Gladys Reunited

by Sandi Toksvig

  It was still raining as Lori steered the convertible up Jimmy Carter Boulevard and past a hotel which offered ‘B’Fast and Pool’. I didn’t know if ‘pool’ meant swimming or snooker and we didn’t stop to enquire.

  On the way we seemed to pass nothing but fast-food outlets.

  Strangely, we were not drawn to any of these or indeed to the other retail options such as the Dinette Center or my personal favourite, The Plastic Bag Mart. As we got closer to our destination, advertising hoardings began beckoning us to Horsetown —the Largest Western Store in the US, and an inviting offer of Top Soil for Sale. All along the highway large signs warned us to ‘Keep Off the Median’. I asked Lori about this.

  ‘What’s the median?’

  ‘It’s the grass in the middle of the highway. You get a lot of immigrants who don’t know any better and they stop and have a picnic there,’ she explained.

  I could see immigrant alfresco dining could be a problem but I doubted many of them would grasp the concept of the median and where it was located. I wondered what they would make of signs encouraging everyone to ‘Adopt a Highway’ or ‘Stop for a Jiffy Lube’ or even an ‘Express Lube’. There must be something different about American cars. The preponderance of quick oil-change places on every street corner suggests vehicles gasping for a bit of new lubrication.

  We passed some great restaurants — the Lettuce Souprise You, with two carrots making the Ts of lettuce, and the Chick-Fil-A, but stopped for coffee at a fast-food joint called the Golden Griddle. It was a high-class affair littered with instructions about not bringing firearms in or causing trouble. Definitely not a place for turpitude. Despite this, the welcome available was second to none. We sat up at the counter and were served by a collection of wonderfully cheerful people, called Oliver and the like, all of whom had had their teeth entirely reconstructed in gold with diamanté infills. Our main waitress was called Pythia, pronounced, she told us, with a hard P.

  ‘It’s a Greek Goddess,’ she said.

  ‘Oh really?’ we asked. ‘Which one?’

  ‘I have no idea,’ she replied and took our order. Great place. Great people.

  It was a long way to the flea market but as Lori said, ‘I am happy to drive for ever if I am questing for something.’

  Questing we were, and the Pendergrass Flea Market is something. I would recommend it to everyone. The leaflet does not lie when it tells you that you can ‘Walk through more than 2½ miles of storefronts centred around a turn-of-the-century old town main street’.

  And I guarantee, whatever it was you were looking for is in there somewhere. It’s not very nice but it is in there. We parked our rental car amid a sea of pick-up trucks. These were big vehicles. Some so large they gave the suggestion that the people didn’t just arrive in them — they were also their homes.

  ‘Is this what they call “white trash” country?’ I asked Lori, ever questing for some sociological understanding of America.

  ‘Will you be quiet?’ she hissed. ‘These people have guns.’

  We had arrived in a part of the South which can only be described as redneck country. Men wearing plaid shirts and even the occasional pair of ancient dungarees wandered about calling each other ‘Bubba’. We entered across a large wooden porch which had a fading Thanksgiving display and two wooden rocking chairs as if it were a genuine ‘down home’ experience that we were about to enjoy. The turn-of-the-century old town main street turned out to be a kind of set through which many people were happily strolling as if it were the real thing.

  There was no soft sell about any of it. Everything was ‘A Bargain!’ and ‘Utterly Unique!’ I think I got the measure of the place from a display of bumper stickers which boasted the Confederate flag plus quotes from one or two of the more amusing things Hitler had said. There were also stickers that contained fairly straightforward sentiments clearly designed to be read at high speed.

  ‘You came to this country. Now speak English or get out.’

  The purveyor of friendly car sentiment was a friendly sort of guy. His other merchandise included numerous blowpipes, a 200,000-volt stun gun for just $36 and a Road Warrior knife with a 12-inch serrated blade — ‘Yours to Take Home and Treasure’ — for a mere $24. It was a scary display and the owner watched us the whole time we were checking it out. He made no move to serve us. He knew potential customers when he saw them. To me the knife looked like a great King Arthur fake but a large man with no neck picked it up and exclaimed, ‘Heyell thajt’s shiaaarp!’ We moved on.

  All around us the accent had changed completely. Everywhere people were greeting each other in deep Southern drawls.

  ‘Aye remember yooo. Yoooo cut mah Tiffany’s haijr.’

  Up at Jeremy’s Critters, they were offering a special today of a Hand-Fed Cockatiel. Psitaccines, I thought, and told the man about the Teflon. He wasn’t interested. A dozen rabbits lay disconsolately on top of each other in a cage no more than two foot by one. They were miserable and didn’t move. I couldn’t tell if they were for pets or pies or both.

  But I felt calm, for everywhere I was comforted by large signs telling me how much Jesus loved me — although patently not as much as he loves truckers. Jesus was available in a range of merchandise including powder compacts, fridge magnets and chiming clocks. My favourite was the Touch Lamp’ which did as advertised. When you touched it, the thing lit up and displayed the entire Last Supper in an amber glow. A man offered to make me a personalised licence plate with a picture of myself actually with Jesus but I declined. There were too many other purchasing possibilities for my dollar.

  I was tempted, however, to get my own gravestone. This is a purchase which I think is often made too late in life. The one thing you wear for eternity and it is usually chosen by a grieving relative already counting the cost of the canapés for the wake. There were many styles on display and the offers were excellent. For the day I was there (and that day only) I could benefit from the Lay Away plan and get Free Lettering! There is something pleasing about associating the words Lay Away with funerary artefacts but not as pleasing as the rather ironic placing of the stall opposite.

  This was the home of Nancy Clark who gave psychic readings. Nancy was clearly serious about her work although there were many signs proclaiming the fact that she didn’t give refunds. Seated on a sofa at the back of her small tent-like room, Nancy was busy giving a young girl the future low-down. It was obviously an intense experience only marred by a man, whom I took to be Nancy’s husband, sitting on a plastic chair beside them, counting money and speaking on a mobile phone. Perhaps Mrs Clark was busy looking ahead while Mr Clark did a spot of reality making. I hovered, but Nancy was in an intense session and I wasn’t sure that I wanted the future laid out for me.

  As well as the pets, the weapons and the tombstones, avenues of junk radiated Out from the turn-of-the-century main. street. There were many ‘historic’ Coke bottles for sale in this home of the ‘real thing’. You could collect hundreds of different styles through the ages. They looked just like the ones Lori and I had drunk out of as kids. Now we were history. The place was exhausting, but we did find a small oasis down at one end where a jovial man was selling quilts.

  ‘Are they handmade?’ I asked him.

  He nodded. ‘They are by somebody,’ he said.

  We wandered past ‘antique’ furniture from the 1940s and I teased Lori about the lack of history, but she said, ‘A lot of the furniture got destroyed in the Civil War and what there was probably stayed in people’s families. The concept of the heirloom is big. Your history, where you came from, helps establish who you feel you are in America and they are unlikely to sell it off in a flea market.’

  ‘Funny, I haven’t seen any books,’ I commented.

  Lori looked at me over the top of her glasses as if I couldn’t possibly be serious. She’s right. This was not a place where anyone had ever come to buy a book.

  She went off to get some lemonade in Bubba’s Food Court. I couldn’t
face it. The court offered much high-cholesterol fare —chilli dogs, cheese jalapeños and peanuts, endless peanuts, but it was also full of quite young people who were all enormous. A woman my age wandered past with a small child. The roll of her stomach was quite literally banging against her knees. Her bottom was so large it didn’t seem it could possibly be part of her. I felt sure it must have snuck up in the night and attached itself when she wasn’t looking. It is a picture of excess I have not seen anywhere else in the world. The United States contains 4 per cent of the world’s population and uses 25 per cent of the world’s resources. Certainly the people in Bubba’s were doing their bit to keep up the statistics. How sad — a people who could have anything, including health.

  Anyway, my eye had been attracted to a nearby stall. Here a ten-inch white plastic chapel with a grey pitched roof, bell tower and three rather fine stained-glass windows of coloured film stood amid a sea of battery-operated products. Above a small set of red double doors was a miniature clock. A woman behind the trestle table the chapel rested on eyed me with some difficulty. She had a fairly mobile pair of eyes which seemed to wander as she spoke to me. There was a sense that although the Good Lord had placed her vision equipment in the standard place above the nose, actually they longed to drift over her left earlobe. It was slightly unnerving.

  ‘What does the chapel do?’ I asked the woman, because almost everything we had come across so far ‘did’ something. The dinosaur clock which roared on the hour, the plastic water fountain which lit up, played a tune and had a ballerina dance about on top and quite possibly, the gravestone which lit your name in neon when flowers were placed near it.

  ‘It’s fantastic!’ she said. ‘Every hour the windows light up, the doors open, an angel comes out and dances to a tune and then the bell rings the exact time.’

  She didn’t have any batteries to prove this, but by the market standards the thing was rather expensive — $20 — and I was inclined to believe her. She smiled at me and removed a cardboard box marked ‘Musical Inspirational Chapel’ from underneath the counter.

  ‘You’re lucky. It’s the last one.’

  There had clearly been a positive rush for them. She struggled to get the tall, slim church into the tall, slim box.

  ‘Funny, I cannot get this into the box,’ she muttered.

  Her eyes wandered about as she struggled and it occurred to me that the difficulty perhaps lay in her mother having married her cousin. The lid never did close but she handed the box to me with a beaming smile.

  ‘That’s going to give your whole family a whole lot of pleasure. It is an heirloom for tomorrow.’

  In fact, when I got it home, the item was rather better than I had hoped. It took a staggering amount of batteries to power up but there were many more extras than she said. The chapel plays a random selection of four hymns and there are hours of fun to be had sitting in the dark with the stained glass illuminated, trying to guess which of the four listed tunes it could possibly be. The clock also happily strikes the hour as advertised but the actual number of strikes is marginally random. It might not be a good timekeeping device for those relying on aural input only. The box suggests that the chapel would ‘make a comforting night light for children’. I’m not sure about this. I think if a plastic building suddenly lit up at one o’clock in the morning, an angel shot out, played ‘0 Little Town of Bethlehem’ and struck eleven, a child might be damaged for life.

  We hooked up with Richard again who had been threatened with expulsion by the security people because he had been filming with his video camera. I don’t think you can sink any lower than being chucked out of a flea market. As we headed off, I looked into a small stall near the entrance. An African gentleman was sitting beside his display of Nigerian crafts. He was the only black person we had seen and he looked lonely. We had been served by many Vietnamese and Chinese people but I thought it unlikely that in the land of the pro-Hitler bumper sticker, many people popped in for a bit of an ebony elephant or a straw hat.

  We headed south, back to Atlanna and tall buildings and the suggestion of civilisation. Along the way hundreds of companies beckoned for our attention with huge advertising hoardings. There was a ‘Sofa and Loveseat’ available for only $599, a ‘Rooms to Go Outlet’ (oddly closed on Tuesdays and Wednesdays), ‘Previously Enjoyed Cars’ (as opposed to second-hand) and a ‘Diversified Cabinet Distributor’, which might be a thriving business but I felt lacked something as a catchy title. Everywhere signs told us what to do and what not to do.

  ‘Trucks with 6+ wheels ONLY use four lanes.’ (At one time?)

  We drove into the vast, modern city, confident that it must be awash with places to eat but could find nothing. Navigating was confusing. Everything seemed to be called Peachtree something. There were no peach trees, indeed few trees of any kind. (Peachtree Street was the main thoroughfare and it had become severely rutted by all the traffic so the good burghers built a Peachtree West next to it, which is in fact not west but…)

  We went off to get some culture. A magazine in my hotel room had described Gone With the Wind as ‘the world’s bestselling novel (second only to the Bible)’. I thought this was remarkable — not just the sales figures but the description of the Bible as a novel. The Windy author, Margaret Mitchell, was a true Southern girl. Legend has it that as a child she was so steeped in stories of the Confederate past, she didn’t know the South had lost the Civil War till she was ten and her mother confessed. Gone With the Wind is the quintessential Southern novel and I wanted to see Margaret’s house. I had only seen the movie but already I liked her. Apparently she had been refused admission to the local Junior League due to a rather scandalous Apache dance she had done at a charity ball.

  The Margaret Mitchell house is set back from the road (on one of the endless Peachtree streets) and looks like a classic American clapboard house with a white porch across the front, inviting you to ‘set awhile and visit’. I was excited, and there isn’t a better companion for these things than Lori. I have travelled with her in Europe and she is very good at relaxing into the moment. We wandered in looking for a true slice of the South.

  The entrance to the house is via a newly minted office of white walls and giant glass store fronts. Behind the desk a cheerful young woman sat waiting to take our ten dollars to breathe the air that once was Margaret’s. The place was all efficiency mixed with charm. Margaret would have been thrilled, apart from the large poster behind the woman, showing the house clearly quite horribly ablaze.

  ‘You had a fire at the house?’ I asked politely.

  She nodded and smiled. ‘Oh, yes, nineteen nineties, burnt practically to the ground. It was tragic,’ she confided. They had all sorts of plans to use it for the Olympics.’

  Lori and I both thought about that for a moment. She, perhaps, recalling the Olympic disappointment and me trying to think what sport they could possibly have had in mind for this particular venue. Through the glass display hall I could clearly see the house still standing there.

  ‘So they rebuilt it?’ I said rather stupidly.

  ‘Certainly did,’ said the helpful woman. ‘It was gorgeous … (there was a long pause) … then, the darned thing burnt down again.

  This struck me as either fantastically unlucky or suspiciously like the work of a literary critic with an obsessive soul and a box of all-weather matches. Clearly the woman now felt she had done enough to be helpful. There were other tourists behind me.

  That’ll be ten dollars to see the Margaret Mitchell house,’ she repeated by rote.

  ‘Except it isn’t actually her house, is it?’ I persisted in a rather annoying and pedantic way. The woman looked at me with irritation.

  ‘It is …‘ she replied very firmly’… very like.’

  We paid and wandered off to look at the displays. It seemed Margaret began her scribbling as a journalist for a local newspaper, the Atlanta Journal. This was not a time when women did that kind of thing, so she must have been a gutsy girl. T
he small museum had blow-ups of some of her articles. They were written in a snappy style, heavy on the human interest — men who’d lost their memories and didn’t know how they’d got to Atlanta, families in desperate circumstances and so on. The photos on display showed Mags to be a jolly woman in the flapper style, not unlike a Southern Dorothy Parker. There were several tightly strung wires suspended at an angle from floor to ceiling in the main display hall. After a while, a small knot of tourists gathered rather edgily around them as the young woman from the ticket desk moved in to double as tour guide.

  ‘We are about to enter the home of Margaret Mitchell. Does anyone have any questions?’

  ‘What are the wires for?’ asked a man with many cameras.

  It wouldn’t have been my first question but I think it helped to assess the level of the group.

  ‘They are for future displays,’ was the reply. Provided of course they didn’t burn down. We headed outside, across a small dull patch of garden and into the house. The ground floor was entirely devoid of furniture. It had been laid out like an art gallery and contained only black and white photographs of Atlanta and a few of her sons and daughters. The lighting was very modern — little focused halogen lamps on thin wire runners littered the ceiling. It was probably not how Margaret would have had it. This, it seemed, was the ‘corporate area’ where Atlanta dignitaries are entertained.

  There was a rather fine portrait of John Henry ‘Doc’ Holiday —a member of the Wild Bunch and some distant relation of Margaret’s. It transpires he gave up dentistry partly because he had a weak chest and was told to go west and partly from unrequited love. He fell hopelessly for Margaret’s cousin Melanie, who took one look at him and decided to become a nun. It is the kind of decision that would make any man question his powers of attraction to women. Women becoming nuns or lesbians or sometimes both can have a strange effect on the male. He buggered off to shoot people and Margaret named her goody-goody character in Gone With the Wind after her cousin.