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.)
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 pound-
ing 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.”
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“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.
1941
The
Fall
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
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L o r a i n e D e s p r e s
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 hit-
ting 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
T h e S c a n d a l o u s S u m m e r o f S i s s y L e B l a n c 1 8 5
crumbling masonry. Her comfortable life had fallen apart this sum-
mer. First Norman. And now her mother was set to join him.
All spring her mother had complained about a pain in her stom-
ach. The first doctor had diagnosed it as chronic indigestion and
put her on a diet. Then when the pains increased during the sum-
mer, a second doctor, this one in New Orleans, had said it was dis-
tress 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. Explain-
ing 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 tri-
umphal 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
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L o r a i n e D e s p r e s
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 Scar-
lett 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 renum-
bered 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.
T h e S c a n d a l o u s S u m m e r o f S i s s y L e B l a n c 1 8 7
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 lec-
ture. 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 foot-
ball team to go anywhere without the cheerleading squad.
But this morning, Doreen McAlister had taken Sissy aside and
told her she’d seen Parker in New Orleans Saturday night with his
arm around some girl. Parker had admitted it when Sissy caught
him between classes, but had said that the girl was a cousin.
“A kissing cousin?” Sissy asked. She knew Parker couldn’t stand
to be without female companionship for long.
He just laughed it off and told her he was saving himself for her.
But this afternoon, at Hopper’s Drugs, when he pulled out his
wallet to pay for her soda, a condom fell out. He slipped it back