Chapter 9: FEMA Friday

Lots of Amy’s friends talked about their mothers.  Mother-daughter issues. Mother-daughter hate-love relationships. The unbelievable things a mother could say to a daughter.   Amy’s three friends since grammar school—Kay, Ann and Denise—loved to tell their latest mother story whenever they got together.  It’s always about mother, Kay would say, and Denise would giggle behind her napkin and Ann would smile through her eyes while chewing on another boiled shrimp dipped in remoulade sauce.  The last time they had gathered at their favorite restaurant at the West-End edge of Bucktown, the one where the brown-and-white Mt Carmel pennant held the most prominent position over the bar’s 20 foot-long mirror above the top shelf of liquor, they ended up laughing so hard at Kay’s newest mother story that even the wise guys at the bar shook their heads and stuck their fingers in their ears.

Amy joined in the laughing but not in the storytelling.  Her girlfriends all knew that Amy's mother had died when she was still a baby.  They also knew she enjoyed and welcomed their stories.   They all knew that Kay was right—it is always about mother, even when you’ve never known yours.

Amy was never prone to self-pity.   She was born without self-pity or even jealousy. She truly never envied anyone.   She listened to her girlfriend’s stories grateful to be part of strong friendships that had sustained and fed her in her short life.

It had been over a year since Katrina, and almost two years since that last meal at the Bucktown restaurant with the Mt. Carmel pennant.   Amy sat alone at the Point with an oyster po-boy from the New Orleans Hamburger and Seafood Company. The red-roofed white lighthouse on the Point had collapse from its foundation and sat deflated like a clown with its hat pinned to the side of its head.  She was completely alone there. Not a single car travelled along the sea wall just across the inlet.    More than half the city’s residents had not yet returned.  Amy’s grandparents had died post-Katrina, one of many so-called Katrina Deaths that were becoming a commonplace but not formal cause of death.  Kay and Ann had not yet returned, and Denise was busy at Catholic Charities managing the volumes of volunteers that had descended on New Orleans like pennies from heaven.

It was another stunning sunset.  Amy believed that in New Orleans God lived inside the sky.

And that’s how she was.   In the midst of the sadness and loss, she sees the sunset and thanks all the powers that be for the joy of this oyster po-boy and the blood orange and jeweled turquoise sky.

She remembered that it was FEMA Friday and that she and Ralph had made plans to go to these newly-created, post-deluge excuses to party.  It would be something different. Something they had never done pre-Katrina, but seemed to be something to do post-Katrina.  Big Freedia, a New Orleans street party staple since the 90’s, was back in town. It was time to let loose and do some sissy bounce.  Amy seemed to be doing a lot of things she had never done before.  She was inside out and she didn’t fight it.  She simply let the seams show on her clothing and in her heart. No sense in getting even more bent out of shape.

Ralph had never been to a sissy bounce either.  He had spent most of his time behind a book reading or in front of a classroom teaching or at his desk writing.  The latter is what he wanted to do all the time in his small one room apartment near Tulane where he taught mostly privileged kids for whom literature was a necessary evil to be suffered on the way to the MBA or law degree.   Thirty years ago, Ralph was fond to say, Tulane once had the best theater school in the country. John Kennedy Toole studied there and then wrote his masterpiece while teaching at Dominican College (another defunct college).   Even the university bars were the home to a score of bards around whom a poetic renaissance flowered, where words, worshipped, were washed down with whiskey.  

Ralph’s uncle had been the unofficial poet laureate of the Maple Street Bar on Oak Street.   Now, he’d mutter, we’re surrounded by a generation of investment bankers and computer geeks for whom the word is merely another commodity or at best a nuance best reduced to the smallest number of letters to make texting easier.

Those bars had not opened either since Katrina.  So it was off to the Casino on Canal Street to see Big Freedia  and a bunch of women who would take over the dance floor in a declaration of feminine power and independence. 

Of course the casino found a way to open quickly. That’s just the way it is.

On the street car ride to Canal Street, Amy and Ralph sat in  a comfortable silence.  They had had lots of practice with silence sitting in the coffee shop late into the night and sometimes into the early morning.  The city could feel so lonely.  New Orleans had never been a city where one could feel lonely before. People are too talkative, too inquisitive to leave you alone for a minute. But that had changed, too. Most of those folks had not come back.  That silence was not comfortable.  The city had a silence that had never existed before.   As if one’s mother had left, leaving behind chaos, disorder.  Who would clean up after us?  What would make sure we were safe?  Who would see to locking the doors up at night, that a door was even there to protect us? 

Amy sat in the wooden street car seat hanging on to every oak tree that survived the waters, marking each street lamp’s light pushing through the fog that had begun to fall.   And in that instant she knew her mother was there, in this city.  The only constant in her life had been New Orleans.  Its beauty had nurtured her.  Its music and food and people filled her with joy and hope.  Its corruption and seediness tested her faith and dared her to care.  She had come to count on the consistency  of the March azaleas, the February rains and the summer scents of jasmine.  She’d almost lost this mother of hers.  There was no doubt her mother was suffering.  

Amy whispered, “I am here, it’s fine.”

“I know,” said Ralph.