• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 446 0

Tour of the city: the haunted Lower Ninth Ward, where one woman stood on the porch of the only renovated house for blocks, her moving van parked out front. We saw the house of the filmmaker Helen Hill, who’d been shot to death by an intruder while her husband scooped up their baby and ran to safety; we looked at some levees, which seemed to have been stapled back together and left to rust; we passed by other people on similar tours. Everywhere you could see protoplasmic high-water marks on houses, some low enough that you’d know that only the things in the basement were ruined, some so high you wondered how it was that the entire neighborhood had not been washed away. Other houses still had the international orange tattoos left after the storm: date searched; number of people saved; number of people who, being dead, were merely discovered. We ended up at the new Whole Foods near the studio apartment that had been rented for us, goggle-eyed at all that disorienting bounty. Who would need to buy, in such a world, a precooked vegan meatloaf?

“I don’t think they’re done finding bodies,” our hostess told us. She’d just gone on antianxiety medication so that she could bear living in the city she loved.

Spring had arrived just ahead of us, in the form of actual blossoms — magnolias — and the weird kudzu of flung-from-floats Mardi Gras beads in the trees. The city was all blue skies and light breezes and raw nerves and melancholy. Most everyone we met was on edge, some so heartsick we worried, even if we’d never met them before. They seemed frozen. Something had happened. It had been a year and a half, and if you weren’t in the middle of it you might lose patience: New Orleans, why can’t you get over it? We were very sorry for you for a while. Now there are other things to be sad about. It’s not your time anymore. Pull yourself together.

Of course it felt familiar, as wretchedly presumptuous as that sounds. I’d spent the fall and winter feeling only the most cautious of emotions. A gleam of hope, a spike of fear, slantwise guilty grief. One day’s worth of feeling at a time. Surely grand emotion is more than twenty-four hours’ worth, grief compounded with interest, joy magnified by anticipated returns. In New Orleans, I found it extraordinary to be surrounded by great sadness. The people we saw, old friends and strangers, had left and come back, and now they were waiting for the next disaster, the next murder, the next hurricane, the next levee failure, the loss of their home, the revocation of their homeowner’s insurance, and still of course at the same time they had to hope. Hadn’t they come back for that reason, because they hoped?

Me, too: same place, remembering the disaster, trying to believe it would not come for me again.

At a reception that week, I was chatting with the exceptionally lovely, soft-spoken woman who’d donated the money for the program that had brought me there. We sat in folding chairs against a wall, a few feet from the buffet table. Just small talk. She asked me how my pregnancy was going. Then she said, “I was so sorry when I heard about your first child. My first child was stillborn, too.”

My heart kicked on like a furnace. Suddenly tears were pouring down my face.

“Oh no!” said the woman. “I didn’t mean for that to happen!”

I laughed and grabbed some napkins from the table and tried to explain myself, though even now it’s hard to find the words. What came over me was gratitude and an entirely inappropriate love. I didn’t know the woman, but I loved her. I’d felt the same thing meeting another couple on campus, a professor and his wife who’d written me when Pudding died to send condolences and to say that they’d had a daughter who was stillborn nearly thirty years before.

All I can say is, it’s a sort of kinship, as though there is a family tree of grief. On this branch the lost children, on this the suicided parents, here the beloved mentally ill siblings. When something terrible happens, you discover all of a sudden that you have a new set of relatives, people with whom you can speak in the shorthand