Southern Living

by Ad Hudler

  “They’re not takin’ the grilled asparagus spears,” she said to Margaret. “I don’t think they know how to eat ’em.”

  “Just tell them they’re like carrot sticks,” Margaret said.

  “I did. I even showed ’em how to do it.” She set the silver platter on the butcher-block island. “I sure am gettin’ lots of compliments on my tie, though.”

  At a caterers’ supply store in Atlanta, Margaret had found bow ties made from a material of illustrated black-eyed peas floating in a violet background. Both she and Donna wore these, along with long-sleeve white shirts tucked into black pants.

  “Miss Suzanne’s here,” Donna said. “The lady I do all my cookin’ for? She wants me to cater a party she’s gonna have in a few weeks.”

  “Do you cater?”

  “No, but that’s one reason I wanted to help you out tonight. To see how you do this.” She picked up a tray Margaret had filled with circles of sliced, grilled Italian eggplant, each topped with a dollop of spicy baba ganoush. “And I think I could do it,” she said. “If Jackee helped me.”

  “When is it?” Margaret asked.

  “Friday week.”

  The phrase still caught Margaret off guard, one of the linguistic remnants of the English who settled Georgia three hundred years earlier. It was one of those wonderful, path-of-least-resistance, verbal shortcuts so common in the language here; Friday week was an impressive five syllables shorter than a week from this coming Friday.

  “Let me help you,” Margaret said. “I’m not doing anything that night. Dewayne’s working that weekend.”

  “Oh, no, you’re paid to do this,” Donna answered. “You’re a professional, Margaret. You shouldn’t be givin’ your work away for free.”

  “Then what if I don’t pay you for tonight—and instead help you out at your party?”

  Donna raised her eyebrows and nodded. “That would work.”

  “Let’s get this salad out to the table,” Margaret said. “I think that’s everything. We’re ready.”

  They stood back, watching the guests fill their plates from the buffet on the dining room table. “Now which one is she?” Margaret asked. “I’m curious.”

  “Petite with black hair … the black St. John’s pantsuit.”

  Margaret recognized her immediately; it was the woman from the Forsyth Room. Chatty and uninhibited from wine, she’d blown into Randy and Margaret’s table, dropped into the chair and announced to them and her husband that she was pregnant.

  By her own estimate, in her years at the clinic, Margaret had seen close to four thousand pregnant women at every stage of their nine-month journey. And though each carried the weight of a fetus in a way unique to herself, Margaret had never encountered an expectant mother who did not display an unconscious bewilderment at her condition. Even when engaged in conversation, each woman seemed to have a third eye, on her chin, that remained focused with fascination on the growing hump below her breasts: Yes, yes, yes, blah, blah, blah, you talk about some interesting things … but would you look at this! Can you believe this! Look what’s happening to me!

  Perhaps she was wrong, but Margaret thought this woman’s third eye seemed more interested in the contents of Jodi Armbuster’s built-in bookshelves.

  Suzanne was the last to arrive at the party. She was alone; Boone had been called in for emergency surgery. Shortly after the sun went down, on the new I-75 bypass west of town, an eighteen-wheeler full of frozen, free-range chickens from Colorado had slammed into a local man’s old, rust-colored Chevy Impala that was creeping down the busy concrete corridor at twenty miles an hour.

  Jodi answered the door, wearing a black-knit silk tunic and matching pants that seemed to move like stirred crude oil when she walked.

  “You look like you’re fixin’ to have that baby tonight,” Suzanne said.

  “Only in my dreams,” Jodi replied. “She’s a week overdue, and I’m ready to kill her. Is it true what I hear about you?”

  “About the Dogwood party?”

  “No, about the baby.”

  “Oh! Well, it sure is. It sure is.”

  “When are you due?”

  “Oh, not till fall.”

  In one of her clandestine late evenings of chardonnay and phone-order shopping, Suzanne, realizing she was approaching the imagined third month, came across a catalog called Progressive Parenting, and in it she found a strap-on, weighted belly for curious fathers who wanted to know the sensation of carrying a fetus to term. She ordered the three-month, four-month, and five-month sizes and had meant to don the three-month prosthesis for this evening but in the end decided against it because it didn’t look good beneath her St. John’s knit.

  “Y’all haven’t forgotten about my Dogwood party, have you?” Suzanne asked.

  “Actually …” Jodi said, looking sideways and downward at the Barbie centerpiece on the table. “Marc’s bosses are coming out from San Francisco, and it just kind of grew into a bigger thing. I guess we’re having one of our own. When is yours again?”

  “April twelfth.”

  “Oh, no, Suzanne. So is ours!”

  Suzanne faked surprise. “No!”

  “I am so sorry, Suzanne. But Selby’s a big town, and I’m sure we don’t keep the same friends.”

  “Y’all aren’t members of Sugar Day, are you?”

  “That’s correct,” Jodi answered.

  Suzanne glided onward, dismissing Jodi in her own foyer and moving into the living room, where she immediately noticed that the lovely gilt fleur-de-lis bookends she’d given for a housewarming gift had been painted stark white.

  She saw a group of her neighbors—Alison Riner, Trevy Bates, and Jonnie Newnan—huddled in the corner with their glasses of chardonnay. The three women seemed inseparable, and though they occasionally ran into Suzanne in Phipps Plaza or Lenox Square in Atlanta they had never asked her to join them. More than once, Suzanne had heard them recounting their adventures in Atlanta: at ladies’ night at the Gold Club to see the Chippendale dancers … the time the women went to see the French Impressionism exhibit at the High Museum and got stuck in the elevator with the Federal Express man … drinking too much chardonnay at the Kudzu Cafe and, on a dare, riding a MARTA train for one stop before hurrying off and hailing a cab back to the safety of their cars. (The acronym of Atlanta’s rapid-transit rail system, they joked, stood for Moving Africans Rapidly Through Atlanta.)

  “Y’all now … y’all now, listen to this,” said Alison Riner. Suzanne, recognizing no one else in the room, stepped up to the circle.

  “We were fixin’ to go up to our house in Highlands this weekend, in the mountains, and you will not believe what Robert asked me to do.”

  “What?”

  “He wanted me to ride all the way up there on the back of that stupid Harley of his.”

  “No!”

  “Yes! And what was I gonna say? You talk about tacky! So you know what I did? I wore my Sea Island T-shirt without a coat so people could see it on the back.”

  “Oh, Alison!” exclaimed Trevy. “What was your hair like when you got off that motorcycle?”

  “You don’t even wanna know. My lips were chapped like a sailor’s hands. But I spent three hundred dollars at the day spa in Highlands when I got there.”

  “For pain and suffering,” Trevy said.

  “Suzanne!” Jonnie cut in. “Honey, that’s chardonnay!”

  Suzanne looked at the full glass in her hand that she instinctively picked up from the table as she approached the group.

  “Oh, my gosh!” she said. “I thought it was water.”

  As Suzanne held the glass up to the light, the other three women exchanged quick glances.

  “Let me get you some Co-Cola,” offered Jonnie. “Now y’all don’t say anything fun till I get back.”

  Standing so close to the women, all of them mothers, made Suzanne nervous. Again, she chastised herself for not reading the What to Expect When You’re Expecting that Boone’s mother
had given her. She did, however, keep it lying open and upside-down on her nightstand. Josephine had begun dusting it as if it were a vase or lamp or other permanent fixture.

  “So you workin’ on a nursery, Suzanne?” Trevy asked.

  “It’s gonna have to wait,” Suzanne answered. “I’ve got Dogwood, and it’s just killin’ me to get everything done.”

  “I wouldn’t have it,” Alison said.

  “Boone would have a fit if we didn’t have that party.”

  It was true—at least partly true. Suzanne realized that Boone was still smarting from his exclusion from Selby’s oldest and most exclusive palaver club. There were seven such clubs in Selby, allmale, monthly gatherings in which members would gather for dinner and listen to a fellowman’s paper written exclusively for the group. Each man drew on his own experiences and connections, and the subjects ranged from the narcissistic (a travelogue of a bike ride through France) to the esoteric (a historical retrospective of the Monitor, the South’s doomed, Civil War–era ironclad ship) to the male-centered (an inside look at the University of Georgia’s offensive line for the upcoming season). Boone had been lobbying to get into the palaver group for two years, but when one of the ten members finally succumbed to heart failure and new names were put up for consideration, Boone’s was blackballed. And what bothered him most was that he considered everyone in the group a friend.

  Alison used her napkin to wipe the lipstick from her wineglass. “I’d just tell him no,” she said to Suzanne. “Sometimes you just gotta put your foot down.”

  Jonnie returned with Suzanne’s Coke. She leaned into the group so she could whisper without being heard. “Did you see she’s havin’ a Dogwood party? Is it the same night, Suzanne?”

  “I think so.”

  “That is so tacky,” Jonnie said. “I can’t believe that woman. I mean, have you seen that picture in the baby’s room? Those naked ladies?”

  “I saw it bein’ unloaded,” Suzanne said.

  “That baby is gonna have nightmares like you’ve never seen,” Jonnie said. “She is just too strange.”

  “And that floor … black-and-white tile? They know it’s a little girl. Why couldn’t they make that room prettier? She said to me she didn’t like pink. Now I just wanna know what’s wrong with a little pink in a little girl’s room?”

  “You know, they’re gonna send their baby to that new preschool out on John Morris Road … that Montessori?”

  “Those Montessori kids act up. There’s one in church, a new boy in town, and he gets up and gets a drink of water whenever he wants to—right in the middle of the service.”

  “You are kiddin’ me!”

  “There’s lots of Orientals that go to that school.”

  “Is it true they let the little boys play with dolls?”

  “I heard that.”

  “I did, too.”

  Sipping her Coke, Suzanne watched Jodi across the room speaking to John David. With sweeping gestures, she was explaining a large painting that was nothing more than messy, black, random lines on a white background, as if someone had been trying to clean the paint off their brush. When Jodi moved on, Suzanne excused herself and walked across the room to join him.

  “What do you think of this, Suzanne?” John David asked, his arms folded as he looked at the painting.

  “I think it looks like somethin’ out of a nursery school,” Suzanne answered.

  “What you’re supposed to do when you look at somethin’ like this—Jodi just told me this—you clean out your mind … like wipin’ off a chalkboard.… and then you look at the picture and see what thought comes into your head first. And then, see, that should tell you somethin’ about yourself.”

  “So what do you see?” she asked him.

  “I see skid marks from a motorcycle, and then I see a man on a motorcycle, and then I see me behind that man on the motorcycle …”

  “John David!”

  “And my arms are wrapped around that big, burly chest, and at the red light I slip my hand inside his shirt.” John David turned to Suzanne. “What do you see?”

  Suzanne sighed and looked down at the sweating, blue-rimmed, Mexican-glass tumbler of Coke in her hands.

  “I see a great big cold glass of chardonnay.”

  “So go get some,” he said, looking over at the table. “It’s good chardonnay.”

  “I was fixin’ to leave.”

  “Boone home?”

  “No.”

  “He gonna be gone long?”

  “I don’t know. Probably.”

  John David jerked his chin toward the front door. “Then let’s you and me go have some fun.”

  “Like what?”

  “Meet me at my truck in five minutes.”

  “John David.”

  “Oh, come on, Suzanne. You don’t wanna stay here in the Evil Queen’s house all night. Let’s go have us some fun.”

  For ten minutes, Suzanne stood in the dark beside John David’s Toyota 4-Runner, ducking below the hood line whenever a car passed, letting the glare from the headlights sweep over her head and onto the front of the Armbusters’ house. Finally, just as she was about to give up and walk home, she heard loud chatter on the porch and looked up to see John David walking backward, yelling out his good-byes. He arrived at the car rosy-cheeked and out of breath from the backward jog down the long sidewalk.

  “How much have you had to drink, John David?” she asked.

  “I brought you somethin’, Suzanne.” John David unzipped his brown-leather bomber jacket and pulled out two unopened bottles of the Oregon chardonnay, one from under the left breast, one from under the right.

  “John David!”

  “They musta had fifty bottles under that servin’ table. They are not gonna miss two of ’em.”

  He opened his door and reached for a quarter-empty bottle of Knob Creek bourbon on the seat. “This is my poison for the evenin’. You can have all the chardonnay to yourself.”

  “Well, hurry up and open my door. I can’t have anyone seein’ me. It’s not right for me to be with a man after dark like this.”

  “Oh, please, Suzanne. What about that overnight trip to Charleston?”

  “That was a shoppin’ trip, John David. Everybody knows that. But people are gonna think I’m goin’ home with you.”

  “To do what, Suzanne, bake cookies? Come on. Let’s go get us some Krystal burgers and go down and see Terrance. There’s a corkscrew in the console there.”

  Suzanne opened then shut the console. “I shouldn’t be drinkin’ in my condition, John David. You know that.”

  “Oh hell’s bells, Suzanne. I know you’re not pregnant. And why the hell you’d lie about such a thing I have no idea. What were you thinkin’?”

  “John David!”

  “I saw those weird little strap-on bellies in your vanity. What are those all about?”

  “What were you doin’ in my vanity?”

  “Lookin’ for the silver polish.”

  “You breathe a word of that to anyone John David and I’m gonna have to kill myself. And you. You hear me? I mean it!”

  He turned off Red Hill Drive and onto Knolton Avenue. With his open bourbon bottle between his legs and one hand on the wheel, he used the other to open the console and fish in the dark for the corkscrew, which he then handed to Suzanne.

  “I guess if they can have strap-on dildos they sure can have strap-on baby bellies,” he said. “Lord, I am feelin’ more normal every day.”

  Venetian Village Greetings, owned by John David’s housemate, Terrance Holiday, usually closed its doors at six o’clock, in time to get home for the habitual, six-thirty mai tais on the balcony of their historic downtown home. Yet two weeks ago, Terrance’s most reliable salesclerk, Sally Rubenstein, quit so she could enroll in the travel agent program at Middle Georgia Technical Institute. What that meant, of course, was that some things got set on the back burner, and this is why Terrance suddenly found himself faced with a microwave-size card
board box beneath the counter that was so full of returned paper goods they appeared to be multiplying from within, rising up and falling over the edges like popcorn cascading from a theater popper.

  “Hey, hey!” John David yelled from the door, the bell tinkling against the glass as it shut. “Me and Suzanne are here to say ‘hey.’ Terrance?”

  “Down here!” Terrance yelled upward.

  John David and Suzanne walked around the counter and saw him sitting on the floor amid the paper products he was sorting.

  “Looks like a paper orgy,” John David said.

  “Hey, Suzanne,” Terrance greeted his guest. “Did y’all come to help?”

  “We came to provide immoral support,” John David said, holding up the opened bottle of chardonnay.

  “Go on back and get me my coffee cup,” he said.

  “No, this one’s for you. Suzanne’s got her own. I know you don’t got a problem drinkin’ out of a bottle.”

  Suzanne and John David joined Terrance on the floor, crossing their legs like children watching TV.

  “You ever shrink-wrap, Suzanne?” Terrance asked.

  She shook her head.

  “Wanna try?”

  “Don’t know how. But I’m happy to just sit here with my chardonnay.”

  Terrance unrolled and cut off a clear, smooth piece of plastic, about two feet square. He then reached for a box of three-by-five invitations with a Mexican fiesta motif that Ginger Miller had considered too ethnic-looking and set it in the middle of the plastic. Terrance brought up the ends of the shrink-wrap covering and taped them together in the middle, as if he were wrapping a gift. He then picked up the shrink-wrapper, which was really nothing more than a steel, industrial-strength blow dryer, and pointed it at the note cards as if it were a gun. Suddenly, Terrance clicked on the blower, and in less than three seconds, the clear coating melted over the paper rectangle, hurriedly conforming to every edge and corner and plane. It reminded Suzanne of the time-lapsed Pillsbury cookie-dough ads.