by Cathy Holton
“Everyone I know drinks coffee,” she said wearily, leaning to pour herself a cup.
“It will stunt your growth,” Leonard said.
“I started drinking coffee at twelve,” Lavonne said, holding her cup up with both hands, her elbows resting on the breakfast bar.
“I rest my case,” Leonard said. Ashley and Louise thought this was funny. Leonard wasn’t usually funny. He grinned at the girls, enjoying himself.
“I’m five feet six inches tall,” Lavonne said stiffly. “That isn’t short.”
“Don’t be mean to Mommy,” Louise said pouring cream and sugar into her coffee. “She isn’t feeling well.”
Ashley picked at a sweet roll, bored. Lavonne tried to concentrate on a spot on the wall directly opposite her. It was difficult to look at Leonard in his Ralph Lauren robe and slippers. It was hard to be calm when all she wanted was to smash her fist into his cheerful face and knock every one of his shiny teeth down his throat. Lavonne fought a sudden urge to throw plates, cups, saucers, frying pans, and furniture. This secrecy thing was going to be harder than she had thought.
“Dolores Swafford called me yesterday,” she said, casting about for something to say to take her mind off smashing Leonard’s face. Dolores Swafford was a local realtor who had managed to build one of the biggest real estate brokerage firms in south Georgia. She billed herself as a Christian Real Estate Agent, and had biblical verses printed all over her business cards.
“What did that old dragon want?” Leonard said, reaching for a sweet roll.
“She says the Winklers have upped their offering price $20,000.” The Winklers were Dolores’s clients. They were moving here from New York and they desperately wanted Leonard’s house. It seemed he wasn’t the only Yankee with dreams of Tara.
“Damn those people,” Leonard said. “When are they going to get it through their heads we’re not selling this house.” Leonard was getting mad just thinking about it. Some people just can’t take no for an answer. Some people think money can buy anything. “I’ll retire in this house,” Leonard said. “I’ll die in this house. They’ll have to take me out of this house in a body bag.”
“Materialism is the last refuge of scoundrels,” Louise said to her father, quoting Nietzsche.
“I love this house,” Leonard said, ignoring Louise.
Lavonne couldn’t remember the last time Leonard had told her he loved her. Admitting his emotions had always been painful for Leonard. He had told her he loved her the first time they had sex, shuddering and whimpering against her shoulder, but Lavonne had known there was more gratitude than love involved. She hadn’t really expected it. She had never heard her father tell her mother he loved her. She couldn’t remember her parents ever saying, “I love you.” The Schwagels had been too practical for all that crazy stuff. Too stoic and emotionally contained.
“Louise, I love you,” Lavonne said suddenly. “And Ashley, I love you, too.”
No one said anything. Louise set her cup down, leaned her elbows on the bar, and looked at her mother, blinking behind her thick glasses. Ashley looked suspiciously from one parent to the other. After a minute she said, “What are ya’ll trying to tell me? I hope ya’ll aren’t trying to tell me something bad.” Her voice rose. “I hope ya’ll aren’t trying to tell me you’re getting a divorce or anything, because I have it on very good authority that I’m going to be named May Queen and there’s never been a Barron Hall May Queen with divorced parents.”
Leonard, who had been lost in some private reverie, woke up. “Of course we’re not getting a divorce, Puddin’,” he said quickly.
“Don’t call me that,” Ashley screamed.
“May Queen?” Louise said. “Don’t you know that’s just an old pagan fertility ritual?” She poured herself another cup of coffee.
“You’re just jealous,” Ashley said, “because you never got named May Queen.”
“I never wanted to be May Queen,” Louise said. “I never wanted to dance around the Maypole and worship that old phallic symbol.”
“Louise!” Leonard wondered suddenly what it would be like to live in a house with no women.
“See how she talks!” Ashley shouted, flinging her arms wide like a stage actress. “She says words like that at school! She talks trashy at school!”
“What’s trashy about phallic?” Louise said, stirring three tablespoons of sugar into her coffee. She looked at her father and shrugged. “It’s Latin.”
“Well I’m glad to see that prep school education has been put to good use,” Leonard said. His ears were pink. His Adam’s apple bounced up and down the thick stem of his throat like a buoy on stormy seas. “I’m glad to see I haven’t completely wasted my money educating you.”
“Everyone at school thinks she’s weird,” Ashley cried. “Of all the sisters in the world, oh why did I have to have her?”
“You and your moronic little friends,” Louise said, sipping her coffee. “You’re all just a bunch of snobs.”
“Well I’d rather be a snob than an intellectual freak,” Ashley said.
“You’re just jealous because I’m smart and you’re not.”
“Oh, right. Like I’d rather be smart than popular.”
“Are you listening to this?” Leonard said to Lavonne. He could feel his resolve to be calm and cheerful oozing through his pores like gravy through a sieve. His stomach felt lumpy. His heart felt thick and glutinous. “Isn’t there anything you’d like to say to your daughter?”
“You’re right,” Lavonne said to Louise. “The Maypole is a phallic symbol.”
“Go ahead and make fun of me in front of the children! Go ahead and treat this like a big joke!” Leonard’s heart flopped around his chest like a wounded beast. He could feel it hammering against the tender bars of his rib cage. If he stayed married to Lavonne, he’d be dead of a heart attack before he was fifty. “I have to live in this town,” he reminded her. “I have to work in this goddamn town.”
“Look, Leonard,” she said. “You can’t spend your whole life worried about what other people think.”
“Well, that’s easy for you to say, Lavonne. When was the last time you brought home a paycheck?” He smiled at her in a manner she found particularly insulting.
Lavonne could feel something swelling beneath her breastbone, something monstrous and persistent. “It’s kind of hard to bring home a paycheck, Leonard, when you’re taking care of two babies and an enormous house.”
“Oh, so now I’m to be blamed for buying you a big house?” He looked at the girls, protesting this injustice.
“You didn’t buy me this house, Leonard. You bought you this house.”
“Well, you sure didn’t object when we moved in. You sure didn’t ask for something smaller. I didn’t hear you complaining that the house was too goddamned big.”
“Actually, Leonard, I did complain. Numerous times. You just didn’t listen. You didn’t listen because you wanted this house, because this house means more to you than anything else in the whole world.”
Lavonne and Leonard faced each other across the breakfast bar. Leonard’s eyes were wild. His pulse raced. One side of his face twitched. The fullness in Lavonne’s chest was beginning to move up the column of her throat. She could feel it when she swallowed, swelling like a tumor. A man who betrayed his wife with prostitutes was capable of anything. She wondered what other secrets Leonard had locked up in his dark cramped little heart.
Leonard shook his finger at Lavonne. “If you think it’s so easy to make a living and support a family, why don’t you try it for a while?”
“Get your finger out of my face,” Lavonne said.
Louise took a napkin and began to write things down. You couldn’t make up dialogue like this. Louise figured the greatest gift parents could give an aspiring writer was a dysfunctional childhood. She was beginning to believe being born a Zibolsky was a true blessing from God.
“You go to work and I’ll stay home and play tennis and go to the
beach and spend money,” Leonard shouted.
“You wanted me to stay home with the girls, you asshole! You wanted me to quit my job and move down here to this godforsaken banana republic.”
Louise was writing furiously on her napkin. “Is ‘Godforsaken’ with a hyphen?” she asked.
“Goddamn it, you better not be writing any of this down!” Leonard shouted at Louise. “This is our business! This is our family business! You go to your rooms!” He waved his arms wildly at his daughters. Both girls sat where they were. Ashley munched a sweet roll. Louise reached for another napkin. Lavonne stared at Leonard like she would a lunatic stranger. All those years of thinking him an ally, a partner, thinking she knew him inside and out, when, really, she didn’t know him at all. He could be capable of anything. All he cared about was himself. All he cared about was this house. Hell, for all she knew, her name wasn’t even on the title. This thought pushed itself up suddenly into her consciousness. Her breathing slowed. There was a metallic taste in her mouth. She couldn’t remember attending when they closed on the house. She had been saddled with a baby who needed nap time. She couldn’t remember closing on the beach house, either. A warning went off in her head. A sense of foreboding settled ominously in her belly.
Leonard could see a change come over Lavonne’s face, but he was too angry to stop. Any other woman would appreciate what he had given her. Any other woman would be grateful. “You can go back to work anytime you want, Lavonne,” Leonard said, leaning across the breakfast bar and shoving his angry face close to hers. Foam flecked the corners of his mouth. His eyes were wild and dilated, black-rimmed around the pupil. She could see herself reflected there, small and still.
Leonard, sensing suddenly that the mood in the room had changed, forced himself to calm down. He forced himself to breathe slowly and deeply. The kitchen wall clock ticked like a time bomb. Something about Lavonne’s determined expression made Leonard uneasy. He remembered Dillon Foster’s advice: “You have to be like a commando behind enemy lines. She can’t know a thing is wrong until you serve her with the papers.” After awhile, Leonard forced himself to smile. “Sorry,” he said, pushing himself off the breakfast bar. He smiled wider, showing his teeth. “Of course I wanted you home with the girls.” He opened his hands, palms facing her. See, he seemed to say, I’m carrying no weapons. I’m unarmed. He looked at the girls. “Sometimes mommies and daddies argue,” he said. “That’s normal. That’s what happens in every family.”
“Gee, Dad, you don’t have to talk to us like we’re three years old.”
“Just be quiet, Louise!” His voice was harsh but he managed to keep grinning, like a clown with a painted smile. The effect was terrifying. “We’re not angry anymore, are we, Mommy?” he said soothingly. Lavonne looked at her fingers. Her mouth moved like she was adding sums in her head.
“I tell you what!” Leonard said brightly, trying to draw her attention. “Why don’t we all go out to brunch?”
Ashley sniffed. “You mean like one big, happy family.”
“We are a happy family,” Leonard said. He put his arm around Ashley’s shoulders. “We’re just like every other happy American family.”
“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” Louise said. Her father and sister stared at her like she was retarded. She pushed her glasses up on her nose. “Tolstoy,” she explained. “That’s the opening line from Anna Karenina.”
Ashley made a move toward her sister, but Leonard tightened his arm around her, restraining her. It was taking every effort at self-control for Leonard to handle this situation. It was taking every bit of sly conceit and artifice that he had learned through twenty years of practicing law, to manage his family. “You girls go on upstairs and get ready and we’ll go over to the Pink House for brunch,” he said cheerfully.
“I’m not going if she goes,” Ashley said, pointing at Louise.
“I’m not eating at that Temple to Middle-Class Status,” Louise said.
“It’ll be just like old times,” Leonard said. He gave Ashley a little push toward the door. “Won’t it, Mommy?” he asked, grinning at Lavonne and motioning for Louise to go and get dressed.
They all looked at Lavonne. She stopped adding numbers in her head. “Oh yes, Daddy,” she said, forcing herself to look at him. “It’ll be just like old times.”
IN THE END, she convinced them to go without her, pleading a headache. Leonard seemed happy enough to comply, but Louise wouldn’t go until Lavonne promised to meet them later. Lavonne waited until they had driven away, and then she took the spare office key Leonard kept in his dresser, and went down to the office. One or two young associates were working; she could hear the low murmur of their voices as they bent over their tape recorders. She went down the hallway without saying hello to anyone.
Leonard’s office door was closed but unlocked. It took her just a minute to locate the filing drawer marked Personal. The drawer was unlocked. Anyone could have gone through their tax returns, receipts, stock portfolio, and real estate files. He had the whole story of their lives together out there in the open for anyone to see. Anyone but me, she reminded herself as she began to go through the drawer.
It took her an hour. She didn’t find a single document with her name on it, except for the joint checking account, which didn’t have near the balance Leonard’s accounts did. She made copies of what she needed, closed the drawer, and pulling his office door quietly shut behind her, she left.
CHARLES AWOKE THE morning following the party to find Nita gone. The children had spent the night sleeping at their friends’ houses. The house was quiet. He went downstairs and found the kitchen empty, no coffee brewing, no breakfast cooked, no table set, no note from Nita telling him where she was. These were all ominous signs, confirmation that his wife was not in her right mind. They left Charles with an unsettled feeling, a premonition that his life was fixing to change, and not necessarily for the better.
The feeling persisted, intensified, as he hurried into his study, took the key to the shed from his desk drawer, and went through the backyard to check on the Deuce. While he walked down the garden walk he paid careful attention to the soil, trying to spot footsteps in the damp earth, trying to see if anyone from the party had stumbled accidentally onto his treasure. There were footsteps in the soft soil near the fence, left, he supposed, by him and Trevor and Tonya. The men from the tent and awning rental place were taking down the white canopy and long buffet tables. The sky was blue. There was no threat of rain. Charles walked down the path past the pool, past the army of workers, and through the back gate. The garage stood wreathed in kudzu vines and Virginia creeper, hidden in a tall stand of Johnson grass. A stranger passing down the back alley would not even notice it. He looked over his shoulder as he turned the key in the lock and swung the door open, stepping into the darkened garage and allowing his eyes to adjust to the dim light.
The car was covered by a canvas tarp. He could see its long clean lines clearly under the cloth. He walked over to the grille, pulled the canvas back, and ran his hand along the sleek fender like he was running his hand along a woman’s thigh. The Deuce had belonged to his father. It was the only thing the old Judge had ever genuinely valued, the only thing in his life that truly seemed to give him pleasure. As he lay dying, he called Charles in and told him he had arranged to sell the car to his college roommate. He gave final instructions for the sale and asked Charles to handle it. Charles promised he would.
Two weeks after his father’s death, Charles called the roommate, a wealthy doctor in Atlanta, and informed him he would be keeping the car. There was a period of unpleasantness during which the jilted roommate threatened a lawsuit. Charles took the threat seriously. He guarded the Deuce, his possession now, zealously. Even eighteen years after his father’s death, there were few in town who knew of its existence. He never drove it. He kept it hidden in this little garage disguised as a garden shed, hoarding it like a miser hoards his gold. He li
ved in fear it would be taken from him, stolen in the night by a shadowy figure that haunted his dreams like an angry ghost.
Charles replaced the canvas cover carefully and stepped outside, turning the key in the lock. He made a mental note to hang a sign on the back gate, Wet Paint, or Beware of Dog, anything that might discourage people from wandering through the back gate and stumbling on his treasure.
COMING UP THE path he saw Nita’s car in the driveway and suddenly Charles’s world was normal again. All was as it should be. The sun was shining, the Deuce was safe, and his wife was home to make him breakfast. He hurried up the path, whistling.
But Nita was not in the kitchen making breakfast. Nor was she in the family room. Distantly, he could hear the sound of running water. He called her name, but there was no answer. He climbed the stairs, the sound of running water growing louder, and stepped into the bathroom.
Nita was taking a bath. He stood in the doorway and said, “What are you doing?”
She looked at him. One eyebrow rose slightly. “I’m taking a bath.”
“Yes, Nita, I’m not stupid, I can see that. But why are you taking a bath?”
She was soaking in bubbles up to her chin. She blew gently on the surface of the water. “Because I want to,” she said.
Charles rubbed his fingers over his forehead like he was massaging a migraine. He sighed. “Okay, let’s try this again,” he said. “Where have you been?”
“I’ve been at Eadie’s.”
“At this hour? On Sunday morning?”
She made little splashing movements on the surface of the water. “Yes,” she said.
He had heard of postpartum depression. He knew it made women strange and unpredictable. But surely, eleven years after the birth of her last child, Nita was too far along to be suffering from that condition. Was there such a thing as middle-age schizophrenia? Charles made a mental note to check on that. “You didn’t leave a note. You didn’t tell me where you were going. I woke up and you were gone.”