Chapter Three
IF THERE’S A LIE TO BE TOLD ABOUT SEX I’VE TOLD IT, although never to get a job or to get even, mostly to have more sex. I suspect I’ve spent a lifetime trying to rewrite my mother’s chary lessons on the subject. When I was ten, I interrupted her in the bathroom as she lathered her legs for shaving, one foot poised on the edge of the tub, and seized the occasion to ask where babies came from. Screwing up her face with displeasure, she said, “The man takes his thing and puts it in there,” pointing somewhere in the vicinity of the shaving cream, making it clear that she found the whole matter repugnant and had no intention of elaborating.
In the night table next to my mother’s bed, I found a copy of Lady Chatterley’s Loenager,/i> and thrilled to see words never uttered in polite southern society (although “John Thomas” was lost on me). Jane helped to supplement our carnal knowledge by filching her family’s pictorial edition of Gone With the Wind, which contained many heaving bosoms and taught us that sex was about a thrashing Scarlett O’Hara being carried to a scene of conjugal rape. Only slightly more descriptive was the compulsory sex education given in the same school basement where I’d gone to kindergarten. Tedious anatomical drawings were shown on an 8-millimeter projector: a triangular patch of womb, spots with kite tails swimming along tubes. Sperm and eggs were anthropomorphized with the same male and female traits assigned to southern men and women: the sperm described as aggressive, the eggs as almost demure. There was no discussion of pleasure, certainly no mention of female orgasm or of a moral compass offered beyond the oxymoronic: don’t do it before you get married, and don’t be a cock teaser.
I hadn’t a clue why there was blood on my underpants at camp the summer I was eleven--Mother had skipped that subject altogether. I imagined it as a stigmata, a penance for willful tomboyishness, or perhaps evidence of a rare and incurable gastrointestinal disorder. I padded myself with toilet paper until a teenaged counselor discovered I was the source of the cabin’s TP shortage and provided a long overdue biology lesson. When I summoned up the courage to report my new status as a woman to my mother, she shook her head in commiseration, muttering something about “the curse.” In the school bathroom, I would stand frozen in the stall, working up the courage to walk nonchalantly to the wastebasket with my wrapped-up sanitary napkin. I cannot overestimate the significance of the invention of flushable tampons.
Before menstruation, I was physical and athletic and strong. I could run, jump, climb higher than any boy. I earned Shark Club membership at camp (for swimming the most laps) and wrestled with the lifeguards at the pool in unbridled horseplay. Suddenly I had no choice but to act like a lady, which seemed like a dangerous narrowing of perspectives. Whatever lessons in personal deportment were not covered at home I learned in charm school at the country club, a virtual petri dish of southern womanhood. I sat with the other daughters of members in collapsible bridge chairs, practicing how to cross my legs at the ankles, balancing books on my head to achieve the proper floating, ladylike gait: shoulders back, chest out, chin up. Occasionally we’d test-drive our newly honed skills at coed dance classes: giggly girls with bad home perms and pimply boys with castrati voices, slouching awkwardly and improbably through the bossa nova, the Lili Marlene, the bunny hop, balling the jack.
My body seemed to change before my eyes. One year my breasts were embarrassingly too big and the next year they weren’t big enough. Advertisements were touting the wonders of Cross-Your-Heart bras and 18 Hour panty girdles. It was definitely not considered ladylike to have a butt that jiggled under my clothes, and it was particularly mortifying to be observed by Da-Dee, who leered at my new shape and said, “Cybill, you’re getting yourself a T-heinie.” When he announced his intention to give me a twenty-gauge shotgun for my twelfth birthday and take me to the Memphis Gun Club to shoot trap and skeet, my mother considered it a royal edict and high honor. I was thrilled at the prospect of having my own gun, but it was impossible to explain the uneasiness I felt in my grandfather’s presence, and I pressed myself against the passenger door when I rode with him to target practice.
Mother may have taken a pass on sex education, but her imparted wisdom about beauty was exacting. “Honey, you’ve got to suffer to be beautiful,” she’d say as she drove me to Lowenstein’s department store for underwire bras, depositing me in a draped dressing room and smoking a cigarette with the bored saleswoman while I stuffed reluctant breasts into unforgiving elastic. My mother wrapped her freshly coiffed hair in toilet paper at bedtime, but I slept with fat brush rollers digging into my scalp. On several occasions, I found my sister sound asleep, wearing the pale pink plastic hood of a bonnet-style hair dryer, attached to a heat-conducting hose. I once awoke to the smell of something burning and shook Terry to tell her that her bonnet was melting.
Even as I understood that beauty was armored protection in my family, a cosseted thing that guaranteed my status as the perfect child, I seemed determined to imperil it with some regularity. I never saw the rusty filament of barbed wire sticking out of the vine-covered fence I was trying to scale on my aunt Gwen’s farm and didn’t notice the blood pouring down the front of my new white vinyl snap-up jacket, only the pale look of horror on my mother’s face when she saw the triangle of flesh dangling from my upper lip. It was my great good fortune that the doctor on call in the emergency room of the local county hospital refused to sew me up, recognizing that a plastic surgeon’s hands were called for. I lay on the backseat of our station wagon with an ice pack until we got to Memphis and Dr. Lee Haines, who put over two hundred stitches into an area half the size of a dime. I went home with a huge dark lump crisscrossed with black thread, and when I cried as I looked in the mirror, the tears washed over the shiny, gooey salve, carrying a foul medicinal taste into my mouth. But my own horrified reflection was no worse than the revulsion I saw on the faces of my parents and grandparents. I hid when the doorbell rang, sure that the neighbors were asking, “Whatever happened to that pretty girl?” It took three years for the scar to heal, leaving a faint triangular line below my nostrils, but I learned an important lesson about the transience of beauty: in the blink of an eye, my unique family position was jeopardized. Disfigurement was not lovable. And I would never be perfect again.
I singed off my eyelashes and eyebrows when I tried to light the gas grill of our backyard barbecue, but I dutifully rubbed them with petroleum jelly, a therapy I’d used on horses to help their hair grow in over scars. When my lashes came back longer and thicker, Mother stopped just short of recommending conflagration as a beauty treatment to her friends. In her continuing obsession with my hair color, she marveled at a new product called Summer Blonde.
“This is great,” she said in a hushed tone as she hurried me into the bathroom with the box of magical elixir. “All you do is spray it on, and we don’t have to worry about your hair getting darker ever again.”
My whole life I had encountered disbelief when I insisted that my hair color was natural. Now I would have to lie. “What am I going to say when people ask if I dye my hair?” I fretted.
“This is not dye,” she insisted. “It’s a lightener, just like sitting in the sun.” With maternal endorsement for the white lie, I dutifully sprayed on what I discovered, only years later when the FDA became more rigorous about labeling, to be peroxide.
Shopping with my mother usually involved the Casual Corner on Union Avenue, then lunch at the Pig ‘n Whistle Bar-B-Q, where she’d gone as a girl. The implicit uniform of junior high consisted of a white oxford cloth blouse, circle pin at the rounded collar, cabled cardigan sweater with matching kneesocks, and plaid wraparound skirt. The outfit had to include black and white saddle shoes or Bass Weejuns (I favored tassels over penny loafers, since I could never squeeze the coins in the slots). We were fashion lemmings so early in the game, but occasionally I was downright rebellious. Once I got sent home from school for wearing culottes, which were deemed too closely related tants. The assistant principal called my mother to say, “Please come pick up your daughter and have her return in a skirt.” Mother thought it was ridiculous and took me out for barbecue.
She didn’t know she was quoting Dorothy Parker when she said, “Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses,” but I knew there were no Barbie dolls with spectacles. I was fifteen when I failed the eye exam for my driver’s permit, and my mother, refusing to believe the results, got a family friend who was an eye doctor to write a note certifying that I did not need glasses to drive. This explanation did not impress the civil servant at the Tennessee Highway Patrol, nor did my failing the eye exam a second time. I was finally permitted to consult an optometrist for the glasses I so obviously required--I’d been squinting at blackboards, movie screens, and my competition on the basketball court for years. Mother sat next to me while I was fitted with owlish round black frames, a stoic look of loss and resignation on her face, the reflection of the perfect daughter created in her image once again marred. When I reported passing the eye exam on my third try, she said “Fine” in a dull tone that implied nothing fine at all.
The commandments of beauty seemed even more stringent than those of the church, but I didn’t have to wait for the hereafter to reap the rewards. Despite my glasses, the boys did make passes. And I was a born receiver.
I CAN TAKE A TRIP DOWN MEMORY LANE JUST BY walking past the men’s cologne counter of any department store. English Leather--that’s Mike. Canoe--that’s Sam. Jade East--that’s Lawrence. British Sterling...
I did not vomit from my first kiss, but I spit into the sink for a good five minutes and then used half a tube of Crest. I was fourteen and it was at night on my front porch, after a Memphis Chicks minor league baseball game. I had gotten tired of watching the make-out scene from the sidelines and vowed to get it over with.
You might think I’d been vaccinated against drinking from the examples at home, but when I was fifteen I went along with the group that trawled Joe’s Liquors looking for someone who could be bribed into buying us quarts of Miller Black Label. An old man leaning against the store’s gyrating Sputnik-shaped neon sign was easily persuaded, and my few ounces of the purloined stuff, guzzled out of the bottle in a brown paper bag, created a quick buzz. I found myself dancing to “When a Man Loves a Woman” and nuzzling against the sweet-smelling neck of a nineteen-year-old boy with a doughy little cleft where his chin should be, Mick Jagger lips, and bleached blond hair cut in a long mop. When Mike picked me up for a movie date a few days later, he displayed excellent credentials for a first boyfriend: my parents hated him on sight.
My tradition of sex and lies began when I started sneaking out to see Mike using Jane as an alibi. Jane owed me big time since I had saved her from drowning at Shoals Creek--she had jumped off the pier to chase a toy football that my brother threw downriver, got tired fighting the current, and was about to go under when I got to her with a life preserver. But she did not appreciate her role as a beard, nor the fact that I bailed on her if there was a chance of seeing Mike. We had to find other venues when he left a racy, unsealed note for me on Jane’s front porch, and her father got to it first. We steamed up the windows of his MGB all around town, arms and legs splayed in ungainly positions when a policeman interrupted our foreplay with a flashlight’s beam. But our preferred sanctuary was behind my grandparents’ house when they were out of town: once past the porte cochere, we were hidden from the street, safe from discovery.
I was absolutely stunned by the intense pleasure of kissing and caressing, a visceral experience I had no right to expect, given my motherrsquo;s counsel. After six months of exquisite teasing, we’d done everything but “go all the way.” On a clear cold night I walked out on our front lawn, across the grass that was crunchy with frost, gazed at the starry night sky, and negotiated with God in what has come to be known as Clintonian logic. “It’s not intercourse,” I offered, “it’s just outercourse. And I won’t do it anymore.” Then I went inside, looked at the photograph of Mike I kept hidden under the library card in my wallet, and thought: Who am I kidding? I stuffed rollers into a hairnet, placed it on my pillow, and arranged a lump of clothes under the blanket in a vaguely human shape. I climbed out the window and found Mike’s car around the corner.
I felt oddly detached from my first time, as if it were more a rite of initiation to be crossed off a list than a sexual epiphany, but Mike had warned me that it would get so much better. As I climbed back through the window of my bedroom, the ceiling light suddenly switched on, illuminating my father’s face. Wordlessly, he walked down the hall to the room where he kept his toolbox, his silence more frightening than the usual bluster of his anger. My throat seemed closed tight, but I managed to mumble, “What are you doing?”
“Nailing the windows shut,” he said.
“But what if there’s a fire?” I asked, watching helplessly. “I won’t be able to get out.”
He never looked back at me as he took out a ball peen hammer and answered, “That’s not the fire I’m worried about.”
It was too late to safeguard my virtue. Mike and I were already scouting locations for the next time, and the next, and the next, exploring the various versions of lovers’ lane in town. I walked out the front door to meet him now, sanguine behind a careful lattice-work of lies. A subtle change occurred at home: once I became a sexual creature, nobody in my family seemed to like me anymore. My father sensibly realized he could not act as full-time sentry, but he glowered across the dinner table and spoke to me in staccato bursts, as if conversation was expensive. I knew from the rearrangements in my bureau drawers that my mother was looking through my papers, finding letters from Mike, but she referred to my behavior only obliquely, with thinly veiled references to men who don’t buy cows when the milk is free. I kept up my own part in the pretense, wearing Mike’s school ring on a chain hidden under my blouse when I was home and putting it on my finger at school, the fraying bits of white surgical tape wrapped around the band to make it fit.
The most safety and seclusion was in a new development off Walnut Grove Road, where the streets were paved but the houses not yet built. When the weather turned warm, we spent every weekend at the drive-in movie, facilitated by Mike’s new Nash Rambler with collapsible seats. We were hardly the only teenagers grabbing illicit Saturday night sex--by daylight, the grounds of the drive-in were littered with more discarded condoms than popcorn kernels. Emboldened by lust, we planned on adding a Wednesday night and a real bed to our repertoire, since that was when Mike’s parents and younger brother went to Bible meetings. Watching from a safe distance as the family car pulled out of the driveway, we left the Rambler down the block and crept into the house like burglars. We’d barely undressed when there was the unmistakable sound of a key in the front door and a young boy’s voice saying that he did so have a stomachache. Grabbing our clothes, we whispered a frantic escape plan, which entailed my climbing out a chest-high window, running half-naked across the vacant lot behind the house, and waiting behind a magnolia tree until Mike retrieved me.
Longing for a place where we couldn’t get caught and wouldn’t be arrested, we saved up for a room at the Rebetel on Lamar Avenue, the highway south toward Mississippi. There was a flashing confederate soldier’s cap over the VACANCY sign as we pulled into the parking lot. Although we were unlikely to see or be seen by anyone familiar, I was technically jailbait and ducked beneath the dashboard while Mike paid nineteen dollars for a room with cinder block walls painted the color of iceberg lettuce. I refused to touch the frayed graying towels. Only the magnitude of pent-up teenaged hormones could overcome the bed, made with matching gray sheets over a mattress that smelled of mildew and collapsed in the middle like a taco. But the privacy and lack of interruption overcame the lack of aesthetics. This was the real first time. It was daylight when we arrived, and I was shocked to see that it was dark when we left.
Mike was slightly schizophrenic about birth control: he was always prepared with condoms but delayed using one until the last possible moment, relying on the notoriously imprecise method of withdrawal, which I naively accepted. I went through craven watchful waiting for my period every month. One day late, and I couldn’t eat or sleep. Three days late, and I was stumbling in a trance through the green-tiled halls of the school, chastising God for combining the pleasures of the flesh with the only occasional need to reproduce. Five days late, and I was swearing off sex forever, convinced that my life was over. At the first twinge of cramps I’d start to breathe easier, and with the first sign of blood, I dropped to my knees in prayer. Hallelujah! Pregnancy anxiety forever changed my attitude about menstruation--never again “the curse” that my mother described but reason to rejoice.
When I told Mother that my periods were irregular, she made an appointment for me with her doctor, a family friend who used to hunt squirrel and invite us over for stew. Nate Atherton was as wide as he was tall, with a narrow circumference of hair that made him look like a tonsured monk, but he was kind and avuncular as he questioned me, obviously aware that I was sexually active.
“Do you have a boyfriend?” he asked. Unable to meet his eyes, I mumbled yes. “Are you in love?” he asked. Again I said yes, and assured him that we planned to get married one day. He wrote something illegible on a prescription pad, and I blithely handed it to the same pharmacist who’d given me penicillin when I was five, cough medicine for innumerable childhood viruses, Jean Nate for many Mother’s Days. I almost choked when I looked in the bag and saw a pink plastic container with thirty tiny pills on a round dial. Speaking in a hoarse whisper of excitement, I called Mike and said, “I think this is birth control!” We drove to the other side of town, and I cowered in the car while he confirmed that I had been given the miraculous Pill from a druggist I felt certain wouldn’t be bumping into my father at the hardware store.
I still marvel at the doctor’s act of compassion: he knew I would discover that I’d been given a way to escape unwanted pregnancy but avoided any direct conversation about it, saving me from a confrontation with my mother and allowing her to continue being an ostrich. Twenty-five years later I asked my mother, “Did you know that Dr. Atherton gave me birth control pills when I was sixteen?”
“No!” she said, but allowed as to how it was probably a good idea.
THAT SUMMER, MY PARENTS AND GRANDPARENTS WERE going to an appliance convention (the Philco Hawaiian Holiday), and their invitation for me to come along was camouflage for a plot to drive a wedge between Mike and me. Even though the plan was pathetically transparent, I figured true love could survive a vacation, and I could hardly pass up a trip to Honolulu--I’d never been north of the Mason-Dixon line. As we stepped off the plane, we were greeted by glorious women with burnished skin who placed leis of fragrat white plumeria around our necks, and by an attractive young mainlander introduced as Joseph Graham Davis, a Columbia Law student who’d taken a summer job with the travel agency that arranged our trip. He called himself Gray, a patrician name to match his preppy clothes (cotton T-shirt tucked into khakis) and prodigal swath of Kennedy hair. He offered to show me around the island, and with the sense of urgency and speeded-up time of a vacation, it didn’t take long to progress from whiskey sours on the deck of an oceanfront bar to passionate necking on Waikiki Beach. That evening when we returned to the hotel, my father was pacing the lobby with a security guard, a walkie-talkie belching static as he conferred with colleagues around the property. My parents took one look at my disheveled clothes, my shoes and pockets filled with sand, and decreed that I was to remain within spitting distance for the rest of the trip.
I managed to slip Gray my address as I was boarding the plane home, and we exchanged long, philosophical letters about our ambitions and goals (his were written on a yellow legal pad so the lawyers at the New York firm where he was clerking would think he was hard at work). Our relationship probably should have remained epistolary: when I went to New York almost two years later, I was thrilled at seeing him again--a built-in boyfriend. We drove to his parents’ empty house in Westchester County and climbed into their bed, in an old-fashioned frame high off the floor, but our fondling was interrupted by his parents’ unexpected return--a classic scenario in my sex life. I dived under the bed just before his mother came into the room and could see her pink pumps from my hiding place, barely breathing until her bathroom needs gave me a window of escape. A few days later we tried again at the family beach house on the Jersey shore, deserted for the winter, but we both sensed that we were trying too hard and ended up in bunk beds. Driving back to New York in silence was a glaring contrast to our lively conversations before attempting to be sexual. Gray Davis always drove twenty miles faster than the speed limit and was still always two hours late. I would guess that he’s stopped speeding and is more punctual now that he is the governor of California.
The trip to Hawaii did derail my romance with Mike, to the delight of my parents. It’s a bittersweet moment, the recognition that a first love is just that. The person who evoked such hunger and longing and indiscretion isn’t going to walk into the future with you. There will be others with voices like tupelo honey, whose touch will make your palms damp. I broke up with Mike (on the telephone--remarkably easy) and moved on.
Sam wore Canoe. He dressed in preppy blazers from Brooks Brothers and was a founding member of a young men’s social club called the Midnight Revelers, famous for their parties. He was one of the lifeguards I had periodically dunked at Chickasaw Country Club and was considered so socially acceptable by my parents that I was granted permission to visit him that fall for homecoming weekend at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, on the edge of the Smoky Mountains. The campus seemed to glow with an unearthly light from the preponderance of clothing in the school colors: Day-Glo orange and white. Just before the football game, Sam gave me a corsage, a huge white mum trailing orange and white ribbons, and as I sat in the stadium, baking in the noonday sun, I kept sticking my face in the flower, inhaling the mushy coolness. We were so highly chaperoned that the only time we got to touch was when we were dancing. The proctor in Sam’s dorm wrote to my mother expressing her delight in such a well-mannered guest.
When Sam came home to Memphis for weekends and holidays, there were no chaperones, and we borrowed his grandmother’s basement--the ultimate den of iniquity, with a fireplace, pool table, TV, wet bar, and a plush velveteen sofa. Grandma rarely left the seco toloor of her weathered white-brick house, sometimes yelling downstairs, “Y’all okay down there?” Sam would holler, “Doin’ Jim Dandy,” with a surfeit of enthusiasm and peel off my clothing to the accompaniment of Ella Fitzgerald and Sinatra LPs. Unlike my girl friends, who were fooling around to the Four Tops and the Temptations, I was wooed with the music of my parents.
Sam recognized that the way to my heart was through my stomach. I can still taste the pompano almondine and three kinds of oysters (bienville, casino, and Rockefeller) at Justine’s, the most exclusive restaurant in Memphis, in an antebellum mansion with a rose garden (even my grandparents had only been there a few times). I worshiped at the altar of the killer pecan pie Sam’s mother made from a recipe on the bottle of dark Karo syrup. On Valentine’s Day he left the industrial-size Whitman’s sampler at my door, along with a giant wooden heart inscribed “I love you” on the front lawn, pounded into the frozen earth on a garden spike. But I was restless and bored with college-boy sex. I’d be graduating from high school in a few months, and despite the number of ways I found to write “Mrs.” in front of Sam’s name on my loose-leaf notebook, I was pretty sure that his circumscribed image of our life together would grate. Fat tears slid down his cheeks and his face fissured as we sat in his Mustang on a chilly autumn day, but he wasn’t fooled for an instant as I lied that I’d been chatting with God about the sin of sex before marriage. A month or so after our breakup, I was kissing a new beau good night at my front door. Turning to go inside the house, I looked through to the backyard to see Sam watching, wearing his Revelers tuxedo and scowling like Heathcliff.
Lawrence wore Jade East. He went to Florida State, played golf like a pro, and drove a pale blue Thunderbird, which we would park on the far side of Galloway Golf Course. He was more... esoteric in his amorous tastes. “I’ll show you what I like,” he said during what I assumed to be a moment of high arousal. He undid the button at the wrist of his shirt and rolled his sleeve back slowly, all the way above the elbow. Then he said, “Just stroke my arm.” I was thinking: This guy is really weird. He doesn’t want to do anything. And I did it wrong, first too hard, then too soft, so he said, “Let me show you how.” From the vantage point of several experienced decades, the arm-stroking thing now seems fabulously sophisticated, not to mention the ultimate safe sex. And I came to think that a golf course is a rather erotic place, as long as you don’t get arrested.
SEX WAS TOO EARLY AND TOO URGENT IN MY LIFE, AND I wonder how my sexual energy might have been deferred or given another outlet. When I was growing up, there was no Joycelyn Elders to encourage masturbation rather than motel rooms. Academia might have sufficed as distraction, but it was given scant regard for girls in my family. The $150 scholarship I was offered to attend a private high school didn’t cover the cost of tuition, and my grandparents wouldn’t put up the additional money. Our household was big on Collier Junior Classics and Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. I read everything in the bookcase (“That girl always has her head in a book,” my mother said, and she didn’t mean it as a compliment). I even trained myself to read in the car without getting sick. The first time I went to the Highland Avenue branch of the Memphis Public Library, I was overwhelmed. “You mean I can take out as many books as I want?” I asked. I couldn’t understand why I got punished for bad behavior by having to bend over and get walloped with a belt, while my friend Martha got punished by having to memorize “The Raven.”
As adolescent virgins, my friends and I had gabbed without much inforation about “going all the way,” but I stopped talking about sex when I started doing it, and lying about it extended to my best friends. I knew with an unshakable certainty that none of my crowd--all good southern girls--were experiencing what I was, and it was inconceivable to share the intimacies. Even within my troika of Jane, Patty, and Martha, our gossip about social pairings had tacit boundaries beyond which we didn’t venture, resorting to a discreet policy of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” Later I would find out that I was indeed way ahead of the pack.
Certainly Delta Alpha Delta was virginal. High school sororities constituted a cherished Memphis heritage with a fixed protocol that brooked no deviation. During rush week, prospective pledges wearing themed name tags (in the shape of bongo drums, perhaps, or Nefertiti’s head) were invited to partake of cucumber sandwiches and Rotel dip (made with a can of Rotel brand spicy chiles and tomatoes melted with Velveeta cheese) at the homes of older “sisters.” On the weekend that votes were tallied, each girl would wait, hoping for an invitation to join, which was announced by a caravan of cars pulling up to her house, with crepe paper streamers and blaring horns. (Each sorority had a distinctive honk, recognizable from blocks away.) I didn’t just join D.A.D.; I became the class president in my senior year and immersed myself in its genteel traditions of charity work and partying. We formed a white girls’ version of a Motown group, performing at hospitals and nursing homes. To raise money for the parties, we sponsored pancake suppers and car washes, and once a month I’d rise at 5 A.M., drive to the Krispy Kreme, and pick up sixty dozen (or perhaps sixty thousand) doughnuts that we’d sell.
Despite these mannerly rituals, my waterloo in high school was the “charm notebook” required for Phys. Ed. I can only imagine what hyperkinetic gym teacher of an earlier era, perhaps damaged by overexposure to Gone With the Wind, conceived of such a curiosity, quaint even by 1960s standards. We were supposed to put together information about clothes, hair, makeup, and other womanly wiles. Surely this was an assignment for which I’d been in training since the crib, but I thought it was asinine and made an obviously slapdash effort, sloppily gluing pages from Glamour, Mademoiselle, and Seventeen on construction paper. I earned an F. (No small irony that in less than three years I would be on the covers of these magazines.) I’d played on the church softball and basketball teams and set a district record in the long jump (formerly called the broad jump, until the term was deemed politically incorrect). A contender for best female athlete, I failed gym.
My father was outraged and showed up at school to defend me, certain that he’d just “fix” things with the bottomless tool kit of parenthood. I was filled with a smug pride as he strode into the gymnasium to see the evil Mrs. Hotchkiss, keeping close to the wall as his wing tips clacked against the wood floor. They vanished into offices behind the girls’ locker room, too far for me to hear, As my father stormed away from his failed mission, he caught my eye and said, “Sorry, Cy, I couldn’t get her to change her mind.” With a failing grade, I was kicked off the cheerleading squad--the ultimate disgrace--and the next semester, when all of my friends were learning to type, I had to repeat gym. I was still half a credit short at graduation, a deficit magnanimously overlooked by the authorities. In another recurrent dream of my adulthood, I am capped and gowned, marching into the auditorium to the strains of “Pomp and Circumstance,” only to be yanked back to sit with the kindergarten class while a toothless Mrs. Hotchkiss, looking remarkably like the Wicked Witch of the West, chants, “I’ll get you, my pretty.”