Southern Living (11 page)

Suzanne drove by a house where an old woman was rocking on her front porch, and she slowed down to watch. In north Selby, front-porch rocking chairs were ornamental, like stone lions or urns, and in the five years she’d lived in Red Hill Plantation Suzanne had not seen one person use those rockers, always immaculate and painted cruise-ship white.

There was so much to learn in the beginning. (Christmas alone was overwhelming. You had to buy white lights, not multicolored, and you wore a Christmas sweater from Talbots or Neiman Marcus; only south Selby women wore the Yuletide sweatshirts with iron-on appliqués.) Like an immigrant in a new land, Suzanne watched and absorbed, struggling to emulate the north Selby lifestyle and behaviors. People didn’t forget where she came from. They didn’t ask her “Who are your people?” because they all knew. But as long as Suzanne smiled and sent the right bread-and-butter notes she remained a welcome thread of the tapestry. She was, after all, a Parley.

Still, Suzanne frequently found herself confused. Why could you paint your dining room red but not your car? If gold and diamonds and Rolex were so wonderful then why was it considered tacky to
combine all three? And if her mother-in-law stressed that a foyer set the tone for the house then why did she not like Suzanne’s Wedgwood, crystal, and gilt-bronze twelve-light chandelier?

Every time she came to visit her mother—and only during the day, when her father was at Little Debbie’s—Suzanne was surprised at how people left things out for the world to see and judge. Wet clothes lay over porch railings to dry. Dead appliances sat outside the garages, as if they’d been granted some leisure time in the sunshine after all those years of toiling in a dark corner of the basement. Children’s toys—bicycles and bright pink balls and Tonka trucks and forts made of cardboard boxes—were not seen as junk to be hidden out of sight. Suzanne remembered the sawhorses her mother kept on the driveway for her painting projects, and how she pretended they were balance beams after watching Mary Lou Retton in the Olympics on TV.

Finally, she pulled up to the curb in front of her house. No one was home; her mother was probably delivering one of her wedding cakes. Suzanne noticed that another of the green shutters—there was just one left—had fallen from the house and lay on the ground in the untamed ivy that had been allowed to roam free in the front yard. Like water flooding a room, it had run across and smothered much of the grass and, now out of room, had begun to rise, scaling the walls of the house and every tree in the front yard.

“I hope it eats that house up,” Suzanne said to herself.

After sitting in the car for a few minutes, Suzanne decided to walk around the side of the house, to the backyard. The tractor tire was still there, standing on end and half buried so it rose then returned to the ground like some junkyard rainbow. Suzanne remembered standing and hiding in here; if you squeezed inside and made your body follow the contours of the tire, arms over your head as if you were flying like Superman, you could elude any grown-up for hours. This was Suzanne’s refuge when her father would come home on a rampage after losing his week’s wages in a poker game.

Someone, probably her mother, had pierced the inside edge of the tire and hung plastic pots of petunias and geraniums. Plastic—it seemed so foreign. She thought of the clay pots and concrete statues of her own life. The glass measuring cups and mixing bowls. Steel flashlights. Sterling-silver goblets. Why was everything so heavy now? When had she stopped using plastic? How could something so much lighter and easier be considered tacky? Suzanne nudged one of the hanging plants and watched it swing like the pendulum of a clock:
Plas-tic. Plas-tic. Plas-tic. Plas-tic
.

She unhooked two of the plants and set them on the dirt. Bending forward, Suzanne then backed into the tire, one buttock at a time, chafing the rim, leaving black smudges on each side of her pale-yellow linen dress. Once inside, eyes closed, she became aware of her breathing and the beating of the blood in her ears. The tire had absorbed the day’s sun, and Suzanne found comfort in the warmth of the rubber that now hugged her.

I
t had rained earlier in the hour, and as Randy and Margaret emerged from the air-conditioned lobby of the
Reflector
, they saw steam lazily rising from the asphalt of Cotton Avenue. Margaret quickly remembered a call she’d received in Chatter, from some man who truly had too much to say, too many voices in his head wanting to be heard. In between snippets about smothered pork chops and ATM user fees and the new no-smoking policy at Selby Mall, he managed to drop in an exquisite line explaining how steam was the spirit of dead rainwater, rising up to its home in heaven. Margaret was so excited about this revelation that she quickly pulled off her headset and placed it on Harriet’s head, accidentally denting her silver beehive. Harriet politely listened, smiled, said “Well, isn’t that nice?” and then quickly disappeared into the ladies’ room for fifteen minutes.

Randy reached into the breast pocket of his navy blue blazer and pulled out a pair of gray titanium, aerodynamic Oakley sunglasses, which he put on as they crossed the street. Margaret thought they made him look like an insect.

“Jesus! This humidity! Look at my glasses—it looks like I’m in a fucking sauna.”

Margaret internally flinched. Seven months of residing in Selby had already eclipsed twenty-eight years of living with Ruth Pinaldi—her ears were now sensitized to such language. For the most part, all four-letter words used to denote body parts or human waste were absent from the aural landscape of middle Georgia, and hell was verboten because it was a true place and destination people feared. Locals frowned upon damn because it was a root word from the Bible. In fact, Margaret had learned that the word
damnation
occurred eleven times within this book whose thick yet floppy composition reminded her of a raw porterhouse steak.

Shortly after moving to Selby, Margaret bought her first Bible at the New Way Christian Books and Music next to Kroger, where she found twenty-three varieties to choose from, including a downloadable version for Palm Pilots and a liberally abridged Bible for children with attention deficit disorder. Margaret selected a cheaper, burgundy, faux-leather, New International Edition from Dentwirth and Sons Publishing in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and took it to the checkout counter. A twenty-something woman in braces was reading a comic book titled
The Rapture
, whose Roy Lichtenstein–like cover showed jumbo jets falling from the sky and exploding into fireballs on downtown streets full of screaming people.

“Do you want a concordance with that, ma’am?” she asked.

“A concordance?” Margaret asked. “I don’t know what that is.”

“You … uh … you don’t know what a concordance is? What do you use in Sunday school?”

“I don’t go to Sunday school.”

For a few moments, the woman looked into Margaret’s eyes
with an empathetic, solemn expression, as if someone with a horrible secret had just confided in her.

“Well, but you’re startin’ now, and that’s what counts,” she said. “You know I met a man in here the other day who didn’t find Jesus till he was sixty-nine. A concordance is a reference book. Tells you everything that’s in the Bible.”

“Can you show me one?” Margaret asked.

She disappeared between two aisles of books and returned with the cornflower blue, two-inch-thick
New Strong’s Concise Concordance of the Bible
. Margaret thumbed through it and was immediately pleased with this discovery: Some patient, fastidious man named James Strong had dissected and cross-referenced by key word all seven hundred plus pages of the Holy Bible! According to Mr. Strong, palm trees were mentioned thirty-five times. Human feet, ninety-two! Foreskins, a mere five. Scabs, seven. Righteousness, two hundred and twenty-six. Horses outranked dogs, forty-three to fifteen. And, curiously, the number six was mentioned one hundred ninety-one times.

Margaret had learned there were two things that Southerners sprinkled over much of their daily lives—sugar and church—and she wondered if these ingredients were what made this culture so gentle. Margaret could always tell the newer Yankee transplants in Chatter calls not only by accent but also by the delivery of their censure. A Yankee would call someone a fat slob. A Selbyite would say, “Now there’s a lady who likes her cheese straws and biscuits.”

Sharing foul, aggressive language in Selby was no different from lighting up a cigarette in a vegetarian restaurant; in their respective cultures, both acts released fleeting but potent environmental toxins that left a lingering unpleasantness.

“You really shouldn’t talk like that, Randy,” Margaret said. “It’s not acceptable here.”

“Okay, then, how’s this: Well, bless her heart.”

“That’s better.”

“Do you even know what it means?”

Margaret shook her head.

“It means ‘she’s a bitch and I don’t like her and I’m fixin’ to say something ugly about her.’ ”

“Have I complimented you yet today on your translation skills?”

“No, really. It’s like this: Well bless her heart, she’s got the fattest ass on the planet and her taste is all in her mouth, but she does the best she can.”

“Where are we eating?” she asked him.

“The Forsyth Room. You been?”

“Are you kidding me? On my salary?”

“I got the membership as a bennie with the job. It was that or a golf club membership, and I’m not fat enough to play golf in Selby, Georgia.”

“I’ve heard the grumbling in Chatter about the new chef,” Margaret said.

“Oh, he won’t last long,” Randy replied. “He’s raising absolute hell with the natives, but his food is unbelievable.” He walked five more paces before adding, “Dixie meets Napa Valley.”

The Forsyth Room was a private club with a facade of ionic columns in front, tastefully worn Persian rugs in the elevators, and a ladies’ lounge with a tapestry-covered Chippendale sofa. Since 1923 the club had served lunch to the business elite of Selby, and though women were allowed as guests of their men, they could not become members. Then, in 1993, Georgia’s new assistant state attorney, Pat Reinhold, received in the mail an invitation for “A Social Gathering of Men,” which was the Forsyth Room’s annual Christmastime, male-only eggnog party for the power brokers of Georgia. Unfortunately for members, the Forsyth Room’s new (and now former) secretary that year, Jennifer Hebovsky, was not a regular follower of current events, and she did not know that five years earlier Ms. Reinhold had made history by successfully suing the University of Georgia for the right to participate on the Bulldog crew team.

With invitation in hand, Pat Reinhold drove down to Selby for the party, accompanied by Marvin Cornish, the Atlanta correspondent for National Public Radio. Cornish recorded an impressive verbal tussle between the six-foot-tall Reinhold and a diminutive Sigmund Rollie, the chairman of the board of trustees, who, earlier that morning, as he did every year, personally delivered porcelain cups of eggnog to every powerful woman in middle Georgia so they would not feel excluded from the fellowship.

Yet the dinner club’s biggest changes and challenges were to follow. The principal investor died shortly after Toyota came to town, and his children, all of whom had severed their Dixie roots and lived in Connecticut, sold the Forsyth Room to TasteMark, Inc., of Charlotte, North Carolina. (A Chatter caller had begged, “Couldn’t they at least sell it to someone from South Carolina?”)

The new chef, snagged from the Ritz-Carlton in Laguna Beach, had made a name for himself in Latin-Asian fusion, and upon his arrival in Selby began integrating Southern ingredients into his repertoire, casting grits and collards in what some locals considered to be undignified roles.

“The catfish in the ginger glaze is incredible,” Randy said. “He puts it on a bed of wasabi grits.”

Though he was speaking to Margaret, Randy had been watching and eavesdropping on the two couples dining a few tables to the south. They had ordered iced teas, and the waiter had just set down four glasses of what was now the restaurant’s house tea, an unsweetened, lychee-flavored oolong served with a stalk of lemon grass.

“What
is
this?” asked one of the women. She pulled the lemon grass from the glass and held it up to her nose. “You think it’s sugarcane?”

“No, darlin’, sugarcane’s brown.”

“Could be baby sugarcane.”

The second woman took a drink: “There is
no
sugar in this tea! Do y’all think they forgot?”

“Smells like Lemon Pledge.”

“The new cook’s an Oriental,” said the other man.

“Oriental?” asked the woman.

“Is this Oriental tea?”

“I don’t know, darlin’. I just know it’s not sweet tea.”

“I expect this in Atlanta, but things are gettin’ bad when you can’t get a glass of sweet tea in Selby.”

“Maybe they think you’re sweet enough, Sugar.”

Randy quickly pulled from his pocket the small spiral notebook and Mont Blanc pen, and he began to quickly scribble down the dialogue. “Sometimes I just can’t believe I’m hearing the shit I hear.”

The waitress came to take their drink orders.

“Do you like olives?” Randy asked Margaret, who nodded.

“Gin?”

Before she could respond, Randy said to the waitress, “We’ll have two dirty martinis.”

“I don’t think I like martinis,” Margaret said.

He waved the waitress away with an impatient fluttering of his fingers. “Have you ever had one?” he asked.

The answer was no. A size four, Margaret had a metabolism she once compared to a child’s pinwheel; one glass of wine provided enough breeze to send it merrily spinning in the sun. She could not imagine the effect of the gale-force winds from an all-gin drink.