Revenge of the Kudzu Debutantes (7 page)

She thought,
What’s wrong with me?
She thought,
Where will this end?
She pushed her forehead against the cool window glass and stretched her arms out and placed her feverish palms against the glass, too. She reminded herself that she had given up porno romance novels forever. She remembered she had sung in the church choir and been a Crusader for Christ. She recalled she was a wife and mother.

She told herself that he would leave her house today and she would return, gradually, to her old life, to the way she had been before, heavy and slumbering. Jimmy Lee glanced up at the house and saw her watching him from the door.

He smiled and waved.

Nita peeled her forehead off the glass. She dropped her arms at her sides. Like a sleepwalker, she lifted her hand, and waved back.

The children were going home with Virginia after school and Charles would not be home until six o’clock, so Nita sat out in a lounge chair beside the pool all afternoon drinking sweet tea and watching Jimmy Lee work.

She liked the way he handled his tools, the way he measured carefully so all his cuts were clean and precise. He was a craftsman, and she could see he took a certain careful pride in his work. Accustomed to the rantings of her husband when he was involved in a particular case, she found Jimmy Lee’s quiet perfectionism comforting. He reminded her of her daddy, Eustis James, a stonemason who built walls and foundations so well-crafted and sturdy they looked like they’d been there since the beginning of time. “A man has to be able to stand back and take pride in what he has built,” he had explained to her once. “Otherwise his life won’t mean a thing, and he’ll know that in his heart, and it’ll eat away at him until nothing is left but bitterness and regret.”

Nita sometimes wondered if this was not Charles’s problem. She wondered if his frustration and growing bitterness were not caused by the fact that he could never stand back and see what he had built, as if he, too, had realized the practice of law was nothing more than a shifting morass of boredom, incomprehensible language, and resentful clients. Nita sometimes thought Charles would be a much happier man if only he knew how to swing a hammer.

“So, what do you think of your Taj Mahal?” Jimmy Lee asked, looking up at the pool house. He had taken a break and was squatting in the shade of the live oak with his forearms resting on his knees.

“Taj Mahal?” she said.

He grinned and lifted his drink. “I’m just kidding,” he said. His back was smooth and sleek. He had the shoulders of a movie idol. Nita couldn’t remember boys having bodies like that when she was young. It must be something they were eating these days, some superior genetic trait coming through, sure and certain proof of the beauty of evolution.

“I think it’s beautiful,” she said from her lounger. “It’s just what I wanted.”

“Thanks.” His eyes moved critically over his work. He chewed an ice cube and thought about ways he could have made it better. “I think we should trim out the eaves,” he said, pointing to the roof of the pool house. “We should trim it with some kind of cornice work. Something to dress it up a bit.”

“Okay,” she said. It looked perfect to her but if it would keep him around a few days longer, she’d agree to anything.

He shook his head and set his glass down on the ground at his feet, grinning at her over his shoulder. “You’re just about the nicest person I’ve ever worked for,” he said. “I wish all my customers were like you.”

She didn’t know what to say to this so she just stretched her legs out along the lounger and looked at her toes. She was wearing a short skirt and a cashmere sweater. She reddened, thinking that a thirty-nine-year-old woman probably shouldn’t wear a short skirt. Only thirty-nine-year-old women who looked like Eadie Boone could get away with short skirts. She wished she had Eadie’s long legs.

Jimmy Lee looked at her legs like he thought they were just fine. “Hey, aren’t you Eustis James’s daughter? Billy’s sister?” He put the glass to his mouth and tipped his head back, looking at her over the rim.

“Yes. How did you know that?”

“I worked with Eustis and Billy on that new Piggly Wiggly out on Black Warrior Road a couple of years back. I was working on a framing crew at the time and they were doing all the stonework. Is Billy still working with your dad?”

“Yes.” Billy was Nita’s youngest brother. He was twenty-six and Eustis James had done well enough in business to bring him in as a partner six years ago. Nita had grown up in a little ranch house close to the public high school. They had not been wealthy, but Nita and her brothers, Billy and Lyman, had never wanted for anything. By the time she graduated from high school, Eustis’s business had done well enough that he could afford to buy her a brand-new Volkswagen and send her to two years of community college, and by the time Lyman graduated four years later, he’d been able to afford to send him off to Emory University in Atlanta. By the time Billy graduated from high school, Eustis and Loretta James had built a new home on a private lake out from town. The house was not big by River Oaks standards, but it was nice and spacious and Nita liked to take the children out there to spend the night and fish when Charles was out of town and wasn’t there to protest.

“But how’d you know I was Eustis’s daughter? Billy’s sister?”

Jimmy Lee dangled his glass of tea between his knees. “You probably don’t remember this, but I went to school with Billy,” he said, looking up at her again. “We graduated in the same class and I was there the night of the game with Tyner, the night they were crowning you Homecoming Queen.”

Nita had a sudden memory of five-year-old Billy bouncing around the bleachers with a group of round-cheeked boys in baseball caps while he waited for his big sister to accept her crown.

Jimmy Lee took another ice cube in his mouth. He sucked it awhile and when it was small, he went on. “I was just a young punk then, but I thought you were just about the prettiest thing I’d ever seen. A fairy princess.” He stood up and stretched, grinning at her. “I told my mama I was going to marry you when I grew up and she used to tease me for years after that.”

A chilly breeze blew from the east. Nita looked at her toes and thought
I probably used to babysit him.
The depression that had troubled her since last night, and all through her lunch with Eadie and Lavonne and Virginia, returned. Something heavy swung from her collarbone, swaying over the pit of her stomach like a pendulum.

He finished his drink. He grinned and put the glass down on the patio table. “It just about killed me when you got married,” he said.

He was making fun of her now, she was sure of it. Teasing her the way a little boy teases a babysitter. When she was twenty, the year she finished a two-year secretarial program at the community college and accepted a job at Boone & Broadwell, he was still playing Little League Baseball. He was still riding a bike and fishing in the creek when she went to work for old Judge Broadwell and first met Charles, home for the summer and clerking at his father’s firm. When she married Charles at twenty-three, two years after Judge Broadwell died, Jimmy Lee had been a carefree ten-year-old, most likely a Boy Scout or newspaper delivery boy.

He looked at her and frowned. “Did I say something wrong?”

“No.” She put her glass down on the patio and swung her legs around to plant her feet. She sat there for a few minutes looking down at her Tahitian Pink toes. “I probably should get dinner started,” she said, too embarrassed and self-conscious to rise. The Zibolskys’ cat, Pumpkin, crouched on the top of the tall fence, watching them curiously. “I’m thinking of starting a hobby,” she said, thinking
Why did I say that?
“Maybe scrapbooking, maybe conversational French. I don’t know—maybe piano lessons.”

“How about woodworking?”

“Woodworking?” She was embarrassed by her sudden outburst about the hobby. Her mouth seemed to be working without any guidance from her brain. “Where would I learn to do that?”

“I could teach you. I’ve got a shop at my house.” She glanced at him to see if he was kidding. He watched her steadily. Great billowy clouds sailed across the blue sky like an armada. Pumpkin twitched his tail lazily against the fence. “Just think about it,” he said, finally. He put his hands on his hips and leaned back, stretching. Bright slabs of sunlight fell across his face and chest. There was a small scar beneath his lower lip, intricate as a coiled thread. “I best get going so you can get supper started for your family. Ask your husband about that trim on the eaves,” he said, all business again. “If he wants me to do it I can come back next week.”

He began to load his tools into his toolbox, picking up scraps of lumber and dropping them into the burn barrel. Nita sat there, trying not to feel self-conscious while she watched him clean up, not sure if she should go into the house or offer to help, not knowing if he was serious about the woodworking or just making pleasant conversation with a lonely housewife, something he probably did at least once a week.

He closed the lid on his toolbox. “Okay,” he said. He picked up his toolbox, but just stood there looking at the pool house.

She tested her weight, leaning first on one foot and then the other, but not rising. “Okay,” she said.

Without a word he reached his hand out and took her arm to help her rise. The electricity of that touch traveled up her arm like a lightning strike, blasting all other thought from her mind, and in the moment of clear-headed emptiness that followed, Nita felt herself weightless, freed from the burden of gravity and duty, and she was suddenly floating up over the patio and the pool house and the arching branches of the trees toward the deep blue sky. She was definitely having an out-of-body experience. She had seen episodes of
Unsolved Mysteries
that talked about out-of-body experiences and she was definitely having one now. She looked down on the top of her head and Jimmy Lee’s head. She saw the sparkling water of the pool and the steep-pitched pool house and the green grass of her yard and the Zibolskys’ yard spread out below her like she was looking through the lens of a telescope.
Bump, bump, bump
went her head against the moss-draped branches of the live oak where a curious woodpecker watched her ascent.
Thump, thump, thump,
went her heart.

He let go of her arm. There was a whirring sound in her ears and Nita felt herself being sucked down from the blue sky and the arching branches of the live oak and back down to earth. It happened in the blink of an eye. One minute she was up bouncing in the top of the live oak and the next she was standing on the patio beside Jimmy Lee.

“I meant what I said about the woodworking. You have my number. Call me.” He grinned and walked away, whistling, the gate banging shut behind him, leaving her to stare in astonishment at the glittering water of the pool, and the azalea bushes, and the woodpecker perched and shining like a jewel in the top of the tall tree.

CHAPTER

FIVE

T
HE DAY OF
the party dawned unseasonably hot and muggy for early October. Sunlight fell oppressively over brown lawns like a bad omen. Flies as big as fruit bats darted in the bright, still air. Lavonne, who had not slept the night before, sat despondently at her kitchen table sipping a cup of lukewarm coffee and watching for the arrival of the Shapiro van with a feeling of dread that coalesced and spread through her abdomen like an oil spill. Above, she could hear Leonard’s footsteps as he crossed from the bathroom to the bedroom. She could feel each footstep deep in her belly, low and rhythmic like the clacking of railroad cars, like the ticking of a time bomb.

What had she been thinking?
She asked herself this as she sipped her coffee, her bleary eyes fixed on the street where, at any minute, the old blue Shapiro van would come careening around the corner. After that lunch meeting with Virginia Broadwell she had convinced herself that Mona Shapiro would be the perfect choice to cater. She had assured herself that given the fact she couldn’t find anyone else at this late date, she had no choice but to hire her. But now, a week later, with the reality of her decision weighing heavily on her conscience, Lavonne realized there had been a deeper, more profound motive to hiring Mrs. Shapiro. Her plan had seemed so perfect, her revenge so noble, a blow struck for her mother and Nita, and Mrs. Shapiro, and all the other sweet, docile women she had known in her life who seemed incapable of fighting back. It had seemed so courageous that day and now it all seemed foolish and immature and extremely disloyal to Leonard. What exactly did she have to complain about? She asked herself this again, trying to pinpoint the exact cause of her unhappiness. She lived in an expensive house, her daughters attended an expensive private school, her husband saw to it that they lacked nothing in the way of material comforts and still she was unhappy. Her problems, which had seemed that day so burdensome, seemed to her now, observed in the bright, clear light of her husband’s coming embarrassment, insignificant and petty.

She was not a champion of downtrodden women. She was a bored housewife with nothing better to do than plan petty revenges on a husband who did not deserve them.

N
ITA ROSE FROM
bed with a dull headache. Her eyes felt swollen. Her skull felt like it had been stuffed with cotton. Images seemed hazy, sounds seemed muffled. Below her in the kitchen she could hear Charles shouting at the children. This was a big day for him and he was as nervous as a crippled bridegroom.
Poor Charles,
she thought dejectedly.
Poor, poor Charles.

“Goddamn it, boy, get that mess cleaned up! There’s a party here today! You don’t have the sense God gave a grasshopper!” Nita listened to him shouting at their son in much the same way she imagined Charles’s father had shouted at him.

Everybody in town knew stories of the old judge, how he’d been born the grandson of a tenant farmer, the son of a hardware clerk; how the boy had bettered himself through a scholarship to the Barron Hall School and later the University of Georgia, and later still, the University of Georgia law school. Everybody knew how he’d built that big old house out on the river and filled it with the carcasses of animals he’d killed in far-off exotic places like Zimbabwe and Montana; how in thirty-five years of marriage the judge and Mrs. Broadwell had managed to produce only one child, Charles, who cried when he lost at sports and never bagged anything bigger than a goat. When the judge died, Charles locked himself in his bedroom and wept for two days. He had refused to eat and refused to sleep. Virginia had gone away shaking her head as if she had no idea what troubled him, but Nita had known. His daddy had died before Charles could prove himself a man. Now, eighteen years later, he was still trying to prove himself, surrounded by his daddy’s old friends and clients, trying to prove to the people of Ithaca he was every bit the man the old judge had been.

“Go to your room, boy!” Charles shouted from the kitchen. “Go to your room and don’t come out until I tell you to.”

The feeling of weightlessness that had occurred that day in the garden with Jimmy Lee was gone. In the week since she saw him last, she had awakened every morning to a feeling of heaviness and melancholy. He had told her to call him but Nita knew she wouldn’t. She couldn’t.

All she wanted was a good marriage. All she wanted was a marriage like the one her mama and daddy had shared in the little house she grew up in, with its atmosphere of quiet and unrepentant love. Her father still called her mother “baby.” He still held her arm when they crossed a street. Nita had watched her parents love each other all her life. Love and happiness and a simple life. That’s all she ever wanted.

“Goddamn it, boy, are you stupid? I said move it,” Charles roared.

Nita listened to Charles fulfilling his family legacy. Her head hurt. Her heart felt like a wasteland. Nothing would ever grow or flower there again. The best she could hope for was a quiet life. The best she could hope for was a husband who tolerated her, and children who grew to adulthood without hating her too much.

E
ADIE AWOKE EARLY
and made one last call to Denton to go over the plan for tonight’s party. She had rehearsed him twice now because she was afraid he would forget his lines.

“Yeah, yeah, I know what to do,” he said, sounding sullen and sleepy. “Make your husband crazy with jealousy. I get the picture.”

“I’m counting on you,” Eadie said. “Don’t fuck this up.” She hung up. Eadie had spent a week planning tonight’s little fiasco, but for some reason she couldn’t get excited about it. She was tired of Denton, tired of living in this big house all alone, tired of not being able to work. She wanted her husband home in her bed. In their bed.

She lay on her back and watched the sun climb across the ceiling. After awhile she rose and went to stand next to her goddess, looping one arm around the torso’s shoulders and staring wearily at the slow-moving tourists passing on the sidewalks with their guidebooks and their blank upturned faces. The windows were open and a balmy breeze blew through the room. In the street below a little girl saw her and waved. Eadie raised her hand and waved back. Against her hip, the goddess swayed slightly.

She had not worked in months, not since Trevor left. A kind of lethargy had overtaken her, an anxious feeling that left her tired and listless. It occurred to Eadie that the only times in her adult life that she hadn’t been able to work were after Trevor left her for another woman. Both times she had been seized with aimlessness and inertia. He was the only man she had ever met who she thought strong enough to survive loving her, and yet here he was again making her miserable and desperate and killing her creative spirit in the process. Making her unable to work for long periods of time. Making her doubt herself. She wondered if he was aware of the effect his cheating had on her art.

A thin ragged dog slunk down the street poking his nose under the public trash cans. “Don’t touch him,” the mother said to the child.

“Here doggie, doggie,” the child said.

If Trevor didn’t come home, would she ever work again? What was it Denton had called her goddess—a sad abandoned seal lying on the ice waiting to be beaten? Eadie pushed her hair out of her eyes and scratched dejectedly at her hip. After awhile she shook herself and stood up straight. No, she wouldn’t think like a defeatist. She hadn’t won the Miss Snellville Beach contest by thinking like this. She hadn’t dragged herself up out of a life of poverty and adverse destiny by thinking it couldn’t be done. She hadn’t made Trevor Boone fall in love with her by pretending it couldn’t happen.

And he did love her. Goddamn it, he did love her. Eadie knew this even if Trevor didn’t. Even if he had somehow managed to forget. She wrapped her robe tightly around her waist and gave the goddess a hard slap on her contoured rump. Her natural self-confidence and optimism was returning. Trevor would come home where he belonged and she would work again. Eadie was sure of it. She smiled, thinking of her plans for the party.

Trevor had managed to convince himself he didn’t love her anymore, but tonight she would remind him just how much he still did.

B
Y TEN O’CLOCK,
unable to bear the suspense of waiting for the arrival of the Shapiros, Lavonne suggested Leonard and Charles go out to the club for a round of golf. She watched them walk to the car, Leonard swinging his golf bag over his shoulder and whistling like a chubby choirboy, and Charles dragging his bag behind him like a crucifix.

Fifteen minutes later the Shapiros arrived and Lavonne went next door to greet them. Mona Shapiro climbed out of the van wearing a faded cotton housedress and tennis shoes. “We got the good clothes in the back,” she explained, pointing toward the van with her thumb. Lavonne stared at the driver, who had climbed out and was sauntering up the driveway in front of a ragged group of boys wearing baggy shorts and flip-flops.

“Let me introduce you to the Burning Bush boys,” Mrs. Shapiro said proudly to Lavonne. There was Little Moses Shapiro, no longer clean-cut but sporting a goatee and a Bob Marley T-shirt. There was the Finklestein boy, whose real name was Isaac but everyone called him Johnny. There was the Goldfarb boy, who went by the name of Weasel, and there was Goodman Singer, who wore a bandanna and a long gold earring shaped like the Star of David in his left ear. They all wore their hair in dreadlocks.

Stunned and speechless, Lavonne stood looking at them. “So what exactly is Jewish Reggae?” she asked finally, wondering what in the hell she was going to do.

“It’s kind of a blues and reggae mix based on the words of the Torah,” Little Moses said.

“Do you want to hear some?” Weasel said. “I’ve got my guitar in the van.”

“Maybe later,” Lavonne said, struggling against a rising sense of desperation. She wondered if she could talk Ashley and Louise into serving. She wondered if she could pay them and some of their friends to work the party. She could feel a strange humming vibration behind her right eye. She reminded herself she needed to have her blood pressure checked, but decided it was probably high right now given the fact that the firm party was fixing to turn into a disaster and she was in charge of it and all.

Little Moses whistled, looking up at the Broadwell’s big house. “Damn, Miz Zibolsky, is your old man a doctor or something?”

“A lawyer. And I live next door.”

“No shit,” Johnny said. “I may need me a lawyer.”

“Okay boys, let’s discuss our pending court cases later,” Lavonne said, turning around quickly before she had a chance to change her mind. “Follow me and I’ll show you where to get set up.”

The truth of the matter was she only had eight hours until the party started. It was too late to find other servers.
I didn’t have any choice, Leonard. No one will remember who catered the party. Let’s take a trip somewhere and forget this ever happened. From now on I’ll be a good wife, I promise.
She rehearsed her excuses, running them together until they whined through her head like a chain saw.

T
EN MINUTES BEFORE
the guests were scheduled to arrive, Charles saw Mrs. Shapiro and the Burning Bush boys standing out by his pool, and he said, “Who in the hell is that?” The boys had changed into their good clothes, which Lavonne now saw had been a mistake. Cousin Mordecai had sent over what he considered perfect catering attire; four powder blue tuxes with wide lapels trimmed in black velvet. Looking at them, Lavonne thought,
All they need are platform shoes and pimp hats.

“They’re the caterers,” Nita said.

“You’re not funny,” Charles said. “Who in the hell are they?”

Nita looked at Lavonne. They were standing on the Broadwells’ screened porch, overlooking the pool and the patio that had been set with long tables of flowers and silver serving dishes and bowls of exotic-looking fruits. The ice statue, a three-foot replica of Tara replete with garlands of ivy and Star of Bethlehem lilies and even a small carved figure of Scarlett O’Hara standing on the steps in a hoopskirt and wide hat, had arrived and the boys were busy trying to hoist it into place in the center of the main table.
Gone with the Wind
was Nita’s favorite movie. When the ice artist asked her what she wanted the sculpture to look like, she hadn’t even hesitated. Nita had spent her whole life wanting to be exactly like Scarlett and knowing she never would be.

“They’re all we could get, Charles,” Lavonne said, waving her hand vaguely at the Burning Bush boys. “On such short notice and all.”

“Those are not the caterers from Atlanta.” Charles ignored Lavonne and spoke directly to his wife. There was something wrong with one of his eyes. It stuttered and blinked while the other one stayed stationary, focused hard on the Burning Bush boys.

“They’re the only caterers we could find, Charles,” Nita explained in a small voice.

Lavonne hoped Leonard would take it better than Charles was taking it. “Calm down, it’s not the end of the world,” she said to Charles. “If you act like nothing’s wrong, your guests will follow suit.”

His look of disbelief was childlike and almost touching. “Those can’t be the caterers,” he said.

Lavonne grimaced and sucked her lower lip. Nita looked at her feet. The setting sun hung over the yard like a bare bulb suspended from a cord.

“But they don’t even look like caterers.” Charles shook his head stubbornly. He was beginning to catch on, but slowly. “What are they wearing on their heads? Oh my God, is that their
hair
?”

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” Lavonne said.

“Oh my God, I’m ruined.” His nostrils flared. A vein pulsed in his temple like an emergency flasher.

Lavonne said, “It’ll be over before you know it. My advice to you is to just sit back and relax and let it happen.” At least Leonard had a slight sense of humor. Balding and fat, he was used to being laughed at, whereas Charles Broadwell, the golden boy, obviously was not.