The Red Hat Society's Queens of Woodlawn Avenue

by Regina Hale Sutherland

  “Try it like this,” she advised me, grabbing a weed—I still wasn’t clear how to identify one—at the point where it sprang from the soil and pulling it slowly but firmly toward her. “You have to get all of the roots, or it will just grow back.”

  “Okay,” I said, my eyes searching the tangle of greenery as I tried to identify a weed of my own to pull. I located what I thought was one of the offenders, reached down the stem as far as possible, and gave it my best yank. It broke off in my hand well above the roots. I looked at Grace, clutched the plant, and waited for the inevitable scold.

  Instead, she laughed, her frustration withering as quickly as the poor dead plant in my hand.

  “You tried to warn me, didn’t you?” She smiled.

  “Let’s just say that my potential as a bridge player far exceeds my possibility as a gardener, and you know that’s not saying much.”

  Grace slipped off her gardening gloves and used the back of her hand to wipe perspiration from her forehead. Her skin resembled the crepe paper I’d always used to festoon the dining room for one of my children’s birthday parties.

  “Ellie, who convinced you that your only value lies in how well you do something? Don’t you get any credit just for being you?”

  Perspiration slid off my forehead, too, stinging my eyes as sharply as Grace’s question stung my psyche.

  “I don’t know what you mean.” Of course I knew exactly what she meant, but I wasn’t ready to go there.

  “I mean who convinced you that you have no intrinsic value?” She tugged her gloves back on. “Sometimes it’s the mother.” She yanked at another weed and it came up easily, roots and all. She tossed it over her shoulder onto the crabgrass-infested lawn. “Sometimes it’s the husband. Even the children.” As she ticked off each offender, another weed flew through the air to join the pile.

  “You’re way off base,” I snapped, but we both knew my flash of temper came from Grace’s words hitting too close to home.

  “Am I?” She pulled two more weeds and began to hum under her breath. I couldn’t quite make out the tune.

  “I’m not one of those sad women who give up their sense of self because they stay at home all day.”

  “I didn’t say you were.”

  “You implied it.” I couldn’t believe we were having this conversation, and I found it even harder to believe that I was letting her get to me. She was obviously a well-meaning old busybody, but the last thing I needed was a red-hat-wearing, gray-haired Oprah trying to analyze me down the path to empowerment.

  “I know my own worth.” I reached out, fingers desperate to find the right green thing to pluck out of the dirt. Frustration blurred my vision.

  “Do you?”

  Great. I really was being psychoanalyzed.

  “Look, Grace, if you have something to say, please just say it.” I started plucking at plants indiscriminately. Since I couldn’t tell the good ones from the bad ones, why not just uproot everything and start from scratch?

  “Wait, wait. Don’t pull up the daisies.”

  My hand stopped in mid-pluck. “I might as well just clear the whole thing out and start over,” I said, and suddenly I knew I wasn’t just talking about my flower beds. I’d been pushing Jim’s phone call to the edges of my consciousness.

  “But you don’t need to start over.” Grace looked me straight in the eye. “There’s plenty here worth saving. It just needs a bit of discernment.”

  Discernment?

  She nodded her head like she’d heard the question in my thoughts. “You just need some time to sort out the good from the bad.”

  I sank back on my bottom, arching my back to ease the ache there. “How much time will it take for me to learn how to garden?” We both knew my question had to do with a lot more than rescuing my yard from encroaching chaos.

  “That depends,” Grace said.

  “On what?”

  “On how patient you’re willing to be.”

  “I don’t have time to be patient.” I needed a new life, and I needed it now. I had mortgage payments to make, a charity ball to commandeer, and an ex-husband who couldn’t wait to race down the aisle with a woman who made Pamela Anderson look like a Rhodes Scholar. I needed to be fabulous, and I needed it now.

  “I don’t think you have any choice.”

  “I don’t know why not. It would be much simpler that way.”

  “I suppose. But it wouldn’t be nearly as satisfying.”

  At that point, though, I didn’t have much interest in feeling satisfied. I just didn’t want to feel so desperate anymore. But when I thought about it, I realized that the rest of the day stretched before me like a yawning, empty cavern. I had no plans. Nowhere to be. The only thing on my “To Do” list was to e-mail my son about setting up a Web site and to call Karen about a discount at the print shop. Together, those tasks might take fifteen minutes. I looked at the length of the flower bed as it stretched along the side of the yard, across the back fence, and back the other way toward the house. What Grace proposed was a formidable task, but, again, it was better than sitting in the living room and eating Twinkies.

  “All right. I’ll try. But I may pull up more plants than weeds.”

  “You might at first,” Grace said. “But I bet you’ll learn to tell the difference.”

  I didn’t answer. I hoped she was right. If you looked at the last few years of my life, it was hard to make a case for the brevity of my learning curve.

  “Okay, so what do I look for in a weed?”

  Grace nodded her approval. “The thing to realize is that calling something a weed is an arbitrary designation. It’s only a weed because we say it is.” She looked me straight in the eye again to emphasize her point. “You know, we call something a weed because it’s hardy, tenacious, and outgrows other kinds of plants.” She paused for a moment. “Not much of a reward for thriving where others can’t, huh?”

  Were my conversations with Grace always going to have this many levels? Between that and the hot sun, my head swam.

  “So that’s why the only way to tell them apart is to have someone show you the difference?”

  “Yes. But you also have to remember that what makes a weed is only a matter of opinion.”

  “Point taken, Grace.”

  Because of course that’s how I’d been feeling since the separation. Like a hothouse flower that had suddenly been declared a nuisance. I bent over next to Grace again and wrapped my gloved fingers around several long, green stalks. “Weed or plant?”

  Grace looked over. “Weed. Definitely.”

  “All right, then.” I yanked it up with a newfound ruth-lessness. “Just keep an eye on me so I don’t kill the real thing.”

  “I plan to.” Grace smiled again, and we spent the next hour pulling up the unwanted plants in companionable silence.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Power of the Trump Suit

  By that evening, every muscle in my body ached from bending over flower beds all day. My joints screamed in protest when I pulled off my grimy T-shirt and faded khakis and stepped into the shower. The ancient plumbing ran as hot and cold as my life at the moment. Relief and hope morphed with breathless rapidity into stretches of panic and fear. Maybe this house was the right one for me after all.

  I had just stepped out of the shower when the phone rang. Wrapping a threadbare towel that had seen better days around me as far as it would go, I padded down the hall to the kitchen where the phone was. Thankfully, all the curtains were closed. Jane and Grace, as helpful as they’d been, probably didn’t want to see their new neighbor in the buff. I didn’t even want to see me in the altogether; gravity had more than taken its toll in the years since my virginal wedding night with Jim.

  I caught the phone between slippery fingers and fumbled with the receiver until I wrestled it to my ear. “Hello?”

  “Ellie? It’s Linda. Sorry for the short notice, but it’s an emergency chapter meeting. The Queens are going to play bridge tonight.�
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  “Tonight?” My gaze flew to the clock on the counter. It was already after six.

  “We’re celebrating your terrific start on your new life.”

  Terrific start?

  I hadn’t accomplished much except to swindle my husband out of a suit, make phone calls to my son about the website and to my friend who owned the print shop, and give myself the beginnings of carpal tunnel syndrome with all the weed pulling. Hardly a day’s worth of revolutionary activities.

  “You don’t have to bring anything,” Linda said, not waiting for a response from me. “Be at my house at seven.”

  “I still don’t have a red hat.” I don’t know why I said that, but Linda just laughed.

  “Well, I may not have as many of them as Jane, but I bet we can find one here that will suit you. Oh, and wear something purple. That’s one of our requirements, too.”

  Purple? Oy. I’d planned to spend the evening doing my nails in preparation for the big luncheon tomorrow, but I decided I could wait and do that the next morning. Truthfully, I was tired of spending evenings alone on my decrepit couch clutching a pint container of Häagen Daaz and a spoon. Even wearing purple clothes and a red hat seemed a preferable alternative if it got me away from overdosing on butter pecan.

  “Okay, I guess. I can be there.”

  “Great. We’ll see you at seven.”

  We said good-bye, and I returned the receiver to its cradle. Then I made a beeline for my room and began to pull clothes out of my closet, searching for something purple. The towel slipped and I let it go, but I was careful to avoid my reflection in the full length mirror on the back of the bedroom door.

  Tonight, we’re going to teach you about trump,” Linda said as she shuffled the cards. A red pillbox hat perched atop her brunette French twist. Evidently whoever hosted the bridge-game-cum-chapter-meeting would take the lead in my education. Linda sat across from me, so she was my partner for the evening.

  “Aren’t those like wild cards or jokers?” I asked.

  Linda passed the cards to Jane on my right and she began to deal, but she did so with the cards facing up instead of down. “Exactly. Whoever wins the bidding determines which of the four suits will be trump.”

  “And trump cards win against anything in another suit—even aces,” Grace chimed in. She had been pouring iced tea for everyone and set my glass in front of me before sliding into her chair on my left.

  Jane finished dealing out the cards, and I sorted mine out by suit and then from highest to lowest as they’d taught me the last time. Then we all laid out our cards, face up, so that everyone’s hand showed.

  “Trumps allow you to neutralize your opponents’ strength,” Linda said. “Whenever the first person leads a card, you have to follow suit if you can. But if you’re void in that suit—if you don’t have any diamonds or spades or whatever it is—then you can play a trump card.”

  Sort of like my husband had when he’d given me my walking papers.

  “So whoever wins the bidding decides which suit will be trump?” It was like the whole weed versus plant thing all over again, all in the eye of the beholder, so to speak.

  Linda nodded. “You want to have at least eight cards from one suit between you and your partner before deciding to make it trump. That’s called an eight-card fit.”

  “How do you know if you have eight cards without looking at your partner’s hand?”

  “You communicate that when you bid. We’ll get to that later. For now, let’s just practice playing the hand with one suit as trump.”

  “It’s ideal if you and your partner each have four of your eight trump cards,” Linda added, pointing to the four hearts in her hand and the four in mine. “You can almost always catch an extra trick when they’re distributed like that.”

  “Why?”

  “Because one of you can usually trump in on one of the other team’s high cards. Then, between you, you can still take four more tricks with your trump.”

  “Huh?”

  “Let me show you.”

  And she did. Linda removed all the clubs from my hand and traded them for other cards. “Suppose Grace leads her ace of clubs,” she said, pulling it to the middle of the table. “If you’re void in clubs, then you can play a trump card.” She pulled the three of hearts to the center of the table and put it on top of Grace’s ace. “Voila! The enemy is neutralized. You have the lead, and you can pull trump.”

  “Pull trump?”

  “You can keep leading your high trump cards and winning all the tricks until your opponents are out of them. Then the rest of your high cards are all winners, no matter what suit, and your opponents can’t trump any of yours.”

  I liked the sound of that. My sure winners had been trumped enough by other people’s cards lately.

  “Let’s play the hand so you can do it yourself.”

  And we did. Once again, when I made mistakes, the other ladies took back their cards and let me try again. I couldn’t remember a time in my life when I’d been allowed to learn, and fail, in such a supportive environment. By the time we’d demolished Grace’s mint brownies and a gallon of iced tea, I could pull trump with the best of them.

  “We still haven’t played a real hand of bridge, though,” I said later as we were tidying up the kitchen. The camaraderie had taken my mind off my aches and pains, both physical and mental, for long enough that I felt more relaxed than I had in a long time.

  Linda made a final swipe at the kitchen countertop with the dish cloth. “Patience, Ellie. You don’t want to go into battle without all the weapons you’re going to need.”

  A sudden vision of Linda and I walking into Roz’s house the next day flashed in front of me. “It may be too late for that already,” I said morosely.

  “That’s why you have a partner.” She wrung out the cloth one last time and draped it over the faucet. “In case you need backup. If you’re the declarer playing the hand, the dummy can provide some extra winners, even if you have a few cards that are losers in your hand. Don’t forget that.”

  She looked at me so meaningfully that I knew she wasn’t just talking about bridge.

  “A trump suit gives you special powers,” she added as we walked toward the front door. Grace and Jane were juggling their purses as well as the empty dishes of bridge treats, so I opened the door to let them out. “I’ll pick you up at eleven-thirty tomorrow,” Linda called as I followed the other two out the door.

  “I’ll be ready,” I answered over my shoulder. The evening had definitely taken the edge off of my anxiety, but I didn’t feel nearly as confident as I sounded. Pulling trump at Linda’s card table was one thing. Neutralizing an enemy like the one I was going to face the next day—well, that was another thing entirely.

  Roz Crowley (née Smith) gave doctors’ daughters everywhere a bad name. She had been raised with just enough money and social status to make her feel important but not enough to make her an automatic player in Nashville society. Her ruthless climb to the top of the Belle Meade set had been aided by, in succession, her marriage to an older wealthy financier, her single-minded devotion to cultivating all the right friends, and her relentless insistence that her children attend the best schools and make friends only with the offspring of VIPs.

  The only reason I knew all these things was because my mother had worked for Roz’s father as a nurse in his pediatric practice. During my growing up years, my mother was constantly admonishing me to be either more or less like Roz, depending upon her latest achievement or escapade. That alone would have given me significant cause to dislike her, but the fact that I was privy to the intimate details of her life gave Roz cause to dislike me.

  So as I headed up Roz’s front walk with Linda by my side, I was filled with deep gratitude for the robin’s egg blue suit. Fortunately, I already owned a pair of beige Stuart Weitzman pumps and matching purse as well as some killer pearls Jim had given me on our twenty-fifth anniversary, so I was armed for battle. This particular showdown be
tween Roz and me had been brewing for several years. We’d both put in our hours on the Cannon Ball’s lesser committees—pre-parties, mailings, seating arrangements. Last year, Roz had surprised everyone by managing to get herself named chair-elect, leapfrogging over half a dozen other women who were in line for the job. This year would be her crowning glory as she reigned supreme as Chair of the Ball. It was as close to getting yourself crowned queen as one was likely to come in Nashville.

  But as socially successful as she was, Roz was not well-liked, whereas I had always enjoyed a full circle of friends. Had, of course, being the operative word, because my divorce had sent those so-called friends fleeing like I’d contracted bubonic plague.

  Roz’s formal living room held a larger than usual number of attendees for the Cannon Ball Planning Com mittee Kick-Off Luncheon. A photographer from the Tennessean was already making the rounds as the ladies preened and posed, artfully concealing their early-bird martinis behind their skirts when the flash went off.

  My goal for the luncheon was to prevent my total ostracism from society. Linda, I knew, had much higher hopes. She was one of the folks Roz had shunted aside to claim the chairmanship of the ball. Perhaps that, more than her position as the Queen of Clubs, was the reason she had appointed herself my champion in the social arena.

  “You can’t let her push you out,” Linda had advised me in the car on the way over. “She knows you have as much claim as anyone to be the new chair-elect. Keep a foot in the door, no matter what.”

  I wondered if she meant that figuratively or literally. While I didn’t think Roz would actually deny me admittance to her home, I knew she wouldn’t pass up an opportunity to deal me my social comeuppance. No way was she going to name me her heir apparent for the Cannon Ball.

  “Linda! There you are.” Roz came swanning into the living room reeking of Opium. Her sharp, dark eyes darted to me and then away again. “We need your advice on the theme. Angela says it’s too over the top, but I don’t think it’s so outré.” She snagged Linda’s elbow and proceeded to tow her across the room with all the determination of a tugboat pushing a barge. Her intention, to leave me standing alone in the middle of the room, could not have been more clear. Or more perfectly executed.