Choosing Charleston

by T. Lynn Ocean

  “Well, I haven’t touched it,” Mamma added.

  “Me, either,” Lori Anne said. She’d stopped by for a dose of Mamma’s cooking on her way to the salon. “I don’t even know where it is.”

  “Yes, you do,” I told her. “You practically grew up in this house.”

  “Oh, right. Well anyway, I haven’t touched it either.”

  That left Granny. We all looked at her, awaiting a denial. But she was engrossed in a reality television show and unconcerned by the thermostat issue.

  “Those firemen boys have tight butts, don’t you think? I wonder if they wear them thongs?”

  Daddy did some hemming and hawing while he carefully adjusted the thermostat back to its proper position.

  “It’s so nice out this time of year, the air conditioner shouldn’t even be on,” he mumbled. “Besides, the windows are open.”

  Waste bothered him, whether it was energy, food, or a person’s abilities. He was thrifty and believed in taking good care of what you owned. Growing up, Jenny and I had learned to use a march-like walk inside the house and had developed the ability to speed-view the array of goodies that rested inside the refrigerator. We’d been brainwashed to believe dragging our feet would wear a path clean through the carpet and to envision dollar bills dissipating along with the cold air each time the refrigerator door was opened.

  Some of the prudence must have stuck, because I found myself doing things like shopping for gasoline prices before filling up my tank and turning off the faucet while I brushed my teeth.

  Enjoying a leisurely morning, my family was in the kitchen, drinking coffee and nibbling at the remains of Mamma’s homemade sausage biscuits and cheese grits. Precious sat at the back door, intermittently growling at something in the backyard. The twins played with a large conch shell, taking turns holding it against their ear to hear the ocean. Hunter was busy stuffing a piece of biscuit into his nostril and Taffy lay beneath the booster seat, hoping to catch any dropped morsels. Jenny, chatting on her mobile phone, was unconcerned about everything transpiring around her.

  “That dog’s not right,” Granny said, forgetting about her television show long enough to give the poodle a strong look. Precious must have known the comment was directed at her, because she shot a growled response at Granny.

  “I think it needs to be medicated,” Lori Anne said.

  The dog did a roundhouse growl, covering everyone who was looking at it.

  “Do poodle-dog farms have horses and cattle, too? Maybe it got itself kicked in the head by a bull and got brain-damaged,” Granny said.

  The dog took a long, sucking breath before shooting another growl at her. Doggie spittle began foaming up at the edges of its little mouth.

  “I swear, I’m gonna draw a bead on that thing,” Granny threatened.

  I looked at Daddy, wondering aloud if any of his shotguns were within easy reach. Granny had always been a strong-willed woman, and usually when she said she was going to do something, she followed through. Luckily for the poodle, Granny had probably forgotten the threat shortly after uttering it.

  Daddy dismissed my concern about the guns with a wave of his hand from behind the business section of The Post and Courier. “They’re all locked up in the gun safe.”

  “All of them?” I asked, thinking about shooting the dog myself. Lori Anne and I were helping Mamma clean up the kitchen and I was about to take the trash out when she stopped me.

  “The new trashcan has this tricky handle lock,” Mamma warned me, “and be sure to strap the bungee cords back on when you’re done.”

  “Bungee cords?”

  “Your father has declared war,” she told me in a hushed voice. “With the coons.”

  “Coons?”

  “There’s a whole mess of raccoons toying with him…it’s been going on for a couple of months now. They keep getting into the garbage and strewing it all over the yard. He tried trapping them, but they were too smart for that. All he caught was a squirrel and a possum.”

  “What happened to them?”

  “Oh, he turned them loose. Anyway, he’s tried stacking bricks on top of the trashcan lid, booby-trapping it with a string of jingle bells, squirting ammonia around it and he even put out one of those battery-operated pest deterrent things that emits a high pitched sound. But nothing worked.”

  “What happened to the noisemaker thing? I thought they’re supposed to work pretty well.”

  “It disappeared,” Mamma whispered, shaking her head. “Your father says one of the coons carried it off.”

  As I went out, Precious growled at either me or the bag of trash I toted. Maybe both of us. I thought briefly about putting her outside, with hopes the raccoons would carry her off and stash her with the stolen battery operated pest deterrent.

  What should have been an easy chore turned into a ten-minute ordeal. Daddy had built a three-foot high enclosure around the heavy-duty rubber trashcan, and my first obstacle was getting through the safety latch on the short fence’s miniature gate. Bricks lay beneath each of the two wheels, apparently to keep the garbage can from being pushed or rolled by mischievous raccoons. More bricks rested on top of the lid. I chipped a nail getting into the tricky handle lock Mamma warned me about. And one of the bungee cords popped me on the shoulder when I unhooked it.

  Back inside, I asked Daddy if he’d given names to his new pets.

  “Not you, too!” he said. “Your mamma already teases me enough about those crazy raccoons!”

  “Don’t you have some kind of impenetrable high-tech garbage can at your store? There’s got to be something that would be better than bells, bricks, and bungee cords!”

  “They’re smart, the little buggers are. And their paws are like little hands. They can get into anything.”

  Our conversation turned to new products that were hot sellers in his store and I brought up the Protter Development project. His mood changed instantly.

  “It’s a done deal, Little Girl. It’s going to happen, and there’s not a damn thing I can do about it.”

  “So what’s your plan?” I asked. “What are you going to do?”

  “I suppose we’ll have a grand going-out-of business party,” he joked, but I heard defeat in his words.

  Deciding she didn’t need to get to work right away, Lori Anne talked me into going for a drive, just to spend some time together. Because the weather was so nice, we found a parking place on Queen Street and went for a walk. Window shoppers and sightseers filled the sidewalks, soaking up Charleston’s ambiance.

  We found ourselves at the Smith Killian gallery and meandered inside to browse. One of my favorite art galleries, it was a beautiful old building that had previously been a residential home.

  Colorful Charleston scenes and black and white photographs covered the walls. Lori Anne stopped to study an oil painting of a fishing boat and I could tell something was on her mind.

  “What?” I asked her.

  “What, what?” she said.

  “Oh, c’mon,” I said, walking to the next display. “You’ve got that wrinkle thing going on between your eyebrows. It only happens when you need to get something off your chest.”

  She sighed. “It’s about Robert. Since you’ve come back to Charleston, I’ve been thinking maybe I should have told you how I felt about him before you got married.”

  We stopped in front of a bronze sculpture collection, but I was no longer admiring the artwork.

  “What didn’t you tell me?” I asked, feeling a sudden chill and not really wanting to know the answer.

  She lowered her voice. “It’s nothing specific, really. I thought you were crazy to leave Charleston, for starters. I mean, if Robert loved you, he should have moved here. Plus, I just never felt good about you getting married to him.”

  “Why not?”

  Robert had always been a flirt in high school, she said.

  “So were half the other guys,” I said, wanting something more definitive.

  “Right, but
the two of you were sweethearts, you know? So why did he flirt with everybody?”

  “Because he was good looking and could get away with it,” I answered. “Besides, everyone knew he was a flirt. I used to tease him about it.”

  “There was also the time after that football game got cancelled because the lights wouldn’t come on?” Lori Anne said.

  I remembered the night, but nothing unusual stood out. All the students had ended up partying in the parking lot. And that was before Robert and I were even dating steady.

  Lori Anne told me that, before school administrators broke up the party and sent everyone home, she overheard some of the guys playing a game. The object was to say which girl they’d ask out if there were no chance of rejection. Robert had pointed at me and said something about my hips.

  “What about them?” To my knowledge, there was nothing extraordinary about my hips.

  “He said they were wide, perfect for carrying a baby,” she told me. “And he’d pick you because you had nice skin and good teeth.”

  “Wide hips, nice skin and good teeth? That sounds like he was shopping for a farm animal or something!” I said in a tone too loud for an art gallery.

  Lori Anne waved her thanks to an employee and ushered me out.

  “So the other boys were simply thinking of who would be a fun date,” I said outside. “But Robert was looking for a good baby-maker?”

  We headed up State Street and Lori Anne nodded. “I thought it was a really odd thing for your boyfriend say. But then I forgot about it. Besides, you guys went your separate ways in college. I never guessed you’d get back together all those years later.”

  I thought about Robert and the responsibilities of parenthood and my wide hips.

  “He flushed my birth control pills down the toilet a few months after we got married,” I confessed. “I wasn’t ready to get pregnant yet, but he argued that it was unnatural to be on the pill and flushed them.”

  “What did you do?” she wanted to know.

  “Got a refill and hid them inside a box of tampons.”

  Deciding we needed a drink, Lori Anne guided me into A.W. Shuck’s. Although I wasn’t thirsty or hungry, she ordered a glass of wine for each of us and convinced me to split an appetizer of blue crab dip with crackers.

  “I’m no shrink,” she said as we situated ourselves at the bar, “but maybe his goal early on was to create the childhood he never had by making the perfect family. I mean, losing his parents really screwed him up, right? And it was no secret that he hated living with his aunt and uncle.”

  “He felt cheated,” I said. “He always thought they were country hicks. Even though they’re wonderful people, Robert never bonded with them.”

  “Look, Carly,” Lori Anne said when our wine arrived. “The guy just gives me bad vibes. All of a sudden your life completely revolved around Robert. You moved to New York for starters, and you weren’t even married! Then you bought that house, which you told me was way too big. And instead of coming back home to visit, you spent your weekends going to conferences with him or throwing parties for his clients.”

  The crab dip arrived and it looked delicious. Neither of us ate any.

  “Maybe I’m jealous because he took my best friend away,” she finally said.

  “Well,” I said, “even if you would’ve told me how you felt, it wouldn’t have made a difference. I just thought he was so wonderful, and moving to New York was a sacrifice I could live with, since it was what he wanted.”

  She spread some dip on a cracker and handed it to me.

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “You need to eat, or your wide hips could shrink.”

  We burst out laughing, and ate some crab dip and drank our wine. It was nearing one o’clock and A.W. Shuck’s quickly filled with a lunch crowd. A popular spot for fresh oysters and steamed shrimp, Shuck’s was in a structure that had originally been built as a warehouse for Nabisco some eighty years ago. The former warehouse district had been through many transitions, but about twelve years ago, it started attracting locally-owned restaurants. The area has since become a restaurant row. Charlestonians love to eat well, and food critics love Charleston.

  Lori Anne asked if I was mad at her, and I asked if she was mad at me and we both agreed it would be silly for either of us to be mad. Then she predicted Robert would come to his senses, beg forgiveness and want me back in New York, adding that I’d be a crazy fool to go.

  “So would you go back to him?” she asked.

  I thought about it. He’d acted reprehensibly, and his hang-ups about losing his parents were becoming more obvious. But nobody ever said marriage was easy. And despite everything that happened, I still loved him.

  I honestly didn’t know what I’d do, I told her. I’d always believed when I got married, it would be forever. We paid the bartender and walked back to her car, talking with much relief about her current boyfriend instead of my estranged husband.

  * * *

  “Daddy’s here,” the twins announced in high-pitched unison.

  Stephen and his pilot, Mike, were welcomed with much fanfare. The twins, Hunter and Taffy fought for their attention while Mamma and Daddy politely waited for handshakes and hugs. Precious paced between the two men, growling at the ankles of each.

  “Oh, Christ, she brought the dog too?” Stephen said, looking like he wanted to kick it.

  “It’s really not all that bad,” Mamma told him. “It just doesn’t seem to like people all that much.”

  “Or anything else,” Daddy muttered.

  “I thought it was unusually quiet around the house. It was the absence of growling. Damn.”

  Even in jeans and a knit golf shirt, Stephen looked like a successful executive. He complimented my sister perfectly, both in looks and temperament.

  “I’ve got a right mind to shoot that poodle-dog,” Granny told him, standing on her toes to give him a hug and a pinch on the cheek.

  “I’ll get the gun.”

  “You’re married to one of the girls, right?” she asked him. Stephen didn’t look surprised at the question, so he must have known about Granny’s condition. Which meant Jenny must have been following Mamma and Daddy’s lives a lot more than I had been lately. I felt another stab of guilt as I realized how right Lori Anne was when she said I’d been consumed with Robert for the last year.

  “This is Jenny’s husband, Stephen,” Mamma told her.

  “I’m gonna shoot that poodle-dog,” Granny told him again.

  “I’ll get the gun,” he repeated, winking at Mamma.

  I genuinely liked Stephen and although I loved my sister, I sometimes didn’t really like her. How the two of them made their relationship work was a mystery to me. But they did, and they doted on each other. And despite Jenny’s often irrational behavior, she was still together and in love with her husband. Which was more than I could say about myself.

  “She still mad about the fat thing?” Stephen asked me.

  “Well, what do you think?” Jenny said, making a perfectly-timed late entrance. “Of course I’m still mad. I’m not even talking to you, I’m so mad.”

  Stephen’s mouth twitched in what may have been a grin, but he wisely kept it shut.

  “You don’t have to deal with the pressures of being a television personality! I work hard at my appearance, and then you go and tell me I’m fat!”

  “Honey, I love you. You’re not fat.”

  “Well, sure, you’re going to say that now. But, you do! You do think I’m fat,” all one hundred and nineteen pounds of her emphasized the last sentence.

  “You know what, Baby? I really bought the gym membership for me, because I wanted to start lifting some weights again. I just got the family plan in case you wanted to join me sometime. Or play in one of those social tennis tournaments or something.”

  “Really? You didn’t buy it for me?”

  I could see that Mamma and Daddy were as intrigued by Jenny’s logic as I was. Mesmerized, we eagerly
waited for the next act of the play to unfold. Accustomed to such exchanges between their parents, however, the twins only half listened. And Mike’s face was politely blank. It was just another day at work for him.

  Sensing that Jenny was softening, Stephen knew he was onto to something. “Of course I didn’t buy it for you. I bought it for me.”

  She rushed to hug him. “I knew you didn’t really think I was fat!”

  Since the show was over, we headed to the kitchen for lunch, some of us still rolling our eyes. Mamma served her famous chicken salad and it was delicious. She always made it with fresh dill, crumbled walnuts and tangy seedless grapes. Even though I had the recipe, mine never tasted as good as hers.

  Jenny decided that, since her family was already at Mamma and Daddy’s house, they should stay for a few days. Stephen made the necessary phone calls to rearrange his work schedule and Mike decided to head back to Atlanta. Another crisis averted.

  “Oh, and Mike?” Stephen said as Mike headed out. “Don’t forget the dog. Just let the housekeeper know we won’t be back for a few days when you drop the thing off.”

  “I’m taking the dog back? I don’t think it likes to fly. It growls at passing clouds. And remember the last time? It got sick. Then it growled at its own puke. What if it starts throwing up?”

  Stephen raised an eyebrow at him. “You’ll figure something out.”

  “Son of a bitch,” he mumbled, looking around for his four-legged cargo. “You do owe me one.”

  * * *

  Jenny’s getting-ready-for-bed routine was amazing to witness firsthand. It was like a bad car wreck. I didn’t want to stop and look but I couldn’t help myself. There were fifty strokes with the ionic hairbrush, a vitamin C peel-off facial mask, vitamin E and cucumber concentrate eye cream, twenty minutes of a press-on tooth whitening strip and facial exercises with some type of spring-loaded contraption that fit in her mouth. That was just the beginning.

  She produced something that resembled a weight-lifting belt and strapped it around her waist, beneath a silk nightgown.

  “What is that?” I asked.

  “It’s a magnetic weight loss and chi belt,” she answered as though everyone owned two or three.