Enid\u2019s house looked like the Katrina houses, though the storm had yet to come. It wasn\u2019t just the swampy yard, or the front porch slouching off its foundation. It wasn\u2019t the cracked windowpanes, the missing chunks of foundation, the layers of silt and grime. The frayed curtains dangling from busted rods. The piles of chaos inside, as if her things had once been buoyant and then settled, haphazardly, when the water receded. It was more the feeling of evacuation, the evidence of how the owner had been wrenched from the middle of her life without warning. Laundry gone stiff hung in the shower. Open books straddled couch arms. A claw-foot tub sprouted vegetables, herbs in various stages of preservation. Piles of dirty and once-clean dishes now dark with dust and roach droppings. A kettle of moldy water on a burner. Things frozen in stages of completion. She\u2019d been gone for months by then, but her mint was still thriving. Her ornamental peppers, still bearing.<\/p>\n
~<\/p>\n
Lauren and I had been together two years when she brought me to see her grandmother\u2019s house in Lakeview, a wealthy suburb of New Orleans. It was 1999, and Enid was already living at Maison Hospitaliere. I\u2019d only seen her once, a few years prior, when I was visiting. In the bakery aisle at Dorignac\u2019s, Lauren had leaned over and whispered, \u201cThat\u2019s my grandma.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThat bag lady?\u201d I said. Nearby, an old woman engulfed in clothes and coats leaned over a cart. She wore a hat. In the summer. In Louisiana.<\/p>\n
Lauren laughed and pulled me in the other direction.<\/p>\n
Enid was gone by the time we moved there, but Lauren had plenty of people, aunts and great-aunts, neighbors she\u2019d grown up with, nuns and teachers. Her bloodline went back to the canal-diggers. Humidity was in her genes, passed down with pole legs and an aquiline nose, blue eyes, the thick, blonde hair she buzzed off, an accent she could dial up or down at will. But me, this was my first real city. I\u2019d grown up in Orlando, guzzling fairy tale until I was sick. There, street sweepers with dustpans on handles removed the refuse every six to eight minutes inside the theme parks, and outside, a city ordinance prohibited bums. In New Orleans, things smelled bad. I liked that about a place.<\/p>\n
We rented a one-bedroom in Metairie, the suburb where Lauren\u2019s parents had owned a brick house with white shutters for thirty-five years. Pick one you like<\/em>, Al had told his new bride, because we\u2019re not moving.<\/em> My family had lived in fifteen houses in nine years; I\u2019d gone to seven schools. We moved to Orlando when I was eight and spent the next ten years circling the place, trying to figure out how we fit in. We didn\u2019t fit in. Not until they split up did either of my parents settle down. Lauren had roots, people. She knew where she was from.<\/p>\n Our apartment was in a part of Metairie called Fat City, a name which had something to do with the line of liquor stores and strip joints on nearby Veterans Highway, and something to do with the clientele. We picked Golden Key Apartments because the landlady, Barbara \u201cno relation\u201d Bush, said she\u2019d waive the pet deposit on account of how cute our Cocker Spaniel was. Lauren said we were on the parade route, which meant come Mardi Gras, we\u2019d have primo seats. A selling point for me, since I\u2019d never had primo seats to anything but Disney\u2019s electric parade.<\/p>\n The apartment itself was tiny. Empty, even after we\u2019d moved in. For two weeks, Lauren, the dog, and I shared a twin mattress on the floor. When Lauren\u2019s dad Al told us we could loot his mom\u2019s vacant house for furniture, I made a list: dining table, dresser, couch. Things to make an empty apartment seem like home.<\/p>\n ~<\/p>\n Freezerbags full of pennies. Shelves of cheap flashlights, red and green and blue, no batteries. Stacks of potholders. Drawers full of keys. Furniture piled on furniture piled on books piled on linens piled on clocks. End tables on mattresses on wicker chairs on desks. Things packaged and repackaged, stuffed in plastic and re-stuffed in drawers. Tea strainers, wool blankets, umbrellas. In a jewelry box, ten pairs of eyeglass frames, no lenses. A dresser full of paper fans. China crammed full of toilet paper, empty peanut butter jars, gardening books. Plastic cups from Mardi Gras floats. Everything removed from its original packaging and hand-sealed in Enid\u2019s own bags, preparation for some future disaster.<\/p>\n ~<\/p>\n The closeness of the house thickened the summer heat into gravy. It was a giant garage sale, but better: everything free and mine for the taking. After letting us in with his key, Al stayed in the kitchen, near the back door. This was where he\u2019d grown up. Enid had lived here from the time she\u2019d given birth to his older brother until the day Al found her, chin to chest and reeking of urine, laid out on her rattan sofa. She\u2019d been there for days, refusing to answer her phone. Now she called him from Maison Hospitaliere to ask why he hated her. Eighteen, nineteen times a day, she called, pissed, demanding rectification. \u201cWhy you hate me,\u201d she\u2019d say coldly. \u201cWhen I\u2019m going home.\u201d<\/p>\n Lauren made paths through her grandmother\u2019s piles, shouting to me from somewhere close but inaccessible. I found a cheese grater, a ceramic pitcher, a yoga book, a trivet. She found a collection of six screen doors propped against the wall. Lauren coveted doors, wishing, maybe, to possess the means to escape. Or a way to keep someone out. Once, she made a gigantic desk out of a door, one that took up half our tiny room, inlaid with a slate-and-oyster-shell mosaic. A tree branching out of it. Today when she sees a door, she will pause, make a small sound of pleasure, say, Look at that<\/em>. Even after fifteen years, I won\u2019t see what she sees. I\u2019ll be looking for something else.<\/p>\n We didn\u2019t take the doors. We took, instead, the dining room table, oak, round, split down the middle. Masking-taped together. A clear plastic tablecloth melted into the surface. Five thick legs that ended in wheels, like tiny hooves. It pulled apart to make room for a leaf, for two leaves, for six. \u00a0It stretched clear across the room.<\/p>\n Al said we\u2019d find our fortune in that table. Enid hid money in places she could no longer recall, a true daughter of the Depression, sewing cash into her curtains, taping it beneath a drawer. I weighed her bags of pennies in my hands, imagined what could be buried in our table. The fortune I wouldn\u2019t know what to do with.<\/p>\n It took four men \u2013 Al, Lauren\u2019s brother Nick, and two neighbors \u2013 to get the table out of Enid\u2019s house and up to our apartment. We carried the other things ourselves: a three-legged stool held together with wire. A busted tabletop grandfather clock that bonged plaintively all the way from Lakeview to Fat City. Heirlooms. Broken things. Right away I bought a round tablecloth and rigged it to the table. It hung off the edges like a tutu. The wheels underneath like pointe shoes, poised, ready to arabesque out the window. I sat there alone, mornings before work, staring at a banana tree so waxy and green I assumed it was fake. It took up the whole window, our only view. One day it sprouted tiny bananas, but they rotted and fell off before anything approaching ripeness.<\/p>\n ~<\/p>\n Notes taped to the walls and left on tables. Grocery lists. Journals. Names of things she was beginning to forget. \u201cOn\/Off\u201d next to the light switch. \u201cCupboard\u201d next to the cupboard. Recipes, followed by instructions for tanning hides, followed by the symptoms of dehydration. Rants. Poems. One entry where she worried about thieves coming to take her guns.<\/p>\n She had guns?<\/em> Lauren said.<\/p>\n Al grimaced. Found them in her laundry basket<\/em>.<\/p>\n ~<\/p>\n After moving Enid\u2019s table into our apartment, we went out to eat. Every week, sometimes twice, we ate at Metairie landmarks, places with full bars and names in the possessive. Mr. Ed\u2019s, Sidmar\u2019s, Frankie\u2019s. Menus brimming with fried oysters, barbeque shrimp, turtle soup. Soft-shelled crab, Andouille sausage, whole roasted duck. Order whatever you want, baby<\/em>, her great-aunts would croon. You getting a drink?<\/em> Her mom ordered bourbon and water, her dad, strawberry daiquiris. \u201cLauren, what does Kelly want?\u201d they\u2019d ask. There were always appetizers. Always desserts. Always someone tucking away the tab. And because this was Metairie, always someone else to be introduced to. \u201cThis is Lauren\u2019s friend Kelly,\u201d they\u2019d say. \u201cHer college roommate.\u201d<\/p>\n I was a vegetarian whose options were Eggplant Parmesan or the Wop Salad. I worked a minimum-wage job at a bookstore caf\u00e9 where we were forbidden from accepting tips. I\u2019d been Lauren\u2019s roommate, it was true, but we were no longer in college.<\/p>\n \u201cHi,\u201d I said. \u201cI\u2019m the roommate.\u201d<\/p>\n I bent over plate after plate of Eggplant Parmesan I couldn\u2019t afford. Ate quickly. Ordered dessert.<\/p>\n ~<\/p>\n Lauren was good at pretending things were okay when they weren\u2019t. When I got sick, everybody knew it. Large piles of tissues collected around me. Every exhale came out a groan. Do I feel hot to you?<\/em> I said, following Lauren around our apartment. Does my throat look red?<\/em> I shivered audibly, kicked the covers off. I flipped languidly through TV channels.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m miserable<\/em>,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n At dinner, I spun plain linguini on my fork and glared at the steaks and ribs and entire roasted birds around me. \u201cI\u2019m not hungry,\u201d I said to no one, \u201cbecause I\u2019m so sick.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cHow\u2019s the job?\u201d Al asked Lauren between bites of mashed potatoes. \u201cYou selling any cars?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t know why someone with one degree in English and another in theater is selling cars,\u201d her mother said loudly. But Lauren wasn\u2019t selling cars. That was the problem. She\u2019d been hired at the Saturn dealership but had yet to break even between commission and hourly wage.<\/p>\n \u201cI sold a used one at the beginning of the month.\u201d Lauren laughed and looked at me. I\u2019d heard this story. \u201cThe other day I had a woman want to buy a car, you know, so I\u2019m showing her around, giving her my pitch, and she says she wants to buy a top of the line. So I hand her over to financing, and they laugh at me because she\u2019s got no credit. Two repos in the last year. So beware of the easy sell, they tell me.\u201d<\/p>\n Everyone chuckled, nodding into their plates. Al was an accountant; Lauren had bought her first car with cash. I was the one who carried debt like luggage. My dad was in finance, too, but he sold high-interest loans to hard-up customers. Boats for people with bad credit. He believed everyone should have access to money. I was the one who told Lauren to cash in her savings, her mutual fund, her retirement. I was the one who said, \u201cLet\u2019s move,\u201d over and over again.<\/p>\n At dinner that night, Lauren switched plates with me, finishing what I couldn\u2019t. Her Granny asked if I\u2019d lost weight and offered a piece of chicken.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t eat meat,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s right.\u201d She shook her head mournfully. \u201cYou eat seafood, huh?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI try not to.\u201d<\/p>\n Lauren finished my plate and reached for her mom\u2019s, chucking off shrimp heads with a slender thumb. Arms propped on the table, fingers slick with butter. I glowered at her, but she didn\u2019t notice. In my family, we could catch each other\u2019s attention from across the room simply by staring. We felt that attention like breath, like a tap. We looked up. They didn\u2019t use their faces the same way in Lauren\u2019s family. They didn\u2019t point with their eyes; they didn\u2019t threaten with a look. I could stare at Lauren for hours, and she might never notice. Sometime long ago, she\u2019d trained herself to ignore that weight.<\/p>\n ~<\/p>\n Away from Metairie, I could almost forget I didn\u2019t belong there. Driving past the canal at sunset, it was easy to imagine the water pure, cleared of sewage and heavy metals and nutria. The warm, damp air leaned into me like the old ladies in Dorignac\u2019s who\u2019d pick through my cart as I shopped, holding up an off-brand of cheese and saying, \u201cAw, honey, you don\u2019t want this.\u201d In Jackson Square, hustlers yelled, \u201cBet you twenty dollars I can tell you where you got your shoes.\u201d (\u201cOn my feet,\u201d I yelled back, having played this game before.) In the Quarter, boys with soda caps glued to their sneakers tap-danced for tips. Couples in ballgowns and tuxedos jostled neo-hippies in patchwork dresses, addicts lolled against piss-smelling buildings, men painted silver mimed on cardboard-box stages. A trombone player rested in an alley. A short man in a top hat pushed carriage rides. Strip clubs and art galleries, coffee shops and absinthe houses, sushi buffets and Lucky Dog vendors, and on and on and on.<\/p>\n Most nights we walked bare-shouldered to O\u2019Flaherty\u2019s on Toulouse, where you could get cider on tap if you didn\u2019t mind being shit on by pigeons roosting in the trees above the patio. Being from Orlando, I knew how to hate tourists, so I watched what the locals did, picked up the accent, dropped the names of streets and neighborhoods, kept track of the Saints \u2013 both the Catholic and athletic varieties. Nights in this city, before the second and then third bar, before the cash Lauren\u2019s parents gave us for groceries turned into credit transactions, before it all began to rock and collide, before I was tripping into the dark, sloshing through the filthy liquid in the gutters that left a film between my bare toes that I wouldn\u2019t wash off before bed \u2013 nights like these, I felt like we could make it here.<\/p>\n When we left, we walked along streets lined with gas lights, past the waiters in paper hats at Caf\u00e9 du Monde, past signs for midnight tours of above-ground cemeteries, past historical mansions with dark lawns stretched out behind wrought iron fences. In the car, we avoided the foot traffic on Bourbon Street but were always getting stuck behind a horse and buggy, the bag of shit attached to the mule\u2019s ass wagging just beyond the windshield.<\/p>\n ~<\/p>\n By November, Lauren had sold three cars. Still not enough to break even. I\u2019d gotten sick twice more, back to back.<\/p>\n \u201cYou should go to the doctor,\u201d Lauren told me after my six-hour shift making caf\u00e9 au laits and sneaking out a tip jar that my manager confiscated. \u201cThat cold\u2019s hanging on too long.\u201d<\/p>\n It was the longest I\u2019d been sick, a triple succession of viruses packed into a six-week period. I blamed everything: the dirty cups and plates and straws I handled, the stress that\u2019d compromised my immune system \u2013 the time spent crouched over Enid\u2019s table worrying over the electric bill, the phone bill, the student loan bills. The city itself. Something in the air, something emanating from the canals and breeching the levees, something that issued straight from the people.<\/p>\n The coffee shop didn\u2019t spring for health insurance. My sinuses filled like water balloons. They gave me headaches. Made my teeth hurt. Threw off my equilibrium. Made me a little stupider. A little less able to recognize the bigger problems when they arose.<\/p>\n ~<\/p>\n I\u2019d like to think it could\u2019ve begun like this: an illness. Something small, like a papercut on the inside. Impossible to recognize for what it is. When Lauren\u2019s Grandpa Rock, for whom Lauren and I would later name our son, got sick, I imagine Enid held it together for a while. She had a long history of fixing things: she was a gardener, a seamstress. A collector of broken things. A sick husband would\u2019ve been another item on the long list of things she took care of. And she did take care of them. Until she didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n In her house, we found lists carefully cut from periodicals and scotch-taped to the pages of a composition notebook: Hints from Heloise, an ad for Victorian Gingerbread Vintage Woodworks, a geography test from the Times Picayune<\/em>. Templates, budgets for household expenses for things she didn\u2019t own, like a car, and no numbers filled in. Recipes. Gardening tips. The definition and etymology of \u201cwassail.\u201d A two-page list of hog varieties. The bloodline of black and white marriages. A description of shingles and how to treat it.<\/p>\n Nowhere, the symptoms of Parkinson\u2019s.<\/p>\n Or, for that matter, depression.<\/p>\n He was sick for ten years before she locked him out. When you ask Al or the Aunts why she did it, they\u2019ll tell you she was crazy. She was mean, they\u2019ll say. They\u2019ll shake their heads, the verdict clear: no good reason. No reason at all.<\/p>\n There\u2019s more to the story. Of course there is. She locked him out of the house one day, and never let him back in. Not to get his clothes, which she wore, not even to get his wallet, which she kept on top of a cabinet. He went to live with his sisters, the Aunts, and stayed there until he moved into the nursing home where he died. He and Enid lived in the same neighborhood, one-and-a-half blocks away from each other. Enid still showed up at family Christmas parties. It didn\u2019t occur to Lauren that this was unusual, which makes sense once you get to know that side of the family. The Aunts \u2013 there were three of them, though I only knew two \u2013 lived together their whole lives. One of them married briefly. When her husband drowned, she moved back in with her sisters for good. Rock was the only sibling to marry for any length of time.<\/p>\n There are things that keep siblings together: love, certainly, but also shame. Secrets. Things that are not my story to tell. I don\u2019t know why Enid sent Rock back to his sisters after so many years. I don\u2019t know what happened the day she decided to lock the door. What I\u2019m sure of is that she didn\u2019t do it just because she was crazy.<\/p>\n After that, for sure, the crazy found her. She stopped keeping house, started stockpiling. She\u2019d always been a packrat, but she no longer contained the mess to the garage or sewing room. It wasn\u2019t true, what I\u2019d assumed. The day Al removed her from the house, he hadn\u2019t lifted her from the middle of a life. Those things I\u2019d seen partially done, the laundry and the dishes? They\u2019d been like that for months. Maybe years.<\/p>\n There was no money in the table we took. There was no money sewn into the curtains or taped under the dresser. No secret doors or pockets. No stash. The table survived several cross-country moves until, a decade later in a city almost as far from New Orleans as it\u2019s possible get in the U.S., it finally cracked in half. The two parts sit in my shed. I am convinced I will fix it someday. I am convinced, also, that if I stop believing this, it will mean something terrible.<\/p>\n ~<\/p>\n My cold subsided for a while, came back, and by the time I finally got to the doctor it was a few days before Christmas. The doctor stuffed gauze up my nose and said I had a sinus infection, seventy bucks to diagnose what I\u2019d told him on the way in. He asked if I had any allergies, and I told him no, and he prescribed penicillin. I popped one of the samples and drove back to the coffee shop to finish my shift. I\u2019d decided to stay in New Orleans instead of spending money to go home for the holidays.<\/p>\n My condition changed the eve of Christmas Eve at a party at the Aunts\u2019. First I got better: my nose cleared up, my head stopped aching. I woke with two tiny bumps on my back \u2013 mosquito bites, I\u2019d told Lauren.<\/p>\n \u201cThose look like hives,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n \u201cI never get hives,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n At the Aunts\u2019 house I ate peeled shrimp swimming in butter, stuffed artichokes, crab cakes. I drank four glasses of wine, each from a different bottle, justifying both the seafood and alcohol because it was Christmas, and I\u2019d been sick so long, and I missed my family, and it didn\u2019t count if the wine was from different bottles. I got two gifts, one from Lauren\u2019s parents and a gift certificate from her Granny. I guarded my little pile closely.<\/p>\n Then I got worse. My fever returned with gusto. The bug bites turned electric. In a back bedroom, Lauren pulled up my shirt and said, \u201cHoly shit.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhat?\u201d I said, craning around to see.<\/p>\n She touched my skin with a cool hand. \u201cYou got hives.\u201d<\/p>\n My back was a blotchy mess. The hives had sprouted, blossomed, brambled. My hives had hives. I looked like a documentary photo. Disgusting, mesmerizing.<\/p>\n \u201cDo you want to go home?\u201d Lauren asked, and I assured her I could wait out the party. I hadn\u2019t made the connection yet. It must\u2019ve been something I ate last night<\/em>, I told her, though the only thing I\u2019d eaten was peanut butter and jelly, what I ate every night before work.<\/p>\n At eleven thirty, right on schedule, I took my next dose of penicillin.<\/p>\n I remember sitting on the Aunts\u2019 couch. I remember the itching. And then the next thing I remember is getting out of the car at the hospital, my feet so swollen they wouldn\u2019t fit in my shoes. Hives on my face, behind my knees, under my hair. This damn city<\/em>, I remember thinking. It\u2019s going to kill me.<\/em><\/p>\n Even the ER doctor couldn\u2019t disguise his incredulity: \u201cWhy didn\u2019t you stop taking the pills?\u201d he said.<\/p>\n I didn\u2019t know. I hadn\u2019t realized. It\u2019d been Lauren\u2019s mom who\u2019d made the diagnosis sometime near the end of the party. Without her, I might\u2019ve still been taking my pills, blaming my reaction on the shrimp. On the weather. On the canals. Blaming the poisoning on everything but the poison.<\/p>\n ~<\/p>\n After a shot of cortisone in my hip, I spent the night moving between couch and tub. The colloidal-oatmeal baths were like antidotes to the pain. The double dose of Benadryl, like crack. May cause excitability in children<\/em>, it said on the label. I was awake for three nights.<\/p>\n When the twelve-ounce box of Soothing Bath Treatment ran out, I begged Lauren to get more. It was the middle of the night. My hives were raging and my feet were so swollen I could barely walk.<\/p>\n \u201cGet more,\u201d I said. \u201cPlease.\u201d I could see how helpless she already felt, how lost. She studied the ingredients on the box.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s just oatmeal,\u201d she said. Surprised, like she\u2019d stumbled upon the cure for a disease and she wasn\u2019t even a doctor. It was impossibly easy. We had Quaker Oats in the cabinet.<\/p>\n She used the whole box. Even in my incoherent state, I paused over the tub-sized bowl of oatmeal before me. It didn\u2019t look like the Soothing Bath Treatment. But I was already naked \u2013 I couldn\u2019t stand to wear clothes \u2013 and desperate. I got in. I sat in the water for ten minutes before I began to laugh. Lauren, sitting on the toilet, looked up in alarm.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t understand,\u201d she said. \u201cIt just says, \u2018oatmeal.\u2019 See?\u201d<\/p>\n I stood, oats sticking to every body part, dripping from my hair. Oats that refused to be brushed away or to wash down the drain. I got myself together and went back to the hospital. Charged another ER trip to the credit card. Got steroids this time, a step-down program that made me ravenous. It worked. Be careful not to go back to work too soon<\/em>, the doctor at the hospital cautioned. Cortisone weakens the immune system, making it doubly easy for you to get sick.<\/em><\/p>\n ~<\/p>\n When our six-month lease came up for renewal, instead of staying in our primo parade location, we bolted one month before Mardi Gras. I called my mom in Florida, asked what she\u2019d think about us moving in with her.<\/p>\n She said we could have the spare bedroom.<\/p>\n I gave my two-week notice at the coffee shop, to which the manager shrugged. \u201cIt\u2019s hard to keep people,\u201d she said. Lauren waited until the last day to tell the dealership she was leaving, informing her boss that she wouldn\u2019t be back.<\/p>\n \u201cYou mean, for a while?\u201d he said.<\/p>\n No, she said. She meant not ever.<\/p>\n Lauren\u2019s family treated our move out of town like an extended vacation. Like at the end of it, we\u2019d be back. As if either they didn\u2019t believe Lauren would go, or couldn\u2019t stomach the thought of it. Perhaps it just disappointed them to see that we hadn\u2019t grown up. We hadn\u2019t. We left New Orleans without ever once saying, We\u2019re not roommates.<\/em> We left Barbara Bush with a tub full of oatmeal, and forfeited our security deposit.<\/p>\n In the end, we lugged all of our furniture back to Enid\u2019s house, leaving it padlocked in the garage surrounded by roach bait. This time, no one came to help us. We hauled back the things we\u2019d acquired \u2013 boxes of books, lamps, the three-legged stool, the kitchen table \u2013 and kept only our summer clothes. Like kids packing off to camp. It was nearly dark when we finished, the light fading faster in Enid\u2019s overgrown yard. To lock our stuff away, one of us had to go through the unlit garage and close the door from the inside.<\/p>\n \u201cYou go,\u201d Lauren said, and I laughed.<\/p>\n \u201cYou afraid of ghosts?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYeah,\u201d she said. \u201cDuh.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYou forgot,\u201d I said. \u201cShe\u2019s not dead yet.\u201d<\/p>\n When Lauren disappeared into the lightless interior, I made wooing sounds anyway because thinking of ghosts was easier than thinking of nursing homes. Easier than beating our heads against the wall of this history, the questions nobody would answer. Easier than asking, again, what happened here? How did things go so wrong?<\/p>\n Enid wouldn\u2019t have liked me. She didn\u2019t like anyone, really, or so I was told. But I liked her. I found myself taking her side, imagining we were on the same team. Outsiders in this family. Misunderstood.<\/p>\n What I refused to consider \u2013 what I refuse, still, in a way \u2013 was that she was just crazy. That Al and the others were right. She was sick. Trapped. Not so much a mystery as a stock tragedy.<\/p>\n But they lied about me. They knew I was no roommate. Who\u2019s to say they\u2019re not lying about her?<\/p>\n When Lauren got sick, years later, I would feel no fondness toward her illness. There would be no romanticizing its deadening effect. Her depression was all-encompassing; it consumed her whole body, and there didn\u2019t seem to be anything I could do to make it better. She went to doctors, ended up in the hospital. I got mad: at her, at her friends and family, at the doctors, at the sheer terror that this was not something that she, or I, or anyone else, could fix.<\/p>\n ~<\/p>\n During our last dinner as residents of New Orleans, I ordered boiled shrimp point blank. I shouldn\u2019t have been surprised that my food came with its eyes and feelers and legs still attached. I was still a tourist, after all. Where I was from, shrimp came peeled and de-tailed, looking more vegetable than animal.<\/p>\n I pushed the corpses around my plate, thinking no one would notice if I didn\u2019t eat.<\/p>\n After a few minutes, without saying anything, Lauren\u2019s Granny reached over and began peeling my shrimp, her quick fingers stripping away face and tail, dropping the meat in front of me. One, two, three, and only then did I realize she wasn\u2019t eating off my plate. She was doing this for me. I ate one. Then I leaned over and whispered, \u201cThank you.\u201d She kept peeling.<\/p>\n Lauren was talking about Enid\u2019s house, telling the story of how I\u2019d scared her in the garage. Everyone beamed, drinking in her words, laughing into their drinks.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s weird, huh?\u201d Al said of the house.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat\u2019s going to happen to it?\u201d I asked, imagining a renovation, an inventory of all the stuff. A massive clean-up.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ll tear it down,\u201d he said. \u201cBuild some rental property.\u201d He said it without emotion. He\u2019d spent his adult life making order out of numbers, decoding tax documents that no one else could understand. He was thinking now in terms of quantity. How much to tear it down. How much to build something else in its place.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat about the stuff inside?\u201d<\/p>\n He half-smiled at me, bemused. His question was not a question. \u201cYou like that junk.\u201d<\/p>\n I smiled back, baffled. How could he not see it? How could he not be in love with all of it?<\/p>\n \u201cYou promise to call me before you do this, so I can come back a last time,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n \u201cSure,\u201d he said. \u201cY\u2019all\u2019ll be back soon.\u201d<\/p>\n I didn\u2019t know how the destruction of houses went. I was from Orlando, so I imagined wrecking balls. Cartoonish. One thwack and Enid\u2019s house would lie on its side, the contents spilling out the windows. Buried in itself. I imagined the wad of money stashed somewhere for safe-keeping, collapsing with the bureau or sofa or mattress, growing old and brown with time, turning, finally, to dust.<\/p>\n Enid\u2019s house looked like the Katrina houses, though the storm had yet to come. It wasn\u2019t just the swampy yard, or the front porch slouching off its foundation. It wasn\u2019t the cracked windowpanes, the missing chunks of foundation, the layers of silt and grime. The frayed curtains dangling from busted rods. The piles of chaos […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[10],"tags":[24],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Jypy-1k8","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5092"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5092"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5092\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10578,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5092\/revisions\/10578"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5092"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5092"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5092"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Kelly Magee<\/a><\/h6>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"