Big Easy Bonanza

doing that again. She sat up and pulled aside the curtain, the one that was already letting in the sun that had awakened her.
    A little girl was sitting on the front porch of the double shotgun across Burdette Street. She had on a navy-blue dress and black patent-leather shoes with little white socks, as if she were going somewhere. Her hands had fallen down between her knees, so that she was leaning into her skirt, and the sun glinted on her brown hair. Something about her looked touchingly forlorn, as if someone had forgotten her. The house, badly in need of a paint job, seemed to echo her mood. The scene was so beautiful, so moving, someone should paint it. Marcelle knew that Degas, exactly the right person for the job, had lived in New Orleans once, on Esplanade. She thought of his beautiful pictures of children and of the shimmering visions of Paris she’d recently seen in a traveling exhibit of Impressionist works. New Orleans was surely as beautiful as Paris, and she wished it could be painted by resurrected Impressionists. This moment should be preserved forever.
    Maybe, she thought, she should take some more art history courses. Nothing gave her greater pleasure than exceptional beauty—not just in paintings but in other things too. If she were an archaeologist, she might unearth an Etruscan vase, and touching it would be the thrill of a lifetime. If she were a veterinarian, she might palpate a tiger one day, or a giraffe, and she could lie down and die; life could surely hold no more delights. It would be like looking at André asleep. And yet she could do that every night and life was still empty.
    She adored André—surely no parent could be more adoring—but she wasn’t a career mother. That she knew now. André was a person, not a piece of clay for her to shape and mold and tear up and mold again if she didn’t like the first way he came out. She recognized her hardest maternal task as that of letting him be the person he was rather than trying to turn him into the shape-shifting windup toy, sometimes a wooden soldier, sometimes a teddy bear, that she wanted for herself in her darker moments. When she was with him for very long the tension of letting him play out his own life, encouraging him in his own path rather than trying to control, nearly tore her apart. Thank God for day care, or she’d have a four-year-old basket case on her hands, and she wouldn’t be much better herself.
    Oh, God! Who said she was? Certainly no one who had seen her lately. The truth was, she needed that lump of clay to shape. Not André, but
something
of her own. Something to fill that empty hole, to relieve that deep longing that booze and sex had never eased. Even Henry had his acting. She had nothing. Maybe she should take the metaphor literally— the one about the lump—and try ceramics.
    Oh, come on! You’ve got as much talent as that ceiling fan up there
.
    Even as a child she’d brought home lopsided clay bowls while the other children’s were smooth and symmetrical; crayon drawings of stick figures when everyone else had graduated to first-grade realism.
    She was no more an artist than she was a career mother. But her love for art—for the beautiful—rivaled her love for her child. She sucked in her breath and let it out slowly, trying on the thought. She hadn’t put the two thoughts together before. Art history, then. Definitely.
    But what could she do with art history? Teach? No. She wanted to be around the artworks, to have them actually in her life. Maybe—oh, God, here was an idea! Here was an idea that gave her a weird tingling in the pit of her stomach, that was how powerful it was. She knew that tingling and what it meant. It was fear. When she thought of something good, something she wanted, something she really wanted a whole lot, that tingling started. It meant she was afraid she couldn’t have it and she’d better just stop thinking about it.
    The idea was this—maybe she could apply for a job at Uncle Tolliver’s antique store.
    He would teach her about antiques and she could take some courses as well. And every day she’d be there with them, able to look at them, touch and caress them whenever she wanted. She wondered if she would cry when she sold a particular favorite.
    Quickly, she squashed the thought. She was already sold, already committed, already in love, and that wasn’t going to work. If she felt that way, she knew she’d never apply for the job. That’s what always