Day 3
The weather in Biloxi was mild so I could be found most days wearing shorts, a t shirt and flip flops, both to class and to the diner. I undid my braids and allowing my waist length hair to flow freely down my back to be envied by the drag queens coming off shift from the casinos there. I still wonder if my father would have allowed me to go to school in southern Mississippi if he had realized that Biloxi is surrounded by casinos, or dens of depravity as he loved to call them.
At first I was afraid, afraid that the sin of the place would rub off on me if I got too friendly with the casino workers that ebbed into the diner at the end and beginning of every shift at the casino. But it didn’t take me long before I realized that for the most part everyone working in the casino was an average person beneath the makeup, costumes and uniforms. They were fundamentally nice, nothing like I’d been warned that the sinners that inhabit the larger world would be like. So I ended up making a few friends from the regulars at the diner.
The kids at school didn’t dress in prairie styled calicos and braids for the most part, a few did and proudly proclaimed themselves to be something called “Prairie Muffins” But most of the others there dressed as I did but in varying degrees spouted similar religious doctrine as my Daddy did, about a world where you had to watch every stray thought, word or deed or you might end up on the giant fiery slip n slide to Hades. Some would sit rapt at the daily service, eyes focused on the preacher thundering fire and brimstone, while I would be busy thinking about if I dared get a set of hot rollers for my hair and wishing I was brave enough to wear pink lipstick. I didn’t have many friends there and I started seeing fundamentalist Christianity as what it was, a way to control a large group of people using fear. It completely lacked the love of Christ and seemed to have strayed a long way away from the principles that Christ taught were important.
You’d think my parents would pick up on the fact that I was changing but no one did. My weekly duty calls home revealed very little to them and when I came home for the holidays slipping back into my calico and braids was like putting on a comfy old nightgown. I told them what I knew they wanted to hear and proceeded to do what I wanted to do.
In fact, I sold the idea that I was doing just what they wanted so perfectly that at the start of my second year at the college they enrolled Cynthia in the same course and put her on a bus down to Biloxi so she could bunk with me in my apartment just off campus. I’d also arranged for her to wait tables at the diner the same shift I cooked.
As eager as I was to see Cynthia and spend time with her part of me wrestled to know how much of my new life I could share with her. Would she out me to our parents? Call me the sin in the camp? Could I go back to wearing those ugly calicos every day and pretend I was the same? I finally decided it was stupid to hide who I’d become and come what may with the family. It was with great trepidation that I walked down to the main Grayhound bus terminal and waited for my sister. I could see from her face that she was shocked by my knee length denim skirt, layered tank tops and flip flops as much as from the fact that my long brown hair was carefully curled and styled and I wore lipstick and powder. My drag queen friends had restyled me.
But I was equally surprised. Cynthia came off the bus with her blonde hair long and flowing, brushed smooth and unbound from any braids. I hadn’t realized in the last year Cynthia had started to chafe at our parents control and an inward rebellion had been born.
The other big shocker I had for Cynthia is that I had switched majors and colleges. I was going to the local state college and paying for it with my wages and a few grants and I would be studying psychology. I’d decided after a year of studying babies shooting out of vaginas like so many gum balls dropping out of flesh colored machines that delivering babies was not for me. I would never make a good midwife. But the study of the mind interested me a great deal. I found in my year in the diner that people just naturally talked to me and that I had a capacity for listening, listening to others sorrows and offering advice. It hit me in early spring that I’d found what I liked to do after I’d discovered that my favorite classes had been in psych.
There was just one little hitch, I hadn’t told our parents and I wasn’t planning on telling them any time soon. They thought I was down in Mississippi for a three year midwifery certification and they were paying none of my bills. In this one short year I’d become totally independent from them, only on their health insurance policy but working hard and paying my own way.
My fears that Cynthia would expose me were soon allayed. “Don’t worry,” she’d laughed, “Momma and Daddy have their hands full with Jake right now.” before she’d launched into a tale of how Jake had been thrown out of Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia for something called “moral turpitude”, which translated into he was caught in a compromising position with another male. The Holdens from church had broken off the engagement between their daughter Rebecca and Jake because of this sin. Now Jake would be sent off to be reeducated at the strict Western Mennonite College for a few months before joining the Marines. Daddy apparently decided that Jake should go into the military and he started grooming our next oldest brother Robert to be the shining political star for the family.
As sad as I felt for Jake I was most thankful that these troubles kept Momma and Daddy from looking too closely at the life I was living on the Gulf Coast. And once my sister Cynthia arrived I really started to enjoy myself.
It didn’t take much to restyle Cyn, to get her to stop wearing those floral gunny sacks and indoctrinate her into the local relaxed attire. The performing drag queens from the casinos fell in love with Cynthia and remade her, taught her how to do her hair and makeup. I wasn’t jealous of her receiving most of the attention, Cynthia had always been the most attractive of all the girls in the family. Whereas I was just average, average looks, average brown hair, brown eyes, like a million other girls, Cynthia had the face of an angel combined with long blonde hair and light blue eyes. Momma used to get onto her that she was sinfully vain and proud any time she lingered too long at the mirror while combing her hair. I never found my sister to be vain, just extremely beautiful, a swan among the plain ducks the rest of us were.
The years of college living with Cynthia in Biloxi were carefree ones. We went to the beach frequently, Cyn even bought a bikini and proudly wore it on the beach. When I started attending Southern Miss we were pulled into another round of friends and I did something really wild, I pledged with a sorority. When we weren’t working or going to class Cyn and I hung out on campus and at the mid term mark on her second year Cyn just dropped out of college, confessing she didn’t want to be a midwife either but she didn’t know what she wanted to do yet. She did know one thing, she wanted money, big money.
Our parents never caught onto the fact that we weren’t exactly living the same pious old life in Biloxi. A couple of times a year we’d pack our bags, don the calico and braid up our hair to return home for a few weeks visit. But we both found it hard to settle back into the routine of the family after having experienced the freedom that Biloxi represented for both of us.
At first I didn’t know exactly what that meant. She kept working her shift waiting tables at the Seaside Diner but eventually it came out. She took a night job at the casino, stopped waiting tables and started staying out all night working at the casino. I didn’t know what to do, what to think because what time I wasn’t in class or working I was spending studying furiously, trying to catch up in the wide gaps of knowledge in my home schooled education. For awhile I just figured it was something she had to get out of her system. We’d been to a few beer fueled frat parties at school so I couldn’t see how anything Cynthia was doing at the casino could possibly be worse. But it was.
Cynthia was one of the dancers in the show at the Belle Revere casino. She not only danced, she danced mostly naked. The show at the Belle was an old fashioned Las Vegas style review straight out of the Folies Bergere, topless, all the dancers wearing what amounted to g-strings over fishnet stockings. When I found out I was pretty shocked, how could Cyn go from wearing baggy calico to practically nothing at all in a year?
At first I was afraid, afraid that the sin of the place would rub off on me if I got too friendly with the casino workers that ebbed into the diner at the end and beginning of every shift at the casino. But it didn’t take me long before I realized that for the most part everyone working in the casino was an average person beneath the makeup, costumes and uniforms. They were fundamentally nice, nothing like I’d been warned that the sinners that inhabit the larger world would be like. So I ended up making a few friends from the regulars at the diner.
The kids at school didn’t dress in prairie styled calicos and braids for the most part, a few did and proudly proclaimed themselves to be something called “Prairie Muffins” But most of the others there dressed as I did but in varying degrees spouted similar religious doctrine as my Daddy did, about a world where you had to watch every stray thought, word or deed or you might end up on the giant fiery slip n slide to Hades. Some would sit rapt at the daily service, eyes focused on the preacher thundering fire and brimstone, while I would be busy thinking about if I dared get a set of hot rollers for my hair and wishing I was brave enough to wear pink lipstick. I didn’t have many friends there and I started seeing fundamentalist Christianity as what it was, a way to control a large group of people using fear. It completely lacked the love of Christ and seemed to have strayed a long way away from the principles that Christ taught were important.
You’d think my parents would pick up on the fact that I was changing but no one did. My weekly duty calls home revealed very little to them and when I came home for the holidays slipping back into my calico and braids was like putting on a comfy old nightgown. I told them what I knew they wanted to hear and proceeded to do what I wanted to do.
In fact, I sold the idea that I was doing just what they wanted so perfectly that at the start of my second year at the college they enrolled Cynthia in the same course and put her on a bus down to Biloxi so she could bunk with me in my apartment just off campus. I’d also arranged for her to wait tables at the diner the same shift I cooked.
As eager as I was to see Cynthia and spend time with her part of me wrestled to know how much of my new life I could share with her. Would she out me to our parents? Call me the sin in the camp? Could I go back to wearing those ugly calicos every day and pretend I was the same? I finally decided it was stupid to hide who I’d become and come what may with the family. It was with great trepidation that I walked down to the main Grayhound bus terminal and waited for my sister. I could see from her face that she was shocked by my knee length denim skirt, layered tank tops and flip flops as much as from the fact that my long brown hair was carefully curled and styled and I wore lipstick and powder. My drag queen friends had restyled me.
But I was equally surprised. Cynthia came off the bus with her blonde hair long and flowing, brushed smooth and unbound from any braids. I hadn’t realized in the last year Cynthia had started to chafe at our parents control and an inward rebellion had been born.
The other big shocker I had for Cynthia is that I had switched majors and colleges. I was going to the local state college and paying for it with my wages and a few grants and I would be studying psychology. I’d decided after a year of studying babies shooting out of vaginas like so many gum balls dropping out of flesh colored machines that delivering babies was not for me. I would never make a good midwife. But the study of the mind interested me a great deal. I found in my year in the diner that people just naturally talked to me and that I had a capacity for listening, listening to others sorrows and offering advice. It hit me in early spring that I’d found what I liked to do after I’d discovered that my favorite classes had been in psych.
There was just one little hitch, I hadn’t told our parents and I wasn’t planning on telling them any time soon. They thought I was down in Mississippi for a three year midwifery certification and they were paying none of my bills. In this one short year I’d become totally independent from them, only on their health insurance policy but working hard and paying my own way.
My fears that Cynthia would expose me were soon allayed. “Don’t worry,” she’d laughed, “Momma and Daddy have their hands full with Jake right now.” before she’d launched into a tale of how Jake had been thrown out of Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia for something called “moral turpitude”, which translated into he was caught in a compromising position with another male. The Holdens from church had broken off the engagement between their daughter Rebecca and Jake because of this sin. Now Jake would be sent off to be reeducated at the strict Western Mennonite College for a few months before joining the Marines. Daddy apparently decided that Jake should go into the military and he started grooming our next oldest brother Robert to be the shining political star for the family.
As sad as I felt for Jake I was most thankful that these troubles kept Momma and Daddy from looking too closely at the life I was living on the Gulf Coast. And once my sister Cynthia arrived I really started to enjoy myself.
It didn’t take much to restyle Cyn, to get her to stop wearing those floral gunny sacks and indoctrinate her into the local relaxed attire. The performing drag queens from the casinos fell in love with Cynthia and remade her, taught her how to do her hair and makeup. I wasn’t jealous of her receiving most of the attention, Cynthia had always been the most attractive of all the girls in the family. Whereas I was just average, average looks, average brown hair, brown eyes, like a million other girls, Cynthia had the face of an angel combined with long blonde hair and light blue eyes. Momma used to get onto her that she was sinfully vain and proud any time she lingered too long at the mirror while combing her hair. I never found my sister to be vain, just extremely beautiful, a swan among the plain ducks the rest of us were.
The years of college living with Cynthia in Biloxi were carefree ones. We went to the beach frequently, Cyn even bought a bikini and proudly wore it on the beach. When I started attending Southern Miss we were pulled into another round of friends and I did something really wild, I pledged with a sorority. When we weren’t working or going to class Cyn and I hung out on campus and at the mid term mark on her second year Cyn just dropped out of college, confessing she didn’t want to be a midwife either but she didn’t know what she wanted to do yet. She did know one thing, she wanted money, big money.
Our parents never caught onto the fact that we weren’t exactly living the same pious old life in Biloxi. A couple of times a year we’d pack our bags, don the calico and braid up our hair to return home for a few weeks visit. But we both found it hard to settle back into the routine of the family after having experienced the freedom that Biloxi represented for both of us.
At first I didn’t know exactly what that meant. She kept working her shift waiting tables at the Seaside Diner but eventually it came out. She took a night job at the casino, stopped waiting tables and started staying out all night working at the casino. I didn’t know what to do, what to think because what time I wasn’t in class or working I was spending studying furiously, trying to catch up in the wide gaps of knowledge in my home schooled education. For awhile I just figured it was something she had to get out of her system. We’d been to a few beer fueled frat parties at school so I couldn’t see how anything Cynthia was doing at the casino could possibly be worse. But it was.
Cynthia was one of the dancers in the show at the Belle Revere casino. She not only danced, she danced mostly naked. The show at the Belle was an old fashioned Las Vegas style review straight out of the Folies Bergere, topless, all the dancers wearing what amounted to g-strings over fishnet stockings. When I found out I was pretty shocked, how could Cyn go from wearing baggy calico to practically nothing at all in a year?
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