Southern Living (34 page)

M
ichael Kalcheski was dressed in a double-breasted, blue-wool Hugo Boss suit and a maroon tie with green polka dots the shape of kumquats. As he approached Donna, she noticed he was carrying a black-plastic tray of sushi from the fish department. Donna looked at her watch—he was thirty minutes early.

“You want to share my sushi?”

“What kind is it?”

Lord, did this man smell good!

“Dynamite roll—the spicy tuna.”

“Sure. That’d be nice.”

“Is there someplace quiet we can go?”

Donna looked over her right shoulder. “Well, we could use the employee lounge, but it’s against regulation for customers to be in
there. There’s some benches for the smokers out back on the loading dock. How about that?”

His face crinkled up in disagreement then relaxed again with the arrival of a new idea. “What about that bench in front of the TCBY next door?”

They walked past the cashier stations, toward the front door. Donna saw Koquita look up and give her a wink as she dragged a plastic bag of Wonder Bread over the glowing red window of the scanner.

As they sat down, Michael pulled two pairs of chopsticks from his back pocket and handed one to Donna.

“Oh, I’ve never used chopsticks,” she said.

“They’re not hard. You want to learn?”

“Course I do.”

He pulled them from the red-paper sheath, which he crumbled in his hand and set on the bench beside them. (Donna quickly grabbed it and shoved it into her pocket. At the employee morning meeting just three days ago Mr. Tom had told them about a growing problem of litter in the parking lot.) The chopsticks were fused together except at their very ends, and he pulled on these until there was a snap of breaking wood.

“Okay,” he said, taking Donna’s right hand and positioning the sticks in her fingers. She studied them in her hand, pressing them against her thumb as he told her to do, all the while conscious of his warm fingers confidently moving about her hand.

“Okay, now move the top one,” he said. “With your middle finger. That’s good, that’s good.… Like a puppet’s mouth moving open and shut. Like that. Yes, like that.”

Michael held up the tray of sushi rounds. “Okay, now try grabbing one of these.”

“There is no way I’m gonna do that,” she said, laughing.

“Sure there is.”

“They’re so big!”

“You can do it. See? That’s great!”

It bothered her that he had not yet said her name out loud. Donna cautiously brought the piece of sushi up toward her mouth.

“Now what?” she asked, stopping six inches from her face. “I am not gonna fit this whole thing in my mouth.”

“So bite half. Those luscious lips can handle that.”

She did so—the compliment warming her inside—but her teeth did not cut through the papery nori, and the piece of sushi was stuck, as the corner of a trench coat gets shut in a car door, and Donna suddenly grew anxious. What was the least embarrassing way to handle this situation? Should she open her mouth and let it all fall into her cupped hand? Should she reach up and twist it with her other hand until the paper tore?

“Here,” he said. “Let me help.”

Michael brought his fingers to her lips—they gently brushed her mouth as he found a firm hold on the sushi. “Okay,” he said. “Bear down on that nori. Cut it with your teeth. Good.” Freed from embarrassment, she closed her mouth and chewed.

“Do you like spicy?” he asked. Donna nodded.

He tore open the small packet of soy with his teeth, squeezed it into the clear-plastic lid of the container, and he mixed in a dab of the wasabi, stirring with the blunt end of his chopstick and turning the mixture into a pistachio-chocolate color.

“So tell me about your job,” he said. “I hear you’re really good at what you do.”

“From who?” she asked.

“Tom Green.”

“You know Mr. Tom?”

“We’re in the same Sunday school class.”

“For real?”

Michael nodded. “Did you always work at Kroger?” he asked.

Donna looked down at the sushi and wished she would have brought a bag of baby carrots with her … or some of the precut celery, radish, and cauliflower chunks she faithfully packaged each day for people to buy (though very few did) with their fat-laden
cold-cut sandwiches slathered in mayonnaise. (She’d told her boss, “If we can’t get ’em to eat low-fat then we can increase their roughage, which’ll help push all that poison outta their bodies faster.”)

“I used to be a beauty technician for Lancôme at Dillard’s.”

“No kidding? Then we’ve got something in common.”

“What’s that?” she asked.

“I work with faces, too. I’m a reconstructive surgeon.”

Donna drew back and looked at him in surprise. “You’re a plastic surgeon?” she asked.

“We don’t like to call it that, but … yeah.”

Donna looked away. “No kiddin’,” she said.

He looked at her expectantly, but Donna would not meet his eyes. Instead, she focused on the chopsticks in her slowly shifting fingers.

“Tom told me what happened,” he said. “He asked me to help you.”

She whipped her head in surprise and looked him in the eye. “What?” she snapped.

“He wants to help you.”

“Help me what?”

“Repair that gorgeous face of yours.”

“What?” Donna shot up to her feet, folding her arms across her chest.

“It wouldn’t take much. I rebuild entire noses … jaws … this is nothing.”

“Well, I have certainly been the stupidest girl in the universe.”

“Come again?”

“Here I was, thinkin’ you were actually likin’ me, and I’m just a … damn … welfare case!” Donna said, already regretting the curse that had escaped her lips. “You feel sorry for me!”

“No, that’s not true.”

“I can’t stand for someone to feel sorry for me!”

“I don’t …”

“Did you and Mr. Tom ever stop to think that I just might happen to like myself the way I am? I may have a little ol’ line across my face and my smile may be messed up a little, but I’m sure not as bad off as Adrian.”

“I can see why you’re upset, but Tom only wanted to help you. Are you saying you’ve never considered fixing it?”

Donna reached down and picked a napkin off the bench, which she used to wipe her eyes. She then started to pick at a crusty spot of dried strawberry flesh near the bottom of her uniform top.

She nodded. “Maybe. Used to. I’d be lyin’ if I said I didn’t.”

“Why didn’t you do something after the accident?”

“Because …”

Donna sat back down, a vacant, defeated look on her face as she watched a new pearl-white Toyota 4-Runner creep by, its female Japanese driver craning her neck toward the sidewalk, looking for her husband who had not yet been disgorged from the electric sliding doors of the grocery store.

Because my daddy didn’t want me to … because my daddy misses my momma, probably even more than I do, and I just want to keep him happy … because my daddy uses God to hand out guilt like it was an endless roll of paper towels, and I’m just now gettin’ around to reachin’ up to stop that spinnin’ roll and pick up the flood of paper from around my feet and bag it and throw it all away … because I didn’t have the money myself, and by the time I finally could build some savings—and not spend my whole salary at the mall and Rio Cantina—I’d convinced myself that it was okay, and that I didn’t really need a face … because I’ve learned, or maybe I’m just foolin’ myself, that I’d rather just be some old, warty, hard turban squash ’cause you don’t have to tiptoe through life worryin’ about gettin’ hurt
.

“Because what?” he asked.

Donna sighed, turned toward Michael and looked him in the eyes. “Because I just didn’t get around to it, I guess.”

***

Donna knocked on Tom Green’s office door. There was a pause and then, “Come in.”

On the phone, he motioned for Donna to sit down, giving her an exaggerated look of curiosity because he’d never seen her look so steamed up and red in the neck. She obediently fell into the chrome-and-gray Herculon chair whose seat cushion was stained with pen ink and soda spills. As Mr. Tom spoke, he tried to diffuse her anger by playing with the plastic Mr. Potato Head on his desk, sticking ears where the eyes should be, a tongue on top of the head, a bow tie for a mouth. Donna did not smile. She rapidly tapped the arms of the chair with her fingers.

Finally, he hung up. “Oh, Donna, what a day,” he said, trying to buy more cooldown time because he had never seen her this mad. “You know I’m on the board of the downtown Rotary Club, right? Well, luck has it that we just happen to be the last club in the entire country that is dragging its heels on opening membership to women. And now the national office is threatening to revoke our charter … 
and
National Public Radio’s coming to town to do a story. Not the hacks from Atlanta either. Noah Adams himself. That’s the kind of day I’m having.

“So … what gives, girl?”

Donna blew: “You wanna know what gives? I’ll tell you what gives. I just had lunch with your friend Michael Kalcheski.”

“So he finally talked to you.”

“Oh, yeah, he talked to me all right … and I have never been so embarrassed in all my life.”

“What?”

“All that time he spent tryin’ to win my trust, and I thought he was sweet on me.”

“Oh, no.”

“Yep. And boy did I feel stupid today. Thank you soooo much, Mr. Tom.”

Tom Green stood up and walked around his desk to sit in the chair next to Donna.

“You’ve got to know I would never do anything to hurt your feelings,” he said. “I have more respect for you than anyone else in this store. Mike was just gonna give you a really good deal. It sounded like a good thing.”

Donna stood up, as if they were children playing school, and the roles of pupil and teacher had suddenly been reversed.

“How could you do this to me?” she asked.

“I only wanted to help.”

“What makes you think I’m not happy the way I am?”

Tom Green picked up a yellow No. 2 pencil and began tapping it on the desktop. “Donna, you were heartbroken when Robbie dumped you. I was heartbroken to watch it all. Don’t you remember crying in the bathroom all those times?”

“But that was a long time ago!” she said. “I’m over that. I’m a different person now, Mr. Tom. I’m way beyond Robbie. Don’t you like me the way I am now?”

“Donna …”

“Answer me, Mr. Tom.”

“Of course I do. God, Donna, if you had any idea …”

Donna sat back down, next to him, and when she looked at Tom Green in the eyes he quickly looked down, as if her gaze had burned him, and he stared at his scuffed, black Rockport loafers that were nervously scraping the floor.

R
andy’s head materialized over Margaret’s gray cubicle wall.

“Hey,” he said. “Let’s go to the Forsyth Room for lunch. My treat.”

Margaret looked up from her monitor. “I’m not sure I’m talking to you anymore,” she said.

Like a puppet whose scene has ended, he suddenly dropped beneath the gray-upholstered wall. Margaret could hear him wheeling Harriet’s empty desk chair around the cubicle.

“Knock, knock,” he said, pushing the chair to a spot beside hers, then sitting down. “Okay, what gives? You’ve been increasingly distant and cool.”

“The snide little editor’s comments you’ve been putting into Chatter,” she answered.

“I thought you’d like those.”

“I don’t. You know that. It goes against the whole philosophy of the column—to let people speak without fear of retribution.”

Randy loosened his tie even though the top button of his pink, oxford-cloth shirt already was undone. He had gained sixteen pounds during his tenure in Selby, thanks largely to Rodney Washington, the new cook in the cafeteria who served Southern specials daily, comfort staples that the tortured soul of Randy Whitestone could not refuse, including fried okra, pork chops, biscuits smothered in bacon gravy, pieces of macaroon pie that were four inches tall, and a breakfast-time egg casserole with canned green chilis and four different versions of cured pork. On average, Randy now drank six glasses of sweet tea a day.

“Listen, Margaret,” he said. “Honestly?”

She nodded.

“Chatter’s getting flat. It doesn’t have the same sparkle that it used to. I’m just trying to make it a little more effervescent.”

“What do you mean?”

“I think you’ve grown sweet on these natives. You’re not including the really stupid comments anymore.”

“Excuse me?”

“It’s not as funny.”

“Not as funny?”

“Most of the calls you put in are from Yankees, and you’re picking the ones that make them look really bad. Really
ugly
, as they say.”

“These people who call
are
ugly.”

“And you’re cleaning up the language. You’re inserting
g
’s now where people don’t really say them. You’re trying to make these people sound smarter than they really are. I think you’re blending in too much, Margaret.”

“It’s my job to blend in,” she said. “I’m an anthropologist.”

“You’re a journalist. It’s your job to be removed and dispassionate.”

“Uncaring,” she said.

“If necessary to do the job right, then, yes, uncaring.”

Margaret took off her headset and set it on her desk, then swiveled in her chair so she faced him. Over his shoulder she noticed that Harriet Toomey had just entered the newsroom, wearing
a new spring dress, short-sleeved with a print of pink cherry blossoms on a sky blue background. Much to Randy’s surprise, Harriet’s Thanks for Askin’ column had grown to be one of the most popular features in the
Reflector
, devoured every Thursday by the growing community of Yankees and Japanese hungry to acquaint themselves with Southern fare. Some weeks Harriet received up to fifty inquiries: Can I cut down on sugar in a cobbler without ruining the recipe? Can you reprint that recipe for ham pie? Just where does someone purchase lard?