No Daughter of the South by Cynthia Webb Read Free Book Online Page B

Christmases of twenty years past, I decided to get up and get started. Momma refused my offer of help with the dishes, a pleasant switch in our relationship from the days when I lived at home.
    She was willing enough to loan me her car, but uneasy about letting me drive: “If I call Seth, I’m sure he’ll come right over and drive you where you want to go. He’d be happy to do that for me.”
    “I can drive, Momma. I had a job delivering groceries when I was in high school, remember?”
    She looked like she was going to cry again. “Of course I remember. It’s just you’ve lived so long in that city, without a car. I worry about you up there, walking alone at night.”
    I tried a sweet, conciliatory voice. “Really, Momma, I appreciate your concern. But I’ll be fine. I promise I’ll drive real careful.”
    “You just watch these old people. I don’t think you realize what terrible drivers they are.”
    I doubted that it would be more dangerous than taking a cab through midtown Manhattan at rush hour, but I knew enough to let the conversation end there.
    I took the keys off the hook near the door. Momma stood there, looking forlorn. It’s not like I was leaving her without a car. Daddy had taken his truck and both his Buick and her Oldsmobile sat in the driveway. What I really wanted to do was rent a car, but I didn’t know a way to do that without Momma taking it as an insult.
    In Manhattan, I was properly contemptuous of Florida’s bull-dozed lots, rows of identical houses with tiny windows, and central air in every house, blasting all day and night, every single day and night—except, of course, the two cool, breezy days a year. The lawns were seeded with scraggly St. Augustine grass, which required extensive watering to keep its appearance from imitating well-done bacon. From Manhattan, the use of electricity and water had seemed heedlessly extravagant. But when I tried to slide into the car, the seats were so hot that it felt like my legs were blistering through my jeans. The metal ignition and the turn indicator burned my hand. I felt like I couldn’t breath in the thoroughly-stewed air. Sweat ran down the back of my neck. Air conditioning seemed an inspired idea. I turned it on full blast.
    I was a little rusty in my driving skills, but my main problem was the big car. It felt like I was steering a yacht. I was also unfamiliar with power brakes, electric windows and locks. Even the control to move back the front seat was electric and complicated.
    I drove through the downtown proper, and was amazed yet again at how right Momma and Seth were about one thing. I almost didn’t recognize the place. New houses everywhere. More people moved here all the time. My God, what did all these people think they would find here? What was it that they hadn’t found wherever it was they came from?
    Every year I’d been in school here, my classes grew larger. I’d been born into a small Southern town, surrounded by orange groves, and open countryside. But I had left a homogenized Sunbelt blight of development after development. I was maybe nine or ten when building really took off. People retired to Port Mullet for the low taxes and the warm weather. Construction workers were brought down from up north to build retirement villages for retired firemen and teachers and insurance salesmen from Ohio and Michigan and Maryland. When the masons and carpenters and roofers saw the nice weather, and the low cost of living, they sent for their families and settled them in little concrete block houses. Their cousins moved in next and opened pizza parlors. (Up until then, we’d thought of pizza as an exotic foreign food.) Then suddenly there were miniature golf courses and drive-in movies and bowling alleys, fast food restaurants and car dealerships. It wasn’t too long before as many kids in school talked Yankee as talked right. And yet the development continued. Each time I visited Port Mullet I thought, that’s enough,