The Secret Lives of the Kudzu Debutantes

by Cathy Holton

  Nita didn't know what she meant. “Sorry?” she said.

  Grace rolled a mini-bunco and kept going. “What is it you think Madame President has up her sleeve?”

  Nita, still not understanding, said, “She's taken Whitney and some of her friends up to Atlanta to go shopping this weekend. I think that's real sweet of her. The girls were so excited.”

  “Nita and Virginia have turned over a new leaf,” Eadie said to Grace. “They're good, good friends now.”

  “That's right,” Nita said stubbornly.

  “We keep trying to remind Nita of how Virginia made her life miserable for sixteen years but she seems to have forgotten all that.”

  Lavonne said, “Are you keeping score, or should I?”

  “You keep score,” Eadie said. “Remember, Nita. Once a rat, always a rat.”

  Lavonne rolled another set of threes. “What was that you said earlier about people changing?”

  Nita frowned and shook her head. “There's a lot about Virginia y'all don't know.”

  Eadie and Grace looked interested. “Like what?” Eadie said.

  “Game!” Lavonne said. They added up their points. Lavonne and Eadie put W's next to their third round and Nita and Grace put L's.

  “Does she ever say anything about growing up on that island in the middle of the river?” Grace said. “Virginia, I mean. Does she ever talk about that with you?” Her face was splotched with color and her eyes were intensely blue. Blue like sapphires. Like bayonet points glittering in the sun.

  Nita leaned over and pretended to count her losses. She didn't want to tell them what she knew about Virginia's childhood, not here anyway, in front of everybody. She felt oddly protective of the older woman. After all, Virginia had taken Whitney and her friends up to Atlanta, at her own expense. Who could ask for a better grandmother than that?

  A pale sliver of moon hung over the shed like a tattered cloth. Fireflies flickered in the darkness. Grace said, “I've always wondered why Virginia didn't develop that property earlier. I guess I'm not surprised she and Redmon have set up that development deal. I guess I was a little surprised, though, to see that Jimmy Lee's involved, too.”

  Lavonne looked at Eadie and frowned. Nita looked blankly at Grace. “What development deal?” she said.

  VIRGINIA'S REVENGE SCHEME WAS COMING ALONG NICELY. It was going so well that sometimes Virginia had to wonder if she might have missed her calling as a war games planner or State Department strategist. She had convinced Redmon and Jimmy Lee to pay her a one-hundredthousand-dollar finder's fee and had her attorney draw up the contracts so that she retained ownership in the island and only released the property one lot at a time. Flush with money, she began to regain some of the confidence she had lost when the stock market dropped and Boone & Broadwell collapsed, leaving her a pauper. She even managed to convince Redmon to let her redecorate portions of the house, starting with the kitchen and the dining room. They were still negotiating the Elvis Red carpet.

  Redmon had more important things on his mind these days than interior design. After overcoming his initial reluctance, he had thrown himself into the Culpepper Plantation project with all the zeal and determination he could muster. He left early in the morning and returned late at night, too tired for anything but dinner, a few hours in front of the TV, and bed. Exhausted, he was snoring within minutes of his head touching the pillow. Virginia was only sorry she hadn't cooked up the scheme earlier in their marriage. It might have saved her countless embarrassing episodes of the Cheerleader and the Coach or the Schoolteacher and the Naughty Schoolboy, not to mention her latest performance as a romping debutante.

  And having Redmon distracted with work left Virginia with more time to spin her web around the pliant Whitney. The girl was an easy mark, with her love of clothes and adolescent luxuries, not to mention the possible gift of a new automobile that Virginia dangled in front of her like a piñata. (She had warned Whitney to keep it between them for the time being; she had promised to bring Nita around to the idea eventually.) The process of winning Whitney's loyalty had been as easy as cutting butter with a hot knife, as her daddy used to say, and all Virginia had to do now was wait until the time was ripe to strike.

  There were moments when Virginia was amazed at her own genius, at her own capacity for treachery and deceit. There were times when it seemed her whole life had been nothing but a dress rehearsal for this one climactic expression of vengeance, a righting of all the wrongs and slights she had suffered throughout her solitary childhood, her loveless marriage, her lonely ascent to the top of the Ithaca social ladder. But there were other times, less frequent, when Virginia wondered if she might not be missing something important, moments when she questioned whether vengeance was the pinnacle of happiness or the slough that separated her from it. In those brief moments of self-awareness, she realized that she missed her sexual escapades with Redmon, she was conscious of the fact that she enjoyed the time she spent with her granddaughter, she understood that she might have been a better mother to a daughter than she had been to a son, had fate and circumstances not worked to her disadvantage. These moments, however, were fleeting.

  Most of the time Virginia just thought about how clever she was.

  ASHLEY AND LOUISE WERE SPENDING SPRING BREAK WITH LEONARD and his new family in Florida, and Eadie had flown up to Bald Head Island to meet Trevor, so Lavonne had the whole week to herself. She spent as much of it as she could with Joe, who was leaving on Wednesday to fly up to Chicago to see his daughter. On Monday and Tuesday, Lavonne took some time off from work and they packed picnic lunches and rode their bikes down to the Riverpark. In the evenings they had dinner and saw a movie or ate in and watched TV.

  After he left, he telephoned every day. She looked forward to his calls the way a cheerleader looks forward to a call from the captain of the football team. It was corny, but it was true. She was forty-seven years old and she felt like a high school sophomore. They laughed and talked on the phone for hours. When she wasn't talking on the phone, Lavonne stood in front of the bathroom mirror looking at her naked body. It's not too bad, she decided, turning this way and that. She'd lost a lot of weight but the skin was still firm. Her nipples might not stick straight up but they were still more horizontal than vertical. All in all, she was pretty pleased with herself. If she'd looked this good twenty years ago, it wouldn't have been just Eadie Boone streaking across the Wal-Mart parking lot and jumping naked into the Courthouse fountain.

  So far her physical relationship with Joe hadn't progressed much beyond kissing and snuggling. Any time things got too intense, Joe would pull himself away, take a deep breath, and go into the kitchen to grab a beer or make a bowl of popcorn. He seemed to be just as willing as she was to take things slow.

  Maybe it was because he wasn't pushing it that Lavonne began to fantasize about what it would be like to sleep with him. She wasn't one of those women who found beefy twenty-year-old hard-bodies appealing. She liked a man with a few wrinkles in his face, a little gray at his temples. Someone who could discuss the intricacies of postperestroika Russia, but still knew who Monty Python was. Someone who appreciated an imported beer but kept himself in the well-toned, muscular shape of a college swimmer. The more she thought about Joe Solomon, the more she appreciated the fun that could be had by two unfettered, consenting adults.

  But other times she thought about how great it was to have a friend to watch movies and television with, someone to laugh with and go out to dinner with. Then Lavonne was determined not to blow it by sleeping with him. She knew from experience she could go without sex, but she wasn't sure she could go without his friendship. She had grown too accustomed to having him around.

  ON SATURDAY LEONARD CALLED TO SAY THAT HE AND CHRISTY and the boys were driving up from Florida and wanted to stop in to pick up some furniture that Lavonne no longer wanted. Ashley and Louise had flown back to New Orleans the day before and Lavonne really didn't want to see Leonard, but she figured money must be tight
if he was willing to take her cast-offs. She had forgiven him long ago for being a shitty husband, and she found it best to maintain a cordial relationship with him, if only for the girls' sake. Now that she had fallen for Joe Solomon, she could afford to be generous with her ex-husband.

  “Sure,” she said. “Come on. I'll be home all afternoon.”

  Leonard had remarried soon after their divorce, before he moved to Atlanta to practice law. He married Christy, his thirty-something, ex-secretary. She was everything Leonard had ever wanted in a wife—young, slim, pretty, and subservient in that coy, false way that Leonard so admired in Southern women. Christy lost no time getting pregnant with twin sons who were born eight months after Lavonne left Leonard.

  “Congratulations,” Lavonne said, when he told her. “Are they yours?”

  “Of course they're mine,” Leonard said irritably, followed quickly by, “they were born a little early. I never actually slept with her until after the firm party.”

  “Well, technically, we were still married at that time,” Lavonne said. “Which makes you a bigger asshole than I originally thought.”

  “I may need to borrow some money,” Leonard said.

  “Good luck with that,” Lavonne said.

  Leonard had somehow managed to hang on to the beach house during the financial melee that followed Boone & Broadwell's dissolution, although Lavonne had insisted he mortgage it and put the money into a college trust fund for the girls. It was at the beach house that Leonard, Christy, and their sons had spent spring break with Louise and Ashley. The girls affectionately referred to their half-brothers as the Devil's Spawn. The twins' real names were Preston and Landon.

  “Landon threw the cat off the balcony,” Ashley told Lavonne when she had called two days earlier. “Christy got hysterical and while she was downstairs checking on the cat, Preston stuck a fork in the toaster and set fire to the kitchen.”

  “Where was Daddy when all this was going on?”

  “He was playing golf. But Christy says his golfing days are over.”

  Lavonne laughed all afternoon. When Joe called, she told him and they laughed together. But when Leonard pulled up in front of her little house in a brand-new, bright-yellow Hummer, Lavonne decided she might have to rethink the generosity thing.

  “What'd you do, Leonard, pillage your clients' trust funds?” she said, pointing to the urban assault vehicle in her driveway.

  Leonard, who had just spent five hours in an enclosed space with Preston and Landon, not to mention a wife on the cusp of a PMS meltdown, was not amused. “Where's the furniture?” he said, all squinty-eyed and sullen. His face was sunburned and he'd lost a substantial amount of hair in the last year. Lavonne tried not to stare at his sad comb-over and pointed with her thumb toward the shed.

  “It's in there. Be careful not to mess with Eadie's stuff.”

  “Eadie?” he said. “What's she doing here?”

  “She's visiting. You might need a bigger trailer than that,” she said, looking at the U-Haul attached to the bumper.

  Leonard didn't say anything. He put his head down and trudged toward the shed. Inside the Hummer, Christy was screaming at the boys to leave the cat alone. Landon had figured out how to unbuckle his seat belt and he'd sprung his brother, too, and now they had the unfortunate feline cornered in the luggage compartment. The passenger door opened and Christy swung down over the running board like she was rappelling off a vertical cliff face. Lavonne was surprised to see she had put on some weight. She stopped and stared sullenly at Lavonne. Behind her there was a flash of brown followed by a squalling sound, and Christy turned in time to see the family cat disappearing under the neighbor's hedge.

  “No, kitty,” Christy screamed. “Here, kitty-kitty. Here, kitty-kitty.” But kitty had streaked across the neighbor's yard and was halfway down the block. With any luck, he'd make Florida by nightfall. Landon stuck his cherubic face around the edge of the opened door. He saw Lavonne and grinned. “Landon, you stay in the truck,” Christy said over her shoulder, hurrying after the escaping cat. “Stay in the truck, Landon.”

  Landon swung down out of the Hummer like a monkey in a banyan tree. Preston, the more cautious of the two, turned around and slid out of the vehicle backward, the way he had been taught to safely come down a flight of stairs. They were loose by the time Lavonne reached them but she squatted down and pretended to be looking at something in the grass, and when they circled back, she caught one in each arm. They were dressed in identical outfits and probably weighed about forty pounds each. Lavonne was breathing heavily by the time she set them down in her living room.

  Winston came out of the kitchen and stood there, looking at her sadly.

  “Kitty!” Landon screamed. They were developmentally advanced for their age, the way mathematical geniuses and serial killers are apt to be. Winston had once gone up against a rottweiler in the street, but he took one look at Landon and Preston and headed for the back bedroom. Lavonne found him later, cowering under the bed.

  She handed each of the boys a pair of wooden spoons and two cooking pots and when Leonard came in later they were beating on the pots with the steady precision of jazz musicians. “You might want to invest in a couple of drum kits,” she said loudly. She was sitting on the sofa reading the newspaper.

  Leonard stood in the doorway looking at his sons with the same expression Winston had used. “I need a drink,” he said.

  “How about some sweet tea?” she asked, rising.

  “How about a beer?” he said, mopping his brow with the back of his hand.

  She stepped around the boys. Stopping in the kitchen doorway and turning around to ask Leonard if he wanted a lime in his Corona, she caught him.

  He was staring at her ass like he'd just seen the eighth wonder of the world.

  CHRISTY APPEARED LATER, EMPTY-HANDED, LOOKING TIRED AND despondent. She shook her head when Lavonne asked her if she wanted something to drink. “Whiskers done flew the coop,” she said to Leonard.

  Leonard, who sat on the sofa looking like a man on the edge of something dangerous, lifted his beer and said, “Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, I'm free at last.”

  Christy, who had no appreciation of Martin Luther King, in particular, and irony, in general, said, “First thing I'm gonna do when I get back to Atlanta is get me a new cat.”

  “No more cats,” Leonard said. “They all run off. They're too smart to stay.” He burped loudly. “We've had four goddamn cats,” he said, holding up three fingers. Lavonne, who had not failed to notice the way he was tossing back Coronas, began to worry she'd have to offer them a place to spend the night.

  “How about some sandwiches?” she said, rising. “Before you head back? Or maybe a pizza?”

  Christy stood over by the bookshelves, pretending to recognize some of the titles. “Naw, we got to get going,” she said.

  “Sure,” Leonard said. He stared at his ex-wife appreciatively as he sipped his beer. Landon, who had mastered the four-four beat, moved on to a syncopated rhythm. Preston, tiring of the whole thing, leaned over and rapped his brother on top of the head with one of his spoons.

  “You know I can puree the boys some vegetables or fruit in the blender if you like,” Lavonne said to Christy. “I can sliver some carrots and celery.”

  “Naw,” Christy said. “They won't eat that shit.”

  “Well, maybe if they'd learn to eat that shit they wouldn't need Ritalin by the time they start preschool,” Leonard said morosely. He couldn't believe the way his life had turned out. When he left her, Lavonne had weighed two hundred ten pounds and had an ass as big as a Yugo. He'd figured she'd spend the rest of her life alone, shut up in some dark, decaying house filled with cats. Now she looked like one of those attractive women on those TV make-over shows, the ones where plastic surgeons and experts turn hopeless middle-aged ugly ducklings into sexy swans. Not only that, but he was pretty sure Lavonne had a six-figure retirement account, not to mention what she was bringi
ng down annually with the Shofar So Good Deli, while he was struggling to make the payments on the beach house, the Hummer, and the new condo Christy had insisted they buy. Not to mention Christy's weekly shopping sprees at the mall and her recent decision that the boys would need to attend one of the most expensive private preschools in Atlanta.

  If Leonard could have looked into a crystal ball a year and a half ago and seen what his future held now, he might have made some different decisions. He might have lived his whole life differently.

  “I'll make some sandwiches,” Lavonne said.

  “You got any more beer?” Leonard said. After a year and a half in Atlanta, he had begun to lose his false, carefully cultivated Southern accent and spoke now in the hard, clipped tones of his Ohio youth. He sat there looking despondently at his sons.

  Lavonne said, “I can make up some goody bags for the boys, if you like.”

  Christy, fearing Lavonne might try to load the twins up with contraband like apples, carrots, or celery, asked suspiciously, “What kind of goody bags?”

  “How about handcuffs and duct tape,” Leonard said.

  “I've got some road games the girls used to play with when we traveled,” Lavonne said. “The boys are pretty young but the games might keep them occupied and quiet.”

  “Oh, those boys are angels in the car,” Christy said. She had a doting mother's capacity for selective amnesia and had already managed to forget the torturous drive from Florida.

  “We'll take the travel games,” Leonard said. “And any Darvon you might have on hand.”

  “You can't give Darvon to babies,” Christy shrilled, looking at Leonard like he was stupid.

  “You can give it to me,” Leonard said morosely.

  Preston dropped his spoons, staggered over to the ficus plant, and began to methodically strip the leaves. Lavonne went into the kitchen and came back out with an old phone book that she set on the floor. “Hey, Preston,” she said, bending over. “Look at this.” She began to tear the pages, one by one into long strips. Preston, entranced, toddled over and squatted down on his haunches. He pushed Lavonne's hands away and began to tear the pages himself.