The Day's Heat Page 5

  Lee couldn’t remember any such agreement.

  Now, she marveled that her secrets about this baby and Father Palmer—silence had turned them into secrets—and silence had caused Charles to talk.

  As they dressed for bed that night, there was an easiness between them. Charles didn’t turn toward the wall but lay flat on his back, so that Lee knew, if she wanted to, she could slip in under his arm and rest her head on his shoulder. In an unexpected lightheartedness, she started an impromptu dance, swaying her hips to the “Lee-ee James to the Rescue” song in her head. She knew she shouldn’t. Too much display, too much sexiness made her husband uneasy, made his teeth come together in a bulldog, low-jawed way, determined not to be drawn in.

  From the bed Charles watched unsmiling and asked, “Where’d you learn to dance like that?”

  The energy of the morning, the power of the secrets spilled through her. “In my long career as a stripper, I learned to do all kinds of dances,” Lee improvised. She lifted her arms and turned her hips as she had seen television dancers do. “Remember that little strip joint, the Pink Pussy Cat, down from Mount De Sales?”

  The vision was completely made up—a joke—but suddenly there it was in her mind: a square cinderblock building two blocks past the red-brick Catholic high school, a garish pink neon sign spelling out Pink Pussy Cat, the trash of napkins and cigarette butts in an open doorway, a dim stale beer smell inside, and herself in a glitter bikini on a small runway in a hot pink spotlight. She didn’t so much invent the scene as see it, as she went along. “It was my after-school job—two hours of stripping from four to six. I could have left school at noon in the D.E. program, but there were no customers at the Pink Pussy Cat until four.”

  At this point, partly from the improbability of her barely there figure making the transition from the Mount De Sales’s blue and white plaid school uniform into a rhinestone bikini and partly from the stricken look on Charles’s face, she gave up the image and started laughing.

  “They let you strip for D.E.?” Charles asked, clearing his throat.

  Lee knew of Distributive Education only because of Charles’s school stories, which he told her back then, often regretting not having applied himself to his studies. Lee could see how Charles was not dumb but not pushed either by anyone to get more than a high-school diploma. The D.E. program at Strickland High had let him off every afternoon of his junior and senior year—except when playing football—to work in the plumbing business. Lee often thought her husband might speak better English, might have earned passing grades at Georgia State, if it hadn’t been for all those lost afternoons.

  “No, honey,” she answered, trying to find the balance between kindness and the joke, “Remember, Catholic schools don’t have D.E.” But then unable to resist, she said, “I did the part-time stripping on my own.” She laughed loudly, couldn’t stop, slapped her hands together at the very idea of a too dark, too Catholic, too watched-over daughter of an Atlanta contractor leaving school every afternoon to strip, then shielded her eyes from the images that kept coming. In that moment, she knew she could let her imagination fly, could invent a double life, a life that Charles would believe in: school girl and stripper.

  A halfway smile came to her husband’s pale narrow lips but did not reach his eyes.

  “God, you know I’m teasing, don’t you?” she asked.

  Charles shook his head slowly, almost sadly, as if speaking to a retarded child: “You don’t know your place, woman.”

  Still, for a short while that night, her husband lay toward her, his arm heavier and warmer as sleep came. He seemed more like her old Charles, the one she’d fallen in love with when he was asleep, and she didn’t move away until he turned toward the wall. When his deep breaths slowed to rasping snores, Lee slid down to the foot of the bed and rose. Barefooted, she padded down the short hallway and let their dog Furlough in through the side door. The thick, black Labrador retriever waited on the carport every evening and seemed to understand that Lee would let him in only when the lights were turned off. The animal moved like a dark shadow, thumping his heavy tail against the refrigerator, and settling down on his blanket at the back of the kitchen. Next, Lee went to her daughters’ rooms and checked. Were the girls covered? Lill was in bed with Cassie. Just like Ray and I used to do, Lee thought; we couldn’t stand to sleep alone either. Then she stood in the narrow bathroom and pressed her forehead against the fogged window pane, looking out on the backyard at a silver disk of moon coming up behind the crooked pear tree. It seemed that no matter how tired, or how pregnant, or how long the day, she had to stay awake until everyone else was asleep. Sometimes she sewed, catching up to her ten-dollar-a-day quota, but more often than not she stood like this, barefoot and in her nightgown, looking out one of the back windows.

  “Come, Holy Spirit, come,” she said against the cool glass. “And from thy celestial home, shed a ray of light divine.” The verse from the Sequence Hymn of Pentecost bubbled up into her mouth exactly the way the Churchill saying had done that morning. Words that the nuns had required her to memorize, recite, copy in calligraphy, always slipped into her mind, unexpectedly, and somehow always seemed to fit.

  For some reason—she couldn’t say why—she’d had an insight into Charles that evening, a ray of inspiration, although she was only now saying a prayer that asked for it. Her silence had led her husband into speech. Most of the time, he didn’t like to talk, and tonight she’d decided that she’d just have to get used to it. Wasn’t that his right, to be silent, to have some privacy? Everyone needed privacy. Not everyone had to be thinking and talking all the time like she did. Wasn’t that one of the things she hated most about her own family: all the dark aunts and uncles jabbering away at once, her father’s long stories that reached back to the first Lebanese immigrant in Atlanta, her mother’s “Cat got your tongue?” to her daughters without waiting for an answer.

  From now on, Lee determined, she’d be silent in the evenings, too, keep things back, let Charles talk if he wanted. Wasn’t that what she resented most? That after she gave him all the particulars of her day, all she got were grunts and one-word replies in return? She would wait him out, let him ask the questions, let him ask if she were pregnant. She wouldn’t try to butter him up and make him happy about it; wouldn’t say, “Maybe this is our boy”; wouldn’t admit to having a baby even if she went the whole nine months and was as big as the fat lady at the fair. He’d have to say, “You’re pregnant, aren’t you?” And then, and only then, maybe she’d answer cryptically, “Yeah, well, maybe—could be,” and keep watching television.

  The days of the week passed, and Lee found herself even more changed. The arrangement to take Father Palmer to the dentist on Monday and the decision not to tell Charles about the pregnancy brought a curious release.

  Now, in the morning before leaving the house, she put on fresh clothes—Ray was right, bigger boobs made clothes hang better—and back-combed her hair. It was a trick from a beauty magazine, of hanging your head down and combing the wrong way, and it made her long black hair shiny and full, and she touched lipstick to her lips and cheeks. Now, each morning’s run to the school was an exciting exercise, and she looked forward to seeing the priest, as he gathered pecans under the bare trees, as to a forbidden rendezvous. Before, she had attributed this feeling to her overactive imagination, but now there was a real link: the Monday dental appointment. And those encounters were different for him, too—she could tell. He smiled and waved broadly. And it might still be her imagination, but right at 8:25 a.m., right when she pulled in, Father Palmer was always closer to the school building, where the leaves were already raked, and Ralph would be back at the unraked line of leaves and smoldering fires, looking puzzled.

  “The janitor told me you put Father Palmer’s tooth back in his mouth?” Father Kennedy said with a wry grimace on Wednesday evening. The old priest’s knock and appearance at the side door under the carport caught Lee by surprise, both the question and his
presence. Father Kennedy never stopped by on a weekday.

  “Yes,” she said, letting the old man in and making instant coffee to go with the three cigarettes he always smoked at every visit. Like a black-suited Santa Claus, he sat wheezing at the table, puffing and slurping, and she gave him a bit-by-bit account of the knocked-out tooth and the trip to the dentist’s office, leaving out only the electric glances that had passed between her and Father Palmer. Father Kennedy, unlike Charles, loved minutia, Lee’s minute observations and detailed descriptions.

  “Tell me everything you know” was how he’d start a conversation. And the old priest never seemed to tire of hearing how much Lee’s different customers spent on clothes, how their different bodies demanded alterations—Mrs. Andrews gaining ten pounds and then losing it—or what Cassie and Lill were playing in their many pretend games. “What have you been reading?” would be his next question, and Lee would explain an article from a magazine or give the plot and characters in a novel, sometimes reading a favorite passage out loud to the old man. And finally, he would ask, “Now, what’s on at the movies?”

  Today, when Father Kennedy ran out of questions and breath, Lee asked, “What’s Father Palmer’s first name?” She could have looked it up in the church bulletin that was passed out every Sunday, but she hadn’t thought of wanting to know it until that very moment.

  “David. David Palmer. A regular plain old American name, I suppose.” The priest said “American” with a twist of his whiskered mouth, making it come out “Ameer’can,” inviting Lee with the sarcasm to see the comparison between his Irish name, Patrick Kennedy, and the plain old “David Palmer.” But Lee didn’t answer, couldn’t see that one name was any better than the other, the same way she couldn’t see why her parents always made a distinction between the Lebanese and the Americanias, what they called Americans, in Atlanta.

  Father Kennedy lit another cigarette and leaned back. The slight dining-room chair creaked under his weight. “His Eminence David Palmer was an Army brat growing up, I’ve heard—father a general or some such, stationed all over the States and some years in Germany, too. A bit of a loner I’d surmise by the looks of it. His housekeeper comes for the mornings, but never much company at that new rectory he just had to have. And it all made up so grand.”

  Even after two years, the new rectory was still a wound with the old priest, and he never missed a chance to point out that the rooms above the old school should have been good enough to serve David Palmer, as they had served Father Kennedy for over twenty years.

  Lee, on the practical side, agreed. The top story of the old building could have been made to do. But she knew, from her first year of marriage, from living in one of the Bettlemains’ ancient rental houses, about high ceilings, space heaters, and crumbling plaster, too worn to hold paint. She didn’t blame David Palmer for insisting on a new and better home.

  “David. David,” she whispered, and said the words again silently inside her head. She hardly sipped the bitter coffee that she drank only to keep the old man company.

  “Why do you call him His Eminence?” she asked out loud.

  “Well, he’s on the inside track, isn’t he, love? Everyone knows it. Built that big church in Albany five years ago. He’ll build a new one here at St. Anthony’s, too, and then it’ll be up and off to the diocese in Savannah. He’s the Bishop’s boy.”

  “Good riddance,” Lee said, not meaning a word of the phrase, but glad for the wolfish smile that slid under the old priest’s mustache.

  That night, she changed her routine. After Charles and the girls were in bed, instead of finishing her ten-dollar-a-day quota, she cut out a blouse, one she’d been intending to make ever since Lill was born. She’d bought the material, a fine white silk that showed the weave, but had never found the extra time. Now, it seemed important to have it made by Monday when she took Father Palmer to the dentist. Yet even as she pinned on the tissue pattern pieces, she asked herself, Why are you doing this, instead of the sewing you need to do? Well, she reasoned back, I can borrow some money out of Ray’s suitcase if I have to.

  The blouse was similar to those her sister wore, a yoke in the back and little gathers at the shoulders. As she cut the fabric, she counseled herself: Be more like Ray, be relaxed, languorous, sophisticated. Maybe after this baby came, she’d take up smoking like her sister, bending forward to puff on one of those thin brown cigarettes, talking about everything, about other people’s sex lives.

  “How’s your love life, kiddo?” Ray would ask, the question coming out of the blue. “You seem a little frazzled.”

  But Lee didn’t want to consider her sex life. Charles, who didn’t mind crawling under houses or working on septic tanks, was strangely fastidious when it came to blood and breast milk.

  In the first month of their marriage, taking a shower together, lathered slick as two otters in the steamy water, the white suds on Lee’s legs were suddenly streaked with red.

  “God, you’re bleeding,” Charles had said.

  “It’s only my period,” she’d explained and slid against him, feeling even more aroused by the swirls of crimson down the insides of her legs and washing across the bottom of the white tub into the drain. She had a thought of what Charles’s penis might look like covered in blood and soap.

  “You’ll get some on me!” was his reaction, backing away into the water to scrub at his leg with a washcloth.

  In one way she understood taboos, the sanction against menstrual blood throughout the ages, women having to stay apart from the village in special huts, the Book of Leviticus giving purification rules. Still, we’re modern people, Lee thought, and later read to Charles from the marriage manual: “Intercourse can be even more satisfactory during a woman’s menses when the tissues are engorged and there is no fear of pregnancy.”

  This information only made her husband lie even farther away on his side of the bed, hide behind a blustery, “I know that.”

  And nursing, which could have been great since she had no periods, was almost as bad. The milk, a thin sticky liquid, seeped out of her breasts, coating Charles’s chest, running down her sides, soaking the bed when she was excited. In a way, it was wonderful, every part, even her back, wet and squishy, but to Charles it was “a mess.” He had to take another shower. So she wrapped herself in a thick towel before they made love. If I pulled the cloth up over my face, she’d thought, this could be sex with a stranger.

  She did it. As Charles lay on top, she lifted an end of the towel over her face. “Pretend you don’t know me,” she said, her voice muffled. “Pretend I’m a woman you’ve kidnapped and wrapped up in a sack, and you’re going to fuck me and not let me see who you are.” Even as the words formed, she was frightened, shivered, and started to pull the towel down, started to tell Charles she was joking, that she couldn’t stand it that way. But he was holding her tightly and growling, “Lady, you’re going to get it!”

  Suddenly it was scary and terrible, and not a game anymore. “Please, don’t hurt me,” she choked through the terry cloth, meaning the words, trying to push him away. But her husband was lost in the fantasy, holding her motionless, pressing too hard.

  And later, when they lay apart, when Lee tried to say she was sorry she’d started the kidnapping game, that she didn’t like sex that way, Charles said, “Well, I don’t like you saying fuck neither, you hear?”

  “What in the hell do you want me to say?” she’d asked.

  “Decent women don’t say fuck, or hell.”

  “I’ll say what I damn well please,” she answered.

  He hit the pillow beside her head with his fist. “Don’t push me, girl. I’ll hurt you!”

  You already have, she thought, and turned toward the wall.

  Friday night, after everyone was asleep, Lee sat in a ring of light from the living-room lamp and finished the blouse—the fine, shiny white cloth obedient, the lapels folding at exactly the right angle. She’d cut the tiny mother-of-pearl buttons from her worn-out
trousseau robe that matched the sheen of the fabric. Each button hole was handmade, microscopic stitches around and around. And she could imagine how she’d look to David Palmer, her dark eyes and dark hair set off by the wide white neckline. The loose threads under the material reminded her of the prickle of his beard, his chin in her hand, the catch of their eyes before she worked the tooth back into his gum.

  She hummed a tuneless melody, a sort of chant, an incantation—snatches of her daughters’ nursery rhymes, bits of popular music, words that came for no other reason than they matched with what went before. She hardly knew what she was singing.

  An itsy, bitsy spider

  went up and down inside her.

  Come to me, my melancholy, baby,

  Cuddle up and don’t be blue.

  Baste and sew, and cast a gleam,

  Mercury’s magic in this seam.

  When done, she hung the blouse on a hanger on the back of her daughters’ bedroom door; it could have passed for one of Ray’s designer originals. And it certainly wasn’t free. The cost was exactly twenty dollars: the two days she’d spent making it, not doing her regular sewing. Lee went to the hall closet and quietly pulled out Ray’s canvas bag.