News of the Spirit

The

BUBBA STORIES

Even now when I think of my brother Bubba, he appears instantly just as he was then, rising up before me in the very flesh, grinning that one-sided grin, pushing his cowlick out of his tawny eyes, thumbs hooked in the loops of his wheat jeans, Bass Weejuns held together with electrical tape, leaning against his green MGB. Lawrence Leland Christian III—Bubba—in the days of his glory, Dartmouth College, ca. 1965. Brilliant, Phi Beta Kappa his junior year. The essence of cool. The essence not only of cool but of bad, for Bubba was a legendary wild man in those days; and while certain facts in his legend varied, this constant remained: Bubba would do anything. Anything.

I was a little bit in love with him myself.

I made Bubba up in the spring of 1963 in order to increase my popularity with my girlfriends at a small women’s college in Virginia. I was a little bit in love with them, too. But at first I was ill at ease among them: a thistle in the rose garden, a mule at the racetrack, Cinderella at the fancy dress ball. Take your pick—I was into images then. More than anything else in the world, I wanted to be a writer. I didn’t want to learn to write, of course. I just wanted to be a writer, and I often pictured myself poised at the foggy edge of a cliff someplace in the south of France, wearing a cape, drawing furiously on a long cigarette, hollow-cheeked and haunted, trying to make up my mind between two men. Both of them wanted me desperately.

But in fact I was Charlene Christian, a chunky size twelve, plucked up from a peanut farm near South Hill, Virginia, and set down in those exquisite halls through the intervention of my senior English teacher, Mrs. Bella Hood, the judge’s wife, who had graduated from the school herself. I had a full scholarship. I would be the first person in my whole family ever to graduate from college, unless you counted my aunt Dee, who got her certificate from beauty college in Richmond. I was not going to count Aunt Dee. I was not even going to mention her in later years, or anybody else in my family. I intended to grow beyond them. I intended to become a famous hollow-cheeked author, with mysterious origins.

BUT THIS IS THE TRUTH. I GREW UP IN MCKENNEY, Virginia, which consisted of nothing more than a crossroads with my father’s store in the middle of it. I used to climb onto the tin roof of our house and turn slowly all around, scanning the horizon, looking for…what? I found nothing of any interest, just flat brown peanut fields that stretched in every direction as far as I could see, with a farmhouse here and there. I knew who lived in every house. I knew everything about them and about their families, what kind of car they drove and where they went to church, and they knew everything about us.

Not that there was much to know. My father, Hassell Christian, would give you the shirt off his back, and everybody knew it. At the store, he’d extend credit indefinitely to people down on their luck, and he let some families live in his tenant houses for free. Our own house adjoined the store.

My mother’s younger brother Sam, who lived with us, was what they then called a Mongoloid. Some of the kids at school referred to him as a Mongolian idiot. Now the preferred term is Down’s syndrome. My uncle Sam was sweet, small, and no trouble at all. I played cards with him endlessly, every summer of my childhood—Go Fish, rummy, Old Maid, hearts, blackjack. Sam loved cards and sunshine and his cat, Blackie. He liked to sit on a quilt in the sun, playing cards with me. He liked to sit on the front porch with Blackie and watch the cars go by. He loved it when I told him stories.

My mother, who was high-strung, was always fussing around after Sam, making him pick up paper napkins and turn off the TV and put his shoes in a line. My mother had three separate nervous breakdowns before I went away to college. My father always said we had to treat her with kid gloves. When I think about it now, I am surprised that my mother was able to hold herself together long enough to conceive a child at all, or come to term. After me, there were two miscarriages, and then, I was told, they quit trying. I was never sure what this meant, exactly. But certainly I could never imagine my parents having a sexual relationship in the first place—he was too fat and gruff, she was too fluttery and crazy. The whole idea was gross.

Whenever my mother had a nervous breakdown, my grandmother, Memaw, would come over from next door to stay with Sam full-time, and I would be sent to South Hill to stay with my aunt Dee and my cousins. I loved my Aunt Dee, who was as different from Mama as day from night. Aunt Dee wore her yellow hair in a beehive and smoked Pall Mall cigarettes. After work she’d come in the door, kick off her shoes, put a record on the record player, and dance all over the living room to Ooh-Poo-Pa-Doo. She said it got the kinks out. She taught us all to do the shag, even little Melinda.

I was always sorry when my dad appeared in his truck, ready to take me back home.

When I think of home now, the image that comes most clearly to mind is my whole family lined up in the flickering darkness of our living room, watching TV. We never missed The Ed Sullivan Show, Bonanza, The Andy Griffith Show, or Candid Camera—Sam’s favorite. Sam used to laugh and laugh when they’d say, "Smile! You’re on Candid Camera!" It was the only time my family ever did anything together. I can just see us now in the light from that black-and-white Zenith: me, Sam, and Memaw on the couch, Daddy and Mama in the recliner and the antique wing chair, respectively, facing the television. We always turned off the lights and sat quietly, and didn’t eat anything.

No wonder I got a boyfriend with a car as soon as possible, to get out of there. Don Fetterman had a soft brown crew cut and wide brown eyes, and reminded me, in the nicest possible way, of the cows that he and his family raised. Don was president of the 4-H Club and the Glee Club. I was vice-president of the Glee Club (how we met). We were both picked Most Likely to Succeed.

We rubbed our bodies together at innumerable dances in the high school gym while they played our song—The Twelfth of Never—but we never, never went all the way. Don wouldn’t. He believed we should save ourselves for marriage. I, on the other hand, having read by this time a great many novels, was just dying to lose my virginity so that I would mysteriously begin to live, so that my life would finally start. I knew for sure that I would never become a great writer until I could rid myself of this awful burden. But Don Fetterman stuck to his guns, refusing to cooperate. Instead, for graduation, he gave me a pearl pre-engagement ring, which I knew for a fact had cost $139 at Snow’s Jewelers in South Hill, where I worked after school and on weekends. This was a lot of money for Don Fetterman to spend.

Although I didn’t love him, by then he thought I did; and after I got the ring, I didn’t have the nerve to tell him the truth. So I kept it, and kissed Don good-bye for hours and hours the night before he went off to join the Marines. My tears were real at this point, but after he left I relegated him firmly to the past. Ditto my whole family. Once I got to college, I was determined to become a new person.

LUCKILY MY FRESHMAN ROOMMATE TURNED OUT TO BE a kind of prototype, the very epitome of a popular girl. The surprise was that she was nice, too. Dixie Claiborne came from Memphis, where she was to make her debut that Christmas at the Swan Ball. She had long, perfect blond hair, innumerable cashmere sweater sets, and real pearls. She had lots of friends already, other girls who had gone to St. Cecilia’s with her. (It seemed to me a good two-thirds of the girls at school had gone to St. Something-or-other.) They had a happy ease in the world and a strangely uniform appearance, which I immediately began to copy—spending my whole first semester’s money, saved up from my job at the jeweler’s, on several A-line skirts, McMullen blouses, and a pair of red Pappagallo shoes. Dixie had about a thousand cable-knit sweaters, which she was happy to lend me.

In addition to the right clothes, she came equipped with the right boyfriend, already a sophomore at Washington and Lee University, the boys’ school just over the mountain. His name was Trey (William Hill Dunn III). Trey would be so glad, Dixie said, smiling, to get all of us dates for the Phi Gam mixer. All of us meant our entire suite—Dixie and me in the front room overlooking the old quadrangle with its massive willow oaks, Melissa and Donnie across the hall, and Lily in the single just beyond our study room.

TREY FIXED US UP WITH SEVERAL PHI GAMS APIECE, but nothing really clicked; and in November, Melissa, Donnie, Lily, and I signed up to go to a freshman mixer at UVA. As our bus approached the university’s famous serpentine wall, we went into a flurry of teasing our hair and checking our makeup. Looking into my compact, I stuck out my lips in a way I’d been practicing. I had a pimple near my nose, but I’d turned it into a beauty spot with eyebrow pencil. I hoped to look like Sandra Dee.

Freshman year, everybody went to mixers, where freshman boys, as uncomfortable as we were, stood nervously about in the social rooms of their fraternity houses, wearing navy-blue blazers, ties, and chinos. Nobody really knew how to date in this rigid system so unlike high school—and certainly so unlike prep school, where many of these boys had been locked away for the past four years. If they could have gotten their own dates, they would have. But they couldn’t. They didn’t know anybody, either. They pulled at their ties and looked at the floor. They seemed to me generally gorgeous, completely unlike Don Fetterman with his feathery crew cut and his 4-H jacket, now at Camp LeJeune. But I still wrote to Don, informative, stilted notes about my classes and the weather. His letters in return were lively and real, full of military life (the food sucks) and vague sweet plans for our future—a future that did not exist, as far as I was concerned, and yet these letters gave me a secret thrill. My role as Don Fetterman’s girl was the most exciting I’d had yet, and I couldn’t quite bring myself to give it up, even as I attempted to transform myself into another person altogether.

Okay, the upperclassman-in-charge announced casually, and the St. Anthony’s Hall pledges wandered over in our direction.

Hey, the cutest one said to a girl.

Hey, she said back.

The routine never varied. In a matter of minutes, the four most aggressive guys would walk off with the four prettiest girls, and the rest of us would panic. On this occasion the social room at St. Anthony’s Hall was cleared in a matter of minutes, and I was left with a tall, gangly, bucktoothed boy whose face was as pocked as the moon. Still, he had a shabby elegance I already recognized. He was from Mississippi.

What do you want to do? he asked me.

I had not expected to be consulted. I glanced around the social room, which looked like a war zone. I didn’t know where my friends were.

"What do you want to do?" I asked.

His name (his first name) was Rutherford. He grinned at me. Let’s get drunk, he said, and my heart leaped up as I realized that my burden might be lifted in this way. We walked across the beautiful old campus to an open court where three or four fraternities had a combo going, wild-eyed electrified Negroes going through all kinds of gyrations on the bandstand. It was Doug Clark and the Hot Nuts. The music was so loud, the beat so strong, that you couldn’t listen to it and stand still. The Hot Nuts were singing an interminable song; everybody seemed to know the chorus, which went, Nuts, hot nuts, get ’em from the peanut man. Nuts, hot nuts, get ’em any way you can. We started dancing. I always worried about this—all I’d ever done before college, in the way of dancing, was the shag with my aunt Dee and a long, formless clutch with Don Fetterman, but with Rutherford it didn’t matter.

People made a circle around us and started clapping. Nobody looked at me. All eyes were on Rutherford, whose dancing reminded me of the way chickens back home flopped around after Daddy cut their heads off. At first I was embarrassed. But then I caught on—Rutherford was a real character. I kept up with him the best I could, and then I got tickled and started laughing so hard I could barely dance. This is fun, I realized suddenly. This is what I’m supposed to be doing. This is college.

About an hour later we heard the news, which was delivered to us by a tweed-jacketed professor who walked onstage, bringing the music to a ragged, grinding halt. He grabbed the microphone. Ladies and gentlemen, he said thickly—and I remember thinking how odd this form of address seemed—ladies and gentlemen, the President has been shot.

The whole scene started to churn, as if we were in a kaleidoscope—the blue day, the green grass, the stately columned buildings. People were running and sobbing. Rutherford’s hand under my elbow steered me back to his fraternity house, where everyone was clustered around several TVs, talking too loud. All the weekend festivities were canceled. We were to return to school immediately. Rutherford seemed relieved by this prospect, having fallen silent—perhaps because he’d quit drinking, or because conversation alone wasn’t worth the effort it took if nothing else (sex) might be forthcoming. He gave me a perfunctory kiss on the cheek and turned to go.

I was about to board the bus when somebody grabbed me, hard, from behind. I whirled around. It was Lily, red-cheeked and glassy-eyed, her blond hair springing out wildly above her blue sweater. Her hot-pink lipstick was smeared; her pretty, pointed face looked vivid and alive. A dark-haired boy stood close behind her, his arm around her waist.

Listen, Lily hissed at me. Sign me in, will you?

What? I had heard her, but I couldn’t believe it.

Sign me in. Lily squeezed my shoulder. I could smell her perfume. Then she was gone.

I sat in a rear seat by myself and cried all the way back to school.

I CAUGHT ON FAST THAT AS FAR AS COLLEGE BOYS WERE concerned, girls fell into either the Whore or the Saint category. Girls knew that if they gave in and did it, then boys wouldn’t respect them, and word would get around, and they would never get a husband. The whole point of college was to get a husband.

I had not known anything about this system before I arrived there. It put a serious obstacle in my path toward becoming a great writer.

Lily, who clearly had given up her burden long since, fell into the Whore category. But the odd thing about it was that she didn’t seem to mind, and she swore she didn’t want a husband, anyway. "Honey, a husband is the last thing on my list!" she’d say, giggling. Lily was the smartest one of us, even though she went to great lengths to hide this fact.

Later, in 1966, she and the head of the philosophy department, Dr. Wiener, would stage the only demonstration ever held on our campus, walking slowly around the blooming quadrangle carrying signs that read Get out of Vietnam, while the rest of us, well oiled and sunning on the rooftops, clutched our bikini tops and peered down curiously at the two of them.

If Lily was the smartest, Melissa was the dumbest, the nicest, and the least interested in school. Melissa came from Charleston, South Carolina, and spoke so slowly that I was always tempted to leap in and finish her sentences for her. All she wanted to do was marry her boyfriend, now at the University of South Carolina, and have babies. Donnie, Melissa’s roommate, was a big, freckled, friendly girl from Texas. We didn’t have any idea how rich she was until her mother flew up and bought a cabin at nearby Goshen Lake so Donnie and her friends would have a place to relax.

By spring, Dixie was the only one of us who was actually pinned. It seemed to me that she was not only pinned but almost married, in a funny way, with tons and tons of children—Trey, her boyfriend; and me; and the other girls in our suite; and the other Phi Gams, Trey’s fraternity brothers at Washington and Lee. Dixie had a notebook in which she made a list of things to do each day, and throughout the day she checked them off, one by one. She always got everything done. At the end of first semester, she had a 4.0 average; Trey had a 0.4. Dixie didn’t mind. Totally, inexplicably, she loved him.

By then, most of the freshman girls who weren’t going with somebody had several horror stories to tell about blind dates at UVA or W&L fraternities—about boys who dropped trou, or threw up in their dates’ purses. I had only one horror story, but I never told it, since the most horrible element in it was me.

THIS IS WHAT HAPPENED. IT WAS SPRING FLING AT THE Phi Gam house, and Trey had gotten me a date with a redheaded boy named Eddy Turner. I was getting desperate. I’d made a C in my first semester of creative writing, while Lily had made an A. Plus, I’d gained eight pounds. Both love and literature seemed to be slipping out of my sights. And I was drinking too much—we’d been drinking Yucca Flats, a horrible green punch made with grain alcohol in a washtub, all afternoon before I ended up in bed with Eddy Turner.

The bed was his, on the second floor of the Phi Gam house—not the most private setting for romance. I could scarcely see Eddy by the light from the street lamp coming in through the single high window. Faintly, below, I could hear music, and the house shook slightly with the dancing. I thought of Hemingway’s famous description of sex from For Whom the Bell Tolls, which I’d typed out neatly on an index card: The earth moved under the sleeping bag. The whole Phi Gam house was moving under me. After wrestling with my panty girdle for what seemed like hours, Eddy tossed it in the corner and got on top of me. Drunk as I was, I wanted him to. I wanted him to do it. But I didn’t think it would hurt so much, and suddenly I wished he would kiss me or say something. He didn’t. He was done and lying on his back beside me when the door to the room burst open and the light came on. I sat up, grasping for the sheet that I couldn’t find. My breasts are large, and they had always embarrassed me. Until that night, Don Fetterman was the only boy who had seen them. It was a whole group of Phi Gams, roaming from room to room. Luckily I was blinded by the light, so I couldn’t tell exactly who they were.

Smile! they yelled. "You’re on Candid Camera!" They laughed hysterically, slammed the door, and were gone, leaving us in darkness once again. I sobbed into Eddy’s pillow, because what they said reminded me of Sam, whose face would not leave my mind then for hours while I cried and cried and cried and sobered up. I didn’t tell Eddy what I was crying about, nor did he ask. He sat in a chair and smoked cigarettes while he waited for me to stop crying. Finally I did. Eddy and I didn’t date after that, but we were buddies in the way I was buddies with the whole Phi Gam house due to my status as Dixie’s roommate. I was like a sister, giving advice to the lovelorn, administering Cokes and aspirin on Sunday mornings, typing papers.

It was not the role I’d had in