Big Easy Bonanza

happened when she wanted something. She wanted it for only about ten minutes. Then she let it recede to the back of her mind and stay there till she forgot about it. Zoning out, she’d come to call it. Whatever seemed important, necessary for quality of life, she just zoned out.
    She was going to have to get some distance on this thing if she was going to make it happen. But of course she probably wasn’t going to make it happen. She never made anything happen. She wished she could be like Skippy Langdon. Skip knew what she wanted and went after it and got it. She was Marcelle’s idea of a true woman of the ’90s—strong, competent, sure of herself, and bold enough to do a job usually considered blue-collar, male, and dangerous. If only Marcelle could be like that. If only there were something she wanted to do the way Skip wanted to do police work. She was somewhat in awe of Skip, even intimidated by her, and always had been, throughout their childhood. As a small child, she was afraid to try to be friends—she knew somebody like Skippy Langdon could have only contempt for a wimp like her. As she got older, she’d become more secure in the friendship—after all, they really had known each other all their lives, and Skippy had been in her wedding. Surely she wasn’t going to just go away now.
    Though of course she would be filled with justifiable contempt if she had any idea how many men Marcelle had been to bed with in the past two years—how much a part of her life, how compulsive random seduction had become for her. The beautiful things she had lately been appreciating were men’s bodies.
    That was her favorite part of sex—looking at the bodies, touching them as reverently as she would touch a tiger or an Etruscan vase if she had the chance. That was all that was really left now—that and the momentary pleasure. The cheap thrill, she thought contemptuously.
    Before, sleeping with everybody she’d grown up with, everybody who’d married everybody she’d grown up with, everybody who was new in town, and everybody who was just visiting, had given her little bursts of self-esteem. For a while she felt like some twentieth-century Scarlett O’Hara, some magnolia-smelling version of la belle dame sans merci, tiptoeing heedlessly through a field of male tulips and stomping when she chose. There was a lot of strength in having absolutely nothing invested in sex, nothing emotional except aesthetic pleasure and erotic gratification. She felt beautiful and powerful—not lonely, empty, not the way that, deep in her heart, she really was.
    She would gladly have gone on with it forever if she hadn’t started feeling more like Blanche DuBois than Scarlett O’Hara—some pathetic, broken thing dependent on the kindness of strangers to satisfy her needs. Lately she’d been feeling not powerful but impotent, not beautiful but tattered, slutty. Desperate.
    She sank down under the comforter, restraining herself from actually pulling it over her head. It’s oka
y
, she said to herself.
    You’re allowed to be this depressed two days after your father dies—your father, your only living relative (formerly living relative, try to grasp that, please)—your only relative who gave a damn about you and, let’s face it, whom you could stand.
    The sobs rose in her throat.
    I never had a mother at all, and now I have no father.
    Bitty was always dressing her up, putting her into little black velvet dresses and little red felt jumpers, and little black patent-leather shoes, like the ones the little girl across the street had on. Bitty’s little girl had to be perfect—a perfect little extension of Bitty’s beauty and Bitty’s breeding. Everything was about public appearances, nothing was about her and Bitty. And she had to be what Bitty wasn’t too—competent, alert. Shit,
awake.
If Bitty’d been half awake herself, maybe she would have seen that Marcelle needed someone to hug her once in a while, someone to kiss her knee when she skinned it, not someone who wouldn’t let her ride a bicycle for fear she’d skin the goddamn knee.
    That was the other thing about Bitty. She was afraid of her shadow and wouldn’t let Marcelle do anything more adventurous than take a walk around the block holding tight to Louise’s hand, or Tonetta’s, or whatever hand was attached to the current all-too-temporary surrogate mother. Mostly, Bitty just wasn’t there. She was in her own amber-colored haze, emerging only long enough