by Julia Reed
There were countless no-brainers that no one in any position of power seemed equipped to handle and I was reminded of the final debate back in 1991 between Edwin and Duke on Meet the Press, when Tim Russert asked Duke to name the biggest employers in the state and Duke responded that he didn’t know, that he did not carry around an almanac. Edwin hadn’t been able to get over it for the whole rest of the day. “An ALMANAC? An ALMANAC? You look at the almanac if you want to know the stages of the MOON,” he said over and over. Now I wondered if, like me, he was thinking of that day, since Blanco apparently had been without both an almanac and a governor’s manual.
13
BLANCO MAY HAVE been the governor, and the mayor was, alas, still the mayor, but as the holidays approached there were plenty of other things to be thankful for. For one thing, at the start of November, FEMA began disposing of all the refrigerators, which was no small task. After being toted to one of a half dozen appliance mortuaries overseen by the EPA (at the cost of $2 million a day), they were emptied of their contents and power-washed with bleach before being drained of Freon for recycling. What was left was then piled onto a big heap and crushed into metal bales that were bought by scrap metal dealers who hauled them away. Before it was all over, more than 200,000 refrigerators had been picked up and destroyed, and a million pounds of Freon, a fleurocarbon capable of doing some heavy damage to the ozone, had been recovered (which explained the graffiti I’d seen on a French Quarter fridge admonishing that “Chemtrails Are Real”). Trash, it turns out, is a complicated thing—the average TV set left out on the curb, for example, is a lethal little bomb containing four pounds of lead.
I was also tremendously grateful for the delivery of two brand-new appliances, the washing machine and dryer that was a belated birthday present from my very generous mother. She’d already given me many more extravagant things for the house, but this was especially important to her because she knew how important it was to me. I was forty-five years old and had enjoyed the use of a washing machine only one time in my entire adult life, during the year I’d lived in a rented cottage in Orlando, Florida, and worked for the newspaper there. That had been exactly two decades earlier and since then I had done a whole lot of weeping during those General Electric commercials, the ones where irresistible golden retrievers and pretty children bounded around, and happy people pulled warm towels from the dryer and pressed them against their cheeks. Such was the ads’ schmaltz level that I’d heard plenty of people admit they cried too when they saw them, but I think my tears went deeper. I so craved the domestic scene I watched on the screen, but I didn’t, apparently, have the slightest idea of how to go about achieving it—I’m not even sure I was conscious of how badly I wanted it. There had been no room in any of the places where I’d subsequently lived for a washer and dryer, and, I had thought, no room in my life for all the less concrete stuff that usually went with them. In addition to adding a great deal of convenience to my life and being, well, normal, the gift of these two items was extraordinarily symbolic to me. So much so that I did not mind taking a number and waiting in line for almost two hours to pick them out at Sears, which was doing a bang-up business from all the thousands of people who were back and forced to replace their destroyed appliances.
Then there was the happy fact that Rose and Quincy and Roseanna were coming to town for a Thanksgiving visit. Rose and Quincy were driving down from Dyersburg in Quincy’s Suburban; Roseanna, who was waiting for her New Orleans roof to be repaired, was coming in from the country. They were homesick and wanted to make some money. Since I had invited pretty much everyone I’d run into on the street—literally—for Thanksgiving lunch, our needs were in sync.
I knew I’d asked at least twenty-four people, which was how many our table seated with all its leaves, but John warned me that there were likely a few folks I’d forgotten about, since my magnanimity generally expands with each drink and we were still attending the festive reopenings of every bar and restaurant in town. JoAnn and Alan and Ken were coming, and Elizabeth and her girls, of course. My parents were driving down from Greenville and staying at the Windsor Court hotel, where there was no room service or even an operational restaurant yet, and nothing in the minibars, but it was far better outfitted than our house, which still possessed only one bed. My father’s business partner of fifty-two years and his wife were visiting their daughter, M.T., and her husband, so they were on the list. (Like Elizabeth, I’d grown up with M.T. and she was one of my closest friends as well as my neighbor in Manhattan. John and I had fixed her up on a blind date with a friend of his, a judge from across the lake in Covington, and they had married four months after we had.) Our former “landlady,” my cousin Linda Jane, was driving over from Baton Rouge with her husband and their two children. Then there was one of my solo male neighbors whose wife and kids were still away, John’s son Roger, and, as John continued to point out, God knows who else.
No matter who came, we’d have enough to eat. I’d ordered two turkeys from D’Artagnan (not all our grocery stores were close to being open yet and I did not want to take a chance). I was also making oyster dressing (despite the immediate dire warnings that it would be years before we could avail ourselves of the bounty of Louisiana’s oyster beds, the state department of health and hospitals allowed half of them to reopen in late October, after what they assured us had been extensive testing); green beans with caramelized shallots; corn macques choux with crawfish, in a nod to the Indians and my borrowed Louisiana roots; and cranberry relish with the kumquats that were ripening all around us, including on the tree that was just outside the big kitchen window. Elizabeth was bringing the marshmallow-topped mashed sweet potatoes in orange shells that her children (and some of the adults) could not get through the day without, and M.T., one of my all-time favorite cooking partners, was supplying miniature crab cakes for hors d’oeuvres, along with slow-cooked Brussels sprouts with pine nuts and her grandmother’s cornbread dressing.
Quincy turned out to be an ace turkey cooker and hyper-efficient baster who never failed to set the timer at thirty-minute intervals, while Lorel and Lamont, two of Roseanna’s triplet nephews, did an excellent job of keeping everyone well lubricated with Bloody Marys and brandy milk punches and lots of Champagne. Only three people I had forgotten about turned up, but we somehow made room for them, and when we sat down to give thanks, we all realized, for the millionth time, how blessed we were to be here. The only mishap came during the washing of the dishes when the sink backed up and almost a foot of water came flooding into the kitchen. Eddie’s idiot father-and-son plumbing team had returned to fix the same problem—I swear—seven times, and each time they had billed me for it. Fortunately, Lamont had a neighbor who was a plumber, the dashingly named Wellington Grant, and we implored him to come over the next day.
Like our governor, our original plumbers must have been without a manual. Within about three minutes of his arrival, Wellington had removed the pipe that drained the water from the sink to the street, and it was so caked and corroded on the inside that the passageway was now maybe an eighth of an inch wide—a cigarette could not have fit through it, much less a double sink full of water within any reasonable amount of time. I saved it with the thought of beating Eddie over the head with it if I ever saw him again, but that was looking increasingly unlikely since he had not been in touch since his Mexican respite.
Just after Thanksgiving, John enlisted Lamont and Lorel to help him salvage what was left at his brother Andrew’s old apartment. We had been there once before and found that the door was blocked by an enormous bookshelf that had washed in front of it, the sofa was upside down on top of a table, and a treadmill was on top of that. John had climbed in through the window and discovered that Andrew’s books and his treasured pipe collection on the second floor had survived intact. There was his Standard French-English Dictionary, his Modern History and Anatomy textbooks, his John Lennon albums. Andrew had gone to Columbia and was exceedingly bright, so when I looked a
t his things it was doubly heartbreaking. A lot of people had been forced to undergo the painful process of sorting out the remnants of what was now another life pre-Katrina. But Andrew’s things had already been remnants of his life before his illness kicked in—now there was another remove. Still, he was happy to get his stuff, and he told John they provided a great amount of comfort in his new life so far away.
At the same time John was packing up Andrew’s things, Elizabeth was dealing with a different family issue. Since Katrina, she had not heard from Mike’s mother or any of his siblings and none of the phone numbers that she’d starting dialing as soon as the storm passed had ever worked. Finally, just before Katie’s birthday in November, her mother-in-law, DeeDee, had gotten in touch, and after Thanksgiving Elizabeth took the girls to see her. It turned out that she had an extraordinary story. She’d been in her house in Lakeview with one of her sons when the water began rising. The two of them sat atop ladders until they were no longer high enough, at which point they swam underwater, which was the only way to get out the front door. DeeDee, who does not actually know how to swim very well, grabbed onto a passing Little Tykes truck and managed to stay afloat before being pulled atop a tall nearby shed by her son and a neighbor who had jumped in to help. This was made all the more remarkable by the fact that she is eighty-something years old, and not only vastly overweight but also afflicted with Parkinson’s disease. Once she was on top of the shed, with a back that had been skinned raw, another whole day went by before they were rescued and flown to a hospital in Baton Rouge.
Maybe it was survivor’s guilt in the wake of such stories; maybe it was just the excitement of having a house. Whatever it was that had gotten into me, I launched into such a frenzy of holiday entertaining that Elizabeth gave me a guest towel embroidered with the message “A Fool and Her Money Can Throw a Hell of a Party.” Our neighborhood of temporary bachelors was finally filling up with mothers and children again (and Jean had returned to Bob), so I had all my new neighbors over one night, and then the hundred-plus folks from John’s office, who had worked so hard and pulled together under so much stress, the next. Rose was bored out of her mind in Dyersburg, so I got her a train ticket and almost every day we were in the kitchen together, making roasted pecans and cheese straws for gifts, or preparing sausage balls, watermelon rind pickles wrapped in bacon, and ham biscuits to pass at the parties. Standing in line at the Langenstein’s meat counter to pick up the tenderloin and crabmeat I always served on the dining room table, I was reminded once again of how much patience was required to live in the new New Orleans—and to wait on spoiled rich people. I’d been in the store a long time, but it wasn’t me that I felt sorry for. Buddy, the eighty-two-year-old butcher who had been politely serving the denizens of Uptown New Orleans for many decades, was having what sounded like a particularly harrowing conversation with a Garden District matron from her house in Martha’s Vineyard, where she had been ensconced since the storm. Apparently she wanted reassurance about the availability of holiday shellfish. “Yes, ma’am, we’ll have oysters for Christmas,” he said over and over again. “We have them right now…Yes ma’am, the crabmeat is pretty, yes ma’am.” This went on for so long the line wound up and down the aisles and Buddy was running back and forth behind the counter trying to fill each order with the phone tucked beneath his chin, frantically wrapping and taping and marking each package. I got so worried he was going to have a heart attack I wanted to snatch the phone from him and hang up on the woman myself. (Which is why I have not been a proud member of the service industry since I manned the counter at McDonald’s at fourteen, in a martyrous attempt to pay for the dent I had put in my mother’s car.)
My parents, my cousin Frances, and John’s children were all planning to stay in the house for Christmas itself, which meant that we needed to buy more beds, sheets, towels, and at least one TV for my TV-junkie parents. I had already started sprucing up the place—Blair Dupré had told me he knew of a guy who might finally be able to repair the still-leaking sunroom roof. He was available, which should have been the first red flag, but he ran the hose over everything for a long time when he finished, and when there were no leaks, we were so grateful John cooked him a big breakfast with homemade biscuits and the sausage from Kentucky M.T.’s parents send us every year for Christmas. The rug man had been keeping the custom-made sisal for the sunroom floor in his warehouse—on a high shelf, thank God—since a month or two before the storm and he was more than ready to get rid of it. So we laid it down and hung pictures and installed the matchstick blinds and two days later it rained and the whole thing was covered in irreparable brown spots from at least twice as many leaks as there’d been before the guy had started. Apparently a garden hose is not the equivalent of a New Orleans rainstorm. I was about to have the kind of “house fit” I hadn’t thrown since before Katrina, and then the man who was finally laying the marble tile in my bathroom told me to “get over it, it’s only a rug,” and I realized he was right. I was just very lucky that the furniture had somehow escaped the leaks, and anyway, when Frances arrived she had a new poodle in tow who confused the rug with a giant piece of newspaper, adding more spots of a slightly more sulfurous hue.
Since the benches for the front parlor were being upholstered and we had no other furniture to put in there, I filled the whole room with a Christmas tree so big we had to cut it up with a chainsaw when it was time to take it out; I wired satsumas and enormous Louisiana lemons to the wreaths out front, and filled every big bowl I could get my hands on with more citrus of the season. The “front steps” were still poured concrete risers waiting for the actual limestone, my parents’ bed was delivered about ten minutes after their own arrival, and the “chandeliers” in both parlors and the dining room were bare bulbs hanging by a wire. But my good friend, the extraordinarily talented John Alexander had painted us an amazing oil—I call it a “still-life on acid”—featuring: skittering shrimp, dozens of oysters, a redfish, a catfish, and a crab; a watchful turkey buzzard, one of my beloved crows, and an ibis; along with garlic bulbs, grape clusters, and even a few stalks of cotton in the background. We hung it over the dining room mantel where it reminded me of the Audubon crow and crab that I loved so much. It was also more than enough to divert attention, at least briefly, from the bare bulbs and the spotted rug, and I camouflaged everything else that was wrong or unfinished with lots of magnolia branches from what was left of the tree outside. Benton had told me that it likely wouldn’t last another year, so I accepted its parting gifts with gratitude.
On Christmas Eve, we went to Elizabeth’s, just as we had always gone to her parents’ house when we were growing up, and on Christmas Day, everyone came to us. Since the youngest child at the table was hardly a child anymore—Lizzy, who had been barely a year old when I arrived in New Orleans, was now fifteen—I spoiled us with grown-up food. We had roast duck, braised red cabbage with bacon, and butternut squash with white truffles. We also had a gorgeous wheel of Stilton, but sadly we couldn’t linger over it because I had gotten a tad too ambitious and planned a big bash for Christmas night, just as my mother had for at least twenty years before me. There were dozens of photographs of McGee and Elizabeth and M.T. and me, all dressed up year after year, playing with my new toys from my very extravagant grandmother, and drinking sparkling Catawba juice (which came in a bottle thrillingly like Champagne) while our parents in their own Christmas finery (Daddy in his red Christmas vest, Burrell in his maroon velvet jacket) drank the real thing. I even served much the same menu: country ham with rolls and my mother’s homemade hot mustard; dressing balls, and more hot spinach dip, though I replaced her seafood Newburg with a local specialty, crawfish Cardinale.
By the end of the night, John was playing the piano and Roger was playing the guitar, and we all had a wonderful time at our first Christmas on First Street. But it dawned on me that I had been trying to cram twenty years worth of G.E.–style holiday moments into a single season, and I had to laugh at myself.
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14
DURING CHRISTMAS, THREE more plumbing disasters had occurred. When my mother tried to take a bath in her luxuriously appointed guest bathroom, the hot water never got hot, which we later discovered was because the plumbers had hooked the hot water pipe to the cold water handle and vice versa. While we waited for Wellington, she gave my bathtub its virgin run, and when she drained the water, part of the kitchen ceiling below fell in—the drain, it turned out, had never been hooked up to any pipe at all. Next came the ceiling in the second-floor guest room—enormous dripping cracks appeared after the fourth or fifth time the third-floor shower was used. Eddie, who had laid the tile in that bathroom himself (“I’ve laid tile more than most tile guys,” were the exact words I remembered him telling me) had not sealed the space between the tile and the tub, so water leaked right through. It had been an interesting trial run.
January brought Dupré’s team back to repaint all the ceilings, while Joe Wallis continued working outside, where I was beginning to think he might stay forever. He had finished most of the work on the house itself, but I was waiting on a carpenter to replace the hideous metal door of the former garage, which, on Ben’s plans at least, was now called a studio (read nice-looking toolshed), with a pair of windows, and he would need to paint that, along with a wooden fence that would one day be erected around the air-conditioning units. Also, my metalworker had decided to move to the comparatively dry mountains of North Carolina after the storm, so once I found someone to fill in all the many wide gaps in the iron fence that surrounded the entire yard, Joe would need to paint it too. I loved having Joe around—not only is he entertaining as hell and full of cosmic questions (“Why is it that every time a human sees a spider they want to step on it, no matter what kind it is?” he asked me after I’d squashed what I was convinced had been a brown recluse), he turned me on to the best of the new Mexican food stands, Chapparal Patio, which had begun life a month or so after Katrina in the bed of a pickup truck. Now it had moved to the cashier’s booth of an abandoned gas station that was a quick roundtrip ride on Joe’s scooter, and we availed ourselves of the tacos al carbon and tacos al pastor, the slow-roasted pork with rice and beans, or the avocado quesadillas for lunch nearly every day.