But maybe she wouldn’t. Maybe she’d look straight at me and say, “Sylvie, you must be imagining things.” That’s what had happened the first time, when I was twelve.
So…bring on the screen tests! Unfortunately, Sylvie’s preternatural knowledge of trademarks of the stars—“[Natalie Wood is] my ideal. We have practically identical eyebrows. The first thing I’m going to buy when I get my break in the movies is a gold slave bracelet”—does not translate into a similar knowledge of how to protect your money while on the road to Jericho. Because somewhere around Springfield, Ohio—right after Sylvie has settled on the screen name “Venida Meredith,” swiped, admirably, from a “Venida Hair Nets” ad—she too is set upon by thieves:
I reached into my pocketbook to get a dime. I felt around, but there was so much stuff in there, I couldn’t get to my wallet. I started taking things out and lining them up on the table: my compact, my lipstick, tissues, my pink scarf, the sunglasses with the white plastic frames I’d gotten at Woolworth’s, my pad and pencil for letters to my mother and Judy…. Faster and faster I grabbed for things, and the more stuff I took out, the more frantic I got. I should have been able to get to the wallet by now….
And now we come to the Extraordinarily Inopportune Moments To Have Your Wallet Stolen category. (Runner up: Thelma and Louise?) Delicate readers, be forewarned. Luckily, at Sal’s Roadside Rest, Sylvie too finds her Good Samaritan, a certain Walter Murchison, who offers to drive her the rest of the way in his “Pontiac Chief Star Catalina.” He is, luckily….
A Bible salesman! At first I felt this kind of twinge of disappointment that he wasn’t a reporter, and wouldn’t be doing a story about me…[but] what could be safer than riding with a person who was in the Bible business? Maybe I shouldn’t have gotten into the car with a strange man, but if I had to get into a car with any strange man, I was certainly lucky that I had picked Walter Murchison.
This is not the first moment where, in a burst of ambition, Sylvie tosses aside all good sense. (And, unfortunately, her suitcase, which she leaves on the Greyhound and does not remember until untold towns later.)
Although Walter has the irritating habit of constantly getting single hotel rooms, he is one hell of a Bible salesman, something Sylvie has much occasion to witness as they stop off in rural area after flyover nowhere after godforsaken waste-land for Walter to unload his uplifting stock:
“All God’s work is handsome,” Walter said. “But if you don’t mind a little humor, Mrs. Fitch, the Good News Bible is the deluxe edition of God’s work. Now, tell me the truth. Isn’t this a Bible you’d be proud to have in your home? Isn’t this a Bible that wouldn’t be stuck on a shelf somewhere, but would deserve a place of honor right out on a table in your front room? Please look at the gold-tipped pages too, Mrs. Fitch. This isn’t just the holy word of God….”
I forgot how hot it was. I forgot my suitcase, my three scratchy crinolines, and changing my name to something other than Venida. I kept looking from Walter to Mrs. Fitch and back to Walter again. This was like a Ping-Pong game and I couldn’t figure out who was going to win.
It’s around this point that a reader might look around with surprise and realize that this interaction, like all that have come before, is entirely adult—not only in constitution but in nature. There’s no sassy best friend for Sylvie, no helpful older sister—not even a queen bee to make her life miserable. Her closest pals are found in her Photoplay magazines, and her day-to-day life is an ongoing quest to slap on enough makeup to manage to look 18 for her Hollywood arrival, the sooner to hang with Natalie on-screen—hoping events at home don’t go Splendor in the Grass.
But it’s no surprise that adults are so (oddly) central in the story—they’re also oddly central in Sylvie’s life—and that’s the problem! If only Walter were content to exist as a sideline, a kitchen-table sage who dispensed fatherly wisdom while Sylvie went off to the movies with someone age appropriate. But instead, he’s bent on muscling Sylvie out of the starring role and into a role alongside him:
Was it just that…Walter was old enough to be my father and had a big Adam’s apple and a bow tie and wore his belt so high that his pants were practically hitched halfway up his chest?…I started getting confused again. Maybe the only thing that would unconfuse me was to start concentrating on my movie career, which I hadn’t thought about for what seemed a very long time.
But a savior of sorts does occur in the form of Vic, who is (appropriately enough) a lifeguard Sylvie stumbles upon in Las Vegas. Vic is a young, handsome psychiatrist-in-training who takes an interest in Sylvie, both intellectually and emotionally—although, unlike all the others, he is able to put aside the latter for the former. And if up until then Sylvie has had to suffer through adults behaving far more dismally than your average on-screen heartthrob, Vic makes up the distance immediately, providing her with shelter, sustenance, and psychological support—minus the romantic clinch.
And, as the bizarro-world romantic lead, Vic not only treats Sylvie like a child, he makes her understand why it’s okay for her to have romantic feelings—but only for someone in a very different position with Sylvie than he is. Because when Sylvie finally confesses that she wasn’t most afraid of Uncle Ted, but of “myself. I was afraid—I’d let him. I wanted him to,” Vic stunningly replies, “I don’t think that’s so unusual”:
“So you have these feelings, but what can you do about them? Now, here’s Uncle Ted acting affectionate toward you, and no one else in your whole life ever has. See what I’m getting at?”
“Not exactly. If I went out with boys I wouldn’t feel this way about Uncle Ted?”
Even in the dim, flickering light from the TV screen, I could see Vic was frowning. “I’m not sure. Maybe. I told you this was complicated. I’m just trying to figure it out from what’s in my psych books. But why I said it was natural was because you always wanted somebody to love you, and Uncle Ted’s acting like he loves you—or, at least, wants to make love to you. And one part of you says that’s wrong, but another part of you wants it.”
“But that’s not love!” I cried. “That’s sex.”
“Sometimes people don’t know the difference.”
A lot of those other people cracking psych books are STILL trying to figure that one out. But Conford took Sylvie seriously, and she took us seriously enough to let us chew on that, with Walter’s Sen-Sens, for a while. Because while growing up in a YA novel is one thing, Conford shows us something else we might want to think about with Sylvie: a girl who grows up just enough to realize she’s still a child.
Chapter 9
Old-Fashioned Girls
They Wear Bonnets, Don’t They?
Girls in White Dresses with Blue Satin Sashes
Clotted cream. Silken furs. Silk. Furs. Governesses. Starched, clean cotton. Trains, cold chicken, hot cross buns, belladonna, crimping, satin, bows, ribbons, gardens, villains, Dickon, Craven, Polly, ayahs, typewriters, Model-T’s, boarding schools, shingled hair, silk stockings, thick, creamy creamy clotted creamy cream—
OH, ALL RIGHT, I’LL STOP. Those of you who stuck mainly to late-twentieth-century texts are, of course, currently feeling no pain. But all of the girls who delved into the previous era’s works are, I must inform you, currently in agony.
Of all the forms of fetish pornography running rampant in society today, the deepest and most invidious must be that found in all of the stories of young orphaned girls plunked down in splendorous circumstances who proceed to go about returning all the inhabitants thereof to a state of beruffled, wool-stockinged happiness. Laura Lippman, in her essay on the works of Joan Aiken, sums up the danger signs to look out for in her neat formula, COVENS:
Clothing
Orphans, Real or De Facto
Villains
England
Nature Boys, a la Dickon
Specialized Schools—A Boarding School, a School for the Performing Arts, an Orphanage or—The Dream That I Have Yet To Find—An Orphanage Devo
ted to the Performing Arts.
One need only look to any Merchant-Ivory film or, God forbid, Harry Potter sequel, to see that English colonial porn is alive and well—as are its American offshoots. (Louisa May Alcott or Frances Hodgson Burnett—mutton or marron glacé, what’s the difference if it’s got a floor-length skirt of satin someplace?) Why? Well, obviously, because living a life by a crackling fire where a maid sweeps out the grate and a mysterious Indian man redecorates your room sumptuously and you are whisked away in a carriage and sent on a night train to, really, anything resembling a manor, clearly trumps any other walk of life, flush as it is with the accoutrement of great wealth without any fear of beheadings. (Works like Cheaper by the Dozen and Belles on Their Toes merely up the ante by transferring all that cozy goodness to a slightly more recent era.)
I’d like to argue that all of these texts have fascinating things to say about how society confounds and builds itself on ideas of class, ambition, empire, religion, economics, destiny, and nationhood, and in fact, they do. I’d also like to say they are vivid snapshots of history. In every case, each book is a world you would be thrilled to pluck out of its hazy black-and-white and return triumphantly to color.
However, I really just want a pair of silk stockings and an ermine-jacketed china doll.
BOOK REPORT
An Old-Fashioned Girl
By Louisa May Alcott 1869
Polly Want a Slacker?
“It’s time to go to the station, Tom.”
“Come on, then.”
“Oh, I’m not going; it’s too wet. Shouldn’t have a crimp left if I went out on such a day as this; and I want to look nice when Polly comes.”
“You don’t expect me to go and bring home a strange girl alone, do you?” And Tom looked as much alarmed as if his sister had proposed to him to escort the wild woman to Australia.
“Of course I do. It’s your place to go and get her; and if you wasn’t a bear, you’d like it.”
I remember exactly where Louisa May Alcott’s An Old-Fashioned Girl resided in my elementary school’s quiet library, and well I should—I took it out every week. It was a hardcover edition with a clear plastic dust jacket covering a pink cover with a picture of a heart-shaped girl with round, sausage-like curls and a sweetheart neckline, and it was placed on the top right shelf in the second to last row on the right-hand side of the main fiction area, just behind a fire door and below the official children’s section. In our elementary school, when you took out a book, you weren’t allowed to take it home—it was only yours for the biweekly half-hour reading period, and this was probably good for my slowly disintegrating edition. Left to my own devices, I would have separated most of the crumbling signatures from their saddle-stitching in about a week.
I have your average registered bookworm’s healthy regard for Little Women, a book I loved so much that for years I eschewed the copy of Little Men someone had given me as a gift, not wanting to destroy the magic of its predecessor. (I needn’t have worried—my edition of Little Women, like many, actually contained both books, so I had read it a few dozen times. There’s some sort of cognitive-behavioral lesson in there for all readers, I’m sure.)
An Old-Fashioned Girl is different, however. First and foremost, rather than forcing the reader to choose among four characters of distinctly different character (thus ushering in years of women’s novels set at Harvard, and episodes of Golden Girls and SATC for the enjoyment of us all), we have only Polly, her best friend Fan, and Fan’s brother, Tom. Polly is the lively country bumpkin who arrives to visit for the “season” (oh, can we BRING back social “seasons”?) with Fan. The expectation, of course, is that the family will suffer her coarse, amusing failures gracefully, slowly bringing her up to snuff as a young lady of the finest fashion.
All efforts in this regard, of course, fail. In an attempt to curl Polly’s bangs, she burns them completely off. Showing a plump, pleasing white shoulder merely horrifies Tom, who’s used to a rough-and-tumble girl who’d rather sled with him than promenade in fine clothes. And Polly finds that, at fine parties, she far prefers the company of the rambunctious children to the stilted ladies imitating their peers.
Her effect on the Shaw family she visits, however, is lasting and profound. “A happy soul in a healthy body,” as Alcott puts it, Polly, who shuns finery, has not only the moral advantage over her hosts but also the emotional. Simply, her plain, straightforward dress, free of vanity, reflects her purity of heart and soul. On her visit, she reminds Fan of the virtues of real friendship, soothes Fan’s little sister Maud’s sulky passions, manages to make even the fretful Mrs. Shaw happy, bonds with Grandma Shaw and, most impressive, calms Tom down. (She is also the first person in years to show any daughterly affection for Mr. Shaw, who funds the whole operation.) In short, she shames them all and, in the best sense, reminds them of what they have in each other.
Well! All of this would be very well and give-your-Christmas-breakfast-away in the best Little Women tradition, but for the follow-up Alcott wrote, entitled 6 Years Later, in which Polly returns (shades of Vanity Fair) from the country to the city just before the Shaws lose all their money in the crash, brings the story to its true depth by letting us get to know Polly as a woman. I know many fans of Little Women find the whole Professor Bhaer situation kind of a gross-out—how can Jo, who’s been scribbling with her cap on in sisterly domestic harmony for years and years with only vague inclinations toward a girlish Laurie for sexual interest, have to go live with that horrid bearded old man?—but in Polly’s case, her love interest (Spoiler! Spoiler! It’s Tom!) is a beguiling mix of manly and dandy.
I have always been sympathetic to the period of Jo’s loneliness, when all her sisters marry off and she’s living in a boarding house—and Polly has a similar situation, although she has to make lemonade out of far more lemony lemons. Not only is she snubbed by Tom, his girlfriend, Trix, and Fan, who have vaulted into a social circle that can no longer include Jo, but also, her job as a piano teacher keeps her ever on the verge of poverty, she is never allowed to see her brother, Jimmy, and she feels herself constantly in the position of the patronized pet, too prideful to borrow an outfit, and therefore never able to go to the party. When the Shaws lose all their money, she’s able to help them with all of the cost-cutting and spirit-raising measures she’s lived with her entire life, true, and there’s the same satisfaction in watching her help Fan turn all her old dresses inside out to save them for the next season (Oh, seasons, seasons!) as we see with Sarah Crew inventing a warm rug and crackling fire for her bare room. But unlike in Little Women, the moral lessons alone are not the book’s purpose. In the person of Polly, Alcott has placed not only her best arguments for the virtues of, well, virtue (I’ve ALWAYS felt that the girls could have at least eaten HALF of their Christmas breakfasts, and did they always have to give away all their money for presents for Marmie?) but she’s placed a deep passion only hinted at in Jo, briefly. Jo is independent and willful, surely, but Polly is actually, literally independent and strong-willed—a true adventurer, who in her youth is unafraid to make herself part of a family and change them for the better, and in her old age is courageous enough to hold out for the family she wishes to have, not the one society dictates would be most practical for her.
We’re certainly happy (Spoiler! Spoiler!) when Polly and Tom have a happy ending—he goes out West to make his fortune, becomes a man, and makes himself worthy of her—but it’s quite clear to us also that, whatever happened with Tom, Polly, simply by being forthcoming, open, smart, and interested in life, would have managed to craft a sequel any reader would want to take out, week after week after week.
OVERDUE
The Wolves of Willoughby Chase
By Joan Aiken 1962
Life’s a Bitch…and So Is the Governess
By Laura Lippman
After tea…the children were set to mending. The meal had consisted of bread, dry this time, and a cup of water. Sylvia had contrived to save
a half of her morsel of bread for Bonnie, and she pushed it into Bonnie’s hand later, as they sat working in the biggest classroom, huddled together for warmth. This was the only time of the day they were allowed to talk to each other a little.
…“We can’t stay here, Sylvia.”
“No, we can’t,” breathed Sylvia in heartfelt agreement. “But how can we possibly get away? And where would we go?”
“I’ll think of some plan,” said Bonnie with invincible optimism. “And you think, too, Sylvia. Think for all you are worth.”
Sylvia nodded. Then she whispered, “Hush, Diana Brisket’s looking at us,” and bent her head over the enormous rent in the satin petticoat she was endeavoring to repair.”
Whenever I visit my parents—not often enough, as they would be the first to tell you—I always end up thinking about Maude. Yes, that Maude. One of the many All in the Family spinoffs of the 1970s, Maude centered on an “uncompromising, enterprising, anything but tranquilizing” woman from Tuckahoe, New York. (By the way, several Internet sources claim it’s “that old compromising,” which makes NO sense.) Route 404, which winds through Maryland and Delaware, skirts Tuckahoe State Park, so every time I come to that part of the trip—well, then there’s Maude.
And now that I’ve got the Maude song fizzing around in everyone else’s head—what was really so extraordinary about this outspoken-but-privileged woman? Yes, she was mouthy, and, yes, she had one of television’s first legal abortions, but her restless intelligence now seems wasted to me. Did Maude work outside the home, or even volunteer? (In the home, she had Florida to clean for her, at least until Florida got her spinoff.) What did she do other than battle with her husband and pal around with future Golden Girl roomie Rue McClanahan?
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