Magic Shoes

It’s New Orleans night in our little apartment raised three floors above the bums who sit on the stoop downstairs. Talking in loud gruff voices, they leave empty bottles of Wild Eye in the vestibule which I will find tomorrow on my way out. I throw the front windows wide open, inviting in a summer night of drunken voices and the rush of cars along the street below. A horn interrupts some woman singing oh baby yeah to a pulsing rhythm which fades like an echo as the traffic light changes and the car pulls away. I chop tomatoes, celery, peppers, onions into the pot, and they sizzle against the heat. Thick chunks of andouille sausage dressed in spices and a rich pork stock—the cornbread bakes, and flushed with the heat I sing along with the Professor, Tipitina tra la la la. The lazy piano pulls me in and I turn up the volume, and the guys on the street raise their voices. I can picture them rattling their awkward limbs in defiance of 4/4 time, as they pass the Wild Eye with sticky lips trying to sing. I stir the old silver pot, releasing a spicy incense that struts with the city’s late night din like a festival in this downtown hotbox tonight.

Down three flights of narrow stairs, he works kneeling over newspaper in a dimly lit basement, dribbling red, blue, yellow, purple in chaotic strokes over old black shoes secured last week from the second-hand store.

The pot simmers, and I sit on the couch flipping through a new book I bought with rent money from a shop window on Central Ave today. The Professor sings headin’ out baby headin’ out honey chile, and page by page, I ease my way into the world on my lap. One writer says in words that mix with my own steady breathing that she has reached the age where she is doing things for the last time... And suddenly I am not afraid anymore, her image standing before me with cotton candy hair and a neck gathered in loose, creamy folds--and the rent man goes away.

And there he is like a child stepping off the bus, holding up his Jackson Pollock shoes; he waves them through the air like flags. I shake my head and laugh, stir the spicy stew. They are worried about our future, saying music and books won’t buy benefits, living room drapes, or a washer and dryer. I tell them not to worry, that I’ve adorned the windows with plants so the sun can come through, and his parents had lots of benefits which changed nothing for them in the end. I wash things out by hand sometimes and leave them by the open windows to dry.

Love the shoes, I say, and he explains that he will wear them whenever he writes or plays out—and the bums downstairs raise their raucous voices in celebration. He sets the painted shoes by the open windows as the slightest breeze tickles the back of our necks. Another horn blares, a muffler-less car guns angrily at the light, and he picks up the guitar and strums the new song he’s written today: ten songs in ten days. Always a goal. We’re short fifteen dollars in rent and he throws his head back, adding his voice to the late summer night.

That night, we ate steaming bowls of Cajun stew over rice, and thick slices of cornbread warm from the oven, as the shoes dried by the open window. I remember someone bellowing into the payphone on the corner, and then hearing the bums yell back. And the Professor sang oh yeah baby I done run’d out of money. I told him that night how much I liked his new song. And I knew that the next day, long after all the state workers had trudged home, that there would be another festival in some dark, smoky room with neon beer lights and dollar drafts, and that he’d wear his new shoes. That he’d sing We talk of New York, we talk of New Orleans, we’ll all be going there soon. And, at the time, all those years ago, I believed him--as he passed the hat, praying for rent.
***

Secrets

I have three muddy secrets, which I have hauled around these past many years. Like a first-class traveler, I stash them in the overhead bin, drink a dry martini to help me forget. But they are crafty, my secrets--morphing, changing, moving--as I plod along, trying my best to ignore them. On good days, they become as thin as reeds, smooth themselves out like a new coat of paint. Slip unnoticed into the landscape of history.

But the good days are not every day, and so these same three secrets sometimes gorge themselves on my living, compete with me for breath. They settle heavily on my tongue, sit themselves on one wary shoulder—as I craft elaborate stories around them, trying to hide that they're there. And when that happens, even I can hear the marbles in my mouth. Even I can hear the falseness, the movement away from where those secrets lie. Shhh, I say when they tip-toe onto my tongue some nights when I ache to reveal....

It is many years ago that she calls to say that I must come home, that she has something to tell me. I know this woman of drama and risk, this woman who has leaned on me, has cried. I know how the vein snakes along her left leg, how she trembles sometimes, how she lashes out whenever she's angry. We have been hungry together, she and I; we have been cold. We have lived through turned-off electricity and night time stories shared in the dark. After the phone call, I drive the hour’s drive north, up to that town, wondering what I possibly don't know.

When I arrive, she is sitting at the table, alone in that house. Sit down, she says, and soon the tears come. I wait. Finally: What? I say. Tell me... She lifts an unsteady hand to cover mine. Swallows. Talks of a baby born twenty-seven years ago. A girl. Her daughter. That she gave away a few years before I came along…

I felt only this: the weight of my mother’s secret—like a ball and chain crashed to the floor. Felt the pull of it, felt the heft and magnitude of it. Thought of the birthdays, the wondering. Recalled mid-morning gazes, her hands stilled in the dishpan. Recalled her eyes trained on me. I studied her face as she cried, that day, her pinched shoulders moving. Saw her shame and regret cupped between two tired hands. The telephone ringing one late afternoon, and her lost daughter there...

Why didn’t you tell me? I whispered. Why didn’t you say?

But she did tell me. I just wasn’t listening, didn't decipher the code. The year before with my own swollen belly, my own dashed lover--my star-shaped youth. She hugged me that day when I told her, and promised me that I would be safe... Still, I gave up my baby a different way, and then carried that secret, tucked away in my skin.
***