Southern Living

by Ad Hudler

  “About the dog?”

  With the phone tucked in the crook of her neck, Suzanne carried her wine out to the dining room. She stood in the doorway, looking at her new lamp on the sideboard, a crouching, cloisonné monkey that was holding some kind of red fruit in its hands. She walked over and clicked it on, then stepped back to admire the warm, yellow-beige glow from the rectangular silk shade whose bottom and top edges were outlined in gold leaf.

  “Oh my gosh, no,” Suzanne said. “What?”

  “She was walkin’ out to get the mail, and she couldn’t open the front door, so she went out through the garage and came up front … and you are not gonna believe what she saw.”

  “What?”

  “A dead dog!”

  “No!”

  “Right there on the porch. Right between those cute rocking chairs she’s got. It was Buck, the Matthews’ golden retriever.

  “I can’t believe it,” Suzanne said. “That little dog was so cute.”

  “Just six months old.”

  “You know, I’ve seen that little dog in my yard. I just can’t believe it.”

  “That’s seven dead dogs now in Red Hill Plantation, Suzanne.”

  Buck, in fact, had been one of the principal artists in the ever-changing work of art that was the yard of Boone and Suzanne Parley. Suzanne was glad the little mongrel was dead; now maybe her grass could begin to heal from its acidic burns, and Boone would be happy.

  “Do you think we should have a meeting at the club?” Suzanne asked.

  “The police have been out here, Suzanne. They just don’t know what’s goin’ on.”

  “The police? Who called the police?”

  “I don’t know. And Lord knows I don’t like what’s happening, but I don’t have time for anything like that. Not now.”

  Suzanne bit: “You been busy?”

  “You haven’t heard my little secret?”

  “No.”

  “I’m pregnant, Suzanne. I’m gonna have a baby!”

  “You are kiddin’ me!”

  “At my age! Can you believe it?”

  Suzanne’s eyes opened wide, far enough that she was conscious of stretching facial muscles that had long been in hibernation. She immediately remembered to add specially printed coasters to the list for the printer: Welcome to the Parleys’—One of Selby’s Oldest Families and a New Dogwood Tradition. Or would it all fit? Maybe she would simply put Parley Dogwood.

  “June twentieth’s my due date. Of course I’m gonna have to drop everything to get that nursery ready. There’s just no way I can do the fund-raiser dinner for the symphony this year. I can’t be hostin’ anything, Suzanne.”

  “Oh, no. I understand.”

  “I was even playin’ around with the idea of havin’ the Griffins’ Dogwood party, but that’s off for sure.”

  Suzanne almost laughed out loud. Their posturing for the party had been officially clandestine but known to all.

  “You know,” Suzanne said. “I was thinkin’ of havin’ that party.”

  “Then you better get goin’.”

  “Why?”

  “Because that new neighbor of yours from California is fixin’ to do the same thing.”

  “No!”

  “Yes!”

  “She’s not even from Selby!”

  “I know, I know. It’s so tacky. And can you imagine what her decorations are gonna look like?”

  After telling Ginny about the huge, strange painting she’d watched being unloaded outside her new neighbors’ house, she got into her Lexus and, after debating for a moment on whether she should go anywhere in this state of drunkenness, she carefully backed out of the garage and drove to the Kroger in south Selby.

  Greater Selby (population 146,400) straddles what is known in Georgia as the Fall Line, the spot where the Appalachians finally peter out and the coastal plain begins its long, subtle slope out to the sea. The higher, northern half of the city feels more like foothills, and gardeners need pickaxes to penetrate the compacted, red clay of their backyards. Yet in south Selby, one can effortlessly push a spade into sandy soil that yields an occasional fossilized whale bone, shell, or shark’s tooth left over from two million years ago, when the southern half of Selby was ocean floor and the northern half was prime beach-front property. Two lands, two types of people, and Suzanne was one of the few who could claim both sides of town as home.

  Home to the Armstrong ceiling-tile factory and the Little Debbie’s bakery and Happy’s Flea Market, south Selby was segregated from north Selby by Truman Parkway, and the only reason a north Selby woman would venture south of that line was to pick up an aging relative who was afraid of the immensity and mad-ant pace of the Atlanta airport and had hopped one of Delta’s shuttle flights that landed four times each day at the Warren “P. J.” Reynolds Municipal Airport.

  Suzanne was born and raised in south Selby in a house on Kottrell Avenue, where her parents still lived.

  Her father, an oven supervisor at Little Debbie’s, was the mastermind of a now-famous, two-block Christmas decorating endeavor that pulled visitors from as far away as Birmingham and Jacksonville: a dense, polychromatic milky way of Christmas lights that not only covered every house and tree and chain-link fence but also crisscrossed the street like the laces of a corset. One neighbor had constructed life-size aluminum-foil sculptures of camels, made of an accumulation of the silvery squares from thirty-four years of sandwiches he ate while working the graveyard shift at Armstrong. And each year, on the day after Thanksgiving, Suzanne’s uncle Marlen, who lived across the street, would denude his living room and porch of furniture to display his collection of three-hundred-plus mechanical Christmas characters: a Santa checking off his list of good girls and boys, Snoopy striking a hockey puck, carolers in plaid berets who leaned back and forth in unison as they sang “We Wish You a Merry Christmas”—all of the machines humming with electricity and moving in a repetitive, sleepy, pre-digital manner. For a donation, visitors could tour the Christmas wonderland, and as they milled about, Uncle Marlen, dressed in a Santa suit, sat on a chair in the corner with the beard pulled down, the elastic bands stretching out from the ears as he smoked cigarettes and welcomed guests into his house.

  Suzanne was always caught off guard when she walked into this Kroger; it was set up differently, the floor plan inverted. Intending to inquire at the deli, she found herself in the produce section, and because traversing the entire length of the store seemed impossible at this point—she felt light-headed and numb in her fingers and cheeks and above her eyes, and it was already noon, and her breath felt as shallow as a puddle—Suzanne walked up to a young woman who was unloading and stacking lemons. Her name tag said Donna.

  “Can I help you, ma’am?” she asked.

  A beautiful girl, Suzanne thought, and then: What has happened to this poor girl’s face?

  “I hope so,” Suzanne said. “I’ve got this dish here—it’s a casserole—and I need to make one but I don’t know what’s in it.”

  Suzanne held it out with two hands, as if it were a present of gold or frankincense, and the young woman took it from her.

  “All I need you to do is taste this and tell me what’s in it,” Suzanne said.

  “Ma’am, I don’t think I can do that,” the girl answered. “I mean I’m just the produce clerk.”

  “I’ll pay you,” Suzanne said.

  “Ma’am?”

  “I’ll give you twenty dollars if you tell me what’s in this. Please, you’ve just got to. I don’t know what I’m gonna do if I can’t make me one of these.”

  The young woman unsnapped the blue plastic lid and peered inside.

  “It’s some kind of casserole,” Suzanne said.

  “Yes, ma’am. You know, you can buy some Hungarian goulash—they make it here in the deli—and sprinkle some breadcrumbs on it. Or you could melt some cheese on top if you want it to look like this. That’d be good.”

  “I need this one!”

  The young
produce clerk noticed the tears welling in Suzanne’s eyes, the tremble of her chin. She reminded her of a child who had just broken her mother’s precious vase and was panicked and wanted to set things right, to turn back time, before the mother returned from her errands.

  “Are you okay, ma’am?”

  Suzanne reached into her Louis Vuitton handbag and pulled out her wallet. “I’ll pay you a hundred dollars if you make this casserole for me.”

  “Ma’am?”

  “You can do it at home, I don’t care. What time do you get off work?”

  “Ma’am, I don’t think I can help you.”

  “What time do you get off?”

  “At two, but I don’t think …”

  Suzanne plucked a second hundred from her wallet and held it out.

  “I gotta have it by six. Can you do that?”

  The young woman looked at the bill. “Ma’am?”

  “I need this casserole. I gotta have it tonight. How about a hundred now and a hundred when I pick it up?”

  “To make this here casserole?”

  “That’s right.”

  The young woman held the Tupperware container beneath the lights over the Brussels sprouts. “It’s got a pie crust, but I can do that. I make good pies.”

  “Can you bring it to my house?”

  “I might could do that.”

  “No. I’ll come pick it up. Where do you live?”

  “Dahlonega Road, down by Happy’s Flea Market.”

  Suzanne fished for and found a pencil and a Pasta To Go receipt in her purse. “Two sixty-five Dahlonega Road,” continued the woman, watching Suzanne write it down in tight scribbles. “Little green house with white trim. My daddy’s got a Bible message on a big board in the front yard. It’s kinda hard to miss.”

  Suzanne handed her a hundred-dollar bill then turned to walk away.

  “I can’t accept this much money, ma’am.”

  “It’s worth every penny to me,” Suzanne said.

  “You want me to bake it, too?”

  “I want it all done, everything. Like it’s gonna go right on the table.”

  On the day Suzanne O’Neal married Boone Parley in Tattnall Christ Church on Cotton Avenue, her father showed up fifteen minutes before the ceremony was to begin. He was wearing one blue sock and one black, with Jack Daniel’s and cash register mints on his breath and a speeding ticket poking out of the breast pocket of his tuxedo like a kerchief. His wallet had been emptied, once again, that morning at a roulette wheel in the Creek Indians’ Big Peach Casino south of town.

  Suzanne, expecting the worst—expecting exactly this—intercepted her father at the front door and yanked him by the arm, pulling him into the pastor’s study. Her mother, seeing this from the room across the vestibule, followed them inside then shut the heavy walnut door behind them.

  Suzanne pushed her father into a wooden chair. Drunk, he fell back easily, and he looked at her, hurt and bewildered. “What’s all this about, young lady? You better get to talkin’ and you better get to talkin’ fast!”

  Suzanne bent forward at the waist, got her hands around the base of the veil and came back up, flipping it, like long hair, to the backside of her head. She wanted nothing in the way that would soften or filter her anger.

  “No, Daddy,” she said. “You listen to me, you sorry, sorry man.”

  She spoke in a hushed tone, just a few degrees stronger than a whisper, but the words were born from someplace so deep within her that by the time they reached her lips they seemed to pack the power of an untethered, primal scream.

  “Look at you! You look like somethin’ the cat drug home and the kittens refused. My gosh, Daddy, can’t you even shave on your own daughter’s wedding day?”

  “You got some nerve to—”

  “No, you’ve got the nerve. I can’t believe you, I just can’t believe you. You know, Daddy, I’ve been wantin’ to say this for a long time, and I’m gonna say it now. You are a worthless man. You are a drunk. You’re a gambler—”

  “Honey, don’t be ugly to your daddy,” her mother interrupted.

  “You have ruined Momma’s life, and you sure as heck have tried to ruin mine, and if I hadn’t won the Miss Selby pageant and gotten that scholarship to Athens my life would still be a livin’ hell.”

  “Suzanne, now watch your language,” said her mother.

  Suzanne jabbed her rigid index finger onto his chest as she spoke. Both her mother and father watched her, wide-eyed with mouths open. “Momma and me are sick (jab) and (jab) tired (jab) of you makin’ our lives junky and poor, and I promise to you right now that the rest of Suzanne O’Neal’s life is gonna be rich and sweet—I am never gonna eat canned beans again—and if you mess this up for me today I truly think I could find it in my heart to kill you, ’cause you’ve already just about killed Momma, and you’ve tried to kill me, but thank the Lord we are both stronger than you.”

  Suzanne stood up straight again and took two deep breaths to calm down. The veins in her neck twitched and pushed at the surface of her reddened skin.

  “Momma,” she said. “can you help me with this veil?” Her father sat there, looking at the floor with his shoulders slumped, deflated as a burst balloon.

  “Now,” Suzanne commanded, “you need to walk me down that aisle without fallin’ down … if you think you can do that. And then I want you to turn right around and walk right back up that aisle and out that door and I never wanna see you again.”

  It was five-thirty. Suzanne had half an hour before she was due to pick up the casserole from the pretty girl with the scar on her face. Already in south Selby, she found herself drifting toward her old neighborhood—down Bloomfield Road, left onto Jennifer Drive, right onto Carson Street. The once-familiar homes, most of them single-story ranches, seemed so small to her now.

  Suzanne drove by a house where an old woman was rocking on her front porch, and she slowed down to watch. In north Selby, front-porch rocking chairs were ornamental, like stone lions or urns, and in the five years she’d lived in Red Hill Plantation Suzanne had not seen one person use those rockers, always immaculate and painted cruise-ship white.

  There was so much to learn in the beginning. (Christmas alone was overwhelming. You had to buy white lights, not multicolored, and you wore a Christmas sweater from Talbots or Neiman Marcus; only south Selby women wore the Yuletide sweatshirts with iron-on appliqués.) Like an immigrant in a new land, Suzanne watched and absorbed, struggling to emulate the north Selby lifestyle and behaviors. People didn’t forget where she came from. They didn’t ask her “Who are your people?” because they all knew. But as long as Suzanne smiled and sent the right bread-and-butter notes she remained a welcome thread of the tapestry. She was, after all, a Parley.

  Still, Suzanne frequently found herself confused. Why could you paint your dining room red but not your car? If gold and diamonds and Rolex were so wonderful then why was it considered tacky to combine all three? And if her mother-in-law stressed that a foyer set the tone for the house then why did she not like Suzanne’s Wedgwood, crystal, and gilt-bronze twelve-light chandelier?

  Every time she came to visit her mother—and only during the day, when her father was at Little Debbie’s—Suzanne was surprised at how people left things out for the world to see and judge. Wet clothes lay over porch railings to dry. Dead appliances sat outside the garages, as if they’d been granted some leisure time in the sunshine after all those years of toiling in a dark corner of the basement. Children’s toys—bicycles and bright pink balls and Tonka trucks and forts made of cardboard boxes—were not seen as junk to be hidden out of sight. Suzanne remembered the sawhorses her mother kept on the driveway for her painting projects, and how she pretended they were balance beams after watching Mary Lou Retton in the Olympics on TV.

  Finally, she pulled up to the curb in front of her house. No one was home; her mother was probably delivering one of her wedding cakes. Suzanne noticed that another of the green shutters—there was j
ust one left—had fallen from the house and lay on the ground in the untamed ivy that had been allowed to roam free in the front yard. Like water flooding a room, it had run across and smothered much of the grass and, now out of room, had begun to rise, scaling the walls of the house and every tree in the front yard.

  “I hope it eats that house up,” Suzanne said to herself.

  After sitting in the car for a few minutes, Suzanne decided to walk around the side of the house, to the backyard. The tractor tire was still there, standing on end and half buried so it rose then returned to the ground like some junkyard rainbow. Suzanne remembered standing and hiding in here; if you squeezed inside and made your body follow the contours of the tire, arms over your head as if you were flying like Superman, you could elude any grown-up for hours. This was Suzanne’s refuge when her father would come home on a rampage after losing his week’s wages in a poker game.

  Someone, probably her mother, had pierced the inside edge of the tire and hung plastic pots of petunias and geraniums. Plastic—it seemed so foreign. She thought of the clay pots and concrete statues of her own life. The glass measuring cups and mixing bowls. Steel flashlights. Sterling-silver goblets. Why was everything so heavy now? When had she stopped using plastic? How could something so much lighter and easier be considered tacky? Suzanne nudged one of the hanging plants and watched it swing like the pendulum of a clock: Plas-tic. Plas-tic. Plas-tic. Plas-tic.

  She unhooked two of the plants and set them on the dirt. Bending forward, Suzanne then backed into the tire, one buttock at a time, chafing the rim, leaving black smudges on each side of her pale-yellow linen dress. Once inside, eyes closed, she became aware of her breathing and the beating of the blood in her ears. The tire had absorbed the day’s sun, and Suzanne found comfort in the warmth of the rubber that now hugged her.

  Ten

  Dear Chatter: Whoever changed the Selby Mall to no-smoking has sand for brains. I’m not going anymore. I’ll spend all my money at the flea market instead.

  Dear Chatter: The reason there are so many wrong-number phone calls in Selby is because everyone’s fingers are so fat from all the greasy food. That’s the problem.