The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate

She sat at the kitchen table and fanned herself with a cardboard fan while I went to the pantry, where I spotted a stone crock of hard cider. I hesitated and then drew her some of that instead. She looked like she needed it.

“This will make you feel better,” I said.

She drank it right down and stared off into space, fanning away. I brought her another glass, and she sighed. It seemed like lots of people I’d been around lately were either drinking or sighing.

“Callie,” she said at last, “somebody coulda seen you, girl.”

“So?”

“Your mama got plans for you, you know that? Just last week she says she wants you to come out. And now this. No, sir. Can’t have no debutante chopping cotton.”

“Me, come out? What for?”

“’Cause you a Tate girl. Your daddy owns cotton. Your daddy owns the gin.”

“Granddaddy still owns it, I think.”

“You know what I mean, Miss Smarty,” she said. “Don’t you want to be a debutante?”

“I’m not sure what-all it means, but if it means being like that drip that Harry brought home that time, then no.”

“That was a drippy lady, for sure. But that ain’t what it means. It means lots of fancy parties and lots of the young gentlemen coming around. It means having lots of beaux.”

“What do I want with lots of beaux?”

“You say that now. But later on.”

“No, really, Viola, what’s the point?”

“It would please your mama, that’s the point.”

“Oh.”

“Miss Selfish,” she said.

“I am not selfish,” I retorted.

She went on, “Make you a young lady of society. Instead of a scarecrow.”

I ignored this last ungracious remark and thought for a minute. “Did Mother come out?”

“They put her name down for it. But she never did.”

“Why not?”

Viola looked at me. “You should ask her.”

“The War?” I said, puzzled. Viola nodded.

“But it was over by then. Mother must have been . . .” I counted on my fingers.

“There was no money left, that’s all,” said Viola. “And then her daddy die of typhus, and that was the end of that.”

“So I have to come out? Because she missed her turn?”

“I’m telling you, you got to ask her yourself. Go get cleaned up. You a mess. I got to rest my heart—it’s beating like a kitten. Lord help me.”

I left her fanning herself.

My mother had got one girl out of seven tries at it. I guess I wasn’t exactly what she’d had in mind, a dainty daughter to help her bail against the rising tide of the rough-and-tumble boyish energy that always threatened to engulf the house. It hadn’t occurred to me that she’d been hoping for an ally and then didn’t get one. So I didn’t like to talk patterns and recipes and pour tea in the parlor. Did that make me selfish? Did it make me odd? Worst of all, did it make me a disappointment? I could probably live with being thought selfish or odd. But a disappointment—that was another matter, a harder matter. I tried not to think about this, but it tailed me about the house all afternoon like a bothersome, bad-smelling dog demanding attention.

I sat in my room and looked out at the trees and paid the matter some mind, turning it this way and that. I hadn’t intended to be this way. Could I be blamed for my nature? Could the leopard change her spots? And, if so, what were my spots? It all seemed so muddled. I came up with no conclusions, but I did get a middling headache. Maybe I needed some Lydia Pinkham’s like Mother. Maybe I was more like her than I thought.

Would coming out as a debutante be so bad? Maybe I wouldn’t mind it so much. Eventually. Meanwhile, I would have to find out more about it.

Granddaddy had taught me that the important questions could not be answered without the best scholarship you could lay your hands on, along with plenty of time to weigh and measure the alternatives. I had another six or seven years to think about it. That might be enough time. I didn’t know anyone who could tell me about such things except Mother, but if I asked her, wouldn’t that just get her hopes up, hopes that might have to be dashed later on? My head ached, and my neck started to itch.

Hives again.

THE NEXT MORNING, I found Mother outside examining the rows in the kitchen garden, a wide straw hat shading her face and a pair of white cotton gloves on her hands, following her own dictum that a lady always hid her hands and face from the sun. I approached her cautiously in case Viola had told her of my apparently shameful public experiment, but there was no special alarm in her eyes. No more than usual.

“Where’s your bonnet?” Mother called out. “Go inside and get it.”

I ran back inside for it. There was no point in starting this conversation off on the wrong foot. I grabbed it from the peg inside the back door and went out again.

“That’s better,” she said. “Are you coming to help me with the flowers?”

“I wanted to ask you something,” I said. “Viola told me . . . Viola told me you were supposed to come out when you were a girl but that you didn’t get to. Is that true?”

A shadow of something—surprise, annoyance, regret maybe—passed over her face. She stooped and clipped a Cherokee rose. “Yes. That’s true.”