It was said, in a jocular tone, that my father could find his way driving home by feeling for the curb with his foot. One Thanksgiving he passed out in the front vestibule, the door wedged open by his inert body until a chilly draft alerted the household. My brother grabbed his arms, my sister and I his ankles, dragging him far enough inside to close the door, then we turned out the lights and ignored the phone, pretending that no one was home. During their parties I huddled in bed under an inadequate bunting of protection provided by my nubby white chenille spread. With cotton balls stuffed in my ears, I sang to drown out the raucous laughter from downstairs.
One morning I awoke to find a huge oval crater in the wall outside my parents’ bedroom. My mother had locked my father out, and in his attempt to force the door open, he ricocheted backward, pushing his body through the opposite wall. The hole was plastered and painted over the next day, but we all knew it was there, like pentimento on an artists’ reused canvas. My legacy from this incident is a recurring nightmare: I run from door to never-ending door of the house where I grew up, frantically making sure they’re all locked, but there’s always one I don’t get to before someone or something gets in, and I wake up screaming.
Men of my father’s generation never heard the expression “What part of ‘no’ didn’t you understand?” As an adult, I have come to know that there is a place between consenting partners where “no” can be erotic, and that sexual fantasies don’t have to be politically correct. The sounds of sex are confusing to a child, who can’t distinguish between pleasure and pain. Once when I tried to come between my parents, my father flung me out of his way and then roared “The hell with both of you” as he lurched from the room. And I still can’t explain or forget the time I walked into my parents’ bedroom and found my mother weeping while my father and grandfather stood near the end of her bed, laughing.
Without warning, the loving man who coached my softball team and taught me to dance and painted my rusty bicycle bright red like new would disappear, and I knew instinctively to stay away from the drunken impostor who took his place. Logically, I thought, if the poison that made him act crazy wasn’t in the house, my real father would prevail, so one night I took all the bottles from the bar and stashed them creatively-beneath sofa cushions and inside the zippered stuffed animal that was the “pajama buddy” on my bed. He found the bottle I’d stowed under the sink and mumbled something about being lucky that he hadn’t drunk the drain cleaner in the “new” liquor cabinet.
The morning after one of these episodes, my father would come down to the kitchen with amnesia, smooth-shaven over a gray pallor. He’d skulk up behind my mother, encircling her waist with his arm, and give her neck a quick kiss. She’d elbow him away, her voice taking on a noticeably defeated tone as she got breakfast ready, making the choice between Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes and Rice Krispies sound like a matter of critical attention. My father poured his own coffee and settled behind the newspaper, pretending not to notice the punitive silent treatment.
As if by consensus, my siblings and I ignored the friction between my parents and never discussed the family drinking patterns, except that we referred to Moma and Da-Dee’s Florida condominium as Fort Liquordale. Sometimes my grandparents, for the moment lucid and sober themselves, herded us into their white Cadillac, its leather seats the color of coffee ice cream, and gave safe harbor. Moma would put us in a guest bedroom and bring us thin-sliced raw potatoes and radishes in ice water while we watched What’s My Line. Our tacit contract matched the adults’ denial: if we didn’t name the problem, maybe it wasn’t true, or would just go away, and it wasn’t really polite to mention it anyway. Southern etiquette requires no validation of unpleasantness, the kind of social myopia related in a quirky story called “My Mother’s Dead Squirrel” (everyone ignores the stiffened creature on the sofa out of a sense of good manners).
Our family turmoil seemed to go unobserved in the other houses on Highland Park Place. The chief of police, who lived across the street, just called his customary “Morning, Shep” to my father as they both left for work. I was a little blonde ornament high in many trees on our block; sometimes climbing a neighbor’s elm was the safest harbor from my parents’ warfare.
I did not ascribe any special significance to the delivery of new beds for my parents, just like the ones Lucy and Ricky Ricardo had. It was unthinkable that a marriage (theirs or anybody’s except Elizabeth Taylor’s) could be vulnerable. Parents weren’t supposed to be happy or unhappy, satisfied or not, and the word dysfunctional was not part of the common parlance. Their old double bed was moved into the room that my sister and I shared, and it was thrilling, at the age of four, to leave my baby bed, to finger the fat puffs of faded blue quilting on the big new headboard. I was already under the covers when Terry turned in for the night, and I reached out to cuddle against her, but she kicked me away and pummeled me with her fists, yelling, “Leave me alone.” Hugging a few inches of mattress edge, I whimpered all night.
When my father saw my bruised shins and red-rimmed eyes, he made Terry bend over, hands to ankles, and walloped her with his belt. She incurred a similar punishment every time she chased me around the house and attacked me, which was often because I regularly provoked her (awfy dumb, since she was older, bigger, stronger, and faster). I hid over a floor furnace in the hallway outside the den every time she was punished, talking to my plastic horses while my sister yelped, determined to avoid such punishment myself. I, Miss Perfect, rarely got whipped: my most egregious sins were repeatedly scribbling in crayon on the living room wall and taunting my brother to bite me, then telling on him when he did. The spankings came to an end when I stopped crying.
My sister had every right to be jealous over my designation as “the pretty one” in the family, but I was hardly her only target--she once took a hammer to the TV because the picture kept rolling across the screen. I wonder if her aggression wasn’t the inevitable result when kids are asked to be the container for family turbulence. My brother and I were close playmates until he reached puberty and made an early emotional defection from the family. All our attempts at building bridges seemed to fail. For a while we went for counseling together, and at one session the therapist suggested, “Draw an imaginary line around yourself showing how close you want people to get.” When I made a circle about fifteen inches away from my body, my brother looked stricken. “I don’t know why you’d shut me out like that,” he said.
I’ve never stopped mourning how my sister and brother were lost to me at an early age, in ways that have been difficult to recoup even with adult understanding--a wound that wouldn’t be cauterized. I knew I was loved by our parents, perhaps loved better than Terry or Bill because I tried so hard to be perfect. But our sibling relationships were defined and limited by our mutual needs to survive and to contain the secrets of our fragmented lives. When there’s so much anarchy, so much hidden in a family, the natural ability to bond and establish meaningful connections is broken because it’s every man for himself.
And yet each Sunday we answered the carillon bells of a city that was reputed to have more churches than gas stations. We washed our tearstained faces and put on clothes that smelled of Niagara starch, to sit in sanctified silence at Holy Communion Episcopal Church. I sang in the choir, a perfect perch for looking at my family in a front pew, miserable but spit-shined behind a Donna Reed facade. Whatever tempest had been weathered at home, I would feel renewed and forgiven after church, caught up in the exotic, quasi-erotic imagery of eating the body and drinking the blood of Jesus Christ. The Holy Communion itself, that most blessed of sacraments, seemed to speak directly to me: “Almighty God from whom no secrets are hid, cleanse the thoughts of our hearts.” I made Faustian bargains in silent prayers: I’ll be good, just please make Terry stop hitting me, please make Mother and Dad stop fighting, please make everybody stop drinking. 1’11 be good, I’ll be so, so good.
Of course, I was almost a teenager, and good was out of the question.
Chapter Three
“GOING ALL THE WAY”
IF THERE’S A LIE TO BE TOLD ABOUT SEX I’VE TOLD IT, although never to get a job or to get even, mostly to have more sex. I suspect I’ve spent a lifetime trying to rewrite my mother’s chary lessons on the subject. When I was ten, I interrupted her in the bathroom as she lathered her legs for shaving, one foot poised on the edge of the tub, and seized the occasion to ask where babies came from. Screwing up her face with displeasure, she said, “The man takes his thing and puts it in there,” pointing somewhere in the vicinity of the shaving cream, making it clear that she found the whole matter repugnant and had no intention of elaborating.
In the night table next to my mother’s bed, I found a copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lo speak /i> and thrilled to see words never uttered in polite southern society (although “John Thomas” was lost on me). Jane helped to supplement our carnal knowledge by filching her family’s pictorial edition of Gone With the Wind, which contained many heaving bosoms and taught us that sex was about a thrashing Scarlett O’Hara being carried to a scene of conjugal rape. Only slightly more descriptive was the compulsory sex education given in the same school basement where I’d gone to kindergarten. Tedious anatomical drawings were shown on an 8-millimeter projector: a triangular patch of womb, spots with kite tails swimming along tubes. Sperm and eggs were anthropomorphized with the same male and female traits assigned to southern men and women: the sperm described as aggressive, the eggs as almost demure. There was no discussion of pleasure, certainly no mention of female orgasm or of a moral compass offered beyond the oxymoronic: don’t do it before you get married, and don’t be a cock teaser.
I hadn’t a clue why there was blood on my underpants at camp the summer I was eleven--Mother had skipped that subject altogether. I imagined it as a stigmata, a penance for willful tomboyishness, or perhaps evidence of a rare and incurable gastrointestinal disorder. I padded myself with toilet paper until a teenaged counselor discovered I was the source of the cabin’s TP shortage and provided a long overdue biology lesson. When I summoned up the courage to report my new status as a woman to my mother, she shook her head in commiseration, muttering something about “the curse.” In the school bathroom, I would stand frozen in the stall, working up the courage to walk nonchalantly to the wastebasket with my wrapped-up sanitary napkin. I cannot overestimate the significance of the invention of flushable tampons.
Before menstruation, I was physical and athletic and strong. I could run, jump, climb higher than any boy. I earned Shark Club membership at camp (for swimming the most laps) and wrestled with the lifeguards at the pool in unbridled horseplay. Suddenly I had no choice but to act like a lady, which seemed like a dangerous narrowing of perspectives. Whatever lessons in personal deportment were not covered at home I learned in charm school at the country club, a virtual petri dish of southern womanhood. I sat with the other daughters of members in collapsible bridge chairs, practicing how to cross my legs at the ankles, balancing books on my head to achieve the proper floating, ladylike gait: shoulders back, chest out, chin up. Occasionally we’d test-drive our newly honed skills at coed dance classes: giggly girls with bad home perms and pimply boys with castrati voices, slouching awkwardly and improbably through the bossa nova, the Lili Marlene, the bunny hop, balling the jack.
My body seemed to change before my eyes. One year my breasts were embarrassingly too big and the next year they weren’t big enough. Advertisements were touting the wonders of Cross-Your-Heart bras and 18 Hour panty girdles. It was definitely not considered ladylike to have a butt that jiggled under my clothes, and it was particularly mortifying to be observed by Da-Dee, who leered at my new shape and said, “Cybill, you’re getting yourself a T-heinie.” When he announced his intention to give me a twenty-gauge shotgun for my twelfth birthday and take me to the Memphis Gun Club to shoot trap and skeet, my mother considered it a royal edict and high honor. I was thrilled at the prospect of having my own gun, but it was impossible to explain the uneasiness I felt in my grandfather’s presence, and I pressed myself against the passenger door when I rode with him to target practice.
Mother may have taken a pass on sex education, but her imparted wisdom about beauty was exacting. “Honey, you’ve got to suffer to be beautiful,” she’d say as she drove me to Lowenstein’s department store for underwire bras, depositing me in a draped dressing room and smoking a cigarette with the bored saleswoman while I stuffed reluctant breasts into unforgiving elastic. My mother wrapped her freshly coiffed hair in toilet paper at bedtime, but I slept with fat brush rollers digging into my scalp. On several occasions, I found my sister sound asleep, wearing the pale pink plastic hood of a bonnet-style hair dryer, attached to a heat-conducting hose. I once awoke to the smell of something burning and shook Terry to tell her that her bonnet was melting.
Even as I understood that beauty was armored protection in my family, a cosseted thing that guaranteed my status as the perfect child, I seemed determined to imperil it with some regularity. I never saw the rusty filament of barbed wire sticking out of the vine-covered fence I was trying to scale on my aunt Gwen’s farm and didn’t notice the blood pouring down the front of my new white vinyl snap-up jacket, only the pale look of horror on my mother’s face when she saw the triangle of flesh dangling from my upper lip. It was my great good fortune that the doctor on call in the emergency room of the local county hospital refused to sew me up, recognizing that a plastic surgeon’s hands were called for. I lay on the backseat of our station wagon with an ice pack until we got to Memphis and Dr. Lee Haines, who put over two hundred stitches into an area half the size of a dime. I went home with a huge dark lump crisscrossed with black thread, and when I cried as I looked in the mirror, the tears washed over the shiny, gooey salve, carrying a foul medicinal taste into my mouth. But my own horrified reflection was no worse than the revulsion I saw on the faces of my parents and grandparents. I hid when the doorbell rang, sure that the neighbors were asking, “Whatever happened to that pretty girl?” It took three years for the scar to heal, leaving a faint triangular line below my nostrils, but I learned an important lesson about the transience of beauty: in the blink of an eye, my unique family position was jeopardized. Disfigurement was not lovable. And I would never be perfect again.
I singed off my eyelashes and eyebrows when I tried to light the gas grill of our backyard barbecue, but I dutifully rubbed them with petroleum jelly, a therapy I’d used on horses to help their hair grow in over scars. When my lashes came back longer and thicker, Mother stopped just short of recommending conflagration as a beauty treatment to her friends. In her continuing obsession with my hair color, she marveled at a new product called Summer Blonde.
“This is great,” she said in a hushed tone as she hurried me into the bathroom with the box of magical elixir. “All you do is spray it on, and we don’t have to worry about your hair getting darker ever again.”
My whole life I had encountered disbelief when I insisted that my hair color was natural. Now I would have to lie. “What am I going to say when people ask if I dye my hair?” I fretted.
“This is not dye,” she insisted. “It’s a lightener, just like sitting in the sun.” With maternal endorsement for the white lie, I dutifully sprayed on what I discovered, only years later when the FDA became more rigorous about labeling, to be peroxide.
Shopping with my mother usually involved the Casual Corner on Union Avenue, then lunch at the Pig ‘n Whistle Bar-B-Q, where she’d gone as a girl. The implicit uniform of junior high consisted of a white oxford cloth blouse, circle pin at the rounded collar, cabled cardigan sweater with matching kneesocks, and plaid wraparound skirt. The outfit had to include black and white saddle shoes or Bass Weejuns (I favored tassels over penny loafers, since I could never squeeze the coins in the slots). We were fashion lemmings so early in the game, but occasionally I was downright rebellious. Once I got sent home from school for wearing culottes, which were deemed too closely related tants.
The assistant principal called my mother to say, “Please come pick up your daughter and have her return in a skirt.” Mother thought it was ridiculous and took me out for barbecue.
She didn’t know she was quoting Dorothy Parker when she said, “Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses,” but I knew there were no Barbie dolls with spectacles. I was fifteen when I failed the eye exam for my driver’s permit, and my mother, refusing to believe the results, got a family friend who was an eye doctor to write a note certifying that I did not need glasses to drive. This explanation did not impress the civil servant at the Tennessee Highway Patrol, nor did my failing the eye exam a second time. I was finally permitted to consult an optometrist for the glasses I so obviously required--I’d been squinting at blackboards, movie screens, and my competition on the basketball court for years. Mother sat next to me while I was fitted with owlish round black frames, a stoic look of loss and resignation on her face, the reflection of the perfect daughter created in her image once again marred. When I reported passing the eye exam on my third try, she said “Fine” in a dull tone that implied nothing fine at all.
The commandments of beauty seemed even more stringent than those of the church, but I didn’t have to wait for the hereafter to reap the rewards. Despite my glasses, the boys did make passes. And I was a born receiver.
I CAN TAKE A TRIP DOWN MEMORY LANE JUST BY walking past the men’s cologne counter of any department store. English Leather--that’s Mike. Canoe--that’s Sam. Jade East--that’s Lawrence. British Sterling...
I did not vomit from my first kiss, but I spit into the sink for a good five minutes and then used half a tube of Crest. I was fourteen and it was at night on my front porch, after a Memphis Chicks minor league baseball game. I had gotten tired of watching the make-out scene from the sidelines and vowed to get it over with.
Cybill Disobedience Page 4