Southern Living

by Ad Hudler

  dog food

  Jodi Armbuster answered the door in elasticized, maternity blue jeans and an XXL white T-shirt with a black-and-white photograph of a naked man. Muscular and young, with the creamy, hair-free skin of GQ models, he lay on his side, hugging his knees as if doing a cannonball off the diving board.

  Yet what startled Suzanne even more was Jodi’s exposed face, pale, sun-spotted and devoid of foundation or blush or lipstick … and her blond hair, pulled up into a ponytail on top of her head.

  “Oh, I am so sorry,” Suzanne said, already turning to leave, looking more at the redbrick sidewalk than at Jodi’s face, as if Jodi herself had answered the door naked and Suzanne was doing her best to preserve her new neighbor’s dignity. “I knew I shoulda called. I’m just so sorry. I’ll just come back later.”

  “Don’t be silly,” Jodi said. “Please, come on in.”

  “Oh, no, no, that’s okay,” Suzanne said. “I just had a little somethin’ to give you, but it can wait.”

  “No, please,” Jodi said. “I could use the company. I need a break.”

  She followed Jodi inside, this time noticing the back of her shirt: Mapplethorpe: Good art is supposed to scare you.

  “I’m dying to show somebody around,” Jodi said. “I’ve been working my ass off, and it has not been easy carrying around these extra twenty pounds. Let me get us something to drink. Come on back to the kitchen. Is Evian okay? I even might have some lemon.”

  The wood floors had been yanked out and replaced with terracotta Mexican tile, and Suzanne’s heels echoed through the empty rooms, sounding like an amplified metronome. With sadness and revulsion, she inventoried the changes as she walked along. Gone was the mahogany paneling and coffered ceiling of the den. Gone was that gorgeous, marble faux fireplace in the parlor and the French doors that separated the parlor from the foyer. The windows, though covered with new, white plantation shutters, looked naked and vulnerable and cold without curtains. Holes had been punched into the ceilings of every room for recessed halogen lights—how many were there? thirty? forty?—evoking the feel of a department store. Everything was so … white. What Suzanne considered architectural rape Jodi called understated, elegant minimalism.

  When they started hunting for a house in Selby, Jodi and Marc, her husband, quickly grew intrigued by the staples of affluent Southern decorating: Dark, beautiful hardwood furniture and fake fireplaces. Flawlessly crafted faux food, mainly desserts, on the sideboards in the dining rooms. Animal-print accents bought during a braver shopping moment and included in the decor only because it was the rage in Atlanta. Curtains that looked like voluminous Renaissance ball gowns, dripping with tassels and fringe like the Spanish moss on the live oaks outside. In some vacant homes, Jodi and Marc were surprised to find large family or living rooms whose oak flooring was interrupted by a huge expanse of crude plywood, which a Persian rug obviously once covered. “It’s a mix between a movie set for a Dickens novel and Elvis’s Grace-land,” Marc said.

  When they signed on their house, the real estate agent said, “That’s a good deal considering they’re gonna leave all those gorgeous window treatments.”

  “The curtains,” Marc said, “are outta here.” And he brought up his thumb and jabbed it backward, over his shoulder, the way a basketball referee does when kicking a player off the court.

  “Mr. Armbuster,” she said, “those are very fine curtains.”

  “Yes, they are,” Jodi cut in. “They’re very well made, I can tell. I’ll bet there’s almost a hundred thousand in these curtains.”

  The agent leaned forward in her chair, raised her eyebrows and divulged in a hushed tone, “Ma’am, there’s a hundred and fifty thousand of curtains in this house.”

  “In window treatments alone?” Marc asked.

  Nodding her head, she leaned back in her chair. “Miss Ginny, the owner of this house, has very good taste.”

  Suzanne and Jodi sat down at the kitchen table with blue-rimmed Mexican glasses of Evian and lemon wedges.

  “This is for you,” Suzanne said, handing Jodi a wrapped present. After leaving the bookstore, she had stopped back home to rewrap the gift because the trademark Barnes-&-Noble-blue seemed too plain, and the clerk rolled his eyes and shook his head when she asked for a bow.

  “It’s lovely,” Jodi said. “Look at this paper. Are these pansies?”

  “They sure are.”

  “Oh, my God … look at these,” said Jodi, pulling out a pair of gilt bookends, two fleurs-de-lis the size of grapefruits. “We have tons of books. These will be very handy.” She set them on the mesquite, rectangular kitchen table that she and Marc had bought from an impoverished church outside Ensenada. Beneath the varnish on the top were several black marks from toppled candles that had been lit for troubled souls.

  “So are y’all settled in yet?” Suzanne asked.

  “Not too far away,” Jodi answered. “Do you want to see the house?”

  They began upstairs, in the nursery with the painting of the naked women that Suzanne saw being unloaded from the truck that day. Jodi pointed to the ceiling. “When Emma’s born, we’re going to paint her natal chart on the ceiling … you know, the planets and stars and how they’re situated on the day of her birth. I found someone in Atlanta who can do it.”

  Like the downstairs, every room was painted white, the windows bare except for plantation shutters. The carpeting had been yanked up and replaced with light, maple-wood flooring. Navajo and Latin rugs were randomly scattered, like puddles after a rain, around the entire second floor. Folk art, in the form of sculptures and pottery and carved, painted wooden figures, graced the tops of bureaus and tables so big and blocky and nicked they reminded Suzanne of an ancient castle’s door. And where were all the doors?

  “Are y’all gettin’ your doors repainted?” Suzanne asked.

  “Oh, no,” Jodi answered. “We took them all off and filled in the holes from the hinges. It’s better feng shui without the doors. We like that open feeling.”

  In one bathroom Suzanne saw a yellow sink that looked like a big mixing bowl sitting on the countertop. There was a steam room as well, and a shower so large it did not need a door.

  Jodi stopped before a five-foot-by-five-foot watercolor painting at the end of the hallway. “This is my favorite piece,” she said.

  It was an amorphous red, roundish mass, comprised of various chambers, some darker reds, other lighter, all blending into one another. Tiny white lines floated in the mass, resembling pieces of scattered rice floating in tomato soup.

  “What do you think?” Jodi asked her.

  Suzanne unconsciously twisted the four-carat diamond on her finger. “Looks like a tomato, right?” she answered. “Is that what it is—a tomato?”

  “The artist is an ob-gyn in Oregon,” Jodi said. “That gives it a slightly different perspective, doesn’t it?”

  “Well, it sure is cute,” Suzanne said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  She looked at her watch.

  “Oh my gosh. It’s almost four o’clock. I’ve been havin’ such a good time talkin’ that I lost track of the time. I sure like what you’re doin’ with it, though. You’ve been busy.”

  They descended the stairs, and on the way to the front door Suzanne noted that over the fireplace, instead of the traditional oil portrait of the lady of the house, hung a painting of a glowing orange square floating in a chartreuse-green background. She reminded herself to schedule an appointment to have her own portrait repainted in time for the Dogwood Festival. This time she would find someone outside of town, someone who had never painted a Selby woman before, maybe that artist whose ad she had seen in the back pages of Atlanta magazine.

  “Oh,” Suzanne said before descending the stairs of the porch. “I was fixin’ to tell you about Dogwood. I don’t know if you know this, with you bein’ newcomers to Selby, but the Dogwood Festival’s the biggest thing of the year in Middle Georgia, and Boone and me have the big party, so don’t
you be leavin’ town during Dogwood. I want to see y’all there.”

  “I know about Dogwood,” Jodi said. “I can’t wait. It sounds glorious.”

  “You haven’t seen anything till you’ve seen Selby in the springtime. And my party’s gonna be somethin’ you don’t wanna miss.”

  Her territory claimed, Suzanne waved as she stepped into her Lexus for the twenty-yard trip home. Jodi, who followed her out to get the mail, watched her honk at a female black Labrador, squatting on the grass near the large magnolia tree. Unperturbed by Suzanne’s car horn, she finished her business and ambled on down the street.

  Fourteen

  Dear Chatter: Put your bird feeder on top of a metal pole and smear that pole with Vaseline. I’ve never seen a squirrel that can climb a metal pole with Vaseline on it.

  Dear Chatter: If you don’t like gospel music then you must not love Jesus. I play my gospel music loud so I don’t have to listen to all your cursing.

  Dear Chatter: I’m wantin’ to know who makes the best chitterlings in Perry County—and do they do takeout?

  They had come to Kroger solely for collards, but Dewayne could not pull Margaret away from the produce section. He leaned against the end cap of dried fruits and nuts, his arms folded as he watched with amusement as she scurried from the key limes to the passion fruit, from yucca root to the herbs, picking everything up and smelling them before moving on.

  “Dewayne, look at this!” Margaret said.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “Lemon grass! I can’t believe you have lemon grass! I haven’t seen lemon grass since I moved here.”

  “What on earth you gonna use grass for?” he asked.

  But she was off again. This variety of apples! It shamed the Kroger near her house … Jonagolds and Fujis and Empires and the hard-to-find Cortlands. Across the aisle, rectangular baskets nearly spilled over with Anaheim chilis, habaneros, dried chipotles, anchos, and gingerroot. Laying alongside the omnipresent collards were the more exotic escarole and kale and mustard greens. And the melons! Casabas and canaries and …

  “That’s the way to do it,” said a voice.

  Holding a melon in her hands, Margaret looked up and saw a beautiful young woman in a Kroger uniform standing beside her. On her face was an odd scar shaped like the letter L.

  “I’m sorry?” Margaret said.

  “You know how to pick produce. With your nose. The best fruits don’t always look real pretty. Like these melons.”

  The woman—her name tag said Donna—scanned the pile of crenshaws then finally picked one up. “See,” she said. “The shoppers who want the pretty fruit don’t always get the good fruit. Like these crenshaws. I see ’em every time, shoppers come in here and they try to find a clean melon, and I try to tell ’em, you want that flat muddy spot because that means it wasn’t picked early, and it was sittin’ on the ground gettin’ sweet and ripe.”

  Donna had been sampling every item she sold and learned that the most delicious and beautiful of God’s creations often hid behind an imperfect epidermis. The sweetest, reddest pomegranates had dents and brown scabs. The mottled Fujis, not the storybook-perfect Red Delicious, were the sweetest and crispest and most predictable. And the kiwis! For years, Donna hadn’t touched them; brown and stubbly, they looked like they’d dropped off an old man.

  She took Margaret’s melon and replaced it with the one in her hands. “Like this one, see?” Margaret looked at the smeared, brown spot that resembled a smudge on the knee of some pale-yellow pants that had slid into home plate.

  “Is this your produce section?” Margaret asked.

  “Well, not really,” Donna answered. “Mr. Tom—he’s the store manager—he hasn’t hired a produce manager yet so I’m kind of in charge. But, no, I’m not really the boss.”

  “It’s beautiful,” Margaret said. “I wish mine had even half these wonderful things.”

  “You think so?”

  “Yes!”

  Tom Green was not sure why—it might have been the heart potato sighting; it might have been the opening of the Target and Costco across the street—but the receipts in his store’s produce section had jumped twenty-two percent in the past three weeks. Like an American spotting his first McDonald’s overseas, these first-time customers were surprised and overjoyed to find bok choy or chilled, vacuum-packed soybeans between the collard greens and peanuts. It was Tom Green’s guess that the growing diversity of Selby would warrant such a store, and if he could give the city a true urban market it would draw customers for miles.

  And while Donna still did not like the insecticidelike smell of grapefruit or having to clean dirt each night from beneath her fingernails, she did enjoy the attention she was getting from the heart potato, which was now at home, safe in her freezer in a large Tupperware container that included other cherished and perishable mementoes: two snowballs from the time it stormed in Selby when she was twelve; a Three Musketeers bar that Billy Ray Cyrus had taken a bite of and thrown into the crowd at his concert in the Selby Civic Auditorium; a serving of the last peach ice cream her mother made before dying.

  Even more, Donna enjoyed the exposure to a variety of people so unlike those she had lived with all her life. The Yankees and Japanese bought much more produce than native Selbyites, excluding collard greens and okra, and they did not seem to be as intimidated by the papayas and baby zucchini and enoki mushrooms. They asked questions, plenty of them, even more than her Lancôme customers did. And time and again Donna would have to find an answer from Mr. Tom or online and get back to them as they finished their shopping.

  “Which Kroger do you shop at?” Donna asked.

  “The one on Ben Pond Jr. Boulevard.”

  “We call that the gold Kroger.”

  “Because …”

  “All the rich ladies shop there.”

  Donna then leaned into Margaret so she could lower her voice and still be heard.

  “And between you and me, the reason they don’t have much produce up there is ’cause the ladies in north Selby don’t cook. I even make meals for one lady … Miss Suzanne. I cook for her three times a week.”

  Margaret looked over her shoulder at Dewayne. “I’m Margaret Pinaldi,” she said to Donna, holding out her hand.

  “Donna Kabel,” she replied. “I’d shake hands but mine are all sticky—I’ve been cuttin’ watermelon. My sales of watermelon increase by three hundred percent if I cut ’em up. Can you believe that?”

  Dewayne lived in south Selby, in a small, tan, ranch-style home with white ornamental shutters on the windows. A white-washed, life-size deer stood in the front yard, something Dewayne inherited with the house when he bought it five years ago. The doe, her head and ears perked in alertness, had weathered down to the gray concrete, and the friend Dewayne hired to paint his house suggested he color the deer to match the shutters. Dewayne thought that would be just fine, though he later called him back to paint a black mouth and eyes on the face because Dewayne thought it looked too much like an animal trapped in some evil snow queen’s spell.

  With Margaret in the passenger’s seat, he slowly pulled under his carport. The roof was made of corrugated, translucent green sheets of fiberglass, and when the sun was high it cast an Emerald City glow on everything below.

  “Does he have a name?” Margaret asked.

  “Who?”

  “The deer.”

  “His name’s Casper.”

  Inside was plain and utilitarian, the furniture mostly shades of brown or blue and most of it matching. Pictures of Dewayne’s mother and father and two sisters hung on the wall over the television. A wooden cross with a shiny-gold, plastic Jesus was suspended on the wall over what looked to be Dewayne’s TV-watching chair. From across the room, Margaret noticed two small black-and-white figurines on an end table. She left Dewayne’s side to get a closer look.

  “Oh, my gosh, these are so cute!”

  She then saw another, this one a sitting Beanie Baby that leaned against a
blue vase. She turned to Dewayne. “Dewayne … you have penguins in your living room!”

  He lowered his gaze to the floor and rubbed the back of his neck. “Well,” he said. “I collect penguins.”

  “You collect penguins?”

  “Everybody collects somethin’.”

  “I’ve never known anyone who collects penguins, Dewayne. How interesting! Why penguins?”

  “I don’t know … I just like ’em. They look like they’re havin’ fun.”

  “Is this something you do to get women to go to bed with you?”

  “Ma’am?”

  “Because I’m sure it works.”

  Dewayne held out the paper Kroger sack to her. “I thought you wanted to learn how to make good biscuits.”

  “Show me the kitchen.”

  Over the next few hours, Dewayne not only baked the flaky, moist biscuits he promised but also cornmeal-and-vidalia-onion dumplings that simmered in ham hock–flavored collard greens. Margaret enjoyed watching his arms as he slowly sliced large, musky, beefsteak tomatoes that he would serve alongside the entrée.

  As a cold, crisp complement, Dewayne included spicy okra that he had pickled himself with garlic, dill, and dried red pepper pods. And Margaret was surprised at the simplicity of his smothered chicken. All Dewayne used was the bird and its drippings, along with flour, butter, salt and pepper.

  “No other herbs?” Margaret asked.

  “Do you like chicken?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you like butter and flour?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, then,” he said. “Why glue glitter on a dog’s fur?”

  The only awkward moment of the date came early on, when Margaret opened the refrigerator and began rummaging through its contents. Dewayne, who was chopping onions on his butcher block, suddenly stopped, and Margaret looked over her shoulder to see on his face a look of amused bewilderment.

  “Are you okay?” she asked. “Is something wrong?”

  Dewayne resumed his chopping of the onion. “Do you always do that?” he finally asked.