The Lucie Odes

The Lucie Odes

For Lucie Nell Beaudet (1960–2018)

I.

I’d known you six years before you told mehow your first husband pimped you out—used the cash to buy a fried-chicken franchise

along a rural highway in Alabama. How youslept under the counter where you cashieredwings and thighs. How you rinsed, out back,

and spread baby powder across a bath towelto soak up the tumid August sweat, keep offskittering roaches. For the rest of your life

you had nothing to do with chicken. Mixed,in memory, with the smell of strange men’ssemen. How you dreaded what came despite

rough-shod precaution. How you stole fromthe till, dollar at a time, until you had enoughfor a bus to the clinic. I picture you there alone,

benumbed, draped and gauzed in a steel theater,vowing never to seek what had been siphoned.How, after, he hunted you with a shotgun,

not to get you back but to put the narrow shapeof you under his dirty boot, under carmine soil.He called you darling paydirt, his working girl,

and promised broken knees; a bullet in eachpalm; a tongue ribboned; and your eyes gored—in primitive backwoods punishment and burial.

II.

Twenty-seven bucks got you as far as St. Louis,once the gambol of young Thomas Stearns Eliot,an indoor creature, his double hernia delicately

trussed as he daydreamed his mahogany futurestaring into the glass of Prufrock’s Furniture,plotting revenge against the failure of his flesh.

You heard, on the radio, that Eliot was the greatpoet from St. Louis, so you bought his Quartets,recited the liturgical lines as you washed floors

nightly at the medical school. There, you metDr. Fischer, famed neuroanatomist, fugitiveof Kristallnacht, who insisted on cleaning his

own lab to Wagner’s Flying Dutchman. He sawyour mop and asked your name. Within a week,you’d offered to work for free if he would train

you in pathology, and to his surprise you lovedperfusing tissue, fixing slides, teasing diseaseinto blooms of legible color. You did not flinch

at gutted cadavers or dank shit of euthanizedchimps. Neither of you spoke of a past, of menmechanized in murder who killed off a sister,

or the dark knives in a drunk mother’s slurrykitchen. Both of you, schooled in subterfuge,took temporary refuge in never looking back.

III.

Unlikely from the start: our friendshipin a night course where I felt a fraud,teaching adults as old as my mother.

You with the cornflower-blue eyes, silkblouses, Chanel blush, and cat-eye glasses,classing up the class. My ugly orthopedic

shoes and brace. Both of us learning to actfrom half-wrecked bodies: my accidenta small occasion beside your catastrophe,

paralysis, metal chair. In your essays,I learned of the reckless man who sped,flipped his car, the chassis’s shear of your

thoracic spine, a tailpipe’s tattoo of yourlong leg. How Dr. Fischer visited, daily,as you recovered. I learned, too, of your

penchant for opera and Creole cooking,Melville and Eliot. And of your technicaljob, the spellbind that is mitosis: daughter

cells twinned in chromosomes, circumstance.Ballet of mirror neurons. After the last class,I walked to your car while snow squalled low

over the sullied city, Prufrock’s retreats. Soon,I was sidekick and kid sister. Two solitudesopened to the field and furrow in each other.

IV.

What you knew: how to anesthetize a smallanimal without it seeing the glint of needle.Sculpt perfect blue lunettes and dark kohl

over the eyes; launder black lace; rise earlyand stay up late; quell heartbreak, hangover.Coax a cork or cactus bloom. Plump a soufflé,

dodge a Bible thumper. That year, my petitereckoning: a man-child to whom I’d beenbetrothed called it off late one night, in a fit

of rage, as I lay down to sleep. For weeks,I dozed upright in a shabby sublet wherethe lights...