Cybill Disobedience (3 page)

Rather ironic, considering that I was not even supposed to be a girl. My mother had miscarried twice in the four years since my sister was born (christened Gladys, for Moma, but called Terry). Her unexpected pregnancy was ascribed with a sacred duty to provide my father with a son, but it was deemed a washout the moment the doctor peered at me and said, “It’s a girl.” (When her did produce a male heir four years later, she triumphed in a rare practical joke on my father, bringing my brother, Bill, home from the hospital with a pink ribbon Scotch-taped to his bald head-- small “up yours” to the intimation that boys were better than girls.)

Perhaps I sensed in vitro that my gender would come as a major disappointment to my family. I was in no hurry to enter the world and literally backed in, rear first (never the smallest part of my anatomy). “You were easy to deal with,” Mother told me, “until you were born.” She had gone to the Methodist Hospital when her water broke, naturally expecting contractions to start. When nothing much happened, she summoned my father from the clouds of cigar smoke in the waiting room and, in true iron butterfly spirit, went to have her hair washed and set at Gould’s Beauty Parlor. She had just ordered mint tea and selected a pleasing tangerine frost for her nails when my position in the womb, called a frank breech, became apparent and progressed to a harrowing labor, for which Mother has yet to forgive me. I was born with a birth defect, a nerve tumor on the back of my neck that had to be removed. (Ironic that someone who would earn a living projecting an image of female flawlessness would get the first of a lifetime of scars before even leaving the hospital.) I remained “Girl Shepherd” for several days while my family debated what to call this female child, finally justifying my presence by combining the names of my grandfather (Cy) and father (Bill).

Well before I could have articulated it, I was instinctively aware of my assignment in the family: to be perfect. If I couldn’t be a boy, at least I could be the uber-female: pert, polite, charming, compliant, and above all, lovely to look at. (It was implicit that my sister was excused from this commission, being bigger, brawnier, and brunette.) Certainly I was not to say or do anything controversial or unladylike. “Siboney,” my grandmother would intone, making a pet name out of the unofficial national anthem of Cuba where my grandparents often vacationed. “Don’t go too far to the left or too far to the right. Stay in the middle of the road. Stay puuuuure vanilla.” I wore white cotton gloves with smocked floral dresses. Against my vehement protests, my hair was tortured into a frightening mass of deep-fried curls, which was considered more feminine than my straight hair with the recalcitrant wave in back. My godmother, Marie Hay, asked me to select my silver pattern (“Chantilly”) when I was ten, and I learned to dance by standing on my father’s black and white wing tips, swaying to “Just the Way You Look Tonight” while my mother primped for an evening out. There was a limited choice of destinies for a girl like me, with the distinct suggestion that life’s ultimate achievement was to be anointed the Maid of Cotton, fetching symbol of Memphis’s most important industry, or (spoken in reverential hushed tones) Miss America, a possibility that might have justified being born female.

All of which conflicted with my natural inclinations. I jumped from the highest branch of trees, hiked the old Shiloh military trail, and used a key worn on a lanyard around the neck to tighten metal skates, which left me with perennially bleeding elbows and knees. I declined to brush my hair until compelled to do so, and wore the same pair of tattered overalls until they disappeared from my closet (my mother quietly consigned them to incineration). To avoid getting dressed, I streaked naked next door and sat on the neighbors’ porch swing until my mother by assembling what I thought to be a decorous outfit: a pink dress with puffed sleeves and my favorite red sneakers. “Look Shep,” she called to my father, as if I had placed a lampshade on my head, “she picked this out herself.” My grandfather would grasp my hands with unedited distaste for my gnawed cuticlaying, “You can always tell a lady by her nails.” I rejected all dolls, especially the busty new Barbies coveted by my prepubescent crowd, all of us still wearing Fruit Of The Loom T-shirts over flat chests, and when my brother got electric trains (derisively telling me, “That’s for boys”). I sulked for weeks and contemplated various means of derailment. (He also got a cross-country turnpike set, a Rin Tin Tin badge, and a Fort Apache. I got talcum powder and a bath mitt).

The tomboy temperament that vexed my mother helped forge a bond with my father, even after my brother came along. He endorsed my interest in sports, didn’t think it was weird to toss a football with me on the front lawn, gave me a baseball glove, and shared the sacrament of rubbing the leather with oil and shaping it by letting it spend the night cupping a ball. He even exulted when I beat the crap out of a bully named Chris Crump (as much crap as a whiffle bat could extract), for holding my little brother’s hand in an anthill. In those years when I was a surrogate son, my father let me accompany him on Saturdays to the warehouse he ran for Da-Dee, when it was quiet enough to roll a secretary’s swivel chair up and down the aisles. He taught me to swim by buckling on an orange Mae West and dropping me off the end of the pier at my grandparents’ summer home.

For the great French writer Marcel Proust, the door of memory was opened by the taste of a Madeleine cookie. For me, it’s Dr Pepper: one sip, and I am returned to that summer house on a slender tributary of the Tennessee River in Alabama called Shoals Creek. It was built in the 1930s as a hunting lodge on a remote promontory near a forest of cedar, pine, and burr oak, but the original owner felt too isolated and sold the five-acre property to my grandfather for the 1950 bargain price of $35,000. As a toddler who couldn’t pronounce the letter
l
, I called it the “yake house,” and the moniker stuck with the whole family. On the four-hour drive from Memphis, we stopped at filling stations with green jars of sour pickles for sale by the cash register. (I could make a pickle last all day. The goal was to suck out the insides but maintain the outer shell so you could blow it up like a balloon, make it breathe. I’d find the jettisoned ends of pickles under my sister’s bed). Da-Dee arrived in a style more befitting the lord of the manor, landing his own twin-engine Beechcraft Bonanza on an airstrip across the creek and announcing his presence by buzzing the house from the air so that Moma would be waiting on the tarmac when he touched down.

In the early summer mornings, before the humidity would slap down like a biblical plague, Da-Dee and I got up before the others to sit in penumbral shadow on the long screened porch and watch the choppy surface of the water become streaked with first light, which looked like thousands of glittering broken mirrors, so bright that we had to squint. We’d wad up some day-old bread, stick the gummy ball on a hook and line at the end of a cane fishing pole, then plop into the reclining chairs on the pier and wait for the bite of catfish and bream and crappie (a delicacy not yet appreciated by chic chefs). I was the only one in the family with enough guts to eat calves brains and eggs with Da-Dee. There was a huge black cauldron in a tarp-covered clearing near the house for deep-frying fish and hush puppies, the crisp puffs of cornmeal meant to placate dogs driven mad by cooking smells but appropriated by smart humans. Moma kept baby goats, which ate up the shrubbery, and peacocks whose shrill reveille I learned to imitate with ear-splitting accuracy, and hens that roosted in the trees at night, but these were more pets than livestock. Dinner was often an anonymous quail or duck shot by Da-Dee (there were usually a few vanquished carcasses hanging in the kitchen), and we never sat down to a summer meal that didn’t include tomatoes, often fried green matoes, even at breakfast. I took the red paisley bandannas that served as napkins and made streamers for my bike or slings for a fake broken arm.

It was there at Shoals Creek that my grandfather seemed most content, only vaguely morose. He would lapse into a private reverie, occasionally broken with an enigmatic aphorism (“Everything’s gonna be all right”) said as much to himself as to anyone else. I never considered his taciturn manner an indication of a dissatisfied soul-- he had every conceivable creature comfort and was coddled by the sort of wife who put the cuff links in his shirt every day. Years later my father told me that he imagined the wistful cast in Da-Dee’s eye was a woman named Daisy, ensconced in a downtown Memphis apartment with my grandfather’s name on the lease. When Moma found prima facie evidence of the affair, she sent his suitcase to the Peabody Hotel, then thought better of it. I heard that she threatened to study taxidermy and mount the stuffed and formaldehyded bodies of Da-Dee and his mistress alongside the deer head over the massive stone fireplace at the yake house. Daisy disappeared, as did a certain kick-ass vigor in my grandfather’s spirit. He mentioned her name in the narcotic musings of his deathbed, when I guess he felt he had nothing left to lose or hide.

Moma was not about to abdicate from the perquisites of an indulgent marriage, exemplified by more than a hundred pairs of shoes filling three closets--a tottering chronicle of fashion victimization that ranged from Duchess-of-Windsor bejeweled to Chiquita-banana tacky. Years later I learned about one source of her shoe fetish: back home for a visit, I was exploring the Memphis Yacht Club, the hyperbolic term for what was then a series of wooden boathouses strung together with steel cable and wired with yellow lights to keep the bugs away. I was shocked to see a sailboat tacking back and forth across the Mississippi River. Sailing on the Mississippi? What kind of nutcase would try that? There’s a constant traffic of enormous barges, several cit blocks long, that move huge amounts of water out of their way, and it takes these behemoths thirty minutes to stop, often sucking smaller vessels into their wake like helpless anchovies. The current runs strong only one way over treacherous whirlpools, and the depths of the muddy water can be deceptive. So it was axiomatic that nobody would try to navigate the river without a least one engine. The mad sailor turned out to be a devilishly handsome silver fox named Smith. When I reported our meeting to Moma, she got a dreamy look in her eyes and said, “Oh, that’s Smitty from the Julius Lewis Department Store. I must have bought fifty pairs of shoes from that man.”

Most of her wardrobe came, apparently without erotic subtext, from The Helen Shop: sherbet-colored chiffon sheaths for charity balls, pearl-buttoned cashmere cardigans, scarves to match every outfit, a prized chinchilla stole--all supported by a long-line girdle that redistributed a thickish waist from bust line to just above the knees. There was one set of noises when she was putting it on and another when she was desperately pulling it off, the indicia of zippers and garters pressed into flesh like thumbprints in yeast dough. In one of her closets were two tan leather suitcases with yellow knit bows on the handles, kept packed at all times in case Da-Dee had an urge to fly off for a “rendezvous,” one of the parties held by the Sportsmen Pilots Association all over the country, with buffet tables set up right in the hangar. I got taken along once as a teenager, and the gin and tonics started before the propellers stopped spinning.

Like me, Moma had been something of a jock, a predilection uncommon to her generation, until a heart attack in her forties curtailed all sports but golf. I liked to play with her trophies from country club tournaments, topped with tiny gold-plated figurines of sturdy women swinging drivers over their heads. Ldies’ Day at the clubhouse was the only time I saw my grandmother in pants, the kind of clothes I appreciated. She hated the female liturgy of the beauty parlor, preferring her own Aqua Net, and claimed she owed her baby pink complexion to a nightly smear of Lady Esther cold cream--once a week she left it on all day long, walking around the house with a greasy mask. Years before, according to the fashion of the times, she had plucked out her eyebrows and had to draw them back on. I would watch her apply the Max Factor brownish-black eyebrow pencil as we sang a duet of “Jesus Loves Me, This I Know,” with me doing the harmony part. Moma loved music more than anything, and growing up she taught herself to play the church organ. I never visited her house that she didn’t sit down either at her organ or her piano to accompany us kids singing the gospel hymns of her childhood. A few years after my grandmother’s death, my mother came across a note scrawled on a yellow legal pad concerning Moma’s only regret: that she hadn’t “followed up and done something with her music.” She was always urging me to do what she called those “sweet songs” like “Michael Row the Boat Ashore,” and at her insistence I sang it as my talent portion of the Miss Teenage Memphis Pageant.

Moma grew up in the small rural town of Carlyle, Arkansas. The churchyard was kept at full occupancy by the influenza epidemic of 1918, which claimed her mother when Moma was only seven. Startled by an unusual thump coming from the parlor where the body was laid out, she refused to accept that the window had slammed shut, believing that the coffin had been tumbled off a table by ghosts, and engendering a fear of spectral spirits that was not completely dissipated in adulthood. The care of three younger siblings fell to this child, with devastating consequences: baby sister Edith crawled too near a fireplace, and her leg was so severely burned that it was amputated above the knee. As a child I was fascinated by her prosthesis and was always trying to get a peek of it or her without it. But Great-Aunt Edith never let her false leg keep her down. She became a graceful dancer, married Saul Byarly, who printed the
Arkansas Gazette
, and had four impressively achieving children: an airline pilot, a doctor, a lawyer, and a chief nurse in cardiovascular surgery.

As adolescent lady of the house, Moma enjoyed certain benefits along with the burdens, partnering her widowed father at every rural shindig. When her position was subsumed by a stepmother, she began a rebellion of such ornery defiance that she once ate an entire shipment of green bananas meant for the store and was sent to live in a Little Rock boardinghouse owned by a family friend. With only one line left on her dance card at the DeMoolay Young Men’s Organization, she caught the eye of a hulking blond boy with elephantine ears and a killer smile, two years older and ready for a wife. Perhaps she saw marriage to a clever and ambitious fly-boy as her ticket to ride. Moma and Da-Dee crisscrossed every square mile of the delta in his plane, which was red canvas covered with two open-air cockpits. Having baby Patricia Cornelia Shobe didn’t much crimp their style, my mother was often left on the farm with grandparents who doted on her, waiting for her parents to swoop down in a cleared field and pick her up. I have a photograph of Patty, Tommy, and Cy when my mother was a toddler; they look like the American dream, an enviable portrait worthy of a cereal box or a postage stamp.