Southern Living

by Ad Hudler

  “As in Parley Road?”

  Suzanne nodded. “That was named after Boone’s great-great-granddaddy.”

  “Really.”

  “The Parley family’s had four generations of doctors in Selby. Boone’s a neurosurgeon. What does your husband do?” she asked, already well aware that he was the new president of WSEL. Boone had told her with concern one evening that the television station had been bought out by a company based in Sacramento, and that Billy Thieber, the president and their neighbor, had been asked to retire at fifty-six.

  “Marc’s the new president and general manager of WSEL,” Jodi said.

  “I think I remember Boone sayin’ somethin’ to me about that.”

  “Here it is, Miss Suzanne,” interrupted the clerk, lifting onto the counter a large oil painting, surrounded by an imposing gilded rectangle so ornate and thick it seemed more sculpture than frame. “Lord, is this heavy!”

  As a surprise for Boone, Suzanne had commissioned an artist to paint Journey’s End, the Parleys’ historic family beach house on Sea Island. She had given the artist photographs and swatches of all the fabrics and wallpapers in the dining room so he could do his best to make it match.

  “It sure is pretty, Miss Suzanne,” said the clerk.

  “You sure you don’t think the frame’s too much?” she asked the clerk. Suzanne looked over her shoulder to engage Jodi, but she had already left.

  “Oh, no, ma’am. It’s a beautiful frame.”

  “Can your man help me out with this? Is he around?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  The clerk disappeared into the back room and returned, followed by a sixty-something black man with a close-cropped gray beard who was permanently bent at the waist. His tan work pants were wet from the water outside, where he’d been washing the store owner’s car. He leaned over to pick up the painting and stopped short when Suzanne spoke.

  “You got to wrap that first,” she said. “Don’t go grabbin’ that frame until it’s wrapped.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he answered, his eyes never leaving the floor.

  On the way home from the frame store, Suzanne stopped at Enright’s Jewelers and had them install a small brass plate on the bottom of the frame that said Journey’s End: Our home away from home! for the benefit of those who did not know about their house on the sea.

  At home, Virgil had already put in the screw. Suzanne gently pulled off the paper and hung the painting on the wall.

  Thrilled with the outcome, she poured herself a glass of chardonnay and stood back to admire the wall. It was not the painting that pleased her most, but the entire setting, which she had orchestrated without John David’s help. Two wall sconces, which were large, gilded scallop shells, flanked the painting, adding to that overall nautical theme. And she was especially pleased that the artist managed to work in some spots of the yellow from the vase on the table beneath the painting.

  Suzanne left the dining room and began her late-afternoon ritual of walking the house and turning on all the lamps, twenty-eight at last count. In the den, she closed the drapes to admire how the forty watts of yellow light bathed the Chippendale secretary, which lay open to show a feather plume and bottle of ink and two sheets of expensive vellum. Josephine had dusted the day before, and Suzanne quickly saw that she had moved the plume so it lay parallel with the edge of the paper. Suzanne quickly returned it to its correct position, laying it diagonally across the top of the paper, as if someone had been penning a letter and left it unfinished.

  Suzanne could spend hours enjoying the company of her house, walking from room to room, switching lamps on and off, depending on the position of the sun at that time of day. She moved vases and pictures to different spots or transposed throw rugs and pillows. She would move and remove and replace until she felt that satisfying but imperceptible click that occurs when the eye, for inexplicable reasons, decides it is happy.

  Yet in an instant the house could turn on her, revealing a void that would scream until she filled it. A corner, perfect the night before, would suddenly be in desperate need of attention. Why hadn’t she noticed it before? Perhaps she needed a silk fern, bursting upward like a fountain. Another table? But what would she put on it? Suzanne would sit down with magazines and catalogs and search out ideas. Horchow. Ballard Designs. Southern Living. She would buy and return, buy and return, buy and stick it under the bed until John David found the right place for it or took it away to resell to somebody else.

  Suzanne heard the rhythmic beeping of a truck in reverse and went to the window to investigate. She saw a white box truck with an Atlanta tag backing up to the third garage bay of Jodi Armbuster’s home next door. Jodi emerged from around the side of the house to meet the driver. After briefly talking, he and his partner unloaded three huge panels covered in white plastic, each about the size of a twin-bed mattress. Once they were leaning against the truck, they removed the covering.

  Lined up, side by side, the paintings showed the entire life span of a human female, starting on the far left as a baby, then moving right, growing older and taller and reaching the full height of a twenty-something woman in the very center, then descending again, painfully chronicling that age-old relationship between gravity and human flesh, falling into motherhood, then middle age, then on down to an old lady, hunched over in a wheelchair with a toothless smile on her face. Each figure, from the newborn to the crone, was naked.

  She picked up the phone and dialed her neighbor’s number.

  “Mary Nash, go look outside your front window right now.… I know!… I know! Can you believe that? I mean, what is it? You think it’s for the baby’s room? I just can’t imagine a baby sleepin’ next to somethin’ like that.… Uh-huh. Just today. I met her at the Frame Game. She had on purple tights.… I am serious as I can be.… Yes!”

  As she spoke, Suzanne watched Jodi and the two men looking at the panels, each of them occasionally stepping forward to point out a new discovery, then standing back to absorb them as a whole. She scanned the painted characters and estimated that she was closest in age to the career woman with pearls and a black-leather briefcase clutched in her hand. She was at the highest point in this chronological arc of humanity, midway through the life cycle, and, oddly enough, the petite woman looked a lot like Suzanne, who was nearly thirty-four with small facial features, plucked, fermata-shaped eyebrows, breasts that Suzanne considered too small, and black, shoulder-length hair, just long enough that she could pull it back with a bow on Sundays for church if she wanted to.

  As Suzanne listened to her friend describe a dining room sideboard at the Lakewood Antique Mart, she focused on the squealing baby, evidently fresh from the womb, all wrinkled and glistening and pink-red. And then, as it had done countless times before, Suzanne’s mind traveled into her own body, visualizing the inside of her congenitally half-formed uterus. She saw a hopeful, naive egg, fresh from its journey down the fallopian tube, jump into the deep-scarlet uterine sea, then get sucked out a hole the size of a grapefruit. Since her senior year in high school, when she learned of the deformity that would leave her childless forever, Suzanne had imagined these eggs the size of caviar, hundreds of them by now, maybe thousands, floating up and down her arteries and capillaries, all of them lost, all of them looking for some safe harbor where they could drop anchor.

  She had married Boone, the last male heir in the Parley family, without telling him. There was always hope, she thought—bodies healed themselves all the time if it was God’s will. Let’s not have children right away, she’d told her new husband. Let’s have some fun and travel and then settle down and be responsible and boring. Suzanne was certain he’d change his mind about kids once he saw how wonderful life could be with just the two of them.

  For four years, this was true. Then, in a Delta 757 somewhere over the Atlantic, on their way home from Ireland, Boone announced it was time to start a family, and he focused his energies on this endeavor until a Saturday when one of his golfing partners was c
alled out of town for a brother’s funeral. His replacement for the day’s game was Rossie Nolan, a stranger to Boone but not his wife, whom he’d seen naked once every twelve months for the last five years, his head and hands probing between her thighs as she lay on the crinkly white paper liner of his examination table.

  “I think your wife’s a patient of mine,” he said.

  “I thought so,” Boone answered. “I wasn’t sure, but I thought so.”

  “Suzanne … right?”

  Boone nodded. “You’ll be seein’ a lot of us pretty soon,” he said. “We’re fixin’ to start a family.”

  To hide his bewilderment, Rossie took a long drink of his Diet Coke. He pushed on the pedal with his cleated foot, instantly filling the silence with the mosquitolike whine of the electric motor as their cart climbed a hill.

  “I’m hopin’ for sons,” Boone said.

  “Sons,” Rossie echoed.

  “I’m the last of the Parleys,” Boone said. “It’s gotta be boys or nothin’.”

  He would reveal the truth to Boone later, at a corner table in the lounge of the clubhouse, the backs of their necks red and warm from the sun, a third round of bourbon buzzing through their veins. Oh, how to tell a man he’s been fooled by his wife! And that his family name will perish when he takes his final breath on this sweet Earth.

  Seven

  Dear Chatter: To the person who wanted to get rid of moles. Just pour gasoline and broken glass down that mole hole and it’s see-you-later-alligator.

  Dear Chatter: To the lady who wants to get rid of the deer eatin’ her hydrangeas in her backyard: Just set out a bowl of urine and that’ll scare those deer away. It’s got to be male urine because those deer aren’t afraid of women.

  Margaret was halfway through transcribing Chatter when she decided her ears needed a break. Too much of the Georgia drawl created an uncomfortable discordance in her mind because it differed so greatly from the collective societal voice she’d absorbed as a child. Taking in too much Chatter at one time had the same effect as someone banging away on the black keys of a piano. She removed her earphones and walked back to Randy’s glass-walled office.

  Margaret was the only person in the newsroom who seemed comfortable in Randy’s presence, and indeed people would look over with wariness when they heard the two of them cut up in laughter, as if they were suspicious of being made the butt of a joke.

  This was the first time in Margaret’s life that she had had a boss other than her mother, but authority held no mystique or power in a household that questioned its every motivation and move. And Ruth Pinaldi, whose like-minded, messianic famous friends would drop in for weekend visits, taught her daughter to hold no one on a pedestal. Margaret’s eggplant Parmesan was loved by Jane Fonda and Paul Simon. Betty Friedan would call a day ahead with her request for Margaret’s Puerto Rican asopao, a rice dish flavored with green olives and capers, smoked ham hocks and dark-meat chicken.

  “Hey,” Randy greeted her. “You want to have lunch?”

  “I don’t think I have time for lunch.”

  “Sure you do. Come on. I need a Waffle House fix.”

  “Waffle House?”

  “You haven’t been to Waffle House?” he asked. “Oh, man, you haven’t had scattered, smothered, and covered?”

  Randy had tried his first Waffle House restaurant on the initial trip down to Selby. He saw his first one outside Louisville, and as he sank deeper into the South, the brown-brick-and-yellow restaurants grew in frequency, with one and sometimes two at every interchange. Randy liked the aggressive retail presence and the retro appearance: the white orb lights suspended like yo-yos over yellow Formica tables, the counter stools upholstered in orange vinyl, the walls covered in what looked like wood-grain Contac paper, the waitresses’ hair hidden by yellow-and-orange kerchiefs tied at the napes of their necks. Later, he would learn that what appeared to be an effort to look fifties actually was nothing more than a refusal to evolve and match the aesthetic whims of the outside Yankee world. Fact was, the privately held Waffle House Corporation had intentionally never changed—it remained true and loyal to Southern sensitivities. The iced tea was sweet as Life Savers candy. The salad was made exclusively of iceberg lettuce with some token shavings of carrot and red cabbage. There was a constant tug-of-war between the smoke from frying pork and unfiltered cigarettes for dominance of the airspace, and after eating at a Waffle House you carried in your clothes for the rest of the day the smells of a culture not concerned with preventive health.

  Randy and Margaret took stools at the counter. A waitress whose name tag said Nancy—Nineteen Years! set white coffee mugs down in front of them. Around her neck hung a gold cross the size of a circus peanut. Her glittery, aquamarine eye shadow reminded Margaret of the contraband Barbies she used to play with whenever her mother was at work.

  “How y’all doin’ today?” she asked.

  “Very well, thank you,” Randy answered. He turned to Margaret. “Do you trust me to order? You like spicy, right? Okay, then, two orders … no, two double orders of scattered, smothered, covered, chopped, diced, and peppered. And two sweet teas.”

  “Y’all want chili on those hash browns?”

  “Absolutely,” he answered.

  After scribbling down the order, the waitress stepped up to a line of brown tape on the floor, about five feet from the grill. “Okay, boys!” she yelled, bringing her pad out to arm’s length as if she were farsighted and reading a song book, and she began to bark out the order. “I need two scattered-smothered-covered-chopped-diced-peppered. And drown it all!”

  The two cooks before the open grill, both of them middle-aged men (Lonny—Twelve Years! and Warren—Seven Years!), wore the pup tent–shaped paper hats Margaret remembered from American Graffiti. Their faces were pinched in focused scowls of concentration, and it took Margaret a few minutes to understand why. Each waitress shouted out her order, and, like tape recorders, the cooks absorbed the words and repeated them back, all the while their hands reaching for rubbery orange squares of cheese and flipping circles of red, raw meat and dumping piles of shredded potatoes onto the sizzling grill.

  “My God,” Margaret said. “How do they remember everything?”

  “It’s like that in every single Waffle House,” Randy replied. “Is that the weirdest damn thing or what?”

  “But why?”

  “You’re asking me to interpret Southern culture? Hell, Margaret, I don’t know why. Why do the grown men here keep the Y’s on the ends of their names? You tell me why.”

  Within five minutes, Margaret had before her a steaming mound of hash brown potatoes speckled with chopped tomatoes, onions, diced ham, American cheese, jalapeños—all of it awash in a big ladle of chili. The waitress suggested she try a few shakes of Tabasco to top it all off, and Margaret agreed.

  “I had two more calls about dogs today,” Margaret said to Randy as they ate. “Where’s Red Hill Plantation?”

  “It’s the newer McMansion neighborhood around Sugar Day. The docs and lawyers and children of Old Selby. Why?”

  “Someone’s black Lab was found dead in the middle of a neighbor’s driveway. And then there was a different dog found in someone’s yard. Or at least it sounds that way.”

  “You mean in addition to the ones from last week?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hit by cars?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t tell from what I’ve heard in the calls.”

  “So that makes what? Five now?”

  “That we know of.”

  “My guess is death by monster truck,” Randy said, speaking with his mouth half full. “The teenagers in that zip code know no limits. North Selby is so fucking weird. They think they’re English aristocracy over there.”

  Despite being the editor of the newspaper, it was obvious to Margaret that Randy had no intention of ever integrating with Selby; he had divulged to her that the president of the newspaper division of Granite-Peabody told him that if he did
his job well they would rescue him from his exile deep in the heart of Georgia and reward him with the managing-editor position at the Enquirer. As a result, Margaret thought he was more anthropologist than journalist, except that his observations were always tinged in judgment—funny and accurate, yes, but oftentimes mean-spirited.

  Randy had not even bothered to search for a house. He lived in the new Residence Inn, an extended-stay, faux-Tudor motel off I-75 on the west end of town, and, even after half a year, the warranty tags still hung from the grill inside the oven. As if he were a guest, Randy continued to use the free, miniature soap bars, even though they seemed to dissolve as quickly as a lozenge on the tongue, and he was always cursing at the diminutive size as they slipped from his grip like a wet goldfish. He flavored his take-out meals with the paper packets of salt and pepper that the maids refreshed every day. He unconsciously refused to change the AOL access number on his laptop from Philadelphia to Selby, requiring a long-distance call each time he wanted to retrieve his e-mail. In fact, the only thing Randy Whitestone had added to feather his new nest-in-exile was the black Krups espresso machine in the kitchen, which he used morning and night.

  Randy kept a journal of what he called his “travels,” filled with the details of life in central Georgia that he found unique, and he would pull out this palm-sized leather-bound notebook and his yellow Mont Blanc fountain pen whenever anyone started telling him something that he feared his friends on The Outside, as he called it, would never believe.

  He focused his attention and wrath on the affluent northern half of town, the environs of Sugar Day Country Club. These were the people, the power brokers and agenda setters, whom he had to deal with in his job, and he despised their air of exclusivity and attempt to create an identity of British landed gentry. He did not like how they drove to Atlanta for shoes or T-shirts instead of shopping with the working class and blacks at the Selby Mall. He scoffed at their perfectly symmetrical, oversized, hollow-pillar homes with the circular driveways and boxwood topiary hedges. He did not like how they had all but abandoned the public school system.