Thinking of Mustafa, she felt a promising twinge of intimacy, inspiring her to pull the little blue blanket in the carriage over Ramadan’s exposed arms. Maybe he was feeling the chill of the morning breeze. She was, and she snuggled her oversized gray cardigan around her sundress. As she was rising, still relishing these moments of caring for Ramadan (they were rare), having found the strength to take this stroll with him, the initiative to adjust his blanket, she looked down and saw him frowning, maybe not cold after all. (She really had no idea what he wanted.) He shoved the blanket down and began stretching and wriggling his arms ecstatically, writhing with a freedom of his own design. And with those defiant movements, an innocent rejection of his mother’s attempt at attentiveness, he effortlessly dashed all her hope away.
* * *
WITH THE NEGLIGENCE of the dispirited, Alicia pushed Ramadan through morning traffic into the French Quarter, heading for the river. The driver of a passing St. Claude Avenue bus honked a warning at her back, but she exuded a carefree air, the horn barely penetrating the inebriation of her malaise.
But her pretense of ease was soon exposed when, three blocks away, at the corner of Bourbon and St. Philip, outside Lafitte’s Blacksmith bar, she tripped and tumbled to the ground. The cracking sidewalk had dipped, its failing design presenting the need to navigate an undulation, to surf the stony, unforgiving little shard of a wave, and the toe of her sneaker caught on the last lapping inch of its jagged crest. Her balance shifted to the left, toward the street, and she reached out to try to grab the left handle of the stroller—partly to keep herself from falling too hard, partly in an ill-conceived effort to protect Ramadan from rolling into traffic. Luckily the tip of her finger only tapped the handle and slid away. Had she succeeded, she would have overturned the stroller, hurling Ramadan into the middle of Bourbon Street. Instead, the little carriage wobbled from side to side, tenuously at first, threatening to topple over before steadying itself. Then it rolled and bounded to a stop on the sidewalk, its front right wheel wedging into a gap in the crumbling brick of the centuries’ old bar on the corner.
Inside, Ramadan gripped the blanket he had earlier rejected, and it was bunched at his waist, cushioning his hip against the rigid inner frame. Though motionless, he was swept upon a curious current, basking in some vague impression of the womb, the elegant negation of being. But it was a turbulent nostalgia, competing with the here and now—which meant: this bright blue sky above that at once beckoned to him and pressed down with a weighty discomfort; the cloth of his little cotton T-shirt that felt good one moment but irritated him the next; the pungency of the French Quarter air (whatever its source) that he needed to survive, but that also stung his nostrils, hurting him even as it sustained him. That breeze Alicia had tried to protect him from with the blanket—but that he had wanted to feel flowing over his skin, arms, neck, chin, lips, nose, and then finally to take in, in, in!—that breeze was not all bliss. He could have cried (and crankiness would have been a fair reaction to one’s first instance of real disillusionment), but there was too much pleasure in the sweet memory of the unbreezy wherever he had come from, and too much promise in his stark awareness that where he was now had enough of that place in it to remind him, from time to time, if not always—but now, yes, right now—of that before-feeling. So you could cling to the brightness of the blue and the memory of the bliss. (Were they the same thing?) The blue and the bliss—and the breeze, of course, even laced with this stench of impurity. Could you live on that? On this! Could you? His heaving chest, his thumping heartbeat said he could. Yes, yes, he could! And so, there on the sidewalk outside Lafitte’s Blacksmith, the eighteenth-century barroom named for a pirate, a structure that appeared to want to cave in on itself but apparently would not—a building in the throes of an architectural existential crisis that matched Ramadan’s own—an optimist was born. No wonder the tantrums he would throw a few years from now—that moodiness Mama Joon could tame with a rag—would always give way to giggles.
As Alicia fell into St. Philip Street, she watched an old rusting pickup truck come chugging down Bourbon Street. Its bright red body was crudely adorned with colorful handwritten words that, in the blur of her tumble, were illegible. The truck looked like an out-of-season Mardi Gras float as it glided past, and its wheels rolled over the spot where she might have flung Ramadan. She closed her eyes in anticipation of pain, but her sundress billowed like a parachute, and she could have been touching down in a meadow somewhere, her palms flattening not against grainy concrete but thatches of summer grass. Her chin bumped into her wrist, and she heard the springs of the old pickup squeak. Looking up, she saw the front bumper, angled out of its rightful position. On the faded red-and-black front door and the side of the slow-passing vehicle, she read a scrawl of yellow and white words: ORANGES and AVOCADOS and COLLARDS and BELL PEPPER and SWEET CORN. The truck bed was loaded with cardboard cases presumably filled with the fruits and vegetables advertised on the body of the truck. Then she heard an old man’s muffled but amplified voice, thickened with the most local of accents, calling to her (and anyone within its range), as the vehicle creaked farther away, “I got unyun . . . I got collyflowuh . . .”
The driver’s raspy cries and the odd spectacle of his produce-hauling contraption—a market on wheels—magnified for Alicia the purity of the man’s entrepreneurial impulse. On the ground with embarrassment and fascination, she thought of Adad, the Syrian merchant with his strangely relevant little storefront, who somehow had helped shove her down in this street. He and the vegetable man were kin, peddling what they had accumulated to those who could not be bothered to gather things for themselves, entrusting their welfare to the whims and desires of others. They were as vulnerable as she was, as Ramadan was. Cast by chance into the world from the soft center of some woman not unlike herself. Seeded there with the randomness that had produced the passing vendor’s tomatoes and cabbages. By a force as potent and invisible as Mustafa! It was all entirely preposterous, really—but, okay, somehow wonderful. She got it. It was the Mustafa part that made it wonderful. Otherwise the absurdity of it all would have doomed the entire enterprise.
She could have lain in the street much longer musing about her fall, her safe if bittersweet landing, but—
“You all r-i-uht?” a balding, red-faced man with a salt-and-pepper mustache was asking as he bent down and extended a ring-laden left hand. His right hand held a clear plastic cup of sloshing beer, and an ash-tipped cigarette was wiggling between his lips as he spoke, like the baton of a sluggish conductor, guiding the rhythm of his speech with a millisecond’s delay. A lazy musicality distinguished his tone. Alicia couldn’t tell if his accent owed more to the drawl of his Southernness or insobriety.
She nodded that she was fine, though her left leg was stinging. When she looked down, she saw a dark, grit-speckled contusion forming on her shin. The man helped her up, extending his beer away from his body with a ballroom-dancing flair that cost him a swallow or two of frothy beverage. Standing, she was about to thank him, but gratitude morphed into a gasp of delayed concern for Ramadan.
She rushed over to the stroller and peeked under the canopy, where Ramadan appeared wide-eyed and smiling, like a kid after a roller-coaster ride, flapping his arms up and down. Alicia sighed and dusted off her knees.
“Honey, you better be more careful out here,” her rescuer warned. “These streets will kill you!”
She flinched. Had her clumsiness betrayed her? Revealed a wish so apparent that any tipsy streetwalker could see it—her not-so-secret desire to lie down. Clarissa hadn’t seen it, but she wasn’t observant and, anyway, she was probably too busy hiding her own wish for Alicia to fall, to fail. But then she saw a twinkle in the man’s blue eyes and realized he meant something else. These streets will kill you! had more to do with him than her. When he resumed walking down Bourbon Street, he lifted his splattering cup in one hand and his cigarette in the other. Then he looked back and said through hoarse laughter, “Be
lieve me!”
* * *
MINUTES LATER, AS she was concentrating on crossing Decatur Street, a glint of gold flashed in the corner of her eye. The sun was reflecting off the hind legs of a horse suspended about ten or twelve feet in the air. A miracle, this golden horse, levitating way up there? But no, once she moved closer and the branches of the crape myrtle tree that had been obstructing her view parted, she saw the tall stone base upon which the gleaming animal was posed in mid prance, and her eyes traced the lines of the statue. Perched atop the golden horse was a golden girl, her scarf sweeping backwards and her long hair hanging down her back with an enviable thickness, like a wondrous weave. She circled the statue while pushing Ramadan, and he gurgled with contentment, admiring the flecks of gilt flickering in the irises of his mother’s awakened eyes. Up close, Alicia could see that the literally statuesque girl riding the horse wore a tight suit of armor, and her feet pointed straight down into stirrups on either side of her steed. She raised a flag high above her head triumphantly, and even before Alicia read the engraving on the base of the statue, she knew she was looking at the warrior saint:
JOAN OF ARC
MAID OF ORLEANS
1412–1431
That was all. You were expected to know who she was and why she was here. What little Alicia knew about Joan she had learned one Sunday years ago from the homily a priest visiting from France had delivered at St. Augustine Catholic Church. She couldn’t quite remember his specific theme. Something to do with being virtuous, the ideal of standing up for something maybe, fighting for what is right. No, that wasn’t it. But he said he had been to see this very statue, and it had moved him to tell the congregation—well, whatever it was he told them that day.
She stared up at the memorial with its tombstone-like engraving and wondered what it really meant, what those few words and dates celebrating Joan’s existence didn’t say. Yes, her name was Joan. And, what, she was from someplace named Arc? Or was she just a distant relative of Noah’s? Who wasn’t? So that didn’t make any sense; the “Arc” meant something else. She was a maid? Not like Mama Joon, of course. Joan didn’t clean houses or hotel rooms; she was a soldier. No, she was a different kind of maid, as in maiden, as in an unmarried young woman, like Alicia, though, unlike Alicia, pure. Famously pure. “Poor and pure,” the priest had said, inspired by his subject to seek poetry in a foreign tongue. Alicia could see that in Joan’s sculpted face now, the determination and the purity, her eyes wide open, peering straight ahead and focused on saving France. You couldn’t save a nation if you were too busy flirting with guys, looking back to see if a certain hot young Syrian was staring at your butt. “Of Orleans.” From Orleans. Old Orleans as opposed to New Orleans. Which explained why someone decided to put her in Decatur Street, thousands of miles away from home, far from where she’d had her divine visions and her triumphs, before martyrdom, before sainthood. That much, Father what’s-his-name had made clear. “They burn chère Joan—how you say—at dee stake . . . at dee stake.” He had been vague about the exact details. (You could cut an icon some slack when it came to the particulars.) Legendary was legendary. That was why all they had bothered to etch into the stone was her name, birthplace, marital status, and birth and death dates. That was all you needed to know, Alicia thought. Joan was enshrined on an island in the middle of the street (“Drive around my majesty, please!) in a strange country almost six hundred years after her horrible death. All because she had believed in something. That was it! That’s what the sermon had been about. Faith. Joan had believed in God and in her visions. You have to believe, the priest had said. You have to believe.
Alicia read Joan’s dates again. 1412–1431. As she was wont to do, she did the math. Nineteen! Joan was just nineteen when she died. The same age she was when she met Mustafa! But if Joan of Arc were alive and she tried to buy a drink in the Quarter, they would card her and deny the saint a daiquiri!
You have to believe. Was that really true? Maybe you could do something small, or nothing at all (while believing only a little or not at all), and then die a quiet death—not at dee stake—and be perfectly happy not ever knowing what it feels like to be Joan. But if you wanted to wind up like Joan, immortalized in gold, sitting high above tourists and lonely girls to make them feel good about themselves for a few minutes, then it probably was true. But even then, believe in what?
As if in search of an answer, she began moving the stroller again, heading toward the river, putting her hand out to the oncoming traffic. The driver of a Ford F-150 skidded to a halt, though he had the green light, and she pushed Ramadan bumpily to the other side of the street.
* * *
THE MOMENT THEY passed the French Market shops, the scent of the river rushed them. Ramadan writhed with excitement, rocking the stroller with his movements. Without realizing it, Alicia pushed him faster. When she reached four steps leading up to the levee, she stopped. The front wheels of the stroller hit the bottom step, and Ramadan’s head lifted from his pillow and landed with a poof. Confused, he clinched his fists and would have cried if Alicia hadn’t scooped him up. His head rested on her shoulder; the sky, which he knew so well from his travels in the stroller, dominated the scene. But there, below that sky, was this quivering thing that he would forever connect to the wet wind whipping his face, seeping into his mouth like the last wispy sips from a bottle, the part that always made you want more. Behind him Alicia was struggling with the stroller. Finally, she decided just to drag it as she backed up the steps.
Once at the top of the landing, she resumed her quicker pace, jerking the carriage over wheel-averse railroad tracks. The Crescent City Connection, spanning the river, caught her eye. Even though from this distance it appeared toylike in scale, the bridge emphasized the Mississippi’s breadth. Ramadan, sensing he was missing something, wriggled around so that he was facing the river again. As she moved them closer to it, the waterway seemed to summon their presence and herald their arrival. Determined, she let the wheels of the stroller thump against the next set of steps as she lugged it carelessly behind her. With the river revealing its true dimensions as she ascended, she felt on the verge of a Joan-like vision of her own. Could the eyes of the defiled witness the divine? Well, yes, apparently—for there it was!
The river dazzled Ramadan, too, and now, understanding its absolute liquidity, he wanted it with a fetal intensity. He wanted to be in it, to be of it. Again. Yes, again! His tongue, as if a prehensile appendage, stuck itself out of his mouth, desiring the water, desiring to be watered. He seemed to have arrived at the source—the Mother of Mothers—which meant: maybe he was on his way back to where he had been before there was any need for a bottle or a nipple or the fraudulence of a binky. Before the embarrassment of hunger, which had sealed his fate, his banishment. How the need to suckle had humiliated him with this hereness! In a display of frustration—his first real episode of Ramadanian alienation, his first tantrum—he began to beat his fists against Alicia’s chest, wanting it not to be true. But there was no way back; he understood this now. He knew. No way home, whatever and wherever that was. Just this place that for some reason wanted to make you forget about the better place—and sometimes did—that tried to make you feel like you were in the better place when, really, you were just gone. So he banged his mother’s chest. Somehow she had done this to him; she was complicit in his capture. She had helped push him out of the water and into all this. Forced him to forsake everything—which was nothing. The supreme comfort of not being here. The joy of not being. Blue skies and buggy rides—upon further consideration—what a crock!
Alicia endured Ramadan’s flailing as best she could, struggling to hold him in her arms. His little fists pounding into her served only to remind her how little they had in common, how little he liked her, how little she liked him. He wanted something she could not give him; that was clear. And she wanted Mustafa. Not this declension of their love. This fraction of their fervor. Not Ramadan—who would always want something she
could not provide. He wanted Mama Joon more than he wanted her. She accepted this completely now, as Mama Joon was in every way a more substantial version of motherhood than she was. Any child could see that. Even hers. Earlier this morning she and Ramadan had had a chance to come together, to come back together. (Not long ago, they had been one.) But that was before he had pushed the blanket away. Then again, maybe they’d still had a chance at Bourbon Street, after her fall. If only he would have cried out for her. If only. But he hadn’t. He had chosen the roller coaster, the thrill of life over her, over needing her. Anything but her, even danger, was what he wanted! And now here he was hitting her, each thud of his fists thumping her chest in an arrhythmic pattern counter to the beating of her heart, his life force so fundamentally out of sync with hers. So, no, they had no chance. Not now. Not with him wanting something else so badly, something other than her, and with her knowing now, so irrefutably, that he did.
Compelled to let him know she knew, she yelled, “What do you want, Ramadan?”
He kept staring at the river, banging his fists and squirming in her arms.
“What do you want?” she asked again, following his eyes, deducing the approximate truth. “Do you want the river? Is that what you want?”
Leaving the stroller behind, she started to climb down the rocky decline of the levee toward the muddy bank of the Mississippi. Ramadan’s gyrations stopped, and Alicia felt emboldened. Finally, she had figured him out.
It was only about thirty feet to the long flat strip of land that formed the river’s edge, a mix of dark sludge and patchy grass. The sloping landscape was not steep, and the large chunks of beige and gray stones were no more treacherous than the buckling French Quarter sidewalks that had tripped her up earlier. She wedged her sneakers into the spaces between stones and tiptoed her way down. A city girl who had never set foot on a hill, she thought, “So this is hiking.” A helpful gust whipped up, keeping them from leaning too far forward. Another strong blast blew from a slightly different direction, and she followed its force, too, listing to the right for the next few steps. Was this what you called “riding the wind”? Or was that just something you did when you sailed or took flight? Out of her element, she staggered ahead, aware that whatever else she was doing, she was definitely throwing caution to the wind.
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