A decade and a half from now, when I’ve grown up and followed my parents into the law—when I am still certain that I believe in the law—I’ll be assigned to work in the vast intern room of a Louisiana law firm while I wait for an office to become available. The intern room is windowless, situated in the heart of a warren-like building. It holds a cluster of craft tables pressed together, each like the one my mother kept in the playroom for us when I was a child. Each table holds a boxy beige computer that still uses floppy disks. The computers contain a database of legal briefs we’ll modify for all the cases that pass through the office.
Against the bookshelves in one corner stands a mannequin that must have been used to illustrate a defendant’s position during a shooting death. Now its neck is strung with colorful Mardi Gras beads. The mannequin is black, one arm white, and an intern has posed the arm into a permanently lewd gesture at its crotch. On the floor to my left sits a large cardboard box with its top open, full of folded felt blankets. They’re not here for the late nights we sometimes spend in the office. They’re too hot to be of use in this swampy climate. Instead, intern rumor has it that they were once used to illustrate the smothering death of a child. Working in that room afternoon after afternoon, looking up cases as the Pixies blare from my computer speakers, it will again be the objects that compel me the most. That return me to the feeling of my childhood, to the collision between the story and the artifact. Next to the box lies a replica of a white plaster cast in the shape of a woman’s torso and legs.
Bessie.
I stare at that cast every day and I remember the cracked casings on my father’s wrists that held the story of something long ago. Lying in that cast, immobile and imprisoned—is it possible Bessie wanted to make love to Alcide, that Ricky was born of a desperate attempt at connection, a desperate attempt to regain what was shattered in the crash? Or was it Alcide who wanted it, always a drinker with a temper, now more so after the crash? Was what happened—was what began Ricky—love? Rape? Something hard to define, in between?
*
When I am twelve, my mother decides to go to law school. Quickly, law spreads everywhere in our house. The bookshelves hold memoirs by the hard-charging trial lawyers my father admires. He plays cassettes of their closing statements while he does push-ups on the carpet of the staircase landing, or sits on the steps shining his shoes with a wooden brush. In her early forties now, my mother attends law school not part-time at night but full-time during the day, with students in their early twenties. Evenings, while dinner cooks on the stove, she spreads her books on the white Formica table. They are each three inches thick, with hard burgundy covers. She opens one and leans close to its dictionary-thin pages, licking the pad of her ring finger to turn each page. Sometimes she holds her finger there, and pokes up her head to root for a yellow highlighter she’ll use to underscore the text. Then one of our school No. 2 pencils. She marks a note in the margins, sits back and bites the pencil in its middle. I bite my pencils the same way. The house is soon full of pencils nearly splintered at the center. Years later, I remember the waxy taste of the yellow paint, the papery taste of splintered wood, the sharp metallic of the graphite. When dinner’s ready, she calls to us. We set our plates on the other end of the table, and while my mother studies, we eat.
My mother has a talent for law, it turns out. She makes good grades and joins moot court. Soon my father takes over dinner, wrapping pork chops in bacon and provolone, griddling them and dousing them with ketchup. We have been raised my mother’s way, eating carob instead of chocolate, taught as toddlers that the word candy meant bananas topped with plain, unsweetened yogurt—at least until we got to kindergarten and our friends corrected us. The griddled, tangy fat against the cool sweet slip of the ketchup shocks our tongues. That year, my father makes our Halloween costumes, and he throws himself into the job with a newcomer’s enthusiasm. With yellow fabric and a staple gun, he turns me into the Cowardly Lion from The Wizard of Oz. The television show ALF, about a furry brown alien with a porcine nose, is popular that fall, and for my brother my father staples together brown felt and paints a cardboard toilet paper tube into a snout. Next year, the stores will be crowded with ALF costumes, but that year, when the local children line up in the town auditorium on Halloween, the municipal employee serving as the judge walks down the line of children dressed as clowns or in witches’ hats, their ninja blacks and their fairy-tale pinks, and pins the blue ribbon on my brother’s chest. When we have a school vacation while the law school is in session, it’s my father’s turn for a break and my mother takes us to class with her—and to the cafeteria. My brother is still frighteningly skinny; anything he wants to eat is cause for celebration, and later we’ll all talk about how much we love law school when what we mean is we love macaroni and cheese.
But it’s the professors who make an impression on me. I sit with my knees close together in a hard-backed chair at a pull-down desk, impossibly grown-up law students all around me, and stare at a woman with bobbed gray hair who wears a burgundy jacket and skirt. I’ve never seen a woman in a suit before. Standing in front of an enormous three-part blackboard, she raps the board with the chalk and begins. “Imagine…” she instructs the students, and begins to describe a set of circumstances. I don’t know yet to call what comes out of her mouth a hypothetical, the quick situations sketched by law professors to teach students to analyze how a principle applies to different circumstances. I recognize it for what it is: a story.
*
My mother’s law school loan money is a windfall. My parents have always loved money, always had the faith that more will appear if they spend it. They take us to the French Caribbean, renting a house at the edge of a cliff. They’ve miscalculated, it turns out: Dinner the first night costs as much as they’ve planned for the week. But we are already there, the trip has already begun, and soon the week has the feel of magic.
During the day, we run barefoot on the beach, and try to shimmy up coconut trees, able to scale only a few feet before we tumble back onto the sand, laughing. We collect the fallen coconuts from around the trunks and pitch them into rocks, trying to smash our way to the sweet meat inside. My father has rigged up speakers at the house, and at night he sends French torch songs sailing over the deck. He and my mother hold hands and kiss as they listen to the music. My sisters and I stand on the deck, the shale tile cool against the soles of our feet—for a week, it seems we never have to wear shoes—and take turns twirling, the matching turquoise silk skirts my mother has bought us sliding coolly up our legs, our laughter flying out over the ocean. We are all light and happy and far, far away from home.