Georgia Bottoms

by Mark Childress

  “That friend of yours, Mr. Big Shot Baptist with the big gold knuckle rings. You said never trust a Baptist that wears that much gold.”

  “Aw, you talking about old Teebo Riley,” said Little Mama.

  “Teebo! That’s it!”

  “His real name was Clarence, or Horace or something.”

  Georgia kept her voice casual. “Wasn’t he some big to-do at the Southern Baptist Convention, in Montgomery?”

  Little Mama nodded. “He’s the right-hand man of the one that runs the whole shebang.”

  “I wonder whatever happened to old Teebo,” Georgia said.

  “He’s still around, called me last year on my birthday. Least I think it was him. Might have been somebody else.” Little Mama’s memory was getting spottier, but she filled in the gaps with her imagination. She’d been working the same jigsaw puzzle for years, but if it didn’t bother her, so what?

  “You still got his phone number, Mama?”

  “I think so.”

  Within minutes Little Mama was cackling on the phone with ol’ Teebo. Georgia listened for a while at the edge of the conversation, to make sure Mama got the details right. Then she poured herself a fat glass of red wine and carried it into the chill of the sunporch to celebrate.

  She looked forward to the smoothing effect of the wine. Her body felt achy and tingling, leftover trauma from the shock she had received at church—as if she’d touched a live wire, or had fainted for real. Eugene’s attempted betrayal was not only shocking, but humiliating. Georgia was not accustomed to having her private life dangled in a threatening way in front of the congregation. The first sting of rejection had been quickly replaced by a sense of resolve.

  Either party in an affair should have the right to break it off at any time, Georgia believed. That’s one reason she never married—she liked keeping her options open. People are so naturally fickle that she understood why some might want a binding legal contract to enforce a promise of the heart. But Georgia’s life, at least, was too complicated to put in writing.

  If Eugene wanted to break it off, okay—but to shout it from the pulpit for the whole town to hear? She simply couldn’t allow it. She conducted her affairs discreetly; no one had any idea what she was up to. Rarely did she have to bring the hammer down on anybody. It was nice to know she still could if she had to.

  She sipped her wine and waited. Presently up the hall came the walker with split tennis balls mounted on the front legs for traction. “All done, baby.”

  “Mama, you are a miracle worker. Remind me to buy you a mink coat for Christmas.”

  Mama snorted. “I could use one, cold as you keep it in here. Ain’t your feet freezing? My toes are like niblets of ice.”

  Little Mama never asked why her daughter might want her to make such a call. Simply did as she was told. Eugene and Brenda would never know what hit them.

  Little Mama halted her walker at the sofa.

  “Put on socks if you’re cold,” Georgia said. “Go around barefoot, no wonder.” Thumbing through the Montgomery yellow pages, she settled on “Charlie Ross Regal Moving” because she liked the cartoon of Charlie Ross wearing a jeweled crown as he rode and whipped his moving van like a bucking bronco. She appreciated a moving company with a sense of the ridiculous. She dialed the number and explained the situation to a pleasant woman called Shirley.

  “And your name is?” said Shirley.

  “Brenda Hendrix,” said Georgia. “I know this is awful short notice. Can you really get a truck here first thing in the morning?”

  “It’s your lucky day, we had a cancellation,” said Shirley. “I’m sending you down my best crew.”

  Georgia thanked her and hung up. She consulted the yellow legal pad with the list for her September luncheon, three handwritten pages of closely spaced items still to do. It was only forty-eight hours until the first guests would begin parking their cars along Magnolia Street. “What you think, Mama? Chicken salad or pimento cheese?”

  “For what?”

  “Finger sandwiches for the table in the front hall.”

  “Chicken salad,” Little Mama said. “Nowadays some people can’t tolerate cheese. I don’t get it—nobody used to be against things like cheese. If we still had a colored woman, you could just tell her to make both of ’em and then people could have whichever they want. It’s all because of that damn Rosa Parks.”

  “Now don’t start…” Little Mama was a lethal bore on the subject of Rosa Parks, whom she blamed for every form of misery that had come into the world since 1955. If uppity Rosa Parks hadn’t sat down on that bus in Montgomery, things might have stayed as they were when Little Mama was young: gasoline was nineteen cents a gallon, a white woman had privileges, you could have a colored girl do your housework for nothing. Little Mama didn’t invent that way of living, but she sure as hell preferred it to the way things were now. There were plenty who agreed with her, but mostly they were senile or dead, or keeping their thoughts to themselves.

  Outside the house, Little Mama had to stay quiet about her opinions, but inside she let fly, mainly to irritate Georgia, who was like her father, a yellow-dog Democrat on the subject.

  They used to have the most terrific dinner-table wars, Little Mama roaring that Paw was a worse nigger lover than Eleanor Roosevelt, Paw roaring back that she ought to put on a hood and a sheet and go night riding, if you’re going to be a Klucker do your duty, woman! They raged like that for decades. Paw lost the argument—or got out of it, anyway, by dying. Georgia tried not to argue with Little Mama if she could help it. There were at least three African-American women in town she would be perfectly willing to invite to her luncheon—Dr. Madeline Roudy, for instance, the pediatrician at the county free clinic, a good-natured person, attractive, intelligent—but Georgia didn’t dare. Little Mama would find a way to bring up Rosa Parks.

  “She wasn’t even a seamstress, that was all just publicity,” Mama announced. “What she was was a Communist agitator. I’ve seen the pictures of her in the Communist training camp in Tennessee.”

  “Yeah, Ma, I know, just leave it alone. You’re right, I’d better make both pimento cheese and chicken salad, or somebody is bound to be disappointed.”

  To Georgia, the silliest argument of all was this endless wrestling match over race. As far back as she could remember, everyone in Alabama had been re-fighting the Civil War, a hundred forty years later. Someone was always trying to send the black man back into slavery, or raise him up higher than he was ready to go. To Georgia, the solution seemed simple: Everybody just forget about it. White people, get used to it. Black people, stop dwelling on it. Let’s all just pretend we’re equal, and get on with our lives.

  People, thought Georgia, should aspire to be more like ants. Ants make no distinctions based on color.

  Georgia had this thing about ants. She’d spent much of her childhood on her knees with her nose near an anthill. She liked to pick out one ant with her eye and follow its travels as long as she could, imagining its life from beginning to end. As a grown-up she watched every ant documentary that came on public television.

  She was fascinated by the way ants passed complex chemical messages down the column. A bad message could get them dashing around in a panic, tiny mobs going berserk. Whenever Georgia got to feeling alone, maybe a little bit useless, she reflected on the “Ant Connection.” Ants work their whole lives for the good of the species. They don’t need words to speak to each other. They don’t mind being one speck among millions—or do they? Maybe they don’t realize how tiny they are. Maybe they seem as large to themselves as we seem to us.

  There were lessons to be learned: One ant doesn’t matter much. We are tiny, but we are connected. We all have to work for the good of the Ant Connection.

  “I’m too busy to drive Brother. Why can’t he just walk over there?”

  “You know he’ll just call that Bailey boy to come get him. And they’ll wind up in jail again.”

  “I have a to-do list t
wenty feet long, if that matters to anybody,” Georgia said. “Are you done shelling those peas? You want me to put ’em on for your supper?”

  Little Mama said, “There’s a piece of fatback in some foil in the back of the icebox.”

  Georgia went to put on the peas. She cranked up the soft rock on WBGR, woo woo no baby please don’t go… She fanned out her Southern Living cookbooks and launched into the first major round of cooking for her Tuesday luncheon.

  She roasted and peeled a large pan of red peppers, then dragged out the food processor, a hunk of cheddar, and a huge tub of mayonnaise to whip up her famous pimento cheese. She plopped two chickens into a pot to be boiled, cooled, and deboned for Curried Chicken Salad with Grapes and Candied Pecans. She sliced, mixed, and stirred, opening can after can of ingredients for the fancy casseroles and layered salads that would anchor the main buffet table in the dining room. She peeled and grated a pile of Granny Smiths for the Fresh Mountain Apple Jell-O Compote that Krystal swore was the best thing she had ever put in her mouth (since Billy Satterfield, ha ha).

  Georgia didn’t own the fifty shot glasses needed to give each guest her own serving of the Lobster Scallion Shooters. In a burst of inspiration she’d had Fred at Hull’s Market order two cases of votive-candle holders, which she now had to wash, dry, and scrape the price tags off until her thumbnail was a ragged rim of gray sticky cheese.

  Once she repaired the nail with a clipper and emery board, she set into making a double batch of Taco Cheesecakes, which were so labor-intensive that she only bothered because they were such a major hit last year.

  When the cheesecakes were in the fridge setting up, Georgia constructed Miss Angie’s Five-Layer English Pea Salad, and a vat of Cranberry Ambrosia Cream Cheese Spread for stuffing into Endive Boats.

  She began dicing cantaloupe for the Pizzetta Bruschetta and was swept by a sudden wave of hunger. She ate a big hunk of melon just like that, ripe juice dripping down her chin. Generally she tried to avoid eating—that was the only way to stay slim—but sometimes hunger took over her hands, made her do things. Awful things. She ate half the cantaloupe in four bites, mluph mluph.

  The last count on her invite list showed forty-four yeses. Plus the inevitable last-minute RSVPs, and those who would show up without bothering to reply. That meant at least fifty women roaming the house, hungry as bears, eating everything down to the lace tablecloths. Georgia could lay out chips and store-bought onion dip, and they would consume it all without saying a word—to her face—but oh Lord later how the phone lines would sing!

  Over the years, Georgia had set a certain standard with her September luncheon. Husbands were said to be jealous that only their wives were invited. Georgia put out the fanciest food, the most dazzling flower arrangements, the cleverest centerpieces. She inscribed each guest’s name on a place card in her impeccable hand. Each would depart with an elaborate homemade goody bag. Year after year Georgia kept raising the bar, although she claimed her only goal was to give the kind of party to which she would like to be invited. The pressure was tremendous.

  The preparation was the part she enjoyed. The party itself was always a combination letdown and blur.

  Now that she had the dishes washed and stacked, the kitchen under a semblance of control, she slipped out the back door, over the broken bricks of the garden path. The sun was setting but the air was still heavy and hot, bugs zipping around. A blue jay raised a piercing alarm.

  If Georgia kept at it without a break, she thought, she had just enough time to clean the apartment before driving Brother. Who you’d think could get himself across a town as small as Six Points without help from his sister.

  The big houses on Magnolia Street all had these back buildings, which some called “dependencies,” or “slave quarters” if they were being historically accurate. The Bottomses had always called the first level of their back building “the garage,” though it was built as a stable and had never been a garage, and the upstairs was “the apartment,” though no one had lived there since slavery times.

  The garage’s double-arched doorways were large enough to admit a horse and carriage. Now it served as the laundry, and a repository for croquet sets and broken lamps.

  Georgia grabbed a mop and bucket and headed upstairs. An iron gate prevented anyone from seeing past the landing. Only inside the gate could you peer into the long, high-ceilinged apartment with the four-poster bed, green velvet chair, the skinny seven-drawer highboy dresser. A bathroom had been added in the 1920s, but otherwise the room looked as it had for a hundred years. The chimney was gradually disintegrating, sprinkling clay-orange brick dust on the floor every morning. The floor sloped toward the chimney from all sides. Over time, the heavy chimney was sinking into the soft earth, dragging the rest of the house into the hole with it.

  Along the front of the building ran a balcony with an elegant wrought-iron rail. Anything that happened in the apartment was hidden by a pair of honey locust trees with foliage dense and thorny enough to prevent anyone from climbing up or seeing in.

  The apartment smelled musty—God help us, the leftover funk of Eugene Hendrix. Georgia threw open the French doors, stripped the sheets, carried them downstairs, and stuffed them in the washer. She went back up and put fresh sheets on the bed, and set into a radical cleaning, from one end of the room to the other. She vacuumed the rugs, hung them over the railing, and beat them with the broom. She swept the sloping plank floor and mopped it twice.

  In a Hull’s Market sack, she collected the remnants of Eugene—silk shorts, pack of Camels and a lighter, the shiny blue polyester bathrobe he smuggled in early in their affair when he was thinking of himself as some kind of Hugh Hefner type. A pair of black candles. A paperback called The Imaginary Christian that she had tried to read, at his suggestion. An empty Gallo Blanc de Blancs bottle (the religious ones always need alcohol to get the motor running) and a crumpled bag of Funyuns, his favorite. That reminded her to retrieve his toothbrush and mouthwash from the bathroom sink. And the box of Magnum XL.

  One thing about Eugene she would miss.

  She fished the little key from its hidey-hole at the back of the highboy dresser, turned the ingenious rod-and-pin mechanism that unlocked all seven drawers at once. One drawer for each day of the week—Eugene was the bottom one, the Saturday drawer. There was nothing left in it but one white crew sock, a can of athlete’s-foot powder, and a Christian tract: a hand-sized comic book called “This Was Your Life!”

  Georgia flipped through, recalling how the Campus Crusade girls used to hand out these things at football games before heading up under the bleachers to make out with boys.

  She slid the photo of grinning Eugene out of the silver frame. She set the frame back on the bedside table, and dropped the photo in the Hull’s sack. She carried the sack down to the alley and stuffed it in the garbage can.

  Night was falling through the trees. She went back upstairs to turn on the lights.

  Eugene Hendrix had arrived in Six Points with two strikes against him: (A) he was from north Alabama, practically a Yankee, and (B) he had come to replace the Rev. Onus L. Satterfield, beloved pastor of the First Baptist of Six Points for the past forty-three years.

  Eugene managed to ingratiate himself that very first Sunday by preaching on the subject of whether God would root for Auburn or Alabama. In the end, he satisfied the whole congregation by concluding that God was probably an Auburn man—like most of the men in the church, coincidentally—while the rebellious Jesus no doubt would have sided with the Crimson Tide just to irritate his father.

  Georgia put down the paper towels and Windex. She retraced her steps downstairs, to the garbage can. It was full dark now, crickets fiddling in the trees. She retrieved the crumpled-up Hull’s sack and carried it to the backyard, the barbecue pit.

  Grandpa Speeler and Uncle T.C. built this pit from stones they lugged in croaker sacks from the river bottom. Georgia fished Eugene’s cigarette lighter from the sack, placed the sack on the
grate, and fetched a can of lighter fluid from the garage.

  She squeezed the can with both hands, enjoying the goonk of the liquid glugging out. She used a good bit more fluid than was necessary. She flicked the lighter and tossed it, WOOF! It blew bigger than she’d thought, a Wizard of Oz belch of flame that lit up the whole yard and the trees in the neighbors’ yards. Georgia jumped—a faint smell of burning, the light hairs crisped on her arm.

  She picked up a stick and poked at the sack until she was satisfied it would burn completely, then headed back toward the garage.

  “Cookin’ weenies?” Brother jumped from the shadows.

  She tried to act as if he hadn’t startled her. “Don’t touch that. I’m just burning some trash.”

  “I’m hungry, Georgie. Cook me a weenie!”

  “Hush. The whole neighborhood can hear you.”

  “You gonna drive me?”

  “Give me five minutes, okay? I’m almost finished upstairs.”

  “I’ll wait in the car,” he said. “Give me the keys so I can listen to the radio.”

  If she gave him the keys he would drive off in her car. “Can you just wait in the house until I’m done?”

  Brother huddled in the flickering firelight. “Aw come on, I won’t wreck your car,” he whined.

  Maybe not, she thought, but when you get pulled over with your license revoked, whose car are they gonna impound? Not yours, because funny thing, you haven’t got one, because you would have to have a job or at least some money of your own, which is something that will never happen.

  All she said was, “Forget it.”

  “Why you so mean to me, Dimmy?” Brother made a face like a demon.

  She shook her head. “Go wait for me in the house, Linda Blair.”

  He pulled his sweatshirt hood over his head and vanished in the darkness of the side yard.

  It was not a good sign, Brother going back to his old sneaky ways. When he was twelve, his favorite game was to sneak up on Georgia to scare her. He hadn’t done it since the night she was carrying scissors and nearly stabbed him in the eye.