The Scandalous Summer of Sissy LeBlanc

by Loraine Despres

  SISSY CALLED CLARA and asked her to drop by after her shift at the chemical plant. Clara felt funny about seeing Sissy again, after that awful evening with Parker. But Sissy had persistently tried to set up a scholarship fund for her, so Clara knew she owed her. Besides, Clara missed her older cousin.

  They sat in the darkened living room with coffee cups on their knees and Clara couldn’t help noticing the floors didn’t shine much anymore and she’d bet the wainscoting was covered in dust. She felt uncomfortable as a guest in the house where she’d worked as a servant, especially since Sissy kept pressing her about Parker.

  “I don’t like to talk about things like that,” Clara said.

  “Oh, come on, you can tell me. It’s important.”

  Finally Clara admitted, “Well, he can be a real sweet lover.”

  “I’ve never had me a sweet lover,” said Sissy. Her voice sounded wistful.

  “Are you in love with him?” Clara asked. It would be easier to step aside for love.

  But Sissy just snorted. “Love’s a myth invented by men to get into our pants.”

  “You don’t believe that!”

  “More than I believe in love. But I don’t want Peewee to have to watch the kids while I’m cheating on him. It doesn’t seem right.” And then she laughed a deep, throaty laugh. “I still have some standards.”

  Clara wondered if she wanted a role abetting a sin specifically forbidden in the Ten Commandments, twice. She took her commandments seriously, especially since she was going to church regularly now and praying for a miracle that would get her out of Gentry and into the University of Chicago. It was only seven weeks until Labor Day. All Sissy’s attempts to find her a scholarship had led nowhere. “What did I tell you,” crackled Clara’s grandmother. “These high-minded white womens got the attention span of a gnat.”

  Clara had received a generous offer of help from Parker, but that was one offer she didn’t want to accept. She was desperately searching for any alternative.

  “Please say you’ll stay with the kids. My grandmother is at some kind of convention on the Gulf Coast and I don’t trust anyone else,” Sissy said.

  “I don’t know…” Clara’s voice trailed off.

  “Please.” Sissy was begging now. “I need you.”

  “Well, I could sure use the money.” And in spite of everything, Clara couldn’t help feeling proud that she could be so useful to her white cousin.

  Sissy hugged her. “Then you’ll do it!”

  “I guess.” Silently Clara prayed to God to forgive her. If white folks want to sin, you know there’s no way I can stop them, she told the Lord.

  THAT NIGHT IN bed, Sissy had second thoughts. Was she really going through with this? Rule Thirty-five came back to her. Did she really want to give up the power of unrequited lust? Suppose it was a disappointment. Suppose it didn’t work out. Suppose Clara was lying and Parker got his kicks knocking women around. Or couldn’t get his kicks at all! What would she do with the rest of her life? What would she ever have to look forward to again?

  Lying next to Peewee in the dark, listening to him grind his teeth, smelling him sweat, she thought about that old hotel. She imagined the cool, dry air, the big bed, the clean sheets, and Parker all over her. Naked and hairy and all over her. That’s when Sissy decided to amend Rule Thirty-five to Unrequited lust can get real old.

  SISSY’S CAR WAS parked in the Maison Blanche garage. The school clothes she’d bought as an excuse for her trip were packed away in the trunk. She still had half an hour before she met Parker. She walked over to Bourbon Street, enjoying the way the damp, hot air felt on her face and arms. Enjoying the looks she got from the men as she swung down the street in her green linen dress and white straw hat.

  She walked past Galatoire’s, where a crowd was lined up on the sidewalk waiting to eat oysters Rockefeller and trout almondine with crisp loaves of French bread. She passed the Paddock Lounge, open and beckoning the serious drinkers, while a recording of a local jazz band was piped over the sound system and into the street. She stopped and looked at a display of lacy underwear with the nipples cut out of brassieres and slits cut into the bottom of panties. A boisterous group of tourists in Bermuda shorts stumbled out of the Famous Door, carrying their beer and hurricanes in glasses as they made their way to the next watering hole. “Laissez les bons temps rouler!” one of them yelled. New Orleans. Disneyland for alcoholics.

  “Hey, sweet thing, get a look at this,” said a doorman as he beckoned her into a club advertising the Naughty Lass and her Submarine Strip. Sissy was never one to miss a free peek, but all she saw was white skin writhing around behind a hot pink spot.

  She remembered the time in high school when she and Betty Ruth, not yet Bodine, had played hooky. They’d gotten hold of Betty Ruth’s father’s old one-eyed Buick and driven to New Orleans, where they made their way down Bourbon Street from club to club. They reveled in their power to attract attention until Betty Ruth passed out (she’d consumed almost all the drink minimums) and had to be carried back to the car by a couple of very willing sailors. Then, of course, Sissy had to fight them off and drive that big old boat with its one dim headlight through the dark perils of the old Swamp Road only to catch holy hell when they got back to Gentry. It had been their big adventure. It had been glorious. It had been another life.

  “Come on in, sweet thing, we’ll waive the cover charge for you,” the doorman said. Sissy shook her head and moved on.

  The next club featured a redheaded stripper with tassels pasted to her nipples. The billboard said she could twirl them in opposite circles while performing indecent acts. Sissy stared at the poster, and turning her back to the street, squeezed her pectoral muscles to see if she could make her boobs swing around in circles. If she could, she’d give Parker a real treat. She chuckled at the thought. There were shops right on Bourbon Street that sold tassels, but all she could manage was a little bounce. She pressed her hands together and bounced some more, trying to make them clap, when she saw her father-in-law come out of a side street holding the elbow of an elegantly dressed woman with blue-gray hair, dripping in pearls. Sissy dropped her arms to her sides and stood up straight.

  Bourrée kissed the lady on the cheek, put her in a taxi, and charged over to where his daughter-in-law was standing.

  “What you doing, chère? Looking for work?”

  “Now, there’s an idea, Bourrée. Why didn’t I think of that? What were you doing? Pearl diving?”

  He squinted his eyes and lit a cigar. “That’s Estelle Perkins; I manage her timberland.”

  She dropped her voice and stepped in real close. “I’ve heard it said that you manage the widows and rape the land. Or is it the other way round? I never can keep it straight.” She knew in this heat he could smell her perfume. He didn’t move back.

  “You meeting somebody, Sissy?”

  Her heart pounded and she felt it beat between her legs. “What gave you that idea?”

  Bourrée looked her over. “Don’t tell me it’s just you and me alone in the big city.”

  “Could be,” she said, not knowing what to do about the pounding of her heart. It sounded so loud she was afraid he could hear it. “What do you have in mind?”

  “No reason why kinfolk like us can’t have a drink somewhere,” he said, blowing cigar smoke in her face. “I mean, New Orleans can get real lonely if you’re all alone.”

  “Just a drink?” Sissy asked and held her breath. The moment she’d waited for all these years was coming.

  “You look old enough.” He smiled a mean little smile. Then he moved in on her, and said softly, one conspirator to another, “Course, I wouldn’t want to take a lady to a bar. But I do keep an apartment over on Royal Street.” Two women in street clothes and heavy makeup came out of the strip joint. Sissy felt the cold, clammy air hit her skin.

  He raised his cigar hand up to his mouth, brushing her breast in a proprietary manner. Then clamping his cigar between his teeth he brought
his hand down and gave her nipple a quick pinch. “For old times’ sake.”

  She jumped back, her body reeling from the invasion.

  He twirled the cigar between his lips. “What do you say, chère? I’ll be there at two o’clock.”

  “Sounds good,” Sissy said and repeated it so she could feel the sensuousness of the words forming in her mouth. “Sounds real good.”

  “The address is 428 Royal.” He licked his cigar. “And, Sissy, you know I don’t like to be kept waiting.”

  “I know that, Bourrée,” she said as the Hallelujah chorus went off in her head.

  “CHAMPAGNE COCKTAIL,” SISSY said to the maître d’, who’d led her to a table against the back wall. Yellowed pictures of dead Mardi Gras queens lined the dark panels and smiled down on her.

  Sissy smiled back, and when the waiter arrived with her drink, she raised her glass to them. She’d spent the last fourteen years of her life waiting for this moment. Waiting for him to ask her.

  She knocked a cigarette out of her pack, and when the waiter bowed over her to light it, she ordered another champagne.

  She looked at her gold watch with the black suede band. One-fifteen. She tried to concentrate on Parker and what he was doing at this moment. Parker Davidson, the man who’d driven all the way to New Orleans to find a hotel for them to be alone in. Her first love.

  The waiter brought her drink. She inhaled the sharp, fruity smell and rolled the champagne around in her mouth, feeling the sparkles prick her tongue in a hundred places. She drank slowly, thinking about Parker, but she couldn’t keep the memories of Bourrée from crashing the gates of her mind. She looked up at the dead Mardi Gras queens and mused on all those lovers’ trysts they must have witnessed and wondered if any of them had happy endings.

  PART II

  1941 The Fall

  Chapter 13

  Watch out for men who are on speaking terms with the

  Almighty.

  Rule Number Thirty-four

  THE SOUTHERN BELLE'S HANDBOOK

  SISSY STOOD IN her short cheerleading outfit, looking down at the yellow and brown sycamore leaves strewn over her brother Norman’s grave. It was the autumn of 1941. The afternoon sun shone through the thinning branches above her and made dappled patterns on the ground.

  She tried to envision her brother’s face in the scatter of sunlight and shadow. The way he’d looked this summer, when he’d come home from LSU in his torn Levi’s, his red hair long and flying around because he hadn’t had time to get it cut during finals.

  He’d done real well on those finals. Three As and a B. But he never knew it. They got the news two days after he’d drowned in the gravel pit.

  Sissy felt the pang of guilt she always felt when she thought of that afternoon. Maybe if she’d gone to the gravel pit with him, maybe if she hadn’t been so busy working on a surprise party for Parker (a party that, in the end, she never gave), maybe she could have stopped Norman from diving into water he hadn’t tested since the summer before.

  Instead he’d gone alone, eager to wash away the summer heat. He’d hit his head on a submerged log.

  She kicked the dead leaves from his grave. They crumbled and crunched under her white tennis shoe. Then she bent down and swept the rest away with her hands. She touched the name on the tombstone. Norman, Norman Thompson. Her big brother.

  She remembered the day he’d taught her to swing out over the creek on a rope tied to a tree and splash into the water without hitting the roots. And the afternoon of her first real date with a boy, when Norm patiently watched her try on every outfit in her closet. Afterward, he’d sat her down on the front porch and told her how to intercept a pass without making the boy angry. How to make him respect you instead.

  They’d always shared their problems with each other, except she couldn’t any more, and she needed him. She needed to talk to him about Parker.

  She and Parker had started going out the previous fall. Norm had known Parker the way an upperclassman knows an underclassman who’s making a name for himself on the football field. But when she announced they were going steady, Norm had taken the bus home from LSU. He wanted to be sure Parker was straight and would treat his little sister right. The two boys had hit it off right away.

  Parker had said he’d always wanted a brother like Norman. And Norm had kissed Sissy on the forehead, giving Parker his stamp of approval as he boarded the bus back to school.

  Sissy tried to conjure up the three of them, walking arm in arm to the bus station, but when she closed her eyes, she saw Norman’s face, blue and lifeless, staring up at her from the edge of the gravel pit where she and Parker had found him. She opened her eyes and shook her head.

  The autumn smell of burning leaves floated into the cemetery, over the vine-covered wall, with its peeling white paint and its crumbling masonry. Her comfortable life had fallen apart this summer. First Norman. And now her mother was set to join him.

  All spring her mother had complained about a pain in her stomach. The first doctor had diagnosed it as chronic indigestion and put her on a diet. Then when the pains increased during the summer, a second doctor, this one in New Orleans, had said it was distress over the loss of her son. But it turned out to be a cancer the size of a Ping-Pong ball. There had been operations and optimism, but Sissy could see her mother disappearing every day and taking her daddy with her.

  The optimism was still there. But it was like the grin pasted on the face of a monster.

  Home had become a place she hated to go.

  Sometimes her father was okay. Just like he used to be. Explaining the economic causes of the war in Europe. Throwing a tizzy fit when Sissy didn’t pick up her room. But mostly he was preoccupied and she couldn’t blame him exactly, but she couldn’t count on him either. The only person in the world she’d been able to count on was Parker. Until now.

  Half an hour ago, they’d swept into Hopper’s Drugs like a triumphal procession, led by the star captain of the football team and the head cheerleader.

  It’s funny, she thought, how she felt entitled to the attention: everyone wanting to sit next to them, across from them, cramming into the dark wooden booth, hanging over it and bringing up chairs.

  Even Peewee LeBlanc had looked up from the magazine rack when Sissy walked by, but as soon as she stopped and turned around to say hello, he grabbed a magazine and buried his head in it. She said, “Hey, Peewee,” anyway and watched his ears get red. She knew from the way his eyes followed her in the halls that he had a crush on her. But she also knew he’d never have the courage to tell her so.

  Sissy had always been in the town crowd, the “in” crowd, thanks to her mother’s admonitions and her grandmother’s exhortations. At first she’d simply internalized their advice like everyone else. But three years ago, in ninth grade, she’d read Gone With the Wind. In that book Scarlett O’Hara’s mother along with Mammy taught her the secrets of being attractive to men and it worked so well that Scarlett became the belle of five counties. Sissy had pored over the novel, reading it and rereading it, but Margaret Mitchell never revealed exactly what these secrets were. Sissy was very disappointed.

  She decided to pay attention to what her mother and grandmother said and discover for herself what worked and what didn’t. Boys squirm when you look at them over your shoulder and half close your eyes. The best way to make a boy like you is to ask him to do something and then thank him sweetly. Finally she began numbering the rules and the Southern Belle’s Handbook was born, although the title had been conceived at a garden party when she was twelve.

  One of Norman’s friends had taken her shoe. He and Sissy were running through the guests, shrieking with laughter, when her mother pulled her aside and told her to act like a lady and stop chasing the boys. “But he’s got my shoe,” Sissy had wailed.

  “Well, you just sit right down and wait for him to bring it back.”

  “Why?” That didn’t sound like much fun.

  “So you’ll be admired.
”

  Sissy with all the sophistication of her twelve years said, “What’s that, the Southern Belle’s Handbook?” Then she jerked out of her mother’s grasp and took off after her oppressor.

  By the time she was thirteen, she’d decided being admired was a very good thing indeed. Over the years she changed and renumbered the rules, but many of her early discoveries proved to be pure gold, such as Boys find themselves fascinating. And her mother’s advice: A lady shouldn’t have to fight to get what she wants. Still, even with her dedication to the arts and graces of being admired, she’d never felt quite so special until she and Parker started seeing each other. A successful man gives a lady a position in society, her mother was fond of saying. Sissy figured that should be way back in the handbook. She made that Rule Number Seventy-nine.

  Of course, she and Parker weren’t supposed to be seeing each other anymore. Not since the night after the game when they’d stolen the sheriff’s car and driven it all over town with the siren blaring and Sissy waving a banner that said, “Go Gentry!”

  Her daddy was furious that he’d had to pick up his daughter at the parish jail, and to make it worse, the sheriff had given him a lecture. But he’d only grounded her for a week until that witch, Betsy Davidson, Parker’s mother, had called and said Sissy was a bad influence and was corrupting her son.

  That really ticked off her daddy. He told Mrs. Davidson to keep her damned son away from his daughter or he’d go to court and get a restraining order.

  Mrs. Davidson had said that wouldn’t be necessary. Parker was going to win an appointment to the Naval Academy and couldn’t afford to associate with juvenile delinquents.

  That’s how it had stood for over two whole weeks. No more bicycle rides into the country. No more hot kisses at the drive-in. No more long talks, telling each other their secret dreams and plans in the front seat of his father’s car. Now, the only time they could see one another was in school or in a crowd like this afternoon. Even Mrs. Davidson couldn’t stop her son from going out for a soda with the football team. And she could hardly expect the football team to go anywhere without the cheerleading squad.