She is standing outside the bar at the corner of Toulouse and Bourbon and there is laughter and shouting and a great gabbling roar of voices and Bourbon Street is tightly thronged and it is that first Mardi Gras and her black mask is still on and her whiskers are still pristine and she does not yet know Michael Hays exists in the world, and her sister Katie, four years older and the prime instigator of this visit, and Theresa, Katie’s life-long friend — the reassuringly-even-more-messed-up-than-I-am sort of friend — are huddled with her as shirtless frat boy revelers painted gold and purple lurch past, and Katie says in a shout above the din, “My head’s about to explode.”
Theresa says, “Definitely time for a pit stop.”
And now more frat boys. Maybe frat boys. Three of them, young certainly, not painted but drunk. They float by and they make meowing sounds at Kelly and veer too near her and she turns her back to them and they go on. Theresa says to her, “I should have done like you. I need a costume.” Both Theresa and Katie are dressed in jeans and sweatshirts.
“I need a drink,” Katie says.
“Me too,” Theresa says.
Katie does a now-presenting hand-sweep toward the door nearby. “Bar,” she says.
“Bar,” Theresa says.
The sound of the crowd swells down the block. This is all still new to Kelly and she is not drunk and she has no need to get drunk at the moment. She feels surprisingly invisible here and she wonders if that’s one of the allures of Mardi Gras, to feel this way: unseen, unseeable, unknowable in the midst of the tumult of so many others. And the more intense the crowd, the more comfortably bound inside herself she feels. The crowd down Bourbon is chanting something and cheering and Kelly says, “You two go on in. I’ll catch up with you in a few minutes.”
“You going to flash for some real beads?” Theresa says.
“Catwoman’s above all that,” Kelly says, and she moves off toward the hubbub.
People are packed too densely for her to push through in the street itself so she moves to the edge of the sidewalk, just beneath the overhanging balconies, finding the seam between the street crowd and the crowd that has oozed from the doors of bars and clubs. Underfoot is the squinch and slide of the gutter muck and the smells are strong of waste and spillage and spew, smells that will become for Kelly, in the years ahead, just a faint presence in the nose and in the finish of the scent of New Orleans, a not unpleasant thing in that form, like the smell of a skunk from a great distance out on a farm road can be not unpleasant, but near to her, in her first Mardi Gras, the smell is overwhelming and she struggles to keep her footing in her stilettos. But she makes progress toward the voluble center of the block.
Voluble now with a cry in unison: “Show your tits! Show your tits!” Over and over the cry is sent upwards and Kelly is facing this compressed center of the crowd and she is beneath a wide Creole townhouse balcony with the objects of the crowd’s attention clearly located above. All eyes are turned upward, a hundred hands are raised, jiggling strands of beads. And right in front of her is a small cleared arc of space made by the crowd having moved away a bit from two young women. These two are the objects of a quieter entreaty from above. They are each of them a little too corpulent, not quite pretty in the face, one with a weak chin and a crooked nose, the other with close set eyes and thin lips, not homely but not quite pretty, women who never get looked at twice in the Florida town or the South Carolina town or the Illinois town where they live, but here they wear tank tops and they are the objects of intense and clamorous interest, and these bodies of theirs, which they stand before mirrors and criticize and rue for all the other days of the year, are suddenly desirable, are commodities of great value commanding a currency that everyone around them covets ardently, the beads, the good beads, the thick red and gold and purple and green beads with attachments, with miniature masks or babies or mermaids or devils or rubber duckies or bottles of Jim Beam, cheap shit novelty stuff at any other time of the year but on these few days they are the world’s wealth, they are physical objects of desire, they are the primo Mardi Gras throws, and the two young women can have these things because of their bodies and they can have wild adulation from faces and cameras and whoopings and cheers all around them, but first there is negotiation, there is naked capitalism, supply and demand, hard bargaining. And Kelly takes all this in and her sense of being alone here in the middle of this tumult, alone and untouchable in her own solitude, is very strong now.
And the crowd cheers and the air is full of beads flying up, up and out of sight toward the balcony and caught above: tits have been shown up there just now and the two young women in the street are laughing and they look at each other and Kelly takes a step into the empty space, away from the two women but near them, she stands with those who are gawking and pleading, and she glances up, and all along the balcony is a row of mostly male faces turned downwards. But side by side in the center of the row are two young women and they are putting on their new beads, their nipples blinkered again somewhere beneath the dozens of heavy strands of accumulated wealth.
And next to the women who flashed are two men with forearms draped in large-beaded plastic necklaces. Gold ones with the beads alternating three to one with black Darth Vader heads and purple ones with jester faces and another with king cake babies and another with a Big Bird pendant, and the men dangle these now at the two women before Kelly. She looks at them. The women are motioning to the beads they want. The business of this goes forward. They are demanding two strands. Not two for the two of them. Two for each of them. The man above is not giving in. The women gesture: one strand for each tit. He appreciates the argument, but he will not yield. One for each set. And the crowd is now joining in the negotiation. The faces have all turned to the two women from Panama City or from Aiken or from Joliet and they are secretaries in a real estate office or they are elementary school teachers or they are librarians and the crowd is crying out to them “Show your tits! Show your tits!” and the most wonderful beads are quivering above them and they look at each other and they laugh and they know that they are, in this moment, something they always dreamed they might be, and they raise their faces and grasp the bottoms of their tank tops and they lift the tops and their breasts are naked in New Orleans, their nipples wake wide-eyed to the pop of flashbulbs and the loud cheers of hundreds.
And Kelly, fascinated thus far, now recoils inside, once she sees the deal being closed. She never quite indentified with the two young women. She is herself pretty, pretty enough and confident enough in her prettiness not to have that particular self-doubt, and the self-doubt she cannot name but that fills her up could never be assuaged by strangers, and she knows the value of the objects in the world and she desires many of them but not if Big Bird or Darth Vader are attached, not even in this sealed, self-defining world of Mardi Gras, because she has felt for a little while here that she is herself sealed and self-defining, but now it’s time to move away, go back to the bar and have a drink with her sister and her friend.
But the crowd is shifting its focus, and Kelly finds that the two young women are sliding away and she has a sudden empty space around her and the way back to the sidewalk has new faces, new bodies, men who are focused on Kelly now and are shoulder-to-shoulder and she doesn’t want to have to push by them and she has a quick sharp-clawed scrabbling in her chest and she can hear a call of “Catwoman” from above and she looks up and one of the young men is dangling a long strand of purple beads with a Batman pendant and he makes a lifting motion for her to show her tits and the man next to him is making the same gesture and the two balcony women are laughing and dipping their heads at Kelly in encouragement and they pantomime the raising of their own tops and Kelly shakes her head no, not me, I won’t, and she turns, looking for a way out, she makes a complete circle, looking for a way out but seeing only the tightly compacted crowd, and all the faces are on her and the cameras are raised and the circle she makes does not look to anyone like panic and the urge to flee, it looks like a show, like an appeal for encouragement, and the crowd takes that up with the cry of “Show your tits! Show your tits!”