The Dolls(2)
“Weird,” I murmur. We continue through a swampy area that gets darker and darker as more tangled branches stretch overhead. Mist is rising from the shallow water surrounding the road, and as we break through a clearing, my confusion deepens. I thought I’d recognize Carrefour right away, but this place doesn’t look at all familiar.
The town that lives in my memories is Southern, Gothic, and filled with old mansions and stately, moss-draped cypress trees. But what’s rolling by my window is a lot plainer than that, making me wonder if I’ve imagined everything. Bland row houses line the paved streets, and kids play in a few of the yards. I see a yellow car jacked up on bricks in front of one of the homes and a cluster of plump, middle-aged women wearing dresses and wide-brimmed hats sitting on a front porch of another. A tangle of little boys kicks a soccer ball lazily around the end of a street, and two girls ride rusted bikes in circles at the end of a cul-de-sac.
“This is Carrefour?” I ask.
“Technically, yes,” Aunt Bea responds. “But you didn’t spend much time out here in the Périphérie.”
The name rings a vague bell, but I can’t place it. Behind the row houses, I glimpse marshy wetlands, gnarled cypresses, and a pale green film on the surface of what appears to be a stagnant creek. Spanish moss hangs from hickory branches that arch over the road like a canopy. Above them, the sky swirls with the dark clouds of a coming storm.
I look out the window again, feeling a little sad. “I just don’t remember the town looking like this.” Not that I’m judging. I loved the cluttered disarray of Brooklyn. But I’d always thought of Carrefour as so opulent—and so wealthy.
“This was always the . . . less privileged area of Carrefour,” Aunt Bea says, her brow creasing. “But it seems like it’s gotten a whole lot worse since we left.”
“Bad economy?” I guess as the road leads us past the last dilapidated house and into a deep, misty forest.
“Maybe,” she says slowly. “But I’d be willing to bet central Carrefour is doing just fine.”
As we round another bend and emerge from the woods, sunlight suddenly streams in from all directions. In under a half mile, we’ve driven into an entirely different world.
Just beyond the final creeping cypress tree of the Périphérie sits the edge of the most perfect-looking town I’ve ever seen. As we begin making our way through a neighborhood, I see immaculately manicured lawns, houses with picket fences and matching shutters, and gardens blooming in brilliant color even though it’s January. “It’s like one big country club,” I say.
I stare out the window as Aunt Bea takes a left, turning into what appears to be Carrefour’s downtown area. On the corner there’s an ice cream parlor flanked by a café with an old-fashioned enjoy a coke sign out front, and beside it a little French bistro called Maxine’s. A half-dozen shops that look like they belong in an Atlantic seaside resort town—not middle-of-nowhere Louisiana—extend down the left side of the street.
“That’s where my bakery will be,” Aunt Bea says, pointing to a sliver of storefront next door to a boutique called Lulu’s. “It used to be a little walk-up hamburger stand when your mom and I were kids.”
Perfect canopies of blue and white stripes shade the sidewalks of the main street—which is actually called Main Street—and the store windows are all cloaked in curtains of sea foam green and pale yellow. The buildings are a uniform clapboard white, and the people strolling along look like they’ve been plucked from Martha’s Vineyard and dropped here in their shirtdresses, khakis, and button-down shirts.
“They know it’s winter, right?” I ask as I watch two women emerge from the market with a wicker picnic basket. “And that they’re not actually on their way to a clambake?”
Aunt Bea laughs. “Roll down the windows. It won’t feel like winter here.”
I give her a skeptical look, but by the time my window is halfway down, I realize that it must be in the low seventies outside. “But it’s January,” I say.
“It’s Carrefour,” she says without explaining.
“Does everything here look like a postcard?” I ask, wriggling out of the sweatshirt I’ve been wearing since we left New York.
“Wait until you see our house,” she says, and, suddenly, I feel uneasy. The last clear memory I have of this town is standing in our front hallway with my mother’s two best friends, Ms. St. Pierre and Ms. Marceau, as the police chief arrived to tell me the news. Honey, your mama killed herself, he’d drawled. Drove right into a tree. I’d screamed and screamed until I passed out.