Stop Dressing Your Six-Year-Old Like a Skank (18 page)

During a break in a long discussion about her latest bout of hemorrhoids (“I swanee they’re as big as sofa cushions”), I noticed a spit cup surface from under Azelene’s bedcovers.

For a few moments, all you could hear in the hospital room was the sound of an old woman’s spit hitting the side of a Tar Heels 1993 National Champions mug. The relative peace was disrupted, as it always is when the Southern Redneck Woman has company in the hospital.

A friend had dropped by to visit but confessed he was nervous. “I haven’t been in a hospital since my brother shot
hisself in the leg on account of trying to commit Hare Krishna.”

Somebody brought fried chicken.

Lula and I, bored by the
Falcon Crest
reunion that was taking place on the TV overhead, just soaked it all up, including a lengthy visit from Azelene’s preacher, a thunder-voiced Pentecostal who sold double-wides by day. He’d come straight from his weekly visit counseling all the lost sheep in the “pentenchurary.”

“Did you see my Edwin?” Azelene asked.

“Shore did. He said he didn’t rob that Kangaroo Mart, and he can prove it.”

“Course he can! My baby’s innocent as the day he was born. Which like t’ve killed me. He weighed damn near sixteen pounds, you know. They had to remove all my internal organs just to prize him out. They say you can’t live without a liver, but I been doin’ just fine. I knew they didn’t put everything back. Saw it sittin’ on the counter just like it needed some fried onions with it.”

“Merciful heavens,” Lula half groaned.

The next day, rolling out of Azelene’s life forever, Lula waved good-bye. Azelene, not a sentimental sort, just yawned. “On your way out, tell that bony little hank o’ hair out at the desk I need a pan. Did I tell you about my hemorrhoids?”

I had to call the phone company after a small hurricane passed through, ripped the line down, and left it in a mangled mess on my deck.

This didn’t go well. See, I live in North Carolina, and the phone company representative—who for some inane reason began every sentence with “Now, Miss Riventybarky, we understand that you are frustrated” while simultaneously adding to my frustration—was elsewhere, like Bangalore.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Some of my best friends are Bangaloreans. Okay, not really. I’m from the South, where when we say, “The phone line’s down, and y’all need to get a truck over here to put it back up,” this is somehow greeted by the Bangalorean as completely unreliable.

“Miss Riventybarky,” she began, “have you considered that perhaps the phone is unplugged or there is a problem with the, uh, [sound of shuffling translation guides] jack inside the [shuffling again] abode?”

I distinctly remember grabbing an unopened bottle of wine at this point and considering banging it open on the side of the kitchen counter, thus bypassing the more time-consuming corkscrew method.

“I don’t live in an abode; I live in a house, a house without any telephone service and my name is
not
Riventybarky!”

“Miss Riventybarky, now I do understand that you are frustrated—”

“Arrrgggh!”

Long story short, I finally convinced my almond-eyed friend on the far side of the world that I really did have enough sense to recognize a tattered phone line on the ground. She finally agreed to believe me, and we all gave peace a chance. The very next morning, a fabulous crew from the local phone company showed up in whipping rains and “got ‘er done.”

I was thinking about this because I just learned that my Southern hometown is now a major “call center” for Verizon, a telecommunications giant whose name comes from the Latin
Veri,
which means “bladder” and
zon,
which means “elongated.” I don’t care; it still sounds cool.

Any who, the funny part is that here we are, in the Deep South, and we’re the call center servicing, get this, Metropolitan New York City! What elongated bladder genius thought this would be a good match?

NY CALLER:
My phone’s broken and you need to fix it today.

US:
Todaaaay? Do what?

NY CALLER:
Yes, today, Gomer. I’m a very busy and important person wearing way too much hair product.

US:
I understand your, uh, frustration—

NY CALLER:
“I’ll give you somethin’ to be frustrated about. Now get the grits outta your mouth and fix my f-ing phone.”

US:
I bet you wouldn’t talk like that in front of your mama.

Click.

Thing is, we don’t talk like the rest of the country, and we’re frankly relieved.

Remember this above all else: Southerners despise bad news and loathe sharing it without some gloss. We invented that classic joke about the beloved cat that was killed while his owner was away from home. It’s the one where the neighbor bluntly says “Your cat’s dead,” and his devastated friend says, “Couldn’t you tell me nicer? Ease me into it? Tell me the cat got up on the roof and then tumbled down and died instantly and without any undue suffering?” A few weeks later, the same neighbor is forced to relay some sad
news again. Remembering his friend’s request, he begins, “See, your grandma was on the roof. . . .”

This near-pathological avoidance of bad news has led to such famous Southernisms as using “the late unpleasantness” to describe the War Between the States. We don’t just come right out and say something; we have to cozy up to it like the cat to the cream jar.

One of the best examples of classic Southern under-statement is found in the word
unfortunate,
which, in the South, can describe anything from losing all one’s earthly possessions in a house fire (“Selma and Jim-Bob experienced a most unfortunate fire”) to describing your exceedingly homely girl-cousin as having “a most unfortunate nose.”

Unfortunate,
you’ll notice, is usually paired with
most
for purposes of emphasis. Don’t use
very,
or you will be revealed to be the outsider that you truly are and told to go back to sprinkling sugar on your grits and similar abominations.

Here’s a quick checklist for dos and don’ts down South. No thanks are necessary; it’s thanks enough that I am able to help.

DON’T
say
yous.
Practice saying
y’all, y’all’s,
or
yalls’es
without sneering. Get over yourself.

DON’T
discuss how much money you make or how much you paid for your leaf blower, standing mixer, lawn tractor, shoes, and so on. Southerners don’t do that, because it’s tacky.

DO
realize that tacky is the worst label that can be applied to any person, behavior, or event in the South. As in, “Mama
said Raylene’s bridal shower coming three months after she had the baby was as tacky as those Sam’s Club mints she served right out of the carton.”

DON’T
criticize our driving. We know where the turn lane is and what it’s for. We’re just messing with you.

DON’T
accuse us of being “thin-skinned” or lacking a sense of humor. We laugh plenty behind your back.

DO
remember that
barbecue
is a noun, never a verb, and it’s a holy noun at that.

DON’T
question the superiority of Atlantic Coast Conference basketball. This could lead to a most unfortunate coma.

Of course, as is often the case, we in the South can be our own worst enemy. I recently learned that there is a course being taught at the University of South Carolina that helps Southerners lose their accents. Can you believe it?

My ox is gored, my tater fried, and, yes, the red has indeed been licked off my candy.

You see, I have a dog in this fight. The notion that you should try to get rid of your Southernisms makes me madder’n a wet setting hen.

The professor, Erica Tobolski, says that she is teaching her students how to stop talking Southern and start using Standard American Dialect (or, appropriately, SAD for short). This way, we can all sound exactly alike. Isn’t that just gooder’n grits and finer’n frog’s hair?

Of course it’s not. The truth is, I wouldn’t give Ms. Tobolski air if ‘n she was trapped in a jug. Which it sounds to
me like she may have been. For some time. How else do you explain such oxygen-deprived plumb foolishness? I swear if that woman’s brains were dynamite, an explosion wouldn’t even ruffle her hair on a windy day.

“Many students come to see me because they want to sound less country,” Ms. Tobolski told the Associated Press. They want to be able to turn their native Southern accent on and off so it doesn’t embarrass them when they travel or go on job interviews.

Y’all want to know what embarrasses me? That any right-thinking daughter or son of Dixie would sign up for this insulting course. Do we really want to sound like the “You’ve got mail” guy or the android who tells us to “Press One for Customer Service”?

Answer me.
Do we?

Oh, “hail” no.

I have a friend who travels to the Northeast a lot on business. She’s a high-powered, successful executive, and she takes pride in her Southern accent.

Going toe-to-toe with Boston lawyers on their turf, she refers to them as
y’all,
but they have learned that to question her brainpower would just prove that they’re the ones dumber’n a sack of hammers.

What we need to do is celebrate our accent and nevah, evah try to change it. If we try to get rid of it so others will think better of us, we will have lost our Southern soul, trading the essence of ourselves for what?

So take that course, if you must. But don’t be surprised if you end up spending your empty little life stumbling around just as lost and prone to misery as a blind horse in a punkin patch.

Y’all know I’m right.

If you’re going to go and get yourself a really noisy, nasty intestinal virus, it’s always best to do it while visiting your in-laws for the holidays. That way, the entire extended family, which is staying overnight in the small brick ranch house that your husband grew up in, can be treated to a cacophony of sounds that they will long remember.

And that way, one by one, they can step, in their bath-robes, to the closed door of the one full bath in the house and shout, with a mixture of pity and fear, “You doing all right in there?”

To which you scream a loving
“Go away!”

Maybe I’ll write about my Christmas night “song” one day in one of those tiny little volumes with treacly prose that sells so well during December. As I snuggled into my
husband’s boyhood bed mere hours before the attack on my innards was launched, I read five of these little books, all filled with misty-eyed memories of hearth and home and angels and snowmen. None offered a memory like the one I was about to generate for all the family to snicker about for years to come.

Hours later, my humiliation complete, I lay in bed and tried to ignore the smell of frying country ham. A brother-in-law timidly offered to bring me some breakfast, but I told him to just bypass the middleman and throw it directly into the toilet on my behalf. All morning long, I could over-hear the conversation between niece and nephew, aunt and uncle and so forth.

“I heard her at about four thirty,” said one.

“Naw, it was closer to two thirty. You must’ve slept through the first round.”

Oh, sweet Jesus, make them stop.

It didn’t take a genius to figure out that this was going to permanently scar the younger members of the family who, mere hours before, had happily been playing with a whoopee cushion brought by Santa himself. Now the sound wasn’t all that funny.

“Do you think she’s gonna die?” I heard one ask.

“Sure sounds like it,” another said solemnly.

A relative in Texas called with holiday greetings, and I heard my husband cheerfully announce that I couldn’t come
to the phone because “She’s busy at both ends!” Great. There’s one less state I can show my face in again.

The rest of the morning, I heard the relatives leave, cheerfully reminding my mother-in-law to “Lysol the door-knobs!” My husband’s family believes that Lysol solves everything. I was deathly afraid they might sneak in and try to spray me from top to bottom while I slept. And dreamed of writing “Upheaval at the In-Laws’: A Christmas Song.”

Yeah, that’ll sell.

I’m not sure a flu shot would’ve helped in my case, but I couldn’t get one anyway, because I was too young. I told everybody that and enjoyed it mightily. It’s the most fun I’ve had since I told the nurse running the church Bloodmobile that “I can’t donate on account of I don’t weigh enough.”

Oh, settle down. I’ve signed away my organs and, frankly, the way that guy at the Optimist Club booth stared at me when I was signing away my dead corneas, I was a little scared he was going to take ‘em right then.

But give blood? Uh, not so much. So instead of being the weenie that I am, fainting in front of an entire basement full of people, I said I didn’t weigh enough.

Because this is the South, where people are civilized to your face, there were no follow-up questions such as, “Honey, your ass appears to need its own area code, so I’m guessing you do weigh more than ninety-five pounds.”

She sure was thinking it, though.

When I took my octogenerian dad to the drugstore to get his flu shot, I couldn’t believe the crowd. The line snaked through eight—count ‘em, eight—aisles. For the first hour, it barely moved. When we finally saw one man walk by, pointing to his arm and then making a Ffor victory sign, we burst into spontaneous applause.

The funny thing about getting in line for a flu shot is that, if you are not of a certain age, you get dirty looks. I was just there for moral support, but I could see the raised eyebrows:
Hmmm, she better be missing some kidneys or something.

I recognize the look because it’s the same one I use when I see someone park in a handicapped space and then cheerily skip into the mall having figured out that sometimes it’s cool to borrow Great-gran’s Taurus.