Under Magnolia: A Southern Memoir (30 page)

After a week at home for the summer, I start traveling. My sister in Atlanta likes for me to visit because I adore my nephew, which frees her and her husband to go out. We spend long weekends at their log house at Lakemont. Frankye behaves there, as she always does when she leaves the city limits of Fitz. Always we seem to arrive before anyone else and always we have the wrong key. The kitchen window pushes in. I’ve climbed in before. Here’s the loft, here’s the bed made of limbs where the water moccasin coiled on the pillow. Frankye goes into a cleaning frenzy. Mice have been in the flour bin, wasps, dirt daubers. Here’s where I lay, eyes freezing on
Marjorie Morningstar
while I listened with my whole body to my aunt in the swayback bed, what is he doing to her, whimpering like a run-too-hard hound.
Then quiet. The lake lapping. Shadow of antlers on the window, spiders in the shower. Damp quilts.

Slowly everything works. The hoist lowers the boat back down in the water, Frankye’s blackberry cobbler slides into the oven, waxy laurel blossoms float through my fingers. I can hear my hair growing. I suddenly realize: The cape jasmine sends up its fragrance whether I am here or not. Can it be made of words, the faint scent hovering along the edge of the lake? I imagine there is someone I can tell this to. My voice recrosses the lake three times. Hello. Hello. Hello.

We’re in the water all day, swimming, floating, waterskiing, and at night Cleve, my brother-in-law, and I take the old restored Chris-Craft out in the dark and idle around docks, shining a flashlight into shallow water until we stun a frog with light and stab it with the gig. Late, we all line up along the porch facing the water and talk. Frankye and I sleep in the lower floor bedrooms in the log beds with red quilts. One morning, she steps out onto a gigantic furry tarantula, like squishing a banana. David comes for a visit, then Gwynne, my R-M roommate, and we go to the square dances in Clayton. The lake is pure joy, green as a Coca-Cola bottle, and furred around the shore with layers of other greens.

Back in Fitz, Frankye starts her night walks, and now I’m old enough to get away.

I take a bus to Gainesville, catch a ride, and visit Gary in Palm Beach. We’re lying on a blanket on the beach at night, listening to music on a portable radio. The program is interrupted to announce that Ernest Hemingway has committed suicide. A
policeman walks up and asks for Gary’s license. He checks the address to see if he’s local. Can’t have just anyone making out on exclusive Palm Beach. I’m wild about the Addison Mizner houses. We walk in the ultrafancy neighborhoods, the bushes groomed within a millimeter, and fantasize about the princesses and princes who live in such mighty splendor.

After a few days, I visit my other sister, who now lives in a spacious house with a curved lanai surrounded by birds of paradise and banana plants. So much about Florida speaks my native language.

A week there and I make a call and catch the next bus, then train, to visit Oliver in Birmingham. I wish I were going to visit Rena but she’s married the herpetologist. Oliver, a Princeton boy I’d met on another visit to Rena, picks me up at the station and we drive down to Montevallo, where Rena and her husband have set up house on a shady street near the college where he will begin to teach in the fall. Lizards, snakes, and toads. Looking around at Rena’s tasteful lamps and cups and candlesticks and her mother’s paintings, I feel sad that we never sailed to Piraeus. No more May baskets filled with poems and flowers. No more Beethoven turned up to the max as we painted our nails or sat cross-legged on our beds reading Yeats aloud. As she made coffee in the kitchen, I whispered a little about Paul.

Oliver and I are both quiet as we drive back to Birmingham to his family pillared home, firmly anchored in a century of southern charm and conservative history. In the pristine guest room that night, I hear handsome Oliver cough across the hall in his room decorated with lacrosse gear and model airplanes. He always seems to be congested. His mother has a library of
leather books and reigns as the perfect mother and the consummate hostess. Willowy and slim, she stares at me with a slight bird-of-prey look. The father seems like most fathers—a remote figure, gracious but quick to hide behind the newspaper. This was my preferred trajectory according to Frankye: Houdini escape from Fitzgerald with a
city
boy from a
good
family. Junior League, a beach house, country club lunches and dinners ad infinitum, some “nice” church, not Baptist.

In a fetal curl, I relive my early and certain love for David, now lost, and my passionate connection with Paul, who is presumably proceeding down the primrose path with the New Orleans girlfriend. Then there’s smart, funny, liberal Gary, and Joseph from Miami, a big crush who resists me because I’m not Jewish, and several others whose romantic overtures keep me bound to the quest for the jolt that arrives with love. I want ardent notes, wildflower bouquets left wedged inside the doorknob, poetry books wrapped in tissue, first kisses, the lips at my ear, the soft words, the
moment of being
, dance cards with tassels, midnight walks through old neighborhoods, laughter reaching up to the moon in the palms. Oliver and I, earlier, were lying in the grass kissing, kissing. For a moment I pretended that he was Paul but then I felt with my tongue his front teeth, one slightly crossing over the other. I turned away and nuzzled my face into his neck. A thread snapped. There, it’s happened again. Even in the short run, he’s not going to work for me.

I kick off the bedspread and bicycle in the air, my legs white scissors cutting the dark. I have been gone all summer. Time to go home.

With Rena married, I moved into the Chi Omega house on Panhellenic Drive, all graceful old brick with wrought iron porches framed by long skeins of moss. Romantic, but a poor second to the
Hellenic Destiny
sailing for Greece. After Frankye asked them, my older sister and her husband offered to pay my fees (not easy for them with three small children). The Trust Company of Georgia, Daddy Jack’s executor, refuses to allow her any money, despite the wording in the will that funds can be withdrawn from the corpus for “comfort, maintenance, and support.” Every time I hear the word “corpus,” I imagine Daddy Jack’s rotund body in his casket, wormy and oozing. “Three years of college is more than sufficient for a young woman,” the prim executor told her. Now Frankye becomes determined that I will finish college. When I revisit my impulse to work for TWA and travel, she throws a fit and starts one of her filibusters: “You are not going to end up in some dead-end or be like
the dead-end Mayes family or live in death-in-life Fitzgerald or marry some dead-ignorant pilot or crash dead into the ocean—over my dead body.”

Frankye spirals ever downward. What ever will lift her up? Red veins shoot through her blue-blue eyes. Her own sister Mary is so angry she barely speaks to her.
She was always spoiled rotten
. My sisters take her to their houses but all the encouragement goes nowhere. How to hold onto a falling star? Until now, Frankye could rally for visits from Mary or my sisters—camellias floating in a glass bowl, oyster stew, pound cake, new magazines on the coffee table, as if she cared what anyone in
Harper’s Bazaar
wore to a benefit ball a thousand miles away from our little house in the pine barrens. Daddy long gone, Willie Bell gone, Daddy Jack gone, me gone to college: the shaky scaffolding has collapsed upon itself. Rising after ten, she skips coffee and goes straight to her tumbler. If I peek into her room, she’s lying on her side looking out the window, frozen and silent. “Hey, Frankye, let’s ride over and see Grace. She said to come pick some zinnias. Or Gladys. She’s always fun.” I stand in the doorway, half-hoping for her to jump up and say, “Let’s go!” No answer. I would like to grab her ankles and pull her out of bed. I would like to shout
Get up this minute
. “Wonder if Mr. Bernhardt got in some corn today?” Finally, I back out and go to my books.

At times she waxes the kitchen floor at three in the morning or polishes all the silver. I try talking sense for the thousandth time. “There’s AA in Macon. We could stay overnight. You could live with your cousin and go to meetings.”

She sneers. “That’s for bums and derelicts and hobos.”

“
Hobos?
There are no
hobos
anymore. You are just
alien
. Do it for
us
! Your life is a blur.” I’m shouting.

“Do what for you? I do everything for you. If it were not for you, I would not be in this two-bit place, and besides I don’t
have
to drink anything; I can stop anytime I please.” She’s always slyly shifting the blame for her drinking onto me but I know in some sure place that I am not the cause, and neither is the two-bit place. Other people live vivid and valid lives here. I could stay if David and I had not canceled our love.

When she says, “I’m the best friend you’ll ever have,” I think
I’d hate to see the worst
. When she says, “I’m the only one who loves you,” I talk back.

“That’s what
you
think. Lots of people love me.” My ephemeral romances slide across my mind and out. Am I
worthy
of anyone’s love? “If you loved anybody, you wouldn’t drink—what do you even mean by ‘love’? Love! Damn, Frankye, you’re committing slow suicide.” My throat feels like a swarm of bees. I won’t, won’t cry.

“You have no idea what you’re talking about. Don’t cry for me; cry for yourself. You think you’re so smart, but you’re going nowhere fast.”

“I’m going somewhere fast and that’s out of here.” I slam my door and crawl under the covers. Adrenaline feels like liquid hate coursing through my body. I am so angry that I think I could black out or go into a seizure. I’m appalled that I said “slow suicide.” I’ve named it. The aftershock of that keeps shaking me.

An hour later, she pushes open the door and brings in a tray with Coca-Cola and warm brownies. “I thought you might be
hungry. A slice of lemon in your Coke, just the way you like it. Brownies, your favorite.” I bite into one. She has forgotten to add the sugar.

Fall, my senior year, and I must move back into communal living. My new roommate, Saralyn, and I share a corner room in the sorority house, perfect for stepping out onto the balcony for fraternity serenades when one of our sisters gets pinned. I’m on foot again. Frankye capriciously gave Daddy Jack’s Oldsmobile to the yardman. A double blow—loss of the sunny apartment and of my wheels. I return to school with new determination to step closer to maturity. What will I
be
? Well, what else in the world is as riveting and important as writing? Since I first turned the pages of
Dick and Jane
, I wanted to write books. I will prepare myself to by analyzing the structures of books—outline enough plots and surely I will know how to do it—and I will keep my ideas in notebooks. What will I write about? Ezra Pound became famous with a single image: petals on a wet black bough. This was supposed to be equivalent to faces at the metro, but I just liked the fragile flowers and the contrast to the slick, stark branch. Since I love imagery, I will practice writing as though I were painting, as if my words could re-create a single glimpse of a panel of sunlight on the grass, the flash of a fish, antique gold in the murky pond, the first scent of wet lilacs, and then the underscent of ashes and rain. The blank leather book Rena gave me is where I will begin. I fill my pen with lavender ink.

Joseph, my big crush from last year, finally asks me out for the Florida State weekend. We stop in front of the sorority house a few minutes before curfew and sit in his car talking. The next day a committee of three takes me aside and informs me that Chi Os don’t date the Jewish boys. Of course, they are very nice boys, but just
different
. I hate to get off on the wrong foot, but I smile and say firmly, “You all, I’m going to date anyone I want to. Wouldn’t you, seriously, go out with him if he ever asked you?” I am not sure they get my little dig, but they never mention it again. During rush week, we cross off girls for the tackiness of their earrings, their hick accents (there’s a sliding scale of southern accents), or simply their not-like-us qualities—too serious, too fat, too loud.
A figure like a deflated beach ball
. A Fernandina girl I champion is
not Chi Omega material
. I suspect that if I were going through rush, I would be cut after the first tea:
bad attitude
.