Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady

by Florence King

  “Louise, giving birth at home is the only way to be sure of getting the right baby. Suppose you got some trashy woman’s baby by mistake? It wouldn’t have any blood. Hospitals get the babies mixed up all the time, you know. Of course, they don’t dare admit it, but I have it on good authority. Those nurses are so busy having things to do with doctors that they can’t think straight.”

  “Dat de truth. Dem nurses is lak de fleshpots of Babylon.”

  “Many nurses are insane, you know. They get so jealous from having to take care of other women’s babies that their minds go. They get even by deliberately mixing the babies up.”

  “Dey lips drip honey but dey’s strange womens.”

  “As for those identification bracelets,” Granny said scornfully, “they’re so cheap and flimsy they just break and fall right off. Did you know that, Louise?”

  She did now. She reached for a pack of Luckies, her fourth that day, and tore off the cellophane strip. She had heard every obstetrical caveat known to science and myth except the one about smoking during pregnancy. For all of Granny’s strictures on ladylike behavior, no one ever heard her utter a word against smoking: tobacco, after all, comes from Virginia.

  “Louise, promise me you’ll have the baby at home. We’ll get Tessie Satterfield, and Jensy and I will help her.” Tessie was a retired obstetrical nurse—but never a fleshpot—who lived in Ballston.

  “All right, Mother, I’ll have it here. Now leave me alone, I want to listen to the World Series.”

  Except for taking the sun on the bathroom porch by crawling through the priest’s hole, Mama got no fresh air or exercise. Whenever she tried to go out, her keepers set up an outcry. Did she want to miscarry? Suppose she fell down and hit her stomach like Pauline Fairfax when she leaned over to pick up a dime and couldn’t stop? Didn’t she know that walking during pregnancy put pressure on the bladder? Suppose it burst and the baby drowned? Did she mean to walk past dat firehouse wid all de mens sittin’ out front wid dey chairs tilted back an’ dem lookin’ at her an’ knowin’?

  Her combative instincts dulled by pregnancy, Mama gave in and spent the day lying in bed drinking pot liquor until she was as fat as Granny. Around this time Herb bought another rollaway cot and set it up in the short leg of the kitchen. There, amid his library books and copies of The National Geographic, he slept, leaving Mama to her ash-strewn sheets. Granny called his action “considerate” and told everybody in the Daughters until the telephone wires buzzed with that ne plus ultra compliment old ladies bestow on sexually restrained men: “He never bothers her.”

  As the pregnancy neared its end, Granny began casting eager glances at Mama’s stomach.

  “It’s going to be a girl,” she said firmly.

  “How the hell do you know?”

  “Because you’re carrying low. Boys are carried high.”

  “I don’t have any high or low left. The goddamn thing’s all over the place. You’re talking through your hat, Mother.”

  At the start of the ninth month, she saw a bluish tinge in Mama’s navel. From this curio of whelpery she extracted what she wished to believe and manufactured an instant old wives tale.

  “The navel vein,” she intoned sonorously. “That means it’s a girl. You never find a navel vein in a woman who’s carrying a boy, but a girl baby always brings one on. You see, when a girl baby turns around inside the mother’s stomach, she always pushes up on that vein.”

  “With what?”

  “Miss Louise!”

  On New Year’s Eve, Mama started to feel certain twinges. It was the biggest night of the year for Herb so Granny told him to go on to work. He returned home the next morning expecting to find a baby in the apartment, but Mama was still in a holding pattern. Four days later her labor began in earnest and Granny called Tessie Satterfield.

  Rawboned, crop-haired Tessie arrived amid repeated backfires in her ancient Model A. Mama sent Herb to the drugstore for two cartons of Luckies, but by the time he got back the first big pain had hit and she had bitten a cigarette in two. It was to be six hours before she would be able to smoke another one, a hiatus that goes far to explain why I am an only child.

  Around ten P.M. her waters broke and Granny put together another legend.

  “Look at all that water! That means it’s a girl! You never get that much with a boy!”

  “Whatever it is, it sure is big,” Tessie grunted.

  After the horror stories Mama had heard, “whatever” was an unfortunate word. She let out an agonized yell that sent Herb running for the bathroom and me into the world. Nobody who smokes four packs a day can yell very long without coughing. As her gothic ululation changed into a phlegmy rattle, Tessie broke out in triumph.

  “I see the head! Keep coughing, Louise!”

  “Ack-ack-awwrrrggghhh!”

  “Hyeh it come!”

  “Ack-ack-awwwrrrggghhh!”

  “It’s a girl!” Granny cried ecstatically.

  “Ack-ack-awwwrrrggghhh!” To some of us, it spells Mother.

  Nobody remembered Herb until Jensy ran into the bathroom to get more towels and found him sitting on the edge of the tub with his head between his knees. They scared each other silly.

  “OOOOEEEE!”

  “Lor’ blimey!”

  She told him the news and ran back to the bedroom with the towels. It was time for the placenta, a holy relic as far as Granny was concerned. When it came, she gathered it lovingly into a towel.

  “Look,” she murmured reverently. “Nine perfect little sections of blood, one for each month of the lady’s missed time.”

  “Look at dat.”

  Herb emerged from the bathroom during this gynophilic litany, and hearing the word “Look,” he did.

  “Crikey! It’s dead!”

  “Oh, no, Mr. King, this isn’t the baby! It’s the afterbirth. See? Nine perfect little—”

  “Take it away,” he groaned, staggering against the wall. Overcome, he headed for the bathroom again, with Granny and Jensy trailing behind him reciting old wives tales.

  “The afterbirth has to be disposed of in a certain way, Mr. King. The husband has to bury it. It’s his duty!”

  “Flush it down the loo,” he gasped, between heaves.

  “Oh, no, Mr. King, you can’t do that! It’s birth blood.”

  “You spoze to bury it unner a dogwood tree so it bloom in de springtime an’ bring de chile good luck.”

  They kept following him around with the bloody towel and chanting hex stories until he gave in and agreed to give the placenta a proper burial. After fortifying himself with a shot of whiskey, he borrowed a shovel from the janitor and went out into the alley. He told Granny and Jensy that he dug a suitable grave, but years later he told me that he had thrown the sacred object into a garbage can.

  The next day:

  “It’s a girl,” Granny said tenderly, gazing down at my red wrinkled face.

  “Mother, you’ve said that seven times in the last hour.”

  Granny got up and stood at the bottom of the bed and gave Mama an appraising stare.

  “Louise, how do you feel?”

  “My ass hurts.”

  “That’s to be expected. I mean how do you feel?”

  “All right.”

  “Well, you don’t look all right. You remember Nancy Montgomery? She thought she was all right, too, and then her ankles exploded. I think I’d better stay until the end of January.”

  At the end of January:

  “I’m worried about your varicose veins. You remember Betsy Winchester? She got so she looked like a road map. I think I’d better stay until the end of February.”

  At the end of February, Mama ignored her protests and went out to the store.

  “You remember Fanny Wallingford? She died in the A and P.”

  “I never heard of Fanny Wallingford and neither did you! I’m sick of being cooped up in this apartment! I feel fine!”

  “Be that as it may, I think I’d better stay awh
ile.”

  It was a fatal regional vagary. Southern homes are full of people who are just “staying awhile.” When Evelyn Cunningham took two years to drink a glass of milk, Granny told everybody that she was just staying awhile. That unparalleled tactile experience of stepping on a human face in the middle of the night lingers like a moist legend on the Southern foot because someone who was just staying awhile was asleep on the floor when you padded slipperless to the bathroom. Sears sells more camp mattresses and foam-rubber pallets in the South than anywhere else in the country. Southerners buy more adhesive tape than anybody else; not to bind our wounds but to make extra name strips for the mailbox so the postman will know who is just staying awhile. The most challenging jobs in America are with the Southeastern Regional Office of the Bureau of the Census, and there’s always plenty of overtime.

  As Herb would later tell people, the longest-running comedy in the history of the American theater is The Mother-in-Law Who Came to Dinner. It opened on Park Road in 1936. Granny never officially moved in with us, she just stayed awhile. Nor did she ever go back to Ballston and pack the rest of her belongings; that would have been an open betrayal of her Virginia roots. Loath to let anyone actually see her moving, she announced that she was just staying awhile and asked people to bring things to her.

  Each time our relatives and friends visited us they brought over another dress, another pair of Enna Jettick laced oxfords, more rayon drawers, and those crocheted head scarves known in Granny’s youth as “fascinators.” One week Aunt Charlotte and Uncle Botetourt brought over a hat, the next week Dora Madison produced the veil, and the week after that Evelyn Cunningham showed up with the stuffed bird. It went on for more than a year, but nobody ever suggested that Granny had moved. They simply pulled another size 44 from a Lansburgh’s shopping bag and said, “Since you’re staying awhile, I thought you might need this.”

  Thread by thread, button by button, they put Granny together again. The tactful transfer reached its climax the day Dora brought over her one-eyed fox fur piece and Aunt Charlotte appeared an hour or so later with the creature’s missing eye.

  Everybody knew what she was up to. Expecting Granny to stay away from an unformed blob of female material was like expecting a cobra to stay away from a flute.

  »three«

  THE experts of the thirties swore by the bottle but Granny preached femininity, so Mama nursed me for eight months. The immunities I gained were canceled out by the perils of our particular madonna-and-child scenario. My little blankets were full of scorched holes and I developed severe colic from her impassioned shouts of “Throw him out at third!” as she listened to the radio.

  Once I was weaned I passed exclusively into Granny’s hands. It was the era of the scientific nursery; women’s magazines insisted on strict schedules, fanatic measurements like two-thirds of an ounce, and the absolute need to protect “Baby” from germs. But Granny, a Southern primitive and a hardy Saxon underneath her genteel veneer, dismissed it all with “A few germs never hurt anybody.” If I dropped my pacifier on the floor, she picked it up, wiped it off on her apron, and stuck it back in my mouth. She doctored me herself. Intoning, “Whiskey or salt will cure anything,” she spoon-fed me hot toddies and taught me to gargle before I could talk. I received no vitamins, no cod liver oil, and was never touched by a pediatrician.

  She refused to recognize what the magazines called “tender baby stomachs,” so I acquired all sorts of acquired tastes by the age of three. Raw oysters, pickled pigs feet, and olives were my staples, and coffee was my favorite beverage. “It won’t hurt her,” said Granny, and Mama, who drank twenty cups a day, poured us both a refill.

  Whether it was a chemical imbalance or simply a manifestation of the nonconformity that swirled around me, I developed a dislike of sweets that grew into an aversion and thence into what seemed to be an allergy.

  “My nose is beating,” I whimpered one day, after eating out of politeness a piece of candy a neighbor gave me. The bridge of my nose was throbbing like an arterial pressure point.

  The idea of taking me to a doctor never crossed Granny’s mind. She was not one to go all medical as long as genealogy was at hand.

  “The Uptons have never had anything like that, neither have the Rudings. Mr. King, does beating nose bridge run in your family?”

  “No, but we lived for a time at Notting Hill Gate.”

  After I outgrew my crib I slept with Granny on the convertible sofa. On any given night our bed contained a hot water bag or an icebag, depending upon her affliction of the moment; tubes of Ben-Gay and Musterol with or without caps; loose Lydia Pinkham pills that felt like buckshot; old mustard plasters that fell off her back and stuck to the sheets; a box of Kleenex; crochet needles; and one or more copies of the Daughters’ magazine.

  Without her Shapely Stout corsets, she billowed out like a tube of Pillsbury biscuit dough when you press on the dotted line. Each time she turned over, I identified with the characters on comic book covers who were always racing away from collapsing skyscrapers or cresting tidal waves. Her sound effects were out of the Mesozoic Age, an accusation she denied with her usual sublime self-assurance.

  “I do not snore. Snoring is unladylike.”

  My training for ladyhood began with the duets we sang in bed. “They don’t write songs the way they used to,” she said darkly, citing “Body and Soul” as an example of degeneracy. To keep me from “going bad” when I grew up, she taught me suitable hits from her youth. Propped up on our pillows, she crocheting and I crayoning a coloring book, we gave forth with earnest renditions of “She’s More To Be Pitied Than Censured,” “She May Have Seen Better Days,” and “The Picture That’s Turned Toward the Wall.”

  “Oh, shit,” Mama said from the bedroom.

  Mama took care of my outings. Her favorite arena was Meridian Hill Park on 16th Street, which contained an equestrian statue of Joan of Arc that she liked. Gripping the handle of my stroller, she would break into a dead heat and race down the terrace yelling “Charge!”

  Her addiction required a lot of time out but she always observed Granny’s ironclad rule—the only one, to my knowledge, that she ever paid any attention to.

  “I’m going to have a cigarette while we’re sitting on the bench. It’s all right to smoke on the street if you’re sitting down, as long as you don’t do it while you’re walking.”

  We sat down a lot on our walks. Had we lived anywhere else she would have fallen into a nicotine fit, but Washington, like the Paris that inspired it, has a lot of parks. We had no sooner left one than Mama was hurrying furtively toward another like an espionage courier who can’t remember where the rendezvous is supposed to take place.

  Herb never returned to Mama’s bed. He went on sleeping on his rollaway in the kitchen leg, which became his reading room as well. How chaste a cot it was I do not know. If he occasionally closed his after-work book and crept down the hall to the bedroom, it was for nothing more than a brief conjugal visit. In the mornings he was always asleep in his retreat like a monk in a cell.

  I don’t know why I called him by his first name; perhaps because Daddy has two syllables, while Herb is a one-syllable sound that falls easily off the childish tongue. A more interesting question is why no one corrected me. Mama was not one to care about such niceties, but Granny was a stickler for good Southern manners and Herb himself held such typically British views on children that he would not even let me refer to Mama and Granny by pronoun. “She is for she-goats!” he would snap, yet he never made me call him Daddy.

  I think their permissiveness sprang from an unconscious wish on all their parts to regard our family group as three siblings with Granny at the matriarchal helm. Mama wanted a buddy instead of a husband, Herb wanted an intellectual companion instead of a wife, and Granny wanted to boss a show, any show. By never saying Daddy, I symbolically eliminated the patriarchal figure that would have spoiled their game.

  My unfilial custom caused consternation on Park Road.<
br />
  “Is he your real father?” a lady asked me.

  “Yes, ma’am, but I call him by his first name.”

  She shook her head in disapproval but she did not seem very surprised. A man who wears a tuxedo while emptying the garbage at four A.M. is bound to have strange children. His sartorial habits led to a number of puzzled inquiries. The most memorable incident occurred one night when he stopped by the corner drugstore on his way to work and ran into old Mrs. McIntyre, the neighborhood Nosy Parker.

  “I’ve been meaning to ask you something,” she squawked in her going-deaf voice. “Are you an undertaker?”

  “No, madam, but I’ll be happy to call one for you.”

  She didn’t hear it but everyone else in the store did.

  Now when he went out in the daytime he usually took me with him. We walked up to the Mount Pleasant branch library, I holding his index finger and he talking, patiently explaining what things were and how they worked: streetcars, fire hydrants, the yellow line down the middle of the street. When we entered the library, the stern-faced spinsterish librarians would look up with smiles and carol, “Oh, here’s Mr. King!” in a way that made me realize that women liked Herb the way men liked Mama.

  While he chose his books I had to sit absolutely still and recite to myself things he had taught me: the alphabet, the Presidents, and the five degrees of peerage (duke, marquess, earl, viscount, and baron). When he had his books he would take me upstairs to the children’s room and help me pick out something for myself.

  Afterwards we sat in the park outside the library, ostensibly for me to play but really because he could not wait to get at his books. He would open them and do some preliminary scanning, and I, never much for playing, would do the same with mine. One afternoon he uttered a triumphant “Ah-ha!”

  “What?” I said.

  He tapped the page. “Occam’s Razor. It’s the law of intellectual thrift devised by William of Ockham, a medieval philosopher,” he read aloud. “He said that hypotheses should never be developed beyond necessity.”