The Secret Lives of the Kudzu Debutantes

by Cathy Holton

  Nita shook her head slowly. “I've got a feeling about this,” she said. It was true, she did. Just when things had looked their bleakest, a thin shaft of light had broken through the dark clouds. She felt like she had that day in the car with Logan driving home from the custody hearing, that anything was possible, that hope was not dead. “I think we might be on to something.”

  “I just hope Loretta isn't right,” Lavonne said cautiously. “I just hope all this reading between the lines is not a wild-goose chase.”

  “Promise me something,” Nita said, looking around the table. “Promise me you won't say anything about any of this to anyone. I want to keep it quiet until I figure out how to go about checking this story out. I don't want Virginia to get wind of what's up. I want to be just as dirty and underhanded with her as she's been with me.”

  “Now you're talking, girl,” Eadie said, sipping her drink. “We have to be careful though. Virginia's pretty wily. She's pretty subtle.”

  “Virginia's about as subtle as the business end of a cattle prod,” Loretta said. “And just as dangerous.”

  “Count me in,” Lavonne said. “I'll help anyway I can.”

  “I still say you girls got the wrong dog by the tail,” Loretta said. “Virginia's too self-centered to have ever loved anybody but herself. She's too clever to have ever made a mistake as big as Hampton Boone.”

  THE DAY FOLLOWING THE COTILLION BALL, VIRGINIA AWOKE early and hurried down to get the newspaper. She swung the front door open and stepped out onto the porch. The day was gray and overcast. Virginia picked up the newspaper, her hands trembling with excitement, and stepped back inside, flipping on the hall light. She always looked forward to reading about the Cotillion Ball, to seeing her photograph displayed so prominently among the cream of Ithaca society, some of whom had refused to speak to her in high school.

  But today, looking down at the front of the Lifestyle section, Virginia felt a swelling sense of disbelief and outrage. The paper had covered both the prestigious Ithaca Cotillion Ball and the lowbrowed Kudzu Ball on the same page. And to make matters worse, the Kudzu Ball was listed at the top. Virginia stared down at the large photograph crowning the page, her sharp eyes glittering like spear points.

  There, in all her glory, was the behemoth Grace Pearson, looking drunk and foolish in her kudzu crown and leg o' mutton–sleeved ball gown. Underneath the photograph, in large bold letters, larger than those captioning the Cotillion Queen, it read “Seventh Kudzu Queen Crowned—Miss Velveeta Gritz (a/k/a Grace Pearson) Takes the Throne.” Beneath this photo there were several others, fully half the page, as well as several interior pages that were devoted to coverage of the Kudzu Ball.

  Virginia had been trying to get the Kudzu Ball closed down for years. It irritated her that people would make a mockery of the Cotillion Ball, would ridicule what had taken her years of scheming and hard work to achieve.

  She recognized Lavonne Zibolsky and Nita and Eadie Boone, and also several prominent couples who, just a few years ago, wouldn't have been caught dead at the Kudzu Ball. They all looked drunk and ridiculous, decked out in tacky prom dresses and camouflage leisure suits and a couple of the men sported mullet wigs and Fu Manchu mustaches. By comparison, the Cotillion Ball Debs looked bored, the Queen looked less virginal than in years past, and the King looked dusty and ancient and maybe even a little senile. There was a larger photograph of Virginia and Redmon, and she noticed with dismay that the camera lights had accentuated her sagging cleavage, which her expensive dress did little to hide. Redmon wore his stunned-deer-in-the-headlights expression. He clutched his soda water and stared miserably into the camera and Virginia noted (again, those damn lights) that his tuxedo did not fit him properly and he needed a haircut.

  She closed the paper in disgust. It would do no good to complain to the newspaper about their coverage of the Kudzu Ball. One of their own journalists had been named Kudzu Queen and most of the staff had, no doubt, attended, so they could not be expected to help her close down the ridiculous affair. Virginia felt sure the event would die out if the publicity sur rounding it stopped. She wondered if she might be able to talk Redmon into buying the newspaper. The first thing she would do, of course, is take over the editorial department, fire any left-wing writers, including the renegade Grace Pearson, and see to it that future coverage of the Cotillion Ball would figure prominently in the society pages, and coverage of the Kudzu Ball would cease entirely.

  This thought, planted in the fertile soil of her imagination, took root and spread like the kudzu vine itself, until her mind was a veritable jungle of twisted vines and suffocating greenery and she could think of nothing but her desire to acquire the Ithaca Daily News and punish those who needed punishing.

  She stood in the hall tapping her little slippered foot angrily against the parquet floor. When Redmon came downstairs later, she was still standing there among the scattered newspaper, lost in thought.

  ALMOST TWO MONTHS AFTER HE LOST ALL HER MONEY and ran off to parts unknown, Jimmy Lee Motes walked into the Shofar So Good Deli where Nita was working. It was in the middle of the lunch rush on a Friday and the place was crowded, so Nita just nodded at him once and indicated a small, unoccupied table close to the window. She brought him a glass of sweet tea and a menu.

  “I'm real busy right now but can you wait thirty minutes?” she said. “We need to talk.”

  “Sure,” he said. His face was still tanned from the summer and he'd let his hair grow long over his ears. Across the room a table of office girls smiled and eyed him boldly.

  “Can I get you something while you wait?” He shook his head. “I'm not hungry.”

  She turned to go and he reached out and took her arm. “You look good, Nita.”

  “Thanks.” She smoothed her hair behind her ears and moved off. She couldn't even remember if she had brushed it this morning; she had other things on her mind these days. When she wasn't working, she spent long hours on the Internet or on the telephone, searching for homes for unwed mothers that had existed in the 1950s. She entered the data into a spreadsheet, and although many of the homes had operated illegally and had only kept the first names of the mothers, she didn't lose hope, concentrating on women who had given birth in the first few months of 1951. She followed up these slim leads with telephone calls or e-mails or letters. She gave some of the leads to Lavonne and Eadie, who were desperate to help, but Nita kept most for herself. She felt intuitively that this was something she had to do on her own.

  Nita moved mechanically through her lunch routine. She could feel him watching her as she went about her duties, but it didn't make her nervous. She was used to the job by now and was learning to enjoy interacting with the customers, most of whom were tourists down from Atlanta. She had rehearsed what she had to say to him a hundred times but she went over it again in her head, briefly, while she took orders at the counter and walked around to refill drinks. A group of businessmen sat at a big table near the counter and one of them smiled at her as she refilled his sweet tea. “Hey,” he said, “didn't you use to be an actress? Didn't I see you in some Hollywood movie about stewardesses gone bad?”

  “Sorry,” she said. “That wasn't me.”

  “Maybe it was a soap opera. Don't you play a vixen on daytime TV?”

  “Don't tell anyone,” Nita said. “I don't want people knowing what my real job is.”

  They left her a twenty-five percent tip. Later, when she went over to sit down with Jimmy Lee, he said, “What did that fat fucker want?”

  Nita said, “Why are you here, Jimmy?”

  “I don't think this job is such a good idea,” he said. He was clearly agitated. He played with the salt and pepper shakers, tapping them steadily against the table. She rose and went over and got a pitcher of sweet tea and brought it back to the table, pouring each of them a glass. The lunch crowd had thinned considerably. The new girl, Marjorie, had no trouble handling the few tables that were left.

  Nita sat down. She crossed her
arms on the table and leaned forward. “So, where have you been?”

  Jimmy Lee stacked the salt and pepper shakers like he was building a wall. “I've been up in Bowling Green, Kentucky, working with my cousin. He's building a house for some couple and I stayed with him just trying to get my head clear.”

  Nita picked up a spoon and stirred her tea. “How'd that work out?”

  “It didn't.” Jimmy Lee looked like he might take her hand, but then thought better of it. He lowered his voice and said, “All I could think about was you, Nita. All I could think about was how bad I fucked everything up.”

  Nita stirred slowly. She took the spoon out of her tea and laid it on the table. “Who told you I was working here?”

  “Your mother. When I hadn't heard from you, I got desperate and called her. She told me. Everything.”

  “I'm sorry I didn't call you back,” she said. “I just needed some time. I've had a lot on my mind lately.” In between her Internet searches and work schedules, Nita drove around interviewing nurses who might or might not have worked at various underground homes for unwed mothers in the 1950s. She was thankful for the distractions. It kept her from thinking about Whitney, from wondering whether her marriage to Jimmy Lee would ever work out.

  “I didn't know anything about the custody thing until Loretta told me yesterday. I didn't know about any of this.”

  “I know.”

  “Goddamn it, Nita, why didn't you tell me?”

  She frowned and counted the ice cubes in her glass. “After you left, I was pretty pissed off.”

  “I didn't know,” he said stubbornly, shaking his head. “I didn't know anything about her taking Whitney.”

  “Yeah, but you didn't stay around long enough to find out, did you?” she said, glancing up at him and then back down at her glass.

  He leaned forward and took her hands in his. She let him hold her hands but she kept her fingers curled into tight little fists. “I figured you hated me. After I lost the money I figured you'd never want to see me again.”

  “It's not about the money, is it?” she said. “It never was, for me anyway.”

  He took a deep breath, looking down at her balled fists. “I was crazy,” he admitted, “getting caught up in all of that.”

  “I wasn't angry at you about the money,” she said, slowly letting her fingers uncurl. “I was angry at me. I should have asked more questions. I should have kept the money out of our marriage. I wouldn't have even had the money if Lavonne and Eadie hadn't made me take it from Charles when I got the chance.”

  “You deserved it.”

  “Yes, I deserved it but that's not the point.” She frowned, trying to re member her rehearsed speech. It was hard saying what she had to say when he sat across from her looking tanned and handsome and contrite. “All my life I've been passive. I've let others push me into making decisions I should have been making for myself.”

  Jimmy Lee frowned and tugged at her fingers. “I've been sending you checks to pay you back but you haven't been cashing them.”

  She wasn't going to let him distract her. Nita felt for the first time in her life she was seeing things clearly. She pulled her hands away, gently, and folded them on the table in front of her. “I went from my father's house to Charles's house and then to yours, and now for the first time, I'm alone. I'm learning to stand on my own two feet and take responsibility for myself.”

  Jimmy Lee didn't like the way this was going. “It wasn't my house,” he reminded her. “It was ours.”

  “You know what I'm saying,” she said. “Don't pretend like you don't.”

  “Just tell me what I can do to make things right, Nita.”

  “You can pay the utilities. At least until I get this custody fight settled. And help me with the car insurance.”

  “And you can cash the checks I already sent you,” he said sullenly.

  “All right, I will. As long as you know this isn't about the six hundred thousand dollars. I don't expect you to try and pay that back.”

  An awkward silence fell between them. Across the room, Marjorie bused her last table, glancing at them from time to time. The table of office girls got up and left, giggling loudly.

  “Can I move back in?” he asked finally. She looked at him and he sighed and leaned back in his chair stretching one leg out in front with the other resting against the table leg. “Okay,” he said. “I'll call one of my high school buddies and see if I can stay with him a while.”

  “Right now I have to concentrate on getting my daughter back. That's all I can think about.” Whatever was wrong with her marriage would have to wait until after she brought Whitney home. She had made up her mind and there was no turning back.

  He turned his face to the window and cocked his head as if listening to distant music. When he turned back to face her, his eyes were steady. “I love you, Nita,” he said. “I just want it to be the way it used to be.”

  She stood up. Outside the window, a group of schoolchildren passed, swinging their backpacks like weapons. “It won't ever be that way again,” she said, and reaching out to touch his shoulder lightly, she left.

  ————

  AFEW WEEKS AFTER LOGAN MOVED IN, VIRGINIA HAD HAD ABOUT all she could take. If she made it through to the next custody hearing without having a stroke or a heart attack, it would be a miracle. In all of her careful scheming, Virginia had failed to foresee this clever trick; it had never occurred to her that Nita would dump both grandchildren on her. And with her high-priced lawyer's tender outpourings in court, his assurances that Virginia cared only about the welfare of her grandchildren, Virginia's hands were tied as far as kicking her juvenile delinquent grandson out of the house. Unless he got arrested or stole something from the house, which was always a definite possibility, she was stuck.

  It seemed she had underestimated her meek ex-daughter-in-law.

  Sometimes it felt like her whole life was closing in around her like a thick black cloud of billowing smoke, and in those moments Virginia had to wonder if revenge was all it was cracked up to be. She had to wonder if it wasn't more trouble than it was worth. She had been surprised, leaving Judge Drucker's courtroom, that she hadn't felt more of a feeling of triumph and joy. Instead, a vacuous emptiness had spread through her like an oil slick. She had rushed home and tried, unsuccessfully, to fill the void with a pitcher of martinis. Even the memory of Loretta James being dragged out of the courtroom by a thick-necked deputy did little to raise her spirits.

  The truth of the matter was, she missed Leota Quarles. The woman had been more of a mother to her than her own mother, and Virginia missed going out to see her every week. Never mind that Leota's mind had begun to go there, at the end. She slipped in and out of the past as easily as a car switching gears on a mountain slope. She would begin some story with “the young Mrs. Broadwell came to see me and asked me about the island,” and Virginia, thinking she was talking about herself as a young matron, would discreetly change the subject. Leota's mind would wander alone down dusty corridors, along secret passageways hung with cobwebs while Virginia twittered on about the weather or the price of tomatoes or today's lunch menu. Still, despite the decline of those last few months, Virginia missed her. She missed the only mother-daughter relationship she had ever known. Leota's death had left a big hole in her heart that nothing seemed to fill.

  And in the weeks following her grandson's arrival, Virginia's depression had only deepened. He stayed up all hours of the night, had table manners like a field hand, dressed and talked like a reality-show drug addict, and humiliated Virginia every chance he got. Just yesterday he had crashed her bridge group, coming downstairs wearing nothing but black eye liner, a metal lip ring, and a pair of obviously soiled boxer shorts pulled down so low in front you could see the beginnings of his dark thatch of pubic hair.

  “My grandson is home sick from school today,” Virginia had explained nervously to the stunned bridge group. She hadn't even realized he was in the house. “Y'all know Lo
gan, don't you?” she said in a bright, hopeless voice. Over by the window, Worland Pendergrass and Lee Anne Bales snorted and giggled into their hands.

  “How y'all doing?” Logan said, waving from the doorway. He grinned in a friendly manner and put his hands on his narrow naked hips. “Is this what y'all do when your husbands are off at work? Gamble and drink and talk about everybody who's not here?”

  Virginia rose and walked over to where he stood, putting herself between him and the room of slack-jawed women. She put her tiny hand on his chest and said tersely, under her breath, “In the kitchen. Now.” Over her shoulder, she smiled at the bridge group and said loudly enough for them to hear, “Honey, would you like some breakfast?”

  Logan grinned his wide, lopsided grin. “Sure, Grandma,” he said, and Virginia winced. She hated being called that. She preferred Grandmother, or Miss Virginia. “Breakfast would be swell,” Logan said, showing her that he could act as well as she could.

  He followed her into the kitchen. She swung around on her heel and hissed in a voice just above a whisper, “How dare you embarrass me in front of my friends? How dare you skip school and show up half-naked in front of my entire bridge group?”

  He crossed his arms over his chest and leaned against the breakfast bar. “I guess you're getting a little more than you bargained for, huh, Grandma?” He wasn't grinning now.

  Her face went rigid. She pointed at him with her index finger. “You will go upstairs and get into bed this minute,” she said, “and you will not come downstairs undressed again. Not while you're under my roof.”

  He said, “Your roof?”

  It was the first real exchange they had ever had. They stood facing each other over the new breakfast bar, and there was something in his sullen, stubborn expression that reminded Virginia suddenly of her dead husband. The boy had inherited his grandfather's bold temperament and, realizing this, Virginia felt a chill come over her.