by Cathy Holton
He looked at her for a moment and then turned around and went back to work checking his hunting gear. “My golf game got canceled,” he said.
It didn’t really bother her that Leonard rarely came home for dinner anymore. Lavonne thought it was probably a good thing he spent so much time away from home. It was probably the only reason their marriage had lasted as long as it had. “Why are you packing for your trip four weeks early?” she said.
“I’m not packing, I’m just checking to see if there’s anything I need to buy.”
She opened the pastry box. Mrs. Shapiro had thoughtfully included a plastic fork. Lavonne figured that besides her daughters and Eadie and Nita, Mrs. Shapiro probably knew her better than anyone else in town.
“So, what’s for dinner?” he repeated.
“I’m having Peach Paradise,” Lavonne said. “What are you having?”
He got up and went into the kitchen to make himself a sandwich. She picked up the remote control and began to flip through the channels, chewing mechanically as she watched scenes of mayhem and destruction, TV pitchmen selling juicers and jewelry, co-eds whining about their love life, talk-show guests hurling chairs at each other, and finally, settling on reruns of Leave It to Beaver. It had been one of her favorite childhood shows. The bland normalcy of the Cleaver household had filled her with hope and a sense that anything was possible, even a happy childhood. Even a father who didn’t raise his voice, or a mother who could clean the oven wearing pearls and a petticoat, and be happy about it.
“Lavonne, do we have any bread?” Leonard shouted from the kitchen.
“Look in the bread box.”
“The bread box?”
She chewed the Peach Paradise, trying not to think about her sad mother standing in a queue at the bus stop, trying not to picture Mona Shapiro’s innocent face as she considered selling her building to Redmon and Leonard. Lavonne made a mental note to ask Leonard about this proposed sale after the trauma of the party had faded.
She could hear her husband helplessly slamming cabinet doors. Lavonne felt a slight tremor of conscience over not rising to go into the kitchen to make his dinner. Really, Leonard was not so bad. She reminded herself of this at least three times a day. He didn’t bully her like Charles Broadwell bullied Nita. He didn’t run around with other women like Trevor Boone. If you took away the fact that he was boring, self-indulgent, and sexually unappealing, Leonard was not such a bad husband.
“Goddamn it, we’re out of mustard!” he shouted from the kitchen.
“Look in the pantry!” she shouted back.
She and Leonard had met their senior year of college and had dated long-distance for three years while she finished her master’s and he attended law school at the University of Georgia. Lavonne should have known when he returned home to Ohio, tanned and dreamy, wearing knit golf shirts and loafers without socks, that their relationship was changing, growing into something she might not appreciate or accept. Instead, she threw herself into her practice, and when Leonard graduated from law school, they married. Three years later his father died and Leonard accepted a partnership with Boone & Broadwell. They were both twenty-eight. Lavonne sold her fledgling accounting business and they headed south.
Leave It to Beaver had gone to commercial, so Lavonne flipped back through the channels, stopping for a minute on Oprah. She had watched yesterday and had been shocked to learn that a young blond guest with long red fingernails was actually a financial adviser, and had been brought on the show to advise women on how to protect themselves from the financial disasters of divorce and the death of a spouse. “Make sure all the bank accounts are in both your names,” the girl had said in her wispy little voice. “Make sure all the real estate is in both names.” She giggled and wagged her finger at the audience. “Don’t leave all the financial decisions to your husband. Don’t let him handle all the checkbooks. Knowledge is the best form of protection.” It occurred to Lavonne, watching the girl, that in the eighteen years she had spent at home as a wife and mother, the world had changed. While she had been changing diapers and teaching a four-year-old to read, the workforce had become filled with young, attractive, well-educated women.
Leonard came into the room carrying a sandwich and a mound of potato chips on a plate. He set the plate down on the coffee table and settled himself on the sofa, opening a napkin on his lap. “Where’s the remote?” he said.
“I’m watching this,” Lavonne said, switching back to Leave It to Beaver and turning up the volume. June Cleaver was advising Ward how best to deal with the boys, who were selling shoe polish door to door against Ward’s advice. Her pearls shone like alabaster. Her starched apron flared modestly around her twenty-two-inch waist. June watched Ward, wide-eyed, her chin dropped submissively. Her face was vacuous but pleasant. June was not a woman of wild emotional swings. Lavonne wondered if June had ever questioned her decision to stay home with Wally and the Beave.
Leonard put his sandwich down and opened the trunk again. A strong but peculiar odor rose from the interior, musty and sharp and faintly sweet. The scent reminded her, curiously, of something else, some distant, just out of reach memory.
“Is this all that’s on?” Leonard said, pointing at the TV screen.
“That smells like the stuff they used to use to clean the girls’ locker room at school,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “Why does your trunk smell like that?”
Leonard’s face flushed suddenly. He put his sandwich down and closed the lid of the trunk, carefully fastening the latches. Then he sat back, stretching his arms along the length of the sofa. “Turn it to CNN,” he said.
It was not entirely fair to blame Leonard for her decision to give up her career for the children. Staying home with the girls had been something she wanted to do. She had been there for their first steps, their first drooling attempts at language, their first lost baby teeth; what career could be better than that? She had two beautiful, smart, strong-willed daughters and they were who they were because Lavonne had raised them.
“Here, watch what you want to watch,” she said, waving the remote at Leonard. Their marriage, if not exciting, was at least predictable. Secure. How many twenty-one-year marriages could you say that about?
Leonard looked at her suspiciously, munching his sandwich.
Lavonne shrugged and laid the controller down on the coffee table. The truth of the matter was, the girls were nearly grown and she still had twenty years to figure out what she wanted to do with the rest of her life. Twenty years was a long time. Twenty years was time enough to lose sixty pounds and find a job and figure out a way to fall in love with her husband again.
JIMMY LEE’S TRUCK was still in the driveway when Nita arrived home. She went around through the side gate, letting it bang shut behind her so he’d know she was there. She was too embarrassed to call out his name. She could hear him whistling as she came down the stone path between the rhododendrons and the azaleas. Jimmy Lee was standing by the pool with a couple of two by fours balanced across one shoulder. Shafts of sunlight fell from the wide blue sky and pooled around him like a spotlight. His hair curled damply around his neck. He saw Nita and waved.
“Well, hello there,” he said, shifting the weight of the studs. The muscles of his shoulders strained beneath his Rodney Foster T-shirt.
“Hi,” Nita said.
“I wasn’t sure you’d get home before I finished.” He looked like he had just crawled out of bed. He had that rumpled, sleepy-boy look that made her legs feel like she was standing on wet sand.
“Would you like something cold to drink?”
“What’ve you got?” He swung the lumber down off his shoulder and set it on a pile at his feet. A small gold earring dangled from his right ear. With his dark hair, tanned skin, and dangling earring, it wasn’t too hard to imagine him as a pirate. It wasn’t too hard to imagine him in any of the fantasy scenarios set up by Dr. Ledbetter.
“I’ve got sweet tea,” she said. “Juice. Coca-cola.”<
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“Sweet tea would be fine.”
She climbed the steps to the deck and went into the kitchen through the screened porch. She was humming to herself, thinking how smooth his skin was, like baby skin, really, tanned to a light brown except for his chin and lower cheeks, which were stubbled with dark beard. Five o’clock shadow, they called it. She wondered how it would feel against her skin. She imagined him rubbing his face across the places where Lone Wolf had kissed his captive bride, and her stomach spasmed and her heart ricocheted through her rib cage like an emergency flare. A strange sensation of heat rose into her head. She breathed with difficulty and her skin felt hot to the touch.
She went to the refrigerator and filled the glass with ice and poured him some sweet tea from a pitcher. She crossed the room and stood at the French door that led out onto the porch, watching him drag his materials into a neat pile. From time to time he would stop and push his hair behind his ears and stand with his hands on his hips looking at the pool house. His jeans were bleached by the sun and torn below his left knee. She imagined him standing in the middle of her yard wearing nothing but a loincloth. She imagined the sculptured contours of his chest and belly. Her hand shook so badly the cubes rattled against the glass, and she raised it and touched it to her burning face, but it gave her no relief. She set the glass down on the counter.
She was worse than those lecherous old men who sit outside the Jim Dandy Barber Shop ogling the high school girls who pass by. She was beginning to feel like a stranger to herself. She wondered if she was on the edge of a nervous breakdown. All her life she had fought against the urges of the flesh, she had bound up that part of herself with ropes and chains of iron link and buried it deep, and now here she was reading dirty novels and daydreaming about acts of sexual perversion with a boy who wasn’t even her husband.
She thought, What’s wrong with me? She thought, Where will this end? She pushed her forehead against the cool window glass and stretched her arms out and placed her feverish palms against the glass, too. She reminded herself that she had given up porno romance novels forever. She remembered she had sung in the church choir and been a Crusader for Christ. She recalled she was a wife and mother.
She told herself that he would leave her house today and she would return, gradually, to her old life, to the way she had been before, heavy and slumbering. Jimmy Lee glanced up at the house and saw her watching him from the door.
He smiled and waved.
Nita peeled her forehead off the glass. She dropped her arms at her sides. Like a sleepwalker, she lifted her hand, and waved back.
The children were going home with Virginia after school and Charles would not be home until six o’clock, so Nita sat out in a lounge chair beside the pool all afternoon drinking sweet tea and watching Jimmy Lee work.
She liked the way he handled his tools, the way he measured carefully so all his cuts were clean and precise. He was a craftsman, and she could see he took a certain careful pride in his work. Accustomed to the rantings of her husband when he was involved in a particular case, she found Jimmy Lee’s quiet perfectionism comforting. He reminded her of her daddy, Eustis James, a stonemason who built walls and foundations so well-crafted and sturdy they looked like they’d been there since the beginning of time. “A man has to be able to stand back and take pride in what he has built,” he had explained to her once. “Otherwise his life won’t mean a thing, and he’ll know that in his heart, and it’ll eat away at him until nothing is left but bitterness and regret.”
Nita sometimes wondered if this was not Charles’s problem. She wondered if his frustration and growing bitterness were not caused by the fact that he could never stand back and see what he had built, as if he, too, had realized the practice of law was nothing more than a shifting morass of boredom, incomprehensible language, and resentful clients. Nita sometimes thought Charles would be a much happier man if only he knew how to swing a hammer.
“So, what do you think of your Taj Mahal?” Jimmy Lee asked, looking up at the pool house. He had taken a break and was squatting in the shade of the live oak with his forearms resting on his knees.
“Taj Mahal?” she said.
He grinned and lifted his drink. “I’m just kidding,” he said. His back was smooth and sleek. He had the shoulders of a movie idol. Nita couldn’t remember boys having bodies like that when she was young. It must be something they were eating these days, some superior genetic trait coming through, sure and certain proof of the beauty of evolution.
“I think it’s beautiful,” she said from her lounger. “It’s just what I wanted.”
“Thanks.” His eyes moved critically over his work. He chewed an ice cube and thought about ways he could have made it better. “I think we should trim out the eaves,” he said, pointing to the roof of the pool house. “We should trim it with some kind of cornice work. Something to dress it up a bit.”
“Okay,” she said. It looked perfect to her but if it would keep him around a few days longer, she’d agree to anything.
He shook his head and set his glass down on the ground at his feet, grinning at her over his shoulder. “You’re just about the nicest person I’ve ever worked for,” he said. “I wish all my customers were like you.”
She didn’t know what to say to this so she just stretched her legs out along the lounger and looked at her toes. She was wearing a short skirt and a cashmere sweater. She reddened, thinking that a thirty-nine-year-old woman probably shouldn’t wear a short skirt. Only thirty-nine-year-old women who looked like Eadie Boone could get away with short skirts. She wished she had Eadie’s long legs.
Jimmy Lee looked at her legs like he thought they were just fine. “Hey, aren’t you Eustis James’s daughter? Billy’s sister?” He put the glass to his mouth and tipped his head back, looking at her over the rim.
“Yes. How did you know that?”
“I worked with Eustis and Billy on that new Piggly Wiggly out on Black Warrior Road a couple of years back. I was working on a framing crew at the time and they were doing all the stonework. Is Billy still working with your dad?”
“Yes.” Billy was Nita’s youngest brother. He was twenty-six and Eustis James had done well enough in business to bring him in as a partner six years ago. Nita had grown up in a little ranch house close to the public high school. They had not been wealthy, but Nita and her brothers, Billy and Lyman, had never wanted for anything. By the time she graduated from high school, Eustis’s business had done well enough that he could afford to buy her a brand-new Volkswagen and send her to two years of community college, and by the time Lyman graduated four years later, he’d been able to afford to send him off to Emory University in Atlanta. By the time Billy graduated from high school, Eustis and Loretta James had built a new home on a private lake out from town. The house was not big by River Oaks standards, but it was nice and spacious and Nita liked to take the children out there to spend the night and fish when Charles was out of town and wasn’t there to protest.
“But how’d you know I was Eustis’s daughter? Billy’s sister?”
Jimmy Lee dangled his glass of tea between his knees. “You probably don’t remember this, but I went to school with Billy,” he said, looking up at her again. “We graduated in the same class and I was there the night of the game with Tyner, the night they were crowning you Homecoming Queen.”
Nita had a sudden memory of five-year-old Billy bouncing around the bleachers with a group of round-cheeked boys in baseball caps while he waited for his big sister to accept her crown.
Jimmy Lee took another ice cube in his mouth. He sucked it awhile and when it was small, he went on. “I was just a young punk then, but I thought you were just about the prettiest thing I’d ever seen. A fairy princess.” He stood up and stretched, grinning at her. “I told my mama I was going to marry you when I grew up and she used to tease me for years after that.”
A chilly breeze blew from the east. Nita looked at her toes and thought I probably used to babysit him.
The depression that had troubled her since last night, and all through her lunch with Eadie and Lavonne and Virginia, returned. Something heavy swung from her collarbone, swaying over the pit of her stomach like a pendulum.
He finished his drink. He grinned and put the glass down on the patio table. “It just about killed me when you got married,” he said.
He was making fun of her now, she was sure of it. Teasing her the way a little boy teases a babysitter. When she was twenty, the year she finished a two-year secretarial program at the community college and accepted a job at Boone & Broadwell, he was still playing Little League Baseball. He was still riding a bike and fishing in the creek when she went to work for old Judge Broadwell and first met Charles, home for the summer and clerking at his father’s firm. When she married Charles at twenty-three, two years after Judge Broadwell died, Jimmy Lee had been a carefree ten-year-old, most likely a Boy Scout or newspaper delivery boy.
He looked at her and frowned. “Did I say something wrong?”
“No.” She put her glass down on the patio and swung her legs around to plant her feet. She sat there for a few minutes looking down at her Tahitian Pink toes. “I probably should get dinner started,” she said, too embarrassed and self-conscious to rise. The Zibolskys’ cat, Pumpkin, crouched on the top of the tall fence, watching them curiously. “I’m thinking of starting a hobby,” she said, thinking Why did I say that? “Maybe scrapbooking, maybe conversational French. I don’t know—maybe piano lessons.”
“How about woodworking?”
“Woodworking?” She was embarrassed by her sudden outburst about the hobby. Her mouth seemed to be working without any guidance from her brain. “Where would I learn to do that?”
“I could teach you. I’ve got a shop at my house.” She glanced at him to see if he was kidding. He watched her steadily. Great billowy clouds sailed across the blue sky like an armada. Pumpkin twitched his tail lazily against the fence. “Just think about it,” he said, finally. He put his hands on his hips and leaned back, stretching. Bright slabs of sunlight fell across his face and chest. There was a small scar beneath his lower lip, intricate as a coiled thread. “I best get going so you can get supper started for your family. Ask your husband about that trim on the eaves,” he said, all business again. “If he wants me to do it I can come back next week.”
