Under Magnolia: A Southern Memoir (25 page)

Stranger was the odd-even hoopla. If your year of graduation was ’64 you were the sister of the class of ’62. Classes often serenaded the sister class at night, winding through the halls with candles. The downside was that the Evens had a set of “trophies” that were hidden around the campus, as did the Odds. In your spare time you were supposed to search under rocks and in storerooms and behind books in the library for the other classes’ trophies. If you found one (the only one I remember is a horse’s tail) you sounded an alarm and gathered at the Odd Tree or the Even Post for various songs extolling your class. Sort of a perpetual treasure hunt. Several well-adjusted friends actually loved scavenging for trophies and thought I would too if I “just would try.”

This roaming tribal fervor is channeled, at the end of sophomore year, into a performance of Euripides’s
The Bacchae
. We barefoot girls in fawn skins dance around the amphitheater in the moonlight in the service of Dionysus, god of wine and fertility. Whoever chose the play had a diabolical streak. We are perfect for whipping up into a froth of fleshy, religious ecstasy.
We can get into these parts as we cannot get into
The Glass Menagerie
. Racing around night after night whirling torches, wild with divinity, ludic maenads:

Power, mythic power we feel in the blood. We sing in Greek. The words ringing out all across the dell:

The green joy feels cathartic. We wind back up the trail to the dorms, flashlights beaming the edges of the path, singing
like maenads, in touch with all that fire the entire mechanism and history of the school seeks to suppress, suppress, suppress.

I do not regret going to R-M in the last throes of repression because of the friends I made there. I’m happy that I followed the president, Dr. Quillian, down Crush Path with my classmates singing “Gleam Little Lantern.” We were supposed to be pure, coiffed, gracious, intelligent, unselfish, subtle, capable. We were. Semi-isolation from men at the very time many wanted that most turned us toward ourselves and one another. Life without the friendship of Rena and Anne—unthinkable.

We had the bond of loving books. We spent the summers traveling from Fitzgerald to Rena’s in Birmingham and to Anne’s in New Orleans. Frankye, who’d criticized all my friends in high school, loved Anne and Rena. To my surprise, they liked Fitzgerald. Frankye became her charming self again. She gave teas for them and took us to Jekyll Island and baked pound cakes and Toll House cookies, and served us frozen fruit salad and delicate chicken sandwiches with celery and nuts. She wanted them to stay, to fill the house with their grace and loveliness. Rena and Anne both thought I should think again about giving up on David. Rena was stirred to quote Yeats’s line about
more beautiful than thy first love / But now lies under boards
. And couldn’t I at least influence him to move as far from Fitz as Atlanta?

In Birmingham and New Orleans, there were more parties, their old friends to meet, new things to taste at restaurants, and always books to pass around and read from aloud, and blouses and belts to swap.

After holidays, we took the long train back to Lynchburg. Beginning in New Orleans, the Crescent swung through the South picking up hundreds of college students and depositing them at schools all the way to Washington. We adored the little compartments and read
The Magic Mountain
and
Light in August
aloud, sharing tins of cheese wafers brought from home. Rena came up with a copy of
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
. I admired a natural dignity Anne was born with, admired Rena’s passionate response to everything, as though she had one less layer of skin than the rest of us. Dozens of splendid young women, idealistic and nasty, intelligent and naive, adventurous and unsophisticated.

We began to forget we were supposed to please men. There weren’t any. We were like the Spartan women during long wars. We were hell-raisers on sabbatical. At R-M again, we bought strawberries and sat in the rain on front campus whooshing them with Reddi-wip and screaming with laughter as our hair dripped and the whipped cream ran. We were unconsciously developing a strong core self. Confined as we were, we enjoyed one another thoroughly, and so acquired the talent for friendship, one of the two or three chief pleasures of my life.

Beyond my two closest friends were circles and circles of other friends, Kit, Gwynne, Lucy, Alice Neale, Joan, Linda, Nancy, Rebecca, Catherine, Marion, Mary Jo. I visited in Greenville, Atlanta, Lexington, Washington. The whole South was our playground. Each friend stays indelible and unique in memory. Rebecca, doubled over with cramps, wrapped in a blanket telling jokes while her roommate strummed endless
verses of “The Eddystone Light.” Lovely Joan dressed in red on the wisteria-draped Main Hall porch. The night watchman’s flashlight passing briefly, late, under our doors. Sue, who slept in her panties (the same Sue who called out “Oh hell, I’m awake,” when her alarm went off), often met him in the hall on her way back from the bathroom. She crossed her arms over her bare flat chest and stared straight ahead as he passed. Gwynne and I acting out the hare and tortoise tale for drama class, feeling humiliated to be hopping and slugging along the rug. Everyone swaying in a chorus song from a play about isolated life in the remote country of Andorra one of us wrote. The first story I wrote was about the imaginary death of Daddy Jack by tumbling down the stairs at his house, vivid in detail. I was thrilled to be published in the school magazine,
Potpourri
, but could not show it to anyone at home—my first brush with the edgy situation of the writer’s life.

Ten thousand images, one for every rule.

Many are of the Virginia seasons, unparalleled. To see the fall trees on the campus blessed my days. A golden rain tree on front campus gave up all its fan-shaped leaves on the same day, a brilliant shower falling into a circle like the melted tigers in “Little Black Sambo.” I loved kicking through the leaves of hundreds of scarlet and yellow maples, and that clear fall air touched with some stirring, unnamable scent. When snow fell in huge wet lovely flakes, we built an altar to Zeus on the lawn. In spring, a sharp green newness lasted weeks, then arrived the white and lavender lilacs, made to sing about, and the immense Japanese magnolia filling the library windows. First the buds
seemed so tight they almost quivered, then they splayed open, offering streaked lavender petals to the eyes of girls reading, dozing, dreaming in armchairs at the windows, in a world of their own, though not of their own making.

The weeping cherry tree outside New Hall exists in my mind’s eye as the paradigm ever after for all trees. This tree was twisted and large, the limbs trailing, effulgent with white blooms. I took pictures, wishing I had the Chinese landscape painter’s delicate hand instead. To stand under those blossoms looking up at the intense spring sky was a pure pleasure that never diminishes. Rena and I typed Housman’s “Loveliest of Trees” and tacked it to the trunk. Every spring since, after all these years, someone repeats the gesture, that instinct for tradition at its best.

When I dream the anxiety dream, that I have not started the work and the exam is upon me and they’ve switched the subject anyway, the setting is Randolph-Macon. At least once a year, I’m back there for senior year and must make up all the requirements I skipped. I wince at the memory of my professor Mr. St. Vincent’s remarks in the margins of my creative writing notebook: “Maenad,” and “What is to become of you?”
Vita abundantior
, the Latin motto on our blazers, meant “the life more abundant.” But Anne’s brother on a weekend visit said, “I’ve been in navy barracks all over the world and this is the most depressing place I’ve ever seen.” Sandy tried to slit her wrists. Louise broke out as soon as she got the lay of the land, a woman before her time. I was balancing. I loved my friends
and my sense of the place and the traveling. Often I returned to R-M’s structure with relief, sheep to the fold. There was just enough abundance to keep me attached, not enough for me to commit. No loneliness of any year has been as bad as freshman year, staring out my fifth-floor dormer window at bare trees, the river hidden, and no clue where I’d been or was going.

As soon as The Pill hit, R-M as it reigned, was lost. The truly revolutionary consequences of women having control over their own bodies kicked those date parlor doors closed, ripped up those destination slips, put those ladies in Charlottesville with their white toast, teapots, and emery-board towels out of business forever. As preservers of The Way, how wise those women who ran the school proved; they invoked tradition, grace, protection, the concept of respect, culture, decorum: all those paternal gods of undamaged goods. We were imprinted with an intricate moral code of rules, from belted bathrobes to bedtime a hundred miles away. Soon, the little wheel of pills—we will cross a great divide. Didn’t those deans and dorm mothers foresee exactly, unleashed, how complicated our lives would become?

Rena and I were foolish enough to think our families would allow us to pause for a year and go to Greece. We thought we’d figure out a way to work and pay for ourselves. We wrote away for pamphlets on freighters that took passengers. The
Hellenic Destiny
would sail in July. We tucked all the brochures in our luggage as we packed for the summer break.

Below the southern fall line, that place where the hard, as I imagine it, soil of the North meets the silty coastal plain I lived on, stream beds are pure white sand, so beautiful when dry—the meandering course patterned with the shimmers of flowing water. In droughts, I walk these sandy watercourses, looking for flint arrowheads and quartz crystals, which once I found in handfuls. I walk, too, for the pleasure of the fine sand under my feet, powdery soft in places, grainy as ground glass in others, and for the occasional clear pool; I am following the idea of water.

The summer after I turn twenty is the longest in the history of the world. No sign of rain. No dream of the dead, no peacock screaming, no sweat on a glass of cold water. Just chiggers and ticks. The heat has to break.

“Suffocating,” people say. But really, I feel more like the turtle must in its carapace, the whole atmosphere weighing on my body, and I carry the heavy air step by step.

“It’s going to be a scorcher,” Daddy Jack says at breakfast every day.

“Sweltering,” Fanny Brown agrees, as she breaks a raw egg into his shot of bourbon. My grandfather believes in high-octane breakfasts. He takes it in a gulp.

Willie Bell used to fix cinnamon toast and hot chocolate for me, but she’s gone to the North and her kitchen’s been overtaken by Fanny, a big knobby woman with skin the color of a room when the lights suddenly go out. Willie Bell’s gingerbread-colored face has moved to Chicago, or is it Detroit? No one can seem to remember which, both being equidistant to the moon. “Up and left six days before the bridesmaids’ luncheon Margaret and I were having for Dottie Richards,” my mother had written to me at school. At our house, her exodus has raised what Daddy Jack calls “the Nigra Question.” Frankye and I aren’t interested. Mother thinks anybody with half sense who can walk out of Fitzgerald should. I just miss Willie Bell. She found a job cooking in a pool hall; Willie Bell, who’d specialized in the freshest lady peas, just shelled butter beans, fried tomatoes with tomato gravy, watermelon rind pickles, brown sugar muffins, pressed chicken, tarragon beans, and airy biscuits.

“She won’t last up there in Yankeeland. She’ll be back begging for her job before Christmas,” Daddy Jack predicts. “Nigras don’t know when they’re well off.” He unfolds the
Atlanta Journal
and blessedly covers his face. We dread the news. My
grandfather recently had cast the first Republican vote of his life. My mother had not. She thought John Kennedy was very attractive and Nixon’s nose looked as though it were carved from a baking potato. Daddy Jack, therefore, held Mother personally responsible every time Kennedy or his “upstart fool” brother Bobby made a move. “Where do you think the nigras are getting these big ideas of theirs?” he shouted at her frequently. The words “march,” “demonstration,” and “freedom riders” were beginning to be heard. When he reads that Bobby
asked
the freedom riders to cool off for a while, he rails, “Why don’t they have the fortitude to call out the tanks? What are tanks for?”