Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady_A Memoir

by Florence King

  “Yes, you! He’s your boyfriend. If he won’t do right, you have to. I want those books or I want twelve dollars.”

  “Now wait a minute, Flo. If he said he didn’t borrow them, then he didn’t borrow them. I’d help you if I could, but I just can’t remember!”

  “You’re afraid of losing that frat pin, aren’t you? If you took my side against him, he might ask for his pin back, and then you wouldn’t have a man to make you feel like a woman!”

  “Flo, so help me God, I swear I don’t remember!”

  I looked into the labored innocence of her wide eyes. This was her version of femininity. Carried to its logical extreme, it was the psychology of the gun moll, the perjured witness, the accomplice. So far I had heard femininity defined as nervous breakdowns, insanity, spontaneous hysterectomy, and illiteracy. Now to that glorious list I could add defect of character.

  “Malkin!”

  I slammed out of the room. That was the day I joined the Marines.

  It was Career Week. The campus was full of folding tables piled with brochures and presided over by smiling men in gray flannel suits who had come to tell twenty-year-olds about pension plans. This was the boys’ version of “finding somebody.” Total security appealed to Roosevelt babies; the girls wanted to marry a man who would solve everything and the boys wanted to work for a man who would solve everything.

  There were hardly any tables for girls, but there was one in the lobby of the dorm. At it sat a woman in a magnificent blue uniform with captain’s bars on her red-piped shoulder tabs. The sight of it sent a thrill up my spine. I approached and spoke to her. She told me she was a procurement officer for the Woman Officer Candidate School at Quantico. She explained that as a rising senior, I could take the twelve-week course that summer and be commissioned a second lieutenant when I graduated from college a year hence.

  It sounded like the answer to my problems. While hardly the idyllic grove of academe of my spinster fantasy, the Marine Corps was an elite closed society with limited appeal for most women and none whatsoever for malkins. Second, it would be a job. I had no postgraduate plans, and I had chosen a major that, even more than English, left one with no choice but to teach. A career in the Marine Corps would save me from a fate worse than death. Third and best of all, I would get to wear that uniform.

  Most people with a lust for uniforms also have certain other characteristics that go with uniforms. These include team spirit, conformity, reverence for authority, a capacity for blind obedience, a bureaucratic turn of mind, and a serious outlook on life. All I had was a lust for uniforms; even my different drummer heard a different drummer. I was too engagée to give this minor point any thought, though, so I signed the papers.

  Mama: “If I were younger I’d go with you!”

  Herb: “Life is a vale of tears, its wonders to perform.”

  Granny: “They’re all morphodites!”

  Jensy: “Yo’ big momma be right!”

  Granny continued to talk about morphodites up to my departure for camp. It was her all-purpose word for sexual abnormality, serving her for everything from homosexuals to carnival freaks, both of whom she swore she had never laid eyes on. I don’t know whether she was trying to say “hermaphrodite” and missed, or whether “morphodite” was the going word in her youth, along with “waist” for blouse and “stout” for fat. Herb and I looked it up and found it was spelled with an i instead of an o. The definition of morphidite said: “A pair of compasses or calipers with one straight pointed leg and the other leg bent inwards at the end;—called also moffs, oddlegs, and jenny.”

  A few days after the school year ended, I took the train the short distance to Quantico. Several girls got on at Alexandria, presumably after having debarked from a plane at National Airport. It was obvious that we were all going to the base, so we talked about what made us decide on a Marine Corps career.

  “They take care of you,” said one. “Medical, dental, food, housing, pension.”

  “You get stationed in neat places like Hawaii where you can work on your surfboarding,” said another.

  “You meet a lot of guys,” said a third.

  I kept quiet about Henry Adams.

  Our train was met by a hearty sergeant with a beautiful permanent wave. Every Woman Marine, officer and non-com alike, had one; carefully coiffed and curled hair seemed to be the order of the day. It was, in fact, an obsession. Discovering that many of the O.C.s had butch cuts, the captain chewed them out for not having a “softer” hairdo.

  They gave us a lecture on hair. What they wanted was a medium bob or short pageboy—clubwoman hair, First Lady hair—short enough not to touch the collar (a regulation) but long enough to look like a woman from behind. The captain did not put it quite that way, however.

  “It looks more feminine,” she said carefully.

  My vacation from femininity also included a lecture on lipstick and nail polish. All of the Women Marines wore bright red lipstick regardless of their complexions because regulations demanded that lipstick match the red piping on the dress blue uniform and the red-bordered chevrons on the green one. This being the case, nail polish had to match both. Many of the Women Marines wore nail polish, which I found surprising. Officially it was “optional,” but there was so much talk about matching it to lipstick that I smelled peer pressure. Remembering Granny’s uproarious talk of morphodites, I realized that the Marine Corps was worried about the Lesbian image that had plagued the women’s services since their inception. Those who study Greek must take pains with their nail polish.

  They were also worried about the tramp image.

  “A Woman Marine never smokes on the street.”

  As soon as we got our uniforms, the Public Information Office requested an O.C. to photograph for publicity shots to show America what a Woman Marine looked like. Guess who they picked?

  “King!”

  They woke us up at 5:55 A.M. by blowing a police whistle. Mama would have been up and at ’em before the last roll of the ball; but I had Herb’s metabolism. We had to have the bed made regulation-style by six and ourselves ready to march to breakfast by six-thirty. After breakfast they marched us to the drill field for inspection. My O.C. pins were upside down. After inspection they turned us over to male drill instructors who had been picked for their unblemished service records and solid domestic histories.

  After drill we had sports. They gave us a choice of softball, sailing, and horseback riding. I picked riding because it gave me a chance to sit down. We had to groom our mounts ourselves and mine stepped on my foot. When I took off my shoe and sock, my toes looked like a tit after archery. They sent for an ambulance and took me to the base hospital where a medic almost broke my leg trying to get my foot in the right position for the X-ray machine. I had to fill out an Accident Report Form in quintuplicate. When the captain read it and found that I had referred to the medic as Attila the Honey, she tore it up and made me fill out a new one.

  “No humor in official reports!” she barked, and marked me down in Attitude.

  A good attitude was known as “gung-ho.” It meant having a singleminded love for the Marine Corps and exhibiting hearty good cheer under stress and pain, the kind of response that might have come from Patient Griselda if somebody had told her to keep her pecker up. It also meant singing “The Marine Hymn” and “Lady Leathernecks” while we laundered and starched our green fatigues and spit-shined our shoes.

  A Marine is neat. Spots on uniforms were removed by carbon tetrachloride. I left my bottle on a sunny windowsill and it blew up. I was marked down in Safety. A Marine is clean. I neglected to dust my bunk springs and got marked down in Area. I stored my toothbrush in my helmet and got marked down in Hygiene. They took us to a weapons demonstration and I fell asleep while shells exploded all around me. I flunked Alertness.

  My sole area of excellence was military etiquette. Forbidden to address officers in the second person, we had to say, “Does the captain wish anything else?” It was so much
like Granny’s grace notes that I never forgot the form.

  By the middle of the course I knew the Marines were not for me, but I hung on because of the money. It was the best summer job I ever had; we got corporal’s pay the first six weeks and sergeant’s the second, plus room and board. (The food was delicious.)

  Knowing that I was going to flunk, I salvaged my pride by quitting a week before the end. After filling out the termination forms, I had a final interview with the colonel.

  “I’m sorry to see you go,” she said. “If you want to return next summer and try again, I’ll give you a recommendation myself. I think you’d be a credit to the Marine Corps.”

  She leaned back in her swivel chair and surveyed me with a fond smile.

  “You’re a lady to your fingertips.”

  »twelve«

  COMING back from Quantico, I could not decide whether the clicking train wheels were saying feminine-feminine, lipstick-nail polish, or softer hairdo-softer hairdo. I was sure of one thing, though: at last I had the concise one-sentence definition of “malkin” I had been seeking since high school.

  A malkin is a woman who worries about her femininity.

  That absolved Granny, who worried about everybody else’s, but it cast a comprehensive net over all the other women who had ever driven me nuts, from Miss Tanner and Ann Hopkins to burly lady leathernecks red in tooth and claw.

  I arrived home at three in the afternoon and went directly to bed. For the next six days until classes started, I caught up on my sleep and exorcized the turgid prose of the Marine Corps Manual with Nancy Hale’s The Prodigal Women. Exorcizing the wishful thinking of Granny and Aunt Nana was harder. Neither wanted to believe that the horse had merely stepped on my foot; one pressed me for a kick in the stomach and the other for a kick in the head. Evelyn Cunningham had calmed down considerably in the last couple of years and they needed a new doppelganger.

  More wishful thinking awaited me on campus. When I walked into the sorority room, everyone jumped up and saluted, then dissolved in giggles. I stiffened warily, detecting something new in the air, and I was not mistaken. After the general questions were asked and answered, they raised the specific one that was on their minds. El kicked off in a stage whisper.

  “Did any fairies bother you?”

  “Are you kidding? They ran us so ragged we were too tired to lift a finger.”

  I swear to you, nobody caught that. They sat there staring at me with intensely curious, eager eyes full of the hard bright shine of cattiness waiting to pounce. By joining the Marines I had given them a perfect chance to round on me. At last they could get their druthers for all the poisoned darts I had sent their way, and supply themselves with a neat explanation of why I was “different.”

  “Did you have to take showers together?” Faysie asked.

  “There was one shower room but it had separate stalls—just like ours.”

  “Did they get in any free feels during inspection?”

  “I didn’t feel a thing.”

  “Did anybody stare at you real hard?”

  “Only during inspection.”

  Five pairs of lips twitched with skepticism. El, the squad leader of the assault, heaved a deep sigh and gave the signal for a round of patronizing comments.

  “I feel sorry for women like that.”

  “They have to turn to each other because they’re so unattractive that no man will look at them.”

  “I don’t understand what two women can do.”

  “I’d die if a woman touched me.”

  “I’d feel robbed of my femininity.”

  “If one makes a pass at you, it means you don’t have any femininity. They can always tell.”

  Listening to their lugubrious, cliché-ridden talk, I wondered why on earth I had ever joined—yes, joined—a sorority. But of course I knew why. To get dates, which I hated, so I could play Everything But with fraternity boys, whom I despised. Suddenly I thought of my classmates in high school French. Where were those girls now, I wondered. I wished I had them back. A wave of loneliness washed over me, surprising me with its intensity. I had never admitted it before, or even realized it, but I was lonely. I had never had a woman friend, but now, even though I despised women, I wanted one. I did not know how both things could be true, but they were.

  “I still don’t understand what two women do.”

  “They kiss each other you-know-where.”

  “Oh, you’re kidding! They do that?”

  “I’d vomit.”

  “I could do it to Susan Hayward,” I said.

  Silence. Five pairs of eyes widening in horror, five mouths dropping open in a death-in-life rictus, five audible swallows like rusty clicks. I rose and picked up my books.

  “If y’all are against Lesbianism, it can’t be too bad.”

  I was thrown out of the sorority, except they didn’t call it that. Just as there are former Marines and dead Marines but no ex-Marines, there are no ex-sorority girls. Being privy to the secret password, handshake, and knock, I was in the position of a defrocked priest whom nothing short of a lobotomy can divest of heard confessions. They called it “going inactive.” As for the charge, they came up with my old theme song, “anti-social attitudes.” Ayn Rand would have loved it. I was allowed to keep my pin, which I hocked. I also saved six dollars a month in dues and a small fortune in contributions to bridal and baby showers.

  If my summer with the lady leathernecks had brought on a bad attack of malkinitis, starting senior year brought on an even worse one. With graduation looming, I was destined to be tarred with the malkin brush whether I worried about my femininity or not. Come June I would have to get a job, but there were no good jobs for women. I would end up in a malkin pool, no different from the women I saw on the streetcar during rush hour; “government girls” in Washington, secretaries and typists elsewhere, anonymous everywhere.

  Being a college graduate would not raise me above the mass, except perhaps to give me a grandiose title. From my various part-time and summer jobs I had learned that a file clerk with a college degree was called a “depository administrator” but she went right on filing. The classified ads lured educated women with come-ons like “Career-Minded Miss!” but whatever autonomous glories they promised, most of them ended with “Relieve PBX.”

  I wasn’t used to being anonymous; the thought of joining a faceless, powerless regiment of women revolted me. Ever since high school I had been one of the special girls because of my grades; A’s were the source of my power, but A’s came from school and school would soon end. When it did, I would go from “God, she’s a brain,” to “Hey, she’s a secretary,” except I did not know shorthand.

  My mounting panic was exacerbated by the silent nagging I endured at home. Mama and Herb, like so many unsophisticated parents, still assumed that I would walk off the commencement stage and into a walnut-paneled executive suite where I would earn the proverbial million dollars a year for “running” some organization or other. There was no way to dislodge them from their blind spot; Herb was locked up in his ivory tower and Mama was immersed in the female-dominated telephone company where she had been promoted once again and was now a trainer of new operators. Having several dozen thoroughly cowed young women under her aegis (“When I say shit, they squat!”) had made her blissfully unaware of sex discrimination, so there was no point in trying to get through to her.

  My communication problem was complicated by the fact that to the Southern mind, “discrimination” meant only one thing. Using the word in reference to myself would have brought down the house, with Jensy hooting the loudest. There would have been jokes about having a touch of the tar brush, mock-reverential observations along the lines of “She sho come up light, dint she, Miss Lura?” and reminders to get my hair straightened before I went job-hunting. As for Miss Lura, she would have said what she had been saying ever since I could remember: “A woman can get anything she wants, an-nee-thing.”

  I was too much a product of my
time and place to think of my problem as discrimination. A passion for social change was not part of my rebelliousness; I was content to let the world stay exactly the way it was, provided I could have special privileges. I wanted to be a token. I saw the situation in individual terms, and I was the individual who mattered. All I knew was, I couldn’t get a decent job because malkins had given women a bad name. “Women quit to get married,” employers said, and they were absolutely right. Not satisfied with gumming up the classrooms of America, malkins gummed up the working world as well. “I want to work for a couple of years to save money for my wedding,” they said prettily, flashing their quarter-carat diamonds. Those who were not already engaged went to work solely for the purpose of finding a husband, quitting as soon as they discovered that their offices did not contain any eligible men.

  They were my pawnbrokers, my badass razor-toters, my Mafia with garlic breath; I was Gustavus Adolphus and they were Onkel Axel. I understood perfectly how Jensy felt, so much so that I adopted her standard philippic for my own purposes. “You rents to one malkin, she bring in all her friends, an’ ’fore long you looks up an’ you sees dem sleepin’ wid dey feets hangin’ out de winda!”

  I always thought I would be an exception because the three women who raised me all behaved like freewheeling, slightly mad Popes. All I had to do, I reasoned, was copy them and let the malkins hang themselves. But it was not that simple; there were too many of them. They had purple-inked the entire female sex into a corner.

  The solution to my job problem came to me in Renaissance England, taught by Dr. Newton, who had refereed the Patient Griselda fight. Thanks to Granny, I had become his pet. Impressed by my ability to read a genealogical chart and keep all the kings and queens straight, he always called on me to untangle royal relationships. On this particular day, we came to one of history’s finest scrimmages, Lady Jane Grey’s claim to the throne.

  Dr. Newton began his lecture.

  “Edward the Sixth died childless in 1553. The three claimants to the throne were his half-sister Mary Tudor, daughter of Henry the Eighth and Catherine of Aragon; his half-sister Elizabeth Tudor, daughter of Henry the Eighth and Ann Boleyn; and, as usual, Mary Queen of Scots. However, both of the half-sisters had been declared illegitimate and Mary Stuart was Catholic. They had to find somebody who was both legitimate and Protestant, so they picked Lady Jane Grey.”