Page 2 of Meet Me in the Garden

“Other people do.”

“You think I’m reckless?”

“Maybe. Or brave.”

“I prefer brave. But honestly, I’m fine with reckless, too. I’m outgrowing my life.Bothof us are. Don’t you feel that way?”

“Yes,” I say. The truest thing I’ve ever said.

“Are you mad at me? For not telling you right away?” She’s searching my eyes. I forgive her. I have no other choice.

“I’m not mad.”

She smiles. Opens her purse for her rose water. Sprays her face and her neck and the insides of her elbows. “Want some?” she asks, and she sprays me with an extravagant thoroughness. “We didn’t even look at our drawings,” she says, twisting the cap back on.

I expect us to laugh at what we’ve made, but there’s something in them that moves me.

“This mouth,” Delphine says. “It’s just like mine.”

There’s a line on Delphine’s drawing of me, I’m not sure what it is at first, and then I see that it’s the edge of my ear, and its grace takes me by surprise, and the arch of my brow does, too, how carefully she drew it. Our features aren’t placed where they’re supposed to be, but they capture us.

I wish we could talk into the evening, but it’s time to go. She’s not taking the streetcar back to the Lower Garden District with me, she’s going to stay here in the Marigny to steal an hour with Bill. She opens her silvercompact, engraved with roses, to check her face and her hair. Sunlight catches the mirror glass, sharp and painful. And then we’re at the garden gate. “Odette,” she says. She takes my hand. Gaze searching until she’s sure I’m looking back. “What does it matter, really, what anybody thinks of us?”

I don’t plan to do it, but when the streetcar stops at Magazine Street, I step out. I should be getting home now—they’ll wonder where I am—but I want to see Delphine’s portrait.

The studio rises from the corner, photographs on stands in its windows. I don’t see Delphine at first, but when I turn, there she is, spotlit behind the glass. Her same beautiful face I just drew. But here’s theWhites Onlysign, right next to her. Delphine’s smiling at me and I can’t tell who the joke’s on.

TWO

BACK HOMEon Louisiana Avenue, in my sisters’ half of our side-by-side shotgun house, I take out my tin of paints, my pad of paper, my turpentine and linseed oil in their jars, my pigment-stained rags. I’m going to paint Papa’s easy chair.

A month ago, Maman had her new husband take it out to the street. I watched, disbelieving, from the window, as Jean Pierre struggled to drag it down the steps. My father’s chair. His mornings with the paper, his evenings with the magazines, how I’d perch on the arm, watching him turn the pages.

Bernard, my eldest sister’s husband, was the only one home. He rose from the kitchen table when I rushed in to tell him, followed me to the street, fumbled when we lifted it, his injured hand unable to grip, jerking upward to balance the weight on his forearm instead. We cleared a spot for it in the corner, near the door.

Now, alone in the house, I sketch the chair in pencil, trying to look as closely as I did in the garden. Velvet brocade, worn around the arms. A burning in my chest at how Maman tried to discard it. Same as she discarded Papa. Springtime, he was just back from the war. Suffered from insomnia, from memories that wouldn’t let him be. Sat at the kitchen table at night, head in one hand, cigarette burning down in the other. Butin the daytime he still read his art books, still stopped me in the entryway to gaze with him at his favorite pair of paintings. Delighted in his first grandbaby, played cards with my sisters’ husbands. He was sad and he was changed, but so were all the men who came home. Yes, he was sometimes confused. Yes, he took to getting fully dressed at three o’clock in the morning and waiting out the rest of the night. Sometimes he drank too much and passed out at the table. But none of this was enough for Maman to have him sent away that morning, no warning, the men in white forcing him into the car, to the East Louisiana Hospital for the Insane, where he was supposed to get better but where he got tuberculosis and died instead.

I mix the blues and violets and blacks on a sheet of glass, hands trembling. I need to reallypaint. Like Monet, going blind. Like Frida Kahlo after the bus accident. What else to do with this fire in my chest? But an hour passes and another, and the painting is splotchy and crude, absent of any true feeling, the turpentine bruise hued when I soak the brushes.

My sisters come home—Claire, with a bag of groceries; Adele, with Baby Rudy on her hip. I gather the paint tubes, drop them into the tin, tidying so Rudy can crawl around and play.

“We went to Dryades Street,” Adele says. “Would have invited you along, but you weren’t home.” They’re dressed in the red gingham. We got a bolt of it from Halpern’s. Claire made a belted skirt, Adele an off-the-shoulder top. In my closet hangs a pair of matching trousers. For as long as I remember, we’ve dressed this way to go out. Heads turn, women stare, men whistle, my sisters pretend not to notice. I follow their lead, always have. The three Honoré sisters, except I’m the only one of us who still carries the name.

“I went to meet Delphine,” I say.

Claire sighs. “She never comes around anymore. Did she forget that we’re her cousins, too?”

“There’s a place we like to go,” I say, drying my brushes on a rag. And then I’m back in the garden, and Delphine’s blushing, saying Bill’s name. What would my sisters make of it all? I want to tell them. Imagine telling them. But Adele makes a sound, wrinkles her nose.

“Thesmell,” she says, waving her hand toward the turpentine. “It’s fine that you’re sleeping here on the sofa. But do you have to paint here, too?”

I’ve commandeered a tiny corner of their pink-walled living room for my painting supplies and a basket of clothes and the blanket and pillow I sleep with. There are six people living here on my sisters’ side; only Maman and Jean Pierre on the other side of the wall where my bedroom is, where I lived all my life until two months ago, when I heard Maman and Jean Pierre late at night, their love sounds unmistakable, just four weeks after Papa died. (“Shakespeareanin her betrayal,” Delphine fumed when I told her. “Biblical.”) I left right then, made my bed on my sisters’ sofa, and that’s where I’ve slept ever since. Maman hasn’t said a word to me about it. I haven’t said a word to her, either, about anything. I stopped going with her to the Adamses’ to help with the chores and the errands. If she cares, she hasn’t let on. She always told me I was too much like my father, not enough like my sisters, who knew what was expected of them and how to behave. The comparison stopped three years ago, when Adele told us over dinner that Al had proposed and she was going to say yes. Maman was silent, next to me at the table. “Of all the fine Creole men in the ward, you’re choosing the darkest,” she finally said. “Undoing a century’s worth of progress.”

Adele forced a smile. “I love him.”

I went from being the perplexing, concerning child to being invisible, Adele stepping into my former place. Since then, she’s been trying to regain Maman’s approval. Not even protesting when Maman sent Papa away. Biting her tongue and nodding along when Claire said Maman certainly knew best. Shushing me when I wouldn’t stop demanding that we all visit.

Impossible now to consider painting on that side of the house. But I tell my sisters I understand.