Under Magnolia: A Southern Memoir (24 page)

On weekends, I go farther and farther, though there’s a limit to how far you can get on trains and buses and still get back by ten thirty Sunday night. R-M made it difficult to stray far afield: They scheduled Saturday classes. I’ve never heard of another school in modern times with Saturday classes. Girls appear at eight thirty, raincoats wrapped over their nightgowns or pajamas, hair unrolled, barely combed, deeply demoralized, vacant eyes staring at Dr. Voorhis as he consults his yellowed three-by-fives. He harps on the Hapsburgs. World history. Invasion from without, decay from within. All wars begin in spring.

I cut. Skip to Annapolis or Princeton or Chapel Hill. Annapolis was one school more mightily skewed than ours. Those constant salutes! And all the crew-cut officers always around. But one of the ladies who takes in dates has a basement room that is a true pit. In the few minutes the midshipmen have to
deliver the dates at curfew, something could happen, though not much can take place on those cushions in the dark. For sure, everyone is stone sober after a dance with fruity fruit punch and crackers, the same snack served in Robert E. Lee kindergarten in Fitzgerald, Georgia. My friend Joan already is in love and knows she will marry Mike, whose friend I dated. He came from Des Moines, Iowa, but loved the sea. West of the Mississippi, my imagination flattens out into an endless corn prairie. I simply can’t see that anyone irresistable could come from such a place. Even so, he is. But he kisses fast and I’m glad of the dark so I can wipe his saliva on my sleeve rather than swallow it. Joan and I feel stirred in chapel with all the midshipmen singing “Eternal Father” under the cold light from the highest windows. We love sailing in yawls on the Chesapeake Bay, holding hands under the table in crowded tearooms crammed with uniforms and lovely girls who streamed in from girls’ schools every weekend they were allowed.

Princeton, oh, even better. The dreaming spires of Scott Fitzgerald, pink blooming trees along the lake, the big talk in the eating clubs, the town that looks like a model village for an HO scale train set. Rena’s high school boyfriend Jamie fixes me up with his friend Ernie. The football coach’s wife gives us the run of her house. The coach had died and one room is filled with his trophies and ribbons. Ernie calls me
cara mia
and we take long walks across campus, past the Princeton Inn, to the grad school where the students dine in robes. Late at night the living room is littered with couples making out in armchairs, on the floor, four to the sofa. Someone plays “Misty” on the
piano. We kiss until we are dizzy and sweaty. Heaven. That was heaven. Sunday mornings at Ivy Club we sip milk punch and listen to a string quartet, and begin counting the minutes until the train south.

Rena and I make it back at the last instant. All quiet on the western front. We slide our bags down the hallways then bump them up the stairs, looking up for waiting friends who want to know how it was, what did he say, did you meet anyone else, looking up at each scrubbed, creamed face, hair in rollers, book in hand.
I probably should have stayed here and studied for the anatomy quiz tomorrow
.

The reason we follow the elaborate rule book is the honor system: a system devised not just to prevent cheating in classes but an inclusive, strict code of ratting on anyone who broke any rule. Anyone’s broken rule was tied to your “honor.” If you see someone 19.9 miles away from school pop a beer, you are on your honor to turn her in to the council. Any infraction is up to you. Your conscience should burn if you know someone sneaked out the window after hours at Mrs. Clark’s in Charlottesville. You can’t just turn over and go to sleep. For this girl’s own good, you must turn her in. This is extolled as a system of mutual trust.

Once turned in, the culprit would be summoned in the middle of the night to march down to the dean’s office to face a black-robed tribunal of faculty and peers. At this mini inquisition, you could be drummed out of school. Helen, who caused
a ruckus at UVA involving two boys in a bed (reported from fraternity mother to date-house mother to R-M dorm mother) never saw Monday morning at R-M again. Calm-spoken, outraged faces greeted her at the door. Since the process was secret, I never learned the lesser forms of retribution.

Was my going against the prescribed academic grain a perverse way of rebelling against rigidity, a freedom stakeout that didn’t haul me before the midnight court? Not sure. I do know that a rigid sense of truth took root in me. My mother always encouraged the “white lie.”
Just tell him you are going out of town. Say you’re sick. You have another invitation. Tell them someone backed into you
. After my R-M years, I can’t even tell someone I don’t particularly want to see that I’m busy, if I’m not. What is just? Fair? Right? I open my mouth and the truth spills out. As a result of R-M indoctrination, I’ve had countless tedious lunches and dinners. There, I never actually saw a rule broken and so was spared an acute moral dilemma of ratting on friends. Such good girls. We were kept in place by the appeal to a higher sense, morality; the rule was the thing, not the judgment of the act behind the rule.

Faced with a real crime, the system was useless. For a while a klepto was loose in the halls, picking up our wallets casually left on desks or beds. Emptied, they were discovered floating in the toilet tanks. Gradually a rumor surfaced that X, from one of the First Families of Virginia, was the thief. A girl who went to high school with her said she’d done the same there, too. We were not allowed to put little dime store locks on the door. Rena
tried and was told she couldn’t deface the door and besides that was contrary to the atmosphere of R-M. Apparently the school was reluctant to confront Miss First Family. We just learned to hide our ten-dollar bills and driver’s licenses from her.

Virginity seems quaint in light of later days of genital warts, herpes, AIDS, and other fallout of the then-nascent sexual revolution. An old granite statue in front of a dorm was supposed to wink every time a virgin walked by. His eye must have been permanently fluttering, even though these were the last days of the virgin cult. Many of us didn’t think for a minute sex was “wrong,” but fear of pregnancy was a powerful deterrent, as were stories of coat-hanger abortions in a Boston apartment smelling of cabbage. Those, compounded with the big word “reputation,” kept us relatively chaste. A high school friend got pregnant her first semester of college and was forced into marriage by the parents. She cried when we wished her well and tried to act excited about the baby. “I think babies are dirty,” she kept saying. Frankye had brainwashed me into thinking that life would end if I slept with my boyfriend and turned up “pg.”

Some did have developed senses of sin. Anne worried about the exact moment a kiss turned passionate and therefore sinful. She went to confession for such things. The priest defined passion as beginning after fifteen seconds, no tongues included, so, while kissing, Anne also had to count. Many girls had never kissed anyone; they’d been sentenced even in high school to other tidy girls’ schools and never dated at all.

Fitzgerald is not the antebellum, heavy-duty South, with patriarchs reading Tacitus on the porch, but only the backwoods of Georgia, stratified as a midden, but not hidebound like the tidewater South. At home, like all my friends, I’d stayed out late, kissed dozens of boys, fallen in love. I’d had steamy nights at drive-ins and summer cabins and swum naked down the river with my real high school love. This corseting rubbed me wrong. I liked boys but never got to know any well while I was “up north.” Given even the smallness of the pond, wasn’t I popular in high school? Now I began to feel less attractive. My natural instincts to be expressive started to snuff out. I couldn’t think of anything to say to the Scotch-drinking Virginia school dudes. Being “cool” never interested me. The endless loud party in a crummy fraternity house got old quickly, as did football games, especially since the University of Virginia team had endured a three-year streak of solid loss, and the tanked-up boys now cheered for whatever team theirs opposed. Everyone I met had some Civil War name, Moseley or Stuart or Meade. Besides having to jump through hoops to date us, boys faced the stigma that we were “smart.” The Sweet Briar and Hollins students had better reputations as well-rounded, party girls, May queens, debutants. We were rule-ridden, and with a tight bit. Horses like that tend to spook easily. I began to spend more weekends at school reading or scrambling down through the brush to the edge of the James River, where I tried to write poems or just sat there thinking moody thoughts. I didn’t even want to go home, not with Frankye circling the drain. At least with Daddy Jack, I always knew where things stood; he was utterly predictable. He
blundered through the world, scattering effects from his disinterest about any life beyond the absolutely practical. David and I agreed that we wanted different lives. He planned to live in Fitzgerald. I wanted something else, not that I knew what that would be. Things at home were awful.

With a few others, I even remain at school over Thanksgiving. Those big echoing halls, the trees bare, our little places set for meals, and nothing going on. My big sister in the sorority insists on fixing me up with an “older man,” twenty-four, who teaches at a prep school. He drives a sports car and likes to dance, she says. I’m not excited to date someone who has settled into teaching high school boys. He’s handsome and attentive, and unlike the other boys, doesn’t drink. After the movie, though, when we’re driving back to campus (curfew rules still applied on holidays), he takes my hand and says, “You don’t know how fond of you I’ve grown.”

Fond. “Oh, thanks,” I answer, trying to sound sincere. Rain sloshes over the tiny car. I want to cry myself because I’m missing David, eight hundred miles south, with his Hermes by Praxiteles mouth, more beautiful than anyone in Virginia, even if he has grown up only a block from me. The TR3 windshield wipers scrape back and forth; the windows steam, not from my hot breath. He squeezes my hand then lifts it. At first I think he’s placed my hand over the gear knob, then I realize that the bony protuberance is sticking up in his dress pants. I jerk back my hand and look at it as though it were burned. This, and we’ve never even kissed. He apologizes all the way to the college gate and I never go to the telephone when he calls over and over.

The alma mater is in Latin. The composer, Miss Willie Weathers, was oblivious to the fact that in such a repressive atmosphere, the Latin words
quae ubi pinus exit
sung by a chapel of girls might have other reverberations than the context suggested. When we come to those lines we thunder out the word
pinus
. The deans all look down; some of the younger professors smirk. To mention it would be an acknowledgment that penises existed in the world, and that did not happen. I wonder if Miss Weathers ever noticed and if so whether she cringed or suppressed a smile.

The most telling activities we were urged toward were the custom of “stomps” and “odds and evens.” I thought from the outset that both were beyond belief. Stomps were marches at night when several secret societies such as STAB (said to mean Stately Tall Attractive Brunettes) “brought out” a new member—girls selecting other girls with their own type looks for mutual glorification. The group, folded arms up, stomped through the dorm just before closing, chanting their special chant. At the room of the new member they all stomped their feet hard and shouted out her name. Everyone looked out of their doorways, clapping and calling congratulations. Underground, there was a group that thought this was all too corny for words; I was “brought out” SOB my sophomore year. We had no rituals like the rest, only a bond of contempt. No alternatives occurred to us. The
rumor mill was always churning up names. So-and-so should be Pi or AmSam, whatever they were. My roommate spent hours each night in beauty rituals. Her hair was her glory, but was it enough to get her into Omega, the blond beauties? For an hour and a half each night she rolled her fine pale strawberry hair. Every morning she applied mascara and crimped her lashes before going down to breakfast. I was the only person ever to see her sweet, washed face. She was brought out, to many happy tears and congratulations.