Ruby (Landry 1)

"I can see that. Very well, monsieur," he said with some pomposity, "I accept your daughter as one of my students. Provided, of course," he added, shifting his eyes to me, "she is willing to accept my tutelage completely and without question."

"I'm sure she is. Ruby?"

"What? Oh, yes. Thank you," I said quickly. I was still absorbing Professor Ashbury's earlier compliments.

"I will take you through the fundamentals once again," he warned. "I will teach you discipline, and only when I think you are ready, will I turn you loose on your own imaginative powers. Many are born with talent," he declared, "but few have the discipline to develop it properly."

"She does," my father assured him.

"We'll see, monsieur."

"Come to my office, Professor, and we will discuss the financial arrangements," my father said. Professor Ashbury, his eyes still fixed on me, nodded. "When can she have her first lesson with you, Professor?"

"This coming Monday, monsieur," he replied. "Although she has one of the finest home studios in the city, I might ask her to come to mine from time to time," he added.

"That won't be a problem."

"Tres Bien," Professor Ashbury said. He nodded at me and left with my father.

My heart was pounding with excitement. Grandmere Catherine had always been so positive about my artistic talent. She had no formal schooling and knew little about art, and yet she was convinced down to her soul that I would be a success. How many times had she assured me of this, and now, an art instructor, a professor at a college, had taken one look at my work and declared me very possibly his best candidate.

Still trembling with joy, I hurried upstairs to tell Gisselle, my heart so full, I had no room for anger anymore. I gushed out all the professor had said. Gisselle, trying on different hats at her vanity table, listened and then turned with a look of puzzlement on her face.

"You really want to spend hours with a teacher after spending most of the day in school?" she asked.

"Of course. This is different. This is. . . what I've always dreamt of doing," I replied.

She shrugged.

"I wouldn't. That's why I never pushed for the singing teacher. We have so little time to have fun. They're always finding things for us to do: teachers pile on the homework, make us study for tests, and then we have to fit our lives to our parents' schedules.

"Once you get to know some of the boys and make some friends, you won't want to waste your time with art instruction," she declared.

"It's not a waste of my time."

"Please," she sighed. "Here," she said, tossing a dark blue beret at me. "Try this on. We're going to the French Quarter to have some fun. You don't want to tag along looking like someone just born," she added.

We heard the sound of a car horn, a funny bleep, bleep, bleep.

"That's Beau and Martin. Come on," she said, jumping up. She grabbed my hand and pulled me along, not showing the slightest regret for the things she had said to our father and Daphne about me only a short while ago. Lies did float about this house as lightly as balloons.

"You're not going to lie to us again about which one of you is which, are you?" Martin asked, smiling as he pulled open the door to Beau's sports car for us.

"Now that you're looking at me in broad daylight," Gisselle retorted, "you surely can tell I'm Gisselle." Martin glanced from me to her and nodded.

"Yes, I can," he said, but he said it in such a way to make it hard to tell if were complimenting her or complimenting me. Beau laughed. Annoyed, Gisselle declared she and I would sit in the back together.

We squeezed tightly into the small rear seat of Beau's sports car and held our berets on our heads as he shot away from the curve. Speeding down the street, we screamed, Gisselle's voice louder and more filled with pleasure and glee than mine which was driven by a pounding heart as we spun around a turn, tires squealing. I imagined we made quite a sight, twins, their ruby red hair dancing and flicking like flames in the wind. People stopped walking to pause and watch us rush by. Young men whistled and howled.

"Don't you just love it when men do that?" Gisselle screamed in my ear. With the sound of the engine and the wind whistling by us, we had to shout to be heard even sitting next to each other.

I wasn't sure what to say. On occasion in the bayou, walking to town, I recalled men driving by in trucks and cars whistling and calling to me like this. When I was younger, I thought it was funny, but I remembered once being frightened when a man in a dirty brown pickup truck not only called to me, but slowed down and followed me along the road, urging me to get into the truck with him. He claimed he would give me a ride to town, but there was

something about the way he leered at me that set my heart thumping. I ended up running back toward home and he drove off. I was afraid to tell Grandmere Catherine because I was sure she would stop letting me walk to town by myself.

And yet, I also knew there were girls my age and older who could parade up and down the street day in and day out and never get a second look. It was flattering and threatening at the same time, but my twin sister seemed to draw satisfaction from this attention and looked surprised that I wasn't having a similar reaction.

Our tour of the French Quarter was quite different from the one my father had taken me on, for with Beau, Martin, and Gisselle, I was shown things I hadn't seen even though we were walking on the same streets. Maybe it was because we were there at a later part of the day, but the women I saw lingering in the doorways of jazz clubs and bars now were scantily dressed in what at times looked like no more than undergarments to me. Their faces were heavily made up, some using so much rouge and lipstick and eyeliner, they resembled clowns.