Under Magnolia: A Southern Memoir (31 page)

Once the pledging ends, a houseful of thirty girls, all Chi Omega material, settle in for the semester: shaving cream fights, three a.m. laughing shrieks in the hall, pajama study groups, chapter meetings with secret rituals, dinner served by fraternity boys, hall phone constantly ringing, communal bathroom steaming with scents of lime shampoo, Chanel No. 5, hair spray, and menstrual blood.

With no privacy available, I soon discover the library’s music carrels, essentially closets with stereos, that I can sign out by the hour. I love to close the door and write in my notebook while listening to Wagner’s
Tristan and Isolde
and Bach’s cello suites, which sound like music the heart would write if it could.
I’m taking aesthetics, Renaissance lit, Shakespeare tragedies, French, individual work in religion, history of art—an intense schedule I devised to keep myself swamped with work. I will graduate and somehow work in Europe, where I will write novels. I’ll play. I’ll party. But I will not fall for anyone, not even the divine Joseph, whose wit keeps me laughing and whose walk seems smooth and oddly motionless, an animated Egyptian statue. The grader in my Shakespeare class asks me out, saying he’d like to talk about my Lear paper. After two dates, I don’t want to see him again and my A papers are suddenly B papers. I drop Buzz, who has gained fifteen pounds. Even Gary moves on to another girlfriend.

In late October, I walk into the student union with Saralyn, and she stops to talk to a group of boys playing cards. One of them fans out his royal flush on the table and leans back in his chair. We look at each other and he stands up. “Hey, I’m Frank.” His eyes are Atlantic green with flecks like mica. He’s wearing a white dress shirt with jeans. Cool. I’ve never seen him before but I recognize him immediately.

I run into him the next night at Gatorland and we dance. He can dance! The way he holds his head back and tilted as he looks down at me reminds me of my father. His eyes are like David’s. He’s tensile and lithe. He seems like the boy I would want to be if I were a boy. Does this explain the familiarity I feel as we dance to “Unchained Melody”? The melody builds slowly, inevitably, rising like warm bread dough in a bowl.
I-I-I
neeeed your love …
At the high trembling, heart-cracking
neeed
, Frank tightens his arms, pulling me closer.
I’ll be coming home, wait for me
. Next, the jukebox plays Ray Charles singing “Georgia on My Mind.” He whispers in my ear, “Hey, Georgia.”
The road leads back to you
. Right then I thought, I’d dance with him for the rest of my life.

Letter to Rena:

Normal girl. Later in the year, I write to Rena:

Rena and I often had laughed over Gerard Manley Hopkins’s description of nuns as dying of ingrown virginity.

Frank and I meet each other’s family over spring break, spending Easter at his house in Pensacola, where we walk the sublime Gulf beaches, so undeveloped and serene, and buy a bucket of shrimp from the dock. I love the history of the town and the exotic street names: Zaragoza, Miramar, Salamanca, Palafox. I don’t warm to his parents. His grumpy father props in his armchair smoking. Because of my rigorous training, I know a tyrant when I meet one. His mother waits on him like a servant. She’s gracious and welcoming to me and I know Frank spent his high school years helping her peel and chop on Saturdays, while they listened to opera together in the kitchen. Sometimes one image can stand for a whole relationship and I take that as who they are together. Frankye always has advised, “Marry an orphan,” but that is not going to happen.

Whatever they are, the visit is fun. We picnic at the Civil War fort among the wildflowers and I read Yeats aloud and Frank shows me his old schools and friends’ houses. Voltage runs between us, the exhilarating feeling I always have when I fall in love, but this time there is a calm, certain center. With others, I always snagged on “but.” But he has a girlfriend, but he’s going to live a stodgy life, but he’s not that smart … Now, we walk into a clearing, two would-be adventurers. A future to invent.

As it has to be, traveling to Fitz is fraught. I forewarn, but
nothing prepares Frank for the moment when he asks Frankye for my hand in marriage. He sits down with her in the living room. “Frances and I, as you know, want to marry. I surely would like your blessing.”

Without a pause, she replies, “That is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard of.”

“Boy,” he says later, “how did you survive all this?” I introduce him to some of my friends, then we visit the church where the ceremony will take place. Late in the afternoon, we walk over to see The House. Hazel has restored it on the outside. Inside it’s still burned. Peering in we see her charred piano, blistered walls, and the staircase sagging along the wall. Flowers line the front walkway. The brass door knocker gleams as though polished this morning. I’m relieved that he still loves me after we return to school.

I finish the year with a hideous case of poison ivy. Frank and I usually meet in class gaps and walk down to a sinkhole pond to talk and watch a granddaddy gator on the other side snapping at insects. We sit in lush weeds. The poison ivy starts on my inside arm, just where I had it when I was in my sister Nancy’s wedding at age thirteen. Then, Daddy was busy dying, my sister about to move to French Morocco, my mother dancing on the head of a pin. I lather myself in chamomile lotion. The poison turns systemic. Soon it spreads to my face, which looks like the surface of the moon, then to my legs and arms—an advanced stage of jungle rot. I am allergic to chamomile. The doctors
become alarmed at my listlessness and start me on steroid shots. Gary gives me a bell to ring, like a medieval leper. I stay in my room, reading
Candide
and swabbing myself with baking soda and water. In some odd way I cannot understand, the poison ivy eruption seems as though it comes from my fear of school ending and of making an enormous decision. My life has sped up, hurling me along toward the unknown. Should I stop it? Go home and try to force Frankye … I take long showers. The hot water on my live skin produces exquisite pleasure/pain. You do have to cast your bread upon the waters, yes? I’m not going home.

Frank sends flowers, via Saralyn, and she looks out for me. While the rash subsides, I have euphoric surges, a reaction to the steroids. With the energy of a ten-year-old, I return to class and write what I consider brilliant papers. They come back marked “I don’t follow you here,” and “This paragraph shows you know something more than the rest of the paper indicates.” My make-up phys ed class is bait casting. We toss slow and elegant casts across a field, with Mr. Philpot shouting encouragement.
It’s all in the wrist
. On one long and elegant maneuver, my line soars, then as it sinks, the fishhook embeds in Mr. Philpot’s shiny bald head. A friend drives him to emergency, where the silver barb is—painfully—extracted. Graciously, he awards me a B for the class.

For a six-week session in the summer, I move to a dorm for my last gasp of requirements. Frank has gone home to work by
day as a roofer and on weekends as a draftsman in a real estate office. He’s saving for a car. What thrills me most about him is not his handsome face. He’s not just smart, he’s brilliant, though he maintains that he never does more than what’s necessary to make an A. And he’s open to living in Europe, not at all headed for the accepted idea of the future. We talk about living in England. He will be an Oxford don and I will write novels. He’s sailing through a five-year engineering program. Since we must be in Gainesville another year, I line up my first job ever at a clothing shop. I’d applied for a social worker position but my whole family disapproved and, on second thought, I didn’t want to be around more down-and-out problems when my home front was bad enough without further misery.

I adore Gainesville in the calm summer—the soaring temperature and the warm rain, wet streets with steam rising, the night scents of dripping leaves. There’s something dreamy about summer school, more relaxed without the party frenzy. I’m memorizing the opening to the
Canterbury Tales
. Soon I’m walking home from the library with the studly, as my roommate calls him, Rich Herrin, who sits by me in Chaucer. Our talks grow more intimate. He throws his arm around me as we stop to look at the university mascot, Albert, a penned alligator. Rich starts a conversation, letting the gator say what it’s really like to put up with football maniacs. Rich has thick blond eyelashes. He’s funny. He leans to kiss me but I turn away. I suddenly realize that I could fall in love with him. He’ll be a lawyer in Coral Gables. I will open a bookstore and write books. A phone call, and my life will go in a different direction. Wait. Could
this cycle continue forever? Rich likes Middle English and is a total Florida boy, tan, muscular, ready to party. Ready to be ready. I slip out from under his arm. Time to close the fire door. Grow up.

The small wedding could not take place at midnight. The Methodist minister said midnight was a “furtive” hour and he would go no later than nine. He probably thought I was pregnant, since the wedding was hastily organized, and so unlike the Mayes girls. My sisters each had a wedding for a thousand, dinners of guinea hen and quail, honeymoons in the Caribbean. Now Frankye pivots. “Why can’t you elope if you plan to go through with this? Well, sister, believe you me this is the last wedding I plan to attend. You should have married David and stayed home.”

Summer school ends and I arrive home with my hard-earned BA degree. Frank drives up in his new car, a twelve-year-old Chevy named Old Blue. I’m ebullient. He has come for me. What luck we have between us. We are dying to escape into real life. We escape Frankye by spending as much time as possible in the party-room barn behind our house, wrapped around each other in the same chair. Miraculously, I am a virgin, barely so but still officially. Our local doctor refuses to prescribe the birth control pill—too dangerous—but has given me some foam to try on the wedding night.

On the afternoon of the wedding, as I lay out my hose and satin shoes, the phone rings—
Hey, babes. That you?
Rich Herrin calling from Coral Gables.
Please don’t go through with this. Marry
me. I’ll take you to Paris. You’re the only girl I want
. For a moment I think of bolting.

I wash my own hair and polish my nails. Lipstick, a brush of mascara, the hundred tiny pearls all buttoned. I’m ready.

Instead of flowers, I carry a leather book of Keats’s poems. My little niece, Jane, seems to be the only family member who is excited. As I walk down the aisle Frankye leans out and grabs my dress. I turn to hear what she has to say; does she have some final redeeming words of wisdom? “It won’t last six months,” she says. I stumble slightly, suppress a laugh, and walk forward.

She has managed to arrange a supper afterward at the Elks Club, the only pretty venue in town. She looks faded in the silky limp dress she bought for my sister’s wedding ten years ago. I’m just thankful that she doesn’t bring down the house somehow and reveal to Frank’s family that she has been shot out of a cannon.

In our furnished duplex cottage I tape poems around the sink so I can memorize as I wash dishes. Already, I can cook. Raised around women making great food, I’ve absorbed more than I realized. Our favorite is called Chicken Florence. Cut-up breasts dipped in egg, covered with bread crumbs and Parmesan from a little green container, quickly sautéed then baked in the oven with a half stick of melted butter. After work, I make spaghetti, meat loaf, or Willie Bell’s fried chicken with a dash of red pepper. I love my kitchen and, as if all the future kitchens I will have flash before me, know that I’m at home cradling a bowl and beating something with a wooden spoon.

I’m the sole supporter—wouldn’t Daddy Jack be surprised? Frank’s father said if he was old enough to marry, he was old enough to support himself. Although the pay is low, I’m immensely happy at my sales job. Bill Donigan, owner of the shop, hires people he likes. The four of us fool around all day, but manage to sell fantastically and keep the shop pristine and straight. Bill is unusually handsome. Too bad he’s so old, Saralyn says. He’s thirty.