Authors: Jessica Penot
I sat down beside the tree with her. "You only get coal this year, you know," I said.
"I think it’s you who gets the coal this year. Working all the time and neglecting your poor wife."
I leaned over and kissed her. "I would never neglect you. How could I?"
"My other lover says that you neglect me."
"Other lover? Are you saying that you’re sleeping with another man?"
"Not just one," she teased. "Ten beautiful men who hang on my every word. And all of them promise that they'll take me back to Alabama for New Years."
I became serious. I always took her seriously. "I'm sorry about this."
"Nothing to be sorry about." She smiled as she cried. "I knew what I was getting into when I married you. You never lied to me and I'll never regret it."
She kissed me and I forgot about my dissertation. She had that power. "Open your first present from me then," I said.
"Which one should I open?"
"The small one."
She shook the little box before she opened it. She tore into the silver paper like a child. Her hands quaked as she unfolded the small scrap of paper inside the box and as soon as she read the scrap she laughed almost hysterically. The laughter melted into tears and she threw her arms around my neck.
"Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!"
I basked in the warmth of my success. "Are you sure?" she asked. "I mean, you can have any internship you want. You could go to one of the best internships in the country."
"I don't want that. I know you think I can't, but I know how sad you've been. You hate this place."
"Oh no. I love it. I love the yellow snow and the black ice. I love the smell and I love the fact that I'm terrified to walk the dog after 5:00 p.m. What's not to like?"
"Always joking," I said with a wry grin.
"My humor is what has kept me alive these last four years."
"It hasn't been that bad?"
"Not that bad. I had you and I have a few friends. I'm just homesick and I hate the cold."
"Well, to Pintlala, Alabama we go then." I said with a grimace
"It wouldn't have been my first choice, but it is still closer to home than before."
"There aren't too many internships available in Alabama."
"I know. I'm not complaining at all. Have you ever been to Pintlala?"
"No. I've been to Mobile. That's about as close as you can get and not end up on dirt roads."
She laughed. "Sweet home Alabama." I hugged her.
"Aren't you going to open the rest of your presents?" I asked.
"I don't need to. This is all I want. We'll only be a few miles away from Mom and Dad and Sally and Rachel and all of our friends. It'll be good for you too, you know. You’ll never have to have my icy feet on your belly again."
"Somehow I doubt that. Your feet will be cold when it is 90 degrees. Your feet are always cold."
"That's not fair. My feet get warm."
"I can't think of when."
That was a good Christmas. She was happy. I had made her happy. I had made her glow and that was all that mattered. I did not want to return to Alabama. We were going home and I was ambivalent about this; I had been content in Detroit. I found its stark landscape alluring and I loved the way the steam rose from the manholes in the winter. I liked the silence with which the general population moved through life. Never greeting one another. Afraid to make eye contact on the street. They were all separate and estranged. They never asked questions or cared what you did or whom you did it with.
At home, everyone smiled and asked you how your day was going. They hugged you when they didn't know you and talked about you when they didn't care. It didn't matter. It was just a place, like any other.
* * * *
Pria and I rented a small house in Mobile. It was nestled among the long, lazy oaks that make the South famous. Spanish moss hung from the branches of the enormous trees in our yard and brushed the ground with their blackened fingertips. Spider webs had taken over the backyard and enormous, yellow banana spiders lived in colonies that hung over our heads. We didn’t mind the fist-sized spiders because they kept the phone-sized flying, tree roaches at bay. They also formed what my wife called a protective net. In her mind, this net kept the mosquitoes out of our house. Sometimes she even fed the spiders. She called them our pest control men.
Before I began work, she and I would sit on the back porch clinging to cups of saccharine sweet tea and watch the spiders. The dog would get caught in the webs and run back to us with the sticky nets clinging to her nose. Pria always laughed at this and she laughed at me when I got mad at the dog. I hated bathing the dog and I wouldn’t let it in the house when it was dirty. Pria mocked me. She called me obsessive-compulsive, and somehow this seemed to make it better. It made the dog seem less dirty and the dirt seem less important.
For the first week we were in Mobile, we were bombarded with friends and family. They packed our two-bedroom house with housewarming presents and surrounded us with a nest of welcome. I hated this nest. I hated people moving in and out of my space like they belonged there. Her friends, her mother, other people. They drifted in and out of my life like it was their own. I missed the cold and the solitude. My wife pulled them in. She cooked for them and put out our wedding china. She gave them keys and smiled when they walked in without knocking. All I could do was sit in the corner and wait to begin work. It was the incessant prattle that wore on me the most. Their chirping voices rattling on about things that did not matter. Shoes, food, who aunt so-and-so was dating and which people back in India were doing what things.
After that first week, I became lost in my own emotion. This emotion mutated into rage. Rage that I had sacrificed my career and my dreams to sit and watch Pria talk about the most inane bullshit with everyone in the world. My brothers noticed my mood and they swooped in to save me from myself. My brothers took me to New Orleans.
I’m one of three boys. It is a common misconception that all Southerners are stupid white trash who can’t do much of anything well. This isn’t true. In my family, there are many well-educated and successful men and women. Unfortunately, my brothers had nothing in common with these men and women. They embodied the Southern Stereotype. They weren’t successful and they aren’t educated. Jeremy, my older brother, works for Alabama Power and Jeff, my younger brother, moves from job to job. Neither of them had ever left the small town we had grew up in. They liked Gulf Shores. They liked the blue water and the warm sand. Mostly they liked to drink and watch the sun rise and fall on the ocean. I always wanted more than this, as had our parents. I had worked hard to erase my Southern accent and to talk "proper" as my brothers said. I had also worked hard to become everything my father wanted of me. I wanted to follow in my father’s footsteps.
My brothers and I went to New Orleans as we always did. We had always lived only two hours from New Orleans, and the culture that built our area wasn’t so different from the culture that had shaped New Orleans. Not that we had ever cared about that. Mostly we went to drink on Bourbon Street and watch the pretty girls lift up their shirts for anybody who offered them a strand of fifty-cent plastic beads.
Jeremy and Jeff got a room at the Days Inn on the edge of Canal Street and the inter-state. We didn’t stay in that room for more than ten minutes. We tossed our stuff on the grayed comforter and disappeared into the chaos. At first, we just wandered. We talked and watched. We didn’t want to pick a bar too quickly.
"I'm amazed Pria let you come," Jeremy said with his heavy Alabama drawl.
"Pria would have taken me to a strip joint herself for bringing her back to Mobile."
"Still. She has got to know that all we’re gonna do is go from one tittie bar to the next."
I laughed. "No one told me that we were goin' to tittie bars."
"You've been married too long," Jeff responded.
"Long enough to know I'm not going to watch a bunch of fat or skanky underage girls rub all over a filthy pole."
"I didn't think there was anything else to do in New Orleans," Jeremy laughed.
"Hey, now. Don't forget the chain of Voodoo shops and Karaoke bars," Jeff said.
"Look y’all, that girl over there is showing her tits right now. Isn't that enough? We'll go sit at Cats' Meow with some beads and watch the pretty sorority girls lift up their shirts. You know I won't be able to go home to Pria if I walk into one of those strip joints. It's not like y’all aren't married men. What are Carrie and Brooke gonna say?" My Southern accent was already rediscovering itself again. My brothers had that effect on me.
"We don't have the pussy-whipped relationship with our wives like you do with yours. Brooke doesn't tell me where I can go and I don't have to tell her every time I take a leak," Jeff said.
"Y’all are a little too close," Jeremy added.
"What does that mean?"
"It means Pria has your balls in a little jar beside the bed. Hell, we all know you hate it here. You always hated Alabama. You could be at one of the best programs in the country, but instead you're here and she's got your dick in her hand."
"I don't even need to answer that. I did not come here to get lectured on what a healthy relationship is by two guys whose wives come over to my house to bitch incessantly about them. At least my wife is happy. And I promise you that happiness results in me having a lot more fun with my nights than y’all have wandering around at night looking for sleazy strip joints."
Jeff shrugged his shoulders and lit a cigarette, "You got a good point. And Pria is hot."
I smiled broadly. "None of these women even hold a candle."
For a while the topic was dead. We found a bar and sat and talked. Mostly we drank until Jeff's speech disintegrated into a slurred mush of y’alls and fixin' tos. It was like being a teenager again. At that moment, I had to admit to myself that I was happy to be home again. I had missed my brothers. We could just sit and laugh about nothing for hours. Mostly we talked about football and women. I was the only Auburn fan in my family and my brothers rode me hard about it. It didn't matter though. It was the same things we had always talked about. Nothing changed with them. It was as if they had been living in suspended animation.
"That's it," Jeff declared around midnight. "You’re on your own. I'm too drunk to sit in New Orleans without seeing something besides tits."
"I thought we finished this talk," I said. "Do I have to kick your ass?"
"You’re gonna have to. I'll meet y’all back at the room." He just left with a sheepish grin, and Jeremy followed him.
I sat there for a while finishing my drink. I wasn't mad at them. I couldn't blame them. That was who they were and that is what they had always done. I wouldn’t have expected them to change or do anything different. The only difference was that four years ago, I would've gone with them. And I couldn’t judge them. I had my own vices.
After a while, I just got up and wandered the streets. I watched the swarms of people interact. A couple of frat boys had glowing spin sticks that they spun above their heads to read, "Show your tits." Men chanted at teenage girls. Other men curled up and vomited on the curb. Finally, I made it away from the Bourbon Street chaos to Cathedral Square where the fortunetellers sat at card tables or on benches. Most of the fortunetellers looked like teenagers who had bought books on palmistry at the local Books-a-Million and were just trying to scam the tourists. Others looked like some of my old patients. Either way, they did not seem like wise men or prophets that one would go to learn about one’s past or future. I stood in front of the white cathedral watching the people move. Watching their gestures and trying to imagine what diagnoses I would give each of them. I thought that when pathology was as grotesque as it was in New Orleans, maybe I could tell by just watching.
I didn't see her at first. She had been just part of the crowd, but once I saw her it seemed impossible for her to be part of anything but herself. Her green eyes stared out at me through the heat and I stopped thinking about anything but the moment. Her hair was short and cropped. It hung off her head in sharp knots, like feathers. It glowed an artificial blue-black in the dim streetlights. She moved deliberately, like she wanted to draw attention to herself. She turned and smiled at me, showing me her back. She wore a black slip that left her entire back naked. The eyes of an emerald green peacock stared out at me from the enormous tattoo on her back.
I moved towards her without thinking why and she never took her eyes off me. When I approached her, she didn't smile or greet me in any traditional way. She just took my hand and looked at my palm. She had a youthful look about her, but her exact age was impossible to determine. She seemed like a tiny bird. Her skin was cool and soft against mine.
"You’re going to die young," she said.
"You’re doing it wrong," I answered. "You’re supposed to placate me with vaguely positive predictions about the future so I feel good and pay you more money. You’re supposed to figure out what I want to hear and say it."
"You don't have much faith in my art," she said.
"I'll have faith if you tell me to," I responded.
She just looked at me for a minute with a complete self-confidence that only made her more desirable. She knew the effect she had on men. "Do you want to hear the rest of your fortune?" she asked.
"Only if you’re in my future."
"I don't think so. I see other women in your future."
"You see all of that in my palm."
"No, I can see that in your aura. I see a dark woman. She looks foreign. And I see another woman with blonde hair and blue eyes. The dark-eyed one has no future. It is the one with the blue eyes who is really your future."
"Are you saying I'm going to leave my wife?" I asked mockingly. She was speaking vaguely enough that anyone could have found truth in her predictions. Everyone has some woman in his life who is dark, and everyone wants someone who has blonde hair and blue eyes, at least stereotypically. I put no more faith in her prediction being true than I did in God himself.