Cybill Disobedience (7 page)

The trip to Hawaii did derail my romance with Mike, to the delight of my parents. It’s a bittersweet moment, the recognition that a first love is just that. The person who evoked such hunger and longing and indiscretion isn’t going to walk into the future with you. There will be others with voices like tupelo honey, whose touch will make your palms damp. I broke up with Mike (on the telephone--remarkably easy) and moved on.

Sam wore Canoe. He dressed in preppy blazers from Brooks Brothers and was a founding member of a young men’s social club called the Midnight Revelers, famous for their parties. He was one of the lifeguards I had periodically dunked at Chickasaw Country Club and was considered so socially acceptable by my parents that I was granted permission to visit him that fall for homecoming weekend at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, on the edge of the Smoky Mountains. The campus seemed to glow with an unearthly light from the preponderance of clothing in the school colors: Day-Glo orange and white. Just before the football game, Sam gave me a corsage, a huge white mum trailing orange and white ribbons, and as I sat in the stadium, baking in the noonday sun, I kept sticking my face in the flower, inhaling the mushy coolness. We were so highly chaperoned that the only time we got to touch was when we were dancing. The proctor in Sam’s dorm wrote to my mother expressing her delight in such a well-mannered guest.

When Sam came home to Memphis for weekends and holidays, there were no chaperones, and we borrowed his grandmother’s basement--the ultimate den of iniquity, with a fireplace, pool table, TV, wet bar, and a plush velveteen sofa. Grandma rarely left the seco toloor of her weathered white-brick house, sometimes yelling downstairs, “Y’all okay down there?” Sam would holler, “Doin’ Jim Dandy,” with a surfeit of enthusiasm and peel off my clothing to the accompaniment of Ella Fitzgerald and Sinatra LPs. Unlike my girl friends, who were fooling around to the Four Tops and the Temptations, I was wooed with the music of my parents.

Sam recognized that the way to my heart was through my stomach. I can still taste the pompano almondine and three kinds of oysters (bienville, casino, and Rockefeller) at Justine’s, the most exclusive restaurant in Memphis, in an antebellum mansion with a rose garden (even my grandparents had only been there a few times). I worshiped at the altar of the killer pecan pie Sam’s mother made from a recipe on the bottle of dark Karo syrup. On Valentine’s Day he left the industrial-size Whitman’s sampler at my door, along with a giant wooden heart inscribed “I love you” on the front lawn, pounded into the frozen earth on a garden spike. But I was restless and bored with college-boy sex. I’d be graduating from high school in a few months, and despite the number of ways I found to write “Mrs.” in front of Sam’s name on my loose-leaf notebook, I was pretty sure that his circumscribed image of our life together would grate. Fat tears slid down his cheeks and his face fissured as we sat in his Mustang on a chilly autumn day, but he wasn’t fooled for an instant as I lied that I’d been chatting with God about the sin of sex before marriage. A month or so after our breakup, I was kissing a new beau good night at my front door. Turning to go inside the house, I looked through to the backyard to see Sam watching, wearing his Revelers tuxedo and scowling like Heathcliff.

Lawrence wore Jade East. He went to Florida State, played golf like a pro, and drove a pale blue Thunderbird, which we would park on the far side of Galloway Golf Course. He was more... esoteric in his amorous tastes. “I’ll show you what I like,” he said during what I assumed to be a moment of high arousal. He undid the button at the wrist of his shirt and rolled his sleeve back slowly, all the way above the elbow. Then he said, “Just stroke my arm.” I was thinking:
This guy is really weird. He doesn’t want to do anything.
And I did it wrong, first too hard, then too soft, so he said, “Let me show you how.” From the vantage point of several experienced decades, the arm-stroking thing now seems fabulously sophisticated, not to mention the ultimate safe sex. And I came to think that a golf course is a rather erotic place, as long as you don’t get arrested.

SEX WAS TOO EARLY AND TOO URGENT IN MY LIFE, AND
I wonder how my sexual energy might have been deferred or given another outlet. When I was growing up, there was no Joycelyn Elders to encourage masturbation rather than motel rooms. Academia might have sufficed as distraction, but it was given scant regard for girls in my family. The $150 scholarship I was offered to attend a private high school didn’t cover the cost of tuition, and my grandparents wouldn’t put up the additional money. Our household was big on Collier Junior Classics and Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. I read everything in the bookcase (“That girl always has her head in a book,” my mother said, and she didn’t mean it as a compliment). I even trained myself to read in the car without getting sick. The first time I went to the Highland Avenue branch of the Memphis Public Library, I was overwhelmed. “You mean I can take out as many books as I want?” I asked. I couldn’t understand why I got punished for bad behavior by having to bend over and get walloped with a belt, while my friend Martha got punished by having to memorize “The Raven.”

As adolescent virgins, my friends and I had gabbed without much inforation about “going all the way,” but I stopped talking about sex when I started doing it, and lying about it extended to my best friends. I knew with an unshakable certainty that none of my crowd--all good southern girls--were experiencing what I was, and it was inconceivable to share the intimacies. Even within my troika of Jane, Patty, and Martha, our gossip about social pairings had tacit boundaries beyond which we didn’t venture, resorting to a discreet policy of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” Later I would find out that I was indeed way ahead of the pack.

Certainly Delta Alpha Delta was virginal. High school sororities constituted a cherished Memphis heritage with a fixed protocol that brooked no deviation. During rush week, prospective pledges wearing themed name tags (in the shape of bongo drums, perhaps, or Nefertiti’s head) were invited to partake of cucumber sandwiches and Rotel dip (made with a can of Rotel brand spicy chiles and tomatoes melted with Velveeta cheese) at the homes of older “sisters.” On the weekend that votes were tallied, each girl would wait, hoping for an invitation to join, which was announced by a caravan of cars pulling up to her house, with crepe paper streamers and blaring horns. (Each sorority had a distinctive honk, recognizable from blocks away.) I didn’t just join D.A.D.; I became the class president in my senior year and immersed myself in its genteel traditions of charity work and partying. We formed a white girls’ version of a Motown group, performing at hospitals and nursing homes. To raise money for the parties, we sponsored pancake suppers and car washes, and once a month I’d rise at 5 A.M., drive to the Krispy Kreme, and pick up sixty dozen (or perhaps sixty thousand) doughnuts that we’d sell.

Despite these mannerly rituals, my waterloo in high school was the “charm notebook” required for Phys. Ed. I can only imagine what hyperkinetic gym teacher of an earlier era, perhaps damaged by overexposure to
Gone With the Wind
, conceived of such a curiosity, quaint even by 1960s standards. We were supposed to put together information about clothes, hair, makeup, and other womanly wiles. Surely this was an assignment for which I’d been in training since the crib, but I thought it was asinine and made an obviously slapdash effort, sloppily gluing pages from
Glamour
,
Mademoiselle
, and
Seventeen
on construction paper. I earned an F. (No small irony that in less than three years I would be on the covers of these magazines.) I’d played on the church softball and basketball teams and set a district record in the long jump (formerly called the broad jump, until the term was deemed politically incorrect). A contender for best female athlete, I failed gym.

My father was outraged and showed up at school to defend me, certain that he’d just “fix” things with the bottomless tool kit of parenthood. I was filled with a smug pride as he strode into the gymnasium to see the evil Mrs. Hotchkiss, keeping close to the wall as his wing tips clacked against the wood floor. They vanished into offices behind the girls’ locker room, too far for me to hear,
As
my father stormed away from his failed mission, he caught my eye and said, “Sorry, Cy, I couldn’t get her to change her mind.” With a failing grade, I was kicked off the cheerleading squad--the ultimate disgrace--and the next semester, when all of my friends were learning to type, I had to repeat gym. I was still half a credit short at graduation, a deficit magnanimously overlooked by the authorities. In another recurrent dream of my adulthood, I am capped and gowned, marching into the auditorium to the strains of “Pomp and Circumstance,” only to be yanked back to sit with the kindergarten class while a toothless Mrs. Hotchkiss, looking remarkably like the Wicked Witch of the West, chants, “I’ll get you, my pretty.”

MOMA CALLED SOMEONE WITH A BIG EGO “SUCH A
much.” I was certainly supposed to spend time and energy on my appearance, heeding my mother’s remonstrance that women must suffer to be beautiful, but I wasn’t supposed to act prideful about the results. This confusing message left me with only disdain or indifference about the beauty pageants that were endemic to the culture in 1966 (it seemed as if there was a Miss Magnolia Blossom or Miss Local Carburetor Shop being lauded in the papers every other week). I considered beauty pageants dorky and myself anti-establishment: failing gym, cheating in Latin, smoking Prince Edward cigars with Jane, and sneaking out for sex. Ignoring my disinclination to enter such a contest, my cousin Tom Byarly (son of Great Aunt Edith, who crawled into the fireplace) decided that I was the perfect candidate for Miss Teenage Memphis and kept sticking that application under my nose, saying, “Just sign it.” With no real enthusiasm, I signed.

Every aspect of the contest was scrupulously regulated. Instructions for a written test, to be administered at the local Sears Garden Center, were a source of unwitting humor: “there is no way to prepare for this test.... Dress is optional, but try to look your best.... You are encouraged to socialize with other girls while enjoying free Dr. Pepper.” I answered questions such as “How would you achieve world peace?” without a trace of irony.

Each girl was allotted two minutes for a talent routine that was taped early in the week--I sang “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore” while playing the bass ukulele. (“Get into costume immediately, then relax”) The finals were to be broadcast live on WHBQ, the local ABC-TV station. (“Be yourself” and “Use all available knowledge about good grooming.”) I was a nervous wreck that day but declined Mother’s offer of a mild sedative (she said everybody took them). I dressed in the gold and white formal we had selected and then I submitted to the hairdresser, who managed to achieve the perfect flip that had always eluded me.

I head George Klein, the master of ceremonies, announce, “And the winner is....,” but when he said my name, I looked around for a moment to make certain there wasn’t anyone else named Cybill Shepherd in the group. My parents bolted out of their metal folding chairs in the TV studio, beaming broad smiles and clapping wildly while the other families politely applauded. The next day, the Western Union man because a familiar figure at our house, delivering dozens of telegrams from local politicians, beauty parlors, the church rector, even Chris Crump, whom I had beaten with the whiffle bat years ago. The note from one family friend summed up the prevailing sentiment: “As far as your parents and grandparents are concerned, you are already Miss Teenage America, as you are such a sweet, thoughtful all-American girl. If you stay this way, and I’m sure you will, you can never really become a loser!”

My prizes were a Sears wardrobe and a year’s supply of Dr Pepper, which was stacked on our porch almost to the top of the pale green riveted plastic roof. But I also got to represent Memphis in the Miss Teenage America pageant, where the stakes were considerably higher: $10,000 in scholarships, a stock portfolio, and a car. All of the “young ladies” were to be accompanied to the contest in Dallas by their mothers. On one side of us was Miss Indianapolis, on the other Miss Spokane. Every time we left the hotel we were chauffeured in a cavalcade of turquoise blue Comets, escorted by cadets from Texas A&M to entertainments such as a Turtle Derby. (Each contestant got to keep her turtle and a supply of Gourmet Turtle Food.) My scrapbook from that week includes a recipe card for avocadop and a coupon for dinner, noting in my scratchy penmanship: Had to have meal ticket or couldn’t eat-always an important concern to me. The judges were introduced peremptorily at a cocktail party that featured a tomato aspic in the shape of an armadillo. I was thrilled to meet Dick Clark, but on a more practical level I was interested in the director of the American Airlines Stewardess College, something I’d always considered a viable career option, a last resort to get out of Memphis.

When the finalists were announced, I was not one of them. Instead I was named Miss Congeniality, one of the honorary but dubious consolation prizes that included Miss Personality and Miss Sportsmanship. Lying to a reporter from the
Memphis Press
-
Scimitar
who called for an interview, I gushed, “This is the greatest thing that ever happened to me. All the contestants are best friends already. Last night we had a slumber party, and tonight we’re dancing at a go-go place, but no boys are allowed. It’s a good thing the frug came along since the girls have to dance by themselves.” Failing to make the cut as a finalist was devastating, reinforcing my lifelong anxiety about falling short of perfection. Sad and miserable, I had to swallow my disappointment and participate in the remaining festivities, rehearsing a group song about the spectrum of national contestants (“They’re beautifying Baltimore and out in Santa Rosa, in Louisville and Buffalo and on the Ponderosa”). The winner was an “at-large” candidate from Milpitas, California, whose talent was an “authentic” hula dance performed to a Don Ho record.