“Thank you,” I said. Already, I’d learned to say thank you first and ask questions later.
“As a for-instance”—Fontaine’s voice hitched up the tiniest bit—“I didn’t mention your mother had married a Jewish man.” She mouthed “Jewish” like it was a curse word. I tugged at my neck, where my Jewish star would be nestled if I ever wore that necklace, which I did not.
“How come?” asked Nattie. My question exactly.
“Firstly, it didn’t come up,” Fontaine said, readjusting her brim. “People weren’t all that curious, frankly. Secondly, I want you girls to have the full debutante experience—Ruthie, you will adore the dresses. This is something I can give you that New York cannot. Not that New York doesn’t have a deb situation; it does, of course, but more geared to countesses and college girls. We do things earlier in the South. So better not to mention certain subjects, especially since the religious business did not come up.”
Maybe I should have been surprised that Fontaine, the chitchat champion, just ignored Dad and his Jewishness. But I felt a whoosh of something else. I decided it was something like awe. Awe for a woman who could bend the world exactly to her liking.
“Thirdly,” Fontaine went on. “Aside from your hair, which you certainly picked up from your father, you don’t look—”
“Don’t look what? Jewish? Is that a compliment?” I’d heard many such compliments—“I didn’t realize you were Jewish”—from plenty of friends, many of them Jewish, my whole life. As if all Jewish girls had madman hair, which I did, and a nose the shape of New Hampshire, which I did not. As if being Jewish was somehow shorthand for not being pretty, which was ridiculous and awful, though Fontaine likely hadn’t meant it that way.
“Yes, it is a compliment that you look beautifully exotic,” Fontaine said, her gaze not exactly on me. “And you must learn not to dodge these niceties when they come your way. Simply say ‘Thank you.’ Now . . .” She straightened her back as if pulled by an invisible string. “Birdie’ll be pouring up some Co-Cola floats. She’ll have them out at lunchtime for my Magnolia Queens in training.”
“Will you jump in the pool with me?” Nattie asked, tapping Fontaine’s elbow, seemingly oblivious to the compliment conversation. “Just the shallow end?” Nattie had unsuccessfully tried to lure Fontaine and Mr. Hank and even Birdie into the twenty-two thousand gallons of water sloshing around our grandparents’ quite grand pool. Nattie had asked the gardener about the capacity—it was the kind of information she liked to collect and write in minuscule print on index cards.
“Would love to, buttercup. But Mr. Hank and I are off to the Club for lunch,” Fontaine said.
Honestly, I didn’t want to dive in either. It would take me hours to redo my hair—hair that revealed its Jewishness, hair that had a habit of poufing up and out into a cumulus cloud. Instead, I gave Nattie half of what she wanted. I changed into a bathing suit—black with a big daisy—and kept her company while she splashed. I brought out Dad’s lousy transistor radio, which I’d tucked into my suitcase, for whatever reason, before we left the Upper West Side.
I settled into a chaise and sunned my legs. From here, up the curving brick path lined with dahlias (so I learned from the gardener), I could see the back porch and kitchen door of the main house. Nattie had counted the steps here, too. Two hundred and ninety-three, almost a football field, separated the main place from our guesthouse.
Birdie and her noiseless shoes delivered Coke floats—four for the two of us—on a silver tray. “Here you go. This is your grandmother’s favorite summer chiller,” she said.
“Thank you, Birdie,” I said quietly. “Nattie, say, ‘Thank you, Birdie.’ ”
“Thank you, Birdie,” Nattie repeated.
Birdie had worked for our grandparents for fortyish years, but accepting something on a silver platter from her, from anyone, was still new to me, so I tried to always be quick with the thanks.
When we all first arrived a few weeks ago, it seemed entirely weird to have a housekeeper make our meals and fold our gunders. Of course, I knew people in New York who had maids—mainly Negro or, in Miriam’s case, a white Polish lady by way of Akron, Ohio. But Mother was opposed on principle, and so Nattie was in charge of cleaning the bathroom and I was in charge of ironing and chasing dust balls around the floor. Already, I was in love with the idea of never picking up an iron or a broom, which I realized was a shallow way to think about housekeeping, but shallow was my middle name. Actually, Tarbell was my middle name, for the journalist Ida Tarbell, but I knew my way around the shallows pretty damn well.
In the actual shallow end, Nattie was practicing her dead-girl float. “Count. And see. How long. I can hold. My breath,” she said, spitting out fountains of chlorine.
“Ready, steady, go,” I called, thinking a Coke float was the perfect summer drink—cold and creamy and bubbling with happiness. It gave me hope I could survive one-hundred-degree days and being secretly Jewish and all the rest.
Frooshka dozed under my chair, and I half sang along to “Great Balls of Fire,” wondering if I’d find anyone in Atlanta to shake my nerves and rattle my brain, when Mother appeared in her shirtdress, casting a shadow over me.
“How was the paper?” I moved over to make room for her on my chaise. Last week, I’d seen the gardener take out a ruler to measure the distance between the lounges.
“It was. Where’s Nattie?” Mother looked washed out—shortish brown hair, simple dress, sensible-heeled pumps. If Fontaine was Kodachrome, Mother was black and white.
Oh, right. Nattie.
Just then, she shot up for air. “How long was that?” Nattie gasped.
“Fifty-seven seconds,” I said. It could have been five minutes for all I’d been paying attention.
Mother sighed. She’d begun sighing—a barely audible form of complaining—before we’d even packed up in New York. “Mr. Hank must’ve told them to give me the easiest assignment. Garden club. Pest control, starting with slugs.”
That was the other reason we were here: Fontaine and Mr. Hank and the rest of the Landry family owned the newspaper, had owned it for seventy-odd years, and Mother was guaranteed a job. Before Mother had moved to New York to study poetry at Sarah Lawrence—and met Dad and decided to stay and converted to Judaism—the plan was always that she’d be part of things here.
“You have a black thumb.”
“So ironic.”
I handed her my not-touched second Coke float, even though it was now flatter than flat. Mother downed it anyway.
“Momma, change and come in,” Nattie yelled. “Come.”
On the word “come,” Frooshka roused from her nap. She shook her ears, stretched her neck, and jumped into the pool with an impressive splash. The poodle paddled over to the steps and sat, half in, half out. The first time she’d plopped in, we all flipped. But Froo knew what she was doing, and now the sight of her black fur bobbing around in the blue was positively ordinary.
Amazing what you could get used to in a few weeks.
Mother shimmied her dress up high enough to unhook her stockings from her garter belt. “How about toes, Nattie?” she said.
I felt like a finker for not going in earlier. Hair be damned, I got off the chaise and dove in now, letting all twenty-two thousand gallons of water slip over me. The water was warm and forgiving, enveloping. I pushed off from the side, my arms out in front, pale against the pool-blue light, then submerged. Beneath the surface, everything was shimmery and quiet. Nattie and I somersaulted, forward, back, back, forward, until there was no telling which way was up.
Later, when I hoisted myself out, I saw that one of us—human or canine—had splashed Mother with water in the shape of continents, darkening the gray of her shirtdress. And I had to give her credit: She hadn’t said a word.
Mother’s generosity of spirit sloshed over to dinner. She turned on the ceiling fans
, changed into a white top and checkered culottes, and poured herself a glass of sherry.
I opened the freezer, deciding which slab to slide into the oven. Obviously, the chicken à la Elvis. “We have something new in the casserole department, and it arrived with an invitation to Tea and Etiquette,” I said. “The woman says she knows you: Mrs. Eleet.”
Nattie stuck her head in the freezer. “Your lipstick’s still crooked.”
Mother spritzed a tablecloth with water and draped it over the window to chill the air on its way in, an ad hoc air conditioner. The guesthouse was sans air-conditioning. Mother said the human body was surprisingly adaptable and we must cope with the air we have. The spritzy-tablecloth trick helped.
“Eleet? Millie?” Mother paused. “Ruth, I know you need friends here, but please, please, do not slip right into that pre-debutante piffle. Make some excuse and skip it.”
“I already said yes. She has a daughter my age. And Fontaine asked her to invite me.”
“Ha!” Mother said. I waited for her to expand on her “ha,” but she didn’t. Instead, she took a long sip of sherry.
At that moment, I missed my older sister, Sara, even though she was going through a bouffed-up phase and liked to refer to herself as Sara-without-an-h, who was a junior at Sarah-with-an-h Lawrence. I last saw h-less Sara the day Mr. Hank arrived to pack us up; she arrived with her guy, Jerome, who’d driven her to the city in a brand-new Thunderbird. Saying goodbye to her had left a jumbo lump in my throat.
“Fontaine said you were a Magnolia Princess,” I added after a minute.
“Queen,” Nattie said.
“There were many opportunities to be a queen,” Mother said, again with the sigh. “Chrysanthemum. Magnolia. Maid of Cotton. Reverie. Holley with a superfluous ‘e.’ Don’t be too impressed.”
But I was impressed. “School doesn’t start for two more weeks,” I said, trying to keep the gloom out of my voice. “I need a friend who isn’t forty years old. Or eleven.” Mother shot me a look. “And it’s all sanctioned by Fontaine.”
“Of course it’s sanctioned by Fontaine,” she said.
I dished up Elvis. We slid into our usual spots, Mother at the foot of the table, me in the middle, and Nattie across from me, in Dad’s chair. Mother had wedged a single chair with a squishy red vinyl seat into Mr. Hank’s cavernous trunk so one thing would be the same when we gathered together. Most nights, Nattie claimed it as her own.
Elvis wasn’t quite warm. The cream and mushrooms were a little congealed.
Mother pushed a pimento around her plate in a figure eight. “I’m sorry, Ruthie. You’ll have to send regrets,” she said. “Believe me, Mrs. Eleet will not be fond of the fact I am raising you and your sisters Jewish. As a rule, the people and places that celebrate the pre-debutante are those at which Jewish girls are summarily not included—or invited, wanted, desired. Choose your verb.”
“Fontaine says it didn’t come up,” I said, warming up to her omission strategy. (Or maybe the warming was the lack of air-conditioning.) What hadn’t come up would let me make friends with girls with umbrella-flipped hair.
“But I bet—” Mother straightened her collar for dramatic effect. “I bet Millie Eleet said something like: ‘Say hey! I’d be honnnorred if y’all’d come over to my little old house for a little elitist tea.’ ”
“No, she didn’t,” I said. “She said, ‘Hay is for horses.’ ”
“Gracie did,” Nattie said. “She definitely said, ‘Say hey.’ ”
“What’s the harm in a little tea?” I asked, thinking if Mother threw one of her independent-minded fits I would go mad. “Whoever died from a little Lipton’s?”
The ceiling fan’s blades beat at the air. I could feel my hair lift and sway, wider and wilder with each revolution.
And then Mother laughed her great laugh. “All right. But forget Mr. Lipton. It’ll be sweet tea or lemonade.” The tablecloth fluttered from the window, and it was like Mother herself was waving the white flag of surrender.
3
Southern Discomfort
“Are you thinking this is a tea dress?” Nattie pulled my gingham fit-and-flare from our closet.
I sat cross-legged on the bed. “I haven’t the foggiest.”
“Maybe white is better?” Nattie shoved the gingham back in and held up the eyelet sheath I wore to Sara’s graduation at least one size ago, before my breasts came in. I was still five feet flat, but my chest had landed in true-bosom territory. Nattie balanced the hook of the hanger on the top of the closet door. The dress swung to and fro to the rhythm of the ceiling fan.
Yesterday it had seemed a swell idea to have tea, certainly sweller than sweltering in the guesthouse with only a little sister and giant poodle for company. (Mother was off covering the record pecan crop.) But today it seemed less swell because I didn’t know what to wear. And I liked to think I always knew what to wear.
I read Mademoiselle every month. Cover-to-cover read it. In New York, I’d buy a copy on the newsstand under the clock near Grand Central Station, right across the street from the magazine’s offices, because that particular newsstand had Mademoiselle two days before any other place in the city. The round woman behind the counter would bark “This is not a lending library” if you weren’t fast enough with your money, but I’d fist my change before she even saw me.
Mother thought my dalliance (her word) with fashion was shallow, but fashion was about art and creation and self-expression. If that counted as shallow, count me in.
Now I tried to picture how Mademoiselle would photograph a tea party. I remembered a story about London with flowered frocks and heathered sweaters. I closed my eyes to conjure up the details, but instead of teacups, I saw Dad’s favorite white coffee cup, the one he stole (“borrowed”) from the best diner on 110th. Some people closed their eyes and the world dropped away, but when I closed my eyes, Dad came alive.
Nattie threw a strappy Mary Jane at me. “Wake up! You can’t be more than ten minutes late. It isn’t fashionable.”
“According to?”
“I read it in the pink book. Page fourteen.”
“You’ve memorized the rules?” I threw the shoe back, and it sailed past her braids.
“Not all of them.”
In that second, I missed Nattie’s old room with her too-many stuffed animals. I missed so, so much. I missed Dad and his quips—“The only change you can count on is from a vending machine.” I missed our revved-up sidewalk talk, missed slices of standup pizza on upper Broadway. I even missed the ripe smell of garbage on summer days. Well, that one less, but here everything was so green and pretty. How could it be a city? And how could it be a city where only three of us lived?
“If you’re going to throw shoes at me, I’ll leave,” Nattie said.
“Shoe, singular. Stay.”
She crawled under my coverlet and didn’t look like she was going anywhere.
I put the eyelet away and took out a black shift—sleeveless, citified. A look-alike style was in the window at Saks Fifth Avenue last May, but my version cost six dollars at a place on Amsterdam where girls from Barnard College liked to shop. Classic black was always sophisticated, according to Mademoiselle, because you could both blend in and stand out.
“Does it look tight?” I asked Nattie from her perch on my bed. In the dressing table mirror, I saw only a slice of myself.
“In a good way,” Nattie said, but I had to consider the source: an eleven-year-old who hadn’t mastered the art of braiding her own hair.
Earlier this summer, not even three weeks after the funeral, Danny Rosen told me I had curves like a Corvette. I didn’t like Danny. He had a habit of standing on one leg like a stork. But, oddly, that didn’t stop me from necking madly with him and guiding his hands up and down those curves he couldn’t get enough of. Sara said the grief had turned me around, but it had turned
her around, too. She and Jerome were all over each other, all the time.
Now, on this T&E afternoon, I put on stockings, lining up the back seams as best I could, a squirrelly task since the nylon stuck to my clammy calves. I secured the tops into the hooks of the garter belt. I folded the girdle in half and stepped into it, rocking it back and forth until it came up over my hip bone. “Heat is misery,” I said.
“You’re supposed to wear proper foundation garments, even if it’s hot,” Nattie said.
We walked to the kitchen, and I swiped on a little from-the-freezer lipstick. “Don’t tell me the pink booklet has rules about what kind of gunders to wear.”
“Okay, I won’t.”
One problem with girding yourself for change—the change of, say, making a friend or two in a southern climate—was the girdle itself. It sliced off circulation to your waist and possibly your brain. Pink booklet be damned, I went to the bathroom and peeled the girdle and stockings right off.
It took only ten minutes and a bucket of perspiration to walk the five blocks to the Eleets’ place, a white-columned house at the foot of a long U-shaped driveway. I was clearly late, though at least I didn’t smell—I did a quick sniff test to be sure.
I smiled my way through a small circle of girls in frosted-sugar dresses on the lawn. Every one of them had on stockings with straight seams. There was the scent of something velvety in the air. Maybe it was gardenias, but maybe it wasn’t. I really had no idea what gardenias smelled like.
Gracie was nowhere in sight. At the edge of the not-small-after-all porch, I struck what I hoped was a nonchalant pose, ballet flats turned out, a passable first position. I practiced pulling my stomach in, along with something else, my otherness.
A very tall girl in a blue dress so pale and icy it looked almost silver held court near the front door. “I haaaate Davis E. Jefferson.” She swiveled around to the others, and her hair—white blond with knife-edge bangs—swung after her.
In the Neighborhood of True Page 2