Southern Living (18 page)

A man’s voice boomed out from the back of the room: “What about cottonmouths?”

“Not that we can tell,” Nordy answered. “There’s no swellin’ anyplace.”

“What about mushrooms?” asked another man. “You think they’re eatin’ mushrooms?”

“We ain’t got no poison mushrooms growin’ here in Selby,” Nordy answered. “But I’ll tell you this—we do think someone just might be feedin’ ’em poison.”

The comment drew gasps and whispers among the group. Suddenly, one man in a maroon polo shirt raised his hand.

“Sir?” Nordy acknowledged.

“Do you think they’re eatin’ my wife’s cookin’?” he asked. Nordy ignored the laughter. “Any other questions?” he asked. Suzanne Parley, holding an empty wineglass, raised her hand.

“Yes, ma’am?”

Her hand came down, and she nervously began twirling a section of her gold necklace around an index finger. “How do you know they’re bein’ poisoned?” she asked.

Lieutenant Thorpman, who had been leaning back on the edge of the desk, stood up and squared his shoulders, then hooked his thumbs in his belt.

“I ain’t at liberty to say anything else about it, ma’am,” he said.

“Why not?” someone asked.

“It’s an ongoin’ investigation. There’s some things I just can’t say right now. But y’all need to know that we’re doin’ everything we can do to figure this thing out. Sheriff Barnes knows this neighborhood is home to Selby’s finest families, and he promises he’s gonna get on top of this. The sheriff wants your dogs to be safe. No man should have to worry about his dog dyin’ young.”

Unbeknownst to Margaret, Randy had snuck up behind her to read from her screen.

“Holy shit!” he blurted, jolting Margaret in her seat. “This reads like a Johnny Cash song. Did he really say that?”

“I can’t write a news story, Randy,” she whined. “Besides, nothing happened. It was interesting, but nothing happened.”

“Bullshit,” he said, “you’re doing fine. Just keep going. I need it in twenty minutes.”

As she did in her journal entries, Margaret selected those details that tickled and fascinated her the most, and they were the type of fictionlike details Randy had been trying to get his staff to include more of in their reporting, such as Lieutenant Thorpman’s sad, basset-hound eyes and his habit of scratching his left forearm when he answered a question … and the oil portrait of the owner’s golden retriever who had succumbed to cancer (
“Radar” 1982–1996 … Gone huntin’ in heaven
, said the brass plate beneath) … and, flanking the Ristles’ driveway, identical sandstone sculptures of Irish setters, each with a paw on a basket of stone flowers … and, Margaret’s favorite detail of the evening, the tuxedo cat who attentively watched the entire meeting from the window ledge outside.

She finished just before ten o’clock. After sending the story on to Randy, Margaret went to the bathroom then to the lounge to retrieve her purple, plastic Hunchback of Notre Dame lunch box that she’d found at a garage sale in her neighborhood.

On her way out, she stopped to see Randy. He leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head. “You’re right,” he said. “It’s not a news story.”

“I told you so.”

“It’s really, really great, but it’s not a news story. It’s an essay is what it is.”

“Pass it on to whoever can use it as research.”

“Still, it’s really good. Hilarious.”

“It’s not meant to be—that’s your perception of the culture—but thank you.”

“New lunch box?” he asked.

“Yes, it is.”

“Nice.”

“And look.” Margaret opened the lid and pulled out the thermos. “It’s a castle turret. Isn’t it fun?”

Everywhere Margaret turned she’d been finding irresistible items
of whimsy that had been absent from the home she shared with her mother all her life. It’s not that Ruth Pinaldi disapproved of a child-centered environment, she just never really thought about it. Margaret was ten when she lost her eighth baby tooth one night while munching corn on the cob. Her mother, upon noticing, gasped and said, “Oh, my God! I forgot the whole tooth-fairy thing. I owe you”—she paused, calculating in her head—“a dollar and seventy-five cents.”

Ruth Pinaldi’s life was filled with battles—raising a daughter alone, scurrying to shore up the eroding foundation of abortion rights, struggling to keep open a clinic that did more than its fair share of pro-bono work—and, as in the military, her tools in life needed to be easily recognizable and plain and sturdy, which gave their house on Linden Avenue the feel of a spartan bachelor’s apartment. She banished throw rugs from the house. (“They are obstacles in a necessary path.”) And why, she asked her daughter one day, should they place a bowl of colorful fruit on the center of the kitchen table when it needed to be moved for each meal?

“Have you been avoiding me?” Randy asked.

“No.”

“I get the feeling you’ve been avoiding me.”

At two minutes before seven, Margaret was roused from bed by an energetic rapping at the back door. Somewhat groggy from staying up until one o’clock to finish a collection of short stories by Flannery O’Connor, she hurried into her aqua chenille bathrobe and scuttled out of the room.

Holding a white paper bag and the day’s
Reflector
, Randy blew in like cold air.

“There’s hope for this town yet. Look: Bagels! And the
Times
!
Today’s
Times.”

“It’s seven o’clock, Randy.”

“I’ve got something to show you.”

He set the bag on the kitchen counter and pulled out two bagels and a clear, plastic dish of cream cheese. “I’ve never seen you with your hair down,” he said, looking at her. “It’s longer than I thought.”

He looked around at the spartan furnishings—an orange bean-bag chair, a card table and chairs, and a lava lamp that Margaret had found at Second Hand Rose. “Nice place,” he said. “Who’s your decorator?”

“You’re here this early to show me bagels?”

“No. This,” he said, tossing her the
Reflector
, still folded in its plastic bag, which Randy called a condom. “On the op-ed page.”

Margaret unfolded the paper and turned to the editorial page in the local section, which Randy had renamed
Metro
from
Mid-state Report
. She scanned the two pages … Ellen Goodman … William Raspberry … a guest-opinion column about the new Planned Parenthood that was scheduled to open that month in Selby … and then she saw it and gasped. Randy had taken her notes and run them as a guest editorial column … with her photograph!

“Randy! What is this?”

“It’s brilliant. That’s what it is.”

She scanned the essay—he had run it almost verbatim—and at the bottom was an italicized tag line that said,
Margaret Pinaldi, a “Reflector” writer and editor, earned her B.S. in anthropology and master’s in women’s studies at State University of New York at Buffalo. She is covering this issue for the “Reflector.”

“Where did you get that picture?”

“It’s from your photo I.D. H.R. had a copy.”

“You didn’t tell me you were going to do this.”

“I didn’t ask.”

“I would have said ‘no.’ ”

“I know.”

“Youuuu!” She shook the open paper in his face like a voodoo rattle and let it fall to the floor. “God! I feel so … violated!”

“I don’t understand what you’re so mad about,” said Randy.

“You’ve exposed me,” Margaret answered. “Don’t you understand that?”

“Most people cream their jeans if they get on the editorial page.”

“I’m not most people, Randy. I am a very private person. It is why I like doing Chatter.”

“Would it help if I told you the publisher loved it?”

“No, it would not.”

“Here,” he said, handing her half a bagel slathered with cream cheese.

“I don’t want any, thank you.”

“Oh, quit pouting, Margaret. Come on, let’s celebrate brilliance. Yours and mine.”

“Sometimes I think your arrogance might even dwarf my mother’s.”

“It’s called confidence.”

“That’s exactly what she used to say.”

Randy set down the bagel and walked up to Margaret. He put his hands on her arms and dipped his head down, trying to see into her eyes. “Hey,” he said in a voice softer and lower than she had ever heard. The tone startled Margaret, and she felt the tension ebb from her body. “I thought you said you were drawn to confidence,” he said.

“No,” she replied. “I said I was drawn to brilliance.”

He leaned into her. “So am I.”

A good eight inches shorter than Randy, Margaret had to tilt her head back as he moved in over her like a cloud, and as they kissed Margaret kept her eyes open. Overhead, a moth banged against the lit bulb again and again and again, despite the warnings of the corpses of her burned brethren that littered the glass of the fixture. She seemed slower each time she returned to the bulb … dazed and burned and weaker but inevitably unable to resist such brilliance. And for what in return?

“No,” Margaret mouthed beneath his lips. “Stop.”

And when he rose with a quizzical look on his face, Margaret, too, was perplexed, uncertain if she was addressing Randy … or the moth … or herself. But one thing she knew for sure: It was not Randy she was kissing here—it was her mother.

I
n the Rand McNally atlas, cities are represented by pale orange, ragged stains that grow with each census, creeping outward like a drop of water on a paper towel. In the center of the orange mass that was Selby, Georgia, floated a strawberry-shaped white spot, and therein lay Sugar Day Country Club and its affluent environs, a boldly gerrymandered island in the Sea of Selby created long ago so the leaders in town wouldn’t have to pay city property taxes on
their sprawling brick homes. For this reason, some locals called it The Reservation.

Sugar Day was host to everything that mattered in affluent, white Selby. It was where a stripper could still perform at an allmale cigar party for the birthday of a prominent banker. It was where Hickey Freeman and Talbots sponsored their annual, regional trunk shows and where a wife would debut her newest, Austrian-crystal Judith Leiber handbag.

It cost eighty-five thousand dollars to join, and golfing privileges were another twelve hundred a month from initiation till death, but Sugar Day had a five-year waiting list. And young, climbing couples would brood and worry and feel like the fat kid on the playground as they awaited sweet inclusion and sipped their chardonnay and bourbon with the masses in no-name bars and restaurants throughout town.

Lately, though, cracks had formed in the foundation of the venerable golf club. For the first time in the history of the one-hundred-and-sixty-year-old institution, both the publisher and editor of the
Reflector
had declined invitations to join, as did the general manager of WSEL, middle Georgia’s oldest and farthest-reaching television station. Not wanting to anger the local advertisers, the publisher and TV executive tiptoed around the issue. (“Oh, we’re not the golfing types.”) But editor Randy Whitestone was not as diplomatic. He’d been heard in a local Mexican restaurant, slamming an empty Tecate bottle down on the table and proclaiming in Yankee volume, “It has no black or Latino or female members. That’s why we’re not joining your stupid club!”

Boone Parley, head of the membership committee, sat in the daytime dining room of Sugar Day, awaiting his mother and talking with Comer McDonald, the club’s manager. Though neither would say it out loud, both men had spent much time pondering the significance of the three powerful Yankee men’s snubbing of Sugar Day, and just that morning, as if someone had been
reading their minds, an item in Chatter gave them extra gristle to chew on.

Boone wondered: What was it about the privileges of membership that these men could not understand and appreciate? Who could not like Sugar Day? Who could not embrace Bulldog Saturdays in the bar, when the men of The Reservation would gather to eat boiled peanuts and drink bourbon as they cheered on their alma mater? Who could not like the Fourth of July with their private fireworks display and low-country boil, a stew of crawfish, spicy sausage, tomatoes, potatoes and corn served poolside, with corn bread and champagne in sterling-silver goblets? Who could not like the fellowship and sanctuary from their wives that Sugar Day provided? Boone lived for his Saturday mornings when he would meet Donny and Langston and Dunill on the crest of the tee-off for hole one, the toes of his brown-leather, saddle-style golf shoes darkened by cool morning dew; his aluminum, insulated cup of morning coffee warm in his hands; the verdant, rolling landscape enshrouded in a light morning haze; the mockingbirds that cockily swooped and darted from magnolia tree to Georgia pine to the top of the Greek Revival clubhouse, chirping their schizophrenic collection of sounds that hadn’t changed since Boone was a child growing up in the white Italianate on the sixth green.

“Here comes your momma,” Comer McDonald said. He and Boone stood up from the table to greet her.

“Miss Evelyn.” Comer leaned in to air-kiss her cheek. “You’re lookin’ beautiful as ever.”

Wearing her cobalt-blue St. John knits and a simple strand of pearls, her gray hair pulled back into a bun, Evelyn Parley had just
come from a board meeting at the Telbottom House, which was not only regional headquarters for the Daughters of the American Revolution but also Selby’s only architectural casualty of the Civil War. After burning Atlanta, Sherman, for unknown reasons, marched right on past Perry County and Selby, ignoring her, as if she had nothing to offer and was not worth his soldiers’ trouble. It created in Selbyites an odd inferiority complex that lingered to this day. Indeed, when the Olympics came to Atlanta, Selby was the only second-tier Georgia city that did not have a sporting venue; it never even occurred to local leaders to ask for one.