Beliefs, myths, and narratives about women in the South have run the gamut, from the exalted Southern belle of the Lost Cause to the feared voodoo priestess in horror movies. Yet, few attempts have been made at creating mythic narratives about modern Southern women, living in a time when traditional roles and expectations have been dissipating. As girls and women have gained access to greater levels of education and opportunity, this change has meant that everyone in Southern culture has had to adapt, however unwilling some may be to do so. This essay shares one woman’s experiences in the 1980s, when she embraced a modern life that was increasingly less dependent upon approval or support from men.

Members Only
by Margaret Donovan Bauer

Dreamscape, 1989

I am returning from attending a poetry reading out of town, out of state even, with my new—boyfriend? Seems an odd word for a man who is forty-one, fifteen years older than I. My new lover. Not a term comfortably used by a Southern woman, even in the last decade of the twentieth century. (I’m only just learning from my fellow graduate students to use women instead of girls when talking about my twenty-something self and friends.) My first anything—date, relationship—since my marriage to a man who was a huge part of my life for almost eight years. I’ve been involved with this new man only about eight weeks.

It’s just been a few months since I left my marriage. Not atypically, I got seriously involved right away with the first person I dated in my new single life in Tennessee, several states away from my Louisiana home. The disaster of that is another story. Suffice it to say, I would find myself escaping again when I finished graduate school. And eventually, I would learn to extricate myself from a bad relationship without moving, but that would take some time, and the first attempt would be painful and consequential.

But here, in the fall of 1989, the new man in my life and I are driving back from our first road trip together. I had enjoyed hearing him read his poetry, the occasion for the trip. I was impressed by the audience response and proud to be there as the featured poet’s “significant other.” I had not, however, enjoyed the visit with the couple we stayed with, the man old enough to be my father. I was freezing in their drafty old home, and bored by our host, who told story after story after story, dominating the conversation with his claim to fame: he knew the author James Dickey. His Dickey stories were the same tales anyone who’d spent time with the Southern poet would tell: Jim got drunk and did this; Jim got drunk and did that. (It would not be long before I had my own James Dickey story, once my poet lover introduced me, and the famous drunk’s response was a lewd, “Oh, we’ve met before, I’m sure. You’re from Louisiana, you say? A hotel in New Orleans perhaps?”)

Even if I’d liked the movie the host insisted we watch (which I didn’t), he didn’t stop talking through it either. My teeth hurt from biting back the urge to ask him to “please, just shut up.” I did like his wife, significantly younger than he, even more of an age difference than the one between my poet and me. I had enjoyed the little time she and I had to get to know each other, the short conversations as I helped her clean up in the kitchen before we all finally turned in after so many hours of her husband’s stories. And then again over coffee in the morning before her husband joined us and I disappeared to shower and cut down on the time I had to listen to him, not sure how I was going to handle another day of his blustering.

Through it all, however, I practiced my best Southern manners and never let on that I was miserable.

But neither did I speak up once alone with the poet on the way home.

Upon returning to my new town, my apartment, I need to process all this, in particular my failure to tell my new lover during the three-hour drive that I was not so enamored with his friend as he was. I just want to go inside my apartment, close the door behind me, and have some time to myself to think about my hesitancy to speak up. Or just to be in my own space. Alone. I’ve come to appreciate solitude since moving into this apartment, far away from the first quarter century of my life. And yet, here I am, in another relationship already, and is that a red flag, my not telling him what I was thinking? Am I silencing myself for another man? I need to think.

But I’ve come home to what is likely to be an equally, if differently, uncomfortable experience. When we pull into a parking space in front of my apartment, there is a man standing outside my apartment door who looks like—but can’t possibly be—but is—my not-yet-officially-ex-husband.

Wow, I really thought I was awake, I say to myself. This moment remains the surest I have ever been that I am dreaming while actually wide awake. Don’t worry, this is only a bad dream, I can tell myself in the middle of a nightmare. I can even sometimes physically shake myself awake to escape whatever dangerous, tragic, or embarrassing situation my subconscious has conjured up to torture my sleep. I try that now, just in case. I shake my head. But the man in the charcoal-grey leather Members Only jacket is still standing there, leaning against the railing outside my second-floor apartment door, almost directly above the parking space my companion has just pulled into. The lost-looking man on the landing does not know the car that just pulled in next to mine. Can he see me through the windshield in the front passenger seat?

It’s not that I’m frightened to see him there, even though I do consider finally leaving him as an escape. I’m not concerned about my safety. I am disconcerted because he is so out of place here, over seven hundred miles from where he is supposed to be. He doesn’t quite look like himself, in spite of the same curly brown mullet he has worn throughout the ’80s, and I am unsettled by my sudden uncertainty about whether I am awake or dreaming. What I see has major elements of a dream—familiar yet unfamiliar, something amiss I can’t quite identify.

I was dozing on the drive home. I consider again the possibility that I’m still asleep. I shake my head again. Ask aloud (again? Have I already spoken this question or just thought it?), “What is he doing here?” A question my companion cannot answer. He doesn’t know the man standing above us, though surely he has guessed who the man must be.

I have a suitcase with me, and I am with a man. I am thinking fast, feeling guilty, even though I am legally separated from my husband, our divorce pending in three months (except it ends up being longer when he won’t sign the papers until he has his own lawyer look them over, but then doesn’t bring them to a lawyer, most likely, because he found out how expensive that would be).

“Are you okay?” the poet asks. “Do you want me to come in with you?”

“No. I’ll be fine. This is just too weird. What is he doing here?” I ask, yet again, while mentally devising an explanation to keep my lover uninvolved in this awkwardness. My still-husband-on-paper doesn’t have to know that I was on a trip alone with the man who brought me home. “You go on home,” I say. “I’ll call you later, after he’s gone. I’m fine. Really.” I don’t think I ever said, “That’s my ex.” I didn’t have to.

Deep breath, we open our doors, get out, go to the hatchback, get our bags, and then go our separate ways, me straight ahead and up the steps to my apartment. He turned toward the next staircase to go to his, which is, I found out soon after I met him at a department party on campus, in the next section of the same building, on the top floor, catty corner from mine.

“What are you doing here?” I hear myself asking the person who can actually answer the question as I approach and see with wide-awake eyes that, yes, it is the husband I left several hundred miles away, several months ago. So no, I am not dreaming. The surreal, nightmarish element comes in part, I realize, from the fact that he has shaved the mustache he’s had since he finished high school. Without it, he does not look like himself, and maybe that is what helps me, on this day, get past whatever had held me back from telling him what I really think of him, in contrast to my gentler explanation when I announced that our marriage was over and I was leaving him behind when I left for graduate school: “We are just not compatible. We want different things out of life,” I had told him, keeping it simple. He had not heard any of my complaints for years by then, why would he suddenly start listening?

More likely, it’s the damn jacket he is wearing that loosens my tongue on this Sunday afternoon. I gave it to him for Christmas the year he was going through his mid-life crisis (in his late twenties). He was mad at the world, but especially me, it seemed, perhaps because my life was just getting started as I was finishing college, while his had stalled after high school. To punish me, he didn’t wear the new jacket. But neither did he tell me to take it back to the store. A waste of money. I hate waste.

I do not feel a thing for the man on my porch except, at this moment, resentful of his intrusion into my new life, and anger. His presence means he likely spent at least three hundred dollars on a plane ticket. That is a lot of money to a graduate student in 1989, and besides that, he owes me several semesters of college tuition that I paid for his bachelor’s degree. Also, this visit is another waste of time. I have absolutely no doubt that our differences are irreconcilable. Did I mention I hate waste? Like all those years I stayed with him after realizing our marriage was doomed simply because I did not have the courage to tell him I wanted to end it, had not had the courage to say the words that would put an end to it even before we got married.

——

“What did you buy for two hundred dollars at the Sunglass Hut?” I call from upstairs one evening about a year into our marriage. I am on the loft landing, an alcove at the top of the stairs that has become my office. I am sitting at my rolltop desk, going through the receipts I pulled out of one of the desk cubbies, matching them to the credit card bill. But I know I didn’t put one in there from the Sunglass Hut. Still, I go through the motions of looking. I have asked him to put his credit card receipts in there, though he rarely does.

“Very funny,” my husband calls back to me from downstairs. He’s on the couch in the living room below, watching television.

“No, seriously.” I am honestly baffled. I really can’t fathom a two-hundred-dollar charge at the Sunglass Hut.

“What do you think?” He is starting to sound annoyed.

And now, so am I. “I can’t imagine.”

“Sunglasses, maybe?” he says, his tone suggesting I’m an idiot for asking.

“Sunglasses? For two hundred dollars? Are they prescription?” He wears contacts, so would not need prescription sunglasses, but such could explain the cost. It is the 1980s. Two hundred dollars is a lot of money for sunglasses. We are both working part-time while taking college classes. I’m finishing my master’s degree, while he, five years older, is pursuing his bachelor’s.

“Don’t you want me to protect my eyes on the golf course?” His latest job is grounds manager at a golf club, some days a glorified caddy, mostly a maintenance man. “Would you prefer I wear cheap sunglasses and go blind?” he adds. I’m the bad guy. Again.

I don’t ask the questions that come to my mind: Who spends that kind of money for sunglasses? My sunglasses are a pair someone left on a golf cart and then didn’t pick up from Lost and Found—or so he said when he brought them home to me. Who knows if he even put them in Lost and Found? But that’s the kind of sunglasses graduate students wear—glasses left by someone who can afford to replace, rather than look for, a lost pair. Apparently, undergraduates spend two hundred dollars (of his wife’s money) on sunglasses.

“I’ll pay you back,” he says, resentfully. No, he won’t.

But when I left, I took everything except his clothes and personal effects, which were not many. The only thing I remember is the brass golfer that was on the groom’s cake of our wedding. Our furniture was mine to start with, albeit mostly hand-me-downs from my parents. I figured all the wedding china and crystal, everyday dishes and glassware, cookware and casserole dishes, made up for at least some of the tuition I paid for his college degree—and for those damn sunglasses. I should have taken the jacket too, still unworn. I could have used its thickness to protect me against the unfamiliar cold in Tennessee, with thick sweaters fitting comfortably underneath the man’s size large. I was soon to learn that my Louisiana wardrobe did not include a coat suitable for Tennessee winters.

——

I don’t remember how or if the intruder answered my “What are you doing here?” question as I unlocked my apartment door, babbling something about just returning from a poetry reading, somehow implying that a bunch of graduate students had gone, and I was the last one dropped off since I lived in the same apartment complex as the driver.

I scan the apartment as I walk in ahead of him. Are there any tell-tale signs here that there is a man in my life now? My already-considered-to-be-ex did not need to know anything about my current personal life. After I left, I did finally tell him, in a letter, that our marriage was over. He called, and I managed to remain firm across the safety of a long distance phone call. And it was over, for me. Apparently not yet for him.

What I see as I lead him through the apartment is my space: my new computer desk in the living/dining room. “Why hole yourself away in your guestroom when you live alone?” my mother asked. She was the only person who knew my plans. The same black shelves hang over the sofa here as hung in the home we lived in together. But gone are the photos from our wedding that used to sit on these shelves, except for a framed pair, one featuring my dad and his wife, the other my mother and her husband. He begins to remove his coat before sitting on the end of one side of the L-shaped sofa, and, my attention caught by it, more consciously this time, I remark sarcastically as I sit on the other side, “Nice jacket.”

I spent a lot of money on that coat—one of those Members Only leather jackets of the ’80s. I picked charcoal grey to distinguish it from all the black ones men had been wearing since the Fonz made leather jackets cool in the ’70s. The grey would also bring out his beautiful blue eyes, I thought, when I bought it for him for Christmas my last year of college. He was pulling away from me and I was desperately trying to hold on to him, having lost sight of who I was outside of the couple we were in our couple-centric, male-identified culture. But he didn’t wear my gift. Perhaps he already suspected what I wouldn’t face yet—there was no way we were going to last—and he was punishing me for that.

Looking back, it occurs to me that envy and resentment might have been fueling his anger toward me during that period: I was finishing my degree. He had flunked out of college before I even started. Indeed, I now had career potential doing what he’d said he wanted to do, teach (or rather, he wanted to coach, and high school coaches had to serve as teachers, too, in small schools like the one we both went to—and where he saw himself returning). Without a college degree, his job possibilities were limited, even more so by his unwillingness to leave our hometown, where his family lived and where he’d established his legacy on the football field and basketball court. Perhaps he was realizing his days as high school sports hero were really over, that he’d been out long enough now that the new players did not remember him. If he needed to lash out, I was a good target for his resentment, just starting out, excited by my pending career. Could he have been at least self-aware enough to recognize that we were ultimately not compatible? Did he at some level foresee that I would not be so willing to return to our small town after college? That in spite of all those years of him waiting for me to finish up and move home, I wouldn’t.

“I’ve always loved this coat,” he says, as he places it next to him on the couch, missing the sarcasm in my tone when I commented on it. The exact wrong thing for him to say, as it reminds me of what a bullshit con artist he is and of the Christmas I gave it to him, though I had hardly seen him otherwise during my semester break at home.

“Your dad says you’re just going through a phase,” he tries as he settles back on the couch that once sat in the house we shared. More bullshit. He knows that my being male-identified began with being a daddy’s girl, but he is definitely not self-aware enough to recognize that Daddy had never approved of our marriage.

“My dad did not tell you that,” I responded, adding, “And if he thinks it, then he’s moving quickly to get us divorced before I come out of this phase. He hired a lawyer to handle the paperwork within five minutes of my telling him you were not joining me in Knoxville.”

I flashed on my dad asking me one evening during that sad Christmas break five years before, “What are you still doing here?” He’d found me in the living room where I was waiting, futilely, where no one would notice how late it was getting. “I thought you were going out with —.” I’d been stood up. Dad looked closer at me, probably detecting that I’d been crying. “You know, he doesn’t seem to make you very happy,” he said. What was I going to say? Dad wasn’t wrong. But his inquiry didn’t go anywhere. We were not a family for heart-to-heart talks.

Though we’d not broken up, I didn’t go out with my boyfriend the whole time I was home the Christmas of that jacket, and when I saw him out soon after he had allowed me to come over to his house one night to bring him his gift, he was wearing another coat. So now, the jacket reminded me of the ridiculous midlife crisis he had, though not yet thirty, and of my pathetic efforts to hold onto him, including late-night visits to his bedroom in his parents’ home, where he still slept in a twin bed.

Recalling sneaking into and out of a grown man’s childhood bedroom released a valve inside of me that day in Knoxville, sitting across from this intruder from my old life, reminding me of my old self, whom I was trying, too, to leave behind, a woman who did not know herself without a man. (It would take me years to realize I’d not left her behind and had just replaced one man with another.) I started to enumerate the reasons I’d finally ended our relationship, for good. And since he came all this way, I gave him a plane ticket, leather jacket, and sunglasses’ worth of candid truth to make sure he did not invade my new space unexpectedly ever again.

“I told you a year ago that we were not alright, but once again, you chose to live in your own reality. Do you remember me saying that? Telling you I was done fighting with you, but we were not okay?” I’d realized how irreconcilably different our work ethics were, our priorities, our values. I was realizing that the person he seemed to be during the long conversations of our early years together just didn’t exist. Nor did he seem to like the person he’d professed such admiration for when we first met, once my ambitions were not convenient to his lack of interest in ever leaving home. I didn’t have time to fight anymore. I was working on writing samples for PhD program applications and revising papers from my master’s program to submit to journals to establish a publication record that might make an admissions committee take notice. Our arguments were draining and usually left me feeling pathetic and unlovable. So I stopped talking and started planning how to get out. Leave the state for graduate school and leave him behind. He couldn’t bear to live forty-five minutes from home. He would not want to move out of state.

“When you were late coming home all those nights, I realized I was no longer worrying that you were dead in a car crash but fantasizing that you were. . . .” Though he was both working full-time and finishing his college degree, he made regular visits back to our hometown to hang out with his brother and old high school friends. When I accompanied him, I had to practically drag him out to the car to leave. Reminding him that he or I had an early class or a paper to write or other homework to do did not help. He would insist he’d done his work and was all ready for classes the next week. I should have done the same. I knew he was lying but did not call him out on it in front of his family. I stopped going “home” with him when I realized my throat would close up, my first experiences of claustrophobia, every time we turned off the highway into town. Without me there to coerce his leaving, he would return later and later, hours after calling to say he was on his way. At first, I was concerned, but soon I didn’t care. Indeed, as I admit aloud to him on this day, sitting in my apartment, I would imagine police showing up at the door to tell me my husband had been in a car accident (and that I was free).

“Because,” and it was time I said this out loud, too, “you married me for my daddy’s money. . . .” Well, Daddy was bankrupt now. The ’80s had not been kind to people like my father in Louisiana, and so there was no more reason for my gold-digging husband to stay with me. He could no longer charge two hundred dollars for sunglasses on “our” credit card, which I paid. I was living on my graduate student stipend now, which was less than his golf course maintenance wage.

“I am not your mother. . . .” For as long as I’d known him, he’d complained about how little his parents seemed to care about what he did. And his behavior during our marriage turned me into the concerned mother he never had. I had to wake him up and make him go to school when he went back to college (which I paid for, like a parent). I have just started on a career path in an area I am absolutely passionate about, and he has just earned his bachelor’s degree in General Education, without getting certified to teach and coach, as he’d led me to believe he was doing. Me. The person who was paying for it. Just one example of his constant deceitfulness.

“You cannot tell the truth, and you believe your own lies as soon as you tell them. . . .” I’d listen to his stories and wonder, what would happen if I called BS on this in front of our friends? Say, “I was there, remember? That is not how that happened.” But I’d been the loyal (or perhaps just embarrassed) wife and let him spin his yarns, wondering, does he just trust me not to expose him? Or, worse, is this his reality? And of course, I didn’t want people to know what I’d discovered about the man I married—what I, truth be told, knew about him before marrying him—and married him anyway, because that’s what a girl did after college in south Louisiana. We were already a year behind schedule because of his mid-life crisis my senior year.

“Your bosses are not the assholes. . . .” My stepmother would wait until after we separated to point out how “interesting” it was that every person he worked for turned out to be “an asshole.” How many jobs had he gone through in the years we were together? I’d lost count.

That’s how I got away so easily. We’d done unemployment before, so I just told him I’d move first, and when he found a job there, he could join me. He moved me into the Tennessee apartment and went back to Louisiana, and then I told him what he would have already suspected if he were as “observative” as he claimed. How was he supposed to find a job in Knoxville all the way from Louisiana? This was pre-internet, before email was even imagined by regular folks like us.

“By the way,” I interject into my list of previously unspoken points I was finally saying aloud, “observative is not a word.”

“What do you mean?” he asked, the only response I remember him making since suggesting my dad was on his side.

“The word is observant. And you are, most definitely, not an observant person. If you were, you would have seen this coming.”

“Why didn’t you ever tell me before?” He looked mortified, which I was pleasantly surprised to realize did not bother me after all those years of staying quiet so as not to discomfort him.

“Early on, because I loved you. I didn’t want to embarrass you.”

Which brought me to, “I have not loved you in so long I don’t remember loving you. I don’t think I loved you when I walked down the aisle to marry you.”

I had not been able to understand what had always held me back from saying any of that before when we’d argued, and we argued often. I’d stopped caring, stopped fighting, and started packing, but still remained silent, even when whatever fear of regret that stopped me from walking out ages ago was not as bad as turning onto the street we lived on and thinking, Damn, he’s home. There are worse things than being alone.

Which is what I reminded myself in those difficult first weeks in Knoxville before the semester started. I knew no one, but loneliness, I realized, finally, was better than a loveless marriage.

And now, only a few months in, I am thriving. Moving out of state was like going to summer camp when I was a kid, where I had found that I was not so different from the other girls as I was back home. I stopped going to summer camp when being on the high school dance team meant summer practice and dance camp. I’d forgotten what it was like to be surrounded by girls who talked about future careers rather than weddings and future families. One cabin mate wanted to be a doctor, another a lawyer (and they both eventually fulfilled these goals). The busy-ness of high school also got in the way of the long letters that kept me in touch with these girls between summers. But now, in graduate school, away from home again, I was surrounded by others who loved literature, in contrast to the man who told my mother that he’d never met an English teacher he liked—and then took a few beats, perhaps noticing the look on her face, before he realized he should add, “Well, until Margaret.” I still cannot believe I married that man.

It seemed that he had unstopped some cork in me that day he, barged uninvited and without warning, into my new life.

And if you think I was too harsh with him, consider this: within a few months of finally signing our divorce papers (putting it off until my dad brought them to him personally and told him he’d have the lawyer add alimony if he didn’t sign them), my ex-husband married a widow from our high school. According to a friend from home, her husband had died in a freak accident, and local gossip reported that she had received a hefty double-indemnity settlement. So, he found another gravy train, I thought, not as surprised as the friend who told me about it, a cousin-by-marriage of the new wife. She was disgusted that suddenly my ex was golden in her husband’s family for “rescuing” this lady in distress. We both recognized that the widow was rescuing him from having to take care of himself for once.

Several years later, I receive my high school’s alumni newsletter. Reading the caption under a photograph, I chuckle to myself, recognizing the parents’ names of the two students in the photograph. Well, she had two kids, and now they have two kids. Plus him, with his immature attitude toward responsibility. Five kids are a lot to handle. Better her than me.

“Did you get our high school alumni newspaper?” one sister asks (with a smirk) while I am home for the Christmas holiday. My family will continue to tease me about my ridiculous first marriage for the rest of my life (so far). My other sister follows that question up asking, “Are you going to send a donation?” My dad quickly takes a sip of wine to hide his own grin.

“A donation?” I respond, incredulous. “I sent them my last therapy bill.”

Wine spurts out of Dad’s mouth. It will not be the last time we enjoy a laugh at my ex-husband’s expense.

Or that I make a joke out of another failed relationship. But the therapy wasn’t a joke. I did reach out finally, when I got to a point in my career that I couldn’t just move to escape a failed romance. I sought out a therapist to help me figure out why a woman with a reputation for outspokenness had so much trouble speaking her mind to her romantic partners.

I never did tell the poet I had not enjoyed our visit with his bombastic friend the weekend before my ex-husband’s visit, and it would not be long into my relationship with this older man before I learned not to express myself when my thoughts countered his. “You have some mighty strong opinions for someone so young,” he told me once, to which, I am embarrassed to admit, I did not assert my right to have opinions. Once again, I muted myself to avoid prompting painful verbal jabs. That relationship ended too with me moving away, never addressing our problems, and I internalized his emotional abuse, accepted his accusations that I was self-centered whenever my own desires or ambitions got in the way of his, which made it easy for the next man disappointed in me to make our failed relationship all my fault—and the next.

But this story does have a happy ending, thanks to that therapy I mentioned.

“You need a project,” my therapist suggested one day as I complained about loneliness while teaching myself to be single rather than to settle. She suggested I buy a house, get out of my dark apartment.

“I don’t want to buy a house alone,” I responded. That would feel too much like giving up on ever finding someone to make a home with.

“A husband is icing,” she told me. “If your cake is good, it tastes just fine without icing. And your life is good cake.”

Or maybe, if you build it, he will come. In this case, buy it. I bought a house, started focusing on my life, myself. Took the time I needed, alone inside of it, to think about any red flags that flew while I was out with a man. I learned to end a relationship much more quickly, to say, this isn’t working out for me, and to go home, alone. I never did figure out why the men who found so much fault with me wanted to continue the relationship. My therapist noted that the ones with sociopathic tendencies enjoyed the challenge of a strong woman but, threatened, needed to break me. My second husband (whom I met, finally, soon after turning forty) would say it’s because I’m “fantabulous.” And he’s almost got me believing it too. We’ve been together twenty years, and the person I talked to late into the night about our values and goals during our get-to-know you courtship months lives those values and goals every day. And he still likes me after all these years. He finds me funny and entertaining, does not find my ambitions to be an inconvenience to him or my accomplishments to threaten to him. And we talk. I can tell him anything.

---

Margaret Donovan Bauer grew up on a bayou in south Louisiana and now writes on a river in eastern North Carolina. She is the Rives Chair of Southern Literature and a Distinguished Professor of Harriot College of Arts and Sciences at East Carolina University. After three decades of publishing books and articles about Southern writers, she is publishing essays and working on a memoir about growing up in the South.

Lesson Plan: NH-MSF Lesson Plan Personal-Historical