Plantation (18 page)

“Business?”

“Your mother didn’t tell you? When Moultrie kicked the bucket, I said to myself, Sweetie? You ain’t going with him just yet, and you need something to keep yourself out of trouble. So I went on down the road to the College of Charleston, took a course in business and another one in computers. This year I’m gonna ship close to ten thousand bottles of jam. That should have been plenty for me, but now I’m thinking pickles.”

“Pickles?” My eyes grew wide and hers twinkled. She was thoroughly pleased with herself to be able to shock me with her news.

“Oh, yes, ma’am, there’s good money in pickles. Good thing Moultrie is dead ’cause he’d die anyway if he knew how much money I spend on all this technology! Keeps me busy. So tell me everything. How’s that precious boy of yours?”

“Oh, Miss Sweetie, Eric’s great. Just the love of my life, that’s all.”

“And Richard?”

“Well, Richard’s still Richard.”

“Men. I tell you, some days I just scratch my head and wonder just what in tarnation makes ’em tick. Pain in the ass. All of ’em.

Let’s get us something to eat.”

Mother came into the room with her other best crony on her P l a n t a t i o n

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arm, Nancy Cotton, affectionately known as Miss Nancy. She had short blond hair and green eyes, and she looked to be about thirty in her khaki pants and blue shirt. And, she was wearing black Prada loafers with white socks. Very cool.

“Caroline, come say hello to Nancy!”

“Hey, Miss Nancy! How’re you?”

“Well, for an old lady I’m still managing to get around. Come give me my kiss, child.”

“Miss Nancy! You’re not old!” I gave her cheek a light kiss.

“Not so old as your mother!” Miss Nancy said, eyes twinkling with mischief.

“What?” Mother said. “What kind of foolishness are you telling this time, Nancy!”

“
Calm à vous,
Lavinia. A mere chronological tidbit of truth, my dear Lavinia. May I please be fed before I faint?”

“She takes one little trip to France and now she pelts us with her international self every five minutes,” Miss Sweetie said.

I offered Miss Nancy the round silver tray of tea sandwiches and she looked suspicious.

“Now, what do we have here?” Miss Nancy said. “Lavinia? Are you absolutely determined to ruin my figure? Do you think I could just have tomatoes on toast? No mayo?”

“Miss Nancy, you can have whatever you want,” I said. “I’ll be
rat
back.”

“Lavinia?” I heard Miss Nancy say. “How on earth did an ugly old buh-zard like you give birth to such a beautiful girl?”

“Hush up and pour me a glass of sherry before she gets back,”

Mother said.

“Pour me one too, Mother!” I called out. Hell, I may as well jump right in, I thought. Did I work for Alcoholics Anonymous? I didn’t think so.

Before long the game was under way. Miss Sweetie was my partner. Miss Nancy shuffled and dealt the hand, bracelets jangling.

I picked up my cards and arranged them. They were fabulous. I 1 3 6

D o r o t h e a B e n t o n F r a n k had the ace, king, and queen of spades, the ace of hearts, the jack, and four others, a void in clubs, and four decent diamonds. Miss Sweetie opened.

“One diamond,” she said.

“Who shuffled?” Mother said.

“I did, Lavinia,” Miss Nancy said politely. “It’s your bid, Lavinia, dear.”

“Pass,” Mother said and sighed hard enough to blow me off my chair.

“One spade,” I said, hoping I was doing the right thing.

“Pass,” Miss Nancy said.

“Three hearts,” Miss Sweetie said and winked at me.

“That’s it!” Mother said. “There will be no signals in my living room!”

“
Mon Dieu!
Just bid, Lavinia,” Miss Nancy said.

“Pass,” Mother said and leveled her glare at Miss Nancy.

Mother’s mood had gone sour. I could not believe that she was actually so competitive and a poor sport to boot! Needless to say, we kicked their butts to Kalamazoo and by the time five o’clock rolled around, Mother was thoroughly annoyed. It wasn’t my fault.

I played dummy half of the time anyway and I thought she had won enough hands to save face.

“Will we see you in church Sunday, Caroline?” Miss Sweetie said at the front door.

Mother and Miss Nancy were there too, chattering and giggling, for which I was grateful. Miss Nancy had always been able to shift Mother’s moods.

“Oh, yes! Wouldn’t miss that sideshow for all the world,” I said.

“We have a cute new preacher,” Miss Sweetie said, whispering behind her hand to me. “I think your mother’s sweet on him! God knows, she hadn’t been to church in ten years until this cute young thing showed up!”

“Hush your bad mouth, Sweetie!” Mother said.

“How old is he?” I asked.

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“What’s the difference if he’s willing and able?” she said and stopped on the steps.

“Il est un hot-tay!”
Miss Nancy said, wiggling her eyebrows up and down.

“Good Lord, Nancy,” Mother said, “I sure hope you don’t go to China!”

“Hottie? You girls are bad! Probably wants endowment money,” I said, under my breath.

“You don’t know your mother well at all, do you?” Miss Sweetie said.

“He’s already well endowed,” Mother said, mumbling under her breath to her friends.

“Mother!”

“Honey, you can tell by a man’s body language what he’s got, don’t you know that?” Mother said, eyebrows arched.

We all burst out laughing.

“Mother!”

What in the hell was going on here?

“They all want money, Caroline, we know that!” Miss Nancy said. “But we have a list of what we want too!
C’nest pas?
”

I shook my head wondering what my mother and her friends had been up to, while they giggled like a bunch of schoolgirls. We all waved good-bye to Miss Sweetie, who kicked up the dust when she peeled out of our drive in her red Mustang convertible.

“She had to buy a red one?” Mother said.

“Strawberries? Get it?” Miss Nancy said.

“And when she goes in the pickle business I imagine that she’ll buy a green one?” Mother said and they began to cluck.

“I imagine so,” Miss Nancy said and walked down the drive to her navy BMW.

“Cool,” I said.

“Indeed,” said Mother with all her attitude and we went inside. “Caroline? Better get some rest. Trip and his gang will be here at seven.”

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D o r o t h e a B e n t o n F r a n k Oh Lord, I thought, what next?

“Prepare for the worst,” she said.

“Mother? May I ask you something . . . personal?”

“Maybe. What?”

“Is it true that you had an affair with the gardener?”

“Caroline! Of all the crust!” She looked at me with narrowed eyes. “All right, I’ll tell you so you hear the story from the horse’s mouth and not from your brother’s jaded perspective. Yes, I did.

And it was fabulous! For six months Raoul Estevez and I tripped the light fantastic. He wasn’t the first and he won’t be the last!”

“Mother! You shock me!” I leaned against the living room door for support. So what Trip had said, at least part of it, was true!

“Caroline! Wipe that look off your face this instant!” She crossed her arms and shook her head. “Child? Haven’t you ever read the Constitution?”

“What’s that got to do with this?”

“We are
entitled
by our forefathers to the
pursuit of happiness!

Think about it!”

“You’re
entitled
to sleep with a man half your age by the
Constitution
?”

“If it makes me happy? Yes! Since when did you become so anal, Caroline? Life’s short! Live it, girl! Now, I have to go rest before they arrive.”

She patted my arm, gently raised my jaw to meet my upper lip, and went upstairs. I watched her. She had more spring in her step than I did. Pursuit of happiness. Entitled to it. I’d have to give this my full focus. It was a strange but interesting concept.

M i s s L av i n i a ’s J o u r na l
Oh, my, it’s good to have my daughter here with me! And I
think it’s going to be good for her too! Lord knows, she’s way
too serious! That girl needs fun!

Fourteen

Cocktail Time

}

F my daddy had drawn air long enough to know Frances Mae, he would’ve held his hand to the Bible I and declared that Trip would surely die a drunk. If he’d lived to witness the shenanigans of Amelia, Isabelle, Caroline, and Frances Mae combined, he would’ve recommended plain old murder. That’s what Daddy would’ve done. Because after all, there were just certain kinds of people who could lead you to dive right in the bottle, especially if you were a peace-loving sort of fellow.

That was what Daddy and Trip had in common. Peace-loving good old boys, who knew their place, when to speak, and which topics were considered polite in mixed company. They revered generations of tradition—these things were their Bible. Hunted for sport, never killed more than they could carry. Never overfished.

Never broke an oyster bed until it was the season. Mended their own casting nets, cleaned their own guns. They followed a code of P l a n t a t i o n

1 4 1

honor on the river and in the woods, living like they had the game warden on one shoulder and Jesus on the other.

They stood when Mother or any lady entered the room, held her chair at dinner, and opened every door for her. They never discussed money or the affairs of government in front of ladies. And they never made a vulgar reference with a lady present. For all their refinement, they were as masculine as a man could be. They were gentlemen and gentlemen were expected to marry ladies. What the hell happened to Trip’s judgment when he brought home Frances Mae was anybody’s guess.

Even Millie had been horrified. Mother, Millie, and I became the Unholy Triumvirate. Behind her back we called Frances Mae everything from
sine nobilitas
and
rapacious
when we were feeling superior, to
hairball
and
mucus
when we had been overserved and the hour was late. We had many names for the Idolater of the Dollar, the Pernicious Peroxided Pretender to the Throne, and the alliterated Jabbering Jacksonboro Jaguar.

In the old days, gentlemen of our family were supposed to marry ladies from another, more sophisticated and worldly society.

And ladies of our family did the same. But not Trip and not me.

Nope. Richard’s résumé may have been bizarre to some, but Frances Mae’s was downright scary.

The first time Trip brought her home it caused a major brain spasm in Old Lavinia. For the only time in her life she was without words. It was the summer of 1986. Trip had finally graduated from Carolina Law School and was studying for the bar.

Trip was tooling around town in the new convertible Chrysler Le Baron Mother had bought him as a gift. I was home for a weekend visit from New York and weeding in the garden with Mother when his car came screaming around the front drive.

“What?” Mother said, looking up from the rose bed.

Mother was wearing a huge straw hat to shield her face from the sun and a sundress with an open back so she could tan. I looked 1 4 2

D o r o t h e a B e n t o n F r a n k up then and saw Trip hop over the side of the car and run around to open the passenger door. It was just like Troy Donahue and what’sher-name from the fifties movies—Sandra Dee or someone.

“On my mother’s grave! He’s got a young woman with him!”

“I’ll be damned,” I said.

Trip was not successful with the ladies unless they looked and smelled like Labradors. That car was an apparent asset.

We stood and watched her get out and look at the house. Actually, she took inventory of our family’s home, smiling. A chim-panzee with curled-back lips—it was all I could think. You would have thought he’d tossed her the keys to the joint. Next, she threw her arms around Trip and kissed him so hard he fell back against the car, most likely bruising his pelvic bone in the process. He had his hands on her round little backside, rubbing it. Mother turned so red, I thought for a minute she would burst her carotid artery. I was coming undone with surprise and giggles. I knew her. She was the waitress from the coffee shop in Jacksonboro. The waitress with
the
lips
. Mother held her hand to her chest. Trip finally had the presence of mind to quit tickling Slut Bubba’s tonsils and look up to where we stood. That was the first hello. Some opener!

Mother and I stood rooted in the garden like a couple of overgrown tulips, slack-jawed and burned. Nothing Sherman ever did frightened a woman in our family as much as Frances Mae Litchfield in her tight jeans, white high heels, and tube top. Except for her hair.

Bleach! Bleach! Bleach! No! No! No! Women of Mother’s family never bleached! Highlight, perhaps. Enhance, maybe. Clorox, never.

It was going to get worse before it ever got better. Or get better before it got worse.

Mother started walking toward them and I followed on her heels.

I would rather have taken a bullet in my head than miss a syllable.

“Mother!” Trip said, calling out. “Come and meet Frances Mae!”

Even from the back of Mother’s head, I could tell her jaw was locked in her Greenwich Grin.

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“Hi!” I said, stepping up to them and extending my hand, which hung in midair while she inspected it like a fish on ice. “I’m Caroline.”

She finally figured out she was supposed to shake my hand and snapped back to earth. “Hey!” she said. “Yew juss as purdy as your bubba say-ed. Yes, ma’am, yew sho nuff is.”

She smiled wide and tossed that mane of layered pseudo Farrah to the left and to the right. She was all of five feet one to Mother’s five seven and my five eight. Her accent was so thick it could have had us evicted forever from the Charleston Yacht Club. Her arms never left Trip’s waist. “En, yew mussy be Mizz La Viniea,” she said to Mother, not realizing that among our friends, her behavior would have been considered having sex in public.

“Let’s go inside, shall we?” Mother said. Chill of major magni-tude.