Five #2
“Don’t I have a say in it?” My voice again, strained and small.
“You should come to Los Angeles. You have the money to get started. It’s Hollywood.
You’ll have so much work there. I’ll find work, too.
Maybe I could assist you, and we can see each other all the time.
We could even get a place together. As roommates—that’s what we’ll tell everyone. ”
“Odette. Stop.” I bend forward, my dress too tight around my ribs. “We both know there’s no future in us,” Hattie says.
Roar in my ears. “Easy for you to say that, when you don’t even love me.”
“I do love you,” Hattie says. “Sure, some girls could get away with what you’re describing.
Girls without close family. Girls who are on their own.
Girls who aren’t watched over, who don’t have as much to lose as you do.
You’re an Honoré sister. The third in line to marry any man you choose.
Everyone’s waiting to see who you’ll pick.
I never dared to imagine that we could last.”
“Tell me again,” I say.
“Tell you what?” Between us, it’s very quiet now. Very still. “Don’t make me,” she says.
“Tell me.”
“I love you,” she says.
I close my eyes. My whole body, aching. She loves me. She loves me. She’s cutting me off. No future in us. She’s asking me for something absurd, nonsensical—but she loves me.
“Let me tell you what I’m thinking.” She’s planned it all out.
She’ll send Cyril over in the morning. We’ll spend a few days together, to see how we get along—only eleven left before he reports to Shreveport, no time to waste.
She’ll sew me the most beautiful wedding gown if I say yes.
“You don’t know him well, not yet, but I promise there is no boy sweeter than Cyril.
He’s good and strong and he’ll provide for you. He’ll treat you well.”
The longer she speaks, I see that she’s decided. The clock chimes upstairs, it’s midnight. I cross the room to her pile of fabric scraps, wipe the lipstick off my mouth. “Kiss me,” I say.
“Will you do it?”
“Kiss me.” She wants to. I can see it. “Come to Los Angeles.”
“I’m never doing that. Odette. Please. He’s so young. He’s so scared.”
“You’re giving me away?”
“I would keep you if I could, but that’s not how things work and you know it.
And you’ll live here. You’ll be out of your mother’s house.
We’ll see each other every day until you need to go.
He knows about California. He said he’ll follow you when he gets back from overseas.
” She puts her hand on my face. Stops there.
“I’m not his yet,” I tell her.
“Yet?” Her mouth to my mouth. I expect the kiss to feel different knowing that she loves me, but it feels the same. She’s felt this way all along.
When she pulls away, it’s with finality. She widens the distance between us. “Can I send him tomorrow? That’s all I’m asking. Spend some time with him. Let him show you how special he is.”
I’m cold, the floor hard underfoot, the shadows long across the room.
“Okay,” I say. I don’t know why I’m saying it. I thought our kiss might change her mind.
“We should go back up now.” I follow, watching her ahead of me on the stairs.
In the living room, someone’s singing at the piano.
Someone’s handing me another Sazerac. I drink it down, find my sisters, tell them I’m not feeling well.
A crushing headache, maybe too much to drink, and no I don’t need anyone to walk with me, but I do really need to go.
Purse from the hall tree, waving my goodbyes, and I’m on the street now.
Alone among the dark houses and the bright ones.
Delphine, where are you?
Cyril and I spend three days getting to know each other.
I’m leaden with heartbreak. We’re at the pictures and all I hear is Hattie saying, “I love you.” We watch the boats and all I see is Hattie stepping away.
But when he takes me to the live oaks and we’re strolling together, just looking, I discover that his mouth turns down at the corners when he’s contemplative, the same as Hattie’s.
He holds my hand in a club and his hands are like hers, too.
Beautiful hands, for a boy. When he drops to his knee, Hattie’s in my ear—“there’s no future in us”—and the wanting in his eyes matches the wanting in hers on so many Thursday afternoons.
He’s on his knee. He’s waiting.
Seven days until he leaves for Shreveport.
And I’ll live in his parents’ house, with Hattie, until it’s time to go, and once we’re in Los Angeles, Hattie and I will be tied together by a marriage even if it isn’t ours.
When Cyril and I visit home, it’s Hattie we’ll be going back to.
And when Hattie visits California, she’ll sleep in a room next to mine.
We’ll stay close, we’ll stay tethered. Maybe once every few years we’ll give in to each other.
End up alone in a house, unable to resist. Not right, but not entirely wrong, either, to give Cyril everything he wants from me, and in exchange take only a little, every now and then, of what I want for myself.
I say yes.
Just hours later, Hattie comes to fit me for a dress. My sisters and Maman watch as she wraps the sewing tape around my waist, my breasts, unaware of how many times she’s touched me. They talk about silk and lace, necklines and veils, ask my opinions.
“Whatever Hattie thinks,” I manage to say, and I wait and I wait and I wait for her to change her mind.
She leaves down the front steps with her sewing bag.
I imagine her rushing back to me. At night I listen for pebbles or taps against the living room window.
Nothing comes and the next day I can’t complete my sentences.
I burn the rice on the stove. A day later, the dress is finished.
I’m married on the next. A Saturday morning at Saint Peter Claver, just like my sisters.
Bernard meets me at the back of the church to walk me down the aisle, offers me his arm.
“Wish he could be here to see you,” he says.
“He’d be proud.” But if Papa were still alive, he would have spared me from all of this.
The ceremony is unbearable, so many eyes on me. Cyril slips his grandmother’s wedding band onto my finger and a cheer rises. I search for Hattie but she’s wearing a hat that obscures her face.
At the luncheon reception, on my way to the powder room, I trip over the carpet and Felix appears from nowhere, catches me. “You all right, Odette? You look a little pale.”
“Too much attention,” I say. “I’m not used to it.”
“Go on, then. I’ll guard the door in case some of the aunties try to go in.”
Someone’s set a doily on the bathroom counter, a dish of wrapped peppermints atop it. Above hangs a frameless mirror. I lean against the wall, close my eyes.
Hours later, I’m in a borrowed car on the way to our Baton Rouge honeymoon, and every time I look at Cyril it shocks me.
My husband. He drives carefully, both hands on the wheel.
“Look,” he says, and tips his chin toward something out the window, but I miss it, startled by the straight line of his jaw.
There’s an unreality to everything, the blur of road and trees, the mansions and the river bends, like I’m not really myself, like the real me is still down in Hattie’s sewing room, in the moment before she says she loves me.
Wait.
Let’s take a minute here. Let’s think a moment about what we’ve done.
But we keep moving.
Just inside city lines, Cyril turns down a long gravel path, past a simple cottage.
There’s a flutter from a window. A little guesthouse waits in the back.
Cyril carries our suitcases through the unlocked door.
On the kitchenette counter: a vase of baby’s breath and a note that says, Welcome, lovebirds.
“Whose house is this again?” I ask, not sure he ever told me.
“My cousins’.” He opens a door and sets our suitcases in the closet. “They said to pretend they aren’t even there.”
I close myself in the bathroom. Rose petals in a little gauze bag balance on the edge of the tub.
Stripped of romance, they barely make sense.
The bathroom is dim, I don’t bother turning the light on.
I wash my body with a hand towel. Stare at myself in the mirror.
Who are you? When I turn the knob it comes at me with force: my dream life of white curtains in the breeze, Hattie in my bed.
Instead, Cyril’s rummaging through a bag, pulling out a bottle of scotch.
He steps into the last of the light. My husband.