Peachtree Road (30 page)

Even the girls who were pinned were presumed chaste until proven otherwise, and since there was literally no way to do that except by an obvious pregnancy, the presumption held even when the couple’s automobile was seen to be rocking in the last row of the drive-in like a dory in a high gale. Virgins or not, the Pinks of Atlanta twitched through their high school years wearing chastity like armor, and the girl who screwed and liked it, or even worse, told, was out of the pack faster than a spavined yearling in a migratory caribou herd. I never knew a Buckhead Pink who had sex and admitted it except Lucy, and somehow all rules were off when it came to her. The prices she paid were higher, and had been paid earlier, than any we could exact.

It was an era of incredible double standards and witless innuendo, fueled by unrequited lust and made both piquant and terrifying by the absolute taboo of pregnancy. “P.G.” or

“preggers” or “knocked up” were punch lines to locker room jokes and also the words a Jell dreaded most to hear from a white-faced, tearful steady. For a Pink, pregnancy was pure and simple social suicide. I’m sure many more Buckhead girls than I knew about made predawn visits to the sinister clinic in Copper Hill, Tennessee, whose address every prudent Jell secreted in his wallet along with the Trojans, and I am equally sure a

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number of quiet visits to respectable Northside physicians, who just happened to be family friends, ended in more than an invoice. Snake Cheatham, who went through Emory Med and interned at Grady before he snared a residency at Piedmont, told me much later that during our college years some people whose names were most vividly and fondly inscribed in our
Hi-Ways
came to him asking how to terminate a pregnancy…but that was when we were, mostly, at Tech and Georgia, in the wider and looser days of fraternity parties in earnest and far more open drinking.

I knew of no illicit pregnancies though there was always talk going around. I don’t know how the Jells of my high school days coped when they got caught, if they did. Not one of the Pinks dropped abruptly out of school like one or two anonymous non-Pinks did each year. Maybe some of those summers abroad, or at relatives’ cottages at the more remote resorts, had dual purposes; I wouldn’t have known a pregnancy in those days if the water had burst at my feet.

And no matter what lies and half-truths we told each other, no matter what female functions and phenomena we tittered about—breasts, buttocks, menstruation, masturbation, aph-rodisiacs, sexual techniques, the dark convolvulus of the female genitalia—we would not have talked about pregnancy and abortion. It was far too terrifying and too near.

But the quest for tail went on unabated through our high school years and into and through college. Some Jells got their first experience with sex from Frances Spurling, a cheerful nymphomaniac of fifteen who lived with her parents behind a seedy white frame grocery store on Roswell Road, who would call up the boy of her choice and say, “Your bananas are ready. You can pick them up at three.” Or four, or whenever her parents were not about. And the boy would go, trembling and swaggering, over to the store and park behind the stock shed

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out back and steal into the filthy, black, cobwebby interior, and Frances, her underpants down around her meaty ankles, would be awaiting him on a pile of gunnysacks, and would grab him and stuff him inside her with no more ado than if she were manning the grocery cash register, and buck wildly for a moment, until he spilled his nervous seed more in bewilderment and haste than passion, and then dry herself off with the gunnysack and push him, still zipping up, out the door, saying, “Bananas are a dollar a pound this week.”

My own inevitable encounter with Frances came the Hal-loween I was fourteen, a good year after everyone else I knew claimed to have been ushered through the gates of Heaven by her. For sheer ignominy, little in my life has ever matched it.

The year before that, Snake Cheatham had organized a small and highly elect club, a sort of secret society among the Buckhead Jells, called the Touchdown Club, and membership was based solely upon one’s having scored with a woman. Since there was no conceivable way to prove this with any Pink in her right mind, the initiation rite agreed upon was a visit to Frances Spurling, the successful completion of which she rewarded with an
X
made with red ballpoint ink on the wrist of the new initiate. It was diabolically clever and simple: Frances proved to be incorruptible in this matter, and would not award the coveted red
X
unless the deed was, indeed, accomplished. Since she received from each initiate the sum of two dollars cash money for each rite of passage, the temptation to accept the occasional discreet bribe must have been great, but Frances hung tough. Once on the path to the storage shed behind the grocery, one knew one had no recourse but to perform.

Charlie Gentry and I were the last of the Buckhead Boys to join the Touchdown Club, and finally let ourselves be goaded and humiliated into this Allhallows 230 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

foray simply because there was no other even faintly honorable alternative.

“Tonight or never, Bondurant and Gentry,” Snake jeered that afternoon. “And if it’s never, the whole school’s going to know about it in the morning. Frances awaits you at nine.

X
marks the spot.”

Charlie and I set out that night with the spirits of the Atlanta dead and the hoots and jeers of the all-too-live Buckhead Boys in our ears, desperation and utter despair stopping our voices.

“I’ll probably get asthma and die,” Charlie said finally, pedaling woefully along beside me out black Roswell Road on his bicycle. “I’ll probably choke to death right there on top of old Frances, or wherever you’re supposed to get. I hope I do.”

“Listen,” I said, shame nearly strangling me. “I’ve got a red ballpoint pen and twenty-five dollars. It’s all I’ve saved for the past two years. I’m going to offer to buy her off, and if she says no, we can just make an
X
on our wrists and say we did, and she’s lying.”

“No,” said Charlie, who would rather face Torquemada than lie. “We can’t do that, Shep.”

“Well, I can,” I flared. “You and your principles can fuck old Frances Spurling till midnight, if you can’t bear to lie about her. Thank goodness I’m not as pure as you.”

“I’m not pure,” Charlie said miserably. “I’ve got seventeen dollars in my pocket myself. But if she won’t take our money we’re dead, because Snake says she has her own secret way of making the
X
, and nobody but her knows what it is. It won’t do us any good to lie.”

We pedaled on in silence, doomed.

But the great god Pan was kind to us that night. When we reached the stygian storage shed behind the dark grocery and knocked timidly on the door, and at the muffled “Come in,” pushed it open and went inside, it was to see Frances Spurling, by the light of a khaki plastic PEACHTREE ROAD / 231

Girl Scout flashlight, sprawled out on her gunnysacks looking distinctly unseductive in flannel pajamas, a big, bulky wool bathrobe and huge fleecy slippers. Even Charlie and I could tell it was no costume for deflowering youths. Our hearts leaped up in our racketing breasts.

“You can just forget it for tonight,” Frances said sullenly.

“I fell off the roof just before you came.”

“Jesus,” I said, wincing. “You shouldn’t be out here, Frances. Did it…is it real bad?”

“Well, it ain’t a lot of fun, I’ll tell you,” she said. “But there ain’t going to be any bananas tonight, you bet.”

“Lord, I guess not,” Charlie said vehemently, real horror in his eyes. “You want us to call your folks? They probably ought to take you to the doctor….”

“I don’t need no doctor, I just need to get in bed with a heating pad,” she said. “I been out there in the cold waiting for y’ll since eight. I reckon that’s worth two dollars.”

“Well, sure,” I said, reaching for my wallet, deliverance spinning lightly in my ringing ears.

“No,” Charlie said stubbornly. “I’m sorry about your…accident, Frances, but it’s not our fault. We didn’t know…and we came all the way out here on our bicycles. I don’t see how you can ask for two dollars for that.”

“Charlie…” I began desperately.

“We’ll give it to you if you’ll do the
X
’s, though,” he said.

She glared at him balkily. Then she said crossly, “Oh, shit, all right, stick your wrists out here.”

We did. She made quick, sharp crisscrosses on them, and then held her fat pink palm out for the money. I got mine out. Charlie did too, and then paused.

“Are they the right
X
’s?” he said.

“They’re the right
X
’s, you little sonofabitch,” she said.

“Now get on out of here. My daddy would shoot you in the head if he caught you out here.”

232 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

We went. We went pedaling back down Roswell Road toward the three-way intersection where Snake and the others were waiting for us with flags flying and hearts high, shouting and singing, “We’re off to see the Wizard” and “I’ve been working on the railroad.”

“I’ve been working on old Frances,” we bellowed.

But as we neared the intersection Charlie began to go quiet, and when we got off our bikes and went up to Snake and held out our anointed wrists, Charlie suddenly blurted,

“Wait a minute. It’s all a lie. We didn’t. We couldn’t. I mean, Frances couldn’t. She fell off the top of her house tonight and hurt herself. She really couldn’t. We did try, Snake.”

Snake just stared at us for a moment, and then he began to laugh. He hugged himself and staggered around on the freezing sidewalk; he bent double and yelled and wept and howled with laughter; he beat the wall of Wender & Roberts, and covered his face with his hands, and bayed his hideous mirth to the sky. All the others laughed, too. Ben, and Tom Goodwin, and Pres, and A.J.—they laughed and laughed, and it seemed to me that I would hear the sound of that laughter eternities later, safe at last under the quiet earth of Oakland.

“You silly shits,” Snake roared. “‘She fell off the top of her house and hurt herself’! Oh, Jesus! Don’t you know anything? She fell off the roof! She got the curse! She was riding the rag! She was flying Baker flag! Oh, Jesus!”

He did not, after all, tell the entire school that Charlie and I failed in our attempt to screw Frances Spurling. He simply and for four years after that awful night called us, in front of everyone we knew, the Roofing Brothers. I do not know to this day if anyone outside our crowd knew what it meant.

Probably everyone did.

It was a high price to pay for not buying Frances’s bananas.

PEACHTREE ROAD / 233

Others like Frances did a brisk trade in the various neighborhoods adjacent to Buckhead, and I suppose it’s a good thing, or the Jells would have, to a man, gone to their marriage beds virgins. But I can’t think there was a lot of romance in it, and we lived, then, for romance. Other boys—rogue males like Boo Cutler and Floyd Sutton—were commonly known to screw nearly constantly, anyone who caught their fancy, and this proficiency was as much a part of their lustrous legends as their expertise with drag racing and shine running. We admired it enormously, but, like the dragging, few of us sought to emulate it. No Pink would have dated twice a Jell who put a serious move on her, and Jellhood was more to be cherished, in those days, even than nooky.

No. We necked and petted and lied and leered and ached and cursed and jerked off, but fuck we did not, most of us, until the altar was virtually in sight. I am sure that’s why so many of us married on the very day we graduated from college, and a few even before. I am equally sure that the high mortality among my crowd’s marriages was due to that long enforced abstinence. By the time we got out of college, we simply couldn’t wait any longer to get laid. Whatever com-patibility and commonality of interest we had with our girls was centered below our waists.

It was a strange time in the world, and in Atlanta too, so far as sex went. Lucy and I talked about it once, late in the sixties when both of us had been burned by passion and its aftermath and knew, at least a bit better, of what we spoke.

“You know,” she said, looking across at me in the gloom of the summerhouse veranda in a spring twilight. “It’s funny when you think about our parents’ lives while we were growing up. There wasn’t any scandal. I can’t remember any great, glamorous sexual scandals like you hear about among the filthy rich in other places, like

234 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

Palm Beach or Long Island or Los Angeles, places like that.

We had some divorces, and lots of nervous breakdowns and alcoholics, and suicides and all that stuff, but do you ever remember a single soul running off with somebody else’s wife or husband, or getting caught in bed, or breaking up marriages, or any of the good stuff? Can you remember even one crime of passion? I can’t. Lord, look at Mama; if ever there was a woman made to stay on her back and fuck her way through the Northside, it was her; still is, the way she looks. And the way she was before she married Daddy. But never since she set foot in this house has she had a date; I can’t even remember her looking sideways at a man, not to mention flirting a little, or wearing something sexy. She might as well be a nun. And Mama is no saint, believe me. It’s this town. What is there in this town?”

I thought about it. She was right. Sexual scandal had no part in the lives of anyone of my parents’ generation; not that I knew of, anyway.

“I guess it’s because most of us haven’t had our money very long,” I said. “And we’re not all that grounded in our status, if we have any. If you’re new rich, you’re not too likely to risk your social status with scandal. Not that kind, anyway. I guess that comes later, in the older places like Charleston and New Orleans and Savannah, or the really big ones like New York, where nobody gives a damn. It was the early fifties then, after all. Now, when anything goes and everybody’s doing everything with everybody, nobody cares anymore. That generation sinned, of course, but it seems like they were more sins of omission than commission. And the wages were the wages of repression. I think maybe everybody was too busy making money.”