Secret Lives of the Kudzu Debutantes (26 page)

Lavonne sipped her martini. “What does it mean when young mothers start looking like teenagers?”

“It means you're older than shit.”

“That's what I thought.”

“Hell,” Eadie said, eyeing the young couple with the screaming baby. “For all we know, they
might
be teenagers.”

The baby, whose name, unfortunately, was Caldwell, raised his voice an octave and began to kick the table with his feet. “Now, Caldwell,” his mother said in a cheerful voice loud enough to be heard by most of the restaurant. “I know you don't want to sit in that high chair, but Mommy and Daddy are trying to have dinner with our friends and we'd appreciate it if you could be patient. Can you be patient, Caldwell?”

Apparently not. Caldwell opened his arms wide and turned his tear- streaked face to his mother. “I just love it when he makes that face,” she said. “Isn't he the cutest thing?” she gushed.

“Adorable,” the other woman said.

Caldwell's screams took on a tinge of rage.

“You know,” Lavonne said to Eadie, “when my kids acted like that, one of us got up and took them out of the restaurant. There was a period of about six years when neither Leonard nor I ever got to sit through a complete meal.”

“I always thought your girls were well-behaved.”

“It's not that they were well-behaved. They were awful at times. It's just that we didn't feel it was right to inflict them on innocent bystanders. Mothers today seem to think they can
reason
with toddlers. There's no reasoning with a two-year-old.”

As if to prove her point, the young mother at the opposite table said loudly, “Caldwell, I can appreciate your frustration. I wouldn't like it either if I was strapped into some wooden chair. And I know, if you could talk, you'd express your frustration more reasonably than you're doing right now.”

Caldwell began to throw himself violently against his restraints.

“Now that,” Eadie said, clutching her martini glass and pointing with one finger, “is why I never had children.”

“Actually, I always thought you'd make a good mother.”

“Tell the truth, Lavonne.” Eadie raised one eyebrow and sipped her drink. “Don't you miss having babies around?”

Lavonne looked at Caldwell. “No,” she said. “I mean, don't get me wrong, I loved being a mom, I still do, but I wouldn't go back to those toddler days now. I've got the rest of my life in front of me to do with as I please. I'm not picking up after anyone but myself. I'm not wiping anyone's backside but my own.”

Eadie grinned. “Speaking of wiping other people's backsides,” she said. “How's Leonard?” Lavonne had told her about the visit with Christy, Landon, and Preston. They'd laughed about it for days.

“I haven't heard from him since he got back to Atlanta. Since I told him about Joe.”

At the next table, Caldwell's mother refused to give up. “Look, Caldwell, what shape do you see here?” She held up a cocktail napkin. “Is it a square? Is it a square, Caldwell?” She picked up a votive candle. “Look at the candle, Caldwell. It's round. Can you say round?”

Eadie said, “Look at the martini glass, Lavonne. It's round. Can you say round?”
Lavonne said, “Look at the cocktail shaker. It's round.”

“And speaking of round,” Eadie said, waving down the waiter. “We'll have another one.”

After a while, Caldwell's father tired of the baby's screams. He picked him up and carried him around the restaurant nestled in his arm, standing in front of the opened kitchen so the baby could watch the employees work. Their food came and Eadie and Lavonne settled down to a quiet dinner. A few minutes later, Eadie's cell phone rang. She looked at the caller ID, and then turned the phone off.

“It's Trevor,” she said. “I'll call him later.”

“How are things going with you two?”

Eadie twirled her pasta with her fork. “As well as can be expected,” she said. “Something's wrong but I don't know what. It's frustrating. He's starting to lose patience with me.”

Lavonne hesitated, trying to pick her words carefully. “Maybe this isn't about you and Trevor.” Eadie looked at her, but kept eating. “I've been thinking about what you said earlier. You said you'd been dreaming about your mother, right? And she's trying to tell you something, only you can't remember in the morning. Maybe your subconscious is trying to tell you something. Your shadow.”

“Goddamn it, you sound like Trevor. I'm not crazy, Lavonne. At least I don't think I am.”

“Crazy is a subjective term.”

“I'll try and remember that when they're hauling me off in a straitjacket.”

“Look, Eadie, I went through something similar a couple of years ago. I started seeing my dead mother. Everywhere. I saw her on street corners waiting to catch a bus; I saw her in crowded supermarkets, as real as you are sitting across from me now. I was beginning to think I had some kind of hormonal imbalance. I was beginning to think it might be time for a trip to the psychiatrist. But what I realized sometime during all of that craziness, is that middle age is a time when we have to face our childhood demons. We have to slay those dragons, and then move on.”

Eadie drank steadily and then put her glass down again. “Who said anything about dragons?” she said. “I don't buy into that blame-your-parentsfor-your-problems-as-an-adult mentality. People have to be responsible for their own lives.”

“I'm not saying to blame anybody. I'm just saying acknowledge what happened and then move on.”

“My mother did the best she could,” Eadie said stubbornly. “Given the circumstances. She had a hard life.”

“I know that, Eadie, but from what you've told me, you had to grow up fast. You had to be the parent because your mother wasn't capable of being one. You had to lock up that child persona and take on the responsibilities of adulthood.”

They ate in silence, their spoons clanking against the ceramic pasta bowls. Eadie hated talking about her childhood. Not that hers had been all that bad. She'd talked to plenty of people who'd had it worse than she had. And after Eadie figured out a way to stop Reba from bringing home any more stepdaddies, things had gotten a lot better. She'd done it by giving her mother something to concentrate on other than a bunch of sorry men. She'd done it by becoming a beauty queen. She'd let Reba and the girls down at Miss Eula's House of Hair enter her in Purvis Auto's Little Miss Mag Wheels Beauty Pageant and Tire Sale. Eadie promptly won a set of tires and was crowned Little Miss Mag Wheels. In quick succession she won the coveted crowns of Miss MoonPie Deluxe, Miss Waycross Watermelon Festival, and Miss Tishimingo County Fairest of Them All.

During the week Eadie was Queen of the Goths at Ithaca Public High School, wearing thick eyeliner and black lipstick; on weekends she was a beauty queen collecting trophies and glittering tiaras as casually as if she were picking daisies in a field. It was the kind of dyslexic contradiction that only the South can produce. By the time she was a junior Eadie had made enough money through modeling and endorsements to buy Reba a little house over on the south side of town, and by the time she graduated she had enough money saved to make it through two years of college.

So all in all, her childhood really hadn't been all that bad.

Lavonne finished her spaghetti con polpettini. She was determined to help Eadie get through this anyway she could. She figured she was entitled to act as a psychological counselor on account of what had happened to her two years before and the fact that she loved Eadie like a sister. “You know I love you like a sister and I don't want to hurt you,” she said, pushing her empty bowl away.

“Good,” Eadie said. “Then don't.”

“But remember: depression is anger turned inward.”

Eadie put her fork down. “Who said anything about depression?” she said.

“Look at your art.” Eadie groaned and put her head in her hands, but Lavonne went on. “Look at what you make for yourself. You create an army of giant goddesses the same way a Chinese emperor creates an army of tomb soldiers.”

“So? A lot of artists create female shapes. And in case you haven't noticed, Lavonne, I've been painting a lot of cherubs lately.” Lavonne stared at her as if this might be significant, and Eadie flushed and lifted her martini.

“You have to ask yourself, do these images mean something to you? Do they symbolize something important?”

Eadie put her glass down. “Okay, Lavonne. You tell me. Obviously you think they symbolize something.” She was feeling belligerent. It seemed everyone in her life felt like they had the right to psychoanalyze her whether she needed it or not.

“The female figures are totems,” Lavonne said. “Powerful female figures to compensate for the powerful female figure you never had—your mother.”

“Oh my God, you've been reading Jung again.”

“Just think about it, Eadie.”

Eadie grimaced and shook her head. She wished now she was drinking something a little stronger than peach martinis. If she'd known Lavonne had analysis on her mind, she'd have ordered a bottle of tequila instead. “What are you suggesting?” she asked in exasperation. “That I spend countless hours and thousands of dollars in therapy. That I give up my goddesses and paint still lifes?”

“No. The answer is simple. And cheap.”

“I'm all ears,” Eadie said morosely. She picked up her glass and looked down into the bottom like she was trying to read leaves in a teacup. The father walked by with a complacent Caldwell nestled in his arms. The child sat facing out with his chubby legs stuck straight out in front of him, his back resting against his father's chest. He looked at Eadie and smiled vaguely. “I'm listening,” she said. “What's the answer?”

Lavonne leaned forward and rested her arms on the table. She smiled at Eadie's sullen expression. “Forgiveness,” she said.

T
HE WEEK BEFORE
M
OTHER'S
D
AY
, N
ITA WENT OUT TO THE
nursing home with an orchid and a small present she had wrapped for Leota Quarles. She was not in her room, but the nurse was, arranging items on the bedside table. The room looked different. “Is Leota at lunch?” Nita asked, standing in the doorway.

The nurse, startled, looked around. “Miz Motes, didn't you get my message?” she said.

“What message?”

“I left it with your daughter last week.”

Nita flushed and held the plant awkwardly out in front of her. She shook her head slightly. “She must have forgotten to tell me.”

“I thought you knew. I'm sorry. Miz Quarles died in her sleep last Tuesday night.”

O
N
W
EDNESDAY AFTERNOON,
L
OGAN STAYED AFTER SCHOOL FOR
band practice so Nita went by the middle school to pick up Whitney. She
was still shaken by the news of Leota Quarles's death and by the knowledge that she had not known about, and therefore hadn't attended, the old woman's funeral. She couldn't see Whitney when she pulled up in front of the school, so she parked in a spot close to the flagpole to wait. A few minutes later, a girl climbed out of a truck across the parking lot and leaned in the passenger's window to collect her book bag. She wore a skirt short enough to show off her long lovely legs and also her black thong underwear. The girl stood up and Nita, shocked and curious to see who had allowed their daughter out of the house dressed like that, craned her neck to see.

It was Whitney.

She watched her daughter saunter across the parking lot toward the car. She opened the rear door and threw her backpack in and then climbed into the front seat beside her mother. Nita sat for a few minutes, staring at the flagpole.

“What's wrong?” Whitney said.

Nita turned her head slowly. “Last week. Someone called me about a Mrs. Quarles. You were supposed to give me a message.”

Whitney snapped her gum and rolled her eyes. “What about her?” she said.

“She died.”

Whitney slouched down in the seat, putting her knees up on the dash. Nita started the car and backed up slowly, eyeing her sullen daughter with an expression of disappointment and concern. “Did your father see you before you went to school today? Did he see the way you were dressed?” Whitney had been spending the week with Charles.

She blew a bubble. “Christ,” she said.

“Don't say ‘Christ.’ And don't sit like that.”

“Why not?” Whitney turned her face to the window but kept sitting the way she was. She plucked idly at her hair.

“Because it's not what a nice girl would do.”

“I don't care about being a nice girl. I don't want to be a nice girl,” Whitney said, pushing herself upright.

“Seat belt,” Nita said. Whitney slammed the belt in the buckle and Nita put the car in drive. She drove slowly past the pickup truck, trying to catch a glimpse of the driver. Then she circled the lot and came back up on the other side of the truck.

“What are you doing?” Whitney said, her voice edging toward panic as
Nita slowed down. “Mother, what are you doing?” She put her hand over her eyes and turned her face to the window.

Nita stopped beside the truck and put her window down. “Excuse me,” she said loudly.

“Mother,” Whitney groaned.