by Ad Hudler
“I swear they seem more consumed with class than race in this town, especially north Selby,” he said. “Have you noticed the weird little stickers in the back windows of all the cars?”
Indeed, Margaret had noted the cryptic adhesive patches, always in the lower left-hand corner of the back windshield of a Chevy Suburban or Mercedes or Lexus SUV. She’d seen a red P on a white circle; a yellow T rimmed in black; a blue star with a cur-vacious, plump white C that was reminiscent of the S on Superman’s chest.
“It’s taken me forever,” Randy said. “But I’ve got it all figured out now. Okay, so the red P is for Montezuma Presbyterian Day School. It’s expensive but very, very conservative, so you don’t see many docs’ kids there. Certainly no Northerners. Basically it’s where the rich white-supremacists go.
“Now, the yellow T is for Traemont Academy. Tuition is half of what it is at Presbyterian Day, so these people can’t even really hang with the P people, and they’re more likely to drive teal-colored cars and luxed-out pickup trucks. The T says ‘I might not have graduated from college but my kids are going to.’ I’m sorry: ‘fixin’ to.’ Oh … and a lot of them smoke. And it’s obvious that a lot of the moms dye their own hair.”
Randy took another bite of hash browns, swallowing after just three chews.
“Now the C,” he continued. “The C is the signature of royalty in the kingdom of Selby. It costs twelve thousand a year for your kid to go there. The C in your window means you belong to Sugar Day or are on the waiting list to belong. It means you own your own tuxedo and that you probably retain a poor older black guy around the house to do things like wash your sidewalk. Canterbury’s acceptable to the transplant Yankees because it’s the only school in Perry County where Emory and Duke recruit. And it’s where the Japanese kids go. Oh, and the C moms will find something at Target and lie and say they bought it in Atlanta.”
Margaret smiled.
“Now get this,” he said. “The other day I saw a Suburban with four C stickers on her windshield. Four! Now what the hell would she need with four of them? What’s she trying to say? ‘Hey, I’m at the top of the food chain in this Cesspool of the South!’ … It’s like some African tribal branding thing, isn’t it?”
Randy’s cell phone rang, an electronic chiming of “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” which turned heads every time it went off. He retrieved it from his breast pocket, looked at the display window, and answered.
“What is it, Pearline?”
Buckner Meeks, a local oncologist and owner of several dilapidated inner-city houses, had caught wind that Randy’s new investigative reporter was researching an exposé on substandard housing. It turned out that Meeks, along with a dozen or so other wealthy, old-Selby families, moonlighted as slumlords who rented their decrepit properties to inner-city black families. Already the reporter had uncovered two cases in which people had been killed by antiquated wiring and a collapsed roof, and the families were paid ten thousand dollars to keep their mouths shut.
“I’ve got to take this one,” Randy said to Margaret. “I’ll be outside. Here.” He pulled his white-leather, Hugo Boss wallet from his pocket and tossed it to her from across the table. “Go ahead and pay.”
As Randy left, a young man on his way inside held the door open for him, watching Randy with a bemused smile on his face. He then walked in, looked at the counter and nodded in the manner of a cowboy at Margaret, politely staying back until she nodded and smiled in return.
Obviously off-duty now, he wore a tan, crew-neck T-shirt tucked into a pair of blue jeans that were clean and pressed but faded at the knees. On his feet were square-toed, broken-in boots that were clean and polished, a brown the color of dark chocolate. A blond cowlick on the top of his forehead reminded Margaret of Dennis the Menace, yet he was a big man, with shoulders that could fill a doorway and hands that could conceal the identity of a can of Coke.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hello,” Margaret replied. “You were right. My cat came down when he wanted to.”
“How long was she up there?” he asked.
“Till that next day. I woke up and he was curled up like a shrimp on the front porch. I thought he was dead—he looked so skinny.”
“She gonna be all right?”
Margaret nodded.
“You keepin’ her inside now?”
“I try to,” Margaret said. “But he’s fast.”
“I thought she was a girl. I thought her name was Susan.”
“No, it’s a boy. It’s a long story, but it’s a boy.”
“I didn’t catch your name.”
“Margaret.”
“Margaret.”
“Yes. Margaret.”
“Margaret what?”
“Margaret.”
He ran his hand through his short, thick hair, then pursed his lips and nodded as he looked out toward the parking lot. “Well, I’m sorry,” he said. “But I was fixin’ to ask you to a movie or somethin’, and I sure can’t call you if I don’t know your last name.”
“I’m not comfortable giving it out,” Margaret said. “I’m sorry, but I’m not.”
“Okay, then,” he said. “Well, have a nice day.”
“Good-bye.”
He turned and headed for a booth where a uniformed firefighter awaited him. Margaret wondered if he walked this slowly all the time or if he was lingering as long as possible, hoping she would change her mind and call out to him. She noticed how the hair on the back of his head grew in a circular pattern with the cowlick at the very center, giving it the appearance of a blond hurricane.
Once more, he turned to her. “Don’t you even wanna know my name?” he asked. “It’s Dewayne.”
“Duane.”
“No, you say it Dee-wayne, like that.”
“Dee-wayne.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Margaret stood and picked the bill up from the table. “Well, I’ve got to get back to work, Dee-wayne. Enjoy your lunch.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Margaret pushed open the glass door and walked into the sunshine and the smell of Confederate jasmine, which mixed with the lingering odor of microscopic pork grease particles that had come to rest in the fibers of her shirt. Randy disengaged from his cell phone as she was smelling the sleeve of her arm.
“You smell everything,” he said.
“Not everything.”
“Yes you do. Why?”
“I don’t know. I get pleasure from smells.”
Over the years, many people had remarked on Margaret’s predilection for smelling the things she invited into her personal space. She smelled each fresh handful of toilet paper. She smelled a clean coffee mug before filling it. When Margaret grocery shopped she unconsciously sniffed each item before setting it in her cart, not just apples or eggplant or a grouper fillet, but even a box of tampons or toothpaste or a lightbulb in its cardboard packaging.
“It’s like you’re looking for clues or something,” Randy said. “Like a bloodhound.”
“Very flattering, Randy. Thank you.”
“So what was that all about inside?”
“What?”
“Mr. Refrigerator.”
Margaret smiled. “That was Dee-wayne.”
“You know him?”
“Not really.”
“What did he want?”
“Nothing.… Nothing that’s your business, anyway.”
From the sidewalk, Randy scowled at the two men sitting in the booth beyond the window.
“Don’t be so sure of that,” he said.
When it was time to build Selby’s first cemetery in the late seventeen hundreds, founding father Reginald Flanders, who did not much like the idea of being lowered into the ground and forgotten forever, found the inspiration for Rosemont. He traveled the world in search of unusual flora that would thrive in this middle Georgia latitude, and he planted them all on these thirty-six acres that consumed four hills.
He told the Selby Reflector, “I
want young couples to come here and proclaim their love beneath these glorious oaks as the sun sets. I want a leafy respite from the heat of the day, where a lady can take her hat off and ponder life from her bench overlooking the majestic Muscogee. I want to see families here, with picnic lunches spread out on the grass, feeling the wisdom and warmth emanating from their loved ones who lay beneath.… In essence, a cemetery in a park.”
In Margaret’s opinion, the word majestic was a stretch as a modifier for the river that ran the entire length of Selby. Sluggish and thick from cutting through miles of clay, it reminded her of a pot of bean soup that had been simmering and thickening for hours. Yet its heavy, tortoise pace, which mirrored the speed of the people who lived here, comforted her.
Margaret had never lived so close to a river and was surprised at what a wonderful meditation tool it was. Watching the water flow eastward, she would let a thought bubble to the surface of her mind, and then she would set it into the current and imagine watching it float away, ridding herself of item after item that crowded and clambered in her mind until she was empty and calm. Somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, or perhaps even farther away now, were nuggets of anger and grief with Ruth Pinaldi’s name on them. Margaret mused that psychics might say she was polluting the environment with toxic waste.
Margaret parked her car at the cemetery entrance, grabbed her journal and began the walk to her favorite concrete bench at river’s edge. She had just forty minutes before dark, when the resident pack of wild dogs that lived beneath an old magnolia tree would awaken and claim the cemetery’s cobblestone streets as their own.
Margaret passed the Victorian gazebo where Robert E. Lee reassured Selbyites more than a century earlier that their sacrifices would not be made in vain. Beyond this lay row upon row of Confederate soldier graves, the identical, arch-shaped headstones so dense and plentiful they reminded Margaret of magnified, white beard stubble. It had rained earlier in the day, and the water gathered in holes and puddles in the red clay, making it look as if the earth were covered in fresh wounds.
Finally at her destination, Margaret sat down to write:
I actually have two man friends!
RANDY: Randy is the type of man I’ve always thought I should/would be attracted to. Smart—brilliant, really—and confident with a passion for excellence that rivals my mother’s. (They say girls marry their fathers, but since I don’t know mine I guess I’m destined to marry my mother.) I enjoy his company, but is it smart to date someone at work even though he’s not my direct supervisor? He seems to have no concern for appearance or rules. I suppose that’s one thing I like about him.
DEWAYNE: His wonderful scent. Smells like warm peach scones. How and why can one of the natives be attracted to me?
At Waffle House I kept fighting the urge to lean into him as you would lean into the shade of a cabana in the desert.
Does he drive a truck?
Eight
Dear Chatter: To the lady who wanted to stop her gums from bleedin’: All you gotta do is rub some kaolin clay and baby oil on those gums every night. Also stop eatin’ potato chips and carrots because there’s somethin’ in potato chips and carrots that makes your gums bleed. Thank you.
Dear Chatter: This is to the person who is messin’ with my husband. I know it. God knows it. You know it. And I am gonna leave it in the hands of the Lord. But I say unto you, “Woe to you.”
In a span of ninety minutes, Koquita paged Donna eleven times. It got to the point that whenever Donna heard the electronic ping that preceded every announcement she would roll her eyes, drop whatever produce she had in her hand, and start walking toward the line of registers.
“What is it now, Koquita?” she asked.
“Don’t get ugly with me, girl. What’s this?” she asked, holding up a bag. Donna squinted, trying to distinguish the mass of green beyond the wrinkles of clear plastic.
“Sunflower sprouts. I already told you that yesterday.”
“I thought you said it was watercress. Looks like watercress to me.”
Donna opened the bag and looked inside. “No,” she said. “Sunflower sprouts are puffier, see? And smell it—smells like a sunflower seed.”
“I ain’t smelling nothin’, girl. What’s the code?”
“Four nine six.”
Carefully, because of her inch-long orange fingernails with tiny rhinestones glued on in the shape of a K, Koquita keyed in the numbers.
On the way back to her section, Donna recognized two girls who graduated from Southeast High a year after she did, Class of ’97. One of them was Raymie Sisson, who was on the junior varsity cheerleading squad with Donna her sophomore year. They were picking out snack food in aisle twelve, Donna’s usual path from produce to the front of the store.
“Great,” she sarcastically whispered to herself. The last thing Donna wanted was for anyone under thirty to see her in this uniform. She hated her Kroger uniform; she hated everything about it. She hated the polyester knit that rubbed against her skin like the nylon scratchie she used to wash the dishes at night. She hated the flared pants with the elastic waist. She hated the brown-colored smock that buttoned down the front and the white accents on the lapels that were so wide they reminded Donna of aircraft wings on the F-16 fighters that landed at Robins Air Force Base east of town.
Donna detoured through frozen foods, undetected, and returned to her work. She had been packaging broccoli rabe in green foam trays with cellophane and decided that she would take some home that night. Donna had been trying to get her father to sample and embrace the new vegetables and fruits she was discovering at work.
“What kinda dessert is this?” he’d asked the night before.
“They’re prunes, Daddy.”
“I know what they are,” he said. “What about some cobbler? Or some cookies and ice cream?”
“Daddy, you’re overweight. You shouldn’t be eatin’ like that. Besides, prunes slow down the aging process in the brain, and they got lots of antioxidants.”
Frankie Kabel leaned forward, toward Donna, who sat across the rectangular oak table. “Food ain’t supposed to make ya live longer, Donna,” he said. “It’s just supposed to make ya live.”
Since her mother’s death five years ago, Donna’s father had gained four to six pounds a year. Donna, who learned to cook from her mother, prepared every meal for her father, and it seemed to her now that he was using this food to help him remember something he had lost, and instead of burying his nose in a perfumed hanky, he held on to his wife through the flavor of glistening brown gravy with a hint of nutmeg. Since his wife’s death, Frankie always wanted the same Sunday-dinner foods every night of the week, and he would stuff himself with cheese-and-squash casserole and stewed okra with tomatoes and smothered chicken and biscuits with butter, stuff himself until he was overcome with the fuzzy, warm dizziness of a carbohydrate overload, and he had to lean back and close his eyes and rest his hands on his belly as if it were a shelf. And then, after a minute or so, with the taste of his wife’s food in his mouth, he would take one deep breath and slowly open his eyes as if returning from a dream, and Donna would see a look of bewilderment and disappointment on his face, and she would feel guilty, albeit briefly, because she was not whom he wanted to see sitting at the other side of the table.
Finished with wrapping the rabe, Donna carried it out to the display case and saw Mr. Tom standing in front of the apple case, his hands on his hips with a furrowed-brow look of concern on his face.
“Mr. Tom,” Donna said.
“Hey, Donna. We’ve got a little problem here.”
“Sir?”
“These bananas … they’re too close to the Fujis. We’ve got to get them farther away. That banana gas is going to ripen those things in a few days, and we’ll have all that waste.”
“Oh, Mr. Tom, I am so sorry.”
“That’s okay, but you’ve got to isolate your bananas, Donna. They really should go on an end cap. Here,” he said, beginning to roll
up the sleeves of his blue shirt. “Let me help you move them.”
“Oh, no, sir, I can do this.”
“It’ll be my pleasure. There’s something I want to talk to you about, anyway.”
The store manager, Tom Green, had been transferred from a Kansas City Kroger two weeks after Donna started work. Aghast at the condition of the perishables sections of his new store, he quickly fired the produce and meat managers, which left Donna all alone with no boss. So three or four times a day, Mr. Tom, as his new Southern employees called him, would breeze through and stop to check on Donna, the smell of his Polo cologne lingering in the air until she would break open a carton of fennel bulbs or ripe bananas. In snippets of conversation he’d learned of her job at Lancôme and noted the sadness and regret and reluctance she’d carried with her to Kroger.
“I want to talk to you about Adrian,” he said, gently placing bunches of bananas into a box on the stock cart.
“Yes, sir?”
“You’ve got to exercise more patience with him, Donna.”
Though she would never divulge this to Mr. Tom, Donna remembered Adrian Braswell from Trafalgar Weaver Middle School. Of course they were not friends, and he most likely would not remember her, but Adrian Braswell was one of those hard-to-forget people Donna always saw and stared at from afar. A five-foot-tall African American, Adrian had one arm that was half the length of the other, and instead of a hand there appeared to be a flesh-colored mandible, two thick, Snickers bar–sized stubs that he worked like a hand puppet. A small, limp pinky finger hung on the underside, dangling like a piece of jewelry. Adrian was a roving stock clerk at Kroger, and because Donna was short-handed in produce Mr. Tom had placed him there to help her out.
“He dropped a whole flat of kumquats today,” Donna said. “They were rollin’ around this place like marbles.”
“No harm done, though, right?”
“And it took him two hours to refresh those nectarines.”
“Donna, the boy has one arm. Would you cut him some slack?”