Cerise has come to see that a lot of, well, she guesses it’d be North American ways of being, from doorknobs to car controls to television remotes, are all made for right-handers. She’s been practicing trying to write with her left hand, but she thinks it’s useless. No way in hell is Cerise going to learn how to hold a pen properly enough at this point to let people decipher her message on the other end of a note card. Best she learn how to use a keyboard one-handed better than she can right now. The hen pecking’s going to be her demise.
She scratches her left hand on everything, including the director’s chair armrest. She comes back around, over and over, to all the animals on this globe that itch themselves. Some things everyone just has in common. She thought maybe she’d stop itching by now. Go figure. Maybe she’s made it a habit.
Can’t be much past eight when the Harrises, only the three of them, leave their house, the parents going to real jobs, the son Daniel going to a street job. Used to be they had a daughter with them sometimes going to school. “Sharon, Nate,” Cerise says, raising her left hand. “Daniel.”
“Miss Cerise,” Daniel says first like he’s tryin’ to beat his parents to the punch. It makes Cerise smile.
“Daniel, you eat yourself a healthy lunch.”
The child heads off towards the Bend, towards Pigeontown where she knows he works, same as where his older brother did before the accident.
It’s hard for Cerise to think about the accident sometimes, but then her brain just does its thing. Maybe she could’ve used a broom handle or something to try to lift the grill, but she wasn’t sweeping the damn porch when it all occurred. She was heading to make groceries, and Roy wasn’t going to stop burning and wait for her to go back inside and look for a mop or some piece of wood layin’ around.
In a dream, Cerise made the boy Michael get up on his broken leg and come drape over on the grill on top of Roy. It was to get the heat to cook him rather than Roy. It was sort of working, but Roy kept on with his groaning, and Michael’s broken leg started bleeding, and the blood cooked up like the inside of a sausage, and then Cerise laid her hands on anyway.
The way Cerise tries to see it, you can’t undo one damn thing. You wish you could, but you can’t. The older she gets, the more she realizes that fact. You just can’t undo what’s already happened. And the older she gets, the more damn regrets she has about her past actions no matter what understanding she’s come to.
She wishes, for example, that when she’d gotten pregnant with Marie, she’d not eaten so much seafood all the time. All she wanted was oyster po-boys with extra tomatoes. Now she keeps reading about how pregnant ladies shouldn’t eat anything much out of the water at all. And she wishes that she’d told her sister how much she loved her when she was alive. They just never said the words coming up in their family, and now she can’t ever say them to Desiree but in a prayer. Cerise wishes she’d been kinder to her sister the night she went on the date with that boy in that car. So many years ago, she thinks. Fifty-six last month. She wishes the Harris boy hadn’t gotten on that motorcycle. Lord, she wishes he hadn’t. But where can it stop? She wishes Michael’s friend hadn’t loaned it to the boy in the first place. She wishes Roy hadn’t decided to grill. She wishes they had bought a regular-size grill rather than that damn barrel.
She will kill herself with wishes, Cerise thinks. Maybe that’s how so many her age go.
She needs to find a way to get over her right hand.
Cerise opens her nutritional shake with her left hand and takes a sip. She tries her normal ways of helping her mood. She thinks about being legless in a wheelchair. She thinks about Roy having died. She thinks about Lil Thomas dying. She thinks about a hurricane actually hitting New Orleans again. She thinks about being alone. It’s just a hand. It’s just a hand. And it’s still connected to her arm. Get over it, woman. Move forward. You don’t got one other choice in the matter. You ain’t going to lay down and die just yet, damn it.
Ed is spoiling Ella and Miles tonight, exactly his goal. They need some good attention. Ariel’s working later than late. She can’t object when she’s not around.
Ed and the kids rode the streetcar to the corner of St. Charles and Napoleon where it stopped, as far as it goes during Mardi Gras when an Uptown parade route is cordoned off. They walked down St. Charles a number of blocks to the corner of Marengo.
Every single week without fail, Saturday evening makes Ed think about date night. For years, he’s spent the night alone—not including the kids. He can’t remember when Ariel had one off.
This Saturday evening, Ed looks around at the crowd of parade-goers near him. Many are coupled up. A teenaged boy tucks his hand into a chubby girl’s back pocket. A pickup truck parked on the cross street with its tailgate down hosts a keg party, no less than ten young people dancing in the truck bed to music blaring from a porch nearby.
Ed keeps an eye on Miles, who runs around with other kids on the grassy middle of the shut-down boulevard. Miles and another boy chase the rest with cans of silly string. Ed bought Miles the stuff off one of the trolling pushcarts loaded down with a thousand different pieces of junk, all of them made in China or Mexico. Miles chose silly string and two boxes of snap ’n pops to throw on the pavement. Ella chose a plastic jeweled tiara, a glowing purple necklace, and a bag of penny candy.
The Sparta parade, followed by Pegasus, is supposed to roll at six. People and their ladders glut the curbs, children sitting in homemade box seats on top of the ladders, sitting on This Is Not a Step, waiting for the parades.
Ed would swear there are more ladders tonight than at any parade last year. He doesn’t see black people with ladders, only white suburbanites, the ones who drive their behemoth SUVs into the city for a few hours and leave mounds of garbage behind. Sure, the ladder contraptions might let children see better, but, lined up, they create walls, expanses of ladders that people can’t really see past or move around. Ed thinks the city needs to ban ladders too close to the curb.
Ella holds his hand and watches her wild-child brother. Sugared to near hyperglycemia, she bounces in place. Ed knows she’ll be awake hours past her normal bedtime. Oh well. Kids should have treat days. New Orleans has a lot of special days. Ed is beginning to understand why.
Maybe he should have more himself. Adults deserve treat days too, don’t they? He’s raising children, providing everyone with a clean and habitable home, cooking nutritionally sound food. He should be allowed to spend time at Tokyo Rose when he wants to. Well, when he’s able. A few treat hours here and there.
The other boy with silly string, a black boy, catches another black boy without anything for a counterweapon but a corndog. The little kid’s been running around with it, making Ed nervous for well over a minute. Running and eating food on a pointed stick never go together very well.
Ed can’t really tell which kids belong to which adults. The grownups stand drinking or sit in lawn chairs, socializing, not minding the children.
The one black boy sprays a wad of silly string all over the other black boy’s corndog. The second screams to high hell. Miles stops running and watches. The boy with the corndog loses it. He smacks his mess-on-a-stick over the head of his aggressor. Ketchup and silly string splatter.
The bigger kid, the one with silly string, shoves on the other one, and suddenly they’re scrapping on the matted grass and streetcar tracks.
A nearby white woman exposing too much cleavage says, “Hey, hey!” She holds a plastic cup of beer and wears a green feather boa around her neck. “Stop that!” The boys roll onto the woman’s feet. “Hey!” Ed can see the decision playing across her drunken features: Should she pour her drink on the boys?
Ed waits and watches for the boys’ parents to break it up. Miles seems to be waiting for the same thing, but nobody really intervenes. Ed’s son remains frozen when the boy he’s been chasing, a white boy with a buzz cut, figures out he’s no longer in danger. He races at Miles, his arms extended, and, with the force of a
small bulldozer, shoves Miles to the ground as well. Aggression has taken hold of the children.
Ed rushes out and breaks apart the tussle between Miles and his attacker. He looks to the other two boys still fighting. Nobody does anything. The boys continue to roll around. Ed drags Miles by his upper arm to the scuffle of the other boys and picks up the kid on top. “Cut it out!” Ed hollers. “That’s enough! Go on. Get back to your families.”
A couple adults nearby applaud Ed.
The black boy he has by the shirt collar, the one who had the corndog, stares directly in Ed’s eyes. He can’t be more than six years old, max. Ed expects the boy to swear at him, but instead, he starts to cry. The kid cowers, hanging in his loose shirt in Ed’s hand like he’s slung in a hammock. “Stand up,” Ed tells the boy. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
The boy still on the ground stares wide-eyed up at Ed. “It’s okay,” Ed says. “Just get up. It’s okay.”
The boy stands and stares at Ed as though he’s a principal.
“Are you okay?” Ed asks.
The boy just stares. Ed realizes he still grips the other boy’s shirt in his fist. Ed lets go.
“He my brother,” the bigger one says suddenly.
“You two are brothers?” Ed asks.
The beat-up one nods.
“You shouldn’t fight,” Ed says, not knowing another piece of advice to offer just then.
They both take off down the boulevard, racing on for more than a block. Where are they going? Where’s their family?
Miles twists out of Ed’s grip and immediately shoves his way into the crowd. Ed stands alone, a schmo just trying to do the right thing. He looks at the tens of people suddenly watching the Ed show.
Ed raises his hands and shrugs. His Rescue Man cape is stuck up the crack of his ass. Maybe he really just doesn’t understand this city. Probably not at all. Everybody else just stood around letting the boys work it out. Is that what you’re supposed to do? Is that how life works, as long as nobody gets seriously hurt?
Ed looks to where he left Ella. He doesn’t see her. He looks left and right from the spot where he’s sure they just were. No Ella. He looks back to the spot in the crowd where Miles disappeared. No son.
Don’t panic. Hang in there.
Panic sets in almost immediately. Ed feels the absolute necessity to yell. He doesn’t even think about it. The urge comes from a primordial source. Ed holds his hands to his mouth and shouts into the crowd, “Ella! Miles!”
“Jesus, buddy,” somebody says back. Ed looks at the person, a white man holding a styrofoam bowl in his hand, shoveling a plastic fork of something into his mouth.
Ed shoves his way into the crowd. “Miles! Ella!” Ed bumps around between folding chairs and people who’ve marked their patch of ground with picnic blankets. Ed will clear the entire block in one fell swoop if he cannot find his children in five seconds flat.
Ed spies something glowing purple in the crowd. It’s a necklace.
“Hi, Daddy,” Ella says. She holds out her bag of candies to an elderly black woman in a lawn chair. Sharing, like a good girl.
“No, thank you,” the woman says to Ella.
“Where’s your brother?” Ed asks.
The black woman pours bottled water into her hand and rubs it on Ella’s sticky face. “There you go. And see? Yo daddy’s here right fast.” The woman wipes at Ella’s face with a napkin next, saying to Ed without looking at him, “Beautiful child.”
Ella knows she’s being talked about, showing her teeth in a grin, when the sirens on the police cars clearing the way for the parades sound out in the street. What is Miles wearing? How can Ed see him in this fucking bedlam? “Thank you,” Ed says to the woman. “Come on, we have to find Miles.” He picks Ella up.
“You lose more’n one child? Mmm mmm.” The woman shakes her head.
Ed gets out of the crowd and walks the streetcar tracks back and forth, scanning. It’s the wrong place. Everyone has turned towards the boulevard to watch for the start of the parade. Ed needs to get to the street. Miles would head for the front, no question.
On horseback, black men in cowboy hats and fringed chaps clop down the street. The horses take fancy steps. People applaud. Ed works his way through the crowd as the horses move away. “Horses!” Ella exclaims.
“Ella, what’s Miles wearing today? What do his clothes look like, sweetie?”
Ella shrugs in Ed’s arms, fingering her glowing necklace, chin on chest. She’s picking up Ed’s vibe.
“Help me remember,” Ed almost pleads. The horses dance away down the avenue, but a random popping remains. Ed knows. He just knows. He heads directly to the sound.
And there the little shit stands, throwing his snap ’n pops into the street during a parade gap. Another older boy across the way has a box too, and they wing the tiny gunpowder spitballs towards each other’s feet as hard as they can. “Miles,” Ed says sternly a few people away from his son, “come here right now.”
“Just a minute,” Miles says, not even looking at Ed, digging through the sawdust of his box for another mini bomb.
Ed steps out into the gap. Coming his way, white-hooded white men on horseback beneficently anoint parade-goers with odd pope gestures. Ed grabs Miles’ wrist and pulls him away from the street through the crowds, apologizing to people as they bump their way to an open space.
Ed squats on the streetcar tracks and puts Ella down. She rests one small hand on Ed’s shoulder as she shakes her candy bag in her other tight fist, looking intently at what’s left. Swedish fish flop. A distant marching band’s music drifts their way. Ed squares Miles’ shoulders to face him. “Miles, what you did is unacceptable. Absolutely and completely wrong. You can never, ever do that again. Do not ever leave me or your mother and walk into a crowd. Do you hear me?”
Ella stops her bag shaking and stares at her brother.
“What?” Miles asks in a Pee-wee Herman voice. “I can’t hear you.” Miles takes a snap ’n pop and throws it at the streetcar track. It misses, landing unexploded in the dust beside the metal rail.
Ed stands, spins Miles around, and spanks him.
17
All the housekeeping staff get to leave after turndown service, as Ariel insists, unless there’s extraordinary P ’n B work to do. Most of them have some form of family to get back to in the evenings, or more often a second job.
The Belle feels better at night, a little more room to breathe. Fewer people Ariel needs to govern. Most days she’s a woman covered in ticks.
When Warren’s big back is turned, Ariel gives Javier the eye, her nod.
The parade lumbering down Canal will keep her on-site for hours still. The guests have made their communal way out to the boulevard in their clanking attire of plastic beads. The kitchen is prepped for the late-night menu.
Usually it goes like this: Ariel makes herself scarce for a while. Javier takes his break or finishes his shift. She flashes the room number with her fingers at him when she can or, when she has no other option, leaves it written on a slip of paper slid under the edge of his employee locker. She’s vaguely aware of the fact that her handwritten numbers could be used against her.
Through room 341’s window, Ariel watches tourists ooze down the street, everyone moving towards Canal.
Ariel doesn’t understand the Mardi Gras holiday, but she’s happy for the excuse to stay away from home. Life around Ed has proven next to impossible. The kids have been monsters since Christmas.
The knock sounds.
Ariel closes the curtains. She answers the door.
Javier shoves past. He says something in Spanish she can’t understand, but it makes no difference. It’s the quality of the foreign that tamps down her reservations, quashes her higher reason. He smiles, his teeth pretty against his dark skin. He lusts after me, Ariel thinks. He has never used the Spanish word she recognizes for dirty female anatomy, so he must be saying something complimentary.
She has melted slowly ove
r the course of his shift today, started thinking about the finish by midmorning. One direct look from him in the kitchen, and the burner gets lit. Lately, when she’s sitting at her desk in her office and decides to go to the kitchen for something or other, her nipples harden. He could ring a bell and she’d start salivating.
Javier pulls an accordioned strand of wrapped condoms from his pocket and tosses it on the bed. Ariel can’t get caught buying them with Ed in town. She wears an IUD.
“Wanna fuck the boss?” Ariel says. She raises her skirt.
“Díme más, guapita sucia.”
She will never let them make a mess. Climbing between hotel sheets is off limits. Since Ivan, they’ve spent no more than fifteen minutes together in a room.
But she has lost count of the number of times. She wonders what that means. Do other people keep track? Men would. Javier probably knows exactly. The conquest of a GM would be worth a count, or so she thinks. Or maybe she hopes.
Ariel believes Javier now asks her to raise her skirt further, which she does.
She’s come to learn he’s a leg and ass man. Javier gives props to her tits, but only because he seems to think he should. She’s never cared all that much about her own breasts, so she’s fine with his predilection. Once, on his knees above her as she lay on her back, he straddled her face. She licked him wet and then pushed him towards her chest, squeezing her breasts together with her arms so he could slide inside the cleavage. It seemed to work for Javier. Anytime he gets away without wearing a condom is good for him. He moved between her tits while she called him names, puckered her lips, and stuck out her tongue. She worked her fingers between her legs, but still he came far quicker, long before she ever might have.
If Ed ever leaves town again without her, Ariel will let Javier into other places, do things that will make him want her every moment of every day. But some things take time, tenderness, commodities they have little of tonight.
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