First Five Pages of Chapter One

All Sistie could think about was sex, moving to Grandma’s just before Hurricane Katrina hit in August, 2005, The family gathered in Pass Christian, Mississippi with the lush foliage and waves that made her feel ripe . Patches Legere was 17 and her hormones were fiery and depleted like that coastline. The brick villa, which her grandmother had named Serenity, loomed over the Gulf of Mexico like a mausoleum, its inner steel structure defying August hurricanes that threatened to suck beach mansions into the waves like surreal icebergs. Other manors had succumbed in 1927, 47, 69. But the 20 year span that birthed the big hurricanes had passed and people felt safe.

Sistie was from New Orleans ninety minutes away, and New Orleaneans in the ancestral tradition had expanded family compounds for recreation. Most were within two hours of New Orleans on the Gulf of Mexico in Mississippi . Serenity was the biggest and most impressive mansion on the most exclusive strip, Pass Christian. Built of steel post construction and St. Louis brick, the house rivaled the Titanic in construction.

That July day, the chauffeur, Clifford, walked briskly over sun-parched grass, his navy suit crisp over dark skin. It was already 100°. Global warming was making hot summers even hotter and storms more frequent and violent. Heat stirred up tempers, hurricanes and desire. All Sistie could think of was she needed to have a boyfriend by 18.

Let’s get out of this heat. They passed police dogs lounging on the gallery. One snarled at Clifford and showed his yellow teeth. A Black yard man had thrown stones at him and made him hate Negroes. Rockers rattled in the breeze, and windows reflected uneasy trees. Sistie’s mother had waved good-bye on this gallery. She had run off with her lover over the timeless gray sea. She had brushed back her daughter’s hair, soft fingers soothing her temples, and promised they would be together soon, if only Patches would visit her in Paris .

Clifford heaved back the steel door, which spilled out cold air. He led her to the chilled morning room, with its great swags of dreary olive fabric and silk cord. All the expensive furnishings were on the 2 nd floor which had been built higher than the surges of Hurricane Camille. Serenity was built farther back, twice as big, with twelve inch walls of old-plantation brick.

The portrait of Sistie’s uncle over the mantle startled her. Today, in the silence, he was so close, almost breathing. His soft doe eyes looked down as if to say hello, boyhood, lending sweetness to a brooding smile. It carried an edge which defied his hair, loose and tumbling against his brow and huge hands, decoratively useless, resting on China white slacks. Sistie wrote in her diary: “Uncle took twenty years to rip off that suit, and run off to the French Quarter. How long will it take me?”

Upstairs, Sistie’s grandmother screamed from the balcony. She was a petite woman with red hair, who even in stifling Mississippi dressed as if going to high tea: designer suits, pencil-heeled pumps, hair swept in a tight French twist. Her fierce gray eyes took the girl in with a dismissive stare. Sistie pecked her forehead which reekedof Chanel perfume. They sat on the coffin-gray iron chairs, the girl slouching, the matriarch shielding a newspaper before her face.

Below, Sistie’s German Shepard Greta lunged her great white shape at Clifford, who leashed her and took her whimpering away.

Nature seemed uneasy, the sun speckled and hot, the gulf too quiet, the moss thinning in the oak trees. Drilling off the gulf had eroded the marshlands that surrounded the villa and dirtied the water out front.

The family didn’t talk about the environment in New Orleans or Mississippi unless it was to raise the A/C for it was getting hotter or to negotiate a better contract from the oil companies drilling in the Gulf way out front. The family owned the water rights before Serenity and leased them to companies that drilled discretely beyond sight. Of course the family only used the beach.

Sweat throbbed at Grandma’s temples. “Beastly weather! Boils the flesh!” she said. “Your Uncle Blaise doesn’t seem to mind. He likes it.”

Sistie’s pulse quickened at her uncle’s name. She fantasized a sexual explosion between them. Kissing underwater, then a rendezvous at midnight in the guest bedroom. Though no one knew, it didn’t squelch the guilt. If she didn’t meet some young men soon, Sistie feared she’d lay down naked before the first gardener she could find. Put down that spade. Spade me, spade me.

“I’ll line up some sailing lessons for you.” Grandma smiled lips tight over pearly teeth. She handed Sistie the yacht club schedule. “Your uncle will take you the first time.”

Her heart skipped. Blaise preferred regattas and champagne to jeans and Pepsi. He’d studied at the Philadelphia School of Art and shocked the family by painting nudes in the New Orleans French Quarter. How to deal with this man whose brush strokes captured breasts and thighs who sculpted women in oils so he could touch every curve in their bodies?

Grandma, nodded down at Clifford who washed the Cadillac, the dripping hose loose and familiar. He cleaned the car regularly before and after he took her out.

“Cadillacs suit any occasion, Sistie. Weddings, funerals, divorces. What was that thing your uncle drove?”

“A yellow sports van.”

“A banana truck. Far be it for me to judge your uncle. The older he gets, the less he resembles me. Grandma poked at the brace that squeezed her torso. Her car had slammed into a pothole, racing to report Blaise missing to the Coast Guard when he took the Sunfish out during a squall. “Blaise is totally unreliable.”

“Unreliable?”

“Defends your mother’s running off to Paris . We won’t discuss this thing. Your mother’s affair thing,” Grandma said, clearing her throat.

“Yes, Grandma.”

“I don’t like that word. It’s Irene” She straightened her pearls between her breasts.

First-naming someone so old felt disrespectful, like a funeral director nicknaming a corpse.

Penetrating eyes burned below her carrot hair. “I don’t like ‘Sistie’ either. Why not call yourself Barbara?”

Sistie was short for Edith Irene Legere. “Popular girls have nicknames,” Mama had said when she put me in school. “I’m Kitten, you’re Sistie, then there’s Aunt Bitsy, Cousin Peaches, Tootie, Pudding, Muffin.”

“You’re Edith to me, and I’m Irene. Besides, your mother is pubescent. Leads a self centered lifestyle. I hope you pray for her because I can’t.” Grandma tightened her French twist.

Sistie looked out. The grim gallery of oaks before the house forbade approach. Few boys would have the nerve to visit here. Behind them, a shiny highway coiled before the sallow private beaches of the Gulf of Mexico .

Wind picked through her hair from the choppy waves 1000 feet in the distance. For a moment, she was thirteen, squishing wet sand into a castle while her mother sunbathed and read. Mama held her head high and talked. “You need to build up your soul with books. She waved The House of Mirth, pages fluttering. You’re going to love Edith Wharton.” Mama read aloud, her voice resonating to the red splashes of sunset on the beach.

Her heart was beating all over her body—in her throat, her limbs, her helpless, useless hands. Her eyes traveled despairingly about the room; they lit on the bell, and she remembered that help was in call. Yes, but scandal with it—a hideous mustering of tongues.

Was her mother lonely then? Had she already given up on her father?

Sistie’s father strolled over, didn’t touch them; just said he’d be leaving, then walked down the beach. Mama raked her hair back in a slow sweeping motion, feigning a smile. Sistie supposed she could go the rest of her life without talking to her father. Millions did. Still, sometimes she missed the pale blue eyes that shone through you. His touch rattled her heart. But she could do without it if she had her mother.

Grandma handed Sistie a card from Luxembourg Gardens : luscious roses and Greek fountains. If she got lost, Mama had promised to meet her there.

She and Mama had gone to Paris every summer for six years, when Blaise was a Fulbright there. Deepest love, Mama the card read.

Sistie looked at the card. A 20-foot-tall fountain where nude powerful bearded Cupid reached for his beloved Psyche. Water streamed down their moss-encrusted faces, chests and thighs. Did Mama read Ronsard to her lover there beside the fountain? Did he appreciate the poet of chivalry who eulogized the child named Rose with his poem to roses? “Rose elle a vécu comme les roses. L’espace d’un matin.” (Rose she lived like roses. The length of morning.) Would Mama and her lover walk hand in hand, as they had done, smelling but not touching the roses? Would Sistie and Blaise go there some day?

Sistie’s mother loved American beauties. When she’d get a bouquet from Dad after some transgression, she’d pick the sweetest one and perch it delicately on her dresser, for eight days. Roses elle a vécu comme les roses . . .Patches scattered the card over the grass.

Grandma inhaled sea salt and freshly cut grass. Although she rarely walked outside because of the sensitivity of skin peeled with weekly facials, her grandmother prided herself on a well manicured estate. “Your mother called from the French Riviera.”

Grandma smiled vaguely, her blue-veined fingers threading her pearls.

“Did she leave a number?”