Big Easy Bonanza

wasn’t just one or two beautifully preserved eighteenth- or nineteenth-century structures that Skip could see. It was rows and rows of them, some carefully restored, some needing paint, some falling down, all (except maybe the Creole cottages) carved into little apartments like hers—not museums or monuments, just magnificent buildings for people to live in, as if suburbs didn’t exist. Restoration had been sweeping the Quarter lately, and Skip didn’t care much for it. The old buildings were being painted tasteful pastels that would have looked lovely in California, but here they just looked wimpy. New Orleans, like the Caribbean, cried out for robustness, even vulgarity, in Skip’s view. She hated particularly the new fad of painting the lacy ironwork soft gray instead of the honest black it was meant to be.
    On her street were two graceful old Creole cottages, one newly painted mauve and gray, the other an embarrassing pink with apple green trim. The first looked like something a decorator who’d run out of ideas had dreamed up; the second fit in.
    The man from the Quarter Master deli, dressed like a pirate, passed and waved. A white-coated vendor struggled down the street behind his crazy cart shaped like a hot dog, crying out for customers and making her, for some reason, think of Tennessee Williams. Surely Stanley and Stella and Blanche bought their dogs from these old guys.
    She loved the Quarter as much as she hated the Garden District. It teemed with infinite variety and felt alive. Yet tonight she barely noticed her neighborhood. She was crying, and not for Chauncey either. For herself. It was Mardi Gras night and she had nowhere to go, no one to be with. True, she had to wait for Steve Steinman to bring the film, but that wasn’t exactly the same as snuggling up with your sweetie.
    The idea of even having a sweetie seemed so remote she couldn’t imagine it. She wondered if she should go down to the Abbey and see Claude. But she couldn’t stand the idea of braving the Carnival crowds, and besides, Toni might be there. Claude’s wife. Claude was a yat with two semesters at Loyola, no future except maybe as bartender in a fancier joint, and no conversation except football and bigotry. And that was before you got to the married part. But he was big and liked his women big, and Skip didn’t have anyone else. There probably wasn’t anyone else for her.
    She was an alien. A flying saucer had set down one day in her parents’ State Street yard and abandoned her. Or so it seemed to her at times. Her father spent his time playing tennis and setting the bones of the rich and well-born. He was a member of Rex, but not of Comus, and this was his greatest disappointment. Her mother served on committees for charity balls. They seemed to care for only two things—social climbing and using her to promote their hobby. Surely they couldn’t be her real parents. Surely real parents had at least a modicum of feeling for what a child actually is rather than only for what they want it to be.
    In accordance with her parents’ wishes, Skip went to McGehee’s (though she was smart enough for Newman) and Miggy’s dancing school in sixth grade, Icebreakers in seventh grade, Eight O’Clocks in eighth grade, and of course Valencia later on—never mind that she was too tall, too fat, too shy, too unpopular, and too confused about what it was all about. She even pledged Kappa at Newcomb, though that was her own doing and she should have realized by then that she no longer had to do everything her parents wanted. The realization came soon after, with a bang.
    She made her debut. She could have been queen of a Carnival ball as well—her father belonged to Proteus as well as Rex—but she drew the line there. Carnival queens were always someone’s daughter, and she was sick and damn tired of being nobody but Dr. Langdon’s daughter.
    She agreed to make her debut for a very particular reason—it was possible, just possible that by doing this she might somehow learn to fit in. It certainly wasn’t that she didn’t want to. But from her earliest recollection she hadn’t understood the rules. She got things mixed up. Not things like manners and etiquette, things with written-down rules. Those were easy. But she had no talent for conforming and couldn’t seem to catch on to implied rules, social customs, fashions, fads, the what-is-done-when sorts of things Southerners are usually born knowing.
    For failing to