“Ah don’t believe it … . Ah’m dreamin’ … you are not of this world … . Ah can’t believe ma eyes!”
I handed her the finished translation. “Now listen,” I said, “I’ve done this exactly right but don’t you do it exactly right—make a few deliberate mistakes.”
She circled thumb and forefinger in her now-familiar gesture and gave me her conspiratorial wink.
“Bring me the others as you get them and I’ll do them for you.”
“Lawd … Oh, Lawd, Ah just don’t know how to thank you!”
“Quietly,” I suggested. She nodded vigorously, winked again, and scurried upstairs.
On her next shopping trip to Memphis she brought me back a bottle of Guerlain’s Mitsouko. Not a phial, a bottle. She proffered it literally under the counter as I sat at the proctor’s desk, but this time her Medici wink did not quite come off. There was a note of shyness in her manner and it was ingratiating.
“Ah’m partial to White Shoulders myself, but Ah gave it a good deal of thought and Ah decided that this is more you. Ah hope you like it.”
I was touched. My first sniff renewed my faith in Mississippi tastes: they knew a lot more about perfume than they did about hooch.
Soon it was time for the Homecoming dance. Tulaplee’s preparations began with the arrival of her father’s chief henchman, a Lee Marvin look-alike with an undeniable overseer’s air, who drove up from the Delta to hand-deliver a black velvet box containing the triple-strand pearl necklace that had been in the family for generations. It had the usual history centering around poker games, honor and dishonor, and houses in flames. The henchman arrived in a Tulip Enterprises, Inc. truck with a full gun rack in back. He delivered the heirloom into Tulaplee’s hands, made arrangements to pick it up at nine the next morning, and repaired to the Rebel Motel for his vigil. If anything happened, Tulaplee was to call him at once.
I know what you’re thinking, but it didn’t happen. If this were a novel I could invent a Maupassant ‘n’ magnolia tragedy of errors starring a freaked-out good ole boy, but it isn’t. Tulaplee did not lose the necklace, nobody got shot, and the henchman spent what was, for the Rebel Motel at least, a quiet night.
Here is what did happen:
Tulaplee arrived back from the dance fifteen minutes early and agreed to sit in the lounge with her date. As he lowered himself onto the sofa beside her, she gave a cry of despair.
“Oh! Ah left ma gloves in the car! Would you be an angel and run out and get ’em for me right quick?”
Hard-on with boy behind it rushes out door. Merciless cackle from depths of sofa. Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock. Glove-bearer returns.
“Lookit all that ole black dirt on ma gloves!”
The boy began a stammering apology but Tulaplee cut him off and started laying into him for something that had happened at the dance. Shrieking, screeching, cawing she went, a Bird of Purgatory rending balls for breakfast.
I crept into the foyer just in time to witness the finale. The boy was coming apart; shaking, sweating, blubbering like a senile old man in the face of her unearthly rage.
“Langston Bob Treadwell, Ah banish you! You are banished! You are gone!”
“Tulaplee, Ah—”
Her head jerked up and her eyes widened to Theda Bara proportions.
“What’s that? Are you talkin’? How come you’re talkin’? Don’t you know you can’t talk anymore? You’re banished! You can’t talk if you’re not there, and you are not there!” Raising her slim white arm, she pointed her taloned finger into his pasty face. “Ah heahby poah acid on you! Ah melt you! You have ceased existin’! You’re just a l’il ole grease spot on that rug! You are gone, Ah tell you, gone!”
She spun on her heel and stormed upstairs, her tulle skirts flouncing behind her. The dorm shook as she slammed her door. Just then the clock struck twelve.
“You have to go now, Langston,” I said. It sounded so inadequate.
The dorms remained open over the brief Thanksgiving holiday so I did not go home. Neither did the other out-of-state Southerners. In part our decision to stay put was based on practical considerations of limited time and holiday travel crowds, but only in part. The real reason was the subconscious Southern feeling that Thanksgiving is a Yankee holiday. Granny’s generation was the last to say it out loud but the idea had not yet died.
Bres and the Grope were all having parent trouble, so they did not go home, either. We spent the day drinking in her apartment. The conversation centered almost exclusively on grants and freighters to Europe. With the Grope clustered worshipfully at her feet—they were inveterate floor-sitters—she held forth on the gentle art of separating philanthropists from their money. Despite her ivory tower rarefaction I detected a touch of the con artist in her makeup. Raised by an hysterical mother to be a belle, she had emerged from the fray with a bizarre gift for flirting with foundations. She was not greedy on a grandiose scale, wanting only enough to live a decently comfortable life of the mind, but she had a way of making herself everyone’s favorite project. The late model car, for instance, was a demonstrator that had been given to her free by her brother-in-law, who had a Ford dealership. She never poormouthed, but rather presented herself as a gentlewoman in distress and let it be known that she was ready to receive her sponsors.
“Tell about the boy who went to Spain and never came back,” Vanny urged her.
This was Vanny’s favorite story and she always requested it like a child who refuses to go to sleep until she hears a certain nursery rhyme recited in a certain way. It was about a graduate student in fine arts who went to Spain to catalogue the contents of the Escorial and never stopped. He was still at it after five years, and his grant had been renewed each year with a learned paper on some Philip II artifact—a sword, a vase, a wine goblet. He lived on two dollars a day and a Eurailpass, and when not cataloguing he rode around on trains getting to know “the real people.” The journal he kept was the basis of some other grant he had just won.
All of Bres’s stories involved someone who was writing an article, or sketching, or doing surveys in youth hostels or under bridges with a supporting cast of “the real people.” That these same real people would have been designated immediately as “trash” in the South was a reality the Grope chose to ignore, just as they chose to ignore their own thoroughly Southern orientation that lay just under the surface of their artsy exterior.
They were committed one hundred percent to la vie de bohème, but try as I might, I could not entirely share their enthusiasm. I liked the idea of living in Paris and wearing black turtleneck sweaters, but the more I heard about the joys of existing on rutabagas and stale bread dipped in wine, about the unadorned naturalness of squatting over a wire grate (“That’s why Americans are constipated—they sit!”), and the bracing simplicity of a weekly sponge bath, the more bourgeois I felt myself becoming. When I boiled it down to the basics, I did not see how one could be a fully relaxed Lesbian without an American bathroom.
Bres was in a sexy mood that day. While we were in the kitchen making grilled cheese sandwiches, she asked me to spend the night with her.
“What about the anonymous phone calls?”
“They’ve stopped. Anyhow, it’s different on a holiday, everybody has company then.”
I would have risked anything for that sleep of tangled legs, but I was scared. I was still not used to the Deep South’s exquisite balance between hatred and hospitality. Making love in a ground-floor bedroom in Mississippi reminded me of The Lady—Or the Tiger? It would have been no more surprising to look up from Bres’s twat and see a shotgun coming through the window than to see a smiling face saying, “Hey, how y‘all doin’?”
Because I expected death, that Thanksgiving night shines in my memory as a festival of lubricity. The old adage about danger enhancing sexuality is all too true, and the reason why Southerners are so horny. Much has changed now; liquor is in and racism, at least the blood-and-thunder kind, is out, but old-time religion
is still flourishing and those black velvet nights are still ominous. I have a feeling that Mississippi is still the best place to be a consenting adult, and might even be our national G-spot. Just press Jackson and every woman in America will come.
The dorms closed over Christmas. I did not want to go home because I hated travel crowds, I could not afford the fare, and because there was no point to it. My family never paid much attention to Christmas except for eggnog. We had put up a few trees when I was very small but that was about it. Somehow the Yuletide spirit never seemed to penetrate the din made by the Different Drummer Corps that marched back and forth across the parade grounds of our minds. Even Jensy was lukewarm about Christmas, considering it excessively festive and deficient in that bleak aura of sin she so enjoyed during Lent.
Bres could not go home because she had been declared officially dead. With one mother sitting Presbyterian shivah and the other yelling “Hark the herald angels shit!” out the window at the carolers, there was no reason why we should not spend the Christmas holiday together. Neither of us particularly wanted to hang around the deserted campus for ten days, however, so Bres came up with a plan.
“We’ll visit the Darnay sisters. They own a motel near Vicksburg and make candy for a store in New Orleans. I have a standing invitation. I lived with them for four months when I was waiting for the Mary Margaret Mc-Chester Fund to come through.”
“What are they like?”
“In their fifties. They’ve been lovers since high school.”
“Sisters?”
“They’re not blood sisters, and their name isn’t really Darnay. It started years ago when they first moved to Vicksburg. They hired this gal to help with the candy-making, but she was a little simple and couldn’t get their names straight. Instead of saying she was working for Miss Ella Darnell and Miss Pauline Naylor, she came out with ‘Darnay.’ Well, it spread through shacktown the way everything like that does, and before long all the colored thought that Ella and Pauline were sisters. The white people heard their maids talking about the Darnay sisters, so they picked it up, too. It made a good name for the motel, short and easy to remember, so they had the sign repainted, and now everybody calls them the Darnay sisters.”
She made a phone call that was received with Southern hosannas audible all the way across the room. Seated on the couch I heard, “Y’all come right on down and stay as long as you want!” A grant from the Dixie Foundation.
We drove down to Vicksburg the next day. The Darnay Motel was actually a cluster of tourist cabins in a semicircle behind a larger house that served as home, of fice, and confectionary. Located on a back road in a small town some fifteen miles from the city, it was the kind of place that would not get many guests except in summer or during Civil War remembrance functions. There were no cars in front of the cabins.
As soon as we pulled up, the Darnay sisters spilled out of the house to greet us. I don’t know what I was expecting—Cotette and Missy, perhaps, or Radcliffe and Lady Una, but I was not expecting the Darnay sisters. That’s exactly what they looked like: plump, rosy Southern maiden ladies in finger waves and print dresses who needed nothing but dead husbands to qualify as Ole Miss housemothers.
Never underestimate the power of Southern Lesbians to make just as much noise as any other Southern women. The Darnay sisters started talking simultaneously and we all surged into the house. My next surprise was their decor. My own ideal living room would have featured leather sofas and a ship’s hatch coffee table. I sought this kind of solidity in the Darnay living room but found instead a furbelow factory in the grip of an imminent epiphany. Although the motel fronted on piney woods, they had a pink artificial Christmas tree. The furniture was covered in velour pastels that matched the Darnay bonbons: pink, yellow, and mint green, like Tulaplee’s pencil. Everything else in the room was glass—tabletops, lamps, candlesticks, even the pictures on the wall were unframed sheets of glass bearing silhouettes of eighteenth-century figures chasing each other through gardens. Glass candy jars full of bonbons sat everywhere.
Looking into the kitchen, I saw a black woman stirring a huge kettle. The whole house smelled like hot sugar and boiling syrup. The bridge of my nose started to throb. I excused myself and went to the bathroom, and of course you know what I found: rosebuds of soap in glass jars, bath-oil balls in glass jars, book matches in glass jars, a toilet swathed in pink fur, a shower curtain with a valance, and hoop-skirted dolls concealing extra rolls of toilet paper.
I thought my first all-Lesbian social occasion would be marked by mutual awareness, a sense of freemasonry, some sort of verbal shorthand to indicate that we were all on the qui vive. I wanted silent acknowledgment, sly, clever allusions, and a little gruff humor. In short, I expected the Darnay sisters to be matey. That’s what I expected. This is what I got:
When I returned to the living room, they were talking about some woman they knew who had refused to move from a condemned house.
“ … and then the floor just opened up and swallowed huh,” said Miss Ella.
“She would have been killed if the cellar hadn’t been flooded,” said Miss Pauline. “The water was up to huh neck and she couldn’t swim a stroke. It was just pitch black and there she was, just beside huhself with feah. She felt huhself startin’ to drown, but just then an old chair floated by so she grabbed hold of it.”
The black woman shouted from the kitchen. “It was de leaf f‘um de dinin’ room table, Miss Pauline.”
“Oh, that’s right. So she floated ovah to the winda and tried to open it but she couldn’t, it bein’ stuck, you know what Ah mean, so she felt around in the darkness for somethin’ to break it with and she found this old huntin’ horn up on top of a chifforobe. It was an antique.”
“The chifforobe?” asked Bres.
“No, the huntin’ horn. Her great-great-grandfather won it in England in 1820 in a race meet—”
“No’m, he dint win it, some dook give it to him when he was ober dar huntin’ wid de Inglish peepuls and de dook’s wife she fall off an’ break her laig an’ he carried her back to de big house an’ de dook wuh so grateful he give him de horn.”
“Oh, that’s right. But what was it he won? Ah just know he won somethin’ … . Ah declare, my memory is goin’, it’s just goin’. It’s my time of life, Ah reckon. It’s got to come to all of us someday.”
“Did she summon help by blowing the horn?” Bres asked.
“Oh, no, she didn’t have the strength to get any sound out of it, she just broke the winda with it and started screamin’ for somebody to rescue huh.”
“Screamed huhself hoarse,” said Miss Ella. “But they finally came, and you know what? When they pulled huh outta there, huh hair had turned completely white.”
“Overnight,” sighed Miss Pauline.
At no time during our stay did our hostesses indicate by word or glance that the four of us had anything unusual in common. I suspected they were not Lesbians at all but merely partners in what the Victorians had called a “Boston marriage”—an unconsummated relationship that never goes beyond hugging and kissing—but Bres said no. The woman who had seduced her when she was sixteen had known them for years and knew for a fact that they were full-fledged lovers.
They shared a room with twin beds and gave Bres and me another. We got in with each other a couple of times but it was not very satisfactory because I was afraid the sisters would hear us. Glick-blick-sloosh sounded exactly like the candy cauldron when it really got going, and they might think they had left the stove on and the latest batch was about to burn up.
Bres also said that they knew about her, and therefore about us, but I didn’t believe it. I don’t think they knew about themselves. Somewhere along the line they had actually become the Darnay sisters in their own minds.
»sixteen«
WHATEVER the Darnay sisters did or did not do in bed, they had lived together most of their lives and were obviously happy. Driving back to Oxford after our visit with them, I was caug
ht up in envious yearning. I wanted to be with Bres forever, but now I realized that “forever,” at least that part of it that was my year at Ole Miss, was narrowing rapidly.
“It’s January, almost a new semester,” I said with a frown. “The year’s half over.”
I was counting in scholar’s fashion on a calendar divided into semesters and seasonal breaks. Having been in school for seventeen of my twenty-two years, it was now the way I measured time. September was the first month of the year and June was the last, and summer was a limbo to be spent working at a temporary job in what Bres and the Grope called “the outside world.”
“June will be here before we know it,” I went on.
She reached for my hand and put it in her lap. “As Babbitt said in the commencement speech, ‘Tempers fidgit.”’
She was referring to an actual speech by a rich but ignorant alumnus whose attempt to say Tempus fugit had thrown the Classics Department into hysterics the previous year. But time did fly, and now it was no laughing matter.
“What’s going to happen in June? I can’t just leave you and go back to Washington.”
“I didn’t expect you would,” she replied, squeezing her thighs around my hand. The car slowed for a second.
“But, Bres, I’m running out of money. I brought four hundred dollars with me from Washington, and now it’s almost gone and I have no way of earning more. People on fellowships aren’t allowed to work for the university, and there aren’t any jobs in Oxford. Besides, fellowships aren’t renewable. To stay at Ole Miss another year, I’d have to get a graduate assistantship, and they don’t pay much more than fellowships. Even proctoring the dorm, it still wouldn’t be enough. Anyhow, an assistantship wouldn’t start until September, so that still leaves the summer to worry about.”
“Apply for a foundation grant,” she advised.
Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady_A Memoir Page 22