Parker hadn’t believed it. He didn’t know why Sissy had dumped him for the toad, but he didn’t want to believe that.
Steam was forming on the inside of the windshield. He rolled the window back down and hit the gas pedal, splashing parked cars with muddy water on the rain-slick street. But he couldn’t go very fast, not with the speed bumps and stop signs and cross traffic. He rubbed his hand on the steering wheel. He could still feel the curve of Sissy’s waist under his palm. And the way her flesh yielded to his fingers when he slid them down her body.
He’d missed his last call, and now it was nearly six, past time to close up. Calvin Merkin, his supervisor, would be hopping mad at having to wait for him. Parker had blown into town without much money. He’d never liked to save for tomorrow what he could spend today. Calvin, who’d been in Parker’s class, but whom Parker barely remembered, had taken him on right away, made a job for him. Parker had tried to hold out for something better. But this was about the only job in town.
Suddenly, a rickety pickup packed with crates of chickens swung out in front of him. Parker fluttered his brakes as he came into the intersection. The telephone truck skidded sideways. Lightning flashed on an old hearse full of high school kids coming straight at him, paying no attention to the stop sign. Parker threw his weight on the wheel, turned into the skid, and managed to get the truck out of their way. The teenagers were safe, but he couldn’t get around the chicken farmer, who was going fifteen miles an hour. He heard the thunder growl in the distance.
Parker pounded on the steering wheel with his fist and then forced himself to relax. He inhaled the dark, woody smells of the rainy summer evening and thought about the auburn-haired cheerleader who’d jumped into the air and yelled for him every time he made a touchdown. And then leaped into his sweaty arms when the game was done.
He’d tried to put her out of his head at first, but over the years he’d found memories of her helped. He’d thought about her during the war, when the wet heat of the South Pacific nights and the buzzing of the flies made him think about Gentry.
He thought about her after the war, too. He was just twenty-one in 1945 when it ended, and he hadn’t a clue what he wanted to be when he “grew up.”
He’d always expected he’d get a football scholarship and then turn pro. Everyone did. But that dream ended on some no-name island when he caught a load of shrapnel while building a bridge under enemy shelling. A bridge that in the end was never used. He got the Silver Star for leading his men on that fool’s mission. Nobody in his right mind would have done it. But then, during the war, nobody ever accused Parker of being in his right mind. He was just young and wild.
Sissy’s father gave him a big write-up in The Weekly Avenger. GENTRY’S GREATEST FOOTBALL STAR BECOMES GENTRY’S MOST GALLANT WAR HERO. Schoolchildren from all over the parish wrote him fan letters. He read a couple and threw the rest away. Too many of his men had died.
The chicken truck headed toward the intersection at Church and Grand Avenue. The light was green. Come on, come on, Parker willed. He sure as hell didn’t want to be fired his first day on the job. It would be like flunking your high school reunion. But here he was, caught in the Gentry rush minute, behind a shipment of poultry that slowed for oncoming traffic.
Lightning shot across the sky. A car pulled out of the courthouse parking lot and the poultry truck stopped politely. And missed the green light. Parker shook with the thunder.
He wished he were back in Asia where you could nudge frightened farmers right through country intersections.
He’d taken his discharge overseas. With no career and nobody waiting for him, he’d set out to see the world. Somewhere there had to be something that made him feel as good as running ninety-five yards for a touchdown with Sissy leaping up in the air and the whole town standing up and cheering for him.
He bummed all over Asia. He never worried about money. With his training in the engineering corps, he knew he could always pick up something.
Of course his parents were desperate for him to come back and go to college on the G.I. Bill and then take over the shoe store. But Parker wasn’t ready to settle for that.
The chicken truck turned left on Grand. The town was founded in 1870, shortly after the Civil War, but the streets were named in 1910 in a fit of civic boosterism: Grand Avenue, Progress Street, Commerce Street, Education Drive, Church Street, and of course Hope. All that naming hadn’t helped much. The population hardly grew at all. Parker shot straight across the tracks, hung a right, and drove through the two-story stucco business district that ran for five blocks on Grand along both sides of the railroad tracks. His father’s shoe store was gone. The neon sign he’d helped hoist over the entrance had been replaced by a wooden plaque with “Nettie’s Knits” burned into it.
All those years of worrying about “the business.” All those entreaties to set a good example and become a pride to his race, while of course never mentioning or calling any attention to his Jewishness. All that fear of “waving the flag.” In the end, what difference did it make? They called him a Jew boy behind his back and bought their shoes down the street at Rubinstein’s.
A red-and-green neon sign outlined the department store on the corner of Grand and Progress, where he turned. Golden letters flashed on: RUBINSTEIN’S SERVING GENTRY SINCE 1875. The raindrops on his windshield lit up in a splatter of color, the colors of the temples of Thailand.
He’d landed there in 1948 and felt an affinity for the steamy, underdeveloped country with its temples of gold and red and green. He acquired a real taste for the spicy Thai food and the lissome women who cooked it.
He found a job with Jim Thompson, an American G.I. who was revolutionizing Thai silk, changing it from a cottage industry into a major export. But Parker didn’t much like textiles or working for the fastidious, fussy Thompson.
He was more comfortable with a former Seabee captain, who was starting up a construction business and promised to teach him anything he didn’t already know about building.
They took an influential Thai businessman in as a partner and began to build downtown Bangkok. Parker was on a roll again, as his company moved into the spotlight. His partners took care of the contracts, the bribes, the business. Parker stayed at the job site. He liked being out there in the heat with the other men, building something he could see, something he could lay his hands on.
One of Thompson’s pretty weavers moved in with him and Parker settled down, as much as he could settle down. As soon as the actual construction slowed, he’d be off by himself trekking through the mountains on elephants or wandering around the jungles of Burma on foot. Once he disappeared into a Buddhist monastery and didn’t come out for two months. At first he thought he’d found what he was looking for. There the monks in their saffron robes tended rows of golden Buddhas and taught him that this life was just one small step in the eternal journey. They showed him how to take away the pain of living. But after a couple of months, he realized they were so focused on the pain, they’d given up on the joy. He couldn’t stay. The river of desire was too strong in him.
Then in 1954, when a big contract they were counting on didn’t come through, his American partner skipped town with all their money. Parker managed to pay off his men. He knew they’d have starved if he hadn’t. But it wiped him out. And he wasn’t able to repay their big suppliers. He remembered his father telling him, “A man has to stand behind his word.” Parker felt he’d had his shot and he’d dropped the ball. He was humiliated.
His Thai partner suspected Parker was in league with the thief. All Americans looked the same to him. With an Asian prison looming over his future, Parker, who was carving out a place for himself as an international businessman, was forced to slip out of the country at night, in an old fishing boat that belonged to one of his laborers.
The girl cried. She wanted him to marry her and take her back with him. He considered it. She was strong and sweet and when she’d throw her long black hair around and
look at him from the corner of her eye, he found her hard to resist. But he knew it would be wrong. He didn’t love her.
By then he’d had more women than he could count, in every color and hue. And some of them meant a lot to him. But he always held back. Something indescribable was missing.
He slunk back to the United States with the bitter taste of defeat on his tongue. He felt like a stranger in San Francisco, where nobody cared that he claimed to have been part owner of a construction company in some godforsaken underdeveloped country.
He returned home to his mother, now living in Miami, and his sense of humiliation was complete. The only work he could find was on nonunion construction crews. His mother lied about his occupation.
He met a girl in Miami, this time Southern and Jewish. She was smart and sarcastic, and had wonderful curly red hair. Her father owned a big Cadillac dealership and was willing to take Parker into the business.
“Perfect,” his mother said.
The date was set. Parker went with his fiancée to pick out their silver. As he watched her agonize over the pattern, arrange knives and spoons on different place mats, he envisioned their life together and he couldn’t make himself go through with it. He couldn’t spend the rest of his life living off his father-in-law’s dole. Besides, that indescribable something wasn’t there.
His mother said he’d find any excuse not to get tied down. “You’re thirty-two and you don’t have anything to show for it. No family. No education. No business. Nothing. It’s time you built yourself a life, boy, or life’s going to pass you by.” He knew she was right.
In the middle of his life, Parker’s vision of himself was shrinking.
He decided to go back to Gentry, where, once upon a time, crowds cheered and called him the great Parker Davidson. Besides he wanted to see how Sissy was doing.
He’d half hoped she was settled and fat, so he could reject her as she had once rejected him. He intended to close the door on that painful adolescent fantasy. So the last thing he’d expected was the heat their encounter had generated. But there it was. Maybe that’s what he’d really been hoping for all along.
He swung the telephone truck into the rutted gravel parking lot. Calvin Merkin, his supervisor, was standing in the doorway looking pissed.
Parker jumped out and went inside to face him. As the lightning flashed and the thunder boomed, Calvin did his duty and chewed him out for a good five minutes, until he noticed the lipstick on Parker’s shirt. “I should fire your ass, boy,” he said. “Who you been catting around with? Some housewife with a bad phone?” But his eyes didn’t show anger. Instead they gleamed with eager admiration. “You SOB.”
Parker said nothing.
“Come on,” Calvin said. “I’ll let you buy me a drink.”
They went out into the parking lot together. Calvin watched Parker grab a jar of homemade pickled watermelon rinds from the telephone truck and toss it into his MG.
“Damn!” said Calvin. “Damn! She gave you a souvenir!”
“I’ll see you at the Paradise,” Parker said, and peeled away from the curb.
He’d fallen in love with Sissy in the days of his youth, when he was struggling to remain pure at heart. He’d never even tried to make love to her. Now he ranked that as one of the stupider decisions.
As he pulled up to the bar, he thought about the bigoted toad she’d married. But he didn’t know what to do about it.
Chapter 3
Love is like cigarettes. It gives you a little pleasure while you’re at it, but it leaves you with a bad taste in your mouth and a pain in your chest.
Rule Number Forty-two,
THE SOUTHERN BELLE'S HANDBOOK
SISSY STOOD IN the bathroom window, her hand on the creased, yellowing shade. She heard the voices of Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers floating down the empty street singing “Why Do Fools Fall in Love.” Good question, she thought as she saw the secondhand hearse filled with high school kids round the corner under the streetlight.
She remembered what it was like when she was in high school looking for trouble on a hot summer night and her biggest problem was she might not find any.
The storm had blown over, leaving the town breathless and muggy. She pulled the shade down and hung her green chenille robe on the hook in back of the door. The wet clothes everyone had thrown into a heap and left for Mother were lying in a puddle on the black-and-white tile.
Balancing an ashtray on the edge of the old, claw-footed tub, she sank wearily into the water. It was barely tepid now that she’d gotten the rest of her family bathed. She closed her eyes, too tired even to pick up the soap.
After a while she sat up and took a drag on her cigarette. As the nicotine curled through her system, the horrors of the afternoon came back to taunt her. Peewee had been so brave. Foolish but brave. He could have died in that damned gravel pit like Sissy’s brother Norman had all those years ago. Guilt crawled up and down her stomach. Okay, that did it, enough. She was going to remain a good and faithful wife just as she’d always been. She decided to make that Rule… she searched for an appropriate number… Fifty seemed about right.
She ran the pink bar of soap along her arms and around back of her neck where her auburn hair was more or less pinned up. No more yielding to temptation, she swore to herself. What does it get you, anyway? A different man. Big deal.
A memory flashed through her body of another man, a long time ago, a short powerful man in a hunting jacket. She reached for her cigarette. Southern Belle’s Handbook Rule Number Seventeen: A lady doesn’t waste her precious time on bad memories. She inhaled shakily. Ashes fell into her bath. Shit. She tried to grind out the butt, only to knock the ashtray onto the floor.
Love is like cigarettes, Sissy thought as she leaned over the edge of the tub and shoveled up the dead butts and old cellophane wrappers. It gives you a little pleasure while you’re at it, but it leaves you with a bad taste in your mouth and a pain in your chest.
She picked up her still burning butt and tried to take one last drag, but it fell apart in her ash-wet hand.
She stretched her chin to her chest, working the kinks out of her neck, and wondered what she was going to do when she saw Parker again. Nothing, she assured herself, wallowing in soapy water and rectitude. She was finished with love. From now on, she was determined to be a good and faithful wife. And love had nothing to do with that.
She stepped out of the tub, rubbing herself dry with the last clean towel, a thin, flowered thing she’d gotten in a box of detergent, and then she slipped into her green chenille robe. She unpinned her hair. It fell around her face as she bent down to pick up the wet clothes.
As her sundress unfolded, she saw to her horror the creosote hand imprinted into the folds of her circle skirt. My God, had it been there all the time? She was pretty sure Peewee hadn’t noticed. He would have said something. She brushed her hand over her skirt. She couldn’t resist letting her fingers play over the sticky handprint one last time. Her body remembered what Parker’s big hand had felt like when he put his dark mark on her behind, and then, in spite of her newfound probity, her nipples hardened. One man’s as good as another, Rule Number Twenty-one, she reminded herself with as much conviction as she could muster. But her nipples didn’t pay any attention. She wadded the dress into a ball.
As she passed the bedroom door, she heard Chip explaining to his father how Marilee had crawled out of the water when no one was looking. “Guess my little girl’s a better swimmer than any of us thought.” Peewee sounded pleased. Sissy glanced into the room and saw the little girl snuggled up next to her father in the big four-poster bed. What more do I want? she asked herself. She wondered if she should make up something appropriate for the Southern Belle’s Handbook, but she was too tired.
She threw all the wet clothes except her dress into the washing machine and turned it on. Then she opened the broom closet and almost threw the crumpled dress into the rag bag. But remembering the look on Chip’s face, she took i
t outside and threw it straight into the garbage, which was scheduled for pickup the next day. Something was happening to Chip. He was changing in front of her, not that he’d ever been easy. Maybe he needed more attention, more encouragement. She decided to buy him the chemistry set he wanted. He was right. It would be educational.
“TIME FOR BED,” Sissy announced when she stepped into the bedroom. As she expected, this announcement set off much moaning and gnashing of teeth. Marilee whined. Billy Joe threw himself on the mercy of his father and tried to plea-bargain.
“Bedtime,” Sissy repeated, ruffling her middle child’s hair.
“You heard your mother,” said the patriarch. Sissy smiled at her husband gratefully.
Forty-five minutes later, when all three children’s heads had at least touched their pillows, Sissy returned to the bedroom. Peewee lay on top of the white sheets in his boxer shorts and T-shirt, reading Popular Mechanics. She switched on the radio to a down-and-dirty jazz station and felt her body respond to its beat. She swung her hips and did a slow grind. Peewee didn’t even look up.
Locking the door behind her, she untied the sash of her green chenille robe. She let it fall to the floor at her feet and walked naked to the bed.
“Sissy, for God’s sake!” Peewee jumped up. “What do you think you’re doing, parading around for the whole neighborhood to see?”
“Don’t worry, sugar, the curtains are drawn.”
“But the shades aren’t.” He raced from window to window.
“You expect some late-night Methodist to stand in the yard, just waiting to get a peek at me?” Sissy was tickled at the thought and wondered, not for the first time, why men set such a store by a woman’s modesty, while to women it was only a passing inconvenience.
Peewee filled the air with angry silence. So Sissy sat down on the bed and said, “I’m sorry, sugar, I really do appreciate your protecting my chastity and all.”
The Scandalous Summer of Sissy LeBlanc Page 4
