A grim Linwood was at the wheel. Stan, whose license had been suspended, was snoozing away in the passenger seat.
Christmas was the day after tomorrow, but nobody had bought any presents yet. The idea was that we’d all go shopping tomorrow in the Quarter, but I wondered. It was as if we were complete strangers, bound together on this journey by an odd twist of fate.
“Look,” said June.
A couple of boys in black rubber wet suits were trying to ride what passed for waves, little ripples. Bread would get a good laugh over that. He had pictures of those real surfers in Hawaii, their boards sliding diagonally down what looked like mountains of water. That’s the way the world would end: wiped out from ocean to bay by the great looming giant of a wave.
Only 156 miles to New Orleans. We’d only been there in the summer, it was such a warm-weather city. Even now when I could see the cold wind blowing the trees, I assumed it would be hot in New Orleans. Balmy air, lazy sound of insects. The mosquito trucks would glide up and down the streets at night, spraying their smoky odors.
The French Quarter was the best. The painters at their easels around Jackson Square (though Linwood sneered at what they did, calling it “craft” rather than art) wearing berets and blue jeans with splotches of color. In the center of the square were sheaves of flowers, pink and yellow and red. Farther down was the coffee place and the thick warm doughnuts covered with powdered sugar, like the talcum powder you pour over yourself after a bath. (Maybe I used too much? When I got talcum for my birthday, it never seemed to last very long. I wanted to make my skin white so I’d look Japanese.)
The doughnuts were great, but so was the just-sitting-there, watching how bright and lively everyone was. Linwood would smile and turn her sunglasses toward the light. She liked to explain how black people were the prettiest, the gleam of their skin, the firm line of their bones. When she’d started sculpting a few months ago (everything destroyed now), it looked like that’s who she wanted to shape. Always her ideas were so much larger and grander than real people. The men were warriors, the women were curvaceous and fruity, like Betty and Veronica in the Archie comic books. There was no way I’d ever look like that. Even Deane, who seemed to have a lot going on in the breast department, routinely stuffed Kleenex in her bra.
Linwood had showed me once how men could be drawn as a series of triangles and women as a series of circles. Even then, I knew my body would be straight lines all the way.
“I sure wish we were going somewhere else.” June’s sigh was profound.
“Me too.”
“Pet?” Linwood was surprised. “I thought you liked New Orleans.”
Jackson Square, the smell of coffee and doughnuts, and the women sashayed by, orange bandannas over copper skin, turquoise skirts, red and yellow blouses. “I do, but I have this, uh, bad feeling.”
“What kind of bad feeling?”
All I could see when I thought of New Orleans was this big red schmear all over everything. But who knew?
“Fatso has dreams,” said June. “Even when she’s awake!”
Where did that come from?
“Let’s all have an awake-dream,” said Linwood. “I’ll start. I see us… oh, sailing off on a boat….”
Stan was wearing a jaunty nautical cap, Linwood sprawled on deck in a flowered bikini. June was fishing. They were all neatly tanned, waving, waving to whoever had come to see them off. The sun hot and calm, they were about to sail away… forever. The bright white of the sky was like a Band-Aid over everything that had happened before.
But where was I?
“No,” said June. “No boat! How about just a regular house…”
They were all in the backyard barbecuing hamburgers on one of those big round grills. Stan was wearing a jaunty chef’s hat and a silly apron. Linwood reclined in a chaise-longue, a frosted drink poised in her beautifully manicured hands. June was on the lawn, playing in a sprinkler, and she was much younger, maybe four or five.
No me again.
“A ‘regular’ house?” Hurt in every syllable. “What was wrong with the house you grew up in, now that it’s gone?”
“The Buddha, for one thing.”
“My glorious Buddha!” Linwood was trying not to cry. “That’s a very Zen way of going, though, fire.”
“Regular people don’t have Buddhas and they don’t talk about ‘Zen’ and they don’t have witches for sisters.”
“Don’t exaggerate,” said Linwood. “Deane may have her problems, but there’s nothing wrong with Pet.”
“That’s what you think,” June muttered.
I silently agreed.
“And we may as well all enjoy each other now,” Linwood continued, as if to convince herself. “We’re all we have. The insurance paid off generously. We have no ties. We’re free as birds—it’s a wonderful feeling, really….” She began to sob quietly.
“We could go to Alaska!”
This looked bad; this picture, I was in. We each had our own dog sled, and we were each wrapped in thick fur coats against the snow. Sundown. We were heading off into the cold and the dark, no one knew where. Huge rounds of mink haloed our faces, which were lonely and afraid. Somehow I knew that each of the sleds would end up going in a different direction, the four points of the compass. We would never meet again.
Alaska was cold. Alaska was bleak. It was like the snow of the spirit, covering everything over. Maybe the tropics were better, after all.
“New Orleans is wonderful,” I said. “It’ll be great.”
After all, I had no proof that the picture in Deane’s journal was New Orleans. It could be Haiti or Havana. I’d never seen that voodoo shop.
“Do you really think so?” Linwood’s voice was childlike now.
“Yes.” I wanted to be very strong, for all of them. “We’ll have a terrific time. A real adventure. And then we’ll buy a new house, just for the four of us.”
“We’ve got lots of money for Christmas,” Linwood added.
“Oh yeah?” June asked.
“You girls can each have fifty dollars to buy presents with.”
That would have seemed like a ton of money, once.
“Won’t that be fun?”
“What’s so great about Antoine’s?” June asked me.
We were sitting in our room, putting off getting dressed. No matter how long we delayed, we’d still be ready before they were. “I don’t know.”
“Plus it’s after nine. I wish we could order sandwiches and ice cream from room service.”
I did, too. We were staying in the Hilton. What good was staying in the Hilton if you didn’t get to do all the different stuff? We’d already been down to the indoor pool, and the sauna, ordered Shirley Temples from the downstairs bar and charged them to our room, ridden up and down the elevators a dozen times, and watched the color television. But room service!
The phone rang. June picked it up and said, “We already gave at the office.” She hung up.
“That was them,” I said.
“I know.”
When it rang again, I picked up. Stan told me we had ten minutes and he didn’t appreciate being hung up on. “We better get dressed.”
I put on the outfit Linwood had bought me for Thanksgiving: a black velvet dress with a white lace collar, white tights, and short black patent leather boots. Then I brushed back my long, straight, thin hair and tied it with a green ribbon. When I put on my red coat, I’d look festive.
You had to try.
June put on her new gray wool dress, which looked exactly like her coat. It was the only thing she let Linwood buy.