Homesick by Sela Ward Read Free Book Online Page B

And I endured it without complaint, just to belong.
    Once you were in one of these clubs, of course, it was all peaches and cream. We went to chapter meetings, did community-spirited things such as visiting the elderly at rest homes or helping out at children’s shelters. The lasting legacy for me, though, was the meanness I had to endure to get in. If social cohesion is one of the good things about growing up in a small town, the downside is
the unchallengeable power of cliques. That sort of thing is in the nature of the teenage beast, but in bigger towns and cities there are usually so many different social groups within a single school or locality that most kids can find others they feel comfortable with. Not so in a small town. If you don’t conform, even at the cost of sacrificing your principles and self-respect, you will be an outcast. And if you have a sensitive nature, it will mark you for life.
    Many years later I ran into Sally, one of the girls who had been so mean to me during Hell Week, at a class reunion back home. I decided to talk to her about what she had done to me, hoping it would help me come to terms with my own memories. She was horrified. The next day she sent me an arrangement of flowers, in the colors of the Dusties. The card said, “You’re beautiful, and I know it.” It was such an elegant and gracious thing to have done, and I was so glad I’d taken the risk of approaching her. It made it possible to build a lovely friendship with Sally, rather than continue to mourn that one horrible week when we were teenagers. I think we’re both grateful that we found a way to forgive and be forgiven.
     

     
    There were only thirty-five kids in my graduating class, so everybody knew everybody else at Lamar. I never went steady in high school, just dated a bunch of different guys. We’d go water-skiing a lot, and to the movies, and ball games, or go tubing down the Chunky River. In the summer we’d have lake-house parties in nearby locales, or go for big weekend jaunts to New Orleans. Music was a big part of our life; we drove to Mobile, Tuscaloosa, and Jackson for concerts as our favorite bands toured through the South. But our most common pastime was to hang out in the parking lot of the Quik Stop—and that was as much fun as anything.
    Sandy Steele was my best friend then, and I did everything with her and three other girls. After I got my license we’d all pile into the red Plymouth Barracuda Daddy bought me, and drive around the houses of boys we had crushes on. We’d slow down, hoping to catch sight of a boy out washing the car in his driveway—then we’d have a shrieking giggle fit, and floor it. That’s small-town courtship for you.
    This story would be a lot spicier if I could offer true confessions of a failed Southern lady. The truth is I was a good girl, more Melanie Wilkes than Scarlett O’Hara. I don’t credit it to any particularly strong sense of virtue. Rather, it had to do with my chronic shyness, and the severe pressure to conform to my mother’s and society’s expectations.
    I was the perfect young Southern woman: quiet, demure, feminine, seen and rarely heard. Polite. Proper. Never raised my voice, never gave my parents a moment’s trouble. Shied away from unpleasantness. Strove to maintain that teeth-together-lips-apart ideal. And I wouldn’t have had the courage to risk a moment’s presumption. I will never forget this: One day during my teenage years my next-door neighbor’s mother, a sophisticated woman and family friend, took me aside. “Sela,” she told me, “you must never think that you’re beautiful. It’s just not an attractive trait. There’s always someone more attractive than you, and always someone less so.” And I was my mother’s daughter: I never doubted for a moment that she was right.
    My Southern childhood was a happy time. And yet somehow, by the time I was through with high school, I had become overwhelmed by the urge to escape. Why was