Under Magnolia: A Southern Memoir (28 page)

Time for the back-to-school dream. I have not bought the book, the exam is today, the teacher is speaking another language, where is my blue book, my number two pencil, what is the subject everyone else is so intent on? I am in the wrong class, perhaps the wrong cosmos.

We’re sprung. Rena and I haul boxes to the second floor. From the porch, we overlook a row of seven mighty magnolias. Ours is the apartment on the end—living room, bedroom, bath, and kitchen. “Can you believe this?” we ask each other over and over. Frankye finds blue and lavender carpet remnants and brings chairs. Rena arrives with lamps, pillows, and pans. We paint the bedroom lavender, with dangling bunches of grapes at each corner of the ceiling. We hang posters by Picasso, a castle in Austria, and bright paintings by Rena’s mother. The small closet and chest of drawers from a thrift shop bulge with our clothes. As soon as we plug in the stereo, we turn up “The Great Pretender,” “Only the Lonely,” and the theme from
A Summer Place
.

Half the class transferred from the lovely woman’s college at the end of sophomore year. In spite of the contemplation, intellectual challenge, friendships, the glorious Virginia seasons … 
enough was enough. For many, the sense that an active world zoomed by the gates of the redbrick wall became too strong. We went off to big universities, Texas, LSU, North Carolina, and Florida. Some married. I didn’t have much choice. Daddy Jack said, “You have your head in the clouds, young lady, and I’m not paying a cent for you to waste any more of your time. You can go to Georgia or nowhere.” Two years “up north,” and no husband in sight. And I’d brought up the idea of the freighter to Greece. He was explosively mad. He mopped his bald head with a Kleenex, leaving damp white balls in the remaining hairs. “And put a smile in your voice when you speak to me,” he added.

But I had taken none of the requirements for Georgia and the admissions office remained unimpressed with my Roman drama, creative writing, dramatic interpretation, and Greek etymology courses. The University of Florida was more lenient and allowed me to transfer if I doubled back for intro classes such as Florida history, phys ed, logic, and a couple of Western civilization courses. Daddy Jack agreed. Gainesville was only three hours from home. “Rena, you’ve got to go with me!” I called her in Birmingham. She hadn’t decided what to do about fall. Her family, too, nixed the Greece plan. At the last minute, miraculously, we were admitted to the University of Florida.

After Frankye hangs café curtains for us, she drives on to visit my oldest sister and her family farther south in central Florida. I’d been there many times since my sister Barbara married when
I was eleven. I love the hazy division between water and land, where the big-horned white Brahman bulls flicked their tails and cooled off, like visions from India, and stalky white birds looked perpetually startled while balancing on one pink leg. In the sandy soil, you can sometimes kick up a shark’s tooth from when the land was under the sea. Frankye likes Florida, too, and forgets to drink excessively when she’s there. If she permanently escaped, would she evade that scorpion roaming through her head? Couldn’t she find a job there—flower arranger at the yacht club, housemother at the college—and a cottage covered in bougainvillea? She stays several weeks this time, playing bridge, shopping, and helping my sister with her three children. When she passes back through Gainesville, she throws out one plan after another. Bring Rena home for Thanksgiving. Let’s go to Atlanta. This summer, the beach. She’s in love with Florida colors and thinks she’ll paint our house in Fitzgerald Bermudasand pink. She scratches off, waving out the window, beeping the horn till she turns the corner.

We have long ID numbers and make-up core classes with hundreds. We meet dozens of foreign students. The Caribbean boys teach us how Latins dance without moving the tops of their bodies; with the fraternity boys we learn to twist and to sip Scotch although we don’t really like it. We cook spaghetti and Rena brings home Mustapha from Libya and Tyge, a thin Dane with a great laugh. I meet sophisticated Gary from Palm Beach and mysterious Joseph from Miami and Buzz, who takes me
shell hunting on Sanibel Island, where Ponce de León supposedly breathed his last after failing to find the fountain of youth.

Cruel, we occasionally call friends who stayed at Randolph-Macon and let them know we’ve had five dates that week. We no longer have strict rules to hamper us but we also no longer have their protection. No handy excuse of curfew for boring dates or difficult situations. At our place, the rousing Russian army chorus and the Academic Festival overture we keep turned up loud. We put glasses to the wall and listen to the newlyweds next door squealing and bouncing. We roast a turkey and don’t know to take the package of neck and gizzard out of the cavity. We thaw frozen vegetables, mix frozen orange juice, fry hamburgers. At R-M, we’d pledged sororities, but here we ignore groups of girls and, instead, easily meet boys in classes. They seemed exotic, coming from such evocative places as Lauderdale, Coral Gables, Sarasota, Clearwater, Tarpon Springs, Tampa, Ocala. We are in paradise. We are living the life of exiles welcomed home to the large banquet of freedom. I can
go
from here. For the first time ever, nothing is clamping me down. Like exiles, we are charged and challenged. As we walk out of our apartment every morning, we feel as if live sparks fly away from our bodies.

I always have loved Florida. A million trees shade Gainesville. Moss-draped oaks feel right to me, the way trees ought to be. Giant azaleas (“a ghastly pink,” Frankye says) banking the houses, palms, dogwoods, scraggly grass in sandy soil—the atmosphere immediately feels like home. The wind through
pines, yes, but I love more the sweet breeze rattling the palms, and the habit they have of thrusting upward, unfurling green as fronds die below. I walk the few blocks to campus, taking different routes just to feel the comfort of trees and the houses built low, as if to stay close to cool ground. Cracker cottages, small brick ranches with jalousied breezeways, miniature Tudors, and gracious white-painted houses with screened porches and long windows—I imagine the lives inside, almost can slip in and take up residence. Someone told me that a lady left her back door open while she was hanging out the wash, and came back in to find an alligator in her kitchen. Nature, I read in Tennyson, “red in tooth and claw”—that’s the far South, the scrubby, steaming, flat far South.

Rena starts dating an older graduate student in herpetology. “That’s snakes,” I say. “He’s a snake handler?” But no, he’s interested in some unsung salamander. There are plenty of impressive reptiles of every stripe and venom around here. She brings home the boyfriend and he’s different, a grown-up who has been in the army and knows what he wants. Rena clearly is part of the plan. I sense that he thinks I’m a bad influence, since he would like to see Rena become more practical. When they go on collecting trips to swamps, she seems fascinated. I drive with them outside town to Paynes Prairie, what William Bartram called “the great Alachua Savannah” in 1774. Once a lake, the vast expanse suddenly drained in the late 1800s, leaving a steamboat stranded high and dry, and a marshy home for
creatures, even for wild horses left by Hernando de Soto. (Why were the Spanish conquistadors always abandoning horses?) A fact of the southern landscape: Limestone foundations can collapse suddenly, leaving circular
bottomless
lakes. Or, a plug can open and a lake can disappear just as mysteriously, leaving prairie and a great expanse for sky. Sun, rain, evening, dawn—the aurous light ripples over the subtly changing grasses. If I were a landscape painter I would sit on a hummock with my brushes and hope the nuanced russet, sage, dun, and gold might seep into the canvas.

A raised narrow road, bullet-straight, crosses the flat, wide-sky prairie. In the heat the asphalt shimmers as though it wants to turn into water. After a storm, hundreds of snakes seeking higher ground slither up onto the road. As we drive across, we can’t help but run over dozens. We pause and roll down the windows. Among arm-thick, five-foot writhers, we see the brilliant slender coral snakes. Scarlet, yolk-yellow, black—the pattern of color tells if it can kill you. Red and black, the rhyme goes, friend of Jack. Red and yellow, kill a fellow. But who’s stopping long enough to see whether black abuts red?

Daddy Jack up and dies. As soon as Frankye hangs up the phone, my first thought is
Now she will be all right
. Frankye had prefaced her explanation of his death by, “Now, I don’t want you to think I had anything to do with it.” Why would she begin that way if she hadn’t?

Daddy Jack’s house, The House, burned. A neighbor found
him in shock, clinging to the monumental magnolia tree in his front yard. Daddy Jack died in two days, just stopped, with no apparent physical cause. Shock, all the newspaper articles lauding his life would repeat. Several stiff drinks probably caused him to fall into a little nap in his chair, where supposedly, his cigarette fell and started the blaze. No doubt he woke with a shock, found himself outside, watching flames rise in the windows of the house his father-in-law built for him and Mother Mayes, his Fanny, in 1906.

Another story quickly forms in my mind.
Red and yellow, kill a fellow
.

Earlier in the evening Daddy Jack and Frankye had supper at the Fitzgerald Country Club, and then stopped at our house for a few nightcaps. I know the bitter water mixed into each drink they shared. My mother was sick of his sour tyranny. “He has a mean streak,” she repeated, and I pictured a broad yellow swath down his hairy back. Because my father never was truly well after his heroic act, and because he was the favorite boy, even though he often was a bad boy, and because my parents used all their money for my father’s long illness, and because my father neglected to renew his insurance policy when he knew he was dying, Daddy Jack had by now “taken care” of us for six years. With a constant reference to the lack of appreciation he received (a drone that echoed my father’s “You all think I am
made
out of money”), he doled out the cash that paid the bills at our house. Frankye, like a child reminding the
parent of an allowance, had to ask for everything each week. I wanted a warm grandfather who genuinely cared about us. Instead, D.J. the D.J., as I called him (to his nonamusement), only criticized. He didn’t like it that I wanted to go out with boys all the time (“Party, party, that’s all you think of”). But he didn’t like it that I liked to read six or eight books a week, either (“Lift your eyes off that book and you’ll see life is not a bed of roses”). I was not allowed to work because it was “beneath” me, or to apply for a scholarship because “we don’t take handouts,” but at the same time I liked clothes too much. I was vain, frivolous, too serious, impractical, smart-mouthed. (Probably all true.) My mother’s flimsy attempts to get a job were ridiculed. While Daddy Jack infantilized her, at the same time he resented her dependence. For the few months she commuted to South Georgia State College in Douglas, taking English 1A and trying to think of something she could do to get out of her financial situation, Daddy Jack denied she had a problem, and constantly made fun of “the college girl.” The dark undercurrent was his sexual attraction to my mother, his favorite son’s lovely wife. My mother used his attraction for her own purposes and hated him for it.

Is it my impotence that provokes the imaginary action now? Did I want her to burn his house?

In this fantasy, it’s late and Frankye sends him home. Reeling a little, she changes to her red flats and walks the two blocks from our house to his. With no moon, the house looms large and
solitary against the dark. She sees his profile in the window as he nods in his armchair. She lets herself in the always-unlocked back door and silently passes through the kitchen and dining room. As she leans into the living room, she hears him snorting in sleep. The yellowing chintz draperies, not changed since Mother Mayes died, hang stiffly with old dust. She glances out the window. No one. She strikes a match and touches it to the printed coral and pink roses. Immediately, a blaze erupts. She slips out the back door, down the alley to Roanoke Drive, and then turns back toward Lemon Street, throwing the match in the Arnolds’s yard. By the time the sirens start, she is at home in her nightgown, sipping a bit of Southern Comfort, or so I imagine.

My sister from Lakeland drives by Gainesville and we head toward Fitz to Daddy Jack’s funeral. “Do you think Mother set Daddy Jack’s house on fire?”

My sister keeps her eyes on the road north. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Didn’t Big Mama’s house burn, too, that weird house in Vidalia?”

“I don’t remember and I don’t want to remember.” She turns up the radio and I slump down, pretending to fall asleep. Perhaps the fire did spread from his fallen cigarette, and my mother remains innocent. Big Mama’s weird house on Franklin Street did burn mysteriously long before I was born. And Big Mama’s mother’s house—I recall that sepia photograph taken on the
porch where the big family squints into the light, with Big Mama in glasses holding a baby.