Dimestore (6 page)

Lady Lessons

WHEN I WAS A LITTLE
GIRL,
my mother drove me all the way across the entire state of Virginia to visit my Grandmother Marshall and my Aunt Millie and Millie's best friend, Bobbie, in Baltimore. This annual trip was part of my mother's grand plan; she was raising me to be a lady. The drive took two days with my mother at the wheel. We broke our trip by staying with Mama's friend Frances at Port Republic in the Valley of Virginia. My mother always said “the Valley of Virginia” in a certain way, with a certain tilt of the head. Frances's family lived in a huge house, a plantation really, with a white-columned portico and a long view out over the golden, rolling land.

These summer journeys symbolized the difference between my parents. Mama was a real lady from the Eastern Shore of Virginia, where her father had been in the oyster business. He was a high roller and harness racer. A picture of him hung in our sitting room: a handsome man with a big mustache, dressed to the nines, standing tall and straddle-legged atop what appears to be a small mountain of oyster shells. He carries a silver-headed cane; he wears a dark broad-brimmed hat; the drooping gold chain of his watch hangs down from his pocket. A man of consequence, of style. The family lived in a substantial square white house with sidewalk and street in front, green lawn sloping down to the Chesapeake Bay behind. In the backyard stood the summer kitchen, the smokehouse, the icehouse, the cistern for catching rainwater, the little train my grandfather had constructed mostly for his children and his own amusement, which carried loads of mainland goods and groceries from dock to house. (In those days before the Bay Bridge was built, the only way to the mainland was by boat. In winter, Mama said, she had to “walk the ice” to get back to Madison Teachers College after her Christmas vacation.)

My mother was named Virginia Elizabeth Marshall, called “Gig,” and she was, I have to say, an absolutely adorable young woman. Early photographs show a mop of unruly dark curls, huge blue eyes, a carefree smile, and deep, mischievous dimples. Her flapper-style looks exactly fit the prevailing beauty ideal of the day. No wonder my father fell madly in love with her at first sight and brought her home to Grundy, to those peaks and hollers where she would feel a little bit out of place forever, even though she adored him. And he adored her. In fact, as a child I was horribly embarrassed by the Technicolor-movie-style quality of my parents' passionate marriage.

I remember one bright summer Sunday when my cousins gave me a ride back from Sunday school—for some reason, my parents had stayed at home. I ran down our flagstone walk, burst into the house, and yelled, “Hello! I'm back!” but the sunlit living room seemed strangely empty. I went into the kitchen, following my nose. I smelled bacon and coffee. Sure enough, their breakfast plates were still on the table. This was not at all like Mama, the best housekeeper in the world. Maybe they had been kidnapped by aliens, I thought, which happened frequently in the pages of the
National Enquirer
, which Mama and I loved.

“Mama?” I called. “Daddy?”

Nothing.

Yet a thin blue haze of their cigarette smoke still hung in the air. “Mama?” I looked out on the back porch and into the backyard where her beloved roses bloomed. Nobody. “Daddy!” I yelled.

“Why, honey, what's the matter?” Suddenly they were there. Mama bent down to kiss me, with Daddy right behind her. Yet something was wrong with them, I could tell. Mama's pansy-sprigged blouse was buttoned up wrong, her red lipstick slapped on a little askew, while Daddy just stood there in the doorway as if in a trance, smiling at Mama, not at me—not at me, who had been so worried, so scared! The next day, at school, I told everybody I was an orphan. (“No you're not,” my patient teacher said.)

A YEAR OR SO LATER,
when I was sick, I woke up suddenly in the middle of the night with my throat on fire. I headed for their bedroom, knowing that Mama would get up and give me an aspirin and put Mentholatum on my chest and a cold washcloth on my forehead, and maybe even dose me up with some of her surefire cough medicine—a spoonful of honey and bourbon. But their bedroom door stood ajar, the lamp burning on the bedside table. The chenille bedspread lay undisturbed on their carefully made bed—clearly, it had not been slept in. I checked the clock: 1:15. I padded down the hall and paused at the narrow back staircase where suddenly I heard music. I crept downstairs, with Nancy Drew–like stealth, until I could see them—dancing barefoot in the kitchen! How gross, I thought; they were old. I plopped down on the step in disgust.

My parents were jitterbugging wildly to the Louisiana rhythm of Hank Williams singing, “Jambalaya and a crawfish pie and filé gumbo . . . Son of a gun, we'll have big fun on the bayou!” Daddy would pull her to him, then swing her around. Her red skirt flew out on the turns. They were wonderful dancers. Then the record changed to that sad whippoorwill song and Daddy pulled her close and they were dancing cheek to cheek, dipping and gliding around the kitchen floor. Now he held her in a tight embrace. “The moon just went behind the clouds . . . I'm so lonesome I could cry,” Hank Williams's mournful voice floated up the stairs. I started crying myself. I snuck back to bed where I lay in quivering pain and silence for a long time. Maybe I'm having a nervous breakdown, I thought, like Jane Eyre when they put her in the Red Room.

Mama was a very popular teacher at the high school; even boys signed up for her home economics classes. Years later, at her funeral, one man stood up and said that he had “gone to school to Miss Gig,” and announced that she was “real nice, for a foreigner”—this despite the fact that she had been married to my father and had lived in Grundy for over fifty years.

I WAS NOT A FOREIGNER.
I was my daddy's girl through and through, a mountain girl, a born tomboy who loved Grundy and everything about it, especially in the summertime when I was part of a wild gang of neighborhood children who roamed from house to house, ran the mountains as we pleased, and generally enjoyed a degree of freedom that it is almost impossible now to imagine. Summer spread out all around us like another country, ours to plunder and explore. Aside from chores and one week of compulsory Bible School (red Kool-Aid, Lorna Doone cookies, lanyards) we were on our own. We had no day camps, no lessons, no car pools. We played roll-to-bat, kickball, Red Rover, dodge ball, Pretty Girl Station, tag, statues, hidey-go-seek. I was utterly fearless in those days; I could run like the wind, and hit like a boy.

Sometimes I wrote plays, which we'd all put on in the breezeway at Martha's house, using a quilt on a clothesline as the curtain. Some of the more fundamentalist parents got very upset, I remember, at one particular production named
The Drunken Saloon
that ended with all of us, cowboys and cowgirls alike, pretending to be passed out cold on the concrete floor.

Inspired by Nancy Drew, my cousins and I concocted an elaborate ongoing plot concerning a mystery train that ran around the tops of the mountains and an evil group of invisible beings who were inhabiting the bodies of townspeople we didn't like. We spied on these people and kept official notebooks filled with our clues and “findings,” written in code.

One time my cousin Randy and I pushed an old oil drum off its rusty perch at an abandoned tipple and watched with great satisfaction as it crashed down the mountainside, gathering speed, then crossed the road and slammed into a filling station, where luckily nobody was hurt.

Sometimes my daddy took me up on Compton Mountain to ride the mine ponies, blind from their years underground. Often I'd go to town with him and work in the dimestore. But mostly summer consisted of roaming the mountains with the other kids—“like little wild animals,” Mama said in disgust—building forts, waging wars, and playing make-believe games of every description. Sometimes we'd flatten out cardboard boxes and take them up to the tree line where we'd sit on them, holding the front up to form a kind of sled, and slide down the long sage-grass hillside to the road, then trudge back up again. After a few rides, the flattened grass would be really slick. We would do this all afternoon.

Despite my inclinations, my mother kept at it, trying her best to raise me to be a lady. She sent me to visit my lovely Aunt Gay-Gay in Birmingham, Alabama, every summer for two weeks of honest-to-God Lady Lessons. Here I'd learn how to wear white gloves, sit up straight, and walk in little Cuban heels. I'd learn proper table manners, which would then be tested by fancy lunches at “The Club” on top of Shades Mountain. I'd learn the rules: “A lady does not point. A lady eats before the party. A lady never lets a silence fall. A lady always wears clean underwear in case she is in a wreck. A lady does not sit
like tha
t
!”

I didn't want to be a lady, of course; I wanted to be a boy.

EVEN THOUGH OUR VISITS TO
Baltimore were a part of Mama's grand design, I enjoyed them. I loved Baltimore itself, with its clanging streetcars, funny-looking people, lamplights, pigeons, and ice cream cones. I loved to sit out on the marble stoop after dinner and watch the teeming parade of street life; I always had a nickel in my pocket just in case the organ-grinder came by with his monkey. This monkey wore a little green coat with brass buttons. I loved my sweet, refined grandmother in her dim, high-ceilinged row house with lace at the windows and doilies on the tables. She always referred to my late grandfather with great respect, often making such statements as “Mr. Marshall raised trotters, you know” or “Mr. Marshall loved oysters in any form.” This deference enchanted me.

Much, much later, I was astonished to learn that Mr. Marshall had, in fact, hanged himself when my mother was five years old and Millie was only three, leaving my grandmother alone with a half a dozen young children to raise. She'd turned their house into a boardinghouse; later, she'd sold it and followed Millie to Baltimore, where everybody's favorite cousin, Nellie, had made a brilliant marriage and lived in style, with—of all things—a butler! Family legend tells that I'd been instructed again and again how to behave in the presence of this butler before I was first presented to him; then I'd disgraced everyone by rolling on the floor.

In my own memory, my elegant Aunt Millie was always referred to as an “executive secretary,” a phrase that fascinated me, as there was no such thing in Grundy. I loved my Aunt Mille, but I absolutely worshipped her friend Bobbie, the most glamorous woman I'd ever seen.

In hushed tones, my mother informed me that Bobbie was a divorcee; back home, there was no such thing as that, either. Bobbie was said to be a crackerjack stenographer. She was a tall woman with stylishly cut suits featuring big shoulders and tiny waists. She wore stiletto heels, stockings with black seams up the back, and red lipstick. She had the long, lovely legs of a fashion model, and—best of all—lacquered hair, which she wore up, in a jaunty French twist. It looked like patent leather.

Despite these attributes, Bobbie was reputed to be “unlucky in love,” an expression that never failed to send a great dark thrill shooting through me. During our visits, Mama and Millie and Bobbie always sat up late and giggled and blew smoke rings and drank Black Russians, and talked about men. I'd fall asleep to the muffled sound of their squeals and laughter.

My grandmother died when I was about ten. This time, our long trip was a sad one. My father drove, my mother cried. They both smoked cigarettes all the way, filling our fishtailed car with a blue haze indistinguishable from the constant rain outside. I was asleep when we got there, waking at noon to hear myself deemed “too young to go to the funeral.” Bobbie would stay with me.

I will never forget that long afternoon, which I spent sitting on the horsehair sofa looking out at the rain and the row houses opposite us while Bobbie drank red wine and railed against the latest “jerk” who had betrayed her. She wore black silk pants and a lime green sleeveless angora sweater.

“Listen,” she said, stabbing out a cigarette. “Never, ever, trust a man who says, ‘Trust me.' ”

Then her mood changed abruptly. “Well,” she said, “we've got all afternoon. You might as well learn to dance.” She got up and crossed the room to the record player.

“Come here,” she said, and I did. “Now stand like this. Put your hand on my waist. Good. Now put your other hand on my shoulder, like this.” I did. “Okay,” she said. “Follow me.”

We glided off into the dramatic opening of “Begin the Beguine.” It was easy, easy. I imitated Bobbie's proud carriage, the reckless set of her crimson mouth, and my legs moved of their own accord across the flowered, threadbare carpet. Round and round we went, now to “Deep Purple”: “when the deep purple falls over sleepy garden walls, and the stars begin to twinkle in the sky . . .”

I REMEMBERED MY PARENTS, DANCING
in our kitchen. I could imagine my grandmother dancing with the doomed and dashing Mr. Marshall. And suddenly, for the first time, I could imagine myself, dancing with a man whose face I could not yet see. For despite Bobbie's warning, I would grow up to love several men, some of them trustworthy and some of them not—though perhaps I would never love anybody else in quite the same way I loved Bobbie herself that afternoon of my grandmother's funeral, as we swept back and forth across the darkening apartment to those old sweet strains . . . “Through the mist of a memory, you wander back to me, breathing my name with a sigh . . .” while her angora sweater brushed my cheek like angels' wings.

Marble Cake and Moonshine

ALTHOUGH I DON'T USUALLY
WRITE
autobiographical fiction, the main character in one of my short stories sounds suspiciously like the girl I used to be: “More than anything else in the world, I wanted to be a writer. I didn't want to learn to write, of course. I just wanted to be a writer, and I often pictured myself poised at the foggy edge of a cliff someplace in the south of France, wearing a cape, drawing furiously on a long cigarette, hollow-cheeked and haunted. I had been romantically dedicated to the grand idea of ‘being a writer' ever since I could remember.”

I had started telling stories as soon as I could talk—true stories, and made-up stories, too. My father was fond of saying that I would climb a tree to tell a lie rather than stand on the ground to tell the truth. In fact, a lie was often called a “story” in southwest Virginia, and well do I remember being shaken until my teeth rattled with the stern admonition, “Don't you tell me no story, now!”

But I couldn't help it. I got hooked on stories early, and as soon as I could write, I started writing them down, first on my mother's Crane stationery when I was about nine, later in little books with covers I carefully made for them, pasting on pictures I'd cut out of magazines or catalogs, or illustrating them myself. I wrote my way through school, fueled by my voracious reading. I'd read anything: mysteries, romances, true crime, science fiction, all the books that came to our house from the Book of the Month Club. Finally at St. Catherine's School in Richmond, during my last two years of high school, I was gently but firmly guided into the classics, though my own fiction remained relentlessly sensational.

At Hollins College, I wrote about stewardesses living in Hawaii (where I had never been), about orphans, evil twins, fashion models, and alternative universes, receiving Bs and Cs and cryptic little comments from my professors Lex Allen and Richard Dillard that said, basically, “Write what you know.” I thought this was terrible advice. I didn't know what they meant. I didn't know what I knew. All I knew was that I was not going to write anything about Grundy, Virginia, ever, that was for sure. My last glimpse of home had been my mother and two of her friends sitting on the porch drinking iced tea and talking (endlessly) about whether one of them ought to have a hysterectomy or not. Well! I was outta there!

But I was still drunk on words and books, just as I had been as a child, when I used to read under the covers with a flashlight all night long. My favorite professor at Hollins was Louis D. Rubin, Jr., who introduced us to Southern literature; I hadn't even known it existed when we started out. I had already gotten drunk on Faulkner a couple of times, then had to go to the infirmary for a whole day when we read William Styron's
Lie Down in Darkness
—I got too “wrought up,” as my mother used to say. The nurse gave me a tranquilizer, and made me lie down.

Even so, I considered cutting class on the day that this woman with a funny name, from Mississippi, was coming to visit us. She was on campus, I believe, to receive the Hollins Medal, an honor undoubtedly engineered by Mr. Rubin, one of her earliest and greatest champions. But I had never heard of her, and it was so pretty outside, a great day to cut class and go up to Carvins Cove and drink some beer or just stomp moodily around campus smoking cigarettes and acting like a writer. This was my plan until I ran into Mr. Rubin in the campus post office, and then I had to go to class.

There were a lot more people in that old high-ceilinged classroom than we had ever had before, and some of them were male, a rarity at Hollins in those days. The seats in the back of the room were filling up fast with faculty from our own college and from other area colleges, too, (beards, leather patches on the elbows of their ratty sports jackets: not your dad) as well as graduate students from UVA and W&L. The graduate students needed haircuts, and looked intense. In fact they looked exactly like the fabled sixties, reputed to be happening somewhere outside our fairytale Blue Ridge campus at that very time.

A ripple of anticipation ran through the crowd. Mr. Rubin was ushering Eudora Welty into the room.

I was deeply disappointed. Why, she certainly didn't look like a writer! She didn't have a cape, or boots, or anything. What she wore was one of those nice-lady linen dresses that buttoned up the front, just like all the other nice ladies I had known in my life, just like my mother and all her friends. In fact, she looked a little bit like Miss Nellie Hart, my eighth-grade English teacher. (My favorite English teacher ever, but still . . .) I lost interest immediately.

I can't remember what Mr. Rubin said when he introduced her; I was probably too busy stealing glances at the back of the room while appearing not to.

Then Eudora Welty began to read “A Worn Path” out loud in her fast light voice that seemed to sing along with the words of the story. And I was suddenly right there—in Mississippi with Phoenix Jackson as she sets out to get the medicine for her grandson, encountering the thorny bush, the scarecrow, and the black dog, the young hunter and the lady along the way. I could see that “pearly cloud of mistletoe” near the beginning and then Phoenix's little grandson near the end: “He got a sweet look. He going to last. He wear a little patch quilt and peep out holding his mouth open like a little bird.” I sat stunned when it was over.

Miss Welty had seemed perfectly composed as she was reading; her face was luminous, lit from within. Now, having finished, she looked nearly shy, though her huge blue eyes were shining. “Well,” she said, looking all around, “any questions?” Hands waved everywhere.

She chose the young man who seemed the most impassioned. Knowing what I know now, I'll bet anything his dissertation was riding on his question. He leapt to his feet to ask it.

“I wonder,” he said, his dark curly hair going everywhere, “if you could comment upon your choice of marble cake as a symbol of the fusion between dream and reality, between the temporal and the eternal, the male and the female, the union of yin and yang . . .” He made yin-yang motions with his hands.

Miss Welty smiled sweetly at him. “Well,” she said slowly, considering, “it's a lovely cake, and it's a recipe that has been in my family for years.”

Marble cake! My own mother made the best marble cake in town.

It would be years before I would understand that exchange, and what really took place in our classroom that day. Later, in the final section of
One Writer's Beginnings
, Miss Welty would put it best when she wrote that “the outside world is the vital component of my inner life. My work, in the terms in which I can see it, is as dearly matched to the world as its secret sharer. My imagination takes its strength and guides its direction from what I see and hear and learn and feel and remember of my living world.”

Immediately after Miss Welty's visit, I read everything she had ever written. And it was like that proverbial lightbulb clicked on in my head—suddenly, I knew what I knew! With the awful arrogance of the nineteen-year-old, I decided that Eudora Welty hadn't been anywhere much either, and yet she wrote the best stories I had ever read. Plain stories about country people and small towns—my own “living world.” I sat down and wrote a little story myself, about three women sitting on a porch drinking iced tea and talking endlessly about whether one of them does or does not need a hysterectomy. I got an
A
on it.

BASED ON EUDORA WELTY'S
INFLUENCE
upon my own beginnings, I have always felt that one of the most important functions of any good writing teacher is to serve as a sort of matchmaker—“fixing up” a new writer with the fiction of a successful published author whose work comes out of a similar background, place, sensibility, or life experience. A certain resonance, or recognition, occurs. This can be an important step in finding a voice. Especially when we are just starting out, we encounter other writers who are like lighthouses for us.

For instance, when I introduced young Kentucky writer Silas House to the work of Larry Brown. Silas recalls, “
Father and Son
had a profound impact on me. The way his characters were so intertwined with place—they couldn't be separated. I recall shortly after reading the book that a major reviewer said Brown wrote ‘about the characters with whom you'd never want to have supper.' I thought: ‘Those are the folks I've been eating with my whole life!' And so Larry's work really gave me permission to write about my people in all of their gritty glory, a grit formed by the rough land where we lived.”

But even though my reading of Eudora Welty had led me to abandon my stewardesses, setting my feet on more familiar ground, telling simpler stories about small-town Southern life, I was never able, somehow, to set my first stories in those deep mountains I came from, or to write in my first language, the beautiful and precise Appalachian dialect I had grown up hearing as a child.

This did not happen until I encountered James Still—all by myself, actually, perusing the
S
s in the Hollins College library.

Here I found the beautiful and heartbreaking novel
River of Earth
, a kind of Appalachian
The Grapes of Wrath
chronicling the Baldridge family's desperate struggle to survive when the mines close and the crops fail, familiar occurrences in Appalachian life. Theirs is a constant odyssey, always looking for something better someplace else—a better job, a better place to live, a promised land. As the mother says, “Forever moving, yon and back, setting down nowhere for good and all, searching for God knows what. Where are we expecting to draw up to?”

At the end of the novel, I was astonished to read that the family was heading for—of all places!—
Grundy
.

“I was born to dig coal,” Father said. “Somewhere they's a mine working. I been hearing of a new mine farther than the head of Kentucky River, on yon side Pound Gap. Grundy, its name is . . .”

I read this passage over and over. I simply could not believe that Grundy was in a novel! In print! Published! Then I finished reading
River of Earth
and burst into tears. Never had I been so moved by a book. In fact it didn't seem like a book at all. That novel was as real to me as the chair I sat on, as the hollers I'd grown up among, as the voices of my kinfolk.

Suddenly, lots of the things of my own life occurred to me for the first time as stories: my great-granddaddy's “other family” in West Virginia; Hardware Breeding, who married his wife, Beulah, four times; how my Uncle Vern taught my daddy to drink good liquor in a Richmond hotel; how I got saved at the tent revival; John Hardin's hanging in the courthouse square; how Petey Chaney rode the flood; the time Mike Holland and I went to the serpent-handling church in Jolo; the murder Daddy saw when he was a boy, out riding his little pony—and never told . . .

I started to write these stories down. Many years later, I'm still at it. And it's a funny thing: Though I have spent most of my working life in universities, though I live in piedmont North Carolina now and eat pasta and drive a Subaru, the stories that present themselves to me as worth the telling are often those somehow connected to that place and those people. The mountains that used to imprison me have become my chosen stalking ground.

THIS IS THE PLACE WHERE
James Still lived most of his life, in an old log house built in the 1800s between Wolfpen Creek and Dead Mare Branch near Wolfpen, accessible only by eight miles of dirt road and two miles of creek bed. Still was born into a farm family of five sisters and four brothers in Alabama in 1906; went to Lincoln Memorial University near Cumberland Gap, Tennessee, where he worked as a janitor in the library to earn his scholarship and discovered
Th
e Atlantic
magazine, which he read cover to cover, every issue. Later he would publish ten stories and several poems in the very magazine that he had read so carefully. He earned another bachelor's degree in library science at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and a master's in English at Vanderbilt, but was still unable to get a job in the midst of the great Depression. After picking cotton and riding the rails, he came to Knott County, Kentucky, in 1932, where he finally found employment at the Hindman Settlement School, an association that would last for the rest of his long life. As the librarian, he carried books to people all over remote Knott County, working for room and board only. Eventually the school paid him $15 a month, and he began to sell his poems and stories to magazines nationwide. He also worked for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, traveling the county on foot, talking to everybody, writing their stories down in his ever-present notebook.

After six years, as he liked to tell it, he “retired” and turned to reading and writing full-time. As one of his neighbors said, “He's quit a good job and come over in here and sot down.” Another called him “the man in the bushes,” and yet another suspected him of “devilish writing.” But he was a gardener and a beekeeper as well, soon becoming almost like a family member of his dulcimer-making neighbors, the Amburgeys. Though not locally read, he was locally accepted. He talked to everybody, at every opportunity—at country stores, pie suppers, and the like. “You may talk smart, but you've got hillbilly wrote all over you,” one man told him. His neighbors' writings and sayings appeared in
The Wolfpen Notebooks
, published in 1991.

When the nearby Hindman Settlement School started its now-famous Appalachian Writers' Workshop, I had the immense pleasure of getting to know Mr. Still and becoming his friend, from my first visit there in the seventies until his death in 2001, when we buried him up on the mountain above the school. We always called him “Mr. Still,” all of us—even Mike Mullins, who ran the Settlement School and knew Mr. Still better and longer than anybody. The continuing Appalachian Writers Workshop gave me (and many others) an Appalachian community of the heart, just as Mr. Still gave us all the example of a real writer, not in it for money or fame but for the love of the language and the telling of the truth as he saw it. Deeply erudite, he once told me he had read an average of three hours a day, every day, for over seventy years. He was a world traveller who had visited twenty-six countries, yet he was as interested in the sayings and doing of his neighbors as he was in the Mayan culture of Central America, where he returned time after time. Though
River of Earth
(1940) remained his masterpiece, his short stories and poetry were widely and justly praised as well, appearing not only in
The Atlantic
but also in
The Yale Review
,
Saturday Review
,
The Saturday Evening Post
,
Esquire
, and many other publications, textbooks, and anthologies. He loved children and also wrote for them—
Sporty Creek
,
Jack and the Wonder Beans
—and in his later years I had the honor of helping him get together a collection of his Appalachian Mother Goose poems.