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  “Good, it leaves plenty of grass for the tigers to hide in,” Lee tried joking, tried to make up for her impatience earlier, but Charles kept his face closed, blank, as he moved toward the bathroom and a shower.

  What was there to fuss about? Lee thought. Her husband worked all week, paid the car payment, the Sear’s card, the gas, the utilities, and she would have him work on weekends too: the yard, painting, making shelves, taking out the trash? She tried to see it from his side.

  Her plan to be silent and let him talk was not working, except for that first time. After the girls were in bed, the last few evenings had been copies of the older Bettlemains’ times together, no sound except the gray-white noise of the television and Charles’s thoughtless face in the flickering light. The change lay in Lee, acceptance and resignation forming and growing along with the tadpole shape deep inside. After wiping the counters in the kitchen, she reached for The Strickland Free Press, November 27, 1941 and read it from front to back.

  On the first page was an announcement that the Soviet Union had detonated a megaton H-bomb and Dr. Linus Pauling said it would cause 40,000 infants to be born with birth defects. Lee rubbed her stomach. There was also the beginning of a series of articles by a Dr. Libby, a Nobel Prize winner, telling the ordinary citizen what to do about fallout, how to construct a $30 bomb shelter and increase one’s chances of survival by 100%. Lee vowed to read every article. And at the bottom of the page was a forlorn picture with the caption: “Mother of Three Jailed for Armed Robbery.”

  Lee thought, Did the poor woman’s sewing customers abandon her?

  Coming to the slick bright-colored pages, Lee read the toy ads, beginning to appear for Christmas: the red rocker for Lill, $2.98; the Tom Thumb Typewriter with case for Cassie, $10.88. She’d need an extra $5 a week for lay away, for Santa Claus. Birdseye diapers, hemmed, were on sale, $1.33. She could get by with another two dozen, added to Lill’s diapers, which had to be brought down from the attic. Lee made up her grocery list: Cokes, the girls’ treat, on sale for 19 cents; four cans of applesauce, $1; sirloin steak, Charles’s favorite, 69 cents a pound. The Second Time Around starring Andy Griffith and Debbie Reynolds was on at the movies. Father Kennedy wouldn’t want to see that.

  On the very back page, near the bottom, where she almost missed it, she read: “Atlanta Negroes Picket Theaters.” The Committee On Appeal for Human Rights was setting a date for a stand-in, a picket of downtown theaters, if the owners didn’t agree to start desegregation.

  Lee thought it would be terrible not to go to movies at all, no matter what the cause. In Strickland, the coloreds sat up in the balcony of the Baton, the one theater, and were able to see everything.

  All the while, turning the newspaper and making the list, the thought of seeing the priest the next day hung like a shining mist between her and the pages—something to look forward to.

  That night in bed, Charles immediately turned his back, his signal that he was ready to sleep. Lee fitted herself against him, her arm across his waist, her fingers gently scratching his stomach, her nose against the broad plane of his shoulder blade. “I love you,” she whispered onto his skin.

  He shifted as if uncomfortable, “Babe, I’ve got a long day tomorrow,” he mumbled.

  “But you took a nap this afternoon.”

  Charles took several deep breaths as if already unconscious and didn’t answer.

  Lee lay completely still, willing her hand and arm not to jerk away in anger. She counted back: six weeks. Two weeks before her period when she got pregnant and four weeks since her period should have started, six weeks since they’d had sex. The saliva bubbled under her tongue and filled her mouth. If she didn’t move, she was going to throw up, but instead she forced herself to turn slowly, yawn and stretch as though settling down, pretending to be tired, too.

  Thank you, she mouthed the words against the pillow, thank you for not saying I love you back. Yet it was hard to go to sleep.

  “It’s the part of married life I can’t get used to,” Peggy Higgens had said at the bridge table, the other women’s heads nodding in understanding. “Such a bother, and so messy.” Peggy’s furrowed lips clamped together, causing the lipstick to run up into the creases.

  Coward, Lee thought, for she had nodded, too, crossed her legs and kept silent, all the while feeling a twinge of excitement at the mention of the bother, the mess. Lee made the same statements herself, condemnations of sex and men.

  When she was first pregnant with Cassie, Peggy had asked, “Didn’t you want to wait a little longer, dear? It would have been so much nicer to have had a few years or so—without children.”

  Lee wanted to answer, “Mind your own business, you old bag,” but instead found herself saying, “Oh, you know how men are.”

  Her mother-in-law’s freckled eyelids raised in disbelief and then lowered, “Lee’s Roman Catholic, partner. I ’spect I’ll have more than my share of grandchildren.”

  It was always that way. Lee came away from Claire’s bridge parties feeling set apart, wounded, yet not quite sure where or how the knife had gone in.

  “Lee’s foreign, you know. Lebanese,” was Claire’s way of introducing Lee.

  After the tenth time of saying, “My family is third generation in this country,” Lee said, “Actually, I’m half-colored, but Claire’s passing me off as Lebanese.” She cackled at her own unexpected, malevolent joke.

  “My god!” Claire said, under her breath and the nervous flurry of the other women’s uncomfortable laughter.

  Lee lay so long, waiting for Charles to be asleep and not just breathing deeply, that she dozed off herself and missed letting Furlough in for the night. A litany of what she would do on Monday drifted her away: I’ll take Father Palmer to the dentist, I’ll use Ray’s money to pay Willie Mae, I’ll have an entire afternoon to myself.

  The next day, Lee hung clothes on the line in the morning fog that caused her hair to frizz, tightly curly and wispy all at the same time. She did laundry and hid clothes in closets so that Willie Mae wouldn’t iron them. No matter how often Lee told the colored woman not to iron, not to clean, that babysitting was more than enough work, the round brown face smiled and said, “I likes to help you, Miss Lee.”

  On the phone earlier, Claire had brushed Lee’s explanations of doing “church work” aside, and now when Lee went to pick the maid up, her mother-in-law continued her generous but repetitive offer. “I’ve always said you need some time away from the children, honey. Why don’t you let me give you a couple of Willie Mae’s afternoons: one for shopping and one for playing bridge—we need a fourth for another table.”

  The bridge afternoon had been offered before, but now, there was the bribe of an additional one for shopping.

  “Kiss your granny good-bye,” Lee said, instead of, “I can’t afford Willie Mae for one day, much less two.” That would have started up their old argument of Lee not having to pay the maid, that she hardly did any work for Claire. “Let her go home then,” Lee had said more than once, but it was the rule: Willie Mae stayed at the Bettlemains’ house from eight to five o’clock, no matter what.

  Lee peered at the maid’s broad features in the rearview mirror and wondered what she thought of Claire’s offers of extra afternoons of housework and babysitting for no extra money, but the colored woman sat in the backseat, talking softly to Lill in her lap. She always sat there, unless Lee caught her first and said, “Sit up front with me, please, Willie.”

  Looking in the bedroom mirror, Lee told herself for the hundredth time, “Calm down, calm down,” as she smoothed a drop of Charles’s Vitalis into her hair—making the curls better, looser. But best of all was the blouse. Lee hadn’t tried it on since Friday night, but today when she slid her arms into its silky folds, buttoned the tiny mother-of-pearl buttons—the top one at that exact point where another fraction of an inch would be too low—it was perfect. The black corduroy pants were faded, but the blouse covered most of them and swung in a slimming way
around Lee’s waist and hips.

  The unexpected was the pair of shoes she’d taken, along with the twenty dollar bill out of Ray’s suitcase. Narrow, black wing tips with slight heels, the shoes had a design of perforations across the toes and satin ribbon laces. The almost sheer, almost men’s black knee-high socks Lee found rolled up in the shoes, extended an elegant smoothness halfway up her legs. Lee looked down at her feet. They felt small and light and somehow seductively evil. She turned, stepped up on the cedar chest where she could see them in the mirror, twirled—her foot out behind her. The white blouse flared, her hair fell back, almost touching the shoe. If these were red, like the shoes in the Grimm’s fairy tales, Lee thought, I’d be afraid to wear them.

  “You’se beautiful, Miss Lee.” Willie Mae stood at the bedroom door, holding Cassie and Lill by the hands. “The best I ever seed you looking.”

  Cassie and Lill agreed, “So pretty, Mama.”

  Lee bowed from the height of the cedar chest, “Thank you, thank you, my lovelies, my sweets, my only fans.” She jumped down, bent to kiss Cassie and Lill on their round smooth cheeks, and without a blink stood and kissed Willie Mae, too, on her equally soft face, grasping her by the arms, feeling the slight flinch in the flesh beneath her hands.

  Chapter 5

  How beautiful are thy feet with shoes, O prince’s daughter! The joints of thy thighs are like jewels, the work of the hands of a cunning workman.

  Song of Solomon 7:1

  Lee drove to the back of the rectory and parked on a side street. For all her preparations—the blouse, the shoes, the wiping off of the dashboard of the car—there was suddenly no joy in taking Father Palmer to the dentist the way she enjoyed the movies with Father Kennedy. Her arms and legs felt stiff and awkward as she walked under the huge blackjack oaks and slipped between the shrubs and a high cane break hedge to reach the rectory’s back door. And once under the fabric awning of the vestibule entrance, she stayed close to the wall, hoping the old priest in his aerie across the street hadn’t caught sight of her. Now, she wished she’d mentioned the Monday trip to the dentist to Father Kennedy, wished she’d made light of it.

  The doorbell was a small white tab set in the bricks, and Father Palmer did not answer right away. Lee could hear his voice off somewhere behind the dark-paneled door, but the triangular panes of glass were placed too high for her to see inside. She would have liked to jump up for a peek but instead rang the bell again and turned to look at Father Palmer’s polished tan car in the double garage, next to neatly stacked piles of string-tied newspapers and magazines for the paper drive. So different from the old priest’s dirty red and yellow Buick.

  Father Palmer, a little breathless, finally opened the door, “Oh, Mrs. Bettlemain, thank you—you’re here. I had to answer the phone just as the bell rang.” He stepped across the threshold to stand beside her, keys in hand.

  It was crowded in the entrance way, but Lee did not pull back from under the awning, even though the priest was obviously uncertain at her nearness.

  “I do appreciate your driving me, Mrs. Bettlemain. I don’t know why Dr. Obermon thinks it’s necessary, but I guess it is. Just let me lock the door here, and we’ll …. Where’s your car?” he asked, looking past her.

  “On the other side,” she motioned with her hand. It meant they would have to walk back the way she’d come through the hedge, but there could be no explaining that the route was so she could hide this trip from Father Kennedy.

  Father Palmer was not wearing his long black soutane or the stiff white Roman collar but ordinary clothes: a burgundy plaid shirt and dark pants. His nut-brown hair, with a few gray strands, was damp around the ears and neck. This close she could see the silver wire around the knocked-out tooth and smell his lemony aftershave. The burgundy shirt was new, the fold lines from the package still in the material across his back as he bent to lock the rectory door.

  She led the way back to the car under a flat blue sky with no clouds.

  In the car, Lee was uncomfortable down to her bones, her lips hardly moving, but feeling them move, she asked Father Palmer how he liked Strickland, now that he’d been here for what, a little over three years?

  “It’s rather like Columbus, where I was stationed before, but without the river—or the historical district—or the museum,” the priest replied, adding each item, as if just realizing what Strickland lacked.

  What else is there? Lee wanted to ask, but found herself, instead, listing what she missed most about Atlanta: the hilly landscape, the trees in the fall, her family—most of all her father. The rest of the way down Main Street, she pointed out places as though Father Palmer were a newcomer and needed to be informed, as well as entertained.

  There was the Crescent, a copy of a huge antebellum plantation house on the corner, its white barrel-round fluted columns lining the long front and side porches; and then the houses of two parishioners, the smallish, red-brick King house—where did they put all those children? And the Colby’s frame dwelling with a wonderfully high metal roof, next to Dr. Obermon’s remodeled square brick building. Lee filled up the drive with babble, the sound of her own voice somehow reassuring.

  In a terrible way, it was similar to her first date with Charles in Atlanta, her first date ever. Her father had hired a group of Georgia football players to remove stadium seats and replace them with new ones. Later, he’d asked some of the hardest workers, those who’d stayed late, to come out for dinner. He stopped to pick up Lee and Ray. Their mother refused the invitation. “You know how I hate spur of the moment,” Darcy said.

  Lee had sat beside Charles in a booth and he whispered under his breath, “Wanna go to a show tomorrow night?”

  They had driven to the movies and Lee, knowing that the people meant nothing to him, had nervously named the owner of almost every house on the way.

  “I know most everybody back in Strickland, too,” Charles said, driving his green Plymouth, keeping his eyes steady on the paved street.

  After the show, sitting in a drugstore with cherry cokes, she’d practically retold him the entire musical they’d just seen, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers; how it was taken from the Sabine women legend where the men abducted women for wives. You sound exactly like your mother, she thought, explaining everything. But at least the talk covered her nervousness.

  She hadn’t stopped chattering until finally, in front of her parents’ house, Charles had turned the ignition off and all in one motion grabbed her tightly and kissed her hard.

  After the momentary surprise, the lumbering, off-center kiss was wonderful: wonderful, the sheer bulk of a man, his bunched arms, wide shoulders, and his thick neck; wonderful, the call of flesh to flesh opening her mouth—a good and sinful feeling all at the same time.

  The daring to return the kiss bubbled up inside of Lee out of necessity. Wasn’t that what one was supposed to do? Kiss and be kissed? And a few dates later, when Charles slid his hand across her breast, saying, “We’ll get married,” there was the chance of freedom—freedom from her mother’s drunken tirades at her father, and from what else Lee was never exactly sure. She was seventeen. Marriage would be a different life, desirable, the possibility of an immediate adventure, in contrast to the predictable: graduation from high school; four years in college; four more years of living at home with all her parents’ arguments and unhappiness.

  Later, when someone asked Lee why she had married so young and come to Strickland, she wanted to ask back, Why are you so old? So gray? So fat? So thin? So? So what?—whatever applied to the person asking the question. Whatever question could not be answered.

  Lee sat waiting in Dr. Obermon’s office for almost an hour, leafing through magazines, her thoughts drifting along with the Bach Prelude she recognized on the intercom, finally leaning her head back against the cushion and settling into a half-state of comprehension that helped the long minutes pass. All the tensions of the week, the arranging of hours, of clothes, the lie to her mother-in-law, now seemed ridic
ulous in light of the commonplace, errand feel of it: a woman of the parish doing a favor for the parish priest. Stupid. She decided that after taking Father Palmer back to the rectory, she’d go on to Gillburg’s and look at material. After all, what had she wanted? Some sort of mad romantic escapade, like a teenager? And where was all that built-up libidinous energy that Protestants accused Catholic priests of possessing? In the car, Father Palmer had been as uncomfortable as she was, a piece of cardboard in the passenger’s seat, like one of her daughter’s paper dolls.

  Always seeing him off at a distance, up on the altar or under the pecan trees, had made him inaccessible and wholly desirable. But now, up close at the rectory door, the damp hair, the aftershave, and in the car, the hesitant words, gone was the drama of the tooth, her ability to act naturally or to even speak normally. She couldn’t reach over and touch his hand—it had lain on the seat between them—and say she liked his new shirt, say she’d made herself a new blouse. What would he have done? She could hear him now: “Stop the car, Mrs. Bettlemain! Let me out! You have a husband, children! You showed yourself to me in the hospital on purpose!”

  Think of something else, Lee commanded, and sat up and opened her eyes.

  In comparison to the jumble of thoughts in her head, the waiting room was hushed and untroubled. The other patients read or spoke to Dr. Obermon’s receptionist in whispers as though in a sanctuary. Lee wondered what they would do if someone spoke out loud, in an ordinary outside voice. She was tempted to ask suddenly, loudly, raspingly, as Lill did on her midnight trips to the potty, “Why are we whippering?”