The Long Journey Home (9 page)

It wouldn’t have crossed my mind to bring a print of one of Van Gogh’s paintings to Mrs. Forbes’s to copy as I copied the dog and cat, scenes of woods and streams, pots of roses, or bunches of grapes. He and his paintings didn’t belong in that Victorian house across from Paradise Park any more than much of me didn’t belong there either.

After I grew into my midteens and no longer spent Saturday afternoons painting at Mrs. Forbes’s, there was a brief period when I tried to enter into Van Gogh’s vision and paint as closely as I could in his style. I painted two paintings during that time. One was of my Aunt Sarah’s house. It was an old white wood house with a gabled roof and a cypress tree in front. It looked very much like a house Van Gogh might have chosen to paint had he painted in South Georgia. I began the painting with an almost feverish excitement, the high-pitched roof rising against the brilliant summer sky, the cypress twisting itself toward the heavens in memory of Van Gogh. I don’t know that I’d ever felt more at home and content painting than I felt painting my aunt’s house.

It was with pride and excitement that I took the barely dry painting across the street to show her. I was prepared to make a gift to her of the painting. I imagined her hanging it in a place of honor in the old, high-ceilinged house, with its antique furniture and cut glass. My aunt was painfully polite as she looked at my painting propped against her old-fashioned wallpaper of horse-drawn carriages, men in top hats, and women in hoopskirts. Her tight smile was locked securely in place. But it was clear not only that she didn’t want to hang the painting in her house but that she felt insulted by such a rendition
of it. Feeling apologetic, ashamed, and hurt, I took the painting home. Trying to console myself, I told myself that my aunt simply didn’t understand real art, that the loss was hers, not mine. In time I believed it.

That summer I painted one last picture in the style of Van Gogh. It was a self-portrait. I worked hard on it, standing before my easel and staring into a mirror hour after hour, sweating in the summer heat, piling the thick paint on the face in yellows and greens that reflected the colors Van Gogh used in his self-portraits. The eyes were very green. I was so absorbed in my work that my entire body jumped when my father’s voice startled me.

“Sister?”

“Yes?” I replied, regaining my composure and returning to the world of ordinary consciousness. He stood behind me staring at the painting. I turned to look at him, but he shifted his eyes from mine.

“Sister, I’ve never asked you to do anything like this before,” he said apologetically. “But I’m asking you to destroy that painting.”

“What?” I screamed at him, incredulous.

“I’m asking you to destroy that painting,” he repeated. I could hear the pain under his words.

“But doesn’t it look like me, Daddy?” My heart ached with confusion.

“Yes, Sister, it does look like you, and I can’t live with those eyes.”

I looked at the painting. More than any other painting, I’d felt a real measure of satisfaction with this one even though it was as much Van Gogh’s as mine. And it was the first time I’d been able to do a self-portrait that actually looked like me. I felt a flood of self-hatred tear through me. I jerked the painting off the easel and thundered through the kitchen, down the back steps, and out to the trash can. With an unquestioned rage I banged the canvas stretcher frame against the edge of the can repeatedly until it came apart, the splintered wood poking through the limp canvas, the painting smeared and covered with garbage.

But looking at my watercolor of the dog and cat with Mrs.
Forbes, I was several years yet from the destruction of my self-portrait. This day I watched as she made a correction in the line of the dog’s mouth with her pencil. I looked at the watercolor washes, the mottled fur of the cat, the precise pencil lines delineating the shape of a paw, the angle of an ear. Mrs. Forbes said something complimentary about the painting, but what I felt was numbness.

If Van Gogh was as mad as the books claimed, he also had life in every stroke his brush made. What I wanted was life.

Once, when I was fourteen, I overheard Mother talking to Daddy about me. Bubba and Mercer must have been outside playing, for the house was still and quiet. I was lying on my bed on my stomach, head hung over the edge so I could read the book spread open on the floor beneath me. It was Tennessee Williams’s play
A Streetcar Named Desire
with its unforgettable “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers,” spoken by the tragic Blanche DuBois as she is being taken off to the insane asylum by a questionable-looking doctor in a hat and his stern matron assistant.

Our high school drama coach, Diana Thomas, had taken a group of us to Albany, Georgia, to see a production of it performed by a road company. I was thrilled to see “real” theater. It was a highlight of my high school experiences. We had front-row seats and were delighted when Stanley shook a bottle of beer vigorously, then popped the cap, spewing beer on several of us.

My relationship with Miss Thomas was another highlight of my high school experience. She was a small, perky young woman with a head full of short blond curls and the body of a phys-ed teacher, with well-developed calves and biceps. She was funny, mischievous, bright, and creative. She kidded me about my serious nature yet accepted me warmly. Warmth was one of the largest things missing in
my home life, and I was drawn to her warmth the way someone parched with thirst is drawn to water. I was in plays she directed and took private speech lessons from her. I found any excuse I could think of to visit her apartment after school. Though I can remember little of what we did or talked about aside from speech, drama, and her ongoing account of the practical jokes she played in college, what I do remember vividly is warmth and laughter. I saved my money to buy her a bright-red leather wallet for her birthday, an extravagant gesture given my lack of money, but I believe I would have given almost anything to please her. Being in her presence made me happy.

The house was deathly quiet as I read about Stanley Kowalski’s crude and violent tyranny, the crash of the radio as he hurled it through the window, shattering glass as he cleared his plate and glass from the table with a swipe of his hand. But my attention was drawn away from New Orleans’s French Quarter by the words Mother was saying to Daddy. She spoke in a stage whisper, her voice filled with fear. She was talking about her concern over how much time I spent with Diana and her roommate, Betty Miller, and how that didn’t feel normal to her. She’d heard, she told Daddy, that one of the symptoms of sexual perversion in girls was attraction to older girls or women.

“I don’t know how I could live if Margaret were like”—she named a cousin who’d moved away from Cairo, never to return, a cousin rumored to be a lesbian. Mother sighed one of her soul-deep sighs. “I just don’t know if I would be able to
live
if Margaret was like that.”

I sucked in my breath and slowly let it out, careful not to move on the bed or make any other sound that would tell Mother that I was awake and had heard her horrible fear about me. She didn’t know if she could
live
if I was “like that.” I looked down at the book, trying to read, trying to erase what I’d just heard. I focused on page after page but could take in nothing beyond Mother’s words.

Then the play came alive in my mind as Blanche told Mitch about how she’d walked in on her young husband—“a boy,” she called him—and an older man, and how the three of them acted as if nothing had happened as they all went to Moon Lake Casino together. Then, on the dance floor, dizzy with drinking and dancing, Blanche blurted out that she had seen, that she knew, that he, her young husband, was disgusting.

“Disgusting.”

He broke away and ran out of the casino into the night. Then a shot rang out and the music stopped. Blanche and everyone else ran to the edge of the lake, the place from which the shot had come. Someone restrained Blanche. Someone else said it was Allan Grey and that he had stuck a revolver in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

I felt awful.

Could I be—I couldn’t even think the word—even though I was attracted to boys? Boys.
And
girls.

I agonized over the possibility that I could be so terrible as to kill Mother with shame. I’d always heard that it was normal for little girls to have crushes on one another. When did it stop being normal and start being something else? I thought of how I always enjoyed being the boy when I’d played dolls as a child. I even sometimes fantasized about growing up to be a man with woman lovers. Could I, I asked myself, be a queer? I could hardly bear to think the word. No. Whatever it was, it was a phase and I would grow out of it.

In high school I overheard talk about queers. One time there was a paperback book circulating among the girls. From what I overheard, it had sections in which girls did sexual things to one another. Whether because my usual depression was interpreted as disinterest or because the girls thought me too naïve to share such things, the book never got passed along to me. I was much too self-conscious to ask about it, so I spent a lot of time trying to imagine the things the queers did.

The other thing I heard about queers was that they always wore
green on Thursdays. Knowing that, I was very careful to never wear anything green on that day of the week. I became self-conscious about my pale green bedroom walls and my deep-green bedspread.

I felt sick with shame that my attraction to Diana Thomas might be a horrible perversion. I saw her no less than before I heard Mother’s fear about me, but a shadow had been cast not only on my relationship with Diana but on the basic nature of who I was.

Whatever I was
, I told myself,
I am
not
a queer
.

Bobby was the most handsome man I’d ever seen. He worked at the sawmill and was an ex–army sergeant who wore corduroy pants and work boots or loafers. I was fifteen years old. I was at a party at Fred Clark’s house when he came over to where I sat feeling miserably alone and out of place. Looking back, I’d describe his behavior as compassionate, and perhaps curious, but at the time I didn’t analyze anything, I was just thrilled by the attention.

I couldn’t believe that Bobby Blake was interested in me. I was timid and insecure, which, a friend told me, often made me appear cold and unfriendly. In a magazine—I believe it was
The Saturday Evening Post
—I’d seen a cartoon in which a psychiatrist was telling his patient reclining on a couch: “But of course you have an inferiority complex. You
are
inferior.” Reading the cartoon, I decided that an inferiority complex was exactly what I had, and I had it because, just like the man in the cartoon, I
was
inferior, though I didn’t know exactly what made me that way. The only thing I knew about psychiatry was that one went to a doctor who listened while the patient talked. If I was inferior, what good would talking do?
Talk can’t change who I am
, I thought.

When Bobby called and asked me for a date I was surprised and happy. And after the first date, another, and then another. We cruised up and down Broad Street, met friends at the Blue Gable Drive-In,
where we ate French fries with catsup, drank Coca-Colas, and smoked cigarettes. Once we double-dated with Judy Matthews and Ben Williams and went to the drive-in movie. We sat in the backseat. I remember the loud crackling sound my paper taffeta dress made when Bobby put his arms around me and pulled me hard against him.

He taught me how to shoot a gun, took me swimming at the Sand Pit, to dinner at Dodson’s or the Silver Slipper in Thomasville. I was drunk on love, on his handsome face and muscular body. At one point he talked about marriage. He was much older than I, and was getting ready to settle down. Suddenly my imagination was filled with the image of the trunk of Bobby’s car crammed full of vacuum cleaners, dust mops, dishpans, bottles of Windex, and cans of Old Dutch Cleanser. I told him that I wasn’t about to spend my life pushing a broom. I was in high school. I was expected to go to college. I never questioned my parents’ expectations. Certainly I was too young to think of marriage. In my dreams I imagined being an artist and living in Greenwich Village painting pictures and talking with other artists who sat at sidewalk tables in front of coffeehouses, watching the stream of humanity passing by.

When Bobby and I finally broke up, he told me that he’d been moved by my sadness, that he’d only wanted to make me happy. But he was not in love with me. I went numb. We were parked at the Blue Gable Drive-In under a pecan tree near the back of the building. I remember the squat old woman standing at the window taking our order, and how she cocked her head to one side, listening.

I couldn’t look at Bobby.

All the nights of necking in a parked car in the woods; all the nights at the Blue Gable when I’d traced his fingers with my own, loving the shapes of his fingers, his fingernails, the swirl of his thumbprints; all the nights I’d followed the muscles in his neck to run my fingers through his thick dark hair. Days on the beach at Alligator Point. And the night he parked in an old country churchyard where an owl kept hooting its mournful cry from someplace deep in
the woods. “Do you hear, Bobby?” I’d asked. “Do you hear the owl?” But I was asking a larger question than I could comprehend. I was asking if he could hear what I was hearing; I was asking if he could touch that deep place inside me where I stood so very much alone.

“Yeah, I hear the owl,” he’d said, lighting a cigarette. To him, the moment was ordinary, while to me it held poetry and mystery that went beyond my ability to articulate. It was night and nature and God all caught in the prolonged and haunting hooting of the owl.

If it was true that I had simply fallen in love with love, it was also true that the object of that love was Bobby Blake, with his soft brown eyes, his strong chin and jaw. I had fallen in love with his teasing grin, with his perfect ears flat against his fine skull. I had fallen in love with Bobby Blake, who had only taken pity on a quiet young girl with grief in her eyes. Now Bobby was discarding me with a condescendingly calm tone of voice, and I felt that I’d be brokenhearted forever.