The Day's Heat Read online

  Now, she helped the girls out of the backseat of the car and herded them toward the small stucco house. In the second year of her marriage, she’d insisted on moving out of the Bettlemain’s rental into this small home, three bedrooms and one bath, but at least all theirs. Charles had seemed proud at the time, Lee using her father’s wedding gift of $500 for the down payment. With the outside walls painted gray and Chinese-red wood shutters—they’d painted it together—it was different from its neighbors’ houses, pale yellows and greens. On the quarter-acre lot, the boundaries were clearly set by the Formosa azaleas, also planted the first year she and Charles lived there. Every year the bushes grew larger, making the house more private, and every spring there were masses of fuchsia-colored flowers that oddly did not clash with the red shutters. It had seemed back then that she had to mark off territory, distinguish her place from the row upon row of identical buildings, but now she saw that the small differences only emphasized the sameness. The subdivision in Strickland was just another backwater, Bible-Belt place, a dull stone on the silver wire that her sister, with shiny cars and planes, strung between Atlanta, Miami, and Phoenix.

  Though Cassie and Lill would rather have run into the backyard, Lee pushed them ahead, a front line of defense. Two children were a good explanation for her unwashed face, the unmade beds, and the dishes still in the sink. Well, at least today, my breasts will be as big as Ray’s, she thought, holding back her shoulders. Of course, within a couple of months every part of her body would be bigger than her sister’s.

  Inside, the house was more of a disaster than Lee remembered from the evening: toys, paper dolls, newspapers, and Charles’s four empty beer bottles beside t he recliner. And from that morning: cereal bowls, glasses, and a half-filled pitcher of orange juice sat on the dark Formica dinette table that filled one end of the L-shaped living room.

  Ray sat on the blue and brown striped couch as Cleopatra might have lounged on a royal barge going down the Nile. Her sister’s auburn hair, dark red flames around an extremely pale face, brought out her yellow-brown eyes. Elegant, Lee thought; Ray was completely elegant, from long painted nails to matching lipstick, to a silky blouse that fell like water over her breasts, her nipples showing plainly through the thin material since she no longer bothered with a bra.

  Charles always noticed and made one of his few observations. “I don’t remember Ray looking so good, so—so big, at our wedding,” he’d remark, as though Ray’s breasts had been kept a family secret until after he married Lee.

  “She had silicone implants a couple of years ago, remember? I told you,” Lee said, and then had to dully remind her husband every other time Ray made a pit stop in Strickland. It was an admission of defeat, though Lee couldn’t explain why. Her own breasts were large as long as she was nursing or pregnant, but shrunk back to their pre-maternity state, 34B and nothing extra, as soon as those functions ceased.

  Ray had a good explanation for the implant surgery. “Your clothes just hang so much better, kiddo,” she’d joke. “And when you’re dead and lying in the coffin, your tits will still be standing at attention.”

  Lee wanted to ask all kinds of questions. Did the breasts get in the way while making love? Were they hard? They looked hard. They felt hard when she and her sister hugged. But Lee couldn’t bring herself to be so inquisitive. There was a distance between her and her sister, a reserve in Lee, a wildness in Ray—a separateness that couldn’t be bridged or explained.

  “Ray has my hair and my temperament, open and uncomplicated,” their mother Darcy would say, “but Lee belongs to her father, just like Abram. Could have had her all by himself—a sly nature hiding in all that black hair.” It was an alliance created by genetics and discussions of who had inherited the most of Darcy’s or Abram’s family traits: the flowing dark-auburn hair or the black kinky curls, the pale amber or midnight-blue eyes. A clear smooth complexion came from both sides, peaches and cream from Darcy and cream of olive from Abram, all mixed together. That both sets of parents were second-generation Lebanese—Arabic—and to outsiders looked the same, would have been taken as an insult, as blindness.

  But now, except for Ray, her family in Atlanta was like a long-ago dream, her father and mother locked in a battle that excluded their two daughters. Here in Strickland, Lee was just plain old “foreign” and way too dark-skinned. “Sand nigger,” was the term Lee had heard in a grocery store aisle, but when she turned, no one was looking in her direction.

  “I let myself in, kiddo.” Ray said and rose from the littered couch. Her long fingers, ten hot-pink shells matching lips and blouse, reached out to hug Lee.

  In an instant, with her sister’s thin shoulders under her hands, smelling the strange un-sweet perfume that Ray always wore, Lee felt all resentment flow out like so much water. Wasn’t this the baby sister she doted on? What were clothes and hair? This was her beautiful sister, the perfect combination of dark and light, proof that with a little effort Lee could be beautiful herself. They weren’t all that different. This was her smart sister, the one who had gone to college to major in art, and then on to a big furniture chain in Phoenix, Arizona, but who still loved Lee enough to make an effort to stop in South Georgia, to see her. No one else did.

  Lee hugged Ray longer than necessary.

  “Your house is too easy to break into, kiddo. I just lifted the glass jalousie of the front door, reached in, and turned the knob.”

  Then she was embracing Cassie and Lill, calling them her blonde babies, ruffling their hair and tickling them, and giving them two bracelets from her purse, identical blue-green turquoise circles. The girls, in turn, touched their aunt’s dangling earrings, her long nails, told how Lill had been to kindergarten that morning, and begged Aunt Ray to spend the night, to sleep in their beds.

  “This isn’t Phoenix, Ray,” Lee laughed above her daughters’ chatter. “It’s Strickland, Georgia. Nobody locks doors around here. Besides, what could they steal? The dirty dishes?” As she talked, she picked up toys and papers, knowing that within minutes the living room would be presentable.

  Each section of the narrow room was marked off by a dark blue carpet and in the kitchen by blue and white tiles. The small L of a room took only fifteen minutes or so for Lee to tidy up, but in five minutes the girls and Charles could mess it up again. How, she didn’t know. There was a tradeoff somewhere that escaped her.

  Ray started helping, picking up newspapers too. Cassie and Lill copied their aunt, putting their paper dolls back in the boxes.

  “I didn’t want to be like Mother, kiddo,” said Ray, “and start cleaning before you came home. You know what she did last winter—her one visit in five years? My apartment was spotless—I moved Angel out for a week—and the maid came in twice. So what does Darcy do? She dusts the leaves of the potted plants, one by one. Hours of wiping, and then she buys that shiny stuff and paints each individual leaf. I have to admit they looked great.” Ray used the pads of her fingers to keep from breaking a nail.

  Lee didn’t say, “Mother’s never come to see me or her grandchildren.” Instead, she said, “Well, cleaning’s better than drinking.” There, the truth, out loud.

  Ray changed the subject, “Want to hear my good news?”

  Want to hear mine? Lee replied silently. I’m pregnant again. She started clearing the dining-room table.

  “I’m flying to Jamaica next week for three days,” Ray continued. “I’ll make the selections for every store in the chain this summer. Can you believe it?” Her sister did a graceful turn and bowed, her dark-red hair fanned out behind her, her thin hands and arms wide as if for another hug. Cassie and Lill twirled beside their aunt.

  “That’s wonderful, hon. You girls go outside,” Lee said to her daughters and pushed them toward the side door. “Show your friends the bracelets Aunt Ray brought you.”

  Ray followed Lee into the kitchen. “It was tricky at first, with Angel and me living together. ‘Living in sin,’ as Dad would say. But the owner doesn’t
care, likes me, says my displays with Masons have made it one of their best stores. I did everything in pale green and pink last year, with white wicker furniture—very cool, coming in out of that Arizona heat.”

  Lee wondered if Ray would stay long enough to hear about the pregnancy and about Father Palmer losing his tooth. Somehow in comparison to flying to Jamaica and being chosen as a buyer for a national chain, a third child and a knocked-out tooth seemed insignificant. The feelings of importance from that morning dwindled like something seen through the wrong end of a telescope.

  What was this pregnancy after all but one night of not wanting to push that yellow-brown diaphragm holding a dollop of spermicide up inside herself—not wanting the whole ugly process: the antiseptic smell, the slick jelly spilling over her fingers, the hard edges that Dr. Yuller swore she was not supposed to feel once it was “correctly inserted.” Hadn’t she gotten pregnant with Lill even while wearing that damned thing every single time?

  Also, how was she to know Charles would get over being mad? They’d gone to bed fussing about school tuition—that he’d turn back toward her in the middle of the night, his soft, wet kisses coming as if in a dream, holding a half-hearted apology. As he stroked her, she charted the obstacle course of using the birth control. First, get out of bed, fumble in the back of the drawer, then to the bathroom—bright light, cold tiled floor—and try to put it in right, then back to the bed again, only to find him fallen back asleep. It had happened before.

  She didn’t blame him. Working for his dad in the plumbing business, ten hours a day, five and sometimes six days a week, he was worn out. And with the light, the smell, she’d be out of the mood, too. Still, she’d lie there, feeling the hard edges of the diaphragm every time she turned, debating whether to get up and take it out or leave it in. There was always the off-chance that later her thighs pressing against the backs of Charles’s legs, her hand sliding up under his undershirt and down into his shorts would bring the feelings back again—for both of them.

  So consciously, mentally saying, “What the hell!” and fully aware she was fertile—the marriage manual read, “A thin mucous flow in the middle of the monthly cycle.”—Lee decided: No diaphragm. And it was better, inside her own head, feeling his weight, his entering, and somehow inside his head, too, somehow feeling how small and wet she was under him.

  Just lately, he’d spoiled all the good feelings by saying, “You’re so tiny,” bending her hand backwards. “I could snap your little wrist; so easy—your little neck.” He encircled her throat with his long fingers. She didn’t dare tell him she’d taken a chance.

  “Don’t just stand there staring, Lee. What do you think?” Ray was asking.

  “About what?”

  “You’re a million miles away, kiddo. You all right?”

  “Sure, sure. What do you want for lunch?”

  But Ray couldn’t spare the time. She was on her way to Tallahassee to catch a three o’clock plane to Miami. In the carport, before she left, she asked Lee to keep a suitcase. “Put this in a closet, will you, kiddo? I don’t want to lug it all the way down there and back.” She pulled a soft canvas valise, strapped in brown leather, from the backseat of the rental car. “There’s some money in the side pocket if you need it, and some good-looking clothes, too. Try them on. They’ll give you a lift.”

  Lee knew Ray’s choices. Her sister’s taste ran to white fox collars, iridescent see-through blouses with satin pants to match. Where would Lee wear those kinds of clothes in Strickland?

  Cassie and Lill lay down, twisting on the grass, crying, “Kiss me again, Aunt Ray. Please come back,” until the silver tail fins were no longer in sight. Lee watched, too, telling the girls, “She’s not the Queen of England, you know.” But inwardly she asked, How does one year in age and 2,000 miles make us all that different?

  After Ray left, it didn’t much matter that she hadn’t told her sister about the pregnancy. Better three months from now when the baby was a real person in Lee’s mind as well as in her body, a human being with miniature arms and legs fluttering inside. And she’d probably never tell Ray about Father Palmer losing his tooth and the way she’d slipped it back into the bloody gum. What was that after all but a schoolyard accident? Different only because the tooth belonged to the new priest, the man whose cool gray-blue eyes had looked so straight into her own that morning.

  Even he’d made a small joke about it in the dentist’s office. “Well, uh, a little excitement there, uh?” he’d said to Dr. Obermon as the gas wore off. And then to Lee, on the drive back, an almost grudging, “I appreciate your quick thinking, Mrs. Bettlemain. It certainly seems you took the correct action.” He shook her hand briefly in the few seconds he sat in the car outside the rectory.

  Lee relived the moment, Father Palmer’s rough hand grasping hers and then quickly pulling away, and then watching his long steps that took him to the new rectory door. The new rectory he’d insisted on, away from old Father Kennedy across the street.

  Lee threaded her hand, the one Father Palmer shook, under the dirty dishes in the sink, pulled the plug, and released the old dishwater, dank and smelly. She’d wash the dishes and then let that batch dry and let another batch soak. The flaw in this method was that there were always dishes in the drainer, in the sink, on the counters, or on the table. The same was true of clothes. At that very moment, there were dirty clothes on the bedroom and bathroom floors, dirty clothes in the hamper, wet clothes souring in the washing machine in the laundry room, wet clothes in a basket waiting to be hung out, dry clothes on the line waiting to be brought in and piled on other clothes that needed to be folded. Dishes, clothes, meals: a list of work hung in Lee’s mind, work that was never completed, only repeated.

  “This house is always a mess.” Charles often commented. Lee agreed.

  She gave Cassie and Lill peanut butter sandwiches and milk for lunch and ate hers standing by the table. For if there was a housework list in her mind, there was another list called “sewing,” and it took first place, for sewing meant money. If she hemmed three skirts and one coat, she’d have eleven dollars for today, and it was only Monday. She divided the week up in this fashion, doing at least ten dollars’ worth of alterations every day so that by Saturday she had fifty dollars: $25 went for groceries and $25 toward the $87.50 monthly house payment. If she kept on schedule, no asking Charles for money at the end of the month. So, who gave a damn if the house wasn’t clean? She paid for it.

  Lee pulled a skirt from under a four-foot stack of garments wedged between the couch and wall, took measuring tape, scissors, thread and needle out of a shoebox, and started. It still amazed her that anyone was willing to pay to have hems turned up. Marking and cutting, she was able to sew one, ready for pressing in forty-five minutes. Three dollars for forty-five minutes of work, whereas poor old Willie Mae Waters, her mother-in-law’s maid, made three dollars for an entire day, 8:00 to 5:00.

  Every time Lee sewed the first stitch, she thanked the old nun, Sister Emily, who had taught Home Economics at Mont De Sales Academy, because the crinkled hands and face seemed to be hovering above, saying, “All honest work is blessed.” It was that nun who’d insisted that the students learn the basics of turning a hem and altering garments. “Everyone’s shape is different and with just a little time and effort, one can wear something that fits.”

  Although the sewing brought in money, it also caused problems. In the beginning, all of Lee’s customers came from her mother-in-law’s friends, Claire’s bridge partners. It was a subtle violation of some sort of order, the women using Claire’s daughter-in-law as a seamstress, putting Lee, almost but not quite, in the same category with Willie Mae, the maid, or with Algebra Williams, the laundress, the colored woman who came to the Bettlemains’ house for the dirty clothes once a week.

  “I can’t understand you wanting to work,” Claire had said, clearing off dishes from the bridge table early one evening. “We’ll pay the hospital bill. You don’t have to worry about
that.” Most of her mother-in-law’s conversations with Lee began with, “I can’t understand ….”

  Eight months along with Lill, her legs swollen from sitting, playing bridge for four hours straight, Lee had watched Claire with an emotion somewhere between hatred and admiration. All the Lebanese in Atlanta played canasta, bridge, and an Arabic game called Low Point. Abram, their father had taught Lee and Ray to play, even poker. During the afternoon, the thought had come to Lee that her mother-in-law was not ignorant, not uneducated—played bridge with a mathematical sharpness—in fact, on some basic level, she might be shrewder and better self-serving than Lee was to herself.

  “You mean Mr. Bettlemain, your husband’s going to pay, don’t you?” Lee asked.

  Claire pretended not to hear.

  Lunch over, bread crusts and napkins left on the table, Cassie and Lill came and sat by their mother. One on either side, they leaned against her, gradually stretching out on the couch for naps, their afternoon routine.

  If Ray had stayed, Lee thought, we could have talked. She slid the needle into the dark flannel so that no thread showed through on either side. Talk would have kept her from thinking about this new baby too much. She’d have to watch that part of her brain or she’d start crying, like when she was first pregnant with Lill. It had been a nightmare time, with Dr. Yuller suggesting “irregular use of the diaphragm,” and Charles blaming without a word. She remembered crying in unusual places so he couldn’t hear. The tears would start suddenly, sobs pulling her down: in the shower with water pouring over her head; or lying across the stove, the burners still warm from dinner; or sliding down against the washing machine out in the storage room, the rhythmic sloshing somehow comforting. It made tears come into her eyes even now, just to think of those days.