Under Magnolia : A Southern Memoir (9780307885937)

by Mayes, Frances

  Virginity seems quaint in light of later days of genital warts, herpes, AIDS, and other fallout of the then-nascent sexual revolution. An old granite statue in front of a dorm was supposed to wink every time a virgin walked by. His eye must have been permanently fluttering, even though these were the last days of the virgin cult. Many of us didn’t think for a minute sex was “wrong,” but fear of pregnancy was a powerful deterrent, as were stories of coat-hanger abortions in a Boston apartment smelling of cabbage. Those, compounded with the big word “reputation,” kept us relatively chaste. A high school friend got pregnant her first semester of college and was forced into marriage by the parents. She cried when we wished her well and tried to act excited about the baby. “I think babies are dirty,” she kept saying. Frankye had brainwashed me into thinking that life would end if I slept with my boyfriend and turned up “pg.”

  Some did have developed senses of sin. Anne worried about the exact moment a kiss turned passionate and therefore sinful. She went to confession for such things. The priest defined passion as beginning after fifteen seconds, no tongues included, so, while kissing, Anne also had to count. Many girls had never kissed anyone; they’d been sentenced even in high school to other tidy girls’ schools and never dated at all.

  Fitzgerald is not the antebellum, heavy-duty South, with patriarchs reading Tacitus on the porch, but only the backwoods of Georgia, stratified as a midden, but not hidebound like the tidewater South. At home, like all my friends, I’d stayed out late, kissed dozens of boys, fallen in love. I’d had steamy nights at drive-ins and summer cabins and swum naked down the river with my real high school love. This corseting rubbed me wrong. I liked boys but never got to know any well while I was “up north.” Given even the smallness of the pond, wasn’t I popular in high school? Now I began to feel less attractive. My natural instincts to be expressive started to snuff out. I couldn’t think of anything to say to the Scotch-drinking Virginia school dudes. Being “cool” never interested me. The endless loud party in a crummy fraternity house got old quickly, as did football games, especially since the University of Virginia team had endured a three-year streak of solid loss, and the tanked-up boys now cheered for whatever team theirs opposed. Everyone I met had some Civil War name, Moseley or Stuart or Meade. Besides having to jump through hoops to date us, boys faced the stigma that we were “smart.” The Sweet Briar and Hollins students had better reputations as well-rounded, party girls, May queens, debutants. We were rule-ridden, and with a tight bit. Horses like that tend to spook easily. I began to spend more weekends at school reading or scrambling down through the brush to the edge of the James River, where I tried to write poems or just sat there thinking moody thoughts. I didn’t even want to go home, not with Frankye circling the drain. At least with Daddy Jack, I always knew where things stood; he was utterly predictable. He blundered through the world, scattering effects from his disinterest about any life beyond the absolutely practical. David and I agreed that we wanted different lives. He planned to live in Fitzgerald. I wanted something else, not that I knew what that would be. Things at home were awful.

  With a few others, I even remain at school over Thanksgiving. Those big echoing halls, the trees bare, our little places set for meals, and nothing going on. My big sister in the sorority insists on fixing me up with an “older man,” twenty-four, who teaches at a prep school. He drives a sports car and likes to dance, she says. I’m not excited to date someone who has settled into teaching high school boys. He’s handsome and attentive, and unlike the other boys, doesn’t drink. After the movie, though, when we’re driving back to campus (curfew rules still applied on holidays), he takes my hand and says, “You don’t know how fond of you I’ve grown.”

  Fond. “Oh, thanks,” I answer, trying to sound sincere. Rain sloshes over the tiny car. I want to cry myself because I’m missing David, eight hundred miles south, with his Hermes by Praxiteles mouth, more beautiful than anyone in Virginia, even if he has grown up only a block from me. The TR3 windshield wipers scrape back and forth; the windows steam, not from my hot breath. He squeezes my hand then lifts it. At first I think he’s placed my hand over the gear knob, then I realize that the bony protuberance is sticking up in his dress pants. I jerk back my hand and look at it as though it were burned. This, and we’ve never even kissed. He apologizes all the way to the college gate and I never go to the telephone when he calls over and over.

  The alma mater is in Latin. The composer, Miss Willie Weathers, was oblivious to the fact that in such a repressive atmosphere, the Latin words quae ubi pinus exit sung by a chapel of girls might have other reverberations than the context suggested. When we come to those lines we thunder out the word pinus. The deans all look down; some of the younger professors smirk. To mention it would be an acknowledgment that penises existed in the world, and that did not happen. I wonder if Miss Weathers ever noticed and if so whether she cringed or suppressed a smile.

  The most telling activities we were urged toward were the custom of “stomps” and “odds and evens.” I thought from the outset that both were beyond belief. Stomps were marches at night when several secret societies such as STAB (said to mean Stately Tall Attractive Brunettes) “brought out” a new member—girls selecting other girls with their own type looks for mutual glorification. The group, folded arms up, stomped through the dorm just before closing, chanting their special chant. At the room of the new member they all stomped their feet hard and shouted out her name. Everyone looked out of their doorways, clapping and calling congratulations. Underground, there was a group that thought this was all too corny for words; I was “brought out” SOB my sophomore year. We had no rituals like the rest, only a bond of contempt. No alternatives occurred to us. The rumor mill was always churning up names. So-and-so should be Pi or AmSam, whatever they were. My roommate spent hours each night in beauty rituals. Her hair was her glory, but was it enough to get her into Omega, the blond beauties? For an hour and a half each night she rolled her fine pale strawberry hair. Every morning she applied mascara and crimped her lashes before going down to breakfast. I was the only person ever to see her sweet, washed face. She was brought out, to many happy tears and congratulations.

  Stranger was the odd-even hoopla. If your year of graduation was ’64 you were the sister of the class of ’62. Classes often serenaded the sister class at night, winding through the halls with candles. The downside was that the Evens had a set of “trophies” that were hidden around the campus, as did the Odds. In your spare time you were supposed to search under rocks and in storerooms and behind books in the library for the other classes’ trophies. If you found one (the only one I remember is a horse’s tail) you sounded an alarm and gathered at the Odd Tree or the Even Post for various songs extolling your class. Sort of a perpetual treasure hunt. Several well-adjusted friends actually loved scavenging for trophies and thought I would too if I “just would try.”

  This roaming tribal fervor is channeled, at the end of sophomore year, into a performance of Euripides’s The Bacchae. We barefoot girls in fawn skins dance around the amphitheater in the moonlight in the service of Dionysus, god of wine and fertility. Whoever chose the play had a diabolical streak. We are perfect for whipping up into a froth of fleshy, religious ecstasy. We can get into these parts as we cannot get into The Glass Menagerie. Racing around night after night whirling torches, wild with divinity, ludic maenads:

  … crowned their hair with leaves

  ivy and oak and flowering bryony. One woman

  struck her thyrsus against a rock and a fountain

  of cool water came bubbling up. Another drove

  her fennel in the ground, and where it struck the

  earth

  at the touch of god, a spring of wine poured out.

  Those who wanted milk scratched at the soil

  with bare fingers and the white milk came welling up,

  Pure honey spurted, streaming, from their wands.

  Power, mythic power we feel in the
blood. We sing in Greek. The words ringing out all across the dell:

  When shall I dance once more

  with bare feet the all-night dances,

  tossing my head for joy

  in the damp air, in the dew,

  as a running fawn might frisk

  for the green joy of the wide fields

  The green joy feels cathartic. We wind back up the trail to the dorms, flashlights beaming the edges of the path, singing like maenads, in touch with all that fire the entire mechanism and history of the school seeks to suppress, suppress, suppress.

  I do not regret going to R-M in the last throes of repression because of the friends I made there. I’m happy that I followed the president, Dr. Quillian, down Crush Path with my classmates singing “Gleam Little Lantern.” We were supposed to be pure, coiffed, gracious, intelligent, unselfish, subtle, capable. We were. Semi-isolation from men at the very time many wanted that most turned us toward ourselves and one another. Life without the friendship of Rena and Anne—unthinkable.

  We had the bond of loving books. We spent the summers traveling from Fitzgerald to Rena’s in Birmingham and to Anne’s in New Orleans. Frankye, who’d criticized all my friends in high school, loved Anne and Rena. To my surprise, they liked Fitzgerald. Frankye became her charming self again. She gave teas for them and took us to Jekyll Island and baked pound cakes and Toll House cookies, and served us frozen fruit salad and delicate chicken sandwiches with celery and nuts. She wanted them to stay, to fill the house with their grace and loveliness. Rena and Anne both thought I should think again about giving up on David. Rena was stirred to quote Yeats’s line about more beautiful than thy first love / But now lies under boards. And couldn’t I at least influence him to move as far from Fitz as Atlanta?

  In Birmingham and New Orleans, there were more parties, their old friends to meet, new things to taste at restaurants, and always books to pass around and read from aloud, and blouses and belts to swap.

  After holidays, we took the long train back to Lynchburg. Beginning in New Orleans, the Crescent swung through the South picking up hundreds of college students and depositing them at schools all the way to Washington. We adored the little compartments and read The Magic Mountain and Light in August aloud, sharing tins of cheese wafers brought from home. Rena came up with a copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. I admired a natural dignity Anne was born with, admired Rena’s passionate response to everything, as though she had one less layer of skin than the rest of us. Dozens of splendid young women, idealistic and nasty, intelligent and naive, adventurous and unsophisticated.

  We began to forget we were supposed to please men. There weren’t any. We were like the Spartan women during long wars. We were hell-raisers on sabbatical. At R-M again, we bought strawberries and sat in the rain on front campus whooshing them with Reddi-wip and screaming with laughter as our hair dripped and the whipped cream ran. We were unconsciously developing a strong core self. Confined as we were, we enjoyed one another thoroughly, and so acquired the talent for friendship, one of the two or three chief pleasures of my life.

  Beyond my two closest friends were circles and circles of other friends, Kit, Gwynne, Lucy, Alice Neale, Joan, Linda, Nancy, Rebecca, Catherine, Marion, Mary Jo. I visited in Greenville, Atlanta, Lexington, Washington. The whole South was our playground. Each friend stays indelible and unique in memory. Rebecca, doubled over with cramps, wrapped in a blanket telling jokes while her roommate strummed endless verses of “The Eddystone Light.” Lovely Joan dressed in red on the wisteria-draped Main Hall porch. The night watchman’s flashlight passing briefly, late, under our doors. Sue, who slept in her panties (the same Sue who called out “Oh hell, I’m awake,” when her alarm went off), often met him in the hall on her way back from the bathroom. She crossed her arms over her bare flat chest and stared straight ahead as he passed. Gwynne and I acting out the hare and tortoise tale for drama class, feeling humiliated to be hopping and slugging along the rug. Everyone swaying in a chorus song from a play about isolated life in the remote country of Andorra one of us wrote. The first story I wrote was about the imaginary death of Daddy Jack by tumbling down the stairs at his house, vivid in detail. I was thrilled to be published in the school magazine, Potpourri, but could not show it to anyone at home—my first brush with the edgy situation of the writer’s life.

  Ten thousand images, one for every rule.

  Many are of the Virginia seasons, unparalleled. To see the fall trees on the campus blessed my days. A golden rain tree on front campus gave up all its fan-shaped leaves on the same day, a brilliant shower falling into a circle like the melted tigers in “Little Black Sambo.” I loved kicking through the leaves of hundreds of scarlet and yellow maples, and that clear fall air touched with some stirring, unnamable scent. When snow fell in huge wet lovely flakes, we built an altar to Zeus on the lawn. In spring, a sharp green newness lasted weeks, then arrived the white and lavender lilacs, made to sing about, and the immense Japanese magnolia filling the library windows. First the buds seemed so tight they almost quivered, then they splayed open, offering streaked lavender petals to the eyes of girls reading, dozing, dreaming in armchairs at the windows, in a world of their own, though not of their own making.

  The weeping cherry tree outside New Hall exists in my mind’s eye as the paradigm ever after for all trees. This tree was twisted and large, the limbs trailing, effulgent with white blooms. I took pictures, wishing I had the Chinese landscape painter’s delicate hand instead. To stand under those blossoms looking up at the intense spring sky was a pure pleasure that never diminishes. Rena and I typed Housman’s “Loveliest of Trees” and tacked it to the trunk. Every spring since, after all these years, someone repeats the gesture, that instinct for tradition at its best.

  When I dream the anxiety dream, that I have not started the work and the exam is upon me and they’ve switched the subject anyway, the setting is Randolph-Macon. At least once a year, I’m back there for senior year and must make up all the requirements I skipped. I wince at the memory of my professor Mr. St. Vincent’s remarks in the margins of my creative writing notebook: “Maenad,” and “What is to become of you?” Vita abundantior, the Latin motto on our blazers, meant “the life more abundant.” But Anne’s brother on a weekend visit said, “I’ve been in navy barracks all over the world and this is the most depressing place I’ve ever seen.” Sandy tried to slit her wrists. Louise broke out as soon as she got the lay of the land, a woman before her time. I was balancing. I loved my friends and my sense of the place and the traveling. Often I returned to R-M’s structure with relief, sheep to the fold. There was just enough abundance to keep me attached, not enough for me to commit. No loneliness of any year has been as bad as freshman year, staring out my fifth-floor dormer window at bare trees, the river hidden, and no clue where I’d been or was going.

  As soon as The Pill hit, R-M as it reigned, was lost. The truly revolutionary consequences of women having control over their own bodies kicked those date parlor doors closed, ripped up those destination slips, put those ladies in Charlottesville with their white toast, teapots, and emery-board towels out of business forever. As preservers of The Way, how wise those women who ran the school proved; they invoked tradition, grace, protection, the concept of respect, culture, decorum: all those paternal gods of undamaged goods. We were imprinted with an intricate moral code of rules, from belted bathrobes to bedtime a hundred miles away. Soon, the little wheel of pills—we will cross a great divide. Didn’t those deans and dorm mothers foresee exactly, unleashed, how complicated our lives would become?

  Rena and I were foolish enough to think our families would allow us to pause for a year and go to Greece. We thought we’d figure out a way to work and pay for ourselves. We wrote away for pamphlets on freighters that took passengers. The Hellenic Destiny would sail in July. We tucked all the brochures in our luggage as we packed for the summer break.

  Below the southern fall line, that place where the hard, as I imagine
it, soil of the North meets the silty coastal plain I lived on, stream beds are pure white sand, so beautiful when dry—the meandering course patterned with the shimmers of flowing water. In droughts, I walk these sandy watercourses, looking for flint arrowheads and quartz crystals, which once I found in handfuls. I walk, too, for the pleasure of the fine sand under my feet, powdery soft in places, grainy as ground glass in others, and for the occasional clear pool; I am following the idea of water.

  The summer after I turn twenty is the longest in the history of the world. No sign of rain. No dream of the dead, no peacock screaming, no sweat on a glass of cold water. Just chiggers and ticks. The heat has to break.

  “Suffocating,” people say. But really, I feel more like the turtle must in its carapace, the whole atmosphere weighing on my body, and I carry the heavy air step by step.

  “It’s going to be a scorcher,” Daddy Jack says at breakfast every day.

  “Sweltering,” Fanny Brown agrees, as she breaks a raw egg into his shot of bourbon. My grandfather believes in high-octane breakfasts. He takes it in a gulp.

  Willie Bell used to fix cinnamon toast and hot chocolate for me, but she’s gone to the North and her kitchen’s been overtaken by Fanny, a big knobby woman with skin the color of a room when the lights suddenly go out. Willie Bell’s gingerbread-colored face has moved to Chicago, or is it Detroit? No one can seem to remember which, both being equidistant to the moon. “Up and left six days before the bridesmaids’ luncheon Margaret and I were having for Dottie Richards,” my mother had written to me at school. At our house, her exodus has raised what Daddy Jack calls “the Nigra Question.” Frankye and I aren’t interested. Mother thinks anybody with half sense who can walk out of Fitzgerald should. I just miss Willie Bell. She found a job cooking in a pool hall; Willie Bell, who’d specialized in the freshest lady peas, just shelled butter beans, fried tomatoes with tomato gravy, watermelon rind pickles, brown sugar muffins, pressed chicken, tarragon beans, and airy biscuits.