Southern Living (22 page)

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.

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 Loretta 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.

Margaret found Dewayne’s free arm and squeezed his thick wrist. Dewayne looked away from the deer to meet her gaze. He’d stopped chewing at the end of the first mount and now had to swallow his bite of cake. Margaret watched his Adam’s apple rise then fall like a light switch.

“You want some more Co-Cola cake?” he asked her.

My life with Dewayne is stuck in Donna Reed Land. We hold hands and snuggle, and we have kissed and kissed and kissed until my lips seem to lose their elasticity. His fingers sneak quick brushes over my bare skin when my shirt fortuitously rises above the belt line—but then he stops. So what is stopping me? I certainly was not raised to depend upon a man for anything. What is he waiting for me to say? To do? Am I sending a message of reluctance or is he as inexperienced and as scared of performance as I am? Perhaps he’s not as attracted to me as I am to him
.

The same was true with learning how to ride a bike. After the appropriate age passed me by, I was suddenly too embarrassed to let
anyone know I could not ride one. And I have yet to try because I’m supposed to know how
.

I must be the oldest virgin in North America. I have to be
.

I didn’t know how to kiss. I don’t think he did either. (But we’re both pretty good at it now!) Could I have met my match in inexperience? He may not be aware of it, but whenever we see a love scene in a movie he or I will try to emulate it—that is, anything that happens before the clothes come off
.

Why haven’t I bought any birth control?

I feel satisfied when I am with him. Why this man? Why now? Why have I never felt such stirrings?

Dewayne’s metabolism radiates heat like a stone hearth, and I wonder—with my mother gone and father somewhere, be it dead or alive—have I simply sought out a comforting source of heat in this solitary journey in which I am all alone?

Or do I just need to get laid? I’m certainly overdue
.

God, being a teenager is difficult. I wish I would have done it earlier
.

S
uzanne had laid the sterling silverware out on the dining room table, each piece side by side like the rice-size pencil scrawls of someone keeping score in a card game.

“Every piece of silver?” Josephine asked her.

“You ask me that every time, Josephine,” she answered. “Yes, every piece. I want it all polished and shiny, shiny, shiny.”

Shaking her head, Josephine looked at the silver, nearly two hundred pieces in all, including the requisite forks, spoons, and knives but also a sardine server, olive spoon, asparagus fork, asparagus server, macaroni server, fish-serving fork, fish-serving knife, food pusher, chocolate spoon, cheese knife, cheese scoop, tea strainer, toast server, waffle server, jelly cake server, large berry spoon, small
berry spoon, lemon fork, butter pick, ramekin fork, and bonbon spoon. Nearly every time Suzanne went to Atlanta for the day she would bring back with her a piece of silver. And four times a year, Josephine would have to polish it all and replace them to their black-felt sleeves and wooden cases, though a setting for two was left out for Suzanne and Boone’s daily use.

“I need the tea tray polished, too,” Suzanne said. “And the gravy boat.”

“Miss Suzanne,” Josephine said. “How you gonna use all this silver? You don’t use all this silver.”

Suzanne walked over to the sideboard, pulled open a drawer and retrieved a white pamphlet, now old and flimsy with creases worn to the point that they had started to leak light. Suzanne picked it up years ago when her mother-in-law took her to Beverly Bremmer’s Silver Shop in Atlanta to pick out her pattern for Boone’s and her wedding.

“Just read this,” she said, handing the paper to Josephine.

Josephine scanned the pamphlet, as if she were looking at a photograph, and handed it back to Suzanne.

“All I know is I’m not gonna have time to go grocery shoppin’ if I have to polish all this silver.”

“You don’t have to,” she answered. “I’ve got Donna makin’ me somethin’ for tonight.”

“Do I have to finish all this today?”

“Tomorrow I’m gonna need you to spray Clorox on the bricks of the patio. I’m fixin’ to serve dinner outside on Friday.”