Secret Lives of the Kudzu Debutantes (22 page)

“You think we'll need to turn on the bug zapper?” Lavonne asked. “The mosquitoes are getting pretty bad.”

“No, I think we'll be all right,” Eadie said. “I've got the citronella candles burning. If you think the bugs are bad here, you should see New Orleans. They've got mosquitoes the size of hummingbirds and those Formosan termites will eat through anything.”

B
Y TEN O'CLOCK THE BUNCO PARTY HAD DEGENERATED INTO A
raucous affair of screaming women, clattering dice, and clinking martini glasses. Someone had turned up the CD player and the song “Put Your Teeth (on the Windowsill)” reverberated across the yard, followed shortly thereafter by “Dirt Track Date” and the ever-popular “Daddy Was a Preacher but Mama Was a Go-Go Girl.” Every fourth round of dice rolling, the losing partners got up and moved to the next table, which kept things lively and also indicated who was in need of a designated driver to get home. By the twentieth round, Nita, Lavonne, Eadie, and Grace Pearson found themselves seated at the same table.

“How's Trevor?” Grace said. She and Nita were partners and so far had the most losses for the evening. Which was good, because the ones with the most losses got to go home with their money.

Eadie shrugged. “He's out in L.A. putting the final touches on his movie deal. I forgot to tell y'all. His manuscript's been optioned by Paramount.”

Lavonne looked at her with a stunned expression. “How do you forget to mention something like that?” she said.

“This thing that's going on between you two,” Grace said, rolling two ones. “You don't call it a trial separation. What do you call it?”

“A working vacation,” Eadie said.

Over at the next table Kaki Murdock squealed “Bunco!” and clapped her hands like a cheerleader.

Eadie said, “No way. Y'all are cheating. That's five buncos tonight. There's odds against that happening.” She looked at Lavonne for confirmation of this mathematical precept.

Lavonne, a former accountant, lifted her drink and said solemnly, “The law of probability makes that a definite improbability.”

“See,” Eadie said.

“You're just jealous 'cause I'm winning and you're not,” Kaki said. She flipped Eadie the bird and wrote down her score. “Rolling twos,” she shouted.

Eadie picked up the dice at her table and rolled. “Speaking of husbands, Grace, whatever happened to yours? You didn't chop him up into little pieces and hide him under the floorboards, did you?”

“Who, Larry?”

Eadie stopped rolling and looked at her. “Yes, Larry. How many husbands did you have?”

Grace shrugged her wide shoulders. “He moved up to Atlanta about twenty years ago. He works at a bar down in Little Five Points called Gay Par-ee.”

Eadie lost her roll and handed the dice to Nita. “Hey, I know that place,” she said. “All the employees are female impersonators. They dress up like Marilyn Monroe and Liza Minnelli and Madonna and …” She stopped talking suddenly and looked at Grace.

Grace grimaced. She nodded her head slightly. “That's right,” she said. “He goes by the name of Lola Fellatio.”

Eadie's eyes were round as bottle caps. Her mouth was a perfect
O
of astonishment.“Oh my God,” she said. “Larry Pearson is
gay
?”

Lavonne said, “Say it a little louder, Eadie. I don't think they heard you over in Dooly County.”

Two tables over, Sally McBryde stopped rolling. She said, “Little Larry Pearson that graduated in my brother Clay's class?”

“Here we go,” Lavonne said.

“Little Larry whose sister plays the organ down at the Church of God?”

“That's right. The one who was married to Grace. His mama was a Stockett.”

“What about him?”

“He's queer.”

“So what? All the Stocketts are queer.”

“No, not queer. Gay. You know.”

“Little Larry Pearson is gay?” Sally said.

“Cooter Pearson is a transvestite?” Kaki said.

“Who needs another martini?” Eadie said.

Later, after she got them calmed down, Eadie leaned across the table and said to Grace, “I'm an idiot. Sorry about that.”

Grace shrugged. “It's an old secret and I'm surprised it hasn't got out by now. It really doesn't affect me one way or the other. I'm just glad Larry's happy.” They were rolling threes now. After a minute, Grace looked at Nita and said, “Speaking of secrets, how's Virginia?”

Nita didn't know what she meant. “Sorry?” she said.

Grace rolled a mini-bunco and kept going. “What is it you think Madame President has up her sleeve?”

Nita, still not understanding, said, “She's taken Whitney and some of her friends up to Atlanta to go shopping this weekend. I think that's real sweet of her. The girls were so excited.”

“Nita and Virginia have turned over a new leaf,” Eadie said to Grace. “They're good, good friends now.”

“That's right,” Nita said stubbornly.

“We keep trying to remind Nita of how Virginia made her life miserable for sixteen years but she seems to have forgotten all that.”

Lavonne said, “Are you keeping score, or should I?”

“You keep score,” Eadie said. “Remember, Nita. Once a rat, always a rat.”

Lavonne rolled another set of threes. “What was that you said earlier about people changing?”

Nita frowned and shook her head. “There's a lot about Virginia y'all don't know.”

Eadie and Grace looked interested. “Like what?” Eadie said.

“Game!” Lavonne said. They added up their points. Lavonne and Eadie put W's next to their third round and Nita and Grace put
L
's.

“Does she ever say anything about growing up on that island in the middle
of the river?” Grace said. “Virginia, I mean. Does she ever talk about that with you?” Her face was splotched with color and her eyes were intensely blue. Blue like sapphires. Like bayonet points glittering in the sun.

Nita leaned over and pretended to count her losses. She didn't want to tell them what she knew about Virginia's childhood, not here anyway, in front of everybody. She felt oddly protective of the older woman. After all, Virginia had taken Whitney and her friends up to Atlanta, at her own expense. Who could ask for a better grandmother than that?

A pale sliver of moon hung over the shed like a tattered cloth. Fireflies flickered in the darkness. Grace said, “I've always wondered why Virginia didn't develop that property earlier. I guess I'm not surprised she and Redmon have set up that development deal. I guess I was a little surprised, though, to see that Jimmy Lee's involved, too.”

Lavonne looked at Eadie and frowned. Nita looked blankly at Grace. “What development deal?” she said.

V
IRGINIA'S REVENGE SCHEME WAS COMING ALONG NICELY
. It was going so well that sometimes Virginia had to wonder if she might have missed her calling as a war games planner or State Department strategist. She had convinced Redmon and Jimmy Lee to pay her a one-hundredthousand-dollar finder's fee and had her attorney draw up the contracts so that she retained ownership in the island and only released the property one lot at a time. Flush with money, she began to regain some of the confidence she had lost when the stock market dropped and Boone & Broadwell collapsed, leaving her a pauper. She even managed to convince Redmon to let her redecorate portions of the house, starting with the kitchen and the dining room. They were still negotiating the Elvis Red carpet.

Redmon had more important things on his mind these days than interior design. After overcoming his initial reluctance, he had thrown himself into the Culpepper Plantation project with all the zeal and determination he could muster. He left early in the morning and returned late at night, too tired for anything but dinner, a few hours in front of the TV, and bed. Exhausted, he was snoring within minutes of his head touching the pillow. Virginia was only sorry she hadn't cooked up the scheme earlier in their
marriage. It might have saved her countless embarrassing episodes of the Cheerleader and the Coach or the Schoolteacher and the Naughty Schoolboy, not to mention her latest performance as a romping debutante.

And having Redmon distracted with work left Virginia with more time to spin her web around the pliant Whitney. The girl was an easy mark, with her love of clothes and adolescent luxuries, not to mention the possible gift of a new automobile that Virginia dangled in front of her like a piñata. (She had warned Whitney to keep it between them for the time being; she had promised to bring Nita around to the idea eventually.) The process of winning Whitney's loyalty had been as easy as cutting butter with a hot knife, as her daddy used to say, and all Virginia had to do now was wait until the time was ripe to strike.

There were moments when Virginia was amazed at her own genius, at her own capacity for treachery and deceit. There were times when it seemed her whole life had been nothing but a dress rehearsal for this one climactic expression of vengeance, a righting of all the wrongs and slights she had suffered throughout her solitary childhood, her loveless marriage, her lonely ascent to the top of the Ithaca social ladder. But there were other times, less frequent, when Virginia wondered if she might not be missing something important, moments when she questioned whether vengeance was the pinnacle of happiness or the slough that separated her from it. In those brief moments of self-awareness, she realized that she missed her sexual escapades with Redmon, she was conscious of the fact that she enjoyed the time she spent with her granddaughter, she understood that she might have been a better mother to a daughter than she had been to a son, had fate and circumstances not worked to her disadvantage. These moments, however, were fleeting.

Most of the time Virginia just thought about how clever she was.

A
SHLEY AND
L
OUISE WERE SPENDING SPRING BREAK WITH
L
EONARD
and his new family in Florida, and Eadie had flown up to Bald Head Island to meet Trevor, so Lavonne had the whole week to herself. She spent as much of it as she could with Joe, who was leaving on Wednesday to fly up to Chicago to see his daughter. On Monday and Tuesday, Lavonne took some time off from work and they packed picnic lunches and rode their bikes down to the Riverpark. In the evenings they had dinner and saw a movie or ate in and watched TV.

After he left, he telephoned every day. She looked forward to his calls the way a cheerleader looks forward to a call from the captain of the football team. It was corny, but it was true. She was forty-seven years old and she felt like a high school sophomore. They laughed and talked on the phone for hours. When she wasn't talking on the phone, Lavonne stood in front of the bathroom mirror looking at her naked body.
It's not too bad
, she decided, turning this way and that. She'd lost a lot of weight but the skin was still firm. Her nipples might not stick straight up but they were still more horizontal than vertical. All in all, she was pretty pleased with herself. If she'd looked this good twenty years ago, it wouldn't have been just Eadie Boone streaking across the Wal-Mart parking lot and jumping naked into the Courthouse fountain.

So far her physical relationship with Joe hadn't progressed much beyond kissing and snuggling. Any time things got too intense, Joe would pull himself away, take a deep breath, and go into the kitchen to grab a beer or make a bowl of popcorn. He seemed to be just as willing as she was to take things slow.

Maybe it was because he wasn't pushing it that Lavonne began to fantasize about what it would be like to sleep with him. She wasn't one of those women who found beefy twenty-year-old hard-bodies appealing. She liked a man with a few wrinkles in his face, a little gray at his temples. Someone who could discuss the intricacies of postperestroika Russia, but still knew who Monty Python was. Someone who appreciated an imported beer but kept himself in the well-toned, muscular shape of a college swimmer. The more she thought about Joe Solomon, the more she appreciated the fun that could be had by two unfettered, consenting adults.

But other times she thought about how great it was to have a friend to watch movies and television with, someone to laugh with and go out to dinner with. Then Lavonne was determined not to blow it by sleeping with him. She knew from experience she could go without sex, but she wasn't sure she could go without his friendship. She had grown too accustomed to having him around.

O
N
S
ATURDAY
L
EONARD CALLED TO SAY THAT HE AND
C
HRISTY
and the boys were driving up from Florida and wanted to stop in to pick up some furniture that Lavonne no longer wanted. Ashley and Louise had flown back to New Orleans the day before and Lavonne really didn't want
to see Leonard, but she figured money must be tight if he was willing to take her cast-offs. She had forgiven him long ago for being a shitty husband, and she found it best to maintain a cordial relationship with him, if only for the girls' sake. Now that she had fallen for Joe Solomon, she could afford to be generous with her ex-husband.

“Sure,” she said. “Come on. I'll be home all afternoon.”

Leonard had remarried soon after their divorce, before he moved to Atlanta to practice law. He married Christy, his thirty-something, ex-secretary. She was everything Leonard had ever wanted in a wife—young, slim, pretty, and subservient in that coy, false way that Leonard so admired in Southern women. Christy lost no time getting pregnant with twin sons who were born eight months after Lavonne left Leonard.