Southern Lady Code: Essays(4)

Don’t get angry with your husband when he sneezes too loud. Don’t get angry when he sneezes more than three times in a row.

Don’t tell your husband how he almost messed up.

Don’t walk around with a bathrobe pocket full of Kleenex. Don’t let your big beige panties hang over the lip of the hamper. Don’t let him see you get out of an athletic bra or into a pair of control-top panty hose. Don’t wear eyeglasses on a neck leash. Don’t lotion your elbows in front of him in bed.

Don’t remake the bed after your husband makes it. If your husband is loading the dishwasher, he’s loading it “right.”

Accept it: every time you cry out from another room, your husband isn’t going to call out, “Are you okay?”

Quit quoting When Harry Met Sally and Carrie and Fatal Attraction and 9 to 5. No matter how many times you say, “Oh, I’ve been looking for a red suede pump” or “They’re all going to laugh at you!” or “I’m not going to be ignored, Dan!” or “I’m gonna change you from a rooster to a hen with one shot!” your husband will never get the references.

Nor will he understand why the good dermatologist and the good gynecologist cost so much.

If you can afford it, have separate bathrooms. If you can’t, have separate peanut butter jars.

Buy earplugs and scented candles. Buy eye masks. Buy birthday gifts from the two of you. Write thank-you notes and forge his signature.

If you can’t say anything nice, lock yourself in the bathroom. If you don’t know how to say you’re sorry, say it with fondue. If you’re in the mood for love, stand in front of the TV naked. As long as your wedding ring fits, you haven’t let yourself go.





FREE TO BE…


            YOU AND ME


            (AND CHILDFREE)





When I was nineteen, I sat my parents down and said, “I want to go on birth control and I want you to pay for it.”

Papa looked at Mama. Mama looked like she’d stepped on a rake. Papa nodded. Without a word, they stood and walked out of my childhood home.

Mama always said, “Helen Michelle, you can tell us anything. We may not like it. We may walk away from you and walk around the block a few times to cool off, but we will always come back. And we will always help you.”

Asking my parents to put me on the pill so I could have college sex with my never-went-to-college twenty-four-year-old boyfriend is the only time I’ve made my parents walk around the block.

Up until then, I’d been a good girl.

Growing up in Alabama, good girls kept to themselves and stayed out of trouble. Pregnancy was trouble. The risk of pregnancy was just as much trouble. A “pregnancy risk” is Southern Lady Code for making out in your bathing suits. In high school, I didn’t know anyone on the pill. A Southern young lady’s birth control was an aspirin pinched between her knees. Mama’s departing words every time I left our Tuscaloosa house to go on a date or to a party were: Jump up and down and be sweet! And don’t let anybody touch your woo-woo! The letter A was for Abstinence. You never said the other A word, but if you did it was a whisper.

Alabama was not—and I don’t think is—an abortion-friendly state. Remember: Birmingham is where a man made the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list by bombing a Southside abortion clinic, killing a security guard. The bomber’s brother was so upset by the manhunt that to protest, he cut off his own hand with a circular saw. And he videotaped it. And then he drove himself to a hospital. EMTs were sent to his house to collect the hand, and a surgeon reattached it. This is Southern Gothic country. Our zealots don’t play.

I come from a very real place where girls missed seventh-grade roll call because “She havin’ her baby!” High school girls really did have babies in my high school bathrooms. Ambulances never got there in time because full-term fetuses—fueled by Mountain Dew and Betty Crocker frosting straight out of the can—rocketed from fourteen-to-eighteen-year-old vaginas like a Six Flags log ride.

The alternative to showing up to school hugely pregnant was to disappear altogether. Some girls moved away to “spend time with their aunt” and then returned to school months later, deflated and forlorn. If they’d had the babies and given them to relatives to raise, or given them up for adoption, or had it taken care of somewhere up north, I do not know. Rumors spread that the girls had really been in insane asylums, and those rumors were not disputed. Better to be crazy than a slut.

Once a slut, a girl was forever after a slut. And getting pregnant was always blamed on the slut.

We did have Sex Ed, but you had to get a signed permission slip to attend the class, which—to avoid mixing church and state—was taught outside the school building in a double-wide trailer. Mama had had “the talk” with me and bought me several books about feminine hygiene and “becoming a woman,” but I wrote this anonymous question for the teacher: “How do you pee with a tampon in?”

The answer was: “You hold the string.”

I had no idea what this meant because I was so sexually inactive, I thought pee and menstrual blood came out of the same hole. It was also rumored that a tampon could pop your hymen and ruin your wedding night because your husband would want to divorce you when he found out he hadn’t married a virgin.