Club Storyville by Riley Lashea

for me, which side of the train I would prefer, and I wondered if she could, if, in some ways, she knew me better than I knew myself. The same way Nan knew me, past the person I tried to be, to the person I truly was, timid and afraid and feeble in the face of others’ demands and expectations.
    “I’m sorry no one was available to greet you ladies when you came in,” the waiter came to our table with enthusiasm, his smile especially bright against dark skin. “We had a little trouble in the kitchen.” As he opened a menu and put it into my hand, I felt the same inkling of discomfort I always felt when dealing with colored folks directly. “Is this table satisfactory for you?”
    “I prefer this table,” Ariel said.
    “Can I get you something while you look over the menu?” the waiter asked, and, as another waiter passed behind him to deliver dinner to a white couple across the way, I saw he too was colored.
    Glancing to Ariel, she appeared unfazed at this development, but I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to behave. A lifetime living under Jim Crow, and sometimes it was still hard to understand the rules.
    When we stood with Daddy on the platform in Richmond, the colored waiting area was clearly marked, all the colored passengers standing together in the small space allotted them. When we boarded, the colored cars were linked together at the train’s end. This car, though, was a place for both whites and blacks, apparently, and it never had made much sense to me that whether or not it was okay for the races to mix was dependent entirely upon which side of the menu a person was on.
    “I’d like a cognac neat, please,” Ariel said, polite, but with conviction, and I realized I’d only ever heard Nan order that way. Most women I knew asked if they could have something - Could I get an iced tea, please? or Would you bring me a glass of water? - even in places where that was all they were there to do, eat and drink.
    Looking up at the waiter, I watched his eyes struggle not to rise as he nodded, and I wondered if it was still too early for such a hard drink, or if he too was used to ladies asking permission.
    “For you?” he turned the question to me.
    “I’ll have the same,” I said, wanting nothing more than to put the same surprise on the waiter’s face.
    “Have you had cognac?” Ariel robbed my moment of its power.
    “No,” I admitted, gaze flashing uncomfortably to the waiter, who seemed to close his ears to the conversation the instant he was no longer being addressed. “I want to try it.”
    Staring across the table, as if waiting for me to renounce my order and ask for an iced tea instead, Ariel glanced to the waiter again when I didn’t.
    “Set hers on fire,” she told him, and, though I hadn’t a clue what that meant, I still felt my cheeks flush as a split-second grin came to the waiter’s face.
    “Certainly,” he responded. “Is that it for now?”
    “That’s it,” Ariel replied, and, with a nod of acknowledgment, our colored waiter headed to the bar.
    Watching Ariel pick the menu up from the table, I held mine before me too, unable to decide if I was angry at her for embarrassing me, or if I was ashamed of myself for letting her get away with it simply because she was beautiful.
    Sitting there in her pressed pants and tailored jacket, she looked like she knew exactly where she was going and how to get there, despite having never been, and I wondered why she had to be so exquisite. There were hundreds of nurses in Richmond, maybe even thousands. Why did Nan have to pick the one nurse who was so much of everything, so pretty and funny and smart and caring, that I looked right past the fact she was a woman to fall so stupidly in love with her?
    Maybe Mama had been right from the start. If Ariel wasn’t around, things would have been easier. I never would have suffered such ungodly thoughts. I could have stayed normal. Maybe I would have even been happy at Jackson’s proposition if