Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady_A Memoir

by Florence King

  Second, I looked like a Nice Girl. There was nothing outwardly sexy about me. I had the fresh-faced daisy-in-the-dell look that the fifties cherished while it drooled over Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield. Having a big bust was all it took to make people think the worst, but I wore a 32B so I was a Nice Girl. It was a Wasp decade, the way the sixties were black and the seventies ethnic. Being dark, or short and stocky, or having sensual lips or any other exotic feature could change entirely the way girls were perceived; but I was five feet six, small-boned, fair-haired, blue-eyed, and had the kind of lips Thomas Hardy described as “meeting like the two sides of a muffin,” so I was a Nice Girl.

  I tugged heartstrings all over town. When I ate dinner in a crowded downtown cafeteria on my way to my part-time job, old ladies invariably headed for my table like hounds on the scent.

  “When I saw you sitting here I said to myself, I said, ‘I’m going to sit with that nice girl.’”

  By the time the meal was over, I had been told I was the hope of the future.

  “When I think of all the terrible things going on today, what with girls running around in cars with boys and all, it does my heart good to meet a girl like you. Why, anybody could just look at you and know you’re a lady to your fingertips.”

  I collected St. Georges wherever I went. One evening as I ate a hamburger in a Little Tavern, some men started arguing and emitting damns and hells. The tattooed counter man turned to them in fury and shouted, “Hey, knock it off! There’s a lady in here!”

  He gave me a stricken look and apologized. “I know a girl like you ain’t used to hearing that kinda talk.”

  I managed to keep a straight face. He kept wiping my area of the counter as though there were something on it that would bring a blush to a maiden’s cheek, and when I left he told me to “stay as sweet as you are.”

  Servicemen on F Street tried to pick me up but they were always tentative: “I guess you wouldn’t want to go to the show?” I found several of them attractive and fleetingly considered going to a hotel with them; sleeping with someone I would never see again would have been an ideal solution to the reputation problem, but I was afraid of getting pregnant or murdered—in that order.

  My third cachet was grades. To the adolescent male mind, anyone capable of mental concentration must be free of distracting sexual desire. This is what boys meant when they said, “Girls get good grades.” Interest, ability, ambition had nothing to do with it; an A was proof of what the Book of Common Prayer calls “the gift of continence.” The gift I actually had was the female’s cyclical lust. Sometimes when I tried to study, my mind wandered and I got so horny I had to change my pants, but the rest of the month I was a calm little honor student. Thus, when the first semester grades were posted in February, I could have run naked past Fraternity Row and all the boys would have said, “There goes that nice girl.”

  Sorority Row also took note of my grades when the groups looked around at unpledged freshmen for someone who could help them win the scholarship cup. I was invited to a tea and given a bid. I accepted it because fraternity boys were reluctant to date an Independent girl, and most of the boys on campus belonged to fraternities.

  Over my protests, my sisters began calling me Flo. No name was too short or too formal for a nickname; our sorority ritual was full of references to sisterhood but nobody knew what it meant, so we settled for diminution. Ellen was El, Charlene was Char, and Fay was Faysie.

  Each of the sororities had an alumna advisor, suburban housewives in their late thirties or early forties who could have substituted for Pat Nixon without Dick’s being any the wiser. We were Nice Girls and the advisors were Nice Women. Ours gave us advice on premarital sex (“If you love him, you won’t”) and described, with eyes closed and speech measured for dramatic effect, what it was like to give birth. “Having … a … baby … is … the … most … wonderful … experience … on … earth.”

  Whenever she left or whenever her name came up, we were supposed to turn to each other and say, “Isn’t she terrific?”

  She was fond of claiming that nothing had ever shocked her except the time she found a bidet in her hotel room on her first trip to Europe. She said she had not at first known what it was for, and related with merry self-deprecation all the uses she had put it to before finding out what it was. She washed her undies in it, soaked her feet in it, chopped ice in it, and tried to develop film in it.

  “What is it for?” asked El.

  “People who don’t have nice bathrooms sit across it and wash … .” She pointed to her lap.

  As I pictured in my mind the trail of ruined bidets she must have left in her wake, with enamel hacked away or decomposed by developing fluid, all I could think of was a line from Cariolanus: “You would be another Penelope, yet they say all the yarn she spun in Ulysses’ absence did but fill Ithaca full of moths.”

  Being in a sorority gave me a place to spend the night after on-campus dates, no mean consideration for one who lived all the way across the city. Three of the Virginia commuters had the same problem, so the four of us fell into the habit of sharing a guest room fitted out with two double-decker bunk beds.

  We discussed the vital topics of the day, like finger-fucking, a widespread substitute for coitus practiced by pinned couples and me whose glick-blick-sloosh sound effects enabled even El to answer correctly that standard lit exam question: “Define onomatopoeia.” My roommates and I differed in that I finger-fucked with every boy I dated, while they did it only with the boys they loved. According to sorority consensus, it was something you did not for yourself but “for him,” though how any girl could believe this was a mystery to me. Finger-fucking was hard work. Once the boys had satisified their curiosity about what the inside of a vagina felt like, they did not especially want to do it, but they did it anyway to strengthen their case that a hand job was the proper quid pro quo. The “I did it for you” argument always worked, whether a girl was motivated by Southern do-rightism, English fair play, or free-floating female guilt.

  What was to stand as the sorority’s most memorable crisis started the night Faysie burst through the door of the guest room with semen all over her skirt.

  “It got on me! It got on me! I’m P.G., I know it!”

  She spread the voluminous folds of her ten-gore taffeta cocktail dress and showed us the wet spots.

  “Look! If it gets on you, anywhere near you, you can get P.G., it has happened. Did you read in Coronet about the girl in the swimming pool?”

  She sank down in a chair and sobbed. Reaching into her coat pocket for a Kleenex, she pulled out her pants instead. As she was about to dry her eyes on them, she realized what they were and dropped them with a moan. She opened her bag and pulled out something white but it was her bra.

  “Oh, God!”

  Char gave her a Kleenex. She snuffled into it for a moment and then continued her story.

  “He asked me to … you know, play with it. I didn’t want to do it but I love him! I mean we’re pinned! It’s all right to do it when you’re pinned! Everybody does it when they’re pinned! It’s okay!”

  “We know that, honey,” Char soothed.

  “If one, just one, hits you in the leg, it can get into your bloodstream and travel all through your system until it reaches you-know-where!”

  Something of Mama’s easily stirred irritation came over me. “For God’s sake, they’re not buckshot.”

  “But if it gets on you, anywhere near you, you can get P.G., it has happened! Did you read in Pageant about that girl in New York who used her brother’s bathwater during the water shortage?”

  “Oh, no,” said Char, closing her eyes and putting her hand over her mouth.

  Faysie spent the next two weeks counting on her fingers and asking frantic questions like “What day was it that your mother bought you the green sack dress that you hated and traded to Ginny for the black suede heels? For God’s sake, you’ve got to remember!” Her terror was so convincing that we began to w
onder if we might be pregnant, too. We were all virgins, but then so were the unfortunates in Coronet and Pageant. The drumbeat of “on you, near you, in you” throbbed in our brains. I had recently enjoyed a dry screw on a dark dancefloor; maybe it wasn’t as dry as I thought; maybe one, just one, came through his pants and swam through my skirt and then swam through my pants and then …

  The counting and babbling continued.

  “I was in my middle the night it happened even though it was three days before my usual middle because last month was February and that always messes up the count because it’s so short. Wait! Is this Ground Hog Year? That adds another day, doesn’t it? Oh, I’m P.G., I know it!”

  By the time she got the curse, the rest of us were destroyed. She, of course, was the first to recover.

  “I wasn’t really worried.” She smiled.

  A good sex manual would have helped, but the fifties offered nothing but marriage manuals. Their chief object was to deny the importance, and if possible the existence, of clitoral orgasms. Consequently, when Char had a clitoral orgasm during a diddling session, she had hysterics as well.

  The source of her woe was an author whose theory of the subcontracted orgasm read like a directive from the Interstate Commerce Commission. He said that while the clitoris was not licensed to operate independently, it was a spur line of female pleasure that helped carry the delirious consignment to its final destination. It did this by transferring its sensations to the vagina; the vagina then signed for them, and had the orgasm for the clitoris.

  Char reasoned that since her clitoris had made an orgasm run all by itself, she must be a nymphomaniac.

  Another manual discussed the morning erection in a way that made the penis sound like a bird’s cloaca. In a passage hauntingly reminiscent of “Your grandfather was a perfect gentleman,” the author cautioned husbands against waking a hardworking wife and mother to get rid of a morning erection. Morning erections should never lead to intercourse because they had nothing to do with sexual desire, he said, and proved it with a golden example of post hoc ergo propter hoc: “Empty the bladder and the need is met.”

  Our most tangled web grew out of El’s treatise on the oversized penis.

  “I don’t expect the man I marry to be a virgin, but I don’t want somebody who’s done it with hundreds of girls.”

  “Did he tell you he had?” asked Faysie.

  “No, but he’s got such a big you-know-what that he must have. The men in those Charles Atlas magazines get those big arm muscles from lifting bar bells, so it stands to reason.”

  After marriage manuals, the favorite sorority reading matter was magazines. El read them aloud to us.

  “Listen! Oh, this is so true. ‘For the sex act to be fully satisfactory to a woman she must, in the depths of her mind, desire deeply and utterly to be a mother.’”

  “Who said that?” I demanded.

  “It’s an excerpt from a book called Modern Woman: The Lost Sex.”

  “It’s a bunch of bull.”

  Her eyes widened in horror.

  “Have you … gone all the way?” she croaked.

  “No, and neither have you, so you don’t know whether it’s ‘so true’ or not. But we’ve all enjoyed everything else we’ve done with boys, and God knows none of us wants to be a mother.”

  “Not yet,” she corrected. “But someday … someday …” She smiled moistly and began rocking back and forth like the extras in The Snake Pit. It was Ann Hopkins all over again.

  “The only reason I’d have a baby is to cure my cramps, and then I’d give the little nerd away.”

  “Oh, Flo! How can you say that? I have cramps just as bad as you do, but I love my period and my cramps, too, because they prove that I’m a woman.”

  “Why do you need blood and pain to prove that you’re a woman? Why do you need anything to prove it? You are a woman, that’s that.”

  “Ye-e-e-s-s, but it makes me feel feminine.”

  “Why do you need blood and pain to make you feel feminine? Do you feel masculine the rest of the month?”

  “Oh, no! I mean, God …”

  “Then if you don’t ever feel masculine, why do you need proof that you’re feminine?”

  “Well, God, Flo, I don’t know, it’s just natural.”

  “Henry Adams said it’s impossible for an American woman to be feminine.”

  “What frat is he in?” she asked indignantly.

  “Oh, never mind.”

  »eleven«

  IN my second year of college, all the boys started chasing freshman girls and the “sophomore slump” dominated sorority conversations. My sisters were terrified that they would never “find somebody.”

  In 1954, “finding somebody” was a euphemism for what Granny called “catching a man.” Her field & stream idiom vanished from the female vocabulary when McCall’s invented Togetherness. Merely being safely married was no longer enough. Girls dreamed of eternal bliss in suburban snuggeries, love and marriage turned into a horse and carriage, and there was horseshit everywhere.

  My career was gone, but I still did not want to find somebody. The only thing about marriage that appealed to me was sex without scandal: husbands could be counted on not to ask, “How come you let me go all the way?” Everything else about marriage appalled me, with children leading the list, but I was an exception.

  The campus resembled a swamp wafting deadly vapors of marriage fever. Even the women faculty members were infected. A few had Ph.D.’s but none wished to be called Doctor. “Mrs.,” they corrected with sweet smiles, like Paula Hale of the token French Department. One of them was famous for making her preference known first crack out of the box to each new class.

  “If you call me Doctor, I won’t answer,” she cried gaily. “I’m Mrs. Thornton.”

  “Isn’t she terrific?” El asked after class.

  “No. I’m sick of terrific women. I prefer women like Angélique Paulet.”

  “Who’s she?”

  “She was the mistress of Henry the Fourth of France. She never married because her fiancés kept getting killed in duels with her lovers.”

  “I think that’s sad.”

  El’s favorite course was Preparation for Marriage, which proved so popular that they had to split it up into three sections and hold them in the ROTC armory. I was the only member of our sorority who did not take it, but I might as well have; El read her notes aloud in the suite.

  “Use bathroom together. He shave, you tub, make closeness.”

  “That sounds like Hemingway. Long ago good, now not good.”

  “Oh, Flo, why don’t you take it, too? Everybody else is,” she added reproachfully.

  Soon it was impossible to find a free washing machine in the dorm because all the girls in Marriage Prep were washing their boyfriends’ socks.

  “Grad. intro. wife duties,” El explained.

  “What he do hus. intro.?” I asked.

  “Wash my car, except I don’t have one.”

  My favorite course that year was Medieval Portraits: Literature as History, taught by the campus heartthrob, Dr. Newton. The library’s copy of The Directory of the American Historical Society fell open to his page because so many girls had looked up his biog that the spine had broken. He was in his late thirties, muscular, with a sandy crewcut that looked like a newly mown lawn. Though he was known as a hard grader who never fraternized with students, girls like El took his classes anyway because he was so “cute.” It was the presence of so many malkins in Medieval Portraits that led to the fight over Patient Griselda.

  “Patient Griselda was the Melanie Wilkes of medieval literature,” Dr. Newton lectured, “except that Melanie was married to a gentleman and Griselda was not. Griselda’s husband demanded proof of her devotion, and so he beat her and set fire to her wimple and put her through various tests to see if he could make her lose her temper and criticize him. But she never did. She simply went on making cloth for the manor, hence the famous line, ‘Patient Gris
elda, always spinning.’”

  “Awwww …” sighed the malkins.

  “Shit-eater,” said a boy behind me.

  “Griselda crops up quite often in medieval literature,” Dr. Newton went on. “Chaucer and Boccaccio used her, and so did many minor folklorists and ballad-makers. For this reason many scholars consider her to be the representative woman of the era.”

  I raised my hand.

  “Miss King?”

  “How could a woman that meek be representative of the Middle Ages? She lived at a time when the Virgin Mary was the leading symbol of power. Men were in awe of the Virgin then, so it wouldn’t have taken much to put them in awe of all women. I think Chaucer and Boccaccio were poking fun at Griselda for being too dense to realize what she had going for her. Their works about her are actually satires.”

  El was waving her hand frantically. Dr. Newton called on her.

  “But the Virgin Mary was meek, too, just like Griselda,” she said eagerly.

  “No, she was good,” I countered. “There’s a difference.”

  “Yeah,” said the boy behind me.

  Dr. Newton heard him. “Mr. Panelli, do you have a comment?”

  “The Blessed Mother had a lot of sorrows and she suffered a lot, but she didn’t let anybody shove her around. Griselda was a doormat. She was probably one of those dames that if you slug ‘em, they worry about whether you hurt your hand. That makes a guy want to slug ’em again.”

  Gasps of shock punctuated the malkin corner. “What frat is he in?” El whispered indignantly. “He isn’t,” somebody replied, “he’s a Korean vet, that’s why he’s older.”

  I raised my hand again. Dr. Newton nodded to me.

  “Henry Adams said that women in the Middle Ages were supreme in a way that American women could never be, because the power of the Virgin rubbed off on them. It’s American women who are powerless; Griselda had clout if she had wanted to use it.”

  “Oh, Flo!” El wailed.