Miss Dreamsville and the Collier County Women's Literary Society

by Amy Hill Hearth

  But in a way this wasn’t funny. Not funny at all.

  Without giving a hint that she was Miss Dreamsville, Jackie, at our next meeting, ranted about life and how unfair it could be. She felt “locked into” her role as housewife and mother. Sometimes, she said, it was necessary to shake things up, to rebel.

  We thought she was talking about her new car.

  When Jackie was in one of her moods, we were never sure what to say. Miss Lansbury, thankfully, spoke up. “I have a suggestion of something we could read next,” she said in a tone that seemed meant to soothe Jackie’s nerves. “There’s a new book that was serialized in Mademoiselle magazine that I think we would like. It’s called The Feminine Mystique, and it was written by a writer in New York named Betty Friedan.” No one felt like arguing, so we agreed without any discussion.

  That night, when Jackie drove us all home, we begged her to put the top up on the Buick; our southern blood was just too thin to have cold, damp night air blowing through our hair. With the top up, the Buick looked subdued, like a lady with a beehive hairdo squashed under a rain bonnet.

  Still, the Buick was a beautiful car and a lot more interesting than the station wagon. As Robbie-Lee pointed out, we weren’t likely to be mistaken for northern “agitators” while driving a sassy convertible painted a tropical color.

  This was the night we met Dolores, Robbie-Lee’s mother. We’d all been trying to get a gander at her each time we dropped him off, but she’d never come outside and we were blinded by the floodlights. But on this night, Robbie-Lee told us we were welcome to come inside. He sprang this on us, maybe so we wouldn’t have time to think of any good excuses.

  Robbie-Lee jogged to the front door and waved us in. I was glad we had dropped off Priscilla earlier; this would have been an awkward moment for her. She might have felt she should stay in the car rather than go inside a white person’s home. Jackie, Plain Jane, and I edged our way slowly toward the house. We couldn’t see a darn thing on account of the lights, and while it was true we wanted to see what Robbie-Lee’s mother looked like, we got a bit more than we bargained for.

  The house was, thankfully, not as brightly lit on the inside. In fact, a few minutes passed while our eyes got used to the change. We stood like a gaggle of gawky teenage girls, not sure what to do.

  “Dolores!” Robbie-Lee called out. “We’re here. Come on and say hello to my friends.”

  A once-beautiful woman slouched into the room wearing a pink bathrobe that had seen better days, just as the wearer surely had. The belt of the robe was tied high above her waist with the effect—intended or not—of creating a sling of sorts for her very large breasts. In the woman’s left hand was a bottle of gin. In her right was a shot glass. A small cigar in her mouth finished the picture. “Howdy,” I think she said.

  As Mama used to say, no one on earth goes from cute to catastrophe faster than a Florida stripper. By the time they hit forty, they look like five miles of bad road.

  Robbie-Lee pointed at each of us, one at a time. “This is Jackie, Jane, and Dora,” he said. Dolores nodded.

  “We’d better get going!” Jackie said cheerfully. “Nice to have met you! See you later, Robbie-Lee!”

  It was a fast getaway. I had to admire that about Jackie. She was smooth.

  In the car, even though we knew we shouldn’t, we picked apart every second of the surprise encounter.

  “I bet she was gorgeous,” Jackie said.

  “Did you see her hands? They looked like an old man who’s been out in the sun his whole life.” This from Plain Jane.

  “Well, she hunts alligators for a living,” I said, not exactly in Dolores’s defense. “And skins them.”

  “Did you see her chest?” asked Jackie.

  “How could we miss it?” Plain Jane replied.

  “She has a lot of trouble with her bosom,” I said. “Robbie-Lee said that when she was young, she had her, um, breasts injected with something—God knows what—to make them huge. And now they hurt so much, she told Robbie-Lee she wished she could have them, uh, removed. She needs an operation, but the doctors she’s talked to just laugh at her.”

  “Whoa,” said Jackie. “That is sad! Poor woman.”

  “Funny how Robbie-Lee has to call her Dolores,” Plain Jane muttered. “Never heard of someone calling their mother by her first name.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Jackie said. “I think that’s interesting. Like she’s an actual person, with her own personality, and not just someone’s mom.”

  “Okay, this is very catty,” I said, knowing they would slap me down unless I warned them that I was about to step over a line. “But do y’all think she was married when she had Robbie-Lee?”

  “Oh!” said Plain Jane. “Probably not! But we shouldn’t be talking like this about our friend’s mother.”

  “That’s right,” Jackie said. “We shouldn’t. End of conversation. Let’s change the subject.”

  At our next meeting, Jackie told us she’d asked her kids if they would call her Jackie instead of Mom.

  Their response? No dice.

  “Forget it, Mom,” Judd told her. “I’d rather call you Mama than Jackie.”

  She never brought it up again.

  Thirteen

  This is not hard to picture: Jackie devoured her copy of The Feminine Mystique.

  She sat in her favorite chair for hours, her bare feet propped up on the coffee table. She didn’t bother to get dressed—just stayed in that chair wearing a muumuu, one of those awful, shapeless dresses you could buy at the five-and-dime that make you look like you’re wearing a flour sack.

  Judd asked her once—only once—if she was all right. After she snapped, “Hell, yeah!” he left her alone. The twins tried a few times to get her attention but failed. Even standing directly in front of their mother and rolling their eyes didn’t get the usual rise out of her. She just kept reading, looking up only to light a cigarette, drink a little Scotch now and then, or eat a chocolate bonbon. She got up just long enough to stretch, go to the john, and get a new supply of vices. She didn’t even empty the ashtray.

  First I heard about this was when I ran into Plain Jane in the fresh produce aisle at Winn-Dixie. Ted, she reported, had come home from a business trip, and he and Jackie had a big blow-up. Something, she said, about catsup.

  Now that sounded mighty peculiar, even for Jackie. But Plain Jane, who’d been sitting out on her patio, said Jackie had left her kitchen window open, and half the neighborhood could hear the word catsup shouted hither and yon from inside the Hart household.

  At our next meeting, Jackie told us about her fight with Ted, only she called it an “altercation.” She was so mesmerized by The Feminine Mystique that she didn’t even look up when Ted carried his suitcase in from the car. She didn’t offer to do his laundry. She didn’t prepare his favorite meal, as she often did when he’d been away.

  Finally, he decided to get his own dinner. The kids had helped themselves to peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, so he was on his own. He opened the refrigerator and found enough leftovers to pull together a sad little meal of a hot dog and baked beans. But he could not find the catsup. He could not eat a hot dog without catsup. He never had, and he never would.

  And so he marched into the living room like Sherman’s troops tearing into Georgia.

  “Okay, Jackie,” he said, “where is the catsup?”

  Jackie said she barely paused in her reading. “What? Is that you, Ted? Did you say something?”

  “I said, ‘Where is the catsup?’ I can’t find it. Is it in the cupboard?”

  “How should I know?”

  “Well, since you bought it at the store, I thought perhaps you would know where you put it.”

  “Ted, you know what? You have a college degree in business administration. You were a lieutenant in the Army. I have all the confidence in the world that if you put some effort into it, you can locate the bottle of catsup. All by yourself.”

  “You can’t st
op reading that book long enough to help me?”

  “Get it yourself!” she hollered loud enough to wake the dead. Then, Jackie said, she returned to her reading. She was, she said, beyond focused. She was ravenous.

  She was the only one of us who had finished the book. In fact, she seemed to have memorized it, like a preacher who knows the precise location of every passage in the Bible. We couldn’t keep up and didn’t even try.

  “This book describes exactly how I feel,” she announced. She opened her copy and read aloud: “ ‘In the second half of the twentieth century in America, woman’s world was confined to her own body and beauty, the charming of man, the bearing of babies, and the physical care and serving of husband, children, and home.’”

  She read another passage: “ ‘Where is the world of thought and ideas, the life of the mind and spirit?’”

  Jackie slammed the book shut triumphantly. “This author is right on target! All these women going crazy! Restless! Bored! And made to feel bad, as if somehow these feelings are our fault. I’d like to see any man stay home with a bunch of ungrateful kids, cooking, cleaning, and sewing, and let’s see how many of them would have a smile on their face by the end of the day. Not all women are cut out for this. ‘The Problem That Has No Name’—that’s what the author calls the discontent that some of us feel. But you know what? The problem does have a name! I can sum it up in three words: ‘just a housewife’! If I hear one more person use that expression, I think I will die. And that goes for men and women saying it. Especially women describing themselves that way!”

  Jackie was talking so fast and with such intensity that her voice had become raspy. She left the circle to get a sip from the watercooler that sat outside Miss Lansbury’s office. For a moment, I thought she was walking out, as if our circle couldn’t contain her feelings and she needed to walk them off. But she came back and sat down.

  Robbie-Lee cleared his throat. “I think it must be very hard to be a woman,” he said cautiously. “I see what Dolores has been through.”

  “And who is Dolores?” Miss Lansbury asked politely. Driving her own car to and from the library had left Miss Lansbury out of the loop. I realized how much the rest of us had bonded during those car rides with Jackie.

  “Dolores is Robbie-Lee’s mother,” I said, hoping to nip that conversation in the bud. I wanted to hear more reaction to The Feminine Mystique, not necessarily from Jackie but the others. Myself, the topic seemed somewhat foreign, I guess ’cause I didn’t have children of my own and was divorced. While I could understand how Jackie felt, I couldn’t feel it as deeply.

  The following week, Darryl showed up again. He was staying at his aunt Martha’s cousin’s house, which was actually a farming homestead near Immokalee. There was no chance of talking privately at the post office and I didn’t want him to come to my house. Against my better judgment (or maybe just so I could get back to work), I told him I’d meet him later at the Shingle Shack, Naples’s only attempt at nightlife. I would have preferred to meet him at the Dairy Queen, but in the early evening, the place would be full of teenagers.

  So the Shingle Shack it was, although I generally avoided the place because of the smell of old cigarettes and spilled beer. Darryl was already there when I arrived. He tried to smile when he saw me.

  “How is the turtle?” he asked, trying a new tactic.

  “You mean the snapper? The one you wouldn’t help me with? He was doing fine, so I let him go.”

  “How do you suppose he got injured like that?”

  “Must’ve been nicked by a car, or maybe a boat propeller,” I said, realizing, at that moment, that I missed Marty the turtle more than Darryl the man.

  “I always liked the way you helped turtles,” Darryl said. “You have a gift.”

  “Don’t flatter me, Darryl.”

  “No, I didn’t mean it like that. I just admire the way you care for animals, especially the ones no one else’ll take care of.”

  “I never really intended to become the Turtle Lady, you know,” I said wearily. “People bring them to me and I can’t say no.”

  “Then how come you can say no to me?”

  I looked at the man I’d known my whole life and married at nineteen and wondered who he was. “Because . . . you’ve changed, Darryl. Maybe we were too young when we married.”

  “Aw, bullshit,” he said. “Listen, Dora, things are going well for me. You should come back and see. Lots of new houses going up. Shopping centers. All over the state. I can’t get enough men to fill all the jobs. Soon it’s gonna happen here too.”

  “What’s going to happen?” I asked.

  “Land development,” Darryl said with a cocky grin. “You should see what they’re planning for Orlando. The whole damn state is going to be paved over.”

  “I don’t want the whole damn state to be paved over.” All I could think of was, Where would the turtles go? And the birds? Alligators? I hoped Darryl was completely wrong. As for Orlando, I couldn’t imagine hordes of people moving to a little sunbaked town like that. At least Naples was on the Gulf. “Why is all this a good thing, Darryl?”

  “Because it’s money, Dora.” He looked at me as if I was simpleminded. “Naples will be developed too, mark my words.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “Because there are some very smart people behind the scenes making sure the rich folks who move to Florida choose Naples,” he said.

  “And how will they do that?”

  “Fishing and boating,” Darryl said.

  I laughed. “Just about every place in Florida has good fishing and boating,” I said.

  “But not every place has golf courses,” Darryl said. “Not first-rate golf courses, like the ones being planned, right now, for Naples. And don’t forget our location at the bend of the Tamiami Trail. When more folks come through here, they’ll be needing places to stay before they drive through the Everglades to Miami. So there’ll be a need for some big hotels.”

  I thought of Jackie, and the other Yankees, who talked about being scared to death to drive the part of the Tamiami Trail between Naples and Miami. At seventy-five miles per hour, you could be there in less than two hours, but you’d better not let your mind wander. That stretch was a pitch-black two-lane road with deep drainage ditches on either side. Even the locals knew you could end up as alligator chow if you made the smallest mistake. If more Yankees were headed to this part of Florida, I could imagine that they’d want to stop here and rest up for the nail-biting drive to Miami.

  But I was bothered by Darryl’s attitude. “You really have changed, Darryl,” I said.

  He had to stop himself from pounding his fist on the bar. “Damn it, Dora, I am trying to tell you that you should come home. We can get remarried; I’ll forget you ever left. I’ll forgive you.”

  “No, thanks, Darryl.” I spoke so softly, I wasn’t even sure I’d said it out loud. When I looked at his face, I knew I had.

  “Well, good luck, Dora,” he said. “I mean, good luck finding someone else who’ll marry you. You’ll never find anyone! You’ll probably never have kids. I bet you’ll never live in a really nice house. Are you still living in that crummy place that was in your father’s family? Huh? Have you really thought about what you’re giving up?”

  That weekend I stayed entirely by myself, not venturing out. In the back of my mind I always thought I might, or could, go back to Darryl, like maybe I hadn’t shut that door tightly behind me. Either that, or I’d look for somebody else. But now I kept thinking about Jackie and The Feminine Mystique.

  I wondered how many women, right in Collier County, felt the same as Jackie and the women in the book. Surely some of them—maybe many of them—were as happy as they appeared to be. But I kept thinking of the women who came into the post office, usually with three or four children in tow, who looked so miserable, it scared me. It was pretty common for them to say something (when no man was around) that was clearly a complaint, maybe even a cry for help. They
were the ones who had bought the dream—hook, line, and sinker—but maybe it hadn’t been the right dream for them, and they couldn’t understand why they weren’t happy.

  And then it hit me. Could it be that some of these women were envious of me? I felt a stab of guilty pleasure. Yes, I suppose so. Because I had one thing they didn’t have—freedom.

  At the next meeting, Mrs. Bailey White and Plain Jane said the book had confirmed what they’d been thinking for years. “You know, when I was young, I think women were more independent. Women had just gotten the right to vote,” Mrs. Bailey White said. “Then it seemed like we started going backward in some ways.”

  “Yeah, think of all the women who worked during World War Two,” Plain Jane said. “I worked for an insurance company in Tampa, and I loved it. I sold more policies than anyone. But when the war ended, they took my job and gave it back to the man who’d had it before he left for the Army.”

  “So all you gals want to work? This is about having jobs?” Robbie-Lee said. “I was always kind of secretly envious that women didn’t have to work. Seemed pretty nice to stay home, make curtains, and all that. That’s just not an option for men.”

  This was food for thought. “That’s interesting, Robbie-Lee,” Jackie said quietly. She looked tired. “The book is about women and our lack of choices, but as you say, men are limited in their choices too. Priscilla, what do you think?”

  Priscilla had been completely silent. “Come on, Priscilla, we would love your opinion,” Jackie said in her gentle tone.

  Something was amiss. I couldn’t put my finger on it. Jackie continued to encourage Priscilla, but this time her effort missed its mark. Priscilla looked down at her hands and picked at her nails.

  “Maybe Priscilla doesn’t feel like talking,” Miss Lansbury said. Sometimes she had a gift for stating the obvious.

  “No, no, actually I do have something to say. I’m just not sure how to say it.”

  In the long, empty moment that followed, a feeling washed over me that I couldn’t quite place. Uneasiness, I suppose.