Read The Scandalous Summer of Sissy LeBlanc Online
Authors: Loraine Despres
Tags: #Loraine Despres - Scandalous Summer of Sissy LeBlanc 356p 9780060505882 0060505885, #ISBN 0-688-17389-6, #ISBN 0-06-050588-5 (pbk.)
sought his knee.
“I got a new job today,” she said.
“You quit Sissy?” His heart leaped. He’d have a free shot at
her now.
Then Clara told him about the letter from the university and how
excited she’d been at Sissy’s mission, a scholarship drive for her and
in the newspaper. “I should have known they weren’t gonna take
up a collection for a colored girl.” Misery leaked out of her voice
and spilled over to Parker.
He took her in his arms and held her as she talked. He thought
about all the schools that had waved scholarships at him. All the
schools he’d run out on.
“I was worried I wasn’t gonna have enough for bus fare and
warm clothes and all. But now I’ve got to come up with a thousand
dollars and I’ve only got two months.” Parker stroked her back
until she was comforted a little. “How’m I gonna do it, Parker?”
“Shhh.” He felt her nuzzle into him and kiss his neck. But when
he offered her money, she stiffened. “Hey, I’m not paying for ser-
vices rendered.” He cupped her chin in his hand. “Heck, girl, don’t
you know, I couldn’t afford you.”
But she didn’t want to be beholden to him or any man for money.
“My mama never had any kind of a life once she started down that
road.”
He pulled her to him and murmured with his face in her hair, “I
want you to get your chance, that’s all. I want you to have a real
life.”
“Let’s see where I am next month, okay?” Her voice was hoarse.
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He held her to him. She unbuttoned his shirt and ran her fingers
through the curling brown hair. Then she slipped her hand into his
jeans. But it went in too easily. There was no straining against the
fabric. She looked up at him, startled.
“I told you I wasn’t paying for your services,” he said, taking
the hand out of his pants and kissing her carefully manicured fin-
gertips.
She looked down at his crotch and quickly looked away. “I just
wanted to be with you.” There was a wail in her voice. “I was feel-
ing low-down and blue about having to work at that smelly chemi-
cal plant and all.”
“I know,” he said and kissed her hair.
She smiled up at him like a soldier marching into battle and
unbuttoned her white blouse.
He ran his hands lightly over her chest, but tonight, for the first
time, he felt nothing. Her bra was pink nylon. It molded her flesh
into torpedo points, covered with cheap machine-made lace. He
reached around and undid the hooks, freeing her breasts to fall into
a human shape. He held them, one in each hand, as if weighing can-
taloupes, pretty beige cantaloupes. Sissy’s were smaller, more the
size of grapefruits, oranges even. He remembered how small and
lost they looked in her black-lace push-up bra. He watched Clara’s
nipples bounce, her dark brown nipples.
“What are you doing?” Clara asked.
He snapped out of his reverie and laughed. “This doesn’t turn
you on? How about this?” He ran his thumb over her nipple and
watched the shiver go through her body. He reached under her skirt
and began to stroke her thighs and then between her thighs. She lay
back and moaned. Parker wondered why he felt nothing. With his
fingertips he reached into her panties. Matching pink lace, he
guessed. Clara was always careful to match everything. But he
didn’t bother to look, didn’t even bother to pull up her skirt. She
was moving her body up and down, her eyes shut tight.
She reached for him as wave after wave of feeling made her trem-
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ble. “Don’t stop,” she moaned and grabbed the metal buttons on
his jeans. Her eyes still closed, she began unbuttoning those tight
metal buttons, but tonight they weren’t tight at all.
Clara sat up and opened her eyes. “What’s the matter?”
He shrugged and tried to smile, but how could he smile? “I don’t
know.” Nothing like this had ever happened to him before. Christ!
What had these women done to him? He pulled away from her.
“You feeling all right?” She put her hand to his head.
He took her hand and held it. “These things happen to men, you
know.” But not to me! Not to me! He wanted to scream at her,
shake her, tell her it was her fault. Make her see. What?
Clara pulled her hand away and put it in her lap. She looked at
him like a frightened bird. He felt sick to his stomach, but he didn’t
want her to know.
“You’ve had other men, haven’t you?” He tried to keep his voice
kind, neutral.
She didn’t say anything.
“I’m not the first?”
She shook her head. Parker felt relieved.
“He was a boy in my school,” she said, looking into her hands.
“Oh, high school boys. They’re always horny.”
A little smile played around her lips. With her head still bowed
she said, “For the first couple of months, I thought an erection was
a man’s natural state.”
Gee, thanks for telling me that, Parker thought. That’s just what
I needed to hear. “What happened to him?”
“I was afraid if I kept on with him, I’d never get out of here.
Besides, he just wanted to show me off.”
They sat in silence for a long time. Then Clara adjusted her
panties and Parker hooked up her bra for her. They both concen-
trated on being very, very nice to one another. Very thoughtful.
Very polite. Parker could see how hurt she was. But goddammit, he
was hurting too.
“I’ll drive you home.”
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“You don’t have to,” she said, waiting for him to protest.
“It’s okay. I don’t mind.” He was looking at his Most Valuable
Player award.
“Don’t mind! Don’t mind!” Parker had never heard her raise her
voice before. Suddenly her face was flooded with insight. “You
thought I was Sissy, didn’t you?”
He looked up at her without saying anything.
“Tonight, when I came in.”
He didn’t say anything.
“Answer me, Parker.”
“No.” And then, “I don’t know, maybe. What difference does it
make?”
“What difference? Oh, sweet Jesus.” He saw her eyes fill with
tears. “I thought you cared about me. Me. But it was always Sissy,
wasn’t it? That’s why you picked me up, because I looked like her?”
Parker shook his head, but he was afraid she was right. He was
also afraid that after finding Sissy again, holding her, he just wasn’t
interested in anybody else. He was shocked that a girl as pretty as
Clara could come over to his house and start taking off her clothes,
and he didn’t care. It was a hell of a thing for a man who’d always
been wild and free. He wondered if he’d ever be wild and free
again.
Clara wiped her eyes and stood up. “All that time, I was just sub-
bing for Sissy, wasn’t I? Well, school’s out, Parker. The substitute
teacher’s done quit.” She walked to the front door, her head held
high. Parker remembered the night Sissy had walked the same way
to the same door. Clara must have remembered it too, because she
turned at the door and said, “To hell with you, Parker Davidson.
To hell with you both.”
She slammed out of the front door, ran across the porch, and out
into the night.
A girl doesn’t have to give in to temptation, but she might not
get another chance.
Rule Number Thirty-nine
The Southern Belle’s Handbook
As the muggy days of July dripped into one another, Sissy felt
as if she were swimming upstream in a warm river of unrequited
lust whose source was Parker’s endless phone calls.
With Clara gone, Sissy was a hostage to her children and the sim-
plest errand became a fight. Before she could go anywhere, she had
to find, wash, and dress Marilee and Billy Joe and load them and Ed
Sullivan—or Chip, she didn’t trust him and the dog alone
together—into the car and rush through whatever she was doing
before one or all of them began to whine, make a mess, or chew
large chunks out of the car’s upholstery.
So Sissy stopped going out. She had the groceries delivered and
hung around the house with only the tenuous line of the phone
linking her with the outside world. That suited Parker. He called
her every time he climbed a telephone pole.
He called when the sun beat down on him, sticking his shirt to
his back and shrinking his jeans right on his legs. He called when
the air was thick and the sky heavy with dense, gray clouds. He
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called when the rain pelted him and lightning flashed across the sky
and the thunder cracked around his head. He loved to talk to her
when he was suspended between earth and sky. They were like
teenagers again, taking up where they’d left off in high school.
At first they caught up on each other’s lives. Parker told her fab-
ulous tales of adventures. He described the night they were caught
in a typhoon on the South China Sea and he had to lash himself to
the side of an open boat. He told her about the rigors of monastic
life. “One morning I was dragging my butt out of bed to cover a
bunch of statues with gold cloth, and I asked myself, ‘What in the
world is a nice Jewish boy from Gentry, Louisiana, doing with all
these monks?’ ”
Sissy laughed. She knew exactly what a nice Jewish boy was doing.
He was running away from responsibility. She couldn’t say she
blamed him.
Finally he ran out of fabulous tales. He confided in her how he’d
lost his business in Bangkok.
“You couldn’t help that. Your partner stole your money.”
“There were signs,” he said. And she heard the dry echo of
despair in his voice. “There are always signs. You just have to know
how to read them.”
“So you’re going to spend the rest of your life beating up on your-
self, because you weren’t . . . what do they call it? Clairvoyant?”
“A man has to take care of his debts.” There was an ugly harsh-
ness in his voice, which hurt Sissy, even though she knew he had
turned it on himself. “I was an American in a foreign country. I had
an obligation to set a good example.” Sissy knew these were his
father’s words, but they sounded as if they had been torn out of
Parker’s throat.
They made her throat hurt too, but she couldn’t let him know
that, so she laughed and said, “Somehow, I think the United States
of America will survive.” There was silence on the other end of the
line. “Oh, come on, sugar, look what you achieved. You started a
business in a country where your men couldn’t even speak English.
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You built schools and offices and places for people to live. Are the
buildings still standing?”
“I made sure the construction was first rate. They wanted me to
cut corners, but I never did.”
“So people are living and working in buildings you built.”
“I guess so. Sure.”
“Well, that’s a lot more than any other man I know has accom-
plished.” She kept on talking that way, building him up until she
heard that old note of confidence, which had been Parker’s hall-
mark when he was winning all those ball games. Rule Number
Thirty-three:
The surest way to a man’s heart is to become his
cheerleader
. She kept up the flattery and the banter until he laughed
and said, “Enough, woman. Let’s hear about you.”
Since she’d been nowhere and seen nothing, she had to fall back
on her teasing ways. She never talked of love or even sex, but her
conversation was so full of innuendo that her words hung between
them like hot nuggets burning up the phone lines. When her teasing
really worked and turned Parker to molten metal and steam, it
worked on her, too.
She would straddle the fat round slipcovered arm of the couch,
throw back her auburn hair, and play with her buttons. Sometimes
when his voice became warm and tempting, she’d grip the sides of
the sofa arm with her naked thighs and rub them up and down
across the nubby fabric. Then she’d laugh a hoarse, throaty laugh
that would make him tremble and hold on to the telephone pole for
his life.
Sissy knew that
a woman’s greatest power came not from love,
but from unrequited lust
. Rule Number Thirty-five, Southern
Belle’s Handbook.
When the children ran in from the yard she had to be careful
about what she said. She was always afraid of what Chip would
overhear and kept an eye on him when she talked. But Chip had
changed. This summer, to Sissy’s great relief, he finally made some
friends. Almost every day a small band of boys would troop
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through the house or crawl into his window and sit around his
room for hours talking, laughing, or fooling with his chemistry set.
Once, following Parker’s instructions, she checked the phone line
for taps, but found none. Chip had other things on his mind, she
decided, and then smiled to herself. He’s growing up. But even if he