Venus Envy (30 page)

“You and my momma.” Mandy broke up a clod. “For the record, I think you’re taking this, uh, change remarkably well.”

“Maybe I figured out I needed to do this myself. No point in bitching and moaning and pointing the finger at other people. This was my own work and I had gotten so far away from
me
I suppose only a major mess and a half would force me to do something about it. You know, Mandy, my mind was like a suitcase with the clothes haphazardly tossed in, then slammed shut because I was in a rush to some destination—only I didn’t really know where I was going. If I hadn’t gotten sick, if I hadn’t written those letters, I probably wouldn’t have thought about the nature of my life, the course of my actions,
until I was old. I believe people can change at any age, but how much better to do it now. At least the second half of my life is going to be richer than the first half. When I laugh now it’s from my belly and not those polite little gurgles in the throat, you know.”

“Uh-huh.” Mandy wiped her hands. “Think Carter can change?”

“He’s trying but he doesn’t have as much to work with. I don’t mean that in an ugly way but, well …”

“I know. Maybe it’s the way men are raised or maybe it’s Carter, but my experience with men is they won’t do any emotional work unless a woman is there to pull them through it: Mommy, the wife, the lover, whoever. It must be awful to be so dependent on women. Would sure make me hate women.”

“Never thought of it like that.” Frazier dumped out the last of the soil. “Once this divorce is final I hope he’s got the guts to go or get serious about a career.”

“Yeah, me too. Think he’ll stick with Sarah?”

“She’s good for him and she’s real. He’s gotten pretty far away from his own self too. How does that happen, Mandy? I look around me and I don’t see all that many people who are their true selves.”

“Authentic selves
is what the therapists call it.”

Frazier, who didn’t know bugfuck about therapy, stopped and considered the term for a moment. “Whatever you call it there’s not a hell of a lot of it. I don’t think my mother has ever had an authentic emotion in her life. As for Dad, well, he gave in to her so long ago it probably doesn’t matter anymore. Maybe in your sixties you forget.” She spoke with a sudden vehemence: “God, I hope not. I love my dad even if she has whipped up on him. He’s weak that way but he deserves to be happy. Carter too. I want him happy.”

“Families. We’re so different and so alike. It’s the
source of every deep sorrow and rage we feel but if there’s any kind of strength it comes from that same bunch of people. I love my momma and my daddy. I can tolerate my two sisters occasionally. Oh, I love them, I guess, but I’m damn glad everyone stayed in Birmingham. I couldn’t have them around me like you do. Why’d you come back here?”

Frazier smiled and pointed to her feet. “The answer’s underneath you. I’m like Antaeus. If my feet can touch this Virginia soil I’m indestructible. If you lift me up, the way Hercules did Antaeus in the wrestling match—’course he had some help; a goddess told him what to do, since he was losing, but when he lifted the Titan over his head Antaeus could no longer receive nourishment from Mother Earth and he weakened and was defeated. I have to have this, Mandy. I have to have this earth and I have to have those paintings. I don’t have to own them but I have to find them, research them, know the painter’s history, and then find a home for them. Painting, sculpture, music, literature—it’s the best that other people have left for us. No matter what I did to myself I clung to that, you know. There was some kind of emotional intelligence at work within me, no matter how frail.”

“Maybe it’s the same—the earth and art. They both feed us—one the body; the other the mind. And I know right about now you’re going to tell me how lucky we are, and I know we are, but my back hurts and I want to sit down.”

And so she did. She sat under the baby green buds of a sweet gum tree and watched as Frazier kept working. And Mandy wondered how it must have felt for her ancestors to work land they would never own. The more she thought about it, the more she realized that different as her journey was from Frazier’s, here they were in the same place, at the same time, with the sun shining like a beacon of joy on their heads in Somerset, Virginia.

W
ILL YOU BACK ME UP IF I BRING SARAH TO THE DOGWOOD
Festival?” Carter asked.

“Yes, but I’ll be running the fireworks. If the shit hits the fan on the club lawn there’s not a lot I can do,” Frazier warned him.

“Laura and Mother will be joined at the hip.” He rubbed the blond stubble on his chin. It was seven in the morning and he hadn’t yet shaved.

“So what else is new?”

Carter grunted. The phone rang. “Who in the hell?”

Frazier picked up. “Hello. Aunt Ru, what’s the matter?” She listened intently, then paused. “Carter, put on your shoes and run down to the mailbox.”

“Why?”

“Just do it!” As he obeyed, Frazier listened to her aunt, in a total fury. “It’s fantastic.”

“How can they do this to him?” Ru fought back tears.

“Auntie Ru, until I read the article I can’t say much except it sounds like lies to me. Have you called Dad?”

“No. He doesn’t get up until seven-thirty, but I will call him before that nosebleed sits down to her morning coffee and orange juice, flops open the papers, and has a
grand mal
seizure. Just fry her creativity.” Ru displaced some of her hurt and anger onto Libby, a handy target regardless of the circumstances.

“Mother’s very creative. I just wish she’d express it in ways other than mental anguish. Uh, here’s Carter.”

“My God!” Carter handed Frazier the paper, the Central Virginia section. As she also took the
Richmond Times Dispatch
, he leafed through that and found offending material there as well.

Frazier quickly scanned the paper. “Oh, my God.”

“Sistergirl, there’s some here too.” He shoved over the Richmond paper.

“Ru, it’s in the Richmond paper too.”

“My brother never so much as overcharged a customer in his life. He’s the most upright and decent man I have ever known, just like our daddy, and I will wring the neck of the sorry son of a bitch who did this to Frankie. I’ll kill!”

Frazier continued reading. “I’ll help you.”

“Improper procedures—what? They’re accusing him of monopoly. They’re accusing him of—”

“Price fixing. Poor Daddy. Poor Daddy.” Frazier felt helpless, then tried to crank over her brain—hard, since she needed her tea. As if reading her mind Carter poured steaming water onto a teabag, sliding the cup to her. She grabbed his hand and held it for a moment. “Auntie Ru, you’d best tell Pop. When you’ve spoken to him ring me twice and hang up. Then I’ll call. By eight o’clock everyone he wants to talk to and everyone he doesn’t
will have read this story and the phone lines will melt. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“And Auntie Ru, you show up at the country club tomorrow night for the Dogwood Festival. I’ll be damned if we’ll hide away. It’s all hands on deck.”

“I’ll be there with rings on my fingers and bells on my toes. Bye-bye, honey.”

Carter passed a plate of glazed doughnuts to her. She waved them away and sipped her tea in fierce concentration. He was morose. “Guess I’d better not ask Dad for a loan now.”

“You should never ask him for a loan anyway.”

He shifted uneasily in his seat. “I’ve never been as smart as you.”

“Bullshit. Anyway, Carter, Dad might be needing our money—”

“Your money,” he interjected. “I haven’t got any.”

She sat down opposite him. “This could really hurt his business, and the recession has cut into him pretty deep as it is. Carter, we might have to go to work for Dad for a while.”

“You’d be crazy to do that.” He sat up straight in his chair. “You make a bloody fortune doing what you do, and good as Mandy is, she doesn’t have your contacts or your eye.”

“Well, thanks, but we can’t let Daddy go under.”

“Listen, if it’s that bad, Auntie Ru can work with me. Damn, she’s not afraid to break a sweat and I can operate that heavy equipment. It’s been a while but I’ll remember it soon enough.”

“So you will help?”

“Yes—if he’ll let me.” That was the easiest decision Carter ever made in his life, and if someone had asked him about such an event even yesterday he would have
been tortured by weighing both sides of the issue, by his thorny relationship with his father, by remaining close, geographically, to that
vagina dentata
Laura.

The phone rang twice. Frazier jumped up and dialed Dad. Carter stood up and walked over behind her.

“Mom, may I speak to Dad, please?”

“This is a disaster!” Libby wailed. “No, he’s trying to eat his breakfast and you’ll only upset him more.”

Carter, his ear close to the phone, heard this and yanked the phone out of Frazier’s hand. “Mother, get Dad on the phone right now.”

As her adored child had only once before spoken to her in such anger, Libby, presumably in a state of shock, handed the portable phone to her husband. Carter handed the phone back to Frazier.

“Daddy—are you all right?”

Frank swallowed a mouthful of food. “This is a tempest in a teapot. It will work out. Don’t you worry about me.”

“I am worried about you. You’re a wonderful businessman, Dad, and this is just … ridiculous. I want to help.”

“You can help me by taking care of yourself, and then I’ll have only one child left to worry about.”

Carter heard that. Frazier quickly replied, “Daddy, I don’t think you have to worry about Carter. In fact, he’s right here and he wants to talk to you.” She handed the phone to Carter.

He gulped, squinted hard, then began in an unusually husky voice: “Dad, I haven’t been worth a damn. I know that but I’m turning over a new leaf. I haven’t had a drink since I smashed up Yancey Weems’s Mercedes and Billy’s Volante. I’m realizing some things. Uh, I’m not making any excuses for myself, Dad.” He breathed deeply again. “What I’m trying to say here is that I’d like
to come work for Armstrong Paving and I don’t expect much money at all. Just enough to cover groceries as long as Frazier will tolerate me. I can operate the equipment and with a little work I can learn to bid out on the jobs—well, a lot of work really, but I can do it, Dad, and this way you can save one salary. Times are bad and this asinine article might slow things down further. And Frazier said Ru can come on in and work too. We can do it. We can get through this—if you’ll just give me a chance.”

A long, long pause on the other end of the phone was agony. “That sounds like a good idea, son.”

A flush washed over Carter’s cheeks. Frazier put her arm around his shoulders. “Just one little thing—will you go to bat with Mildred for me? You know she can’t stand me.”

Frank laughed. “Carter, don’t give it a second thought. I’ll see you in, uh, how about an hour?”

“Great.”

“Tell Frazier not to worry. You know how she gets.”

“Yeah, I’ll tell her. Bye.”

“Goodbye.”

Carter held the phone in his hand. He couldn’t hang it up. Frazier pressed down the disconnect button. “He said for you not to worry. You worry too much.”

“I’m proud of you, Brudda.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

She would have been proud of her father, too, if she could have seen him in Libby’s country kitchen. When he told his wife she blew a fuse, said it would ruin what was left of his business—not that Carter wouldn’t be of some help but father and son fought like cats and dogs. She then indicated that this would just break Laura’s heart.

Frank might not have been the most perceptive man in the world but he figured out that his wife feared he would forge a closer relationship with his son and then she wouldn’t be needed as a go-between. Libby lived by “divide and conquer.” She ragged on until he finally told her to shut up.

Libby, misreading Frank’s determination—an easy enough mistake to make, since she’d led him by the nose for four decades—pressed: “Then you insist he give up that girlfriend of his. She’s a person of low degree. It will hurt your image. It will hurt your business. Carter has got to give her up.”

Frank bellowed, “Shut the fuck up!” and hurled his cup and saucer against the wall, smashing both and leaving a coffee stain on the wall. He grabbed his car keys and left Libby to reassess her position.

T
HE WARM BRICKS OF THE COUNTRY CLUB, SET OFF BY A
linen-white entablature, contrasted with the spring green from the surrounding walnuts, chestnuts, red oaks, and maples. Soon enough the three-story magnolias would open their enormous buds as if on cue, the white flowers seeming to float like waterlilies amidst the glossy dark-green leaves.

The roads into the club were clogged with cars, and people walked as far as half a mile for the dance and the fireworks.

Tables with pastel tablecloths dotted the undulating lawn, bouquets with hurricane lamps gracing the center of each table. Liveried waiters and waitresses served the guests. A dance floor, used for outdoor gatherings, squatted over the expansive lawn. Under the lingering twilight the bandleader—wearing a toupee so bad that if he threw it in the middle of the road, drivers would
think it was a dead cat—rapped his baton on a music stand. The small orchestra picked up their instruments. Thirties and forties tunes floated over the boxwoods and azaleas.

Everybody who could walk, run, or be carried was in attendance tonight. The spring gowns of the ladies shimmered in pastels, while the men looked like smart penguins. Frank and Libby headed a table on the west side of the dance floor. Libby seethed when Carter arrived with Sarah, overdressed but sexy nonetheless. However, Frank’s outburst yesterday kept her lip temporarily buttoned. She allowed herself to be introduced to Sarah but remained frosty. Ru diverted Libby’s attention at every opportunity. Frazier sat on the other side of the sultry woman. They engaged in a lively conversation while Mandy, wearing a peach chiffon dress, chatted up Frank. That didn’t sit too well with Libby either, having a person of color at her table. She elected to be heroic about it so her gang could feel for her, comment on her grace under pressure. The recent riots in Los Angeles had instilled in Libby a fear that any show of distaste on her part would induce violence on the part of an individual who was not white. Libby’s racism, like Libby’s other “isms,” managed to incorporate current events in such a way as to reinforce her prejudice, not challenge it.