Under Magnolia: A Southern Memoir (8 page)

Time sputters.
And as W. H. Auden’s refrain goes,
Time will say nothing but I told you so
. I thought, with luck, the gypsies who
parked their squalid trailer behind the gas station would steal me and I would disappear
without a trace
. My parents, those stars, proclaimed a daily misery to the heavens and the rains, a face-to-face, hand-to-hand combat. Border wars. Territorial disputes. Manifest destiny. Why did my mother court trouble? Why did my father carouse? I found the pink pop-apart pearls on the floor of his Oldsmobile. They were tacky. When I answered the telephone, a woman laughed and hung up. She didn’t sound like anyone we would know. I said many things to myself by the age of seven.
If I ever get out of here, I will never select unhappiness
. When the plate of unhappiness is passed around and more and more is offered, I’ll say no thank you, no. But they wanted seconds, thirds.

At school I could fall into being a child. Now and then a fact sticks: the capital of Afghanistan, vitamin C prevents scurvy, slavery was “a good idea” at the time, times change. My country was represented in the corner by the mended flag; there is only one way to fold it, like a note you throw across the room, and only one way to raise it and Monroe Fletcher was chosen. For the rest, chalk sounds on the board gave the teacher the creeps, and she crossed her legs in dust-colored support stockings, and told dull stories of her vacation to Vero Beach when she left her bag in the car and came back four hours later and no one had touched it:
People are basically decent
. The desk with initials cut deep. Cards with holes, and numbers turn to faces when sewn right with yarn. At recess, I love taking out the coil of rope.
Double time, red pepper, hot stitches, and: “Mother, Mother, I feel sick, call for the doctor, quick quick quick. Mother, Mother, will I die? Yes, my child but do not cry. How many cars will be at my funeral? One, two, three …”

Negro houses surround the playground on three sides. Washwomen scrubbing pots of clothes under the pecan trees, spreading towels over bushes to dry, folding sheets on the sloping porches. In one of the leaning houses a fortune-teller lives and big cars pull up and white women go in. Could one be the voice on the telephone?
Why don’t Negro children have to go to school every day? Because they don’t need to know. You do
. Grade to grade, I worked my way around the playground. Hopscotch, jump rope, red rover, jungle gym: the cardinal points. Outside I was a wholehearted child, under the watchful playground duty of Miss Pope, Miss Hattaway, Mrs. Gurganus, Mrs. Bailey, and Miss McCall, who’d been, once, to Mexico and wore a red felt jacket embroidered with sombreros and cacti for the seven years I was in grammar school. It always caught my eye.
Lamentable
, my mother said. In third grade, she was wearing it the day Gill C. Tucker said to her:
You look like a bulldog
, and she said,
Would you say that again?
, and he didn’t have the sense to shut up. We were all thrilled, and he said straight up,
You look like a bulldog
, and she told him to get out of her class and she started to cry and said we’d have to excuse her but she wasn’t used to putting up with white trash. She hoped none of us ever would be rude, crude, and socially unacceptable like that. Gill C.—the possibility of open rebellion. Gill C., truth teller, a horse running into fire.

Because my family was overwhelming, the small self-conscious pains of ordinary childhood never bothered me. I could take the hooked stick and fish for the window shade ring in the hot classroom with everyone staring while I aimed and missed and let the shade fly up and hit the ceiling until everyone laughed and Miss Hattaway got furious. The fury of teachers never impressed me. I envied Jane Floyd’s total blush when she was embarrassed. I rarely was. I felt bad for Joan Appleton’s face while she had a “fainting fit” with her tongue out. The teacher got a spoon out of her desk drawer. I held down Joan’s arms, skinnier than mine, and saw her fascinated face in its privacy and twisting. It seemed she let some anger out—anger I might have, too—then she was limp. She wet her pants, too, but never cried when she woke up—just let herself be led to the nurse’s room. I pretended to be simple. At the fair, picked up, swung by the farmer square dancing, I was not a smiling rag doll, but stiff as wire, face pressed under his arm and him hahooing, moonshine breath. I thought of kicking and did not, rode it out, only made a face when he put me down. My English was only as far as a lisp of bad words said to the mirror.

In summer, the transfer to Highlands Camp, a two-week interruption to the sound and fury of my house. Camp was tall pines and good girls, willow twig armchairs and wisteria. We bathed in cold water, rubbed archery blisters with balm, learned to post. The girls shared a streak of DNA, a litany of running off at the mouth, screaming giggles. I’m in a skit. I’m a planter
with nothing to do for months of winter. “Accompany me to Paris,” I say in fake French.

I’ve escaped. My new friend from Marietta has a golden retriever at home and her father is a pediatrician and I don’t know what that is. She plays voluntaries on the cello and says the word should have an apostrophe in front of it but people are too ignorant to know that. I’ve never seen a cello, with or without the apostrophe. We have only the baby grand at Daddy Jack’s, with one broken key that I plunk over and over until someone shouts
Stop that
. She wants an English saddle, will get one. Plump and slow, she farts when she runs. In the woods I hide notes in boxes:
If you ever find this please write to me
. I’m out of the mess and rattling of home. There are those who care about apostrophes. Then there’s my father turning over the table during a game of penny ante, pulling down the chintz draperies. Some fathers care for
babies
.

I see an opening I’ve seen only in books.

On the final night of camp, with candlelight and the girls all in white with linked arms singing, “Thy sunshine is fairest, my summer-time home,” I’m suddenly homesick for somewhere, not there, but somewhere.
“My Highlands calls me wherever I roam.…”
Four hundred girls in pressed shirts and shorts, everyone waiting for Mrs. Sykes to give out the achievement awards. Everyone anticipating. I arrange the blank on my face. High Dive. Beauty Queen. Progress. Equitation. Archery. Best Camper.… This is long after I arrived and the counselor jerked me aside after fifteen minutes, said I had the wrong attitude, was cheeky, a troublemaker, and I’d have to clean my
plate whether I liked it or not. Now the girls, running up to the podium one after another claiming a bit of glory. Tennis. Crafts. (My beaded moccasins are very nice.) And at the very end my name is called, a special award announced,
For Learning to Eat the Crust of Bread
.

Within my family, I could not be a child. But wait, my parents regarded me as smart and adorable. “She’s the cleverest little thing you’ve ever seen,” they’d tell anyone. Praise was for the wrong things, often, but it was plentiful. I was showered with a feeling of immense (if inappropriate) possibilities.
You are going to grow up to be Miss America! You have a memory like an elephant! You can have anything in the world you want—just tell me what you want and you can have it! You could float down the Nile covered with flowers!
No one was strong on realism; inexplicably, the strong suit was family pride.
Never forget you’re a Mayes
. Looking around, I could see no possible reason to do anything else but try my best to do exactly that. Sometimes, when my mother was angry, she’d say, “Marry a Hungarian peasant. The blood’s all shot in this line.” I felt bad for my new cousin when he was named the Fourth because his father, the Third, banged on our back door drunk and shouting at least once a week, and his sweet mother, who once was Miss University of Georgia, had sugar diabetes and hands that trembled when she lit a cigarette. Because she knew I loved German chocolate cake, she baked them on Saturdays, while the Third sat by the shortwave Stromberg-Carlson, listening to static and foreign voices, staring
at the cover that flipped up to show a map of the world time zones and frequency bands. He twitched in his leather wing chair and said when I walked by, “Well, you think you’re something don’t you, Miss Priss? Well
I
am a graduate of Georgia Tech.” Adults could do anything. Anything.

My ally was Willie Bell. She had worked for us since before I was born. It was not a cozy, member-of-the-family, Aunt Jemima,
Gone with the Wind
Mammy thing. I was not clasped to her soft bosom for darky lullabies. She was skinny, anyway, and she and I simply knew we were in it together. She for her twenty dollars a week (
We pay more than anyone in town
.) and I for the duration of childhood. “Just run out and play, try not to pay them any mind, they all crazy,” she’d say, not looking up from the stove.

She offered me not sympathy, but a steady point of view. One sass at the table and out I had to go to pick my privet switch in the yard. As I stalked through the kitchen, Willie Bell shook her head. “When are you going to learn?” she said quietly. “Just don’t talk back.”

My mother switched until my legs bled, frowning and working her lips. My father read the paper, looking bored. If I cried he’d say, “Cry and I’ll give you something to cry about,” or “Cry louder! Can’t you cry louder? I can’t even hear you.”

Usually they were too busy between themselves—jets over the ocean—to notice what I did. I began to drive the car at nine and they never knew. Once, I ran away. I stayed in a culvert all night, just a block from home. When I returned, blank and tired the next morning, I felt grimly triumphant. I expected the state patrol, my mother properly distraught, my father taking vows never to act up again. No one had noticed that I was missing.

I was unguided, rebellious, solitary, a prankster, at war. No side to take. I taught myself the bull’s-eye with arrows. I could disappear in the tops of trees. I walked to school every day past the Spotted Pig restaurant, down the pig trail, through the Blue and Gray Park, past poor houses, sidewalk graffiti (only one word, relentlessly repeated), cottages draped with peavine. Lonely, rowdy, I knew everything (like all children) and pretended to know nothing. I reported to the flat streets. I passed Mrs. Drummond every day, her huge bulk in the rocker behind the
lard cans of geraniums lining her porch. Her daughter, Emma Sue, worked at the Pig and brought home leftover chicken-fried minute steak. I know because Judy Pike and I combed the alleys and pulled things out of trash cans. We held up bloody sanitary napkins, odd balloons like squashed jellyfish, bills demanding payment, the tinfoil and remains of the old steaks. As I walked home every day, I smiled a sweet six-year-old smile at Mrs. Drummond, who said, “How you today, little Missy?” Like policemen are said to understand crime and are trained to respond with a shot—they’re closer to crime, in their fastest blood—so was I to innocence. A girl in a blue-checked pinafore skipping home.
The apple of her daddy’s eye
. Mrs. Drummond had a brass vase made out of a bomb her son brought home from Germany.
In bad taste
. She weighed at least three hundred pounds, all steak. Her false teeth were whiter than Chiclets. One day, on my way home, a spot of warm blood blown by the wind landed on my blouse. From where? An angel with a halo, a bird, a body going to heaven? I could not be sure.