The Crowning Glory of Calla Lily Ponder

by Rebecca Wells

  “Are you okay?” Sweet said.

  “Yeah, I’m fine.”

  “Callll-lah! Baby!” I heard Sukey yell, “It’s Sukey, it’s Su-kay!” Then it was like she had some kind of radar. She came straight at me.

  “Oooh,” she said to Sweet, as soon as she noticed him, “who—are—you?”

  And then she just flung her arms around his neck and wrapped her legs around his waist.

  “Baby, you are something else!” she said, planting a big, wet kiss on Sweet’s cheek. Then she let go of him, and I thought, Oh, God—thank you, thank you. Let her back away, just back away.

  But Sukey was just gearing up.

  “Yes, you are what I want! You are! C’mon, baby, let’s strip!”

  And then she actually started to unzip the back of her dress, let it drop, and was standing there in her tiny bra and panties. I was about to cry .

  “Sukey!” I said, “get out of here! Don’t even put your dress on. Just pick it up and drag your drunken ass out of here! I’ve had it with your drinking! Now, get out!”

  “Oh, Calla!” she slurred, “don’t be such a goody-goody! That’s all you’ve ever been—a goody-goody.”

  “Don’t you dare talk to me like that!” I said. “I’ve known you since we were little girls.” I was sobbing. “Now get out!”

  The next thing I knew, Ricky was there, and he had his arm around Sukey.

  “Suke, I think it’s time for you to go home.”

  She tried to shove him away, saying, “When I leave is not up to you!”

  Steve stepped up and said firmly, “I think it is. It’s our party.”

  I wanted to reach out, grab Sukey myself, and throw her out the door. Steve must have seen the look on my face, because he came over to me and whispered, “Calla, it’s okay.”

  Ricky had hold of Sukey and was walking her out, half carrying her naked little self. I closed my eyes, unable to look at Sweet.

  “I’m so sorry,” I told him. “I’m just so sorry. I told you that I’m not always a flower. Sometimes I’m not pretty at all!”

  Sweet pulled me to him and said, “I don’t know anybody who could have continued to be a flower at the sight of her best friend plastered and jumping all over me.”

  He laughed, and then he held my hand and kissed me really lightly on the lips. Again, it seemed like the party faded, leaving only the tinkling of the fountain, the sparkly lights, and Sweet Chalon holding me in his arms.

  That was the opening night party for Ricky’s, and the opening night of my love for Sweet.

  Chapter 25

  1974

  Sukey laid low for a while. Ricky guessed that she was embarrassed to death, which I was sure was true. But I missed her, so I decided to break the ice and just go out and have fun with her. I asked Ricky and Steve to come with us.

  “Let’s make it coffee,” Steve suggested. “I think we’ll be more likely to see Sukey at her best in the daytime.”

  So I called Sukey and asked her to meet us at the Café du Monde, down by the river. I rode the streetcar down St. Charles and then walked along Chartres Street, thinking about my friend and her drinking. Sukey and I arrived at the same time, and the boys already had a table. She apologized for her behavior at the party, admitting that she couldn’t remember much.

  “All I know is that you were mad at me, Calla, and that Ricky and Steve kicked me out. I want to tell you why I was so out of control that night. I’d lost my job. Bunny Mother Trixie fired me.”

  “Why?” Ricky asked.

  “Well, I don’t know,” she said. “It was something about how she didn’t like the way I was, quote, behaving in the club. Like I would do anything wrong! I mean, I was the best in my Bunny training class. Even Bunny Mother Trixie said so. But she said over the past year or so I’d slipped and no longer met the club’s high standards. That is just bull. You want to know the real reason? It was jealousy. Bunny Mother Trixie and some of the girls hate the fact that all the key holders love me. I was the best!”

  None of us could say anything. So we all just sat there eating hot beignets, waiting for Sukey to go on.

  “I even told that to Bunny Mother Trixie,” Sukey said. “I said, ‘You know, I can’t help it if the men like me more than the other girls. How is that my fault? Isn’t entertaining the key holders the whole point of the Playboy Club?’ But she didn’t even answer. She told me I could no longer represent the Playboy Bunnies. She took away my outfit. And”—Sukey started sobbing—“she even took away my little bunny tail!”

  I began to think about when I’d talked to Sukey in the evenings. She usually went to work around seven and came home after three in the morning. But there were times when she’d called me at ten or eleven, and it would be hard to understand her because she’d be slurring her words. “Aren’t you at work?” I’d ask.

  “No,” she’d say. “It was a slow night, so they sent some of us home.” Or she’d say, “You know how I get bad cramps at that time of the month, so I told the Bunny Mother I had to get in bed with the heating pad.”

  Then there were the times when Sukey came to visit and just cleaned out all the beer in my refrigerator. I always had a six-pack in the refrigerator—you don’t live in New Orleans without that—and when Sukey left, it would always be gone.

  I realized I had been very worried about my dear girlfriend.

  Sukey was crying hard now, and Ricky and Steve were soothing her. Suddenly, she stood up and said, “I’ve got to go.”

  She took off so fast that she forgot her purse, a big burlap bag from India with ivory handles and an elephant on it.

  The three of us sat there in silence for a while, just drinking thick coffee out of our heavy, ivory-colored mugs with people swirling around us, boats going by on the river tooting their horns, and the sounds of a saxophone coming from somewhere.

  Finally, we all looked at each other. “Poor Sukey,” I began. “She loved that job.”

  “I don’t blame her for being upset,” Ricky said. “But do I blame her for blaming other people when she screwed up.”

  “Do you think she did screw up?” I asked, knowing the answer in my heart.

  “Well, it seems possible,” he told me.

  Steve was the one who said it. “Our Sukey is a drunk.”

  I had to jump to her defense. “Don’t say that, Steve! Sukey’s always been high-spirited. She likes to be outrageous. And if she got fired, I can understand why she’d drink too much.”

  Ricky was silent, so I turned to him and said, “Ricky, can’t you please tell Steve not to talk about Sukey like that?”

  He didn’t answer and just looked away.

  “Come on, Ricky! We all love Sukey. She’s our dear friend,” I said.

  “Calla Lily.” Ricky looked back and gently told me, “I can’t ask him to take it back.”

  “Well, fine,” I said, “Y’all just go ahead and think what you want.” Then I picked up Sukey’s purse and left. I didn’t even say good-bye.

  When I got home, I put on a Curtis Mayfield album. He always made me feel better with his wonderful, kind, falsetto voice singing to the soul, “Everybody knows that it’s all right, whoa, it’s all right.” And I danced like M’Dear taught me to, because really, dancing was the way I prayed. After a while, I gathered the nerve to open Sukey’s purse. Inside was a pint of Smirnoff vodka. She must have bought it before meeting us. Oh, Suke! I thought. Oh, baby. Oh, Suke.

  But I wasn’t about to give up on my best friend. I made a date for just the two of us to go listen to jazz at Preservation Hall. It started out late at night with slow music and good blues and then built up to Dixieland.

  Sukey was late picking me up. I waited fifteen minutes—no big deal. I waited half an hour. With Sukey, that was nothing special. But then two hours went by, and she didn’t show up. I called her. No answer. I kept calling and calling, and still there was no answer.

  Something could have happened to her. Anything can happen to you in New Orlean
s. Anything can happen to you anywhere.

  Another hour went by, and I was worried sick, so I called Ricky and Steve. They were already asleep.

  “Look,” I said, “I’m sorry to wake y’all, but it’s late and Sukey hasn’t shown up. Will you give me a hand? I mean, can we go look for her?”

  “Okay,” Ricky said, “just give us a half an hour to get there.”

  I sat down, and I thought about the times that I went over to Sukey’s house. The times I thought she was sleeping really sound because she worked those wild hours. I’d gone over and tried to wake her up. “Hey, Sukey!” I said, “Get up! C’mon, let’s have a Coke and go walking outside. There’s some nice air—a little breeze is going—and it’s not too hot.”

  I remembered her not waking, not even stirring. And I realized she wasn’t sleeping—she was passed out. It was starting to seem like Sukey had a private life, and that her private life was all about drinking.

  We drove Steve’s VW bug over to Sukey’s favorite bar over on Esplanade. I’d never been there, but Ricky and Steve seemed to know it.

  In New Orleans, bars are allowed to stay open all night, and this place was jumping. The Hook, Line & Sinker was a small place, only a couple of tables, but every seat at the bar, which had a blue light shining up through it, was filled.

  Ricky and Steve walked up to the bar, and I followed. The bar was glass—a big aquarium with real live fish swimming in it, back and forth like snakes. I couldn’t help but wonder how those poor fish could breathe, being sealed in that way, and how it was to have drinkers staring down at them all night.

  Ricky asked the bartender, “Hey, have you seen my friend Sukey?”

  “Yeah, Sukey, the one that likes her vodka. Uh-huh, that Sukey can throw it down! We’ve got to pick that gal’s head up off the bar at least a couple times a week.”

  “We don’t want to hear about it,” Steve said. “We just want to know if you’ve seen her tonight.”

  “Yeah, I’ve seen her tonight,” the bartender said. “She took off with some guy. Look, I run a good bar here. I don’t like young girls laying their head up on my bar. I’ve told her before, ‘I don’t like the way you drink, and I don’t like serving you.’”

  “Do you have any idea where Sukey and this guy went?” Steve asked.

  “You might try that bar over by the river, where all the French sailors go. It’s called Simmy’s.”

  “Thank you.” Steve slipped the bartender a five-dollar bill.

  The bartender said, “I hope you find your friend, and I hope you can dry her out. I really don’t need her business.”

  So we went back out into the night, and we found Simmy’s . Inside, the music was playing loud, and there were sailors everywhere, and sure enough, there was Sukey at a table with three sailors. But she wasn’t really with them. Her face was flat down on the table, and the sailors were ignoring her. They just kept on talking to two other women.

  Meanwhile, Sukey’s glass had fallen over, and her face was just lying in bourbon.

  “Calla,” Ricky said, “why don’t you wait outside? This is ugly. You don’t need to see it.”

  “It’s Sukey,” I told him, “so I’m going to help.”

  Ricky and Steve got Sukey up. They were right—there wasn’t a whole lot I could do. It’s not easy to carry anybody—even little Sukey—who has passed out. They dragged her out to the car and laid her down on the back seat. We drove her back to Steve and Ricky’s place, where they sat her up, put on a pot of coffee, and got her to drink one cup after another. Finally, she came fully awake, looked at us, and started to vomit.

  “Jesus Christ!” Ricky said, picking Sukey up and rushing her to the bathroom.

  “Help me,” he called out. “Steve, can you help me get Sukey under the shower?”

  I said, “No, Steve, let me go in there. I’ll do it.”

  I rinsed all the vomit off her, then I soaped her up and I washed her hair. I imagined that rain water was falling down over her, washing her clean. I massaged her head with shampoo and saw all the darkness flow into the La Luna River. “Let it flow into the river,” I heard M’Dear saying. “The river can handle it. The river can wash it all away.” And I could see that Sukey’s life had to change. No way could we go through this again.

  I dried her off and helped her into bed. She stirred for a moment, her eyes looking terrified. “You’ll make it. Remember: you’re a La Lunette,” I whispered.

  When I came out, Ricky said, “This is not the first time—you need to know that, Calla. Sukey has called us to come get her when she can’t even tell us where she is, just crying and begging to be rescued. Then, when we get there, she’s passed out. Sometimes she fights us.”

  “Why didn’t y’all tell me?” I demanded.

  “Because this is New Orleans, so people act up. And because, unlike a lot of people we know, Sukey wasn’t doing drugs. She was just hitting the bottle too hard. We thought it would end. We’d talked to Sukey, and she promised that she’d get a hold of herself. But she kept going back to that Hook, Line & Sinker.”

  I said, “Oh, the fish, the fish in that horrible bar—” And that’s when I started to cry. “We ought to do something, shouldn’t we?”

  Steve said, “No, we don’t have to do anything. It’s really Sukey who does.”

  Ricky and I both stared at him.

  “Hear me now. We all love Sukey, but I’ve had situations like this before, at home, with my family. You have to love enough to let it be hard. If you love Sukey, then you’ll let her hit rock bottom and crawl up as best she can. Don’t throw a lifeline. She’ll just go back and drink. You have to let her crash.”

  “Oh, God!” I said. “Steve, you’re not saying that we’re just going to sit here and watch our Sukey hurt herself?”

  Steve said, “Right now, all we can do is let her play this out and be there for her when she wants to straighten up.”

  We talked and talked all night, Steve, Ricky, and me. We put Sukey to sleep wrapped in a nice duvet on the floor, where she wouldn’t do too much damage if she vomited. It must have been close to dawn when I stepped out onto the sleeping porch off Ricky’s bedroom. The fingernail moon still hung in the sky.

  “Moon Lady,” I prayed. “I’m going to put this in your hands. Sukey’s like the sister I never had, and I love her so much. Please hold her in your care and guide us about what to do.”

  I sat there on the porch for a while, smelling the scent of sweet olive in the air. Sukey loved that smell, so intense and pure. It was strange, sometimes, how you could smell it stronger thirty feet away from the tree than right up next to it. Sukey used to put those flowers in little-bitty Gerber baby food jars and put them around her bed so she could breathe in their scent all night.

  Then I thought, Sukey doesn’t do that anymore. She probably doesn’t even recognize that sweet olive smell. She wakes up in the morning, and she doesn’t remember how the person in her bed got there! Then I thought , The La Luna is a powerful river, but you have to want to clean up before the water really reaches you.

  I cried and wiped my tears, then I went back inside and said, “Okay, here’s my vote. We go ahead and we do hard love. We just let Sukey hit rock bottom.”

  Ricky gave me a hug and said, “That’s my decision, too.”

  Steve said, “Without Sukey, we’re only a trio now. We’re not a quartet, but we will be again.”

  “We will be again,” I said.

  January 3, 1975

  New Orleans

  Dear Nelle,

  I hope this letter finds you doing just fine. I’m curious to know how your hip is feeling after working all three of our horses so intensely. To work my Golden Princess, then Sable Star, and your Mister Chaz you need to spread it out, don’t you think? I can see you right now, saying “Who do you think you are? Telling me what to do?” So I’ll stop. Have you been keeping an eye on Papa? He really is spending more time at the fishing camp, isn’t he? Teaching music and dance and fis
hing. I told some of my New Orleans friends about Papa, and they said he sounds like a character from a movie or something. Hah! I tell them. My whole La Luna is like that.

  How is Miz Lizbeth? I bet she is in her garden from dusk to dawn now. I’m going to come home next weekend—or my version of the weekend, with Sundays and Mondays off.

  Do you see Renée out with Calla Rose and Little Eddie? That is the hardest thing living here—not being able to see them grow up from scratch, so to speak, and not just from visit to visit.

  Here in the Crescent City, Sukey is not doing so well. In fact, she is not doing well at all, Nelle. I’m worried what’s going to happen to her if she doesn’t slow down.

  My work keeps me sane. Like you always told me. Build a career, and you’ll have a platform to stand on. I do feel that my career will continue to be the strong place where I can stand, no matter what. I’m only now beginning to understand what you meant, and I thank you for it.

  Love,

  Calla

  Chapter 26

  1975

  It had been almost a month since I’d seen Sweet at the opening party for the salon. I’d only seen him twice in person, but I found that I was missing him already. He popped into my mind all the time.

  He’d called me a couple of times, and we’d talked late into the night, even though he had to be up before dawn. Even though he was beat-tired, he always kept his sense of humor. And he listened on the phone to my worrying about Sukey. He’d make a wise observation here and there, but mainly, he just listened to me. Recently, one of his buddies had to have his boat in dry dock, so Sweet had been working seven days a week to help cover his buddy’s route. Two or three times a week, though, I’d get postcards from him, postmarked from places like Barataria, Lafitte, and Ollie. Sweet would write them on his boat and then ask the rig workers he dropped off to mail them for him when they got home.

  Then, that dear Sweet! He stopped in New Orleans on his next river trip, and he called to ask me out on an actual date.

  “Why don’t we go have oysters at Felix’s?” he said. “And after that—well, do you like to dance?”