Plantation

by Dorothea Benton Frank

  “She takes one little trip to France and now she pelts us with her international self every five minutes,” Miss Sweetie said.

  I offered Miss Nancy the round silver tray of tea sandwiches and she looked suspicious.

  “Now, what do we have here?” Miss Nancy said. “Lavinia? Are you absolutely determined to ruin my figure? Do you think I could just have tomatoes on toast? No mayo?”

  “Miss Nancy, you can have whatever you want,” I said. “I’ll be rat back.”

  “Lavinia?” I heard Miss Nancy say. “How on earth did an ugly old buh-zard like you give birth to such a beautiful girl?”

  “Hush up and pour me a glass of sherry before she gets back,” Mother said.

  “Pour me one too, Mother!” I called out. Hell, I may as well jump right in, I thought. Did I work for Alcoholics Anonymous? I didn’t think so.

  Before long the game was under way. Miss Sweetie was my partner. Miss Nancy shuffled and dealt the hand, bracelets jangling. I picked up my cards and arranged them. They were fabulous. I had the ace, king, and queen of spades, the ace of hearts, the jack, and four others, a void in clubs, and four decent diamonds. Miss Sweetie opened.

  “One diamond,” she said.

  “Who shuffled?” Mother said.

  “I did, Lavinia,” Miss Nancy said politely. “It’s your bid, Lavinia, dear.”

  “Pass,” Mother said and sighed hard enough to blow me off my chair.

  “One spade,” I said, hoping I was doing the right thing.

  “Pass,” Miss Nancy said.

  “Three hearts,” Miss Sweetie said and winked at me.

  “That’s it!” Mother said. “There will be no signals in my living room!”

  “Mon Dieu! Just bid, Lavinia,” Miss Nancy said.

  “Pass,” Mother said and leveled her glare at Miss Nancy.

  Mother’s mood had gone sour. I could not believe that she was actually so competitive and a poor sport to boot! Needless to say, we kicked their butts to Kalamazoo and by the time five o’clock rolled around, Mother was thoroughly annoyed. It wasn’t my fault. I played dummy half of the time anyway and I thought she had won enough hands to save face.

  “Will we see you in church Sunday, Caroline?” Miss Sweetie said at the front door.

  Mother and Miss Nancy were there too, chattering and giggling, for which I was grateful. Miss Nancy had always been able to shift Mother’s moods.

  “Oh, yes! Wouldn’t miss that sideshow for all the world,” I said.

  “We have a cute new preacher,” Miss Sweetie said, whispering behind her hand to me. “I think your mother’s sweet on him! God knows, she hadn’t been to church in ten years until this cute young thing showed up!”

  “Hush your bad mouth, Sweetie!” Mother said.

  “How old is he?” I asked.

  “What’s the difference if he’s willing and able?” she said and stopped on the steps.

  “Il est un hot-tay!” Miss Nancy said, wiggling her eyebrows up and down.

  “Good Lord, Nancy,” Mother said, “I sure hope you don’t go to China!”

  “Hottie? You girls are bad! Probably wants endowment money,” I said, under my breath.

  “You don’t know your mother well at all, do you?” Miss Sweetie said.

  “He’s already well endowed,” Mother said, mumbling under her breath to her friends.

  “Mother!”

  “Honey, you can tell by a man’s body language what he’s got, don’t you know that?” Mother said, eyebrows arched.

  We all burst out laughing.

  “Mother!”

  What in the hell was going on here?

  “They all want money, Caroline, we know that!” Miss Nancy said. “But we have a list of what we want too! C’nest pas?”

  I shook my head wondering what my mother and her friends had been up to, while they giggled like a bunch of schoolgirls. We all waved good-bye to Miss Sweetie, who kicked up the dust when she peeled out of our drive in her red Mustang convertible.

  “She had to buy a red one?” Mother said.

  “Strawberries? Get it?” Miss Nancy said.

  “And when she goes in the pickle business I imagine that she’ll buy a green one?” Mother said and they began to cluck.

  “I imagine so,” Miss Nancy said and walked down the drive to her navy BMW.

  “Cool,” I said.

  “Indeed,” said Mother with all her attitude and we went inside. “Caroline? Better get some rest. Trip and his gang will be here at seven.”

  Oh Lord, I thought, what next?

  “Prepare for the worst,” she said.

  “Mother? May I ask you something . . . personal?”

  “Maybe. What?”

  “Is it true that you had an affair with the gardener?”

  “Caroline! Of all the crust!” She looked at me with narrowed eyes. “All right, I’ll tell you so you hear the story from the horse’s mouth and not from your brother’s jaded perspective. Yes, I did. And it was fabulous! For six months Raoul Estevez and I tripped the light fantastic. He wasn’t the first and he won’t be the last!”

  “Mother! You shock me!” I leaned against the living room door for support. So what Trip had said, at least part of it, was true!

  “Caroline! Wipe that look off your face this instant!” She crossed her arms and shook her head. “Child? Haven’t you ever read the Constitution?”

  “What’s that got to do with this?”

  “We are entitled by our forefathers to the pursuit of happiness! Think about it!”

  “You’re entitled to sleep with a man half your age by the Constitution ?”

  “If it makes me happy? Yes! Since when did you become so anal, Caroline? Life’s short! Live it, girl! Now, I have to go rest before they arrive.”

  She patted my arm, gently raised my jaw to meet my upper lip, and went upstairs. I watched her. She had more spring in her step than I did. Pursuit of happiness. Entitled to it. I’d have to give this my full focus. It was a strange but interesting concept.

  MISS LAVINIA’S JOURNAL

  Oh, my, it’s good to have my daughter here with me! And I think it’s going to be good for her too! Lord knows, she’s way too serious! That girl needs fun!

  Fourteen

  Cocktail Time

  IF my daddy had drawn air long enough to know Frances Mae, he would’ve held his hand to the Bible and declared that Trip would surely die a drunk. If he’d lived to witness the shenanigans of Amelia, Isabelle, Caroline, and Frances Mae combined, he would’ve recommended plain old murder. That’s what Daddy would’ve done. Because after all, there were just certain kinds of people who could lead you to dive right in the bottle, especially if you were a peace-loving sort of fellow.

  That was what Daddy and Trip had in common. Peace-loving good old boys, who knew their place, when to speak, and which topics were considered polite in mixed company. They revered generations of tradition—these things were their Bible. Hunted for sport, never killed more than they could carry. Never overfished. Never broke an oyster bed until it was the season. Mended their own casting nets, cleaned their own guns. They followed a code of honor on the river and in the woods, living like they had the game warden on one shoulder and Jesus on the other.

  They stood when Mother or any lady entered the room, held her chair at dinner, and opened every door for her. They never discussed money or the affairs of government in front of ladies. And they never made a vulgar reference with a lady present. For all their refinement, they were as masculine as a man could be. They were gentlemen and gentlemen were expected to marry ladies. What the hell happened to Trip’s judgment when he brought home Frances Mae was anybody’s guess.

  Even Millie had been horrified. Mother, Millie, and I became the Unholy Triumvirate. Behind her back we called Frances Mae everything from sine nobilitas and rapacious when we were feeling superior, to hairball and mucus when we had been overserved and the hour was late. We had many names for the Idolater of the Dolla
r, the Pernicious Peroxided Pretender to the Throne, and the alliterated Jabbering Jacksonboro Jaguar.

  In the old days, gentlemen of our family were supposed to marry ladies from another, more sophisticated and worldly society. And ladies of our family did the same. But not Trip and not me. Nope. Richard’s résumé may have been bizarre to some, but Frances Mae’s was downright scary.

  The first time Trip brought her home it caused a major brain spasm in Old Lavinia. For the only time in her life she was without words. It was the summer of 1986. Trip had finally graduated from Carolina Law School and was studying for the bar.

  Trip was tooling around town in the new convertible Chrysler Le Baron Mother had bought him as a gift. I was home for a weekend visit from New York and weeding in the garden with Mother when his car came screaming around the front drive.

  “What?” Mother said, looking up from the rose bed.

  Mother was wearing a huge straw hat to shield her face from the sun and a sundress with an open back so she could tan. I looked up then and saw Trip hop over the side of the car and run around to open the passenger door. It was just like Troy Donahue and what’s-her-name from the fifties movies—Sandra Dee or someone.

  “On my mother’s grave! He’s got a young woman with him!”

  “I’ll be damned,” I said.

  Trip was not successful with the ladies unless they looked and smelled like Labradors. That car was an apparent asset.

  We stood and watched her get out and look at the house. Actually, she took inventory of our family’s home, smiling. A chimpanzee with curled-back lips—it was all I could think. You would have thought he’d tossed her the keys to the joint. Next, she threw her arms around Trip and kissed him so hard he fell back against the car, most likely bruising his pelvic bone in the process. He had his hands on her round little backside, rubbing it. Mother turned so red, I thought for a minute she would burst her carotid artery. I was coming undone with surprise and giggles. I knew her. She was the waitress from the coffee shop in Jacksonboro. The waitress with the lips. Mother held her hand to her chest. Trip finally had the presence of mind to quit tickling Slut Bubba’s tonsils and look up to where we stood. That was the first hello. Some opener!

  Mother and I stood rooted in the garden like a couple of overgrown tulips, slack-jawed and burned. Nothing Sherman ever did frightened a woman in our family as much as Frances Mae Litchfield in her tight jeans, white high heels, and tube top. Except for her hair. Bleach! Bleach! Bleach! No! No! No! Women of Mother’s family never bleached! Highlight, perhaps. Enhance, maybe. Clorox, never. It was going to get worse before it ever got better. Or get better before it got worse.

  Mother started walking toward them and I followed on her heels. I would rather have taken a bullet in my head than miss a syllable.

  “Mother!” Trip said, calling out. “Come and meet Frances Mae!”

  Even from the back of Mother’s head, I could tell her jaw was locked in her Greenwich Grin.

  “Hi!” I said, stepping up to them and extending my hand, which hung in midair while she inspected it like a fish on ice. “I’m Caroline.”

  She finally figured out she was supposed to shake my hand and snapped back to earth. “Hey!” she said. “Yew juss as purdy as your bubba say-ed. Yes, ma’am, yew sho nuff is.”

  She smiled wide and tossed that mane of layered pseudo Farrah to the left and to the right. She was all of five feet one to Mother’s five seven and my five eight. Her accent was so thick it could have had us evicted forever from the Charleston Yacht Club. Her arms never left Trip’s waist. “En, yew mussy be Mizz La Viniea,” she said to Mother, not realizing that among our friends, her behavior would have been considered having sex in public.

  “Let’s go inside, shall we?” Mother said. Chill of major magnitude.

  “Why not?” said the miniature Barbie, who now took my brother’s arm, snuggled up to his side, and made the fatal mistake of taking the front steps before Mother.

  I could see Mother’s nostrils fill and collapse. Her jaw remained firm and resolute. She would not let this crimson-necked slut from nowhere steal her baby. That was the first of our many miscalculations about Frances Mae.

  Frances Mae Litchfield and James Nevil Wimbley III were married by a justice of the peace in Florence, South Carolina. Mother did not attend. Mother was not invited. Mother took to her bed for two weeks in the greatest of all southern swoons. Even Millie disappeared for a day or two. Trip took Frances Mae to Bermuda.

  I was back in New York with Richard when Millie called to tell me I had a sister-in-law. We thought it was a perfectly scandalous event and decided to get married too. What the hell, I thought, after Frances Mae, Richard would look like a prince to the family. Wrong again.

  The fact that time flew the Concorde did not escape me. Frances Mae and Trip with their three daughters from hell were coming for dinner. Where had the years gone? And, Frances Mae was pregnant again. I looked at the clock. Six-forty-five. In fifteen minutes, their arrival would shroud Tall Pines with the first act of classic southern family dysfunctional drama. It was inevitable.

  I opened the French doors in my old room and let the breeze come in. The river smells rushed in on a magic carpet and I took a deep breath. I sat right down on the floor in the lotus position in full view of the Edisto. The Edisto, majestic and musical as it slapped the riverbanks, made a little song for me as it had when I was a child. I closed my eyes and tried to empty my mind. It was good. I saw rushing waves of purple and green pulsating larger and then shrinking away only to be replaced by more floating waves of color. I was alone, in a beautiful breeze without a care in the world.

  Somewhere in the distance I heard the door close, like the great jaws of Jonah gulping down a snack. And, like old Ahab, we would all bang around the belly of familial indigestion for the next few hours. I would rise to the occasion and not allow any of them to unarm me. Unarm. What an odd choice for my expectations of the evening! Boy, was I conflicted or what? Who knew? It could be fun. Maybe Frances Mae had had a lobotomy since I saw her the last time. Meow.

  From the hall stairs I could see Trip pouring drinks in the living room. Frances Mae was shrieking in the hall powder room that one little witch of hers had put gum in another little witch’s hair.

  “Tell her to go to the kitchen and get some ice from Millie,” I said. “Freezes it and then you can chip it off.”

  “Ah, Caroline! Just in time!” Trip handed me a glass of white wine. “Let the healing begin.”

  We clinked glasses and I sat on the sofa opposite Mother in her chair, taking a small sip.

  “Thank you, brother, it’s good to see you.”

  “And you as well, sister. Don’t you think Mother looks particularly lovely tonight?”

  I looked at Mother and she rolled her eyes. “Freshen my bourbon like a good boy and don’t try to fill my head!” Mother said. Despite her feigned annoyance, she smiled at him. He was, after all, the family’s Christ child. He took her nearly empty tumbler, offered her a bowl of nuts, and she picked through them for the cashews.

  Trip poured and Frances Mae burst in, her baby demons hiding behind her.

  “Caroline! How lovely to see you!” she said, and I watched the muscles under her face twitch. Nerves. Who could blame her? I got up to greet her.

  “Hey, Frances Mae! How are you feeling?”

  “Oh, as well as can be expected, I imagine. My ankles give me such a fit! And my breasts are killing me! Girls, come kiss your aunt!”

  Mother coughed at Frances Mae’s reference to her breasts.

  As if on cue the girls ran away, out the front door and down the steps, slamming everything. Giggles and screams.

  “They are so bad,” she went on. “I try, but your brother here just won’t switch ’em. When I was a little girl, my daddy beat the stinking slop out of me if I didn’t behave! I’ll go get them.” She smiled and left to fetch her, as she would say, “younguns.”

  “Stinking slop,” Mot
her said in a faraway voice. “How utterly picturesque.”

  “What you mean, Mother, is how lacking in gentility, how unrefined?”

  “Hey, y’all, let’s cut her some slack tonight, okay? When I go back to New York, y’all can autopsy me too,” I said.

  They stopped and looked at me. It was an uncommon moment of support for Frances Mae. I felt a little sorry for her. She had gained at least thirty pounds and her outfit, from a garage sale in a tacky neighborhood, teetered somewhere in fashion maternity hell. And, as usual, she had neglected to blend her lip liner, so that her mouth gave the appearance of a mackerel. I knew my thoughts were unkind, even mean, but, God in heaven! She stood out in such loud contrast to everything around her, I truly had a struggle to hold them back. I glanced at Trip, who read my mind. He took a long drink and turned to pour another for himself. He raised it to me and suddenly I was a little annoyed with him and with Mother.

  “I’ll be right back,” I said, “I want to see my nieces.”

  I opened the front door and looked across the yard. It was one of those Carolina nights that makes you glad to be alive. Low humidity. Beautiful intermittent breezes. The smells of flowers. I walked around the gravel drive to the left side of the house and toward the river, following the sounds of their voices. From the distance I could see Frances Mae straightening Amelia’s hair and retying her bow. I stopped to watch for a moment. All three girls wore tea-length sundresses. My two little nieces, Isabelle and Caroline, had puffed shoulders and sashes. Amelia’s dress was different because she was, after all, thirteen. Nonetheless, the little girls had perfect blunt, chin-length haircuts, parted on the side, with a hank of their hair rubber-banded and tied over with a large satin bow. Except Amelia, who wore a headband. From where I stood, they looked like three lively angels, all innocence and light. I knew better.

  The crickets were clattering away in the woods and lightning bugs glittered all around. Frances Mae had sunk into a lawn chair and put her feet up. She was trying her hardest, she always had. It wasn’t her fault really that she always said the wrong thing or did the wrong thing. And, to her credit, her English had improved and her accent softened. A little. Trip wasn’t complaining so why should I? No, Trip was just a challenge to his liver, that’s all.