Southern Living (16 page)

“You’re too kind,” Suzanne said. “Maybe some sweet tea would be good.”

“I’m afraid we don’t have any sweet tea. But we have a really good mango tea.”

“Oh,” she said. “Well, then, I’ll just take some water, thank you.”

The past month had been glorious—everyone was waiting on Suzanne. Boone, who would not let her cook now, often brought home takeout from different restaurants, and he was surprised how much the lasagna from Café Amore tasted like his wife’s homemade version.

Lately, Suzanne had been staying up after Boone went to bed,
and she would drink a bottle of chardonnay as she leafed through catalogs and wrote down items for John David to order. At the end of her illicit evening, too dizzy to wash the wineglass and eliminate all evidence, Suzanne would turn off the burglar alarm, walk out onto the patio, across the yard, and up to the edge of the forest that separated their property from the eighth hole of Sugar Day. Then, awkwardly, like a presidential wife throwing out the first pitch of a baseball game, Suzanne would chuck the glass as far as she could into the trees. Some broke against the trunk of an oak or sweet gum or pine, but most of them landed in the thick quilt of decaying leaves and needles. In the morning, when the rays of sunlight penetrated the strip of forest, the glass sparkled like dew on spiders’ webs. No one would ever know the difference. The only living creatures who ever went back there were those stupid dogs, and that problem was being taken care of.

Historically, Boone did not like Suzanne to linger in bed in the mornings, and he intentionally tried to rouse her. He would drop the toilet seat, shut the medicine cabinet door too firmly, or set his glass bottle of aftershave onto the granite countertop with an unnecessary amount of force.

Nowadays—and who would have thought that the possibility of a baby would change him so much—Boone slipped out of bed, tiptoed into the closet, then walked down the hall to shower in the guest bathroom so the running water and his Norelco did not wake her. Some days he even made coffee and set aside a cupful for her in the microwave. And better still, he was leaving her alone in the morning. It had been three weeks since she last heard the six
A.M
. rhythmic rustling of the 520-count sheets as Boone stroked himself in preparation, an audible warning of things to come, like the thunder of an approaching storm. And on those mornings, with her eyes closed, she would suddently sense the mass hovering over her, bringing darkness for two or three minutes, until the cloud was spent and moved on its way.

Yet she would welcome him now; Boone was sweet again. He
was the man she remembered from ten years ago, and Suzanne had actually enjoyed him these past few weeks. For the first time in years he was sharing anecdotes and jokes from the hospital. He listened when she brought out fabric samples and paint chips from Lonnie’s Color Wheel, and he even gave an opinion on the wood for the library bookshelves. Over breakfast, they laughed together at items from Chatter, and, briefly one day, she almost mustered enough courage to admit that she occasionally called the hot line herself.

Suzanne knew this could not last, but she was not yet ready to give it up.

At the Barnes & Noble, she reached into her purse and pulled out an alligator-skin Daytimer. With a royal blue ballpoint pen from the Amelia Island Ritz-Carlton, she began a list:

Like a spirit taking leave of its body, Suzanne’s mind drifted into the cherry-wood cabinets of her kitchen, snaking among the cans and bottles and boxes, circling the peanut butter jar, peering within, and then on to the refrigerator, where it gauged the crispness of the baby carrots and counted the Stouffer frozen entrées that lined the freezer-door shelf like a set of miniature orange encyclopedias. What was missing on this daily tour of inventory and need? What could not wait until tomorrow, when Josephine would go to the store?

She clicked the ballpoint pen and wrote down one more item:

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.

T
hey 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.