She and Anders decided to live with it.
We walk into her wood-beamed living room. Sitting on the glass coffee table is the new bowl. It practically glows it is so brightly painted with blues, purples, and golds. Painted around the edge of the bowl are wispy angels and nymphs.
“It’s gorgeous,” I say, picking it up to admire it more closely.
I wish John Henry would think to buy me something this beautiful.
“I caught Anders screwing the tenant,” says Tiny.
I set the bowl back down on the coffee table and turn to Tiny.
“What?”
Tiny takes a sip of her wine, leaving a pink stain on the lip of the glass. She nods.
“He was always going back there to check on things; I knew something was up.”
Tiny and Anders’s house includes a one-bedroom garage apartment that they rent out for eight hundred dollars a month.
“You mean that little girl? Ashley? How old is she?”
Tiny smirks. “Twenty-two years old. Just graduated last year from Georgia. Still has a Kappa Kappa Gamma sticker on the back of her car.”
“Are you sure they were having an affair?”
Anders is devoted to Tiny. He has been ever since they met their sophomore year at Chapel Hill, right around the same time John Henry and I started dating.
“You should have seen Anders’s face when he looked over his shoulder and saw me standing in the doorway.” Tiny touches her upper lip with her pointer finger and pulls away a drop of white wine. She touches her finger to her mouth, and the drop is gone.
“Come,” she says, “let’s get our lunch ready, and I’ll tell you all about it.”
I look for signs of distress on Tiny but see none. Her face holds the same bemused expression it always does. In fact, her eyes seem to be sparkling. It occurs to me that Tiny is glad to have caught Anders, is glad to have this thing to hold against him. It’s as if she has checked him in a long-standing game of chess they’ve been playing.
“I’ve got things set up in the sunporch,” she says. “Bring your wine.”
THE SUNPORCH HAS two walls of windows. Tiny fusses with the silhouette shades until the blinding sun is blocked. “There,” she says. “Sit.”
Surrounding a vase of delicate dendrobium orchids are plates of food Tiny has set out on the small round table, much more food than we could ever eat. There is a plate of asparagus glistening with hollandaise sauce, a plate of sliced pork roast, a bowl of apricot compote, and a beautiful green salad with grapefruit, candied walnuts, and avocados. Tiny has also put a cheese board and a bowl of glazed strawberries on a foldout tray by the table.
“This looks wonderful,” I say.
“I forgot to bring the bottle of wine,” she says. She rushes back to the kitchen while I put food on my plate, eyeing my portions carefully. Ever since I reached my forties I have realized that being thin is a product of youth, not virtue. But that doesn’t mean I don’t resist my thickening middle.
Tiny returns from the kitchen with the bottle of pinot gris and a small platter loaded with mini quiches. “I almost forgot these,” she says, sliding three onto my plate and refilling my glass.
Lord. I should probably just forget about my diet for this lunch. She’s probably got more food waiting to bring to the table; the cheese and strawberries she set out will probably be only a part of our dessert.
I eat a bite of the meat with a little apricot compote. Tiny works wonders with pork roast. She marinates it for a full day before cooking so that it comes out of the oven tender and flavored throughout.
“Oh, this is so good,” I say.
“Junior League recipe,” she says. “Same thing I’ve been making for fifteen years.”
Even sitting down Tiny is a good head taller than me. When I was a little girl the term for ladies her height was “statuesque.” Tiny has always claimed that she is actually short-waisted, that it is only her long legs that make her loom above everyone. Once, when we were sixteen, we were eating hamburgers at the Varsity and she got a booster seat for herself and then sat in it for the duration of the meal.
Tiny has always been crazy like that.
I want Tiny to start up again with the story about Anders and the tenant, but I don’t want to ask for details she doesn’t want to give. So I just eat and tell her how delicious everything is, and she replies again and again that everything she fixed was simple, simple. If I so much as take two sips from my wine glass, she refills it.
Finally I put down my Francis I fork, so full I absolutely cannot take another bite.
“Tiny, I’m dying. You have got to tell me about Anders and that girl. Unless it’s too painful. I don’t want to open back up any ugly wounds.”
“You think they’ve had time to heal?” Tiny laughs. “Lou-Lou, I caught the two of them two days ago, on Saturday, the day of the party. I had to play host all night with the image of my husband pressed up against that girl’s hiney.”
“No,” I say.
“I think the term is ‘doggie style,’” she says. “I warn you: refuse a position and your husband will find someone else to do it with.”
“Oh Tiny,” I say, squeezing her wrist. “What did Anders say when you caught him? What did that girl say?”
Tiny barks out a laugh, grabs the cheese plate off the tray, and sets it on the table between us. Using a delicate ivory-handled knife, she lobs off the nose of the Pierre Robert and spreads it onto a thin slice of French bread.
She must be really upset. She never cuts the nose off a piece of cheese but always slices it down the side of the triangle, the way our eleventh-grade French culture teacher taught us to do.
“That girl hid her head under the pillow. Which was the most sensible thing she could have done. Anders started sputtering that things looked worse than they really were.”
Tiny pops the piece of bread and cheese into her mouth. She points to the wine bottle, but when I pick it up to pour, I realize that we have already emptied it.
Even though she’s in the middle of a bite, she talks anyway, holding her hand in front of her mouth so I won’t be exposed to her half-chewed food.
“Do me a favor, Lou-Lou. Go to the fridge and get out a bottle of Veuve Clicquot.”
I am already feeling light-headed, but I love champagne. And obviously, Tiny needs me to drink with her.
I return with the bottle. Tiny motions toward the liquor cabinet. I open it and take out two crystal champagne flutes from the bottom shelf. Once Tiny’s cat, Barbara Bush, jumped in there and knocked over a whole shelf of crystal. Amazingly, only one glass broke.
Tiny removes the hood from the champagne bottle, takes her white hemstitched linen napkin out of her lap, and uses it to twist the cork off with a pop.
“Cheers,” she says after pouring two full glasses. We clink rims and each take a sip. The champagne is delicious, cool and bubbly with just a hint of yeasty sweetness.
“Did Anders buy the fairy bowl as a way of saying he’s sorry?” I ask.
I plop a glazed strawberry into my champagne flute and let it float.
Tiny shakes her head. “It came days ago. Anders hasn’t known what the hell to say to me since I caught him.”
I stick my fork into my glass trying to fish out my strawberry, but it bobs out of the way every time I try to spear it.
“Sometimes I wish John Henry would cheat on me and then we could just get a divorce,” I say, surprising myself. The champagne must be going straight to my head. “Lord knows it’s been easier with Caroline out of the house and across the country, but ever since we gave up on trying to get her back home, John Henry and I haven’t had much to discuss.”
Tiny raises her eyebrows. She has them shaped every other week into two perfect crescents. “Well maybe Charles will fuck up and then the two of you can bond over worrying about him.”
I let out a little laugh, though it is rueful and not really amused. Charles, if not exactly “fucking up,” has become more and mor
e distant. It started when he began high school, and now that he’s a sophomore it’s as if I hardly know him. He spends all his time in his room with the door closed, playing terrible music that sounds like human misery itself.
I stick my fork back into my champagne glass, trying again to jab the strawberry. Again it bobs away.
“Don’t you know not to stick sterling silver into champagne?” asks Tiny, and then sticks her own fork into her glass. I laugh and pour myself some more Veuve.
“Excuse me, Miz Persons?”
Standing at the entry of the sunporch is Faye, wearing baggy shorts and one of those terrible T-shirts she has, this one proclaiming, “1 cross + 3 nails = 4 given.”
“Sorry to interrupt you ladies, but I’m going to head out. I just mopped the kitchen floor so be careful you don’t slip if you go back in there.”
All this time I didn’t realize anyone else was in the house besides Tiny and me. It must be the alcohol dulling my senses, or maybe it’s the music—Frank Sinatra’s Greatest Hits—that Tiny has been playing so loudly.
“Thank you so much, Faye. I’m sure you did a terrific job. Now did you manage to get to that little pile of delicates I left on top of the washing machine?”
“Yes, ma’am,” says Faye. “I washed them out with Woolite. Hung them up in your bathroom.”
“Perfect,” says Tiny. Faye turns and walks away but Tiny calls after her.
“I have some leftover bacon from this morning’s breakfast, which you are welcome to take with you if you like. Just pop it in a Ziploc bag; there’s a box of them in the drawer to the right of the stove.”
Tiny is always trying to fob off her throwaways on the help. That might be one of the reasons her maids often stop showing up. That, or the fact that she expects them to handwash her underwear.
“Okay,” says Faye. “Missy just loves bacon.”
WHILE SIPPING CHAMPAGNE and eating strawberries and chocolate brownies (I was right, Tiny did bring out another dessert), Tiny tells me that Earl LeTrouve is soon going to make it big. I love Tiny, but she has really gone over the top with this folk art thing. Probably she’s just trying to irritate Anders, whose taste is more refined. That or she truly thinks she’s going to one day make a mint on the pieces she’s collected. I don’t know why she’s so sure that certain artists—Earl for instance—will eventually gain mass appeal. Maybe it’s just that Tiny has a bedrock trust in her own taste.
I already own one LeTrouve piece, which Tiny convinced me to buy a few years ago at the Big Angel Blowout over in Inman Park. As is often the case when I am with Tiny, my judgment was impaired by the three glasses of white wine I’d had, and truly I probably would not have bought the piece had I been sober, but regardless, I do like it.
It’s a big, bold portrait of Jesus, wearing a bright blue ball gown, a diamond tiara on his head. The title of the piece is Every Woman Has Some Jesus in Her, which I thought was clever. John Henry, of course, abhors the painting and would like nothing more than to rip it off the living room wall, where I had it hung. He claims it’s sacrilegious, but I told him so is having sex on Sunday mornings, when we should be at church. He backed down after that, not wanting to give up a good thing.
“So are you game?” asks Tiny, her eyes shining. “Because I can speed-dial Jose and he’ll be here in twenty minutes.”
Jose is the driver that Tiny and Anders use for special occasions and trips to the airport (technically, Jose is a driver at Anders’s firm, but he and Anders have worked out some sort of an arrangement). Beyond that I’m not sure what she’s talking about. I’ve had too much to drink.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “This champagne went straight to my head. Game for what?”
“For going to see his home studio. It can’t be more than an hour and a half away from here; Stephen said he lives just past Eatonton, toward Milledgeville.”
“You want to go to Milledgeville?” I ask. “To see Flannery O’Connor’s house?”
“Good Lord, Louise. How much champagne have you had? Not to see Flannery O’Connor’s house, to see Earl LeTrouve’s studio. He’ll sell his stuff right out of it and we won’t have to pay a gallery’s markup. Seriously, Stephen says that Earl is going to be huge one of these days and that we should buy up his stuff now while it’s still cheap enough to do so.”
“Stephen?”
“Is your old-timer’s acting up? I’ve introduced you to him I don’t know how many times.”
Right. Stephen. Stephen. Stephen is Tiny’s gay friend, the one who runs the framing shop.
I look at my watch. It is already one thirty. Charles will be arriving home from school soon, and I haven’t done anything productive with my day, let alone made any plans for dinner tonight. I should go home and get things done, except when I think about it, about the reality of what I will do (go to the dry cleaner, watch Oprah, attempt to get Charles to answer me with more than a single word), I feel sad, lonely.
“Okay,” I say. “I’m up for an adventure.”
The truth of the matter is it’s good Jose can drive us around for a few hours. I am way too inebriated even to drive the mile and a half back to my home.
BEN ASCHER, THE Jewish boy I dated, was incredulous that I had never visited Milledgeville before. He thought I should pay tribute to the hometown of Flannery O’Connor.
“I can’t believe that you haven’t yet made a pilgrimage!” he said. “My God, you grew up in Georgia, and you’re an English major at a southern university. What more do you want?”
What Ben didn’t understand was that girls in Chi Omega—at least not my circle of friends—did not make literary pilgrimages. Maybe girls in the less popular sororities did such things, but the only pilgrimages we ever made were to Myrtle Beach to attend fraternity formals.
Tiny holds forth during the entire drive. Her daughter, Helen, is getting married next spring, and Tiny is in charge of the wedding because Helen is living in New York. Helen is marrying a boy who also grew up in Atlanta, so his guest list is as long as hers. Tiny thinks they’ll end up inviting over five hundred people.
“We have to have the reception at the Driving Club,” she says. “Which kills me, because the food there is so mediocre. But what else can we do? It’s the only place that will hold all of us.”
“I went to a wedding reception there last month and the food was actually quite good,” I say. “Plus as long as you give people those buttered saltines they’ll be happy.”
Tiny moves on to the subject of flowers, while I think about Caroline and how she will never have a big Atlanta wedding, how she probably will never get married. I used to think that she and Frederick would marry each other—not that their wedding would be a Driving Club event—but they broke up not one year after they ran off to San Francisco. When she called to tell me about the breakup I thought that meant she might move home, but instead he moved and she stayed put.
To be perfectly honest, San Francisco is a better place for her than Atlanta ever was. It suits her. It seemed that the moment she stepped off the plane and onto California soil she got her act together. She earned her GED, not that we’re exactly beaming with pride over that, but then she enrolled at San Francisco State University. She’s majoring in something called American Studies, although judging by what she’s learning it should be called American Sins.
I don’t mean to sound negative—I think it’s important to learn about indigenous cultures and to take a skeptical stance toward government, and so on and so on—but I do sometimes get a little tired of being lectured so often by her on the Complicity of America in all things Evil.
If Ben Ascher and I had ever consummated our relationship, I would swear she was his.
She has a steady job waiting tables at an adorable little Middle Eastern restaurant, and she is forever acting in different “important projects” (her term) around the city. I thought that without Frederick’s support she wouldn’t be able to afford San Francisco, but she seems to be okay. Of course we pay for
her college classes, and John Henry sends her a small check each month to cover part of her rent, but other than that, she’s on her own.
It’s funny looking back on the first few months after she ran off. We did everything short of kidnapping her to get her to come home, but she wouldn’t and we couldn’t make her since she was eighteen and legally an adult. So then we waited for her to fail so that we could go clean up the pieces and straighten her life out for her. But so far she hasn’t failed. It’s as if away from all our worry she’s finally started looking after herself. I find myself wondering if I ever could have done what she did—defied my parents and run off with, say, Ben Ascher. Well obviously I couldn’t.
I didn’t.
Ever since she left—after I stopped wanting to kill her with my bare hands for running off in the middle of the night—I’ve been so proud of Caroline, so proud of her independent spirit. Truly, it is a thousand times easier having a rebel daughter who lives across the country than it is having one living down the hall.
EARL LETROUVE’S HOUSE is a plain brick ranch just off an empty stretch of 441. I would not have guessed that a folk artist lives here. There are no steel structures in the yard, no prophetic messages spelled out across the roof in white Christmas lights, no painted cars with Barbie doll heads glued to the front hood. There is an American flag flying from a tall flagpole stationed in the front yard, and a white pickup truck parked in the driveway.
Tiny double-checks the address and tells Jose to let us off, that this is it. “I’m sure we’ll be at least an hour,” she tells him. “Feel free to go get yourself a bite to eat.”
We get out of the car and walk up the concrete path that cuts through the grass and leads to the door. As I watch Jose pull away, I have a terrible thought.
“Tiny, we do have an appointment, don’t we?” I ask.
Tiny looks at me, all wide-eyed innocence. “His home is his gallery, Louise. He welcomes drop-in visitors.”
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