American Pop

by Snowden Wright

  “Oh, don’t worry,” her parents would say to their guest. They’d laugh and add, “She’s just Imogene’s ghost!”

  Imogene knew the girl was only a product of her imagination, but that did not keep her from relying on her make-believe friend. Penelope was brave when Imogene was scared. Penelope was bold when Imogene was timid. Even now, so many years after her ghost had faded from her life, long since relegated to the past the way thumb-sucking and bed-wetting were for other children, Imogene often wondered how Penelope would have responded in certain situations. She was doing just that when she heard a strange noise from the other side of the room.

  “What was that?” Imogene asked, as confident as Penelope would have been.

  Nicholas responded, “What was what?”

  For the next few minutes, the only sounds in the bedroom were the wood crackling on top of the firedogs and the endlessly rhythmic plop, ping, plop, ping from the bathroom sink. Then Imogene heard a muffled, baritone rumbling the identity of which took her a moment to figure out.

  Her brother was farting in bed.

  Of course it would be just her luck to have to spend the night in a room stunk up by the flatulence of a four-year-old brat. A notoriously picky eater, Nicholas had been enamored, over the past year, with Van Camp’s Beanee Weenees, straight from the can. Half his meals consisted of the stuff, and at dinner that night he’d had two helpings.

  Imogene, getting assaulted by a smell so strong she imagined it curling her eyelashes, noticed another noise following each passing of gas, the sound of something being wafted. She looked over at Nicholas. He was lifting his bedsheets up and down over himself, as though they were tablecloths and his body the table. She asked, “What in the world are you doing?”

  “I broke wind.”

  “So then fix it.”

  Again Nicholas started to waft the sheets over his body, prompting Imogene to ask about the more curious matter. “But what are you doing with your sheets?” When he told her the answer, the smell no longer bothered her, she found him so endearing. One part of her wanted to tease the little guy, and another part wanted to give him a great big hug.

  The next day, while her brother was still asleep, Imogene took her breakfast, served by Miss Urquhart the cook, in the kitchen alcove used for informal meals. There were two Miss Urquharts in the household, mother and daughter, who, to avoid confusion among the staff, were often referred to with the suffix of their post, “Miss Urquhart the cook” and “Miss Urquhart the maid,” the former of which was mother of the latter.

  Imogene considered the suffixes demeaning. “Miss Urquhart,” she said while stirring her bowl of chicken mull, “would you like to hear a funny story?”

  “I’ve been known to enjoy them on occasion.”

  In the kitchen, Miss Urquhart, a coarse switch of hair atop a bald patch the only indication of her sixty years, scrubbed a Windsor pan as Imogene told the story, aided by sound effects, of Nicholas’s bedtime flatulence.

  “So when I asked him why he was flapping his sheets up and down like that, guess what he says? He looks at me and says, ‘So my legs won’t get stained brown’!”

  The two of them broke down in laughter at the punch line, Imogene accidentally spilling some of her breakfast, Miss Urquhart accidentally dropping her wire sponge. They were both laughing so hard neither spotted Nicholas standing in the doorway, still dressed in his pajamas. He brought a quick end to their amusement when he finally saw fit to speak up.

  “At least my legs aren’t dead.”

  Until that moment, Imogene had always thought no one actually dropped their jaws when shocked, but on hearing Nicholas, that was what she did. She sat there, slack jawed, in the kitchen alcove, unable to stand because of her legs, unable to speak for that same reason.

  Don’t let him talk to you like that, Penelope would have told Imogene in this situation. You know what to do to that little shit. Put him in his place. Go over and teach him he can’t talk to you like that.

  It was almost as though Miss Urquhart heard Penelope’s hypothetical command. Scottish in temperament as well as heritage, the elder Urquhart promptly traversed the kitchen and, with her hands still grimy, slapped Nicholas across his young cheek. “Shame on you,” she told the boy.

  His face bore a faint outline of fingers in sudsy grease. Throughout the rest of her life, Imogene felt enormous gratitude for Miss Urquhart—who was fired by Sarah Forster that evening but who the next morning Houghton Forster rehired—even when, years after the slap, Nicholas repaid it by taking over the Panola Cola Company.

  * * *

  Nicholas Forster, whom his sister describes as a “wolf in wolf’s clothing” in her famous autobiography, never forgave himself for what he said that cold, gray morning in 1949. He also never forgave his sister for making him say it. “She sits in that chair like a queen,” he once told his mother, “and everybody treats her like one.”

  He was a lonely child in the way children with too many friends are. Not smart enough to be self-conscious but self-aware enough to know he wasn’t, Nicholas used that balance to win people over, alluring them with his handsome facade and charming them by taking it for granted. The result was friendship without intimacy. Later in life, when his career was on the rise, such general likability would serve him well, board members supporting his right to lead the company, trade journalists describing him as a savior of the industry, in much the same way and for similar reasons that, later still, those very people would turn on him, spreading rumors of a forced resignation, publishing headlines such as adios, dividends! sayonara, splits! Future career aside, Nicholas’s loneliness as a child was known only to him, exacerbated by his misunderstanding of the attention people gave his sister regarding her disability, and, much to his relief, cured by the advent in the household of his cousin Susannah.

  Born four years apart, the two of them had, through the early part of their adolescence, been too different in age to get along. Nicholas knew her as the baby his aunt danced on her shoulder, as the toddler slinging handfuls of spaghetti from her high chair, as the preschooler who only visited on holidays, as the quiet little girl with a bow in her hair playing “Chopsticks.” In 1956, though, Aunt Ramsey and her daughter, following the death of Nicholas’s grandfather from a stroke, came to spend the summer at The Sweetest Thing. Nicholas was twelve. Susannah was eight.

  Despite the pervasive gloom about the house—family members sweating through black fabric in the heat, a wife arguing with her mother-in-law about the desuetude of widows’ bonnets, lawyers offering graceless condolences as they asked for a document to be signed, the dog waiting patiently by the door for his master’s return—the two cousins had themselves a high time. Nicholas showed his relative from California what it was like to grow up in Mississippi. They ate pink popcorn next to heaps of rain-sogged cotton. They rode an abandoned kid hack down the spoil bank of a drainage canal. They trundled hoops with sticks along cedar-boarded roads.

  Nicholas’s favorite thing to do with Susannah was sit in the living room of The Sweetest Thing, a glass dish full of spoon-serve in each of their laps, listening to Fort Laramie or Dragnet or X Minus One on the Capehart.

  “Imogene never listened to the radio with me,” he once told his mother. “Why couldn’t I have had a sister like Susie?” His mother wasn’t paying attention to what he said; she was too focused on telling him something herself. Earlier that day, the company’s chief in-house counsel, Connor Rolph, had informed Sarah about certain parts of Houghton Forster’s will, particularly who’d inherited a controlling interest in PanCola. She did her best to explain the situation to her son. Nicholas, heartsick that his cousin would be leaving at the end of the summer, had just one question. “What’s ‘come of age’ mean?”

  * * *

  A few months earlier, before the girl Nicholas wished were his sister came to stay in Batesville, his actual sister sat in a classroom at Radcliffe College, where she was a senior majoring in economics. That day
was the last class. “In the future, what will be the most powerful, the most malleable type of entity in the world?” asked the professor, Elwood Ballantine, Ph.D., who’d never once received the correct answer to this question from his students in Economics 1308: World Economic History, a course he’d been teaching for the past five years. “Miss Powell?”

  “Nation-states?”

  “Wrong. Miss Rowe?”

  “People?”

  “No. Miss Forster?”

  “Corporations?”

  “Exactly right.”

  Professor Ballantine told the students he would let them stew on that one as they entered the world as “founding citizens of the corporate state.” Class was dismissed.

  Outside, slowly wheeling herself from Longfellow to Briggs Hall with a stack of books in her lap, Imogene took in the urban arboretum that was Garden Street, its red maples and hedge maples, its littleleaf linden and American linden, its ginkgo, ash, and sophora, all the while thinking, Guess that’s it, my last class as a college student, my last hour of not being an adult. Birds whistled a rhythm to her thoughts like the bouncing ball on animated song lyrics, and young men decked out in crimson parted around her chair.

  She reached her dorm at half past four. Imogene had just set aside her books, dried sweat from her face, and poured a glass of water when her roommate, Maggie Wyndham, burst into the room, yelling, “The time is right for getting tight!” In one hand she held an uncorked bottle of champagne, in the other a crisscrossed pair of flutes, wielding the panoply in the manner of a knight at arms.

  The black sheep in a family that consisted solely of black sheep, Maggie had, over the two years they’d roomed together, acquainted Imogene with alcohol, jazz, cigarettes, poetry, and berets. She’d grown up privileged on the Upper East Side but came into her own below Fourteenth Street. During her teens, Maggie drank lowballs at San Remo, Chumley’s, and the Minetta, accepted the occasional half ounce of primo grass from trust-funded, quasi-beatniks in exchange for correcting their grammar on term papers, went down on Jackson Pollock in a toilet stall, and made out with Lee Krasner behind a coatrack, activities she pursued under the auspice of what her parents called “a real education.” Often in college Maggie took Imogene on weekend trips to her old haunts. Once, as they left a house party in the Village full of people wearing turtlenecks, Imogene said to a poet who worked as a curator at MoMA, “So nice meeting you, Frank. Let’s have a Pan sometime!”

  Years after they were roommates, Imogene, who in her autobiography writes, “Radcliffe gave me an education, but Maggie prepared me for the world,” would pay for her friend’s stint at Hazelden recovering from a heroin addiction and, later, introduce her to the editor who would publish her award-winning poetry collection, Marching to the Beat of No Drummer.

  “I can’t go out and get drunk with you tonight,” Imogene said in the common room of their suite at Briggs Hall. “I need to work on my speech. I still don’t have an ending.”

  “Valedictorian, shmaledictorian,” Maggie said. “We’re going out for drinks.”

  “No.”

  “Yes.”

  “Absolutely not.”

  They arrived at the bar half an hour later. In contrast to its name, Tops’l was furnished with unaerodynamic stools, tables, and chairs, all Shaker designs with sharp angles. Everything in it looked wooden. Imogene, whenever she came to the bar, always felt as though she’d entered a fairy tale, the kind with gnomes living in a giant tree trunk, each detail of their home, cups and lamps, plates and rugs, carved from the whole.

  “Four rum and Pans,” ordered Maggie, a chronic double-hand drinker. With marked reluctance the bartender placed two cocktails before each girl.

  Maggie said to Imogene, “Feel like we should get these at half price, seeing as you kind of own half the ingredients.”

  “That’s absurd.”

  The crowd was large even for five o’clock on the last day of classes. During her pointless attempt to keep up with Maggie, Imogene looked around the bar and, while sipping her drink, fell into a habit she had not yet managed to kick: ogling boys. She could have spent all night doing it. A veritable newspaper ad for J. Press sat reading a worn paperback in the far corner, and in the back, half a dozen members of the Porcellian toasted to their future good fortunes. Boys were carrying pitchers, boys were striking matches, boys were rattling ice cubes. They were the one experience Imogene had failed at throughout college. Over the past four years, she’d excelled in class and made all kinds of friends, but she had not lost the stupid, ridiculous burden of her virginity.

  Many years later, purposely unmarried and unabashedly childless, Imogene would disparage her former self, the dependence she’d once felt toward men. “They call us ‘the better half’ to make up for treating us like half a person,” she writes in the part of Ms. Panola Cola excerpted in Ms. magazine’s fourth issue. “I’ve only got one response to such reasoning: that dog don’t hunt.” On the evening of May 4, 1956, however, Imogene Forster still felt she was missing a key component in her life, especially as she watched, from her seat at the bar, a young man coming toward her through the crowd.

  “I was going to ask if I could buy you a drink, but it looks like somebody beat me to it. Two somebodies. You must be quite the popular one.”

  He introduced himself as David. Dressed in gray slacks and a light pink sweater that, against his tan cheeks, threw his blue eyes into striking relief, David seemed a physical embodiment of the Stars and Stripes, a polychromatic anomaly of colors that were never supposed to run. “And what’s your name?” he asked.

  Imogene paused. “I’m Penelope.”

  “Pleasure to meet you, Penelope. Where’re you from?”

  “Batesville, Mississippi.”

  “Wow.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “It’s just, I love a good accent.”

  “Well then, butter my butt and call me a biscuit,” Imogene said, playing up her twang, all the while thinking, Please don’t ask me to dance, please don’t ask me to dance, please don’t ask me to dance.

  Earlier, after helping Imogene climb onto a barstool, Maggie had parked her wheelchair in the broom closet. It was their standard routine. For as long as she could keep from having to use the restroom, Imogene could hide her disability, a compulsion that, like her dependency on men, she would later regret.

  She turned to where her roommate had been sitting but found an empty barstool. Maggie always knew when to make herself scarce. “Why don’t you have a seat?” Imogene told David, hoping to curb his asking her the opposite.

  “Thanks,” he said. Imogene found the word oddly endearing. It wasn’t as if she owned the stool.

  “And where are you from?” she asked.

  “Michigan, originally. But my fami—”

  David’s mouth fell open, his eyes refusing to blink. For a moment, Imogene worried he had noticed her legs, that he’d brushed against them and felt how unnaturally thin they were, but she changed her mind on realizing David was looking past her. His face, as though the psychosomatic manifestation of a racial cliché, paled. Soon the entire bar followed his lead. “The hush that comes across a room full of rich Ivy Leaguers on first seeing a six-foot-six, 250-pound Cherokee Indian in their midst is a truly remarkable thing to behold,” begins the third chapter of Imogene’s autobiography.

  At the bar she turned around to ask Branchwater what on earth he was doing up north. “Is everything okay?” All it took was one glance into his eyes to know everything was not.

  3.6

  The Magnolia and the Mayflower—Return of the Academic Punk

  “Knew from day one I should have kept my maiden name. Right? I can’t blame them for not giving a bid to Jane Marunga.”

  For the past twenty minutes she had talked of nothing but the Junior Auxiliary. Robert was only half listening. In a booth at the Magnolia, the second oldest restaurant in town, he tried to feign interest as his gaze drifted, from the photos of celebrities behind t
he counter to the house specials painted on the backsplash, from the framed magazine covers to the models of sailboats on shelves with collectible soft drinks, Archie Manning peering from a bottle of PanCola.

  Jackson’s oldest restaurant was the Mayflower. Established in 1935 by Greek immigrants, the café on West Capitol Street formed, along with the Magnolia across town, a binary of historical significance, particularly during the civil rights movement. John Doar supposedly quelled an angry mob by inviting them for lunch at the Mayflower, and Medgar Evers was said to have conducted secret meetings in the kitchen of the Magnolia. Both restaurants provided activists with boxed meals of fried catfish, bread pudding, collards, pork chops, coleslaw, and burgers doused in comeback sauce during the Freedom Summer. The Mayflower had once been the site of a sit-in held by the progressive students at Millsaps, and decades later it remained a popular hangout among undergrads. For that reason the more logical place for a tryst with the wife of one’s thesis adviser was clearly the other half of the historical binary.

  I may be an idiot but I’m damn sure smart enough to know that much, thought Robert at the same time as Jane asked, “Are you even paying attention to what I’m trying to tell you right now?”

  “Of course!”

  “It’s just, with all that’s going on, I need to think about me, not others. I need to center myself.”

  “Right.”

  “I’m so glad you understand.”