Southern Living (2 page)

“Well,” she said, “everything’s gotta come down some time or other.”

Harriet then shook her head and looked into the air with a quizzical expression, an index finger on her closed lips, as if she were searching for a book on a high shelf. Suddenly, her face lit up.

“Did you call the fire department?” she asked.

“Do they really do that kind of thing? I thought that was a myth.”

“Ben Tuckabee’s cat got up in a tree and they got him down.”

“Good morning, ladies.”

As Randy Whitestone approached, Harriet quickly turned her focus to the pile of folders before her. Margaret realized early on that the new executive editor, with his un-Southern, brusque delivery and the impatient, staccato manner in which he chewed his gum, made Harriet nervous. He also bombarded her with constant requests to add an international flavor to the food page. Randy was a foodie. Harriet would come to work two or three days a week and find hurriedly-torn-out clippings on her desk from
Cook’s Illustrated
and
Saveur
, recipes for kimchee and Vietnamese beef soups and low-fat pad Thai. Harriet responded by pinning to the gray fabric walls of her cubicle certificates of appreciation from the Middle Georgia Muscadine Growers Association and the Georgia Pecan Board, among others.

“What deep-fried delicacy are we planning for this week’s food page, Harriet?” Randy asked. He leaned forward, resting his arms on the top ledge of her cubicle.

“Well …” Her hands, usually as steady and fluid as a heavy door on hinges, shook slightly as she looked at a press release from the Peach State Pork Council. “See, next week is National Pork Week. I was gonna write up some recipes for pulled pork.”

Randy ignored her, turning his attention to Margaret. “Have you had the barbecue here yet? It’s incredible. Tangy, not sweet like you’d expect it to be. Why is that, Harriet?”

“Sir?”

“What’s the story behind the barbecue in central Georgia? How did it get so tangy?”

“Just always been that way,” she said.

“No, no, no, there’s got to be a reason for it. It’s got to do with ingredients or influence of some culture or something. You need to call a food historian.”

Harriet wrote on her yellow legal pad—
Call food historian
—in slow, curvaceous letters that reminded Margaret of the young, delicate tendrils of a vine.

“What about next week’s page?” he asked.

For the first time in the conversation, Harriet looked up at him. “I was gonna write a story about an artist in Vidalia who’s makin’ fake food.”

“Fake food?”

“Yes, sir. They call it faux food. He makes polymer fruits and some desserts that look real as can be.”

Randy laughed and started to shake his head. “Why would anyone want to use fake food, Harriet?” he asked.

“For decoration,” she explained. “People like to use fake food in their decoratin’. Like a bowl of fruit out on the counter.”

“But why not use real food?”

“Because it’ll spoil,” she answered.

“That’s okay, Harriet. Never mind. It must be a cultural thing.… Did you get that article I put on your desk yesterday?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And?”

Harriet stared at the blinking cursor on her screen for a moment. Her chin began to tremble slightly, and her eyes grew shiny with a coating of tears. Finally, she looked up at Randy.

“Mr. Randy,” she blurted. “I just don’t think my readers are gonna wanna read about raw fish.”

“It’s sushi, Harriet.”

“I already write about fish.”

“There’s only so much you can say about fried catfish.”

“There’s no need to get ugly with me.”

“I’m not getting ugly, Harriet. I just know that three hundred
Japanese families now call Selby, Georgia, their home. We’ve got to diversify our food coverage to meet their tastes.”

Just two months before Margaret arrived in Selby, the Toyota Corporation opened its newest North American auto assembly plant southeast of town. Along with the executive families relocated from Osaka, nearly twelve hundred workers from a closed plant outside Camden, New Jersey, followed their old jobs south. Shortly thereafter, the rest of the world discovered Selby, Georgia.

In these tumultuous, post-Toyota days—Randy referred to them as A.T., After Toyota—a Japanese grammar school moved into the abandoned Ponderosa Steakhouse on Cusetta Road. Walgreens bought out a local four-generation drugstore chain named Ringleman’s and not only stopped home delivery but replaced the adjacent Hallmark card shop with liquor marts. Natives were boycotting their banks because the new out-of-state owners fired the receptionists and installed voice mail. Selby’s first X-rated video store opened in the old post office on Pio Nono Road. New Yankee parents at Ronald Dunwoody Elementary School started a petition to fire the principal because she refused to abolish the moment of silence that followed the Pledge of Allegiance each morning. Four sushi restaurants opened in the affluent, northern part of town, and the Selby roll was born—a marriage of barbecued pork, tempura-fried Vidalia onions, and rice wrapped not in nori but in a ribbon of steamed collard greens. And, for the first time ever, it was possible for Selbyites to get their hair cut and car washed on the Sabbath.

Two months after the Toyota plant opened, the
Reflector
, a family-owned newspaper that had seen just six publishers, all with the same last name, in its one-hundred-eighty-year history, was sold to Granite-Peabody Communications of Washington, D.C. On the day the sale was announced, they brought in Randy Whitestone, a Pulitzer Prize–winning editor from the
Philadelphia Inquirer
who, unfortunately for Harriet Toomey, knew the difference between a serrano and jalapeño chili. It was Randy who took the
daily Bible verse off the front page. He cut the society column that featured monied Selby enjoying themselves at Sugar Day Country Club. He directed the features editor to include a men-seeking-men and women-seeking-women section on the personals page in the weekend entertainment guide. He started Chatter and hired Margaret, despite his concern that she was vastly overqualified with her master’s in women’s studies from SUNY-Buffalo.

After extracting a promise from Harriet that she would ask the consumer test panel to weigh in on rice cookers, Randy wheeled a chair into Margaret’s cubicle and sat down. Lanky, six-foot-two, with brown eyes, an omnipresent beard shadow on fair skin, and black hair parted on the side, Randy reminded Margaret of Alan Alda’s
M*A*S*H
character of Hawkeye Pierce, with an opinionated voice that seemed to babble on like a brook after spring thaw. Randy seemed incapable of practicing verbal restraint, and Margaret could imagine him talking back to the television at home, in the dark: “The peanut you are referring to in your ad is pronounced BOY-uhld … not bold. It is BOY-uhld peanuts, not bold peanuts! BOY-uhld peanuts are cooked in hot water. Bold peanuts would be peanuts that are flavored with Cajun spice.”

“I’m loving that Chatter, Margaret,” he said. “Are they still howling about food?”

The first shot had been fired that Monday, when a newcomer to the city called in to complain about the paucity of salads in local restaurants.

“I was wondering,” Margaret said. “Should I keep the ‘y’alls’ or write ‘you all’?”

“Keep it raw and real,” he answered, “just like you’re doing. That’s the charm of the column.”

“You don’t think it parodies the natives?”

“What’s not to parody?”

“Be nice,” she said.

“Be real,” he countered.

Randy seemed to have an addiction for throwing the final volley in a conversation, and though everyone else in the newsroom would quickly disengage from him with a “Yes, sir,” a verbal shutting of a door on his face, Margaret would often counter his remarks because she thought that someone had to tame and corral this man, and the Southerners were too polite to do so. Randy seemed out of control, brilliant but wild and arrogant, and Margaret enjoyed watching him exhaust his oral firearm, shot by shot, until the only bullet he had left was an “Okay, then” that would humbly trickle from his lips.

But not now, Margaret thought. At this very minute, she had a cat stranded more than thirty feet up a sweet gum tree in her backyard on Kimes Place, and she wanted to quickly key in the last of the typesetting commands, send her column to the copy desk for editing, run by Kroger for gingerroot and fennel bulbs, then get home and try, again, to coax him down.

“Yes, sir,” she said to Randy.

S
uzanne opened the door to find John David swinging a grease-spotted white bag of Krystal hamburgers. “I’m here to tempt you, Suzanne,” he said. “How ’bout an early lunch?”

Suzanne looked at her silver Bulgari watch, which she had bought two weeks earlier at Neiman Marcus in Atlanta. “It’s ten-forty, John David. We can’t eat lunch right now.”

“But it’s not too early for a highball, is it, Suzanne?” he asked, raising his eyebrows and looking at the glass in her hand.

“I’m working extra hard, you know that, John David. This house has got to be perfect for Boone’s office Christmas party, and I’m copin’ the best way I can.”

“And we’re gonna eat outside,” he said. “On the patio.”

“No, John David, we’re not eating outside. They’ll see us.”

“I know.”

Suzanne already had started back toward the kitchen.

“I want mine in a Waterford tumbler just like yours,” he yelled after her. “And get us some napkins, too. You know how messy Krystals are.”

John David had shown up almost daily since the roof work began on the addition next door. For the past seven days, three young men with broad, tanned backs had been working to shingle the steep, plywood slopes of what would soon be the largest home in Red Hill Plantation, ten thousand square feet. With the addition of the third story, the house was so tall it required a crane, which cast a shadow that throughout the day crept across Suzanne’s property like the hour hand of a clock.

The tag on the truck indicated the crew had come from Marietta, and it was obvious this was their first Selby job. The unwritten rule for service workers in Selby, even the young men who cut the grass, was that they wear a shirt on the job.

Suzanne and John David sat on the patio, eating the burgers and drinking vodka and ice from their tumblers.

“I don’t care what you say, John David, I think it’s awful.”

“If that’s awful then you’ve got problems, girl.”

“I’m gonna call the number on that truck and complain.”

“Suzanne, if those roofers put their shirts back on I’m leavin’, and you’re gonna be here to drink this luscious Ketel One vodka all by yourself.”

He took a drink. “Look at those backs, Suzanne. Brown and hot! Don’t you think they look like loaves of bread fresh outta the oven?”

“I think it’s tacky, John David.”

“I’ll bet you butter would melt on those backs.”

The roofer John David had named Sven looked down, and John David gave a wave.

“Y’all are doin’ great work up there!” he shouted, holding his glass in the air in a toast. “Keep it up!”

He turned toward Suzanne. “I want Mr. Mediterranean,” he said. “You can have Sven.”

“John David!”

“Oh don’t get your panties in a wad, Suzanne.”

“John David,” she said, “we gotta talk about the master bath and that tub. You gotta find me a claw-foot tub with Jacuzzi jets.”

“What do you want a Jacuzzi for, Suzanne? You’re too uptight for a Jacuzzi.”

“There’s gotta be a way to get one.”

John David took a drink of his vodka. “I’ve told you there’s no way to hook up a freestanding tub to Jacuzzi jets, there’s just no way,” he said, his eyes focused on the roof. “Besides, Jacuzzis are tacky. When are you gonna learn that?”

John David popped the last corner of a Krystal burger in his mouth and followed it down with a wash of vodka. “Did you get the wallpaper up in the foyer?” he asked.

“Ronnie didn’t show up today,” Suzanne said. “He said his momma was havin’ a coughing fit, and that he might could do it tomorrow. I do not want to sleep another night in this house with that old wallpaper.”

“It’s not even a year old, Suzanne.”

“But it’s not right, John David. It’s never been right since the day it went up.”

John David had seen this before; Suzanne would pick a new bed or painting or carpeting or wallpaper and be satisfied with it until she saw something she liked better in a catalog or store or someone else’s house. When she decided it was time to replace something, the older version immediately repulsed her, and the once-cherished item suddenly became as undesirable as a stinking vagrant asleep on the front porch.

John David had anticipated this passionate and urgent desire to redecorate, fueled, in part, by the castle rising next door. (Until the renovation of this house, Suzanne’s had been the largest in the
subdivision.) There also was the feature in
Metropolitan Home
of her new next-door neighbors from California. The San Francisco row house with wooden floors was sparsely decorated with Persian rugs, Mexican antiques, and a combination of Louis XIV and Bauhaus-inspired furniture. John David’s favorite feature was the collection of different-sized, perfectly round, Calder-red rugs whimsically placed around the house. It looked as if a giant had cut his finger and bled in random spots.