Home Is Where My People Are: The Roads That Lead Us to Where We Belong (8 page)

That didn’t do a single thing to diminish my deep and consuming desire to look like someone in a Hawaiian Tropic ad.

Now if you have ever seen me in real life, you can attest to the fact that the good Lord did not make me with tanning in mind. As best I can
remember, my hair is naturally dark blonde (thanks to Carla, my hairdresser, it’s been a while since I’ve seen my hair in its natural state), and my eyes are light blue. For the longest time I was convinced that I didn’t have a trace of melanin in my skin, but about four years ago I realized that I could in fact turn sort of a muted pink after spending about thirty consecutive days at the pool while slathered in sunblock.

But my freshman year of college, I was still harboring some misguided notions that with a little planning, the perfect tan was within my reach. During the fall and winter I had no problem putting my sun-kissed dreams on the back burner, so to speak, but I never let go of the dream that once spring arrived, it was going to be my time to be tan.

Delusion is a powerful thing, my friends.

It didn’t help that Elise, Tracey, Daph, Marion, and so many other folks seemed to tan with little to no effort. They could sit outside at the Chi O house on a sunny afternoon and look like they’d spent the weekend in the Caribbean. On top of that, they didn’t burn at all
 
—a feat that was utterly inconceivable to someone (um, ME) who once spent the majority of a van ride from Panama City to Myrtlewood vomiting repeatedly after a particularly wicked case of sun poisoning.

I was young and stupid. I had no idea that those UV rays poking through the clouds were the most dangerous rays of all.

By the time March of my freshman year rolled around, I was more convinced than ever that a tan was in my immediate future. Sigma Chi’s annual Derby Day was fast approaching, and I knew it was going to force my tanning hand. My sorority was wearing red T-shirts, and someone who was clearly much tanner than I had decided that we needed to pair the red shirts with white shorts. Suffice it to say that fear and trembling filled my soul, because when you are melanin deficient (that is not an official term, but it sounds almost troubling, doesn’t it?), white shorts are perhaps the most unflattering garment that you could dream of wearing against your glow-in-the-dark legs.

Honestly, the only positive thing I could come up with as far as the
white shorts were concerned was that my veins would have never looked bluer.

So, since I didn’t have the power to fight the sorority dress code, I figured I needed to be proactive and, you know, finally make a trip to a tanning bed. Oh, I could have settled for some self-tanner, but it was the late eighties, and the only thing self-tanner did, at least for me, was tint my skin an orangish hue that could not, be found in nature. To my way of thinking, the tanning bed was my only choice.

The day before Derby Day, I made an appointment with a local salon that had five or six tanning beds, and a couple of hours later, I drove across Starkville so I could meet my tanning destiny out on Highway 25. Unbeknownst to me, some beds had stronger bulbs than others, but since I didn’t know that, I just picked the one with the cutest name and ended up in a bed called Bora-Bora.

Perhaps that should have been my first warning sign.

In hindsight, there are many things I wish I’d done differently. I wish I hadn’t felt the pressure to be tan. I wish I hadn’t waited until the day before Derby Day to start the tanning process. I wish I hadn’t ignored my mama’s many sun-related warnings that were blaring like weather alerts inside my head.

And more than anything, I wish I hadn’t forgotten to put on sunscreen before I got in the tanning bed.

You see, it never occurred to me that stepping into a tanning bed without some sort of sunscreen was pretty much the equivalent of stepping onto a beach at noon (practically nude, mind you), slathering myself in Crisco, and staying put for three hours. All I can figure is that somewhere along the line I’d been deceived by the misnomer “
tanning
bed,” because frankly, in my case, it should have been called a “burn-up-your-milky-white-behind bed.”

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

After I’d spent about seventeen minutes in Bora-Bora, I decided I’d forfeit the last thirteen minutes of my appointment because, quite frankly, I was ready to go home. I was burning slap up (and I’ve never really been one to enjoy activities that involve heat), so I got out of the tanning bed, put on my clothes, and drove back to my dorm. I looked forward to the golden tan
that would no doubt greet me the next morning, and I felt utterly relieved that I wasn’t going to feel self-conscious wearing those bright-white shorts.

Life had never been so full of hope and promise.

But when morning came, there was no tan. I figured I hadn’t stayed in Bora-Bora long enough, and I was just as sad about wasting fifteen dollars as I was that my legs were the same pasty white they’d been the day before. I gloomily donned my white shorts and red T-shirt, and even now I remember standing on the steps of the Chi O house as we prepared to walk over to Derby Day, hoping with everything in me that my perma-pale state wouldn’t be an embarrassment to the sisterhood. Everybody else, at least in my estimation, seemed to have beautiful golden tans.

I, on the other hand, looked like Casper wearing a bright-red T-shirt.

The day was relatively uneventful, but after a couple of hours I definitely started to notice that my face felt flush. I chalked it up to all the Derby-ish excitement and didn’t pay much attention until around tug-of-war time, when I also started to notice that my legs felt just the tiniest bit warm. The color of my skin started to make a gradual progression, too, and when the Derby Day festivities were over, I realized that my normal chalky whiteness had turned bright pink. About thirty minutes later, when I was back at the sorority house, I looked in a mirror, and I couldn’t help but notice that I was beginning to look, well,
red
.

And by the time I got back to my dorm room, I was, you might say,
ablaze
with color.

I had plans to go out that night with my friend Bryan, who at the time drove an SUV. The primary reason this detail stands out so prominently in my memory is because when he picked me up, I had to climb into and out of the passenger seat, and I was all too aware that my knees were increasingly reluctant to do any sort of bending. We had a perfectly lovely time, as I recall, and I reckon it was a mighty good thing, because by the time he dropped me off at my dorm later that night, I knew that I was in capital-
T
Trouble.

Bora-Bora bit back, my friends.

And hard.

At first there was the nausea, and after a couple of hours of willing it to
stop, I finally surrendered and went down the hall to the community bathroom, where I lay down and even slept a bit (I am mortified by every detail in the last half of this sentence). The unexpected bonus to dozing off in the bathroom was that the tile provided some sweet relief
 
—because I cannot tell you how burning-up hot I was. I rubbed Noxzema over every part of my body, and I don’t even care what kind of mental image that conjures, because OH, I was on fire with the heat of a thousand suns.

Or a thousand tanning bed bulbs, as it were.

But as it turned out, Saturday night was the easy part. Because Sunday was a full-on, sun-scorched plague.

By late Sunday afternoon, you see, the backs of my knees had started to blister and also ooze. As a result, I could not bend my knees at all, and that presented a bit of a problem in a collegiate setting where there are many, many stairs. I will never forget that I had a history test coming up that Monday morning, and since I didn’t feel like I could contact my professor and tell him that I would be unable to take his test due to an unfortunate run-in with an evil tanning bed named Bora-Bora, I figured I could at least study with a friend of mine who was very smart and always took notes in class. She lived across campus, though, so I had no choice but to drive to her dorm (lowering myself into my Buick Regal was no easy feat), hobble across her parking lot, and then walk up several flights of stairs to get to her room.

All without bending my knees.

Honest to goodness, it took me twenty-five minutes to walk from the parking lot of McKee dorm up to the “intensive study floor” where my smart friend lived, and when I got there, I couldn’t sit down because, well, BLISTERS ON BACKS OF KNEES, and I figured the resulting high-pitched scream might disturb the other residents. Unfortunately, after I stood around very awkwardly for several minutes, I realized that my “study buddy” was slightly annoyed by the prospect of helping me. Apparently she resented the fact that I had “skipped class” and “not taken notes,” and I could not persuade her to have sympathy on me even though I could not, in fact, bend my knees. So at some point I just gave up and walked, stiff-legged, back down to my car. Once I actually made it to the car, I had to
slide under the steering wheel with the seat pushed back as far as it would go because there was no way
 
—no way at all
 
—that my knees were Ever. Going. To. Bend. Again.

Make no mistake: they were JACKED UP.

Fortunately, I did get better over the course of the next few days. By the next week, I even attempted to roller-skate at a Chi O skating party. It was fun, but it wasn’t necessarily a
wise
decision; when I fell, the scabs on the backs of my knees prevented me from getting up, and Elise’s boyfriend, Paul, finally just let me hold on to his waist while he propelled me around the skating rink. Eventually I learned that if I needed to stop, I could hurl myself into the waist-level wall, and it would break my fall.

These
 
—these are precious memories, aren’t they?

I haven’t even told you the part about how the scabs over the water blisters leaked a time or nine while I skated, so my jeans were covered with blistery liquid all across the backs of the knees.

Really, I don’t know why I didn’t come away from that event with several potential suitors.

I can’t imagine that I’ve ever looked more attractive.

However, you’ll be happy to know that when I was on the way home from the skating party, I stopped at the Popeyes and bought myself a delicious two-piece dinner. And when I got back home, I changed into my Chi O nightshirt before I coated my hot-pink legs in Noxzema, devoured my fried chicken, and admired the cuteness of my dorm room.

Sometimes, I guess, all your dreams really do come true.

O
NE OF THE
unusual parts about being the baby of the family by a ten-year margin was that by the time I was eight, my brother and my sister had already moved out of the house. It never felt strange to me, though. Being the baby by a mile was totally normal because it was all I’d ever known, but that didn’t change the fact that sometimes the contrasts between our lives were almost comical. I was still watching
The Muppet Show
every night when Brother was finishing his degree in economics (well, truth be told, Daddy always said that Brother actually majored in Sigma Nu and
minored
in economics, but that’s probably not an issue we have to settle today). And when I was gearing up for the end of sixth grade, Sister was getting ready to marry Barry and move to Nashville. Sister and Barry bought their first house, for heaven’s sake, before I could even drive.

As I got older, though, the distance between our ages became a little easier to navigate. That process was a gradual one, for sure, but I have a
vivid memory of when I started to feel like I had something to contribute to the collective sibling conversation. I was in ninth grade, and Daddy and I had traveled to south Mississippi for a family reunion at a beautiful old country church. That particular reunion was the first time that I really wanted to sit around and listen to the stories (as opposed to, oh, walking around the church fellowship hall and making a point to sample all the cobblers), and about two hours into the afternoon, I sat next to my daddy’s aunt Cecil at a picnic table. Aunt Cecil had long enjoyed a reputation as a “character” in our family, but since I’d never really experienced the force of her personality live and in person, I figured I’d have a seat next to her and see what all the fuss was about.

I kid you not
 
—I’d been listening to Aunt Cecil’s conversation for all of five minutes when I heard her say, “Frankly, I don’t know what in the world she wants to have to do with him. I’d rather be alone than have him for a husband. Plus, I’ve heard for years that when he was in the war he had a run-in with a grenade and got his tallywacker blown off. But that’s none of my concern, now is it? If she thinks he’ll make a good husband, that’s her business, I reckon. SHEWWWWWW.”

My favorite part was that when she said the part about the grenade, she reached over and patted me on the arm. LIKE I NEEDED TO MAKE SURE TO SYMPATHIZE.

I may have only been fourteen years old. But I knew the first thing on my Monday morning agenda was to call Sister and Brother and fill them in on the storytelling glory I had just witnessed.

And y’all, it was the strangest thing, but when I told Sister and Brother that story and they laughed out loud, it was like I’d crossed over. Granted, I was still the baby of the family
 
—nothing could ever change that
 
—but I felt like a participant in the conversation instead of just an observer.

And I liked it.

By the second semester of my freshman year at State, I was fully in the habit of talking to Brother, Sister, and Barry once or twice a week. It was mighty sweet of them to make time for their younger sister like they did;
now that I’m older, I completely recognize that it’s no easy feat to include an eighteen-year-old in your life when you’re twenty-eight and thirty-two.

And that spring, Sister went above and beyond the call of sibling duty.

Barry’s job had taken them from Nashville to his hometown of Atlanta, and in the process of trying to figure out her work situation, Sister reconnected with a friend from college. Over the course of several conversations, Sister and her friend Kerri decided that the timing was perfect for starting their own special events company. Much to their surprise, the new business took off right away (disclaimer: the success of the business shocked absolutely no one else; they were both cute as buttons, smart as whips, and “personality-plus,” as my mother-in-law would say), and before the ink had a chance to dry on their new business cards, they’d booked several events for the upcoming summer, which was only a few months away.

So. Faced with an abundance of work and no employees, it dawned on Sister that my cousin Paige and I might enjoy living in Atlanta and working with her and Kerri over our summer break. Paige was finishing her junior year at Ole Miss, and she was as game for a little summertime adventure as I was. The plan was that we’d live at Kerri’s house, which is where the business was based, and in addition to all the experience we’d get, we’d earn a little money, too
 
—all while hanging out in the biggest of the Southern cities.

There was absolutely nothing about this plan that didn’t appeal to me.

A couple of days after the last exam of my freshman year, I packed my car and drove to Atlanta. Since I felt like it was important to strike the right chord in terms of what was sure to be a very sophisticated summer in the big city, I planned my outfit very carefully. I chose a two-piece maroon ensemble (#HailState) (#GoDogs) with an abstract, cream-colored print all over it, and I paired my stylish knitwear with some fairly horrendous white suede bucks that were my favorite wardrobe item at the time. They reminded me of something Jennifer Grey would have worn in
Dirty Dancing
, and it’s only now that it occurs to me that maybe I should have reevaluated my footwear standards.

I also used my fake Ray-Bans as a headband because I thought that made me look cool, like Jami Gertz in
Less Than Zero
.

So I think I’ve clearly established that I had some questionable style icons.

Hindsight’s brutal, y’all.

Since I’d planned most of my road trip sound track well in advance, I made sure that my red canvas cassette tape holder was riding shotgun as I drove east on I-20. I alternated between George Strait, Billy Joel, Amy Grant, the
Dirty Dancing
sound track, and James Taylor, and as I crossed the Georgia state line, I was giddy with independent feelings. I was going to be a CAREER GIRL (well, kind of) and TAKE ATLANTA BY STORM (well, not really) and SET THE CITY ON FIRE (well, not at all, and besides, Atlanta had already been on fire once before, thanks to General Sherman, so obviously my choice of metaphor was dicey at best). If Kelly Clarkson and Destiny’s Child had been around back then, I would have been blasting “Miss Independent” and “Survivor” out of my sweet Delco stereo speakers. I might have even rolled down the windows and screamed the lyrics at the Georgia pines, but the Buick’s windows weren’t always cooperative about rolling back up, and it would have been a shame to let the wind ruin my cool Jami Gertz hair or, even worse, lose those Ray-Ban knockoffs that were worth fives of dollars.

(Also, I feel like I need to point out that even though the Destiny’s Child song would have totally fit my mood, I hadn’t really survived anything at that point in my life.)

(Well, that’s not entirely true.)

(I’d survived the whole acid-washed jeans craze.)

(But that hardly merits a heartfelt rendition of a not-yet-existent pop anthem.)

It was late in the afternoon when I finally arrived in Atlanta, and to my delight, Sister was at Kerri’s house when I pulled in the driveway. Kerri lived in a gorgeous older neighborhood off Peachtree Road, and she also drove a Volvo, so she was pretty much the yuppiest person I had ever known. After I said my hellos and unloaded my car and visited with Sister and Kerri in the dining room/makeshift office, I found myself filled with all manner of hope regarding the summer of 1988.

It was going to be awesome.

Kerri’s house was a 1920s bungalow with loads of charm: there were big windows, hardwood floors, and even a few original light fixtures scattered throughout. However, Kerri’s husband, who fancied himself a bit of a DIY-er, had passed away unexpectedly several years before, and several of the projects he’d started were still incomplete when Paige and I moved in. We were just young enough to see the unfinished stuff as interesting and not annoying, so we thought it was quirky and fun that the hallway between the kitchen and the dining room didn’t actually go anywhere. It was like someone had plopped down a giant, hollow Jenga stick in the most central part of the house, and while it would have made a lovely hallway if it had actually, you know, led to some rooms, as it stood, it gave Kerri some extra storage space for her winter clothes.

The area on the other side of the kitchen was just as perplexing. Kerri’s late husband had added on an area that would have eventually been their master bedroom, but again, he’d never completed the project. The room was large enough for Paige and me to share, so it became our sleeping quarters for the summer, but since the final wall and doorway hadn’t been finished, the “master” was wide open to the kitchen and the adjacent sunporch, which served as Sister’s office. The floor in all three rooms was Spanish tile, and while I can see how that detail might seem unimportant, I just want to emphasize that Paige and I slept in that part of the house, and NOISE.

There are train stations in major metropolitan areas that are more peaceful.

Paige and I didn’t care so much, though. We had a couple of twin bed frames
 
—on rollers, no less
 
—and if we got in or out of our beds too quickly, those metal frames would screech across the tile floor and set our teeth on edge, so naturally we’d laugh until we cried. If Kerri decided at two in the morning that she needed a big glass of ice water, we’d wake up to the sounds of her emptying the ice tray and turning on the faucet. Then we’d laugh until we cried. And when Kerri would wake up at dark o’clock to fix her coffee and round up some breakfast and do whatever young entrepreneurs do in the predawn hours, Paige and I would roll over in our respective twin
beds, pray the frames didn’t scrape the tile, look at each other over our covers, and laugh until we cried.

It was a good thing that just about everything struck us as funny at that stage of our lives. And also that we didn’t have a whole lot of needs when it came to our privacy.

After our first few days in Atlanta, Paige and I both started to understand the lay of the land in terms of our day-to-day responsibilities. Paige worked mainly as an assistant to Sister; they figured out the details for all the upcoming events and worked to make those things happen. I worked mainly as an assistant to Kerri; we wrote letters and designed brochures to secure new business, and I was also supposed to answer the phone and handle all the word processing stuff.