Ace Atkins - New Orleans Noir - The Classics

So Letty and Dr. Zander and Dr. Mullins and Dr. Pickett and Dr. Smith decided to try an experiment. They decided to give Helen five milligrams of Dexedrine every day for twenty days each month, taking her off the drug for ten days in between.

“Children with dyslexia react to drugs strangely,” Dr. Zander said. “If you give them tranquilizers it peps them up, but if you give them Ritalin or Dexedrine it calms them down and makes them able to think straight.

“You may have to keep her home and have her tutored on the days she is off the drug,” he continued, “but the rest of the time she should be easier to live with.” And he reached over and patted Letty on the leg and for a moment she thought it might all turn out all right after all.

Helen stood by herself on the playground of the beautiful old pink-brick convent with its drooping wrought-iron balconies covered with ficus. She was watching the girl she liked talking with some other girls who were playing jacks. All the little girls wore blue-and-red-plaid skirts and navy blazers or sweaters. They looked like a disorderly marching band. Helen was waiting for the girl, whose name was Lisa, to decide if she wanted to go home with her after school and spend the afternoon. Lisa’s mother was divorced and worked downtown in a department store, so Lisa rode the streetcar back and forth from school and could go anywhere she liked until five thirty in the afternoon. Sometimes she went home with Helen so she wouldn’t have to ride the streetcar. Then Helen would be so excited, the hours until school let out would seem to last forever.

Sometimes Lisa liked her and wanted to go home with her and other times she didn’t, but she was always nice to Helen and let her stand next to her in lines.

Helen watched Lisa walking toward her. Lisa’s skirt was two inches shorter than those of any of the other girls, and she wore high white socks that made her look like a skater. She wore a silver identification bracelet and Revlon nail polish.

“I’ll go home with you if you get your mother to take us to get an Icee,” Lisa said. “I was going last night but my mother’s boyfriend didn’t show up until after the place closed so I was going to walk to Manny’s after school. Is that okay?”

“I think she will,” Helen said, her eyes shining. “I’ll go call her up and see.”

“Naw, let’s just go swing. We can ask her when she comes.” Then Helen walked with her friend over to the swings and tried to be patient waiting for her turn.

The Dexedrine helped Helen concentrate and it helped her get along better with other people, but it seemed to have an unusual side effect. Helen was chubby and Dr. Zander had led the Wilsons to believe the drug would help her lose weight, but instead she grew even fatter. The Wilsons didn’t want to force her to stop eating for fear they would make her nervous, so they tried to reason with her.

“Why can’t I have any ice cream?” she would say. “Daddy is fat and he eats all the ice cream he wants.” She was leaning up against Letty, stroking her arm and petting the baby with her other hand. They were in an upstairs sitting room with the afternoon sun streaming in through the French windows. Everything in the room was decorated with different shades of blue, and the curtains were white with old-fashioned blue-and-white-checked ruffles.

“You can have ice cream this evening after dinner,” Letty said, “I just want you to wait a few hours before you have it. Won’t you do that for me?”

“Can I hold the baby for a while?” Helen asked, and Letty allowed her to sit in the rocker and hold the baby and rock it furiously back and forth crooning to it.

“Is Jennifer beautiful, Mother?” Helen asked.

“She’s okay, but she doesn’t have curly black hair like you. She just has plain brown hair. Don’t you see, Helen, that’s why we want you to stop eating between meals, because you’re so pretty and we don’t want you to get too fat. Why don’t you go outside and play with Tim and try not to think about ice cream so much?”

“I don’t care,” Helen said, “I’m only nine years old and I’m hungry. I want you to tell the maids to give me some ice cream now,” and she handed the baby to her mother and ran out of the room.

The Wilsons were rich in maids, and that was a good thing because there were all those children to be taken care of and cooked for and cleaned up after. The maids didn’t mind taking care of the Wilson children all day. The Wilsons’ house was much more comfortable than the ones they lived in, and no one cared whether they worked very hard or not as long as they showed up on time so Letty could get to her meetings. The maids left their own children with relatives or at home watching television, and when they went home at night they liked them much better than if they had spent the whole day with them.

The Wilson house had a wide white porch across the front and down both sides. It was shaded by enormous oak trees and furnished with swings and wicker rockers. In the afternoons the maids would sit on the porch and other maids from around the neighborhood would come up pushing prams and strollers and the children would all play together on the porch and in the yard. Sometimes the maids fixed lemonade and the children would sell it to passersby from a little stand.

The maids hated Helen. They didn’t care whether she had dyslexia or not. All they knew was that she was a lot of trouble to take care of. One minute she would be as sweet as pie and cuddle up to them and say she loved them, and the next minute she wouldn’t do anything they told her.

“You’re a nigger, nigger, nigger, and my mother said I could cross St. Charles Avenue if I wanted to,” Helen would say, and the maids would hold their lips together and look into each other’s eyes.

One afternoon the Wilson children and their maids were sitting on the porch after school with some of the neighbors’ children and maids. The baby was on the porch in a bassinet on wheels and a new maid was looking out for her. Helen was in the biggest swing and was swinging as high as she could go so that none of the other children could get in the swing with her.

“Helen,” the new maid said, “it’s Tim’s turn in the swing. You been swinging for fifteen minutes while Tim’s been waiting. You be a good girl now and let Tim have a turn. You too big to act like that.”

“You’re just a high-yeller nigger,” Helen called, “and you can’t make me do anything.” And she swung up higher and higher.

This maid had never had Helen call her names before and she had a quick temper and didn’t put up with children calling her a nigger. She walked over to the swing and grabbed the chain and stopped it from moving.

“You say you’re sorry for that, little fat honky white girl,” she said, and made as if to grab Helen by the arms, but Helen got away and started running, calling over her shoulder, “Nigger, can’t make me do anything.”

She was running and looking over her shoulder and she hit the bassinet and it went rolling down the brick stairs so fast none of the maids or children could stop it. It rolled down the stairs and threw the baby onto the sidewalk and the blood from the baby’s head began to move all over the concrete like a little ruby lake.

The Wilsons’ house was on Philip Street, a street so rich it even had its own drugstore. Not some tacky chain drugstore with everything on special all the time, but a cute drugstore made out of a frame bungalow with gingerbread trim. Everything inside cost twice as much as it did in a regular drugstore, and the grown people could order any kind of drugs they needed and a green Mazda pickup would bring them right over. The children had to get their drugs from a fourteen-year-old pusher in Audubon Park named Leroi, but they could get all the ice cream and candy and chewing gum they wanted from the drugstore and charge it to their parents.