papers underfoot. But mostly he lied about time.
He cushioned arrival times without revealing that he was infuriated by Marie’s hopeless lateness. At first he exaggerated by only a ten or twenty minutes, but by the end of Marie’s pregnancy he was inflating their arrival times by a few hours. The appointments they kept in those final weeks of pregnancy were due to Steven’s cunning. Marie never noticed his dishonesties; she was too gripped by the bizarre happenings inside her body—the squashed bladder and compromised lungs, the odd pains in her abdomen and hips, the heat rash and heartburn, the otherworldly sensation of a sentient being moving around inside her.
During her third trimester, Marie spent an inordinate amount of time resenting the scaffolding. After living in Soho for four years, she had turned dodging teenagers and tourists into an art form. But the scaffolding disarmed her. It hemmed her in, turning wide, open sidewalks into narrow corridors. She couldn’t dart about, couldn’t zigzag around leisurely shoppers. Steven had heard so many complaints on the topic that he refused to listen to another word. She was left to hate the scaffolding silently, blaming it for everything from her lateness to the anxious tightening in her chest that flared whenever she had to navigate around strollers and slowpokes.
Mostly she resented the scaffolding for stealing her sunshine. The winter had been hell: the coats, struggling with layers, the flashes of sweat that engulfed her when she was finally all bundled up. When she started seeing the sun, and feeling warmth when she pressed her hand to the windowpane, all she wanted to do was go outside and let it soak into her skin. She would smile anticipating the flush of the sun’s rays on her cheeks as she leisurely strolled to her appointments. But the sunny meanderings she longed for would rarely materialize. She would waste time reorganizing her file cabinet, cleaning the edges of the kitchen hardware with a Q-tip, or shredding junk mail with a pair of scissors. By the time she left her apartment, strolling was not an option. She had to make a mad dash for a cab as soon as she made her way down her front steps. She would stand in the shadow of the scaffolding, hand raised to hail a cab, with an angry scowl on her face.
Sunshine was not something Marie grew up chasing. Warmth came early in the bayou where Marie grew up, and hung around—thickly—for most of the year. But here, in New York, spring brought a giddy eagerness that Marie knew her brothers would have teased her for feeling. Their teasing, once the torturous backdrop of her childhood, had become the language of their newfound closeness as adults.
Marie would be the first to admit that their closeness was metaphorical. It had been so long since her last trip home, she might as well have been estranged from her family. The irony of her absences was not lost on her. During her first months in New York, she had held on to her memories of home, feverishly, desperately, as if she would wash away on a sea of the city’s dirty grays and browns if she didn’t hold on to her birthplace as her anchor.
Her perpetual longing for home had been so acute that it had taken on a sound—a staticky buzzing that had followed her around like a smog. In her earliest experiences with subway stations, she’d found that no matter where she stood on the subway platform or in the subway car, she heard a hum and a crackle overhead. She had at first blamed it on the ancientness of the subway system. After some weeks, she came to think of it as her grief and imagined everyone could see a dark melancholy bleeding from her skin.
To make matters worse, her homesickness was tinged by her unshakable suspicion that there was something deeply and terribly wrong with New York City. It wasn’t until Joe Jr. sent her a picture of him and Daddy that everything clicked for her. In the photo they were just back from a fishing trip. Fishing gear peeked out from the back of her father’s pickup truck, and both father and son triumphantly hoisted thick clusters of glistening fish. Eyeing the curve of oak branch arcing just behind Joe Jr.’s head, she realized what had been nagging her about New York City. “Trees,” she whispered to herself. “There are no trees here.”
There were, of course, trees in New York. Slim little decorative things grotesquely outmatched by steel and glass. There were more substantial trees in parks and gardens, but their constrained presence had no strength, could not compare to majestic oaks whose powerful roots ripped up sidewalks, shaded porches, and gifted the earth with a bounty of acorns.
Whenever she mourned the loss of trees, she found herself on a slippery slope to misery. She would leap from missing the old quiet of ancient trees and the drape of Spanish moss hanging from their branches, to remembering the smell of shrimp shells cooking down to make stock and the tangy musk of flour darkening into a roux. Before she knew it, she’d be aching for a steaming paper bag bulging with crawfish, the grainy sweetness of homemade pralines, and salty mouthfuls of gas-station po’boys, especially hot sausage po’boys with their supernaturally red juices soaking into a white pillow of French bread.
The first February was torture. She’d felt like she was trapped on an alien planet. At home there were parties and parades; people went about masked and glittered. But New York had no carnival season—no Professor Longhair on the radio banging out the familiar chords that told the whole city that it was Mardi Gras time, no ragtag neighborhood parades, no liquor in plastic cups. She was disappointed in everyone around her, disgusted at their lack of imagination, angry that no one came to work with a king cake in tow.
In the following years, as her longing for home loosened, up blossomed nostalgia, choking out old hatreds. The first time she wished for a second line to parade across her path, she shocked herself. At home, street revelers had been nothing but an inconvenience and an annoyance. She’d hated the way they backed up traffic as they bounced, dipped, and sauntered down the middle of the street. Yet now she found herself cocking her ear every once in a while, listening hopefully for the guttural vibrato of a roving trumpet player’s instrument.
She even managed to miss the gory magic of caterpillar season. It was a mystery how the sight of dull green insects crawling over each other, coating the branches of trees had become something Marie cherished. Back home, she’d hated how they spilled over in excess, falling from overhead branches, crawling over benches, littering the sidewalk with their smashed, bloody bodies. But the relief of not having to dodge them underfoot was now dwarfed by her desire for a life governed by the unique seasons of home.
The loss that pained Marie the most was intangible. It wasn’t in the holidays or the landscape, but in the people. New Yorkers weren’t particularly mean, nor were they as rude as they had been stereotyped to be, but they were too harried and driven to share intimacies with her. At home, every stranger was a friend—or at least a distant cousin—for the length of time you were in one another’s presence. At bus stops and convenience stores you learned about the private histories, recent disappointments, and crowning glories of someone you had never met.
She couldn’t replicate bayou accents up North, but she tried to inspire Southern fellowship in the city of strangers. She wished random people “Good evening,” tossed a “How y’all doin?” to people sitting on stoops, and complimented subway performers on their singing. She had accepted the fact that nobody, not even the cashier at the grocery store, would call her
Breaking the back of the culture that reared you is a little like breaking in an animal, and Marie had no taste for it. Ever since she was a child, she hated to watch anyone working the wildness out of a horse. But little by little she did it. She stopped trading back-home stories with the janitor at work. She gave her neighbor’s children a tight smile and shut the door in their expectant faces rather than invite them in to play. She resisted the urge to get to know the bathroom attendants when she went out clubbing. Her friends, proud of her progress, congratulated her on becoming a real New Yorker. One winter, when she found herself pushing a slow pedestrian out of her way, she was horrified. Her friends, exultant, told her that her transformation was finally complete.
Loss and gain are two sides of the same heavy coin. As Marie lost the behavioral habits of an outsider, she gained a painful estrangement she had not anticipated. Her hit-and-run intimacies had not only kept her in touch with home, they had given her an excuse to revel in the company of black people. Her friends found her interest in black people strange. They would question, as gracefully as they could, why she was always gabbing with them at security desks and on street corners. They noticed that she didn’t laugh at their black jokes and never echoed their sentiments when they complained about the blacks splattering their loud, rude behavior everywhere.
Marie never let so much as a hint of anger show when her friends were stuffing black people into tight little boxes of distaste. Internally, she scoffed at their attempts to define blackness. Blackness was nothing like what they thought it was. It was more diverse, and less tragic, than they could imagine. She missed people who understood the nuances of the color line. As she solidified her identity as a New Yorker, she lusted for a cultural milieu that had a place for her, that recognized what it meant to be Creole, and therefore Black. It was with sadness, rather than triumph, that she accepted the fact that no one in New York seemed to suspect she could be
