Bless Your Heart, Tramp

by Celia Rivenbark

No one can wrench more boxes out of fewer purchases from more sales clerks than I.

  Being box queen isn’t easy. Last night at the mall, I became so filled with Christmas spirit, it seemed the perfect time to buy a sweater and skirt for myself.

  “Two boxes, please,” I said to the clerk.

  Was it my imagination or did she snarl at me?

  She did!

  “I saw you try these things on. These aren’t presents, these are for you.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I did not realize that these were deducted from your salary,” is what I wanted to say. But the box queen didn’t want to lose the old Miss Congeniality award.

  She was right, in a way. But at this time of year, two pieces of clothing equals two boxes. Doesn’t matter if it’s for me or for my old Aunt Mineoloa who lives in Elephant Tusk, Alaska.

  “And your point would be…?” I asked, meeting this woman’s steely stare with one of my own reserved just for moments such as this.

  “That these are not actual presents and therefore you do not need boxes to wrap them in.”

  “Ah, now that’s where you’re wrong,” I said, pretending to scrutinize her name tag very, very carefully, “Miss, Miss, uh, Lardbottom.”

  “It’s Smith.”

  “Whatever. The point is, I am buying two items and that means I get two boxes big enough to wrap them in. Whether or not these are for me is simply not your concern, Miss, uh, Nosey-butt.”

  “SMITH!”

  “So sorry. A simple mistake. I’ll bet that happens to you all the time.”

  She snarled again, but since a line was forming all the way back to the clearance racks, she finally gave in.

  Some stores are happy to give you boxes, but you may go crazy in the process.

  Sales clerk: “Of course you can have boxes for these presents. Just walk the approximately two miles back to the customer service, take a right at the elevator, and descend into the dungeon. Cross the swinging bridge—mind those alligators now—swing by your teeth from that little wisp of rope over the quicksand, pass the ladies’ room, and tell the troll at the gates the secret password.”

  Boxes become so valuable at Christmastime, I halfway expect to stumble into a man in a greasy raincoat outside a shopping mall, going “Pssst! Over here. I got yer good boxes, yer small for watches, yer large for bulky sweaters and men’s jackets…”

  I have just a few more words on this subject: tissue paper and bows. If you make a total pest of yourself, the store is liable to give you enough of this stuff to take you through three or four joyous holiday seasons.

  And always remember to scrounge as many boxes as you can on Christmas morning. And bows. Become that crazy old aunt you remember from childhood who’d snap the bows off your presents while you were still “you shouldn’t have”-ing.

  As soon as the gift has been opened, swipe the box, toss it behind you, and be prepared to say with a straight face: “Box? What box? I haven’t seen a box.” Works for me.

  Time to Reclaim My Funny Skin?

  I hadn’t realized just how “stay-at-home mom” I’d become until a working mom friend dropped by recently and my toddler began to rub her legs and mutter, “Funny skin, funny skin.”

  And then it hit me: She’d never seen Mommy in pantyhose. My friend’s exotic lawyer clothes included mysterious stretching skin that made her more exciting than a personal play date with Buzz Lightyear.

  When you stay at home, you don’t have to wear pantyhose. Heck, you don’t have to wear anything if you don’t want to.

  But you also have a lot of conversations like this:

  “Honey, what do you want for lunch?”

  “Mulan.”

  (slower) “What…do…you…want…for…lunch?”

  “Mommy, the Gingerbread Man is telling Rumpelly Still Zin that he’s in time out.”

  “Mac ’n’ cheese or PB&J?”

  “Hoodiedoodie, hoodiedoodie, hoodiedoodie.”

  “Okay, I’m going to fix some noodles. You want juice or milk?”

  “Alabama!”

  You worry that your kid watches too many videos if you’re a stay-at-home mom, unless you’re one of those Mutant Moms who doesn’t believe in TV, and who has never raised her voice even when all her Lancome moisturizer gets flushed down the toilet along with a travel-size Magna Doodle, a pack of Chiclets, and some knee-highs.

  What? This hasn’t happened to you?

  I watched a Mutant Mom the other day at a fast food restaurant. Her toddlers happily wolfed huge green salads with cartons of milk while mine smeared ketchup-coated chicken nuggets on the table and screamed for Diet Coke.

  They even said the blessing.

  “Look at that,” I said, honestly awed. “Those little girls are eating their vegetables and saying the blessing. Isn’t that sweet?”

  My toddler looked at the scene thoughtfully for several seconds, then grinned at me. “Pocahontas has orange hair,” she said.

  But about these videos. I always thought that as long as it was Disney, how bad could it be? Then I started watching more closely.

  Take The Little Mermaid. Sure, Ariel is pretty and smart and has a great set of pipes, but what does she do? At sixteen, she deliberately disobeys her doting father and tosses him and her adoring sisters aside like week-old flounder to chase after an older man whom she decides to marry just THREE DAYS after they meet.

  Within mere hours of meeting Prince Eric, they’re shackin’ and her poor family back there “under the seaaaaaa” is sick with worry.

  My daughter has Little Mermaid nightgowns, shoes, socks, underwear, dolls, tapes, and stuffed animals. How do I tell her that her heroine is an inconsiderate little tart with raging hormones?

  Mulan isn’t much different. Sure, she’s a great role model, what with that Evelyn Wood weenie-to-warrior course she apparently takes before saving all of China, but here’s another teenager who can only achieve greatness by abandoning her loving parents and lying her way into the army.

  It’s possible that I’ve stayed home too long, when I dwell on such things. Maybe it’s time to reclaim my “funny skin” and venture back to the real world.

  But I don’t think so. Not quite yet, anyway. Somebody’s gotta be around to tell her that Pocahontas doesn’t really have orange hair.

  Right?

  Part Two

  The South

  Bless Your Heart, Tramp

  Someone once noted that a Southerner can get away with the most awful insult as long as it is prefaced with the words “Bless her heart” or “Bless his heart.”

  As in, “Bless his heart, if they put his brain on the head of a pin, it’d roll around like a BB on a six-lane highway.”

  Or, “Bless her heart, she’s so bucktoothed, she could eat an apple through a picket fence.”

  There are also the sneakier ones that I remember from tongue-clucking types of my childhood: “You know, it’s amazing that even though she had that baby seven months after they got married, bless her heart, it weighed ten and a half pounds!”

  Think about it.

  As long as the heart is sufficiently blessed, the insult can’t be all that bad, at least that’s what my Great Aunt Tiny (bless her heart, she was anything but) used to say.

  I was thinking about this the other day when a friend was telling me about her new Northern friend who was upset because her toddler was just beginning to talk and he had a Southern accent.

  My friend, who is very kind and, bless her heart, cannot do a thing about those thighs of hers, was justifiably miffed.

  After all, this woman had CHOSEN to move south a couple of years ago.

  “Can you believe it?” she said to my friend. “A child of mine is going to be taaaaalllkkkin’ a-liiiike thiiiis.”

  I can think of far worse fates than speaking Southern for this adorable little boy who, bless his heart, must surely be the East Coast king of mucus.

  I wish I’d been there.

  I would have said that she shouldn’t
fret, because there is nothing so sweet or pleasing on the ear as a soft Southern drawl. Of course, maybe we shouldn’t be surprised at her “carryings on.” After all, when you come from a part of the world where “family silver” refers to the large medallion around Uncle Vinnie’s neck, you just have to, as Aunt Tiny would say, “consider the source.”

  Now don’t get me wrong. Some of my dearest friends are from the North, bless their hearts. I welcome their perspective, their friendships, and their recipes for authentic Northern Italian food. I’ve even gotten past their endless carping that you can’t find good bread down here.

  The ones who really gore my ox are the native Southerners who have begun to act almost embarrassed about their speech. It’s as if they want to bury it in the Hee Haw cornfield.

  We’ve already lost too much.

  I was raised to swanee, not swear, but you hardly ever hear anyone say that anymore. I swanee you don’t.

  And I’ve caught myself thinking twice before saying something is “right close” or “right good” because non-natives think this is right funny indeed.

  I have a friend from Bawston who thinks it’s hilarious when I say I’ve got to “carry” my daughter to the doctor or “cut off” the light.

  That’s okay. It’s when you have to explain things to people who were born here that I get as mad as a mule eating bumblebees.

  Not long ago, I found myself trying to explain to a native Southerner what I meant by being “in the short rows.” I’m used to explaining that expression (it means you’ve worked right smart but you’re almost done) to newcomers to the land of buttermilk and cold collard sandwiches (better than you think) but to have to explain it to a Southerner was just plain weird.

  The most grating example is found in restaurants and stores where nice, Magnolia-mouthed clerks now say “you guys” instead of “y’all” as their mamas raised them up to say.

  I’d sooner wear white shoes in February, drink unsweetened tea and eat Miracle Whip instead of Duke’s than utter the words “you guys.”

  Not long ago, I went to lunch with four women friends, and the waiter, a nice Southern boy, you guys-ed us all within an inch of our lives. “You guys ready to order? What can I get for you guys? Would you guys like to keep you guys’ forks?”

  Lord have mercy.

  It’s a little comforting that, at the very same time some natives are so eager to blend in, they’ve taken to making microwave grits (an abomination), the rest of the world is catching on that it’s cool to be Clampett.

  How else do you explain NASCAR tracks and Krispy Kreme doughnut franchises springing up like yard onions all over the country?

  To those of you who are still a little embarrassed by your Southerness, take two tent revivals and a dose of red-eye gravy and call me in the morning.

  Bless your heart.

  Where Men Are Men—and Sometimes Women

  Jeff Gray remembers the first time he broke a nail. It was a pretty one, too—nicely painted, perfectly pointed. But that wasn’t half as upsetting as arriving late at the “womanless” beauty pageant and finding he’d been locked out of the school auditorium.

  “Yes, ma’am, can I help you?” the principal asked him.

  Jeff, a member of the Chinquapin Fire and Rescue Squad and a fabric inspector at a textile mill, answered in a deep voice that didn’t match his lavender dress and pumps, “Yes, SIR, you may.”

  Sorry, Jeff. Didn’t recognize you in your heels.

  It’s possibly the most un-PC activity around, these fire and rescue department fund-raisers that have men dressing as women. But the tradition is as rich as the soil around the turkey houses in rural Duplin County.

  And where else will you find a school principal dressed in a tutu and performing a hairy-chested rendition of Swan Lake?

  What motivates these Regular Guys, these farmers, law enforcement officers, teachers, and textile workers, to ask their wives for help with mascara and argue amongst themselves about the relative merits of balloons and Nerf footballs for a better bosom?

  “Definitely the Nerf football,” said Jeff, drawing on a cigarette while dispassionately watching a videotape of a womanless beauty pageant held a couple of weeks earlier. “You see, you just cut it in half and…”

  Yes, yes, Jeff. We get the idea.

  Steve Brinkley, a rotund insurance salesman, put on ladies’ clothing for a practical reason. He and rescue squad captain Pam Hatcher reached an agreement: He’d be in the pageant if she’d see that he got to pitch his Woodmen of the World insurance to squad members.

  Like most pageant participants, Steve’s got a videotape of the evening.

  “I got two dresses, but neither one was big enough,” said Steve, fast-forwarding to where he struts out to “My Girl.” “So I had to borrow one from the fire chief’s wife. It fit good.”

  He searched high and low for his heels, finally wedging his wide feet into a pair of 12’s. He borrowed a tall, platinum-blond wig from a friend for his talent performance, singing “9 to 5.” His chest was enhanced by stuffing his sister’s bra with “old washrags.”

  “I may do the pageant next year,” said Steve. “I kinda enjoyed it.”

  Except for the pantyhose.

  “I hated them,” he said. “And it’s hard to find those Queen 2X’s, you know?”

  Jeff doesn’t mind the hose. But he winces at the memory of that torn fake fingernail, stuck on with Krazy Glue by “my wife at the time.”

  Pam, a squad member for 17 years, grew up in the “womanless” tradition. This year, the department raised $1,500. Last year, the members made $2,800 because they auctioned off a cake shaped like an ambulance, too.

  Besides prancing around in evening gowns, the men must perform a talent, which can range from rambling joke-telling to saxophone playing.

  “Last year’s winner practiced his saxophone behind his chicken houses the whole afternoon before the pageant,” said Pam.

  Recruiting the men isn’t difficult.

  “But one of the guy’s wives did say she hoped we didn’t do it next year ’cause she thinks he’s enjoying dressing up a little too much.”

  Jeff said getting up on that stage dressed like a woman and dancing to numbers like “Meet Me With Your Black Drawers On” isn’t easy.

  Nor was it easy when the gospel singers hired to perform at intermission announced they wouldn’t do it because they didn’t want to give the appearance of endorsing homosexual activity.

  Ridiculous, huffed Pam.

  Some people, said Jeff.

  “Let’s face it: You have to be very sure of your masculinity to get up there and do that,” Jeff said. “And it’s a lot of work. When I couldn’t find a dress I liked, I hand-painted an outfit with big flowers and it looked great.”

  Pam, listening to all this, looks at Jeff through a curl of cigarette smoke, her eyes narrowing.

  “Jeff. Just promise me one thing. Just don’t you ever wear that tacky forest-green evening gown you wore that one time, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  That’s Mizzeriz to You, Kiddo!

  You have to hand it to the Louisiana legislature. Fed up with impudent, first-name-callin’ young’uns, it recently passed a law requiring elementary school students to address their elders as “Mr.,” “Miss,” “Ms.,” or, as we say in the South, “Mizzeriz.” (How else to assure the deep respect that should be accorded anyone who has, through the simple act of speaking her marriage vows, accumulated Chantilly silver flatwear for twenty-four?)

  I imagine this law was passed after the honorables were greeted by one too many bratty schoolchildren with “Yo, Bob” or “Susie, whatzup?” And while I’d have to agree that politicians are frequently not deserving of all that much respect, they’re older. They probably don’t know Pokemon from Pinocchio, but they still deserve to be addressed proper-like by the GapKids set.

  This trend of toddlers-on-up calling adults by their first name is distinctly un-Southern. Sadly, manners among our
young are becoming as scarce as a deviled egg at a church picnic. While this sort of behavior is fine for those who live in parts of the country that encourage children to be treated as equals (ha!), it simply isn’t “fittin’” for children of the South.

  These days, children don’t even so much as tag a lame “aunt” in front of an adult’s name. An offer of more lemonade is greeted with a sullen “uh-huh” or “huh-uh.”

  The properly reared Southern child responds to such a question with, “Yes ma’am, Miss Lura Mae, I surely would love some more of your delicious lemonade if it’s not too much trouble.”

  Of course, that is a bit long-winded, but we Southerners believe that a simple yes or no has a certain harshness in it that could be construed as, horror of horrors, rude.

  We never answer a question so simply. It just isn’t in us. It is why, even when asked the time of day, we are accused of also furnishing information on how to make a watch. It is why, during questioning for selection in a jury pool, I couldn’t simply say yes to the question of “Do you know the defendant?” Rather, I said, “Him? Why, he’d snatch the taste right out of your mouth. I only know him in the most casual way because his mama ran the Texaco down the road from my Aunt Lura Mae—well, she’s not really my aunt, we just love her like she is—and who by the way, makes the most delicious lemonade you ever tasted—I believe it has to do with adding just a pinch of salt…”

  I am assured by Northern friends that this sort of response is what drives them crazy in the head. That, and our lousy directions. (“You need I-95? That’s easy, just take a right at Granny Beasley’s farm and then a left at Mr. Joe Gresham’s nightcrawler stand and you’re there!”)

  This is a long-winded (naturally) way of saying that when a Southern child answers an adult’s question with a simple yes or no, the adult is entirely justified in asking the age-old question: “Boy (or Girl), are you sassin’ me?”

  Now the concept of “sassing” is also foreign to non-Southerners. A friend recently observed that on television sitcoms, sassing by young’uns is considered cute even by the sassed parent. This is because these shows are written by residents of large, cosmopolitan cities where small children can simultaneously sass and order out for sushi.