Southern Living

by Ad Hudler

  “Do what?”

  “Do they do that in New York—go into other people’s refrigerators like that?”

  “Like what?”

  “That’s okay. Never mind.”

  “No, Dewayne, please. I’ve obviously done something wrong here. Please, tell me.”

  Again, he stopped chopping. “Well … it’s just kinda forward.

  That’s all.”

  “Opening the refrigerator?”

  “That’s how I was raised.”

  “Is this a family rule or cultural rule?”

  “I thought everybody was raised that way—you just don’t go into other people’s refrigerators unless you’re family.”

  “Wow,” Margaret said. “That’s fascinating. Why?”

  He shook his head. “Just always been that way.”

  “So, it’s the same as rifling through someone’s panty drawer?” she asked.

  Dewayne said nothing and looked down at his hands, which were still dicing the onion.

  “You’re blushing!” Margaret said. “My God, Dewayne you’re a bigger prude than I am.”

  “I wouldn’t know anything about that,” he said.

  “About what?”

  He paused, letting courage accumulate like water behind a dam of mud so that it could gather in mass and finally burst through: “Panties,” he finally said.

  Fifteen

  Dear Chatter: That girl findin’ the heart potato is a sign from the Lord that he wants us all to shape up and get nice and start treatin’ everyone like the Bible says we should. Love thy enemy. That’s what that heart potato means.

  Dear Chatter: Can anyone tell me where to find a good selection of imported beers? All I seem to find everywhere is Budweiser.

  The turnout for the emergency meeting was so great that Margaret had to park her mother’s Mercedes two blocks away. As she walked down Red Hill Drive—there were no sidewalks in this subdivision—Margaret smelled the paper mill south of town, an odor she likened to wet spitballs with slight notes of anise root and mint and sour milk. Almost weekly, newcomers to town railed about the odor in Chatter, worrying about airborne carcinogens. Yet natives swore the smell had actually improved over the years, and that every nose got used to it if it stuck around long enough, just as ears learn to ignore the ever-present buzz of fluorescent lights.

  A man, presumably the owner of the house, answered the door. He smelled of a musky cologne and wore a blue, pinpoint-oxford-cloth shirt with the initials HDR on the pocket.

  “I’m Margaret Pinaldi,” she said, eliciting no response. “With the Reflector?”

  Suddenly, his eyes widened. “Oh, yes, yes,” he said, offering his arm to be shaken. “I’m Harnod Ristle. Pleased to meet you. Please, please come on in, come on in. Thank you so much for joinin’ us tonight.”

  Margaret walked into the foyer of polished limestone floors and a wallpaper of blooming peonies. “What an unusual name,” she said. “Is it H-A-R-N-O-D?”

  “That’s it. That’s my momma’s maiden name.”

  Considering the patriarchal leanings in Southern culture, Margaret was intrigued by this tradition that gave women’s surnames one last leg to hobble on before they collapsed and decayed into the earth. She had encountered men named Haney, Verney, Walker, and Chalmers and women who went by Word and Tucker and Munnolin.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t catch your name the first time.”

  “Margaret Pinaldi.”

  “Are you new at the Reflector?”

  “Relatively new … yes.”

  “Well, come on in, make yourself at home. Everyone else is back here in the den. I sure do wanna thank you for comin’.”

  The den had a men’s club feel to it, with an abundance of dark wood, broad leather furniture, a stuffed pheasant on the fireplace mantel, and a wildcat of some sort immortalized on a fake outcrop in a corner of the room. Next to that was a freestanding globe the size of a beach ball. Later, when walking by, Margaret would notice that each country—and not all the countries were represented—had been carved of semi-precious stones and inlaid into black-onyx seas.

  Chardonnay and bourbon flowed freely in crystal tumblers and stemware. A black, uniformed maid offered cheese straws from a silver platter. To show solidarity, some of the women wore sweaters or vests with dogs crocheted or embroidered on them. Margaret noticed a uniformed Perry County sheriff’s deputy sipping a can of Coke. And holding court in a corner was an ebullient middle-aged woman with a flame-red, perfectly round bouffant that reminded Margaret of the halos in medieval paintings. From earrings to shoes, she was dressed in yellow so pale it almost resembled French-vanilla ice cream. Margaret had seen her around town, driving a Cadillac of the very same color.

  Despite Margaret’s objections, Randy had sent her to cover the meeting as a news story, and she knew she could not leave without quotes from people in attendance. Margaret began to work the crowd. All the while, she caught glances from the woman in pale yellow who, with her hand perpetually stuck out front like a campaigning politician’s, seemed determined to interact with every person in the room.

  “Hey, y’all!” yelled Harnod Ristle, clapping his hands. “I need your attention up here.… Y’all now!… Y’all now!… Everybody!… up here!”

  The buzz in the room died down, quiet enough that Margaret could hear buoyant ice cubes tinkling in the glasses.

  “I wanna thank y’all for comin’ tonight, and I’m gonna hand the gavel here to Lieutenant Thorpman of the Perry County Sheriff’s Department. He’s fixin’ to tell us about this crazy mess.… Lieutenant Thorpman?”

  Over the next fifteen minutes, Nordy Thorpman briefed the concerned listeners on what the department had learned. To date, thirteen dogs had been found dead, all in Red Hill Plantation. No puncture wounds. No bullet holes. No signs of trauma from being run over. They looked as if they had simply laid down and fallen into a Rip Van Winkle–like sleep.

  A man’s voice boomed out from the back of the room: “What about cottonmouths?”

  “Not that we can tell,” Nordy answered. “There’s no swellin’ anyplace.”

  “What about mushrooms?” asked another man. “You think they’re eatin’ mushrooms?”

  “We ain’t got no poison mushrooms growin’ here in Selby,” Nordy answered. “But I’ll tell you this—we do think someone just might be feedin’ ’em poison.”

  The comment drew gasps and whispers among the group. Suddenly, one man in a maroon polo shirt raised his hand.

  “Sir?” Nordy acknowledged.

  “Do you think they’re eatin’ my wife’s cookin’?” he asked. Nordy ignored the laughter. “Any other questions?” he asked. Suzanne Parley, holding an empty wineglass, raised her hand.

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  Her hand came down, and she nervously began twirling a section of her gold necklace around an index finger. “How do you know they’re bein’ poisoned?” she asked.

  Lieutenant Thorpman, who had been leaning back on the edge of the desk, stood up and squared his shoulders, then hooked his thumbs in his belt.

  “I ain’t at liberty to say anything else about it, ma’am,” he said.

  “Why not?” someone asked.

  “It’s an ongoin’ investigation. There’s some things I just can’t say right now. But y’all need to know that we’re doin’ everything we can do to figure this thing out. Sheriff Barnes knows this neighborhood is home to Selby’s finest families, and he promises he’s gonna get on top of this. The sheriff wants your dogs to be safe. No man should have to worry about his dog dyin’ young.”

  Unbeknownst to Margaret, Randy had snuck up behind her to read from her screen.

  “Holy shit!” he blurted, jolting Margaret in her seat. “This reads like a Johnny Cash song. Did he really say that?”

  “I can’t write a news story, Randy,” she whined. “Besides, nothing happened. It was interesting, but nothing happened.”

  “Bullshit,” he said, “you
’re doing fine. Just keep going. I need it in twenty minutes.”

  As she did in her journal entries, Margaret selected those details that tickled and fascinated her the most, and they were the type of fictionlike details Randy had been trying to get his staff to include more of in their reporting, such as Lieutenant Thorpman’s sad, basset-hound eyes and his habit of scratching his left forearm when he answered a question … and the oil portrait of the owner’s golden retriever who had succumbed to cancer (“Radar” 1982–1996 … Gone huntin’ in heaven, said the brass plate beneath) … and, flanking the Ristles’ driveway, identical sandstone sculptures of Irish setters, each with a paw on a basket of stone flowers … and, Margaret’s favorite detail of the evening, the tuxedo cat who attentively watched the entire meeting from the window ledge outside.

  She finished just before ten o’clock. After sending the story on to Randy, Margaret went to the bathroom then to the lounge to retrieve her purple, plastic Hunchback of Notre Dame lunch box that she’d found at a garage sale in her neighborhood.

  On her way out, she stopped to see Randy. He leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head. “You’re right,” he said. “It’s not a news story.”

  “I told you so.”

  “It’s really, really great, but it’s not a news story. It’s an essay is what it is.”

  “Pass it on to whoever can use it as research.”

  “Still, it’s really good. Hilarious.”

  “It’s not meant to be—that’s your perception of the culture—but thank you.”

  “New lunch box?” he asked.

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Nice.”

  “And look.” Margaret opened the lid and pulled out the thermos. “It’s a castle turret. Isn’t it fun?”

  Everywhere Margaret turned she’d been finding irresistible items of whimsy that had been absent from the home she shared with her mother all her life. It’s not that Ruth Pinaldi disapproved of a child-centered environment, she just never really thought about it. Margaret was ten when she lost her eighth baby tooth one night while munching corn on the cob. Her mother, upon noticing, gasped and said, “Oh, my God! I forgot the whole tooth-fairy thing. I owe you”—she paused, calculating in her head—“a dollar and seventy-five cents.”

  Ruth Pinaldi’s life was filled with battles—raising a daughter alone, scurrying to shore up the eroding foundation of abortion rights, struggling to keep open a clinic that did more than its fair share of pro-bono work—and, as in the military, her tools in life needed to be easily recognizable and plain and sturdy, which gave their house on Linden Avenue the feel of a spartan bachelor’s apartment. She banished throw rugs from the house. (“They are obstacles in a necessary path.”) And why, she asked her daughter one day, should they place a bowl of colorful fruit on the center of the kitchen table when it needed to be moved for each meal?

  “Have you been avoiding me?” Randy asked.

  “No.”

  “I get the feeling you’ve been avoiding me.”

  At two minutes before seven, Margaret was roused from bed by an energetic rapping at the back door. Somewhat groggy from staying up until one o’clock to finish a collection of short stories by Flannery O’Connor, she hurried into her aqua chenille bathrobe and scuttled out of the room.

  Holding a white paper bag and the day’s Reflector, Randy blew in like cold air.

  “There’s hope for this town yet. Look: Bagels! And the Times! Today’s Times.”

  “It’s seven o’clock, Randy.”

  “I’ve got something to show you.”

  He set the bag on the kitchen counter and pulled out two bagels and a clear, plastic dish of cream cheese. “I’ve never seen you with your hair down,” he said, looking at her. “It’s longer than I thought.”

  He looked around at the spartan furnishings—an orange bean-bag chair, a card table and chairs, and a lava lamp that Margaret had found at Second Hand Rose. “Nice place,” he said. “Who’s your decorator?”

  “You’re here this early to show me bagels?”

  “No. This,” he said, tossing her the Reflector, still folded in its plastic bag, which Randy called a condom. “On the op-ed page.”

  Margaret unfolded the paper and turned to the editorial page in the local section, which Randy had renamed Metro from Mid-state Report. She scanned the two pages … Ellen Goodman … William Raspberry … a guest-opinion column about the new Planned Parenthood that was scheduled to open that month in Selby … and then she saw it and gasped. Randy had taken her notes and run them as a guest editorial column … with her photograph!

  “Randy! What is this?”

  “It’s brilliant. That’s what it is.”

  She scanned the essay—he had run it almost verbatim—and at the bottom was an italicized tag line that said, Margaret Pinaldi, a “Reflector” writer and editor, earned her B.S. in anthropology and master’s in women’s studies at State University of New York at Buffalo. She is covering this issue for the “Reflector.”

  “Where did you get that picture?”

  “It’s from your photo I.D. H.R. had a copy.”

  “You didn’t tell me you were going to do this.”

  “I didn’t ask.”

  “I would have said ‘no.’ ”

  “I know.”

  “Youuuu!” She shook the open paper in his face like a voodoo rattle and let it fall to the floor. “God! I feel so … violated!”

  “I don’t understand what you’re so mad about,” said Randy.

  “You’ve exposed me,” Margaret answered. “Don’t you understand that?”

  “Most people cream their jeans if they get on the editorial page.”

  “I’m not most people, Randy. I am a very private person. It is why I like doing Chatter.”

  “Would it help if I told you the publisher loved it?”

  “No, it would not.”

  “Here,” he said, handing her half a bagel slathered with cream cheese.

  “I don’t want any, thank you.”

  “Oh, quit pouting, Margaret. Come on, let’s celebrate brilliance. Yours and mine.”

  “Sometimes I think your arrogance might even dwarf my mother’s.”

  “It’s called confidence.”

  “That’s exactly what she used to say.”

  Randy set down the bagel and walked up to Margaret. He put his hands on her arms and dipped his head down, trying to see into her eyes. “Hey,” he said in a voice softer and lower than she had ever heard. The tone startled Margaret, and she felt the tension ebb from her body. “I thought you said you were drawn to confidence,” he said.

  “No,” she replied. “I said I was drawn to brilliance.”

  He leaned into her. “So am I.”

  A good eight inches shorter than Randy, Margaret had to tilt her head back as he moved in over her like a cloud, and as they kissed Margaret kept her eyes open. Overhead, a moth banged against the lit bulb again and again and again, despite the warnings of the corpses of her burned brethren that littered the glass of the fixture. She seemed slower each time she returned to the bulb … dazed and burned and weaker but inevitably unable to resist such brilliance. And for what in return?

  “No,” Margaret mouthed beneath his lips. “Stop.”

  And when he rose with a quizzical look on his face, Margaret, too, was perplexed, uncertain if she was addressing Randy … or the moth … or herself. But one thing she knew for sure: It was not Randy she was kissing here—it was her mother.

  Sixteen

  Dear Chatter: When I talk to a Southerner why do they look at me with a blank smile? It’s like they don’t understand what I’m saying or asking. Can someone enlighten me here?

  Dear Chatter: The only way to keep a squirrel from eatin’ your bird seed is to shoot it.

  Dear Chatter: I’m absolutely amazed at how you Southerners can find Jesus and God’s hand in everything. Let’s get some things straight: God has nothing to do with you winning the l
ottery or the raise you get at work, and he sure as H—doesn’t do magic with potatoes. I’ve lived in Selby for six months now, and sometimes I feel like I’m living with wild natives of some third world country.

  In the Rand McNally atlas, cities are represented by pale orange, ragged stains that grow with each census, creeping outward like a drop of water on a paper towel. In the center of the orange mass that was Selby, Georgia, floated a strawberry-shaped white spot, and therein lay Sugar Day Country Club and its affluent environs, a boldly gerrymandered island in the Sea of Selby created long ago so the leaders in town wouldn’t have to pay city property taxes on their sprawling brick homes. For this reason, some locals called it The Reservation.

  Sugar Day was host to everything that mattered in affluent, white Selby. It was where a stripper could still perform at an allmale cigar party for the birthday of a prominent banker. It was where Hickey Freeman and Talbots sponsored their annual, regional trunk shows and where a wife would debut her newest, Austrian-crystal Judith Leiber handbag.

  It cost eighty-five thousand dollars to join, and golfing privileges were another twelve hundred a month from initiation till death, but Sugar Day had a five-year waiting list. And young, climbing couples would brood and worry and feel like the fat kid on the playground as they awaited sweet inclusion and sipped their chardonnay and bourbon with the masses in no-name bars and restaurants throughout town.

  Lately, though, cracks had formed in the foundation of the venerable golf club. For the first time in the history of the one-hundred-and-sixty-year-old institution, both the publisher and editor of the Reflector had declined invitations to join, as did the general manager of WSEL, middle Georgia’s oldest and farthest-reaching television station. Not wanting to anger the local advertisers, the publisher and TV executive tiptoed around the issue. (“Oh, we’re not the golfing types.”) But editor Randy Whitestone was not as diplomatic. He’d been heard in a local Mexican restaurant, slamming an empty Tecate bottle down on the table and proclaiming in Yankee volume, “It has no black or Latino or female members. That’s why we’re not joining your stupid club!”