Revenge of the Kudzu Debutantes

by Cathy Holton

  Fuck them. She sat for a long time watching the traffic pass. Steppenwolf played on the oldies station. Eadie felt the cold lump of sorrow that was frozen around her heart beginning to thaw. Courage and outrage, her old companions, swept through her like a brushfire. Sometime during the mortifying realization that her husband still thought she was stalking him, Eadie had made a final decision. She had decided that everything that happened to her from now on, every aspect of her life, her hopes, her art, her future, depended solely and entirely on her.

  She would go through with the hunting trip revenge, she would commit herself to divorce, she would find a way, somehow, to work again, and when it was all over she didn’t care if she ever saw Trevor Boone again.

  CHAPTER

  * * *

  EIGHT

  LAVONNE ROSE EARLY, ate a bran muffin and some yogurt, and went for a walk. She walked briskly. The morning air was cool and damp against her face and fragrant with the sharp scent of pine. The sky brightened gradually as she walked, washing the yards and houses with a faint golden tinge. Cars zoomed past her; husbands on their way to work clutched steaming cups of coffee, their eyes fixed wearily on the road.

  She had dreamed last night she was flying. High above the roofs and treetops of Ithaca, she soared like a great black bird, gliding peacefully over the sleeping town. It was like swimming, really. Flying. Like moving through water, her body grown suddenly light and supple, making movement effortless. She had awakened to an incredible feeling of lightness and hope. She had awakened to a feeling that everything was going to be all right.

  When she got home the girls had already left for school. She stood in the kitchen and stretched for a while, giving her worn muscles a chance to relax. She poured herself a cup of coffee and sat down at the breakfast bar to read an article on women business owners she had found in one of Leonard’s magazine. By the year 2010, one out of every two small businesses will be owned by women. It made her feel good to read that. She finished the article and sat for a long time, drinking her coffee and contemplating her future.

  It occurred to her suddenly that she no longer had to live in Ithaca. Louise was in her last year of high school. Ashley had another year to go. They would both be leaving in the next two years to go off to college. There would be nothing to keep her in Ithaca except her friendship with Eadie and Nita. Nothing, she reminded herself, except a potential business opportunity.

  She went to the phone and called Mona Shapiro to set up an appointment to see her at two o’clock. Then she called Dolores Swafford, the town’s leading Christian Real Estate Agent, and made an appointment to see her the following day.

  UNTIL SHE MET Eadie and Nita, Lavonne had never had close girlfriends. She had never been one of those giggly feminine girls who surrounds herself in high school and college with other giggly feminine girls. Except for the odd loner she met during debating events or at school clubs, Lavonne’s only true childhood girlfriend had been Teresa Cuplink, her next-door neighbor. The Cuplinks were Catholic and there were nine children ranging in age from two to eighteen, including Teresa, who was a year older than Lavonne but similar to her in temperament and social status. They were both smart and athletic, and at a time when girls were not allowed to wear pants to school or play organized sports, they considered themselves “tomboys.” They would spy on the Cuplink boys, or build forts in the woods, or play Bad Barbie, a role-playing game where they dressed Barbie in revealing outfits and had her perpetrate acts of cruelty on a willing and submissive Ken. It wasn’t much of a childhood, but it wasn’t as bad as some, and when the Cuplink grandmother died and Ralph and Enid moved their swarm to her big crumbling house across town, Lavonne lost her best childhood friend, put on twenty pounds, and went back to reading comic books alone in her attic.

  High school was a blur of homework, honors classes, debating events, and the occasional club meeting. Lavonne had little time for socializing. College, which she attended on an academic scholarship, was little different, except that she managed to lose forty pounds her senior year and met and began dating Leonard Zibolsky. They were both studious and ambitious and socially awkward; it seemed a match made in heaven. Lavonne’s mother died of a heart attack three years after she graduated from college and her father, who had never in his entire married life made himself a sandwich or washed his laundry or made a bed, died six months later. Lavonne and Leonard married that same year, the year Leonard graduated from law school and took a job with a small Cleveland law firm. Three years later, they moved to Ithaca.

  Until they moved south, Lavonne and Leonard had lived quiet, conservative lives. They had not done a lot of socializing. But within their first week in Ithaca they went to three dinner parties, a luncheon, and a brunch. Lavonne had never known people who partied as much as these Southerners did. They’d take any opportunity to have a “throw down.” She couldn’t imagine how anyone ever got any work done.

  The people Lavonne met were kind and polite; they were so friendly and sweet it made her teeth hurt just talking to them. She had never met people who seemed so outgoing and neighborly. The women especially had a way of making you feel like you’d been good, good friends all your lives. They were always saying about one another, “Oh, she’s a good, good friend of mine,” right before they spilled some juicy bit of gossip about the good, good friend involved.

  At every party, Lavonne saw the same people. At every dinner party, every supper club, every barbecue, the same small group of people congregated. They were an island in the great rushing river of social equality. They were an evolutionary disaster waiting to happen.

  To make matters worse, Leonard had gone completely native. She hardly knew the man anymore. He had managed to pick up a really bad Southern accent, the kind that TV actors use. She caught him practicing one morning, standing in front of the bathroom mirror, drawing out his vowels and talking like he had cotton batting stuffed in his mouth. It was embarrassing. It made Lavonne feel as if she had been dropped suddenly into the middle of a Tennessee Williams play and everyone but her had been given scripts. It made her feel as if she had been transported to a Southern version of The Stepford Wives.

  But then Lavonne met Eadie Boone, and her opinion that Southerners were all alike and unoriginal changed forever. It was early June, their second week in town, and she and Leonard were at the “get acquainted” party the Boones had thrown to welcome the Zibolskys to town. They had arrived at the Boone mansion to find Eadie standing on a table singing the “Georgia Fight Song.” Trevor was trying to convince her to climb down but he was looking around, too, and grinning like a man who knows he’s the luckiest son of a bitch in the world. It was obvious he was crazy about his wife. Lavonne thought Eadie was the most beautiful woman she had ever seen.

  Lavonne stood awkwardly beside the bar that had been set up on the patio and watched Leonard move among the guests like he had lived here all his life. He was wearing khaki pants and a pink polo shirt and loafers with no socks. He’d only been here a little over one week and he was already saying “ya’ll.”

  Lavonne sipped her wine and watched the party and tried not to say too much. Leonard had warned her to just listen for a while, to smile and be polite, and for God’s sake, to keep her voice down.

  Eadie Boone did a high kick and one of her shoes, a stacked sandal with a stiletto heel, shot off and smacked Dolph Meriwether in the back of the head. He swung around violently, one hand, the one not holding his drink, clenched in a fist. Eadie put her hand over her mouth. The party got real quiet except for Trevor’s loud chuckling.

  “Death by stiletto,” he shouted, and Dolph, seeing it was Eadie who had smacked him in the head, relaxed and unclenched his fist and drawled, “I don’t mind you singing the ‘Georgia Fight Song,’ Eadie, but try not to kill me while you’re doing it.”

  For some reason, maybe it was nerves, maybe it was boredom, maybe it was three glasses of wine, Lavonne found all this very funny. She snorted loudly, and the whole party turned
to look at her. Leonard’s face fell. From across the patio, Eadie grinned at Lavonne and lifted her glass in a silent toast.

  Nita James, the shy sweet girl who was dating Charles Broadwell, moved up beside Lavonne and touched her lightly on the arm. “Mrs. Zibolsky, how’re you settling in?” she asked. Lavonne was glad for her support. Nita seemed genuinely sweet and she was very pretty and, like Lavonne, seemed nervous around these people, as if she knew she didn’t really fit in.

  “Call me Lavonne,” she said. “When I hear Mrs. Zibolsky, I immediately think of my mother-in-law.” She rolled her eyes comically and Nita laughed. Nita was engaged to the Tyrant Charles, which is how Lavonne, who had only known him briefly, had already begun to think of Charles Broadwell. Having grown up with an autocratic father, Lavonne could always spot a tyrant, and avoided them if at all possible, a lesson she wished the unfortunate Nita had also learned.

  Worland Pendergrass and another woman stopped by to say hello. “Hi Laverne, I’m Lee Anne Bales,” the woman said, smiling brightly. She had the whitest teeth Lavonne had ever seen. She was wearing a diamond tennis bracelet that she kept twisting around her wrist and holding up to the light so everyone could get a good look at it.

  Lavonne wished she had chosen something a little stronger than white wine to drink. She wished she was drinking whatever Eadie Boone was drinking. “It’s Lavonne,” she said to the woman with the blinding teeth.

  Lee Anne frowned and leaned in close like she suspected Lavonne might have a speech impediment. “Excuse me?” she said.

  “My name. It’s Lavonne, not Laverne.”

  “I just love your outfit,” Worland cooed, her eyes traveling from Lavonne’s shoes to her hairstyle with one darting glance. It was like the flickering of a serpent’s tongue, that glance, and it deduced everything there was to know about Lavonne, from her weight (165), to the kind of schools she attended (public), to the kind of people she came from (blue collar).

  “Thanks,” Lavonne said, trying not to be put off by the woman’s probing eyes, trying not to appear too vain or pompous. She had recently lost fifteen pounds and she was feeling pretty good about herself. She wasn’t fashionably thin, but she wasn’t fat either, and the woman at the department store had promised her navy blue was slimming.

  Later, Lavonne overheard them talking about her in the bathroom. She was waiting outside the locked door, standing in the wide hall that ran from the front to the back of the Boone house. Tall doors opened onto the formal rooms on either side of the hall, which were filled with huge sculptures, slightly menacing female shapes that glimmered in the lamplight like an army of Chinese tomb figures. Lavonne remembered that someone had told her Eadie Boone was an artist.

  She could hear Worland Pendergrass and Lee Anne Bales from behind the heavy door.

  “My God, the Yankees are coming.”

  “Can you believe that suit?”

  “Can you believe she’s wearing white shoes with a blue suit?”

  “Can you believe she snorts when she laughs?”

  “Yes, I can believe it. Look at how she looks.”

  “And the husband’s even worse.”

  “If that’s possible.”

  Lavonne went upstairs to find another bathroom. When she came back out onto the patio, Eadie Boone was standing beside Nita James with her arm draped around Nita’s shoulders. Lavonne made her way through the crowd toward them. She could hear Leonard’s loud laughter from somewhere across the pool, and she could tell from the sound that he was already drunk.

  Eadie saw her coming and grinned. “Hey, I’m Eadie.” She stuck her hand out and Lavonne shook it. “Sorry about all this,” she said, lifting her hands to indicate her guests. “These whores, cheats, and backstabbers are the best Ithaca has to offer in the way of social entertainment, and if you’re like me you’ll learn to get through it by drinking as much as you can stomach and ignoring as many people as you can. Later on I’ll introduce you to the few, besides my husband and Nita here, who are worth knowing.”

  A waiter passed and stopped to take Lavonne’s drink order. “I’ll have whatever she’s having,” she said, pointing to Eadie’s glass.

  AFTER THAT, EADIE and Lavonne became best friends. They went everywhere together, and under Eadie’s influence Lavonne became the wild and crazy girl she had never dared be in high school and college.

  Once they got drunk at a bar in Atlanta and Eadie took a piece of blank paper and scrawled For a Blow Job You’ll Never Forget—Call Worland. She put Worland’s home phone number on the paper and then they called a cab and drove to the nearest Kinko’s and made five hundred copies of the paper. They had the driver stop at a parking lot in downtown Atlanta and they took turns throwing reams of paper into the air. Two weeks later Worland tearfully told them she had been receiving obscene phone calls from as far away as Tokyo and she’d had to change her phone number. She confessed that her husband, Connelly, had been looking at her real funny lately. She was pretty sure she must have somehow gotten listed on some Internet porn site. Eadie raised her eyebrow when Worland said this, but Lavonne frowned and shook her head, no. She figured they’d done enough damage.

  Sometimes they’d go out to Bad Bob’s to drink Coors long-necks and swing dance with the cowboys and carpenters and peanut farmers who congregated there. Bad Bob’s was out on the river close to the concrete plant. It was the kind of place that showed up in every bad movie about the South ever made. It had concrete block walls painted shit brown and a big yellow door and no windows. Someone had tried to brighten the place up a bit by painting a cowboy scene on the front wall, complete with grazing cattle and cowboys on horseback and dancing señoritas. A sign above the door read Beer, Food, Dancin. The parking lot was always filled with the usual assortment of pickup trucks and Pintos and Camaros. It was the kind of place where Lavonne would never have set foot if she weren’t with Eadie Boone.

  Usually, if they drank too much, they’d call Trevor to come get them, but once they called Leonard. He pretended to be good-natured about the whole thing in front of Eadie, but once they got home, he shouted at Lavonne about responsibility and social standing and the importance of keeping a good reputation and in general acted the way she suspected her father might have acted if she’d been a bad girl in high school.

  Lavonne lay down on the spinning sofa with a pillow over her head so she wouldn’t have to hear Leonard while she pondered the mysteries of friendship and centrifugal force. Right before she passed out, she realized that being Eadie Boone’s friend had opened her up to a whole world of opportunities and experiences she might never have had if she hadn’t pulled up her Cleveland roots and set them down again, tenuously, in Ithaca, Georgia, and for one brief moment between consciousness and oblivion, she was deeply and earnestly grateful.

  EADIE AND LAVONNE were inseparable the first six months after Lavonne moved to the banana republic of Ithaca, and then everything changed. Lavonne got pregnant.

  She wasn’t even supposed to be able to get pregnant. She’d been afraid to tell Leonard after her last medical exam that the doctor had told her she would never conceive. She was stunned. “Never?” Never. The young doctor seemed bored. She protested, “Are you sure?” Very sure. “But I’m still young.” Perhaps you should consider adoption. “You’re not God—you don’t know whether I’ll get pregnant.” I’d stake my career on the fact you will not.

  Two months later she was pregnant. She thought of the pregnancy as a miracle, not only because of the young doctor’s dire pronouncements, but also because of the infrequency of her and Leonard’s sex life. The fact that a pregnancy would occur, that life would renew itself against such obstacles, had a profound effect upon Lavonne. She stopped drinking alcohol and caffeine. She began to plan and cook only healthy meals. She began an exercise routine.

  Eadie was supportive, up to a point. She had made it clear that she and Trevor would never have children, that her life would always revolve around Trevor and her art. Those were her pr
iorities. Eadie knew what it was like to grow up in a house where children are not valued, where they come a dismal last in the long line of parental priorities.

  Gradually, Lavonne saw less and less of Eadie Boone. By the time her second child was born, they saw each other at dinner parties or the occasional luncheon or the annual beach vacation. Lavonne’s whole life revolved around her two daughters. They were like twin suns and she a doddering old planet that circled, endlessly entranced, within their radiant orbits. Somewhere off in the farthest reaches of cold deep space, Leonard circled them all like a rogue satellite. He was often gone, but Lavonne didn’t care. She got used to it being just the three of them. She liked the sameness, the carefully measured routine of their days together. They were the friends she no longer needed. The sisters she never had. The career she would never return to. She thought it would always be like this.

  Time passed like the flashing of a comet. The girls, her playmates and confidantes, the center of her life, were suddenly grown. They locked their bedroom doors against her. They grew sullen and private. They did not want her sticking her nose in their business. They wanted her to “get a life” of her own. The illusion of a purposeful life that she had built so carefully around herself crumbled.

  Now, she was forty-six years old, teetering on the edge of divorce, and driving to an appointment with Mona Shapiro to see if she could figure out what she was going to do with the rest of her life.

  LITTLE MOSES WAS cleaning the plate-glass window when she arrived.

  “Hey, Lavonne,” he said. He was wearing a T-shirt that read Shofar, So Good. “My mom’s in the kitchen. Go on back.”

  The kitchen was cozy and warm with the fragrance of rising bread. Lavonne stood just inside the swinging door, breathing deeply and watching Mona Shapiro scamper around the small room. Her sleeves were rolled to her elbows, and her face was pink with the heat and the exertion of lifting bread pans into the ovens. She was singing to herself as she worked, a tune Lavonne did not recognize.