by Laura Newman
In the end she gave as much money as possible to Sanjita and we moved to Paris. She opened a used-book store and became a salon-style coffeehouse intellectual. She kept up the Charminar cigarettes and favored Darjeeling tea. It was at last the life that suited her blown-knee jeans and white linen shirts. But she ever kept a photo of my father by her bed with marigolds, when she could get them, in a small vase by its side.
I was the one who came to open the restaurant. With my French-Indian wife, in Montmartre. The House of Naan and Saffron. Come see us sometime; the food is divine.
The Franklin Avenue Rookery for Wayward Babies
Katrina has a regard for nuns, and it isn’t high.
“Some son of a bitch wet my bed!” That’s me, wakin’ up.
“Oh my God, Katrina, y’all wet the bed again?! You’re nine years old!” That’s my brother Beau, yellin’ at me. But I don’t wanna talk about it. So I climb right out of that pee puddle. Beau opens the curtains and the sun comes in. I don’t know why my brother is in my room anyway. Where’s Mama at? She’s the one who wakes me up.
Beau tells me to wash up and come straight down for breakfast. Usually Mama does my hair. It’s Sunday, so she could be hung over, lying on the floor of her bedroom, the French door with its peeling blue paint open for oxygen. I’ll find her later and tickle her elbow insides. She hates that! But she never yells at me like Beau just did.
Beau sets out Cheerios and leftover fried chicken. Well, that chicken’s from Willie Mae’s Scotch House so I’m eatin’ that. I don’t wanna eat anything called Cheerios anyway. Don’t tell me how to feel. Beau isn’t talking, he’s just shuffling around like he can’t pick his big black feet up off the ground. “Baa Baa, why aren’t you talkin’ to me?” I ask and all he says is, “Stop calling me that.” He is flat-out angry today. He slaps a glass of milk down on the table and Kitten Little jumps up and starts licking up the spillover. I pet her.
Charlie walks in and he looks at Beau, but he won’t look at me so I know something shitty’s going on. The two of them go over to the kitchen sink and turn away from me, facing out the window, kind of twinned together. My brothers. Baa Baa, I call him that because he looks like Black Sheep in my rhymes book, I don’t know why he doesn’t like that. He has woolly hair. And Charlie, pock marks stitched across his left check, he’s Oriental like the drawings in my Marco Polo book. The two of them stand there looking like the black-and-white ying-yang tattoo Charlie has on his shoulder.
Well, I can’t do nothin’ about whatever’s bothering those two. I share my cold chicken with Kitten Little.
Beau sends me outside to the garden, which is the size of a pea. The magnolia tree is in bloom—imagine being able to push flowers out of yourself—pink and waxy and smelling faintly like they just got out of the bath. We have a patio of old red brick mossed over and a statue of Saint Francis in the corner of the flower beds. Shreds of old Mardi Gras netting from the people who lived here before us still hang on the fence. I think about taking the netting down and wrapping it ‘round my head like a sultan’s turban, but it’s probably got spiders in it. I sit down and start to color in my paper book of saints.
Color is what I do when things go wrong. If I want to pretend everything is all right, I stay in the lines and press softly. I make the gold halos see-through. If I’m feeling blue, I color everything blue. If I’m angry, watch out, that page is going to be so thick you could run a fingernail through the red wax.
I know I was born in the Superdome. My name’s Katrina Theresa. Named after the storm and Mother Theresa. Not the good one. Just our mother, Theresa Chalfant.
Sometimes I imagine what it must have been like in the Superdome. Mama won’t tell me about it. So I make the story up in my head: I picture the Superdome coming off its foundations, pulled out to sea. A slave ship. The weather is like looking into the round porthole of the washing machines at the launderette. Inside the Superdome, too many people. It smells like men, hot metal, fried chicken gizzards, people-shit. I picture my mom in labor, her hair tied up in her banana-print scarf, kinky hair coming out the top like exclamation points. She has to gulp down those smells. Her legs are spread and some old-men bastards sit on their cots and watch. Women coo around her, put towels on her dark forehead, but the water isn’t cool and the rags smell like old bong water. At last I come out, white hair and blue eyes. No one hears me cry. The slave ship heads into the storm.
After the hurricane all of New Orleans is a rotting bayou. Alligators eat bloaty-floaties like it was lunch at Commander’s Palace. What a feast! Water hyacinth and mosquito fern edge the streets of the Lower Nine. Mold blossoms in flower shapes inside, outside empty houses. Egrets land like angels, flutter their wings in released prayer, fly on. Motor boats putt-putt up and down the waterways, Bring out y’r dead.
I get bored imagining the past and read some of my Classics Illustrated comic books. Finally, I sneak back inside the house. Beau and Charlie are still in the kitchen drinking coffee. As I enter the room, Beau puts sugar into his cup and when he drinks it a few grains stick to his lips like glitter. Beau tells me to go straight to my room and put on a dress. Charlie is taking me to church. I say nothing. Charlie doesn’t go to church. Mama does. Mama takes me.
I put on my blue check and head back downstairs. But my feet bypass the stairs and go into her room. I see her vanity with the Woolworth’s lipsticks and the printed cardboard box of lavender powder, white satin ribbon on the puff. A box of Dark and Lovely. Her empty bed is unmade, her favorite old crazy-quilt askew. She is on the ground, toes sticking out from the far side of the bed. Wineberry polish. I watched her apply it just last week. I move a little closer. The French door is open and a slice of sunshine turns her skin two different shades of brown, like toast where one side is toastier than the other. She is wearing her Swiss dot nightgown, buttons all the way up the front.
Charlie is at the door before I see her face. “Let’s go, Katrina, let her sleep.”
Charlie and I walk through the French Quarter to the St. Louis Cathedral. I look in the windows of the shops we pass on Decatur Street. But I’m not looking at the gaudy displays. I’m looking at my reflection. My pale hair in too-tight braids and my clothes always too big because I’m skinny as a voodoo pin. My face of freckles. I look like a girl who lies. If I see a rainbow, that’s all it is. I’m not going over it.
I beg for beignets every time we pass by Café du Monde but I never get ‘em.
We pass the Presbytère, where Fats Domino’s Katrina-wrecked Steinway lies in requiem. The Steinway took a vow of silence on the day I was born. Fats’s house was in the Ninth Ward. On the day after the storm, morning light filtered through Fats’s punched-out roof, spotlighting the underwater piano. A catfish slapped its heavy tail on the ivory keys and a slow cloud of algae rose instead of melody.
Church is church. Tourists, locals, and nuns. Kneel, stand, kneel, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. This is the body of Christ; this is the blood of Christ. Yuck. I mostly look at the stained-glass windows depicting the life of King Louis IX of France. He pooped himself to death in 1270 during the Eighth Crusade, which somehow translated into making him a saint. Charlie, who hasn’t been to church since his sixteenth birthday two years ago, listens to the priest and pays to light a long, sallow candle after the service. The little flame immediately blows out in the wake of a fat white woman and, against the rules, Charlie relights the wick. This time the flame takes hold and waves goodbye to us as we turn away.
Charlie doesn’t make me go to Little Saints Sunday School and on the way home we stop at Café du Monde! Under the green-and-white-striped awnings I drink chicory coffee for the first time, and although I thought chicory was a type of horse like a pinto, it’s not. Turns out beignets are sugar-powdered angels that you eat. The whole experience is holier, more gratifying to my soul than an hour in that cold cathedral with its roofline of three pointy black witch hats. Hecate and the other tw
o.
As we leave the café the bells of the cathedral chide me, naughty girl, naughty girl. When we get home Beau tells me Mama is dead. Her body was taken away while we were at church and all I got to say goodbye to were her Wineberry toes.
Two Months Later
I have cried every day for two months. I look like a snowy barn owl, all big eyes. It is hard for me to understand my brothers. Charlie is eighteen and Beau nineteen. They are old enough to take possession of me. But they do not. They tried, and I tried to be good as gold. But let’s face it, I’m more like that rack of cheap Black Hills stuff they sell at Woolworth’s, they don’t even put it behind glass. I cuss, I wet the bed, I fling my thoughts to the wind. Boys that age don’t know what to do with little girls. The laundry alone confounds them. And there’s no money. Even I know that. Even I know what an Eviction Notice is. My brothers are joining the armed services and I’m going to The Rookery on Franklin Avenue. They promise to write. I know they will. I nod to the magnolia tree and steal the Saint Francis statue, squirrels at his feet, puppy in his arms, birds on his shoulders like Cinderella.
Kitten Little is lost to me.
On the day Beau and Charlie walk me to The Rookery, my legs don’t work. Head down, I see my skinny knees below the hem of my yellow dress. My kneecaps look like little brains. My knee-brains want to turn around and run the other way. Plus, I’m so mad. A summer butterfly wings by like a sonnet and I cuss at it, call it a shithead. Beau picks me up in his big dark arms and tells me I’m twitching like I got that St. Vitus’ dance disease. I don’t know what that is, but yeah, I got it bad. “Baa Baa … ,” I cry into his shirt that smells like something I am going to miss and he holds me tight. I’m just a bag of sticks.
The Rookery is a small Catholic orphanage run by two young white nuns, Sisters Camille and Hope, and an old black nun, Sister Lily. Sister Lily is so old she’s almost ashes and she’s got a gimp. I meet them on the front porch. They wear full-length habits and headpieces that cover their hair, the fabric faded to a sad gray, and their hems are frayed. I’m not sure they would let them in at the witch-hat cathedral. Charlie tells me I am lucky—the Sisters only take in six children at a time, usually babies to be adopted out. I am clearly too old for The Rookery. I turned ten last week. I’m probably going to be made into a slave. If they think I am going to join them in nun-dom, they got another think coming.
I sit out on the porch in a wicker rocker and old Sister Lily gives me a cola drink in a glass bottle. Beau and Charlie go just inside to the sitting room and sit. It’s a hot day and the windows are open. Everyone keeps their voices low, but Sister Hope has one of those traveling voices and I catch snitches and snatches. “What a tragedy …” “We are happy to have her …” “Y’ll’s mother …” “Y’ll’s mother …” “Heroin … ”
Heroin! Those fuckers told me it was a heart attack. If I had my crayons and my saints coloring book right now I’d find a picture of the Virgin Mary and I’d make her black. I’d give her springy hair and dark eyes. Then I’d get my red crayon and put the flames of Hell around her so thick I’d use my whole stick. Right over her face. I hate her I hate her I hate her. She died and left me at The Rookery with a bunch of penguin kooks.
When I say goodbye to Charlie and Beau I’m crying so hard it’s as if I’m behind a waterfall. They are wavery, already-gone brothers. Beau tells me he loves me more than football, but I don’t believe him. Charlie tells me not to cuss in front of the Sisters and I tell him go to shit in a bucket. They both hug me so hard all my bones crack, or at least my heart.
Well, life goes on, doesn’t it?
The Rookery is an old house with wood-plank floors that talk to each other constantly. The kitchen is speckled linoleum worn to the nub. It has nothing to say. I know the floors intimately because it’s my job to clean them. The window frames are painted pink and there’s houseplants everywhere, big Boston ferns that look like banshee heads at twilight. Palms, and purple coleus. Old Sister Lily plays a rickety piano, and all the furniture is comfortable. I am allowed to sit anywhere. The TV is larger than you would think. Both younger Sisters have laptops. Sister Camille is fond of ‘70s and ‘80s music and she takes me with her to Euclid Records, where, believe me, nuns don’t usually go. With Sister Hope I go to the Crescent City farmers’ market, where all the vendors know her and our baskets runneth over for free.
The Sisters gave me a room of my own! It has a small bay window with a seat that lifts up, and I keep my art supplies and Saint Francis in there. There are two twin beds, quilts thicker than I am. I have a trove of books—Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, Anne of Green Gables, and my secret favorite, the baby book Madeline, about the little French orphan raised by nuns.
I don’t want to say I like it at The Rookery.
The babies are the best part. Aaron, Sarah, Jacob, Charlotte, and Suzette. They don’t know they are orphans, so they don’t cry over that. The Sisters don’t have to ask me to help. I like to give the babies baths, two at a time, bubbles, and powder their backsides until they look like beignets.
I have a regard for nuns, and it isn’t high. I associate them with a lack of makeup and a ruler that seems to be used for many things, excepting measuring. You don’t need crayons to draw them; a pencil will do. The Rookery nuns are different. They appear to be people.
Of course we go to church. On my first Sunday I expected we would walk over to the St. Louis Cathedral but instead we headed two miles straight down our street to the Franklin Avenue Baptist Church. I thought it was a mistake when the Sisters started bouncing the baby strollers up the front steps, but the pastor came out to help us, calling everyone by name and asking about me, “Who’s this here, who’s this here?” His eyebrows shot up when old Sister Lily said, “Theresa’s girl.” The babies got bundled off to the nursery, and I assumed we would leave and go around the corner to a Catholic church. But no. We went in. I didn’t think nuns were allowed to go there; isn’t that against the law?
The only church I ever met was a cathedral. Gilt and guilt. This church looked more like a movie theater, full of wood and only one stained-glass window with a big white dove. Pretty much like the one on a bar of Dove soap. I’m familiar with a Jesus who hangs on a cross, all skinny, wearing some diaper thing, long dirty hair, face down, nails in his hands and feet. Nails! You better listen up! Look what this man did for you! There was no Jesus on the cross in the Baptist church. How am I supposed to feel bad if I don’t see Suffering Jesus?
The younger Sisters from The Rookery and I were just about the only white people there. Certainly the Sisters were the only nuns. There were no tourists sneaking photos. Then the sermon started and, Holy Christ, what a commotion. That church could bust a move. At the cathedral I got down on my knees, head bowed, palms pressed tightly together to pray. I had nowhere to look but inside. What am I going to see in there that I don’t already know? The Baptists do it differently. I watched as those around me held open one hand, two hands, raised those hands to receive. The Sisters did it too. Hands up and open, they sang. I was a nervous little sparrow so all I could make myself do was tentatively hold open one palm, just barely, awkwardly close in to my body. But I left it open.
Maybe I felt Jesus there, just in the palm of my upturned hand.
For a year or more I stayed in my room when I was sent to bed. Sometimes I would sit in the window seat and think of Charlie and Beau. They did write me, and sent me halvah and Persian nougat. I tried to picture them with bandoliers crisscrossing their chests, I tried to picture them killing people. I felt I would never know them again. In the worst of the summer humidity I would watch clouds rise right out of the cypress trees, like ghosts in the moonlight. In winter raindrops would catch in the Spanish moss and the night birds would stop for a drink. I would sit in the window and think of my mama and how she liked to pin a gardenia in her hair. Her beautiful fingers. She would sing me to sleep. I hate her I hate her I hat
e her. Mother fucker, heroin addict drunk fuck-up dead cunt.
Late at night I would hear old Sister Lily at the piano and the nuns laughing in a quiet way that made me think of crystal glasses. Always they were quiet to keep the babies still. Sarah and Aaron had been adopted out and now we had Justin and surely another baby would be here soon. I had to learn to think of the babies as puppies, something to play with that we couldn’t keep. There seemed to be no question of anyone adopting me.
One hot night I couldn’t sleep and I listened to the Tinker Bell sounds of old Sister Lily at the keys. Soon I heard her climbing the staircase, headed to bed. I waited a stretch. Then I ghosted out of my room and down the staircase. I could have named each plank, I knew those steps so well from cleaning them; they would not squeal on me. I peeked into the parlor and almost peed.
The Sisters were playing cards. It couldn’t have been poker with just the two of them, so maybe gin rummy. Their robes were huddled on the floor like loyal gray hound dogs. There was a bottle of dark wine. Candles. Sister Hope was in a red bra and black panties, Sister Camille in white, nothing but lacy bits. And they had hair! Just the fact of that!
Sister Camille lost the next hand and Sister Hope gave a pirate laugh. She held her cards up like a dagger. Sister Camille surrendered her bra but held Sister Hope’s eyes so intently that Sister Hope could not break the stare. I was the first one to see Sister Camille’s release of candlelit flesh.
I ran back up stairs.
Was that a hula girl tattoo I saw on Sister Hope’s arm?
And so began the great spying game. Most nights the Sisters sat around in jeans and ponytails, shorts, a glass of wine. Books and laptop videos. Some nights Sister Camille liked to dress up like Madonna, wearing all her crosses at once, and she would dance to “Like a Virgin” and “Papa Don’t Preach”, and Sister Hope would applaud. On these nights they seemed like … sisters.
