Lookaway, Lookaway

by Barnhardt, Wilton

  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 m
ade 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.

  It was also an education sitting next to her mother throughout Millie’s ceremony. After her role as Girl at the Book was finished, Annie joined her mom and Jerilyn in the church pew. The music was lavish—a string quartet. There had also been Millicent’s Mary Washington roommate who majored in music, vocalizing something or other, flat and mediocre. Annie tried to catch eight-year-old Jerilyn’s eye to laugh about it, but Annie saw her little sister was enthralled by the spectacle like it was a deeply moving theater play. Then, to a processional Annie thought she recognized off a Kenny G. album, entered the bridemaids and ushers.

  “Oh lookee there,” her mother whispered, as one peach-magenta chiffonized bridesmaid holding a flower basket strode by. “She has the stems facing the wrong way.”

  Annie turned around to see that all the girls carrying baskets had the stem end of the flowers facing the guests on their side of the aisle, rather than the flower heads.

  Good God, Mrs. Johnston whispered, the best man and the groom had the same boutonniere … and look, they have the same ties as the lowly ushers—was there a Men’s Wearhouse special on ties, eight for the price of six? Here came the mother of the bride, fifty if she was a day, in a gown with ample display of bosom in front and back in back. (“Mutton dressed as lamb,” Jerene purred.) A five-year-old urchin smugged his way down the aisle littering the way with rose petals, with his twin brother behind as train bearer. The train of the bride was risibly long and kept escaping the hands of the fumbling five-year-old, who looked overstuffed in an excess of sateen and lace trim, a courtier mini-uniform that Gainsborough would have rejected as too much. He had kid gloves which could find no purchase on the satin train, so he kept dropping it and running after it, which everyone, even Annie, found adorable.

  “That’s cute, you have to admit—”

  “It’s appalling,” corrected her mother. Jerene pointed out that his shoes were black while he was in white. The program listed five maids of honor, when only one should have had that designation. No mention of the auxiliary Girl at the Book, Annie noticed.

  “At least two of them, including her sister,” Jerene said quietly, “are married so they are hardly maids of honor.”

  “What are they supposed to be called?”

  Matrons of honor. The photographer they had hired AND the videographer were blatant nuisances, all but inserting themselves between bride and groom for the shot. “Scarcely comprehensible,” breathed Mrs. Johnston, though she was nearly swaying with pleasure. At last, after a tendentious homily that was twenty minutes of moralizing about the state of modern marriage, the preacher pronounced them man and wife and the happy couple kissed fully on the mouth—“How nice,” Annie’s mother noted, “to get a preview of the intimacies of the bridal suite.” Then the wedded couple accompanied each other up the aisle, followed by the maid of honor still clutching the bride’s bouquet. “No no, darling, pass it to a matron of honor for safekeeping,” urged Mrs. Johnston, under her breath. “Oh look, she’s going to actually take the arm of the best man for the exit. Maybe they can do-si-do up the aisle, like a square dance in a barn.”

  “How many of these stupid little rules do you know, Mother? Is this your game at weddings? Counting the infractions?”

  Mrs. Johnston smiled, barely. “I’ve counted at least twenty breaches of tradition, and today’s lapses in good taste are … oh my land, without number, without number.”

  Jerilyn broke in to say she thought it was the most beautiful wedding she had ever seen.

  “I can make sure yours, Jeriflower, is better by a long shot,” Mrs. Johnston said, gathering her gloves—her mother was still wearing gloves then! in 1993!—ready now to turn her attention to the enormities of the subsequent reception.

  “What about my wedding?” asked Annie.

  “I fully expect you to be married upon a mule in a national park, presided over by a hippie shaman in a cloud of incense smoke.” That made Jerilyn laugh. Jerilyn would be the perfect lifeless doll when she grew up, Annie thought, for her mother to play wedding dress-up with.

  “Well, Jerilyn,” Annie said, “I will NOT be the Girl at the Book at your wedding, so don’t even ask.”

  “Who says you’ll get to be in my wedding?”

  At the reception (where Annie lost count of the continually mounting atrocities adumbrated by her mother), she got to see her old Mecklenburg Country Day associates, and clearly her reign as alpha female had passed. Rather than shriek with delight in seeing her or pull her into a corner to recall mishaps and follies of the debut they all had shared, they seemed to look at her—was it her imagination?—with a kind of pity, a reserve. Was it the fat thing? The goth-black hair which she, nonetheless, had styled neatly for the wedding? Was it her ludicrous bridesmaid dress that only emphasized the upper arms and paunchy stomach? Before coming to Millicent’s wedding, she had dreaded seeing these throwbacks to her private-school past, but when she saw them and they held her at some polite, smiling remove, she felt oddly crushed. They all had dates, trial husbands-to-be, all handsome and promising, particularly where starting salaries were concerned. Poor Annie, she could hear them thinking, all strange and hanging out with UNC-G weirdos and fat, fatter than last time, fatter than anyone we know on earth …

  It was Annie’s nature not to be coerced or obligated to do one fool thing she didn’t want to do, including dieting.
She wasn’t a binge-eater, she wasn’t one of those women who when things turned stressful ate a carton of ice cream; she ate healthfully but plentifully, and every bit of it found its way to boobs, upper arms, thighs, hips. She did tell her UNC-G roommate Gillian about the humiliation of the bridesmaid dress and the still-top-secret debutante ordeal, about her being the biggest deb in North Carolina history, and her vile old racist aunts.

  “Well,” said Gillian, “speaking of race. Why not go out with a black guy? I hear a lot of black men like, you know, plus-sized women.”

  That was a really good question. And Annie wasn’t sure what the answer was. She had fantasized about driving a black boy like a parade float through some stuffy family occasion, maybe some sacrosanct old-biddy thing where her high-society grandmother was holding court like Queen Victoria. Aunt Mamie Mae, I’d like to you meet Jeyrohn. Annie was the least prejudiced white person she knew! She was a round-the-clock racism police with others, as a matter of fact. It wasn’t that she didn’t find black guys attractive—Jesus, you were blind if you didn’t think some of those hip-hop guys or athletes or movie stars weren’t hotter than fire. But that wasn’t her fantasy, her romantic template.

  Gillian kept being helpful, more devoted to Annie’s couplings than to her own nonexistent dating life. “My cousin Janey is pretty, you know, plus-sized, and she goes out with this Puerto Rican boy who is totally fine.”

  Yeah, didn’t that sound like Annie? She could join the Hispanic Student Association or something, and go trawling. Better yet—how about the Mexican boys who were, apparently, the whole of the university grounds crew these days? Get someone who barely spoke English and drag him to campus parties and, yes, take him home to Jerene. Mom, this is Pedro and I love him. Why was she stuck on handsome, somewhat jocky, potential frat boys who’d probably turn out to be future Republicans? It teased at the edge of her consciousness, the reason, just out of reach. The taint of Mecklenburg Country Day School perhaps, early imprinting. It was the challenge, perhaps. To harangue them away from their bourgeois comforts and attitudes, to detach them from their expected blond airhead escorts, to give them their political and spiritual makeover. She didn’t want boyfriends, so much as she wanted converts.