by Edmund White
CHAPTER 2
When I was seventeen I started planning my debut. Bobbie Jean hadn’t met a lot of “the good people,” as she called them, and I think she was planning to social climb through me. She hired Honey Mellen, a “party planner,” as she called herself, although we called her our “society coach.” The fiction was that Bobbie Jean and I were too busy to look after the million and one details involved in coming out, though the truth was we didn’t have Honey’s little green alligator-skin book of names and numbers, we didn’t know who to invite or the right florist or photographers or musicians or caterers. But Honey knew, she knew all about that—she also did weddings. It’s funny, weddings and debuts are all about getting a girl hitched to a man or at least in the right marriage sweepstakes, but both events involve women alone. Whoever heard of asking a man his opinion? At least in Texas, if not in France, women decided the kind of lace, the length of the train, the tiny buds in the tightly bound bouquet, the church, the preacher, the bridesmaids’ dresses, the reception and its hors d’oeuvres, hiring Lester Lanin’s real orchestra and some rinky-dink local band to fill in during the breaks, even if they knew how to play only “Tenderly” and Johnny Mathis’s “It’s Not for Me to Say.” We all liked Mathis. He was Texan. Sort of.
Bobbie Jean told Honey the sky was the limit price-wise. She wanted her Yvonne to be properly launched in society. She and Bobbie Jean decided on the theme for my dance, “Venetian Night,” at the Brook Hollow Golf Club, complete with gondolas and men dressed in tights and straw boaters singing “O Sole Mio,” and a Bridge of Sighs, two-thirds as large as the original, and a campanile-shaped pizza oven.
Honey must have been in her forties, but energy! And she wore the trapeze look from Neiman’s, natch. Her hair was thick and wild, turbulent actually, and peroxided a platinum blonde. She wore nearly black lipstick and matching nail polish (she called it aubergine, though at that time I didn’t know that meant “eggplant”). She drove a red Cadillac convertible with fins out to here and she always kept the roof down. When it was raining she drove faster, honking all the slowpokes out of the way. She played loud colored music on the radio, music from Memphis, she called it race music. She wore a very strong perfume, dizzying really; I think it was an attar of roses, meant to be diluted to eau de cologne, but she used it full-strength and old ladies at concerts complained about it (“a real invasion of our privacy,” they muttered). She was always laughing loudly and jangling her costume jewelry bracelets, a dozen of them, bangles like a slave girl’s, as if she were on Benzedrine. She never finished a sentence but constantly interrupted herself with some new extravagance. She was never catty and never bad-mouthed her other clients, much as I tried to lure her into a good chin-wag. She was as discreet as an agent or a psychiatrist, which she was for all of us, I suppose. She always started out brimming over with excited enthusiasm for my ideas, no matter how dumb, but the way she shepherded you back to a more original concept—and the way she made you think it was your own—was truly astonishing.
Middle-class people imagine the privileged and social are bored and negative and languorously disapproving, but the truth is they’re bubbly, almost frothing with enthusiasm; you’d swear they were on speed. Everything is “fabulous” or “inspired” or “titanic.” If they’re English they say “brilliant.” If they’re French they say something you’ll never find in any dictionary: “Sublissime!”
Honey was a social engineer. She thought Bobbie Jean and I should belong to the Shakespeare Club, to which all these rich menopausal biddies belonged, though most of them were old cattle money and not common oil money like Daddy. We said, “Sure, why not?” to the Shakespeare Club, which was limited to just a hundred old ladies. The first half of the meeting was devoted to a play. Our week it was Cymbeline, which I’d never heard of. Whenever some old bag would say something cautious about Simpline, Bobbie Jean started murmuring assent like she was in church—“Mmm-hmm, tha’s right, um-hum”—and the other ladies would look at her as if she’d farted loud and nasty. Then we all had coffee and an iced cake, mint-green icing over chocolate with jujubes stuck all over it. Then I saw too late there was no place to piss (a lady never pisses in public) so I crossed my legs tight and willed myself dry. At this point, it seemed, they usually heard reports on theatrical events in San Antonio (cultural capital of Texas at that time, home to the Alamo) or Chicago or New York or even London, but that day, I don’t know why, all the world’s theaters were dark, so Mrs. Everett (“Minnie”) Wilson decided we should play Shakespearean charades and the question she chose, which she whispered to me, was “Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania.” The first thing I did was blush poppy-red. I’d never heard that quote before, had no idea which play it came from, and didn’t have the foggiest who Titanium was, but wasn’t that a kind of metal?
I decided to convey “ill” by playing sick. One of those hags on my team said, “Sleepy? Tired? Sick?” And I made inviting gestures like I was landing a plane on a carrier. “Ill?” And another old biddie exclaimed, “Ill met by moonlight,” and I shrugged and smiled, still clueless, though all the old chickens started cooing with cultural rapture.
Bobbie Jean whispered, “What just happened?” And I just blitzed my way through with a knowing smile, too cultured for words. I did guess “To be or not to be” when Mrs. Phipps held up two fingers, then pretended she’d been stung. Honey was delighted, jumping up and down in her seat with such glee that I checked to see if she’d wet herself. I was glad Bobbie Jean didn’t let out a rebel yell. On the street, Honey exclaimed, “You girls are absolute geniuses. Everyone is so impressed!”
“What is titanium?” I asked, but Honey batted my arm like I was just fooling with her. Of course we asked Yvette as soon as we got home. She said, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Titania and Oberon.” She had a way of dispensing information simply and without proprietary condescension, as if all that mattered was the right answer.
Yvette needed to get glasses; I was afraid I was next, but nope. Yvette read so much more than me. She chose the cheapest army-issue tan plastic glasses. Her hair had grown out into bushy black curls on either side of her thin face, not blonde and sleek like mine. So that’s what I’d look like, I thought, if every beauty parlor in the world shut down.
Bushy eyebrows.
Daddy accepted that Yvette wasn’t going to make a debut; one glance at her in her man’s suit, tan glasses, and bushy hair, it was obvious. But Daddy wanted her to attend my Venetian Night at the golf club and my luncheon party at home in the White House. Jane Beth had finally decided on her theme—“the Paris Café”—and her folks were going to hire Edith Piaf, the real Edith Piaf, to sing “La Vie en Rose,” and her rose bill alone would cost more then three Cadillacs. Now that we’d both selected our themes, everyone could get to work—the designers, the gown tailors, the bakers, the florists, those who’d create the invitations (a gondola for me, the Eiffel Tower for her, on little silver plates), and the invitation printers. Jane Beth’s mother, who made her debut in Tyler, Texas, wanted her daughter to choose her old theme, “Gone with the Wind,” but Jane Beth declared, “No, ma’am! No Confederate soldiers for me!”
When Daddy brought up Venetian Night with Yvette, she smiled and said, “I could come as a Moorish boy servant. Or as an eighteenth-century castrato.”
“A what!” Daddy almost shouted.
“Castrati were male singers whose voices never changed because—” She held up two fingers and mimed, “Snip, snip.”
“People actually did that to those poor little boys?” Daddy asked, fuming, grabbing his crotch uneasily.
“Now, P.M., we do that to steers all the time,” Bobbie Jean said, wiping her lips with a heavy damask napkin. She must have been tromping on the servant’s bell under the carpet because Pinky came flying in. “Yes, ma’am?”
“You can clear, Pinky,” Bobbie Jean said generously, as if it were a favor she was granting. “And don’t stack! Run the plates up your arm like a real waite
r, or otherwise make several trips. And never scrape one dish into another. Remember, serve from the left and clear from the right.”
“So how about going to the dance, Yvette, and this time as a girl, a white woman?”
“I don’t know how to dance,” Yvette said. “And you know how awkward I am. I pity the poor boy who tries to lead me.”
“We can get you lessons, huh, Mother?” Daddy’d started calling his own wife Mother.
“We sure can, P.M. There’s that nice Conchita Benson with the castanets and the hair extensions and those big brass hoop earrings.”
“Well, line her up, Mother.” He cocked an eye at Yvette. “Okay by you, pal?” When he spoke to her he lowered his voice, as if it were a secret, and Yvette blushed whenever he called her pal. I wondered what was up between those two. He seemed to approve of her for all sorts of things I couldn’t get away with—approve, or grumble affectionately. Her little-boy clothes, her bushy black hair, her bad eyes, her tutoring little Mexican children in math and English, her anorexia and vegetarianism—tout un programme, as the French say (“the whole kit and kaboodle,” we say, whatever “kaboodle” might mean). He never called me pal.
“Mother” hired Conchita Benson, who drove herself out to the White House in her battered old Chevy. As usual she was wearing her heavy terra-cotta makeup, her murderously red lipstick, her cowcatcher eyelashes, her piled-up hair, her big black castanets with the lacquered red mouths strung together with rawhide, her gunboat high heels, her form-fitting, ageless black sheath dress molded to her flat stomach, flat breasts, and cello hips. She was also carrying a record player designed to look like a powder-blue-and-maroon-striped suitcase. I was peeping through the upstairs window in the Lincoln bedroom. She rang our bell with one of her long red nails, checked her watch, and waited. Pinky answered the door and half-curtsied to the tall lady, made taller by her high heels and hair extensions. She was led up to the ballroom, where Pinky said she installed her record player and fox-trotted experimentally around the room. She pulled a pair of washed and mended white gloves out of her big black purse. She sat perfectly straight on one of those spindly gold chairs up there, deliberately fragile (as Daddy said, “We don’t want those old biddies to get too comfortable up there and miss their bedtime”).
Finally a sheepish Yvette materialized in her little black suit and sneakers, with a volume of Kant under her arm in case there was an idle moment.
“Well, I’d ask you to wear this extra pair of white gloves,” Conchita said, “but I can see they’re way too big and wouldn’t go … with your … clothes. For the next lesson I suggest you wear a long dress so you can get used to it—kicking the train out of the way, lifting the front when climbing stairs, gathering it up in your left arm when waltzing. Holding it correctly for your Texas dip.”
Yvette said softly, “I’m just attending, not making a debut, and I’ll be wearing a tuxedo.”
Conchita expressed her alarm with a quick, nervous clacking of her castanets. “Tuxedo? This is your sister’s debut and you’d become the only subject of conversation if you wore a tuxedo. I can understand wanting to blend in and that can be done with a sweet little blue organdy gown. You can buy one right off the rack. White gloves, a gold cross around your neck, and dahlias in your straightened hair.”
“If you promise I’ll pass unnoticed like that.”
I’m sure Conchita was surprised by her easy victory. “Good, that’s settled. And Yvonne will be so relieved that you’ve made a wise decision.” Yvette reported all this to me at bedtime.
Then the dancing class began. “I’m going to show you the basic fox-trot,” Conchita said, and rattled her castanets sharply (as if to call everyone to order).
She reached down, flexed her long legs, and grabbed Yvette by the waist. Conchita led her forcefully, counting, “One two three four,” and they pranced across the shiny parquet, full daylight flooding down through the high windows. “We must’ve looked,” Yvette told me that night, giggling all the while, as we lay on our stomachs, both of us smelling of toothpaste, “like a praying mantis and an ant, black and tiny, all head and eyes. ‘One two three four.’ ”
“How did you do?”
Yvette shook with laughter. “Horribly. I was horrible. You know how awkward I am. And no sense of rhythm. She kept saying, ‘Just relax. Let me lead,’ and her hand, though gloved, was digging into my side, forcing me into a box step.” She whooped with laughter. “No, she really looked like a mantis, her hair piled up, standing on those heels, towering over me. Don’t mantises snap their victim’s head off?”
“Their victims are their husbands.”
“I must have looked like a tiny, edible husband with my bushy hair, my suit, Capezio flats, very edible.”
“Are you going to try again?”
“Wednesday at four. Do you think Pinky would drive me to the store to buy a cheap formal?”
“Sure. I’ll ask Bobbie Jean to let her off for the morning.”
Pinky drove her old Buick, sitting stiffly upright as if she were trying to get her driver’s license. Yvette sat beside her, playing with the hydraulic window, up and down, up and down. A white family in an old Town & Country station wagon, the kind with the wood sides, pulled up right next to them at a stoplight and gave them the worst stares.
Then some drunk teenage boys with D.A.’s, in a ratty old convertible with Oklahoma plates and a broken exhaust pipe dragging along on the pavement and casting off sparks, drove by real slow and one of them shouted, “You two dykes? Don’t you know it’s ’gainst the law for a white girl to eat out a nigger?” Then they hee-hawed with laughter. “Hey, Whitey, you the husband? You dress like a drag king in your man’s suit.”
“Hell,” one of them asked the other, “what the hell is a drag king?”
“A big ol’ bulldagger in a zoot suit. Hey, Whitey, like that Brillo pad pussy?” Then they laughed, sped up, and turned the corner.
“I tol’ Miss Bobbie Jean this was a bad idee,” Pinky said. “What if they don’t let me in the store?”
Yvette had tears in her eyes, not of embarrassment but of shame. “Let’s go home,” she said. “I’m so sorry, Pinky.”
“Jes’ the way the world is,” and she shrugged and headed home. On the bus, even the school bus, there were little signs over the seats; on one side it said COLORED, on the other WHITE.
That night at bedtime Yvette told me the whole story. “I’m so ashamed of my naivete, putting Pinky in that position. I’m so ashamed of our world, where such things exist.” Yvette must have prayed for an hour that night. The next day she joined the NAACP and gave them all the money she’d saved—$231. I’d have to drive her to her meetings. She didn’t have her license yet, and I wouldn’t have trusted her with one, clumsy and awkward and nearsighted as she was.
Bobbie Jean went with her to get a dress, not a cheap one off the rack, which is what Yvette wanted, but it was blue organdy, by a Paris designer, and after twelve lessons Yvette did learn the box step and how to gather her train for a waltz, though I think Conchita got pretty bruised in the process. Of course, we didn’t take Yvette to a colored girl’s beauty salon but the beautician did use burning hair relaxant for Negroes on her kinky hair. First they applied a thick coat of Vaseline to her scalp to protect it, then this sulfur-smelling relaxer to her hair. It was a dull, thick cream color and they left it on for half an hour. Then they rinsed it all out, the Vaseline as well, and trimmed and styled her hair and dyed it my shade of blonde, though my hair of course was shoulder length, with a soft bouncing curl, and hers was just an itty-bitty blonde cap—she looked like Tweety Bird but, just think, I’d convinced my identical twin to be the same shade of blonde as me! Then, of course, we had to scare up a date for her and at last Honey located a real nerd, as much an egghead as she was, as untanned and as lacking in muscle tone. He had tails but they were his grandfather’s or something and hung huge and gaping on his bony little shoulders. He had a stiff collar and white tie and a whi
te piqué vest and in his coat pocket a white silk handkerchief. His tails were shiny with use.
His name was Edward Coffee, I kid you not, and he was more of a science nerd than a Christian nerd. The Coffees were an old family by Dallas standards, but they lost their money trying to grow cotton in the Hill Country and now they had a little jewelry shop on a side street, where Bobbie Jean, just to be nice and diplomatic, bought a brooch of white gold and pink gold, tied like a bow with a pale blue lapis lazuli haunting the center, an eye with cataracts. Edward didn’t seem to want a date any more than Yvette did. I was robust and tanned in my Dogaressa white gown with sparkles all over and the fabric draped over one shoulder, whereas Yvette looked like a skinny, pale little child in her organdy tube. She was wearing a very tight foundation garment with no panties so she could sit and piss without undressing, and boy, she was scandalized by the no panties. We said no one would know she was hanging free inside that tube. How would they get in there to check it out? She was so skinny she had no tits and had to be sealed into that dress with gummed tape. Honey did it all. It was as intricate as an expensive face-lift. Yvette trundled along in her flats inside that dress, just speeding along in her blue carapace.
Bobbie Jean had offered Edward a glass of champagne. He didn’t dare refuse and they sat there, Yvette in her taped tube and Edward in his gaping tails, running his finger under his collar, for an uncomfortable ten minutes of silence. Yvette, being a bookworm, had prepared to be “interested” in the best Texas way in her date by scanning a book on electrical engineering (Edward specialized in ham radios). She asked him what his “handle” was, and, rather disconcertingly, he said, “Wifebeater.” I mean, that’s how he identified himself on the airwaves. Once that was established, they withdrew into silence. Edward had brought her a wrist corsage, a large purple flower. She fixed it to her thin, starved arm.