News of the Spirit (2 page)

I was a little bit in love with him myself.

I made Bubba up in the spring of 1963 in order to increase my popularity with my girlfriends at a small women’s college in Virginia. I was a little bit in love with them, too. But at first I was ill at ease among them: a thistle in the rose garden, a mule at the racetrack, Cinderella at the fancy dress ball. Take your pick—I was into images then. More than anything else in the world, I wanted to be a writer. I didn’t want to
learn to write
, of course. I just wanted to
be a writer
, and I often pictured myself poised at the foggy edge of a cliff someplace in the south of France, wearing a cape, drawing furiously on a long cigarette, hollow-cheeked and haunted, trying to make up my mind between two men. Both of them wanted me desperately.

But in fact I was Charlene Christian, a chunky size twelve, plucked up from a peanut farm near South Hill, Virginia, and set down in those exquisite halls through the intervention of my senior English teacher, Mrs. Bella Hood, the judge’s wife, who had graduated from the school herself. I had a full scholarship. I would be the first person in my whole family ever to graduate from college, unless you counted my aunt Dee, who got her certificate from beauty college in Richmond. I was not going to count Aunt Dee. I was not even going to
mention
her in later years, or anybody else in my family. I intended to grow beyond them. I intended to become a famous hollow-cheeked author, with mysterious origins.

B
UT THIS IS THE TRUTH
. I
GREW UP IN
M
C
K
ENNEY
, Virginia, which consisted of nothing more than a crossroads with my father’s store in the middle of it. I used to climb onto the tin roof of our house and turn slowly all around, scanning the horizon, looking for…what? I found nothing of any interest, just flat brown peanut fields that stretched in every direction as far as I could see, with a farmhouse here and there. I knew who lived in every house. I knew everything about them and about their families, what kind of car they drove and where they went to church, and they knew everything about us.

Not that there was much to know. My father, Hassell Christian, would give you the shirt off his back, and everybody knew it. At the store, he’d extend credit indefinitely to people down on their luck, and he let some families live in his tenant houses for free. Our own house adjoined the store.

My mother’s younger brother Sam, who lived with us, was what they then called a Mongoloid. Some of the kids at school referred to him as a “Mongolian idiot.” Now the preferred term is “Down’s syndrome.” My uncle Sam was sweet, small, and no trouble at all. I played cards with him endlessly, every summer of my childhood—Go Fish, rummy, Old Maid, hearts, blackjack. Sam loved cards and sunshine and his cat, Blackie. He liked to sit on a quilt in the sun,
playing cards with me. He liked to sit on the front porch with Blackie and watch the cars go by. He loved it when I told him stories.

My mother, who was high-strung, was always fussing around after Sam, making him pick up paper napkins and turn off the TV and put his shoes in a line. My mother had three separate nervous breakdowns before I went away to college. My father always said we had to “treat her with kid gloves.” When I think about it now, I am surprised that my mother was able to hold herself together long enough to conceive a child at all, or come to term. After me, there were two miscarriages, and then, I was told, they “quit trying.” I was never sure what this meant, exactly. But certainly I could never imagine my parents having a sexual relationship in the first place—he was too fat and gruff, she was too fluttery and crazy. The whole idea was gross.

Whenever my mother had a nervous breakdown, my grandmother, Memaw, would come over from next door to stay with Sam full-time, and I would be sent to South Hill to stay with my aunt Dee and my cousins. I loved my Aunt Dee, who was as different from Mama as day from night. Aunt Dee wore her yellow hair in a beehive and smoked Pall Mall cigarettes. After work she’d come in the door, kick off her shoes, put a record on the record player, and dance all over the living room to “Ooh-Poo-Pa-Doo.” She said it “got the kinks out.” She taught us all to do the shag, even little Melinda.

I was always sorry when my dad appeared in his truck, ready to take me back home.

When I think of home now, the image that comes most clearly to mind is my whole family lined up in the flickering darkness of our living room, watching TV. We never missed
The Ed Sullivan Show, Bonanza, The Andy Griffith Show
, or
Candid Camera
—Sam’s favorite. Sam used to laugh and laugh when they’d say, “Smile! You’re on
Candid Camera
!” It was the only time my family ever did anything together. I can just see us now in the light from that black-and-white Zenith: me, Sam, and Memaw on the couch, Daddy and Mama in the recliner and the antique wing chair, respectively, facing the television. We always turned off the lights and sat quietly, and didn’t eat anything.

No wonder I got a boyfriend with a car as soon as possible, to get out of there. Don Fetterman had a soft brown crew cut and wide brown eyes, and reminded me, in the nicest possible way, of the cows that he and his family raised. Don was president of the 4-H Club and the Glee Club. I was vice-president of the Glee Club (how we met). We were both picked “Most Likely to Succeed.”

We rubbed our bodies together at innumerable dances in the high school gym while they played our song—“The Twelfth of Never”—but we never, never went all the way. Don wouldn’t. He believed we should save ourselves for marriage. I, on the other hand, having read by this time a great many novels, was just dying to lose my virginity so
that I would mysteriously begin to “live,” so that my life would finally
start
. I knew for sure that I would never become a great writer until I could rid myself of this awful burden. But Don Fetterman stuck to his guns, refusing to cooperate. Instead, for graduation, he gave me a pearl “pre-engagement” ring, which I knew for a fact had cost $139 at Snow’s Jewelers in South Hill, where I worked after school and on weekends. This was a lot of money for Don Fetterman to spend.

Although I didn’t love him, by then he thought I did; and after I got the ring, I didn’t have the nerve to tell him the truth. So I kept it, and kissed Don good-bye for hours and hours the night before he went off to join the Marines. My tears were real at this point, but after he left I relegated him firmly to the past. Ditto my whole family. Once I got to college, I was determined to become a new person.

L
UCKILY MY FRESHMAN ROOMMATE TURNED OUT TO BE
a kind of prototype, the very epitome of a popular girl. The surprise was that she was nice, too. Dixie Claiborne came from Memphis, where she was to make her debut that Christmas at the Swan Ball. She had long, perfect blond hair, innumerable cashmere sweater sets, and real pearls. She had lots of friends already, other girls who had gone to St. Cecilia’s with her. (It seemed to me a good two-thirds of the girls at school had gone to St. Something-or-other.) They had a
happy ease in the world and a strangely uniform appearance, which I immediately began to copy—spending my whole first semester’s money, saved up from my job at the jeweler’s, on several A-line skirts, McMullen blouses, and a pair of red Pappagallo shoes. Dixie had about a thousand cable-knit sweaters, which she was happy to lend me.

In addition to the right clothes, she came equipped with the right boyfriend, already a sophomore at Washington and Lee University, the boys’ school just over the mountain. His name was Trey (William Hill Dunn III). Trey would be so glad, Dixie said, smiling, to get all of us dates for the Phi Gam mixer. “All of us” meant our entire suite—Dixie and me in the front room overlooking the old quadrangle with its massive willow oaks, Melissa and Donnie across the hall, and Lily in the single just beyond our study room.

T
REY FIXED US UP WITH SEVERAL
P
HI
G
AMS APIECE
, but nothing really clicked; and in November, Melissa, Donnie, Lily, and I signed up to go to a freshman mixer at UVA. As our bus approached the university’s famous serpentine wall, we went into a flurry of teasing our hair and checking our makeup. Looking into my compact, I stuck out my lips in a way I’d been practicing. I had a pimple near my nose, but I’d turned it into a beauty spot with eyebrow pencil. I hoped to look like Sandra Dee.

Freshman year, everybody went to mixers, where
freshman boys, as uncomfortable as we were, stood nervously about in the social rooms of their fraternity houses, wearing navy-blue blazers, ties, and chinos. Nobody really knew how to date in this rigid system so unlike high school—and certainly so unlike prep school, where many of these boys had been locked away for the past four years. If they could have gotten their own dates, they would have. But they couldn’t. They didn’t know anybody, either. They pulled at their ties and looked at the floor. They seemed to me generally gorgeous, completely unlike Don Fetterman with his feathery crew cut and his 4-H jacket, now at Camp LeJeune. But I still wrote to Don, informative, stilted notes about my classes and the weather. His letters in return were lively and real, full of military life (“the food sucks”) and vague sweet plans for our future—a future that did not exist, as far as I was concerned, and yet these letters gave me a secret thrill. My role as Don Fetterman’s girl was the most exciting I’d had yet, and I couldn’t quite bring myself to give it up, even as I attempted to transform myself into another person altogether.

“Okay,” the upperclassman-in-charge announced casually, and the St. Anthony’s Hall pledges wandered over in our direction.

“Hey,” the cutest one said to a girl.

“Hey,” she said back.

The routine never varied. In a matter of minutes, the four most aggressive guys would walk off with the four prettiest
girls, and the rest of us would panic. On this occasion the social room at St. Anthony’s Hall was cleared in a matter of minutes, and I was left with a tall, gangly, bucktoothed boy whose face was as pocked as the moon. Still, he had a shabby elegance I already recognized. He was from Mississippi.

“What do you want to do?” he asked me.

I had not expected to be consulted. I glanced around the social room, which looked like a war zone. I didn’t know where my friends were.

“What do
you
want to do?” I asked.

His name (his
first
name) was Rutherford. He grinned at me. “Let’s get drunk,” he said, and my heart leaped up as I realized that my burden might be lifted in this way. We walked across the beautiful old campus to an open court where three or four fraternities had a combo going, wild-eyed electrified Negroes going through all kinds of gyrations on the bandstand. It was Doug Clark and the Hot Nuts. The music was so loud, the beat so strong, that you couldn’t listen to it and stand still. The Hot Nuts were singing an interminable song; everybody seemed to know the chorus, which went, “Nuts, hot nuts, get ’em from the peanut man. Nuts, hot nuts, get ’em any way you can.” We started dancing. I always worried about this—all I’d ever done before college, in the way of dancing, was the shag with my aunt Dee and a long, formless
clutch
with Don Fetterman, but with Rutherford it didn’t matter.

People made a circle around us and started clapping.
Nobody looked at me. All eyes were on Rutherford, whose dancing reminded me of the way chickens back home flopped around after Daddy cut their heads off. At first I was embarrassed. But then I caught on—Rutherford was a real
character
. I kept up with him the best I could, and then I got tickled and started laughing so hard I could barely dance.
This is fun
, I realized suddenly. This is what I’m
supposed
to be doing. This is college.

About an hour later we heard the news, which was delivered to us by a tweed-jacketed professor who walked onstage, bringing the music to a ragged, grinding halt. He grabbed the microphone. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said thickly—and I remember thinking how odd this form of address seemed—“ladies and gentlemen, the President has been shot.”

The whole scene started to churn, as if we were in a kaleidoscope—the blue day, the green grass, the stately columned buildings. People were running and sobbing. Rutherford’s hand under my elbow steered me back to his fraternity house, where everyone was clustered around several TVs, talking too loud. All the weekend festivities were canceled. We were to return to school immediately. Rutherford seemed relieved by this prospect, having fallen silent—perhaps because he’d quit drinking, or because conversation alone wasn’t worth the effort it took if nothing else (sex) might be forthcoming. He gave me a perfunctory kiss on the cheek and turned to go.

I was about to board the bus when somebody grabbed me, hard, from behind. I whirled around. It was Lily, red-cheeked and glassy-eyed, her blond hair springing out wildly above her blue sweater. Her hot-pink lipstick was smeared; her pretty, pointed face looked vivid and alive. A dark-haired boy stood close behind her, his arm around her waist.