The Secret Lives of the Kudzu Debutantes

by Cathy Holton

  “What is it?” Loretta said nervously, after they had left. “Look, if it's about me trying to kick Virginia's ass in the courtroom, I'm sorry.” She sniffed and tugged at the end of her sleeves and you could see she wasn't sorry at all. “Something came over me and I just lost it for a moment there, that's all.”

  “Mama, it doesn't help me if we're trying to prove how stable our home life is and then you climb over three rows of seats and try to strangle Virginia in front of ten people. That kind of defeats the whole stability thing, if you know what I mean.”

  “I saw the way she was sitting there, smug as a cream-licking cat, the way she always is when she thinks she's pulled the wool over everybody's eyes. Like we're all too stupid to figure out what's going on.”

  “I'm not stupid, Mama. I've figured it out.”

  Loretta's face softened. “Well, I know that, honey.” She put her hand up and smoothed the hair off Nita's face. “But you're my own little girl. I can't just sit back and let someone walk all over you like that.”

  Nita took a deep breath. “Mama, I'm a grown woman,” she said gently, not wanting to hurt Loretta's feelings. “And you've been fighting my battles for me all my life. I love you, and I know you just want to help, but it's time I stood on my own two feet. I know what I have to do and you have to trust me and let me do it my way.”

  Loretta stared rigidly at her daughter. A muscle moved in her cheek. Gradually, her expression changed. After a few moments, her shoulders slumped. She looked suddenly tired and infirm, as if the knowledge that Nita no longer needed her protection had aged her twenty years. She looked down at her feet and Nita could see her scalp shining through her thinning hair, speckled and fragile as a robin's egg. Nita leaned and put her arms around her mother and kissed her.

  “I love you, Mama.”

  Loretta patted her back. “I love you, too, honey,” she said. “All I ever wanted was to shield you from pain and sorrow.”

  “I know, Mama, but you can't.” Nita stood back but kept her hands on her mother's shoulders. “Pain and sorrow are part of life. It's what builds character.”

  Loretta shook her head sadly. “Yeah, well, just remember: what doesn't kill us, maims us for life.”

  “Mama, you're a closet pessimist.”

  “No, honey, I'm a realist.”

  Outside the glass doors, Logan had finished his cigarette. He motioned for his mother to come on, and Nita smiled and put one finger up. Loretta took a tissue out of her handbag and blew her nose. “Well,” she said. “Rosebud's a good lawyer. I guess she knows what she's doing.”

  “I guess she does,” Nita said.

  On the ride home, Nita let Logan drive. She sat with her head resting against the window glass, watching the long rows of pecan trees that stretched away from the highway like the spokes of a giant wheel.

  Logan cleared his throat. “Look, Mom, I've been thinking,” he said, and she turned and looked at him. He had combed his hair for the hearing and although it still glinted with purple highlights, it lay neatly against his skull. He had removed his lip ring and wore only a small conservative nose stud.

  Nita tugged lightly at the sleeve of his dress shirt with her fingers. “What have you been thinking?” she asked fondly. It was only when you got up close that you noticed the pattern on his tie was actually rows and rows of cannabis plants.

  “I've been thinking that I know how to get Whitney back. If you really want her back, that is.” He raised one eyebrow and glanced at her, and Nita smiled faintly and looked at him with a weary expression.

  “Don't you worry about Whitney,” she said, smoothing his tie with her fingers. “You let me and Rosebud worry about getting her back.”

  “It came to me while I was sitting in the courtroom listening to Virginia's lawyer spouting all that bullshit about how she only wanted what was best for her grandchildren. It came to me in a flash, what I had to do.”

  Nita was curious. And it was sweet, the way he wanted to help, the way he wanted to step in like the man of the house to rescue his mother and sister. She stopped fidgeting with his tie. “I'm listening,” she said.

  He looked at her and grinned, and Nita thought how handsome he was despite his purple hair and metal-studded face. He looked a lot like his father, like the kind of boy Charles might have been if he hadn't had Virginia for a mother, if he hadn't been trapped by birth and circumstance and culture. “Well,” Logan said. “Virginia wants one grandchild. She wants Whitney. Right?”

  “Yes.” She felt guilty admitting this but Logan didn't seem bothered by it.

  He glanced at her and then back at the road. “I wonder how she'd feel about having two.”

  Nita said, “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, I'll pack my bag and show up on her doorstep. Tonight.”

  Nita looked at him for a few moments, her eyes filled with sadness. “But, honey,” she said gently, “Virginia doesn't want you living with her.”

  Logan gave her an evil grin. His hair glinted like a crow's wing in the sunlight. “Exactly,” he said.

  Despite the tragedy of the situation, Nita put her head back and laughed. It was funny imagining Virginia's face when her Mohawked grandson showed up on her doorstep.

  “I can keep an eye on Whitney and make Virginia's life a living hell at the same time,” he said reasonably. “And with all that bullshit she fed the judge, about only caring for her grandchild's well-being, she won't dare ask me to leave for fear it'll look bad in court.”

  Nita had seen enough of their interactions to know that Logan did make Virginia nervous. And she knew, too, that Logan was more than a match for his grandmother. But at the same time, who knew what Virginia might be capable of pulling out of her sleeve? “I don't think so,” she said finally, wiping her eyes with a Kleenex. “Virginia's a scary person. I won't send a child to do battle with her.”

  Logan stopped grinning and his face took on a hard, determined look. When he looked like that, he reminded her again of Charles. “First of all,” he said. “I'm not a child. I've made my mind up to do this no matter what. Second, I'm not afraid of Virginia. She's more afraid of me than I am of her. And third, this won't take long. Trust me, after a few weeks of me, after a few weeks of me and my friends hanging out at her place, Virginia will be calling you and begging you to take your kids back.”

  The prospect of sending another child into Virginia's lair should have filled Nita with dread, but somehow it didn't. Somehow, when things were looking their bleakest, Nita was beginning to recover her faith and belief in the future. She was daring to hope that everything was going to turn out okay.

  “I don't know,” she said. She watched the long flat peanut fields stretching into the distance. Beyond the fields a pine forest rose and above the blue rim of the trees, a hawk soared against a gunmetal sky. “I'll have to think about it. I don't know if I can stand losing both you and Whitney.”

  His grin spread slowly across his face. His nose stud shown like a hollow point casing. “Trust me, Mom,” he said cheerfully. “We'll be home by Christmas.”

  ON A WEDNESDAY EVENING IN EARLY SEPTEMBER, LAVONNE and Eadie sat out on Lavonne's deck drinking Cosmopolitans. “I'm a little disappointed,” Eadie said, looking up at the soft purple sky. A pale sliver of moon rested on the top of Lavonne's garage like a scimitar. “I was really hoping we'd be able to come up with some way to get even with Virginia for stealing Nita's child.”

  “‘Hope’ and ‘Virginia’ don't belong in the same sentence.”

  “Yeah, you're right. Virginia sucks hope out of a room the way a vacuum sucks dust.”

  “Nice analogy.”

  “Thanks. I haven't talked to Nita this week. How's she holding up under the strain?”

  “As well as can be expected,” Lavonne said. “She keeps busy working and visiting with her kids. She's substitute teaching, when she can. It keeps her occupied until the next custody hearing.” She'd given Nita a part-time counter job down at the Shofar So Good Deli
so she could fulfill Judge Drucker's employment requirements.

  “It sure has been fun being roommates,” Eadie said, tapping her fingers against the side of a citronella candle. “I've had a great time.”

  “You say that like you're getting ready to leave.”

  Eadie shrugged. “I've got to go home sometime. Before Trevor gives up and throws me out for good.”

  “What about staying to support Nita? What about the Kudzu Ball?”

  Eadie frowned and passed her finger back and forth over the candle flame. “When's the final custody hearing scheduled?”

  “Sometime the first week of December. And you can't miss the Kudzu Ball. It's the third weekend in September and you can't miss it again this year. Come on, Aneeda. You know how much fun we always have.”

  “Well, Ima, maybe I can go home and then come back for the ball and the custody hearing.”

  Lavonne looked up at the glittering stars. “If you go home you won't come back,” she said.

  She got up and went inside to get a sweater. Eadie sipped her drink and watched the moon rise over the yard. She wondered what Trevor was doing right now. He was off on the West Coast somewhere, at a writing conference, and she was supposed to meet him in San Francisco for the weekend. They were still meeting every other weekend at exotic places, where they holed up in various four-star hotels like a couple of adulterers, making love and arguing and living off room service. In between, they lived separate lives; Eadie working on her canvases, and Trevor writing when he could in New Orleans and jetting off to writers' conferences and speaking engagements. He was quickly losing patience with their arrangement and the only reason he hadn't pressured her to come home now was because his book was doing well, and he was traveling a lot. She had promised him, last time they met, that she'd be home by the middle of September.

  Lavonne came back out carrying a sweater in one hand and a shaker of Cosmopolitans in the other. She handed the sweater to Eadie, and Eadie smiled, said “Thanks,” and put it on.

  Lavonne sat down and poured two fresh drinks. “This is my new favorite cocktail,” she said, leaning back and putting her feet up on the empty chair in front of her. “I think I like it better than a martini. I like it better than a margarita.”

  Eadie smiled and sipped her drink. “You're pretty fickle when it comes to alcoholic beverages,” she said. “You'll change your mind in a week or so and then Sex on the Beach will be your new drink du jour. Or maybe a

  Tequila Slammer, Back Street Banger, Tahitian Tongue Tickler …”

  “Wow,” Lavonne said.

  “Test Tube Baby, Paralyzer, Tetanus Shot, Baltimore Blow Job.”

  “You know, Eadie, if this art thing doesn't work out, you might consider work in the glamorous field of bartending.”

  “Maybe,” Eadie said. She looked up at the sky with its dome of glittering stars. “Was that Joe who called earlier?”

  “Yeah. He's in Boston on business but he's coming home tomorrow.” Joe was doing a lot of traveling for DuPont. It was his last-ditch effort to prove himself loyal to a job he didn't really want anyway. He figured he had about three months before the ax fell and then he'd be a man unencumbered by a job, free to set off for the south of France with his bicycle and his notebooks and Lavonne, too, if she'd agree to go. “Did you ask Trevor about his father and Virginia?”

  Eadie shook her head. “He doesn't believe any of that is true. He says they may have dated, briefly, but he's pretty sure they didn't carry on an affair after their marriages. His dad died when he was small and he doesn't remember him too well, but he says his dad and mom went together from the time they were freshmen in high school.”

  “Oh well,” Lavonne said. “I was hoping there might be something there we could use to help Nita get Whitney back.”

  “I think it's all up to Rosebud.”

  “I think you're right.”

  At the house next door, a light came on. A door opened and then slammed, as Fergus, the neighbor's dog, was let out into the yard. He barked twice, a dry, snuffling sound more like a cough than a bark, and then went about his business. Winston, who was sleeping at Lavonne's feet, lifted his head, sniffed the air, and then went back to sleep.

  Lavonne said, “I've been trying to talk Nita into going with me to the Kudzu Ball. She needs something to take her mind off Jimmy Lee and the custody hearing. She needs a good throw-down to take her mind off her problems.”

  “Don't we all,” Eadie said.

  “She thinks she'll be the only one there without a date, but I told her I'd go solo.”

  “Hell, we'll all go solo,” Eadie said.

  “Does that mean you're coming?”

  Eadie sighed. She looked at Lavonne and grinned. “I suppose so,” she said.

  Lavonne said, “Good. It's settled then. I'll call Nita and we'll go down to the Baptist Thrift Store tomorrow and see if we can rustle up some ball gowns.” She zipped the front of her fleece jacket and settled down in her chair with her drink resting on her stomach. The Cosmo had definitely gone to her brain. She was feeling happy and relaxed. There was a pleasant buzzing sound in her head, like a downed high-voltage wire. She lifted her glass and pointed at the garage. “How's the work coming along?” she asked Eadie.

  Eadie had done her best to try to paint still lifes but that hadn't done a thing except give her insomnia. She had quickly gone back to her cherubs and goddesses, working with an intensity that bordered on mania. She worked from early morning to midafternoon and the canvases filled the garage like stone tablets, like bones in a catacomb, like firewood stacked on a funeral pyre.

  “The work is going fine,” Eadie said. “I got a call from the gallery up in Atlanta and they said they'll take six or seven of my canvases in addition to the pieces they already have. They're talking about letting me have a show in the spring.”

  “That's great, Eadie,” Lavonne said, lifting her drink. She sipped and set it back down on her stomach. “Actually, though, I wasn't talking about your art. I was talking about your interior work.” Lavonne had left a book on Jungian theory on Eadie's bedside table a couple of weeks ago. After their conversation that night in The Grotto, she figured it was the least she could do.

  Eadie groaned and laid her head back on the chair, staring up at the wide starry sky. The moon dangled over her head like a fiery sword of Damocles. “If we're going to talk about unintegrated negative complexes and the collective unconscious then I'm going to need something a little stronger than vodka to drink,” she said. “If we're talking psychic crucifixion, then you better get out the tequila.”

  “So you did read the book.” Lavonne was not discouraged by her attitude. Resistance before a breakthrough was common. “You're an extroverted sensate, Eadie, which means your neglected inferior function is intuition— a distinctly female emotion. I think anyone who knows you would agree that your animus is definitely more developed than your anima.”

  “My what?”

  “Your animus. Your male soul image. The hard-drinking, rational- thinking, warrior that exists in every woman.”

  Eadie grinned and raised her glass. “You're a pretty hard-drinking warrior yourself, comrade.”

  Lavonne pulled on her drink and set it down. “Whatever the ego resists will persist,” she said, wiping her top lip.

  “Is this a free session or will you be expecting payment?”

  “Your animus is highly developed but you've got to come to terms with your anima, your female image, your goddess image. She comes out in your work but you've got to accept her in yourself.”

  “Hey, I love being a woman,” Eadie said, “and I can tell you why in two words.”

  “Free drinks?”

  “Multiple orgasms.”

  They were quiet for a while, sipping their Cosmopolitans.

  “I know you're trying to help but I can tell you right now I hate all this pop psychology shit,” Eadie said, running her finger around the rim of her glass. “Maybe the reason I can't work in
New Orleans is because I'm bored. Maybe it has nothing to do with depression but everything to do with boredom. I hate weak, whiny women who blame all their problems on their shitty childhoods. Or their parents. Or even their husbands. Women need to stand on their own two feet and take responsibility for their emotional baggage.”

  “I agree,” Lavonne said. She pulled on her drink, grimacing. “Jung said the same thing. But being female isn't all about being weak and whiny, Eadie. It seems to me you're projecting.”

  Eadie poured herself another drink and topped off Lavonne's. “I mean, anyone can bitch and moan to some overpaid psychiatrist, but it takes a real hero to carry around his neurosis and shut up about it.”

  “See, there you go again. Identifying with your animus.”

  “You got any peanuts?” Eadie said.

  Lavonne set her drink down. The buzzing in her head was louder now. She leaned forward and flattened her palms against the table like she was pushing down on some kind of antigravity force. “You can't keep ignoring this, Eadie. It won't just go away.”

  “Look,” Eadie said, sticking her finger in her drink and then in her mouth. “How do you know this isn't just some physical problem? How do

  you know it's not just my biological clock ticking down to doomsday?”

  “Well of course, that could be part of it.”

  “Maybe it's like that dancing baby on the TV show about the anorexic lawyer.”

  Lavonne looked surprised. “Do you want to have a baby, Eadie? Do you see yourself as a mother?”

  Eadie thought about it for all of two minutes. “No,” she said.

  “Well then, at least entertain the idea that all this might be a shadow projection, your suppressed anima trying to break through to consciousness.”

  Eadie snorted and stirred her drink with her finger. “Okay, Dr. Phil, and what am I supposed to do about it?”

  “Listen to your dreams. Your mother is trying to tell you something important.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don't know. You have to figure it out. Maybe she's trying to tell you to forgive yourself. To let your anima flower. You can only bring forth the Divine Child by allowing both the animus and anima to flourish.”