When my grandmother heard he was from Nebraska, she called him a “damn Yankee.”
She is still bitter than I didn’t go to school south of the Mason-Dixon line. My decision to go to Hillsdale was a slap in the face to her. She couldn’t understand and asked, indignant, “Aren’t any of our schools good enough for you?” “Our” is the confederacy, of course, and everything is a question of honor and offense.
At my send-off party, my family was drinking mimosas, and my dad proposed a toast to Hillsdale. Mimi said, “It will be a cold day in Hell before I toast to Hillsdale.” The evil North was taking her baby girl away from her to be corrupted by New Englanders and intellectuals.
Matters worsened when I started dating a Northerner. Carl visited me over Christmas break and attempted to break down my grandmother’s walls of hostility. He lost some points because he doesn’t stand up when a lady enters the room or wait till a lady sits to sit himself. But then he and my grandmother bonded over drinking Scotch on the rocks, which she does every evening while watching Bill O’Reily and Mike Huckabee.
But even with similar liquor preferences, Mimi was still skeptical. When she heard that Carl wants to go to graduate school and become a professor, she replied, “Why can’t he be something respectable like a doctor or a lawyer?” Questions we all ask.
My grandmother’s vision for my future may be colored by the fact that she was the perfect ’50s housewife. She had a nanny raise the kids, but she could make a mean pound cake with one arm behind her back. My grandfather was a doctor — how respectable — and famous for his mint juleps. They made a perfectly sociable couple for the upper middle class of the South.
Mimi is a woman of her time, but she believes that certain principles are timeless. For example, women should not drive trucks. Whenever I visit her, I sheepishly park my dad’s red Ford F-150 out of view of her window. Raised in Virginia, Mimi insists that she is “Southern” and not “country.” So I try to mask my Alabama twang with a thick, cultured drawl when we sit and gossip about cotillions and country clubs. Mimi has tried to make me polished and genteel like herself, but sometimes this project of femininity, reserve, and modesty has failed. While I was home over break, she commented on my outfit, “That’s a lovely dress. I’m sorry they didn’t have it in your size,” indirectly scolding me for showing my knees.
Back home, my mother and grandmother have the same housemaid. This nice, older lady taught me how to make my bed and how to polish silver. I remember a summer day in my childhood when Miss Willie Mae told me, “You’re a woman now. You need to learn how to iron your pants.” So we started the rite of passage into womanhood in the laundry room, ironing my linen capris.
Mimi wishes for me this life of luxury, of maids and yacht clubs, of bridge games and dinner parties. It is understandable that Mimi would wish such a life of leisure for me, as the wife of a doctor or a lawyer. When I tried to explain to Carl this leisurely sort of life I had been prepared for by my upbringing, he seemed confused. He said, “You know can’t just throw and attend parties as an occupation, right?” Carl introduced me to the concept of working for a living. So I decided I will either be a teacher or a nurse, both of which my grandmother finds acceptable as traditional women’s careers.
