Reality Matters_ 19 Writers Come Clean About the Shows We Can't Stop Watching - Anna David [30]
From what I understand, entry into the demimonde of New Orleans debutantes amounts to an accident of birth. If your mother was a debutante, you can be one too, even if you’re battling some kind of terrible deformity like a cleft palate, an unfortunate unibrow, or a Yankee father. I’m sure there are other ways to get in—joining the appropriate Mardi Gras organizations, making the right friends or other social climbing skills that are usually the province of Edith Wharton novels, an elaborate scheme of sizable donations and secret payoffs to certain key figures in the murky deb underworld—but I’m not certain what they are. All I know is that my mother was a deb, as evidenced by the large photograph of her, resplendent in her long white kid leather gloves and a cream-colored satin gown, hanging in my parents’ dining room. And just as I inherited her impressive height and green eyes, I had been passed along the opportunity to hang photographs of myself as an intimidating debutante (probably for the express purpose of taunting my reluctant daughter) in my own house someday.
I didn’t ask for this, and growing up, I certainly didn’t want it. Every Tuesday afternoon when my school’s resident manners and etiquette teacher, Mrs. Abadie—a prim, white-haired woman whose voice was so round and jolly, she would have been perfect to play a cartoon chicken in a Disney film—came around to instruct my third-and then fourth-grade class, I would slouch in the back of the room, hoping to go unseen. But as it turns out, slouching in a manners class only makes you more visible. “Posture, posture, posture!” Mrs. Abadie clucked at me constantly, as she was going over the proper way to sit (ankle over ankle, never knee over knee), or to curtsy, or to hold a fork. I slouched—because even at that age I was relatively tall and therefore relatively awkward, but also because I usually had an open Lois Duncan book hidden in my desk, and slumping down in my chair was the only way I could read it virtually undetected, staving off what I thought would be an inevitable death from manners-class-induced boredom. Once, Mrs. Abadie made me practice my curtsy in front of the class, and my cheeks flushed with embarrassment as she corrected the curve in my shoulders. “Back straight and proud, Miss Gillette,” she said. “When you slouch, you’re not a young lady, you’re a mouse. Now try it again.” I wanted desperately to get the curtsy right just so I could go sit back at my desk and find out what was going to happen to the babysitter in The Third Eye. By Christmas, I had learned how to hide my book in a sweater on my lap—as well as, reluctantly, how to sit up straight and proud.
While my older sister happily pursued the debutante path when she turned twenty (the usual age for coming out, in the deb sense, in New Orleans)—relishing all the many trips to the dressmaker, giddily penciling in the dates of various balls, holding actual lengthy conversations about tulle—I happily scorned it as I made my way toward my twentieth birthday. The whole thing just felt, you know, stupid. I had gone to an arts high school. I was going to be a writer. I was living in New York and going to NYU. Why would I want to traipse home to New Orleans almost every other weekend of my junior year to dress up like an (elegant) marshmallow, drink champagne with girls I never liked, and curtsy before a crowd of my parents’ friends? I had a crappy college radio show to produce and several Dallas BBQ locations to visit ironically with my friends. Just the idea of doing the debutante thing felt stifling—as if the merry widow I would almost certainly have to wear would