Under Magnolia : A Southern Memoir (9780307885937)

by Mayes, Frances

  I adore Gainesville in the calm summer—the soaring temperature and the warm rain, wet streets with steam rising, the night scents of dripping leaves. There’s something dreamy about summer school, more relaxed without the party frenzy. I’m memorizing the opening to the Canterbury Tales. Soon I’m walking home from the library with the studly, as my roommate calls him, Rich Herrin, who sits by me in Chaucer. Our talks grow more intimate. He throws his arm around me as we stop to look at the university mascot, Albert, a penned alligator. Rich starts a conversation, letting the gator say what it’s really like to put up with football maniacs. Rich has thick blond eyelashes. He’s funny. He leans to kiss me but I turn away. I suddenly realize that I could fall in love with him. He’ll be a lawyer in Coral Gables. I will open a bookstore and write books. A phone call, and my life will go in a different direction. Wait. Could this cycle continue forever? Rich likes Middle English and is a total Florida boy, tan, muscular, ready to party. Ready to be ready. I slip out from under his arm. Time to close the fire door. Grow up.

  The small wedding could not take place at midnight. The Methodist minister said midnight was a “furtive” hour and he would go no later than nine. He probably thought I was pregnant, since the wedding was hastily organized, and so unlike the Mayes girls. My sisters each had a wedding for a thousand, dinners of guinea hen and quail, honeymoons in the Caribbean. Now Frankye pivots. “Why can’t you elope if you plan to go through with this? Well, sister, believe you me this is the last wedding I plan to attend. You should have married David and stayed home.”

  Summer school ends and I arrive home with my hard-earned BA degree. Frank drives up in his new car, a twelve-year-old Chevy named Old Blue. I’m ebullient. He has come for me. What luck we have between us. We are dying to escape into real life. We escape Frankye by spending as much time as possible in the party-room barn behind our house, wrapped around each other in the same chair. Miraculously, I am a virgin, barely so but still officially. Our local doctor refuses to prescribe the birth control pill—too dangerous—but has given me some foam to try on the wedding night.

  On the afternoon of the wedding, as I lay out my hose and satin shoes, the phone rings—Hey, babes. That you? Rich Herrin calling from Coral Gables. Please don’t go through with this. Marry me. I’ll take you to Paris. You’re the only girl I want. For a moment I think of bolting.

  I wash my own hair and polish my nails. Lipstick, a brush of mascara, the hundred tiny pearls all buttoned. I’m ready.

  Instead of flowers, I carry a leather book of Keats’s poems. My little niece, Jane, seems to be the only family member who is excited. As I walk down the aisle Frankye leans out and grabs my dress. I turn to hear what she has to say; does she have some final redeeming words of wisdom? “It won’t last six months,” she says. I stumble slightly, suppress a laugh, and walk forward.

  She has managed to arrange a supper afterward at the Elks Club, the only pretty venue in town. She looks faded in the silky limp dress she bought for my sister’s wedding ten years ago. I’m just thankful that she doesn’t bring down the house somehow and reveal to Frank’s family that she has been shot out of a cannon.

  In our furnished duplex cottage I tape poems around the sink so I can memorize as I wash dishes. Already, I can cook. Raised around women making great food, I’ve absorbed more than I realized. Our favorite is called Chicken Florence. Cut-up breasts dipped in egg, covered with bread crumbs and Parmesan from a little green container, quickly sautéed then baked in the oven with a half stick of melted butter. After work, I make spaghetti, meat loaf, or Willie Bell’s fried chicken with a dash of red pepper. I love my kitchen and, as if all the future kitchens I will have flash before me, know that I’m at home cradling a bowl and beating something with a wooden spoon.

  I’m the sole supporter—wouldn’t Daddy Jack be surprised? Frank’s father said if he was old enough to marry, he was old enough to support himself. Although the pay is low, I’m immensely happy at my sales job. Bill Donigan, owner of the shop, hires people he likes. The four of us fool around all day, but manage to sell fantastically and keep the shop pristine and straight. Bill is unusually handsome. Too bad he’s so old, Saralyn says. He’s thirty.

  Frank studies while I work, and our nights are free. We are on the edge of Florida party world now. Bob, the Bad Pad host, has married my friend Patty and they’re expecting a baby. We start the milder life of having people over to our kitchen table for supper, going to movies, or walking over to browse in the library. I’m studying my modern poetry tome, learning to scan for meters other than iambic, and dreaming over T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. One night in our white iron bed, I’ve turned out the light after reading late. I hear a noise, a screen unlatching, and I look at the window just as a stick raises the white curtain. I see a shadowy figure outside. I motion “Shhh,” to Frank as he sort of wakes up, and slip out on my side of the bed. Crouching low, I make my way to the phone in the hall. The curtain drops and we hear running steps. Soon the police siren splits the night. “How dumb can they get?” Frank wonders, but then they’re at the door, having caught the peeping Tom. They just stopped by to reassure us that all is well. I look out to the street and in the backseat of the police car I see Rich Herrin looking straight ahead. That was the last time I ever saw him.

  Into our idle comes the Cuban Missile Crisis. We store jars of water and fill the bathtub. On the point of no return, we sit on pillows in the hall, an inside space, for hours, listening to the radio. The tip of Florida is only ninety miles from Cuba. We’re holding hands, our backs pressed to the wall, imagining the unimaginable, that we will be vaporized and not all the love in the world can stop it. I think of Frankye, 150 miles north, probably unaware that her two daughters in Florida are in mortal danger, as is she, as are we all. Other drastic events have happened in my lifetime but with the home fires so incendiary, I have scarcely taken them in. If a door like this can open, what else might walk in? As I quickly wash the plates, the end of W. H. Auden’s poem “Leap Before You Look,” taped over the sink, gives me sudden shivers:

  Although I love you, you will have to leap,

  Our dream of safety has to disappear.

  These unappealing men, Castro and Khrushchev, toy with us. Our president prevaricates. We hide in the hallway sipping hot chocolate. Look if you like but you will have to leap. Yes, I’ve always known that; I just didn’t know that I knew.

  The call came early one evening as I sliced onions for soup. Frankye has fallen. She hit her head on the heater and lay there; no one is sure how long. Matrel, a kind next-door neighbor, discovered her when Frankye didn’t answer the door when Matrel went over to check. She’s in the hospital and our doctor reports that she is incoherent and totally wacky. He says that she needs a “massive shock,” she needs to “wake up,” “come to her senses,” and that he has experience. He recommends hospitalizing her for a brief period. Once there, she will be horrified and realize that she must change her life. “You mean he wants to send her to the loony bin?” I ask. In fact, she has agreed and already has gone, driven over by the sheriff, who used to work for my father at the mill and drive us when we took long trips. Frankye, sent off with a small suitcase, and apparently in confusion. Is Dr. Ward right? “You have to touch rock bottom before you can reform,” he says. I picture Frankye touching bottom in a clear ocean, pushing off and breaking the surface with a smiling face.

  It did not happen his way. What no one understood then was withdrawal. What transpired that first week remains unknown. The next call informed me that Frankye had fallen into a coma. Either the head injury or cold-turkey withdrawal was the cause, and she will not live more than a few days. If you want to say good-bye, the nurse says, come now.

  My sister picks me up and we tunnel north in the dark, passing through Jasper, Florida, where Frankye and Garbert married late one night, having crossed over the state line where no waiting was required. Jasper, a mystery spot on my globe. Also the birthplace of a writer I admire,
Lillian Smith, so ahead of her time. We cross the black rivers and speed through sleeping towns, reaching the hospital late at night.

  We are allowed to see her. Lying on a stainless steel table under gray fluorescent light, she looks ashen and curiously withdrawn. Her head is shaved and a dime-sized hole has been drilled into her skull to drain blood. The metal bowl on the floor under her head is empty. A stroke, they explain. I want to stomp my feet, throw a tantrum, beat the walls. A solitude ten thousand fathoms deep. “Wouldn’t she hate the hospital gown?” I say helplessly.

  She does not die. For six weeks, she lies motionless. We try to talk to her. Frankye, let’s check out of this terrible hotel. There is no flicker of eye movement, no responding squeeze of the hand. None of us is there when she wakes up as a large baby with low, low mental function that never will improve. She’s gone. Throughout the extended family reigns the she brought it on herself sentiment and yes, she did, but for my sisters and me, what does that have to do with it?

  She never will lean toward the light, moisten the thread between her lips, and thread the needle. She’ll never throw the sheet on the floor and pile on the dirty laundry. Brush her hair a hundred strokes. Floorboard the Buick en route to Fernandina, singing “Oh my darling Clementine.” No more—placing blue hydrangeas in a glass bowl, scraping her rings on the inside of the black mailbox, boiling jars for peach pickles, dabbing bath powder puff over her arms, refusing catfish because they’re bottom-feeders, bidding grand slams, pulling meat off the bone for chicken divan, hand washing a peach silk slip, surrounding the birthday cake with pink camellias, tucking a seashell into the bosom of her bathing suit, shouting out the window Go to the woods, live in the woods, draining bacon grease into a jar, dipping kumquats and lemons in wax for a Della Robbia wreath, beeping the horn for help unloading groceries, stepping on a furry tarantula, insisting I buy the red taffeta dress with a balloon skirt—just dynamite on you—pounding a nail into the eye of a coconut, kicking a shoe up in the air, unmolding the loaf pan of tomato aspic, flocking the Christmas tree with white and hanging gold-sprayed wishbones on the branches, extracting a splinter from my heel, zipping her skirt and catching tender skin, cutting a cantaloupe into crescent moons, polishing the lion-face door knocker, feting a June bride with Pineapple Parfait, ripping up Daddy’s birthday check because checks are not romantic, opening her handbag and showing fabric swatches of aqua like the waters of Barbados, saying You don’t know what it was like when every little piece of rubber broke, hiding the bill from Rich’s in the sideboard, skipping church missionary circle meeting (Can’t they see the poor three blocks from here?), stretching the organdy canopy back over the tester, shelling pecans for Martha Washington Jetties: all her lost days, rolling away. She is the lining of my coat I will have to shed.

  I’m twenty-two; she’s fifty-four. Her blue shot-silk eyes express an almost verbal intelligence, like a gorilla looking out from behind bars at the zoo. We move her to a family friend’s nursing home in Fitzgerald. She recognizes everyone and knows our names but has lost the context for our lives. I want to unzip her and pull out the real Frankye. To her, I will be forever twenty-two, even when I am fifty and sixty, still visiting her in the small room, where she takes her long mystery ride to age ninety-two. “Constitution of iron,” the doctor says. “Good genes, Frances.” Is he serious? Each time I approach the building, the mysterious rash blazes down my arm. On her door hangs her photograph from a prettier time. A woman on her hall has elephant man disease. When I walk by her room, she opens the door and sticks out her wild face, her eyes almost hidden by grotesque purple growths all over her. But her eyes—she’s in there somewhere. I need everything I have to smile and say good morning.

  Frankye has many friends and knows quite a few patients, who also have visitors. She’s not alone now and nothing is expected of her. We move some of her furniture into her room and hang photos of the family. She has forgotten that she’d really like a drink. As I leave, I peek back in to see if she is crying. She is not. She lights a cigarette and reaches for the remote. A man with snuff-packed cheeks pulls my arm. “Gimme a nickel,” he says. “Gimme a nickel.” Others are strapped to wheelchairs, staring into the middle distance. A wizened woman jerks awake as I pass and says loudly, “It shouldn’t happen to a dog.”

  I turn up the car radio louder than I can scream.

  By spring, we see graduation looming. Gainesville floats on a vast sea of azaleas. We’re in the wedding when Saralyn marries Bing from St. Pete. We take day trips to St. Augustine and to Cedar Key for Apalachicola oysters, and down to Lakeland to visit my sister and lounge at the Yacht Club and feast on People’s Bar-B-Que. Outside Gainesville, we picnic at a lake with water hyacinths so large I’m tempted to step out of the rowboat and balance on one. The Yearling, a childhood favorite, propels me to visit Cross Creek, the citrus grove where Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings lived. “I do not know how anyone can live without some small place of enchantment to turn to,” she wrote. And, “Cross Creek belongs to the wind and the rain, to the sun and the seasons, to the cosmic secrecy of seed, and beyond all, to time.” The house charms me, though it is a simple cracker farmhouse. What would it be like to have a native place for my own? I love that: the cosmic secrecy of seed. Could I have written some of her words myself, if she hadn’t written them for me? “I have walked it [the road] in despair, and the red of the sunset is my own blood dissolving into the night’s darkness.”

  I have all of Frankye’s recipes, her Black Bottom Pie, Grapefruit Aspic, Chocolate Icebox Cake, and the Custard Cups she made when I was small. In her few cookbooks, she has scrawled recipes all over any white space. Date Loaf, Date Bars, Date Roll, Date Bread with Cream Cheese, Macaroon Date Pie—why so many dates? I can’t ask her now.

  We’ve written letters to graduate schools for Frank, not for me; I’m not there yet. All the letters flew to places far from the South. Daddy Jack once said that God tipped America at the Rockies and everything loose rolled west. That sounds good to me. Frank’s reward for his brains and perseverance: a full stipend to Stanford for graduate school. He will study physics and math. I will … I don’t know what I will do. Something. We sell unreliable Old Blue, and make a down payment on a new VW bug, bright red, with seat belts. At night we plot a long journey through New Orleans, the Painted Desert, Big Sur. Because of the heat, we will drive from three a.m. until ten, find a motel, and see all there is to see. We set off with $500 and no place rented on the other side of the country.

  Before falling asleep at night, I am on a road across the country, a meandering vine of road wending across Florida, the Panhandle, across the Old South, Natchez Trace, Mobile, into Texas, beyond, Grand Canyon, beyond, all the way across deserts the VW rolls along. No other cars are on this journey, and, oddly, I am alone. I have the landscape to myself until I top a hill and see the Pacific Ocean fanning out and out forever, and the red car comes to a stop on the last edge of the country.

  I’ve cast my line far back. Now I’m flinging it forward. In California, I will create a life with my own two hands.

  The End/Beginning

  The solstice. Winter in the South: a blissful week of seventy-degree weather. Skies already haunted with spring. The garden is all put to bed, trimmed, tidied, and mulched. We’ve just planted four hundred daffodils, hyacinths, and tulips, which may slightly outnumber the amount munched away by voles and moles since last year. The native hollies and the ugly nandinas show off clusters of red berries, and the sasanquas’ delicate white and pink blooms look out of place this time of year. What can they be thinking, tossing out spring-hearted pastels into the drear? Other than those spots of color, the landscape fades to grays, a vintage engraving of itself. But the air is enlivened—three cardinals cavort on the grass, chasing and flitting among bare branches. A redheaded woodpecker bangs its brains out on a walnut trunk.

  I carry my small chainsaw; Ed takes his weed wench as we walk to the Eno River, which flows along the bottom of our meadow. Whe
n I was growing up, I haunted the rivers near Fitzgerald, the Altamaha and the Oconee. Writing my novel Swan, I let my character (somewhat modeled on David) J.J.’s first action be a swim in the river he loved. Opening line: He loved the smell of rivers. I couldn’t wait to get him in the water. The Eno lured me to buy Chatwood because I also love the smell of rivers, the shots of warm current, the reflections of trees, the thought that rivers twist and join and reach the sea. There, Heraclitus, I can step into the same river twice. The water may have moved on, as you say, but surely it comes around again.

  We are clearing the tangled, vine-choked woods for a view of the water. The river runs black at this time of year, at other times, a more tannic, sherry brown. Clearing is fun; hauling limbs and weeds is not. But we’re spurred by the idea of a bonfire. As we prune, I look down, hoping to find a blue bead or a tiny flint arrowhead. But only milky quartz rocks glint in patches of light. Records mention the house’s big stable in the nineteenth century. If I could locate it, I could dig up enough horseshoes to have good luck forever.

  A property feels ideal to me if it includes a bit of a ruin. Just in the woods remains the foundation of a springhouse, built from local slabs of stone, where pure water bubbles from the ground. I think of the original gristmill owner’s wife, Mrs. Faucette, who stored her milk and butter, cheese, and hunks of fresh meat on planks in the cool room. She must have sited the house, after the 1770 one burned. She might have watched the British general Cornwallis pass by, then gone inside to check on the bread rising in the south window, just where I set my focaccia dough. A faintly visible track to the river traces an Indian trading path. Maybe they exchanged berries for cornmeal. The old basement door has a three-lock barricade from inside, so who knows how peaceful the exchange was.