The Day's Heat Page 24

  Lill whined from the other room, “I wanna drink of water.”

  Ignoring her daughter, Lee asked again, “What would I be needing a suitcase for?” This, she could tell, was something he was sure of, needed to say.

  “You’ll be wanting to go home to your folks now, where you belong.” Charles spoke with the same certainty that he used to predict a losing football game. Lee laughed a single “Ha!” and went to get water for

  Lill. It was as though Charles had never heard her stories of her mother’s drinking or of her father’s Mediterranean disavowal of married daughters. True, Lee had softened everything about her family into jokes, and changed her own perception from “I can never go home again” to “I will never go home again.” But it was clear that Charles—at least in his mind—had already shipped her, with the children, back to Atlanta, back where he felt she belonged. Lee could almost hear him in the future, talking to Brother over their beers: “Remember that A-rab wife I had once. What a bitch. Couple of kids, too, remember? That woman was crazy, crazy as a squirrel.”

  Still, Lee had to admire his single-mindedness, Charles’s ability, so unlike her own scattered reasoning, to perceive only his side: women, if their husbands left, went home to their families, especially if they were licentious, unfaithful, foreign women. She smiled at the thought without amusement and steadied Lill’s tiny shoulders as she drank from the plastic cup.

  When Lee came back into the bedroom, Charles had finished stuffing and closing the suitcase. The starched shirts and pants that Willie Mae had ironed just that morning hung from hangers clutched in his hand. He looked around as one does in a hotel room, checking to see that nothing of his own remained.

  “Well …” he said, pausing, and then with a certain condescension, “I’m sorry you made me do this.”

  He turned again, hiked the hanging shirts over his back, and scanned again the bed, the dresser, the windows.

  He’s expecting something from me, Lee thought, some female sorrow at this ending. She admitted it was a reasonable expectation and, as a final tribute to what had been between them, tried to see the Charles she’d married seven years earlier, the golden hero who had taken up hiding in this belligerent, bulky, red-faced man that stood before her now. But the hero—if he’d ever really existed—was gone. Looking back, Lee wondered if it was because Charles had so perfectly fit the physical requirements—the wide shoulders and tapering waist, the clear blue eyes and blond features of a prince—that she had imagined the rest. Just as with David Palmer, whose full sonorous voice and large beckoning hands had called to her—so unobtainable. In fairness, she switched places with the two men. Perhaps it was the same for them. What had they seen in her? The dark, the exotic, the beautiful doll one brings home from the fair? Whatever, there was no reason to appease a memory.

  Lee asked, “Are you going?”

  “You better believe it,” Charles said and shuddered, like a horse bit by a fly. He edged sideways with all his possessions through the bedroom door.

  There was a familiarity in the leaving, accompanied by all the words and sounds he used every morning: a scuffling down the hall, a kick at Furlough, “Go on dog!” The unnecessary slamming of all doors. And with each sound, Lee told herself: for the last time, for the last time, for the last time. For some reason, the thought hurt worse than her head.

  The next morning, the alarm rang at 7:00, but she was in no hurry to get up. The back of her head ached and her hair was matted with blood. After turning the buzzer off, she lay completely still, looking up at the rough white ceiling, realizing this would be her view—really alone—for a long time to come, also realizing that she’d slept through what would have been Brother’s 5:00 a.m. honking if Charles were still there beside her in the bed. She also slept through the school bus honking for Cassie. In an imagined aerial view of Strickland, she placed her husband forever with his family, the Bettlemains on Turner Street—all of them, vigorous Huns, “up and at ’em” by 5:00 every morning. Contrary to what anyone else in the world might desire, Lee knew Charles was glad, relieved of an extra hour of rest with her. Let him have what he needs, she told a God who seemed changed, who was no longer Blake’s God of flowing white hair and beard that she’d seen in books as a child. Now, God seemed more like a Chinese Mandarin, an unreadable Asian with a queue down his back and great curving nails. In a red brocade robe and a square hat on a fine-boned, lined face that God seemed to be holding a tea ceremony with other Mandarins, only checking up on the world now and then, like in a crystal ball, to smile a thin-lipped smile.

  She decided not to take Cassie to school, to let her daughters sleep in, give herself a break from the morning schedule and a reprieve from looking for a black cassock under St. Anthony’s trees. Ruefully, she admitted that B.F. Rutledge Elementary School would have at least spared her that search if Cassie had changed schools. But also, Lee felt she ought to try and sort out what had happened the night before, as if in the bright autumn light that came through the window she might be able to understand.

  She lay in the warm pattern created by sun and curtain, between sleep and full awareness, and had to press her lips together in an unhappy smirk, as she imagined the mandarin smiled at how it had all come about.

  Two lies—actually the identical lie to both the priest and her husband. True, the lie to David had been unintentional, something that had hopped like a frog from the scummy pond of coincidence, but she’d let it stay. Let the lie, warty and unreal, live because it suited her purpose—created a link between her and the priest, and a punishment for him. But the lie to Charles was different. That lie was a snake, twisting and turning, holding a monumental shrewdness because it served two purposes—hers and his—yet seemed so simple. Her husband had wanted an excuse to leave, and she had provided it.

  Now, as if to reassure herself, to fill the void a prisoner feels who has lost his shackles, she went over her freedoms: free of the early morning wake-ups to Brother’s horn and cooking breakfast; free of the uncertain waiting for Charles to come home in the evenings, keeping a meal warm in the oven; free of his dour expression as he came through the front door; free of his need to find something to complain about: the children’s toys in the drive, the current Sears’s bill, the casserole that wasn’t “real food.” Free to lie in the bed and tell herself that he would never come back. Determined to be glad, she rolled over, her hand under her body, finding suddenly a vibrating, thrumming from groin to hand. That urge might be a problem she told herself, but reconsidered: it would be the same if Charles were there.

  Those feelings, unresolved, but itchy and gratifying, lifted her out of bed, and after checking to make sure the girls were still asleep, she turned on the shower to bathe and wash the blood from her hair. Under the hot spray, she wondered if the Hamptons and Peggy had really gone to St. Anthony’s that morning, and did they, as they said they would, put sawhorses in front of the school? It might be worth driving over there, later, just to see.

  Don’t make excuses to look for David Palmer, she warned herself.

  The steaming water fell over her body, over Ray’s heavy blue turquoise. She scrubbed the soap into a thick lather and slid her hands over breasts, waist, and hips and felt what she thought she’d forgotten, the shape of an unpregnant woman. Why had Charles called her fat? Her stretched stomach was almost back to its more natural contour, the rubbery texture of the skin returned to satin under the soap’s lather, and surprisingly, it was as though she’d never carried a child in her belly.

  Clean and rinsed, she stepped from the shower, dried herself on a towel and walked naked to the front of the house to let Furlough out. “You can come in early every night now,” she told the dog. “And I can walk through these rooms without any clothes on,” she whispered to the Sears mirror as she stood in front of it. The large dark nipples and her own great dark-blue eyes looked back, out of a body and a face that were no longer a girl’s.

  Charles did not return to the house on Sterling,
did not come back to see his daughters, did not call asking to patch things up, as Lee was afraid he might. Might because of the children—his own anyway—might because of what it would look like to the people of Strickland; might because it was the thing to do.

  “The thing to do,” was Claire’s phrase, Charles’s mother’s fear of what people would say.

  For a week, Lee thought every car passing the small stucco house was Charles’s truck and would turn into the driveway, but no, it never was, and the expectation and relief somehow dimmed even further the thought that David Palmer might call or appear. Lee took on new customers and doubled her sewing hours, cooked only what she and her daughters liked to eat, sometimes only soup or cereal in the evenings. After supper, she and Cassie and Lill walked the cooling sidewalks for an hour, Baby Charlie in a pouch on her back, the neighborhood children trailing along, thrilled to have an adult that would talk, pay attention. Furlough ran ahead and off to the sides of this procession. Before Charles left, she realized she’d spent that time, delaying, getting hardly anything done, hoping for him to come home and for them all to eat together. Often, she gave into her and the girls’ hunger and put his dinner into the oven.

  There was no money from her husband or the Bettlemains, and Lee surprised herself by not fretting, by not calling Ray in Phoenix or her parents in Atlanta. She kept saying she would call—in the morning, then tomorrow, and then at last, putting it off indefinitely—and then justified, saying that since they never called, they deserved not to know.

  Willie Mae was the one who got in touch, arranged with Lee to come over and “help out” every Saturday afternoon.

  “I can’t afford you any more than that, Willie Mae, but you won’t have to do Mr. Charles’s white shirts,” Lee said, without thinking, but then added, “But I guess you’re doing them over there.”

  “Sure am,” Willie Mae answered, but gave the words no special inflection, just an uncomplaining acceptance of the way things were that Lee had to admire.

  The last Sunday in September, Lee started going to Mass again, this time attending Father Kennedy’s nine o’clock service, checking in the bulletin to be sure of the time. It was one of the rules she’d set for herself. The other was not to turn her head as she drove onto St. Anthony’s grounds, not to look out under the pecan trees. This rule took almost more will power than she possessed. The trees themselves seemed to call, the bare limbs became reaching arms, the silver-gray moss like soft waving hair, a forsaken beauty. To drive past, she’d start a foolish, animated conversation with Lill in the backseat or sing some improvised song from a remembered poem. “I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.”

  “You’re silly, Momma,” Lill said, more than once.

  One morning, instead of talking, Lee focused on the white plaster statue of Our Lady of Sorrows that stood by the school wall. She murmured to herself: “Be sad, be completely and totally sad and unhappy. You have reasons. You love someone who ignores you and your husband has left you with three children. You have plenty of reasons.” The tears pooled in her eyes so that everything was a blur and only the brake lights of the car in front showed through the water to guide her down the driveway and away from the school.

  Back home, Lee stood and watched through the rain-streaked living room window as dark clouds scuttled boat-like across a pearl-gray sky. From looking out of this window every morning after she came back from St. Anthony’s, she’d come to know every detail of the street: the uneven hedge of azaleas, the trellised roses, the Japanese magnolia in the front yard, full of fuzzy pale-green buds and from the tip of each oval shape, the drops of water falling in a slower shower. It had rained every day for a week. With Lill wrapped in a blanket, engrossed in Captain Kangaroo, and Baby Charlie and Furlough taking their morning naps, the house held a silent echoing emptiness that matched exactly the hollowed-out place behind Lee’s left breast.

  Just to move, to have something to do, she dialed the number on the realtor’s sign next door and made an appointment with the eager voice of a Mr. Young who answered.

  “The Teflers will be interested in any offer,” he said. “It’s a steal for the right party: a good location, an ideal place for children. Do you have children, Mrs. Bettlemain?”

  Lee admitted to children.

  “A good, quiet neighborhood, great for children, and ….”

  “I know. I live next door.”

  Mr. Young, the salesman, turned out to be an aging yellow face above a navy-blue suit and white shirt, hair combed so carefully it seemed a greenish-brown hat. As Lee knew, the rooms of the Teflers’ house were exactly the same as her own, except for walls painted a startling yellow, floors scarred and dusty, littered with shoes and papers, and a venetian blind hanging—the remains of a life.

  “It will have to be cleaned, but you can see ….”

  “Four hundred for the equity, and I’ll take over the payments,” Lee said, tired of listening to words like “cozy” from Mr. Young, which meant small bedrooms, and “interesting,” which meant an absurd collection of plastic flowered decals on the kitchen cabinets. It was $100 cheaper than she’d paid down for her house.

  Hurt came into Mr. Young’s eyes. “I don’t think they’ll even entertain a proposition that low.”

  “How much are the houses with the blue and white signs in the front?” Lee asked.

  “Oh, those are Government repossessions and in terrible shape. You wouldn’t want them.”

  It was like a game of Monopoly, Lee realized, only with the flavor of bridge—the ESP of the bidding. “Six hundred then. And now, I have to pick up my little girl from first grade.” She turned and went outside, leaving Mr. Young to lock up.

  “Do you want to keep the key, to see it again, uh, Mrs. Bettlemain?” Mr. Young called after her.

  “Yes,” she said, turning and taking the key, knowing that somehow the house was meant to be hers.

  In the end, with closing costs and taxes, Mr. Young said it would be $800 down, but the payments were the same as Lee’s own house, almost $70 a month, and she knew from asking around that some of the houses on Sterling Street rented for $100 a month, some for $110. It would mean $30 or $40 extra, about what Charles gave her for gas and the Sears’ payment. What she hadn’t realized was how much he’d paid on the other expenses: the electricity and water bills, tuition, and little things like bread and milk picked up on the way home—it added up and came to more than she thought. No wonder he was always complaining. She went over the monthly figures in her head time and again, trying to see what she could add to or take away, but at the end of the accounting she’d say out loud, “I will not ask Charles for money.”

  Now, in the mornings, after the trip to school, instead of looking out of windows and wondering about the priest and her husband, she cleaned the house next door. Even though the sale wasn’t final, she swept the floors, threw all the rubbish away, and peeled the decals off the cabinets with hot vinegar water. She found a package of yellowing envelopes tied with a pink ribbon far back in the linen closet. Probably love letters, she thought, and laughed remembering the Teflers’ screaming arguments, and then she pitched them out, not opening one, with the rest of the trash. Love is private, she told herself, hardly belongs to the two people involved, much less to anyone else.

  Chapter 17

  Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.

  Ecclesiastes 9:10

  There was some trouble with the transfer of the loan from the Teflers to Lee, and the pale, plump bank officer, Mr. Ramsey, said that Charles would have to sign. Yes, the house would be in Lee’s name, but the husband was the main borrower; the husband always had to sign first.

  In the polished, refrigerated loan office of Citiz ens & Southern Bank, Lee sat across from Mr. Ramsey, who asked questions from a long list, but in the end, he said Mr. Bet tlemain would have to come in and sign all the paper
s.

  Lee adopted Claire’s slow voice, used her mother-in-law’s uneducated phrases, dropped her eyes the way Claire did in front of men and said, “Charles is awful busy right now, Mr. Ramsey. They’s working down in Madison.” Might as well wear a flour-sack dress and sign my name with an X, Lee thought, but instead she offered, “I can bring the papers home to him.”

  The explanation and arrangement seemed to satisfy Ramsey, and that night Lee practiced Charles’s signature to perfection—thirty times on the back of one of Cassie’s school papers—and then signed it on the thin green lines where Ramsey had put big red check marks. She waited two days before taking the papers back, only to find out that the banker had called Charles at work, probably that very same afternoon she’d applied for the loan.

  “He said you were the business end of the family,” Ramsey smiled and shook his head as if in sorrow, took the papers from Lee’s hesitant hands and leafed through them to be sure the signatures were in the right places. “I warned him: We shouldn’t let our pretty women fool with grubby old money.”

  Lee knew the warning had been given but not the compliment. Ramsey’s water-blue eyes had the same quality as the florescent lights above him, a defused, financial interest in all that passed before him but nothing more.

  Walking out of the cool, damp air of the bank into the fall sunlight, Lee trembled at what Charles might have said. Yet, she knew her husband, could count on him not giving out one word of personal business to a stranger. In a layered sort of insight, she saw that in Charles’s mind this buying a house business proved that Lee was still waiting, still hoping for a reconciliation. What woman gives up a hard-working, steady husband voluntarily? he would think. And she’d often talked about buying another house on the street to rent out every time one went up for sale. So, to her husband, Lee’s buying the house next door was just an extension of their previous life, of her “going on about the business end of the family,” and that by his silence and absence, he could still deny her something. She could imagine Charles’ s face while answering the banker’s questions on the phone, her husband’s lips compressing into a tighter, thinner line, holding it all in, taking the same sullen, sour joy he did in eating in front of Furlough, not giving the dog a scrap.