by Riley LaShea
“Men are quite fond of you.” The same truth that had been impossible to ignore on the train was prevalent again. Punctuating it with a small laugh I didn’t feel, my eyes rose from the white table cloth to gauge Ariel’s reaction, but there was no reaction to gauge.
“Are they?” Ariel’s gaze was unflinching upon me, and I lost all nerve. Just as I had been starting to sink into the feel of being in such a fancy place without my parents, when adulthood felt just out of reach, two words from Ariel made me feel naive and absurd and like a scared little girl again. “If you have something you would like to ask me, Elizabeth, just ask.”
Staring into her eyes, they appeared grayer than usual, and, feeling more like I was being tested than given access to the mysteries that lived inside of her, I knew the wisest thing to do was say nothing, to shut down my mind and insist it find focus someplace else.
“Have you ever...” It was jealousy I couldn’t quite control that wouldn’t let me keep my mouth shut. Realizing what I was about to ask her, I glanced away, wondering what would happen if we were overheard, wondering if I could get through the question without my face turning such a deep shade of red the people around us thought I was choking on bread. At the discovery that no one close enough to hear was paying us a bit of attention, I took a sip of water to steady my nerves, finding it did little more than make my mouth feel drier. “Have you ever been with one?”
“Been with?” Ariel refused to make it easy for me, and, unable to meet her eyes, I could feel the flush crawling up my neck.
“Have you ever... you know,” I breathed, wishing she would just tell me without making me suffer for it. “Have you ever been intimate with a man?”
When Ariel didn’t immediately answer, or say anything for several long seconds after, I was forced to look up, and the expression on her face was mostly shock I had managed to get the question out at all.
“Yes.” I, too, was more surprised that she elected to actually answer me than by the answer itself, though I couldn’t say her response didn’t take me by surprise. “People will do most anything to be normal.”
As the words left her mouth, my mind went instantly to Jackson, across the ocean with Scott, with my promise, but not my heart, while across the table Ariel sat, not knowing how much of my heart she held in her hands, unable to promise me anything, because the world would never accept a promise between us.
Refusing to give into the pain of what I knew I shouldn’t feel, not while Ariel was being open with me, I tried to think of all the things I wanted to know most, my deepest, most pressing questions.
“Was it really that bad?” was all I could come up with.
“It didn’t damage me, if that’s what you mean,” her voice turned sharp, but, beneath its razor edge, I was sure I heard pain, and I shook my head with vehemence.
“No, I didn’t... I don’t think you are...”
I thought she was perfect. I thought she was beyond perfect. That was what I wanted so badly to be able to say to her, but I didn’t have the courage to say anything like that, to go against the opinions of an entire society of people, doctors and preachers included, and tell her there was nothing wrong with her, that everything about her was right, and the silence settled on the table between us like an insurmountable wall.
“You could have anyone you want,” it was several long seconds before I attempted to climb over it. It was the truth, and included me, even if it was impossible and made me achingly sad as I looked across the table at her.
“As long as it’s a man?” she countered, and, her question sounding bolder than any of my own, I glanced to the strangers paying us no attention.
“Do you not even want a husband?” I asked her, and when Ariel broke into helpless laughter, it had a strange, hollow vibration, like she was trapped at the bottom of a deep hole she hadn’t meant to get herself into.
“No,” she declared, and it sounded absolute.
“Then, what do you want?” I was both dying to know, and completely confounded, and I hoped she would explain in a way I could wrap my mind around.
It was such a difficult thing for me to comprehend. Despite women taking work in the factories, finishing college like Ariel, being asked to serve in the Army, even with them getting paid to play baseball in the North, those things were necessities brought about by the economy and the war. They were not a woman’s place in the world.
Even Nan, with her long, untamed youth, ended up a wife and mother in the end.
The answer to that question not coming as quickly or as easily, Ariel at last took a deep breath, and it drew my eyes to her lips, lightly painted peach, as she exhaled.
“Right now,” she quietly responded, “all I want is to have a nice night. So, unless this conversation is imperative to this very moment, I would appreciate it if you would change the subject.”
The conversation was imperative, to that moment and every other moment, all that came before and all that would come after. Unable to admit that, though, I dropped Ariel’s gaze and reached for the undrinkable wine, forcing it past my lips and down my throat.
“Did Nan come here a lot?” I finally found a question that meant almost as much as the one that went unanswered.
“Not a lot, I don’t think,” Ariel said. “But she did come here. This place has been around longer than her.”
“That’s a long time,” I said.
“It is a long time,” Ariel replied, and I was just grateful she was still talking to me.
“Nan’s lived quite a life, hasn’t she?” Looking around the opulent dining room, I could imagine her sitting in a seat at our table, as young and sure of herself as Ariel, before I remembered her back in Richmond, as old and feeble as she was ever going to be, and wondered if we would make it back in time.
“I think she has,” Ariel smiled.
“Like you have,” I stated. Recalling the places she had already been, how many years she’d lived on her own, how educated she was in her field and in the ways of the world, I felt undeserving of Ariel in any way. “You’ve done so much. I feel like I’ll never catch up.”
“It’s not about catching up,” Ariel countered, her eyes finding mine and holding them in a way that made me feel safe and on the edge of something alien to me at the same time. “Nan lived at home until she was nearly my age before she went off on her own,” she reminded me. “There are circumstances that lead people to stay, and circumstances that lead people to go. Sometimes, that’s all it’s about.”
The sad declaration settling over the table, I wondered what circumstances had made Ariel go so often, but, not wanting to ask any more questions that might make her get upset at me, I picked at the bread and drank the bad wine and waited for something else to talk about.
When it finally came, it was in the form of our food, gumbo first, which I tried without asking what each ingredient was, knowing if I knew exactly what I was eating, I would be less likely to open my mouth.
The dish proving as rich and unmatched in Richmond as Nan promised, my waiting grew far less patient by the time the main course came.
“Try this,” Ariel indicated a plate a minute after the waiter left, after I had looked at all the plates twice and couldn’t decide where to start.
“What is it?” I made the mistake of asking.
“Alligator.”
“Alligator?” I repeated. “Are you kidding?”
“No,” Ariel’s soft laughter repelled the worry and hard feelings that pressed in around us. “I’m not kidding. It’s good. Try it.”
Realizing, as she speared a small piece of meat and held it across the table, I would try anything she asked me to, I rested my hand over hers under the guise of keeping it steady, though, I noted with intense interest, it was only as my hand covered hers that Ariel’s shook.
Leaning forward, I pulled the alligator from her fork, thinking, as my lips slid against the metal, it was the same fork that had been between her lips only seconds before, and my eyes flutte
red momentarily shut as I chewed the exotic food that tasted like nothing else.
“What do you think?” Ariel’s voice rasped against the background noise of the restaurant, and when I opened my eyes, I could scarcely believe what I saw in hers. If I were to try to describe it, I could only say, in that instant, Ariel looked at me the same way I had felt for months in her presence.
“It’s different,” I said, and it was so incredibly different. The food, the freedom, and the feelings I had for her that wrapped around me with such affection, while threatening to rip me apart at the same time, all of them unlike anything I had ever known before.
“Different good or different bad?” she questioned, and I wished I knew.
“Just different,” I replied, and, as Ariel pulled her hand away, I missed the feel of her acutely.
If something truly had been there, in that moment, the tiny sliver of time that belonged solely to us, it was swallowed up in a flurry of new foods, as I tried everything Ariel gave me to try, surprised to find I liked far more than I didn’t.
Mostly, though, it was the time with her I liked, even if I shouldn’t and part of me wished I didn’t like it so much. Sitting across the table from Ariel, I let myself dream for a moment it could always be that way, the two of us together in nice places with exotic foods and free of chaperones, a life of autonomy desired by many, but, in our world of social rules and propriety, afforded to few.
‘There is such a thing as too much liberty,’ Daddy often said. ‘When men are free to do as they want, they do as they want.’
That was his reasoning as to why laws had to be enacted and enforced, and, dinner lying rich and heavy in my stomach as Ariel and I got off the streetcar once again and walked through the decorous streets of the French Quarter, I found his warning true.
Free from the watchful eyes of my parents, liberated, if only for a fleeting moment, from the fear of how it made me feel, I slid my hand around Ariel’s arm, ignoring the way she tensed at my touch, too thrilled by the sensation to let her go.
Since the garden, I had been so afraid to reach out to her, afraid of what people would think, of the lustful thoughts a simple touch could sometimes send racing through my mind, of the hedonistic places to which an innocent touch between us could potentially lead. Feeling Ariel’s arm bend slightly, creating a better crook for me, I wondered if that was why she had been afraid to touch me for so long. Now that I knew what it meant to touch her, it made it harder to be casual about it, to pretend it meant less than it did.
A block away, the theater lights shined below the awning like a beacon to time being frivolously spent, Mama might say. Nan had taken us anyway, though, Edward and Scott and me, against all Mama’s protests, and it had gotten inside Scott’s head for a while - the lights and glamour of Hollywood.
“What’s a good character?” he would come running to me as I was doing school work or setting the table for dinner. “Who should I be now?”
“How about the president?” I might say. Or, sometimes it would be a ventriloquist, or a pirate with a heart, or a man who was half zebra. “But a president who always wanted to be a superhero, so he has a whole cabinet of people with amazing powers who go around the country fighting bad guys.”
“What kind of bad guys?” Scott’s eyes would get so wide with excitement when he liked my story.
“Gangsters,” I would say. “And Martians. And giant bug people.”
The ones that weren’t all human always made Scott’s nose crinkle in disgust.
“Don’t worry,” I told him. “That’s why you have Professor Komodo in the State Department. Since he’s part lizard, he eats the bug people for you.”
“Eww, Lizzie,” Scott would laugh, before rushing off to scrounge a costume from his closet, or Edward’s, or mine, or sometimes Mama and Daddy’s if Daddy was at work and he thought he wouldn’t get caught.
I thought he would break my parents’ hearts one day by fleeing across the country to where the weather was said to be perfect and even the men were beautiful. Then, the war came and Edward died and Scott was drafted into respectability. As was I, I realized with a slight frown, the moment I accepted Jackson as my sort-of-boyfriend.
At the thought that should have made me let Ariel go, I only clutched tighter, turning into her, breath catching in my chest as my breast brushed her arm and it felt as if I’d been shocked into life. Not the first time my nipple had hardened in response to something other than the cold, I was certain, it was the first time I was so painfully aware of it, and I could scarcely handle all the things my body longed to feel with her.
“What do you know about this movie?” I breathlessly asked to distract myself from my own runaway desires.
“Not much,” she returned. “It’s a musical comedy. It’s just what’s playing.”
The quiet husk of her voice in the night drawing me even closer, I wondered if Ariel could feel my enthusiasm for late-night indulgence in trivial things, the yearning in my touch to keep her near. If she did, she chose to ignore it, and we walked up to the ticket booth in silence, hers, I assumed, reservation, mine awe that my body could be so insistent it almost drowned out the voices in my head telling me what a bad thing it was to feel.
Glancing to the large display that proudly proclaimed the film “And the Angels Sing” starred New Orleans native Dorothy Lamour, my mind went once again to Scott and his long line of starlet crushes, and then to Edward and the girls he’d thought he might marry before his patriotism overrode his future. How often I had listened to them go on and on about girls, never once considering I might have been so indulgent because, somewhere buried deep, I liked the same things they liked.
Minutes later, I pulled my sweater on in my seat by Ariel near the back of the theater. When Dorothy Lamour came on the screen, smiling bigger than life, I knew how enthused Scott would be, and I glanced to Ariel, as I would have glanced to him, catching the small grin that flashed across her lips, wondering if was humor or something else that put the smile on her face.
It was the first time I had ever been jealous of someone I was never going to meet.
Chapter Sixteen
Ariel’s decision not to spend our evening stuck at the boarding house proved ultimately wise when we returned at an hour my mother would have said no respectable lady would ever wander in and a man who wasn’t Buddy came from the direction of the dining room.
“Evening, Ladies,” he greeted us. Younger than Buddy, I suspected he wasn’t much older than me, and, when Ariel seemed unsurprised to find someone else in Buddy’s place, I assumed Buddy had mentioned that to her too. “Did you have a nice night out in New Orleans?”
“We did,” Ariel replied. “Thank you.”
“Mmm hmm,” the young man hummed, looking us over with subtle interest. “Are you Ms. Brandt?” Despite the formality of his asking, I was certain there was no mistaking us.
“I am,” Ariel answered. “Ariel.”
“I’m Reggie,” he smiled at being on a first-name basis. “Mr. Williams said to tell you there were no calls earlier this evening, and I haven’t gotten any tonight. Sorry.”
“It’s nothing for you to be sorry about,” Ariel assured him. “I wasn’t expecting it to be that easy.” Though she sounded resigned to the point, the fact Ariel didn’t think the note would work was news to me. “Thank you for letting us know.”
“Yes, Ma’am,” Reggie nodded. “Goodnight.”
“Goodnight,” Ariel returned, and, with a nod Reggie’s way, I turned to follow her up the stairs.
“Now, what do we do?” I sighed a few minutes later, when we were alone in our room and Ariel started taking off her jewelry to place it on the tall dresser.
“Now, we go back,” she said, and I accepted the answer with a nod, because it was just what I’d been thinking. While, the night before, the response would have been my ideal solution, though, and part of me was anxious to get back to see Nan and spend the time with her she had left, after the night I
’d just had, there was a growing part of me that wanted to stay in New Orleans forever, to have more nights just like it.
“Nan is going to be so disappointed,” I uttered, and, at Ariel’s bark of laughter, I looked up, surprised that it seemed to be directed toward me.
“Not back to Richmond,” she declared. “Back to the house.”
“Back?” I returned. “There was no one there.”
“Yes,” Ariel acknowledged. “But that address is all that we have.” Her eyes on me, they stared intently, as if trying to uncover something I didn’t know I was hiding, and I shifted uncomfortably, wondering if whatever she was looking for was starting to show. “Do you always give up this easily?” she asked at last, and the words stung like a slap. “Your grandmother sent you away to find this man while she is just barely hanging onto life. Obviously, it is important to her.”
“Well, how are we supposed to find him?” I huffed, wounded at the insinuation I would let Nan down just to keep from having to put in any effort.
“I don’t know,” Ariel shook her head. “But we can at least talk to a few people.”
My gaze fluttering to the floor, I was embarrassed I hadn’t even considered that, or any other possible solutions, ones that weren’t easy, but may actually produce results.
“We do have his name, after all. There must be someone who remembers him. Who knows,” Ariel’s softened tone eased the residual sting of the conversation, “you might even meet someone who remembers Nan when she was young.”
Risking a glance back up at her, I watched Ariel turn to the dresser to gather her toiletries and realized she was right. I was just giving up. One obstacle, and I felt as if there was nothing else I could do. I didn’t even look for a way around it. Something got in my way, and it was instinct for me to just turn around and go back to a place of comfort.
