The Lost Continent - Bill Bryson [29]
Behind the desk sat a large, exceptionally well-dressed black woman. This surprised me a little, this being Mississippi. She wore a dark two-piece suit, which must have been awfully warm in the Mississippi heat. I asked her the way to Rowan Oak.
‘You parked on the square?’ she said. Actually she said, ‘You pocked on the skwaya?’
‘Yes.’
‘Okay, honey, you git in yo’ car and you makes the skwaya. You goes out the other end, towards the university, goes three blocks, turns rat at the traffic lats, goes down the hill and you there, un’stan?’
‘No.’
She sighed and started again. ‘You git in yo’ car and you makes the skwaya—’
‘What, I drive around the square?’
‘That’s rat, honey. You makes the skwaya.’ She was talking to me the way I would talk to a French person. She gave me the rest of the instructions and I pretended to understand, though they meant almost nothing to me. All I kept thinking was what funny sounds they were to be emerging from such an elegant-looking woman. As I went out the door she called out, ‘Hit doan really matter anyhow cuz hit be’s closed now.’ She really said hit; she really said be’s.
I said, ‘Pardon?’
‘Hit be’s closed now. You kin back arond the grounz if you woan, but you caint go insod.’
I wint outsod think that Miss Hippy was goan be hard work. I walked around the square looking at the stores, most of them selling materials for a country club life-style. Handsome, well-dressed women bounded in and out. They were all tanned and rich-looking. On one of the corners was a bookstore with a magazine stand. I went in and looked around. At the magazine stand I picked up a Playboy and browsed through it. As one does. I was distressed to see that Playboy is now printed on that awful glossy paper that makes the pages stick together like wet paper towels. You can’t flick through it any more. You have to prise each page apart, like peeling paper off a stick of butter. Eventually I peeled my way to the main photo spread. It was of a naked paraplegic. I swear to God. She was sprawled – perhaps not the best choice of words in the context – in various poses on beds and divans, looking pert and indisputably attractive, but with satiny material draped artfully over her presumably withered legs. Now is it me, or does that seem just a little bit strange?
Clearly Playboy had lost its way, and this made me feel old and sad and foreign, because Playboy had been a cornerstone of American life for as long as I could remember. Every man and boy I knew read Playboy. Some men, like my dad, pretended not to. He used to get embarrassed if you caught him looking at it at the supermarket, and would pretend that he was really looking for Better Homes and Gardens or something. But he read it. He even had a little stash of men’s magazines in an old hatbox at the back of his clothes closet. Every kid I knew had a father with a little stash of men’s magazines which the father thought was secret and which the kids knew all about. Once in a while we would swap our dads’ magazine among ourselves and then imagine their perplexity when they went to the closet and found that instead of last month’s issue of Gent they now possessed a two-year-old copy of Nugget and, as a bonus, a paperback book called Ranchhouse Lust. You could do this knowing that your dad would never say a word to you about it. All that would happen would be that the next time you went back the stash would be in a different place. I don’t know whether women in the 1950s didn’t sleep with their husbands or what, but this