“You goob! I can’t believe you are not answering the phone!” I said when her voice mail answered.“I got a call from Mr. Happy Hicks! He’s giving me the job! For at least a month, he says, but in one month he’ll be mine. Call me!” I pulled up right in front of Dad’s store, almost knocking over two elderly people in plaid shorts. I apologized as best I could.
Richard was behind the counter pouring some decaf for a young woman.“Put the cup down, Richard.” As soon as he did, I gave him a bear hug and a big kiss on the cheek. Then I grabbed him by both arms, looked straight into his eyes, and said, “I got a job, Richard. A real job.”
Richard let out a big whoop and spun me around behind the counter. My foot caught an empty coffeepot, and it crashed to the floor. Out came Dad,Thomas, Louise, and Mervine.
“Savannah, you got a job?” my dad asked.
“Yes, I got a job. Can you believe it? I pulled a Vicky and it worked. I got a job! I mean it could have blown up in my face. But really, it was the perfect thing to happen. He saw my tenacity, my drive, my passion he called it. He—”
“Breathe, Savannah,” Dad said.
Louise and Mervine scurried away and were back in no time with a cherry floating in a big old Coke.“Special occasions require special things,” Louise said. Mervine,well, she just shook her head. In thirteen years I had never heard Mervine do much more than agree. Maybe she was mute, but now didn’t seem like the right time to ask.
“Vanni, you’re the man!” Thomas hooted. “I never dreamed you could get a job so quick. Who’s paying who?” He leaned against the door that led to the back.
“And what kind of job did you actually get?” Dad asked.
“Well”—I spread my arms wide and grinned—“You are looking at the next human-interest writer for the Savannah Chronicle.”
Richard, who was trying to clean up the mess we had made and actually give coffee to the lady at the counter, set down the cup and said,“That was what Gloria Richardson did. My,my,my Savannah, those are some mighty big shoes for your dainty little feet.”
“Savannah, that’s fantastic. When did you decide you wanted to do this?” Dad straightened his apron over his crisp short-sleeve green polo shirt.
“Well, it all started with that paper Mother kept sending me.” I filled him in while everyone else returned to thirsty sojourners.
When I finished, he said,“I’m very proud of you.”
“I learned something along the way, too . Ya wanna hear?”
“Shoot,” he said, leaning on his elbow and giving me his undivided attention. Something he had always done. From skinned knees to broken hearts, Dad knew when the world needed to stop.
“I saw a lot of people pass through the halls of academia, Dad. But they were so caught up in themselves. Everyone wanted to be the best, you know, have the perfect talent or the loudest applause. But no one seemed to see the real joy in the fact that they had a gift at all. Do you know what I mean?”
“How about I see where you’re going to land.”
“Well, it’s like they missed it. Like the guys who sacrificed everything to be the first in the college draft, even if it meant giving up their character. They had the gift but missed the purpose.”
“A lot of people do that.”
“Well, I don’t want to, Dad.”
“Then always be gracious, Savannah.” Dad paused in a way that said I’d better listen up. “Your gift will make room for you. Sometimes it will bring you before great people. But it isn’t your gift, Savannah; it’s simply been entrusted to you. So hold it modestly. And remember, wisdom will be needed for every decision you make, just like you needed it for this one.”
“That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? To keep me humble and give me wisdom?” I kissed him on the cheek and raised my half-empty glass.“Here’s to gifts.”
Dad raised his coffee cup and added,“Here’s to a paycheck.”
We closed up the shop, but everyone stayed, and we spent the next three hours talking over Chinese takeout. Everyone had suggestions for what my first story should be. Then they all added their two cents about how I should tell my mother. The real beauty of the moment, however, was that I had a job she didn’t even know about.
Everything was perfectly situated—the pillow, the light, the book,my water—when the slight tap on the door interrupted the quiet. Vicky peeked in.
“I hear you had a rather eventful day!” she said, sitting down on the edge of the bed.
“Yes, I did. But who told you?” I asked, laying my book across my chest and trying to conceal my annoyance.
“Your father, but that was about all he gave me. He said you would want to tell me yourself.”
“Oh, he did, did he?”
“So what happened that is so exciting?”
“Well, first tell me about your day. You’re in mighty late.” I knew this would buy me a little time to get my story in place. And like Paige, it never took much to sidetrack my mother. Past adventures proved that.
Like after she tired of decorating our home she went on a Fact Finding mission for our fair city. When Vicky found out there was a store named Jezebel on River Street, you would have thought the sun had stopped shining on the South. Vicky worked herself into a lather, sure the heathens had come to town and pretty soon we were going to have massage parlors on every corner doing “Lord knows what!”
“I’m sure the Lord knows what,” I told her.
She got mad that I would even suggest that the Lord would know what went on inside a massage parlor.
Then one day we heard that she had actually gone inside Jezebels. Well,we figured whoever owned that store had been subjected to a big-time come-to-Jesus meeting. But the store owner, now one of Mother’s best friends, told us later that Vicky was so overtaken by the green linen ensemble in the window that she stayed until three that afternoon, trying on clothes and telling her life story. She denied it was true. But then we saw her leave the house in an outfit in the lovely shade of green.
“Oh, a few members of the Chamber are trying to change my mind about some of the tour guides having to dress in original southern dresses. They want everyone to wear those khaki shorts and logoed button-up shirts. I still can’t believe you were able to talk me into allowing that in the first place,” she said, poking me under the covers. “It’s so unprofessional.”
Vicky is colossally concerned with the impression Savannah visitors take home with them. She feels if they don’t want, even long, to return, then she has failed as the head of the Chamber. So she decided a couple of years ago to make sure that every aspect of our social graces was operating, well, with grace. It began with her incognito rides on the local Savannah touring trolleys, horse-drawn carriages, or walks in one of the walking tours. If the tour guides didn’t entertain the visitors, if they didn’t know Savannah history as well as they did the ins and outs of their own families, if they didn’t create a total feeling of consummate hospitality, Vicky would inform the guides’ bosses of their inability to “capture their audience.”
“Just remember,” established tour guides tell the new recruits, “real tourists don’t wear high heels. If you spot one, it’s her. And if she doesn’t leave your tour crying, you are over.”
She still has no idea they are onto her. And I’m not about to tell her. There’s nothing more amusing than driving past a trolley car and watching the guide with more motions than a synchronized swimmer, while Vicky sits in the back in her pink hat and large sunglasses. She looks like a bad Susan Lucci impersonator, thinking no one knows who she is.
Where I really feel Mother has gone over the edge, however, is in this crinoline controversy. Back when I was in high school, I passed one of the tour guides in a full-length peach dress, with about forty-five layers of crinoline and a huge bonnet with roughly the same number of flowers on top. She was giving a tour dressed up in this garb with the heat index at 110 degrees. Her makeup had melted, and she had mascara tracks all the way to her chin.
<
br /> Most of it had pooled at the top of her lace collar, which looked as if it was choking her. Poor thing was trying to blot herself with a tissue and spin a parasol at the same time.
I came home and told Mother, “This is totally inhumane. You should at least give those poor pitiful souls a choice.” I didn’t figure anyone would choose to wear those ridiculous getups, and Vicky didn’t either, so she compromised by breaking it up half and half. God bless the miserable creatures who were at the cutoff line of the crinolines.
I closed my book and laid it on the nightstand and put my arms behind my head, thinking we might be here for a while. “People get enough of the authentic here without making others endure human torture.”
“Well, you start snipping away, and pretty soon we’re no better than Charleston.”
“Mother, Charleston is beautiful, and I doubt they make their people dress up like bad southern belle impersonators just to make tourists feel they’ve had a real cultural experience.”
“You don’t think they wear those kind of dresses in Charleston?”
“No, Mother. Charleston is progressive, and you need to be careful not to hold Savannah back from what most would see as progress.”
“But I love those dresses. The girls look so sweet in them,” she said, having no recollection as to why she had come into my room.
I rolled over on my side and yawned, hoping this would not be a terminal discussion.
“Well, I still haven’t decided,” she said, not moving.
“You mean you kept those people in a meeting for almost five hours without reaching a decision?” I asked in mock disbelief.
“Yes, but I’m too tired to worry about it anymore tonight. I’ll think about it tomorrow.” She leaned over and kissed me good night. When she reached the door, she turned back around and cut out the light. Standing in the doorway, the hall light created her silhouette. “I know you think I forgot why I came in here, but you obviously aren’t ready to tell me your news. So I’ll just let you tell me when you’re ready.” The door closed behind her.
“The lady is good,” I said to the door.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Good morning, Mother,” I said, greeting her with a kiss. I sat down at the counter to enjoy my breakfast.Maybe she would still let me come by for breakfast and dinner even after I move out, I thought. My word, I’m not going to be so well off that I can do it all. Everyone needs a gradual transition, don’t they?
She was prancing around in a beautiful cream linen sundress with matching cream mules when I entered. “How did you rest, darling?” Her hair was somewhere in the brown family today. This is as close to her real color as we’ll be seeing this side of heaven.
“I rested great. It’s nice just to be home in my own bed.”
“Well, I’m so glad you’re here, precious. This is exactly where you belong, with your mother and your father and everything that makes you comfortable,” she said, fixing me a plate. I knew why she was there. She knew why she was there. And even cleaning my bathroom from stem to stern wouldn’t prevent this conversation from having to take place eventually.
“OK, you’ve been patient long enough. I’ll tell you,” I said, trying to scarf down some bacon before I began. “I got a job.”
“You got a job? Already? Where?”
I knew she didn’t think I could get one without her, but I refrained from needless gloating. I responded, “At the paper. I am going to write human-interest stories.”
“Savannah, oh my word, well, that, that is wonderful. Is that what you really want to do?”
“Yes, it is. It’s exactly what I want to do. Well, I’ve got a busy day, so I’d better get going.” I poured myself just enough juice to wash down the entire scrambled egg I had just crammed in my mouth.
“But, Savannah, I had our day planned,” she said, puffing out her lip like a spoiled two-year-old child.“There are some new neighbors I told we would meet for lunch, and then I was going to take you and show you some of the houses that the college finished since you were home last. And I’d like to know more,more about this, this job thing.”
“Mother, we’ll do all those things, I promise. I have to go to the paper today. And I have to start early.”
“Today? So soon? And in those shoes?”
“Yeah, I’ve only got a little over a week before my first story is due.”Then I went in for the kill.“And while we’re talking change here, I think you need to know that I’m going to move out as soon as I get enough money.”
“But, Savannah …”
With my hand in the air to try and stop her graciously, I headed to the door. “You know, the funny thing is, I never would’ve even thought about the paper had it not been delivered every day while I was at college. It was so strange too, because I never ordered it, nor did I ever have to pay for it. Oh,well, I guess it was just meant to be. I’ll be home for dinner.”
Most things in the South run slowly even Mondays through Fridays, but tack on a weekend and,well, let’s just say, snails could outrace a southerner. But not at Jake’s. The environment was rather frenzied for a Saturday in Savannah.
“Big day?” He handed me a Coke glass filled to the brim.
“Yes, and an eventful morning too. I told Mother that once I get a couple of paychecks I’m going to get my own place.”
“I think you should, Savannah. You’re a grown woman, and you need to pave your own course and create a life for yourself. So where are you going to live?”
“I have no idea.” I leaned back against the counter and took a long swig of my Coke. Dad picked up his coffee and took a drink himself.
“How did your mother handle such eventful news?”
“Didn’t give her time to do anything!”
“How did you accomplish that?” he said with a laugh.
“Walked out the door after revealing that her newspaper was what led me down this whole path in the first place.”
“You are shameless.”
“I know.”
“No dramatic unfoldings? No emergency-room scares?”
“No, but I expect to be confronted eventually with everything from heart palpitations to the fact that ‘criminals loom in the streets seeking single females who live in apartments all by themselves,’” I said in perfected Victoria.
“Ooh, that one might even scare me.”
From my parking place across the street, I could see through the windows that lights were on everywhere, and people were obviously working feverishly preparing the Sunday morning copy. I tried to forget that the only thing I knew about newspapers I learned reviewing books for the Massie School Ledger, a job I was given because I was the only one who actually read them.
The second semester of my junior year at UGA, I decided to take a literature class with a required-reading list of fifteen books. It included Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, other titles you might recognize, and some that might make you cock your head the way Duke does when he has no clue what you’re trying to tell him. That course was a turning point for me. After that class, I knew there was a place for me. I needed to hone my craft, polish my abilities, and learn how to place my words on a page the way they were uniquely formed in my mind before my fingers ever typed them. This was my masterpiece to create. No one alive could create it the way I could. No one could copy it or duplicate it exactly. So I poured myself into what I already loved. I thought it had proven faithful.
Yet here I was, staring at a newspaper building with a questionable sting still in my gut. I should be staring at the front door of the largest publishing house in the nation, she thought. But, no, I had to have some intervening circumstances. Circumstances that had diluted my world into a city. With all the changes of the past month, I still wanted to leave a mark that would last. A mark that would change something or, dare I believe, someone the way Gloria’s mark had changed me. Whether I liked it or not, destiny hovered in front of me,
daring me to enter. Before leaving the comfort of my car, I decided to leave all preconceived ideas behind with it, taking in my confidence instead. If I left that behind as well, I might never find it again.
Between her continual “Savannah Chronicle, please hold,” the receptionist mouthed she would be with me in a moment. After putting the 111th caller successfully on hold with or without permission, I told her I was here to meet Mr. Greer. She declared it loud and clear over the intercom and went back to find that caller number one had hung up hours ago.
Mr. Greer was a small, elderly gentleman with a nice smile, strong hands, and a round little bowling-ball tummy. “Savannah, nice to meet you. Follow me, and I’ll show you Gloria’s office.” We walked through a maze of cubicles to the back of the building. He walked with such a spry step it was hard to keep up. As I wove my way through the great gray abyss, I pitied the poor people who had to spend their lives staring into such a dismal sea. I had spent six years of college writing in parks, sitting in coffee shops, or staring out my window into a stunning courtyard. We proceeded to the same elevator I had ridden only once before. The numbers on the buttons were nearly invisible from years of being poked, and the elevator creaked so loudly, I held on in hope that the doors would open to actually reveal the next floor and not some helpless state of in-between.
The doors opened to the infamous third floor, and we walked straight ahead in the direction of Mr. Hicks’s office. Situated next door, looking out over Bay Street, her name still declared on the door, was Gloria Richardson’s office. I was almost afraid to go in. I stopped by the door and looked up at Mr. Greer to make sure it was OK to enter. It almost felt wrong, almost disrespectful. “It’s OK, Savannah. I’ll check on you in a little while. If you need anything, my office is right around the corner there. I hope you find what you’re looking for.”
“Thanks. Me too,” I said. I peered through the glass wall for a moment, wanting to be absolutely certain I should enter at all. It was clear that all of Gloria’s personal things were gone, but everything else was in pristine and perfect order. I finally gathered the courage to enter, slowly turning the knob, and letting the door slide gently open. The sun was already illuminating the office, but my aversion to dead-people’s belongings prompted me to turn on the lights anyway. For a moment I took in the fact that this office was amazing.“Can you believe this view?” I asked out loud to no one.
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