing in his cards with Bob Boatwright and those Northern Jews come down to carpetbag us all over again.”

“I think Mr. Yerevanian is Armenian, not Jewish,” Jerene reported.

Annie’s mother made sure her exposure to her husband’s aunt was limited to the bare social minimum, but you’d never know it from her practiced easy smile. Annie realized she was just one of maybe four humans (her father, Aunt Dillie, Josh, the housekeeper Alma) who could tell her mother-being-charming from her mother-being-contemptuous, so implacable were her manners. Jerene continued, “We are brushing against the world of real estate, it would seem. Duke is helping with the easements, doing some legal work, south of Lake Wylie for another big development.”

“Charlotte’s grown so big, I suppose they’ll be building houses on stilts over Lake Norman ’fore too much longer. Lord, I thought Duke was
maniacal
that they don’t build anything near that precious bit of land where two people fired their guns and missed in eighteen sixty whatever-it-was. I think he talked me out of a few thousand for the committee to preserve that sacred patch of kudzu—what’s he call it?—the Tussle in the Mud?”

“The Skirmish at the Trestle,” Jerene supplied.

“The Skirmish at the Trestle. With the pestle in the castle and the chalice in the palace! Oooh I am dating myself, aren’t I?”

Aunt Elaine, another of Duke’s aunts and the most severe, bestirred herself. “When are you going to make that husband of yours,” she aimed at Jerene, “get back to his legal practice? It isn’t natural for a man with his gifts to spend all of his time piling up Civil War bric-a-brac and going out to the schools to talk to first-graders about cannons and the like. I thought he would be the state governor by now.”

Aunt Mamie Mae: “Oh, I think it’s charming, Elaine. He’s like a nineteenth-century Southern man of leisure. All he needs is the pickaninnies fetching him his julep—”

“Vulgarity,” policed Aunt Gert.

“—fetching him his mint julep as he sits on the front porch!”

Annie was about to the walking-out point. She glanced at her mother, who glanced back impassively, yet her eyes seemed to confirm that this would be ending quite soon.

“Please,” Annie fumed. “Pickaninnies? There are—somehow—a few black debutantes in this pageant. Are you going to talk like that in front of them?”

“Well, of course I wouldn’t. I was being colorful referring to olden times, and how the blacks got in this pageant I will never know! Don’t they have their own debutante ball these days?”

Jerene brought out that there were white men from old, established families who had married African-American women or who adopted black children and those daughters were among the debutantes tonight, and yes, there was a North Carolina black debutante organization, though nothing like Atlanta, Charleston or Savannah—

“You’d think they’d want to go march in that ball and not this one in Raleigh. I cannot abide Raleigh! I get on that beltline and I’m like some ball on a roulette wheel: I’ll go round and round and round, never knowing
where
to get off or be able to get over to the rightmost lane to exit. It’s a wonder I’m not still on the darn thing, going round and round and round. Of course, Dennis wouldn’t drive me.” Aunt Mamie Mae successfully had changed the racial subject, and no one objected to it.

Annie decided she had become like one of those Virgin Mary statues in Latin countries festooned with drapings, bejeweled capes, flowers, relics, that was then lifted up and processed through the street for worship and veneration. She would try to turn off her mind for a few hours and then hope it rebooted when this despicable enterprise was over.

“I’m proud of you for behaving,” said her mother on the way to the Convention Center, in the privacy of the limo.

“For not throttling Aunt Mamie Mae?”

“I would have helped you cover up that crime.”

“Oh now,” said her father, “Mame’s not so bad. Whatever the old girls were doing in the hotel room, my daughter looks smashing.”

Smashing, thought Annie. Like Godzilla through Tokyo, taking out buildings and antenna towers with her wide ass and big boobs, in a blindingly white froufrou ball gown you could spot from the space shuttle.

In the sharp spotlight of the Raleigh Convention Center, she took her father’s arm and marched; she would always remember how ghastly the spotlight made her father look, one million years old, and that cold gust of his mortality further enforced her good behavior that night. Parry and thrust with her father as she did at the dinner table, she would never humiliate him publicly and, clearly, she had learned this evening, there were those in the family who thought him a layabout, a shirker, and whereas she could find fault with her folks as much as she liked, she found it intolerable that the great-aunts felt entitled to any opinion at all. That was the problem with Southern family gatherings: you came away
judged,
as to weight, as to economic progress, as to who was making good marriages, getting good promotions. And the most horrible old venomous shrews with wretched mislived lives were doing the judging too—that hardly seemed right.

There were photos of the affair, mostly destroyed when Annie could get her hands on them. Not because of any political protest, but because she truly looked stuffed into her Dupioni silk sausage casing. The photographer was the shortest man alive—all her photos were shot from miles below, she was all double chins and lit like a late-night TV horror-movie host. She was, without rival, the biggest girl at the debut, surrounded by insect-thin blondes (precious
few
of them natural … oh God, now she was getting catty like the rest of the women, too!), tanning-bed browned, lacquered and made up with a beauty pageant sheen, perfect teeth, some—it was rumored—with breast implants, gotten when teenagers. And she heard the whispers, the comments, saw deflected glances (as if looking upon the fat girl was contagious for one’s own weight), she radioed in on the female-intuition frequency, sensing hypercritical girltalk and ruthlessness. Oh well. Looks like they’ll get first crack at the boys wearing checkered golf pants and yellow sports coats, breathing booze-breath on everyone at eleven
A.M.
at some lily-white-people’s country club …

After the intolerable debut, there were several intolerable weddings of her friends.

Millicent Tilley had been Annie’s partner in unruly rebellion at Mecklenburg Country Day and, from all reports, doubled down on outrageous behavior once she got to Mary Washington. She, too, caught Annie’s attention at their debut, widening her eyes, mouthing
When will this shit be over?
as the older women herded and wrangled the girls into the correct presentation order backstage. But come wedding time, you might have thought her wedding was Charles-and-Diana Redux for all its ostentation, its cast of thousands.

“I want you to be the Girl at the Book,” Millie asked her.

“Does that have anything to do with off-track betting?”

“No, dumb-dumb. You get to greet all the people when they enter the sanctuary and have them sign my register so I know who showed up for my special special day.”

“Do I have to buy some organdy melon chiffon-fringed gown to be the Girl at the Book?”

“I’ve already picked it out!”

In the early stages of this wedding, Millie could be ironic about it, make flip jokes, but as the date approached she was almost as frantic as her mother, barking out orders, losing her temper at underlings and caterers, making her bridesmaids cry. This spectacle made Annie despair for women in the South, and by extension, throughout the world, this succession of high priestesses, generation upon generation, presiding with violent solemnity over foolish female fripperies like they were the serious business of human sacrifice.

“We’re going to put sherbet in
this
?” Millie screamed at one point in the planning. “Merciful God, I would not expect my DOG to lap out of a … an on-sale-at-Pet-Smart bowl like this!” Then a cereal bowl went frisbeeing against the wall, shattering.

It’s as if, thought Annie, some wicked masculine committee in charge of Life had known the women would worry their pretty little heads over all this rigmarole and thereby leave the running of the big important world to the men, who would look upon all the flounces and frills, tears and hysteria, with a knowing wink, a nudge in the side,
Told you that’d keep ’em occupied.