Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady

by Florence King

  He looked up with a smile. “Why did they pick her, Miss King? Tell us about it.”

  It was nothing compared to the descents I had heard Granny trace. She had corkscrewed and serpentined herself all the way back to Richard the Lionheart, so Lady Jane Grey was a piece of cake.

  “She was the great-granddaughter of Henry the Seventh,” I began. “Henry the Seventh’s youngest daughter Mary married Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, and had three daughters. The eldest was Lady Frances Brandon, who married Lord Henry Grey, Marquess of Dorset, and also had three daughters, the eldest of whom was Lady Jane Grey.”

  My Daughterly presentation was greeted with “Whew!” by my classmates. A boy who had finger-fucked me turned around and gave me a look to which I had grown accustomed: part resentful, part puzzled, and part grudging admiration. It was a look that took me seriously, a look that saw me. I needed the hostility it contained. I did not like to tease men—that hurt me as much as it did them—but I did like to disturb them, even if it made enemies of them, because I loved to bring forth that all-shook-up look. It was solely for this purpose that I had made myself an expert on that tangled web, the annexation of Schleswig-Holstein. Now, scholarship and “the look” were one and the same in my mind; once I left school and joined the ranks of so-called career women, I would stop getting it. I must never stop getting it; therefore, I had to stay in school.

  After class I stopped by the podium and spoke to Dr. Newton.

  “I want to go to graduate school. I need to find out about fellowships. May I have an appointment with you to talk about it?”

  He snapped his fingers. “We must be telepathic. I made a note on my calendar to call you in about that. You want a fellowship here? I’ll fix it up.”

  “Not here,” I said quickly. “I was born and raised in the District. I’d like to see another part of the country.”

  “That’s always a good idea. What part did you have in mind?”

  “The Deep South,” I replied, remembering Herb’s theory about Virginia’s dearth of belles. “I’d like to see how women there compare to Upper South women.”

  “Well, how about the University of Mississippi? You can’t get any deeper than that.”

  “All right.”

  It was much simpler than I expected. He wrote a letter, I supplied a transcript, and a few weeks later I had a fellowship to Ole Miss: free tuition plus a stipend of one hundred dollars a month. Dr. Newton gave me a money-saving tip.

  “Write to the Dean of Women and ask for a dorm proctorship. You get a free room in exchange for tucking the little girls in. They like graduate students for that—more mature, settled down, good example for the co-eds.” His glance flickered over my face. “Enclose a picture of yourself,” he added.

  It worked. The dean replied saying that she was assigning me to a freshman dorm. I am sure you will help us maintain the highest standards of Southern womanhood, she wrote.

  Winning the fellowship filled me with triumph and confidence. Now that I had it, my final semester’s grades didn’t matter, so for the first time in my scholastic career I goofed off. I settled for a lady’s B and looked around for other forms of fun and relaxation.

  The one I wanted most was normal genital intercourse. I was tired of finger-fucking; now that I was twenty-one it seemed perverse. I was ready for the real McCoy. But winning the fellowship made me more afraid than ever of getting pregnant—a baby would keep me from going to Ole Miss.

  It dawned on me all of a sudden that it was not concern for my reputation that had kept me virginal thus far. I could have handled “fierce” boys, or found an older and more sophisticated lover who was unconnected with the gossipy fraternities. The campus was swarming with marvelously oversexed foreign students who had sent a delegation to the Dean of Men to ask him where Washington’s whorehouses were; the dean had reputedly answered, “If you find out, let me know.” Being, outwardly at least, the personification of all-American girlhood had made me the target of smoldering stares from hooded eyes; I could have had a sheik or a gaucho or a maharaja, as long as Jensy didn’t find out about it. There would have been no reputation problem because the foreign students were a little afraid of American women, and men who wear turbans do not fret over why you let them go all the way.

  No, I had refrained from fucking because of that ceaseless, gnawing, paranoid terror of getting pregnant. Yet it was not the baby or the ruin that terrified me; babies could be given away, and Mama could be counted on to shout Granny and Jensy down. I was terrified of getting pregnant because “She had to leave school” was a metaphor for malkin. I had not dared combine coitus with matriculation; for four years my subconscious motto had been: “Graduate first.”

  Now I was forced to consider a charming conundrum. If I carried out my burgeoning plan to become a fellowship bum and stay in school as long as possible, I would not be able to fuck until I was thirty.

  There was only one solution—a diaphragm. I knew all about them thanks to Evelyn Cunningham, who had shown us hers one day out at the house. Incapable of editing herself, she had delivered a treatise on the care, use, and efficiency of diaphragms, speaking so volubly and steadily that Granny did not get a chance to say, “Mr. Ruding was a perfect gentleman,” until it was all over. Proof that diaphragms worked was the fact that Evelyn, to whom unplanned things were always happening, had only two planned-for children (both of them boringly normal).

  The problem was how to get one. You couldn’t buy them without a doctor’s prescription and nearly all doctors refused to fit unmarried women. Somehow I had to find one of the renegade few who were said to fit engaged women. How? Whom to ask? Remembering my high school infirmary nurse, I was reluctant to ask anybody. Not that I had much choice; since leaving the sorority I had gone from near-friendless to friendless in a trice, so that I did not even know any malkins now.

  I ended up asking a woman I hardly knew. She was one of the bohemians in Contemporary Appreciation, a fine arts course I had signed up for in the usual final-semester smorgasbord way, chiefly because it dovetailed with my bus schedule. Her name was Patsy but should have been Tanya. She wore black leotards with pink ballet slippers, dirndl skirts, peasant blouses, and paisley shawls fastened with old Stevenson buttons. She was married but childless, she said, because she refused to bring a child into This World. (I had figured her for an apocalypso dancer.) She also said she wanted to stamp out ignorance, so I asked her to stamp out mine.

  “A diaphragm?” she repeated loudly, giddy with uplift. “There’s a dedicated woman doctor in one of those residence hotels down by Union Station. She knew Margaret Sanger. Just tell her you’re getting married—that way, she’s covered.”

  “Suppose she asks me why I don’t have an engagement ring?”

  “Tell her he’s saving his money to go to graduate school. She won’t ask, though.”

  I made an appointment and took the streetcar downtown.

  The doctor’s waiting room contained a nurse-secretary at a scarred desk, and two plastic couches with chrome legs. As I sat down, the inner office door opened and a young woman emerged carrying a small package. She paid her fee in cash and gave me a tiny conspiratorial smile as she left. Evidently it was a diaphragm mill.

  My turn came. The doctor was extremely short and plump, with grizzled hair and glasses that kept slipping down her nose. I told her what I wanted and named a June wedding date. She nodded and told me to undress and get in the stirrups. A rubber glove snapped and she bobbed up between my knees like a buoy with a set of fitting rings around her finger.

  “Have you ever had a baby?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Have you ever had intercourse?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Well, you probably take a sixty.”

  I didn’t take a sixty, or a seventy, or a seventy-five.

  “Eighty,” she pronounced, peering up at me from her burrow. “Are you sure you’ve never had a baby?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”<
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  “Let’s put it this way. Have you ever been pregnant?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “You can tell me, I don’t care. I’m just curious, that’s all.”

  “I’m telling the truth, ma’am.”

  “Hmmp,” she grunted, shaking her head.

  “Is there anything wrong with me?”

  “No, you’ve got a healthy-looking pelvis. But eighty is a married woman’s size as a rule.”

  So I had terminal ultima thule. It was all those fingers, I thought dismally. Had I ruined myself for fucking? What would I say when I got laid? Would I ever have a satisfying sex life? Men might marry women with big twats but they didn’t run around with them.

  I was afraid to ask any more questions for fear she would ask some more. When she reached for a number eighty diaphragm from among the boxes on her shelf, I turned my head away, certain it would look like a dinner plate. I kept my eyes closed while she smeared it with jelly and stuffed it in me. Satisfied that it fit, she took it out and made me insert it.

  It wasn’t nearly so big as I expected; in fact, it was only about three inches in diameter, but that still seemed big. I was shaking so badly that when I pinched it into the requisite figure-eight to insert it, it flew out of my fingers and rose up like a pop fly. The doctor caught it and handed it back to me. I finally got it in.

  “What’s the biggest size?” I asked obliquely.

  “A hundred-five. Generally you find that in women who’ve had lots of children.”

  Her generally was as ominous as her as a rule. If I was an eighty now, what would I be after fucking? I felt like Pinocchio.

  “Now remember,” she said, summing up her instructions. “You must smear vaginal jelly all over the diaphragm before you put it in. Using a diaphragm without a spermicide is almost as bad as using nothing. And you must douche with plain warm water before you take it out, then douche again after you take it out. Whatever you do, don’t take it out until six hours after intercourse. Six!” she repeated, thrusting her head out at me. Her glasses slid down her nose.

  She gave me a tube of vaginal jelly and I stopped by the drugstore to buy a douche bag. Now my mission was complete; I was ready to fuck.

  Whom? My preferred candidate was Dr. Newton, for three reasons. I did not require love, but I did want compatibility, and we certainly had that. Second, I found him physically attractive. Third, he was married, which meant that I would not have to date him. Married men can’t take you anywhere except to bed. I couldn’t tell whether he was attracted to me or not, but I kept thinking about his allusion to our telepathy and wondered if it had reminded him of the telepathy scene between Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester. It was the most famous instance of telepathy in literature, so it must have crossed his mind. If so, he had entertained at least one non-professional thought about me. It was a start.

  My fucking equipment was proving hard to carry, so I went to Woodward & Lothrop and bought the biggest shoulder strap bag I could find and dumped everything into it then and there while the saleslady cut off the tags and put my old pocketbook in a paper bag.

  A horrible thought struck me as I left the store. If Dr. Newton took me to a motel, how could I douche six hours later except at home? And how could I douche at home without Granny finding out about it? What would I say when she asked me why I was douching? Where would I keep the douche bag, the jelly, the diaphragm? Granny and I had separate bureaus but we still shared a room—I had to masturbate in the bathtub—so how could I open a drawer and pull out a douche bag?

  There was nothing to do but keep all the fuckiana in my new handbag and sneak the douche bag into the bathroom when I needed it. Presumably that would be late at night when Granny was asleep. If by some chance she happened to see it, I would claim a minor gynecological ailment—something virginal, like an itch—and say the school nurse had recommended douching.

  I could blame the itch on the chlorine in the college pool. Granny could never remember the difference between chlorine and fluoride, and all the Daughters were against fluoridation.

  Needing a summer job as well as proximity to Dr. Newton, I killed two birds with one stone and got a job as the History Department’s typist. I started three weeks before graduation, right after the seniors’ early exams. I was the only female in the office.

  History Departments are macho in the best sense of the world. The English Department across the hall ran to shrill types with that air of timid ruffianism that comes from carrying a razor blade to cut the pages of European paperbacks, but the historians came on like erudite lumberjacks in a smoke-filled, book-lined back room. The jokes were bawdy but they always depended upon a solid grounding in the field: the War of Jenkins’ What? and the Woodrow Wilson Misprint (“The President was observed entering Mrs. Galt, who appeared to enjoy his sally”) were typical daily fare, blending food for thought and sexual awareness in perfect proportion.

  In this atmosphere there was no ice to break with Dr. Newton. The turning point came much sooner than I expected and with very little effort on my part. It happened around four-thirty on the Friday of the second week; everyone else had left early and we were alone in the office. I had been wearing scoopneck blouses and bending over a lot. Now, I took his letters in to him, dropped an envelope, picked it up, and looked at him. I caught him in the act; his eyes shifted quickly to my face.

  “Well,” he said, leaning back in his swivel chair and folding his hands behind his head. “Graduation’s a week off. What are you going to do with yourself this summer? Besides putting up with us, I mean.”

  “Oh, nothing much.”

  “No beach? Weekend trips? Parties?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “What’s the matter with the guys around here?” he demanded gruffly.

  I laughed. “A lot.”

  His pupils distended a little. “Callow youth, huh?”

  “Very.”

  “Maybe Ole Miss will have something better to offer.”

  “Maybe.”

  “One of those Beauregards will sweep you off your feet.”

  “That sounds interesting. I’ve never been swept off my feet.”

  “No?”

  “It’s not a specialty of callow youth.”

  I held his glance for the barest second and then lowered my eyes with a flutter of lashes. Southern flirting is fun when you have a specific lascivious purpose in mind. Besides, it works.

  He looked at his watch. “Say, how about some chow? There’s a place down on the avenue. It’s just a beer joint but they have good hamburgers.”

  My ruin was coming along nicely considering I had never even set foot in Indiana. One of these days I was going to have to go out West and take a look at that state. I left the office with Dr. Newton feeling like a soiled dove about to soar.

  As we drove crosstown past the heavy north-south commuter traffic inching toward the Key Bridge, he sighed happily and beat a little tattoo on the wheel.

  “Look at those poor bastards. I won’t have to do that again till September. When I pulled the National Archives Summer Institute, Curtis in Poli Sci sublet me his apartment in town.”

  “Oh? Where is it?”

  “Just off Wisconsin and Porter.”

  “That’s convenient.”

  “No point in dragging out to Falls Church with the family away. We’ve got a cottage at Rehoboth Beach.” He paused. “My wife and kids are there now. They left last week.”

  “Are they going to spend the whole summer there?”

  “Yes.”

  “How nice for them.”

  “I figured they might as well enjoy the beach even if I can’t. I’ll grab a weekend now and then, if I can get away.”

  His arrow of self-sacrifice went far wide of the mark. He was as bad an actor as I was an actress. Suddenly I wondered if he had been planning a summer bachelorhood all along, numbering me among his possibilities just as I had numbered him among mine.

  The conversation continued in th
e same loaded vein when we got to the beer joint. He led me to a tall wooden booth well in the back and suggested that we have a drink.

  “What the hell, you’re twenty-one,” he said cavalierly.

  I wondered if he meant to verify my age for purposes of his own. If he was worried about my majority, he might also be worried about my virginity. I had already told him that I had never been swept off my feet; suppose he was the type who refused to “lay a finger” on a virgin? Granny had a song about that. A rousé finds his long-lost daughter’s picture in another roué’s pocket and reforms on the spot.

  “What are your children?” I blurted.

  “Huh?”

  “Boys or girls?”

  “Oh. Two boys.”

  Never inject the subject of domesticity at a time like this. It took us a while to get the conversation back to its former tumescence. By the time we did our glasses were empty, so he ordered two more highballs. As we drank and talked, we manifested those classic signs of sexual undercurrent: playing with the cardboad coasters and compulsively fitting our glasses into the wet circles on the table that the coasters were meant to prevent.

  We talked about “life” and finally it came:

  “Are you a virgin?”

  “Not the way you mean.”

  “How do you know the way I mean?”

  “Telepathy. You said we had it.”

  “So I did. You mean you’ve lost your cherry and your innocence, but you haven’t gone all the way, is that it?”

  I nodded.

  “That’s what I thought. We are telepathic.”

  As our eyes met, the denouement became a foregone conclusion. Reader, I fucked him.

  I slipped into the phone booth to call home. Mama answered.