Chapter 21
MY FRESHMAN YEAR OF HIGH SCHOOL, MOM ENROLLED ME AT BEN Lippen, where Jim was a sophomore. She’d started working there as a secretary to the headmaster, and decided I should go there too, no doubt getting a good deal on the tuition. I wasn’t happy about this in the least.
The eighth grade had ended reasonably well.
I had my good friend Linda, and loved tennis.
Mom had been out of the hospital maybe four months.
It seemed she couldn’t wait to send me packing the same way she had the summer we’d moved to Montreat and I ended up at Camp Merri-Mac.
I begged Mom not to make me go to boarding school, where I knew absolutely no one.
But she wasn’t to be dissuaded, and in August she took me shopping at Kmart.
Ben Lippen was even stricter and more religious than my Montreat neighbors.
Girls weren’t allowed to wear pants except on special occasions.
My skirts had to touch the middle of my knees.
I was forced to wear a girdle even though nothing stuck out except my front teeth.
Boys and girls had segregated areas of the campus and weren’t allowed to trespass.
Touching was forbidden. When we talked to each other, we were to be a minimum of six inches apart.
It wasn’t uncommon for a member of the faculty to walk around with a ruler to measure the distance between boys and girls waiting to enter the dining room.
Each day Bible class began with singing, “Sin shall not have dominion over me…” The teacher was my dorm mother, Miss Turk, humorless with permed graying hair.
She often answered the door with her pet parakeet perched on top of her head.
When it died, she told me that she flushed it down the toilet.
I remember being aghast at the image. I asked why she didn’t bury it, annoying her as usual.
Miss Turk was always on me about one thing or another, saying I had “a naughty knock” whenever I’d appear at her door.
She accused me of being willful. I was careless when doing my daily chore of sweeping, mopping, cleaning windows, whatever was assigned.
Every month it was a different task for the students as we helped maintain the facilities. I hated every minute of it.
If you misbehaved at Ben Lippen, you were sent to D Hall on Saturday mornings.
I was a regular, my punishment writing my name five hundred times.
I got quite fast at it, while other misbehaved kids were there for hours.
Whenever I do stock signings now, sometimes five thousand books at a time, I think of my Ben Lippen days.
If only Miss Turk could see me now, it floats into my head.
No doubt she’d say that’s what I get for my wickedness.
But oddly, D Hall was good practice for something that would become part of my routine as an author, although a deep part of me still considers stock signings punishment.
When faced with boxes of tip-in sheets or tables stacked with thousands of books, I feel that I must have done something wrong.
After my freshman year, Mom wasn’t working at Ben Lippen anymore, and she couldn’t afford for Jim and me to continue.
By then I’d acclimated and didn’t want to leave.
I got along well with my roommate and the girls on my floor.
I had a few boyfriends I kept my distance from and never touched.
I hate to think what would have become of me had I stayed in that rigid environment.
Many of the students were the children of missionaries and clergy, much like Montreat.
But most of my neighbors weren’t legalistic and punitive.
The typical trajectory after graduating from Ben Lippen was to attend fundamentalist schools like Columbia Bible College or Bob Jones University.
Nothing I wanted to do in life would have been encouraged at such places.
There was no tennis at Ben Lippen, and on Saturdays when I wasn’t in D Hall, I’d practice by hitting a dead ball against a wall inside the gym.
I can still hear the whacking and echoing, the ball skidding off varnished wood that was much faster than asphalt.
I got quicker and more powerful, practicing split steps, running sprints forward, backwards, sideways.
I don’t remember being very creative my freshman year beyond illustrating papers I wrote.
But in the main I was peaceful. My favorite teacher, Leslie Midkiff, was in his twenties and taught English.
I admit to being a bit sweet on him, enjoying his attention and encouraging comments.
At the end of my freshman year, I asked him to sign my yearbook, amazed by what I thought he wrote: “To Patsy, you’re my favorite girl! ”
“I bet you say that to everybody.” I blushed, and he looked puzzled.
What he’d really scribbled was, “To Pasty, you’re my favorite glue.” People constantly misspelled my name Pasty instead of Patsy, explaining his quip.
Now and then on Saturdays the Ben Lippen bus would take us to Kmart and Sky City so we could shop for shampoo, deodorant, toothpaste, snacks, and other necessities. What a relief it was to be off campus for a day.
I could do as I pleased without Miss Turk looking over my shoulder or getting out the yardstick to measure the length of my skirt.
One Saturday the TV game show What’s My Line?
was filming in front of Sky City. A handsome Hollywood-looking man was interviewing passersby, asking what they did for a living.
As I neared the camera crew at the entrance of the store, suddenly I had a microphone pointed at me.
“Who are you, and what do you do, young lady?” the smiling man asked.
My only gainful employment thus far was babysitting, and bussing tables with my friend Linda Hile at the Ridgecrest Conference Center in Black Mountain. Neither sounded important enough as I felt the camera trained on me, the mic close to my face, the cheery correspondent waiting.
“My name is Patsy Daniels, and I’m a waitress,” I said on national TV.
Decades later when my partner, Staci, and I had cameos in three TV movies based on my Win Garano and Andy Brazil series, we played waitresses serving drinks in the Harvard Faculty Club and working in a diner.
Waitressing was the only real job I’d ever had, I’d tell the producers. It was my private joke.
In the fall of 1971, I enrolled as a sophomore at Charles D.
Owen High School in Swannanoa. I reconnected with my friend Linda, and life took a turn for the better.
I loved to draw cartoons and was in demand for making school posters.
Teachers would have me design bulletin boards that I populated with characters from comic strips like Peanuts, L’il Abner, Snuffy Smith, Andy Capp.
Owen had a women’s tennis team, such as it was.
My sophomore and junior years I played number one and was undefeated.
I was winning the Buncombe County, the Asheville City, and other championships, including the Grove Park Inn Spring Invitational, the most prestigious tournament in western North Carolina.
Every time I won a match, the high school principal, Chuck Lytle, would announce it over the intercom, and I was thrilled. Nothing has ever made me feel as famous and limbic as that. I kept my newspaper clippings and tournament brochures in a blue-covered theme book that I still have.
Written inside the front cover were my five rules for how to win:
Keep eye on ball. Always
Hate your opposition
Move Move Feet Feet
Never Say Sorry
Relax
Not bad instructions for life if one leaves out the hatred and not saying I’m sorry part.
But I understood better than most that you can’t win if you give in to your emotions.
When I was scared, nervous, angry, frustrated, I was my own worst enemy on the court.
I made a habit of traveling around with a copy of Timothy Gallwey’s book The Inner Game of Tennis.
I learned that the Zen of things is just as important as talent and hard work.
A laser focus and lack of self-consciousness are exactly what’s required to create.
As I became well known locally because of tennis, my popularity dramatically shifted.
The girls who’d had no room at the lunch table were now inviting me to slumber parties and football games.
There were few people of color in my high school, and Montreat was anything but diverse.
While my neighbors might not have seemed racist, that didn’t mean they were comfortable with people of different persuasions.
To some extent, this included my mother.
I don’t recall her ever making a bigoted comment, but that didn’t mean she was as open-minded as I assumed.
While I was in high school, there was a handsome Black varsity wrestler I liked a great deal.
When I told Mom about him, she was glad that we were friendly but forbade me to date him.
I wasn’t allowed to ask him to escort me on the homecoming court, and I remember being shocked and upset that Mom felt that way.
“You can’t, especially in this part of the world,” she told me.
“But I really like him…”
“You can’t go out with him and that’s final.”
“But why, Mom? I really like him!”
“The answer is no!”
When I was growing up, I had no friends of color.
There were no Jews or Catholics except in the summertime when western North Carolina was visited by all sorts of people.
I never heard of anyone gay or knew what it was.
Single women living together were old maids or spinsters.
Men who never dated were incurable bachelors or Peter Pans.