City of Refuge Tom Piazza

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.She picked up the underpants with the cutaways one more time, held them out by the strings.She’d wait; maybe she’d come back and buy them.Anyway, Craig wouldn’t be back for another three days.Planka’s was almost at the end of the block.Alice liked the place, an older store run by a family, with all kinds of mismatched stuff—mostly art supplies but also straw hats, tarot cards, greeting cards, coffee mugs, little statuettes and Halloween costumes and posters.The floors were charmingly unreconstructed—linoleum green in some places and black in others, and the art supply section was in back, up a couple of stairs, on bare, worn wood flooring.There she picked out two sets of pastels, a nice starter set for Annie and a slightly larger one for herself—Caran d’Ache—pricey, but this was worth the investment.Annie loved to draw—she was crazy about Ms.Ritter, the art teacher at St.Lawrence—and Alice looked forward to teaching her daughter a little bit about the more sophisticated techniques involved in pastels.And also just drawing herself—she imagined the feel of the pastels in her fingers, the simplicity of the experience, the direct pleasure of making a mark on a piece of paper, the immediate return.She also picked out two sketchbooks with heavy-duty paper and went to check out.Waiting there behind two other customers, she mused idly over the little impulse-buy items, the mints and gum, the talking key chains, the eyeglass-repair kits.She looked at her pastel sets, which made her happy.As she looked at them, she noticed her hands, the slight redness and dryness in the knuckles in the fluorescent overhead lights.She stared at the backs of her hands.Not an old person’s hands, not by a long way, but it seemed that she could read a map of the past eight years in them.Her nails, trimmed short and unpolished, like a nun’s haircut…“Will that be all for you?” came the polite, older man’s voice, Mr.Planka.“Yes, thanks,” Alice said.“These are wonderful,” he said, tapping the pastel sets lightly, ringing them up.Outside, she stood in front of the store for a few moments, looking around at the crisp shadows on the street, the bright blue sky over the two-story buildings, the people coming and going, and she willed herself to be happy.This is life, she thought.Come on.She decided to make one more stop, turned left and crossed North Oliphant onto the third block of OffWabash.Plume was an upscale stationery shop, one of the strip’s new jewel boxes, which sold handmade papers and expensive pens, fine notebooks, custom letterhead, engraved wedding invites.She had been thinking about getting a journal for herself, someplace to keep the thoughts and feelings and experiences she was having in Elkton.If she could start stockpiling these images and good feelings maybe they would begin to accrue interest, maybe before long they would start adding up to a life.Inside, she looked at one leather-bound journal, pretty, a rich, soft brown leather with an elastic band to keep it closed, and cream-colored paper inside.It would have been an extravagance, at forty-two dollars, and she looked around at some others to find one at a slightly more reasonable price.Here was one—red leather, or imitation leather, with a softer cover.Maybe? She opened it, white pages, and for some reason they had put a thick, annoying border around the lined part, and she put it back.Here was a black one, with a rose on it.A rose on the upper-right-hand corner of the front.Craig had bought her a journal very similar to it, not long after they had moved to New Orleans.He bought it at Scriptura, one of her favorite stores, on Magazine Street.He knew she would like it.She set the journal back down and walked out the door.Alice cut around the corner onto Oliphant, weeping, sat down at an empty bus stop bench, furious with herself.Why was she crying? Something inside her had betrayed her, some part of herself that she didn’t even know.Almost like wetting the bed—that sense of affront, of part of her acting on its own, without her permission…It was a strange thing to remember at that moment.Her father had made her feel like a leper about it, but her mother showed an odd sympathy; they had never had that great a relationship, but Alice remembered some feeling of tenderness around that one question.A bus rolled past, down Oliphant.She hated this; there was no room for her to have her own grief about their life, or to miss New Orleans; Craig’s missing it took up all the air there was; it sucked the air out of her lungs.She wanted to be here, where she was.It was a chance at a fresh start, which she had wanted, and it was evaporating before she even had a chance to experience it.Annie had had a bedwetting problem, too.It was a couple years back, and Alice had a hard time with it; she got angry with Annie, kept telling her to pull it together.Why was she thinking about this now? What an idiot, she thought.Craig had been so gentle and understanding with Annie, too, during that time.Their daughter.Where are you, she thought, sitting there weeping…like an idiot, she thought…Craig, goddammit, where are you?All along the grassy neutral ground on Carrollton Avenue, on either side of the dormant streetcar tracks, the little signs bloomed like wildflowers.Little thin wire stems, blowing slightly in the breeze—Oak Street Grill Now Open.Jefferson Chiropractic Open.Crescent Ford Now Hiring.Drywall and Painting Specialists.Ochsner Welcome Home—We’re Open, Walk-Ins Accepted…Craig was driving up Carrollton toward Mid-City to visit Bobby and Jen, who were staying in Baton Rouge and driving into New Orleans every day to gut the first floor of their house.He wished Alice could see these little signs.He took a couple of snapshots with his digital camera.He would tell her about them that evening on their nightly call.What he would not tell her about was how hard he found it to be in New Orleans, even in their neighborhood, which had been spared the devastation of most of the rest of the city.The community had been so wounded; everyone had the worst stories, so many people were absent—temporarily or permanently.It was heavy on the heart, being there, and everyone showed it in unexpected ways.Craig, for example, could apparently not eat enough doughnuts.He would buy a box of Krispy Kremes and eat three right off the bat walking through the rooms of his house.Yet there were also all these little signs of hope—a restaurant opening, a friend seen for the first time…Slowly, some parts of the city were making witty and defiant gestures toward normalcy.Bacco, a high-end French Quarter restaurant, had opened at the end of September, when there was still no safe running water in the city, serving meals on paper plates with plastic utensils and a Xeroxed daily menu consisting only of cheeseburgers.People huddled together in the one steamy coffee shop that might be open within a mile’s radius.But to get to these outposts, one walked or drove through streets where the dust blew down the sidewalk and the houses sat in comas, waiting for life to return.After nightfall, the areas of the city that had flooded were submerged in darkness.Nighttime drivers passing through on Interstate 10 looked down upon two cities, on either side of the elevated roadway; toward the river, the French Quarter was brightly lit, although the streets were empty [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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