Confessions of a 4H Dairy Princess

I learned the difference between fiction and nonfiction young. This painful, shameful lesson occurred at the time of my greatest triumph: the night I was crowned 4-H Dairy Princess of Onslow County. The pomp and gold satin will come later, but first the alligators.

The alligators were unwanted. On many nights in the fall of 1962, Jacksonville dads drove to our house on Elizabeth Lake, sometimes with headlights turned off, and parked. It was always dads. At this point in American home life, disposing of a family pet was considered a masculine job. Moms remained at home with sleeping kids. Was the alligator on the front seat beside the dad? Perhaps in a box, its long snout up to take in the breeze from the open window, not knowing its life was about to change forever. These alligators had begun life as nine inch long Floridians. Families from our town on summer vacation in Lauderdale or Miami chose an alligator as a souvenir and brought it back up I-95. But by the end of September, the adolescent alligator had become four feet long and still growing.

I acknowledge the urban myth about alligators inhabiting the sewers of Miami and New York, places that have little in common with my hometown. While these urban alligators may be mythical, in Jacksonville, N.C. in 1962 the alligators were real. By the time the dad had gotten out of the car and was carrying the pet alligator down to the lake’s edge to drop it in, I would be in my double bed or finishing homework at my double desk, both of which I shared with my younger sister, Laura, she who made me feel as though I was handcuffed to the wrong person, handcuffed for the rest of my life to the wrong person, but I digress.

What I am trying to say is that I did not actually see these dads or their alligators on the nights when their unwanted pets became our problem. Although our house was divided from Elizabeth Lake by the street, we owned the land beside the lake as well. Our bedroom on the back of the house faced a dense pine forest, so I heard only the rude slam of their car doors that pierced the frog and cricket night music.

At breakfast Daddy, smiling, would report, “I believe someone left another reptile gift for us last night.” My father is no longer alive to validate that he made this remark, but those who knew him would agree he was a plain spoken intelligent man who did not take life nor himself too seriously. Daddy laughed at most things that happened. Nor did he fully comprehend the nuisance these orphaned alligators would become.

I admit the alligators were not quite “the grave health hazard” I later made them out to be in my 4-H essay. In fiction this type of exaggeration is called hyperbole; in memoir, according to Oprah, it is lying. Yet what good storyteller, whether telling a true story or made-up one, does not embellish?

Back to the alligators, who were not accustomed to fending for themselves. They misunderstood the purpose of our garbage cans. They thought our garbage was food put out for them. At first light they would slither up on our land, cross Preston Road, and cut across our front lawn to the backyard, where they knocked over the cans, nudged the lids off with their snouts, and munched in. I heard the cans fall and saw garbage strewn over the back yard’s dewy grass. Sometimes I chased one back across the road.

Later Mother denied the alligators ever existed. She wasn’t senile, far from it. The alligators were a part of our lives she didn’t recall, or perhaps she was in denial about them, but I, as the eldest child, had to clean up the garbage mess they left. Perhaps that’s why my memory is more vivid. In hindsight I feel sorry for these creatures taken far from home then abandoned. On their behalf I can say they never attacked people, nor did they appear bitter about what had happened to them. On the contrary, they adapted quickly to their new environment, which could explain how they have been around for over 40 million years, much longer than my own species.

And they acted as muses for me. For they were the subject of the 4-H essay I wrote and entered in the Dairy Princess Competition the spring of eighth grade. Why the competition was called “Dairy Royalty” I never knew. Perhaps it was a tradition from the days when 4-H was only for farming youth.

One night in late March, the phone rang. Laura answered it. “A lady wants to talk to Ellen.” She sent Mother a coded look that meant Ellen must have done something terrible. Mother stopped fussing with the tinfoil on the TV dinners she was about to heat for our supper.

Both she and Laura stood listening beside the wall phone in the kitchen as the county extension agent told me, “Your essay was chosen from all the junior high girls’ entries as the best. You have been named Dairy Princess of Onslow County.” Her words knocked the breath out of me. “Thank you, thank you.” My heart drummed in my ears so hard I found it difficult to hear the rest of her instructions.

When I got off the phone and told them, Mother’s worried face smoothed into a smile. “You’ve always been a creative writer.” She hugged me, which for Mother, not an affectionate person, meant something.

That night I got my choice of TV dinners and chose hamburger steak, unfortunately Laura’s favorite as well. Her eyes remained narrowed at me throughout our meal. I will muse here a moment, something encouraged in creative nonfiction, to say that my little sister was not the adoring type found in sitcoms. Unlike the alligators, she was bitter about being younger and, this is mean of me, bitter about being pudgy and pale, so pale her veins showed through her skin like the transparent man we had gotten for Christmas with organs and glands you could take out, our favorite: his long ropey large intestines.

Notice I said we got. We had to share the man, who was anatomically correct except he had no penis, not that we missed it. I only realize its absence in hindsight, something memoir is full of.

While we were cleaning up after supper, I told Mother, “I’m going to need a formal gown for my coronation at City Hall.” “She does not,” Laura said. Mother ignored her and had Mrs. Weston, the lovely lady who sewed for us, cut down her gold satin evening gown to fit me. Mother even gave me ten dollars to buy matching gold satin for an evening coat to have made to go over the dress, since the gown was strapless. Details are important in both fiction and nonfiction, and the above are completely true.

Nowadays when I go over the business of the gold evening gown with Laura, a Duke grad and educational software saleswoman, she accuses Mother of being cheap, an accusation Laura has made about Mother perhaps a million times. “Why couldn’t she go out and buy you a damn evening gown?”

But Mother, child of the Depression, had grown up in Appalachia, a depressed place even before the Depression as well as since. She was the first member of her family to graduate from high school, where she was valedictorian, and naturally the first to graduate from college, Emory and Henry College, where she was salutatorian. If I was writing fiction, I might have made her valedictorian of both, since fiction is crafted, streamlined, life’s ragged edges trimmed.

My coronation: I could barely think the words in the weeks that led up to the big 4-H event at City Hall.

Until my coronation, the 4-H triumph had been Laura’s. She had learned to make a rich dark prune cake, which had earned her a blue ribbon at the Onslow County Fair in the cakes, fruit division. I will not include the recipe, except to say that the reader ought to set aside any prejudice against prunes he or she might have. This cake is dark and rich with a cream cheese icing, common today, but less so in the ‘60s.

Yet my selection as 4-H Dairy Princess was by far the greatest honor ever bestowed on a member of our family. I began to sense a difference in the way my parents treated me, a little like royalty, deferring to me about which television show to watch or what snack food Mother should pick up at the super market.

The night of my coronation, Laura said, “My throat is raw. I think I better stay home.” “You’re going, and you’re going to be nice about your sister’s honor,” Mother said. Daddy tried to cajole Laura.

Here’s more hindsight. If I had known what would happen at City Hall, how Laura would ruin the evening for me, and in so doing change the course of my life, I would have encouraged my parents to let her stay home. A word from me about how flushed she looked, and she could have stayed home, but—oh no—I wanted Laura to witness my greatest triumph, for her to become my adoring little sister.

City Hall glowed golden in eight o’clock darkness, as we pulled into the parking lot. We passed through the lobby, where my winning essay was on display in a glass case. We went into the auditorium, filling with 4-Hers and their families. Many gave me sidelong glances of admiration in my flowing gold satin. We sat in the reserved section in front on metal folding chairs. They announced the Dairy Prince first, an eighth grade boy, who went up on stage and was directed to his throne. I cannot recall what the man sounded like when he called my name, for my heart beat at the cage of my chest as if it were a bird trying to escape.

At a dramatic moment in fiction, when the action is rising toward a climax, the writer who pauses to describe something in great detail not relevant to the narrative frustrates the reader, but this is nonfiction, and in hindsight the moment wasn’t such a big deal. Nor was that night the first time my writing had singled me out for greatness. I had won several fire prevention essay contests. For one of these, I singed the edges of my essay, winning a movie pass to the Center Theater, a far greater gift than the certificate I would take home from 4-H.

Yet the moment I rose from my metal folding chair, swooped up the edge of my skirt in order to climb the stairs to the stage, and crossed it to my throne felt like the biggest moment of my life. Once I sat and had to face all the people staring back at me, I smiled, my hands folded in my lap. At last I had taken my rightful place in the world; this was where I belonged. The Dairy King and Queen, high schoolers, were named and crowned, but I heard little of what was said.

Once the ceremony was over I went down to my proud parents and had cake and punch at the reception, where so many people congratulated me that I quite lost count. Yes, I could feel my head swelling with pride, but my pride was not just for me but for my beaming parents. I enjoyed seeing them look so happy.

“Where did she go?” Mother asked when we were ready to leave. “We’ll find Laura on the way out.” Daddy brought his hand to the small of Mother’s back and threaded his other arm through mine. He escorted us both out into the lobby.

We found Laura gazing into a glass case. She turned to us with the most evil look in her blue blue eyes. “Don’t ya’ll want to read Ellen’s winning essay?”

In creative nonfiction, time is in the hands of the author, who knows the entire story and can leap ahead years, then back again at will. I will fast forward to December 2005 to say that my sister now denies that the alligators ever existed, which infuriates me because she was intensely afraid of them. When she heard them slithering in the grass, she would squeal and run into my arms, begging me to protect her. Did I make them up to get her to turn to me? I did not.

I admit that as a child I was a chronic liar. I won’t enumerate the many lies I told, except to say that I lied because the truth was boring or would get me in trouble or did not make me look good, but at the time of the alligators, I was twelve, considered the age of reason, when a child knows right from wrong. The alligators were real. Not that my sister doubted the alligators’ existence that night we drove away from City Hall after my coronation.

Sitting in the back seat across from her, I could feel the heat of her anger because Mother had not taken the time to read my essay in the lobby’s glass case. But Laura didn’t give up.

Once the light went green, and Daddy turned onto Highway 17, she came to the middle of the back seat and stood, bringing her head between our parents. Her dress hiked up in the back, so that I could see her nylon underpants and chubby butt cheeks beneath. (Over the telephone, I read this part to my sister, who demanded that I include more details about her, specifically details about how fat she was. Why do the stings of childhood haunt us our whole lives through?)

Leaning forward, she announced, “Everything Ellen wrote in her essay is a lie.” At her words, my stomach knotted. “Lies,” she said. “She never built a platform to keep the alligators out of the garbage!” For emphasis she stretched her arms out between them.

“Hush Laura.” Mother brought her hand to my sister’s shoulder. “And sit down and put on your seat belt. You know you’re never supposed to stand while Daddy’s driving.”

“You aren’t listening.” She remained standing a moment waiting for justice.

Sitting again, she buried her face in her hands.

Looking across the seat, I almost felt sorry for her. Mother and Daddy didn’t care about my 4-H essay, only that I had won, that our family had been singled out for honor.

Laura turned to me, blinking back tears. “You lied,” she hissed in a voice only I could hear. “That essay was supposed to be true. You never did the things you wrote that you did.”

“I meant to,” I said.

Her words awakened my guilt. My little sister has a high regard for the truth, or she did back then. I’m not sure whether this is still true. She sells educational software now. Perhaps one cannot be a successful salesperson and revere truth. Let me say here that much of the fiction I have written has a sisters’ theme, an unhappy sisters’ theme, for Laura and I will never be Jane and Eliza Bennett from Pride and Prejudice, no matter how much I wish we were. Yet we are family. The only certainty I have about her is that I want her always to be part of my life.

And that night in the back seat, I recognized that she had a higher regard for the truth than I did, that she told the unvarnished most of the time. I didn’t deserve to be her big sister and ought to model myself after her. “You lied.” She bit into her bottom lip.

I stared at the back of our parents’ heads silhouetted against the night sky. They were singing softly to the radio, some golden oldie about smoke getting in your eyes, when it dawned on me: I couldn’t live with this lie.

If I couldn’t live with it, I would have to do something about it. I would have to tell Daddy: “Stop the car. We have to go back to City Hall.” Dad would make a sharp U-turn, while Mother would complain that she had to go to work in the morning and needed to get home. But we would drive back. On the way I’d take off my new shoes and hold them. Once Daddy parked, I would jump out of the car, run barefoot across the parking lot into the lobby, and smash the glass case with the heel of my first pair of high heels. When I’d made a hole big enough, I would reach in, take my essay out, and crumple it into an angry ball. Blood would run down my arm where I had been cut on a jagged glass from the case.

By this time, a crowd would have formed around me, and a deputy sheriff would grab my bloody hand and put real handcuffs on me. Before the deputy led me away to jail for damaging city property, I would tell the nice lady extension agent, “I lied in my essay. As soon as my parents post bail, I’ll return my certificate to you. Excommunicate me from 4-H. I don’t deserve to be one of you.”

“What makes you think we’re going to bail you out?” Mother would cry, fury and pain in her voice, as the photographer for The Daily News snapped our picture. The look on her face would say what we had always secretly feared: there was something badly wrong with our family, something badly wrong with my parents’ union as well as the product of their union, me.

Of course none of the above happened. We drove home to Preston Road in silence. Having made no confession of wrong-doing, I would have to live with this lie, and so I have all these years. But that night in our double bed beside my sleeping sister, sleep did not come. My conscience kept me awake long enough to decide that from then on I would write fiction, which you can make up. At the heart of good fiction is truth, yet you can lie with impunity to get to that truth. And I am good at lying.