Joyland

Whenever my mother explains why she does things she resents having to do she says, noblesse oblige, nobility demands it. She tells me we have a certain responsibility. We must live up to it.

The Blackbird

This is supposed to be a love letter. The relationship will start in tears. One of the girls, in the hallway, will spit on the wall. It is a love letter. Later, a shield. The wall will be beige and the spit will be too, three-days-high beige. Tweaking at Disneyland phlegm.

Starting in tears, the relationship will, like a Spirit not a Force, distort the space between four women. Between two single girls. And their two single moms. One of the girls, getting bad cramps, will need to be alone in the showers. Alone, but with the other girl. (You have to put an “out of order” sign on the door to the girls room. Then no one will bother you.)

There will only be these girls. They will hijack the girls’ room. Impending doom will put on its costume, steal their clothes. They’ll have nothing to wear. Maniacal. Something to cover the fat the fat, something to cover, disguise the fat. Rampaging for clothes.

Tensing had said little during the drive and just navigated the potholes—gaping cavities now because of the rains—while muttering frustrated phrases in his language, which I assumed to be the equivalent of swearing. He spoke no French or Kreyol and a little English, which made our conversations somewhat forced. We were easing our way slowly out of the Artibonite valley in an unmarked Land Rover, free of the Agency insignia because of the riots and resentment which persisted in some of the smaller peyizan villages. A glance would inform any passers-by that Tensing was not from the island, not so much from his Asiatic looks but from his gruff gestures and habit of spitting out the window with a great deal more hacking and coughing than a Haitian. Agency drivers had a reputation for disliking us locals, but so far he hadn't said anything condescending. A cigarillo dangled from his lips, and he'd been chewing the end of it so that thin strands of tobacco fell into his lap.

Of course I remember the local Louisiana TV commercials. My favorite was for an army surplus store called Rambeaux. That’s right: R-A-M-B-E-A-U-X, upstanding the pop-Cajun love of ending o-words in eaux. Just a matter of time before we’re heading down to the bingeaux hall and eating peauxtateaux chips. Rambeaux had a song, of course, because every commercial had to have a song. But instead of using the prissy little “I’d like to buy the world a Coke,” let’s-all-hold-hands thing the national commercials used, Rambeaux used a military jingle. It’s a song about the store, but to the tune of “Sound Off” - the Marines’ one big hit if you don't count "Ballad of the Green Berets".

1. Veronica stormed off set and just kept going. She blotted her sweaty, heavily made up face with the linen scrap she kept in the pocket of her costume. Her costume, a copy of a gown worn by Madame de Montespan, a favorite mistress of Louis XIV, weighed fifty pounds. In the film, Summer Felicity, she does not play Madame de Montespan, but a fictional character named Felicity, the mistress of Guillaume Amfrye de Chaulieu, a renowned poet and wit of the 1680s. Craving solitude, she traipsed through a grove of sycamores, too embarrassed to acknowledge the prop girls downing Red Bull as they touched up the gold leaf on her palanquin. Fully aware of her mood, of the recent tabloids, of the rustling satin and dust cloud in her wake, they ignored her. Soon they were gone, and with them the klieg lights, the reggae blasting at craft services, and the director, perverted little Timmy, berating Dani, an ingénue ten years her junior.

I hate this place. I come here each morning at nine a.m. I am greeted with the frigidity of the security guard, dour and unwelcoming. The dim, fluorescent light offsets the purple faces of the secretaries. I know they all judge me. The big blue sign, emblazoned with the moniker SOS Business Solutions, looks smugly at me. I pause to grimace back at it. I hack loudly, drawing the attention of the desk ladies, buried under their binders and files. The skinny one doesn’t even raise her eyes at me. I swear she smirks.

Oumar towers over me, takes my sweaty white palm in his gentle hand, and leads me onstage. We’re in a packed theatre somewhere downtown, I have no idea where. The glare of the stage lights cocoons us from the mesmerized audience. Oumar burns his charcoal eyes into mine as the theme song from “Flash Dance...What a Feeling” starts to play. We glide across the stage, and then he swings me around, spins me, lifts my feet right off the floor, his lips nearly touching mine. I float through the air like a cloud, the soles of my red and black plaid sneakers scraping the wooden floor. I close my eyes, try to block out the hundreds of peering eyes, and breathe. Inhale the scent of his sweat-drenched body as we move, two lonely hearts beating in tandem. Tonight, we hold the world in our hands.

“I’m taking my talents to South Beach,” the King said. Not to me, but to the Mayor. At least, that’s what Carl Gibson told me while we waited together in line at the bakery that morning. Carl was a good friend of the Mayor’s, they’d been neighbors for a while before the Mayor became the Mayor and moved into the house behind City Hall.

“I’m taking my talents to South Beach,” the King had said. According to Carl. “Tonight’s performance will be the last, and then I’ll be on my way.” Carl didn’t say if the Mayor had said anything back. If he had argued, tried to offer the King some reward for sticking around, or if he had just nodded and wished the King good luck.

It’s dusk on a Saturday, I’m out walking. There’s a man, unsteady on his feet, with a long, curled-handle umbrella. He’s holding it up to his shoulder like a machine gun, staring down the barrel and swiveling abruptly, a jungle commando, pausing to catch his image in the scratched Plexiglas window of the bodega. A small boy wanders out of the store and stands a few feet away, watching. The man pivots slowly, beginning to grunt and growl before he comes around to face the boy. The boy pulls his arms around himself and waits to see where this is going. So do I. The man hunkers down and grunts his way toward the boy, the umbrella-gun carefully aimed. I’m weighing my slightness against the man’s new equilibrium. In case. Then, something invisible passes between them and the tension breaks. The boy giggles and runs behind a tree, peeking out. The man pulls a forty-ounce out of a pocket and sits down on the bodega steps. The evening begins.

A while back, I watched a pair of mourning doves in their nest every day, watched as one then the other sat on an egg; saw their baby emerge from the egg, watched its being carried food and fed, saw them all fly away one late summer morning, never to return, I thought. But there are many mourning doves around my neighborhood and maybe those three are back.

Every morning, right to the window; every afternoon, come home, open the door, right to the window—I witnessed the entire cycle of a nesting mother and father, a chick’s beak cracking through the eggshell, the baby’s care, its parents’ nurturing it, the baby’s first flight.