The Day's Heat Page 13

  Claire smiled, put fingers to her lips as though giving away a secret, “Of course, I’m not the best wife—spend too much time on the bridge table.” Her mother-in-law had delicate, well-defined lips and large white teeth. Lee felt her lips too ample, too rounded out.

  “The girls have your lips,” Lee told her. “I hope this new baby has beautiful lips, too.”

  “You’re lucky,” Claire said. “I always wanted a girl, someone on my side, you know.”

  It was only after her mother-in-law left that Lee thought of the Battlemains’ fishing boats, the guns, the hunting, the nights out on Lake Alliston, the week in Canada for the ducks, the bets on football and basketball games, the Fridays off for weekend trips to the playoffs, the Bowl Games, the hours, drinking beer, after work.

  A woman would need a lot of bridge playing, a lot of something, to fill up that time.

  Chapter 9

  One of these portions of the universe is thine own… which, however little, contributes to the whole.

  Plato

  Now, with Ray’s money, Lee was able to afford having Willie Mae work very Tuesday afternoon. The woman stood, her legs two sturdy brown pillars, and ironed while Lee sewed. Each time there was a feeling of circling between the two women, a testing of boundaries.

  Today, Willie Mae was ironing the last of Charles’s white shirts. The door frame separating the small living room from the bedrooms was hung with ironed clothes—two inches between each hanger—and the air was full of the cooked, steamy smell of starch and cloth. On Monday, Lee washed, starched, and hung out the shirts along with the girls’ Sunday dresses and pillowcases. Blue Argo starch, a thick hot glutinous mess, made the clothes dry to a wrinkled stiffness that had to be sprinkled with water, rolled into long rounds, and stored in a plastic bag. Before she had Willie Mae to work once a week, Lee was always behind in the ironing, would store the plastic bag in the refrigerator, seldom getting to the pillowcases, sometimes even letting Charles’s shirts mildew to a cheesy dark green.

  “I’m not good at ironing his shirts,” she told Willie Mae. “Seems like I always scorch the ends of the collars, or iron a big wrinkle right up the front. Once, when Charles and I were first married, I let six of his shirts stay in the bag until they mildewed black. Back then, I didn’t know you could bleach them out white again, so I threw them under the house on Gordon Street and swore they’d disappeared. For months, poor Charles was saying, ‘I know I had more white shirts somewhere.’”

  Willie Mae turned the iron’s point into the edge of a collar. “Yes’m. Them Bettlemain men folks sure likes they white shirts. Why tween Mr. Brother and Mr. Lon, the laundry irons up to twenty a week.”

  The Bettlemain men often took showers at their main building and put on clean clothes before they went out for a drink after work.

  Lee had embroidered the raised flowers on the yoke of her beige smock with red, yellow, blue, and pink thread, and was now sewing the leaves in green. There was something god-like in placing the needle exactly right, lapping the thread to create the leaf veins, the fanning emerald patterns growing under her fingers. The smock would be finished as soon as the green was satin stitched in.

  “You making some mighty pretty stuff for yourself this go round, Miss Lee,” Willie Mae said.

  The maid seemed to know of the pregnancy without an announcement, just as she had somehow known of a man the afternoon of the rectory. Did she speculate on whose child this was? Lee wondered. If so, Willie Mae’s thoughts were hidden; a blankness in her eyes where there could have been questions.

  Lee found herself saying, “Well, if I can’t have the new boyfriend, I might as well have the new dress. Right?” It brought back Willie Mae’s almost clairvoyant perception of that long ago afternoon.

  “Sometimes I thinks a new man is easier to come by than a new dress. I’s got me two bo’friends going, right now. They’s one what took up at the house and one on the side.” Willie Mae winked, an exaggerated, lowered curtain wink, the sweat running down into the crinkles at the corner of her eye.

  To Lee it seemed improbable that this heavy, middle-aged, nylon-capped colored woman could have one boyfriend, much less two. “Does the live-in fellow mind the other guy?”

  “Ain’t nothing to mind. He don’t know,” Willie Mae cackled. “I slips out the bathroom window of a night, after he’s gone to sleep.”

  “Well, it’s a damn poor woman who can’t keep two men entertained,” Lee said, imitating Ray’s cynical view of relationships, also realizing how often she said exactly the opposite of what she felt. The vision of the overweight Willie Mae half in and half out of a high bathroom window, her toes barely touching the commode for support, her thick leg exposed, was too unbelievable, too comical.

  Lee wondered if slipping in and out at night would have been her way, if things had continued with Father Palmer. Of course, she could walk out the front door; Charles slept hard enough. She pushed the thought aside. The afternoon in the rectory, yes; but creeping out at night for a rendezvous, no. But why not?

  “How many children do you have, Willie?” Lee asked, just to stop thinking.

  “So far, they’s my three girls and my three grands.”

  Lee knew of Willie Mae’s children and grandchildren, knew of her poverty and problems as well as she did her own. Claire complained about her maids, Willie Mae and the laundress, and their problems constantly.

  “Willie Mae’s oldest girl done gone and got herself pregnant again, Lon,” Claire had announced at Sunday’s dinner. “She needs money for baby things and to see the doctor.”

  Lon, wiped his shining forehead with a napkin, brought it down his doughy face, over his mouth in aggravation, and grumbled, “I don’t know what you ’spect woman. I ain’t taking them darkies to raise.”

  The words made Lee’s feet shift on the rug. She would never get used to Lon’s short, hateful responses to his wife.

  But Claire didn’t seem to mind. In the following weeks she was buying booties and small receiving blankets—for Lee, too—making an appointment for Willie Mae’s oldest girl, Larrine, with the colored doctor.

  What does Mr. Lon think of my being pregnant for the third time?” Lee asked, breaking her mother’s and Claire’s rule: Never, never ask a maid’s opinion.

  “I ain’t heard nothing from Mr. Lon,” Willie Mae answered, starting to iron the pillowcases, wiping the fine film of sweat from her forehead with the inside of her elbow. “But Mr. Brother pitched a fit. Said what was you doing, putting so many chi’ren on his brother?” The full lips parted, to let a low, breathy half chuckle escape.

  Willie Mae was breaking the rules, too, tattling on Brother and laughing about it.

  Lee shook the embroidery hoop at an imaginary Brother. “What does he know about being married, about having kids? All he’s ever done is follow his father around, like some lame-brain hunting dog.”

  Willie Mae chuckled again. “Yeah, Miss Claire was glad for Mr. Charles to head off to school, do somethin’ sides working and catching fish. Course, he come right on back. But he brung you. Could a done a sight worser for hisself, I say.”

  Lee smoothed the green stitches. “That’s a real compliment, Willie Mae.”

  Lee would have liked to asked more: What had the Bettlemains thought about Mr. Charles flunking out of college and bringing home a dark Lebanese girl from Atlanta? But she didn’t. “Never get too chummy with the help.” Her mother’s slurred voice sounded in some back chamber. “They’ll turn on you.”

  The sewn green leaves finished, Lee stretched out on the couch and closed her eyes. These afternoons she could take a nap. Willie Mae would mind the girls and answer the phone. In the half-light of almost sleeping, Lee saw clearly her mother’s and Claire’s reasons for having maids. There was something deeply soothing about swept walks, made beds, a clean kitchen, and ironed clothes—the order that flowed from Willie Mae’s hands, the order a five-dollar bill bought. One single afternoon of Willie Mae’s work gave a
tidy beauty to the entire week. And because Lee didn’t have the big jobs of vacuuming and sweeping, cleaning bathrooms or ironing, she had time to wash her hair every day and towel it into glistening black curls instead of tying it up into a frayed ponytail. She made up her face to go with the clean hair. She also used Willie Mae’s afternoon to sew, making an entire dress sometimes, so now she had five new maternity outfits to wear, freshly pressed. After getting the children to bed, she read in the bedroom in the evenings, the television noise coming down the short hallway as vague as waves washing against a shore.

  Though Charles never asked how Lee was paying for Willie Mae, the spotless house brought out a curious cooperation in her husband. He picked up his beer bottles and socks and encouraged Cassie and Lill to take their toys and papers to their room. “Let’s don’t mess up Willie Mae’s clean house,” he’d say. And since Lee didn’t harp on emptying the trash cans or working in the yard anymore, now, without encouragement, Charles took the garbage out and started mowing the lawn every other Monday evening, explaining, “Willie Mae will sweep off the walks on Tuesday.”

  Lee found it difficult to understand: Was paid labor more important than a wife’s? But she herself extended Willie Mae’s work: cleaned closets and drawers, threw away dust catchers and old clothes. And in the evenings she cooked, made desserts, wanted to make baklava but never got around to ordering the philo dough from Atlanta. Instead, she tried Claire’s recipes for pineapple upside-down cake and German chocolate cake. Charles often ate a piece with his beer before supper and another one afterwards. And although he spent entire nights in the recliner and looked away when Lee stood in front of him with her hands resting on her belly, the clean house, the good meals and desserts earned a sort of silent approval from her husband that hadn’t been there before.

  Ray’s extra twenty dollars a week bought a margin of ease, along with a fattened saving account earning 6% interest.

  The weekly olive-green bill, wrinkled or papery new, arrived almost every Monday, and if Ray missed, the next week there would be two bills in the envelope. The twenty had stopped coming in cards; now it was almost always wrapped in hotel stationary, and once in an opened-up cocktail napkin from the Hilton at Diamond Head. “Will be puddle-jumping through on the 20th!” Ray foretold her arrivals in one-sentence dashes across the thick cream paper.

  Her sister never stayed more than one or two hours, and now Lee dreaded her visits. Ray had changed. As Lee’s stomach had gradually inched upwards and outwards, as the thick padding of flesh over her body had insulated her into a bovine tranquility, Ray’s flesh had dwindled. Her sister was still beautiful, but now in an angular, sharp-edged way, her hair dyed into a fiery red that demanded attention rather than the dark rosewood color of just a few months earlier. And her clothes, which before had the rumpled quality of fresh out of a suitcase, were now worn once too often, a small stain down the front, a slight human odor under the tobacco smell of the cigarettes she smoked one after another. Ray’s hands, bony and claw-like, held the cigarette, and she leaned into it as if drawing on some sustaining power.

  “You smoke too much, Ray. You’re getting too thin,” Lee said, trying to sound kind rather than critical.

  “You’re never too thin or too rich, kiddo,” was Ray’s answer.

  These days Ray was full of smart comebacks or, worse, long quotations from something called the Bhagavad Gita, which to Lee sounded like “bag of vita”—bag of life—and because of the saying, “Nature is abundant, why are we so miserly?” it made an odd kind of sense.

  “You’re fat as a pig, Lee. Is it good for you to gain so much weight?” Ray asked.

  “Dr. Yuller said since I’ve never had any trouble, to just keep on doing what I’ve been doing.”

  The mention of food, even in this indirect way, caused Lee to make a mid-morning tea. She used the glazed black and gold tea set, her mother’s wedding gift, noting each time how much its pattern resembled the black and gold tapestry on David Palmer’s bed.

  The Earl Grey smell and the pieces of buttered bread made Lee’s mouth water. She spread the toast thick with blackberry jam. “The girls and I’ll have to pick more berries this spring.”

  “I don’t like the seeds.” Ray sucked, wolfish, from the edge of her cup and then on her cigarette, taut lines radiating up from her lips.

  “That’s the best part, cracking those little seeds between your teeth.” Lee made her tea pale with milk and sugar, her toast heavy with the purple blackberries.

  Ray nibbled, leaving large crusts on the saucer—that Lee ate later—and five cigarette butts in the ashtray.

  Ray never spent the night anymore, no matter how much Cassie and Lill begged, even though her trips between the two coasts seemed more frequent than ever. Lately she’d even begun chartering a small private jet down from Atlanta and then on to Jacksonville or Miami, saying it was cheaper in the long run, saying Mason’s Department Store paid for it.

  Lee wondered how Ray’s boyfriend Angel took the absences. “When do you think you and Angel will be getting married?” Lee asked. Actually it was hard to believe Angel existed as other than a disembodied Spanish-sounding voice on the telephone, calling for Ray to answer. Lee had never met her sister’s live-in boyfriend. Ray’s descriptions of him—”Hispanic and hung like a horse”—had changed lately to: “He’s basically lazy and no good.”

  “Get married! Are you kidding?” Ray seemed to have never thought about marrying Angel, whereas Lee had thought that was the purpose all along. You might live with someone, but didn’t you plan on marrying them sooner or later? Before she could stop, the question was out, “Aren’t you living in sin?”

  There was a delay in Ray’s reaction, a remembering: “Yeah, that’s right,” she said wonderingly, and then amused, “We’re living in sin. I forgot.” Still smiling, she said, “I’ll have to tell Angel. It’ll make it more fun.”

  Lee laughed, too, feeling foolish. “I didn’t mean anything by that, Ray. It just came out. It’s the nuns talking.”

  Ray looked out from under her thick false eyelashes, lifted her lined eyebrows, a glaze forming behind her eyes. “I know it, big sister,” she said. “Just can’t stop being what we are, can we?”

  Lee had no idea what Ray meant. What was the point? Nowadays, her sister seemed to be addressing an unseen something to the side of the conversation. Before Lee would have asked, “What’s wrong? You’re not making sense?” But now, because of the weekly twenty dollars, in an uneasy truce, she let her sister’s misdirections slide.

  Ray left after the tea. Lee washed and put the dishes away and wondered what her sister was getting out of all that traveling from one place to another. Ray no longer talked about Mason’s and its customers. Now, it was about the fabulous hotels she stayed in, the gourmet food—though obviously she didn’t eat much—the parties and clothes she wore. It’s the life of a buyer, Lee justified, but she no longer felt that Ray was off on a wonderful adventure in the outside world while she was stuck in Strickland.

  The pain and loneliness of the last months had bought some wisdom. Most of the women in Strickland, most of the women in the world, live exactly as I do, Lee thought. We have houses and yards and children, and not much else. For us there will be no travel, no grand hotels, no expensive meals in great dining rooms—with “ambience” as Ray always said—no cocktail parties by the pool. She realized that the afternoon with Father Palmer would probably be the most unusual thing she ever did in her life.

  Later, Lee sat at the veneered table in the section set off by the blue rug as a dining room and helped Cassie write her name, her letters, her numbers—helped Lill color. “All purple trees, Lill? Well, maybe at sunset.” She made supper—meatloaf and potatoes and peas—as probably every other woman on her street, Sterling, was doing. Not a fancy meal, just one expected by a man who came home from a job.

  The men were no different. There would be no recognition for them either, no victorious ball games, other than the o
nes they watched on television—no home runs, no touchdowns. The most they could hope for was a winning bet or catching a record bass from Two-Mile Lake and their picture with the fish in the newspaper. Somehow it was all sort of sad and all sort of right, too. Everyone taking their small accomplishments so seriously.

  Out of the hormonal calm that came with the pregnancy, Lee felt she could see herself the way she did as a child, addressing an envelope: Lee Bettlemain; 1921 Sterling Street; Strickland, Georgia; United States of America; the World; the Universe. For a long moment, she had an overview, a profound, resigned perception. The sameness of her days, the silent distance of David Palmer, Charles’s weekend fishing trips, and long naps after supper, now held no sting, could have been activities she read about in The Strickland Free Press.

  And the news those days was interesting. Lee read every article, listened to every newscast on segregation and integration.

  A Negro girl, Charlayne Hunter, had been ruled eligible and then ineligible to attend the University of Georgia, along with a Negro boy, Hamilton Holmes, who had been ruled ineligible right away. Something to do with them being unable to come from a semester system school into the quarter system.

  To the Bettlemain men at the Sunday dinner table, it was “the niggers trying to get past the law.” To David Palmer in his sermons at St. Jerome’s, it was a transparent attempt by the whites to keep the coloreds out. And to Lee, who watched from the sidelines, there seemed nothing but contradictions: Lieutenant Governor Garland Byrd saying, on the same front page as the story of the semester-quarter confusion, that he “still clung to the thin hope that Georgia could preserve its segregation patterns.”

  Lee listened silently to Lon’s and Brother’s grousing about the “uppity niggers,” and thought, fifty years ago it was probably immigrants from Ireland or Italy, and fifty years from now it will probably be someone else.