“I’ve been thinking about it. Taking a lover, I mean.”
“Whoop-de-doo, everybody thinks about it.” It was said that after taking care of voting rights, Belle had become a champion of free love, but about that, Sissy had heard only rumors. Belle had never believed it prudent to kiss and tell, especially in Gentry.
Sissy went into the kitchen to get a cup of much-needed coffee and a cigarette. Belle followed. “You’ve got to do more than think. You’ve got to take your life into your own hands, girl.” In the yard, the puppy let out a couple of shrill barks.
“I guess,” said Sissy, looking into the cigarette pack to see if anything moved.
Belle caught her hand and held it. “Honey, listen to me. I’ve been seventeen years old all my life. Then one day I woke up and my joints hurt. The next day I looked into the mirror and I saw this hunch-backed old crone.” She looked down at their hands—Sissy’s long and smooth; her own, gnarled and wrinkled—and dropped them. “And now, all I can do is think about it.” She held out an open palm for a cigarette.
Sissy struck a kitchen match, lighting them both up. “Besides, if you don’t take your life into your own hands, someone else will take it in theirs. Whose hands you going to trust your life to?” A hundred unanswered questions mixed with the smoke and filled Sissy’s head. But before she could put them into words, Marilee rushed back into the kitchen. This time she was weeping hysterically.
“What’s wrong?” Belle asked, sitting down on the Victorian kitchen chair. But the little girl was too upset to tell her. Both women pored over the child looking for cuts, bruises, or bites. Finally she hiccuped something about her dog.
“Chip!” screamed Sissy. When she received no answer she ran out to the yard. There was no sign of him or the dog. Billy Joe stood in the corner of the driveway, looking nervously toward the house.
“Billy Joe, where’s your brother?”
The boy said nothing. He was being stretched between two loyalties.
“I know I always taught you not to tell on one another. But you’ve got to forget about that and tell me.”
Sissy saw a stricken look in his eyes. Then he averted his head and drew a circle in the dust with his bare toe.
She went to him and took his head in her hands. “Billy Joe, where’s your brother?”
He ducked and looked down as if examining the circle he’d just drawn. Then he mumbled, “He’s in our room. He’s experimenting on Marilee’s dog.”
SISSY FLUNG OPEN the door to the room the boys shared. Chip was sitting calmly at his desk, making notes in his lab book. “Can’t you read?” he said, pointing to a sign with a skull and crossbones and the words “Danger” and “Keep Out.”
“Where’s Marilee’s dog?”
Chip didn’t even bother to answer. He calmly looked at the clock and made an entry.
“Chip, I’m talking to you.” Sissy bent down and looked under the beds. But she didn’t find the puppy. She whistled, “Come on, boy, come on, come here.”
A frantic scratching and desperate whine came from the closet. “Jesus, Chip, how could you shut up a little puppy like that?”
“I’m conducting an experiment.”
Sissy turned the knob and pulled on the closet door. It was locked. A long time ago, she’d had the wisdom to dismantle the lock on the boys’ door, but she’d left the closet alone, so they would have some sense of privacy. An acrid smell wafted through the cracks. She heard her daughter crying in the kitchen. Sissy ran her hand on top of the doorsill. She came away with dust. “Give me the key.”
“I can’t. I’m in the middle of an experiment.”
“Chip!” There was a warning in her voice.
“I have to test my invention. Scientists have to test their inventions, you know,” Chip said.
“What invention?” She yanked on the door. The puppy responded, but this time its response was strangely subdued. Again that acrid smell. A terrible thought crept into Sissy’s head. “Chip, what invention are you testing?” He didn’t answer; instead he made another entry in his book. “Chip, I’m talking to you. What is this invention?”
“A new nerve gas.” His voice was quiet, but he couldn’t keep out the note of pride.
“Are you crazy? Open the door!” The dog’s scratches were getting weaker, and each one felt like it was made across her heart. “The puppy could die. Don’t you care?” She heard her voice. It was shrill now.
Chip closed his lab book. “He’s just a dumb animal. I don’t know why you’re making such a fuss. Scientists experiment on animals all the time.” He stood and put his lab book into its place in the bookcase.
Sissy jerked him around. “You are not a scientist. Pretending to be one doesn’t give you any right to torture animals. Now, give me the key to the closet.”
Sissy heard the puppy whimper and cough and felt her own throat constrict. She smashed into the door with her shoulder, but it was cypress and built for the ages. “Don’t you have any feelings?”
He moved to the desk. Sissy rubbed her shoulder and watched him. Was he going for the key? He carefully put his sharpened pencil into its coffee can holder.
Sissy was shaking, screaming now, “Give me the key.” But she knew her screams made Chip more confident. He knew who was in control. She calmed down and said, “You want me to tell your daddy about your scientific invention?”
“You won’t tell on me, Mama. You wouldn’t dare.”
The dog was choking. She couldn’t let her son kill it. She wouldn’t. For his sake as well as the dog’s, she had to call his bluff. “Now listen up, boy, and listen good. You want to end your parents’ marriage? Do it. Go ahead. Tell your daddy everything you saw. In fact why stop with the truth? You’re creative; make up stuff. You don’t even have to wait for him to come home for dinner. Get on your bike. He’s working in the office today. Go on. Just give me the key.”
Sissy saw Chip wasn’t ready for this. He’d counted on his blackmail working forever. But instead of giving it up as she expected, she saw him making calculations. Didn’t he get it? Didn’t he get what would happen to them all? Did she have to spell it out? “I’ll be all right, I’m the mother, so I’ll get the house and the children. Only I can’t handle you.” She didn’t enjoy being cruel but the puppy was gasping for air. “I expect you’ll have to live in some dinky apartment with your father or, if he can’t handle you, in a foster home or at the state orphanage. Is that what you want? You think they’ll let you keep your chemistry set at the orphanage?”
That at least seemed to shake him up, but he said, “Pawpaw’ll take me.”
“You want to live with Bourrée and Miss Lily? Is that it? I’ll call them right now.” She started for the living room. “Of course a couple of months with them and you’ll be begging for the orphanage. Hell, you’ll settle for a reformatory.” She glanced back at him.
He was still at his desk, nervously rolling a pencil in his hand. She picked up the phone. The pencil was in his mouth, but he still didn’t move. She began to dial…
“Wait.”
Sissy’s heart started pounding. She went back into the boys’ room. Chip had the key in the lock and was opening the door. She took it away from him. “Go stand out on the porch,” she said.
When he was safely out of the room, she held her breath and flung open the door.
THE PUPPY LAY still on the grass. “Is he dead?” Marilee asked, her voice filled with tears.
Sissy, kneeling over the animal, shook her head, but she was worried. She didn’t have any experience with sick animals and the vet was still out on his morning rounds of the farms. She stroked the puppy’s head and covered him with a towel. He didn’t respond.
“Don’t let him die, Mommy,” Marilee pleaded.
Billy Joe put his arm around his little sister’s shoulders.
A cane clicked on the cement. Belle arrived with a dish of water. She splashed some on the puppy’s face. Nothing. She poured it on its nose. It sneezed and v
ery weakly tried to shake off the water. “Good, he’s a fighter.” Bending down with some difficulty, Belle took the dog in her arms and walked it like a baby, patting its back, its head nuzzled against her shoulder. “Used to do this with sick calves,” she said, striding up and down, her cane crooked over her arm. “The movement reminds them to breathe.” And Sissy wondered, not for the first time, if her grandmother needed that cane, or if after seeing an Ethel Barrymore film last year, she simply used it for effect.
“I’ll take him, Gram,” said Billy Joe, unburdening her, stroking the puppy as he walked him up and down the backyard. Marilee walked with him, talking to the little animal.
Belle eased herself into a redwood chair in the shade of the old live oak near the back bedroom. Sissy dropped to the grass at her grandmother’s feet. She saw Chip moving around in his room, where he had orders to clean it up and air it out. She called to him to open all the windows and use the fan. Then she pulled up a weed that had sprouted in the little garden in the roots of the live oak tree. “Where’d I go wrong? Do you think he suspects?”
“Oh, for Lord’s sake,” said Belle. “Don’t take that on. You were what, seventeen, when you had him? You were still a child yourself.”
“I always tried to make him feel wanted, in spite of everything.”
“Sissy, look at me,” said the old woman. “In my generation they worshiped mothers. We couldn’t do anything wrong as long as we stayed home and took care of the kids and didn’t worry about politics. Now that you all have chosen to stay home and raise your kids without even the help we had, you can’t do anything right. Everything’s Mother’s fault. They just want to get us. The truth is, that child’s a throwback. He inherited a mean streak from Bourrée. When Lily Moffat said she was going to marry that Cajun I warned her.”
“Let’s not start on the Cajuns.” Sissy leaned against the arm of her grandmother’s chair, too worn out to move and it wasn’t even lunchtime.
“Why, Sissy, you know I’m not prejudiced. I’ve known many fine, upstanding Cajuns in my time. And Bourrée LeBlanc is not one of them. That man will charm the birds right out of the trees and then shoot them.”
“What’s wrong with Chip isn’t Bourrée’s fault.”
“Don’t be too sure,” said the old lady. “The boy’s losing his conscience. They have some scientific word for it now, psycho-something, I can’t remember, but what it all boils down to is he doesn’t care about what happens to anybody else as long as he gets what he wants.”
“Maybe it’s a stage,” Sissy said.
Belle looked at her granddaughter and her look was filled with compassion. “No. I don’t think so. I’ve seen it before. I don’t know why it happens. Bad blood, bad genes. There are all kinds of theories, but it happens to boys mostly and it happens to them about the time they start noticing girls.”
“He’s a teenager, not a leftover from The Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”
“Sissy, I’m serious.”
“So am I. Breaking away from us is his job,” she said quoting the latest magazine article she’d read. “What we object to is, he has a real aptitude for it.”
Belle studied her. “It’s always hardest on the mothers.”
“Oh, for God’s sake.” Sissy turned away.
But Belle pressed on. “I’ve seen more than one boy like Chip tear his family apart and go on preying on his mother year after year. I’ve seen those same mothers give their sons everything they had and then, when they were all but bankrupt, feel guilty they couldn’t give them more. Don’t let it happen to you, honey.”
Sissy shook her head as if trying to wipe away her grandmother’s prediction. “Chip’s not like that. You talk like he’s crazy or something. He’s not. He’s just going through a stage.”
The old woman saw the dark figure press himself against the screen and then move back into the shadows. “Let’s hope,” was all she could say.
Chapter 11
Never put off your education. The world is lying in wait to come between a girl and her ambition.
Rule Number Thirty-one
THE SOUTHERN BELLE'S HANDBOOK
SISSY DROVE THE younger children and the revived dog home from Flannigan’s Animal Clinic, but not before making a sizable contribution to the vet’s new house, the education of his children, and the welfare of his drug suppliers. Peewee’s going to have a conniption fit when he finds out we have a dog, Sissy thought. But Marilee’s dog was there to stay no matter what he said. Southern Belle’s Handbook, Rule Number Twenty-six: A smart woman picks her fights. So when she fights, she wins.
Puppies are naturally seductive. She suspected they had the power of mental telepathy, and this one was beaming “love me, love me” as he bounced around panting. Telepathy or not, Ed Sullivan (Marilee’s name) had won her over. But she sure wasn’t looking forward to Peewee’s learning how much she’d shelled out for its medical services.
She turned the corner and found Clara sitting on the back steps, where she’d spread out a white lace handkerchief to protect her navy skirt. Sissy was flooded with relief. And then sarcasm began making its rounds of her brain, picking up words here and there, accepting some, rejecting others, searching for the really biting phrase. But a second look at the girl stopped sarcasm’s progress. Clara, who was usually so bright, looked as if she’d abandoned all hope.
Sissy walked to the back steps as the children and Ed Sullivan rolled over the side of the convertible. But Clara didn’t even remark on the dog. “What happened?” Sissy asked, sitting down next to her.
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be silly, everyone is late sometime.” Sissy couldn’t believe she was saying this at one o’clock in the afternoon. She heard Peewee screaming in her brain, “You’re letting that girl take advantage of you again. Fire her.”
“I mean, I have to quit.”
“Now, let’s not go through that again.” She put her hand on her cousin’s arm. “If it’s about what happened last night…”
Clara shook her head. She’d spent the morning applying for a job as a sweeper for Gulf Chemicals. She’d given Sissy as a reference. “I hope it’s okay.”
“Are you crazy? What do you want to work at that smelly old place for?”
“A dollar an hour.”
“If this is some scheme to get yourself a raise, forget it. I don’t have the money.” Sissy was still wondering if she should explain the vet bill to Peewee or keep it a secret. Of course if she kept it a secret, she’d have to explain why there was no food on the table for two weeks. She wished she had money of her own, money she didn’t have to explain. Still, she felt a need to justify herself to her cousin. “Nobody pays that much for housework.”
“I know,” Clara said. Misery was radiating from her. Sissy breathed it in and became miserable, too. “Dammit, Clara. Why are you doing this?”
Clara handed her a letter from the University of Chicago, dated May 10. “Sometimes the mail has trouble finding its way from the post office to Butlertown. This one just found me yesterday.”
“I don’t understand,” said Sissy, looking up from the letter. “I thought you had a full scholarship.”
“Me, too. But it was just full tuition. It didn’t cover room and board. They want a thousand dollars.”
“That’s crazy. Nobody can afford that!” Sissy had never seen a thousand dollars in her whole life.
“I talked to the admissions lady this morning. She said the size of my scholarship had been decided by a committee and it was too late now to change it. Then she gave me a lecture on how I should expect to make some contribution to my own education. She said if it was free…I mean were free, I wouldn’t appreciate it.”
Sissy was pissed. She knew the world wasn’t fair, but she always hated getting proof of it. “Even at a dollar an hour, you can’t make that much before September.”
Clara sighed and nodded. “I know, but I’ll be that much closer.”
“Well, damn,” said
Sissy.
The two cousins sat side by side on the porch. “There are always the colored colleges around here,” Sissy said.
“No!” said Clara. She was silent for a few moments. “I guess I could work for a year and apply again next spring.”
“No!” said Sissy, and made up Rule Thirty-one on the spot. “The Southern Belle’s Handbook says, Never put off your education. The world is lying in wait to come between a girl and her ambition.”
“Yeah, well, does your Southern Belle’s Handbook say how I’m going to find the money?”
They were silent for a while. And then Sissy asked, “Have you talked to Uncle Tibor?”
“He hasn’t wanted to have anything to do with us since my mama got married.”
“Then it’s high time you made up with him.” Clara shook her head. “He’s your daddy.” Clara didn’t say anything. “Don’t worry, he’s loaded. My daddy says he only prosecutes the innocent, the guilty pay him off.” But her witticism was lost on Clara, who was staring at the Spanish moss hanging from the branches of the live oak. Then Sissy saw the girl’s lip quiver. She kept forgetting how young she was. “I’ll bet he’d be real proud of you, if he knew. Hell, those boys of his and Aunt Ida May’s are never gonna win a scholarship. Together they don’t have the IQ of spinach.”
“He won’t be proud.” Clara was rigid.
“Okay, maybe the Great White Hope won’t take out an ad in the paper, but I’ll bet inside he’ll be tickled as he can be.” Clara was having a silent debate. “Give him a call.” Clara shook her head. “What have you got to lose?”
“I hate him.”
“Well, get over it. There are some principles a poor girl just can’t afford. Rule Number Twenty-seven, Southern Belle’s Handbook.”
Clara hesitated. Sissy could see she was having a silent battle with herself. “What is it?” But Clara didn’t answer. “Haven’t you figured it out yet? You can trust me.” Still Clara didn’t say anything. “What is it? What did he do to you?”
The Scandalous Summer of Sissy LeBlanc Page 15
