Southern Living (28 page)

“Isn’t he cute?” Donna said. She set him on the ground and posed with her arm around the giant pod. “You know how you can tell he’s a guy and not a girl?”

“How?”

“Two ways. One: He’s hairy.”

“Yeah?”

“And that pointy little head ain’t got room for much of a brain.”

“Oh, you are nasty mean, Donna Kabel,” Betty said, smiling.

“No wonder they keep you back there with those vegetables.”

Super Okra Man was created as a tool of subversive propaganda. For months, Donna had been scheming to get her native Southern customers to purchase and eat a larger variety of vegetables. And after the hugely unsuccessful taste demo of Thai coconut curry with broccoli and carrots, Donna conspired with Margaret, who devised a recipe designed to sneak healthier vegetables in with some old Southern favorites. Margaret’s Piedmont pork stew included the local staples of pork and okra but also slipped in garlic, which could lower blood pressure and help prevent blood clots; red bell peppers (rich in vitamin C); and mustard greens (packed with vitamin A and folate).

Donna stapled Super Okra Man onto a wooden stake and stood him in the middle of the mounded okra pods. She then spent the next ten minutes with her colored chalk to create her tip of the day.

At eight o’clock, Nancy Gringle, the part-timer who served samples to customers, arrived with a pot of stew made from Margaret’s recipe.

“My family loved this, Donna,” she said, setting it on the hot
plate that Donna had put on a card table beside the okra display. “Even Brother—but he still picked out the yellow squash.”

Arms akimbo, Donna beamed.

“Are you just sayin’ that to make my day, Nancy?” she asked.

“ ’Cause that’s what you just did.”

“I’m not kiddin’ you, Donna. It’s good stuff. I’m learnin’ so much about food from you.”

“Thank you!”

And then, from the corner of her eye, she saw Question Man approaching the end cap of bananas on the other side of the produce section. His black hair still wet from a shower, he was walking directly toward her, not even stopping to peruse the tropicals as he normally did. Sometime during the night, an avalanche of lemons had occurred, and some of the yellow fruit cascaded downward, into the limes stacked below. Donna quickly set about reseg-regating the fruits, yellow with yellow, green with green, yellow with …

“Good morning,” he said.

She looked up, feigning surprise. “Oh! Good mornin’.”

He smelled different today … fresher … because he normally came in the early evenings, toward closing. Donna detected some sort of variegated deodorant soap (Coast? Irish Spring?) and a cologne she did not recognize. It reminded her of passion fruit with black peppercorns mixed in.

“You’re here early today,” she said.

He nodded. “I’ve got business.”

“Yeah?”

“I came to ask if I could buy you lunch.”

Donna faltered for a second in her task of sorting fruit, as if a pair of internal, interlocking cogs had encountered a small stick then chewed it to pieces and continued their smooth rotation.

“Lunch?” she asked.

“Yes, lunch. Do you eat lunch?”

“Well, I bring my lunch to work every day ’cause I’m so busy.”

“How about if we eat here in the deli?”

Donna smiled, watching her hands as she stacked the fruit. “You don’t seem like a fried-chicken kinda guy to me. But you could get some sushi in fish and bring it over to deli. They don’t care if you do that. Those tables and chairs are for all the customers, not just the deli customers.”

“How about today?” he asked.

Donna set down the lemons she was holding in her hand. “I’d love that, I really would,” she said. “But today’s my big okra promotion. It’s gonna be a crazy day. Mr. Tom even let me put something about it in the ad in the
Reflector
.”

He frowned and looked away, biting on his lower lip in concentration. “I’m leaving town tomorrow for a few weeks. How about if I come in and see you when I get back?”

“That’d be fine,” she answered.

He put his hands in the pockets of his dark blue, tropical-weight, wool trousers that were cuffed at the bottom. When he wore such pants or suits, he favored Cole Haan, oxblood-colored, tassled loafers, which were Donna’s favorite men’s shoe. “Good, then,” he said.

Suddenly Donna was afraid that in her effort to sound calm she had come off as aloof and uninterested. “I like your tie,” she blurted.

He looked down at his chest. “Oh … thanks.”

“Those little polka dots are the exact color of mango flesh. Don’t you think so?”

“Yes … I guess they are.”

“Did you know that mangoes can be substituted for peaches in recipes?”

He looked at the name tag on her breast. Some time over the past month it had changed from
Donna
to
Donna Kabel, Produce Manager
.

“I am so sorry,” he said. “You don’t even know my name.”

He stuck out his hand, whose creases and pores were free of accumulated grime, the fingernails coated in a satiny sheen and clipped
and filed so the ends looked like perfect, white parentheses. Donna hoped he did not do the same for his toes.

“I’m Michael Kalcheski.”

“Okay, Michael.”

“Mike, actually.”

“Mike.”

“I thought you’d given up on guys,” Jackee said, assembling a chicken fajita. “I thought you said you’d outgrown ’em.”

“Oh, shush,” Donna replied. “This guy is the world’s cutest. And he eats so healthy! If I could just get all my customers to eat like him.”

“I haven’t seen you this bubbly in a long time, Donna. I was thinkin’ your new job was turnin’ you into an old lady or somethin’.”

“Mike,” Donna said. “I’ve got a theory about Mikes. You wanna know what it is?”

Over the years, from the halls of Southeast High, to the Sunday school building of Larry Drive Baptist Church, to the food court at the Selby Mall, Donna had noticed a curious pattern in men’s names: She had never encountered a Mike who was not cute or sexy. Over the next twenty minutes, she and Jackee recounted the names of every Mike they’d ever known, famous or not, recording them with a green crayon on the back of a Corona Light coaster, seventeen in all, starting with Michael Bolton and ending with Mike Huckaby, a fellow high school graduate who was now a technician for Georgia Pride Heating and Cooling.

“Now you tell me,” Donna challenged her friend, scanning the list before her. “Is there one of these who’s hard to look at?”

“You proved your point,” Jackee said.

“So it’s not my imagination?” Donna asked.

“Doesn’t look like it.”

“You promise you’re not just agreein’?”

“No, ma’am.”

Donna circled her index finger around the rim of her empty margarita glass. “But now I’ve gotta wonder,” she said. “Why is it true? I mean, don’t you find that interesting?”

Jackee shrugged her shoulders and sipped through her long straw, and it occurred to Donna that her Friday margarita nights at Rio Cantina, sometime over the past month or so, had mysteriously transformed from recreation into obligation.

As Jackee complained about the new smocks they had to wear as receptionists at LensCrafters in the mall, Donna looked out the window and spotted a stray beagle in the parking lot, pushing his nose into a Taco Bell bag someone had tossed out a car window. He moved on, indiscriminately sniffing at the tires of cars, the beds of yellow and purple pansies in the median, at a Wendy’s cup that rolled back and forth on the asphalt. Suddenly—and she felt a stab of guilt for having this thought—Donna found herself comparing Jackee’s companionship to that of a dog’s, loyal and true but content to sample and meander without thought or a plan of any kind. A dog would wag his tail and move on. Jackee, God bless her, would shrug her shoulders and move on.

Donna knew that Margaret, on the other hand, would have much to say about her Mike theory. They would spend an entire meal talking about it. They might even go to the Barnes & Noble and look at baby-naming books for clues. Donna loved Margaret’s company, and she learned something new every time they were together, if not a fact then a peculiar perspective on things. To Donna, it seemed as if Margaret was always sitting up high somewhere, like a TV football commentator in the Georgia Bulldog press box, looking down at everyone and everything, far enough away that she could find connections and make conclusions that were impossible at ground level.

“I’m sorry about your smock,” Donna said. “You need to say somethin’ to your boss about it.”

“I’m not gonna say anything to Mr. Wade about it.”

“But if you wanna change it back to the old smock you’ve gotta say somethin’.”

“Well, we all don’t have the boss of the year like you do, Donna.”

“Oh, you know what Mr. Tom told me today?” she said. “I can’t believe I didn’t know this—I felt so stupid.

“At home, see, I’ve always put my potatoes with my onions in the same plastic bucket under the sink because Momma always said that light would make ’em want to grow and the potatoes would get those little nubby things on ’em. You know what I mean, right? The eyes?

“So today, Mr. Tom comes up to me real serious like and says that I’m spoilin’ the potatoes by keepin’ ’em so close to the onions. Did you know that onions give off moisture that spoils the potatoes and makes ’em soft? Mr. Tom said they sweat like a marathon runner. And here I was all those years throwin’ ’em in the same basket together … and under the sink with all that moisture. Can you believe that? My momma didn’t even know that.”

Jackee wiped a dab of sour cream from the corner of her mouth, admiring her new manicure as her hand sank back down to the table. “Donna,” she said. “I gotta say I’m gettin’ a little tired of hearin’ about your job. I know it’s important to you, but can’t we just talk about makeup like we used to? I’ve got the new
Vogue
out in the car. You wanna look at it while we eat our fried ice cream?”

H
oney,” Margaret said. “Honey? You’d better get up. We’re gonna be late.”

Dewayne opened his eyes and smiled at what he saw: Margaret stood beside the futon, wearing her flannel Miss Piggy pajamas and Alvin Chipmunk slippers, whose toes sported sewn-on, grapefruit-size stuffed heads of the buck-toothed rodent.

“You look like you’re fixin’ to go out and play,” he said.

She fell to her knees on the futon and climbed across Dewayne’s body until she was stradling his waist. “Good idea,” she said. “Let’s stay home and play.”

Though Dewayne’s cast somewhat limited their options, the
two of them had been making love nearly every night when Dewayne was not at the station. Margaret had gone to Barnes & Noble and bought
The Joy of Sex
and
Art of the Female Orgasm
. She would try to read from them out loud as they lay on the couch, but Dewayne’s neck and cheeks would flush and he would try to change the subject.

So much had surprised Margaret—the springiness and coarse nature of male pubic hair … the way orgasms could come in strings of different-sized beads … the striking similarities between semen and juice of fresh okra and how they both felt and looked the same and smelled almost identical, a fragrance of milk and earth and chlorophyll with a slight note of Clorox. Noting the penile shape of the okra pod itself, Margaret was certain there had to exist in some culture on the planet a story that somehow tied the two together.

“You sure you wanna go with me?” Dewayne asked. “You don’t seem like a church-goin’ girl.”

“And what do you mean by that?” she asked.

“I just mean you ask an awful lot of questions. People don’t ask questions in church, Margaret. They just listen.”

Every Sunday morning, Dewayne would slowly roll off the edge of the bed so as not to awaken Margaret, then patter into the kitchen and eat his breakfast of a strawberry Pop Tart and bowl of Sugar Frosted Flakes awash in whole milk. Afterward, as quietly as possible, he would shower, attempt to tame the cowlick on the crown of his head with water then put on his white button shirt, blue pants, boots and a red-and-blue-striped tie.

Wearing his
SFD
windbreaker, Dewayne would slip from the house, out to the curb, the sounds of mockingbirds and cardinals chattering in the cool morning air, and he would find the
Reflector
, thick and heavy with the Sunday inserts whose coupons he would clip and file away later that day, and return the paper to the kitchen table for Margaret. Then, as if he were going off to some
secret men’s club in the middle of the forest, Dewayne would disappear from her side for half a day.

But now, Margaret did not want him away from her side for that long, so she decided to join him.

Beulah Land Hills Baptist Church was a massive, modern, gray-brick structure whose sanctuary had reflective black windows on the front and a steep A-shaped roofline that gave it the appearance of Darth Vader’s head. Connected to this centerpiece and jutting outward like airport terminals were sections that held a full-size gymnasium, day care, lodging for visiting clergy, a formal ballroom, two banquet halls, and an entire wing of Sunday school classrooms.

Like many predominantly white, conservative Selby churches, Beulah Land had abandoned its inner-city location to follow its white members, who continued to flee the city, into the northern, red-clay hills. Indeed, the affluent and upper middle class of Selby seemed to have unconsciously, unofficially seceded from the city to create a new community of their own on the edge of town, close to their beloved Canterbury Academy and Sugar Day. And the retailers seemed more than happy to oblige them. Target, Bed Bath & Beyond, Pier One, Borders, Orvis Outfitters all had signed letters of intent to locate in a new regional mall in north, white Selby. Nearly thirty years after desegregation, Margaret noted she was witnessing nothing short of a
re
segregation. The only whites who remained enamored with the inner-city architecture and fried-fish restaurants and hat-and-wig shops and Dollar stores and black, toothless men who pushed their shopping cart homes through the oak-canopied, redbrick streets were the newcomer Yankees, and they were snatching up historic mansions for a song, restoring them to their antebellum grandeur, then proceeding to “play” Deep South. They filled their homes with period antiques. They planted formal English gardens with topiary and fountains of cherubs and goats. They served their Jersey visitors cheese straws and pecans sautéed in butter and mint juleps in sterling-silver
cups, accompanied by antique linen napkins monogrammed in the initials of some anonymous, fading Georgia family.