Southern Living

by Ad Hudler

  Suddenly Suzanne noticed her lips; they were dry from unconscious, deep, open-mouth breaths, and she moistened them with her tongue.

  “There,” he said, standing up and backing away to look at her. “When you’ve got a figure like yours why hide it under an opaque raincoat? This way, you can show off your beautiful Pucci and strut around in your Prada at the same time. It’s brilliant, really.”

  “How much is it?” Suzanne asked, now feeling awkward as she tried to look him in the eyes.

  “Does it matter, really?”

  “Of course not,” she said, recovering. “I just wanna know how many Skymiles I’m gonna get today.”

  He handed her the receipt, and she folded it without looking at the price. “Wait,” he said, reaching into a drawer. “This is my card.”

  With exaggerated slowness, he set it into her hand then looked at her for reaction, as if he’d just slipped her a hotel-room key. “I would love to help you again,” he said. “Nothing would please me more.”

  Nothing would please me more, she thought, and Suzanne caught herself staring at his hands, which led to his arms, which led to his chest, which led to the flattest stomach she’d ever seen on a man his age. Wasn’t he over thirty? Maybe not. He had to be over thirty.

  Suddenly realizing she had ogled for too long, Suzanne severed her stare and put the receipt and card into her Louis Vuitton pocketbook. “Well, thank you so much,” she said. “I just loved that champagne. Bye now.”

  “Good-bye,” he answered. “I will see you later, I’m sure.”

  As the heels of her leather Chanel loafers clicked across the marble floor, Suzanne fought the urge to turn and see if he was watching. She hoped the two glasses of champagne did not make her appear wobbly or insecure.

  All the way down the escalator, through the north wing of the mall, across the parking lot, Suzanne kept closing her eyes for seconds at a time and reliving the snapping of the coat and the brushing of his hands against her skin. A chill spread through her body, as freon fills a compressor, producing a tingling sensation from her cheekbones that traveled up, behind her eyes and over her scalp, down the spine and into her extremities—her wrists, her breasts, the bottoms of her pedicured feet—and then back up again, where all this energy seemed to collide at the base of her skull, causing Suzanne to shake her head.

  And then, once in the car, the heat of the Lexus’s interior reminded Suzanne of that beach in her mind, and there he was again, not naked but in white, loose-fitting Polo swim trunks, the ones she’d bought Boone that he had never worn.

  Surprised at these sensations, Suzanne tried to remember another time she’d felt this way and she remembered Boone’s room in the Beta house at UGA. Only it was not Boone she saw. It was his roommate, Dixon Satterfeld, an ag engineering major from Waycross with brown eyes that appeared to be perpetually dilated. He, too, had this inexplicable, electrical effect on Suzanne, which caused her to stay clear because she had already chosen the promising future neurosurgeon from her hometown.

  Dixon used his hands in a slow, thoughtful manner that reminded Suzanne of an aged woodworker, always seeming to savor the texture of whatever it was he was touching—a pencil, a shiny doorknob, even the braided shoestrings of his boots. She remembered a time when a splinter from Boone’s desk chair lodged in her flesh. Dixon took her hand, set it in his blue-jean lap and slowly, repeatedly stroked his index finger over her palm, as if he were telling her fortune, looking for but not finding the penetrating intruder. And Suzanne, experiencing an intensity of physical pleasure unknown to her, and embarrassed by her reaction, and desperately seeking a polite exit yet wanting to linger right there forever, closed her eyes in confusion and fell backward, into darkness, just as she nearly had again minutes ago in the Prada boutique.

  In contrast, Boone’s gentleness with his hands was a learned behavior that surgeons adopt early on, not a natural one, and when he did touch her it seemed as empty of human energy as a mannequin’s appendage. Over the years Suzanne had witnessed the metamorphosis in Boone and all his peers: As their hands evolved into valuable, precision tools, surgeons seemed to grow away from them, just as she imagined prostitutes abandoning their breasts. Indeed, when Boone’s hands were idle during conversation, he would set them in his lap, palms up, as if they were delicate machines no longer attached to his body. They appeared to be items for which he was not responsible.

  Leaning her forehead on the top of the leather-clad steering wheel, Suzanne looked at the Prada receipt that had fallen out of the bag and onto the floor. She picked it up and discovered she had just paid $1,600 for a new raincoat that she did not even like. But no one in Selby had one, and that made it priceless.

  ***

  With Miss Suzanne in Atlanta for the day, Josephine decided to finish deodorizing the carpets and leave a half-hour early.

  In her baby blue Chrysler New Yorker, she headed downtown on Linella Road, feeling a tinge of relief after passing beneath what her people called “the bridge,” which was nothing more than a railroad trestle next door to Talbots yet it was the symbolic dividing line in African Americans’ minds between the land of Sugar Day and the integrated city of Selby.

  She turned onto Pio Nono Road, named for a pope who visited the city a half-century earlier, into the parking lot of a brown-brick strip mall whose original tenants fled the inner city long ago. What used to be a Piggly Wiggly was now Econo Carpets Plus. Ellington’s Lad and Lassie clothing store had evolved into Middle Georgia Pawn and Gun, whose owner had bolted lemon yellow steel bars over the large windows. Next to that was Eunice’s, whose only signage were the words candles and soap painted in white letters on the window.

  A small, homemade anteroom with the look of a lean- to had been constructed of painted, magenta plywood, and hanging from its low ceiling were hundreds of strings of ceramic beads that reached down to Josephine’s breasts. Eunice had hung them to caress her weary, beleaguered patrons and to help brush away tensions created by the injustices of the day. Josephine felt the cool glass beads gently wipe across the skin of her arms and face and neck, and she soon entered a plain, small store with an island counter in the middle and four walls filled with different-colored bottles.

  “Josephine!” Eunice cried, setting down her fried-fish-and-yellow-mustard sandwich. She raised her arms in the air in a hallelujah manner, her hands aquiver. “Where you been, girl? Horace!” she yelled toward the back of the store. “Horace, Josephine’s here!”

  Horace and Eunice Meeker had run a Popeye’s Chicken franchise, a hat and wig shop, and a car-detailing business downtown on Broadway, but their latest endeavor was this low-rent storefront filled with the entire line of Mama Louise’s Potions. Clearly marked with the word alleged on their labels, they came in little rectangular bottles filled with different tints of clear liquid that purportedly cured or alleviated the ills and hurdles of daily life, including poverty, a bad boss, a mean boyfriend, an unfaithful wife. There was the emerald-colored Do as I Say, the scarlet Road Opener Oil, the orange Go Home, the purple Bend Over, the sapphire Win Lottery. If patrons had an aversion to oil, they could purchase the same remedies in candle form or in a colorful cream body wash that looked like tempera paint.

  With her purse in her lap, Josephine sank into the soiled, tan recliner that Horace had found at the curb two blocks from his house on trash pickup day.

  “Lord have mercy,” Josephine said.

  “Miss Suzanne givin’ you trouble again, Josephine?” Eunice asked.

  “It’s days like today when I’m just hopin’ and prayin’ that the good Lord decides to call me home.”

  She shook her head in disbelief. “You know what she done yesterday? You not gonna believe what she done yesterday.”

  “No?” said Eunice.

  “I come into the kitchen and she’s got on her yellow Playtex gloves and right there on the counter’s a gallon jug of antifreeze, and she’s mixin’ it into some smelly dog food. And I come up and I say, ‘Miss
Suzanne, what are you doin’?’ And she just takes off those gloves and walks right over to her purse and gives me a hundred-dollar bill!”

  “Girl!” Eunice exclaimed.

  “Uhm-hmm. And, Lord, I know right then and there that she the one killin’ all those dogs, and she say to me, ‘Josephine, just don’t say nothin’ about this. I’m doin’ this neighborhood a favor.’ And I tell her I can’t take her money. Jesus would frown on me for takin’ a bribe for such a crime. Killin’ some of God’s creatures. Oh, and did she yell at me? Uhm-hmm. Lord, did she yell at me.”

  “Now why would she wanna be killin’ all those dogs?” Eunice asked.

  Her fingers stroking the padded, velour arms of the chair, Josephine shook her head. “Miss Suzanne do a lotta things I don’t understand … you know she’s pregnant with child? Well, she still drinkin’ wine like she just won the lottery.”

  Horace took a bite of his wife’s now-cold, fried-fish sandwich. Despite having the appetite of a teenage boy, drinking full glasses of whole milk with every meal and constant snacks of pecans roasted in butter and salt, he still had a lean, tall figure reminiscent of a Giacometti sculpture. With his mouth half full, Horace said, “I think you’d better call the police.”

  “Nosir, Horace, I need that job. Lord, do I need that job. I’m just gonna mind my own business. You know what happens when we don’t mind our own business. What I’m hopin’ is that you can find me some kinda potion to use on Miss Suzanne. She one sad, sad girl. I know that ’cause she mean. Mean folks is sad folks.”

  Horace, like his wife, wasn’t certain that the potions they sold had intrinsic, benevolent properties, but they viewed their products in the same light as the Scripture; they were tools of empowerment their people needed to help them believe they had control of their daily lives and destinies. The makers of Mama Louise’s Potions also sold a line of more negative tonics—Have Affair, Go Crazy, No Sex, Lose Money—but the Meekers considered them mean-spirited, and they would rather their patrons use positive change to overcome the problems in their lives. Yet, Horace reasoned in his mind, Josephine was kin, his first cousin on his mother’s side, and it sounded as if Miss Suzanne had altogether abandoned inner peace and was too far gone to reform. This time, he would make an exception.

  As the two women talked, he shuffled to the back storeroom and returned with a small, wrinkled paper sack, its top rolled down like a scroll to conceal the contents.

  “This is on the house,” he said, handing it to Josephine. “You be careful with this now, you hear?”

  She opened then reached into the sack and pulled out a small bottle of tonic the color of orange Kool-Aid. Josephine read the label, smiled, and returned it to the bag.

  “Well, God bless you, Horace,” she said, sharing a tired smile. “You a good man. I think this just might do the trick.”

  Seventeen

  Dear Chatter: To answer your question: When a Southerner looks at you with a blank smile and doesn’t answer you right away it’s because he doesn’t trust you and he’s lookin’ you over to see how much damage you can do as a human being. Southerners are good listeners and we take in a lot. Why do you think all the great writers of this country come from the South? Have a nice day.

  Dear Chatter: To that Nixon lover who called I just wanna say he wasn’t no poet, he was a crook. It’s not up to you to tell me where I can throw my trash. God put man on this planet to do what he wanted to do, so there.

  Sipping their peach daiquiris through foot-long straws, Jackee and Donna had been exchanging frequent glances with the table of guys beneath the TV on the other side of the bar at Rio Cantina. “I think they’re fixin’ to come over,” Jackee said. “How’s my hair look?”

  “For the forty millionth time your hair looks fine, Jackee.”

  “You got your lipstick on you?”

  “You know I don’t carry lipstick anymore.”

  In her months at Kroger, in the wake of the accident, Donna’s use of makeup had tapered down to almost nothing. And on most days now, if she wore any at all, Donna allowed herself some blush and a single coating of lipstick every morning, mainly because she missed the smell and it helped keep her lips hydrated in the dry, cool air of the produce department.

  “What is wrong with you?” Jackee asked. “Why don’t you wear makeup anymore?”

  “It’s a waste of time to wax a rusty Chevy, Jackee,” Donna answered.

  One of the guys, handsome, lean, and dark-haired, stood up from the table, drained the last of a Bud Light, then turned and started to walk toward the girls. It was Donna whom he connected with at fifty feet away—a smile, a nod—and as he got closer she began the countdown in her mind … forty feet … he sees something now … thirty … he thinks it might be hair in my face … twenty … a slight startled, inquisitive look in his eyes … ten … he is panicking now; he has come this far and must do something … any second now … any second … click! Just in time, the magnet in his mind flip-flopped, and what was once attractant became repellent.

  “You wanna dance?” he asked Jackee.

  And as she got up and walked with him to the dance floor, his friends back at the table looked at each other in confusion. What the hell happened? He’s got the wrong one.

  “Where on earth did you get tomatoes so red and juicy this time of year?” Frankie Kabel asked his daughter.

  Donna had already finished her meal, a low-fat stir-fry of broccoli, Napa cabbage, and, in a compromise to her father, sliced skirt steak. At the last minute, she realized the plates of food needed a splash of red or orange, and she hurriedly sliced the tomatoes and lightly drizzled them in olive oil. She had learned this trick from her new friend Margaret, who’d switched to her Kroger even though it was six miles out of the way. Margaret was an excellent cook, and she shared with Donna plenty of recipes for her meals for Miss Suzanne, including a white-bean, garlic, and rosemary stew over polenta that she’d been requesting nearly every week.

  “You like ’em?” Donna asked her father.

  “Real good, darlin’. Real good. I s’pose they’re from South America some place.”

  “No, Daddy, they’re American-grown. Outside Orlando.”

  “Well, praise God.”

  “They’re hydroponic tomatoes. They’re grown hangin’ up in the air without any soil.”

  His fork in midair, he frowned. “I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

  “It’s a cleaner environment ’cause they’re not in the ground. And they don’t catch as many diseases that way.”

  Frankie set down his forkful of tomato and took a drink of sweet tea. “It’s just not right, though, Donna,” he said. “It’s not natural. God intended fruits and vegetables to be grown in the ground.”

  “Daddy …”

  “Daddy nothin’,” he said, his voice growing louder and more agitated. “This is the same thing as happened last week. The same thing, and I am not gonna agree with you. They are just dead wrong to be messin’ with God’s creations like this.”

  He was referring to their argument the previous Tuesday about genetically modified crops. For their nightly dinner conversation, Donna made the mistake of sharing with him the highlights of a special edition of The Packer that featured genetic advancements in the produce industry. And what seemed to frighten Frankie Kabel the most was her example of scientists introducing the antifreeze gene from coldwater fish into potatoes so they would become more cold-resistant.

  “I’m worried about you, girl,” Frankie said. “I’m worried about your soul.”

  “My soul is fine, Daddy.”

  “I thought that accident of yours would push you closer to God, but it just pushed you further away.”

  “How can you say that?”

  “See? By that way you’re talkin’ back to me now. That’s how. You never used to do that.”

  Donna threw her wadded napkin on the table. “You know what, Daddy? You know why you think the Devil’s got ahold of me? Because I’m not actin’
like a scared little puppy dog around you anymore, that’s why. And you know what? Momma might’ve acted that way around you, but I’m not goin’ to.”

  Frankie quickly leaned across the table, the corner of it pushing into his large stomach. Shaking his finger at his daughter, he said, “If your momma, God rest her soul, heard you talkin’ to me like this she’d die all over again. That heart potato was a sign, Donna Louise Kabel. You are gettin’ too big for your britches. Psalm twenty-five, nine: He guides the humble in what is right and teaches them his way.”

  “And you know what, Daddy?” Donna’s voice grew louder, as if she were yelling at someone who was rolling up his car windows as she spoke. “Genetic engineering is gonna make it so more people can have fruits and vegetables. They’re gonna cost less and taste just as good. And the more fruits and vegetables we’re gonna eat the less cancer we’re gonna have. Maybe Momma’d still be alive today if she got her antioxidants. The Southerners’ diet is killin’ us off. We gotta change it.”

  “We got no control over such things, Donna.”

  “She died of cancer, Daddy. Quit treatin’ her death like it was the will of God. People die of cancer, and there’s some things we can do to help prevent it.”

  “Cancer is the Lord’s tool for callin’ his people home. Why don’t you think they’ve been able to find a cure? Because it’s God’s secret tool—he don’t want us to figure it out. He needed your momma. He called her home.”

  Abruptly, Donna pushed herself back from the table, her chair leaving two black skid marks on the white linoleum, then stormed into the living room. She sank into the couch but got up after a few seconds to walk across the room and turn on the light in the bleached-oak china cabinet that held her mother’s collection of Hallmark Precious Moments figurines. Frankie had built and given it to her for their twenty-fifth anniversary.