Homesick by Sela Ward Read Free Book Online

and that my Aunt Celeste still lives there. It’s why I’m glad my siblings and I have always remained close, far-flung though we may be. And maybe it’s why I find my mind wandering back, these days, to those Christmases we spent together as children, in front of a warm fire, when all was right with the world.
     

     
    Many a night in those preteenage years, Jenna and I sat home with Mama, watching old movies starring beautiful women like Ava Gardner and Elizabeth Taylor, with their dark hair and dramatic makeup. That standard of beauty was really taken to heart by our parents’ generation, especially in the South. There was lots of pressure to look perfect, and to be perfect—to live up to the unreachable ideal of womanhood. I remember Mama telling me when Jenna and I were really little that in our next house she wanted a staircase, so that when we were older she could watch us girls descend in our ball gowns as we left for a spring dance. And I think it must have been from those old movies that Mama got her idea that if her daughters were going to become proper Southern ladies, they might need a little help.
    When I was three, Mama sent me off to start taking dance lessons. I must have been feeling a need to be noticed, to stand out from the crowd. I remember performing in a revue as one of twenty little girls in a row, all dressed as miniature brides. All of a sudden—and much to my parents’ alarm—I stepped out of line, marched front and center, and performed my routine solo. It seems I had the performer’s showboating instinct from the beginning, though it would lie dormant for years.
    My dance teacher was a local legend named Miss Mary Alpha Johnson. But dance wasn’t the only thing she taught. Reader, I tell you proudly that I am a graduate of Miss Mary Alpha’s charm school, where we aspiring ladies were instructed in the proper ways to walk, talk, sit, and behave.
    We laugh at the idea of a charm school today, but I credit Miss Mary Alpha with teaching me poise and how to carry myself. In fact, it was so important to Mama that Jenna and I grow up to be proper Southern ladies that she enrolled us in a second charm school, a weeklong course at the Sears department store. Sears gave us a little textbook to study, filled with chapter titles like “Good Grooming Is Just a Matter of Organization.”
    I paid Miss Mary Alpha a visit on a recent trip home, and she entertained me graciously in her enchanting parlor, which is a little girl’s fantasia of femininity. The walls are blush pink, the white trim looks like icing on a wedding cake, and the porcelain statues of ballerinas resemble spun sugar. A lady to her fingertips, she was wearing heels and jewelry, her white hair brushed up from her fine-boned, still-beautiful face like a swirl of meringue. That day Miss Mary Alpha was opening registration for a new class of dancers, as well as students for her charm school, but she still made time for me. We had pink fruit punch and homemade cheese straws, and talked of old times.
    Is charm school dated? Well, I guess so. But if there were one available in Los Angeles, when the time came I would have my daughter, Anabella, enroll in a heartbeat. Social grace will never go out of style.
     

     
    After leaving elementary school, I briefly attended public junior high before transferring to Lamar, a small, traditional private school. Starting in the ninth grade, the kids of the town were encouraged to join one of the same-sex social service clubs, which were like junior sororities and fraternities. The girls could join the Debs, Mes Amies, or the Dusties. I was a Dusty. The boys had Phi Kappa or DeMolay to choose from. Phi Kappa had chapters statewide. I was a Phi Kappa little sister, so I would get to go to a lot of conventions and chapter meetings in towns all over the state, which were full of eligible boys. Needless to say, it was a blast. All the local social clubs had a dance every year that was known as a