safe to smile at strangers (chapter 23, part 2)

(photo courtesy Bitzenhofer)

She’s outside kicking the wrought iron fence with her silver high tops when Robin walks up behind her.

“Good morning, mamselle. Did we wake up on the wrong side this morning or did that fence try to sneak up on you?”

Eleanor jumps and blushes. “Oh. No. I just like the way it sounds. See?” She kicks it again; the metal vibrates like an angry hornet.

“That reminds me of when I was a kid.” She wants to say that everything reminds him of when he was a kid but she also wants to hear the story. Robin takes her arm in the crook of his elbow like a proper gentleman. He smells of the same kind of deodorant that Lang uses. “I wasn’t allowed to hit my sisters, not even when they asked for it, not even if they begged me to, so instead I would go out back of our house and take a switch to a hackberry tree. Did you ever see a hackberry tree? I’ll find you one today. My Uncle Kenny used to call it a backscratcher tree, because of the bark.” He smiles and winks at her. “We could rub up against one and see if it actually works. We’ll give it a scientific test.” Sometimes he speaks with an exaggerated accent, as if he were only pretending to be southern. “One time our cat caught a mouse and my sister and I weighed it on a postage scale then watched it squeak and squirm for an hour or two until it finally croaked and we weighed it again. We wanted to know if the soul of a mouse could be measured, you see. It was all very scientific.”

She likes to hear him talk. The more stories he tells her, the more they have in common. If she plays it right she can sometimes keep him talking for more than an hour without stopping. While they play chess, he gets so caught up in the stories he’s telling he forgets to watch his king and when they went fishing, he scared all the fish away with his constant chatter. He tells her she has an old soul. He says she reminds him of a girl he played with when he was a kid.

The streetcar is creaking toward them as they cross to the median and fumble in their pockets for the fare. The driver helps Eleanor flatten the dollar and feed it into the slot, slide the quarter in behind. There are two seats together near the back.

Elle slides into the varnished wood seat by the window. “Could it be measured?”

“What?”

“The soul of the mouse.”

“Of course not, you goose. But we repeated our experiment several times just to be sure. Our cat was an excellent mouser. Rats, sparrows and insects, even the ones with wings. Bet she could catch a squirrel if she wanted to. Could probably do it with a bell tied around her neck.” He reaches across to slide the window down. Under the deodorant, he smells faintly of peppermint and mildew, the smell of laundry left too long in the washing machine. He forgot to comb his hair this morning and has a bit of shaving cream on his jaw. “You know, that’s how you know if a hypothesis is sound or not—if you can repeat the experiment with the same results, then you might be on to something.” He leans back in his seat and clasps his hands behind his head. He talks loud so nearby passengers can listen if they want. “Well, for example, take the first time I kissed a girl. I had just eaten a hot dog with mustard and I thought, hey, girls must be attracted to mustard, so I started eating mustard all the time, on sandwiches and as a dipping sauce, you know. But then the next time I got close to a girl she pulled a face and squealed, ‘Eew. You smell like a hot dog.’”

“Then what did you do?”

“Well then I knew I had been wrong about the mustard. In other words, my hypothesis was faulty because I couldn’t duplicate the experiment. So I switched to ketchup.”

His teeth are as straight and white as a movie star’s. Eleanor lets him finish laughing at himself before she asks, “How old were you?”

She knows he’s 23 and still lives with his mother. She thinks he’s probably never had a real girlfriend, although he’s perfectly nice to look at. He looks like he sleeps in a single bed under a Lord of the Rings posters and a shelf full of Star Wars action figures. Robin glances mockingly from the corner of his eye. “Mam’selle, I was an old, old man. I must have been sixty or seventy when I first kissed a girl.”

“A seventy-year-old kissing girls? Eew. Now that is gross.”

Robin talks them all the way to Canal Street where they get off the streetcar and walk arm-in-arm down Royal. Along the way, he jokes with doormen and waves to people in cars. In her mind, he’s a young politician and she’s his companion. People point and whisper: Isn’t that the rich reclusive heiress who lives alone in the fancy mansion on St. Charles? The one who reads books? On his arm, it is safe to smile at strangers. Through her big green sunglasses, New Orleans is the Emerald City crawling with munchkins and Cuttenclips and Quadlings, and she is a mysterious and sophisticated creature walking among them.

A stanchion blocks the street and a band has unfolded chairs and brought out a banjo, trumpet, dented tuba, fiddle, and a washboard with a bell and a coffee can attached. A skinny half-lidded brunette croons a dreamy rendition of Sugar in My Bowl. Sunlight flashes off the brass into Eleanor’s eyes. She closes them, filling her ears with the dawdling, tinny notes, smelling the wet cement and heady fumes of glossy white paint. After awhile she opens her eyes. “That junkie sure can sing.”

He puts on a face of exaggerated surprise. “What in the world are you talking about?”

“Her, of course.” Eleanor nods to the skinny brunette.

“How would you know?”

“For your information, my mom did a very informative film about a heroin addict. You should see it. It’s quite edifying.”

“Miss Eleanor. You know too much for your own good.”

“My mom says one can never know too much.” Eleanor puts her hand on her hip. “I also know why we never walk down Bourbon Street.” He raises his eyebrows. “You know, I’ve seen plenty of naked ladies before. I live in a house full of them, after all. Seeing a naked lady never hurt anybody.”

“Well, I guess you’ve seen it all, haven’t you?”

*

(If you could cut out any word, sentence, paragraph from this chapter, which one would it be?)