Southern Living (7 page)

“I don’t think I have time for lunch.”

“Sure you do. Come on. I need a Waffle House fix.”

“Waffle House?”

“You haven’t been to Waffle House?” he asked. “Oh, man, you haven’t had scattered, smothered, and covered?”

Randy had tried his first Waffle House restaurant on the initial trip down to Selby. He saw his first one outside Louisville, and as he sank deeper into the South, the brown-brick-and-yellow restaurants grew in frequency, with one and sometimes two at every interchange. Randy liked the aggressive retail presence and the retro appearance: the white orb lights suspended like yo-yos over yellow Formica tables, the counter stools upholstered in orange vinyl, the walls covered in what looked like wood-grain Contac paper, the waitresses’ hair hidden by yellow-and-orange kerchiefs tied at the napes of their necks. Later, he would learn that what appeared to be an effort to look fifties actually was nothing more than a refusal to evolve and match the aesthetic whims of the outside Yankee world. Fact was, the privately held Waffle House Corporation had intentionally never changed—it remained true and loyal to Southern sensitivities. The iced tea was sweet as Life Savers candy. The salad was made exclusively of iceberg lettuce with some token shavings of carrot and red cabbage. There was a constant tug-of-war between the smoke from frying pork and unfiltered cigarettes for dominance
of the airspace, and after eating at a Waffle House you carried in your clothes for the rest of the day the smells of a culture not concerned with preventive health.

Randy and Margaret took stools at the counter. A waitress whose name tag said
Nancy—Nineteen Years!
set white coffee mugs down in front of them. Around her neck hung a gold cross the size of a circus peanut. Her glittery, aquamarine eye shadow reminded Margaret of the contraband Barbies she used to play with whenever her mother was at work.

“How y’all doin’ today?” she asked.

“Very well, thank you,” Randy answered. He turned to Margaret. “Do you trust me to order? You like spicy, right? Okay, then, two orders … no, two double orders of scattered, smothered, covered, chopped, diced, and peppered. And two sweet teas.”

“Y’all want chili on those hash browns?”

“Absolutely,” he answered.

After scribbling down the order, the waitress stepped up to a line of brown tape on the floor, about five feet from the grill. “Okay, boys!” she yelled, bringing her pad out to arm’s length as if she were farsighted and reading a song book, and she began to bark out the order. “I need two scattered-smothered-covered-chopped-diced-peppered. And drown it all!”

The two cooks before the open grill, both of them middle-aged men
(Lonny—Twelve Years!
and
Warren—Seven Years!
), wore the pup tent–shaped paper hats Margaret remembered from
American Graffiti
. Their faces were pinched in focused scowls of concentration, and it took Margaret a few minutes to understand why. Each waitress shouted out her order, and, like tape recorders, the cooks absorbed the words and repeated them back, all the while their hands reaching for rubbery orange squares of cheese and flipping circles of red, raw meat and dumping piles of shredded potatoes onto the sizzling grill.

“My God,” Margaret said. “How do they remember everything?”

“It’s like that in every single Waffle House,” Randy replied. “Is that the weirdest damn thing or what?”

“But why?”

“You’re asking me to interpret Southern culture? Hell, Margaret, I don’t know why. Why do the grown men here keep the
Y
’s on the ends of their names? You tell me why.”

Within five minutes, Margaret had before her a steaming mound of hash brown potatoes speckled with chopped tomatoes, onions, diced ham, American cheese, jalapeños—all of it awash in a big ladle of chili. The waitress suggested she try a few shakes of Tabasco to top it all off, and Margaret agreed.

“I had two more calls about dogs today,” Margaret said to Randy as they ate. “Where’s Red Hill Plantation?”

“It’s the newer McMansion neighborhood around Sugar Day. The docs and lawyers and children of Old Selby. Why?”

“Someone’s black Lab was found dead in the middle of a neighbor’s driveway. And then there was a different dog found in someone’s yard. Or at least it sounds that way.”

“You mean in addition to the ones from last week?”

“Yes.”

“Hit by cars?”

“I don’t know. I can’t tell from what I’ve heard in the calls.”

“So that makes what? Five now?”

“That we know of.”

“My guess is death by monster truck,” Randy said, speaking with his mouth half full. “The teenagers in that zip code know no limits. North Selby is so fucking weird. They think they’re English aristocracy over there.”

Despite being the editor of the newspaper, it was obvious to Margaret that Randy had no intention of ever integrating with Selby; he had divulged to her that the president of the newspaper division of Granite-Peabody told him that if he did his job well they would rescue him from his exile deep in the heart of Georgia
and reward him with the managing-editor position at the
Enquirer
. As a result, Margaret thought he was more anthropologist than journalist, except that his observations were always tinged in judgment—funny and accurate, yes, but oftentimes mean-spirited.

Randy had not even bothered to search for a house. He lived in the new Residence Inn, an extended-stay, faux-Tudor motel off I-75 on the west end of town, and, even after half a year, the warranty tags still hung from the grill inside the oven. As if he were a guest, Randy continued to use the free, miniature soap bars, even though they seemed to dissolve as quickly as a lozenge on the tongue, and he was always cursing at the diminutive size as they slipped from his grip like a wet goldfish. He flavored his take-out meals with the paper packets of salt and pepper that the maids refreshed every day. He unconsciously refused to change the AOL access number on his laptop from Philadelphia to Selby, requiring a long-distance call each time he wanted to retrieve his e-mail. In fact, the only thing Randy Whitestone had added to feather his new nest-in-exile was the black Krups espresso machine in the kitchen, which he used morning and night.

Randy kept a journal of what he called his “travels,” filled with the details of life in central Georgia that he found unique, and he would pull out this palm-sized leather-bound notebook and his yellow Mont Blanc fountain pen whenever anyone started telling him something that he feared his friends on The Outside, as he called it, would never believe.

He focused his attention and wrath on the affluent northern half of town, the environs of Sugar Day Country Club. These were the people, the power brokers and agenda setters, whom he had to deal with in his job, and he despised their air of exclusivity and attempt to create an identity of British landed gentry. He did not like how they drove to Atlanta for shoes or T-shirts instead of shopping with the working class and blacks at the Selby Mall. He scoffed at their perfectly symmetrical, oversized, hollow-pillar
homes with the circular driveways and boxwood topiary hedges. He did not like how they had all but abandoned the public school system.

“I swear they seem more consumed with class than race in this town, especially north Selby,” he said. “Have you noticed the weird little stickers in the back windows of all the cars?”

Indeed, Margaret had noted the cryptic adhesive patches, always in the lower left-hand corner of the back windshield of a Chevy Suburban or Mercedes or Lexus SUV. She’d seen a red
P
on a white circle; a yellow
T
rimmed in black; a blue star with a cur-vacious, plump white
C
that was reminiscent of the
S
on Superman’s chest.

“It’s taken me forever,” Randy said. “But I’ve got it all figured out now. Okay, so the red
P
is for Montezuma Presbyterian Day School. It’s expensive but very, very conservative, so you don’t see many docs’ kids there. Certainly no Northerners. Basically it’s where the rich white-supremacists go.

“Now, the yellow
T
is for Traemont Academy. Tuition is half of what it is at Presbyterian Day, so these people can’t even really hang with the
P
people, and they’re more likely to drive teal-colored cars and luxed-out pickup trucks. The
T
says ‘I might not have graduated from college but my kids are going to.’ I’m sorry: ‘fixin’ to.’ Oh … and a lot of them smoke. And it’s obvious that a lot of the moms dye their own hair.”

Randy took another bite of hash browns, swallowing after just three chews.

“Now the
C
,” he continued. “The
C
is the signature of royalty in the kingdom of Selby. It costs twelve thousand a year for your kid to go there. The
C
in your window means you belong to Sugar Day or are on the waiting list to belong. It means you own your own tuxedo and that you probably retain a poor older black guy around the house to do things like wash your sidewalk. Canterbury’s acceptable to the transplant Yankees because it’s the only school in Perry County where Emory and Duke recruit. And it’s
where the Japanese kids go. Oh, and the
C
moms will find something at Target and lie and say they bought it in Atlanta.”

Margaret smiled.

“Now get this,” he said. “The other day I saw a Suburban with four
C
stickers on her windshield. Four! Now what the hell would she need with four of them? What’s she trying to say? ‘Hey, I’m at the top of the food chain in this Cesspool of the South!’ … It’s like some African tribal branding thing, isn’t it?”

Randy’s cell phone rang, an electronic chiming of “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” which turned heads every time it went off. He retrieved it from his breast pocket, looked at the display window, and answered.

“What is it, Pearline?”

Buckner Meeks, a local oncologist and owner of several dilapidated inner-city houses, had caught wind that Randy’s new investigative reporter was researching an exposé on substandard housing. It turned out that Meeks, along with a dozen or so other wealthy, old-Selby families, moonlighted as slumlords who rented their decrepit properties to inner-city black families. Already the reporter had uncovered two cases in which people had been killed by antiquated wiring and a collapsed roof, and the families were paid ten thousand dollars to keep their mouths shut.

“I’ve got to take this one,” Randy said to Margaret. “I’ll be outside. Here.” He pulled his white-leather, Hugo Boss wallet from his pocket and tossed it to her from across the table. “Go ahead and pay.”

As Randy left, a young man on his way inside held the door open for him, watching Randy with a bemused smile on his face. He then walked in, looked at the counter and nodded in the manner of a cowboy at Margaret, politely staying back until she nodded and smiled in return.

Obviously off-duty now, he wore a tan, crew-neck T-shirt tucked into a pair of blue jeans that were clean and pressed but faded at the knees. On his feet were square-toed, broken-in boots
that were clean and polished, a brown the color of dark chocolate. A blond cowlick on the top of his forehead reminded Margaret of Dennis the Menace, yet he was a big man, with shoulders that could fill a doorway and hands that could conceal the identity of a can of Coke.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hello,” Margaret replied. “You were right. My cat came down when he wanted to.”

“How long was she up there?” he asked.

“Till that next day. I woke up and he was curled up like a shrimp on the front porch. I thought he was dead—he looked so skinny.”

“She gonna be all right?”

Margaret nodded.

“You keepin’ her inside now?”

“I try to,” Margaret said. “But he’s fast.”

“I thought she was a girl. I thought her name was Susan.”

“No, it’s a boy. It’s a long story, but it’s a boy.”

“I didn’t catch your name.”

“Margaret.”

“Margaret.”

“Yes. Margaret.”

“Margaret what?”

“Margaret.”

He ran his hand through his short, thick hair, then pursed his lips and nodded as he looked out toward the parking lot. “Well, I’m sorry,” he said. “But I was fixin’ to ask you to a movie or somethin’, and I sure can’t call you if I don’t know your last name.”

“I’m not comfortable giving it out,” Margaret said. “I’m sorry, but I’m not.”

“Okay, then,” he said. “Well, have a nice day.”

“Good-bye.”

He turned and headed for a booth where a uniformed firefighter
awaited him. Margaret wondered if he walked this slowly all the time or if he was lingering as long as possible, hoping she would change her mind and call out to him. She noticed how the hair on the back of his head grew in a circular pattern with the cowlick at the very center, giving it the appearance of a blond hurricane.

Once more, he turned to her. “Don’t you even wanna know my name?” he asked. “It’s Dewayne.”

“Duane.”

“No, you say it Dee-wayne, like that.”

“Dee-wayne.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Margaret stood and picked the bill up from the table. “Well, I’ve got to get back to work, Dee-wayne. Enjoy your lunch.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Margaret pushed open the glass door and walked into the sunshine and the smell of Confederate jasmine, which mixed with the lingering odor of microscopic pork grease particles that had come to rest in the fibers of her shirt. Randy disengaged from his cell phone as she was smelling the sleeve of her arm.

“You smell everything,” he said.

“Not everything.”

“Yes you do. Why?”

“I don’t know. I get pleasure from smells.”

Over the years, many people had remarked on Margaret’s predilection for smelling the things she invited into her personal space. She smelled each fresh handful of toilet paper. She smelled a clean coffee mug before filling it. When Margaret grocery shopped she unconsciously sniffed each item before setting it in her cart, not just apples or eggplant or a grouper fillet, but even a box of tampons or toothpaste or a lightbulb in its cardboard packaging.

“It’s like you’re looking for clues or something,” Randy said. “Like a bloodhound.”