Illustrations by Jie En Lee.
I was standing on an overturned milk crate on Bourbon Street, in face paint and a ball gown. The world was a blur. My body was entirely still — one hand holding out my huge skirt and the other a paper fan, frozen mid-flutter.
A group of frat boys appeared from the milling crowd around me. They wore Mardi Gras striped polo shirts in purple, green and gold, though it was October. Plastic beads winked on their necks, and they all gripped neon novelty drinks known as Hand Grenades. Though they were just fuzzy swatches in my peripheral vision, I could identify the color-by-numbers attire of tourists in New Orleans.
The group remained a blur because, as usual while working, I gazed only at a softened middle distance, not focusing my eyes. One of the dudes approached, so close I could smell his sugary drunk breath. He clapped his hands a few inches from my face. His palms expelled a little gust of air, cool on my grease-painted nose and cheeks.
I didn’t react. I didn’t look at him, or speak.
For several years in my 20s, off and on, I was a professional statue. Statue was both a noun and a verb. I was a statue; statuing was what I did. My job was, basically, not to react. Unless one of the tourists gave me what I wanted — a tip in the plastic lemonade pitcher at my feet — I gave them nothing.
When I wasn’t statuing, I always gave people what they wanted. I made eye contact. I listened patiently. I was free with my thanks and my apologies. I forgave.
In particular I forgave Toby, my boyfriend of several years, whose name I’ve changed here to protect his privacy. I forgave him for not getting a job, for the long nights I spent listening to stories of his childhood pain, for throwing our bedroom lamp across the room in a temper. I used my statuing money to pay our rent, to buy our groceries. When we were too broke to go to the laundromat, I washed our clothes by hand in the bathtub and draped them over our chain-link fence to dry. Forgiving him was a daily act, a constant renewal.
And above all, I smiled, for Toby’s benefit and everyone’s.
Except here, now, on Bourbon Street. It didn’t matter that my legs ached, standing on the milk crate. That my arms ached, frozen mid-gesture with the fan. That my neck ached, under my huge, flowered hat. I statued as often as I could handle, though I also worked construction, at 10 bucks an hour, for an uptown slumlord. On a good statuing day, I made three times that, but I could only work three-hour shifts; physically, it was the harder of the two jobs.
I’d trained myself to smile in childhood after multiple grown-ups, seeing me frowning in thought, asked if something was wrong. Once I’d learned to make my face rest in a vague smile by default, the grown-ups stopped asking.
On Bourbon Street I didn’t smile, or flinch. Even my blinking was rare and deliberate, and the frat boys weren’t having it. They would not, could not, leave me alone. It was as if, by doing nothing, I had challenged them to a fight. My refusal became a battleground.
“Hey, Gorgeous, will you marry me?” tried the one who had clapped in my face a few seconds earlier.
I didn’t answer.
“She must be a lesbian!”
“Is it even a woman? Maybe it’s a man!”
“Is that a mustache? She needs to shave.”
Another one clapped in my face. I kept the fan still, the skirt still. I didn’t answer.
When a new blur approached — deferential, kneeling to drop a dollar in the pitcher at my feet, I focused my eyes and came to life.
It was a woman who’d tipped me. Her husband, with fat white legs and a bucket hat, stood diffidently behind her. I felt my humanness returning, collecting. I blinked and the world sharpened; I reinhabited my blank, white-painted face. I looked her in the eyes, mouthed “Thank you,” fanned myself, and curtsied. When I smiled at her, it felt like I was bestowing a gift.
“She moved, she moved!” the woman cried, in frank delight. “She looked at me!”
The frat crew hung back; I could see them without seeing them. Now that I’d been suddenly rendered human, they didn’t know what to make of me. One shuffled nearer, but was recalled by his friends, and they wandered uncertainly away. But later, one of those polo shirts bobbed into my vision again. A quick stoop to the tip jar, the rosy flash of a larger bill. A $5, a $10? I’d find out later; for now, finally, I looked the kid in the eye.
“Uh, thanks, uh, sorry about that,” he said. He was flushed under freckles and looked impossibly young. I gave him a curtsy, and, absolved, he was gone.
* * *
I usually dressed for work in the rickety house I shared with Toby and a roommate. Before doing my makeup, I’d shimmy into the blue satin ball gown, borrowed from the friend who’d gotten me into the statuing business to begin with.
After taking an indefinite leave from college, I’d washed up in New Orleans, working one underpaid drag of a job after another. Toby and I lived in a world where everyone patched together crummy little gigs to get by, where the kind of work you did was never the point. The point was everything else. We put on puppet shows at Mardi Gras parades together. We paddled around abandoned Civil War forts in the swamps outside town. We day-drank by the river, ate out of the dumpster, splurged on body-sized slabs of ice from a seafood company and rode them like sleds down the grassy slope of the levee. Only certain musicians among us could earn money by pursuing their art; the rest of us took and left jobs like breathing.
Statuing, though, became more permanent for me than most things because it was my eternal fallback, my safety net — I worked for myself, I worked when I chose, the overhead was low.
Besides the construction job, I’d also tried being a barista at failing coffee shops and a busgirl at hectic restaurants. Meanwhile, I’d watched my friend Libby come home from “work” as a statue — I would have put it in quotes, then, because it seemed so absurd — with a literal bucket of cash. I’d watched her, still in costume, counting tips at her kitchen table: mostly $1 bills, with a healthy smattering of $5s and $10s, sometimes a $20.
“How much did you make?” I’d say incredulously. “How long were you out there?” Libby was generous. It wasn’t like she was the only hustler in the French Quarter, where street performance for cash was legal and largely unregulated. That wilderness was open to anyone with the guts to try it. “I’ll even lend you this dress,” she said. “I have like a million. Use my face paint. Go for it.” And so I did.
On any given day, since he was unemployed, Toby might be napping as I put on the blue gown and got ready to go. His mane of strawberry-gold hair, which I loved, splayed on the pillow like a sea creature. While he slept, it was easy to remember why I wanted to take care of him.
I’d ended up in this house, in this relationship, by saying yes. Or at least, by not saying no. It was amazing how I’d fallen into it all simply by responding as I was expected to. As the world wanted me to. Toby asked for my number. If I wanted to get a drink. If he could bike me home. Could come inside. Toby entered my life, and all I had to do was say yes. Toby was depressed. He needed to talk. He needed me to listen. He needed dinner, sex, money, comfort. He needed to move in together. I became the negative space of his asking, and the negative space was always yes.
There’s a photo from this era, of us spooning, lying in the grass on a hot day. Toby is the big spoon, clinging. I, the little spoon, am staring into space with a frown he can’t see, the old frown from my childhood that I only wore if I thought no one was watching.
Dressed in Libby’s gown, I dabbed white foundation makeup on my face with a soft sponge. I didn’t paint the rest of my exposed skin, like the all-gold and all-silver statues who sometimes shared my block; the face paint and costume transformed me enough.
On the white background, I painted red lips, round red cheeks, peacock eye shadow. I caked on glitter salvaged from an abandoned primary school after Hurricane Katrina. I donned my hat, covered in faded fake flowers from the cemetery dumpster. I stuffed my pitcher and “Tips for photos” sign into the milk crate, left Toby sleeping, and walked through our house feeling like a stranger.
And, while statuing, I was a stranger. I was strange even to myself. A new person or a nonperson, either or both.
For a pleaser like me, statuing was a crash course in stubbornness. What sounds like the most passive trade imaginable — becoming an object, a literal living doll, refusing to move or speak — was, in fact, bizarrely, the opposite. It was exhausting, but it strengthened me. I left work aching and charged up. I learned, for the first time in my life, to refuse people. I learned that it felt good. That it got me somewhere.
If you refuse to move, speak or react when spoken to, you’re breaking the rules. It throws people off, sometimes badly. Because I was acting inappropriately — not responding as a person typically would — my audience acted inappropriately in turn.
People inevitably tried to touch me. Then, and only then, I moved without being tipped. I slapped them lightly, on whatever was closest — hand, face — still deadpan, not speaking, not meeting their eyes. A slap for the drunkard trying to stick his finger up my nose. A slap for everyone who moved to kiss me or lift my skirt, which happened almost daily. The one groper I didn’t slap was a woman my age, alone, who slowly and softly pressed her cupped hand first to my left breast, then my right. I was too surprised to move; she left without speaking.
I did not slap people for touching my hands, though sometimes they jumped back of their own accord, shocked to feel my warmth, my aliveness. “I thought she was a mannequin!” they would shout, horrified.
But often the strangeness spurred by my refusal was more innocent, a grab bag of unfiltered human reactions that fascinated me. I felt myself and my audience pulled together into deep space, a lost world where no one knew how to behave anymore.
One night, out of nowhere, a man tried to hand me his baby. (“What are you doing?” snapped his wife, when she noticed.) A Steelers fan, giddy from the bar where he’d just watched his team beat the Saints, asked me to marry him. “I’m rich,” he said. “You come to Pittsburgh, I’ll take care of you.” He gave me a $20 to prove it. A woman questioned me doggedly for 10 minutes, then turned away, sighing, “Poor thing, I think she’s deaf.” A roofer from Mississippi — according to the business card he left — crossed the street to the ATM and came back to drop crisp $20s, one by one, into my pitcher, cursing each time as if he was doing it against his will. I bought a steak that night, paid our rent, and never saw him again.
* * *
Years later, I left New Orleans, and left statuing, with relief. I don’t miss the strain — on my mind, on my body. It’s hard to keep still. It’s hard to consistently thwart what is asked of you.
But long before I left statuing, I left Toby.
He was out somewhere as I stood in our room for the last time, perfectly still, staring at the artifacts of our life together: tangled blankets, my clothes in optimistically stacked crates that mimicked a real dresser. His shirts tossed over the single chair, his shoes, his smell. I was the doll in the dollhouse, frozen in my own life. I’d denied myself motion for so long, I’d forgotten its utility.
When I statued, being still was my form of refusal; here, at home, stillness was acquiescence, another yes. I felt a new impulse kicking now. My refusal this time required motion. Stillness was not a way to get what I wanted anymore.
In our bedroom, where I usually did my makeup, I shoved clothes and some books into an old Army surplus backpack. I didn’t take everything I owned, but I took enough. I made some calls and found a couch to sleep on. For a while, as I biked down Columbus Street, the world was a blur. Houses crawled by in soft focus, men and women on their porches murmuring, “Arright, Arright,” the classic New Orleans greeting, as I passed.
“Arright,” I said, by reflex. All right. Am I all right? I am.
I am.
I blinked, slowly and luxuriously. My life as a statue had almost imperceptibly strengthened this muscle in me — the muscle of refusal — and now with every push on the pedals, I felt it, somewhere deep in my gut.
The blurred-out world returned — the weathered houses, asphalt, palm fronds against bright sky. The street sharpened and every detail was clear again, was mine.
Rowan Sharp received the 2019 Bread Loaf Katharine Bakeless Nason Award for Fiction. Her work has appeared in The Literary Review, the Beloit Poetry Journal, and Natural Bridge.