Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady by Florence King

Author:Florence King
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2012-03-06T16:00:00+00:00

I don’t know whether Larry told the boys about me or not. Probably he did, but they did not get “fierce” with me. Though I did some pretty heavy stuff with a number of different dates, my reputation remained more or less intact and I was regarded as an official Nice Girl. There were three reasons for this.

In the first place, sexual respect was the only kind of respect available to women in the fifties, so men bent over backwards to bestow it to keep us from developing a yen for the important kinds. Because they sensed that sexual aggressiveness is the first step to general uppityness, “Keep her respected” replaced “Keep her barefoot and pregnant” as the best way to put women down and neutralize all of our aggressions, sexual and otherwise. It was a maddening attitude but it was also convenient: I could do anything I wanted short of actual fucking and still come out of it as an official Nice Girl.

Second, I looked like a Nice Girl. There was nothing outwardly sexy about me. I had the fresh-faced daisy-in-the-dell look that the fifties cherished while it drooled over Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield. Having a big bust was all it took to make people think the worst, but I wore a 32B so I was a Nice Girl. It was a Wasp decade, the way the sixties were black and the seventies ethnic. Being dark, or short and stocky, or having sensual lips or any other exotic feature could change entirely the way girls were perceived; but I was five feet six, small-boned, fair-haired, blue-eyed, and had the kind of lips Thomas Hardy described as “meeting like the two sides of a muffin,” so I was a Nice Girl.

I tugged heartstrings all over town. When I ate dinner in a crowded downtown cafeteria on my way to my part-time job, old ladies invariably headed for my table like hounds on the scent.

“When I saw you sitting here I said to myself, I said, ‘I’m going to sit with that nice girl.’”

By the time the meal was over, I had been told I was the hope of the future.

“When I think of all the terrible things going on today, what with girls running around in cars with boys and all, it does my heart good to meet a girl like you. Why, anybody could just look at you and know you’re a lady to your fingertips.”

I collected St. Georges wherever I went. One evening as I ate a hamburger in a Little Tavern, some men started arguing and emitting damns and hells. The tattooed counter man turned to them in fury and shouted, “Hey, knock it off! There’s a lady in here!”

He gave me a stricken look and apologized. “I know a girl like you ain’t used to hearing that kinda talk.”

I managed to keep a straight face. He kept wiping my area of the counter as though there were something on it that would bring a blush to a maiden’s cheek, and when I left he told me to “stay as sweet as you are.

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