by Barbara Hall
“Not to me.”
They stopped talking abruptly, like quarreling lovers. Nora looked away, and was surprised to find that tears were welling in her eyes, and her throat felt tight with grief. She did not understand how this could be happening, or why it upset her so much. They sipped their coffee and accepted a refill from the porter, and still they did not talk. They listened to the sounds of the city coming to life, a steamboat whistle in the distance, trucks rumbling through the Quarter, the ground shaking as if it were liquid at the center. Which, in New Orleans, of course, it was.
Finally Nora said, “Poppy, I’m sorry. I have issues with religion. And I’m feeling very strange right now, anyway. My life is . . .”
She couldn’t finish the sentence. She wanted to say “out of control,” but that wasn’t really it. Her life just didn’t feel like it was hers. She felt like she was living someone else’s existence, in some circumstances set up by someone who hadn’t the slightest idea of what she, Nora, wanted or cared about. Who came up with calligraphy, for example? Who wanted to marry a guy with an MBA? Who had given birth to two children and let one of them turn into a teenager? It was a mystery how any of this had happened, and how it had taken her this long to feel the impact.
“Don’t worry about it,” Poppy said. “I know it’s a shock. I can’t explain it. Well, I can, but it would take too long.”
“You don’t need to explain.”
And it was true. Nora felt, despite her protestations, that she understood perfectly well. She could still remember the days when she was little, saying her prayers at night, praying to the God her parents assured her was in control of every tiny detail, and she felt relieved that it was all up to Him, and not her.
Anyone would want to believe that.
After breakfast, they parted. It was understood, at that point, that they needed a break from each other. Nora claimed she wanted to do some work (she had brought some invitations with her), and Poppy was going to visit some old friends in town. And, in fact, Nora went back to her room fully intending to get at least half of the one-hundred-fifty-invitation order finished. But she made it through only two when she felt overcome with the desire to call her children. She rang her mother’s number again, but the answering machine picked up. Boo’s voice reverberated in her ear, like the voice of a schizophrenic God, the God of the Old Testament:
“If you want to leave a message, do it after the beep. You have to talk loud and clear and leave your number. If I don’t understand what you’re saying, I can’t call you back. Thank you.”
Nora smiled. It was her mother’s perpetual state of admonishment. She was already angry at the caller, before he or she had a chance to speak.
Nora said, “Hi, Mom. Just me again, hoping to talk to Annette and Michael.”
She paused, wondering what else to say.
“Hi, kids,” she said. “It’s Mom. Having a great time in New Orleans. It’s very hot. Hope you’re doing okay and listening to Grandma Boo. I’ll be home soon. I’m at the Collier House, and Grandma has the number . . .”
There was a loud beeping sound, and the machine cut her off.
She hung up the phone and stared at the walls. They were the color of ripe bananas. The molding and the ceiling were white, like meringue balanced over a cream pie. The painting on the wall was a modern, psychedelic depiction of zoo animals. It was pleasantly anachronistic in the antique setting.
What the hell am I doing here? she thought.
She got out a book of Faulkner’s short stories and started to read. She was embarrassed by her desire to read Faulkner in New Orleans. (She had brought Tennessee Williams, too, and John Kennedy Toole.) Her eyes skimmed over the words, and she tried to remember how she had once felt about literature. In college, she had actually found it exciting. It had made her feel hopeful and alive. Even the authors she hated (Thomas Wolfe, Bernard Malamud, George Eliot) made her feel challenged and envious. She wanted to write. She wanted to create stories and have her thoughts communicated in English classes. When she read people she did like, her heart would speed up and she felt light-headed. Faulkner, in those days, seemed like a personal friend. Someone she should have married. She would have put up with the rage and the alcohol. Flannery O’Connor, Chekhov, Tolstoy, Nabokov, Jane Austen, Ralph Ellison . . . these people made her dizzy with the desire to talk back, to speak her own truth. She had written some short stories in college and even had some published. But once she started dating Cliff, her desire to do anything important dwindled. From the time she met him, she understood that it was he who was going to be important, and she was simply going to feed off his success. For a while she had pretended she was going to keep writing. She even jotted down some thoughts in a journal. But chasing after Cliff’s affection had become a full-time job. She married him right out of college, and then she had embarked on the fifteen-year marathon of making him happy. Obviously she had not succeeded.
She wondered if it counted that she had satisfied him for a while. In the early days—and especially right after Michael was born—she seemed to be enough for him. He was gentle with her, considerate, even worried. He encouraged her to go to work. She shouldn’t be sitting around, cooped up in the house with a kid, he said, not with her drive and intelligence. But she felt that his encouragement was just a test, that the right response was to say, “No, I want to raise my children. I don’t want to hand them off. This is enough for me. Really.”
Though it wasn’t, of course, and she now knew it wasn’t enough for him, either. Now she realized he had been begging her to have another life, something to talk about at the dinner table other than diaper rash and Mommy and Me. She refused to go to the place of blaming herself for the demise of her marriage. But she knew that she had, in fact, cheated herself by trying to be too good. If Cliff had wanted an obedient soul, after all, he would not have married her. She was feisty enough when they first met. It was the children that had smoothed out her rough edges, made her dull. She didn’t blame them, and she didn’t blame herself. That left only Cliff. She blamed him for everything because he had behaved badly. Yet her staunch devotion had not paid off, and it did not make her feel good about herself. When the dust settled, there she was—a martyr, and there was nothing worse to live with than that.
The thing was, she didn’t want Cliff back. The truth was, he had bored her. His restaurants were silly. Oh, yes, they made a lot of money, but the food was simplistic and dull. He always gave a theme to his places, the first one being modern Southern cuisine, the second one Cuban, the third upscale Mexican, the fourth Italian. They all did well because he explored only the surfaces of those cultures, giving people food they could recognize, setting it in a context that made them feel well traveled. She could see him manipulating people. The restaurants weren’t a bad thing, as business schemes went, but Cliff didn’t really care about the food, and that gave her an insight; she was on to him. It was as if he were tricking people. Making fun of them. And if he was making fun of them, then, what about her?
Perhaps she had actually married Cliff because he was so boring and predictable. Her parents’ volatile marriage had made her yearn for something more peaceful. She wanted no surprises. She and Cliff never fought, at least until the end, and even then the fights were polite and articulate. Once when she was needling him about something, he wheeled on her and said, “I won’t have that charge leveled at me.”
Stunned by his polite reaction, she had simply screamed, “Fuck you, you asshole.”
And he had turned and walked out, into the rain. He disappeared until three in the morning, and when he returned she attacked him with affection, and they made love on the floor of the bedroom. She was sorry, he was sorry, they wouldn’t do this again. They stayed in love for days after that. But Cliff’s unpredictable nature went on a long vacation after that, and did not resurface until he stopped paying taxes and met the waitress.
Nora could not concentrate on Faulkner now. She did not care about literature
, and she missed that passion. She was not passionate about anything anymore. Passion seemed dangerous to her, yet she missed it. She examined the prose and tried to feel a stirring in her heart, but instead of taking flight, the words landed like lead, dull thuds with no echo. If she could not get excited about literature anymore, then what was left?
The phone rang. She picked it up quickly, on the first ring, even though in Cliff’s absence she had trained herself to wait until the second or third. She had done this in the early days after his departure, always thinking it would be him and not wanting to seem too eager. It was never him, of course. And it wasn’t him this time, either. It was Simone.
“Nora Kay? Is that you? I’m here, at last.”
“Simone? Where have you been?”
“I had a last-minute assignment in L.A., and I couldn’t get away. I’m so sorry, honey.”
“I ran into Poppy Marchand.”
“I meant to tell you she was coming.”
“Did you know that she’s completely crazy?”
“Oh, yeah, the religion thing.”
“You knew about that?”
“Yes. I’ll explain later. Can I come over?”
“Sure, of course.”
Nora went to the bathroom and put on makeup, as carefully as if she were about to go on a date. It was a well-known fact that women always dressed and primped for other women, not men. Men had no taste. Men wouldn’t know a Jill Sander suit or Stephan Kelian shoes from Gap wear. They certainly couldn’t appreciate the natural makeup approach. (They actually believed women weren’t wearing makeup, and as a result believed that they preferred “natural beauty”—as if there were such a thing.) Simone was particularly difficult to dress for. She was the arbiter of taste, one of those people who could look good in anything. She didn’t wear style; she gave style to what she wore. She had been a model ever since she was sixteen, but had never actually become a “super model.” That was a leap she couldn’t quite make because, as she often complained, she wasn’t willing to “take that many drugs and sleep with other women.” She let her modeling career fizzle out, and somehow replaced it with a calling in the haute cuisine industry. It had all started when she wrote a whimsical piece in the Los Angeles Times called “What Models Really Eat.” The piece was well received, and no one was more surprised than Simone to discover that she could actually write. No one except Nora, who tried very hard not to let any bitterness fester. She had been the writer in college. Well, she hadn’t actually done much writing, but she intended to, and she appreciated and chased after fine prose. Simone hadn’t cared at all about that kind of thing.
Still, Nora told herself, she would never have wanted to be a food critic. It seemed a fatuous occupation, a genuinely silly use of language. And though Simone was often witty and insightful, the fact was, she was just talking about food. How much could be said on that subject?
There was a knock on the door and Nora opened it, prepared to have her own appearance judged, but instead she was taken aback by Simone’s. She was so thin that it actually made Nora’s heart skip a beat, in a kind of empathetic arrhythmia. Her hair, which had once been long and black, was now short, curly and red. Her face was still strikingly beautiful, her eyes a pale gray, deep-set and kind. Her lips were full of collagen, but they wouldn’t have looked so bad if her cheeks weren’t so sunken in. As it was, she almost looked freakish. Nora stood there with her mouth open, not knowing what to say.
Simone said it for her.
“I know, I look like something from Star Trek.”
“What happened?” Nora asked as Simone breezed past her into the room.
“It’s a long story.”
Simone pulled off the red hair, which mercifully turned out to be a wig. Her own shiny black hair tumbled down to her shoulders, giving color and definition to her otherwise hollow countenance. Nora felt she could breathe a little easier, but she was still worried.
“I am a bona fide mess, Nora Kay,” Simone declared. She sat on the bed and fished in her purse for a cigarette. Nora didn’t bother to object. She thought Simone should ingest something, anything, even tobacco.
“Are you sick?” Nora asked.
“No, not the way you’re talking. I have been . . . not well. I’m in the throes of a trauma or two.”
“Why are you in disguise?”
“Because of the job,” she said, twirling the wig around on her index finger like a Frisbee. “I’m not supposed to go anywhere looking like myself. If I get recognized, then my food-reviewing days are over. For obvious reasons, if they see you coming, they treat you different.”
“Oh, right.”
“It used to be just restaurants where I couldn’t look like myself. Now I’m getting so well known, I can’t look like myself anywhere. It’s out of control, Nora. How did I end up in this profession? I don’t even care about food.”
“Obviously,” Nora said, gesturing toward her thin frame.
“Please. I am trying to gain weight.”
“Are you anorexic?”
Simone took a drag of her cigarette and said, “I am someone who can’t eat. If that’s the term you want to give it, okay. I mean, I want to eat. I think about eating. Hell, I eat for a living. But something just happens, and I can’t do it.”
“Are you in counseling?”
“No, Nora, I figured I’d just pray a lot. Of course I’m in fucking counseling. But it’s so complicated. You, on the other hand, look fantastic. Divorce suits you.”
“I am also having a breakdown. Although not as bad as yours, I think.”
“And Poppy’s a goddamn Catholic now. Can you believe it?”
Nora sat by Simone on the bed, waving the smoke away.
“What are we all doing here?” Nora asked. “Are we here because of your condition?” A short wave of her hand indicated Simone’s thinness.
Simone chewed on a fingernail and took a long time answering. Finally she said, “In a way, yes, but not the way you’re thinking. I’ll explain it all at dinner tonight. This is the weirdest time of my life, and as I don’t have a husband or anything, I figured I should just get my oldest friends together. You know, to help me out, moral support, that kind of thing.”
“Absolutely. You should have called sooner.”
“It’s all very recent.”
“How did you find Poppy?” Nora asked.
“I’ve been talking to her and emailing her for a couple of years.”
“You have?”
Simone nodded. “She married a great guy. Adam. He’s worked on a lot of girls I know. Pretty famous plastic surgeon.”
“She’s leaving him.”
“Yeah. She’s crazy now. I watched it happen, her whole demise.”
“Why was she talking to you, not me?”
Simone ground out her cigarette and said, “She’s afraid of you, Nora.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“You’re an intimidating person.”
“I am?”
“You always seemed to have your shit together. You knew what you wanted and you went and got it. That’s intimidating.”
“It was an illusion.”
“Well, now we know.”
They sat in silence for a moment, and Nora felt suddenly disoriented and uncomfortable. It actually hurt her feelings that people thought that she was solid and together, that she knew what she wanted. She was fairly impressed that she had hidden her weaknesses all this time, but it actually made a knot grow in her stomach when she thought of how much her friends had missed the point of her, how badly they had understood her. All this time, all this bonding, and they weren’t even connected to the person she really was. They had no idea.
She was also feeling selfishly threatened, jealous that Simone’s breakdown was now going to take precedence over hers. She had wanted to indulge in a weekend of analyzing her own plight, and here sat Simone with a greater and more urgent set of afflictions. It didn’t seem fair; on the other hand, Nora thought, it m
ight do her good to think about someone else’s problems.
“We should do some sightseeing,” Simone said. “Let’s go get Poppy and get on one of those horse-and-buggies.”
“Oh, really. Do we have to?”
“Yes, we have to. We have to do whatever I want this week. It’ll be fun. It’ll be familiar, me getting my way.”
“Yes,” Nora said and smiled. “It will.”
And as she followed her friend out the door, she felt that familiar sense of childhood comfort, the freedom of not being in charge.
5
The buggy ride was exactly what it was supposed to be—tacky, touristy, benignly annoying. Nora found herself enjoying it. It reminded her of childhood vacations, the only times her parents were ever remotely content, when they had gone to Williamsburg and Jamestown and Monticello and Appomattox, and in later years to Myrtle Beach and Nags Head and sometimes Carrowinds, a big amusement park in North Carolina. Her parents always took the cheapest, easiest route to anything. They stood in line for hours for free tours, and they saved coupons, and they went to dinner at five o’clock at steak-and-seafood chains to take advantage of the early-bird discount. They stayed at a Days Inn or a Motel Six, and Nora grew so accustomed to them that she felt certain the sealed toilets, paper-covered glasses and small soaps were signs of sophistication. In a very real way, growing up with her parents was like being taken on the buggy ride of life. So this morning’s trip felt familiar and soothing, sweating in the humid air, feeling the sun pressing down on her face, sipping a beer and being rocked from side to side. Even the faint smell of manure comforted her.
The driver drew their attention to this and that historic site, and Simone, who had taken this ride before, filled in the blanks.
“This here,” said the driver, “is the haunted house. Now, N’awlins has plenty of haunted houses, but this is the most famous one.”
Simone said, “The infamous Madame Delphine Lalaurie. She tortured her slaves, beat them, chained them in the attic. You’re supposed to be able to hear them screaming at night.”