Well, cher, we’re slowly on our way to Paris — by way of a three-day, self-imposed stopover in New York City. There’s no airplane anymore that’ll fly you straight from New Orleans to Paris, so we had to change planes here anyhow, and I looked at that layover and thought, well, why not stretch it into a few days? We’re already here.
But before I talk about New York, you have to hear about the flight up here.
Gladys passed gas most of the way up the eastern seaboard, and I doubt she’s one bit sorry about it. I’m not sure she should be. God made her gassy. That’s not her fault. You probably remember that Gladys is mostly Boston Terrier, and Lord can those dogs fart. Somewhere over Mississippi she got started, and she was just warming up.
My aunt Yvette sent me off with a book for the flight — The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck. Now, Mama did not raise me to use that word. But somebody went and printed it right there on the cover of a published book, and I have decided that makes it fair game. So I will be saying it. And it isn’t the first time that word has turned up in one of my stories anyhow — the last time, we all swore up and down it was the French word for seal. The title of that book, by the way, is Yvette’s whole philosophy of life. There is almost nothing that woman has ever given a fuck about. I wouldn’t be surprised if the author called her for pointers when he was writing it.
I tried to read it on the flight. I really did. But it is hard to give no fucks at all, the way that book wants you to, when your own dog is gassing the entire plane. So in between fucks, I counted her farts. Gladys gassed Mississippi. Then Alabama. Then Georgia. She gave a long, steady something to North Carolina. She didn’t forget Virginia, and they had it coming, after that speeding ticket I got the last time I drove through there. And as we flew over Washington, D.C., right after the captain told us the White House was to our left, she let a massive one rip. I thought that was a little disrespectful. By the time we crossed into New Jersey airspace, the entire airplane had been fumigated.
The man across the aisle spent the back half of that flight with his baseball cap over his face. The children’s cat, Fifi, started hissing at the smell somewhere over Delaware. And Gladys slept through the whole thing — sound asleep, snoring up a storm, with such a look of peace on her little face that not one soul on that plane suspected her. They suspected me.
At one point a very pleasant flight attendant — a slim young thing who looked just like Audrey Hepburn, but with a tattoo behind her ear of a pixie flying over a daisy — leaned down next to me and asked, ever so quietly and ever so kindly, "Madame, would you like something from the first-aid kit for your stomach?" For my stomach. Rose and Josiah, in the seats beside me, burst out laughing in perfect synchrony — the way only twins can — and were no help to me whatsoever. They both knew damn well that smell was coming from Gladys. I thanked her and told her no. There was no dignified way to point at a sleeping dog and say it was her, so I let that sweet girl go on thinking it was me.
My dog was the culprit. I was the suspect.
The smell was so bad that I am fairly certain the United States government could have bottled it and used it as a weapon. It had a bouquet of rotten eggs, spoiled milk, burned cabbage, and just a pinch of something else. Pineapple. I can’t account for the eggs, milk, or cabbage, but I know exactly where that pineapple came from. My kitchen floor. Very early that morning, cleaning out the icebox before we headed to Louis Armstrong to catch our flight, I dropped a carton of cut pineapple. Now, Gladys has two speeds. Ninety-nine percent of the time, it’s snail. One percent of the time, it’s cheetah. That pineapple triggered the one percent. She crossed that kitchen like she had been shot out of a cannon and had gobbled up the whole carton before I could get to the broom.
We landed at JFK around two on Wednesday afternoon. I’m telling you about Gladys’s digestive disaster from the fresh air of the little lounge off our hotel lobby — and after that flight, I’m grateful for every breath of it. It’s early. The children are still upstairs, dead to the world. Teenagers could sleep through an apocalypse. It’s hard getting these two out of bed before noon, but I managed it yesterday. This morning, I’m fine letting them sleep in a little later. I paid for a late checkout. So here I sit with my coffee, close enough to hear the elevator if one of them comes looking for me — though they’d probably just text me — and for several hours, it’s just me, this laptop, and lots and lots of coffee.
The critters — they’re a different story entirely. Both Fifi and Gladys demanded my full attention the moment I woke up. I had Fifi fed and Gladys walked before I got a single sip of coffee — and there isn’t a blade of grass at this whole hotel, so Gladys would not do her business until I’d walked her to Bryant Park, around the corner, to find some.
This is my third time in New York. The first was years back, with a church group from St. Augustine — we came up at Christmas to see the Rockettes and the living nativity at Radio City, real camels and all. The second time I came with my son Jean, to see Madonna. Not the one from the living nativity. The other Madonna.
Rose and Josiah have been before too — Celeste and Phillip brought them up for a long weekend a few years back, shortly before the divorce, so this makes their second time.
And other than the Rockettes — which isn’t really a Broadway show — I have never in all my years seen a show on Broadway. I’ve caught the touring companies at the Saenger back home — plenty of them — but that is not the same as the real thing. The children had never seen a musical at all, anywhere. So we fixed that Wednesday night, after we’d settled into the hotel and found a pet concierge — a sitting service that comes right up to the room — for Gladys and Fifi.
Now, settling on a show went from a negotiation to me making an executive decision. Josiah had his heart set on the Harry Potter show. Rose, like most teenage girls, thinks Taylor Swift walks on water — and can turn that same water into wine. She was scandalized to learn that nobody has yet seen fit to put her life on a Broadway stage — so she landed on Five instead — the one about the six wives of Henry the Eighth, every one of them up there belting like a pop star. Taylor isn’t in it, but it has six divas singing about a loser who wasn’t worth the trouble. It was the closest thing Rose was going to find to Taylor Swift.
Neither one would give an inch, so they lost the right to influence the decision, and I made it for them. I looked over what was playing, and one title jumped right out: The Book of Mormon. It is an actual holy book, mind you — a real scripture to a great many people, especially out in Utah. Well — that sounded like the respectable choice. A nice show about faith, I thought, and surely no one could fault a grandmother for choosing something that sounded like it took the moral high ground. I should have done my research first. The sacred text and the stage performance, as it turns out, are two very, very different things.
Cher. I was raised in the Church, I still find my way to Mass when the need takes me, and I have lived long enough to have heard just about every vulgarity known to the human race. But never like that — never sung so joyously, so vibrantly, from a Broadway stage, with a whole theater loving every minute of it. They said that same French word for seal more times than I could count — and that was the gentlest of it. I will not repeat the rest. My mouth hung open the entire first act. The children laughed until they couldn’t breathe — and somewhere in the second act, God forgive me, so did I. And that is when it dawned on those two that their sweet old Omi understood every filthy word of it. The horror on their faces. It had never once occurred to them that their grandmother might know a thing or two about how the world works. As if I was born a grandmother. It was the funniest show I’ve ever seen. Watching those two was funnier still.
We’re headed to Paris later this evening on Air France — across the same ocean my grandparents crossed a hundred years ago to start a new life in America. It took them nine days in the bottom of a boat. We’ll be landing in France in time for petit déjeuner — that’s French for breakfast — and I have no doubt the children will still find something to complain about somewhere between here and there.
Yesterday we went to Ellis Island, and we stood in the same hall where Mémère and Pépère first set foot in this country. Just across the way was the old hospital where they held Mémère in quarantine, sick and alone, before they would let her in — a ruin now, windows boarded up, closed off to the public. There is a whole story there. But it isn’t a funny one, and today I am in the mood to stay funny. I’ll save it for when I’m back in New Orleans, out on the porch.
I still haven’t gotten a text, and neither of them has come down on that elevator, which means I’ll have to go up and raise the dead myself. We have a long overnight flight ahead of us, and Gladys, I fear, will pass gas the whole way across — tremendous amounts of it. So on the way to the airport, I intend to stop at St. Patrick’s and light a candle to St. Jude, the patron saint of lost causes, because eight hours over the Atlantic with that dog tucked under the seat is about as lost a cause as he’s ever taken on. A little divine intervention can’t hurt.
There won’t be a porch for a while, cher — ten weeks or so, while I’m an ocean away. But there will still be stories. I have so many to share. You keep coming back.
