“That little girl has no family but her Mamaw, Blanche, who gives her this one day. Begrudging her that, child, you ought to be ashamed.”
And Blanche had been. She’d tried to make up for her jealousy by pretending to be the big sister Loubella had never had.
She remembered holding Loubella, a dark-haired little girl, a doll baby, balancing her on her knees while she divided her hair into sections and braided her pigtails. She taught her to swim at the edge of the river, along with a couple of other little kids. She’d baptized them first, pouring water over their heads with a handleless cup, making up the words as she went along.
“And the Baby Jesus watch over you and carry your little soul straight to heaven without no detours if you drown,” she’d said. Loubella’s brown eyes had grown wide like saucers plopped into her face.
Yes, there’d been a long time when she’d truly loved the girl Loubella, had mothered her and smiled proudly at the mention of her name.
Now, from atop her coffee cup, she slid a look toward the woman and felt a flash of regret, then shame. How fragile friendship could be. How was it you spent years with someone—your minds so intertwined you didn’t even need to pick up the phone but could just transmit thoughts—laughed together, loved each other, and then things changed? There was a misunderstanding, an angry word that grew into a great wrong as you carried it around in your hand, blowing on it to give it life until, like a flame, it had a will of its own. But it had been more than a cross word, hadn’t it, that thing that had turned her love for Loubella to hate?
It had begun one July when Parnell, then Blanche’s husband and owner of River City, decided to pick up where Loubella’s mamaw had left off and in a fit of flamboyance treated his girls to a trip on a paddleboat all the way down the river to New Orleans. He’d said that his girls didn’t have to work on the Fourth, but Blanche had known that that was just his excuse to throw a party for Loubella.
Before that, when Blanche had come back to Baton Rouge to marry Parnell and had found Loubella in his stable of whores, it had made her sad for a bit, but then a woman had to do what she had to do. For a while she and Loubella had carried on together like they had when they were girls. They’d run into each other on the back stairs, Loubella in a yellow silk wrapper that glowed like fireflies, and then they’d sit right down on the steps, their legs tucked back against them within their encircling arms, gossiping and giggling with no mind for the passing hours, reaching their hands out and patting one another on a knee or a shoulder, little butterflies of affection, easy, easy, old love.
But Parnell had noticed, and he hadn’t liked it, not one bit.
“You don’t need that whore teaching you tricks, Blanche,” he said. “Unless you planning on turning pro.”
“Parnell! You know Lou and I’ve been friends since we were girls!”
“I know what you been. You think I didn’t grow up in this very same neighborhood? But Loubella
works
for me, woman. She’s my whore. Just ’cause she don’t punch no time clock don’t mean she ain’t on salary. And the lady of the house don’t fraternize with the help.”
Well. Blanche hadn’t believed a word of that. She knew there was something more tiptoeing around in Parnell’s big head. She also knew that he sampled the goods from time to time, like a moonshiner sipping his own whiskey, and she guessed that included Loubella too. But then, she enjoyed a taste of other sweetmeat her own self now and again, so she wasn’t about to be calling the kettle black.
And every once in a while, like naughty children ignoring all warnings, she and Loubella still slipped off to have a good visit, and whatever quick and dirty passed between her husband and her friend was no part of that.
But then there’d been Loubella’s Fourth of July birthday and the paddleboat and—worse than catching them in bed together, because what would that mean, after all, a little roll in the hay between two people who trafficked in flesh—she’d seen their eyes meet.
Again and again throughout that afternoon, she’d watched that connection between them, as simple and direct as plugging in a lamp. Their glances crossed and caught and held, and Blanche had to turn her gaze away, for if Parnell had leaned over and slowly licked Loubella’s naked eyeball, the act could not have been more intimate. Everything else in the entire world, including her, oh yes, including her, fell away. And Blanche, who had never had that kind of communion with another human being in her whole life but recognized it when she saw it, hated Loubella from that very afternoon to this.
So she’d punished her, hadn’t she, she’d punished her good. Planted a load of dope in her room, then called the cops to raid her own joint. It was hers by then, Aces having already pulled the trigger that morning so long ago, pulled the trigger that had blasted Parnell’s head and sent it rolling and tumbling like a child’s ball down Front. She’d married Aces right after that, before they sent him up for a little stay in Angola.
Now she looked up at Loubella from the edge of her violet-sprigged coffee cup and all the years fell away. There before her was the face of the little girl with birthday candles shining in her eyes, the little girl she’d loved as her own. Parnell had been dead for so many years, and he hadn’t been worth shaking a stick at, anyway. What had all that been about? Blanche wondered what would happen if she reached out and patted Loubella’s cheek and said, “I’m sorry I was so mean.” Would Loubella understand that if she could do it all over again she’d do it differently?
Loubella caught her look and that old communion of spirits that ran between them straighter than the string of a child’s tin-can telephone told her what Blanche was thinking.
She smiled and her gold tooth twinkled. Blanche’s heart lurched. That tooth had always reminded her of Parnell’s with his diamond, but no, no, forget Parnell. He was what had brought her to this pass in the first place. Maybe
that
had been her problem all along, paying attention to men, my God, there had been so many of them, when there were other folks, plenty of other folks, her family, her children, all those women who could have been her sisters, sitting right there in her face big as life—hell, maybe they
were
life—and she had looked right through them like they were water, past them to whatever man was waggling his dick like it was a magic wand that would turn her into a fairy princess with its touch.
Well, you been touched by them wands plenty times, ain’t you, woman, and you ain’t no princess yet
. But here was Loubella smiling at her. Maybe it wasn’t too late.
“You gonna come in the house and sample some of my cake or not?” Loubella was asking.
“Why, I’d be proud to,” Blanche answered, rising from her chair and feeling like she was floating. Something had been released in her, and she felt light and wispy as a pink cloud. “And by the way, happy birthday, Miss Loubella.”
“Thank you, Miss Blanche.” Loubella ducked her head as if she were suddenly shy. Why, yes, Blanche thought. The little girl is still there. We can start over. It’s not too late.
Blanche watched Loubella bustling around her neat kitchen, and suddenly the two girls of long ago had swapped places. Now Loubella was the momma, the momma Blanche had never really been to anyone. For the small acts of mothering Blanche had practiced on Loubella had not followed her into adulthood. Now that she thought about it, she couldn’t remember ever plaiting her own daughters’ hair, though she must have. And she’d certainly never taught Jesse to swim. Who had done all those things—washed their clothes, cooked the countless meals her children must have eaten—because indeed they had grown up. It all seemed like such a blur now, those years of their childhood. She remembered a few snatches, but the pictures in her mind were duplicates of the pictures she’d pasted in a photo album. The kids standing in front of one of her new Cadillacs. All three of them lined up on the porch of River City. Jesse in a new white suit for one of her weddings, she couldn’t remember which.
But there were no photographs of the three children sitting with Blanche reading or storytelling or fixing a hem. Did their grandmother Lucretia have pictures like that in her photo album? she wondered. Did people take pictures of a woman serving dinner to her family?
Well, they ought to. Not that she would ever be caught dead in one, but look now, here, at Loubella putting food on the table in front of her. Those sturdy hands carefully placing the little violet-sprigged dessert plate that matched the cup and saucer, they were delivering more than a piece of cake, more like a gift of love.
“Loubella!” Blanche exclaimed suddenly, for her eye had finally caught the diamond sparkler upon Loubella’s left hand, and her mind quickly jumped from its maternal meditation back to the more familiar territory of earthy goods. “Good Lord have mercy, where did you get that pretty thing?” And in an instant Blanche, with an eye accustomed to weighing and assessing, had its value appraised as precisely as if she’d examined it with a scale and a jeweler’s loupe.
“Isaac.” Loubella smiled. “It’s Isaac’s birthday present to me.”
With that, Blanche remembered why she’d come in the first place.
“Where is Isaac?” she asked, looking around the room as if he might be hiding behind the sugar canister or underneath the table with its plastic lace tablecloth.
“Oh, he slipped out the back to get some Scotch. Said we ought to have a proper celebration and I’d just run clean out. But I’ve got some bourbon. Could I sweeten your coffee with a little nip?” And before Blanche could answer, Loubella had poured her a generous dollop, filling her coffee cup to the brim.
“But I thought you said he was here, inside. Didn’t you say that a little while ago?”
“He was. He’ll be right back. Go ahead, Blanche, drink up.”
Blanche took a sip and then another. The dark, sweet coffee and the alcohol warmed her blood even hotter on this July delta night. She could feel it coursing right down to her toes. And the warmth distracted her for a moment from the other questions that had popped into her mind. Like, what did Isaac want? What was the deal he had mentioned? Why had he given her Loubella’s address? And what was it between them, anyway, his giving Loubella a diamond as if she were a decent woman?
Loubella answered that last one even before Blanche threw it out.
“That Isaac, he is the sweetest man. We’ve been keeping company, you know, for quite some time.”
“Well, I swear. I never knew that.”
“Honey, there’s lots of things you don’t know about Loubella. It’s not exactly as if we been in touch.”
Blanche lowered her gaze then. Here it comes. This wasn’t going to be as easy as she’d thought.
But in a moment all was calm again. She’d mistaken a passing cloud for a storm gathering. And before she knew it, Loubella was sweetening up her coffee again, and they were leaned back in their chairs, Loubella tucking her feet up, her legs in the circle of her arms, and it was like they were back on the service steps of River City gossiping about folks like Parnell had never come between them, as if his head had never rolled down Front.
“Tell me ’bout your children. What’s Jesse up to?”
“Well, I guess he’s doing all right. Married. Uh-huh.” She paused a moment, thinking about that. And then with pride in her voice said, “He called me today just to say hello.”
“He lives in California, doesn’t he? They come and visit you?”
“Uh-huh. Once. Stopped by my house.” She put her cup down, and this time Loubella didn’t even bother with the coffee, just filled it with bourbon, straight up. “Why, I think that day they said they’d been by to see you too.”
“That’s right.”
“Can’t say as I thought much of her.”
“Why not?”
Blanche just shrugged. You’d have to be mother to a son to understand that.
Loubella rose then, steady as a rock, for no alcohol had passed her lips, just coffee and a few bites of cake. As she skirted the back door, she reached out and tested it, just to make sure. Before Blanche came, she had locked that dead bolt from the inside and dropped the key in her garbage sack. Of course, Blanche didn’t know that.
“Way things are these days, you can never be too safe,” Loubella said.
Blanche nodded. “Ain’t that the truth. Why, just last week, I was reading in the paper about some crazy boys downtown grabbed a woman on her way home, arms full of groceries and…”
Loubella wasn’t listening, except to a plan she’d run through her mind so many times that it had become a script. She couldn’t hear Blanche because she was following that script. Now she read the line that said, “Excuse yourself,” and she did.
“Bathroom,” she said.
“Sure, honey. Me too, after you.”
Loubella closed the kitchen door behind her and headed down a little hall to her bedroom where she picked up the red five-gallon can of gasoline she’d earlier placed inside. She tipped the nozzle, splashed the bed, and began a damp trail that followed her as if to her mamaw’s house. In the living room she locked the front door from the inside and hid that key, too, beneath a cushion of her favorite chair. Then she doused the chair, the sofa, the faded Persian rug. After that she did what she’d said, went into the bathroom and relieved herself. For she wanted to be perfectly at ease for this last best part, the cherry on her ice cream sundae.
Then she rejoined Blanche, who had been sitting there drinking another couple of fingers of bourbon that she didn’t need. Loubella frowned. She wanted Blanche slowed, but not so drunk that she missed a moment of the impending horror show.