No, Virginia
The problem was I always did like pretty things. Gramma’s china, all sitting out there for high tea, as it always was, every visit. She had collected a different cup and saucer for each of the states of the Confederacy, with the state flower on them, carefully and delicately painted. When Company came over (and with Gramma, Company always had a capital C), out would come the crisp white linen, the confederate china, the antique silver stand laden with cakes.
When I was five I broke Virginia. It was my cousin Abner’s birthday, and as he was a man now, according to Gramma, he should have a proper birthday tea. There was dogwood in Gramma’s garden, I had picked some (which I got in more trouble for later) for Abner. The way Mama tells it, they were carefully arranging the cakes and sandwiches on plates when they heard a tinkling crash from the dining room. Gramma was in high dudgeon when she saw what had happened, and I, dirt from the garden under my fingernails and streaking my party dress, was crying and saying I just wanted to see if the flowers looked the same.
Mama and Papa, despite being under strict orders to punish me properly, bought me a huge ice-cream on the way home. Papa never did agree with all the craze for the South, despite being born and bred there, and Mama, well, Mama was from Boston, which, according to Aunt Honey, explained everything.
It became a family joke, at least when Gramma wasn’t around. You couldn’t trust Virginia with her namesake. When I got older, and more interested in girls, they stopped making that joke. I moved to New York, after Papa sat me down, gave me a cheque, and told me “They will never understand you. They still don’t understand why I married a Northerner. Go and build a life somewhere where they will.” I spent the journey on the Greyhound thinking about Them. The things they said weren’t pretty, I didn’t like them.
I saw her a month after I moved into my apartment. I was reading on the fire escape, and there she was, in the apartment opposite mine. She moved the way Gramma’s lemon meringue pie tasted. She had on a cotton sundress only a little bit this side of decent, with a large floral print. Dogwood. A wedding ring glinted on her finger. I watched her life, through the window. Was the anonymous tip a few times the police came round when her husband had been drinking. Eventually, we met. She was Ginny. It was close enough. Like they used to say. You can’t trust Virginia with her namesake. But she was already broken.
White OG
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