Revenge of the Kudzu Debutantes by Cathy Holton Page A

in the garden with Jimmy Lee was gone. In the week since she saw him last, she had awakened every morning to a feeling of heaviness and melancholy. He had told her to call him but Nita knew she wouldn’t. She couldn’t.
    All she wanted was a good marriage. All she wanted was a marriage like the one her mama and daddy had shared in the little house she grew up in, with its atmosphere of quiet and unrepentant love. Her father still called her mother “baby.” He still held her arm when they crossed a street. Nita had watched her parents love each other all her life. Love and happiness and a simple life. That’s all she ever wanted.
    “Goddamn it, boy, are you stupid? I said move it,” Charles roared.
    Nita listened to Charles fulfilling his family legacy. Her head hurt. Her heart felt like a wasteland. Nothing would ever grow or flower there again. The best she could hope for was a quiet life. The best she could hope for was a husband who tolerated her, and children who grew to adulthood without hating her too much.
             
    E ADIE AWOKE EARLY and made one last call to Denton to go over the plan for tonight’s party. She had rehearsed him twice now because she was afraid he would forget his lines.
    “Yeah, yeah, I know what to do,” he said, sounding sullen and sleepy. “Make your husband crazy with jealousy. I get the picture.”
    “I’m counting on you,” Eadie said. “Don’t fuck this up.” She hung up. Eadie had spent a week planning tonight’s little fiasco, but for some reason she couldn’t get excited about it. She was tired of Denton, tired of living in this big house all alone, tired of not being able to work. She wanted her husband home in her bed. In their bed.
    She lay on her back and watched the sun climb across the ceiling. After awhile she rose and went to stand next to her goddess, looping one arm around the torso’s shoulders and staring wearily at the slow-moving tourists passing on the sidewalks with their guidebooks and their blank upturned faces. The windows were open and a balmy breeze blew through the room. In the street below a little girl saw her and waved. Eadie raised her hand and waved back. Against her hip, the goddess swayed slightly.
    She had not worked in months, not since Trevor left. A kind of lethargy had overtaken her, an anxious feeling that left her tired and listless. It occurred to Eadie that the only times in her adult life that she hadn’t been able to work were after Trevor left her for another woman. Both times she had been seized with aimlessness and inertia. He was the only man she had ever met who she thought strong enough to survive loving her, and yet here he was again making her miserable and desperate and killing her creative spirit in the process. Making her unable to work for long periods of time. Making her doubt herself. She wondered if he was aware of the effect his cheating had on her art.
    A thin ragged dog slunk down the street poking his nose under the public trash cans. “Don’t touch him,” the mother said to the child.
    “Here doggie, doggie,” the child said.
    If Trevor didn’t come home, would she ever work again? What was it Denton had called her goddess—a sad abandoned seal lying on the ice waiting to be beaten? Eadie pushed her hair out of her eyes and scratched dejectedly at her hip. After awhile she shook herself and stood up straight. No, she wouldn’t think like a defeatist. She hadn’t won the Miss Snellville Beach contest by thinking like this. She hadn’t dragged herself up out of a life of poverty and adverse destiny by thinking it couldn’t be done. She hadn’t made Trevor Boone fall in love with her by pretending it couldn’t happen.
    And he did love her. Goddamn it, he did love her. Eadie knew this even if Trevor didn’t. Even if he had somehow managed to forget. She wrapped her robe tightly around her waist and gave the goddess a hard slap on her contoured rump. Her natural self-confidence and optimism