Daddy Jack thumbed through the Wellesley catalog and tossed it back on the table. I knew what he was going to say. “I went to the school of hard knocks myself,” he rewarded me. “I didn’t have any of this fancy education, and I’ve done pretty well if I do say so.” And you do say so, I thought. “Well, you’ve got your head in the clouds but I tell you one thing, sister, you can go anywhere you want as long as it’s not north of the Mason-Dixon Line. I’m not paying a dime for you to go off and marry some Yankee two-by-four much less mix with nigras not three generations removed from cannibalism.” He puffed like a bullfrog. “What is wrong with the University of Georgia? It was good enough for your sisters.” That they had gone there was the reason why I didn’t want to. I wanted something different, not to follow in their footsteps.
My mother at the door, years past the middle of the twentieth century, said, “And you can forget New Orleans—that’s the white slavery capital of the world.”
“What is white slavery?” I asked.
“White girls are kidnapped and sold to Arabs and other foreign sheiks, and besides Tulane is only for Jews. It’s known as Jew-U. You would not fit.”
I couldn’t wait to go to college.
Given my strictures, I finally opted for Randolph-Macon. Virginia was within striking distance of places I wanted to know, whereas Tennessee was just as “hick” in my mind as where I sat, poets or no.
I drive up north. From the passenger seat, Frankye compulsively presses the floor when she thinks I should brake. We pick up my sister Nancy in Atlanta so Mother won’t have to drive home alone. In my trunk, dance dresses—red taffeta, gold strapless, the old, still good, pink tulle—are layered with blankets, books, and sheets. The blue luggage my family gave me for graduation is packed with sweaters, fall outfits, and a suit for church. Frankye has planned my college wardrobe all summer, something fun for her to do. Now she says every few miles, “What will I do without you?” until I feel I should make a U-turn and head home, get a job at the library, marry as she always warned me against, and try to write. From the backseat, my sister says, “Just speed up.”
When we turn in the redbrick entrance, I let the car creep while I savor the feeling of entering a new country.
Two men haul up my luggage to my assigned room on the fifth floor. Frankye insists on making up my bed. Then she starts to cry and my sister puts her arm around her as they head for the car. Before they drive off, Frankye rolls down her window. “Bud, take this.” She folds into my hand the delicate diamond watch she splurged on at the auction in Daytona Beach. “I want you to have it.” I wait in the bathroom stall until I think my face is not too red to meet my roommate.
We were not gearing up for hippie times; we were still clutched in the last grasp of Queen Victoria. Although Betty Friedan must have been putting the finishing touches on The Feminine Mystique, not one word of that news, as far as I know, had leaked inside the redbrick wall that surrounded the campus. This was the cusp of the sixties, the last of the fifties. Marriage still was the first order of business; any career ideas could be tucked in around the edges. Though we were walking up to the verge of change, the college still remained in the holding pattern.
Randolph-Macon girls arrived with a lot in common. Many of us had similar reasons for being there: Our parents had insisted. Randolph-Macon was thought to be better than the places we put first. We didn’t know to ask: Better for what? Louise wanted Radcliffe badly but her parents told her it was R-M or nothing. Anne longed to go to Stanford; her parents knew California was too strange. Determined to leave the state of Georgia, I simply chose the farthest point north I could.
Academically the school was good—too good. When Eudora Welty made her first foray out of Mississippi back in ’27 she chose Randolph-Macon. After a short time, she had to leave. The administration decided that her credits from Mississippi State College for Women wouldn’t transfer. Welty would have to repeat a year. She headed for Wisconsin, left “weeping across the James,” and thereby escaped into literature. I had no goal other than to read, make friends, meet someone fantastic, and have fun. My purposes didn’t fit the onerous requirements to master two languages, mathematics, economics, and a bag of other unintelligible subjects. I never saw the necessity to attend all those classes, so many days a week, or purchase unreadable texts when so much fiction and poetry waited in the bookstore. I was an ideal candidate for “alternative education,” a concept unknown at the time. My grades tilted from A to F. Greek and Latin etymology fascinated me whereas whatever class happened at 8:10 a.m. sometimes escaped my notice. When I returned to graduate school as an adult, I could no longer remember why I’d had trouble in college courses. By then I’d caught on to cause and effect, the basic idea that one sometimes does one thing in order to be able to do another.
One rule at Randolph-Macon was the belt-to-breakfast rule. We could go downstairs in our robes when the bell rang, but we had to be belted—no sloppy free hanging robes allowed. A student inspector, earning her scholarship, stood at the dining room door. My robe had no belt. It was a copy Miss Leila, our seamstress, made of one my mother saw in a magazine, a bubble line with narrow hem. A belt had nothing to do with it. But every morning I had to tie around me a string belt in order to eat. The dining rooms for each dorm were identical: round tables for eight with white cloths and the special floral-edged R-M Wedgwood. At lunch and dinner the rule was skirts or dresses. No one could leave the table until everyone had finished. The few Yankee girls hated this and even the Southerners, who didn’t know any other way of eating, hadn’t counted on Harriet Bowles from Mississippi chewing every bite twenty-seven times while the housemother drawled on about her youth and about the good families of former students. Scholarship girls waited on tables. (Didn’t they just hate that?) They went down early for their dinner, then donned whites and served.
I was picky. So was Rena, a friend I spotted right away as a wild card in the deck. Across the street was the Columns, a big house turned restaurant. By the end of freshman year we were regulars. Even though Daddy Jack had to pay for my meals at school, I headed across the street several times a week, always when the odor of “train wreck,” a tomato stew, or “mystery meat” drifted up the stairwell. Rena was always ready. We charged, blithely signing tabs that ran up into horrendous amounts by the end of the month. During the week, crossing the street was our only venture outside the brick wall surrounding the campus. Sometimes we walked a couple of blocks to the ice cream shop on a spring evening. Leaving the campus became a distinct feeling. R-M felt like an enclosed world, such a microcosm, such a nunnery, that to leave began to feel odd. We became, some to a not mild degree, institutionalized. The only facts from the great world I remember from then are that Alaska became a state and that a handsome Latin in camouflage acting up in Cuba kicked out the sugar mills. Somewhere they were reading On the Road but behind the red brick, we weren’t. We swooned over “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” Freshman year, we could not ride in a car during the day unless a senior accompanied us. We could have horses, not Jaguars or Jeeps. From this distance, our slowness seems impossible. I see myself trying to run underwater.
I told Daddy Jack the Columns was the name of the school store and I needed tights for modern dance, kneepads for hockey, a school blazer, a choir robe (choir robe!), endless pads and notebooks. He paid but was not amused. He wrote threatening letters. This person who went off to a woman’s college (we are not a girl’s school, we are a woman’s college) and sounds as remote as Emily Dickinson, was, to Daddy Jack, a wild girl who must be broken.
The school agreed. What might we do if we didn’t have the ten thousand rules to live by?
My time at Randolph-Macon was just before girls were able to grab a little wheel of pills, that gesture that changed us forever. A nice girl got pregnant the year before I arrived and her family was furious with R-M, so now a gym teacher lectured to us. She spoke in such vague abstractions that no one had any clue what she was talking about unt
il she concluded by holding up a diaphragm between thumb and forefinger as though dangling a dead bird, and saying, “Now gulls, gulls, I have no idea what you’ll do in your four years at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, no idea, but just remember if you’re a good little actress on your wedding night, your husband never need know. There is no reason for him ev-ah to know.”
Those old wise birds sniffed the winds of change and tightened the grip on freedom one last time. Dating R-M girls had a built-in obstacle course. Each dorm had date parlors. If you were dull enough to want your date to stick around the campus, you sat in there on flowered chintz or linen and kept the door open six regulation inches. The dorm mother paraded through, smiling and chatting about her courting days in Milledgeville (she had gone to the same school as my mother so always mentioned that). The boys rolled their eyes up, as if on an elevator. They’d just driven the Blue Ridge Parkway or back mountain roads sometimes jammed six to a car from the University of Virginia or Washington and Lee in Lexington. They wanted to party, not see Miss Montgomery’s sensible shoe and nose poked in the door. When a boy arrived he approached a podium and filled out a date slip, stating his name, address, destination for the evening—everything but the occupation of his father. My luck was to have dates who listed their addresses as Mars or 10 Downing Street. This, the dorm mother said, implied disrespect toward me. Usually dates were blind dates, never seen before or after. Distance, the number of girls’ schools, the rules, everything stacked against getting to know someone normally.
We did have a unique advantage among Washington and Lee students. Early in the fall, all of us had to line up at the gym for nude posture pictures. Why did we docilely line up? The gym teacher in wide khaki shorts planted her muscular legs and feet on the floor and explained that posture was important to health. We had to strip and walk naked and solo across the floor while they sized us up. We then were photographed in profile and straight on. We were later called in and a teacher would go over our body photos with us, giving us a grade and telling us to walk with our fannies tucked in, stomachs tight, shoulders back, chin up. I can walk for blocks with a book on my head. Those with big busts were told they’d always have backaches and should wear dark colors. Those with small breasts were given an isometric exercise we could do in chapel or anywhere: grasp each forearm with the opposite hand and push, repeating rhythmically, “I must, I must, I must develop a bust.”
Our rush in popularity happened when a drunk W&L boy climbed in the gym window and stole the photos, neatly labeled with our names. His fraternity passed them all over W&L. Somehow we didn’t find this out for a long time; we simply thought we were noticed for our cute haircuts and sharp clothes at the freshman mixer, when boys were bused in and dumped and tagged.
I loved the University of Virginia. Not the boys, especially, but the thrilling serene classicism of the architecture in the somewhat rough landscape. The columns under the sweep of fall-colored trees appealed deeply to my sense of ideal education in an ideal setting. Those Thomas Jefferson “ranges,” little rooms with fireplaces, each one opening to the walkway, seemed the epitome of romantic, intelligent design for students. I imagined Edgar Allan Poe scribbling madly in the firelight. But the boys were hard drinkers by night. By day, dressed in suits and ties, they lounged about pretending, as Rena said, that they were at Oxford. Actually they were just hungover. When we went to Charlottesville for parties, we were placed with a lady with spare bedrooms, usually a widow who had attended R-M so very long ago. Three or four girls would be garrisoned with her. One of us was charged with the “yellow sheet” for signing everyone in and out over the weekend. It was an honor to be selected to monitor. All rules applied even though we were dreaming under Mrs. Blankenship’s Martha Washington bedspread, miles away.
The most stringent was the Twenty Mile Rule. No drop of alcohol could be touched within that radius of the school. Even those who didn’t drink began to plot ways to get 20.1 miles away every weekend.
I have my first drink in Washington—a Cuba libre, naturally. We elect Rena to go in the liquor store. She turns her ring around to look like a wedding ring and orders a bottle of rum. What kind? “The best,” she answers.
“Young lady, are you twenty-one?”
Rena looks amazed. “I wish I’d see twenty-one again,” she says, laughing. Anne and I are crazy with admiration for her. The three of us sharing a room at The Willard rush up and open the bottle. Anne’s brother Paul is in town on leave from the navy. He’s older, a pilot, gorgeous, and engaged. He’s not interested in us at all. What a pity. For hours we play bridge with him and sip rum out of hotel glasses, feeling we’ve succeeded in something but not knowing quite what. In Washington, we don’t have our usual restricted hours but we don’t know anywhere to go after dark.
On weekends, I go farther and farther, though there’s a limit to how far you can get on trains and buses and still get back by ten thirty Sunday night. R-M made it difficult to stray far afield: They scheduled Saturday classes. I’ve never heard of another school in modern times with Saturday classes. Girls appear at eight thirty, raincoats wrapped over their nightgowns or pajamas, hair unrolled, barely combed, deeply demoralized, vacant eyes staring at Dr. Voorhis as he consults his yellowed three-by-fives. He harps on the Hapsburgs. World history. Invasion from without, decay from within. All wars begin in spring.
I cut. Skip to Annapolis or Princeton or Chapel Hill. Annapolis was one school more mightily skewed than ours. Those constant salutes! And all the crew-cut officers always around. But one of the ladies who takes in dates has a basement room that is a true pit. In the few minutes the midshipmen have to deliver the dates at curfew, something could happen, though not much can take place on those cushions in the dark. For sure, everyone is stone sober after a dance with fruity fruit punch and crackers, the same snack served in Robert E. Lee kindergarten in Fitzgerald, Georgia. My friend Joan already is in love and knows she will marry Mike, whose friend I dated. He came from Des Moines, Iowa, but loved the sea. West of the Mississippi, my imagination flattens out into an endless corn prairie. I simply can’t see that anyone irresistable could come from such a place. Even so, he is. But he kisses fast and I’m glad of the dark so I can wipe his saliva on my sleeve rather than swallow it. Joan and I feel stirred in chapel with all the midshipmen singing “Eternal Father” under the cold light from the highest windows. We love sailing in yawls on the Chesapeake Bay, holding hands under the table in crowded tearooms crammed with uniforms and lovely girls who streamed in from girls’ schools every weekend they were allowed.
Princeton, oh, even better. The dreaming spires of Scott Fitzgerald, pink blooming trees along the lake, the big talk in the eating clubs, the town that looks like a model village for an HO scale train set. Rena’s high school boyfriend Jamie fixes me up with his friend Ernie. The football coach’s wife gives us the run of her house. The coach had died and one room is filled with his trophies and ribbons. Ernie calls me cara mia and we take long walks across campus, past the Princeton Inn, to the grad school where the students dine in robes. Late at night the living room is littered with couples making out in armchairs, on the floor, four to the sofa. Someone plays “Misty” on the piano. We kiss until we are dizzy and sweaty. Heaven. That was heaven. Sunday mornings at Ivy Club we sip milk punch and listen to a string quartet, and begin counting the minutes until the train south.
Rena and I make it back at the last instant. All quiet on the western front. We slide our bags down the hallways then bump them up the stairs, looking up for waiting friends who want to know how it was, what did he say, did you meet anyone else, looking up at each scrubbed, creamed face, hair in rollers, book in hand. I probably should have stayed here and studied for the anatomy quiz tomorrow.
The reason we follow the elaborate rule book is the honor system: a system devised not just to prevent cheating in classes but an inclusive, strict code of ratting on anyone who broke any rule. Anyone’s broken rule was tied to your “honor.” If you s
ee someone 19.9 miles away from school pop a beer, you are on your honor to turn her in to the council. Any infraction is up to you. Your conscience should burn if you know someone sneaked out the window after hours at Mrs. Clark’s in Charlottesville. You can’t just turn over and go to sleep. For this girl’s own good, you must turn her in. This is extolled as a system of mutual trust.
Once turned in, the culprit would be summoned in the middle of the night to march down to the dean’s office to face a black-robed tribunal of faculty and peers. At this mini inquisition, you could be drummed out of school. Helen, who caused a ruckus at UVA involving two boys in a bed (reported from fraternity mother to date-house mother to R-M dorm mother) never saw Monday morning at R-M again. Calm-spoken, outraged faces greeted her at the door. Since the process was secret, I never learned the lesser forms of retribution.
Was my going against the prescribed academic grain a perverse way of rebelling against rigidity, a freedom stakeout that didn’t haul me before the midnight court? Not sure. I do know that a rigid sense of truth took root in me. My mother always encouraged the “white lie.” Just tell him you are going out of town. Say you’re sick. You have another invitation. Tell them someone backed into you. After my R-M years, I can’t even tell someone I don’t particularly want to see that I’m busy, if I’m not. What is just? Fair? Right? I open my mouth and the truth spills out. As a result of R-M indoctrination, I’ve had countless tedious lunches and dinners. There, I never actually saw a rule broken and so was spared an acute moral dilemma of ratting on friends. Such good girls. We were kept in place by the appeal to a higher sense, morality; the rule was the thing, not the judgment of the act behind the rule.
Faced with a real crime, the system was useless. For a while a klepto was loose in the halls, picking up our wallets casually left on desks or beds. Emptied, they were discovered floating in the toilet tanks. Gradually a rumor surfaced that X, from one of the First Families of Virginia, was the thief. A girl who went to high school with her said she’d done the same there, too. We were not allowed to put little dime store locks on the door. Rena tried and was told she couldn’t deface the door and besides that was contrary to the atmosphere of R-M. Apparently the school was reluctant to confront Miss First Family. We just learned to hide our ten-dollar bills and driver’s licenses from her.
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