I sank down into my cherry four-poster bed. The heat of summer penetrated the thick board walls of the house. The force of heat, the passion of heat. Even the Dexedrine could not fight it off forever. I sank my face down into a satin pillow. The sounds of the house moved up and down the hall, footsteps, a maid ironing in a bedroom, a radio playing in the kitchen. My baby brother Johnny was being bathed in the bathroom I had so recently vacated. Charles William and I had removed the old wallpaper from that bathroom—six layers of flowered papers. We had spent days at our task, stripping off layer after layer of roses and yellow forsythia and ivy on trellises. Then the paperers came in and covered the walls with a pattern of Williamsburg blues. It was my favorite room in the house, a testament to my native if untapped industry. We had worked feverishly; it was the first week I took the Dexedrine and Charles William had been caught up in the tide. Now the room was finished and my baby brother was in there throwing water and toys at the Williamsburg pattern.

It smelled like heaven that summer in the chocolate-colored house on Wheeler Street. Smells stayed in their places. Even Daddy’s fans could not move those smells. The smell of furniture polish on the dressers and chairs and tables. The smell of new carpets made of the miracle fiber being spun from oil out at Chemistrand which was going to save Dunleith from extinction. The smell of ironed clothes hanging in the closets, ironed starch, soap powder, and bleach. Wallpaper paste and hair spray with plenty of fluorocarbons since we had not even named them yet and certainly didn’t know they did anything but turn our hairdos into helmets.

The kitchen smelled of toasted bread and fried chicken and green beans cooked in melted fat. Of whiskey sours and scotch and water and sweetened tea. Of biscuits baking and bacon frying and coffee being endlessly percolated in the old aluminum percolator that later Dudley and I would press into service as a martini shaker. The smell of Daddy’s and Dudley’s mud-covered boots and dust-covered work clothes. The pickup truck covered with the red clay of roadbeds.

It was a rich life. Even I, the most selfish and least satisfied and most sensitive and wary one, even I knew I was living in a blessed time. I would wake from sleep in that chocolate-colored house and stretch my legs down between the ironed sheets and caress my nightgown with my fingers. I slept in old-fashioned white cotton nightgowns made on a foot-pedal sewing machine in my grandmother’s house in the Delta. Every few months a new nightgown would arrive, packed in scented tissue paper in a box from Nell’s and Blum’s in Greenville.