Between Wrecks by George Singleton Page B

at six women sitting in a circle, all of whom I estimated to be in their mid to late thirties.
    â€œCould I help you with anything?” the owner asked me. She wore a nametag that read Knox—the last name of one of the richer families in the area. In kind of a patronizing voice she said, “Did you forget to pack up your snapshots this morning?”
    The other women kept turning cellophane-covered pages. One of them said, “Pretty soon I’ll have to get a scrapbook dedicated to every room in the house. What a complete freak-up.”
    I had kind of turned my head toward the stickers displayed on the wall—blue smiling babies, pink smiling babies, a slew of elephants, Raggedy Anns and Andys, mobiles, choo-choo trains, ponies, teddy bears, prom dresses, the president’s face staring vacantly—but jerked my neck back around at hearing “freak-up.” I thought to myself, Remember that you’re here to gather revisionist history. You want to impress your professor at Ole Miss-Taylor.
    But then I started daydreaming about Frances Bavier, the actress who played Aunt Bee on The Andy Griffith Show . I said, “Oh. Oh, I didn’t come here to play scrapbook. My name’s Stet Looper and I’m enrolled in a Southern studies graduate program, and I came here to see if y’all wouldn’t mind answering some questions about historical events that happened around here. Or around anywhere.” I cleared my throat. The women in the circle looked at me as if I walked in wearing a seersucker suit after Labor Day.
    Knox the woman said, “Southern studies? My husband has this ne’er-do-well cousin who has a daughter going to one of those all-girls schools up north. Hollins, I believe. She’s majoring in women’s studies.” In a lower voice she said, “She appears not to like men, if you know what I mean—she snubbed us all by not coming out this last season at the Poinsett Club. Anyway, she’s studying for that degree with an emphasis in women’s economics, and I told her daddy that it usually didn’t take four years learning how to make a proper grocery list.”
    I was glad I didn’t say that. I’d’ve been shot for saying that, I figured. The same woman who almost-cursed earlier held up a photograph to her colleagues and said, “Look at that one. He said he knew how to paint the baseboard.”
    I said, “Anyway, I have a deadline, and I was wondering if I could ask if y’all could tell me about an event that occurred during your lifetime, something that made you view the world differently than how you had understood it before. Kind of like the Cuban Missile Crisis, but more local, you know.”
    â€œHey, Knox, could you hand me one them calligraphy stickons says ‘I Told You So’? I guess I need to find me a stamp that says ‘Loser,’” one of the women said. To me she said, “My husband always accuses me of being a germaphobe.” She held up her opened scrapbook for me to see. It looked as though she’d wiped her butt on the pages. “This is my collection of used moist tow-elettes. I put them in here to remember the nice restaurants we’ve gone to, and sometimes if the waitress gave me extras I put the new one in there, too. But even better, he and I one time went on a camping trip that I didn’t want to go on, and as it ended up we got lost. Luckily for Wells, we only had to follow my trail of Wet-Naps back to the parking lot. I don’t mind bragging that that trip was all it took for him to buy us a vacation home down on Pawleys Island.”
    I wished that I’d’ve thought to bring a tape recorder. I said, “That’s a great story,” even though I didn’t ever see it as being a chapter in some kind of Southern culture textbook. I said, “Okay. Do any of y’all do aerobics? My wife’s next door teaching aerobics, if y’all are