Kinfolks

by Lisa Alther

  *

  When my mother hears of this, she drives us both to the school. She drags me into the principal’s office and insists I tell him what’s happened. Shaking his head, he rescinds my expulsion and sends me back to class.

  But Mrs. Hawke and I are now archenemies. One of her test questions asks for the definition of perdition. I write “damnation,” and she counts it wrong because it’s not “hell.”

  I race to the library and look up perdition in a dictionary. The definition given is “damnation.” I carry the dictionary to Mrs. Hawke’s classroom, lay it on her desk, and point this out.

  She says, “Well, I bet every dictionary doesn’t define perdition this way.”

  I reply that one is enough to make my case.

  Gazing at me through narrowed eyes, she agrees to give me half credit. But it’s clear she has me marked out as a troublemaker.

  In the summer of 1959, I work as a receptionist in my father’s office. I’m impressed by how much time he spends with his patients and how kind he is to them. But I’m most impressed by the fact that he charges them only $3 per visit. Some can’t afford even that, so they pay him with cakes or country hams or sacks of beans.

  One evening as he’s driving me home, we pass a poor part of town. I make a snotty-teenager remark about the people who live there.

  Very quietly he says, “Those people are my patients and my friends, and I never want to hear you talk that way again.”

  Later that summer we take a family vacation to a South Carolina beach. When we pull into our driveway upon our return, Stanley from next door greets us wearing a suit, even though it’s not Sunday.

  As I climb out, I ask Stanley, “Why are you all dressed up?”

  “We’ve just been to Martha’s funeral,” he says, and explains that Martha, my best friend from childhood, has died in a wreck at church camp in a car driven by a youth minister who was showing off by racing around the mountain curves. His car veered off the road and rolled down a cliff. Martha, who was sitting by an open back window, was thrown partway out. The car landed on top of her.

  I walk upstairs to my room and lie down on my bed. I’m completely numb, as though my arm has just been lopped off. (When I think of this, even forty-five years later, I’m still numb.)

  Once we get our drivers’ licenses, my friends and I spend most of our lives in our parents’ cars, like gypsies in their pony carts. Marty and Jane are my most frequent companions because they live nearby. Marty’s father is a doctor and her mother is on the school board. She’s very well coordinated and, like me, would love to ruin her emotional health by playing organized sports. Instead, she’s dating the star of our basketball team. Jane, a popular cheerleader whose father is a businessman, is dating our quarterback.

  My boyfriend, Harold, is a good baseball player, but he doesn’t have time for sports. He works almost full-time at Sobel’s, the clothing store owned by the father of Linda, our Dobyns-Bennet High School squaw. Harold is the best-dressed boy at our school. He reminds me of my grandfather — tall and slender with beautiful clothes and a diamond pinky ring.

  Hour after hour, day after day, week after week, Jane, Marty, and I drive up Broad Street to the train station, U-turn, and descend Broad to the church circle. Teens arrive from all over southwest Virginia and East Tennessee to join us. At night, Broad Street is like a Los Angeles freeway during rush hour. Cars stop as passengers from one hop into another, or as people flirt or argue with those headed in the opposite direction.

  Constantly picking up or dropping off any of a dozen other friends, we eat fries and burgers at drive-in restaurants. We go to drive-in movies. Our favorite prank is to move the car when one of us goes to the refreshment stand, so the abandoned one has to hunt through the rows of parked cars with their panting occupants to find us. Smoking Pall Malls, we cruise the new road to Bristol, the first divided highway in our area, with the same excitement as when we rode the new escalator at J. Fred’s.

  Dates with boyfriends take place entirely within cars — at the drive-in restaurants and movies and in secluded spots with fogged-up windows and radios softly purring.

  A girl soon leaves town chubby, only to return skinny a few weeks later. As their bellies swell, a couple more girls drop out of school to elope with traumatized, baby-faced boyfriends.

  One night I find myself attired in a white strapless Scarlett O’Hara gown with a hoop skirt, waltzing at the country club with a tuxedoed and cummerbunded Harold. I’m taking as much pleasure in my Merry Widow corset and satin spike heels as I used to in my shoulder pads and cleats. I, too, am now proud of the Tidewater land grants my fine colonial ancestors received from King James I. My grandmother sits at a table with my parents, smiling like the Cheshire cat in her sequined gown.

  Meanwhile, my sister Jane has been born with an olive complexion. Swaddled in a flannel blanket, she resembles a papoose. My mother, descended from New England Puritans, once proclaimed the idea of extramarital sex as unappetizing as using someone else’s toothbrush, so there’s no possibility of genetic intervention by some Native American milkman. Years later, when a plausible explanation emerges, some acknowledge having noticed Jane’s exotic coloring. But at the time, as in all polite southern towns, no one says a word.

  My brother John was my rebel without a cause while we were growing up. He threw snowballs with rocks in them at passing cars. He tapped into the phone line and made free calls all over the world until the president of the phone company informed my father that John would go to prison unless he stopped. He built a shortwave radio to play chess matches with people behind the Iron Curtain.

  I used to hide in John’s closet to watch him hypnotize his friends, stretching them board-stiff between two chairs, their heads on one and their feet on the other. He’d tell them that when they awoke, they’d walk into the shower fully dressed and turn on the faucets. Afterward they’d stand there in the shower in their soaked clothing, totally bewildered.

  When John dropped out of high school to join the navy, my father hunted him down and shipped him north to Deerfield and then to MIT, where he grew the first beard Kingsporters had ever seen on a young man from a respectable family. He edited the campus humor magazine and orchestrated such pranks as planting a large cardboard missile from a military recruitment display nose-first in the floodlit MIT dome and then painting a crack down the dome as though the missile had crash-landed there.

  Since John is my hero, I take his advice when he tells me to come north to college. In any case, I’m intrigued by my mother’s homeland. I’m also intrigued by my father’s madcap adventures at Harvard Medical School. So I hop a train up there, and John drives me to interviews at several colleges.

  I like the woods and the lake on the Wellesley College campus because they remind me of home — apart from all the anxious young applicants in their Bergdorf Goodman suits, who are strolling the paths with their equally anxious parents prior to their interviews. I’ve bought a suit made from a material that resembles mustard-colored burlap. The red paisley blouse matches the lining of the jacket. It had seemed chic at J. Fred’s on Broad Street. But up against all that gear from Neiman Marcus, I realize that I resemble June Cleaver en route to the dentist.

  I sidle toward a turreted stone structure that looks as though it might house the Addams family. As I present myself to the receptionist, I doubt if I have a chance here. I have a bad suit and no parents.

  I’m ushered into a room with stained-glass windowpanes and enough elaborately carved oak furniture and paneling to have fueled the fireplace in our cabin for an entire winter. My interviewer, an older woman in a Pendleton plaid suit, doesn’t seem to notice my burlap fashion error. But she does ask where my parents are and how I’ve gotten here from Tennessee. I mumble something about my mother’s having a baby and not being able to get away. The interviewer studies me as though I’ve escaped from Tobacco Road.

  An ornate silver tea service sits on a table beside her needlepoint-upholstered
chair. She asks if I’d like some tea.

  I accept.

  Organizing two Limoges cups and saucers, she inquires whether I’d like lemon or milk.

  I’ve never drunk hot tea before, but I like milk and lemon, so I say, “Both, please.”

  She raises one carefully tweezed and penciled eyebrow. A corner of her lip-brushed mouth twitches. Gritting her molars so that her jaw muscles pulse, she pours milk into my cup, followed by tea. Then she briskly places a slice of lemon on my saucer and passes it to me.

  After I squeeze the lemon into my tea, the milk begins to curdle, and I realize I’ve committed a faux pas. I also realize that my quest is hopeless. Whatever made me think that a mongrel like me could sprint with these Ivy League greyhounds? Did I learn nothing from the flag-swinger debacle? I’m wearing a suit sewn from a feed sack. My parents aren’t interested enough in my future to accompany me. My brother at MIT is a juvenile delinquent. I don’t know not to put both milk and lemon in hot tea. And my SATs are well below Wellesley’s average.

  A month later, I’m accepted at Wellesley. Everyone is incredulous, especially me.

  My grandmother arrives at our house in her silver Cadillac demanding, “What’s wrong with Duke or Vanderbilt?”

  I reply that nothing’s wrong with them, but I want to see the world.

  “Boston is hardly the world,” she snaps.

  After enduring many years of condescension from the Seven Sisters wives of the Kingsport plant managers, she’s pleased I’ve been deemed bright enough to function at Wellesley (an assumption that soon proves questionable). But she also seems sad. It was a giant step from Darwin, Virginia, to Kingsport, Tennessee, and once she’d taken it, she rarely looked back. The step from Kingsport to Boston is even more drastic, and she doubts John and I will look back either.

  Her own son went up north to the University of Rochester, one of five promising Kingsport students given scholarships there by George Eastman (who killed himself shortly afterward, hopefully for unrelated reasons). After Harvard Medical School, a residency at the Roosevelt Hospital in New York, and a tour of duty in the field hospitals of France, my father finally came back home for good. But he brought along a Yankee wife, a Congregationalist whose idea of a good time is to read the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The Virginia Clubbers asked my grandmother why my father couldn’t have married a nice Virginia girl, and she repeated this to my mother.

  As I skim the results of the senior class poll to be published in the next edition of the Indian Tribune, I descend into a state of terminal chagrin: I’ve been elected Most Studious. It was bad enough not to make flag swinger. Now this!

  In the first place, I’m not studious. I cruise Broad with the best of them. In the second place, I didn’t need to be studious to become salutatorian. Any idiot could have done well on the true-false quizzes that determine our grades.

  In fact, but for the machinations of Mrs. Hawke, I’d have been valedictorian. At the end of the term, she gave us several spelling tests in which she mispronounced the words, leaving us to guess at what we were supposed to be spelling. The boy who became valedictorian is one of her favorites.

  Although I couldn’t have hoped for Most Popular since I lack vim, I did think I had a shot at Best Smile. I practiced in the mirror all year long, and my smile was definitely among the best at D-B.

  I feel unable to face graduation. But I have to because, as salutatorian, I must deliver my speech. It showcases a quote from Shelley: “Naught may endure but mutability.” I point out to my yawning classmates assembled in the gym that although we can never be sure how things will change, we can be sure that change will occur.

  Afterward, a flag swinger, looking like a crow in her flapping black robe, asks me if this Shelley is Shelley Fabares who sings “Johnny Angel.” I reply yes in a sad attempt to undercut my image as Most Studious.

  Once we arrive at Wellesley in John’s yellow convertible, piled high with my possessions as though we’re the Beverly Hillbillies headed for Hollywood, I understand why they’ve accepted me: they pride themselves on geographical diversity, and there are only three Tennesseans in the whole place. I’m a token Tennessean. This is fine with me. Every college needs a few students who know all the lyrics to “Louie, Louie.”

  Wellesley also prides itself on uplifting the disadvantaged. I pause to wonder if they’ve somehow learned about the Melungeons and mistaken me for one.

  Fortunately, one of the three Tennesseans is a junior from Nashville named Ophelia, who’s been assigned to me as Big Sister. She takes me under her ample wing and explains the mysterious codes that govern the incomprehensible behavior of our Yankee classmates. She, too, has a doctor father, a Yankee mother, a sister, and three brothers. Apart from her bright red hair and heavier build, we could be twins.

  What I find most shocking at Wellesley isn’t just that the other students raise their hands in class and volunteer to talk. It’s also the fact that nobody smiles or comments on the weather when we pass on the campus sidewalks. In Kingsport, I conducted endless discussions — with clerks I’d never seen before — of their latest operations and the delinquencies of their children. Some days I’d wanted to punch a clerk in the mouth to get him just to sell me a damn Coke without intruding on my private turmoil with his sordid family sagas.

  But soon my early training in the orange crate kicks in at Wellesley, and I begin to cherish my invisibility. When I wear my nightgown to class beneath my trench coat, no one notices. In Kingsport, such sartorial behavior would have been critiqued for weeks.

  My only complaint is that after having accepted me for being a Tennessean, Wellesley immediately tries to transform me into a Wellesley Girl. I’m forced to take a speech test. Because of my mother’s extensive coaching on how to pronounce “cow,” I’m able to conceal my true accent and win exemption from the remedial speech class.

  The posture test requires us to strip down to our underwear and be photographed from several angles, as in police mug shots. Because of the Q.T. initiation fashion show, I know how to strut my stuff in a bra and panties, so I pass with high marks.

  However, I’m unable to sidestep the Fundamentals of Movement class, held weekly in the gym. For half a year we’re given instruction in how to sink into a sofa while balancing a cocktail glass and how to get into a sports car in a skirt without flashing too much thigh.

  My hopes are high that I’ll one day need these skills, but each blind date is more excruciating than the last. Few experiences are more demoralizing than spending a rainy weekend at Yale with a surly preppy who hates you. I soon realize that my problem is the same as when I auditioned for flag swinger: I’m not a fun person.

  My parents don’t drink alcohol. It gives my father migraines, as it did his father. Also, a coalition of preachers and bootleggers — strange bedfellows indeed — has conspired to keep Kingsport dry. Moonshine is available, but some partakers suffer blindness and lead poisoning. To buy branded liquor, you must drive to Virginia. But if you get caught by Tennessee patrolmen on your trip home, you forfeit your car. Hence, the popularity of iced tea in East Tennessee. My blind dates in New England find me a drag because my idea of a bacchanal is half a beer.

  However, I’m soon fixed up with Richard from Cornell. He belongs to a fraternity in which the brothers drink so much that nobody notices or cares that I’m sipping the same cocktail all night long.

  Education at Dobyns-Bennett consisted of the memorization of dates and facts. At Wellesley, I soon learn that facts aren’t facts. Math has always been my favorite subject because the answers to problems are either right or wrong, as opposed to the multiple shades of gray in the humanities. But once I learn in calculus about the existence of imaginary numbers, I decide not to major in math after all.

  In Bible 101,1 discover that even the word of God has been put into His mouth by ancient Christian spin doctors. With magic markers we highlight the verses inserted into the gospels by various factions trying to bolster their own grip on p
ower.

  One day in English class I experience my first true thought. As we discuss “Flowering Judas” by Katherine Anne Porter, I notice the recurrence of the word silver. In a flash of illumination I realize that Porter has done this on purpose to suggest a parallel between one of her characters and Judas Iscariot.

  My mind promptly retreats into darkness. But I know I’ve discovered a new function for it. Southerners are always trying to prove how nice they are (even when they aren’t), and Yankees are always trying to prove how smart they are (even when they aren’t). It’s the difference between leading with your limbic brain or your neocortex.

  But now that my neocortex has been jump-started, there’s no stopping it. Soon I’m critiquing situations I’ve always blindly accepted, like a brat pulling the wings off butterflies. Along with this newfound ability to tear anything apart comes chronic melancholy. I feel like Eve after her expulsion from the Garden of Eden as she starts to realize that she and Adam are two separate people and that the talking snake is not really her friend.

  Since these are the Martin Luther King Jr. years, I quickly grow less proud of my grandmother’s alleged ancestral land grants in the Tidewater. After the murder of some civil rights workers in Mississippi, a hallmate bursts into my room to announce, “You southerners make me sick!” Another muses over a pot roast dinner one night, “It’s so interesting to hear you say something intelligent in that accent of yours.” This, despite the fact that I’ve passed their damned speech test.

  I’m bewildered. Back home I was teased because my mother was a Yankee and my pronunciation of “cow” was so bizarre. I’d always longed to be a real southerner. Now I’m being accorded that honor, but it’s been transformed into a badge of shame. We learned in school that southerners fought the Civil War to protect our homeland from invasion by immigrant Yankee riffraff. But my hallmates tell me its purpose was to end slavery. I have to admit that, if true, this seems a worthy goal.