Homesick (8 page)

Despite Mama’s best efforts to make me into Miss Magnolia Blossom, by the end of my high school years that deep, contrarian part of me—the Daddy’s girl part—had begun to assert itself. I knew that if I stayed in Meridian, I’d spend my life worrying over the things I’d never had the chance to do, because they just weren’t available in a small Southern town. I might have had a comfortable life, following the path that society laid out for young women like me. But it would have meant giving up on something—on the unknown, on the chance to ask those questions—and somehow I knew it. So I decided I would leave Meridian. I might come back someday, but if and when I did I would bring with me some knowledge of the outside world, some knowledge of myself and what I was capable of.

I finished high school a year early, and spent a year at a local junior college preparing for full-fledged university study. During that time I bought a Barron’s guide to colleges, looking for the perfect school. Most of my friends were going off to Ole Miss or Mississippi State, but by then my teenage wanderlust was too strong. I deliberately chose an out-of-state school, just to meet new people. For whatever reason—probably having to do with my longing for tradition—I concluded that William and Mary, the oldest college in the South (and second oldest in the United States), was the place for me.

During my spring semester at junior college I sent off for an application to William and Mary, but it turned out they wouldn’t be able to accept me until the following spring. What would I do for the fall semester? Spending it at Ole Miss or State was out of the question. I decided to give the University of Alabama a chance. One semester wouldn’t be so bad, and it would help me get used to living away from home.

I told Mama and Daddy my plan, and they were content. But for me that summer passed too slowly. By now Meridian felt like a fishbowl, and I squirmed with anticipation of leaving.

Finally, in the waning days of August 1974, I said goodbye to my fretful mama and my best friend, Jeanne, the only ones to see me off; my stoic daddy had gone down to our beach house for the weekend, doubtless shying away from an emotional goodbye. I cranked my red Barracuda, slipped Dan Fogelberg into the 8-track, set my compass for Tuscaloosa, and drove off alone, into my future.

3

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When I look back on it now, through the crystal lens of hindsight, it doesn’t surprise me that I chose to leave Mississippi to go off to college in another state—that I left everything I knew, in search of a world I knew not at all. What does surprise me, as I think back on that ninety-minute northeasterly ramble across the Alabama border from Meridian to Tuscaloosa, is that I made the trip by myself. As I remember it, most kids who set off for college in my day hung on to their parents as long as they could—or at least long enough to help with the unpacking and share a few teary goodbyes outside the dormitory, before sending them back home with a lighter car and a heavier heart.

But the interior journey I was making, as I drove away from my home and my family, wasn’t like that at all. Setting off alone the way I did made me feel like—well, maybe Lewis and Clark. I must have made it clear to Mama and Daddy that I was fine going off by myself, and in retrospect, I guess there was something deep within me telling me to try and cut those apron strings.

The whole idea of college must have seemed especially romantic to my generation of teenage girls, who read
Love Story
in high school. I’m not even sure I’d ever heard of the Ivy League before then; now, though, I spent days on end dreaming of studying at Radcliffe, which appeared so stylish and romantic to my seventeen-year-old mind. I even named my Barracuda after Ollie, the character played by Ryan O’Neal in the movie. It’s strange today to realize how little thought I’d given to the world beyond my hometown. But America was a different place then; I suspect there were many people like my family, who just didn’t spend much time worrying about what it might be like to live elsewhere. Today, thanks to the movies, TV, and the Internet, our kids grow up thinking of the whole country, maybe even the planet, as their own. My childhood world was a much smaller place.

From my first day of college onward, though, the University of Alabama gave me all the world I was ready to handle. My high school class had thirty-five students; now I was entering a campus of sixteen thousand. When I arrived on that first fall day, I knew only one solitary soul on campus—a girl named Neva, who’d also come from Meridian. When I think back to the soundtrack of my life then—dominated by melancholy singer-songwriters like Dan Fogelberg and Joni Mitchell—it seems as though this must have been a mournful, introspective time. But in truth what I remember was very little anxiety, and a tremendous amount of excitement. My worries (
How will I ever find my way around this campus?
) were incidental, and soon were swept away in a flush of excitement and pioneer spirit.

After a week or so in a dorm I didn’t like at all, I tried to sneak in and live with Neva, but her roommate took great objection. Finally, though, I learned that the university had an honors dorm, and much to my delight my grades were good enough to get me in. Honors-dorm residents were eligible for certain coveted privileges—namely, that guys could come up for a visit. And before too long the idea of transferring to William and Mary after a year faded into nostalgia. In the haze of my memory, the rest of my freshman year at Bama is like one long evening spent lighting candles and playing Phoebe Snow, and in my more thoughtful moments wondering gleefully,
How on earth did I get here?

I chose the University of Alabama largely on the recommendation of my high school art teacher, Mrs. Gilder, who had gone there herself. I had been serious about art since the seventh grade, when I was selected to take advanced painting and drawing classes. There’s nothing like a dose of unsolicited approval to get a young girl motivated; I decided right then that I wanted to be a painter.

When I first arrived in Tuscaloosa, the art program was my primary focus. As far as I was concerned, the old buildings where the art classes were held—small French Quarterlike structures sheathed in wrought-iron filigree, and centered around lush courtyards—were the closest I was ever going to get to the ateliers of the nineteenth-century French Impressionists whose work I so loved. The air was fragrant with the heady smells of turpentine and paint, and I sailed through my classes in art history and figure drawing, carried along by gushing enthusiasm for the world of beauty that was opening up to me. The greater part of it was sheer excitement over painting itself, and the discovery of new artists (who may have been Old Masters, but were still new to me). But part of the enchantment of those days was meeting other people who shared my sensibilities and interests. For the first time, I began to believe that I wasn’t such a square peg after all. Not only was I discovering and deepening my passion for art, I was making friends with young people who were a lot like me, many of them from small Southern towns, too.

For me, the intellectual and social thrill of all this was beyond anything I could have anticipated—though I realize now, with affection, that when it came to art, Tuscaloosa in the 1970s wasn’t exactly fin de siècle Paris. But it felt that way to me back then, and it may have been all I could have withstood at the time. For in some meaningful ways—more meaningful than I knew at the time—the trip from Meridian to Tuscaloosa wasn’t much of a trip at all.

In truth, the school I’d chosen was an extension of home. I wouldn’t have any of my childhood beliefs challenged in a serious way at Alabama, as I might have at a Northern school. Of course, I was never going to be the stereotypical alienated artist, filled with contempt and disdain for tradition or commerciality. As engaged as I was by my art classes, the locus of my social life at the university was an institution designed to ensure the carrying on of traditions of all kinds: the Greek fraternity and sorority system.

Southerners treasure the clubbiness of the Greek lifestyle, the sense of importance given to social ritual—and it shows. Whether it’s at Ole Miss, LSU, the University of Georgia, or Alabama, one of the most glorious sights on any Southern campus is the array of grand old homes that house the fraternities and sororities. And no block in Beverly Hills is as grand as Alabama’s Sorority Row, a string of residences that can only be described as plantation homes without the plantation. The stately grandeur of these homes, and the effort made to keep them in decent repair despite the wear and tear of decades of student use and abuse, is a testament to their enduring memory in the hearts of the Greek alums who populate the upper reaches of Southern social and economic life.

When I left for college, I made sure to get there in time for rush, that short, intense period when aspiring fraternity or sorority members make the rounds of all the parties—ice-water teas, we called them—trying to find the right fit. One of the teas I attended was at Chi Omega, whose house was as big as a Mississippi riverboat, and filigreed with wrought-iron balconies just like a French Quarter town house. And when we started hearing back, it was Chi O whose bid I accepted. For the rest of my college days, my Chi O sisters would stand in for my family, offering me the warm and welcoming stability of a home away from home.

But it wasn’t a perfect system, to be sure. There was something contrived about the hasty bonding of sorority sisters that didn’t always sit right with me. And for all the apparent closeness we felt in the sorority house, if anyone there was harboring secrets, nobody really talked about them. If you suffered from an eating disorder or depression or anything that would make others think you were less than perfect, you never, ever brought it up. Now and then we’d hear a girl throwing up in the bathroom, and we’d know, but we pretended not to hear. A Southern lady didn’t talk about such things.

In a world of twenty-four-hour Jerry Springer confessionals, it’s easy to feel that people have grown all too ready to open up their private lives for public consumption. But there we were, a houseful of girls in this exciting yet vulnerable time in our lives, living together as a family, yet suffering silently, deathly afraid to air anything that resembled dirty laundry. Today, at least, a woman can address her problems openly, with friends, counselors, even family. But back then all that mattered was what was proper. Years after we graduated, one of my sorority sisters wrote me and revealed that she’d been sexually abused as a child. And when I think of her carrying that burden alone for so long, I’m glad that this is one old-school legacy my children won’t share.

Along those lines, we didn’t talk much about sex. Of course, we did spend plenty of time thinking about boys, as sorority sisters everywhere are prone to do. I remember driving around campus, thinking,
My husband is around here somewhere
. But this was 1974, and Alabama was a pretty conservative place. Remember Lynyrd Skynyrd’s line from “Sweet Home Alabama”: “Watergate doesn’t bother me/Does your conscience bother you?” That pretty much described the atmosphere at the university. College campuses elsewhere might have been the sites of freewheeling, seventies-era sexuality, but for all practical purposes the sexual revolution hadn’t yet arrived in Tuscaloosa.

The sorority environment was designed to prevent vice more than encourage virtue: there was always somebody watching over you. Kiss your date good night on the front porch, and you’d get slapped with a fine; God forbid the two of you should stay out all night together, for you’d return to find they’d put a chair in your bed on the sleeping porch, a signal of your wicked ways. When my Catholic suitemate Ginger and I began getting more involved with our first serious boyfriends, we stayed up late at night searching the Bible for clues about just how far we could go with them and still avoid the stain of sin. We were so earnest, so sweet—and so naive!