Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady

by Florence King

  Our glasses were empty. She threw some more ice in them and held them under the spigot.

  “How does it tie in with the monks?” I asked.

  She smiled, and swayed gently back and forth, singsonging in a rich contralto: “Mystical rose … Ora pro nobis … Mother of Hope … Ora pro nobis … Star of the Sea … Ora pro nobis.” She looked at me questioningly.

  My memory stirred. “That’s what the monks were chanting!”

  “It’s the Litany of the Virgin. You could replace any one of those lauds with a description of the Southern woman from the clipping and it wouldn’t sound any dif ferent. Try it,” she challenged.

  “Rose’s ruby heart …”

  “Ora pro nobis …”

  “Lily’s petal …”

  “Ora pro nobis …”

  “Star-strewn vicissitudes …”

  “Ora pro nobis …”

  I had to be drunk if I was singing, but I hardly felt the gin, so intoxicating was the intellectual puzzle that was falling into place.

  “Repetitive speech comforts people,” I began, “but the Baptist Church has no litanies. Henry Adams was right. The American woman does have to invent her own feminine ideal, and the problem gets worse the further south you go. The Maryland woman is Catholic, so she’s already got the Virgin. The Virginia woman is Episcopalian, which helps some because the Episcopal Church is softshell Catholic. But Deep South women don’t have any Virgin at all, so they keep saying everything over and over—it’s a way of saying rosaries to themselves.”

  I felt so triumphant that I drained my glass in one gulp. Bres poured us yet another and we toasted Henry Adams.

  “There’s one thing I can’t figure out,” I went on. “Where does Bérénice fit in? A Jewish woman would have to reject both Virgin and Venus because they represent alien religious and political enemies, yet Bérénice had no female identity problems. Do you suppose Jewish women have some kind of secret?”

  “I don’t know about that, but I can tell you about Bérénice. She was the third V. She was a virago.”

  I stopped my glass at my lips. “Oh, come on, she wasn’t a bitch.”

  “Virago has come to mean bitch because people prefer to forget what it really means,” Bres said softly. “The first definition the dictionary gives is the right one: ‘a woman of great stature, strength and courage who is not feminine in the conventional ways.’ It comes from the Latin vir meaning male.”

  I wondered how eyes already so huge could grow still bigger, then I understood. It was because they were coming closer. I tasted gin—mine, hers, ours, in a kiss of warm lips and cold tongues. My first thought was how soft her mouth was compared to a man’s. I did not have a second thought. The best description of what happened next can be found in the Book of Revelation, in the verse that describes the end of the world and predicts that “the sky shall roll up like a scroll.” I have always believed that St. John the Divine could not have written this apt line unless, at some point in his career, he had drunk too many martinis, because that is exactly what it feels like when they hit.

  My blouse was unbuttoned and Bres’s fingers were loosening my bra strap. My breast came free and she cupped her hand around it. I put my head on the back of the bolster and waited for the dizziness to pass, telling myself that it would surely pass, that it was just momentary. If only I kept perfectly still, everything would be all right.

  My stomach issued its final warning just as she took my nipple into her mouth. Lurching to my feet, I zigzagged into the bathroom not a moment too soon. The last thing I remembered was the pain that coursed through my knees when they hit the hard tile floor in front of the toilet.

  I came to on the bathroom floor with my head on a dusty shower rug. After a moment or two I remembered what had happened and cringed in mortification. Getting stiffly to my feet, I stuffed my breast back into my bra, rinsed my mouth, and went out to the living room to apologize to a scornful, disgusted Bres.

  But she was beyond scorn or disgust, passed out on the couch with her long graceful arm dangling on the floor in that same bonelessly Southern way I remembered from our first meeting. I aimed for the other couch, landed on it, and passed out for the second time. The lights were still on. When I awoke some indeterminate time later they were off and there was a light cotton blanket over me. My mouth was as dry as flannel. Staggering up, I felt my way over to the coffee table and drank the melted ice out of the bucket, then crashed back down on the couch.

  The third time I awoke it was early morning and Bres was standing beside me with a bubbling, fizzing Alka-Seltzer. I took it in two shaking hands and chugalugged it.

  “Child, child,” she murmured, stroking my hair back from my forehead. She wore a long chenille robe and smelled warm and soapy.

  I handed her the empty glass and looked at her ruefully.

  “I’m sorry,” I mumbled.

  She shrugged. “Everybody throws up.”

  “You’re just saying that to make me feel better.”

  “There’s no reason to try and make you feel better. Why, you’re practically a Yankee when it comes to getting sick. All you did was throw up. You should have seen Vanny the time she mixed the wintergreen alcohol in the fermenting peach juice and—”

  “Please don’t tell any of those stories.”

  “—had fits. I’ll get you some tomato juice.”

  She returned with the juice and I chugalugged again.

  “I slept in my clothes,” I said disgustedly, Rapping my arms. “I feel all sticky.”

  “I’ll run you a bath. I just had one.”

  She seemed so matter-of-fact that I suspected her of not remembering last night. Was it possible? No, I decided. She was a Mississippian; she could stick a straw in a gas tank and drain it dry without turning a hair. If she did remember, was she planning to pick up where we left off?

  “There’s a terrycloth robe on the back of the door,” she called over the rushing water, “and some Ivory Flakes so you can wash out your things.”

  The girlish euphemism for underwear sounded bizarre tripping off a tongue that had licked my nipple. I picked up my handbag—I had optimistically packed my toothbrush in anticipation of an overnight stay—and went into the bathroom. I brushed my teeth, washed out my underwear and stockings, and got into the tub. In a few moments the steam joined forces with the Alka-Seltzer and tomato juice to make me feel almost human.

  When I was stretched out in sybaritic glory, the door opened and Bres came in with a sweating mug of beer.

  “Ice cold. Best thing for a hangover.”

  Sitting on the edge of the tub, she held the mug to my lips. As I drank, I looked at the place where her robe had gaped open and saw something that made me remember the famous line from Auntie Mame: “Agnes, you do have a bust! Where on earth have you been keeping it?”

  When I finished the beer, she put the mug on the toilet seat lid and proceeded to take up where we had left off.

  In the South, Sunday morning sex is accompanied by church bells. Ole Miss had a carillon; we were serenaded with “In the Garden,” “Shall We Gather at the River?” and, later in the afternoon, a terrestrial medley that included the old temperance song, “Lips That Touch Liquor Shall Never Touch Mine.”

  There were other regionalisms to cope with. Bres confessed that she had received several anonymous phone calls the previous year and two more already this year. She explained that the White Citizens Council had reputedly recruited student operatives to spy on people and report any political irregularities. According to the tenets of Mississippi logic, what we had just done automatically made us “niggah-lovin’ Jew Communists.”

  She took my hand. “We’d better not spend any more nights together. Daytime is better, they never call then. They seem to think that nobody would make love except at night.”

  She leaned over me and blew on the line of sweat that had formed between my breasts, and I returned the favor. We lay apart in the afternoon heat, trying to cool off.


  “How did you know about me?” I asked.

  “Oh, something about the way you were looking at your carrel, caressing the desk and all.” A chuckle crept into her voice. “You were making love to that tight little space. Then later on in the coffeeshop, something came over you when you talked about Bérénice, a kind of glow. I figured if you fell in love with a woman who’s been dead for two thousand years, the odds were in my favor.”

  We stayed in bed until it began to grow dark. Bres drove me back to the dorm and thereafter we met in the daytime. I suffered no coming-out trauma; Bres, who had come out at sixteen, said she hadn’t either. Our reactions were not unusual. Southern women tend to go completely to pieces after a homosexual experience and have to be “put away,” or else we take it eerily in stride. The middle ground, as in so many other Southern reactions, simply does not exist. In both extremes the joker in the deck is the South’s worship of femininity. Viewed through this lens, Lesbianism can emerge as conventional behavior. I doubt if there is any other place in the world where eating pussy makes a woman feel like just plain folks.

  In short, I was happy, but of course that didn’t stop me from trying to analyze my happiness. I wanted to know why I had turned to Lesbianism, but when I tried to engage Bres in group therapy, she wouldn’t play.

  “My mother wanted a boy,” I threw out.

  “All mothers want boys, unless they already have two or three. Then they say, ‘It would be nice to have a girl.”’

  “I have a passive father and an aggressive mother.”

  She shrugged lazily. “Who doesn’t?”

  It was finis time. For all her intellectualism, she took a dim view of hypotheses. Analytical meandering irritated her; the classical rigor of her Latin-trained mind rejected the loose construction of speculative thinking in much the same way as the legal mind scorns imagination. She had analyzed Herb’s echolalia clues only because they had to do with Latin; otherwise, she was one of the period-paragraph people. She balked at looking into herself. She was a Lesbian because she was a Lesbian. Finis.

  Actually, she was right; her “Who doesn’t?” was an accurate two-word social history of every advanced civilization. America was full of passive fathers and aggressive mothers, but whatever was happening to their sons, their daughters continued overwhelmingly to turn out heterosexual. Therefore, my Lesbianism had some other cause. Once I dispensed with Freudian clichés, I began to understand what it was.

  Lesbianism is a mirror-image, and most women do not wish to contemplate themselves in anything but a looking glass. When malkins said, “I’d die if a woman touched me,” they were telling the truth. The enhanced self was their nemesis, but it was the staff of life for Bres and me. Neither of us could accept diminishment. The ego of the female is rarer than the male’s but much deadlier, and we both had one. We needed the I-ness of Lesbianism, the unbroken circle of self in which she was me, I was her, and we were us.

  Though I entered into our affair knowing perfectly well what two women “do,” I was unprepared for the intense physical passion we had. Thanks to the silence surrounding the subject of Lesbianism in Lesbian novels, I had imbibed the quaint but very common assumption that Lesbians skipped eroticism per se and took off for fastidious realms of ethereality where grunts and groans were never heard and lubrication turned into some sort of Grecian nectar.

  Bres became an entirely different woman in bed, exchanging her mannered complexity for a rural directness and turning country-girl hot in a way that is uniquely Southern. In fact, she turned just plain lewd and it was wonderful because it implied no threat. There are no trashy women in Lesbianism and hence no ladies either. The nagging worries that go with the heterosexual territory (Does he try that with other women? What will he think if I ask him to stick his finger up my ass?) never came between us. We could let ourselves go.

  We tried Sixty-Nine a few times but neither of us liked it. Since no two people ever come simultaneously, I felt it had all the disadvantages of intercourse: a tendency to concentrate selfishly on one’s own pleasure, a loss of enthusiasm by the one who finishes first, and a fear of taking too long. When I said this to Bres she agreed and confessed to another objection as well.

  “It reminds me of Uncle Antoine.”

  “You mean he … molested you that way?”

  “Oh, no,” she said airily. “But he does parlor tricks. He’s always demonstrating how he can write with both hands at once, and pat his head and rub his stomach at the same time.

  Taking turns making love to each other satisfied our need to experience total aggression and total passivity with no fear of settling permanently into either condition. It’s something heterosexual lovers would like to do but can’t. I always felt silly whenever I got on top of Ralph, but when Bres’s thighs were locked in the vise of my elbows, I really was in charge; yet when we changed places and she did the doing, I could let down my guard and wallow in submission without worrying that she would get “the wrong idea.”

  I had to admit I missed being fucked. Bres, who had slept with a man out of curiosity, said she liked it, too. We did our best with what we had but finger-fucking is inadequate even when you do it with someone you love. There is another problem for two women unless both of you are nail-biters, and neither of us was. Bres enjoyed it more than I did because she did not associate it with dates and fraternity boys, but every time she went inside me I could hear Faysie babbling, “I mean, it’s okay because we’re pinned!”

  We had a few wistful discussions about getting a dildo but they were not sold openly then. Undoubtedly they were covertly available if you knew where to look, but we didn’t, and in any case, no Mississippi resident would have had the strength to embark on such a search. Considering what we had to go through to buy hooch, God only knows what buying a dildo would have involved.

  As for other foreign objects, we never used them.

  Candles melt

  Carrots are tough

  Bottles can hurt you

  You might as well muff.

  On a more mundane level, I decided that Lesbianism saved time, energy, and money. Had Bres been a man, I would have gone shopping at once for some new “things,” mostly black lace things. I had done it at the beginning of the summer when I decided to go after Ralph; every woman does it when she starts an affair with a new man, but now I did not have to. The hassle of romance, the harried, exhausting, distracting, dashing-downtown, color-coordinating, sets-of-three shit of romance (what malkins call “the fun part”) vanished from my life. Women do not vamp each other, and in any case, Bres’s underwear looked as if it should have been stamped LAMBETH WORKHOUSE, so I did not have to worry about mine.

  The major drawback was, of course, coping with two menstrual periods. The good news is that my cramps went away; the bad news is that we never managed to fall off the roof at the same time.

  One such day, Bres, who did not like tampons, came into the bedroom wearing plain white cotton underpants with sanitary belt and pad underneath. She always felt especially sexy during her period, so when she finished making love to me, I pulled her across me and played with her nipples while she rubbed herself against my knee. She came quickly and sprawled, panting, across the bed, her hair tumbled and her cheeks flaming.

  She looked the picture of Woman incarnate, as gloriously feline and sensual as a long, dangerous cat, yet suddenly I had an overwhelming urge to protect and shield her. It was the white cotton pants with the menstrual harness showing through; they made her look so inexpressibly dear and vulnerable that I thought my heart would break. In that moment she was my little girl, and the fierce tenderness welling up inside me was the maternal instinct I thought I had been born without.

  “It’s getting dark,” she said. “The phone calls …”

  At the tremor in her voice, fear wove through me, a special Mississippi fear I had never expected to have. Fear of cars slowing down, stopping, doors slamming—the fear of night. Until now, night had been Herb time, b
ook time, best time, but now it was fear time because Bres and I were nigger-loving Jew Communists.

  »fifteen«

  HAVING found my Bérénice in the flesh, I applied myself to my thesis with lover-like concentration and soon had almost as many note cards as Tulaplee had dress cards. An interesting commonality, because sometime near the end of October the biographer of the world’s foremost Jewish princess entered into a conspiracy with Ole Miss’s foremost Southern belle.

  One night while I was on the proctor’s desk, I heard Tulaplee screeching. Hardly an unusual occurrence, but this time she was screeching about an academic matter.

  “They let me in conditionally ’cause Ah flunked French in high school, and now Ah’m gonna flunk it again and get expelled and Ah won’t get to be a Campus Cutie or join a sorority and Ah’ll die, Ah’ll just die, Ah’ll just fall down dead!”

  She was taking what amounted to Remedial French, except that it had a more tactful name. Her classmates were other freshman girls like herself, their freshman male equivalents, and a few members of the football team. The text was a paperback with a title like French Without Tears.

  “We got to put these ole things in French!” she shrieked, waving a mimeographed sheet. “She’s gonna give us one a week and that’s gonna be the grade! She said we could use the dictionary, but what good is that when Ah don’t know how to do those funny things that keep changin’?”

  I presumed she meant verbs. Catching her eye, I signaled her over to the desk and asked to see the exercise. It was slightly above the plume de ma tante level. Taking out a sheet of notebook paper, I began writing rapidly while Tulaplee leaned over my shoulder in openmouthed awe.