in her hands, I lied extra hard to calm her and to cover my rage. “There’s only a month left till we can go back to Tuscaloosa and freedom” meant that Jean was unhappy with her home life, not that I had said anything about mine. “Your mom is like mine—they want their little girls close, just in case” was really saying how much we appreciated the loving watchfulness from our mothers as we got older. “Just put on a smiling face and count the days”: I couldn’t construct any other meaning for that one.
If I managed to get away with most of my lies, my disobedient acts were more flagrant and perceptible. Mamie’s mode of dealing with me was effective. As an active child, I ran and played as many hours as possible. Feeling trapped inside my house, I stayed outside except for lunch and occasional bathroom breaks, though I even preferred to squat in our back yard behind a hydrangea bush so as not to interrupt my play. Knowing all this, Mamie devised “Punishment.” Never spanked, I was forced to sit perfectly still in a rocking chair in my parents’ bedroom every time I disobeyed. There was a direct correlation between degree of defiance and number of minutes in that chair. The range was from five to thirty: five minutes can be a long time for puppies and little girls; thirty an eternity. I couldn’t take anything of mine into the room—no crayons, paper, books, games. They would distract me from contemplating what a “bad girl” I had just been. My mother never understood that I was trying to be a bad girl, since that was the closest I could get to being a boy.
What I did, shut in that room without a clock to let me see how my confinement was progressing, was fantasize. Within a few months, I was able to become sufficiently involved so that sometimes, out of sheer spite, I refused to leave. Mamie would come to the still-closed door when the last minutes were passing and say, “Time’s up, honey, you can go out and play now.” Mostly I just sat out my fantasy, prolonging the last scenes while she waited for my appearance. Rarely, I said, “Just a minute, I’m busy.” She’d stand it as long as she could and then burst into her own room and urge me out into family space. Once or twice she cried from sheer frustration, saying over and over, “I just don’t know why you hurt me this way.”
After one of my refusals to leave the room on her schedule, Mamie smarted around the house for the rest of that day overlooking smaller disobediences. I comprehended that I had won something; I felt smug and mean and lonely.
Most of my schoolmates lived in situations where at least the bathroom was private. I did not. The excuse went something like: “Oh, honey, excuse me, but we only have one bathroom and I just have to. . . .” There was a turn bolt on that door and my sister used it. When I tried, I was sharply reprimanded for inconveniencing Mamie who, after all, was responsible for dinner or lunch or whatever was currently important. More than I resented those intrusions, I disliked being called in while she bathed and dressed for the day. We talked there, or I was asked to help her into one of her several armoring garments—brassiere, massive girdle, tight-fitting slip. The intimacy and role reversals that surrounded these meetings several times a week for years seem even at this great distance to be troublesome.
I always sat on a little wicker clothes hamper, my eight-year-old feet barely touching the cool tile floor. I stayed very still, hoping my mother would forget I was there. Mouse quiet, I gazed at her, drying from her morning bath. She stood before me, huge and strong and all soft, rounded folds—layers of folds—face, breasts, stomach, thighs, ass, or as she insisted on calling it, “derrière.”
Once dry, she would start all over, this time with a powder puff bigger than my whole hand. The powder made me want to sneeze, but I would hold fingers like a clothespin on my nose so she would go on, forgetting me. With short quick motions, she dusted under her melon bosoms, slowly so they poised between rise and flop. Then she moved down to her satin stomach with its big open space she called a navel—to me a cave. Then her puff-hidden hand moved down, but I have blocked that scene. At this point I would jump off the hamper and ask “why” about some silly thing. I wanted to make her dress; I could not watch her any more.
My question broke into her lazy ritual, and she started to pile on ladies’ armor that crushed her lovely folds. First, a vest, soft but hiding. Then a brassiere one size too small so that her floppy breasts looked like iron ones. Was she really a lady knight in disguise? Then came the girdle I helped her close; I snapped the snaps—one . . . two . . . three . . . four—from waist to . . . Then came hooks and eyes over what I eventually learned was pubic hair. Then soft panties over that and a clingy slipover everything. At the very last, she smeared on Mum, a white cream for marble-shaved underarms, rouged her cheeks, and lined her full lips with a hard red stick.
Then she would loom over me—a statue in a mask—ready to fight her own dragons, I thought. I could not see any skin and had no hope for a soft hug; I would hurt myself on some new-made edge.
The other person living in our house was my sister, Betty. Sixteen and a half when I was born, she had been an only child until then. My first knowledge of her stems from a story Mamie told: when Betty found out that I was on the way, she is supposed to have replied, “If I can’t name the brat, I won’t speak to it.” My mother recounted this to relatives, neighbors, friends. She found it humorous, but I did not like being called “brat” or “it.” Betty was allowed to name me, and she chose Toni. Had I been a boy, I would have been called Tony. Many people do not understand the fine point of this gender-based spelling, so that all my life I have gotten mail addressed to Mr. McNaron. Once when I was going to church camp, I was mistakenly put into the boys’ cabin, only to be moved immediately upon arrival.
My sister is essentially verbal. From the beginning, she taught me words that I at first had no idea about, which I remembered by sound or later by spelling: “postprandial divertissement” was one of my earliest phrases, along with “marsupials are indigenous to Australia” and “the prolixity of lapins is horrific.” I see her sitting beside me rattling off these words, being amused and proud when I could repeat them to her latest swain.
In order to get finer instruction in Greek and French, Betty went to New Orleans to Sophie Newcomb College, then the women’s arm of Tulane University, but returned after one semester with a case of severe homesickness. The family doctor advised bringing her back home in November, but Daddy insisted she stay in New Orleans the whole semester; otherwise, he could not get a partial tuition refund. The story I always heard was that for the rest of that fall, Betty would call Mamie and cry into the long distance telephone.
Born a year after my parents were married, Betty was reared largely by her maternal grandparents. The Hurleys lived in Selma, Alabama, the seat of southern culture and agriculture. Adoring Betty, they lavished upon her clothes ordered from Bergdorf Goodman in New York, toys from Switzerland, and unconditional love. Since my mother’s father worked for a railroad, Mamie had unlimited passes to travel the eighty miles south from Birmingham. Mamie spent the last month or so of her pregnancy back home, and my father commuted on weekends. Once Betty was born, Mamie remained with her mother for several more months.
Grandparental showering at suchan early age convinced Betty that her family was without faultor flaw and that she would always be taken care of. When I was growing up under strict rules about keeping my room pristine at all times, my closet neat, and all my clothes properly hung or drawered, I chafed under tales of Betty’s youth. It seems that she often let her nightgown slip from her body onto the floor, only to have the faithful old family servant, Annie Belle Royal, come along to pick it up and put it away. I could not make sense out of two antithetical codes for children with the same mother.
Though the South of Betty’s youth and courting age was different from my mother’s, both women fulfilled the requirements of “belle.” My sister was what the forties termed glamorous. I remember one photo in particular; lightly tinted, it shows Betty in a soft hat with a huge brim that dips over her face just like Garbo’s or Rita Hayworth’s always did. Her smile is subtle, even alluring, and her soft hazel eyes glance upward from slightly shaded lids.
My sister had her own food story, as did everyone in our family. Determined to be thin at any cost but adoring sweets, she established a bizarre regimen. Breakfast was usually one piece of cheese toast and a mammoth cup of hot tea; lunch, a Hershey bar and Coca-Cola; dinner, tiny servings of food topped by a large dessert. If her morning ritual on the