dad, girlfriend, mother

     Ever since a Hindu yoga class held in a park's gazebo awakened him to maintain good posture, he sits up straight in his chair, hands resting in his lap to hold the little glass. As I prop my feet up on the banister, he prompts me to do the same. We attend the class every Wednesday evening in our linen tunic and pants. There, he's a charming, quick-witted Southern man surrounded by middle-aged, Indian-Tiny ladies who giggle at this piece of work. His short spiked hair is almost entirely gray. Only his hazel glazed eyes signal the whiskey and the toll. His Hindu girlfriend, Cindy, aged halfway between my father and me, is sleeping inside. On Sunday afternoons, she manicures her nails, prepares my father's nasal wash or massages his feet. Cindy wakes up early on weekdays for work in Port of Spain an hour away; rarely does she make weeknight meals. "Boy, was your mother a good cook. All those meals…18 something years. Every day," my father muses. "She just said to heck with it at the end." For all the years that my mother and father were a monolithic force, it is strange to hear one talk about the other in retrospect. "Your mother," he says or "Your father," she says are titles of dissociation. Together they used to pray for me and my siblings in the mornings with their cups of 8 o’clock coffee. Now one calls me to ask if the other will be in town for Christmas. When you are raised by two, loved by two, who grow to be a union of one to the child, despite the rifts between them, how do you divide the cell of your parents to yield separate, equal halves without losing completely the architecture of home?

This Morning

Heidi Slimane

     This morning on Constance Street, in your camelback apartment, in your beige-carpeted room, on the air mattress whose holes you have finally patched, under the grandmother quilt, you lay on my stomach, rest upon me, and I don’t know if you are suffocating me or if I am supporting your weight. 

     Hidden from sight, I can barely hear your breathing. You warm me better than the sheets because your temperature hasn’t yet risen from sleep. I spit out phlegm in the half-empty beer can, and I meekly embrace you. Sliding your feet each on the other, as is your way at night and when you wake up, I can still see the boy in the revolutionist.  

     To know you, to love you is to look for you in everyone else. You outstrip the rules of no-you-can’t. Male and female he created them, but you have created something in between, but every morning you still must choose a face to show. You challenge what’s powerful, and you challenge me. Your hair is as long as a river. The discotheque and the library both house you. We have gamboled in the quarter on whiskey and trampled through history because you know what happened at the beginning. 

     This morning, I think you still might love me mightily, but there is always your future to love more. So many years of in-between, man-and-wife, and beer bachelors—whatever we are and are not—you are the companion of my life. I shake you to rouse you up and out into the city, to take us to the bakery. You groan; I pull and crack your bones, a hatchling blinking. It’s hard to kiss you in the sun.

Displaced

     If I was ever late for my curfew, my witch of an aunt (I was staying with her for the fall semester) could transfigure me into the hallow apple or pear in the kitchen’s fake fruit basket. It was my uncle who, after being asked by my aunt, assigned midnight as my curfew because that’s what it was for his friends’ children down the street. Back home my parents didn’t care much, as long as I popped my head in their bedroom when I arrived and whispered, “I’m home.” I was proud to be the one to give my uncle and aunt a foreshadowing of what their only child, twelve-year-old Griffin, would soon become: a teenager who would not always be slumbering when the hours grew small. But more likely I guessed, if I didn’t respect the curfew, Aunt Barbara would reprimand me in her subtle, icicle way, making me feel like the toy blue marble in the downstairs den, lodged in the corner between the floorboard and carpet. “Didn’t you go out last night, and two days before that?” she said once, her cardigan arms folded. In her sterile house on a hill, the rooms were usually pungent with all-purpose cleaner. After smelling the fumes of the maid’s Friday labor for many weeks, I finally caught sight of the maid, Dee, in the last days I was in Birmingham. She was pale and gap-toothed. Not even she descended the seventeen stairs to the bowels of the house to clean my square, white room in the basement where it was always cold.

Streetcar Ride

     In less than ten minutes, the streetcar driver knows my city of birth, my destination and my future.

     He has thick dreadlocks, many and dramatic like Medusa. I recognize him from rides before, memorable because he is the most swift driver. His driving is not lethargic and historical like those of his coworkers, but monster-truck like in how he asserts his vehicle between the cars, foolish enough to jet across the Carrollton or St. Charles medians. I wish I could sit closer to him, maybe stand at his right hand and comment on the night.
Before he started the route where it begins and where I got on, Carrollton and Claiborne, he sat across from me on the first row of wooden benches. He blabbed in his phone to a friend about something I could not follow. He had a few minutes to spare before he spoiled the timetable, the integrity of which no one in New Orleans expects of these huffing relics who chug and lug down the city's main avenues. Other passengers get on, pay because they know how and sit and are not impatient.
"So where you from," he asks while still on the phone, and his tone is as natural as the August humidity. Hurt that he cannot read what I hope my blood can tell, I don't blame his question because I had tried to pay at the wrong side of the streetcar, which was the front but is now the back given the streetcar changes tracks at the end of Carrollton and Claiborne. I had also asked how often the streetcar stops here, not because of ignorance, but perhaps I could gain the code to understand the whimsy and the rhythm that is this public transportation. "Every eight minutes, till evening." I tell him my convoluted path to finally landing in New Orleans in brief. "How much longer at Loyola?"
"Graduating this year."
'Think you're graduating or you just hope to?"
I wonder if he has been to college or had once thought he would graduate. He seems to be a peer, but maybe later in his twenties.
Then he gets up and readies the streetcar. He tells to a guy sitting on the banquette bench before the first row about the fight between his cat and chiwawa. They seem to know each other, but not beyond passenger and driver. "She is fat. I gotta put that cat on a diet." The guy asks how many animals the driver has. "Oh lord, my house is zoo!" I imagine his house or apartment. He probably left the TV on.
The streetcar picks up speed, and I can only hear phrases of their conversation as the wind billows through the front windowless windshield. "My aunt is a bus driver, took off the whole month of July. If I did that I ain't coming back."
The guy to whom he is talking, whom I am now envious of for his intimate proximity, says "She cut my hours in half." He looks dejected, and an hourly wage job surely can't help that. A chubby man boards at the riverbend in tight gym clothes. Motivation? A dog barks at the streetcar, and we are a rival dog, more imposing and louder than the mutt whose owner eggs on his protest. The driver laughs.
Just before Napoleon I pull the buzzing cord. I walk the few steps to the front, feel like I’m gliding as the streetcar swings on. I stand next to him, ready to exit, and bask in the wind with him as he slows at my stop. I make a comment about my hair and the wind as a fan as for a model in a studio. He laughs again, and we wish each other goodnight. He slams the door on me, and grinds away, leaving me in the night under a streetlamp with only the flickering light of the streetcar as a guide for its movement.