Southern Living (25 page)

“Down here!” Terrance yelled upward.

John David and Suzanne walked around the counter and saw him sitting on the floor amid the paper products he was sorting.

“Looks like a paper orgy,” John David said.

“Hey, Suzanne,” Terrance greeted his guest. “Did y’all come to help?”

“We came to provide immoral support,” John David said, holding up the opened bottle of chardonnay.

“Go on back and get me my coffee cup,” he said.

“No, this one’s for you. Suzanne’s got her own. I know you don’t got a problem drinkin’ out of a bottle.”

Suzanne and John David joined Terrance on the floor, crossing their legs like children watching TV.

“You ever shrink-wrap, Suzanne?” Terrance asked.

She shook her head.

“Wanna try?”

“Don’t know how. But I’m happy to just sit here with my chardonnay.”

Terrance unrolled and cut off a clear, smooth piece of plastic, about two feet square. He then reached for a box of three-by-five invitations with a Mexican fiesta motif that Ginger Miller had considered too ethnic-looking and set it in the middle of the plastic. Terrance brought up the ends of the shrink-wrap covering and taped them together in the middle, as if he were wrapping a gift. He then picked up the shrink-wrapper, which was really nothing more than a steel, industrial-strength blow dryer, and pointed it at the note cards as if it were a gun. Suddenly, Terrance clicked on the blower, and in less than three seconds, the clear coating melted over the paper rectangle, hurriedly conforming to every edge and corner and plane. It reminded Suzanne of the time-lapsed Pillsbury cookie-dough ads.

“You wanna try?” he asked.

“Oh, no, that’s okay.”

Over the next half hour, they sat and watched and drank their
wine. The loud, hollow sound of the blower reminded Suzanne of the color orange, warm and radiant and strong. She loved witnessing this rebirth of once-doomed consumer goods. Shrink-wrapping meant starting over even after you’d made a mess, a second chance for both buyer and seller, redemption of the sweetest, simplest form.

Terrance got up to go the bathroom, and John David was snoring, prone on the floor. Standing up, Suzanne looked down at her feet; her left was in the middle of a large sheet of unused shrink-wrap. She bent over, pulled it up from all sides, around her ankle, as if she were wrapping a bottle of wine in cellophane, and then held it in place with a piece of tape around her leg. As Terrance was walking back to the counter, she clicked on the shrink-wrapper and pointed it at her foot, and in seconds the cellophane warmed her toes and arch and hugged her foot like a blood-pressure machine.

“Very cool, Suzanne!” Terrance said. “Let’s do your legs.”

“Terrance!”

“Oh, come on, Suzanne.”

She lay down on her back and closed her eyes, drowsy and ambivalent from the bottle of wine. He worked his way upward, wrapping her legs together like a mummy’s, then her round belly, her breasts, and, finally, her neck.

“What’s it feel like?” Terrance asked her.

“Like nothin’ can happen to me,” Suzanne said. “Like I’m fixin’ to be born, maybe.”

“Can we finish it?” he asked

“You mean my face?”

“I just wanna finish what I started. Here,” he said. Terrance reached over and pulled a red-white-and-yellow-striped straw from the lid of an empty McDonald’s soft-drink cup. “Put this in your mouth to breathe.”

He gently wrapped her head in the cellophane then lay it back down on the floor. Suzanne suddenly heard the forceful, scorching whine of the blower, and almost instantly her eyes were compressed shut, all smells and sounds disappeared as if she’d suddenly been
thrown into deep water. With her only free, working sense, Suzanne felt John David stirring, then sitting up at her side. And then, a bright flash. A picture taken? An extra light being turned on?

She suddenly felt fingers pulling and tearing at the shrink wrap around her left ear, and it seemed more of an intrusion than a rescue.

No, she shook her head. No.… Not yet.

C
onvinced the heart potato was a sign of impending divine intervention, Adrian Braswell continued to shower Donna with inexpensive but thoughtful Christian gifts. He would set them among the russet potatoes, and they looked like some child’s toy that had washed ashore, lying among the surf-polished, pale-brown rocks. The most recent offering was a small pair of white, painted-resin hands in prayer with an adhesive patch on the bottom.

“I’ve got mine on my medicine cabinet at home, but you can put it anywhere you want to,” he told Donna. “The kids at Piedmont Presbyterian Day School … they keep ’em in their lockers for good luck and to hang their car keys on. But I don’t drive.”

Donna had realized by now that Adrian was definitely borderline something. He constantly asked simple questions of physics and logic, the kinds of queries that bubble from children to help them understand the natural forces and relationships in their
growing world: Why do raw collards feel like rubber? Why are the outsides of radishes red and the insides white?

“Why do you always keep the bananas so far away from everything else?” he asked.

“Because,” Donna explained, “bananas give off this special ripenin’ gas of some kind. If you wanna get something ripened fast just stick it in a paper sack with a banana and shut it up tight. Bananas are real good for that.”

Adrian shook his head. “I can’t get over how much you know about our Lord God’s beautiful creations.”

Yet Donna also learned that the young man, who still lived at home with his mother, had a gift that was both amazing and valuable to her and Mr. Tom and Kroger. Like some guess-the-weight man in a circus, Adrian possessed a sixth sense for determining the quality and ripeness of any fruit that hid behind a mystifying, thick epidermis.

Donna spotted this gift first, and one night she and Mr. Tom stayed with Adrian after closing to test this sensory power. They lined up five honeydews, five cantaloupes and five mangoes. Adrian would hold a fruit in his hand, close his eyes then raise and lower the melon or mango as if he were trying to determine its weight, his right eyelid and the stubs on his other arm twitching as he did this. With his pocketknife, Mr. Tom would cut into the chosen fruits to see how he did, and every time Adrian picked the juiciest, sweetest specimen.

“Are you smelling them?” Mr. Tom asked.

“I don’t think so, sir.”

“It’s gotta be touch,” Donna said.

“But he’s not using his fingers,” Mr. Tom added.

For some reason, this ability seemed to intimidate or at the very least irritate Gary Scalamandre, the new assistant manager in the meat department who called Adrian “Fruit Loop.” Fresh from Detroit, Gary was a barrel-chested man with thick mustache and beefy forearms covered in Marine tattoos, and to date he was Mr.
Tom’s sole bad hiring choice. Twice Mr. Tom had had to formally reprimand him for sexual comments made on the cutting floor, one about a salami and the other about fresh liver and how it reminded him of aroused women.

Adrian had gone for a break, and after thirty minutes Donna began to wonder what was keeping him. He was always on time, always dependable—slow as molasses but dependable.

She found him in the break room, crying in front of his open locker.

“Adrian …”

“Miss Donna!”

“What’s wrong?”

With his good hand he pointed at the open locker. “Someone took my things, Miss Donna. These ain’t my things.”

Donna looked into the locker and recognized the Detroit Tigers baseball cap and the big blue jeans with a circle worn into the back pocket from a can of chewing tobacco. She then opened Gary Scalamandre’s smaller locker and found stuffed inside Adrian’s purple cardigan sweater and his bag of lunch and the pear-size stuffed bear that had fallen off someone’s red heart of chocolates in the parking lot that Valentine’s Day.

“Come on, Adrian!” she said.

“Miss Donna.”

Almost jogging to keep up with her furious pace, he followed her out of the lounge, through dairy and into the swinging metal doors that lead into the meat department.

“Gary Scalamandre!”

Donna had to yell to be heard over the noise of the wrapping machine, which was covering mounded square gobs of ground chuck in cellophane and stamping them with white adhesive price tags.

“You need a goddamned hairnet to come in here, you know that.”

“I’m not gonna be stayin’.”

“What the hell do you want?”

“I want Adrian Braswell’s locker back is what I want.” The five others in the room all stopped what they were doing to watch.

“He don’t need that big-ass locker. Look at me, I’m the man here. I’m the one who needs all that room.”

“For your information lockers are handed out based on seniority, and Adrian here has eleven years in this store. That’s why he’s got one of the newer lockers.”

Adrian quickly tried to interrupt, tapping her on the shoulder with his good hand. “Ten,” he whispered. “Miss Donna, I just got ten. It won’t be eleven till August.”

Gary stepped forward two paces and wiped his hands on the chest of his white apron, already smudged with the blood of lamb. “I run a whole damn department. I deserve that space. I ain’t switchin’ back.”

“Then I’m gonna do it for you. And I can tell you right now you’re not gonna like where you find all your things.”

“You’d better stay away from my stuff.”

“And you’d better start respectin’ other people’s property.”

“Or what?”

“Or I’ll tell Mr. Tom.”

Gary folded his arms across his chest and started to nod. A smile grew on his face. “Oh, I get it,” he said. “You think you can act like you’re in charge ’cause you fuck the boss.”

“What!” Donna screamed. “What did you say?”

“Come on, pretty girl. Who do you think you’re fooling?”

Instinctively, Donna looked for a weapon within reach. From the roller conveyer she picked up an unwrapped, green-foam tray of hamburger meat and threw it at him. Gary dodged it easily, and it flew beyond him and landed, meat side down, with a moist smack on the red-tile floor.

“You’re as low as a catfish, Gary Scalamandre! You need to jump right back in that muddy pond where you came from.”

“You’re turnin’ me on, baby. Keep talkin’ to me like that. I love it.”

Donna breathed in deeply to calm herself down. She thought to herself:
Be professional, Donna. Use your brain. Hit him where it really hurts
.

She perched her hands on her hips, lowered her voice and smiled. “You know, Gary, you remind me so much of some of the boys I used to go out with.”

“Oh yeah? Which ones?”

“These!” she said, extending her pinky until it was erect and pointing at the fluorescent lights overhead.

T
he features department of the
Reflector
included Harriet, the oldest by thirty-two years; Margaret, the youngest and newest member; and a group of six women that Randy Whitestone referred to as “the henhouse,” a name born from the warbling noise that would boil over and spill across the glass partition that separated them from the rest of the newsroom. Margaret secretly admitted to herself that the name fit—en masse, their laughter sounded operatic and shrill as a peacock’s call—and sometimes would have to stop herself from putting her hands over her ears. This was true even outside the newsroom. Many times in Selby she had whipped her head around in alarm when she heard three or more Southern women cut up in laughter, just as one does when someone opens a door at the moment an ambulance is screaming past.

More than once, because she was now writing her popular profiles for the A section, Randy suggested to Margaret that she move to a desk on the other side of the glass wall, among the more cynical, male-dominant metro staff. Margaret did admire the earnest, Chicken Little nature of the news department, and she watched with interest each time they mobilized like fighter pilots after hearing a lead on the police scanner, which sat on a homemade plywood shelf over the metro desk, painted red and black to commemorate the Georgia Bulldogs football team.

Yet she still preferred the company of the women in her section. All of them mothers, the features women created an environment that was part coffee klatch, part slumber party, and Margaret, who had never experienced much of either in her life, soaked in this luxuriant, unmistakably female solidarity. They traded magazines back and forth—
Martha Stewart Living
and
Ladies Home Journal, Better Homes and Gardens
and
Southern Living
. They shared Web sites about parenting news and Hollywood gossip and horoscopes and ways to fight cellulite. They frequently brought in leftover desserts from their family meals the night before—cherry cobbler, peach cobbler, brownies, and pecan pie—or a surfeit of some backyard crop—cucumbers or tomatoes or peaches or muscadine grapes—and, most frequently, flowers in a vase—black-eyed Susans (June) or paper whites (January) or daffodils (February) or orange-red cannas (July), snipped from an editor’s or writer’s garden that morning. Margaret loved how there was no true dead of winter in Selby, no long dormant period when all smells other than chimney smoke would disappear in a freeze-dried landscape. Though it could briefly dip below freezing just before dawn, once the sun began to warm the ground you could smell again the subtle, green notes of chlorophyll from the cold-hardy live oaks and magnolia trees, ivy and sabal palms and yards of winter-rye grass. Though compact and hard as grape seeds, buds appeared on most trees by Christmas. The green shoots of tulips poked out of the soil by Super Bowl Sunday.