PenWomanShip

It’s been a custom in our town for years, at least among the more affluent, to play elaborate practical jokes on people who attract attention for one reason or another. For instance, when one of the men in the forty to fifty-five age group has a birthday, the other men load up a larger-than-life-size concrete lion and haul it on a trailer to the guy’s house and dump it in his driveway the night before. When he comes out to drive his car to work or to the golf course, he sees the lion and knows he’s in for a tough day trying to get it moved away. His wife can’t get her car out either—they always put the lion in the narrowest part—so they both are at each other’s throats until someone with a fork lift can drive across town and move the lion. Sooner or later the men with the trailer will come and carry it away to the warehouse where they store the thing until the next birthday rolls around. There is much snickering on the golf course and in the clubhouse bar if the birthday boy is not a good sport about the joke. If you want to be a member of this group, you have to take the lion like a lamb, so to speak.

You wouldn’t think grown men with lucrative businesses would waste their time on frat house hazing like this, but most of these guys went to Carolina and aren’t above horsing around a bit when the occasion arises. They aren’t above a little bet on a basketball game, either, or another swig of blended whiskey at the tailgate party at a football game in the fall. These guys have pockets deep enough to hold a bet, a flask or the key to the padlock on the door to wherever it is that they store the lion on his trailer.

So it was with some surprise but not dismay that I first spied the pink flamingo perched among the periwinkle at the edge of my front yard. It stood just beside the driveway on two legs made of plastic-coated wire, as if someone had driven through from back to front—I live on a corner lot and have two driveway entrances, or exits if you insist—and leaning out, deposited him without getting out of the car. Someone tall enough to have a long reach, who wanted to do the deed and be gone in an instant, could have done that. Or someone with a confederate riding shotgun, who came in from the right direction, could have the confederate lean out and push the bird’s wire legs into the soil with the car still moving slowly. I had not heard a thing, but everyone I know drives big expensive cars with quiet engines. Poor people don’t waste good money on practical jokes and if they could afford a pink flamingo, they’d have put in their own front yard. It was then five minutes after 10:00 in the morning and I was on my way uptown to do an errand but I never went. You don’t just walk away and leave a pink flamingo in your periwinkle if you live on Barrus Avenue. I needed time to think.

My reasoning went like this: If it takes at least four men and a welded steel dumping trailer with a lift to load and unload a concrete lion weighing roughly 1000 pounds, it would take only one—or at most two—women in a Chrysler Towncar to deposit a hollow plastic pink flamingo by my driveway and escape without a sound. Those flamingoes weigh next to nothing and are ugly as sin, the cheap ones being particularly garish, but what can you expect for $ .99 at the discount store?

I picked up the bird and put him in the room I call the potting shed—it used to be the laundry room—and then considered very carefully before I started calling around to see if anyone would admit to staking out the ugly bird in my shrubbery. At least eight women, all of whom I had considered friends until that moment, denied any knowledge of the incident. One woman, whose husband had been “lionized" not long before, said she woke up one morning to find a dozen of the pink flamingoes all over her lawn. She said she threw them in the trash, but who knows? She could be silently recycling flamingoes, one by one, all over the neighborhood. Well, I finally concluded that someone was trying to insult me or my taste in garden design and I thought I knew who envied me the most and who would help her do anything short of a felony. My radar for revenge homed in on Cissie Carrick and her boon companion Bitsy Dean.

Since Easter was not far in the future I decided to return the bird with a clutch of colored eggs to Cissie’s yard on the pastel coattails of the Easter Bunny. I drove out to the discount store at the mall and bought a dozen of the most garish plastic eggs I could find and stored them in the potting shed with the pink flamingo which might well have laid them, they were all so ugly. Then I sat and waited for the holiday weekend to arrive, savoring the plot of my revenge while I sipped iced tea on the patio muttering “If you can’t join ’em, lick ’em.” That has been my philosophy since the Sub-Debs in high school blackballed me for making straight A’s. Too brainy, they had whispered behind geometry books in study hall, and made an enemy for life.

Cliques exist for the sole purpose of excluding all but the favored few, which in the case of Cissie and her crowd meant the over-the-hill gang with hollow legs and little gold hockey sticks they wore pinned to their polo collars. We were all old enough to know better than to start a war of birds in a town so small that we couldn’t have helped tripping over each other on the way to the post office. But I was incensed at these self-appointed arbiters of taste who, by their very cheapness in their choice of flamingoes, were about to bring my vengeance down on their unsuspecting heads. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned in high school by a bunch of simpering Sub-Debs.

The Saturday before Easter Sunday did dawn bright and clear, or at any rate was bright and clear by the time I woke up at 9:15. I almost never see the dawn these days since I don’t get up as early as I used to. Living alone, I sleep until I wake up, whenever that may be. While the coffee dripped I rubbed my hands together with satanic glee at the prospect of old Cissie’s consternation when she should discover the mother of all ugly pink flamingoes poised above a dozen psychedelic eggs in the azaleas that border her front yard. As I drove by on Friday afternoon, I’d seen that the azaleas were in bloom, a hideous purple-pink that would strike just the jarring note I wanted in contrast with the mother bird’s pale orangey-red body and grass-green legs. The plastic eggs, I thought, were a stroke of genius, even if they had cost me more than the bird had cost Cissie. Sometimes I do surprise myself!

Most people have no idea how to dream up creative vengeance. Most people like to think they are incapable of wit at the expense of someone who has snubbed them. Most women are experts at ignoring opportunities to even the score when other women have pulled a stunt like giving me the bird when I didn’t deserve it. But I am nothing if not determined, and I was determined to see at least one of Cissie’s chickens come wittily home to roost.

So I packed the pink flamingo and the colored eggs into an authentic English garden trug, put them in the back seat of my Buick and drove over to Cissie’s house on Dexter. The residents of Dexter and its parallel street, Ambrose, consider themselves one of the most fortunate neighborhoods in the world, chiefly because once settled there as most of them had done in the Fifties, no one ever leaves alive. There is much bonhomie but very little renovation of the houses, most of which are small and smugly middle class with lots of red brick cottages and asphalt shingled ranches among which one fairytale confection of turrets and battlements stands out like a bad dream. Cissie lives in one of the ranches with a large yard containing many little “garden rooms” tended by a part-time gardener, although it never looks particularly well-groomed.

In the South the indica azaleas, with their billowing habit of growth and their breathtaking spring bloom, are like ladies in great hoop skirts that can cover a multitude of sins. I was afraid my little vignette of a pink flamingo with her varicolored eggs might be invisible in such a riot of color, so I drove on around the block to Ambrose while I considered where to display it all to the best effect. Creeping slowly along down Dexter, I remembered the circular brick mini-patio beside the walk to the screened breezeway that joins the house to the garage. Ground zero!

I parked out front. There was no car in the driveway and no sign of Cissie anywhere. I couldn’t see into the garage because the door was down when I had circled the block but all those billowing azaleas could have hidden half a dozen armed defenders with field hockey sticks. I waited. After five full minutes nothing moved so I got out and started across the lawn to unburden myself of the flamingo and her eggs which had begun to weigh a little on my conscience.

Before I could reach the brick circle Cissie came toward me with her arms raised in her usual flamboyant greeting. As soon as she saw what I was carrying in the basket, her arms dropped to her sides with a deflated whoosh as if all the air had gone out of her. “What … what?” She sounded strangled.

“I was just bringing you some flamingo eggs to hatch” I explained, inspired. “See, here’s the mother bird and these are her eggs. You can raise a whole flock of pink flamingoes. They go so much better with the color of your house than with mine.” Then, as she continued unable to speak “It’s Easter! Eggs. Don’t you see? You can start a new tradition with flamingo eggs ….” I trailed off because Cissie had become quite red in the face.

As she struggled to get her anger under control I set the trug down on the center of the brick circle and turned to leave. I had not intended to leave the trug, only the bird and the eggs. I was going to lose money on this bit of revenge for sure and maybe a piece of my hide as well if Cissie didn’t cool down quick. I hadn’t planned on being caught red-handed, had in fact counted on her being away doing last minute shopping at the supermarket or something. But then I haven’t had as much practice as Cissie in surreptitiously planting birds on people’s lawns or driving in and out of people’s driveways in the dead of night and planting aesthetic land mines.

Finally she found her tongue and said, in the best southern tradition of good manners “Won’t you come in and have a drink?” But I declined and kept on walking toward my car. She followed me, with little sidelong glances back toward the trug. I don’t know what I would have done if she had thrust the whole thing back at me, but she didn’t, and I got into my car and drove away, leaving her to drown her sorrows a little earlier in the day than usual.

Well, revenge is sweet, but never quite as sweet as we anticipate before we take it. Like so much else in life, the pleasures of revenge are more in the anticipation of the future than in the actual event. Still, it’s better to have lost a trug than to have kept a great idea to myself. If I had it to do over again, I’d call ahead to be absolutely sure that Cissie was off on a harmless, long fool’s errand before I showed up with my surprise. If she was guilty in the first place, as I still believe she was, she would have known who did it when she recognized the bird.