Bourée
The Iowa landscape, where I now live, is a no-nonsense one: straight lines of corn and soy beans, ninety percent of the land flat and planted. Midwesterners tend to have attitudes and temperaments to match. When I first moved here from Louisiana I couldn't help but notice the stark contrasts between the two regions. Consider just the differences in the way women dress in the South: more makeup, tighter, more revealing outfits. More jewelry, more perfume, more hair. They are, through cultural conditioning perhaps, more seductive, and those from New Orleans are the most seductive of all. In the Midwest what a woman wears is more aggressively determined by the weather. In Iowa, which has much longer and much more serious winters, women tend to care less about beauty and more about warmth and comfort. The winds, the snow and cold lead to hats, mufflers and coats Iowa women have to wear to protect themselves, which discourage fancy hairdos, sheer stockings, high-heels, or see-through anything. The difference between the women of the two regions is not unlike the difference between the lush, full-leafed tropical flora that thrives in this semi-tropical climate and the more sedate, conservative flora one finds in colder climes.
If you were raised in New Orleans you learned early on that seduction and sex infuse everything, even something as innocuous as the weather report. Taking off your clothes is natural in a hellishly hot climate like ours. Remember, we have nothing to hide, not our vegetables, not our dead, not our stories, and, it seems, not even our bodies. The humidity, which often reaches ninety percent and stays there over the summer, is nothing like any humidity I have ever felt anywhere else. This humidity is like a presence, an animal that breathes on your shoulders, your thighs, your head and legs. The humidity's associate is the temperature, which can reach the 100-degree mark through September. By then I believe some of us would even peel off our skin if we could.
What's the big deal about nudity, we ask. In New Orleans no one uses the euphemism "exotic dancing," which for years I never understood (Asian dancers? belly dancers?). We call it what it is: stripping. Almost everyone raised in the City was exposed to the strippers on Bourbon Street in the French Quarter at some point, because weekend nights the Quarter, that sixty-six square block network of streets that in 1718 comprised the entire city, was the place to go. In the midnight hours we'd walk from deep in the Quarter, where we'd parked our cars, up Bourbon Street past Esplanade Street and the Creole cottages, shot-gun houses and two-story apartments with the signature French and Spanish wrought-iron grillwork, through the gay district where guys slumped against each other and danced in the streets to Donna Summers pumping from the second story of someone's apartment, towards Canal Street and the even wilder parts of the Quarter. We'd descend into its potent mix of blues and jazz clubs, past the tourist shops selling T-shirts, hot sauce, alligator heads and hurricane mix, the sex shops where we giggled at cock rings and edible panties, past the swinging doors of strip club after strip club where hollow-eyed men shouted all girls, all nude all the time.
Maybe we'd stop for a drink in the Old Absinthe Bar, or have some raw oysters or a seafood platter at the Acme Oyster House on Iberville, or turn off into Pat O'Briens for a Hurricane. Then back onto Bourbon, back into the heat and humidity, the smell of the Mississippi in the air, and by now also the smell of piss, sweat and vomit, the sour smell of warm beer and rotting seafood, by now plastic cups and straws and paper lining the sides of the streets, by now more and more people stumbling, or falling down. Eventually we'd pass the strip club that had a second floor window through which a naked mannequin swung. There were curtains in the window, and as the mannequin, in a sitting position, swung out into the curtains and over Bourbon, the curtains would gather into her crotch, hiding its nothingness from the audience below.
When we tired of walking we'd turn off Bourbon for good-at least for that night-away from the street and its colorful, smelly press of people that now make me think of lost spawning salmon. We'd turn toward the river, walking toward the heart of the Quarter-Jackson Square-where we'd soon see the spires of St. Louis Cathedral, the oldest continually active cathedral in the country, the cathedral where several of my ancestors were married in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Walking alongside the Cathedral we'd turn onto Pirate's Ally and pass by the house William Faulkner lived in during his sojourn in New Orleans, where he wrote Soldiers' Pay in 1925. As we walked closer to the river the levee would rise to dominate the background, and the lights of Café du Monde, the open-air café just the other side of the levee from the Mississippi would appear, twinkling and as seductive to me as the warm light from the countless votive candles that surrounded the Virgin Mary's statue in our church. The antidote for a stroll down Bourbon Street was always chicory coffee and beignets-hot rectangular doughnuts sprinkled generously with powdered sugar- at Café du Monde. We'd sit outside the café, the shadow of the cathedral on one side, the levee and the Mississippi on the other, and drink the drink the café was famous for: equal amounts of pungent chicory coffee and hot milk. The powdered sugar on the beignets stuck onto our lips and chins and dusted our clothes, but we didn't care. There was nothing like biting into one of those freshly fried sweet things, full of air and yeast and sugar; if the ritual walk through the Quarter had become a sort of Mass for us, this was the communion.
Sex was everywhere as we were growing up, though, not just in the sleazy, packaged-up-for tourists stuff on Bourbon Street. My father and mother radiated sexual energy, though not always towards each other; flirting, I came to understand, was something you were expected to do. Mardi Gras was an annual public celebration of sex on many levels. Even the statues of Jesus and Mary and the saints in our church were earthy and sexual. I remember Mary's most because I prayed to her most. Her robe was sky blue, edged in gold, and it clung to her closely, revealing all the curves we associate with being a woman. She even wore make-up (or so I used to think): her face was painted with flushed cheeks and peach-dark lips, her eyelashes were as dark as mine when I covered them with mascara, and her hair fell in thick waves round her face, the way mine did when I curled and blow dried it. The face of Christ, in the throes of death on the cross, was painted with excruciating detail, and there was something deeply physical and gut-wrenching about the care the artist had taken depicting his near naked body. I think we loved the statues in the church precisely because they were so life-like and seemed so like us. The church soon began to worry about our attachment to the statues, though, and one day when we arrived for Mass all of them had been replaced by nondescript, unpainted wooden statues. The priest explained to us that we had been taking the statues too seriously. They were symbols, he reminded us sternly, only symbols.
Our parish, our church and school were named after St. Lawrence the Martyr, one of the Roman Church deacons who fell victim to the persecution of Valarian in the year 258. The nuns told us different stories about how St. Lawrence met his death, most of which involved eventual decapitation, but the one I liked best was the story about how, when commanded to surrender the church's treasures to Valerian, he distributed the wealth to the poor instead, and at the end presented those poor to Valerian as the wealth of the church. Valerian, infuriated, initiated a series of tortures, the last of which was to roast him on a gridiron. It is said that during his roasting he joked with his torturer, saying "One side has been roasted, turn me over and eat it."
In addition to teaching us the stories about the lives of the saints and having us memorize the appropriate answers to questions of faith, once we hit fifth grade the nuns also taught us about sex , or rather how to avoid it. Sister Gisela, a big, red-faced nun of an indeterminate age would lecture us on sex during religion class, pacing the hot, unairconditioned classroom, huffing, her face getting redder and redder, as she spoke, her black habit flying out behind her when she turned as if to whip into shape any kid who might have been behind her.
"Your body is the holy temple of the Holy Ghost," she'd say. She had a sometimes stiff way of speaking, and an accent I later learned was Cuban. "This means no kissing until you marry and no touching the holiest parts of your body until you marry!" At this point she would turn and glare at us, one by one, and I swear it seemed as if she could see right into my rotten, sex-crazed young soul. When she looked at me like that I knew that she knew those thoughts I had during Mass while I was pretending to pay attention.
Sometimes she would separate the boys from the girls. Father Schutten, our pastor, would talk to the boys, and she would talk to us.
"No wearing of shiny shoes!" she proclaimed one day. "The boys are looking into the shine of the shoes and seeing what is under there, that which they should not see until you are married." She was sweating on the day she told us this, and I remember how flushed her face was, how drenched she was. She wiped her forehead with a handkerchief. "Jesus, Mary and Joseph," she whispered under her breath.
"And girls, you must look before you walk down the stairs in this building. I have discovered that the boys are waiting underneath the stairs to look up the skirts of the girls as they descend. This is a sin and it causes the Virgin Mary great sorrow when these sins are committed." We squirmed in our seats and my friend Maggie whispered to me "It's the boys' sin, not ours!"
Although I don't think it was the nuns' aim to teach us that our bodies were sinful-they meant to teach us they were holy-that was how we came to understand their lectures. The unclothed body was an unholy body, and anything we did with that body that felt good was probably a sin. We learned that lesson well, but that didn't mean we didn't still take pleasure in seduction. After all, sins of the flesh were not mortal sins.
My friend Maggie gave the first slumber party my mother ever allowed me to attend. We were both in seventh grade. St. Lawrence, not to mention Sister Gisela or Father Shutten, would have been displeased to know that we spent much of the night playing strip-tease music and undressing.
We spent the early part of the evening calling boys on the phone and hanging up. We made several calls to Brian Tizzard, the quiet, dark-haired boy we all had a crush on. At one point we snuck out of Maggie's bedroom window and ran the few blocks down the street to Brian's house where we threw rocks against a window we hoped was his bedroom window. When his mother's head appeared at the window we shrieked and ran back to Maggie's. By midnight Maggie's parents were asleep and we could begin our stripping. I had never seen my mother's naked body, or the unclothed body of any mature woman, for that matter. My breasts were just barely beginning to grow, but Maggie's were fully developed, and I wondered what they would look like.
Maggie went first; she had been practicing, she said. Setting the needle of her pink record player to the beginning of "The Stripper," which she had as a 45, she jumped up on top of her bed and threw her thick, dark hair back, looking at us with a look that reminded me of Sister Gisela's look, but this one knew something else. As the music began she pranced around the bed, tossing her hair this way and that, slowly unbuttoning the buttons of her cotton pajama top, which had, as I recall, blue elephants on it. Her breasts bounced as she danced. She turned away from us, dropped her pajama top, looked back at us and grinned, and with the music as loud as we dared (we didn't want to wake her parents) she jumped and turned toward us revealing herself to us in all her bounty. Hair falling over her face, olive skin glowing in the lamplight, she grabbed her breasts and held them out to us, kicking her legs out from side to side to the music. She represented at that moment all I knew of desire and its mysteries, and all I wanted. With her full brown breasts and their darker areolas and even darker nipples, Maggie's body was both enticing and frightening. Her gutsiness infected us all and soon we were all gyrating hips and waists, throwing our hair about and tossing off our pajamas.
We were fascinated with the strippers on Bourbon Street whom we'd only seen glimpses of thus far. During trips to the Quarter, set up by the church or our family to introduce us to its "history" and "architecture" we always wound up walking down Bourbon street, which I guess the adults thought was ok as long as it was day time. But the strip clubs rarely closed, and sometimes we'd get a peek when the men guarding the doors held them open briefly to entice passersby. The strippers, it seemed to me then, had a power over men I wanted to have. Years later, as a young woman, I would try to get a job as a dancer in a Fat City club, but when I learned stripping was expected I couldn't go through with it. By then I preferred a more intimate form of power and pleasure. I loved the way an orgasm would wash through my body like a flood, filling me, swelling me from my ear lobes down to the very spaces between my toes. To reach orgasm was to reach that place so like a swamp, to be filled in that way with such a diversity of flora and fauna and still, still water, to be awash with desire-this was what it was to be alive, I thought. At once swamped and lifted up above it all.
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