To get away, I drive out to Crystal Lake. Local legend says it’s the devil’s winter home.
As I lower myself into the water, I forget if I am hot or cold. My feet feel the sandy bottom until I find the cold springs, spurting pure as Easter water. I am so cold I was never hot before; I was always ice.
To swim, as a child again. Like one of the brown and violet fish, the deepwater gars that look as if they oozed up from prehistory. I let myself be the fish. The soul is a swimming animal. Let it scrape the bottom; let it grow gills. The soul, flagrant and fishy. Let the cool mud settle. For there is no great dog in the heavens, only an abstract constellation, and who will connect the fiery dots? Let the soul somersault in clean water. Let me be still, a long amphora under water since the seventh century BC; let me be buoyant. Let me swim a psalm.
I climb out in my cleanest skin, burning with cold, and taste the sun all over.
The summer I was ten, I asked Willie Bell what “dog days” meant. “It means dogs go mad from the heat and run us up and down the street, foaming at the mouth.” But that was in childhood on the sweltering back porch where the lattice cut the sun to bits. “This time of year, you better watch out.” I was keeping Willie Bell company while she shelled butterbeans into a brown bag, keeping quiet while Mother and her friends played bridge in the dining room. We could hear the shuffling of cards and the click of ice in their tea glasses. Mother’s friend Marion was back home from Asheville where she went for shock treatments almost every August when the year got to be just too much. “Bulldogs are the worst. They sink their teeth in your leg and they won’t let go till it thunders. Just like snappin’ turtles.”
Marion never forgot a card, could bid baby slams and make them all the time; Mother said her forgetting had nothing to do with diamonds and hearts. The treatments just erased life’s unpleasant moments. Unless they singed you with too many volts, then everything went haywire; you could lose the whole Spanish language, if you ever knew it. When Willie Bell and I took in the chilled plates of frozen fruit salad, I saw Marion looking at little rolls of paper she took out of her purse. Willie Bell told me she saw Amy, Harper, the names of Marion’s children, and 4469, her own telephone number, her address, and where she was born. Mother said that was all there was to it. She said the treatments were like reshuffling the cards after the hand. Our dog Tish lay near the cool brick foundation all day, tongue dripping. Dog days; Willie Bell said if one bites you, you’ll foam at the mouth, too.
Cicadas, the deep end of summer, this is how night sounds when it breathes. Looked at one way, there is much madness. The chthonic spirits have it in for my family. Or do they, like the Greek gods, create mischief to entertain themselves? I want this part of my life to be over. Enough.
Out of the absolute fullness of nothing to do, on Wednesday nights I go to the country club with Frankye and Daddy Jack. Michael Wright, the only boy my age whose parents are members, always turns up there, too. “Well, Mayes, you’re gracing us with your presence. How about giving me a little sugar?” He pushes out his cheek, and I give him a big pink-pursed-lips kiss, which he wipes off with a handkerchief. Michael is polite to all the adults, each of whom he hits with a mocking remark as soon as he or she walks away. “Notice how Ellen had her sweater turned over her arm so we could see the J. P. Allen label?” I’d noticed. She tells us how beautiful, how handsome we are, asks about college, how we are enjoying the summer, and Michael says we are both going insane and she says how nice and drifts on.
He and I have known each other since we were born. At thirteen, his parents sent him away to a boys’ school in north Georgia, the only person in memory to escape so early. This made his old friends uneasy. He must be a sissy; something must be wrong. David was his best friend, and Michael’s high school girlfriend was my best friend. Our old loves probably are at the drive-in with dates right now, struggling around on sweaty vinyl seats. Over the years of our parents’ friendship and our double dating, we have a habit of saying absolutely anything to each other.
We load our plates with ham, corn, potato salad, and hard rolls at the buffet and take our plates and iced tea out by the pool. No one else leaves the air-conditioned dining room. I hike up my dress and sit with my feet on the first step under water. Hot piney air and a great moon, which must radiate heat, too. Only the wet calls of the pond frogs cool the air. Both of us still half-think we’ll marry our old loves. We’ve been to college in other states but, even so, the idea that we can actually leave Fitzgerald forever, simply invent a new life, doesn’t have a firm hold. We’re rooted down to the tap here, both of us. He has the powerful pull of his grandfather’s, father’s building supply business. I have Daddy Jack constantly telling me these are the best days of my life and I’m in for a rude awakening. I have Frankye, too. She’s a fox gnawing through her own limbs but won’t get free. She keeps to her own vatic litany, “This is the end of the earth. There’s one road in and one road out. We are at the end of the earth.” I’m sure Michael will stay; I’m sure I won’t.
“Heard you had a little fling in New Orleans,” he begins. “Is there a deflowering scene?”
“Oh, sure. Would that there were. Just some inspired groping.” I keep chewing the salty, undercured ham and lower my eyelashes mysteriously. Like a creek spilling its banks, a memory surge flashes. Paul breathing on my face, my arms wrapped around him, the word “love” brimming over me.
“Is he rich? I’m sure Daddy Jack’s first question was what his old man does, right?”
I tell him I haven’t heard from Paul since I came home, except for one note I memorized: “When I think how I’d like to spend my life, it is with you. Great sunset clouds at evening, rose, pink, and for Frances blue. A sky clean with light over the river. Thoughts of you, always beautiful. My love, Paul.”
“Pretty juicy, Mayes.”
“Michael, how do you see yourself in five years?”
“In cords from Abercrombie’s, hitting the links,” he says in falsetto voice. “You’re serious? Christ-ola, I don’t know, not in this godforsaken place. Oh, I don’t know, what if you’d … Hey, they’re shaking up the corn for bingo. Big night at the Fitz CC.” There, he hasn’t quite said it again. We each wish, in a fleeting way, that we’d fall in love. Wouldn’t our parents be thrilled? We’ve sat in his mama’s black Cadillac a few times and kissed arduously, but neither of us ever felt inspired.
Through the glass wall we see our families and their friends laughing and settling down with their cards. Harmon Griffin calls out, “Under the O, seventy-five.” Everyone pays; the winner takes the proceeds. That’s not the only kind of gambling. In the bar, which has no windows, illegal slot machines line the walls. Daddy Jack buys a stack of silver dollars. No one minds that Michael and I sit in the bar. Mother wanders in from bingo after a while; she can take only so much. Late, the bar gets smoky and loud. I’m long past ready to go. Michael’s sensible parents leave early and I’m left to wait for Daddy Jack and Mother to exhaust whatever it is that drives them. By the time we go, almost everyone has long since abandoned the place. Mother and I stop at the ladies’, then follow Daddy Jack through the pines to his green Oldsmobile. He sways like an Easter Island stone on wheels. Too many stingers. We see him take out the keys then open the back door and get in. “Look at the old fool,” my mother says. Tipsy herself, she grabs my arm. We watch him groping, then poking the back of the seat, searching for the ignition. “Where does he think the steering wheel is?” I shout. We start laughing and can’t stop. We’re shrieking, doubled over. We knock on his window. “You’re in the backseat! The backseat!”
“God damn it, why don’t they put some lights out here?” He harrumphs to the front and careens out the drive onto 129. Three miles of utterly straight road home. This time he keeps it between the ditches.
At home, all silent, I take my lotion out of the refrigerator and soothe my whole body with the chilly jasmine fragrance. Where will I be? The icy voice of a night bird spumes out of the
pecan trees. I play Ravel, galloping an Andalusian pony through the music, my cape flying, across dusky heath toward Barcelona. Do they have heaths in Spain? Why do the cicadas sing together? I am twelve but I am twenty. Writing in my blank book, I am but I am not. I copy:
Thou my sacred solitude
thou art as rich and clean and wide
as an awakening garden.
My sacred solitude thou—
hold shut the golden doors
before which wishes wait.
RILKE
I write letters, placing a lined sheet beneath the thin blue paper to keep my writing from slanting upward like a nine-year-old’s. I am waiting for the fiancée to return so Paul will tell her. I am waiting to hear that Paul will marry at Christmas. I write a sonnet entitled “Preface” about rain in the Quarter, drumming the iambs on my knee. I read about eternal return in a philosophy book. Everything, philosophers have thought since the Greeks, will come back again, exactly as it is. And what is happening has already happened hundreds of times. A fated plot. My time, the Holocaust raging as I was born, the Fitzgerald Purple Hurricane football team’s number thirty-five standing out on the field under the misty lights, gigantic bombs on the Japs, my mother’s camellias in winter, our street islands a dogwood fairyland in spring. Each blossom and blast coming around again in ten thousand years? My mother, a star losing her heat. How slowly the dead subside. My father, igneous still—Such a rainy night in Georgia …
What, in all this, is will? I know I have that, I feel the force of it in my chest humming like an electrical tower in a cotton field. Will, yes, but to power? Yes. It’s raining all over the world.
Time for the back-to-school dream. I have not bought the book, the exam is today, the teacher is speaking another language, where is my blue book, my number two pencil, what is the subject everyone else is so intent on? I am in the wrong class, perhaps the wrong cosmos.
We’re sprung. Rena and I haul boxes to the second floor. From the porch, we overlook a row of seven mighty magnolias. Ours is the apartment on the end—living room, bedroom, bath, and kitchen. “Can you believe this?” we ask each other over and over. Frankye finds blue and lavender carpet remnants and brings chairs. Rena arrives with lamps, pillows, and pans. We paint the bedroom lavender, with dangling bunches of grapes at each corner of the ceiling. We hang posters by Picasso, a castle in Austria, and bright paintings by Rena’s mother. The small closet and chest of drawers from a thrift shop bulge with our clothes. As soon as we plug in the stereo, we turn up “The Great Pretender,” “Only the Lonely,” and the theme from A Summer Place.
Half the class transferred from the lovely woman’s college at the end of sophomore year. In spite of the contemplation, intellectual challenge, friendships, the glorious Virginia seasons … enough was enough. For many, the sense that an active world zoomed by the gates of the redbrick wall became too strong. We went off to big universities, Texas, LSU, North Carolina, and Florida. Some married. I didn’t have much choice. Daddy Jack said, “You have your head in the clouds, young lady, and I’m not paying a cent for you to waste any more of your time. You can go to Georgia or nowhere.” Two years “up north,” and no husband in sight. And I’d brought up the idea of the freighter to Greece. He was explosively mad. He mopped his bald head with a Kleenex, leaving damp white balls in the remaining hairs. “And put a smile in your voice when you speak to me,” he added.
But I had taken none of the requirements for Georgia and the admissions office remained unimpressed with my Roman drama, creative writing, dramatic interpretation, and Greek etymology courses. The University of Florida was more lenient and allowed me to transfer if I doubled back for intro classes such as Florida history, phys ed, logic, and a couple of Western civilization courses. Daddy Jack agreed. Gainesville was only three hours from home. “Rena, you’ve got to go with me!” I called her in Birmingham. She hadn’t decided what to do about fall. Her family, too, nixed the Greece plan. At the last minute, miraculously, we were admitted to the University of Florida.
After Frankye hangs café curtains for us, she drives on to visit my oldest sister and her family farther south in central Florida. I’d been there many times since my sister Barbara married when I was eleven. I love the hazy division between water and land, where the big-horned white Brahman bulls flicked their tails and cooled off, like visions from India, and stalky white birds looked perpetually startled while balancing on one pink leg. In the sandy soil, you can sometimes kick up a shark’s tooth from when the land was under the sea. Frankye likes Florida, too, and forgets to drink excessively when she’s there. If she permanently escaped, would she evade that scorpion roaming through her head? Couldn’t she find a job there—flower arranger at the yacht club, housemother at the college—and a cottage covered in bougainvillea? She stays several weeks this time, playing bridge, shopping, and helping my sister with her three children. When she passes back through Gainesville, she throws out one plan after another. Bring Rena home for Thanksgiving. Let’s go to Atlanta. This summer, the beach. She’s in love with Florida colors and thinks she’ll paint our house in Fitzgerald Bermudasand pink. She scratches off, waving out the window, beeping the horn till she turns the corner.
We have long ID numbers and make-up core classes with hundreds. We meet dozens of foreign students. The Caribbean boys teach us how Latins dance without moving the tops of their bodies; with the fraternity boys we learn to twist and to sip Scotch although we don’t really like it. We cook spaghetti and Rena brings home Mustapha from Libya and Tyge, a thin Dane with a great laugh. I meet sophisticated Gary from Palm Beach and mysterious Joseph from Miami and Buzz, who takes me shell hunting on Sanibel Island, where Ponce de León supposedly breathed his last after failing to find the fountain of youth.
Cruel, we occasionally call friends who stayed at Randolph-Macon and let them know we’ve had five dates that week. We no longer have strict rules to hamper us but we also no longer have their protection. No handy excuse of curfew for boring dates or difficult situations. At our place, the rousing Russian army chorus and the Academic Festival overture we keep turned up loud. We put glasses to the wall and listen to the newlyweds next door squealing and bouncing. We roast a turkey and don’t know to take the package of neck and gizzard out of the cavity. We thaw frozen vegetables, mix frozen orange juice, fry hamburgers. At R-M, we’d pledged sororities, but here we ignore groups of girls and, instead, easily meet boys in classes. They seemed exotic, coming from such evocative places as Lauderdale, Coral Gables, Sarasota, Clearwater, Tarpon Springs, Tampa, Ocala. We are in paradise. We are living the life of exiles welcomed home to the large banquet of freedom. I can go from here. For the first time ever, nothing is clamping me down. Like exiles, we are charged and challenged. As we walk out of our apartment every morning, we feel as if live sparks fly away from our bodies.
I always have loved Florida. A million trees shade Gainesville. Moss-draped oaks feel right to me, the way trees ought to be. Giant azaleas (“a ghastly pink,” Frankye says) banking the houses, palms, dogwoods, scraggly grass in sandy soil—the atmosphere immediately feels like home. The wind through pines, yes, but I love more the sweet breeze rattling the palms, and the habit they have of thrusting upward, unfurling green as fronds die below. I walk the few blocks to campus, taking different routes just to feel the comfort of trees and the houses built low, as if to stay close to cool ground. Cracker cottages, small brick ranches with jalousied breezeways, miniature Tudors, and gracious white-painted houses with screened porches and long windows—I imagine the lives inside, almost can slip in and take up residence. Someone told me that a lady left her back door open while she was hanging out the wash, and came back in to find an alligator in her kitchen. Nature, I read in Tennyson, “red in tooth and claw”—that’s the far South, the scrubby, steaming, flat far South.
Rena starts dating an older graduate student in herpetology. “That’s snakes,” I say. “He’s a snake handler?” But no, he’s interested in some
unsung salamander. There are plenty of impressive reptiles of every stripe and venom around here. She brings home the boyfriend and he’s different, a grown-up who has been in the army and knows what he wants. Rena clearly is part of the plan. I sense that he thinks I’m a bad influence, since he would like to see Rena become more practical. When they go on collecting trips to swamps, she seems fascinated. I drive with them outside town to Paynes Prairie, what William Bartram called “the great Alachua Savannah” in 1774. Once a lake, the vast expanse suddenly drained in the late 1800s, leaving a steamboat stranded high and dry, and a marshy home for creatures, even for wild horses left by Hernando de Soto. (Why were the Spanish conquistadors always abandoning horses?) A fact of the southern landscape: Limestone foundations can collapse suddenly, leaving circular bottomless lakes. Or, a plug can open and a lake can disappear just as mysteriously, leaving prairie and a great expanse for sky. Sun, rain, evening, dawn—the aurous light ripples over the subtly changing grasses. If I were a landscape painter I would sit on a hummock with my brushes and hope the nuanced russet, sage, dun, and gold might seep into the canvas.
A raised narrow road, bullet-straight, crosses the flat, wide-sky prairie. In the heat the asphalt shimmers as though it wants to turn into water. After a storm, hundreds of snakes seeking higher ground slither up onto the road. As we drive across, we can’t help but run over dozens. We pause and roll down the windows. Among arm-thick, five-foot writhers, we see the brilliant slender coral snakes. Scarlet, yolk-yellow, black—the pattern of color tells if it can kill you. Red and black, the rhyme goes, friend of Jack. Red and yellow, kill a fellow. But who’s stopping long enough to see whether black abuts red?
Under Magnolia : A Southern Memoir (9780307885937) Page 19