I should have noticed when my wedding ring fell out of my pocket. I should have heard it strike and plink on the concrete floor in Big Willie’s dressing room behind the bar when I slung my jacket over…
New Orleans! The moment I landed at the Louis Armstrong Airport, the city seduced me. The convergence of cultures, the jazz and blues spilling out into the street, the French, the food. New Orleans is fifty-seven percent Black and the full spectrum of our color is on display: I didn’t have to explain the history of my lighter skin. I wanted to write a story with a voice that conveyed the emotional intensity I felt when I visited the Big Easy in my forties. It was a place that was home/not-home.
The voice had to be first person, but whose? Nurses who choose permanent nights are special—they run the show because there are few doctors about. On a medical ward of old sick people, death is always close, and when the visitors leave, the patients feel especially vulnerable. It takes a strong, matter-of-fact person to walk the ward at night. Not the traditional stereotype of the doctor’s wife.
Brenda is used to taking care of herself, even feels somewhat uncomfortable with her husband’s attentiveness. When I decided that she was newly married, it occurred to me that her wedding ring might slip off easily, so that she could lose it. I thought of the song title “Hold On, I’m Coming” (Sam & Dave were from Georgia, where my grandparents lived) before I thought of the ring, because Brenda wanted to hold on to her New Orleans experience, but the tangible ring became the heart of the story.
Travel wakes us up by exploding our routine. We think that no one can see us because we are among strangers, but we see ourselves, often differently, under a tropical sun, with a soundtrack that evokes the past. Brenda and Charles are compatible in middle age but she would not have chosen him as a young woman. The struggle to figure out who we are does not end in adolescence—if anything, it is complicated by greater personal history and wider experience.
I wanted to write a happy ending, wherein the woman doesn’t suffer for a moment’s indiscretion. Yet I wanted Brenda to acknowledge Mr. Washington, to risk drawing Charles’s attention to him. What if Charles asks about him? Is she a good liar? Does she feel guilty enough to confess? She is still emotionally unsettled when the story ends.
TONI MARTIN is a physician and writer, author of When the Personal Was Political: Five Women Doctors Look Back (2008). Her stories and essays have appeared in East Bay (San Francisco) newspapers and many other publications, including The Threepenny Review, Bellevue Literary Review, and ZYZZYVA. Read her blog, “Random Thoughts,” at the website linked above, and find her on Facebook @ToniMartinWriter.
