The Marigny Keepers

Chapter 2

When Alene had decided to spend the summer in New Orleans, she had prowled Craig’s List looking for an affordable apartment within walking distance to the French Quarter, or the Quarter, as the locals called the neighborhood. Childishly, she had thought she would find a clean, modern studio within her meager bar maid’s budget and be able to spend the summer living alone, relishing her privacy and nursing her broken heart without any roommates in her business. However, rental property in New Orleans was far out of the league she had been anticipating; her dollars earned at the bar were competing with fat trust funds of Loyola girls and the bottomless bank accounts of tourists who wanted apartments to rent for an entire summer of partying. Finding nothing habitable for less than a thousand dollars a month, she had settled on a small room in the Faubourg-Marigny District, known by all casually as The Marigny, a short walk from the Quarter. 

The room came furnished, which was a plus, since all of Alene’s own furniture was back at her parents’ house in Georgia. It was on the second story of a shotgun house, a popular New Orleans term for houses that were very narrow in width, but extended backward railroad-style, room after room, in such a way that made the house seem small from the street view when it was in fact, quite large. Alene shared a bathroom down the hall with two other girls, one of whom was bartending for the summer at Pat O’Brien’s bar, and the other was waitressing at Brennan’s restaurant. The landlord, Lena Briscoe, known to her tenants only as Miss Briscoe, was an elderly wonder in a flowered pink house dress who had two rules when it came to renting out one of her rooms: you had to be female, and you had to be quiet. In exchange for cheap rent, Alene had agreed to no male visitors for the duration of the entire summer.

Alene could live without boys until school started, of that she was certain. Finals had been a horrible blur of crying and studying in the aftermath of Eric’s unceremonious ending of their relationship. Even two months later when she was apartment hunting in New Orleans, she was still waffling between wanting him to die a drawn-out and painful death and wanting him to call her, begging to get back together. In fact, she had wanted to die, herself, for most of the month of April. She had spent an entire week after Eric’s horrible phone call in her room with the shades drawn, buried under the blankets on her bed. Her roommate, Angela, who Alene didn’t even know very well, had freaked out and called the Tulane psychiatric hotline. Alene had been forced, against her will, to meet with a counselor weekly until the end of the year.

But from the moment she set foot in the room for rent at Miss Briscoe’s, she felt certain it was the right place for her to spend the summer. It was almost as if the room already belonged to her, and had been waiting for her arrival all spring.

As Alene was signing the three-month lease in the first floor parlor of Miss Briscoe’s house at the end of May, she realized why she had been so drawn to the little room upstairs, barely big enough for the twin bed and chest of drawers it contained. Miss Briscoe’s house was on the corner of Royal St. and Franklin Ave., a little bit out of the way, but on a tree-lined street with very little damage from Hurricane Katrina. And it just happened to be the very same block where Alene and her family had lived when she was a little girl, long before they moved to the Garden District and subsequently to Athens, Georgia. She realized when she bounced back up the creaky staircase – two steps at a time – to what would be her bedroom for the summer, that her room’s one large window looked directly across the street into what had been her childhood bedroom in the house across the street. In all of the many years that had passed, the house across the street had been renovated and painted purple, which was how she had overlooked it on her walk over to Miss Briscoe’s for the first time. How she had ventured all the way back to the neighborhood of her childhood without realizing exactly where she was, she would never know, but each time she glanced out her window, her heart swelled with nostalgia.