Revenge of the Kudzu Debutantes (2 page)

“Nita,” Charles said sharply.

She jumped. The wooden spoon in her hand clattered to the floor. “I’ll pick up the shirts,” she promised her husband. “I won’t forget.”

Nita turned the Mercedes left on Main Street and headed toward the newer section of town where the Broadwells lived in a massive new house of indiscriminate architecture, surrounded by other massive new houses of indiscriminate architecture. The area was called River Oaks and it was popular among the young upper middle class and corporate transferees who came in through DuPont. As she drove, Nita was remembering the way Jimmy Lee Motes looked this morning when she left him standing out by her pool, his tool belt slung low on his hips and a kind of rumpled, sleepy-boy look about him. He had smiled drowsily when she came out to ask if he wanted a cup of coffee.

“No thanks,” he said. “I don’t drink coffee.” His hair was brown and glossy and he kept it tucked behind his ears. Watching him smile, something tugged deep in her belly.

“I have to run some errands,” Nita said, trying to sound casual. “Will you still be here when I get back?”

He smiled again. His eyes were dark and opaque as a mirror. “I’ll be here until four,” he said.

Remembering, Nita clamped her foot down heavily on the accelerator. If she hurried, he might still be there. The big Mercedes glided over the bricked streets, past restaurants, shops, and antique stores, past the small upscale laundry where her husband’s shirts hung, neglected and forlorn as orphaned children, behind the big plate-glass window.

L
AVONNE
Z
IBOLSKY HAD
dreamt again of her dead mother, and she spent the following day struggling with the feelings of foreboding and remorse that these dreams always brought. At forty-six, Lavonne considered herself too old for psychotherapy, but there were times in between her eating binges when she realized that the increasing frequency of her dreams might foreshadow something life-altering. There were moments when she wondered if the dreams and the startling memories they evoked might be universal, times when she questioned whether middle age might be nothing more than long-submerged guilt and regret rising to the surface of the mind like corpses in a rain-soaked field. There were other times when she wondered if maybe she didn’t have a hormonal imbalance brought on by menopause or food allergies or blood sugar fluctuations.

The afternoon after the latest dream, Lavonne stood in her sunroom eating Rocky Road ice cream out of the carton and watching her neighbor, Myra Redmon, plant azaleas. Lavonne was supposed to be planning her husband’s firm’s dinner party, but after a morning spent making futile phone calls, she had pretty much given up. The party was less than a week away and she had yet to find a caterer. She had called everyone she knew between here and Atlanta, and no one could do it on such short notice. The party, an annual affair put on for the firm’s clients and office staff, was a very big deal to Leonard and his law partners, Charles Broadwell and Trevor Boone. Lavonne knew if she didn’t find a caterer and the party was a disaster, the blame would fall squarely on her shoulders. Never mind that Charles’s mother, Virginia, who had handled the party for the last fifteen years, had decided at the last minute to dump it on the wives. Never mind that Nita Broadwell, who went around these days in her own dreamy little world, and Eadie Boone, whose marriage to Trevor appeared to be finally crumbling to dust, had been no help whatsoever. None of that would matter if the party turned out to be a disaster. The blame would rest solely on Lavonne’s big round shoulders. Hence the Rocky Road ice cream.

Lavonne finished off the ice cream and took the empty carton into the kitchen and tossed it into the trash. She stood at the refrigerator with the door open and tried not to think about the party. After awhile she decided on a bagel. A bagel might be just the thing to fill the creeping emptiness that threatened, at times, to overwhelm her. She took the cream cheese out of the refrigerator and shoved a bagel into the toaster. When it had crisped, she smeared it with cheese, put it on a plate, and went back to the sunroom.

Gray clouds scuttled across the blue sky. Sunlight fell sporadically through the long windows. Lavonne finished the bagel and licked the cream cheese off her sticky fingers, feeling the usual sense of regret and longing she felt after returning from Shapiro’s Bakery. She hadn’t had a decent bagel since she left Cleveland.
Shalom Ya’ll
the sign in Shapiro’s window read, but in nearly eighteen years of patronage Lavonne had yet to purchase a bagel that even remotely tasted like the ones she had grown up eating at Finkelstein’s down on Third Street.

Lavonne ran her finger along the edge of her plate and sat despondently at the window watching Myra Redmon work. Myra had bleached blonde hair and a misshapen upper lip, the result of a bad collagen job that she tried to disguise with an elaborately drawn line of lipstick. Myra and Nita Broadwell’s snobbish mother-in-law, Virginia, had grown up together and were tight as Siamese twins. They had married well and spent their earlier years climbing Ithaca’s wobbly social ladder, and once at the top, banded together to exclude the daughters of people they considered unworthy for membership in the Ithaca Cotillion and the Junior League. Myra’s father had truck farmed and Virginia’s had worked for the railroad, but Myra’s great-great-grandfather had built a sprawling plantation long before the Civil War and Virginia’s had once owned two dozen raggedy slaves. In the South, it didn’t matter what your father did or whether you grew up with money. All that mattered was the kind of people you came from, and if you went back far enough, Myra and Virginia had come from gentry, and everyone in Ithaca knew it. Myra was sixty-three years old and had a heart as rusty and sharp as barbed wire, but she played tennis four times a week and had legs like a college freshman.

Lavonne went into the kitchen, put the plate in the dishwasher, and opened her Daytimer to the list of things she must accomplish today. Across the top of the page she had written
Find caterer or leave town.
Beneath that she had written,
Find caterer or have nervous breakdown.
Underneath that she had written,
Call Eadie and Nita and beg them to help me find caterer.
She called Eadie and left a message on her cell phone. She glanced through her kitchen bay window to the Broadwell’s big house next door, but Nita’s Mercedes was not in the drive. She would call her later. But if she called her later she might accidentally get Charles Broadwell on the phone. This was a chance Lavonne wasn’t willing to take. She went to the phone, called Nita, and left a message on her machine.

Lavonne supposed it was not unusual for a woman to hate her husband’s law partner. She would have preferred to tell Charles Broadwell to go fuck himself years ago, but, as Leonard was constantly reminding her,
We live in the South now and you can’t go around saying things like that, Lavonne. My God, you’ll ruin me if you don’t learn to keep your mouth shut.

The move south had not been her idea. Leonard had inherited enough money when his father died to go looking for a needy partnership, but he had done so without consulting her. She had been too busy running her own accounting practice to worry about what her husband was doing. It was tax season and he had left her enshrined in her office happily going over her clients’ receipts and payroll records. Too focused on her business to keep up with anything else, she had thought he was going south for a vacation. He returned several weeks later, tanned and happy, and announced they were moving to Ithaca, Georgia. He had found the perfect firm.

Boone & Broadwell.
The firm was old and prestigious, the founders’ sons respectable but cash-poor; it seemed a match made in heaven. Leonard Zibolsky dreamed of moonlight and magnolias, soft subservient Southern girls, and the white columns of Tara. Lavonne sold her accounting business, packed up her books and remaining office goods, and went into mourning. Eight months later they were living in a big expensive house in a small south Georgia town where everyone had known everyone else’s secrets for generations. Life moved placidly, heat shimmered over the lush green landscape, and Cleveland, Ohio, seemed as far away as the gray cratered surface of the moon.

It was hard to believe she had been here eighteen years. Eighteen years in the Banana Republic, and what did she have to show for it? A husband who was rarely home, two daughters who were nearly grown and didn’t seem to need her anymore, and a life that felt increasingly like somewhere she didn’t belong.

Through the bay window she could see the good-looking carpenter Nita had hired to fix her pool house loading his tools into the back of his truck. He had long black hair and wide shoulders. From this distance, he looked a little like Johnny Depp. Lavonne wondered if there was anything she could find for him to do around her house.

The phone rang and she went to check the caller ID. It was Leonard. She let it ring. The last person in the world she wanted to talk to was her husband. She and Leonard could go days without having a conversation, but in the week since Virginia Broadwell dumped the firm’s party in Lavonne’s lap he’d been calling her relentlessly to see if she had found a caterer for the party. Every night when he returned home from work it was the first thing he asked her. It was bad enough she had to attend the damn party, bad enough she had to squeeze into a new dress and stand around making small talk with people she saw only once a year. But now she also had to be responsible for making sure the wretched dinner was a success and be hounded by her husband in the process.

The feeling of grief she had carried with her since awakening from the dream about her mother lengthened and grew into a kind of emptiness she could not fill no matter how hard she tried. She was not hungry, but she needed to eat. Lavonne closed up her Daytimer. Louise was picking Ashley up at cheerleading practice and they were having dinner at the mall. She glanced at the clock and thought about making a run to Burger King. A Whopper might be just the thing to settle her queasy stomach. A cheeseburger might be just the thing to take her mind off the party, the idea of which hovered at the edge of her consciousness like a bad dream, a promise of impending disaster, gunfire on a darkened street, a hint of smoke on the Hindenburg.

As soon as this party’s over I’ll go on a diet,
she thought, leaning to take her car keys out of her purse.
As soon as this party’s over I’ll go on a diet and lose sixty pounds and figure out what I need to do to make me happy again.

She went out through the garage door, waving once at Nita’s good-looking carpenter, who smiled and waved back.

CHAPTER

TWO

J
IMMY
L
EE
M
OTES
was still there when Nita arrived home, loading his tools into a small blue pickup truck with a bumper sticker that read
American by Birth, Southern by the Grace of God.
Nita liked that. It made her feel warm and slightly patriotic. She parked beside him in the driveway and the children climbed out and Whitney said, “Hey” and gave him a little wave.

“Hey,” Jimmy Lee said.

Logan put his head down and slouched into the house, ignoring Jimmy Lee.

Nita slid out of the car. Jimmy Lee closed the lid on his tool chest, clamping down the combination lock. His arms were thick and hard as strands of coiled wire. He was singing softly to himself,
And I want to lay with you in the desert tonight with a million stars in the sky. . . .

“How’d it go today?” Nita said, half-recognizing the song. It sounded like something the Eagles would sing. The Eagles were one of her favorite bands. She liked the way he could sing like that, right out in the open without being self-conscious or shy about it at all. He sang as good as he looked.

“Okay, I guess. I should be able to finish up and get out of your hair maybe as soon as tomorrow.”

“Oh you aren’t in my hair,” Nita said quickly. She blushed crimson and wondered why, when she was around him, her mouth seemed to work like it was disconnected from her brain. He had been working at her house for nearly three weeks now.

He grinned and said, “I wish everyone I worked for was as nice as you.”

She could stand here talking to him all day but she realized he was probably in a hurry to get home. He wore no wedding ring but she imagined he had at least one girlfriend. A man who looked like him probably had at least a dozen girlfriends. She swung her purse strap up on her shoulder, but as she did the soft-porn romance novel slid out and landed with a loud
smack
on the driveway between them.

Jimmy Lee leaned over and picked up the novel and handed it to her, glancing at the title. He grinned, a long slow grin that made her feel like something heavy rested on her chest. A furniture truck rumbled down the street. Great flat-bottomed clouds hung from a blue sky. Nita’s face glowed like a space heater. She stuck the book in her purse and pretended to look for her keys.

“Good reading?” he said.

“It’s for a friend,” she said.

His teeth were white and straight. “Well, I’ll see you in the morning then.”

She smiled and looked at his chin. “Okay,” she said.

N
ITA FED THE
children early, helped Whitney with her homework, and then went upstairs, still thinking about Jimmy Lee’s grin and the way it made her feel, hollow-stomached and light-headed, the way you feel when you climb to the top of a swaying ladder or stand too close to the edge of a tall building. She opened her closet and rummaged around until she found a black see-through camisole she had bought weeks ago at the Victoria’s Secret at the mall. Nita had never been one to wear sexy underwear, but under the influence of her porno romance novels and Jimmy Lee Motes’s intoxicating presence, she was beginning to loosen up a bit. She was beginning to feel like there were whole parts of herself coming to light, parts she only suspected before but had never clearly appreciated—a certain luminous quality to the skin of her wrist, the velvety feel of her earlobe, the way her breasts felt nestled beneath a silk nightgown.

She ran herself a hot bath, lit a few candles, sprinkled the water liberally with lavender oil, and then climbed in to wait for her husband to come home.

N
ITA DIDN’T EVEN
know she was sexually repressed until she went to Lee Anne Bales’s Passion Party. It was one of those parties where instead of Tupperware the hostess sells flavored skin lotions and edible panties and a variety of innovative sex toys. Only Lee Anne didn’t call them sex toys, she called them Passion Playthings. Lee Ann served light hor d’oeuvres and mimosas and after awhile she dimmed the lights and pulled the drapes and gave a little talk about how these parties weren’t for single women or sex perverts, but were for “Christian married ladies who wanted to put a little good clean fun into their sex lives within the bounds of holy matrimony, of course.”

Helen Haynes said “Whoeee!” and knocked her mimosa over, and they all had a good laugh about that, and then Lee Anne passed around a silver tray covered in these little silver bells. Lee Anne called them her Jeza-bells. The idea was that Lee Anne would read from a script provided by the Passion Party people, and anytime she hit on a subject where one of her guests had firsthand knowledge, some kind of spicy sexual escapade she might have participated in with her husband, the guest would ring her little bell. Nita was thirty-eight at the time, the same age as Lee Anne, but most of the other women at the party were younger, in their late twenties and early thirties, and it occurred to Nita, listening to all those little silver bells going off as the party wore on, that sometime between her generation and theirs, a lot of sexual liberation had been going on. Nita had found herself wishing that Lavonne Zibolsky was here. Lavonne was seven years older than Nita and she was from up North, where people kept to themselves and women didn’t seem to feel a need to attend Passion Parties. Nita guessed that Lavonne and Leonard Zibolsky’s sex life was probably even more uninspired than her and Charles’s, which wasn’t something that made Nita particularly happy; it just would have been nice to have a little support. She wished her best friend, Eadie Boone, had been invited but Lee Anne hadn’t asked Eadie, naturally, because no one wanted to listen to Eadie’s bell ringing continuously, no one wanted to put up with that kind of pressure.

Lee Anne passed around another pitcher of mimosas and after awhile the bell ringing got louder and more sustained and the women quit putting their hands over their mouths when they rang, and some of the bolder ones even launched into personal stories that no one really wanted to hear. Nita sat quietly on the sofa, listening, while humiliation rolled over her like a cloud of insecticide. That whole evening she rang her little bell only twice.

The Passion Party had been a year ago, when Nita was still reading her Harlequin Romances, and immediately afterward she graduated to the hard-core heaving-bosom novels she was addicted to now. She told herself she read these to come up with ideas she and Charles could use at home, but so far she hadn’t worked up the courage to suggest anything.

Still, Nita was determined to sexually liberate herself no matter what it took. She was pretty sure there was nothing sadder than a thirty-nine-year-old woman who had never had an orgasm. She watched endless television talk shows that dealt with sexual intimacy, and late one night she happened across a show for twenty-somethings run by two good-looking young men, one of them a doctor and the other a tough-talking New Yorker who looked and sounded like a Mafia hit man. The studio audience would stand up and ask about things that made Nita squirm and cover her mouth in embarrassment. The sex therapists answered the questions calmly, as if they were telling someone how to break down a carburetor or fix a horse race at Pimlico. Nita pulled the covers up to hide her face while beside her in the darkened room Charles clicked and snored and hummed like an old generator.

The more talk shows Nita watched, the more she realized she had a lot of studying to do if she was ever going to catch up with the rest of the sexual revolution. There were times she thought it just might not be possible. There were moments she felt like a ten-year-old trying to cram for a college physics exam. After awhile she decided it might be best if she quit watching the talk shows and maybe found a sex therapist who was a little closer to her own hang-ups and insecurities. The last thing Nita wanted was a sex therapist who talked openly about sex, so after a few weeks of furtively poking through the shelves of local bookstores she worked up the courage to get on the Internet and order a book written by Dr. Simon Ledbetter. Dr. Ledbetter billed himself as a Christian sex therapist and his books were explicit but based on biblical scripture, which somehow made it more acceptable to Nita. Oral sex, for example, was okay based on Dr. Ledbetter’s reading of several obscure passages from Joshua, and variations in position were allowable according to his interpretation of Proverbs.

Nita studied Dr. Ledbetter’s books diligently, highlighting passages she thought pertinent with a yellow marker, and in addition to the numerous variations in sexual position and multiple orgasms and assorted fetishes, she managed to learn quite a bit about the Bible, too.

N
ITA FELL ASLEEP
in the tub and awoke when the book she had been reading sank with a heavy thumping sound into the water. The book was
The Joy of Married Christian Sex,
and she had fallen asleep during the chapter on bondage. She quickly retrieved the book and tried to dry the pages with a towel. From the back cover Dr. Ledbetter, a balding, middle-aged man wearing Coke-bottle glasses and a tweed jacket, watched her sadly.

She put the book on the floor register to dry, slipped on her bathrobe, and went downstairs to check on the children. They were playing video games in front of the big-screen TV.

“Did you two finish your homework?” Nita asked.

“Why are you wearing your pajamas?” Whitney said, clutching her controller to her chest. “It’s not bedtime.”

Nita went to the bar and poured herself a glass of wine. She figured she had a two-hour window of opportunity to seduce her husband, between the time the children finished their homework and immersed themselves in video games and the time they went to bed, and if Charles didn’t hurry, the window would be closed. It was six-thirty and he should be home by now. Sometimes he had dinner at the club. If he played golf with a big client he might have stayed to buy the client dinner. She checked the answering machine, but the only message was from Lavonne Zibolsky, reminding her about the lunch meeting tomorrow to discuss the firm’s dinner party. Lavonne’s voice sounded hard and nasal. Even after so many years in the South, Lavonne still clung stubbornly to her Yankee accent.

Nita loved Lavonne in spite of the odd clipped way in which she spoke and the strange phrases she persisted in using, like calling a Coca-cola a “pop” and saying “you guys” instead of “ya’ll.” Nita loved her in spite of the way Lavonne used four-letter words with shocking regularity and said whatever she thought no matter who she offended. It was her Yankee ways that kept most of the people they socialized with at arm’s length, just like it was Eadie Boone’s flaunting of social conventions that kept her on the outlaw fringe of Barron Hall society. “I’ve asked Eadie to come, too, but I won’t blame her if she doesn’t, given her current situation with Trevor and all,” Lavonne said and hung up.

Nita couldn’t imagine Eadie coming to the lunch meeting either. Eadie had never been very good about helping with firm functions, even when she and Trevor were happily married, and Nita couldn’t imagine she’d bother to show up and help plan one she wasn’t even invited to. Nita and Eadie had graduated from public high school in the same class but they’d never really been friends until after Eadie had married Trevor Boone and moved back to Ithaca from Athens. In high school, Nita had always been afraid of Eadie Wilkens. She ran with a rough group of kids who wore heavy eye makeup and nose rings and were always in trouble for things like painting the school mascot black and setting fire to the home ec room.

Nita had been a good girl all her life, an honor roll student and student council representative who sang in the church choir; a girl like Eadie Wilkens was a mystery to her. It wasn’t until Nita’s senior year of high school, when she was being crowned Homecoming Queen and Eadie stole the show by standing on her head in the bleachers (she wasn’t wearing any underwear), that Nita had a sudden epiphany and realized for the first time why Eadie Wilkens was the way she was. Anyone else would have hated Eadie for stealing the show the way she did, but Nita understood with a sudden flash of insight that everything Eadie did was just her way of protecting herself. Eadie had grown up without a daddy or brothers or male cousins to look after her, and a rebellious reputation was the best chance she had of putting up a force field. Standing on the fifty-yard line with the overhead lights shimmering through her crown like a halo, Nita realized if she’d been raised the way Eadie’d been raised, without a good home and a good family and a decent place to live, she might’ve turned out the same sad way. For the first time in her life, she felt sorry for Eadie Wilkens. Years later, after Eadie had married Trevor Boone and returned to Ithaca, she’d walked into Boone & Broadwell where Nita was working as a secretary and, taking one look at Nita, grinned and said, “Hey, I remember you. You were the only girl who was ever nice to me in high school.” Eighteen years later she and Nita were still friends.

Nita climbed the stairs with her glass of wine. Dr. Ledbetter was where she had left him, lying facedown on the floor. She picked him up and put him on the bed and then went around the room dimming the lamps and lighting a few candles, which she placed on the tables closest to the bed.

After awhile she climbed into bed and lay staring at the ceiling and trying to imagine her husband coming through the door. She rehearsed several seduction scenes in her mind. Dr. Ledbetter was a big believer in using fantasy to put the zip back into a stagnant marriage, and he had set up several scenarios, including dialogue, to use during foreplay. The only one she could even remotely imagine Charles agreeing to was the Lion Tamer and the Naughty Trapeze Girl. For some reason she could imagine Charles wearing boots and carrying a whip. But this fantasy required installation of some ceiling hardware that Nita would never be able to explain to the children.

She read the other scripts, finding that the dialogue pretty much followed the same format. After awhile Nita realized that she had been reading the same monotonous dialogue in numerous soft-porn romance novels. She had always assumed that porno romance novelists must have incredibly varied and innovative sex lives, but now she had a sudden image of a middle-aged librarian locked in a small room poring over sex manuals and entering the dialogue, verbatim, into an endless stream of repetitive novels. It was shocking. It made her wonder if she had wasted a year of her life immersed in a world of false sex and romance. Nita let the book drop. She crossed her hands on her chest and stared at the ceiling. She wondered how hard it would be to install a trapeze. She wondered which way the ceiling joists ran.