Three
FOR A WEEK, Bernard and Al spend the evenings carving prototype tables on the front porch.
Bernard walks Al through the process, dictating each move of the knife, and Al’s a careful listener, patient and painstaking, good with his hands.
Still, there’s a growing pile of discarded miniature tables—made of walnut, just a few inches tall.
“You two could have a side business in doll furniture,” Adele muses. Bernard’s smile is forced. We all know that if it weren’t for his injured hand, the miniatures would have been finished days sooner, would have been works of art.
By mid-October, they’re well underway on the templates and jigs, working in the mill each day. Claire and Adele fix their husbands a hot lunch, send me to the warehouse district to deliver it to them. In the evenings, the men come home covered in sawdust, weary around the shoulders.
Every couple weeks, we sit around the kitchen table and they talk about California. They assume I’m coming, they’ve never asked me, I resent them for not asking. Claire runs her hands across the gleaming tabletop.
“I’ll make you another once we’re settled,” Bernard says.
She stares at its surface, hand moving back and forth. “But I want this one.”
Al’s little brother, Lionel, joins us on some nights.
“I can go anytime,” he says. “You just say the word, I’ll be on that train.
” Most often, his face bears some trace of a fight—a cut lip, a bruise along his cheekbone.
We’re the same age, Lionel and I. We should be friends.
But there’s always a swirl of danger around him.
“It isn’t his fault,” Al tells us. “Cops have had it out for him since he was fifteen years old.” Several times, Lionel’s called the house from the police station and Al’s rushed over to meet him.
They return later, tense and silent. My sisters tend to Lionel’s latest injuries while I hold the baby or take over fixing dinner.
On those nights, I say nothing and listen, just as I do when they talk about Los Angeles.
One Thursday morning, right after breakfast, there’s a rustle from the far end of the kitchen, the back door opening, and Maman appears, crossing through the room without looking at any of us.
“We still have some grits in this pot,” Adele says. “Can I serve you some?”
Our mother shakes her head. “I came for cream.” She opens the refrigerator, takes the bottle.
“I could fix a coffee for you,” Claire says.
“No need, ma chère.” She spots Rudy on the floor, leans over to pick him up.
He giggles, goes to grab her hair. She sets him back down.
“You need to put a hat on him when you go out, Adele. He’s getting darker every day.
” Adele stiffens. Maman heads back to the door.
Stops. “Odette.” The first time she’s said my name in weeks.
My stomach clenching at the sound. “I have the Adamses’ silver here.
It needs to be polished by the evening. I’ll need your help. ”
“Rudy’s perfect, we all know that,” I say softly, when she’s gone.
“She’s relentless,” Adele says.
Claire frowns. “She doesn’t mean it that way. She thinks she’s helping.”
“You should have heard her go on and on about Al working as a janitor,” Adele says. “I told her he shouldn’t have had to be a janitor. He was smarter than all the salesmen there, knew far more about music than any of them.”
Claire nods. “In California, he’ll run a record shop.”
“Maybe a chain of them.”
They go on this way, Adele gaining back her confidence the longer they talk. I’ll have to help Maman now if I want to go to Hattie’s and the garden.
“Good luck,” Adele says when I head to the door.
“I feel like I’m walking into a trap.”
“You two make it sound like she’s a monster,” Claire says.
“She is,” I say, and slip out before Claire can scold me.
Spread along Maman’s dining table are boxes of silver.
I don’t know what this is, why she’s called me over here.
I wait, bracing, but she doesn’t say a word.
I use baking soda, a bowl of water, a soft cloth.
Spoon by spoon I think: She sent him away.
He got sick and he died. Over and over, until two dozen soup spoons are shining, and then all the dessert spoons, too.
Maman and I still silent. Movement in their kitchen. Jean Pierre, opening the cabinets.
I push the teaspoons away, leave them unfinished.
On my way out, I stop in the entry by Papa’s favorite paintings. To the left: a pink sunset over an ocean horizon. To the right: birds in flight against a blue sky. I press my lips to the canvases, one and then the other, like kissing both his cheeks.
I go straight from Maman’s house to Hattie.
Cooler here in her sewing room, easier to breathe.
She fixes us hot milky tea in cups with saucers.
Hand-stitches lace to the top of a blouse.
I lie on the love seat next to her, paging through magazines, wondering how many girls in New Orleans lead secret lives like we do.
Later, she’s behind her sewing machine, and I draw her in my sketchbook.
Her look of concentration. Broad shoulders and bare face, lashes full, hiding her eyes.
I want to wake up with her in the mornings and fall asleep in her bed.
I want to watch her brush her hair. It’s a good drawing, my best in a while.
There’s love in it. I show it to her. She sets her sewing down, takes the sketchbook from me.
Studies it for a long time. If I don’t do something, I’ll be gone in less than three months.
I need to tell her. We need to talk about it. We need to figure out a plan.
“It’s so good,” she says. “Really. Too good for you to keep. We have to cut it out.”
“But what if I want to look at it later, when I’m alone?”
She shakes her head. “Imagine the questions your sisters would ask if they found a drawing of me.”
“They’re talking about going to Los Angeles. Soon after the New Year.” There. Out in the open now. Pulse in my ears as I wait for what she’ll say.
She takes a blade from her desk, slices the drawing out. “People talk about all kinds of things,” she says. “Doesn’t mean they’re really going to do them.”
I can’t tell if she loves me. It makes me weak-kneed, the thought that maybe she doesn’t.
I go to the garden. Delphine isn’t here yet.
I sit on the bench and draw the Angel’s trumpets, hanging upside down in clusters, fluting out and curving upward.
When I’m finished, I draw the tops of my shoes—rounded toes, broguing along the wing tip—against the flowered ground cover.
Finish that drawing, too. I run my finger over what’s left of the page Hattie cut out.
When it’s clear Delphine’s not coming, I walk the streets of the Marigny and wonder which house is his.
A building with peach shutters. A building with green shutters.
One with a stone balcony. One with urns of purple flowers flanking a doorway.
No matter how I try to believe that he loves her, that they’re happy, I can’t ease the ache at the back of my skull.
In mid-November, my sisters pack enough for three men’s lunches instead of the usual two.
Hot jambalaya with andouille, cold potato salad, iced tea sweetened with sugar.
“They’ve brought Lionel on to help,” Claire explains, buckling the straps around the picnic basket.
And then, low so Adele doesn’t hear: “I’m praying he doesn’t bring trouble with him. ”
I ride the streetcar to the warehouse district.
Instead of the usual blare of machinery, it’s quiet when I get to the door.
I ease it open, find the first table assembled, the men gathered around it.
Until now, the work has all been done in parts.
Each piece of the table rough cut, shaped, run through the machine, sanded and contoured and hand-carved and sanded again, eight times over for the batch of smaller tables.
Next will come twelve tables to seat four to six diners, and two banquet tables after that.
Lionel is tightening a clamp, Bernard and Al are on their knees, wiping excess glue from the place where the tabletop meets the pedestal. I wait until they all step back to let them know that I’m here. They’re flushed with effort. “Got to get it right the first time, every time,” Bernard tells me.
“It’s a beautiful table.”
“Wait until you see her all polished.”
I hand him the picnic basket and head back to the courtyard.
Lionel follows me. “Hey, I’ve been meaning to ask you about something,” he says.
He stands a few inches taller than I do, his face a medium brown, a youthful roundness to it.
A small scar near his temple is all that’s left of his latest encounter with the police.
“I was on Magazine Street the other night. Just about did a double take in front of that place on the corner. It is Delphine, right? In the window?”
“The photographer saw her looking,” I say. “He invited her in to have her picture taken.”
He rubs his chin, thoughtful. “Photo’s nice. She looks good in it. The whole thing struck me as very interesting.”
“But?”
“Also dangerous.”
I shouldn’t say anything more, I know. But I’m a little stung from the days, more frequent now, that Delphine doesn’t meet me. “I get this feeling,” I tell him. “A bad one, every time I think about it.”
He nods. “Yeah. I get that.”
Washing up after dinner, the men across the house playing cards in the living room, Claire says, “Odette, come sit. Adele and I have been wondering if any boys have been catching your eye.”
“You’re out who-knows-where so often,” Adele says. “Are you spending time with someone?”
“Just Delphine,” I say. I hate to lie to them, hate that I have to, wish it wasn’t so.
“Anyone you’re sweet on?” Claire asks, flashing a little smile.
To be desperately in love without them knowing—it makes me want to sink into the floorboards. “I haven’t been thinking about boys much.”
“Of course not,” Claire says. “With so much change these past months. Still, it would be nice to have you settled soon.”
Adele lights a cigarette. “We realized it might be tricky to find a nice Creole boy in Los Angeles. A truly suitable one, as good as Bernard and Al. The kind of husband you deserve.” She takes a drag, lets the smoke out slowly.
“You know,” she says, “I’ve heard murmurings a few times after Mass. A certain boy who has his eye on you.”
I can’t hold her gaze. I turn to the tabletop. My face, faintly visible in its glossy surface.
“She’s gotten shy all of a sudden,” Claire says. Lightly, she pinches my cheek. “Go on. Who is it?”
“Cyril Laurent,” Adele says.
“Well, that’s a nice thing to think about,” Claire says. “Isn’t it, Odette?”
I thought that was over. I force myself to nod.
“Speaking of Cyril Laurent, I’ve been contemplating our New Year’s Eve dresses,” Adele says. “What if we used the black ones from two years ago but modified them?”
“That’s a wonderful idea,” Claire says. “You know how I’ve been eyeing that organza at Halpern’s.
Odette, it’s the sheerest black with little polka dots.
We could splurge on just enough for trim.
Change the sleeves and the necklines, bring them up a little.
No one will guess they’re the same dresses. ”
My sisters talk and plan. I watch my reflection on the tabletop, moving up and down when they ask me a question. I could paint myself this way—distorted, only barely here.