The Crowning Glory of Calla Lily Ponder: A Novel

by Rebecca Wells

  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?”

  “I love to dance and I don’t get to enough. I did tell you that I am the daughter of two dance teachers, didn’t I?”

  So we had raw oysters for dinner and then went to Tipitina’s for some good old rhythm & blues—the kind where every once in a while you get that rolling low bass, Dr. John piano sound. We started out doing a Cajun two-step, and Sweet knew all the little dips. He knew just how to hold me, light as air! You could tell he’d danced like this since he was a little kid, just like me.

  Then we started getting down. I thought , Just play around. Just move it around with your body, Calla. And I let my body move.

  Ohhhh! Just put my foot down—plant that boot on one side, lean over on that hip, and let the rest happen on the other hip. Let my head go down and around, and move my body on that hip, and get that foot up and off the floor. And then I wanted to just lift up, look straight at Sweet, and stick my hand out. Getting so far down, hearing that long snake moan, that when the music stopped my hips were still moving.

  Then I opened my eyes, and Sweet was smiling. His mouth was slightly open, which I liked. I had no idea whether he was shocked by me, or whether he really liked me.

  As I reached for his hand, I thought, I don’t care if he’s shocked! I’m just going to have a good time tonight! And we did, the two of us, dancing and laughing, cracking each other up. Just playing all kind of games. Just sitting at the table, looking at each other. Just picking up our long-necked beer bottles and putting them to our mouths.

  I said, “You know what I like about New Orleans?”

  “No, what?”

  “Well, I like the way most of my favorite things in this town have to do with your mouth.”

  He said, “You know, I have always thought that myself. Like singing, right?”

  “Uh-huh. Singing.”

  “Eating.”

  “Yup.”

  “Talking.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Then, all of a sudden, I couldn’t think of the fourth one. Sweet looked at me and he put his beer to his mouth, holding it there for just an instant too long.

  I said, “Singing, eating, talking, and sucking—uh—I mean, sucking crawfish heads. That’s the way you can tell real get-down-with-the-seafood kind of people from your sissy seafood-eaters. It’s whether we suck the heads or not, right?”

  Sweet said, “Exactly! I tell you, in Donaldsonville—man, we get down. At our parties, if they don’t suck the heads—they’re out on their butts!”

  Maybe I’d had too much to drink, but that just got me laughing.

  “So, tell me about your boat.”

  “I’ll be proud to,” Sweet said. “I went to the university in Lafayette for a couple of years, but all I’ve ever wanted to do was work on the water. So I worked hard for a couple years, saving every penny for a down payment on a boat. Now I have my own crew boat, and I’m the captain. I’m self-employed, and I pick up contracts with oil-related companies—although to tell you, I’m beginning to wonder about all this oil business. There’s nothing pretty about my boat, but it can negotiate almost all the bayous, and the open sea out to the Gulf. I deliver crews and supplies to off-shore and marsh oil rigs. It’s not the most glamorous job in the world, but to tell you the truth, I wasn’t lookin’ for much glamour in my work.” He took a sip of beer. He kept the bottle in his hands and gave me a long smile before he put it down. “But maybe now I’m lookin’ for a little glamour in my life.”

  I couldn’t help but laugh. “You’re a bit of a flirt, aren’t you?” I said, taking a sip of my own beer, slowly removing the bottle from my own lips.

  “Naw,” he said, “just trying to get you to like me. Hell, I’m shooting off at the mouth, aren’t I?”

  “Well, you could call it that,” I said, and smiled.

  “But can I tell you just one more thing, the most important thing?”

  “Sure.” I nodded. “You can tell me as many things as you want.”

  “The one thing that really gets me when I’m carrying those workers out to the oil rigs. It’s those poor guys kissing their wives good-bye, kissing their little babies’ heads. And I say, ‘Come on, y’all! Ain’t gonna be gone but two weeks! You gonna be back before you know it!’ You gotta cheer them up a little bit, you know? But I guess even two weeks can be a long time when you love somebody. You know what I mean?”

  I thought about the two weeks after M’Dear died. And after Tuck left.

  “Yeah, I do, I know what you mean,” I said.

  And with those words, all the time I’d been missing Tuck, especially that first year when I kept thinking he would come home, just went floating away. I leaned back and stretched my legs out in front of me. I felt like Snow White—like I was just dancing around outside, so happy in a perfect dress, with little birds around me! And I looked at Sweet and thought, God, could he be my prince? Could he be the one?

  I wanted to know all about this man, and I wanted him to know me. “Tell me about your brothers and sisters,” I said.

  “Well, I got three sisters and two brothers. Good Catholics, you know. We like to keep on going.”

  “I know,” I told him. “My Papa and M’Dear—that’s what I called my mother—always said they weren’t quite as blessed as some people. M’Dear would say, ‘Well, even though we only have three kids, our Calla makes up for at least four.’”

  Sweet laughed. “Two of my sisters are married,” he went on. “And the one sister who’s single works in the funeral home business run by my mother’s side of the family. It’s kind of odd to tell people that your family is in the funeral home business. People always think it’s weird. But, here I am, talking your ear off while you’re sitting there with an empty bottle. You want another beer? Let me get you one.”

  “Okay.”

  I watched Sweet as he walked up to the bar. There wasn’t anything strutting about him. He just moved with a certain confidence. Then he came on back, holding our beers by the neck, smiling at me.

  We took a sip of our beers, then headed back out on the dance floor.

  “What a city this is, non?” he said. “‘The City That Never Sleeps.’ Wait—that’s New York City, isn’t it?” he said, giving a laugh.

  “Yeah,” I said. “They call New Orleans ‘The City That Care Forgot.’”

  We sat back down to finish our beers, watching the others on the dance floor. I could feel a strong but gentle connection with this man. When we left Tipitina’s to go home, Sweet held the door open for me. He said, “If this is the City That Care Forgot, then maybe I’m in the wrong town.” He looked at me for a long time. “Because if I cared for you, I’d never forget.”

  We went back to my place and stayed up all night talking. I told Sweet about M’Dear dying, about the way she taught me to dance. And I told him about Tuck, who I’d always thought would be my husband, how he’d left and broke my heart.

  “Does it still break your heart?” he asked.

  “Not really,” I told him. “I mean, sometimes it’s still there. I don’t know if you’ve ever felt this, but it’s like when I had my wisdom teeth pulled. I kept
thinking that if I touched my tongue back there, I might still feel them. But of course, they are gone. It’s the same with that hurt. I think I might still feel it, but I don’t.”

  “Oh, I’m glad,” he said. “I hate to think of you with a broken heart. Hey,” he said, changing the subject, “tell me more about your work.”

  “My mother was a beautician. She knew how to hold people’s heads in her hands so that each hair wash she gave was like a little baptism of love and kindness. As she was dying, she encouraged me to see the wider world and to try to find more training—to learn how to touch people in a way they could feel safe enough to lean back into you. Your cousin Ricky is doing that, and I’m so grateful to be learning from him. At some point I plan to return to La Luna and practice, but for now it’s the Crescent City.

  “Your cousin, besides being one of the most sought-after hair stylists in New Orleans, knows how to bring out the beauty in a person. Just to touch their hair in a way that says, ‘I know how beautiful you are. You might not see it yet, but I do.’ In fact, that’s what I say to clients sometimes. I say to them, ‘My gosh! Look at your bones!’ ‘But I’m embarrassed,’ a client will say, ‘about that mole on my cheek.’ And I say, ‘That mole is beautiful! Look how it matches your hair.’

  “I just tell them sometimes, ‘You’re so pretty, you just break my heart!’”

  Sweet took my face in his hands and said softly, almost in a whisper, “Calla Lily Ponder, you’re so pretty, you just break my heart.”

  I looked deep into his eyes, and I imagined him saying, Here’s my heart—you can break it. If you want to break my heart, you can. But here it is.

  I felt like I could almost see his heart—this plump, magic organ, so alive and pumping. And yet I knew something could happen to it in an instant—and poof! A heart can get broken in so many ways.

  Papa, standing in my bedroom doorway. I’m sobbing on my bed, the year Tuck left me. Without a word. “Calla Lily, believe your old Papa. Tuck is just a boy. He doesn’t know anything. There’s a man out there, and he’s waiting for you. And when he finds you, he’s going to see that you’re Calla Lily, straight to the heart, you’re Calla Lily Ponder.”

  In that moment with Sweet, I recognized that he was that man.

  Sweet closed his hands over mine and said my name again. “Calla Lily Ponder.”

  He pulled my hands toward him and kissed them.

  Then he got up, picked up his hat, and said, “Now I got to go. Time for bed. Thank you.” And he walked out of my house. My heart was not the only thing in my body that was turning backflips.

  A few months later, even though we hadn’t been dating for long, I knew I wanted to take Sweet to La Luna. I’d been going to La Luna every couple months, driving back in my Mustang to check on Papa. So, when Papa’s birthday rolled around, and we were planning a big party for him, I thought, Well, this might be the perfect opportunity.

  Sweet said, “I would be pleased and proud to come to La Luna with you. Tell me a little bit about your papa, and I’ll see if I can’t get him a birthday gift.”

  “Well, Papa is funny but also a little shy. He plays trumpet and the accordion and about twelve other instruments. He teaches music, and he’s a great dancer—he loves to dance.”

  “Hmm, okay,” Sweet said. “How tall is he?”

  “Why, you going to buy him pants?”

  He said, “No, I’m just trying to get a picture of him in my head.”

  “Let me show you one.”

  I went back into my bedroom and looked at all the pictures of M’Dear and Papa I had on top of my chest of drawers. I decided to bring out the one of their wedding. I showed it to Sweet, and he asked, “May I hold it?”

  He sat down at the table and held it in his hands for the longest time. He looked like he was letting M’Dear and Papa seep into him.

  Then he asked, “You dream about M’Dear?”

  I was shocked that he knew. “Sometimes,” I admitted.

  “Well, I hope she comes to you as beautiful as she is—that she just floats her beautiful self all around your bed, Calla Lily.”

  I paused, and then I told him, “I do this thing at night before I go to bed. I close my eyes, and I try to look outside the window to see the shape of the moon, trying to keep track: the new moon, half-moon, three-quarter moon, and the full moon. Because I do come from La Luna, after all. M’Dear used to take me outside when I was a little girl to show me the Moon Lady. When I look at the moon now, I picture this Moon Lady coming out of the moon, and she mixes together in my mind with M’Dear.

  “Then, when I’m in bed, I say, ‘Now, cover my bed, Moon Lady. I feel you as you dance at all four points of my bed.’ And if I’m quiet enough, I can feel this gossamer bed cover floating over my four-poster bed, protecting me. So I have a sweet sleep almost every night.”

  “Aw,” Sweet said, “Calla, you are something else.” And he just kept shaking his head and smiling.

  Sweet loved the trip up to La Luna, and the long drive just flew by as we talked and laughed and sang songs. When we pulled up to town, Nelle was there to meet us, and I could tell from the get-go that she was checking Sweet out to see if he was good enough for me. Sweet and Papa hit it off right away. “Son,” Papa said, “I have known maybe two other fellows who do what you do. But they never were as young as you when they started. You must have something going for you.”

  “Well, sir,” Sweet said, “I did work pretty hard. I come from hardworking people.”

  “We do too,” Papa said. “But we also celebrate birthdays. Now, I got to tell you that this present from you, Sweet, is fantastic. I’m going to try it on now.”

  When Papa came back, I like to have died—he was so proud! Sweet had given him a midnight blue polyester shirt, with wide cuffs and a pointed collar. It was so cool—a musician’s shirt—and it fit Papa to a tee. He looked so handsome.

  “Mmm, son,” he said. “You make an old man feel good!”

  I loved the sight of Sweet and Papa talking. To give them some time alone, I went into the kitchen and acted like I was still cleaning up after the party. But really I was watching how much kindness came out of Sweet, just talking to my father.

  When I rejoined them, Papa told me, “Sweet has just asked me to show him the dance studio.”

  “Papa,” I said, “it’s late, I’m sure you’re tired. You don’t have to.”

  “I know,” he said. “But we got to talking about dancing, and I thought I should see what this boy can do.”

  Then Papa walked outside and across the lawn to the studio. He unlocked it and flicked on the lights. The room looked a little less vibrant without M’Dear, but it was still filled with magic!

  Then Papa made one of the dance moves he used to do with M’Dear. And oh, it made me so happy to see my Papa dance like that. Then he put on some music and said to Sweet, “Okay, let me see you dance with my girl here.” The song he chose was “I Got the Sun in the Morning and the Moon at Night.”

  Sweet and I started dancing, with Papa moving next to us in a slow fox-trot. And I could just imagine him holding my mother, the way his hands held the air in front of him.

  When the song ended, Sweet went to choose a new one. Papa started singing as soon as it came on.

  “Blue mooon, you saw me standing alooone…”

  At first, I just felt so embarrassed for my father. But Sweet didn’t miss a beat. He just took me in his arms and waited to follow my father’s lead until the three of us were in step, my father dancing with my mother in the air and Sweet dancing with me. Then Sweet added his voice to my father’s.

  Then I joined in and we sang the whole song together, doing the fox-trot. Slowly, the three of us were getting to know each other. Getting to know that we were no longer alone.

  Chapter 27

  1975

  After we’d pulled her out of Simmy’s bar that night, Sukey kind of dropped me and Ricky and Steve and mostly hung out with her drinking buddies. We didn’
t even know who those people were.

  I’d go to her apartment to check on her, and I could never tell how many drinks she’d had. Her breath never smelled. Ricky told me that was because when you really get good at being an alcoholic, you start drinking vodka so people can’t smell it on your breath.

  Sukey would say things like, “Ohh, God! It’s so hot today! I’ve had a glass of ice water in my hand all day long.”

  I’d think, Does she really expect me to believe that’s water in her glass? When she can barely walk? And her words are all slurred?

  Or she’d claim to be drinking coffee, but then I’d hear ice clinking inside her mug.

  The three of us had tried one more time to talk to her about her drinking, saying, “Sukey, we’re worried about you. Come on, you’ve been drinking too much. Things have got to change, Suke. You’ve got to take care of yourself.”

  But she didn’t listen, and so for a while, we lost her. I kept going over to see her, and each time it hurt me so bad that I would go home and cry.

  It didn’t help that Sukey wasn’t working. She told me that she’d saved enough money from the Playboy Club to take a break and decide what to do with her life. But it seemed that all she had decided to do was drink.

  But this was Sukey, my best friend. I had to do something. So one day I tried begging. I took her hands in mine and said, “Suke, this is me, Calla. Sweetie, please don’t do it.”

  “Don’t do what?” she said.

  “Sukey, you know what I mean. Don’t drink anymore. Please don’t be an alcoholic.”

  “I am not an alcoholic,” she said, pulling back her hands.

  “Sukey, please. I’m not trying to criticize you. I’m just trying to say please come back to us—we love you!”

  “I don’t want to hear you get all emotional about friendship, okay?” she told me. “I’m tired of that. So you can tell them all—all of you—to stay out of my life. You stay out of my business. I know we’ve been friends for a long time, but y’all have gone too far. You’re sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong.”