Revenge of the Kudzu Debutantes (6 page)

“Well.” Mona thought about it a moment. She seemed to be warming to the idea. “I suppose I could.”

“Do you know anyone who could help you serve?”

“Usually I hire some of the girls from the temple to help me out, but Little Moses is coming in tomorrow. I can ask him and some of his friends. His record deal fell through so he and the boys are coming home to work and save some money and maybe move up to Atlanta to get something going. They could probably use the money. And my cousin Mordecai has a tux shop out at the mall. He could probably get the boys some uniforms to wear.”

“Great. I can tell you right now my husband’s law firm will pay whatever price you decide is fair.”

This seemed to make Mrs. Shapiro happy, which in turn made Lavonne happy. The only ones who would not be happy were Charles and Virginia Broadwell and, possibly, Leonard. Virginia had always used the same tired list of caterers every other hostess in Ithaca had used. By using Mona Shapiro, Lavonne was breaking with tradition and reminding Ithaca that she, an outsider, and a Yankee outsider at that, could do things her own way and not be bound by the same narrow-minded constraints that bound them. It wasn’t as good as telling Virginia Broadwell to fuck off, but it was close.

“I’ll call you tomorrow with the details,” Lavonne said, looking down into Mona’s sweet, kindly face. Using Mrs. Shapiro was a small blow struck for social freedom, but it was a blow nevertheless. And it was a blow struck for something else, too, although Lavonne could not quite put her finger on what it was exactly. “We can do this, Mona, I know we can.”

Mona grinned and tugged at her hairnet. “Well, all right then,” she said.

C
OMING HOME FROM
the Shapiro Bakery, Lavonne thought she saw her mother standing in a queue at the bus stop. The experience left her light-headed and short of breath, again, and it was not until she was almost to the stop that she realized the woman, a small, stoop-shouldered black woman wearing a maid’s uniform, looked nothing like her mother. Lavonne blinked her eyes, wondering if she might be on the edge of psychosis, and drove on. The feeling of optimism she had carried with her since leaving the bakery began to dissipate and something else took its place, fluttering in her abdomen like a persistent moth. The feeling intensified as she pulled into the driveway and saw her husband’s car. She checked her watch and realized it was only two-thirty. She pulled slowly into the garage and turned off the engine, pondering this development. Leonard never came home early from the office. She and the girls were accustomed to eating dinner alone. She and the girls were accustomed to doing everything alone. Leonard was not a big part of their everyday lives and to find his car parked in the garage at two-thirty in the afternoon was troubling. She wondered if there had been a catastrophe at work. She wondered if there had been an emergency involving one of the girls.

Lavonne grabbed the pastry box from the front seat and hurried into the house. She could hear the TV blaring in the family room. Leonard was sitting on the sofa with his hunting trunk opened at his feet, carefully going through his gear.

“Are the girls okay?” Lavonne said breathlessly, standing in the doorway.

“What’s for dinner?” Leonard said, without looking up. “I know it’s early but I didn’t have lunch and I’m starving.” He was whistling cheerfully, running his freckled hands over neatly stacked camouflage gear and rain ponchos and boots and wool socks. Every year Charles, Trevor, and Leonard went to Montana to sleep in feather beds, eat gourmet food off good china, and hunt anesthetized wildlife at a game ranch called, incongruously, the Ah! Wilderness Game Ranch. Lavonne could not remember the last time Leonard had gone on vacation with her and the girls, but he never missed the annual hunting trip.

“Are the girls okay?” she repeated loudly.

He put his hands on his knees and swiveled his head around so he could see her clearly. “What do you mean, are the girls okay? I don’t know where the girls are. You’re supposed to know where the girls are.”

“So there’s no emergency?” Lavonne came into the room and slid down on the big overstuffed chair facing him. She stretched her legs along the ottoman, her arms collapsed at her sides, letting the Peach Paradise box balance precariously on her stomach. “Jesus, Leonard, you about gave me a heart attack.”

“How’d I do that?”

“Coming home early on a Friday afternoon. I figured something was wrong. I figured one of the girls had been hurt or something.”

He looked at her for a moment and then turned around and went back to work checking his hunting gear. “My golf game got canceled,” he said.

It didn’t really bother her that Leonard rarely came home for dinner anymore. Lavonne thought it was probably a good thing he spent so much time away from home. It was probably the only reason their marriage had lasted as long as it had. “Why are you packing for your trip four weeks early?” she said.

“I’m not packing, I’m just checking to see if there’s anything I need to buy.”

She opened the pastry box. Mrs. Shapiro had thoughtfully included a plastic fork. Lavonne figured that besides her daughters and Eadie and Nita, Mrs. Shapiro probably knew her better than anyone else in town.

“So, what’s for dinner?” he repeated.

“I’m having Peach Paradise,” Lavonne said. “What are you having?”

He got up and went into the kitchen to make himself a sandwich. She picked up the remote control and began to flip through the channels, chewing mechanically as she watched scenes of mayhem and destruction, TV pitchmen selling juicers and jewelry, co-eds whining about their love life, talk-show guests hurling chairs at each other, and finally, settling on reruns of
Leave It to Beaver.
It had been one of her favorite childhood shows. The bland normalcy of the Cleaver household had filled her with hope and a sense that anything was possible, even a happy childhood. Even a father who didn’t raise his voice, or a mother who could clean the oven wearing pearls and a petticoat, and be happy about it.

“Lavonne, do we have any bread?” Leonard shouted from the kitchen.

“Look in the bread box.”

“The bread box?”

She chewed the Peach Paradise, trying not to think about her sad mother standing in a queue at the bus stop, trying not to picture Mona Shapiro’s innocent face as she considered selling her building to Redmon and Leonard. Lavonne made a mental note to ask Leonard about this proposed sale after the trauma of the party had faded.

She could hear her husband helplessly slamming cabinet doors. Lavonne felt a slight tremor of conscience over not rising to go into the kitchen to make his dinner. Really, Leonard was not so bad. She reminded herself of this at least three times a day. He didn’t bully her like Charles Broadwell bullied Nita. He didn’t run around with other women like Trevor Boone. If you took away the fact that he was boring, self-indulgent, and sexually unappealing, Leonard was not such a bad husband.

“Goddamn it, we’re out of mustard!” he shouted from the kitchen.

“Look in the pantry!” she shouted back.

She and Leonard had met their senior year of college and had dated long-distance for three years while she finished her master’s and he attended law school at the University of Georgia. Lavonne should have known when he returned home to Ohio, tanned and dreamy, wearing knit golf shirts and loafers without socks, that their relationship was changing, growing into something she might not appreciate or accept. Instead, she threw herself into her practice, and when Leonard graduated from law school, they married. Three years later his father died and Leonard accepted a partnership with Boone & Broadwell. They were both twenty-eight. Lavonne sold her fledgling accounting business and they headed south.

Leave It to Beaver
had gone to commercial, so Lavonne flipped back through the channels, stopping for a minute on
Oprah.
She had watched yesterday and had been shocked to learn that a young blond guest with long red fingernails was actually a financial adviser, and had been brought on the show to advise women on how to protect themselves from the financial disasters of divorce and the death of a spouse. “Make sure all the bank accounts are in both your names,” the girl had said in her wispy little voice. “Make sure all the real estate is in both names.” She giggled and wagged her finger at the audience. “Don’t leave all the financial decisions to your husband. Don’t let him handle all the checkbooks. Knowledge is the best form of protection.” It occurred to Lavonne, watching the girl, that in the eighteen years she had spent at home as a wife and mother, the world had changed. While she had been changing diapers and teaching a four-year-old to read, the workforce had become filled with young, attractive, well-educated women.

Leonard came into the room carrying a sandwich and a mound of potato chips on a plate. He set the plate down on the coffee table and settled himself on the sofa, opening a napkin on his lap. “Where’s the remote?” he said.

“I’m watching this,” Lavonne said, switching back to
Leave It to Beaver
and turning up the volume. June Cleaver was advising Ward how best to deal with the boys, who were selling shoe polish door to door against Ward’s advice. Her pearls shone like alabaster. Her starched apron flared modestly around her twenty-two-inch waist. June watched Ward, wide-eyed, her chin dropped submissively. Her face was vacuous but pleasant. June was not a woman of wild emotional swings. Lavonne wondered if June had ever questioned her decision to stay home with Wally and the Beave.

Leonard put his sandwich down and opened the trunk again. A strong but peculiar odor rose from the interior, musty and sharp and faintly sweet. The scent reminded her, curiously, of something else, some distant, just out of reach memory.

“Is this all that’s on?” Leonard said, pointing at the TV screen.

“That smells like the stuff they used to use to clean the girls’ locker room at school,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “Why does your trunk smell like that?”

Leonard’s face flushed suddenly. He put his sandwich down and closed the lid of the trunk, carefully fastening the latches. Then he sat back, stretching his arms along the length of the sofa. “Turn it to CNN,” he said.

It was not entirely fair to blame Leonard for her decision to give up her career for the children. Staying home with the girls had been something she wanted to do. She had been there for their first steps, their first drooling attempts at language, their first lost baby teeth; what career could be better than that? She had two beautiful, smart, strong-willed daughters and they were who they were because Lavonne had raised them.

“Here, watch what you want to watch,” she said, waving the remote at Leonard. Their marriage, if not exciting, was at least predictable. Secure. How many twenty-one-year marriages could you say that about?

Leonard looked at her suspiciously, munching his sandwich.

Lavonne shrugged and laid the controller down on the coffee table. The truth of the matter was, the girls were nearly grown and she still had twenty years to figure out what she wanted to do with the rest of her life. Twenty years was a long time. Twenty years was time enough to lose sixty pounds and find a job and figure out a way to fall in love with her husband again.

J
IMMY
L
EE’S TRUCK
was still in the driveway when Nita arrived home. She went around through the side gate, letting it bang shut behind her so he’d know she was there. She was too embarrassed to call out his name. She could hear him whistling as she came down the stone path between the rhododendrons and the azaleas. Jimmy Lee was standing by the pool with a couple of two by fours balanced across one shoulder. Shafts of sunlight fell from the wide blue sky and pooled around him like a spotlight. His hair curled damply around his neck. He saw Nita and waved.

“Well, hello there,” he said, shifting the weight of the studs. The muscles of his shoulders strained beneath his Rodney Foster T-shirt.

“Hi,” Nita said.

“I wasn’t sure you’d get home before I finished.” He looked like he had just crawled out of bed. He had that rumpled, sleepy-boy look that made her legs feel like she was standing on wet sand.

“Would you like something cold to drink?”

“What’ve you got?” He swung the lumber down off his shoulder and set it on a pile at his feet. A small gold earring dangled from his right ear. With his dark hair, tanned skin, and dangling earring, it wasn’t too hard to imagine him as a pirate. It wasn’t too hard to imagine him in any of the fantasy scenarios set up by Dr. Ledbetter.

“I’ve got sweet tea,” she said. “Juice. Coca-cola.”

“Sweet tea would be fine.”

She climbed the steps to the deck and went into the kitchen through the screened porch. She was humming to herself, thinking how smooth his skin was, like baby skin, really, tanned to a light brown except for his chin and lower cheeks, which were stubbled with dark beard. Five o’clock shadow, they called it. She wondered how it would feel against her skin. She imagined him rubbing his face across the places where Lone Wolf had kissed his captive bride, and her stomach spasmed and her heart ricocheted through her rib cage like an emergency flare. A strange sensation of heat rose into her head. She breathed with difficulty and her skin felt hot to the touch.

She went to the refrigerator and filled the glass with ice and poured him some sweet tea from a pitcher. She crossed the room and stood at the French door that led out onto the porch, watching him drag his materials into a neat pile. From time to time he would stop and push his hair behind his ears and stand with his hands on his hips looking at the pool house. His jeans were bleached by the sun and torn below his left knee. She imagined him standing in the middle of her yard wearing nothing but a loincloth. She imagined the sculptured contours of his chest and belly. Her hand shook so badly the cubes rattled against the glass, and she raised it and touched it to her burning face, but it gave her no relief. She set the glass down on the counter.

She was worse than those lecherous old men who sit outside the Jim Dandy Barber Shop ogling the high school girls who pass by. She was beginning to feel like a stranger to herself. She wondered if she was on the edge of a nervous breakdown. All her life she had fought against the urges of the flesh, she had bound up that part of herself with ropes and chains of iron link and buried it deep, and now here she was reading dirty novels and daydreaming about acts of sexual perversion with a boy who wasn’t even her husband.