Venus Envy (13 page)

The other men, surprised at this radical suggestion, spoke among themselves all at once.

Pickens lowered his voice: “Frank, you think we’re in for a true Depression?”

“Yeah, I do.” Frank’s face looked gray.

Pickens nodded. He, too, had come to this assessment.

“Well, how are we going to work out who gets what when? I mean, we could tear each other up.” Larry Taylor, a younger man, raised his voice.

Randy Milliken, one of the older men, gruffly said, “This round table was built on trust.”

“Hear! Hear!” the others shouted again.

George stood up and tapped his spoon against his beer glass. “Gentlemen, gentlemen, Frank has given us a, well, a most unusual idea and one that is worthy of serious consideration in these times. Obviously, we can’t figure this out tonight but we can sure think about it. I guess most of you have heard that Moe Schindler had to bail out—and hey, no golden parachute. So I think Frank’s idea is, as I said, worth our consideration. As you know, tonight we have a guest speaker, John Kalergis from Purdue. He’s here to talk about drainage materials and stress load, after which Pickens will deliver a short address on the use of the helicopter to …”

Randy cupped his hand to his mouth: “Pickens never gave a short address in his life. Break out the sleeping bags, boys.”

The small congregation hooted and clapped. Disturbing subjects, pushed into the background for now, would reappear later, usually around three o’clock in the morning.

T
HE GARDEN CLUB PERFORMED MANY HOURS OF COMMUNITY
service that beautified the county. They planted and tended flower beds in front of the Albemarle County Court House, Lee Park, Jackson Park, and a host of other, smaller parks. Laura Armstrong, a rising star in this bastion of female power, developed a plan to transform the Downtown Mall into a riot of horticulture. She battled for three years to win the approval of the more conservative members of the club. Once she had it, nothing could stop her. She organized fund-raisers, she bedeviled the big nursery over in Waynesboro to lower its already low prices, and she rounded up her troops for their first assault on the mall as soon as the last frost was over.

Frazier had declined to join the Garden Club, although she was asked. This sent her mother into such a tiz that Yancey Weems temporarily prescribed Valium.
Frazier wickedly handed her a bottle of gin to assist in swallowing those nasty pills. By the time Libby returned to consciousness Frazier’s rebellion had receded into memory like the taillight of a speeding car.

Not that Frazier wasn’t sensitive to gardening. She was. She knew her Gertrude Jekyll as well as the next woman. Mostly she declined to join because she didn’t have the time, and if Frazier made a commitment to an organization she wanted to give her best. The other reason was that the group’s idea of gardening was too formal and rigid for Frazier. The real radicals were hot-waxed over Japanese gardens. She shied off that. How many koi could you see and why did they always look like goldfish anyway? But her sense of gardening was that gardens should progress from the house to the wild and the stages should be subtle: more formal around the house and more relaxed farther away. She’d spent a small fortune at the farm dotting the woods with rhododendron, red maple, countless species of violets, varieties of oak, sweet gum, black gum, and the inevitable walnuts and chestnuts. And those were just the plants she cleverly placed to look wild. Around the house she allowed the English boxwoods to flourish, planted there long before she came into this world. Her iris beds were the envy of Orange County and she casually littered her lawn with broken columns, pedestals, and even a huge bell, pieces often hidden behind lilac trees or strangled by wisteria or peeking through the wavy leaves of towering magnolias.

This blatant creativity, first practiced in the New World by Thomas Jefferson, irritated Laura Armstrong. Visiting Frazier was like rubbing sand in Laura’s eyes. She couldn’t accept her sister-in-law’s imagination and she loathed her playfulness. Gardening, like clothing, was a way to express status. Naturally, Frazier’s backyard exploded
with hydrangeas and peonies, which Frazier quite correctly called cabbage roses. The tea roses, yellow and pink, that clambered over her chestnut rail fence drew exasperated protests from Laura because she declared they attracted winged irritants to the house. The only irritant Frazier could see was Laura.

Perhaps it was inevitable that these two women should have strained relations at best. After all, Laura was a Kappa Kappa Gamma and Frazier a Delta Delta Delta. Laura embraced housewifery with post-feminist belligerence. Frazier agreed with Seneca: “Why get married? It’s easier to hang myself.”

Then again, maybe some people were doomed to combat because of chemistry, because of something fundamentally irrational. They not only didn’t click, they clanged in opposition.

Knowing this, Frazier approached her golf lesson with trepidation. Laura usually played tennis at the same time and the two would collide, with large public smiles, at the 19th Hole. The soggy earth, the biting wind, only spurred Frazier to her task. Golf, a game for ancient men in lemon-colored sweaters, had hooked her at age twelve. It wasn’t a game for old men, as she had thought; it was a game of intense concentration, physical beauty, and explosive release. She’d become proficient enough to be a scratch golfer.

Today, working with Toby Wentzle, the pro, she marveled at how the game continually unfolded. No one man or woman would ever know all there was to know about golf. Toby, a former touring pro, loved working with Frazier because she was a natural, but even more so because she had the mind for the game.

After one hour absorbing the intricacies of the seven-iron, Frazier tipped Toby and repaired to the 19th Hole for her usual chef’s salad. Angie, the attractive manager,
greeted her with a cup of hot tea and the Richmond newspaper.

“Aren’t you raw from the wind?”

“Yeah, but that’s half the fun of it. I’ll remember this day in mid-July and think I really did something, you know?”

“You golfers are looney-tunes.”

“I don’t need golf for that.” Frazier slapped at her with the newspaper and Angie, laughing, returned to the kitchen just as Laura flounced through the glass door. The pompons on the backs of her socks were larger than her racket head. She observed her sister-in-law and froze.

“Afternoon, sister.” Frazier was overpoweringly polite. “You’re looking very well.”

“And so are you,” Laura cooed, then sat at the table next to Frazier’s, turning her back, yet still talking over her shoulder. “Your strength has certainly returned. When we put in those flower beds at the mall your strong back would come in handy. Not that you’ll do that, of course.” And then she hissed under her breath, “And not that any woman in the Garden Club will want to be seen with you. You’ll never ever be asked in again.” She glanced up. “Oh, hello, Angie. Thank you for the menu but I have it memorized. I’d like the cottage cheese salad in the cantaloupe and do set out the raspberries on the side and then I’d like some sparkling water, lime on the side—”

“Put the rat poison on the side too.” Frazier beamed over at Angie.

“Isn’t she a card?” Laura trilled to Angie. “Always cutting up.”

“Well, you’re always cutting down,” Frazier trilled back as Angie left them.

Laura, returning to a whisper, assumed an air of urgency. “What is the matter with you? Isn’t it bad
enough you’ve plunged your mother, that sweet soul, into the depths of despair and heartbreak? You’ve attacked my husband. I mean, can’t you behave?”

“Oh, and what has Carter told you?”

“Just that you raked his entire life over the coals, as if you have room to criticize,” she growled.

“I did not rake Carter over the coals. I told him to stand up for himself and to stop drinking.”

“He’s a social drinker. You make entirely too much of it because you hardly ever drink at all. You people see someone else enjoying their libations and you assume they belong in Alcoholics Anonymous.”

“He does.”

Angie returned with both their orders, and sure enough, a small tin of rat poison was on a separate plate. She whirled on her heel and winked at Frazier as she left.

“Is this funny? Ha. Ha. Did you pay her off? Sophomoric You are so sophomoric and don’t think I’ve forgotten that you were the one who filled all the footballs with water. Just about ruined Homecoming. You’ll never grow up, Frazier. That’s really why you aren’t married. You can’t make a mature commitment to another human being. Then, too, your kind of relationships never last.”

“Aha, now you’re an expert on lesbian relationships.”

Laura shifted in her seat so she didn’t have to speak over her own shoulder. “Will you lower your voice? I am hoping—no, let me amend that. I am praying that the family can keep this under wraps until you get some help. I can only pray that those other people to whom you wrote your little bombshells have the sense to shut up about your ill-mannered confessions.” Laura lied through her teeth.

“Sugar, you didn’t read the letter I wrote Carter? No, I guess not.”

“He said it would put me right over the edge. Said you must have been half out of your head.” She reduced her whisper some more. “I really don’t want to discuss this in a public place.”

“The only other person here is Kyle Everly and he’s been deaf since 1952, so they tell me. The mob has come and gone, so, honey, it’s just us chickens.”

Laura shifted back to her original position. “I have nothing more to say on the subject or to you. You’re being entirely too flippant and I am going to chalk it up to your recent fright. When you are quite yourself again we can work this out.”

Frazier jabbed, lightly, Laura’s shoulder with her fork. “I am more myself than I have ever been.”

“Stop that. You’re not normal.” Laura surprised herself with her volume.

“Normal is the average of deviance.” Frazier stood up, reached over and dropped the rat poison in Laura’s cottage cheese. She trotted out the door before Laura could scream bloody murder.

A
SLENDER SAILBOAT, LARGE ENOUGH FOR TWO PEOPLE, SAT
in the driveway like an emaciated banana. Ruru’s pride and joy, christened
Zaca
after her hero Errol Flynn’s yacht, did not add to the luster of the neighborhood. She trimmed her yard and mowed her lawn but a few of the neighbors winced every time they drove by the
Zaca.
Libby didn’t drive by at all. She swore the reason was not that Ruru lived in a modest section of town but rather that Ru fell down on the housekeeping tasks. A maid five days a week contributed to the dazzling appearance of Libby’s country club mansion, and when this was brought to her august attention she proclaimed that when she and Frank were married she had been the maid.

It was true that Ruru and her vacuum cleaner rarely saw each other and yes, there were crumbs on the kitchen counter, but what really drove Libby around the
bend was the dogs. Two Jack Russells and two Dalmatians, one liver-spotted, controlled the house. They slept on the sofa, the chairs, the bed. One had chewed the carpet when it was a puppy but not at the ends. Instead, small holes dotted the surface of the carpet as though a huge moth had feasted on the threads. The cats, four of them, posed no difficulty other than tearing the arms off one chair. They cleaned themselves, were fastidious in the use of their dirt box, and they terrorized the dogs.

Libby would swoon and decry the commotion. To Ruru the sounds of her brood pleased her as much as Bach pleased Pablo Casals.

Frazier motored over after her strained lunch and found Ruru on her knees beside the bathtub, washing her Dalmatians. The tub water was the color of red brick.

“What did they get into?”

“Ruru grimaced as a dog-shake spritzed water over her face. “The usual.”

“Mud’s still better than skunks. Remember last year when Toby and Lulu got tangled up with one?” Toby and Lulu were the Jack Russells.

“How many gallons of tomato juice did I go through? Goddammit, Chief, sit down!” The liver-spotted dog obeyed for an instant and then stood right back up.

“About two, and those are little dogs. I ought to help you, Ru, but no reason for both of us to get filthy.” Frazier reached over for a towel. “But I’ll dry Chief while you work on Marco. That way I only get half-dirty.”

“A bleeding saint, you are. Sit down, Marco!”

Marco, being more obedient than his sister, sat down and stayed down but he rolled his eyes heavenward and implored the god of dogs to release him from this suffering. Odd, because if there was a puddle he’d sit in it; a river, he’d leap in it. Why was a bath such torture? Probably because it wasn’t his idea.

Auntie Ruru rinsed Marco. His black spots glistened. “Here’s another one.”

“How come Toby and Lulu aren’t mudballs?”

Toby and Lulu stayed in the living room as though distance would save them from the fate worse than death, a bath.

“They were in the cab of the truck. These two were in the bed. There now, that ought to do it except that I need a shower.”

“You’ve been dirtier.”

“That’s a compliment.” Ru bent over and patted Marco’s head. He totally ignored her.

The two humans sat down in the living room. The Dalmatians ran back to the kitchen.

“I’ve got to give them a bone. Be right back.” Ruru rewarded Chief and Marco with large Milk Bones. She passed out little ones to the Jack Russells, who, although unbathed, couldn’t bear to see another dog get a bone. Ruru thought of the unearned treat as a bribe toward future good behavior.

She brought in a bowl of potato chips.

“Not me, thanks.”

“Good. More for me.” Ru’s weatherbeaten hand darted into the yellow pile.

“I ate a big salad at the club. Actually, I didn’t finish it because Laura flounced in, plopped at the next table, alone, mind you, and talked with her back to me. Bitch. I put rat poison in her cottage cheese.”

“You what?”

“No, no, it wasn’t that bad. Angie brought out a tin as a joke and I’d finally had it with her so I dropped the tin in Laura’s lunch. She deserved it.” Frazier sighed. “And it felt so good.”