Picturesque

Chapter 2: Prytania

I lived just outside the city during my childhood. While the heart of downtown New Orleans was reserved for Sunday post-church outings for ice cream or shopping, my home was nestled in a quiet suburb right outside the city. Mild winters and humid orange summers characterized most of my memories in that tiny yellow house planted amongst a row of other tiny houses on the street.

As a child, I was not well socialized. I was born in the middle of the second World War, and that war took my father before I could ever meet him. My mother was into her third trimester when a man in uniform came to her doorstep and told her that her husband and the father of her unborn child had been killed in battle on the French coast. My mother named me Rebecca after my father's mother to somehow keep him connected to me, and it was only Mama and I for my entire childhood.

Mama had no choice but to become a shopgirl for a local drugstore immediately after hearing the news, both to support herself and I, and to keep her mind off her husband's death. I believe that for the rest of her life, she lived in a waiting period and constantly busied herself so that time would pass faster, and her husband would return home. For a while, when people asked, she would tell them he was stationed wherever America was focused on and that she couldn't wait for his furlough to come home. Eventually, people stopped asking.

It never bothered me that much since I never met the man. Father to me was the striking young fellow in the black-and-white picture sitting on the radio in the living room. He was Mama's guardian angel about whom she would tell stories to me at night before bed.

"You know, your daddy could fly," she would tell me as she pulled my floral duvet up to my chin, as if it got cold enough in Southern Louisiana to warrant tucking your children in tight at bedtime to keep them warm.

My eyes would alight with wonder as she told me about how he could take a running start and then jump straight up into the air, spreading his arms outright like an airplane and flying through the clouds. She told me that one time he went so high that he touched the sun and came back down with a summer tan.

By the time she got around to vividly describing the aerodynamics of imaginary human flight mostly to ensure I couldn't see through her fib, my eyes would be closed. I would always make myself stay awake enough to feel her kiss my forehead and hear the sound of her turning my bedside lamp off.

As an only child whose mother worked long shifts, I excelled in school for the primary reason that I simply had nothing else to do. When the school day ended and I walked home, I would read my textbooks. By the end of a school year, I had read through my textbooks five times each and nearly every single new book in the small school library.

I was an only child who spent recesses reading or doing homework, so you can imagine how quiet and reserved I was. I didn't know how to interact with the other children at school. The only friend I had besides my imaginary ones was a little boy who lived across the street and was about the same age as me. His father had died in an accident at the factory where he worked, so his mother and he were in the same situation as my mother and me. The start of our friendship was nothing more than "Hi, my name's Rebecca" and "Hi, I'm Greg" when we crossed paths in the street.

In the summers, Greg and I would ride our bicycles all around the neighborhood from morning until dark. One time, we went so far that we ended up in downtown New Orleans, coasting through the streets and gazing up at all the lights as the sun set. We got back home late into the night, and after a beating from our mothers, we stayed within neighborhood limits when on our bikes from then on. If one of our mothers wasn't working, we would make her join in on playing skip rope. It was usually Greg's mother, and she would hold one end of the rope while one of us held the other end and the other kid jumped the rope. Sometimes, when she was jolly enough, we both would hold the rope and she would jump until we purposefully tripped her.