Revenge of the Kudzu Debutantes Read Online Free PDF Page A

fantasy to put the zip back into a stagnant marriage, and he had set up several scenarios, including dialogue, to use during foreplay. The only one she could even remotely imagine Charles agreeing to was the Lion Tamer and the Naughty Trapeze Girl. For some reason she could imagine Charles wearing boots and carrying a whip. But this fantasy required installation of some ceiling hardware that Nita would never be able to explain to the children.
    She read the other scripts, finding that the dialogue pretty much followed the same format. After awhile Nita realized that she had been reading the same monotonous dialogue in numerous soft-porn romance novels. She had always assumed that porno romance novelists must have incredibly varied and innovative sex lives, but now she had a sudden image of a middle-aged librarian locked in a small room poring over sex manuals and entering the dialogue, verbatim, into an endless stream of repetitive novels. It was shocking. It made her wonder if she had wasted a year of her life immersed in a world of false sex and romance. Nita let the book drop. She crossed her hands on her chest and stared at the ceiling. She wondered how hard it would be to install a trapeze. She wondered which way the ceiling joists ran.
    She wondered what Jimmy Lee Motes would say if she asked him to hang a trapeze from her bedroom ceiling.
             
    “N ITA, WHAT IN the hell are you doing?”
    She awoke with a start. Charles was standing in the doorway, illuminated by the light falling from the hallway and the stairwell behind him.
    “It’s nine-thirty and the kids are still playing video games,” he said. “They’re completely unsupervised.”
    “Sorry,” she said, sitting up on one elbow. Drool had collected at the corner of her mouth and run down along her chin and the front of her black silk camisole. She wiped her face with the back of one hand.
    “Do you have the flu?” he asked suspiciously. He stood in the doorway, a dark and slightly menacing figure.
    “No,” she said. “I don’t think so.”
    “I told the kids to go to bed,” he said, coming into the room. “I didn’t know what else to do.”
    “Okay.” She pulled her hair away from her mouth, trying to make herself wake up, trying to remember why she was lying in bed wearing sexy lingerie.
    “Why is it so dark in here?” he said, hitting the switch to the wall sconces. Light flooded the room and Nita shielded her eyes with her hand, swaying on one elbow, her hair wild around her face, lipstick smeared in a red arc around her mouth, mascara oozing beneath her eyes and down one cheek.
    Charles stared blankly at his wife, who resembled a deranged circus clown. The sexual aspect of her lying in bed didn’t occur to him. He hadn’t thought of her that way in years, not since the birth of the children. He had a stack of pornographic magazines in a box in the back of his closet that he masturbated to, but he wouldn’t have thought of doing to his wife what men in the magazines did to those women. Sex with his wife was a sacred trust; a covenant based on two thousand years of faith and history. After a minute, he turned and went into the bathroom.
    She could hear him running water in the sink. She had been dreaming she was locked in a decrepit old house and the sewer had backed up and was steadily filling the house with green stinking water and a kind of brown sludge. She kept running up the stairs and hollering for everyone to get out, and the sewage kept following her up one flight after another, filling floor after floor of the sinking house.
    “Nita, what did I tell you about the toothpaste?” Charles said, leaning around the bathroom door and holding the tube out in front of him like a relay runner holds a baton. Charles was very particular about his toothpaste. There was a right way to squeeze it and a wrong way. The right way was to start at the bottom and roll it. The wrong way was to grab the middle of a full tube and