The Hurricane Sisters (13 page)

I watched as he looked at himself in the mirror over the hall table. He was preening. For whom? Something was deeply wrong between us. He was so distracted and indifferent toward me and had been for some time. I mean, his indifference was one thing, but posing like a peacock was another.

“No, I guess not. But donor dinners are a good way to begin, especially if they’re smaller events.”

“Really? Why’s that?”

“Well, because people can talk about themselves a bit.”

He didn’t say anything. I just watched him neaten his collar around the lapel of his jacket.

I continued. “Listening to them helps me to figure out how important they want to be to the organization. I mean, they know why they’re invited. They’re not stupid. So I’m cooking for these folks. They finally said yes. Finally!”

I may as well have been reciting the Gettysburg Address in Portuguese.

“Well, that should be nice. I’m sure it will go well. I hope you’ve got some help coming. Save all your receipts.”

“I know,” I said. “I do. Actually, Ashley’s roommate, Mary Beth, is coming to help. And Peggy will be here.”

“Well, good. No point in wearing yourself out. Anyway, you can’t be much of a hostess if you’re in the kitchen all night. Is that a new dress you’re wearing?”

“No. It’s from a few years ago.”

“Well, why don’t you take yourself shopping? Buy some pretty new things for yourself? My treat.”

The doorbell rang. Walter had arrived.

“You’ll be home . . . when?” I said.

He picked up his bag and started toward the door.

“Thursday night late, if I can. But probably Friday. We’re taking a small Australian pharma public so I have to see how it goes. I’ll call you.”

“Sure. I need to plan my time, you know?”

“Don’t work so hard,” Clayton said and smiled.

“I’m just trying to make my life mean something, Clayton.”

He took a deep breath, stopped, and turned to say something to me and then hesitated.

“What?” I said.

“I just hate it when you talk like that. I mean, why couldn’t you go to work for something less controversial like, I don’t know, a library?”

We looked at each other then, right in the eyes. For the first time in ages. It was the old argument again. He hated my work. Men define themselves through
their
work. In Clayton’s Ozzie Nelson mind, women were supposed to have complementary careers if they had one at all. My career was a very messy business. Too many unpleasantries. Of course, in this day and age, not working was as ridiculous as it was impossible, especially when you’re married to a world-class tightwad. I’ve heard there are places in India where fat wives are a trophy, testimony to the man’s earning power, and the wife doesn’t work outside of the home. She has servants and she eats great mountains of noodles and other goodies like steamed buns stuffed with candied guava or papaya. Or maybe that was in Africa. No matter. I didn’t live in such a culture, and my husband’s ideas about women’s roles were as weird as Skipper’s llamas.

And besides that smorgasbord of neurotic delights, I’d have preferred to work as a ditchdigger than ask Old Moneybags for a new pair of shoes. He had some outrageous control issues, and for a long time now experts in my field have acknowledged that the need to have control over another human being was an example of abuse. In Clayton’s case I felt like it was just ego based. But maybe my work hit a little too close to home for him. Hmmm. It didn’t pay to overanalyze it. It was best to encourage Sunday to become Monday and just keep moving forward. Maybe I should go shopping and spend every dime of his that I could.

“Go on to New York,” I said. “Travel safely and call me, okay?”

“I’ll call when I can,” he said and I closed the door behind him.

No good-bye kiss. Not that I wanted one.

I’ll call when I can
was Clayton-ese that meant he’d be calling when he felt like it, not because he missed me or even out of some sense of duty. He always left me feeling sad for the old us. But that
old us
had been gone for so long I couldn’t even imagine what that looked like. I decided to call Maisie.

“Well, he’s off to Yankee territory again,” I said, sounding like the dog died.

“Why should
that
put you in the dumps? He’s been commuting for as long as I can remember.”

“I don’t know. I guess sometimes I just miss being madly in love, that’s all.”

“Oh, snap out of it! You’ve got a dinner party to plan!”

“True. You coming?”

“Can’t. You know I hate those things. Anyway, I just joined a new Bunko group and our first meeting is tomorrow night.”

“Bunko? Mother! Aren’t you a little . . .”

I heard her gasp before I could even finish.

“Old? I’ll have you know that most people say I can pass for seventy any day of the week! And I was invited to join by a very nice divorcée Skipper and I met at the garden center.”

“Better watch out. She might have her eye on Skipper.”

“Sweet Mother! I hadn’t thought about that.”

“I’m beginning to think everyone has a secret agenda,” I said, apropos of nothing except Clayton’s attitude. I had a mental flash of him bolting toward the bright lights of Manhattan, flailing his arms, running up the FDR like a madman. He must be having an affair. But guess what? I didn’t really want to know.

“I’ll get my hair done,” she said, “if I can find a salon that’s open on Monday.”

“That’s the spirit! Maybe I will too!” I said and we hung up.

Get my hair blown out? Maybe I’d have a manicure too. That was what I needed—some pampering.
Affordable Pampering
. It sounded like an Obama program.

My foul temper had practically dissolved so I decided to work on my table for the dinner party. I looked around my dining room and suddenly it seemed cluttered, like a grandma’s house. Where did all this old lady stuff come from? I must have had a dozen candlesticks on the sideboards and dining table. Too many tureens, too many tchotchkes. I had collected all these things and was saving them for my children who didn’t want them. Well, someday Ashley might like some of my things but Ivy? Probably not. He had more sophisticated taste.

So while I waited for Monday, I took the small table apart and added a leaf so I could seat my guests. My dining room was very small, as was the scale of my house. Most houses on Church Street were two hundred years old and built for smaller people with smaller possessions. I loved it because it was like living in a dollhouse and also because every room downstairs opened onto a terrace or a porch. And yes, I had one of those well-known Charleston hidden gardens with miniature specimen plants, an ancient handmade brick walkway, and a fountain in the center. The walls of my garden were trellised with Confederate jasmine and fig ivy. In the east corner stood an old live oak tree that produced enough Spanish moss to thrill the camellia and azalea bushes nestled below with some partial shade, protecting them from the lethal sun. But it was deep summer and very little remained in bloom then. Somehow the lack of color gave all the varieties of ferns a chance to take center stage because that was when my garden became more about different textures and variations of green. The only flowers were the water lilies in the fountain and the ones in my hanging baskets. On an ironic note, Maisie did not consider me to be a gardener. Isn’t that nice?

I was debating inviting another trustee and her husband. I knew it was probably dangerous to have Mitzi Summerset because she loved the sound of her own voice way too much. I could see her batting her eyes like a schoolgirl and going on and on about herself while my other guests went catatonic waiting for her to relinquish the mike.

Common sense prevailed and I didn’t invite her. But I did have my hair blown out and Monday night finally arrived. Mary Beth was in the kitchen with Peggy plating salads and arranging cheeses on a huge platter with fruit and crackers.

“I’m so glad you could come, Mary Beth,” I said.

“So am I,” Peggy said with a laugh. “There’ll be a hundred glasses to hand wash!”

“A hundred?” I said and narrowed my eyes at her. Lordy, Lord. Peggy did love to exaggerate.

“Okay. Fifty,” Peggy said.

“No, problem, Mrs. Waters, happy to help!”

“Great! Peggy? Show Mary Beth where the extra wine is and the bottled water. Let’s fill those water goblets at ten to six, okay?”

“Done!” Peggy said.

“I don’t know how we use all those glasses but we do. Sorry.”

“Honey? Use them all! Dirty glasses are my job security!” She laughed again.

With only seven of us for dinner Peggy probably didn’t really need Mary Beth’s help. But Peggy was getting older and she liked to go home early. Two extra hands would cut her work in half and I knew Mary Beth needed the money. It was a tiny win-win in my domestic life.

The delicious smells of roasting meat were wafting all over the house like mythical sirens calling out to sailors to throw themselves on the rocks. Maybe my prospective donors would be so intoxicated by my roast beef and mashed potatoes that they’d write big fat checks for us, and good women and children would be able to sleep safely. I almost had to laugh because a simultaneous thought crossed my mind that dreamers give birth to dreamers. Ashley came by her dreamer personality honestly. Ah, me. Another maternal insight—you always dislike about your children that which you dislike about yourself because you understand the danger of that trait. But who knew? Maybe the community relations person from All Air, Inc.,
would
like to fund a new shelter. Maybe the retired real estate developer would
like
to endow our counseling services. Until somebody emphatically turned me down, the answer was still yes.

The doorbell rang promptly at six and our executive director, Tom Warner, breezed in, gave my cheek a polite kiss, and stood back.

“It smells like heaven in here! Roast beef?”

“Of course!” I said. “Where’s Vicki?”

“Allergies driving her crazy. Sneezing and hacking. God! Smell that? These fellows don’t have a chance. Am I the first?”

“Yes. Come on in. Let’s open a bottle of wine.”

“Excellent idea,” he said. “Is Clayton here?”

“In New York.”

We walked through the living room to the dining room where the wine was chilling. “Too bad. I haven’t seen him in ages. Your house looks beautiful, as it always does.”

“Oh, thanks, Tom. Peggy and I packed away a ton of stuff this morning and lo and behold, suddenly there was room to set up a bar!”

“It’s important to have our priorities straight,” he said and smiled. “Now tell me again; who’s coming? I mean, I know who’s coming. I just want to hear their names out loud. Every other nonprofit in Charleston is dying of jealousy tonight.”

I giggled and Tom opened the bottle. I removed Vicki’s place setting from the table.

“David Malcolm from All Air and his wife, Annie, and Steve Karol, the real estate mogul of all times, and his wife, Michelle. Steve and Michelle are living on Spring Island right now but thinking about moving here. And for a sledgehammer finale, Karen Jones is coming in at eight for dessert and coffee.”

Karen Jones (formerly known as Anne Marie Wilson) was a physician’s assistant whose husband, Leonard, was once a well-respected orthodontist in Myrtle Beach. Karen came to us three years ago, black and blue from head to toe with her two small equally battered children and with just the clothes on their backs. For every good reason, she was fearful for all their lives. But when she took him to court, she blew the lid off his deviant and, yes, criminal behavior and that was the beginning of the fat lady’s song for him. His practice dwindled until he moved to Salem, Oregon, but not before he threatened revenge. Leonard Wilson was as angry a man as you could ever imagine and as mean a son of a gun as you could find on this earth. An order of protection signed by any authority you could name was still a joke to him. He’d kill somebody eventually—I had no doubt of that—but for the moment he was in Oregon and Karen was living in Charleston with her children and new identities for all. She was the head of our Survivors Council and could tell the story of domestic violence with such passion that it gave me chills no matter how many times I heard it.

Mary Beth came into the room carrying a tumbler of something and said, “Here you go, Mizz Waters, I believe you favor vodka?”

I looked at her and thought, This child doesn’t know a thing about the real me.

“Mary Beth? Throw that thing right down the drain. Only Pellegrino! This is a very serious work night.”

“For real!” she said. “Pellegrino it is!”

“Thanks. Listen, these two couples who are coming here for dinner could change my world. I’m looking for money to build a new shelter that is
so
desperately needed. I need you and Peggy to keep your ears open and remember everything you hear, okay?”

“Yes, ma’am! I mean, Ashley told me you were involved with a crisis center, but I had no idea . . .”

“She probably thinks I answer the crisis hotline for Butterball turkeys,” I said and watched Mary Beth’s face fall. “I’m sorry, that wasn’t nice. But I have to tell you, Mary Beth, for what it’s worth, no one in my family has ever taken an interest in my work.”

“I’m gonna wash my hands,” Tom said.

“Down the hall on the right. You know where it is.”

He nodded and walked away, sensing he shouldn’t hear whatever confidence Mary Beth wanted to share with me.

“Maybe they just don’t understand what abuse really is,” she said.

“But you do?” I said. What was this child saying?

“I’m just saying that all kinds of things go on and some people are too afraid to say anything.”

I looked at her face and searched her eyes for meaning and to my great sorrow, there was nothing there I hadn’t seen in the faces of so many damaged women we counseled and tried to help at My Sister’s House.

“If you ever want to talk—” I began, but she interrupted me.

“I’d better help Peggy get that roast out of the oven instead of standing here running my mouth. And I’ll get you that Pellegrino. Lime?”