“Davis Jefferson?” I said. I didn’t add: Wasn’t the real person Jefferson Davis?
She ignored me. “I haaaate him, even though he’s divine.”
“You hate him as much as I hate éclairs, which is not one single bit,” a girl in a dress the color of pistachio ice cream said. Her pocketbook had a fabric flap on the front that matched her dress exactly.
“Oh, hey! Here you are,” Gracie said, coming out the door in what must have been a proper tea dress, soft pink with an impossibly swingy skirt.
“Me?” I fanned my forehead. The heat pressed in, ironing itself against my skin. My formfitting, hopefully slimming, straight black linen sheath seemed spectacularly ill-advised.
“Silly!” Gracie put her hand on my elbow and turned me toward the girls by the door. She was sunshine, Gracie was. Wherever her gaze went, a shaft of light seemed to follow. “Y’all, this is Ruth. Thurston-Ann, say hey. And the tall one, that’s Claudia.”
The girls looked at me. Thurston-Ann, the girl in pistachio, trilled her fingers.
“I’m Ruth. Ruth Robb.” I was aware of being very one-syllable.
“Now that Ruth Robb is finally here, let’s get this show on the road,” Claudia said, swishing her icy-blue skirt around.
Gracie picked up a crystal bell from the porch railing and ding-a-linged it. “Y’all!” she said to the seven or nine girls I’d walked past out on the lawn. “Everyone, Ruth. Ruth, everyone.” She delivered it like a line from a movie, with cool confidence. “Ruth will be a third-year with us at Covenant.”
I gave an inane wave.
Gracie opened the screen door and called: “Norma! Whenever you’re ready!”
A slight Negro woman with a bubble of shellacked hair slid through the door, balancing a silver pitcher and tray of glasses. She set the tray down and disappeared, only to reappear with a second tray, artfully piled with lemon squares.
“Thank—” I said. Norma had turned away before I could say “you.”
“Hey, Ruth. Let’s indulge!” Thurston-Ann put a lemon square on a glass plate and passed it my way.
The lawn girls drifted up to the porch and took perches on the wicker chairs.
Gracie waited for the group to go semi-silent, then bowed her head. “Gracie always says grace,” Thurston-Ann said, a little powdered sugar on her nose, adding to her freckles. “Because of her name.”
“Come, Lord Jesus, be our guest. And let these gifts to us be blessed,” Gracie recited. Fontaine and Mr. Hank never said grace when we visited with Dad, but lately they’d been saying prayers before every meal, and I was getting used to it.
“Amen,” the girls said in unison. “Ah-mein,” I added, a second too late, and in the Yiddish-y way Dad said it, even though Fontaine had been quick to say her amens over me, trying to nip this particular habit of mine in the bud.
“Oh, your accent! It’s fabulous,” Thurston-Ann said. “And you know what else is fabulous? Your hair. It’s come-hither, is what it is. And your eyes?” Thurston-Ann leaned in. She and her freckles were nose-to-nose with me. “Are they black? So exotic! Is your momma Natalie Wood and you’re here hiding from Hollywood?”
I blinked. “They’re brown.”
“Her momma is a Landry!” Gracie said. To me, she added, by way of explanation, “T-Ann is a majorette. Always enthusiastic.” She paused. “Want mint with your sweet tea?”
“Sure. We call it iced tea,” I said, thinking of the sugar party I liked in my coffee. I might love sweet tea.
“Oh, no, no. Sweet tea is not iced tea.” Thurston-Ann shook her head, and her blond curls bounced about. “Norma pours the right amount of sugar in when the tea is hot—not too much, not too sweet—and it mellllts into heaven.”
I took a sip. The tea was divine.
“Tell us, where are you from exactly?” Claudia held her tea the way my mother held a martini, elegantly and a little detached.
“Near Columbia.”
“Columbia? Well, not so far then. Just South Carolina,” she said.
I bit back a smile. “Columbia the university, in Manhattan.”
“Oh, why didn’t you say so?” Claudia put her glass down with a hard knock. “I’ve been up north to see the Rockettes.”
“You could be one, Claud,” Thurston-Ann said. “Your darling long legs. Don’t you think so, Ruth?”
“She’s tall enough.” It wasn’t my most darling response, but I was feeling rather black-sheep-ish (or black-eye-ish) in this sea of sherbet.
“Oh, are we going to go around the porch and state the obvious?” Claudia asked. “You’re short, Ruth Robb. Does that mean you’re something like a jockey?”
“Ruth, pay her no mind,” Gracie said. “Claudia’s tongue is sharp as a razor.”
“It’s all right. I do ride,” I lied for some reason, taking another sip of tea. “In Central Park.” I conjured up the time I’d watched snooty Sylvia Wexler, a velvet helmet perched on her head, canter her dappled pony around in circles. I could be a champion equestrian. Why not? I could be any number of people in front of these girls who had no idea who I was or had been.
“You? Ride?” Claudia said.
“You’ll have to come out to the barn,” Gracie said. “We have a few show hunters at Chastain. Do you ride English?”
I had no idea what I rode, since I rode not at all.
“You know what I remember about New York?” Claudia asked, saving me from having to answer. “It was dirty. Cigarettes flung willy-nilly.”
There was no dirt here, that was for sure. My mind got stuck on a picture of Norma wiping dust from the porch, chasing nearly invisible specks with a cloth in hand, but I blinked it away because maybe she didn’t dust one bit. Maybe I didn’t know what I was talking about.
Thurston-Ann scooted her rocker closer. “What the heck, you live in New York?” Up close, I saw her pistachio dress was freckled, too—a print with a million dots.
“Lived.” There—one true thing.
“Still! Still,” Thurston-Ann said. “Daddy says I can’t go until I’m married. He says New York is full of communists. Commies and Jews,” she said. “True?”
“Hell, no,” I blurted, even though almost everyone I knew in New York was Jewish and my father’s father, long dead, had called himself a socialist. I fanned myself sort of frantically on the spotless porch, hoping it wasn’t the worst thing in the world to leave out the part of your life, the part of yourself, that was inconvenient in the southern sun.
“Whoa-etta! With your colorful mouth you really are from up north,” Thurston-Ann said, holding her glass out for a clink. “Cheers!”
I picked up my glass and ran my fingers over the etched leaves, so delicate they might shatter on sight.
“Cheers! Cheers!” echoed the circle of voices around the porch.
Was I cheering a lack of commies and Jews? Be strong when everything is going wrong. I’d read that in Mademoiselle. I straightened my shoulders and threw out a “Cheers!”
“So your momma’s from here.” Claudia poked around in her pocketbook and extracted a pack of Pall Malls. “What about your daddy? My daddy’s on the board of Covenant, so you know.” She shook out a ciggie, lit up, and exhaled in a long twirl. I thought of the pink booklet’s admonishment about smoking in public and wondered if a porch was considered public or private.
“My dad?” I played with the sprig of mint.
“Yes, what about your daddy, Ruth?” she repeated.
“Ruth’s father passed on.” Gracie shot Claudia a look. “As I told you.”
“He died,” I said. After the funeral, Sara and I’d made a list of rotten metaphors for death. Dad wouldn’t have wanted to pass on, shuffle off the mortal coil, get a one-way ticket, or cross the divide. He would’ve wanted to die. Well, he would’ve wanted to live.
“That explains the shroud.” Claudia ti
pped her head toward my dress. “Remember when Hillary Jane wore a black sack to Annie Lewis’s afternoon birthday. Black by day? Scandalous. Tell us—what’ll be your church, Ruth Robb? Because you’ll need to repent for that fashion faux pas.” She smiled the smile of someone who was never off an invitation list. “Just joshing.”
“Oh, please, Claud. Ruth’ll be at Wesley Methodist, right?” Gracie answered for me. “Her momma and my momma won the three-legged picnic race many years in a row.” She turned my way and added, “But now our home church is Northside Prez because Daddy’s family’s worshiped there since time eternal.”
“Wesley Methodist,” I said. “I’ve been there lots on Christmas Eve.” That much was true; we’d all gone, Dad included. But I still let out an exhale of relief that Gracie was at a different church and I wouldn’t have to make excuses for why I wasn’t Bible studying by her side.
“Oh, terrif,” Thurston-Ann said. “I’m secretary of the youth group there—at Wesley Methodist.”
“Oh, terrif.” I gave my glass a spin and watched as the ice rearranged itself.
Thurston-Ann put her hand on my hand, in religious solidarity, I guessed. Two seconds later, she let go. “Wouldn’t you say it’s time for some So Co?”
“Always.” Claudia ground out her cig, though she’d barely smoked an inch, and pulled a silver flask from her handbag. She had all sorts of vices in there, apparently.
“What’s So Co?” I asked.
“Southern Comfort,” Thurston-Ann said. “A southern tradition. It’s like whiskey, vanilla bean, lemon, and cherry all got together.”
“Everyone has a first So Co story,” Gracie said. “And it often ends with a blackout or someone’s hair being cut against her will.”
I held on to my hair without really meaning to. “I had gin gimlets in the Village all the time,” I said. Once, actually. But I was all for a sip of something that would go over with this crowd and their Fontaine-sanctioned crowns and gowns.
“By all means, let’s give Ruth a double swig before we go inside for decorum,” Claudia said, ribboning the liquor, quickly and definitively, into one glass, then another.
The first gulp was sort of fantastic, but then the aftertaste banged in.
Gracie leaned over. “They say it’s like a tail stuck halfway down your throat.”
The tail of what, I wondered, as I took another sip that sailed right down.
Spiked sweet-tea glasses in hand, we walked into the Eleets’ living room, where everything was both cooler and also spectacularly in bloom: a gold rug with large lilies, green sofas with garlands, and billowy curtains with roses climbing up, like they were looking for a way out.
“Thank God for Mr. Carrier!” Thurston-Ann said, fanning herself with her napkin. “Inventor of the air chiller.”
Praise be to Mr. Carrier.
Gracie patted the sofa, and I took a seat next to her. As we waited for Mrs. Eleet, Claudia topped off my tea. Up close, I saw a monogram on the flask—a C encircled with a wreath. Even liquor was an occasion for decoration.
Beads of sweat were making friends on my top lip. My hair felt like a giant pouf, like Frooshka ungroomed. No matter how long I’d spent on my hair in the weeks since we’d arrived—showering, then sitting under the dryer hood, then smoothing with the curling wand, then Spray Netting—I always came undone in the afternoon.
“This is the perfect time to join us,” Thurston-Ann said, and I was a little in love with her freckles. “The first mixer is girls-ask-boys. In two Saturdays.”
“Aren’t you asked to a bance by a doy? I mean, boy?” My head felt curiously heavy.
“Boys, doys, potato, pa-tah-toh,” Gracie said. “I’ll ask Buck, of course.”
“Because you like to see Buck buck naked,” Claudia said. Her ice-blue dress looked cool enough to dive into. “Buck is a specimen, but he’s no Davis Jefferson.”
“Who is Davis Jefferson, and why is his name backwards?” I knew it was the wrong tone—too New-York-y and not enough pastel-y. As Fontaine had told me, my voice was a strong spice and I had to use it sparingly.
Claudia straightened up. “Our mommas have been fixing us up since we splashed around the club pool in nappies. Long before you had any idea about doys or boys.” Even her laughter was sharp, as if it were shot through with shrapnel.
“At least some of that is not true,” Gracie pointed out.
“Isn’t it warm in here? Even with Mr. Carrier?” I asked.
“Next time, put your girdle in the freezer first—makes a difference,” T-Ann said.
I smoothed my ungirdled lap, imagining freezer shelves lined with gunders and crooked tubes of lipsticks, just as Mrs. Eleet joined us. She wore a shift dress with embroidered sailboats, pressed into shipshape.
“I trust you’ve all made the acquaintance of Ruth.” Mrs. Eleet motioned to me.
I stood, feeling everything about me—too much hair, not enough girdle—was wayward.
“Ruth, dear, tell us the most important thing about yourself.” Mrs. Eleet nodded, which I took as permission to plunk back down.
“I’m . . .” I’m a Yankee, a brunette, an Adlai Stevenson Democrat, an aspiring journalist, a grieving daughter. And Jewish. “I’m happy to be here.”
“You’re missing a word,” Thurston-Ann stage whispered.
“I’m super delighted to be here.” My tongue felt thick, and I worried I’d said “thuper.”
“Nope,” Claudia said, shaking her pin-straight bangs.
“I’m sure, dear,” Mrs. Eleet said with the suggestion of a smile. “Thurston-Ann is correct in that you’re missing the honorific, the ‘ma’am.’ But that isn’t what I mean. The most important thing about you is this: You’re the daughter of a Magnolia Queen, which I’m sure your momma told you gives you a certain pre-debutante status.”
She obviously did not know my mother very well.
Thurston-Ann elbowed me. “A Magnolia Queen? Whoa-etta!”
“My mother and my grandmother,” I said. The room tilted to the right. It seemed I shouldn’t move, if I could help it. It was so heavy, my head.
“Time for a pink-booklet review,” Mrs. Eleet was saying. “What letter should a lady’s legs make?”
I didn’t think she was asking me, but as the legacy queen in the room, I wanted to be a good pink student. “An A?” I’d go from A to Z—that’s how much I liked knowing the answer. If there were to be pink quizzes, I’d wrest the booklet from Nattie and study up.
“It’s S,” Thurston-Ann whispered, her breath so close I could smell the lemon zest. “As in ‘secretary’!” I was a sudden fan of Thurston-Ann and her pistachio kindness.
“Thurston-Ann is correct,” Mrs. Eleet said from above my head. “If a young lady curves her legs into an elegant S shape, a young gentleman will see the length of her limbs, but nothing he has no earthly right to see.”
“A young gentleman like Jefferson Davis—or Davis Jefferson?” I asked before letting out a small burp.
“Mercy!” Claudia snapped.
“It’s all right.” Gracie walked her fingers along the sofa to give my arm a squeeze.
“Mrs. Eleet, I’m wondering if it’s possible Miss Ruth is under the weather,” Claudia said. “Or the effects of liquor,” she added under her breath. Across the room, one or two or three girls stifled a giggle.
I gazed at Mrs. Eleet’s knees. Knees were funny when you looked at them too long.
“To think, I was wondering if you were under the same cloud, Claudia”—Mrs. Eleet paused for a breath—“but since everyone seems to be feeling fine, let’s get to it. The social season is nearly underway.”
I burped, louder this time. “Excusez-moi.”
Mrs. Eleet reached down and took my hand. I liked her more here, without her white gloves. “Ruth, as the daughter of a queen, you must—”
“I must!” I stood up, fast. The Southern Comfort wasn’t all that comfortable in my stomach, even though the other girls seemed to hold their liquor well. My mouth filled with spit, and I feared I might throw up right there on the carpet of lilies. “I must . . . I must go and walk the poodle.”
“I’ll see you out.” Gracie steered me to the door by my elbow.
I waved to Mrs. Eleet. “Ma’am, thank you for the tea, ma’am.”
“Well, she learned one thing today,” Claudia said.
Gracie cracked the front door. “Don’t worry about Momma. She’s seen one or more of us bombed before.”
I wanted to nod, but I didn’t want to move my head.
“You may want to wear red next week—on the first day, I mean,” Gracie added. “We like to start the year with school spirit. Red and white.”
“Cheerio!” I said, idiotically, as I went out the front door, playing the opening scene in reverse, leaving the girls in their pastel circle, Claudia towering over Gracie’s shoulder, wearing the smile of the smug.
I lost my cookies—well, my lemon squares—before I even made it up the drive, leaving my otherness and a little heap of Southern Comfort as my calling card in a bunch of pretty pink flowers I didn’t know the name of.
4
The War of Northern Aggression
In the week following the vomit vignette, life at the guesthouse settled into our new southern routine. I unpacked the last of the book boxes, even though we had no room for books. (Mother’s novels were stacked under her daybed, and Dad’s biographies were lined up, Leaning Tower of Pisa–style, on either side of the front door.) Mother reported on slugs and bugs. And Nattie held her breath, over and under the water.
By the time the first day of school rolled around, Mr. Hank was the only one of us who could get even half a smile out of Nattie, and so he’d told Mother he’d happily drive us to Covenant in the Savoy.
At least I had the fashion figured out. I went with a cherry-print dress and a red bolero jacket. Olé. Thankfully, the temperature had dropped to a semi-civilized seventy-nine, so I didn’t worry about sweating myself silly.
In the Neighborhood of True Page 3