Southern Living (4 page)

The older man, with curly brown hair and a mustache with a few gray invaders, appeared to be in charge. He looked skyward, using his hand to shield the sun from his eyes.

“That cat’s pretty high,” he said. “We ain’t got a ladder that goes up that high, not one that’ll fit back here in these trees.”

“He’s been up there eight days,” Margaret said.

The man looked at his silent partner, who was younger, about Margaret’s age, with ruddy cheeks and blue eyes shaded by long
lashes. His stomach, she realized now, was not nearly as robust as his partner’s.

“Eight days?” the older firefighter asked.

“Yes.”

“Nah—that cat’s been down and gone back up.”

“I can assure you he hasn’t been down,” Margaret said.

The firefighter looked at the dried cat food on the tree trunk, then down at the blue plastic bowl of water and the folding beach chair Margaret had been sitting in for occasional vigils.

“You’re payin’ too much attention to that cat. You just forget that cat and he’ll come on down.”

“How do you mean?” she asked.

Again, he looked at his partner, wiggled his toothpick with his tongue then smiled.

“Ma’am, there ain’t no cat that’s ever not got down from a tree.”

“You’re sure?”

“You know how I know that?” he asked.

“How?”

“You ever see any cat skeletons up in a tree?”

Margaret shook her head.

“Well, there you go.”

“Okay …”

“You a Bills fan?” he asked.

“Excuse me?”

“Your jacket. Buffalo Bills.”

Margaret looked down at her chest.

“Oh, no. I don’t watch football. I won it in a radio contest.”

“I don’t watch the pros, just the Dogs.”

“Dogs?”

“Bulldogs.”

Margaret shook her head.

“Georgia Bulldogs! You ain’t from around here, are you?”

“No,” she answered.

In so many other locales, the next question would have been
“So where are you from?” But Margaret already had learned this was not the Selby way. People here did not pry, and she liked that. Instead, they stood there quietly, waiting for you to toss another morsel of information onto the floor in front of them, and if you didn’t, they simply turned around and wandered away, which is exactly what happened with the two firefighters.

Margaret watched them amble across the grass, back to their long ladder truck at the curb. As she had noted several times before, there was a softness to the men here, and it was more than the doughy, unexercised appearance so many of them had. Their gaze was not as steely or sharp or invasive as the Northern male’s. They seemed to look at women more with the curiosity of a boy than with the hunger of a man.

Perhaps it was the haircuts that made them less threatening, those seventies lengths with bangs, parted on the side like a Ken doll or Watergate-era heartthrob. Randy called it Bubba-Bowl hair. For weeks, Margaret had stared at the men in Selby. Something seemed out of proportion and unnatural, reminding her of the time she transposed the heads of two similarly sized dolls. She was getting her hair cut in the Selby Mall when she finally realized the source of the visual discordance: It was a boy’s hairstyle atop a man’s body.

Most likely, however, it was the bellies that put Margaret at ease. These half-moon appendages were indicative of leisurely grazers, not predatory carnivores—she could outrun them if she had to. Yet there was something appealing about these bellies, and more than once Margaret had found herself wanting to reach out and pat or stroke a Southern man’s stomach as she would pet Susan B.

From the truck, the younger firefighter looked back at Margaret.

“Ma’am, don’t worry ’bout your cat,” he yelled across the yard. “He’s gonna come down.… He’s up there ’cause he wants to be.”

He waved good-bye, grabbed the bar up near the door handle,
stepped onto the running board and pulled his broad body up, into the cab. When the door was shut, the window came down and the elbow of the young man’s tanned forearm poked out and rested on the edge. As the immense truck inched forward, gaining speed, Margaret watched the arm bend outward and then the large palm pop up into a halt-there! position. He then repeatedly opened and closed his fingers, feeling the resistance of the warm, moist air.

Even this late in September, the air outside seemed as thick and fragrant as the air inside a greenhouse. Margaret wondered what the atmosphere was like right now on the outside, in places other than this deep bowl in which Selby sat. She thought back to her drive down to Selby and how surprised she was at the differences in the last seventy miles, from Atlanta to her mother’s house. Somewhere between the two cities palm trees began to appear—not the tall, slender coconut palms of postcards but the squatty, hardier varieties that look like survivors of the Mesozoic era. She saw vines of blooming wisteria that had climbed and smothered the Georgia pines on both sides of the highway so that at times Margaret found herself driving between two fragrant, purple walls. And the kudzu—in spots it covered every tree, every telephone pole until it seemed as if she were driving through lumpy, chlorophyll-green cumulus clouds. All this time, Margaret noticed herself descending, soft dips followed by long stretches of coasting, as in the final stages of an airplane flight when the seat-belt sign pings on to indicate initial descent. During the seven-hundred-foot drop between Atlanta and Selby, Margaret felt as if she were driving into water, a great lake with a long, gradually sloping bank. Even the air changed, sunny clarity replaced with humidity so heavy it gave an appearance of still-life steam. Margaret had not been outside the car since Chattanooga, and when she opened her door and stepped onto the driveway of her new house that very first time, the warm, wet air instantly fogged her glasses.

The firefighters gone, Margaret returned to the tree for one last plea to Susan B. She then looked at her watch and noticed she had thirty minutes before her meeting with the office manager of the Middle Georgia Heart Clinic. Finally, it looked as if she would snag her first contract. For five months, Margaret had run an ad in the
Reflector
classifieds for her heart-healthy catering business named Georgia on My Plate, which was proving to be as popular as crudités at a toddler’s birthday party. Plenty of potential customers had called to inquire, but after receiving a copy of her menu they seemed to instantly lose interest, and Margaret was perplexed. Was it the prices? Was it the food itself? Who could resist gorgonzola cheese grits with grilled shrimp or collards sautéed in garlic and extra-virgin olive oil and topped with grated Romano? Margaret was not making the connection with Selby palates, and it concerned her. Though she loved her job at the
Reflector
, it was barely enough to get by, and Margaret needed furniture in her empty house. She wanted an overstuffed chair and ottoman for reading and an antique kitchen table to replace the black card table from Target and an honest-to-goodness bed instead of the red futon she’d found on clearance at Pier One in Atlanta.

Ruth Pinaldi, much to Margaret’s surprise, had left her daughter with a debt of nearly $320,000, which ate up every cent of the life insurance and more. Unknown even to her attorney, she had taken out a second mortgage on their small Tudor on Linden Street to finance the addition at the ob-gyn clinic.

Margaret not only had to sell the clinic but also the house and most of its contents, leaving the home in Selby as her only option for shelter. Reluctantly, four months before her thirtieth birthday, she bid good-bye to friends, packed her mother’s Tabasco-red Mercedes with books, clothes, and a cat box for Susan B., and headed south. It almost seemed too perfectly choreographed. The debt. The revelation of the second home. More than once, Margaret wondered if her mother had master-planned this odyssey for
her daughter’s personal development. It was not beyond her to do something like this. Over the years, Ruth had accused her daughter of handling confrontation like a possum, claiming that she scaled the nearest tree and hid in the foliage until the tension ebbed away.

At the clinic, Margaret had been her mother’s patient-care counselor, the woman with whom anxious patients would speak when first calling for an abortion. Margaret would talk them through the process and be there for them on the appointed day with kind words and a day-spa certificate and, if needed, a ride home. She shared the office with Greta, the brusque, buxom Norwegian who ran the office and tried to collect on unpaid accounts.

Occasionally, Ruth would send Greta home for a few days of vacation time and force her daughter to secure the money herself. One time, after a young man screamed at her on the phone, Margaret ran into the bathroom and vomited into the toilet. When she lifted her head, she saw her mother leaning against the doorjamb in one of her red pantsuits. Her hands, in white latex gloves, were folded across her chest. “Are you finished?” she asked. “Because you have three other calls to make.”

Margaret left Susan B. in the tree, climbed the stairs to the porch of her brick, bungalow-style home and went inside, to the bathroom. First, because she was just five-foot-two, Margaret had to pull out the white Rubbermaid stool from beneath the sink. She stepped up, looked in the mirror, and unlocked the bun on the back of her head, letting her black hair fall to its full length, just above the curve of the hips. As she brushed it through, she wondered why and how it ever got this long. It made no sense to have long hair because she always wore it up. Yet the more her mother complained about it—and why—the more she quietly resolved to leave it be. As far as Margaret could tell, this had been her sole successful method of rebellion.

And it would stay, she decided, at least for now … because even in death, Ruth Pinaldi was proving to be an impressive force.
Wedged between the hours of missing her mother were newer, swelling nuggets of anger that Margaret likened to the cardamom pods in Indian food—crucial for the depth of the sauce but, if broken open by teeth, causing a turpentine taste to flood forth and contaminate the tongue for the rest of the meal.

In these flashes of anger, Margaret realized she had plenty to be mad about, most notably being forced into exile and poverty, away from her friends and the only home she’d ever known, to a place that had no good bread boutiques or independent booksellers or Planned Parenthood. Her roof leaked. The window frames were starting to rot. She needed a microwave. Everyone in Selby seemed to be blinded or hypnotized by church and Jesus, and even the few smart liberals she’d met attended adult Sunday school classes with their well-thumbed, worn Bibles in hand. Other than Randy, Margaret had met no one who could offer truly secular, challenging dialogue.

She missed humor tinged with cynicism and found herself staying up late to watch David Letterman for a fill of it. She missed the smell of garlic in restaurants. She missed efficiency. Speed. People were always letting her cut in the line at Kroger because, in their eyes, she appeared to be in a big hurry to get someplace. Margaret longed for Wegmans, her supermarket in Buffalo, and she wanted soppressata and passion fruit and soba noodles. She wanted some interesting, pro-choice couple to invite her to dinner for tabbouleh and grilled eggplant. She wanted the Persian rugs that she had to sell before she moved here. She missed seeing bumper stickers that had nothing to do with Jesus or guns or the Confederate flag. She wanted her cat down from that tree.

“Stop it!” Margaret chastised herself in front of the mirror. She set her hairbrush down on the vanity. “You will make a home here, Margaret Pinaldi,” she said. “You have no alternative.”

R
eclined in her father’s brown, crushed-velvet La-Z-Boy, Donna Kabel was reading but absorbing little. She had lingered on page one hundred sixteen of the Produce Manager’s Guide to Successful Merchandising—the section on bulb onions—for a good ten minutes, and the only bit of information that had truly stuck with her was the paragraph that said onions had less tear-producing effects if you chilled them before cutting. The cordless phone lay in her lap.

Donna had not spoken to or seen Robbie in five days. In the first few weeks after the car accident, he had been good about stopping by on his way home from work at Fall Line Chevrolet-Buick. Yet Donna was worried she had soured him on his last visit. Robbie had surprised her with a box of six red roses and news that he’d
been named July’s salesman of the month, winning a free weekend at the Days Inn on Tybee Island and some coupons for dinner at the Olive Garden in Savannah.

“When you get better we can go,” he said, looking at the scar that ran up the side of her cheek. It was the first time he’d seen Donna without a bandage. “How long’s that gonna take to go away?” he asked.

“Robbie, I can’t do that,” Donna replied. “That’s an overnight trip. Daddy wouldn’t like it one bit.”

“You’re twenty-two years old, Donna. He can’t tell you what to do.” As he spoke, Robbie kept shifting his head, looking at the scar from different angles, as if he were trying to see beyond an object that blocked his view.

“If I went off and did that, even if all we did was hold hands, my daddy would think he’d failed as a Christian parent. Don’t you understand that?”

“No, Donna, I don’t,” he answered. “Your daddy’s kinda crazy when it comes to Jesus.”

In south Selby, Frankie Kabel was known as the Plywood Prophet because of the Bible verses he painted on large sheets of wood in fluorescent green paint and displayed in the front yard, leaned up against the trunk of a weeping willow. He also moderated a Bible study group for older Christians who had lost a spouse to cancer. On Saturdays, Frankie rented a space at Happy’s Flea Market, sandwiched between a vendor of camouflage clothing and a woman selling clear plastic bags of deep-fried pork rinds. He handed out rainbow-colored vinyl bookmarks imprinted with Bible verses as he preached to passersby.