Southern Living

by Ad Hudler

  Margaret thought of the air-conditioning in her house, on its last leg, running nonstop even through the night as it tried to catch up with the previous day’s heat. She knew it had to be replaced—that month’s $289 Georgia Power bill convinced her of that—but in her fifteen months in Selby Margaret had managed to save no more than a thousand dollars. She was now buying generic cat food for Susan B. In lieu of blinds, African mud cloth from a garage sale was still tacked over the windows. Margaret had started reading and writing in her journal by candlelight to help keep the house cooler and whittle away at the huge utility bill.

  “I’d be more comfortable at my house, honestly,” she said. “But we can go to your house. I can’t stay long. Just the movie, and then I’m going home.”

  Dewayne got up to go find the waiter, and Margaret closed her eyes and breathed in deeply his wake of air—okay, she thought, maybe his smell wasn’t scones in particular, but it was definitely something baked. She wondered if she was smelling the salt from his pores, or yeast?—and there it was again … that top note of peaches or nectarines loitering in the background.

  When Dewayne returned to the table, check in hand, Margaret was imagining herself leaning into him on his couch, her nose buried in his warm neck.

  “On second thought,” she said, “I think I’d just better go home.”

  On the way back to Margaret’s house, Dewayne, never driving faster than thirty miles per hour, passed the entrance to Red Hill Plantation.

  “Wait,” Margaret said. “Can we turn back? I need to go in there.”

  He turned into a driveway without signaling. No one ever signaled in Selby. Margaret wondered if it was a lingering behavior from a rural past or because the public schools did not have driver’s education … or was it heat-related? Was there a connection between the long, humid days and the economy of words and body movements that predominated behavior here? Southerners were stereotyped as being lazy—and they did indeed move very slowly—but Margaret wondered if this old-dog behavior was simply an ingenious way of normalizing the body temperature in a climate where both crayons and VCR tapes could melt in a parked car within an hour.

  “What are we lookin’ for?” Dewayne asked.

  “I’m not sure,” Margaret answered. “But this is the neighborhood where all the dogs are dying. I’m going to a meeting here next week.”

  The sheriff’s department had been calling Margaret almost daily at the Reflector, wanting to know about any additional dead-dog phone calls into Chatter that she did not include in the column. Law enforcement in town had long enjoyed a cozy relationship with the newspaper, but Randy called them on her behalf to let them know that things had changed under new ownership and that real journalists did not provide such information, and that they’d have to sue the Reflector to get it. Instead, he told Margaret to cover the meeting as a reporter, something she’d been dreading the past five days.

  The houses of Red Hill Plantation were the biggest in town, even larger than those in the historic district. Margaret was surprised at how the neighborhood seemed devoid of humanity, as if it were a space colony and there was no oxygen outdoors, and people had to shuttle back and forth from the stores and work and schools straight to their garages. No toys or children in the front yards. No occupants in all those immaculate, white front-porch rocking chairs. Only an occasional, uniformed maid coming out to retrieve the mail from postal boxes that looked like old-world brick ovens, which had been built in place of the metal-post mailboxes run down by the neighborhood boys in their monster-wheel pickup trucks.

  “When I was a kid we used to drive through here on Sundays,” Dewayne said. “My momma liked to look at the houses.”

  “I don’t feel a pulse in this neighborhood,” Margaret said. “I think it looks empty and sad. It doesn’t surprise me that the dogs are dying here.”

  The clicking of Ferragamos on Mexican-tile floors. For twenty-eight years, it was the last sound Margaret heard at night and the first sound in the morning. Ruth Pinaldi was up by four o’clock every day, reading the Buffalo News, scanning her appointment book for the day, pounding out on her laptop an op-ed piece about pending pro-life legislation in Albany.

  Now, the sound of those heels, as much a trademark of Ruth as her red suits, reminded Margaret of the ticking of a clock, and she wondered if her mother subconsciously knew very early on, maybe even as a child, that her days were numbered, and her goals were endangered, and she had to rush, rush, rush like Lewis Carroll’s rabbit to get it all done, which she did not.

  They had learned too late. Margaret walked in on her mother as she was scrutinizing a CAT scan on the wall-mounted light in her office. “Come on in, Margaret,” she said. “Let me show you something. This …” She tapped the glass with her ballpoint pen bought at Office Depot because Ruth Pinaldi refused to accept any freebies from drug companies. “This is my left ovary. And this … this right here … this white mass that looks like a supernova … this is a six-centimeter necrotic mass with satellite lesions, and I am totally, irrevocably fucked.”

  Armed with all the self-prescribed painkillers she needed, Ruth Pinaldi rode out her last sixteen months at home under Margaret’s care. It allowed Margaret to watch this glacierlike presence in her life drift away, and by the time her mother disappeared on the horizon, Margaret was already accustomed to her absence.

  On the day before she died, Ruth lay on her side in the hospital bed they had brought home. Gaunt and pale, she still had her thick black hair because the cancer had progressed too far to consider chemo, but she had demanded that it be pulled up, out of her way, on top of her head in a pigtail that resembled a whale’s spout.

  She reached out for Margaret’s hand and looked into her daughter’s eyes.

  “You’ve been a great roommate, Margaret,” she said.

  “Oh, Momma …”

  Ruth’s eyes widened. “You’ve never called me that.”

  “I have, too.”

  “No. You always call me Mother.”

  “I don’t.”

  “You do.”

  “Mom!”

  “Stop and listen to me, Margaret … I was never your mom. I was only your mother. You know that.”

  “Mother, please.”

  “I didn’t mean to get pregnant—I’ve told you that before. But I want you to know something … honey … it has been such a pleasure watching you grow up.”

  A tear, which had been forming in the corner of Ruth’s eye, suddenly grew heavy enough to break away and creep down her cheek. Margaret, too, began to cry; in twenty-eight years she had never seen tears on her mother’s face.

  “I really, truly think the reason I never got close to you was because if I did, I could not go on in my work.”

  As her mother spoke, Margaret reached to wipe the tear from her cheek with a corner of the bedsheet.

  “Because don’t you see?” Ruth asked. “How could I terminate all those pregnancies every day of my life if I’d bonded so closely with my own child? How could I rejoice in the fruits of my unwanted pregnancy and then turn around and advise all those young women to abort their fetus? It would have made me a hypocrite, Margaret. And all I can say now is, ‘I’m sorry.’ ”

  Thirteen

  Dear Chatter: I’ve never seen so much litter thrown out of windows in my life. I saw a bag of McDonald’s trash come flying out of a BMW! Selby, clean up your act! To paraphrase Richard Nixon: Such a strange creature is Man—one who will mess in his own nest.

  Dear Chatter: This is to my neighbor, and you know who you are: Quit playing that gospel music so loud or you’re going to be sorry.

  Can we see the manager?” John David asked the clerk at Barnes & Noble. “It’s Faith somethin’.”

  The young man looked at him quizzically. With his wild, intentionally uncombed brown hair and extremely horizontal, thick eyebrows, he reminded John David of the line drawing of Beethoven over the cappuccino bar. Though John David was usually attracted to the type of men
who had commercial charge accounts at the new Home Depot—and indeed he frequently lunched at the aluminum hot-dog stand in front of the home-improvement store on Byron Road—this young man had a brooding intensity he found intriguing and sexy.

  “You must mean Hope Carswell,” said the young man.

  “Faith. Hope. Charity,” John David said. “One of those flower-child names.”

  In search of his manager, he walked toward the back of the store. John David’s eyes absorbed the back of his black jeans; his clinging, butterscotch-colored turtleneck; and the cocky strutting—kuh-lump! kuh-lump!—of his heavy, black Doc Marten boots.

  “That boy is definitely not from Selby,” he said to Suzanne. “He’s so fierce-looking, don’t you think so?”

  “John David …”

  “Like a Renaissance warrior.”

  Two days earlier, Suzanne told John David she wanted to transform the lilac-motifed guest room into a library before the Dogwood Festival party.

  “We need to get to an estate sale to buy some books,” he said.

  “No, John David,” Suzanne replied. “I don’t want some dead man’s books. I want new books.”

  John David called the new Barnes & Noble on Ben Pond Jr. Boulevard and asked to speak to the manager.

  “How much are your books by the yard?” he asked Hope Carswell.

  “By the yard?” she said. “You mean like fabric?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is this a joke? As in, Do-you-have-pop-in-a-bottle-then-go-let-him-out?”

  “Sweetheart, I’ve got better things to do than make prank phone calls to bookstore workers. I’m the highest-paid designer in Selby.”

  “I’ve never been asked such a thing,” she said.

  “Can you get back with me on that?” he asked.

  “Yes. I’ll have to get back with you on that.”

  “I only want hardcover books,” John David said. “None of those tacky paperbacks.”

  Hope Carswell, who would turn thirty-three Friday, stood six feet tall with a brunette, shag haircut and emerald-green, cat-eye glasses. She smiled as she approached them, showing strong white teeth with the dominant canines so common in the portraits of old-money, Northeastern families.

  “Mr. Rush?” she said.

  “Please, you’re makin’ me feel old as my daddy. It’s John David.”

  “Very nice to meet you.”

  “And this here’s Suzanne Parley. She’s the lady who’s gettin’ the new library.”

  “I just love your bookstore,” Suzanne said, offering her hand. “Those pictures of people over the coffee bar are so cute.”

  Hope, who had moved from Washington, D.C., to open and manage her first Barnes & Noble, was constantly amazed at how liberally the local women here used that word, and how they always stretched it, like a piece of fresh taffy, from one syllable into two: kee-YOOT. If something pleased the eye, a cover of a book, the piping on a chair, a sweater from Talbots, a pair of gilt pineapple bookends, they would alert their female compatriot shopper with a “Now isn’t that kee-YOOT?”

  And it did not take Hope long to learn that in order to make the numbers her bosses expected from a new store in a virgin, growing market, she would have to find more room up front for cute items that could suck these wealthy, north Selby women out of the antiques and silk flower and linen stores and into her doors.

  Out went half the titles of Kurt Vonnegut and Carl Hiaasen and P. J. O’Rourke and Dave Barry and others whose needling, aggressive sense of humor did not seem to match the collective local sensitivity. In came an enlarged greeting-card section and leather-bound journals and pens topped with dyed ostrich feathers and a wooden book with hollowed out middle that held a TV clicker and any gilt object Hope could find in the supply catalogs: gold-coated monkeys and cherubs, busts of Shakespeare and James Joyce and Emily Dickinson. (“I could sell a bowl of Cheerios if it was painted gold,” she told her supervisor.)

  “So you gonna sell me books by the yard?” John David asked.

  Hope shook her head. “I called my regional supervisor, and she said you would have to buy them book by book … and then we’ll just ring everything up in the end with a twenty percent discount. Is that okay?”

  “Are you gonna give us young Beethoven?” John David asked, pointing northward with his chin to the other side of the store.

  “No,” she answered. “I’m sorry, but you’re stuck with me. So, are we ready? Where should we start? Art books?”

  “I like the color of those over there,” John David said, pointing.

  “Excellent choice,” Hope said. “Biographies.”

  Standing, Suzanne watched them as John David pointed to and described a book—“The yellow one with the fern-colored letters”—and Hope would pull it from the shelf and show him the cover.

  “I already told you I don’t care what the front of the book looks like. Just the side. All we’re gonna see’s the side.”

  “Do y’all mind if I sit down?” Suzanne finally said. “I’m feelin’ tired.”

  “She’s in breedin’ season,” John David explained to Hope.

  Hope set down a stack of books. She quickly walked over to Suzanne and took her arm. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “You should have said something. Please, come sit in this easy chair. Let me get you some coffee.”

  “You’re too kind,” Suzanne said. “Maybe some sweet tea would be good.”

  “I’m afraid we don’t have any sweet tea. But we have a really good mango tea.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Well, then, I’ll just take some water, thank you.”

  The past month had been glorious—everyone was waiting on Suzanne. Boone, who would not let her cook now, often brought home takeout from different restaurants, and he was surprised how much the lasagna from Café Amore tasted like his wife’s homemade version.

  Lately, Suzanne had been staying up after Boone went to bed, and she would drink a bottle of chardonnay as she leafed through catalogs and wrote down items for John David to order. At the end of her illicit evening, too dizzy to wash the wineglass and eliminate all evidence, Suzanne would turn off the burglar alarm, walk out onto the patio, across the yard, and up to the edge of the forest that separated their property from the eighth hole of Sugar Day. Then, awkwardly, like a presidential wife throwing out the first pitch of a baseball game, Suzanne would chuck the glass as far as she could into the trees. Some broke against the trunk of an oak or sweet gum or pine, but most of them landed in the thick quilt of decaying leaves and needles. In the morning, when the rays of sunlight penetrated the strip of forest, the glass sparkled like dew on spiders’ webs. No one would ever know the difference. The only living creatures who ever went back there were those stupid dogs, and that problem was being taken care of.

  Historically, Boone did not like Suzanne to linger in bed in the mornings, and he intentionally tried to rouse her. He would drop the toilet seat, shut the medicine cabinet door too firmly, or set his glass bottle of aftershave onto the granite countertop with an unnecessary amount of force.

  Nowadays—and who would have thought that the possibility of a baby would change him so much—Boone slipped out of bed, tiptoed into the closet, then walked down the hall to shower in the guest bathroom so the running water and his Norelco did not wake her. Some days he even made coffee and set aside a cupful for her in the microwave. And better still, he was leaving her alone in the morning. It had been three weeks since she last heard the six A.M. rhythmic rustling of the 520-count sheets as Boone stroked himself in preparation, an audible warning of things to come, like the thunder of an approaching storm. And on those mornings, with her eyes closed, she would suddently sense the mass hovering over her, bringing darkness for two or three minutes, until the cloud was spent and moved on its way.

  Yet she would welcome him now; Boone was sweet again. He was the man she remembered from ten years ago, and Suzanne had actually enjoyed him these past few weeks. For the first time in years he was sharing an
ecdotes and jokes from the hospital. He listened when she brought out fabric samples and paint chips from Lonnie’s Color Wheel, and he even gave an opinion on the wood for the library bookshelves. Over breakfast, they laughed together at items from Chatter, and, briefly one day, she almost mustered enough courage to admit that she occasionally called the hot line herself.

  Suzanne knew this could not last, but she was not yet ready to give it up.

  At the Barnes & Noble, she reached into her purse and pulled out an alligator-skin Daytimer. With a royal blue ballpoint pen from the Amelia Island Ritz-Carlton, she began a list:

  Gain weight!! Krispy Kreme trips daily! More Krystal burgers at lunch. Buy whole milk instead of skim.

  In Atlanta: Maternity clothes. Nordstrom? Neiman Marcus? Stop by Aveda Salon for cleansing lotion. Any new candle scents?

  Find throw for caned recamier in downstairs hallway. Must have some of same cranberry color from mats in framed botanicals. NO chenille!

  Ask John David: Who sells Italian marble faux fruits (like in the ad in Veranda)?

  Gift for new TACKY neighbor.

  Kroger list:

  martini olives

  bananas for Boone’s cereal

  those cute little tangerines

  tampons

  Like a spirit taking leave of its body, Suzanne’s mind drifted into the cherry-wood cabinets of her kitchen, snaking among the cans and bottles and boxes, circling the peanut butter jar, peering within, and then on to the refrigerator, where it gauged the crispness of the baby carrots and counted the Stouffer frozen entrées that lined the freezer-door shelf like a set of miniature orange encyclopedias. What was missing on this daily tour of inventory and need? What could not wait until tomorrow, when Josephine would go to the store?

  She clicked the ballpoint pen and wrote down one more item: