How to Marry a Southern Man

Red Rock Review, Spring 2007

fiction by BARBARA DRAKE

I’m standing here on the vinyl flooring of my newly acquired kitchen, in gray flannel Prada and a pair of black, patent-leather Manolo Blahniks—and this tall, dark-haired man in a blue jumpsuit is telling me how to turn my oven on.

            “Ma’am, this here’s your timer,” he says, pointing with a tanned, calloused finger.  “These buttons are your temperature, your timed bake, your broil option. You just push like so, ma’am”—he taps the little buttons up and down, long, square-tipped fingers, no ring—“and you get the digital temperature here.”  I see the blinking red numbers, I’m nodding, the information’s going in one ear and out the other.  He’s being so helpful, so patient; evidently this is part of his job, acquainting new Ocala Power & Light customers with the features of their gas appliances. “Like so, ma’am,” he continues, the syllables a deep, soothing drawl—and now I’m about to fall off my four-inch-high stilettos because this attractive man has pried open my oven door and he’s saying to me something no one’s ever said:

            “Ma’am, here’s where you’d put your pies.”

            Your pies.  The words have me giddy, tingly all over. Your pies.  As in, my pies, pies made by me, Jennifer Chase, all by myself, pies plural, from scratch.  What a concept.  In New York, no one venturing into my one-bedroom shoebox would have mistaken me for someone capable of baking anything, let alone a pie, but here I am standing in my 400-square-foot, soon-to-be-remodeled country kitchen in Ocala, Florida, and some green-eyed stranger is ma’am-ing me and casually imagining scenarios in which I am rolling out pie crusts and fussing with my oven timer.  How outrageous!  Doesn’t this man see who he’s dealing with?  Does he actually think that a woman with acrylic tips like these and a refrigerator door plastered with takeout menus would know what a pie pan is? Do the details of who I am no longer matter, now that I’ve traded my Statue of Liberty license plate for one with a pair of little round oranges on it, now that Eddie Dugall has delivered on his promise and gotten me the Quick & Easy, now that I’m just another 32-year-old blonde who’s bought property in Marion County?

           Oh, God, I’m not ready for this.  I’m going to have to sit down.

            And he’s right there at my side, inquiring like a gentleman, “Miss Chase, ma’am, are you all right? Can I get you a glass of water?” as I sort of helplessly slide off my Cavallis and ease onto a kitchen stool.  And it’s while he’s bending down and his stubbled cheek almost (but not quite!) touches mine that I happen to notice that his hair—his thick, glossy black hair—is combed off his forehead and slicked in place with what must be an inch-and-a-half of hair grease. Like Elvis in Clambake. So, naturally, as I’m noticing these things, I reach for my little amulet and switch to one of the mental exercises I use when I want to make my day more interesting: What if this guy asked me out? Would he take me to a NASCAR race? Would we eat at a Sonny’s barbecue pit? Afterward, would he unfurl a wool blanket under the live oaks and urge me to lie down upon it and unroll my $18 Donna Karan sheers down my legs? Or would that happen on the second date?

            And suppose—just suppose—despite our obvious differences, the Ocala Power & Light man and I turned out to be truly compatible: Could we make the relationship work? Would he, for instance, be willing to scrape the Confederate flag sticker off his rear bumper if I agreed to learn how to make Red Velvet cake? Would our getting married require me to become a Baptist? Or would he be okay with my staying home Sunday mornings and reading The New York Times?

            But I don’t have time to wonder how our marriage turns out. The doorbell rings. It’s my five o’clock.

            “Thanks, ma’am. I’d best be leaving,” he says, slipping on a baseball cap and dropping some brochures on the kitchen table. “Glad to be of service. Don’t hesitate to call if you have questions.”

            Ocala Power & Light tips his brim to Wayne’s Tile World as they pass each another in the hallway. I’m one step ahead of them both. I’ve already changed into a black lace camisole, a Dolce & Gabbana two-piece suit, and calfskin riding boots. I’m wearing Balmain perfume, two-carat diamond studs in my ears. My hair’s reined in a high, sleek ponytail.

            He’s not even my height, five-seven, sloping shoulders, tattooed forearms, belly going soft above his Wrangler jeans. I’m a bit let down after Mr. Ocala Power & Light, naturally. But there are always possibilities.

            We get right to business. He has his tape measure, his figuring pad, his calculator to tabulate price per square foot for tile and labor. He crawls on hands and knees over my vinyl fake-brick floor, skirting the edge of my well-oiled boot. Tappety, tap goes my pointy calfskin toe. Tappety, tap.

            He’s ma’am-ing me every other sentence, but I’m no longer thrown by this (I’m a quick study). I’m focused on what he’s offering to do for me: Put a proper foundation underneath my feet. Before the tile goes in he’s going to have to pour a layer of concrete, of course, because the kitchen’s built on a wood subfloor. When it’s finished, it’ll raise the floor up a whole two inches: Is that okay by me? I’m nodding my ponytail in agreement, crystal amulet in hand; he has deep-blue eyes, dark lashes, and evidently years of experience in these matters. I have only one request: Can his men lay the ceramic tiles on a diagonal, instead of straight across like squares on a Scrabble board?

            “It’s Mama’s kitchen,” he says, his dangerous blue eyes bearing in on me. “Whatever Mama wants, Mama gets.”

            Mama. Skinny, little New York me.  Mama.   Help me, Jesus.

            I want to kick off my boots, sink my heels into the soft sheet vinyl, and give birth to triplets right there, where the doorjamb is. The tattooed tile man will build me my dream kitchen—he will see to that—and I’ll cook collard greens and dumplings in his grandma’s cast-iron skillet. The children will be a lot to deal with, of course, but I won’t mind their clamoring around my knees and pulling the hem of my dress because by then I’ll be a size 3-X and wearing tents, and I’ll have plenty of padding on my thighs, to dull the scraping of their ragged fingernails. And Wayne—because he is the Wayne of Wayne’s Tile World, he’s going to open two more stores in Gainesville and Jacksonville soon, I know it—Wayne will come home every night from a hard day of ripping up linoleum, and after the kids are in bed, the two of us will curl up in front of our 57-inch wide-screen TV with boiled green peanuts and 12-ounce Fosters and laugh ourselves silly, me heaving these big, deep-down belly laughs like I’ve never laughed before, like I could never laugh when I was an arrogant, anorexic, childless Yankee who couldn’t even pop the top off a Diet Pepsi without worrying about breaking a nail. Hah! What an uptight little bitch I was back then, we’ll laugh.

          “Darlin’, I never thought of you as a bitch and I never could,” Wayne will murmur in my face with his boiled-peanut breath. “Wasn’t your fault you was raised by atheists and went to college with a bunch of lesbians and ended up scared of men and marriage. You just needed some good, Southern lovin’, that’s all.”

            But it costs money to hire Mr. Wayne’s Tile World and redo an entire kitchen with a concrete subfloor and 400 square feet of imported Italian tile and a marble backsplash. Nine-thousand-seven-hundred-and-sixty-five dollars, to be precise.

          “Do you take credit cards?” I ask, slipping the amulet under my camisole.

          “Does a hound dog have fleas?” he asks.

            I shake Wayne’s hand and file his estimate in a drawer where the future me (a Southern-ized Jennifer Chase) will keep her grocery coupons.

          “When you’re ready, you let me know, ma’am,” he says. He backs his pickup out of the long driveway and waits for me to pull ahead of him before starting along the road, a gentleman to the end.

            It’s not easy keeping my foot on the pedal in my slippery Lucite wedges, with bits of down from my chartreuse feather boa catching in my mouth, but still I do it: I drive to Albertson’s before they close at 10. They’re at me even before I’m out of my convertible. 

            “Beautiful evening, ma’am.”

          “Welcome to Albertson’s, ma’am.”

          “Can I get you a cart, ma’am?”

          “Here, ma’am, let me help you with that.”

            I count four energetic men in their early twenties—two white, two black, in white button-down Oxfords, tan khakis neatly pressed—circling me in the supermarket parking lot. There is the matter of my Dior chiffon pants getting caught in the car door, but the Albertson’s men can handle it: They laugh and spring open the latch; the shorter, serious-looking one gently eases the fabric from the mechanism and smoothes it until it lies flat again.

            They hook elbows and breeze me to the entrance, five abreast.

            “Welcome,” beams the store manager, rolling a cart toward me. “What’s a beautiful woman like you doing shopping on a Friday night?”

            And because I am feeling talkative this evening, I tell him everything:  How I just moved to Ocala from New York City, how I just bought my first house, how I really don’t know many people in Ocala—yet.

            “A pretty woman like you, not know a soul in Ocala? We’ll have to change that.”

           And he laughs and winks, and I throw my head back and laugh a deep, horsy laugh.

            There are barely any shoppers in the aisles, so I fly through the store, tossing into my cart bananas, frozen bagels, low-fat cream cheese, Scrubbing Bubbles, Tampax. And at the head of every aisle, there is another Albertson’s man in a white shirt and pressed khakis, asking me if I’m finding everything okay, is there is something he can get? Trip, trip, trip. I’m floating in Lucite sandals over a gleaming checkerboard of freshly waxed linoleum, teal and white squares. As I round the corner to Produce, the giddiness accelerates.

            “Ma’am, can I help you find anything?”

            Why, no, I say, but the heavyset man stacking broccoli is already laughing—I think all the men in Albertson’s must have gotten high before their last shift, and why not? It’s a balmy Friday night and nobody really wants to be in a grocery store at this hour, do they?

           “You have a lovely smile,” he says. Warm brown eyes, dusky brown skin. A faint mustache above his upper lip. “Tell me, ma’am: Are you enjoying yourself at Albertson’s tonight?”

           Short of getting high myself, I have an urge to say something outrageous. The clock’s not even running on this one.

          “Enjoying myself? Oh, yes,” I say solemnly, fingering the amulet. “This is a treat for me.”

            “A treat, ma’am? How so?”

            And keeping a straight face, I explain how back home I have a baby, a teeny six-month-old baby, and normally I go food shopping with the baby and it’s arduous, because my baby fusses in the cart and tries to grab things off the shelves—but tonight, I found someone to look after him and so for once I’m able to enjoy the luxury of pushing a shopping cart in peace and quiet, with no screaming baby. This counts as a good night for me.

            “I’ll look after your baby any time you like, ma’am,” he says.

            “Really? How about my two-year-old?”

          “Yep.”

          “And my-four-year-old? My six-and-a-half-year-old? My seven-and-three-eighths?”

            “Them, too,” he grins. “I’ll watch all your babies.”

            And I can see all of us—the white children, the white me, the black produce man, the pinky-brown babies we make together, all the children I don’t have—gathered on the porch of his grandmother’s house in High Springs, Florida. It’s a one-story cracker house built on concrete blocks, with a tin roof, and friends and relatives are pulling up in their cars onto the front lawn, the back seats piled high with presents. The little girls in the wedding party are wearing dresses of pink muslin, with fairytale headpieces made of pink silk roses and satin ribbon. The boys are wearing tailored navy sports coats and khaki pants and white magnolias in their lapels. It’s raining cats and dogs, and we’re all waiting for the rain to stop, and then a rainbow appears—or is it the minister waving a patch of kente cloth?

            But I never get to find out if we jump over the broomstick. Because I suddenly remember that my new phone line is being turned on before midnight, and I have a very important call to catch.

            I rush through checkout and let five of the best-looking men load the groceries into my trunk. “Good luck!” scream the Albertson’s men as I run a red light.

            I’m unlocking the front door when the phone starts to ring—not my new line, the regular one.

            “Congratulations, ma’am,” says Eddie Dugall. “Are you happy?”

            “Oh, yes,” I say, as I toss the groceries, plastic bags and all, into the empty refrigerator. “Incredibly. I can’t believe it’s mine. Thank you so much.”

            “Didn’t I tell you I was your huckleberry?”

            “You did great, Eddie.”

            “Told you I’d come though for you in two weeks and I did. The Quick & Easy. Like I said. I’m only sorry it wasn’t two weeks to the day, ma’am. I regret that.”

            “No problem.”

            “I told them we closed on the thirtieth, but the god-dang girl in the title office messed up and pushed it to the first.”

           “It doesn’t matter.”

            “If there’s one thing I can’t abide, it’s giving someone my word and not living up to it. Two weeks and one day.  Made me furious.”

            “Eddie. Please. Stop it. I got the house. It doesn’t matter about the extra day. I’m very, very happy.”

            “Really? Well, then.” He lets out a sigh. “I was wondering about that little matter we talked about last week.”

           There’s a big pause. My Lucite platforms are echoing on the wooden floors as I walk through the empty house. Clack, clack, clack. I need a bedroom light.

            “Little matter?” I fling open the doors to my walk-in closet and survey the contents. As far as I’m concerned, if you want to get your way in life, you have to dress the part, connect with the Appropriate Power, then visualize like crazy. The logistics take care of themselves.

            “’Bout what you do, ma’am.”

            I unzip the Dior. “I do a lot of things,” I say. “Remind me.”

           “Mistress Isara. Clair-whatever. Que sera sera,” he says. “Your special talents, primary source of income and all.”

           “Eddie, I’m surprised.”

           “Aw, Miss Chase. Let me hear just a little.”

            I put the phone down and let him sweat it out. In New York, they used to call it a Tony Soprano mortgage: no paperwork, no credit checks, nothing. Just a big, fat down payment that you somehow get your hands on: the lender doesn’t ask how or where. It’s the perfect solution for someone like me, someone with a terrible credit rating, two bad judgments against her and $74,000 in outstanding loans and card debt. In fact, My Very Own Mansion has been a favorite on my list of mental exercises for the last six years: the humongous lump sum conveniently depositing itself in my checking account, an amazingly low-interest No-Income-No-Assets-Verification Loan shoe-horning me into the palace of my dreams (ideally, one with room out back for some animals—say, a pair of golden retrievers. No, scratch that: make it an Arabian stallion). So when the IRS made that mistake last June and sent the $100,000 refund check to the wrong Jennifer Chase, I didn’t bat an eyelash, I didn’t mark the envelope “Return to Sender.” No, it may have taken longer than I would have liked, but in the end, like they always do when you follow the plan, things worked themselves out. Now it was up to me to act fast, to find someone to cash that check, and to sink the money into something the government and the collection agencies could never touch.

            Well—as I will one day tell my champion racehorse, Serendipity—thank God for the Internet and Florida’s generous Homestead Exemption laws, which protect every penny of your home equity from being seized, even in the event of bankruptcy! And thank God for the Ocala Realtor whose web site directed me to a 360-degree virtual tour of Mr. Earl Chatham’s four-bedroom, five-acre Country Manor ranch house, complete with paddocks and koi pond! Most of all, thanks to whoever supplied the links that transported me to EverWhichWayLending.com and its founder/CEO, Eddie Dugall, King of the Alternative Mortgages. As Eddie explained to me exactly fifteen days ago, the North Central Florida lending community offers innovative home-financing solutions that are more or less equivalent to those found in the New York/New Jersey/Damn Yankees TriState Area. While not a genuine Tony Soprano mortgage, at four-and-a-half percent the Quick & Easy gives you, the credit-impaired borrower, the flexibility to put down a hunk-o-cash, thumb your nose at the assholes at Bank of America, and take title to your god-dang property within a fortnight, without a bunch of nosy appraisers and building inspectors falling off your roof and serving you with lawsuits.

          Well, you get the idea of what Eddie said to me. I was charmed, actually.

            Eddie’s still on the line. He’s breathing heavy. I don’t know yet if he drinks. I’m sure I’ll find out, one of these days.

          “Hello, down there,” I giggle into the receiver. “I’m back.”

          He gulps. We’ve never met in person, actually. We’ve only communicated by phone and email.

          “Ready?” I’m wearing a red-brocade silk robe from China’s Forbidden City, armfuls of gold bangles, two Bakelite rosaries, a 25-inch-high jeweled headpiece from Bali: my latest online purchases.  If I do say so, I look outstanding. (Thank you, Buddha/Jesus/E-Bay.)

        “Remember,” I continue, leaning back in a chair. “It’s no more ‘Miss Chase.’ You have to say it exactly like it says on the flyer.”

          A hiccup-y moan escapes him. “Now, you know I’m not an ‘exactly’ kind of man. It’s gonna come out my way or—”

          “Eddie. Please.” I close my eyes and feel for the talisman. “Just try.”  

          He clears his throat: “So, Mistress Isara, ma’am. High Priestess of the Infinite, Goddess at the Four Crossroads, All-seeing, All-knowing Oracle of Madison Avenue—aw, heck, ma’am, let me finish it my way—darlin’ Belle of Ocala; seraph with the honey-colored hair, petal open, pollen dripping, blossom to my bee: What do you see in my Three-hundred-sixty-degree Future?”

            I take my time describing it, like I do with the clients who call on the other line. Eddie seems pleased. He’s what we mediums call a clear signal, meaning: a person with a wide-open psyche, the kind that you can peer right into and get a reading from fast. Only, as I’m giving him his reading, Eddie won’t keep quiet, like he’s supposed to. He keeps butting in and revising my predictions with his own ideas—how outrageous!—until I have to admit: Eddie’s no ordinary client. He’s a lot like me, actually: a big talker and an even bigger dreamer, someone who improvises his own Lotto ticket and cashes it at the Piggly Wiggly that same day, one jackpot after another. Maybe he can show me a trick or two, see the way clear to escape the IRS forever. Maybe he could even be The One. Who knows? It’s not implausible. See, the way I understand it, there is no one future. There’s a limitless number of them. The trick is knowing how to call the right one to you. It all starts with a word, and the word is—well, you know perfectly well what the word is. Just put your lips together. Picture a bush covered with a dark-blue berry that’s not called what you think it is. Say it.

Tagged: phone psychic, Southern men

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