The Scandalous Summer of Sissy LeBlanc

by Loraine Despres

  “You’re going to learn some respect!” he growled.

  “It’s over, Peewee!” But the words came out muffled as he stuffed another pillow over her head and held it down. Now Sissy was fighting to breathe.

  He kept on grunting and rubbing, grunting and rubbing. Then he grunted one final time and came inside her. He gave a contented sigh and rolled over. She crawled out of bed and headed for the bathroom, her bandages flapping.

  Sissy stood at the sink looking at herself in the mirror. She felt violated, abused. Hell, she felt raped. Except she knew the law said a woman couldn’t be raped by her husband. Well, dammit, she felt raped all the same! She felt the way she’d felt all those years ago when Bourrée had shoved her against the oak tree. Only this was worse, because she was already so bruised. How could he do that to her? What was it with the LeBlanc men? She had to get her sons out of there.

  She had to get herself out of there.

  She filled a douche bag with water and vinegar. She was not a piece of trash. She was not the kind of girl a man can treat any way he wanted. She would not be the kind of girl a man could abuse. She would clerk in the five-and-dime, she’d wait tables in a diner, but she would never, never let a man treat her like this again.

  Peewee hit the door. This time it swung open. “What are you doing?” he asked as if she were merely having a fit of pique over an everyday marital squabble. Then he saw the bandages flapping, pulled off. Saw the red, burned skin in the bathroom light. “You okay?”

  Her eyes narrowed. Her face was haunted and determined. “Get out, Peewee. Get the hell out of here!”

  Then he realized she was getting ready to wash him out of her. He slammed the door, swearing, threw on his clothes, and left the house without breakfast.

  SISSY SAT AT her dressing table in her slip, staring at herself in the mirror. Her back was throbbing. She felt like a piece of raw meat somebody had used a meat mallet on. It was nine-thirty. Her grandmother should be here any minute to take the children. She had to get herself ready. She wanted to be at the Paradise at ten o’clock sharp.

  The morning was breathless. The air was so hot and still that dust kicked up by passing cars hung suspended over the road and floated through her open window where it clung to her lips. She reached up and began to take out the bobby pins. What was left of her hair sprang free like little coiled snakes. But the movement of her arms intensified the throbbing in her back. She leaned into the mirror and stared at herself. She took a deep breath and heard her true voice. It’s not falling in love that makes a girl come of age. Any snit can fall in love and usually does. What makes you a woman is working up the courage to take your life into your own hands. She thought about that for a moment. The courage to take your life into your own hands. She ran it through the Southern Belle’s Handbook, which was evolving in her mind. She decided it deserved to be Rule Number One, taking precedent over anything she’d assigned to that place. And A smart girl can’t just sit on the porch and wait for her life to start, would move up to Number Two.

  “I’ve sat around Gentry long enough,” she said out loud and thought about Parker. They’d be together in half an hour. Her whole life would change today.

  The phone rang. Her heart skipped. Parker said he wouldn’t call. Had something happened? Oh God, please don’t let him change his mind now!

  She gingerly slipped into a light cotton wrapper, ran into the living room, and grabbed the phone. But it wasn’t Parker on the line, it was Clara thanking her, telling her the check had cleared. She had the money.

  “I’m so glad you called. Are you at the chemical plant?

  “No.”

  “Thank goodness. I need to talk. Can you come over?”

  “Sissy, I…” Clara began, but Sissy cut her off.

  “I can’t talk on the phone. You can spare a couple of minutes, can’t you?” Sissy hated to plead, but she didn’t have anyone else to talk to.

  “I can’t,” Clara wailed.

  Sissy fought the ignoble feeling that Clara was being damned ungrateful. But she told herself you can’t give a person something and hold it over her for life. Still, she’d put herself on the line for Clara only last night.

  “Uh-oh, Sissy, I have to go. They’re loading my bus right now.”

  “What are you doing at the bus station? I thought you wanted to work for another week.”

  “I did. But Mama said after what we pulled off last night, I had to get out of town right away. Just a minute!” Clara called to the bus driver. Then she spoke quickly into the phone. “Sissy, be careful. Don’t let my daddy get you.”

  “What can he do to me?”

  “I don’t know, but, please, take care of yourself.”

  Sissy hung up with a sense of foreboding of that unnamed fear we all carry around with us. Well, she wouldn’t give in to it. She knew her uncle was furious, but he wouldn’t do anything to her, would he?

  She heard Bill Haley and His Comets singing “Rock Around the Clock.” Deafening music had been blasting from the boys’ room, all morning.

  After the prank with the stink bomb, Peewee had grounded the boys for life. Sissy thought it wasn’t quite fair to Billy Joe, but in Chip’s case it wasn’t nearly long enough.

  She heard laughter. How many boys were in there? She checked the clock in the bedroom. Nine forty-five. Already? God, she was running late, but everything takes so much longer when you’re in pain. Where was her grandmother? She ought to see if the children were ready.

  She went into the hall outside the boys’ bedroom and smelled something sweet. She pushed on the door, but the little darlings had blocked it. She started to knock and then changed her mind.

  Quietly, barefooted, tying the wrapper around her, she slipped out of the house and around the veranda, where she caught a neighborhood boy, a couple of years older than Chip, wearing motorcycle boots, with a comb sticking out of the back pocket of his jeans, sliding the window open. When he saw her he lit out across the street and down the block. What was he so guilty about?

  Sissy hurried up to the long window. The shade was pulled down. Giggles. That smell…

  Sissy carefully stepped through the window. The room was stifling. Chip was bending over the gas heater, pouring some powders into a bubbling beaker. Marilee and Billy Joe were sprawled out facedown on the bed. One boy was lying on the floor, a second was bending over the beaker greedily inhaling the sweet gas, and a third was sitting next to it with a stupid look on his face and a straw up his nose.

  Sissy ran to the bed and shook her children. Billy Joe opened his eyes and braced for trouble. Marilee giggled and lay down again.

  Sissy didn’t know much about drugs, but she knew what alcohol could do. If this was worse, she’d be damned if she’d let it get a hold on her children. She grabbed Billy Joe’s baseball bat, and ignoring the pain in her back, advanced on the heater. Chip shielded it with his body.

  “I didn’t buy you a chemistry set so you could drug the neighborhood!”

  “It’s just nitrous oxide,” he cried.

  Sissy didn’t know what that was and she didn’t care. She could see the effect it had on the children. Looking like one of the Furies, her hair wild and snaky, she turned to the neighborhood boys and yelled, “Now, git.”

  The children fell all over each other shoving the dresser away from the door.

  Then she turned to her own children. “Go on out to the front porch and wait for Grandma Belle, you hear.”

  Marilee and Billy Joe nodded, and lit out after the other children.

  “I’d advise you go with them,” Sissy said to her oldest child. The sweetish smell permeated her nostrils, making her feel giddy.

  “To hell with you,” Chip said, lunging at her, trying to grab the bat. But she was too fast. Pushing him aside, she shattered the beaker against the wall.

  Then turning to Chip’s desk, where his chemicals were carefully laid out, she swung the bat back. “Noooo!” Chip shrieked, knocking her against the wall.
Suddenly Sissy was swimming in a sea of pain.

  A smile formed on Chip’s lips. He grabbed at the bat and kicked out, trying to trip her, but she managed to hold on. Chip yelled and slugged his mother twice in the stomach.

  Sissy folded. Pain was everywhere. That’s when Billy Joe vaulted back into the room and smashed into his brother. “You gone crazy? That’s our mama!”

  Chip howled like a wild animal and rolled onto the floor under his brother’s pummeling. Chip hit, kicked, scratched, anything to get Billy Joe off. But Billy Joe, though smaller, held on.

  Sissy choked down her pain and swung the bat. A jumble of colored chemicals streaked the wall. Acid ate into the linoleum as the record exchanger dropped a new record on the turntable and Dean Martin crooned “Memories Are Made of This.”

  Chip wrenched out of his brother’s grasp. He jackknifed up, ran to his desk, and hunched over it, grieving. He turned to his mother, his blue eyes cold as the grave. “Bitch!” he hissed.

  “My God, what’s going on?” Belle Cantrell stood in the doorway, her arm wrapped protectively around Marilee.

  “World War III,” said Sissy, not taking her eyes off Chip, the bat held high in case he came at her again.

  “Now, sugar, you just calm down, you hear, and put down the baseball bat. Just put it down,” Belle said. She wrapped her other arm around Billy Joe. “I understand how they can get to you. But I realized long ago that children are sent to us to be an affliction.”

  Sissy turned, looked at her grandmother, and let out a little hacking laugh. Still holding the bat, she let it rest on the floor. “Affliction, hell, this kid’s a one-man plague.”

  “Fuck you!”

  “Chip!” But he was past listening. He shot out the window. “Chip, you come back. You hear me!”

  Chip climbed the old magnolia tree, stepping on the big white flowers his mother loved to float in bowls. He’d get that bitch and make her pay. He didn’t care what happened to him as long as she got what was coming to her and got it today.

  The heat and the laughing gas made his head pound. Sweat poured off him, but he didn’t answer when his mother and his great-grandmother called.

  He saw them walking around the yard with Marilee and Billy Joe. Saw Sissy kneel in front of his sister. Belle and the children stayed outside when Sissy went back into the house.

  He slipped down the tree and sneaked into the side door of the garage. It was a little cooler in here. Then he heard the bitch walking across the gravel. He slammed down the hood of the convertible and hid.

  “Chip!” He saw her silhouette, black, in the open door. Fats, sugar, and proteins, the boy reminded himself, that’s all she is, a blob of fats, sugar, and proteins.

  “Chip, we have to talk!” the blob said and walked into the garage. “Look at me, son, I’m not your enemy, but I can’t let you run wild. And I sure can’t let you hit me. Come on out…”

  He ran past her, forcing her to jump back or he’d have smashed her into the wall. He climbed into the magnolia tree and then crawled along the roof to his eavesdropper’s refuge outside his mother’s open window and heard her talking. “They say there are no bad children, just bad parents.”

  His great-grandma scoffed. “You notice, they never seem to give us credit when the boy turns out all right. Just once I’d like to hear them say, there are no great men, only great mothers.”

  And then he heard his own mother say those terrible words: “I think he knows I didn’t want him.”

  He didn’t hear what they said after that. He didn’t need to. He didn’t want her, either. Didn’t need her anymore. He’d be better off without her. His father wouldn’t pry into his life, interfere with the progress of science. He thought of his chemistry set shattered on the floor, the chemicals running down the wall. His blue eyes narrowed into Bourrée’s icy stare.

  He was still hiding when his great-grandma backed out of the driveway with Billy Joe and Marilee on the seat beside her. Ed Sullivan, his head out the back window, was drooling down the side of the car. He saw his mother, all dressed up, lean into the driver’s side.

  The clock on the dashboard said ten-fifteen. She was late already, but Parker said he’d wait until ten-thirty.

  “Would you mind taking them to see Dr. Moore before you go out to the farm?”

  “Sugar, there’s nothing wrong with these two that a couple of hours of fresh country air won’t fix.”

  Billy Joe was tickling his sister. “Make him stop, Grandma!”

  Belle turned around and gave her great-grandson a look Sissy remembered all too well. Without a word, Billy Joe sat up and put his hands under his thighs.

  They looked all right. “I’d still feel better if the doctor listened to their chests, just in case,” Sissy said.

  “Okay, I don’t want you to worry. You have enough on your mind. I’ll swing by right now.”

  “I wish I could get Chip over there.”

  Belle shook her head sympathetically. She knew what it was to be a mother, not that Cally had given her any trouble. “The boy’s just like his father. You’ve got to face it. He’s going to do what he wants.”

  “I don’t know what I did that made him that way.”

  “You didn’t do anything. Look at these two perfect people in the back.” Billy Joe and Marilee sat up proudly.

  “You heard her, Mama, I’m perfect!” said Billy Joe.

  Sissy put her head into the back window and gave them both a kiss.

  “Now go on,” said Belle. “It’s after ten. You don’t want him to leave without seeing you.”

  Sissy watched her grandmother turn down Church Street and speed away toward Dr. Moore’s office.

  Then Chip saw his mother cross to the garage. He heard the convertible door slam and the starter motor complain. And complain again. He smiled Bourrée’s tight little smile as he tossed the distributor cap from hand to hand.

  Sissy ran inside, pulled out the phone book, and dialed the Paradise. The line was busy. She tried again, drumming her broken fingernails on the pecan table. Then she ran outside.

  Chip was still in the tree when his mother came out of the house. He watched her walk quickly down the blistering sidewalk. He saw her ankles wobble in her high-heeled sandals. He hoped the pavement burned her toes. From his vantage point he watched her cross Church Street and head up Hope.

  Sissy stepped off the curb with difficulty. Muscles she didn’t know she had ached. The Paradise was five and a half long country blocks away. It only took a minute to drive there. She checked her watch. Ten-twenty. She’d make it on foot, if she kept up the pace. But every time her stiletto heel hit the pavement a jolt of pain shot through her back. And the sun was bearing down on her.

  She stepped up onto the sidewalk and into the shade of a giant live oak in front of the Rubinsteins’ big antebellum house with its white columns and picket fence. Mrs. Rubinstein was playing “Nessun Dorma” on the piano. Sissy wanted to stand there and catch her breath, but she didn’t have time.

  When she was halfway down the block, Chip shot across the street and hid behind the live oak. He was a spy on a mission and the enemy was his mother.

  PARKER LOOKED AT the clock over the bar. Ten twenty-two. She’d be there. He was sure of it. She had to be. There was still plenty of time. He’d awakened at four-thirty that morning, worrying about whether he was cut out for a settled life with a readymade family. What kind of husband would he make day in and day out? What kind of father? Well, he was about to find out. In a few hours he and Sissy and her kids would be together and for the rest of their lives. It was terrifying.

  By nine, in spite of the bandages around his palms and on the fingers of his right hand, he was packed and ready to go. He had left Sid in the yard. He’d swing by and pick him up on his way out of town. At nine-thirty he was in front of the Paradise, waiting for the place to open.

  “You sure I can’t do something for you?” asked Rosalie, polishing the bar. He moved his stool so he could watc
h the door.

  IDA MAY THOMPSON was carefully cutting flowers in the front yard of her pretentious house built of new brick, white trim, and enough Doric columns to hold up the Parthenon in its heyday, when she spotted Sissy all dressed up trotting down the sidewalk in the middle of the morning. Gathering her flowers to her ample breast, Ida May hurried up the stairs and into the house, and banged the door behind her. She was sending a message to that no-account niece of her husband. Sissy didn’t get the message. She was too busy concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other as fast as she could, but the pain and the heat were slowing her down.

  As she crossed Education Drive, Chip hid behind that same magnolia tree that Clara had crawled into when she was six. Its leaves were brown and twisted with blight now, but it still provided ample cover for a spy.

  Sissy checked her watch. Ten twenty-four and she had four and a half more blocks to cover and only six minutes to do it in. Across the street was the red-brick high school, where she and her girlfriends had planned their Junior Prom, where she’d been chosen head cheerleader, and where she’d cheered Parker on to glory. She began to run as she’d run then, but each jarring step on the broken pavement sent sharp pains through her feet and legs and into her back. She had to slow down. She thought she heard someone in tennis shoes running behind her but she didn’t look. She couldn’t look; she didn’t have time to turn around, not now.

  “CAN I GET you something, Parker?” Rosalie asked.

  “I’m fine,” he replied, but he wasn’t fine. She should be here by now, it was ten twenty-eight.

  SISSY WAS PASSING Brother Junior Bodine’s white clapboard Church of Everlasting Redemption. Music spilled out through the open window, music so jazzy that at first Sissy didn’t realize it was the opening strains of “Nearer My God to Thee.” And then she heard Betty Ruth Bodine’s clear voice belting out the words. Betty Ruth sounded more upbeat and assured than Sissy had heard her in years. Then the music became all twisted in “Heartbreak Hotel,” as the black hearse filled with teenagers roared by.