Deadly Housewives Page 6

  “I wasn’t at church to night, or last night. Or even last week. I been plannin’.”

  “Plannin’ what, Butch?” She was afraid to know the answer and yet she felt her heart race, excited to hear more.

  “First I had to get me a gun. Wallace down at work had one he sold me real cheap. Then I had to watch Bridgeman till I was sure I could get him alone.”

  “An’ just where were you to night, Butch?”

  “Out in the wood, buryin’ his sorry ass.”

  Opal fell back. “He’s dead?” she whispered.

  “As a possum all stiff by the side of the road. An’ you know what, honey? I feel like celebratin’. I feel born again.”

  The Lord certainly does work in mysterious ways, Opal thought.

  The sunflowers had long since gone to seed since that first time she’d driven out there and found religion by mistake. As she walked up the stairs now so familiar to her, she could hear someone inside.

  “Reverend? Is that you?” she shouted through the locked door.

  The bolt turned and there stood the man who was going to set her free. Free at last!

  “Why, Opal Decatur, what a nice surprise. Come on in.”

  She shuffled toward the front of the room. “Reverend, I’ve come to confess somethin’ an’ I need you to hear me.”

  He followed her but then stopped and sat in the front pew. “Now, Opal, you know we’re not that kind of church. There are no confessions here. Jesus loves you. Pray to Him. You don’t need no one else.”

  “Oh, I guess I didn’t—”

  “Come sit next to me. I can see you’re upset about something. What is it?”

  She sat down but kept a bit of distance between them. “So, if I tell you somethin’ in confidence, just to ease my own soul, you might have to pass it on? I can’t count on you to keep it private?” she asked.

  “Depends, I guess.”

  “On what?”

  He pursed his lips. “Well, I guess on the seriousness…”

  “Butch killed Tim Bridgeman.”

  Reverend Hempel looked like he was the one who had been shot. Stunned is what he was. Sitting there dazed until she asked, “Are you all right?”

  “I…well…I…are you sure about this?”

  “Positive.” He’d never know how sure she was. No one would ever know that she’d gone out after Butch left for work that day and looked for herself. Yep, right where he’d told her it was. A sloppy grave, just the kind Tim Bridgeman deserved.

  “Well, I’ll have to call the police. Yes.” He stood up, walking quickly toward the back of the room. “That’s what I’ve got to do. Can’t have this black mark on my church. No, sir. Can’t have this. Not while I’m in charge.” He was still muttering when he got to his office. Forgot all about Opal and her husband. Just like she’d hoped he would.

  Maybe she should try traveling next. See the world, well at least Disney World, and get away from all her busybody neighbors. For a while there they had so much to talk about, Opal couldn’t blame them much. What with the police coming for Butch, hauling him away like that. Then there was all the business about digging up Tim Bridgeman’s body and, of course, lots of juicy stories about Reverend Hempel and the House of Deliverance. Like he was a saint or something when all he did was make one phone call. Attendance was up so much there was a building fund to pay for an addition. And she’d even seen a commercial for Sunday services on Channel 10.

  Religion had never really taken hold of Opal Decatur, but still she had to admire how the Lord had managed to clean up all the dirt—make things right. Of course, getting rid of Butch and Bridgeman couldn’t make up for all her suffering…Brenda’s, too. Nothing could. But it was a start.

  Lawn and Order

  Carole Nelson Douglas

  I. Grass Widow

  The ultimate unkillable plant with good resistance to insects. Growth is comparatively slow, but it lasts for many years.

  “Here, Mom,” Madison said. “Nothing like a touch of greenery to make a room homey. I’ll just set one pot on either side of the window. So clean and sculptural.”

  “I don’t want to fuss with keeping plants alive,” I said. “Those look more like dinosaur quills than plants anyway. And my name is Celeste.”

  “Now, Mother Hubbard!” Madison knows I hate that predictable play on words. “Moving here to Dallas from Indianapolis is a huge change, but William couldn’t leave you alone in that awful inner-city neighborhood. And think of the winters! Besides, these plants are in the succulent family. All they need is a bit of water now and then. You can’t kill them.”

  Then she left me, at last, in the mother-in-law apartment over their three-car garage, alone with my Siamese cat, Cleopatra.

  I stroked her now. There’d been nothing “awful” about my old neighborhood. It had been aging, yes, just like me, but the homes had been considered quite nice in their day. And why couldn’t William be Bill? He was before he married one of those women named after avenues or institutions. “Mad” she went by with her friends, but Bill had to be “William.” And never “Sonny,” which had been his nickname since kindergarten. I still used that name to bug her, just as she called me “Mother Hubbard” from time to time, especially when she wanted to remind me to stay in my place. Which was not in her house hold. I was to keep my hands out of running the house, period.

  “You and Cleo,” she’d said when we moved in, “should have plenty of room up here.”

  “Cleopatra’s used to roaming a whole house.”

  “Not mine.” Madison had managed to sound both sweet and sour, like a Chinese dish.

  She was skinny, thanks to endless hours at the gym and Pilates and yoga classes. With two children in school, you’d think she had time on her hands, but going to the French manicurist and community meetings kept her on the run.

  I eyed her professionally blonded hair and meticulously made-up face. She reminded me of some hot house orchid, decorative but useless.

  I was used to managing a whole house, but I didn’t say it. Her sprawling Texas minimansion was three times the size of my lost midwestern colonial, but she employed half a dozen slaves to maintain her domain. I’d managed to run my kingdom solo.

  Cleopatra, crouched on the carpeted “window perch” I had bought her, yowled plaintively to hear her name invoked in nickname fashion. She was a chocolate-point Siamese with an elongated neck and delicate profile that recalled the head of Nefertiti and my cat’s namesake, the Queen of the Nile.

  Madison was what they called the Queen of Denial these days. She wanted to deny that Cleopatra and I were here to stay.

  When she left it was with a last, disparaging glance. This house was her queendom and Cleopatra and I had been dethroned.

  I sighed and began examining the apartment. The large living/eating/kitchen area overlooked the long pebblestone driveway in the front. A separate bedroom/bathroom suite overlooked the “automobile court” in the back. Darling “Mad” called everything by some snooty name like “automobile court” or “suite.” At least the place had a window or two for Cleopatra to look out of. Me, too. Mad had made it clear that Cleopatra was barely tolerated. It reflected her unspoken opinion of my presence.

  These quarters had been intended for a live-in housekeeper, but Madison had a Spanish cleaning woman come in twice a week. Everything here was beige. A no-color “scheme,” as dear Mad would call it. I gazed at my new roommates. The two plants were bunched green spears about three feet tall. Mottled like snakeskin. Their paler green edges and pointed tips looked sharp enough to cut someone.

  Did darling “Mad” think I didn’t know that snake plants were also called mother-in-law’s tongue? A daily reminder to keep my mouth shut?

  We’d see about that.

  “Mrs. Hubbard!” The sixtyish lady across the street who was tending the house-foundation plants on a knee pad stood up painfully to wave. All the houses here were hemmed around with shrubs. It kept the foundations from drying out and
cracking from the heat, Sonny had told me. Such circling greenery also harbored slugs and snails and toads and—I’d been warned—the occasional scorpion.

  “Nice to see you out.” she said. “The neighborhood is as quiet as a tomb during the day.”

  I ventured onto her driveway. Lawns were sacred here; no walking on them…and God forbid if a loose cat or dog should poop on one. The thick St. Augustine grass was unpleasant underfoot anyway, so thick you could turn your ankle and maybe even break your neck. Its short blades were as thick and stiff as the snake plant’s, not the pliable, soft grass that tickled your soles and soul up north, the kind that Walt Whitman had called “the beautiful uncut hair of graves.”

  “Where I grew up, or maybe I should say when…” I began. Mrs. Berwick smiled, her hair snow-white under a wide-brimmed straw garden hat. She wore a long-sleeved, pale blue T-shirt and long denim pants, looking a little like an Asian rice-paddy worker.

  “You and I are among the few seniors in the community,” she said. “Most of the neighborhood residents our age are housed in ritzy assisted-living facilities nearby.”

  “Assisted living is a fast track to assisted death,” I replied. “You start by downsizing from a house to a small apartment with room for none of your favorite things, soon vegetate and move ‘up’ into assisted living, then daily care, and finally hospice. Not for me. I have plenty of energy and ability left, as do you, Mrs. Berwick.”

  “What were you going to say about where you grew up, Mrs. Hubbard?”

  I eyed the two-story brick mansions surrounding us. Massive facades was the realtors’ selling phrase. These homes all boasted winding Tara staircases, home theaters, pools with “natural” waterfalls. During the day, these sinuous, curving streets were deserted except for the battered, tacky trucks of lawn and pool services, or slight young mothers in huge SUVs shooting past, cell phones clamped to their ears, backseat kids unseen and unheard behind dark-tinted window glass.

  “We had city blocks up north, laid out on grids that were easy to navigate,” I said. “Kids used to play outside in my neighborhood, in the streets and yards, until twilight when their parents called them home. The mothers stepped out their front doors to call their names. Kids ‘called’ on other kids to play: stood outside in the summer and yelled the other kid’s name until he or she came out. All the house windows were open to snag any cool breeze through the screens. No air-conditioning. The games kids played were active, inventive, thrilling as dark came on and their voices echoed from curb to curb. Red Light, Green Light. Frying Pan. Simple Simon…No. That’s not right. Simon Says! Hide-and-seek in the dark. These suburban Fort Worth streets are beautiful but confusing and sterile. Hermetically sealed. Nothing happens here.”

  Mrs. Berwick bent to push an edging brick into more perfect alignment with the toe of her tennis shoe. “I remember summer days like that, too. But everything’s air-conditioned now, and no one wants their kids out of sight. Sexual predators, you know.”

  “Who even knew about them years ago? Poor kids today! They’re all being driven everywhere. Their little limbs will shrivel.”

  “Hardly. There’s soccer and baseball and football practice and dance and violin lessons. It’s the mother-chauffeurs who will shrivel, but they have their Pilates classes and gym routines.”

  “I wish I could garden as you do. Or keep house. I’m used to being active, but my daughter-in-law won’t hear of my lifting a finger around the house.”

  “It’s a point of status here, dear. Everyone can afford servants. But I do sympathize with your restlessness, Mrs. Hubbard. Oh, yes. Virgil and I are hangers-on in a much younger area. I so love working in the yard, and my doctor says it’s good for me. Oh, will you look at that!”

  Her tennis shoe toe pointed to a small island of thick-bladed St. Augustine grass. Three brown clumps. “Even here ‘some people’ will let their cats out at night to soil ‘other people’s’ yards. It makes me so mad!!”

  “My cat is kept indoors,” I said hastily, watching my genial neighbor’s face turn furious. “Usually it’s dogs that leave things on lawns. Cats will bury their…leavings if they can.”

  “I picked up fourteen of these miserable little ‘presents’ from my yard last week. The cats claw up my garden trying to bury their offal, but the ground is too hard, so they leave it just sitting there on the lawn for me to deal with.”

  She pulled a plastic newspaper sleeve over one arm like an opera glove, then bent to pick up the sun-dried turds, turning the sleeve inside out to bag them.

  “Are those there to discourage the cats?” I pointed at the creatively colored rubber snakes sunning on the edging stones between the zinnias and lantana.

  They were quite cleverly molded into various sinuous positions. Their fanged, open jaws even sported tiny rubber threads of tongue. Turquoise and white, green and lavender, yellow and red, black and green, they almost resembled exotic flowers.

  “I’ve tried everything—mothballs, commercial repellents. I’m told the snakes are my best bet. And you think that children never play on the streets around here? I’ve found several balls crushing my blooms and leaves, so some little devils must get out once in a while.”

  “Good luck with your lovely garden. I’d best be off on my walk.”

  “The park and green space are that way.”

  “Oh, I like to walk the neighborhood streets. Get to know my new neighborhood.”

  And I did.

  I grew to know it as no one else could, because they all sheltered behind their plantation shutters and air-conditioning and attached garages.

  Sonny’s street was named Meandering Lane. Streets in the sun belt all seemed to be named “lane,” though they were a world away from the shady unpretentious paths that word implied. Things here were never what they seemed. And that applied to people as well.

  The Merediths’ young son, Dustin, for instance, was hired to mow a few neighbors’ lawns as a gesture of neighborhood solidarity. (The Merediths were rumored to have lost it “all” in the dot-com crash and to have sold their French Provincial furnishings on eBay.) Hence poor Dustin labored like an ordinary teenager.

  He was a tall, well-built boy with an athletic scholarship to a major university in the fall. And when he tended the Cathcarts’ lawn, front and back, he spent far longer in the back than seemed necessary. There was, I heard from Mrs. Berwick, a splendid Infinity Pool, spa, sauna, and steam-room environment there, but not much grass.

  There was also likely a fanatically sunbathing Mrs. Cathcart, who needed expert shaping, trimming, and hosing. I’d seen her racing about in her Lexus SUV: a stringy, brown-skinned, highlighted, over-made-up example of contemporary suburban female who daily drove a Datsun Z to Nordstrom’s and/or Neiman Marcus like a bat out of hell. Young Dustin was looking decidedly pooped, but was no doubt getting lots of college-freshman spending money, not to mention dating tips.

  All the women along Meandering Lane were in their frantic thirties or early forties, maintained as meticulously as race horses, domestic goddesses with both too much and too little to do. Now, if Madison had a job, I could handle the house and the children…

  But she never would have any job except controlling Sonny, pushing her children out of the nest and ladying it over me. I really couldn’t conceive of all these women being so useless yet spending so much time and their husbands’ money celebrating that state.

  Of course I was pretty useless myself at the moment. All I could do was walk the neighborhood, peering past the massively false facades into the hidden realities. And there were plenty.

  II. Evil Growth

  Mother-in-law’s tongue is so common and easy to care for that few people, even plant lovers, give it much thought.

  Cleopatra and I used to peer down from our one window that overlooked the street.

  My little Neon was parked far behind the driveway, out of sight, looking like a marooned golf cart. So tacky for the neighbors to see, you know.

  Cleopa
tra always purred as I stroked her bony form in its smooth coat of beige. Her fine points were her chocolate-brown ears, so keen. She always heard the d-in-law coming up the spiral staircase to our quarters before I did. Devil-in-law. Cleopatra’s blue eyes were clearer and brighter than any flower in Mrs. Berwick’s garden across the street.

  And her tail twitched like an annoyed metronome whenever Madison was within sight and hearing. So when she began to droop, I began to worry. Cleopatra was elegant and strong, only seven years old. She took to lying down, rather than crouching on her sole window perch. My fury grew. Madison knew perfectly well we’d been exiled to her vacant servants’ quarters. But Sonny! He said nothing, living in a spreadsheet world, very well remunerated but isolated by the gap between office and home.

  Their son, Kyle, was twelve. Off at a military school! Their daughter was Kinsey. Named after a sex researcher! Only eight and already on such a fast track that she had no time for family dinner.

  So it was often Sonny and Madison and I. Dinner for three.

  The expensive asparagus was overcooked, the main dishes were served half-raw, but Mad occasionally allowed me to “help” with the cooking. At first I was pleased, although the huge kitchen with a granite-topped island long enough to serve twenty made for many extra steps. Then I discovered that this cooking invitation was an exercise in disparaging and humiliating me.

  “Not canola oil, Mother! Extra-virgin olive oil. Must you use that crude cheap grater you brought from Indiana! This is from Chef Jean-Paul’s cooking school. Much finer. Believe me, even you will notice the difference…”

  Even my Cleopatra had wilted like the spinach leaves in Madison’s corrosive French vinegars.

  I stroked her and she no longer purred. Madison called me hysterical when I decided Cleopatra needed a 7 P.M. vet run. Sonny hid behind his Wall Street Journal and murmured meaningless encouragements. “She’ll be fine. A little indigestion.”