Revenge of the Kudzu Debutantes (15 page)

“Not if it’s in his name. Not if it’s in both your names.”

“Shit,” Eadie said.

“I may be able to get you temporary alimony, but without children it’s getting harder and harder to do that these days.”

“Okay,” Eadie said. She wasn’t really worried, but she couldn’t tell Rosebud why. She was pretty sure that once Trevor and Leonard got a look at the photographs she and Lavonne and Nita were going to wind up with, they’d jump through hoops to get the divorces over with. She was pretty sure they wouldn’t put up much of a fight. “I don’t think we need to worry about Trevor dragging this thing out,” Eadie said. “I’m pretty sure he’ll be happy to get this little episode of his life over with.”

“I like your optimism,” Rosebud said, motioning for Stephen to bring them another cup of coffee. “But what makes you think he’ll settle?”

“It’s a gut feeling,” Eadie said.

“I’m curious,” Rosebud said, swinging around in her chair with her elbows resting on the armrest and her hands tented in front of her. “What did Trevor say when you confronted him about the prostitutes?”

“He didn’t say anything.” Eadie picked a piece of lint off her jacket. “He didn’t say anything because I didn’t confront him.” She looked at Rosebud and grinned. “Hard to believe, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is.” Rosebud frowned and bumped her index finger against her bottom lip. Stephen brought their coffee and closed the door quietly behind him. “But how do you know he was involved? I’m playing devil’s advocate here, but shouldn’t you give him a chance to explain what happened before you hit him with divorce papers?”

“I’m through with explanations.”

“Things aren’t always what they seem.”

“Do you want to represent me, or not?”

Rosebud smiled and lifted her cup. “It’ll give me great pleasure to represent you,” she said. She sipped the steaming coffee and set it back down on her desk. “Just promise me you’ll call me if you change your mind.”

“I won’t change my mind,” Eadie said.

L
EAVING
R
OSEBUD’S OFFICE,
Eadie felt like a spring that had come unsprung. Caught up in the adrenaline high of phone calls and revenge planning, she hadn’t had much time to think about Trevor. She hadn’t had time to dwell on his treachery and what it might mean to her and her future. Until now. She walked through the parking lot aimlessly looking for her car. Her feet were not reliable. She felt like she was walking on marbles. She felt like she was pushing something heavy up a steep hill. If she stopped to breathe, the momentum would be lost. If she stopped to rest, the monstrous weight would roll back down and crush her.

As she drove home through the slow-moving traffic, the frenzy she had felt since she discovered her husband’s betrayal continued to subside. The zeal she had carried faltered and ebbed to a vacuous emptiness that thickened and spread like formaldehyde through the hollow cavity of her abdomen. Her heart was numb. Her spirit was dead. Everything she had ever thought true was false.

She had thought Trevor an equal, a worthy adversary, someone she could build her life around, and he had proved himself no better than Charles Broadwell and Leonard Zibolsky. No better than Luther Birdsong and Frank Plumlee, the men her sad mother had loved and lost. She could understand the open cheating, could even, on some unexplainable irrational level, respect the courageousness of it, and could understand why Trevor felt compelled to do it. She understood that it opened him up to the pain of her reciprocal betrayal. It was complicated, and she knew, to many people, it appeared sick and psychologically unsound. But as long as the betrayal had been open, as long as it had been reciprocal, a balance had been maintained between them that allowed their marriage, with its periods of estrangement and reunion, to continue. She couldn’t explain it in any terms other than some weird yin/yang thing. It would not work for most people, but it had worked for them.

And now Trevor had fucked it all up by keeping his dirty little secret all these years. He had upset the delicate balance that was necessary for their marriage to continue. He had lessened himself as a man and made her ashamed to love him. Even if the thing with Tonya didn’t work out, Eadie would never take him back now.

She stopped at a red light. She picked up the book on Frida Kahlo and began to thumb through the glossy pages, stopping on pictures of Frida with a monkey, Frida with her heart clipped and bleeding, Frida dissected on a hospital bed. There was in Frida’s solemn mustachioed face, her anguished eyes, an expression of patient and deliberate suffering that reminded Eadie of her mother. Her mother had worn the same expression all those years ago when she watched Luther Birdsong’s big feet go stomping past, when she waited for Frank Plumlee to come in for dinner.

It startled Eadie, remembering this, and it disturbed her, too, because it occurred to her suddenly that in her relationship with Trevor Boone, she was more like her mother than she cared to admit.

E
ADIE HAD NO
clear recollection of her father. He had left when she was still a baby, leaving her and her mother to the enduring poverty of the Shangri-La Trailer Park. Her mother, Reba, worked a number of jobs to put food on the table. From time to time she worked as a beautician, a waitress, a maid out at the Holiday Inn, a cashier at the Piggly Wiggly, and a laborer on a construction road crew. It was on this road crew that she met her second husband, Luther Birdsong.

Luther was a quiet steady man given to fits of violent rage when he drank, which turned out to be every Friday evening. Eadie would lie beneath the bed with her mother watching Luther’s big feet pass back and forth, the floor trembling and the walls rattling with his bellowed rage. After Luther left, Friday nights at the Shangri-La Trailer Park got quiet again for a while, but Eadie’s mother got sad and nothing Eadie could do would cheer up her. Eadie guessed Reba missed the Friday nights huddled beneath the bed while the tiny trailer rattled like a metal box in a gale. After awhile Reba began to dress herself up and go out on Friday nights, leaving Eadie propped in front of the television with a Coca-cola and a bag of chips, and orders not to stay up too late. Eadie didn’t mind too much. It was still better than hiding beneath the bed watching Luther Birdsong’s big feet go stomping past.

Eadie didn’t much care for the steady procession of men her mother brought home. It seemed to Eadie that men were nothing but trouble. It also seemed to Eadie that Reba could not live without them. She resigned herself to this, and when Reba came home one morning, eyes shining, dragging behind her a small thin man in a plaid suit whom she introduced as “your new daddy,” Eadie extended her arm with as much grace as possible, and shook hands. She was eleven years old and too cynical to believe that this one would last much longer than the others had.

His name was Frank Plumlee. He was a manic-depressive Broderbund Encyclopedia salesman who sold books door to door. In those first few weeks he came to live with them he was a good influence on Reba, who learned to iron his shirts and cook meals that didn’t come out of a box or a plastic tray. Those first few weeks were smooth sailing, but after Frank ran out of his medication, he quit going to work and began sitting around the trailer all day in his underwear. Reba had to go back to work at Miss Eula’s House of Hair to pay the bills, and Eadie would return home from school in the afternoons to find Frank sitting in the darkened trailer watching TV soap operas that showed people too good-looking to be real rolling around together in bed. Her mother didn’t seem to mind that Frank didn’t work. Eadie didn’t know what was worse, listening to the racket Luther Birdsong made on Friday nights or listening to the racket her mother and Frank made every night from the dark fetid recesses of the cramped bedroom. After ten weeks with Frank Plumlee, Luther Birdsong was starting to look pretty good.

To make matters worse, Frank had begun to bother Eadie. She would wake some nights to find him standing over her, his sour smell wafting through the trailer like some sinister disembodied shape. He had begun to follow her with his eyes, leaving her with the feeling that he had run his dirty hands over her and left smudges in places she didn’t like to think about. She tried to tell her mother, but all Reba did was look around wildly and say in a panicked voice, “What are you saying, Eadie? What are you saying?”

Eadie thought it was pretty clear what she was saying. Still, she had learned by now that women could be divided into two groups; those who were miserable and couldn’t do anything about it, and those who were miserable and could. Her mother definitely fell into the former category, but Eadie didn’t blame her for this. She set about planning how to get rid of Frank Plumlee on her own.

She bought a pearl-handled pocketknife and practiced stabbing things with it: upholstered furniture, cereal boxes, her pillow, the sandy creek bank. One Friday afternoon she returned home from school to find her mother’s Pinto parked in the yard. Frank’s El Dorado was gone. The weight that sat constantly on Eadie’s chest like a cement block lifted, and she was whistling when she opened the trailer door and stepped inside.

“Mama!” she called, throwing her book bag on the floor.

“She ain’t here,” Frank said.

Her heart slammed against her ribs. She could see him now, her eyes slowly adjusting to the darkness of the room. He was sitting over by the kitchen in a metal chair wearing nothing but his underwear. His slit was opened in front and his thing was plopped out on the side of his thigh like a dead fish.

“Her car wouldn’t start. She took mine to work.” While he talked the fish began to move slightly. “It’s just you and me,” he said. Frank’s eyes glowed in the dim room as if lit by something deep and powerful.

Eadie reached in her pocket and took out the little pearl-handled knife. Across the room Frank began to chuckle softly. His thing had left his thigh, rising up out of his shorts and quivering like a harpoon embedded in flesh. Eadie tried not to look. Bile rose in her throat. Her bladder swelled like a balloon. She opened the blade of the little knife and began to wipe it on her sleeve.

Frank stood up. “You gonna poke me with that little bitty knife?” he said in a thick voice.

“Frank,” she said in a loud calm voice. “I’ve got a proposition for you.”

He chuckled slightly and took a step toward her. She looked up to meet his gaze, hefting the knife in her hand and closing her fingers over the handle, remembering how she had plunged the tip into her pillow at night, imagining the point embedded deep in Frank’s soft white belly. “The way I look at it,” she said. “You’ve got two options. You can take the money I’ve saved and pack your bags and leave to start a new life in Alabama or Mississippi, or you can come over here and let me poke you with my little knife and then wait while I put on my Girl Scout uniform and go down to the station and tell Sheriff Cox and those two big deputies of his how you stood there and dropped your thing out of your pants for a little girl to see.” She held her two clenched fists up like a scale swaying to balance. “Think about it,” she said. “Jail or Mississippi. Jail or Alabama. What do you choose?”

It turned out Frank Plumlee was an easy man to fool. Eadie didn’t even have a Girl Scout uniform. He stood there with his face setting up around his eyes like cement around two rotten stumps. Suddenly he twitched. His shoulders slumped. After a moment the sinister light in his eyes flickered, and went out.

When Reba came home an hour later to find Frank gone, she went into the bedroom to cry.

T
WO MONTHS LATER
Eadie entered her first beauty contest. She did it to please her mother, who had grown increasingly despondent after Frank Plumlee’s hurried departure. It seemed Reba could not be happy without a man around to make her miserable. She threw the ironing board out in the woods behind the trailer, she quit cooking, and she cut back on her hours at Eula’s House of Hair. Nothing Eadie did cheered her up. Finally, on a hot humid day in June, Eadie came into Eula’s to find her mother and the other beauticians bent over a printed flyer that read in giant letters across the top
Little Miss Mag Wheels Beauty Pageant! Sponsored by Clyde Purvis Auto! $50 in Cash to the Winner! Free Tires! Free Lube and Oil Change! Free MoonPie with Every Fill-up! Come on down to Clyde Purvis Auto for Details!

“Who-ee,” Martha Agnes said. “I sure could use them tires.”

“You’re a little old for a beauty pageant, ain’t you?” Thelma said.

“Shut up,” Martha Agnes said.

“You know who’s pretty enough to win one of them pageants is your little girl,” Betty Lee said to Reba, who was picking despondently at a hairbrush.

“You think so?” Reba said doubtfully.

“Shit yeah,” Betty Lee said. “She don’t never come in here when one of my customers don’t say ‘My goodness Betty Lee, who is that beautiful child?’ ”

“Miz Eva Bedwell noticed her yestiddy,” Martha Agnes said.

“Miz Hampton said she was pretty enough to be out in Hollywood in one of them Hollywood pictures,” Thelma said.

“You think so?” Reba said, frowning.

“Let’s go ahead and enter her in old Clyde Purvis’s contest,” Thelma said.

“I don’t know,” Reba said. Eadie stood quietly just inside the door watching them. The ceiling fans hummed and clanked, stirring tiny clumps of hair that littered the floor. Over in the corner the icebox whirred.

“I can do her hair,” Martha Agnes said.

“I can do her face,” Thelma said.

“She’ll need one of them pageant dresses,” Betty Lee said.

“I don’t have no money for a pageant dress,” Reba said.

“Hell, maybe we can sponsor her,” Miss Eula said, leaning against Thelma’s chair and idly scratching at her monstrous hip. “She’d be good advertising for the shop. A girl that pretty’s bound to attract attention even if she don’t win the damn contest.”

But Eadie did win the Little Miss Mag Wheels Beauty Pageant. And she won or at least placed in the top three spots for most of the pageants her mother entered her in thereafter. For the next six years she and Reba toured the South, pulling Eadie out of school when necessary and driving everywhere in a beat-up old Ford Mustang. In between beauty contests, she made TV commercials. By the time she was sixteen, Eadie had made enough money to buy her mother a little house over on the south side of town, and by the time she was eighteen, Eadie had won a scholarship and set aside enough money to get through the University of Georgia without ever having to enter another damn beauty contest. It was while she was at U. of Georgia that she fulfilled her childhood dreams of glory and destiny by becoming an artist just like she had dreamed of all those years before. It was also here that she met and married the rich and handsome Trevor Boone, which had never figured into her childhood dreams and, seen now, with the bright clear vision of hindsight, might not have been such a good idea after all.