At VCU, the crowd Zoe drifted into never really broke apart into dating couples, but rolled shouting and laughing through the streets of the Fan and the bars of Shockoe Bottom as a giddy, communal mass. Having sex with someone in the group was almost like having sex with the whole group, because everyone knew what had happened and talked about it.
It was no big deal to Zoe, anyway. At fifteen, she had eagerly handed up her virginity to Rafael, a dark-skinned Mexican summer worker with a slow smile and mocking eyes. After him, the high school boys all seemed childish.
What Zoe continually called space was as important to her as Jesus was to her parents. Independence was, in fact, her religion, and the thought of losing herself in a relationship with anyone triggered a claustrophobic dread.
Then she met Scott Vaden, who slipped into her heart through its one unguarded entrance—music.
Scott was twenty-five, and he played lead guitar in a Richmond band called Carnivore 4. It wasn’t a very good band, having been started by four University of Richmond frat boys primarily to amuse themselves—musical masturbation, Scott always called it. But Scott became an excellent guitarist almost in spite of himself.
Everything came easily to him, even his long blond hair, which never seemed to become greasy or tangled even though he rarely washed it. He moved with a leonine grace onstage in the raucous Richmond clubs where Carnivore 4 played, and Zoe could listen to his amateurish but riveting guitar solos and sense them hoisting him above the crudeness of the clumsy, off-key harmonies of his band mates and the boozy shouts of the largely frat boy audiences.
“You’re good,” was the first thing Zoe ever said to him.
“But your band sucks,” was the second.
Scott was standing at the bar in a place called Yo Mama, and his blue eyes showed no surprise or offense. He laughed.
“I guess they do suck,” he said, “but they’re my friends.”
It turned out that Scott Vaden had no particular ambition in mind for his music. Whenever he mastered something, he tended to drop it—a lifelong pattern that applied to academics, athletics and women.
His parents were rich, and they were still waiting for him to add Carnivore 4 to the growing pile of discards in his life, come to his senses and enroll in law school. It maddened them that Scott never seemed to think of the future.
“My Dad will say, ‘You’ve got to think where you’re going to be in five years,’” Scott told Zoe, “and that just blows me away, because I never know what I’m going to be doing in five hours.”
“Parents are idiots,” Zoe replied with conviction.
Scott liked Zoe at first because she appealed to his sense of whimsy. She was so waif-like in appearance, yet so tough in manner, almost as though she were being operated by a ventriloquist. Later, he liked her even more because she was self-contained. Being needed gave Scott the creeps, and Zoe didn’t seem to need anybody.
Zoe liked music, pot, animals and sex. Scott liked music, pot and sex, and could tolerate animals. Neither could envision a future, and neither cared to remember their past. They were a perfect couple.
It was Scott who changed first, fourteen months into a relationship that was floating along as passively as an ice flow.
“I think I’m going back to school,” he told Zoe one night as they lay in bed.
“Go for it,” was all she said. Then, after a pause, “You’re gonna hate it, you know.”
She never knew what had prompted his decision. With Scott, it was anybody’s guess, and she fully expected him to forget about it the next day.
But he didn’t, even though he never mentioned it again. He simply woke up at seven one morning after he and Zoe had stayed up until three drinking two bottles of cream sherry, dressed quietly, smoked a joint on his way to the law school admissions test site, and produced the second-highest score out of seventy applicants.
“Cool,” was all he said when the scores came back.
The second surprise, for Zoe, was when Scott proposed to her. Sort of.
“It’s my parents,” he explained. “They said they’d pay my way through law school, but not if I’m ‘living in sin,’ as they so quaintly put it. Hey, if it doesn’t work, we can always get divorced.”
Zoe gazed at him evenly and said, “Sure, why not?”
A few days later, Scott announced, “I want to meet your folks.”
“What?” Zoe said, genuinely shocked. “Are you crazy?”
“Well, they’re coming to our wedding, aren’t they?”
“I don’t know. To tell you the truth, I hadn’t even thought about it.”
Zoe could have predicted how the meeting would go. Scott gave all the wrong answers to Glen’s paternal interrogation, and they hated his hair. All of Glen’s awkward efforts to find common ground simply sailed over Scott’s shaggy head. The young man their daughter was to marry had no discernible opinions on politics, sports or even the weather. Glen was afraid to ask him about religion, for fear he might tear open his shirt and display a pentagram on his chest.
“What kind of music do you play, Scott?” Marsha Leggett asked him.
He grinned—nastily, she thought.
“Loud music,” he told her.
Why did he want to be a lawyer, they wanted to know? And what kind of lawyer?
“I dunno,” he replied. “Corporate, I guess. I can probably get into my dad’s law firm where I really won’t have to do much. I figure I can get a boat for the weekends and keep playing music at night and on weekends.”
Were there any plans for children?
“Haven’t really thought about it,” Scott said, seeming genuinely disinterested. “Zoe’s got two cats, though.”
What really bothered Marsha Leggett, though, was the sense that Zoe didn’t love this longhaired young nihilist.
“Are you doing this to get back at us somehow?” she asked her daughter when she got her alone.
Zoe considered that possibility for a moment.
“No,” she said finally. “I don’t think so, anyway.”
“Are you pregnant?” her mother asked.
Zoe made a face.
“Mom!”
There was no wedding in the traditional sense, although the Vadens and the Leggetts attended the justice of the peace ceremony. Their appearance at the reception, held in a friend’s backyard deep in the Fan, was mercifully brief, and as soon as they left, the party moved indoors so that Carnivore 4 could play and the guests could indulge in substances considered illegal by the Commonwealth of Virginia.
At one point, as she sprawled stoned in a beanbag chair, watching Scott leer at her as he banged on his guitar, a disquieting thought crept into Zoe’s mind, “What the hell have I done?”
A prophetic thought, it turned out. The marriage, if that’s what it was, lasted a year after Scott got out of law school. He quit the band and cut his hair. “It’s not that I have anything against it,” said his father, second-ranking partner in the Broad Street firm of Henson, Vaden, Freeman & Franks, “but some of our clients do.” His guitar stayed in an upstairs closet of their town house, and Zoe stayed bored.
They never really fought—it wasn’t their style. But Zoe gradually drifted back with her old friends; packing up and leaving for a week at a time to reconnect with the Dead, and Scott found a new challenge in one of the law firm’s secretaries.
He also began wearing a t-shirt that epitomized his slack-jawed takes on life, Been There. Done That.
Before long, he began applying that slogan to Zoe. Still, they rode their increasingly tenuous connection toward the edge of the cliff in a game of emotional chicken, neither wanting to be the first to jump.
The cliff finally arrived around seven one morning. Zoe wandered back to the townhouse after spending the night with her friends. Scott returned about the same time after spending the night with Deborah, the secretary. They stared at each other, standing out in the street.
“This is getting kind of silly, isn’t it?” Zoe s
aid.
“I’ve been thinking the same thing myself,” Scott replied.
After the divorce, Zoe went back to the record store and appeared to move seamlessly into her former lifestyle. Only rarely did pain or regret intrude into her “space,” and when they did, her roommate Holly would say, “You don’t miss Scott, you just miss the good times you had. And there are a lot of good times ahead.”
For eight years, she lived an anesthetized existence. Then, late one night, she heard an old Jackson Browne song at a party, and the words clawed at her from the tape deck with such a fierce relevance that she caught her breath.
“You watch yourself from the sidelines,” Brown sang, as if speaking directly to her, “like your life was a game you don’t mind playing, to keep yourself amused.”
She walked over to the stereo, hit the rewind button, and listened again.
“I don’t mean to be cruel, babe, but you’re looking confused.”
The next morning, a Sunday, she found herself humming that tune in the shower.
“You don’t know the half of it,” she muttered through the beating water. “I’m really confused.”
That afternoon, she got the phone call from Rev. Woodley, her parents’ minister.
Andy flew back from Germany for the funeral and Zoe bought a black dress. Funny, she thought—the only time in her thirty-five years she ever dressed to please her parents was when they were dead. She hadn’t spoken to them in years.
Meticulous as always, Glen Leggett had left a will. After a few paragraphs explaining how all his possessions would go to his widow, attorney J. C. Sears came to this part, “In the event that my beloved wife and I depart this life at the same time, our property and the content of our bank accounts will be divided jointly between our daughter, Zoe Olivia Leggett, and our son, Andrew Curtis Leggett.”
Brother and sister locked gazes across the table.
“I thought they’d written me off,” Andy said.
“Are you kidding?” Zoe replied. “I thought they’d written me off.”
And they laughed, and then they cried, the tears gouging furrows in Zoe’s mascara.
“Now you know why I don’t wear makeup,” she told Andy.
Later, sitting at the oak table in the kitchen where they’d eaten thousands of meals and quarreled hundreds of times, Andy and Zoe pondered the implications.
“I don’t want the house,” Andy said quietly. “I’m happy where I am, and I know Gretchen and the kids don’t want to come here. We might move back to the States someday, but it will have to be somewhere big, where they can find other people who speak German.”
“I don’t want it, either,” Zoe replied. “I spent eighteen years thinking about getting away from this shithole, and I’m sure not coming back now.”
Andy chuckled, in spite of himself.
“All those guys you dumped on are probably managing the Hardees and the Speedy Mart,” he said.
Zoe reached over and punched him in the arm. Hard.
In the end, it was decided that Andy would return to the embrace of his frau and his Uncle Sam, and Zoe would stay in Jefferson Springs long enough to sell the house.
“I trust you,” Andy told Zoe. “I hated you sometimes when we were growing up, but if there’s one thing you’ve always been, it’s honest. Too honest, probably.”
Zoe flashed him a sisterly smile.
“Go to hell,” she said.
That had been in August, a year earlier, and Zoe still hadn’t been able to sell the house. After about six months, when the lawyers finally withdrew their hooks from the Leggetts’ assets, she found herself with a steady supply of spending money. She bought a new truck—after asking Andy first—a bright blue Chevrolet from a Richmond dealership, then she gave the rest of the money to J. C. Sears and said, “I want an allowance. If I keep all this, I’ll blow it in a month.”
She kept the name Vaden, thinking maybe people wouldn’t make the connection, hoping she could get through this time of penance without being recognized or noticed. Sometimes, it worked.
Through it all, Zoe had never stopped writing poetry. Some of it, produced under the guise of Colombian or Jamaican smoke genies, was worthless. Other poems, written to Scott, were too risqué for public consumption. But one day, for some reason, she took some of the others over to the Southside Echo office and showed them to Calvin Hamer.
She caught him on a good day, one in which the old editor was easy prey to impulse.
“I don’t understand all of this,” he said, “but I like the sound of it. How’d you like a little space, once a week? Fifteen dollars sound fair? Maybe it’s time our newspaper got a little culture.”
As she left the office, the same thought came to her that she’d had on the night of her wedding reception, Why did I do that?
But from then on, her license plate took on a new meaning. She cut out the first published poem and taped it to the refrigerator as if she were a first-grader.
My Place. By Zoe Vaden.
CHAPTER EIGHT
PURGATORY
News comes to the masses like drinking water, and the filtration process is ruthless.
What is read to the world by prime-time anchors, or dissected on CNN, or printed in the New York Times, is only a trickle from the river of information continually rushing past.
That river is fed by news tributaries—the wire services, primarily—which in turn are nourished by the larger daily newspapers and big-market TV stations. Smaller news outlets supply droplets of news that sometimes trickle into the mainstream.
Eddie Fogarty knew all this, but in looking through back issues of the Southside Echo during his first weekend in Jefferson Springs, he was at a loss to tell where his new newspaper fit into the watershed. Maybe Echo news was a stagnant pool.
The Echo printed between fifteen and twenty pages each week, and it was a mess. While Fogarty had never cared much about layout, this paper looked as though someone had simply waxed the type and thrown it randomly at the pages. Another thing he began to realize, as he burrowed down through the chaotic stacks of Echoes past, was that Calvin Hamer was worse than a bad editor. He was a non-editor.
For the past decade, at least, the Echo had become Calvin’s toy. He lived for the opportunity to sit at the old Underwood and bang out editorials. His news stories were simply editorial pieces that found homes elsewhere in the maze of unrelated copy. Fogarty searched through Echo after Echo for any shred of balance or objectivity—to no avail.
Anything anyone brought in, apparently, was deemed worthy to be published—usually in the unchanged, sometimes bizarre phrasing of the person who had dropped it on Brenda’s desk. There were four Randolph County communities outside Jefferson Springs, and each had its own correspondent. Scattered through the Echo each week were a quartet of columns—Poplar View News, Bonifay News, Sandy Level News and Conway News.
Fogarty marveled at the banality of some of these dispatches.
“Mr. and Mrs. Melvin Hatton of Sandy Level were visited last weekend by their daughter, Glenda Hatton Hawkins, and her husband Richard, of Conway.”
“This is news?” Fogarty asked the whitewashed walls around him. “Doesn’t everybody visit their parents on the weekends?”
His favorite, though, was a Bonifay News column produced by Novelle Newberry the previous fall.
“We are sorry to learn of the illness of Earl Stratton of Route 4, Bonifay,” she wrote. “We hope Earl will be feeling like his ‘ol self’ soon.”
Ms. Newberry then listed a few bake sales and covered-dish suppers and what the pastor of the Tabernacle Baptist Church had told his flock in his latest sermon. About halfway down the column, Fogarty read: “Earl Stratton of Route 4, Bonifay, is in serious condition in Danville Memorial Hospital. The prayers of his many friends are requested.”
More bake sales, a birthday party, and then this: “We were sorry to learn of the death of Earl Stratton of Route 4, Bonifay. He will be missed.”
Nov
elle Newberry had taken the unfortunate Mr. Stratton all the way through his illness to its sad conclusion, all in the same column. It gave new meaning to a phrase Fogarty used to hear from his old editor, Pat Donnelly, “You buried the lead.”
Fogarty also considered this gem, written by Whitney Scruggs on the discovery of some mysterious pig carcasses alongside a rural road near Conway, Examination by veterinarians showed that the dead pigs were healthy.
The Echo was filled with photos of men with dead deer and men with dead fish and the sort of grip-and-grin shots of smiling people holding oversized checks that Fogarty thought had been banished from journalism decades earlier. The congressman for that district had a monthly Letter from Washington printed, telling his constituents how dutifully he was looking after their interests.
Calvin Hamer wrote well—if a bit too dramatically—, Fogarty conceded, but Whitt Scruggs’ awkward prose was a chore to get through and Regina Judkins seemed to have the ability to turn any story, no matter how potentially interesting, into something as stimulating as a grocery list.
Many of the articles in the Echo were little more than advertisements for local businesses. It was probably like ordering a pizza, Fogarty thought—call Regina and tell her how long you wanted the article, what it should say, how the photograph should be arranged and what the headline might be. If you asked her nicely, she might even let you write it yourself.
He expressed his concerns to Tucker Daniel that Saturday night.
“You guys will print anything, won’t you?” he said. “Anything.”
Daniel looked at him mildly, with a hint of amusement.
“Okay. Looking at those back issues, what would you take out?”
Fogarty grew even more agitated.
“Where do I start? How about those correspondents from Sandy Bottom, or whatever it is, and places like that? I mean, who gives a rat’s ass if somebody went to church with their parents on a Sunday?”
“If it were up to me, I’d get rid of every one of those columns, along with the fish pictures and the check-signing pictures and those mass photos of every organization in the county. I’m surprised you don’t have a group shot of the Ku Klux Klan. And I’d ditch Zoe—her poetry isn’t that bad, but what’s the point?”
The Kudzu Kid Page 7