by Ad Hudler
Dear Chatter: What are cheese straws? Translation, please.
It had rained earlier in the hour, and as Randy and Margaret emerged from the air-conditioned lobby of the Reflector, they saw steam lazily rising from the asphalt of Cotton Avenue. Margaret quickly remembered a call she’d received in Chatter, from some man who truly had too much to say, too many voices in his head wanting to be heard. In between snippets about smothered pork chops and ATM user fees and the new no-smoking policy at Selby Mall, he managed to drop in an exquisite line explaining how steam was the spirit of dead rainwater, rising up to its home in heaven. Margaret was so excited about this revelation that she quickly pulled off her headset and placed it on Harriet’s head, accidentally denting her silver beehive. Harriet politely listened, smiled, said “Well, isn’t that nice?” and then quickly disappeared into the ladies’ room for fifteen minutes.
Randy reached into the breast pocket of his navy blue blazer and pulled out a pair of gray titanium, aerodynamic Oakley sunglasses, which he put on as they crossed the street. Margaret thought they made him look like an insect.
“Jesus! This humidity! Look at my glasses—it looks like I’m in a fucking sauna.”
Margaret internally flinched. Seven months of residing in Selby had already eclipsed twenty-eight years of living with Ruth Pinaldi—her ears were now sensitized to such language. For the most part, all four-letter words used to denote body parts or human waste were absent from the aural landscape of middle Georgia, and hell was verboten because it was a true place and destination people feared. Locals frowned upon damn because it was a root word from the Bible. In fact, Margaret had learned that the word damnation occurred eleven times within this book whose thick yet floppy composition reminded her of a raw porterhouse steak.
Shortly after moving to Selby, Margaret bought her first Bible at the New Way Christian Books and Music next to Kroger, where she found twenty-three varieties to choose from, including a downloadable version for Palm Pilots and a liberally abridged Bible for children with attention deficit disorder. Margaret selected a cheaper, burgundy, faux-leather, New International Edition from Dentwirth and Sons Publishing in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and took it to the checkout counter. A twenty-something woman in braces was reading a comic book titled The Rapture, whose Roy Lichtenstein–like cover showed jumbo jets falling from the sky and exploding into fireballs on downtown streets full of screaming people.
“Do you want a concordance with that, ma’am?” she asked.
“A concordance?” Margaret asked. “I don’t know what that is.”
“You … uh … you don’t know what a concordance is? What do you use in Sunday school?”
“I don’t go to Sunday school.”
For a few moments, the woman looked into Margaret’s eyes with an empathetic, solemn expression, as if someone with a horrible secret had just confided in her.
“Well, but you’re startin’ now, and that’s what counts,” she said. “You know I met a man in here the other day who didn’t find Jesus till he was sixty-nine. A concordance is a reference book. Tells you everything that’s in the Bible.”
“Can you show me one?” Margaret asked.
She disappeared between two aisles of books and returned with the cornflower blue, two-inch-thick New Strong’s Concise Concordance of the Bible. Margaret thumbed through it and was immediately pleased with this discovery: Some patient, fastidious man named James Strong had dissected and cross-referenced by key word all seven hundred plus pages of the Holy Bible! According to Mr. Strong, palm trees were mentioned thirty-five times. Human feet, ninety-two! Foreskins, a mere five. Scabs, seven. Righteousness, two hundred and twenty-six. Horses outranked dogs, forty-three to fifteen. And, curiously, the number six was mentioned one hundred ninety-one times.
Margaret had learned there were two things that Southerners sprinkled over much of their daily lives—sugar and church—and she wondered if these ingredients were what made this culture so gentle. Margaret could always tell the newer Yankee transplants in Chatter calls not only by accent but also by the delivery of their censure. A Yankee would call someone a fat slob. A Selbyite would say, “Now there’s a lady who likes her cheese straws and biscuits.”
Sharing foul, aggressive language in Selby was no different from lighting up a cigarette in a vegetarian restaurant; in their respective cultures, both acts released fleeting but potent environmental toxins that left a lingering unpleasantness.
“You really shouldn’t talk like that, Randy,” Margaret said. “It’s not acceptable here.”
“Okay, then, how’s this: Well, bless her heart.”
“That’s better.”
“Do you even know what it means?”
Margaret shook her head.
“It means ‘she’s a bitch and I don’t like her and I’m fixin’ to say something ugly about her.’ ”
“Have I complimented you yet today on your translation skills?”
“No, really. It’s like this: Well bless her heart, she’s got the fattest ass on the planet and her taste is all in her mouth, but she does the best she can.”
“Where are we eating?” she asked him.
“The Forsyth Room. You been?”
“Are you kidding me? On my salary?”
“I got the membership as a bennie with the job. It was that or a golf club membership, and I’m not fat enough to play golf in Selby, Georgia.”
“I’ve heard the grumbling in Chatter about the new chef,” Margaret said.
“Oh, he won’t last long,” Randy replied. “He’s raising absolute hell with the natives, but his food is unbelievable.” He walked five more paces before adding, “Dixie meets Napa Valley.”
The Forsyth Room was a private club with a facade of ionic columns in front, tastefully worn Persian rugs in the elevators, and a ladies’ lounge with a tapestry-covered Chippendale sofa. Since 1923 the club had served lunch to the business elite of Selby, and though women were allowed as guests of their men, they could not become members. Then, in 1993, Georgia’s new assistant state attorney, Pat Reinhold, received in the mail an invitation for “A Social Gathering of Men,” which was the Forsyth Room’s annual Christmastime, male-only eggnog party for the power brokers of Georgia. Unfortunately for members, the Forsyth Room’s new (and now former) secretary that year, Jennifer Hebovsky, was not a regular follower of current events, and she did not know that five years earlier Ms. Reinhold had made history by successfully suing the University of Georgia for the right to participate on the Bulldog crew team.
With invitation in hand, Pat Reinhold drove down to Selby for the party, accompanied by Marvin Cornish, the Atlanta correspondent for National Public Radio. Cornish recorded an impressive verbal tussle between the six-foot-tall Reinhold and a diminutive Sigmund Rollie, the chairman of the board of trustees, who, earlier that morning, as he did every year, personally delivered porcelain cups of eggnog to every powerful woman in middle Georgia so they would not feel excluded from the fellowship.
Yet the dinner club’s biggest changes and challenges were to follow. The principal investor died shortly after Toyota came to town, and his children, all of whom had severed their Dixie roots and lived in Connecticut, sold the Forsyth Room to TasteMark, Inc., of Charlotte, North Carolina. (A Chatter caller had begged, “Couldn’t they at least sell it to someone from South Carolina?”)
The new chef, snagged from the Ritz-Carlton in Laguna Beach, had made a name for himself in Latin-Asian fusion, and upon his arrival in Selby began integrating Southern ingredients into his repertoire, casting grits and collards in what some locals considered to be undignified roles.
“The catfish in the ginger glaze is incredible,” Randy said. “He puts it on a bed of wasabi grits.”
Though he was speaking to Margaret, Randy had been watching and eavesdropping on the two couples dining a few tables to the south. They had ordered iced teas, and the waiter had just set down four glasses of what was now the restaurant’s house tea, an unswee
tened, lychee-flavored oolong served with a stalk of lemon grass.
“What is this?” asked one of the women. She pulled the lemon grass from the glass and held it up to her nose. “You think it’s sugarcane?”
“No, darlin’, sugarcane’s brown.”
“Could be baby sugarcane.”
The second woman took a drink: “There is no sugar in this tea! Do y’all think they forgot?”
“Smells like Lemon Pledge.”
“The new cook’s an Oriental,” said the other man.
“Oriental?” asked the woman.
“Is this Oriental tea?”
“I don’t know, darlin’. I just know it’s not sweet tea.”
“I expect this in Atlanta, but things are gettin’ bad when you can’t get a glass of sweet tea in Selby.”
“Maybe they think you’re sweet enough, Sugar.”
Randy quickly pulled from his pocket the small spiral notebook and Mont Blanc pen, and he began to quickly scribble down the dialogue. “Sometimes I just can’t believe I’m hearing the shit I hear.”
The waitress came to take their drink orders.
“Do you like olives?” Randy asked Margaret, who nodded.
“Gin?”
Before she could respond, Randy said to the waitress, “We’ll have two dirty martinis.”
“I don’t think I like martinis,” Margaret said.
He waved the waitress away with an impatient fluttering of his fingers. “Have you ever had one?” he asked.
The answer was no. A size four, Margaret had a metabolism she once compared to a child’s pinwheel; one glass of wine provided enough breeze to send it merrily spinning in the sun. She could not imagine the effect of the gale-force winds from an all-gin drink.
“You’re done for the day, right?” he asked. “I am, too. I told Pearline to call me if she needs me.”
The martinis arrived, clouded with olive juice and laced with ice crystals.
“I had someone ask me again today if I’d found a church yet—for the millionth time,” Randy said.
“So have you?” Margaret asked.
“Ha!”
“I’ve been to a few churches.”
“No way. Why?”
“How can you live here and not be curious about church?”
Margaret shared her stories about her visits to both white and black churches. She mused that the latter tended to be less uptight and infinitely more stylish with a stronger emphasis on fashion than architecture. She recalled a women’s choir dressed in asymmetrical, off-shoulder, gray silk dresses. She described heads wrapped in turbans the colors of turquoise and fuchsia and lemon yellow and orange, often paired with a gown that unpredictably swirled like a vortex around the torso. The men wore tailored suits that fit like driving gloves and dress shirts of colors and patterns that Margaret had not seen in the white-world retail landscape.
Next came the Helen Brown Baptist Church on Tifton Road. Drawn by its personal, intimate name, she was surprised to find a mammoth four-story structure that looked like a conventiondestination Holiday Inn with a steeple glued on top. They strategically built the church near an undeveloped exit of I-75, and a computerized marquee with rolling blood-red letters pulled potential worshipers off the freeway.
Got God? Come in for breakfast and daily morning worship! ONSITE day care and dry-cleaning drop-off! We will shine your shoes while you shine with the Lord.
Inside, Margaret found an imposing circular information desk like those in the baggage claim areas of large airports. The greeters, all of them sitting before computer terminals, wore matching lavender polo shirts and cordless headsets like the ones on salesclerks at Old Navy.
On her way to the sanctuary, Margaret passed four nurseries with large windows. In one she counted sixteen rocking chairs all in a row, each of them occupied with a woman snuggling a worshiper’s baby.
Margaret was late, and they had run out of bulletins, so a kindly usher gave her his. “Now this has some things on it that you don’t need to pay no attention to,” he said, “But it’ll let you know what’s goin’ on. Welcome to Helen Brown.”
Margaret noticed that the previous week’s offering and tithing amounted to $67,466.87. She also noted a disclaimer on the bottom of page eight: Ushers, this is only a guideline, not a program. The HOLY SPIRIT is in charge—be prepared to change gears!! You NEVER KNOW!!!!
The sanctuary held eighteen hundred people, a half-scale orchestra, and two choirs whose lavender robes matched the upholstered pews. Hymnals were not necessary because of two minivan-size screens up high on the walls that showed inspirational photographs of landscapes when they were not providing lyrics, which were delivered with help from a bouncing white ball, à la “The Mickey Mouse Club,” guiding worshipers syllable by syllable through the songs.
Midway through the service, the lights in the sanctuary dimmed, and behind the minister, a hundred feet up, near the ceiling, curtains parted to reveal a secret room behind a wall of glass. Two women in white terry-cloth bathrobes took turns being guided into a white Lucite chair and dipped backward for full top-body immersion in what looked like an extra-large shampooing sink from a beauty salon. Margaret was surprised at how clinical and unemotional it was. Each woman leaned back for a second, into the water, then perfunctorily sat upright again, where an assistant quickly wrapped her head in a white towel to help each woman avoid getting any wetter, as if there was something wrong with the water and they had to minimize exposure.
Margaret compared the experience to a baptism she’d witnessed the previous week at a smaller, all-black church south of downtown. There, after an African American woman was submerged, she stood before the congregation, dripping wet in her metallic, kelly green dress, and after ringing out her long hair as if it were a sopping towel, she leaned back and thrust her arms into the air and screamed “I’m here, Jesus—and I’m yours!” And then, as the standing congregation clapped and swayed with the music from the choir, she hugged the minister, turning his black suit even blacker, and then walked out into the congregation, where she hugged her children and her husband, all the while leaving a trail of holy water in her wake. Margaret had never been baptized, but she decided then that if she were going to be, it would happen at a black church where they did not worry about getting the carpet wet.
Randy caught the waitress’s attention. “Two more martinis, please,” he said. Already, Margaret’s head had begun to slowly spiral like an emerging whirlpool, and she began to drink water in hopes of slowing it down. She promised herself not to finish the second cocktail.
“I want to talk about your work at the Reflector,” Randy said. “You know what I think of your work. I think it’s brilliant.”
“I transcribe people’s thoughts, Randy. They are the authors. I’m just the secretary.”
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “You can’t get away with that, Margaret. You have an ear for voice and an eye for irony. Those inane ramblings are strategically, artistically strung together. And I want you to try some other things.” Randy sipped his martini. “I want you to do some writing of your own … with a byline, of course.”
“I’m not trained for it.”
“My undergrad was in English and anthropology,” he said. “My master’s psychology. You’re more qualified than most of those stupid people I’ve inherited in my newsroom.”
“I like the anonymity of Chatter,” Margaret said.
“But you’re wasting your talent. I’m just asking for a few profiles.”
“I don’t think so,” Margaret said.
“I’m thinking of a series that has your name all over it. Profiles of the storybook, quintessential Southern characters—the endangered species of the Middle Georgia ecosystem.”
“I don’t know, Randy.”
Suddenly, one of the women from the table they’d been eavesdropping on bumped into, then slid against the back of Randy’s head. She wore a pale yellow cocktail dress, a large diamond ring, and a trip
le-strand choker of pearls that reminded Margaret of a dog collar.
“I’m so sorry, ’scuse me. I was just tryin’ to take a shortcut to the ladies’ room.”
She looked at Randy, then at Margaret.
“I think I know you, don’t I?” she asked her.
“I don’t think so,” Margaret answered.
“Are you sure?” she asked. “Don’t you work at Silk Flower Warehouse?”
“I work at the Reflector.”
“Oh! Are you a writer?”
“Yes,” Randy interrupted. “She’s a writer. A fabulous writer.”
“Oh, I just love writers ’cause they’re so interested in people, and I never finished school but I’ve been fixin’ to go back for a long time to get me an interior decoratin’ degree.”
She was drunk, and as her brown eyes locked onto Margaret’s with vigor she fell into the chair beside her, and the words, never stopping, began to flow from her mouth like water running down a playground slide. “Let me tell you that bartender over there with the muscles out to here he stopped me and said I looked like one of Charlie’s Angels and I thought that was really sweet to say and he said I was about the prettiest lady he’d seen in here for a long time and I had to tell him I’m a married woman and that’s my husband sittin’ right over there.”
From the corner of her eye, Margaret saw one of the men at the table, shooting quick, inquisitive glances toward them while pretending to listen to his friends.
“Did y’all order the tea tonight? That’s what you should write a story about is that tea. It’s got a little stick in it and it looks like the bamboo on the wallpaper in one of my bathrooms, and I just can’t believe they don’t have sweet tea anymore.”
Suddenly, the woman stopped talking and took a deep breath with eyes closed, as if she were meditating. Her tongue glided across orthodontically straightened teeth. She then leaned sideways, toward Randy, with eyes partly closed, and just when it appeared that she was going to pass out on his shoulder, she reversed direction and weaved the other way, then back and forth again, drunkenly but gracefully and with a rhythm, as if she were remembering a love song from her past. Margaret looked at Randy. He shrugged his shoulders.