Southern Living

by Ad Hudler

  Donna opened the glass door and reached inside for the porcelain girl in overalls holding a violet umbrella and standing in a puddle up to her ankles. She picked it up and wound the silver knob on her back. The tinkling notes of “Singin’ in the Rain” poured forth. Donna carried it with her to the couch and held it in her cupped hands as if it were an injured bird. In the background, she could hear her father mumbling in prayer at the kitchen table.

  “All I want is someone to hug me and say everything’s gonna be all right,” she said, crying. “Is that askin’ too much?”

  Donna squatted down to pull out a carton of green bananas from beneath the display case, and when she rose again to her feet, the heavy Del Monte box in her hands, she saw him again—Question Man, the name she’d given this new shopper because he asked her something every single visit: How can I tell if a pineapple is ripe? How do I grill an eggplant? This time he was holding two bell peppers, a red and a green.

  Seeing he had Donna’s attention, he held them in the air as if they were torches. “Okay, so what’s the difference here?”

  Donna stole a glance of herself in the mirror behind the cucumbers and green onions. She wished she at least would have put on some blush that day.

  “Hey,” Donna greeted him. “Bet you didn’t know they’re the same pepper. They come from the same momma.”

  “But they’re different colors.”

  “The red ones used to be green ones,” she explained. “But they got left on the vine longer so they could ripen. And the longer somethin’s on the vine the sweeter it gets. That’s just a fact with produce. Same with tomatoes and melons. I’d buy the red one even though it costs more; I don’t think the green ones are fit for a horse. They give a lot of people gas.”

  He favored Armani suits and Jerry Garcia ties, and Donna had mistaken him for a lawyer until he came in one time wearing surgical scrubs that were nearly the color of her uniform. She thought he looked like Matthew McConaughey with darker hair, and his voice, soft and buzzing, reminded her of the skin of a peach or the fine hairs on an okra pod. What intrigued Donna most was how he always seemed to look at her scarred cheek for a moment or two and then just keep right on talking. And he returned again and again, always connecting with her through the fruits and vegetables.

  Bagging three red peppers, he said, “You did something different in here, didn’t you?”

  “I sure did,” she answered. “I moved things around quite a bit.”

  “It looks really nice. Like something you’d see in Atlanta.”

  Donna watched him walk away, toward dairy. She knew he always bought a quart of refrigerated, vanilla-flavored soy milk and then went on to meats, where Sabrina usually sold him some variety of fish, usually a salmon or grouper fillet—and always just enough for one.

  Warmed by the compliment, Donna stood back and surveyed her work from the previous day. Even she had to admit that, in recent weeks, she had lifted the produce department to a new level. Warren Jalowski, the perishables manager who had been uncomfortable with Donna’s drive and barrage of daily ideas, had been promoted to manager of a store in Montgomery, and the day he left Donna worked through the night, completing a vision she’d been forming in her mind for months. Somewhere along the way, she had realized that a produce section, like a woman’s face, should be considered as a whole, and the beauty lay in the harmony of its parts. There was a code to be cracked—arranging these creations of God into an uplifting, glorious scene while still following the practical rules of produce care and merchandising. And finally, at seven A.M., her arms and face dusted and smudged with the dirt of thirteen states and seven countries, Donna went to wash up in the bathroom. When she returned she found Mr. Tom standing before her pièce de résistance, the corner of the main refrigerated case that she had transformed into a scene from a Tuscan marketplace. Large overturned baskets lined the top of the case, their contents spilling downward, toward the customer, each with a vegetable that contrasted perfectly with its neighbor, purple eggplant next to the orange-and-green turban squash, green cabbage intermingling with yellow summer squash, carrots with the greens attached, red stalks of rhubarb, artichokes and radicchio and Brussels sprouts and yellow wax beans, all lying in a state which straddled that fence that separates natural chaos and man-made order.

  “See?” she said to Mr. Tom, pointing to an article on page twenty-six of The Packer. “It says here, ‘The spill effect from bushel baskets gives a fresh feel and movement without the need for laborious fruit hand stacking.’ And I just didn’t do it by looks either. I mixed the more popular items … like the yellow squash, which is almost all water with hardly any nutritional value … with the ones they won’t buy … like this vitamin-rich acorn squash … because maybe they’ll try somethin’ foreign if it’s lyin’ next to somethin’ they’re comfortable with. That’s human nature, don’t you think?”

  That afternoon, Donna found a note in her mailbox in the break room, handwritten on a piece of paper with the blue Woolite logo on top.

  Donna: At Lancôme you helped women find beauty they had lost. At Kroger you have an even higher calling. You are successfully helping to change the unhealthy eating habits of an entire city. You are helping people live longer, healthier, and happier lives. You’ve come a long way since the day you tried to sell plantains as bananas. Keep up the good work.

  T.G.

  Eighteen

  Dear Chatter: My little girl’s fixin’ to go into kindergarten next year and she’s still wearin’ a diaper. Can someone tell me how to get my little girl into panties? I’m at my wit’s end.

  Dear Chatter: This message is to the person in Lake Hillary who reported me to the police because my dog accidentally got loose for about ten minutes Wednesday night when I was at church. Thank you for such a warm welcome to the neighborhood. Since it’ll probably happen again in the future–stuff does happen—I suggest you stop bein’ petty and get a life. Or put the Perry County Sheriff’s Department on speed dial, because you will need to call them again.

  A Danielle Steele paperback in one hand, a cream-and-sugar sandwich in the other, Harriet sat at the table in the Reflector newsroom, her chin lifted high so she could see through her cat-eye glasses. They were plastic frames, cloudy gray with a thread of Dijon swirling throughout, and what younger female reporters mistook for expensive, trendy eyewear from an Atlanta boutique was actually the result of five decades of cautious, thrifty living. Harriet had changed these lenses seventeen times.

  “Do you mind if I join you, Harriet?” Margaret asked.

  She looked up and smiled. “Course I don’t mind—I’ve been missin’ you. They’ve got you off runnin’ all over Selby.”

  Margaret sat down and began pulling the contents from her paper bag—a hunk of extra-sharp cheddar cheese, an orange, eleven blanched green beans, a heel of sourdough bread, and a piece of sweet-potato pie Dewayne had baked the night before. Dewayne worked ten straight days at the station, where he slept and took all his meals, then got seven days off. And though he never stayed the night, most of that time was spent at Margaret’s house. He cooked for her and she for him, each eating things they’d never sampled—pork-and-rice casserole for Margaret, and kashi and seared, rare tuna steaks for Dewayne. He taught her how to stew collards and make pimiento-cheese-and-Wonder-Bread sandwiches. When she was at work for the day, Dewayne would clatter around the house with his bulky red toolbox, replacing rotten wood on the porch, planing the bottom of a swollen door, hanging wire shelves in the closet so Margaret no longer had to store her clothes in the plastic milk crates on the floor. “It looks like you’re not plannin’ on stickin’ around here for long,” he had said.

  Harriet wiped the corner of her mouth with a paper napkin. “I sure did feel sorry for that poor man and his family,” Harriet said. “The rocking-chair man?”

  Under pressure from Randy, Margaret had started her series of profiles on local natives, and the most recent was the life of Bernie Pinshew, who, Randy
thought, best illustrated Selby’s recent transition from an insular mom-and-pop economy to one owned and run by anonymous corporate accountants in the windowed high-rises of another city.

  A Selby native, Bernie lost his job as gate guard at the region’s Budweiser distributor when it was bought out by an Atlanta company. The new owners quickly installed a computerized I.D. scanner and electronic gate, replacing Bernie and his outhouse-size, white wooden structure, where he sat all day with a little fan and radio tuned to Peach Country 105.6 FM. But what Randy liked even more was what transpired during the course of reporting the story. “This man’s life is a country-western song if I’ve ever heard one,” he said.

  On her fourth day of shadowing him, Margaret was scheduled to tag along with Bernie to interviews at the Delco battery plant and a new Kroger distribution center on the south side of town. Yet she knew something was wrong when she drove up to the house in south Selby and noticed his metallic gold Ford pickup truck missing from beneath the rusty carport. His wife, Melinda, answered the door, crying, and Margaret quickly discovered that Bernie had landed in jail. Evidently, he’d been driving up and down I-75, snatching the rocking chairs from the fronts of Cracker Barrel restaurants and successfully selling them to the housewives of Red Hill Plantation.

  When Randy read the transcripts of Margaret’s jailhouse interviews, he busted open two full pages for the story. “This deserves the space,” Randy lobbied his publisher. “This man speaks in that misleadingly naive but piercingly accurate and succinct and insightful, sad voice of the South. Just listen to this.”

  He pushed the play button on Margaret’s tape recorder.

  … You can bet I was nervous the first few times, but that didn’t last for long when I learned how easy it was. I just acted like this was somethin’ I was supposed to be doin’ … don’t be lookin’ over your shoulder and act like a dog who’s just got caught messin’ on the rug or you’re gonna get caught.… Anyway, I backed my truck up to the Cracker Barrel porch, and I laid a tarp out on the floor of the truck, then I loaded them up, and I closed the tailgate and drove away real slow. I always took more than one rocking chair ’cause no one’s gonna think that someone would be stupid enough to steal two at a time.

  Sometimes I’d even stop and tie my shoe or light up a cigarette after I loaded them up. That way if anyone was watchin’ me and thinkin’ I might be stealin’ them, they’d think “Nah, he’s too relaxed and he’s takin’ too much time.” That’s what they think, but they don’t even know they’re thinking it. You know how that is. People do that all the time …

  They’re real easy to sell, these chairs. Everybody has to sit down some time, and when they do they’d just as soon be rockin’. Makes ’em wish they was babies again without a care in the world.

  As Harriet listened to Margaret, she was pleased to note changes in the girl’s appearance. Her black hair was still rolled up in a tight bun, but Margaret had started wearing some makeup, and, as she spoke, Harriet fought the urge to wet her thumbs and reach across the table to better blend the rouge into the skin at the outside of her cheek.

  “Are you likin’ writing those other stories?” Harriet asked. She had taken out her processed cheese in a can and squirted a gob onto a Ritz cracker.

  “It’s very interesting,” Margaret said. “But I feel guilty for exposing these people to the whole world.”

  “You’re still doin’ Chatter, right?”

  “Oh, yes, ma’am.”

  “I was worryin’ that you wouldn’t be doin’ Chatter anymore. I don’t like Chatter much.”

  “I didn’t think so.”

  “I think it makes us all look our very worst, like a child talkin’ when he’s mad. But if it’s gotta be done then I want you to do it ’cause you got a kind heart and you don’t judge people. You can’t be doin’ Chatter if you judge people.”

  For a few minutes, they ate in silence. Harriet looked up at the television atop the refrigerator, at a CNN segment on cosmetic facial surgery for men. Margaret listened to the comforting clickety-clack of people’s coins descending through the dark, metal interior of the Coke machine.

  “You sure are lookin’ happy, Margaret,” she finally said. “Good things must be happenin’ to you.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Are you makin’ new friends?”

  Finished with her beans, Margaret dragged her thumb and forefinger across the blue seam of the Ziploc bag. “Yes,” she answered. “A good friend.”

  “Is it the Case boy?” Harried asked. “Dewayne? Don’t look alarmed, sweetheart. I know his grandma. She and I went to high school together. Dewayne’s a good boy. We think you’re just about the sweetest couple in town.”

  “Why haven’t you said anything to me?”

  “It’s none of my business. Have you met his momma?”

  “It’s not that serious, Harriet. We’re just going out.”

  Harriet began to refold her clear baggie, which she would use again the next day. “Cricket bakes the best pies in south Selby,” she said.

  Margaret dug her unpainted thumbnail into the rind of the orange and leaned over the fruit to smell the microscopic explosion of citrus oils.

  “The truth is, Harriet, I’m spending way too much time thinking about him. When he’s in the house I don’t even turn on NPR. I don’t read. I feel so stupid for saying this, but I just like to sit there and look at him. When I’m around him I feel like a cat lying in the sun.”

  Harriet nodded. “He’s got the longest eyelashes I’ve ever seen on a man,” she said.

  “We cook a lot together. We do have that in common. But we really don’t talk about anything of substance. It’s just not what I envisioned in a relationship.”

  Using her wadded-up napkin, Harriet began to brush together the crumbs of the Ritz crackers that had fallen onto the wood-veneer table.

  “You know, Margaret,” she said. “Lorn and I don’t talk much. We’re one of those couples you see at McDonald’s who’s sittin’ there not sayin’ anything. But that doesn’t mean I don’t love him. It just means we’re comfortable with each other.”

  “But is that enough, Harriet?” Margaret asked.

  She shrugged her shoulders. “It is for me.”

  The crumbs gathered, Harriet used the edge of her hand as a food scraper and pulled them into the open paper bag on her lap. She then reached into her purse and pulled out a compact and tortoiseshell tube of lipstick. Margaret had never seen anyone reapply lipstick so often, and it was probably due to the shape of her mouth. Harriet’s thin lips raced across her face like a straight, hurried brushstroke, and to create curves that nature forgot Harriet would stray northward of her top lip, boldly coloring outside the line, creating two symmetrical, red waves that cleanly crashed into each other at the center.

  “You don’t wanna talk too much with your man, darlin’,” she said. “That’s what girlfriends are for.”

  Their stomachs stretched from large bowls of pho, Margaret and Dewayne emerged from the new Vietnamese restaurant on Truman Parkway and walked to Dewayne’s truck. Margaret waited for him to open her door and let her in, then watched him walk around the front to his own. She was inexplicably drawn to and fascinated by Dewayne’s belly-in-progress, amazed at how every ounce of weight a man added to his body could congregate in that one single spot, causing it to grow and grow as if a fetus were inside. Margaret was surprised at how hard it was, not gelatinous but dense and springy, like a woman’s stomach in her last trimester.

  Dewayne got in but did not start the car. Margaret looked over to find him looking at her.

  “You know,” he said. “I’m not gonna bite you.”

  “What?” Margaret asked.

  “Why do you always sit way over there?”

  “As opposed to where?”

  “Right here,” he said, patting his thigh. “By me.”

  “You’re kidding me, right?”

  “No.”

  “Isn’t that a Lor
etta Lynn kind of thing? It’s awfully cliché, Dewayne. Where I’m from they do that in high school.”

  He shrugged his shoulders, the toothpick bobbing in his lips. “You always say you’re cold.”

  “Yes …”

  “Well, why be cold when you can be by me?”

  Dewayne smiled, and Margaret felt a sudden zipper of warmth begin someplace behind her breasts and run down into her loins. Unconsciously looking out the windshield and upward, toward the clear sky, as if her mother might suddenly send some sort of missile down from the heavens, Margaret slowly slid over.

  At Dewayne’s house they sat on the glider beneath the carport as the sun was starting to set, eating pieces of Coca-Cola cake that Dewayne had baked the day before.

  Suddenly, he pointed to the east; a buck had materialized from the wall of dark woods on the side of the house. “Looks like lover-boy’s back,” he said.

  “Oh, my God,” Margaret whispered.

  Dewayne explained how the buck first emerged that Monday and crossed the empty lot into his yard. He first sniffed at the doe’s rib cage then followed a line along her back, leaving a moist, dark trail as would a snail, stopping at her hind side, which he smelled and poked at with his glistening black nose.

  Then, a noise, maybe the Thornton boys shooting squirrels with their BB guns next door, or the whine and clatter of the trash truck down the block. The buck jerked up his head, looked eastward, then suddenly turned and bounded back into the dense woods, which swallowed him in one leap.

  This time, with Margaret witnessing, there was no sniffing, no prodding. The buck strutted alongside the doe, surveying her as a sergeant would scrutinize a line of fresh recruits. When he got to her end, he turned and stood behind her frozen body then suddenly lifted himself onto his hind legs. He fell atop her back end, and he wriggled about, searching for entry and moist warmth, then finally hobbled backward and dismounted.

  The buck walked ten yards to the south, as if taking time to contemplate his strategy. He returned, reared up and tried again. The scene was sad but strangely erotic. Any buck who mistook a white, concrete doe for the real thing was destined to be the end of his genetic lineage. Yet watching him mount the doe excited Margaret. Was it the juxtaposition of warm flesh and cold concrete? The sheer size of the lean, muscled creature as he tried to have his way with her? Still, it bothered Margaret that she was aroused by this arrogant, one-sided, forceful display of desire.