Southern Living (12 page)

“You’re done for the day, right?” he asked. “I am, too. I told Pearline to call me if she needs me.”

The martinis arrived, clouded with olive juice and laced with ice crystals.

“I had someone ask me again today if I’d found a church yet—for the millionth time,” Randy said.

“So have you?” Margaret asked.

“Ha!”

“I’ve been to a few churches.”

“No way. Why?”

“How can you live here and not be curious about church?”

Margaret shared her stories about her visits to both white and black churches. She mused that the latter tended to be less uptight and infinitely more stylish with a stronger emphasis on fashion than architecture. She recalled a women’s choir dressed in asymmetrical, off-shoulder, gray silk dresses. She described heads wrapped in turbans the colors of turquoise and fuchsia and lemon yellow and orange, often paired with a gown that unpredictably swirled like a vortex around the torso. The men wore tailored suits that fit like driving gloves and dress shirts of colors and patterns that Margaret had not seen in the white-world retail landscape.

Next came the Helen Brown Baptist Church on Tifton Road. Drawn by its personal, intimate name, she was surprised to find a mammoth four-story structure that looked like a conventiondestination Holiday Inn with a steeple glued on top. They strategically built the church near an undeveloped exit of I-75, and a computerized marquee with rolling blood-red letters pulled potential worshipers off the freeway.

Inside, Margaret found an imposing circular information desk like those in the baggage claim areas of large airports. The greeters, all of them sitting before computer terminals, wore matching lavender polo shirts and cordless headsets like the ones on salesclerks at Old Navy.

On her way to the sanctuary, Margaret passed four nurseries with large windows. In one she counted sixteen rocking chairs all in a row, each of them occupied with a woman snuggling a worshiper’s baby.

Margaret was late, and they had run out of bulletins, so a kindly
usher gave her his. “Now this has some things on it that you don’t need to pay no attention to,” he said, “But it’ll let you know what’s goin’ on. Welcome to Helen Brown.”

Margaret noticed that the previous week’s offering and tithing amounted to $67,466.87. She also noted a disclaimer on the bottom of page eight:
Ushers, this is only a guideline, not a program. The HOLY SPIRIT is in charge—be prepared to change gears!! You NEVER KNOW!!!!

The sanctuary held eighteen hundred people, a half-scale orchestra, and two choirs whose lavender robes matched the upholstered pews. Hymnals were not necessary because of two minivan-size screens up high on the walls that showed inspirational photographs of landscapes when they were not providing lyrics, which were delivered with help from a bouncing white ball, à la “The Mickey Mouse Club,” guiding worshipers syllable by syllable through the songs.

Midway through the service, the lights in the sanctuary dimmed, and behind the minister, a hundred feet up, near the ceiling, curtains parted to reveal a secret room behind a wall of glass. Two women in white terry-cloth bathrobes took turns being guided into a white Lucite chair and dipped backward for full top-body immersion in what looked like an extra-large shampooing sink from a beauty salon. Margaret was surprised at how clinical and unemotional it was. Each woman leaned back for a second, into the water, then perfunctorily sat upright again, where an assistant quickly wrapped her head in a white towel to help each woman avoid getting any wetter, as if there was something wrong with the water and they had to minimize exposure.

Margaret compared the experience to a baptism she’d witnessed the previous week at a smaller, all-black church south of downtown. There, after an African American woman was submerged, she stood before the congregation, dripping wet in her metallic, kelly green dress, and after ringing out her long hair as if it were
a sopping towel, she leaned back and thrust her arms into the air and screamed “I’m here, Jesus—and I’m yours!” And then, as the standing congregation clapped and swayed with the music from the choir, she hugged the minister, turning his black suit even blacker, and then walked out into the congregation, where she hugged her children and her husband, all the while leaving a trail of holy water in her wake. Margaret had never been baptized, but she decided then that if she were going to be, it would happen at a black church where they did not worry about getting the carpet wet.

Randy caught the waitress’s attention. “Two more martinis, please,” he said. Already, Margaret’s head had begun to slowly spiral like an emerging whirlpool, and she began to drink water in hopes of slowing it down. She promised herself not to finish the second cocktail.

“I want to talk about your work at the
Reflector
,” Randy said. “You know what I think of your work. I think it’s brilliant.”

“I transcribe people’s thoughts, Randy. They are the authors. I’m just the secretary.”

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “You can’t get away with that, Margaret. You have an ear for voice and an eye for irony. Those inane ramblings are strategically, artistically strung together. And I want you to try some other things.” Randy sipped his martini. “I want you to do some writing of your own … with a byline, of course.”

“I’m not trained for it.”

“My undergrad was in English and anthropology,” he said. “My master’s psychology. You’re more qualified than most of those stupid people I’ve inherited in my newsroom.”

“I like the anonymity of Chatter,” Margaret said.

“But you’re wasting your talent. I’m just asking for a few profiles.”

“I don’t think so,” Margaret said.

“I’m thinking of a series that has your name all over it. Profiles
of the storybook, quintessential Southern characters—the endangered species of the Middle Georgia ecosystem.”

“I don’t know, Randy.”

Suddenly, one of the women from the table they’d been eavesdropping on bumped into, then slid against the back of Randy’s head. She wore a pale yellow cocktail dress, a large diamond ring, and a triple-strand choker of pearls that reminded Margaret of a dog collar.

“I’m so sorry, ’scuse me. I was just tryin’ to take a shortcut to the ladies’ room.”

She looked at Randy, then at Margaret.

“I think I know you, don’t I?” she asked her.

“I don’t think so,” Margaret answered.

“Are you sure?” she asked. “Don’t you work at Silk Flower Warehouse?”

“I work at the
Reflector
.”

“Oh! Are you a writer?”

“Yes,” Randy interrupted. “She’s a writer. A fabulous writer.”

“Oh, I just love writers ’cause they’re so interested in people, and I never finished school but I’ve been fixin’ to go back for a long time to get me an interior decoratin’ degree.”

She was drunk, and as her brown eyes locked onto Margaret’s with vigor she fell into the chair beside her, and the words, never stopping, began to flow from her mouth like water running down a playground slide. “Let me tell you that bartender over there with the muscles out to here he stopped me and said I looked like one of Charlie’s Angels and I thought that was really sweet to say and he said I was about the prettiest lady he’d seen in here for a long time and I had to tell him I’m a married woman and that’s my husband sittin’ right over there.”

From the corner of her eye, Margaret saw one of the men at the table, shooting quick, inquisitive glances toward them while pretending to listen to his friends.

“Did y’all order the tea tonight? That’s what you should write a story about is that tea. It’s got a little stick in it and it looks like the bamboo on the wallpaper in one of my bathrooms, and I just can’t believe they don’t have sweet tea anymore.”

Suddenly, the woman stopped talking and took a deep breath with eyes closed, as if she were meditating. Her tongue glided across orthodontically straightened teeth. She then leaned sideways, toward Randy, with eyes partly closed, and just when it appeared that she was going to pass out on his shoulder, she reversed direction and weaved the other way, then back and forth again, drunkenly but gracefully and with a rhythm, as if she were remembering a love song from her past. Margaret looked at Randy. He shrugged his shoulders.

“Suzanne? Sweetheart?”

The man from the table had walked up behind them. “I was wonderin’ where you went to,” he said. “Come on back to the table, honey, we’re missin’ you.”

She opened her eyes and looked at him. Saying nothing, she reached into her purse and pulled out a tube of Bermuda Sunset lipstick, which she twisted open and applied with a look of childlike concentration. When she finished there was a light blip of red that escaped the clean boundary of her top lip, reminding Margaret of the messy, northeast corner of Kansas on a map.

“I’m gonna have a baby,” she said, looking at Margaret.

“Suzanne?” the man said. “Honey?”

She then looked up him. “I said, Boone, ‘I’m gonna have a baby.’ ”

“Darlin’, you’ve had a little too much to drink. ’Scuse us, please,” he said to Margaret and Randy. “Y’all have been too kind. Come on now.”

“In July,” she said. “July fourteenth.”

First, thinking he hadn’t heard her correctly, he lowered his eyebrows and pushed his chin forward a few inches. When his wife
nodded, the look of agitation and puzzlement melted into one of surprise, and Margaret suddenly detected a quick, inexplicable change in his attitude toward this woman. Gently taking her arm, he helped her to her feet then guided her back to the table, his manicured thumb caressing a spot on her lower back.

“But how can that be, Suzanne?” he whispered to her.

“I was fixin’ to tell you, Boone—I had an operation. It’s a surprise.”

“But your doctor said it couldn’t be done.”

“I found me a new doctor.”

“Who?”

“One in Atlanta.”

“When did you do this?”

Pausing for a moment, she finally said, “Last year. When I said I was goin’ down to St. Simon’s with John David for that antiques show. That’s when I did it.”

“And you’re really pregnant?”

“Why won’t you believe me?”

After seating her, he took away her half-empty glass of chardonnay and ordered a cup of coffee. Margaret noticed that the ice had melted in the four glasses of untouched lychee tea.

Randy pushed a fork into his guava cobbler. “Do you think it’s something in the air?” he asked Margaret. “Do you think it comes from a lifetime of breathing in that acrid smell of the paper mill? I don’t know how much more weirdness I can absorb.”

Randy dropped Margaret off at the
Reflector
to get her car, and as she emerged from his BMW she saw, leaning against the building with his hands in his pockets, Dewayne.

Somewhat self-conscious because of her martini buzz, Margaret began walking toward him, and as she grew nearer he pushed himself away from the tan-brick wall and brought his hands behind his back, locking his fingers.

“Miss Margaret?” he said, nodding his head. He wore a white shirt and a too-short, blue-and-white striped tie that sloped down and outward, over his belly like a ski jump.

“Hello,” she said.

“Ma’am.”

“Have you been waiting for me?”

“I have.”

“How’d you know where to find me?”

“Oh, I know a lotta people who know a lotta people.”

“That sure makes me comfortable,” Margaret deadpanned, repositioning the strap of her purse on her shoulder. Reminiscent of Indian moccasins, it was a tan, leather child’s purse with fringe made of turquoise beads, which she had bought at the Salvation Army thrift store on Anthony Road.

Dewayne looked over Margaret’s shoulder, toward the street, as Randy’s car suddenly sped away. After disgorging Margaret, it had idled there in the middle of Cotton Avenue, the driver hiding behind dark green, tinted windows as he watched the two of them converse.

“I haven’t seen you at Waffle House lately,” she said.

“I’ve been workin’ at the station down on Houston Road. They’re short-staffed this month. Some guys got called out on reserve.”

“Where do you usually work?”

“In the north Selby station. Right there on Vineville.”

As he talked about his work, Margaret snatched glances at his body—arms, shoulders, his neck and lips—whenever his eyes would look upward or sideways or down for a second or two, and this did not give her much opportunity because he stared at Margaret in the eyes more than anyone she could remember, other than a salesperson or pro-lifer, and it made her feel simultaneously vulnerable and treasured. He was so reverential and polite and unthreatening, the way he kept his voice soft and arms behind his back.

“So I was wonderin’,” he said. “Would you like to go out with me?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Margaret said.

“You don’t know?”

“I mean I don’t know what to say.”

“How about yes?”

“I just don’t go out on dates,” Margaret said. “I just never have. It’s just … something I don’t do.”

“Well, if it makes you feel any better, I don’t do this much either.”

“Why not?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “Shy, I guess. So don’t make me beg like a dog here. How about you let me take you out for a nice meal. I mean, I’d pay for it and everything.”

Margaret laughed. “How old are you?” she asked.

“Twenty-four.”

“I’m four years older.”

“Is that a problem?”

Her defenses and verbal skills somewhat numbed by two martinis, she sighed in resignation, took a pen and Kroger receipt from her purse, and scribbled down her phone number.

“Don’t be expecting some experienced older woman.”

“Ma’am?”

“You’re going to be disappointed,” she said. “I’m sure we have nothing in common.”

“Do you like to eat?”

“Yes.”

“Then we’ll do just fine.”

Once inside the building, she watched him through the window as he crossed the street and climbed into a clean, blue Ford pickup. Never in her life had Margaret imagined she would be going on a date with someone who drove a pickup. She wondered if it had bucket seats and what kind of stations were programmed on the radio. And why did they call them pickup trucks?