A Southern Girl (31 page)

“So, what are your plans today?” she wants to know.

“Idleness followed by some relaxation hard on the heels of some serious lying around. My day is packed.”

“I guess at your age you need time to recover from staying out so late.” She grins around a bite of banana.

“Speaking of late hours …”

“I was home by two; if you don’t believe me ask Chris.”

“Did he enjoy himself last night?” My question seems innocent enough.

“You mean at your party or after?”

My mind flashes to Adelle’s account of the fog-filled car. “The party, of course. What happened after is none of my business, is it?”

“Only if you care about your daughter’s reputation.”

I deposit the paper into my lap and stare. “Oh?” I am not at all sure I want to hear what’s coming. Allie has always been too candid about these things.

“Yeah, we must have broken a record for sucking face last night. My lips are chapped.”

“I see.”

“Want to hear the rest?”

“No. It usually only gets messier.”

“Not much,” she says casually, as if she doubts it will rain. “I let him get by with a cheap thrill but when he started maneuvering for a big thrill I had to fall back on my elbow-in-the-ribs defense. He took it well. I like that about Chris. I’ll bet his ribs are sore this morning.”

“Sweetheart, how do you expect me to act casually around Chris when you tell me this stuff?”

“Relax, Dad, nothing happened. He was just giving it his best shot. We’ve been out four times now. He has expectations.”

Why is God forcing me to listen to this? Most of my contemporaries can’t get a word out of their teenagers and when they do, black lies follow white ones. Just my fate to have acquired “Miss Open Book of the Orient.” I had fair warning she would be this way a few weeks after Elizabeth died. Allie came to me and said, “Dad, it seems like a rubber-based thing
like a condom would irritate a woman’s sensitive skin. Does it?” At that instant I was ready to trade places with Elizabeth. Allie says she is still a virgin; that she plans to wait until college.

I should be grateful, I am grateful, for her candor, a tool of indispensable utility to a generation confronting AIDs, violence, and drug abuse on a scale worthy of Richter. To the crowd that matriculated with “Just say no” and is graduating with Beavis and Butt-head, her habit of calling a spade by its name is a serum against the ruthless modern epidemic. Whether she inherited it or has adapted to the demands of her era, she is the high priestess of blunt disclosure.

It comes with a price, however; the same one paid by my parents and theirs as each generation drives a few splinters under the social fingernails of its predecessors. For Sarah and her contemporaries, it was bathing suits. Beach wear in her day left everything to the imagination, and she still clucks her disapproval on the beach at Sullivan’s at the promenade of virtual nudity. For me it is language, the double edge on Allie’s frankness. I have not easily accustomed myself to the female use of the word “fuck,” despite Elizabeth’s facile repetition. My abhorrence is part chauvinism, part southern, and part recollection of the stigma acquired by the few members of the sisterhood who, in my college years, dared experiment with purple prose. Now, as she reminds me, it has acquired the acceptance of damn or hell, and for me to take issue relegates me, she warns, to sitting on the dunes with Mother, lamenting the demise of western civilization. I have overheard her on the phone or with friends often enough to absorb its use as a benign banality, but after a futile effort to discourage it I gave up. “Dad, I say it, I don’t do it. Would you rather have it reversed?”

I want this subject to suffer a merciful death of silence so I resume reading the paper. She sips her juice. In time she asks if I would like to accompany her to the stables.

Frost is uncommon in Charleston and what little remained from last night is gone by the time the car leaves the city limits headed south toward Edisto. She is driving, in high spirits as she talks about a new mare that Kenny, her trainer, has brought over from Aiken. Allie’s slender strength is perfect for horses.

We ease up to the barn and park. She immediately goes for the tack room while I take my time.

“Kenny, you old horse thief,” I call to him from across some rail fencing.

“Shhhh!” he says, looking around. “When you find out what I paid for this here mare you’re gonna think you ain’t far wrong.”

Kenny is about fifty and “good ole boy” from hat to boot. And he knows his nags. He also knows riders, and has told me often that she, Allie, is the best he’s ever trained. His facial features ebb and flow, rise and fall like the tidal creeks he was raised on; open, honest features that you need to win over open, honest creatures like horses. But once in awhile, when he tries to communicate something he needs very much for you to hear and understand, like a significant blood line or aberrant scores from judges, he turns gravely serious by freezing his face in a calcified countenance so that you feel as though you’re looking at Abraham Lincoln sitting in his memorial.

“Coleman,” he’ll say, not moving a muscle in his jaw and barely moving his lips, “the girl has no fear. None. Gimme ten thousand riders and I’ll give you one outta the whole lot’s got no fear of a thousand pound animal. That girl’s the one. Damnedest thing I ever seen.”

“Me too,” I could tell him, but I don’t. Like a photo in your wallet, it’s a private memory stored close, the memory of the first time I saw her ride. Not long after the birthday with the pony, we were enjoying a long weekend in the Blue Ridge Mountains. At a weathered sign for “Trail Rides,” we stopped. The owner, a dour woman who looked as though she had been sucking on a persimmon for the hour before we arrived, refused to rent us a horse for Allie. “No experience, too young, ain’t gonna happen.” But Harris doesn’t call me Great Conciliator for nothing, so after urging Elizabeth and the boys to start, I went to work on the persimmon (“Nice place you’ve got here. So well maintained. I can’t imagine trying to manage something like this …” etc.). I never convinced her to let Allie on the trail, but she finally agreed to let me lead a horse along the corral railing and after planting Allie firmly in the saddle, I trooped up and down, reins in hand, to give her a feel for the horse’s movement. Looking over my shoulder, I saw an expression of cautious pleasure mixed with a childish awe that she could be so far off the ground on something that moved. After ten minutes, I heard, “Faster.” I cast around for the persimmon, then broke into a slow trot which forced the horse to do the same. Almost instantly
there came a high-pitched giggle and, glancing back, I saw the difference between pleasure and glee. With each pass, her entire face animated in the purest joy. “Faster,” she said. Back and forth I went, heedless of the persimmon, running the horse into a trot so brisk it approached a canter, and she could not get enough. At last, panting wildly and exhausted, I stopped, nearly collapsing beside the rail. Elizabeth and the boys returned, and I paid the tab. I have wondered in the intervening years if perhaps the persimmon witnessed the whole thing from a secluded spot without the heart to intervene. If not, she surely must have pondered how a horse walking a rail came to be lathered.

Today, I lean on the fence as she warms up the new mare. Kenny, in the center of the ring, calls instructions. “More leg,” and she makes what to me but not to Kenny is some invisible adjustment. “Shorten the reins and give her some inside pressure.” For an hour they work and if, as Allie and Kenny agree at the end, there has been progress I do not see it. As she dismounts, patting the mare respectfully, Kenny joins me at the fence.

“Green as new corn but she’ll be a good ’un,” he says. “Got some big shows comin’ up this spring.” He takes a plain sheet of dog-eared paper from his shirt pocket. “Camden on March 14th, Greenville the weekend after.”

“What about April 17th?” I ask.

He consults the paper. “Yep. Big ’un. State fair in Columbia. Why, she gonna have a problem?”

“Possibly,” I say. “The St. Simeon is that weekend, but I don’t know if she’ll be going.”

“The Saint who?”

“Simeon. It’s a big dance.”

“Sheet,” drawls Kenny. “You can’t tell me she’s gonna pass up a show for a dance.”

“Things change, Kenny. She’s growing up.”

“Lemme tell you something,” and here his face assumes its frozen stillness, his country intellectual mood. “There’s a couple things women never outgrow, and one’s horses.”

“Yeah?” I say. “What’s the other?”

He looks away, but a trace of a grin is on his lips. “The need to be held,” he says softly.

I smile and raise my eyebrows. “I rest my case.”

In the car returning to Charleston, she asks if I have given more thought to her graduation present. “I read in the paper,” she says, “that United is advertising some deals to Seoul. So, are we going?”

“We have a more immediate concern. The St. Simeon is around the corner.”

She downshifts as we approach the main highway. “There’s not much to talk about, is there? The rules say I can’t go so that’s that.”

“Let’s forget the rules for a moment. Do you want to go?”

“Well, sure. The biologicals went, even though Steven took that slut Ashley Porter. You went when you were young. Granddaddy went. My best friends from school are going and the guy I’m dating will be there so why wouldn’t I want to go?”

“Suppose I could get the Society to grant an exception. How would you feel?”

“Do you mean, ‘Will I feel like a second class citizen?’ Yeah, I guess I might.” There is a pause as we both stare ahead. After several reflective moments, she says, “On second thought, Dad, it’s only a dance and it could cause trouble.”

“How so?”

“Charleston is still so conservative. Even if you get the exception a lot of people will resent my being there. Let’s just leave it alone.”

There is resignation in her voice, an intonation that says, “Move on to something else.” It is unlike her not to confront things directly, but then she has always resisted attention or overtures spawned by her uniqueness. As a child, she drew the usual ooh’s and ah’s accorded young girls, but inevitably mixed in were stares, compliments and fuss made by those for whom she was a novelty, and who approached her as they would an exotic pet. Elizabeth and I came to sense her discomfort, and in the more overt encounters we shared it. I found myself walking a thin line between showering her with the natural affection due an only daughter and withholding that affection for fear of appearing, in her increasingly sensitized eyes, overindulgent. The last thing, the very last thing, she has sought or accepted has been deference to her Asianicity. An exemption to the St. Simeon will spotlight it.

“The other night in the basement,” I remind her, “you said you feel like a Charlestonian, as well you should. You have as much claim to the heritage of this city as anyone I know. The St. Simeon is hardly just a
dance. And I hate to think of you denied the right to something you’ve earned.”

“But that’s just it. You can’t earn it. You’re born into it or you’re not. Well, I guess you can marry in but that seems pretty radical.”

“Indeed,” I acknowledge, “although I know of marriages where I’m sure it’s been a factor. At any rate, I don’t want to do anything that will make you uncomfortable. Will you let me know?”

She nods thoughtfully but says no more. We leave it there, and there it stays until Monday night, when I pause at the door of her room.

“Any more thoughts on the St. Simeon?”

She looks over from the book spread before her. “Yes.” There is a finality in her inflection. I walk in and sit on the edge of her bed. “I’ve decided that you’re right. It’s part of my heritage, or should be.”

“Good,” I say. “I’ll call Margarite Huger in the morning.”

“But suppose the Board says no.”

“There are no guarantees, but between the Great Conciliator and a Princeton girl we should be able to work it out.” I rise and stray to her dressing table nearby. On it rests the mirror which arrived with her on the afternoon she came to us. It is small, round, with a lattice design on the handle. Its most prominent feature, however, is the back; a time-worn mother-of-pearl. As it was the sole article that accompanied her, other than the kimono she wore on the flight, she values it highly. As with her, the mirror arrived without much explanation.

“I don’t know,” she says. “I have a feeling it’s going to be harder than you think.”

“Leave it to me. I know these people.”

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