right,” she says. “Suppose there’s a time, after Collie’s stayed over, when you’re trying hard to find something, and you can’t.”
“Now I get it,” I say, clunking off my car’s engine, the better to hear.
“You don’t need to get upset,” Petal says. “Nothing is, in fact, gone. She just has it hidden. Sometimes, she’ll even wrap things up in paper like presents and then she’ll give them right back to you.”
“Collie steals stuff?”
“S’what I’m saying,” says Petal.
[47]
“I never know what to call you,” Lucien says.
My chin is nodding, my mouth tacked. “It’s a little bit of a problem.”
He says, “You sign everything ‘E.’ but, honestly, I would feel like a half-wit if I called you E.”
“Can understand that,” I say. “Ev is fine. My husband calls me Ev.” I exhale. “It’s Eve, all right? My name’s Eve, married to Adam.”
“Oh.”
“Now you know,” I say. “Our names really didn’t bother me that much until the mail started arriving addressed to ‘Adam and Eve Broussard’.”
“I hail from Broussard,” says Lucien, and lowering his voice, and raising an index finger, he says, “I do! Like the very back end of Broussard. I mean the backest-back.”
“Or the endest-end,” I say.
“That’s me,” he says.
He asks, “So, why did you even marry Adam? You should have steered clear of a man with that name. Or did he just bowl you over without realizing it?”
I say, “Well, that sounds like the right explanation. Although, not terribly fair to me.”
“What I’ll never understand,” he says, “is how you decided to pick which one. They’re identically alike! With no difference between them! At least, not so far as the naked eye.”
[48]
I’m through putting Xeroxes of dollar bills into change machines.
No more drinking from the milk cartons in the dairy section of the store.
I’m never again burping the alphabet.
No more wearing white stockings and being anybody’s nurse.
No more stories about ever having been a Carmelite nun.
[49]
Adam takes a seat beside me now on a pique-covered settee. He sits straight, his knees apart, and across his lap rests his walking cane, thing, ridiculous stick.
“That is for an old man,” I say to him.
In a quiet voice he tells me, “Well, I have the liver of a very old man.”
“Ah.”
“It’s simply true,” he says. “We need to house what’s true in our heads. Don’t you think that?”
“Hell no,” I say. “There’s so much bad news and imagery I don’t want in my mind. Hell fucking no. Including this picture I now have of you with a throbbing and decayed old liver. Just what good is that supposed to do me?”
He’s holding the cane almost timidly now.
Looking at me with a little chagrin. What eyes those are, that he has.
[50]
Here’s an unexplained man with a bandaged shoulder, asleep right on the sidewalk at the intersection.
What else could be done to this place, I wonder, besides tipping it over and pouring it out?
I guess the pipes in the earth below us—weakened and wrenched and corroded as they are from the hammering of the storm and the weeks of stewing in saltwater—could split and tear and crack open and leak raw sewage into the water supply.
[51]
Here we’ve got eighteen people, seated in Lafayette Square, whomping empty soda cans on the pavement, all of them chanting all the while, “Let’s be Jesus. Let’s be Jesus ’til it hurts. Let’s be Yaweh—”
[52]
You could fill your time easily, going around and noticing this type of shit. Such as there, dragging along, is a woman wearing one bare foot and the other in a satin dinner slipper.
[53]
My address book is nowhere to be found,
nor my jean jacket,
the box of coffee filters,
the good cookbook,
the tiny ballerina from my childhood jewelry box,
my gymbag,
a rhinestone-studded belt,
the globe!
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