Rita Will

by Rita Mae Brown

  As the bonfire crackled, the kids sobbed their little hearts out.

  The last day of camp some parents picked up their children. Other kids boarded buses to Newton, Massachusetts, where their parents would fetch them amid cries of how much they’d grown and how tanned they’d become. More tears and kisses as the children said goodbye to one another and goodbye to freedom from Mom and Dad. Sometimes they’d grab on to a counselor, vowing eternal devotion. Mom and Dad would have to pry the child away.

  Jerry and I also disembarked at Newton, hopped the MTA to Boston’s main train station and caught a train to New York. Once at Grand Central we had half a day before going over to Penn Station to board a train for Florida.

  Grand Central exudes energy and warmth. The ceilings draw your attention upward to the constellations painted on them. The staircase at the western end seems fantastic the first time you see it. It’s a wonderful example of public architecture.

  I wore tennis shoes, the old white kind, and a shift dress. He had on a pair of khakis and an ironed shirt. We walked over to the old Penn Station, without doubt the most beautiful train station I have ever seen. Vaults of glass curved overhead, and the light streamed down on you even as crowds of people hurried by. A breathtaking structure, it had to have been as extraordinary as the Crystal Palace was in its day. Unfortunately, Penn Station was later destroyed by the wrecker’s ball to make way for a building notable for its ugliness.

  We walked, winding up in the theater district. A well-dressed woman standing in front of the theater where How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying was playing noticed us. She couldn’t use her tickets. She gave them to us. We hadn’t any money to spare, which she recognized. She heard our accents, smiled and wished us well. It was our first Broadway show. The minute the orchestra struck up the overture I was in heaven.

  That was my introduction to the kindness of New Yorkers. I could barely understand a word they were saying. They tended to shout and rush about. No one said hello to anyone else. Definitely no passing and repassing for these Yankees. And yet, it was love at first sight for me—a continuing love affair, although we’ve suffered rocky moments.

  During the long shuffle back to Florida I thought about the city. I was going to study there. Aqueduct was there. (A place without horses was inconceivable.) No hounds, though. That bothered me, but I figured I’d drink up everything I could for as long as I could, then go back home and find hounds aplenty.

  I told Jerry. He didn’t say anything for a while. He knew I wasn’t given to idle statements. If I tell you I’ll be at your house at six in the morning to shoot you, I’ll be there at six in the morning with a gun—as we say down home.

  “I can’t go to school in New York,” he finally answered me.

  “Well, I can’t go now. I meant for graduate school.”

  “That’s not so bad.” He exhaled. “I can live in New York for a while. I’m not raising children in the city, though.”

  “I’m not giving birth to Yankees, so don’t worry about it.”

  “You were born seven miles north of the Mason-Dixon line.”

  This fact delighted him since he could throw it in my face whenever I became too grand and too southern.

  “Eat shit and die.”

  He murmured, “I love you,” laughed and fell asleep until Washington.

  He did love me, too. He’d known me since I was eleven. I didn’t have to explain myself, not that I was inclined to do so. If he’d wanted a sweet, sugar-pie, you’re-my-big-man kind of girl, he would have easily found one. He was becoming a hunk. Not that he had a handsome face, he didn’t, but his body was prime beef and his sense of humor prime-time.

  He wanted a partner who’d stand by him and stand up to him. In that sense, I was perfect. And I was loyal.

  Since I wouldn’t sleep with him until we were married, he’d find a tart and go to bed with her. That was okay. I thought then (and I think now) that our country is silly about sex.

  In America sex is an obsession. In Europe it’s a fact of life.

  I fall into the fact-of-life school of thought. People do what they do and it’s none of my business. To base the most important decision of your life, or one of them, on sexual attraction alone is pure-D foolishness. Marry in haste and repent at leisure.

  He could do whatever he wanted to do as long as he didn’t rub my nose in it.

  Monogamy is necessary for the greater social good but contrary to nature. We each struggle with the conflict.

  Jerry didn’t struggle. He indulged himself thoroughly. But he was about to shock himself and I was the cause.

  If we’d both known what was going to happen to us that year, I wonder if we’d have gone back to Florida.

  39

  Guts and No Glory

  Every now and then, like Mom, I have a brainstorm. Sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t. When they don’t it’s usually funny to everyone else. It’s funny for me years later.

  My sophomore year I decided to declare a major in physical education. I wanted to be a gym teacher like I wanted cancer. However, you had to have a certain number of physical education credits to graduate, and varsity tennis for girls wasn’t part of the deal back then. I wanted to get to my electives for my junior and senior years without the interruptions of required courses. I’d switch my major to English the beginning of my junior year.

  I thought I was being very smart. I exulted in my ploy. I exulted until the first day of gymnastics when a tanned, drop-dead-gorgeous blonde walked down the aisle for class. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t take my eyes off her.

  Julie Swensen exerted an attraction I’d never felt before.

  I didn’t care what anyone thought about me. I did care what they thought about her. I tried to be restrained.

  We’d double-date, me with Jerry. Her twin, Geneva, would sometimes go along with her boyfriend, whom she later married.

  Julie, a year older than I was, was a tremendous athlete. I’d never seen uneven bars. She competed on them in the Junior Olympics. Apart from Betty Rinehart, she was the first woman I’d met who had as much athletic talent as I did. Swensen excelled at everything.

  Once I recovered from the shock, I decided that if she was better, I ought to learn from her. I was better than she was in field events, but what she had, in everything she did, was an animal grace that is equal parts sex appeal, physical power and charm. The French have a term for someone like that—animal de luxe.

  One rarely sees this quality. Ava Gardner had it. The young Jean-Paul Belmondo had it. It’s not about beauty, it’s about something much more seductive.

  I visited her home in Lake Worth for Thanksgiving, a subdued holiday since John F. Kennedy had been shot. We were watching the news report when Jack Ruby shoved a gun in Oswald’s gut, launching him into eternity. The world had gone crazy. We were old enough to feel terrible but young enough to quickly return to our individual pursuits.

  Julie was and remains unassuming, self-effacing and self-reliant. She loved her family and over the decades I never once heard Swensen utter a rude remark about any family member. This was in sharp contrast to my family, where titanic battles followed by hilarious recountings of the hostilities occurred with alarming regularity.

  Every family contains stress points. Most of us can’t resist blowing off steam when a parent, sister or brother irritates us. Julie refused to criticize even when a person deserved it.

  She was a lot like Dad. Jerry was more like Mom.

  Perhaps in the early years of our romantic life we bounce between parental models until we finally figure out what works for us. Then, too, each one of us has to contend with cultural pressures. In the late fifties the ideal woman was Marilyn Monroe: vulnerable, ditzy, overtly sexual and with a voluptuousness that bordered dangerously close to something maternal. The male heroes, best represented by Gary Cooper, had to be tall, taciturn, able to handle any and all external crises, unable to articulate deep feelings.

 
Few of us in our teens and early twenties were Marilyns or Garys. Few of us comprehended what it meant to be emotionally responsible toward another human being. That’s what years are for: to teach us.

  The surprise was that I liked physical education more than I’d thought I would. Physical education majors aren’t bright the way, say, political science majors are bright, yet they can be highly intelligent. The body is their metaphor. Once that sank into my head, I observed them and sports with new eyes. The movement was the message. Winning and losing, at the deepest level, is a side issue. It’s about how the body defines space. In team sports a ballet of competition unfolds. The team athlete needs not just physical skills but also social skills, because you can’t succeed without cooperating.

  Much as I looked forward to declaring my true major in the following year, I was absorbing a great deal from this one. I had decided I wanted to double-major in English and agriculture. There were few women in agricultural departments then. Not only did I face derision about my choice, but my honors professors sang a siren song about how brilliant I was and how I should not waste my time and talents.

  Brilliant is as brilliant does, but in college people focus on your ability to master intellectual material. For me, that’s like falling off a log. It doesn’t, however, mean that I am smart. It only means if you sit me down with a nuclear physicist, a historian or even a mathematician, I’ll “get” what they have to teach very quickly.

  Swensen lacked this. But let her see a motion and she could reproduce it instantly. That’s kinetic intelligence.

  In kinesiology class we had to write term papers breaking down the motion of catching a softball above the shoulder height, at the waist level and then below the waist.

  Julie could no more write this paper than she could fly. First off, she hated to write. Second, why write about it when you can do it? I’ve always thought she was dead-on about that.

  I knocked off my term paper in an afternoon. Then I tackled hers. The challenge thrilled me because I would have to write in a style foreign to me and write well enough to pull a B but no better. If Julie had turned in a flashy term paper, the red flags would have gone up.

  As a writer, I found that the task appealed to me. I knew I could imitate. I’d devoured Gertrude Stein and could parody her easily, but then I guess that’s not too hard.

  Anyway, I worked into the night and got punchy. I inserted a sentence into her term paper that nearly got both of us canned. We turned in our papers and thought that was that. Julie, of course, didn’t bother to read “her” term paper.

  The next week Julie found me at the tennis courts. Since she rarely visited practice I hoped she was starting to like me.

  She’d been called in by her advisor in the department, Ruby Lee Pye, who read the offending passage out loud.

  The passage read, “If the balls are above waist level, consult a physician immediately.”

  Swensen must have turned three shades of red. Fortunately, her advisor liked her, as did everyone, and forgave her.

  By the time Julie finished her story, Jerry was in tears from laughing. Then Julie started laughing.

  “Did you tell them I wrote it?”

  “No.”

  Then I laughed, too.

  We both could have been expelled for my prank. And I was full of them.

  I started a rumor that if you engaged in illicit sex, your urine would turn blue. Naturally, I started this right at the Delta Delta Delta dinner table. Within a week the dreaded new VD story swept the campus. Nothing happened.

  I waited. A month later I snuck into the Beta Theta Pi kitchen. I had begged Jerry, the Master Beta, to cook up a dye that wouldn’t harm anyone but would turn urine blue. Aided by the Master himself, I dumped the stuff into the iced tea vats. Every fraternity and sorority dinner was accompanied by iced tea. Then we bribed the cooks at the ATO house, the Delta Tau Delta house. Phi Delta Theta, Kappa Alpha Theta, Chi Omega and of course Delta Delta Delta. Chi O gave me chills, since they were perfect southern belles. I could hardly wait.

  Didn’t take long. By that evening some of my sorority sisters were weeping in their beds. Hardly a light shone from a Chi O window, and the Phi Delts sat glumly in their yard. Jerry and I cruised around to inspect our handiwork. We knew who was sleeping with whom anyway, but this put the cherry on the ice cream sundae.

  The infirmary was packed.

  It was pure bliss.

  That success emboldened me. I unscrewed shower heads in Jennings dorm and put the dye in there too. That nearly tripped me up … all those blue girls traipsing around campus while I stayed white.

  By now Faye, fed up with school, sought another adventure. Her father bought her a 180 SL, white. Having a Mercedes today is a lovely thought. Imagine having one as a nineteen-year-old!

  Faye and I wore out a set of tires cruising Alachua and the surrounding counties. The combination of great-looking Faye and the car snapped heads around. Me, I was along for the ride, but I knew if I could get the opportunity to talk to someone, they might pay a little attention to me.

  Faye and I snuck out of Jennings through the window one night in search of booze. Alachua County was dry. This drove the money to the nearest wet county, Marion. She had enough fake IDs to fool the FBI. The way Faye’s mind worked she would have made a superb agent. There wasn’t a building she couldn’t get in or out of, a rule she couldn’t bend.

  She pulled up to a liquor store in Ocala and bought a bottle of bourbon. She consumed a large quantity of it before we hit the county line. I took over the driving duties. I always thought people liked me, since I was included in activities, but maybe it was because I stayed sober. At any rate, Faye had a crush on some medical student. We cruised his off-campus residence. He wasn’t there. Disappointed, she polished off most of the bottle. By the time I coasted into the dorm parking lot, lights off Faye had passed out. The first order of business was to stay quiet. I coasted in, barely making a parking spot. I quietly got out and silently closed the door.

  Faye, tall, had folded herself into the 180. Unfolding her required ingenuity and strength.

  I’d learned the fireman’s carry. I hoisted her on my shoulders, tottering to the basement window. I opened it, climbed in and leaned back out. She was a heap on the ground. I whispered her name. Not a flicker of an eyelid. I climbed back out and pulled her to her feet like a rag doll, leaning her against the window.

  Nothing awakened her. I tipped her over the window. However, she filled the space, so I couldn’t climb in to pull her through. The other windows were locked. After all, she’d only paid for one window.

  I dropped my shoulder under her butt and lifted. Slowly but surely I inched her through the window. I heard a soft thump when she landed on the other side, headfirst.

  I clambered through, nearly landing on her.

  She’d picked up a few scrapes in the process.

  Four flights of back stairs awaited me. Again, the fireman’s carry. By the time I reached our floor I thought my quads would give way. I dumped Faye on her bed and collapsed on mine.

  She woke up the next morning and beheld her scrapes and bruises. “Brown, what did you do to me?”

  “Rented you out to the Kappa Alphas.”

  She flounced down the hall to the showers, her humor restored when she returned.

  Whatever Faye was searching for wasn’t at the University of Florida. She left before the end of the semester. I decided I couldn’t stay in Jennings without her. It was too expensive, and too depressing to walk into the room sans Faye.

  I moved over to Broward, an older dorm, the butt of campus jokes. My roommate there had a boyfriend who played the piccolo in the Marine Corps band in Washington, D.C. I don’t remember her name because I think we spoke two words (which were not unfriendly, but we had nothing in common). She was obsessed with her boyfriend and played Marine Corps music morning, noon and night. There are worse sounds than military music, but I am hard pressed to think of one right now.
/>   I hung out at Jerry’s apartment, the library, Julie and Geneva’s apartment and the tennis courts. The sorority house was fun, but I was out of it more than in it because a new regime had taken over, one that actually believed all that gooey crap they tell you when you’re initiated.

  Have you ever noticed how you can look at something and not see it? Full of ideas and activities, I hadn’t taken a hard look at the physical education department, which had a large quota of covert lesbians on the staff as well as among the students. I knew some of the girls were gay. I liked them.

  A student could be expelled for being homosexual and a professor could lose her job. In the sixties and before, in order to attend the University of Florida, a state university, you had to sign a contract, the last clause of which was the morals clause. You could be expelled from the university for immoral behavior. The sexual revolution was still on the horizon.

  This clause made kids hypocrites. The human animal is tremendously sexual at that time of life. Nature intended it that way. Society needs to delay the natural process because life is currently so complicated one is still learning fundamentals into one’s early twenties. Starting a family at fifteen is no longer a good idea, even though it may be better from a physical standpoint.

  Few students were expelled for sexual activity unless they literally did it on the lawn.

  Drunkenness, publicly deplored, was also publicly ignored. Florida football games greatly added to the fortunes of the Busch and Uihlein families (both beer magnates) as well as the distillers of various grades of bourbon. Few students were expelled for drunkenness.

  Steroids were used in football and other men’s sports. No one noticed.

  The duplicity of social behavior was lost on none of us. We had all learned the great rule of southern life even if we hadn’t attended the boot camp of manners, cotillion. That rule was: You can do anything you want so long as you display good manners.