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.)
Jewishness. All that fear of “waving the flag.” In the end, what dif-
ference did it make? They called him a Jew boy behind his back and
bought their shoes down the street at Rubinstein’s.
A red-and-green neon sign outlined the department store on the
corner of Grand and Progress, where he turned. Golden letters
flashed on: RUBINSTEIN’S SERVING GENTRY SINCE 1875. The raindrops
on his windshield lit up in a splatter of color, the colors of the tem-
ples of Thailand.
He’d landed there in 1948 and felt an affinity for the steamy,
underdeveloped country with its temples of gold and red and green.
He acquired a real taste for the spicy Thai food and the lissome
women who cooked it.
He found a job with Jim Thompson, an American G.I. who was
revolutionizing Thai silk, changing it from a cottage industry into a
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 3 5
major export. But Parker didn’t much like textiles or working for
the fastidious, fussy Thompson.
He was more comfortable with a former Seabee captain, who
was starting up a construction business and promised to teach him
anything he didn’t already know about building.
They took an influential Thai businessman in as a partner and
began to build downtown Bangkok. Parker was on a roll again, as
his company moved into the spotlight. His partners took care of the
contracts, the bribes, the business. Parker stayed at the job site. He
liked being out there in the heat with the other men, building some-
thing he could see, something he could lay his hands on.
One of Thompson’s pretty weavers moved in with him and
Parker settled down, as much as he could settle down. As soon as
the actual construction slowed, he’d be off by himself trekking
through the mountains on elephants or wandering around the jun-
gles of Burma on foot. Once he disappeared into a Buddhist
monastery and didn’t come out for two months. At first he thought
he’d found what he was looking for. There the monks in their saf-
fron robes tended rows of golden Buddhas and taught him that this
life was just one small step in the eternal journey. They showed him
how to take away the pain of living. But after a couple of months,
he realized they were so focused on the pain, they’d given up on the
joy. He couldn’t stay. The river of desire was too strong in him.
Then in 1954, when a big contract they were counting on didn’t
come through, his American partner skipped town with all their
money. Parker managed to pay off his men. He knew they’d have
starved if he hadn’t. But it wiped him out. And he wasn’t able to
repay their big suppliers. He remembered his father telling him, “A
man has to stand behind his word.” Parker felt he’d had his shot
and he’d dropped the ball. He was humiliated.
His Thai partner suspected Parker was in league with the thief.
All Americans looked the same to him. With an Asian prison loom-
ing over his future, Parker, who was carving out a place for himself
as an international businessman, was forced to slip out of the coun-
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L o r a i n e D e s p r e s
try at night, in an old fishing boat that belonged to one of his
laborers.
The girl cried. She wanted him to marry her and take her back
with him. He considered it. She was strong and sweet and when
she’d throw her long black hair around and look at him from the
corner of her eye, he found her hard to resist. But he knew it would
be wrong. He didn’t love her.
By then he’d had more women than he could count, in every
color and hue. And some of them meant a lot to him. But he always
held back. Something indescribable was missing.
He slunk back to the United States with the bitter taste of defeat
on his tongue. He felt like a stranger in San Francisco, where
nobody cared that he claimed to have been part owner of a con-
struction company in some godforsaken underdeveloped country.
He returned home to his mother, now living in Miami, and his
sense of humiliation was complete. The only work he could find
was on nonunion construction crews. His mother lied about his
occupation.
He met a girl in Miami, this time Southern and Jewish. She was
smart and sarcastic, and had wonderful curly red hair. Her father
owned a big Cadillac dealership and was willing to take Parker into
the business.
“Perfect,” his mother said.
The date was set. Parker went with his fiancée to pick out their
silver. As he watched her agonize over the pattern, arrange knives
and spoons on different place mats, he envisioned their life together
and he couldn’t make himself go through with it. He couldn’t spend
the rest of his life living off his father-in-law’s dole. Besides, that
indescribable something wasn’t there.
His mother said he’d find any excuse not to get tied down.
“You’re thirty-two and you don’t have anything to show for it. No
family. No education. No business. Nothing. It’s time you built
yourself a life, boy, or life’s going to pass you by.” He knew she was
right.
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 3 7
In the middle of his life, Parker’s vision of himself was shrinking.
He decided to go back to Gentry, where, once upon a time,
crowds cheered and called him the great Parker Davidson. Besides
he wanted to see how Sissy was doing.
He’d half hoped she was settled and fat, so he could reject her as
she had once rejected him. He intended to close the door on that
painful adolescent fantasy. So the last thing he’d expected was the
heat their encounter had generated. But there it was. Maybe that’s
what he’d really been hoping for all along.
He swung the telephone truck into the rutted gravel parking lot.
Calvin Merkin, his supervisor, was standing in the doorway looking
pissed.
Parker jumped out and went inside to face him. As the lightning
flashed and the thunder boomed, Calvin did his duty and chewed
him out for a good five minutes, until he noticed the lipstick on
Parker’s shirt. “I should fire your ass, boy,” he said. “Who you been
catting around with? Some housewife with a bad phone?” But his
eyes didn’t show anger. Instead they gleamed with eager admira-
tion. “You SOB.”
Parker said nothing.
“Come on,” Calvin said. “I’ll let you buy me a drink.”
They went out into the parking lot together. Calvin watched
Parker grab a jar of homemade pickled watermelon rinds from the
telephone truck and toss it into his MG.
“Damn!” said Calvin. “Damn! She gave you a souvenir!”
“I’ll see you at the Paradise,” Parker said, and peeled away from
the curb.
He’d fallen in love with Sissy in the days of his youth, when he
was struggling to remain pure at heart. He’d never even tried to
make love to her. Now he ranked that as one of the stupider deci-
sions.
As he pulled up to the bar, he thought about the bigoted toad
she’d married. But he didn’t know what to do about it.
Love is like cigarettes. It gives you a little pleasure while you’re
at it, but it leaves you with a bad taste in your mouth and a
pain in your chest.
Rule Number Forty-two,
The Southern Belle’s Handbook
Sissy stood in the bathroom window, her hand on the creased,
yellowing shade. She heard the voices of Frankie Lymon and the
Teenagers floating down the empty street singing “Why Do Fools
Fall in Love.” Good question, she thought as she saw the second-
hand hearse filled with high school kids round the corner under the
streetlight.
She remembered what it was like when she was in high school
looking for trouble on a hot summer night and her biggest problem
was she might not find any.
The storm had blown over, leaving the town breathless and
muggy. She pulled the shade down and hung her green chenille robe
on the hook in back of the door. The wet clothes everyone had
thrown into a heap and left for Mother were lying in a puddle on
the black-and-white tile.
Balancing an ashtray on the edge of the old, claw-footed tub, she
sank wearily into the water. It was barely tepid now that she’d got-
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 3 9
ten the rest of her family bathed. She closed her eyes, too tired even
to pick up the soap.
After a while she sat up and took a drag on her cigarette. As the
nicotine curled through her system, the horrors of the afternoon
came back to taunt her. Peewee had been so brave. Foolish but
brave. He could have died in that damned gravel pit like Sissy’s
brother Norman had all those years ago. Guilt crawled up and
down her stomach. Okay, that did it, enough.
She was going to
remain a good and faithful wife just as she’d always been
. She
decided to make that Rule . . . she searched for an appropriate
number . . . Fifty seemed about right.
She ran the pink bar of soap along her arms and around back of
her neck where her auburn hair was more or less pinned up. No
more yielding to temptation, she swore to herself. What does it get
you, anyway? A different man. Big deal.
A memory flashed through her body of another man, a long time
ago, a short powerful man in a hunting jacket. She reached for her
cigarette. Southern Belle’s Handbook Rule Number Seventeen:
A
lady doesn’t waste her precious time on bad memories
. She inhaled
shakily. Ashes fell into her bath. Shit. She tried to grind out the
butt, only to knock the ashtray onto the floor.
Love is like cigarettes, Sissy thought as she leaned over the edge
of the tub and shoveled up the dead butts and old cellophane wrap-
pers. It gives you a little pleasure while you’re at it, but it leaves you
with a bad taste in your mouth and a pain in your chest.
She picked up her still burning butt and tried to take one last
drag, but it fell apart in her ash-wet hand.
She stretched her chin to her chest, working the kinks out of her
neck, and wondered what she was going to do when she saw Parker
again. Nothing, she assured herself, wallowing in soapy water and
rectitude. She was finished with love. From now on, she was deter-
mined to be a good and faithful wife. And love had nothing to do
with that.
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L o r a i n e D e s p r e s
She stepped out of the tub, rubbing herself dry with the last
clean towel, a thin, flowered thing she’d gotten in a box of deter-
gent, and then she slipped into her green chenille robe. She
unpinned her hair. It fell around her face as she bent down to pick
up the wet clothes.
As her sundress unfolded, she saw to her horror the creosote
hand imprinted into the folds of her circle skirt. My God, had it
been there all the time? She was pretty sure Peewee hadn’t
noticed. He would have said something. She brushed her hand
over her skirt. She couldn’t resist letting her fingers play over the
sticky handprint one last time. Her body remembered what
Parker’s big hand had felt like when he put his dark mark on her
behind, and then, in spite of her newfound probity, her nipples
hardened.
One man’s as good as another
, Rule Number Twenty-
one, she reminded herself with as much conviction as she could
muster. But her nipples didn’t pay any attention. She wadded the
dress into a ball.
As she passed the bedroom door, she heard Chip explaining to
his father how Marilee had crawled out of the water when no one
was looking. “Guess my little girl’s a better swimmer than any of us
thought.” Peewee sounded pleased. Sissy glanced into the room and
saw the little girl snuggled up next to her father in the big four-
poster bed. What more do I want? she asked herself. She wondered
if she should make up something appropriate for the Southern
Belle’s Handbook, but she was too tired.
She threw all the wet clothes except her dress into the washing
machine and turned it on. Then she opened the broom closet and
almost threw the crumpled dress into the rag bag. But remembering
the look on Chip’s face, she took it outside and threw it straight
into the garbage, which was scheduled for pickup the next day.
Something was happening to Chip. He was changing in front of her,
not that he’d ever been easy. Maybe he needed more attention,
more encouragement. She decided to buy him the chemistry set he
wanted. He was right. It would be educational.
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 4 1
* * *
bedroom. As she expected, this announcement set off much moan-
ing and gnashing of teeth. Marilee whined. Billy Joe threw himself
on the mercy of his father and tried to plea-bargain.
“Bedtime,” Sissy repeated, ruffling her middle child’s hair.
“You heard your mother,” said the patriarch. Sissy smiled at her