Helen Ellis - Bring Your Baggage and Dont Pack Light: Essays

Southern Lady Code

American Housewife

Eating the Cheshire Cat

Copyright 2021 by Helen Ellis

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

www.doubleday.com

doubleday and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Cover photograph Levi Brown/Trunk Archive

Cover design by John Fontana

library of congress cataloging-in-publication data

Names: Ellis, Helen, author.

Title: Bring your baggage and dont pack light : essays / Helen Ellis.

Description: First edition. | New York : Doubleday, [2021]

Identifiers: lccn 2020029356 (print) | lccn 2020029357 (ebook) | isbn 9780385546157 (hardcover) | isbn 9780385546164 (ebook)

Subjects: lcsh : Ellis, HelenFamily. | Ellis, HelenFriends and associates. | Female friendship. | Authors, American20th centuryBiography. | Authors, American21st

centuryBiography. | lcgft : Essays.

Classification: lcc ps 3555. l 5965 z 46 2021 (print) | lcc ps 3555. l 5965 (ebook) | ddc 814/.54 [ b ]dc23

lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020029356

lc ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020029357

Ebook ISBN9780385546164

ep_prh_5.7.0_139896330_c0_r2

For Poochie!

CONTENTS

Grown-Ass

Ladies

Gone Mild

From the start of our grown-ass ladies trip to Panama City Beach, aka The Redneck Riviera, Paige and I could see that Vicki was having a hard time. Days before, shed dropped her eldest off at college and gotten a bad mammogram. Her follow-up biopsy was scheduled for the week after our reunion with two other childhood friends, and until then, all Vicki wanted to do was stay in her room, sleep late, sit on the condo balcony, sit on the beach, drink white wine out of a Chardonnay glass or drink white wine out of a one-liter sippy-lid souvenir cup, and catch up.

The last time wed gotten together as a group was ten years agomy four childhood friends carpooling over from Atlanta and Athens, and me flying down from New York Cityso we respected Vickis wishes.

As we respected Ellens wish to run on the beach at dawn like she was reenacting Chariots of Fire (which nobody else did). And Heathers wish to play Cards Against Humanity (which four out of five of us did). And Paiges wish to wear matching woven friendship bracelets (which we all did). And my wish to go to a water park (which two of us did).

When Paige and I arrived at Shipwreck Island, we were self-conscious about barefooting around in our one-pieces in the broadest of daylight, but then we saw a nine-months-pregnant woman in a bikini, and her meemaw in a thong. Awash in a sea of botched tattoos and bullet wounds, third-degree sunburns and cellulite that made our cellulite feel good about itself, we stood up a little straighter and wore our particular brand of sunscreened and soft-cupped middle age like Bob Mackie gowns.

Braving the Raging Rapids ride, we sat ass backwards in inner tubes held by beautiful bronzed teenagers.

I said to one good-ole-boy Adonis: Youre gonna have to push me.

He said, Yes, maam, and shoved me over a waterfall like a sack of dirty sheets down a hotel laundry chute.

I screamed.

And Paige screamed. Because she too is a screamer. And Paiges screams have always enabled my screams. Ever since elementary school.

Paige and I met in the 1970s Alabama gifted program. I dont know why we were pegged as gifted, but Im pretty sure I scored high on the IQ test because when I was asked to name all the words I could think of in sixty seconds, I read every word I could see on book spines behind the test givers back.

Dictionary, encyclopedia, parachute, penguin.

From then on, one day a week, me (and another kid from Alberta Elementary School) and Paige (and another kid from Arcadia Elementary School) went to gifted school at Northington Elementary with twenty other kids from around Tuscaloosa.

Heres what I remember about being gifted: logic puzzles (whodunit spreadsheets), Chisanbop (finger math), and our teachers belief that we, a bunch of fifth graders, could put on a show (three acts from, you guessed it, Evita, A Chorus Line, and The Crucible).

Paige remembers: I was one of the extras, and I think my one line was Its up there, behind the rafters, pointing at a witch or a bat.

It was my line too.

For Arthur Millers big courtroom scene, Paige and I played Puritan schoolgirls. But we didnt point at a bat. Costumed in black dresses with white collars and bonnets, we cowered on a cafeteria stage screaming and crying and accusing another girl of turning into a yellow devil bird that wanted to tear our faces off.

Vicki, whos known Paige since kindergarten, attended that show with her mother. She remembers thinking, Whaaaaat?

Paige and I still dont know what. All we remember is that we got those parts because we were the best screamers. Looking back, the best screamers might have been our teachers southern lady way of saying that we were the worst actresses. Regardless, one good screamer holds tight to another for life.

At the water park, Paige and I screamed flying down the rapids, we screamed bumping into each other, we screamed seeing each other scream, and we screamed getting stuck and spiraling in whirlpools.

Every fifteen feet, another good-ole-boy Adonis unstuck us and slung us along.

We screamed, Thank you!

They said, Yes, maam. And shook their heads in what I am sure was marvel over never having seen grown-ass ladies such as ourselves having more fun than little girls pumped up on 16 Handles fro-yo chasing Taylor Swift through a shopping mall.

Paige and I drifted along the Lazy River, congealed with season ticket holders. We got in the Wave Pool and gripped the sides like castaways. We climbed what I believe was in fact a rickety wooden stairway to heaven to ride White Knuckle River, which is four people in a big inner tube going down a 660-foot twisting snake of drainpipe. And we debated the Tree Top Drop, which is a seventy-foot slide down an XXXL humansize straw.

I asked a woman whod just finished it, Should we ride the Tree Top Drop?

She said, If you wanna taste the crotch of your own bathing suit.

We did not.

So instead, we went back to the Raging Rapids and rode it twenty-eight times in a row.

At some point, I asked Paige about the tattoo on her shoulder.

Paiges tattoo is of what I would call three M birds. Three birds that look like the letter M. Inked in black without features, as if seen from a distance, flying high, maybe over an ocean. One is the width of a nickel; the other two, the widths of dimes. Mama bird and her babies. Soaring to safety.