Seven Days in June(8)

2004

“SWEETIE, YOU UP?”

Lizette’s Louisiana drawl was both syrupy and whisper light. No one’s mom sounded like that.

“You awake? Genevieve? My Evie Sweetie? My Eva Diva? You up?”

Well, Genevieve, a.k.a. Eva Diva, was up now. The covers were pulled up to her eyebrows, and she was in the fetal position on the ancient, springy twin mattress. Exactly four days ago, when Genevieve Mercier and her mom drove from Cincinnati to Washington, DC, they’d dragged the mattress up the five-story walk-up and flung it on the patchy carpet of the bedroom floor. And there it had stayed. Genevieve and Lizette were both the same brand of scrawny and couldn’t afford movers, so after struggling to carry Genevieve’s mattress and her mom’s mattress, plus a small kitchen table and two folding chairs, up all those stairs—in the blazing June heat, no less—the nomadic mother-daughter duo had decided they needed no more decor.

Genevieve opened one eye and scanned the itty-bitty space. She was seventeen, and this was a new bedroom, but it could’ve been any of the ones she’d occupied in any of the cities she’d lived in at fifteen, twelve, or eleven. It was nondescript, with disposable details, except for one thing that was unmistakably hers: a plaid suitcase erupting with clothes, pill bottles, and books. She squinted at the dollar-store alarm clock on the bare windowsill. It was 6:05 a.m. Right on time.

Lizette always came home just as Genevieve was waking up for school. Her mom was a purely nocturnal animal. It was like their personalities were too outsized to exist at the same time—so the mother claimed night, and the daughter got day.

Daytime was for responsible people, and Lizette was a delicate, distracted woman, too wispy to negotiate the details of grown-up living. Like cooking. Paying taxes. Cleaning. (One time, Genevieve watched her mom vacuum for an hour before realizing it wasn’t plugged in.) Lizette’s beauty kept them afloat, which was hard work, Genevieve knew—so she handled everything else. She forged Lizette’s signature at banks. She monitored the pills in Lizette’s Valium bottles. She toasted Lizette’s Hot Pockets. She roller-set Lizette’s hair before she went out on her “money dates” (You’re for sale—just fucking say it…).

They’d moved several times since Genevieve was a toddler. Each time was for a different man who promised Lizette a dazzling life. They always set her up with a place to live, all expenses paid. And it used to be such an adventure. Genevieve had spent first grade living in a designer cottage in Laurel Canyon—rented for them by a famous pop producer who bought her a parrot named Alanis. The year before, an oil big shot had set them up in a Saint Moritz chalet, where their cook taught her how to ask for Birchermüesli in impeccable Swiss German. But as Lizette graduated from her “hot young thing” years, the dazzle dulled. Slowly, and then suddenly, the cities got seedier, the apartments got shabbier, and the men got meaner.

This latest guy wasn’t paying for the apartment. But he did give Lizette a job as a hostess in his cocktail lounge, the Foxxx Trap. And he was paying her double time. For what, Genevieve didn’t want to know.

Lizette crawled under the covers, still wearing her Bebe freakum dress, and snuggled up to her daughter. She gave Genevieve a lipsticked peck on the cheek and clasped her hand. With a resigned sigh, Genevieve sank into her mom’s lushly perfumed embrace. Lizette always wore White Diamonds by Elizabeth Taylor, and Genevieve found the scent overwhelmingly glamorous but also soothing.

That was her mom in a nutshell. White Diamonds.

And Black drama.

“Assess your pain level, Spawn of My Loins,” Lizette ordered in her outrageous southwestern-Louisiana accent.

Genevieve raised her head up from the pillow, giving it a little shake. She did this every morning to see how bad it was and determine how many painkillers she’d need to take to start the day. Luckily, she wasn’t in agony. It was just a slow, steady pounding on a door. She could still breathe between thuds.

“I’ll live,” she reported.

“Good, then gimme a story.”

“I’m sleeping!”

“You ain’t. Come on, you know I can’t sleep without a story.”

“Can’t we go back to when you used to do the stories?”

“I would, but you abolished my storytelling five years ago, you little shit,” she cooed, her breath bourbon-scented.

Years before, Lizette would come home in the mornings and regale Genevieve with tales before she got up for elementary school. Their favorite ones involved long-ago scandals from Lizette’s Louisiana hometown, Belle Fleur. And though Genevieve had never been there, she knew the place by heart.

Belle Fleur was a tiny bayou where there were only about eight last names, Black was the race, Creole was the culture, and everyone could trace their bloodline to the same eighteenth-century pair: a French plantation owner and an enslaved African woman. Along the way, their descendants mixed with Haitian Revolution rebels, Indigenous peoples, and Spaniards to produce a rich, insular, filé-flavored culture both highly religious and deeply superstitious. And colorful in the extreme.

The most colorful, though, were Lizette’s mother and grandmother. Their reputations were as wild and dramatic as their names—Clotilde and Delphine. Their lives had been affected by murder and madness and mysterious rage. Explosive secrets and a conspicuous absence of fathers. It was as if Genevieve’s entire matriarchal lineage had spontaneously regenerated from alien pods.