I DRIVE MY mama’s Cadillac fast on the gravel road, headed home. Patsy Cline can’t even be heard on the radio anymore, for all the rocks banging the side of the car. Mother would be furious, but I just drive faster. I can’t stop thinking about what Hilly said to me today at bridge club.
Hilly and Elizabeth and I have been best friends since Power Elementary. My favorite photograph is of the three of us sitting in the football stands in junior high, all jammed together, shoulder to shoulder. What makes the picture, though, is that the stands are completely empty around us. We sat close because we were close.
At Ole Miss, Hilly and I roomed together for two years before she left to get married and I stayed on to graduate. I rolled thirteen curlers in her hair every night at the Chi Omega house. But today, she threatened to throw me out of the League. Not that I care so much about the League, but I was hurt by how easily my friend would be willing to cast me aside.
I turn up the lane that leads to Longleaf, my family’s cotton plantation. The gravel quiets to smooth, yellow dust and I slow down before Mother sees how fast I’m driving. I pull up to the house and get out. Mother is rocking on the front porch.
“Come sit, darling,” she says, waving me toward a rocking chair beside her. “Pascagoula’s just waxed the floors. Let them dry awhile.”
“Alright, Mama.” I kiss her powdery cheek. But I don’t sit. I lean on the porch railing, look out on the three mossy oak trees in the front yard. Even though it’s only five minutes outside of town, most people consider this the country out here. Surrounding our yard lie ten thousand acres of Daddy’s cotton fields, the plants green and strong, tall as my waist. A few colored men sit under a distant shed, staring into the heat. Everyone is waiting for the same thing, for the cotton bolls to open.
I think about how things are different between Hilly and me, since I came home from school. But who is the different person, her or me?
“Did I tell you?” Mother says. “Fanny Peatrow got engaged.”
“Good for Fanny.”
“Not even a month after she got that teller job at the Farmer’s Bank.”
“That’s great, Mother.”
“
“I don’t want to be a bank teller, Mama.”
Mother sighs, narrows her eyes at the spaniel, Shelby, licking his nether parts. I eye the front door, tempted to ruin the clean floors anyway. We’ve had this conversation so many times.
“Four years my daughter goes off to college and what does she come home with?” she asks.
“A diploma?”
“A pretty piece of paper,” Mother says.
“I told you. I didn’t meet anybody I wanted to marry,” I say.
Mother rises from her chair, comes close so I’ll look her in her smooth, pretty face. She’s wearing a navy blue dress, narrow along her slim bones. As usual her lipstick is just so, but when she steps into the bright afternoon sun, I see dark stains, deep and dried, on the front of her clothes. I squint my eyes, trying to see if the stains are really there. “Mama? Are you feeling bad?”
“If you’d just show a little gumption, Eugenia—”
“Your dress is all dirty on the front.”
Mother crosses her arms. “Now, I talked to Fanny’s mother and she said Fanny was practically swimming in opportunities once she got that job.”
I drop the dress issue. I’ll never be able to tell Mother I want to be a writer. She’ll only turn it into yet another thing that separates me from the married girls. Nor can I tell her about Charles Gray, my math study partner last spring, at Ole Miss. How he’d gotten drunk senior year and kissed me and then squeezed my hand so hard it should’ve hurt but it didn’t, it felt wonderful the way he was holding me and looking into my eyes. And then he married five-foot Jenny Sprig.
What I needed to do was find an apartment in town, the kind of building where single, plain girls lived, spinsters, secretaries, teachers. But the one time I had mentioned using money from my trust fund, Mother had cried—real tears. “That is not what that money’s for, Eugenia. To live in some rooming house with strange cooking smells and stockings hanging out the window. And when the money runs out, what then? What will you live on?” Then she’d draped a cold cloth on her head and gone to bed for the day.
And now she’s gripping the rail, waiting to see if I’ll do what fat Fanny Peatrow did to save herself. My own mother is looking at me as if I completely baffle her mind with my looks, my height, my hair. To say I have frizzy hair is an understatement. It is kinky, more pubic than cranial, and whitish blond, breaking off easily, like hay. My skin is fair and while some call this creamy, it can look downright deathly when I’m serious, which is all the time. Also, there’s a slight bump of cartilage along the top of my nose. But my eyes are cornflower blue, like Mother’s. I’m told that’s my best feature.
“It’s all about putting yourself in a man-meeting situation where you can—”
“Mama,” I say, just wanting to end this conversation, “would it really be so terrible if I never met a husband?”
Mother clutches her bare arms as if made cold by the thought. “Don’t. Don’t say that, Eugenia. Why, every week I see another man in town over six feet and I think,
I slip off my flats and walk down the front porch steps, while Mother calls out for me to put my shoes back on, threatening ringworm, mosquito encephalitis. The inevitability of death by no shoes. Death by no husband. I shudder with the same left-behind feeling I’ve had since I graduated from college, three months ago. I’ve been dropped off in a place I do not belong anymore. Certainly not here with Mother and Daddy, maybe not even with Hilly and Elizabeth.
“. . . here you are twenty-three years old and I’d already had Carlton Jr. at your age . . .” Mother says.
I stand under the pink crepe myrtle tree, watching Mother on the porch. The day lilies have lost their blooms. It is nearly September.
I WAS NOT a cute baby. When I was born, my older brother, Carlton, looked at me and declared to the hospital room, “It’s not a baby, it’s a skeeter!” and from there the name stuck. I was long and leggy and mosquito- thin, a record-breaking twenty-five inches at Baptist Hospital. The name grew even more accurate with my pointy, beak-like nose when I was a child. Mother’s spent my entire life trying to convince people to call me by my given name, Eugenia.
Mrs. Charlotte Boudreau Cantrelle Phelan does not like nicknames.
By sixteen I wasn’t just not pretty, I was painfully tall. The kind of tall that puts a girl in the back row of class pictures with the boys. The kind of tall where your mother spends her nights taking down hems, yanking at sweater sleeves, flattening your hair for dances you hadn’t been asked to, finally pressing the top of your head as if she could shrink you back to the years when she had to remind you to stand up straight. By the time I was seventeen, Mother would rather I suffered from apoplectic diarrhea than stand up straight. She was five-foot-four and first-runner-up as Miss South Carolina. She decided there was only one thing to do in a case like mine.
Mrs. Charlotte Phelan’s Guide to Husband-Hunting, Rule Number One: a pretty, petite girl should accentuate with makeup and good posture. A tall plain one, with a trust fund.
I was five-foot-eleven but I had twenty-five thousand cotton dollars in my name and if the beauty in that was not apparent then, by God, he wasn’t smart enough to be in the family anyway.
MY CHILDHOOD BEDROOM is the top floor of my parents’ house. It has white-frosting chair rails and pink cherubs in the molding. It’s papered in mint green rosebuds. It is actually the attic with long, sloping walls, and I cannot stand straight in many places. The box bay window makes the room look round. After Mother berates me about finding a husband every other day, I have to sleep in a wedding cake.
And yet, it is my sanctuary. The heat swells and gathers like a hot-air balloon up here, not exactly welcoming others. The stairs are narrow and difficult for parents to climb. Our previous maid, Constantine, used to stare those forward-sloping stairs down every day, like it was a battle between them. That was the only part I
