by Jane Borden
“Um, my aunt,” I replied. “In North Carolina.”
“You sounded different,” he said, and then imitated the drawn-out short-a in the way I’d said “Bye.”
I tried to push my way through the crowd. “Wait,” he pressed. “Did she ask what you were wearing?”
“Yeah,” I said. “She likes to know that I look nice.”
“But you aren’t wearing black pants,” my friend said pointedly. “You’re wearing jeans.”
What she doesn’t know won’t hurt her. Yes, it was a white lie, but I don’t utilize them as frequently as people think Southerners do. Directly after divulging my roots, I often receive one of two responses: “People down there are really nice” or “People down there aren’t really that nice.” Since moving here I’ve had more than one person confess an initial dislike for me. For example, Brian Finkelstein. We knew each other for years before we became friends. Once, in passing, I asked, “How come it took so long?”
“Because I didn’t like you,” he said matter-of-factly.
“What?”
“I thought you were annoying.”
“Wait—what?”
“Well … the enthusiasm; I assumed it was fake.”
Nope: I’m honestly so optimistic it’s cringe-inducing. I assume that, when he came around, his line of reasoning went, “She’s still annoying, but at least it’s sincere!” Or perhaps he read a copy of How to Be a Lady, as Candace Simpson-Giles clearly notes, “A lady knows that false congeniality is as obvious as bad false eyelashes.”
Of all the colorful idiosyncrasies of my Southern life, none is as interesting to Yanks as the time my father paraded me around an auditorium in a poofy white dress like a prize heifer. I was a debutante. And no, I’m not embarrassed about it.
OK, I’m embarrassed about it. Therefore, a confession requires several follow-up exceptions and qualifications. For example, yes, I grew up with money; yes, I have a couple of sets of married second cousins; and yes, I was a little pudgy in high school … but I am not a snobby, inbred pig!
This is why, rather than repeat such a refrain, I typically hold the information until I choose to reveal it, for example, when someone else admits it first.
One day, I sat at the counter of Hope & Anchor in Red Hook, Brooklyn, anonymously enjoying far too many french fries, when I overheard a gentleman next to me telling his friend about “the strangest experience.” The friend was enthralled, giddy and full of questions: “So they just walked around in a circle?”
“Yeah. Weird, right?”
“And they really wear white dresses?”
“Totally. Wedding gowns. And I had to wear a tux with tails.”
It was so tempting. I wanted to trade stories, have a laugh. But I was unsure. I’ve been burned before. Northerners love to mock us. The stereotype is always the same: dumb, racist, and clinging to the past. Sometimes it doesn’t matter how much you explain or contextualize information. When I told my friend Rachel what I mentioned earlier about not knowing that Jews still experienced racism until I came to New York, she responded angrily, “That’s horrible; you shouldn’t tell people that.” So much for honesty.
But my Hope & Anchor neighbors seemed to face this “deb” experience with curiosity. The escort’s friend had questions. He needed answers, information. And I needed someone to talk to between mouthfuls.
“Wait,” his friend prodded him. “Dudes were in the ceremony too?”
“Oh yeah,” I interjected, entering the scene like the mysterious stranger in the third act of a thriller. They paused and stared at me silently. I sloshed my soda for effect.
“Have you been to one?” the guy who’d been an escort asked with trepidation.
“I did one,” I said. Then I swiveled around on my stool before adding, “Twice.”
“Whoa,” said the friend.
I was starting to feel like Robert Shaw’s character in Jaws when he launches into the monologue about the sinking of the Indianapolis. “Eleven hundred men went into the water … Vessel went down in twelve minutes … Margaret forgot her mascara and had to borrow Leigh’s!!”
They drilled me with questions. I told them about the choreography of the group dance and the duties of the “head deb.” “No way!”s were elicited. “Tell me about it”s were exchanged.
And then, the question I’d expected from the start: “Why do people do it?”
I told them that, originally, the balls were a way for a father to sell his daughter into marriage; he presented her to society bachelors when she was of age. Hence the prize-heifer analogy. However, if you ask a member of a debutante committee today, the response will be, “To recognize families who’ve contributed to the community.” Specifically, this refers to philanthropy, leadership, bringing business to the local economy, and so on. Ultimately, though, each family is wealthy—and, more important, has been for several generations. You know Matthew 19:24? The verse that goes, “It’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for one who is rich to enter the kingdom of God”? In the South, they insert “nouveau” before “rich.”
“But why did you do it?” the escort asked me.
I wish I could say it was because I was nineteen and didn’t know any better. The truth is, the prospect of having a dozen parties and luncheons thrown in my honor was intoxicating. Also, did I mention the presents? So many presents. Why does one get gifts just for turning nineteen? I guess it’s akin to receiving money at a bar or bat mitzvah, but as I believe I’ve made horrifyingly clear, I wouldn’t know anything about that.
In answer to my new friend’s question, though, there is no reason per se. There is no pragmatism or practicality. It’s just what you do. I still harbor fantasies of one day encountering a situation that will call upon the skills I learned as a debutante and thereby retroactively justify my participation in the ritual. It would be my Goonies moment. The kids in that movie face a series of life-threatening challenges while trapped inside a booby-trap-laden underground maze. At one point, they meet an ancient piano made of bones and are instructed to play a sheet of music in order to pass. The character whose role up to this point was that of the whiny squeamish girl becomes the savior when she summons memories from music lessons past to accomplish the task. All I’m saying is, and I don’t think it’s too much to ask, it would be nice if one day a group of my friends and I could get kidnapped, right? And put in some basement where the walls are closing in. And then, just before we all get squashed, a disembodied voice says, “It’s all over, kiddies … unless one of you can display a proper English curtsy!”
the manners-book incident eventually subsided and the deliveries resumed. By that point, her fame was officewide. She has a knack for building fame. People all over North Carolina and Virginia adore her for her beauty and charm and have spent my life telling me so.
“You’re Jane Tucker’s namesake, aren’t you?” they exclaim upon hearing my name. “You know, she is a very fine lady.” Indeed, I do. Then they hug me and say that I must be wonderful too. That’s some powerful runoff.
My aunt doesn’t just greet you, she throws her arms up, fills her lungs with air, and then releases it by exalting your name skyward as if it’s the answer to a quandary that had been stumping her for months: “Haaaaaaaaah, Jaaaaaaaaane!!!”
She refuses to admit how many marriage proposals she entertained in her youth, but my estimates put it at around four.
One of the afternoons she came to visit when I was a child, I remember hearing the click of her keys in the lock and running so fast through the back hall to meet her that my legs slipped and buckled under me like the overexcited dog that rams into a wall when it can’t slow down. And she wasn’t even carrying french fries.
Recently, I bumped into my friend Hobby, who lives in New York but grew up around the corner from my aunt. She grabbed me by the shoulders, locked eyes with me, and said, “I love your aunt Jane.”
“I know,” I said with a smile. “Isn’t she great
?”
“No, you don’t understand.” She pressed. “She gave me a sixpence to wear in my shoe on my wedding day. A sixpence! I’ll never forget it.”
Whenever I talk to my college roommate, Katie, she asks about my aunt and says, “She always made feel like I was the most important person in the room.”
This is especially true for me, her namesake. My aunt has no children of her own. When I visited her, growing up, I was treated like a princess. My parents’ home is beautiful, I mean no disrespect, but they had to deal with three children constantly muddying it. Jane and Lucius’s home was pristine. Anywhere you set your vision were trays of polished antique silver, hand-painted Herend figurines, perfectly fluffed pink and pale green embroidered pillows, and fresh-cut roses from her garden. She had almost a dozen varieties in her side yard—excluding one called ‘Mr. Lincoln’, which my grandmother said she couldn’t plant because of “the War between the States”—and her friends would frequently pull in the driveway to admire them, particularly her favorite, a pink and white climbing rose named ‘Eden’ that had covered a stretch of white-brick wall five feet high and ten feet long.
Each morning after I stayed over, she made me a chickadee egg: one fried egg chopped with bacon and cubed bread, served in a tiny egg-shaped china bowl with delicate brown birds painted on it, and placed between a glass vase bearing a rosebud and a silver goblet filled with orange juice. I, meanwhile, was wearing a hypercolor T-shirt and growing out that bad perm.
Staying with my aunt also afforded me the rare opportunity of seeing her undone. She slept the way I imagined the Queen of England did, in a silk off-white gown that fell straight to the floor and felt like cream to touch. It was bordered with intricate lace, bore her monogram, and flowed when she walked like something you’d see in a Shakespeare production. I couldn’t believe she looked that beautiful in the middle of the night. I imagined she dreamed about rolling prairies and fields of daffodils and never woke up tired. She said I was beautiful too. The brash ACC basketball insignia on my T-shirt argued otherwise, but I figured, Hey, I’m just a kid; my time will come.
When I slip off my Converse sneakers in my grubby Brooklyn apartment, shove them under the broken dresser I found on Franklin Street, and reach for a “Have a Guinness!” glass to fill with tap water, I realize that things didn’t really turn out the way I’d planned—in spite of my aunt’s subtle hints. That first post-book package she sent me? A polka-dot makeup bag. When I opened it at work, Erin parroted back to me, “Darling, how about a little rooooouge?” I laughed. She laughed. It was funny.
After that came a knee-length, pale-blue terrycloth sheath. It is short-sleeved, pulls over the head, has white trim, and, of course, bears my monogram. I’d never seen such a specimen before. Was it a day robe? An apron? I held it up for all to see. “I think it’s the WASP version of a muumuu,” Adam guessed. I laughed. He laughed. It was funny.
When the next package came, a couple of friends had already inspected the box by the time I got into the office. “Open it,” Adam said. This time there was a card inside. She’d written, “I remember you used to love this.” I dug into the tissue paper and pulled out the nightgown. It was a little more yellow than it used to be. And the lace had pulled away from the seam in a couple of places, but otherwise it was exactly the same, which is to say, resplendent.
“Ha! That looks like something out of Flowers in the Attic,” Erin said. “Yeah, I think that’s what Ophelia died in,” Adam added. She laughed. He laughed. I got up to visit the ladies’ room.
“Excuse me,” I said, and took the garment with me.
Locking the door, I slumped onto the commode and started to cry. The three-by-three stall was overwhelmed by the smell of my aunt’s old house. After chemotherapy, she said it was too difficult to keep up all those rooms, so they opted out for a small condo. That was years earlier. The nightgown must have been stewing in a box since. When I closed my eyes, I could see the pale green sofas. I saw sunlight pouring through the breakfast-room window and glinting off the silver goblet. I saw a half-eaten chickadee egg and a green linen napkin with white trim, and through the screen door I saw her roses.
She tore out the garden before they moved. ‘Queen Elizabeth’, ‘Peace’, ‘Tropicana’, ‘Just Joy’, ‘Double Delight’, ‘New Dawn’. She dug up each, giving the most vigorous to friends to replant, and leaving only one behind, the ‘Eden’ that covered her driveway wall. Unfortunately, it’s struggling without her. The new owners have not been able to keep it strong. But the rosemary is thriving. Perhaps it remembers her. And so will I.
That was the last time I opened one of my aunt’s gifts in public. Now I tote the traveling talismans home and inspect them away from Yankee eyes. Because, although it’s true that I’m a New Yorker—Hoahhh!—I am not from here. I may wear a garish worn-out T-shirt during the day, but at night, I sleep like a queen.
out and spun me around—“house.” Then he dipped me. And while horizontal, I had a premonition: an image of me sitting in mud next to a white tent. “She’s mighty mighty.” The next thing I knew, he was twirling me closer to the edge of the dance floor. “Just lettin’ it all hang out.” And although I now knew where this was headed, I was powerless to stop it.
Squish, squish, thump, sigh.
Those were the sounds of my pumps sticking in the mud in quick succession, my rear reacquainting itself with the ground, and me closing my eyes to suffer in solitude the indignity of the joke I instantly, also, foresaw: “Hey bartender!”—I mouthed along as Mr. Haskins guffawed—“Cut her off!”
I stared up at him and the white tent behind him, feeling dizzy and, yes, slightly buzzed, but mostly confused. Was I prescient? I had literally seen the future an instant before it happened, right down to the hackneyed joke. I felt like Cassandra at the ball, doomed to spout party-foul prophecies that old men won’t believe. No wonder I drink, I thought, as the seat of my dress began to dampen with rain.
“Whoopsie Daisy,” Mr. Haskins said, sticking out his hand. “Didn’t see that coming, did you?”
Before I could roll my eyes, there flashed a familiar look in his, and everything made sense: I hadn’t predicted the future; I’d relived the past. July, two years prior, Sea Island, Georgia. Different band, same song. Different friend’s father, same extra-dance-floor tumble. Different couple getting married—same wedding, which is to say, of the Southern variety.
They’re all the same. Sure, nuptial celebrations in general are pretty similar but, as I have come to realize since moving to New York and befriending people who invite me to weddings in other parts of the country, Southern people marry in a very specific way. And since one of those ways is in front of a huge audience—everyone is invited and everyone goes—I’ve experienced the Southern wedding many times, forty-one and counting by my best estimate. I relive the same weekend over and over and over and over and over again. It is permanently set on repeat in my life.
Sitting on the ground, looking up at Mr. Haskins, feeling the wetness soak through to my skin, I figured this out. It is a strange curse but I’ve used it to my advantage. Case in point: I have since danced many times in heels on a makeshift dance floor to the song “Brick House” by the Commodores, and I have since danced with the fathers of many of my friends, but never again have I landed in the mud. I’m doomed to repeat history, but that doesn’t mean I can’t learn from it.
As someone who has been afforded the knowledge gained from both repetition and comparison, allow me to enumerate the basic differentiating characteristics of the Southern wedding and, along the way, offer advice.
First and most important is the one I’ve already mentioned: size. There were 560 guests at one of my sisters’ receptions and 430 at the other’s—and those are only the people who came. Just so you know, years passed before my mother admitted how many people she’d invited to Lou’s wedding (800) so yes, she realizes that some people find it strange. For Southerners, however, it is pretty normal. In fact, when fac
ed with such high numbers, some brides find it easier to do away with lists altogether and instead invite the entire town. Literally. In small cities, including Tarboro and Washington, North Carolina, it is customary for a bride’s family to print the reception’s address in the local newspaper in lieu of mailing invitations.
Obviously there are small affairs in the South, but they are the exception. Small weddings are suspicious; they imply that the bride’s family has something to hide … like a Yankee groom. So, in response to the exclamation New Yorkers most frequently utter regarding my summer calendar: No, actually, I’m not that popular.
Unlike in other parts of the country, a guest at a Southern wedding cannot give the couple money. It’s considered tacky. After the honeymoon, they may return your present to the store and exchange it for money, but they first need a tangible gift to display at the bride’s home. Old ladies will view the loot and gift cards remain attached, so your token of love had better be good.
Wear something pastel to the wedding-day brunch, especially if you’re a dude. Men might also consider seersucker and bow ties, and if the luncheon is casual, remember that men wear shorts two extra inches above the knee in the South, and never wear socks with loafers. All of these style elements are part of a look that my friend Katie McElveen dubbed “Jethro-sexual.”
The fourteen girls in matching outfits at the reception are not the entertainment; they’re the bridesmaids. Six times have I been one among twelve or more. Sometimes there are honorary bridesmaids, too, who were also friends with the bride in college but had been in a different sorority. Then there are readers, ushers, girls who pass out programs. I’m surprised there aren’t also candle lighters, seat warmers, bag holders, aisle clearers.… Why not save money by bestowing on your friends the designation “bartender”?
I mock out of love. Yes, it is ridiculous to stuff twenty-eight people plus a couple and the preacher into the apse of a church. But it stems from a desire to be inclusive, which I find endearing, even if I’m out a couple extra hundred dollars because of it. Southerners want everyone to be a part of the celebration the way kindergarten teachers want everyone to participate in art hour. There is even a place for the kid who eats paint—which means, again, even though I have been a bridesmaid eight times, a junior bridesmaid three times, and an honorary bridesmaid once, I am not that popular.
