When she died, she could not have
imagined that so much of her beauty would live on, in bottles and jars of
potions and lotions, pulled from her bathroom cabinet by her 60-year old son
and taken home and put in his own bathroom cabinet.
He saved lots of things because
they might come in handy sometime, and certainly a small thumb-sized bottle of
smelling salts might come in handy sometime. That was true, with the way things
are and the way people act when faced with fate.
His own wife, in fact, had fainted
quite a few times at tea dances in her early twenties; it was quite the style, down South,
just before the Great Depression.
She carried little glass ampules of ammonia smelling salts, sal
volatile, in her little chain-swung tea
dance bags, along with the little celluloid pack of cards strung on blue silk
which the young men who wanted to dance with her would sign in pencil so that
she could keep track of them, brag about later, then erase with a gum eraser
she kept in her dressing table drawer, under the ruffled skirt.
Even sitting at your own dressing table, in a state of
undress but in your own room with the door closed, you hid your knees under the
skirts of the dressing table. No
wait! That wasn’t until 30 more
years had passed, in the 1950s, that such things as dressing tables had to have
skirts to hide things. Who are we
talking about now, the old woman born in 1878 who used smelling salts and
lotions? or her future
daughter-in-law, who wore silky shifts and kid shoes tied with ribbons? Her, that daughter-in-law, that’s the
one who used ampules of ammonia.
But her bared knees, slick in silk stockings held up by a lace-trimmed
garter belt, were stuck up under a dressing table made of walnut, with a drawer
in its stomach and drawers in its thighs – drawers for pretty handkerchiefs and
beads and powders and pomades that stuck the flirty little curls alongside her
cheeks.
So this future daughter-in-law
would sit there on the padded stool, like a piano stool almost, and play her
music on her face, and smooth her shoulders, and admire how her slim legs
looked coming out of the hems of the charmeuse silk step-ins. She could
sit there and gaze at that tantalizing inch of flesh above the stockings and
below the step-ins, urged in her imagination to show to one lucky tea dance
man.
Is that all they did all week
long? Knock around campus, with
their baggy pants belted high, their books slung under their arms, their hair
brilliantined, their rumble seats warming in the Knoxville sun, attending
geology lectures and waiting for the tea dance at Chi Omega? Hoping to catch a glimpse of silky leg,
and later be allowed to reach inside the top of a silk stocking where it was tight
around a young thigh, and run a finger just under the edge, teasing the leg
while the girl watched?
Is that what the girls did
too? Go to Psychology class and
learn something shocking which they already knew about libido, and then sit out
on the grass, tossing their sleek short curls and adjusting the elastic that
bound their breasts, raising arms to let bangles tinkle down their arms in
accompaniment to their practiced laughter? They were waiting too for that inch of flesh to show as they
were lifted into a rumble seat, their friends shouting and laughing up in
front.
Who gets the rumble seat? Do the girls, hot and lusty in their
elastic and weekday rayon, choose?
Do the hot and lusty young men, who are eager to be at the boyish girls
with their fingers, their fingernails just clipped?
Do these young men run the nails of
their forefingers across their thumb pads to see if they are too sharp? Do these young men carry nail files as
bookmarks? The tools of lust
mustn’t hurt...much. Even a chimpanzee can fetch honey from a bee hole with
tenderness and patience.
There must have been a lot of
laughter and squealing in those crowded black Fords; can’t you see them riding down Gay Street with the canvas
top down, boys and girls from the University crammed in like crackers or
cookies, and one lucky pair sandwiched in the rumble seat?
Mother: When I was your age, young lady, a nice
girl would never think of holding a young man’s hand.
Daughter: But, mother, nowadays a nice girl has
to hold a young man’s hand. *
Did the lucky young lady wish she were more of a woman
instead. “Hard cheese!” she might
have declared, if someone tried to tell her she was not acting appropriately. “Honey, it’s not ladylike to show your
stocking tops, you must be careful!”
“Hard cheese!”
Defiant, but doubtful
nonetheless. Was it really okay to
jump around in the rumble seat, letting the speed of the shiny black Ford
obscure the difference between questing hands of a beau, and the teasing
fingers of a breeze? “Well, hard
cheese,” she comforted herself again.
“Just because I’m not supposed to, does that make it bad?”
And besides, after the tea dance,
which ended at six, there was plenty of time to go home and dress in another
pretty silk shift, and go with another young man to dinner, and maybe another
one after that for a movie, a Chaplin movie at the Gay Street Theatre. Why not?
Did a tangle of fifteen right-hand
fingers spread out over hours, three dates, three different young men make the
cheese any softer? Didn’t some
psychologists she had heard of say there were such things as accidents? Or was that what her minister said
there weren’t – no accidents at all, just God’s will playing out. God’s will, that was a good one to come
back with when her mother cautioned her.
And wasn’t she a young lady by
benefit of being white and twenty anyway?
In Knoxville, from a nice house with a wraparound porch and a little
iron stove in her own fireplace, and a dressing table with drawers of fluff and
scent?
Sometimes she thought of herself as
a begonia leaf. The hardy begonia,
growing all summer with its big beautiful leaves shaped like lopsided hearts
(and wasn’t love lopsided too?), and most telling of all, green on the top side
that showed, green and fresh and natural, and when flipped over, a dark pinky
red, the hot blood side; and when seen against the light, the green won out,
but the veins throbbed with scarlet blood.
Of course, there was the question
of what happened to begonias, even hardy begonias, in the winter. They could be brought in and made to
grow inside, but they didn’t flourish, they were struggling begonias then, they
were meant to laugh and jostle all summer, their hearts beating with the
scarlet blood. So pale in winter,
so small the hearts.
Hardy fellows, macho even through
their beauty in the summer; fragile and more nearly transparent, sucking
sunlight in the winter window as if they were tubercular. Mightn’t it exhaust the hardy begonias
to have to live above ground all year long?
The mother had kept six pots of red
geraniums alive – through hot summers on the porch, and dry winters in a back
bedroom, next to the radiator.
They lived that way--growing more dwarfish and huddled--for six years. She carried them out for what would be
their last summer, and they tried very hard, those geraniums. Their knobby crooked stems, like limbs
with old arthritis, struggled for a month or so. One of them did put out a beautiful flower, and its gentle
red velvet glowed for a few days, then shriveled and wizened it fell to the
porch floor. The other five died
quickly, and then that last survivor died, and not watering or plucking or
pruning or coddling or feeding or talking-to brought any of them back. Is six years the life span of a potted
geranium?
* from
the Tennessee Mugwhump, and the
future d-i-l was assistant managing editor
