The streetcar rolled into a particularly warm stop. The absence of motion made the passengers aware of the still, muggy air, and many were fanning themselves with various maps and brochures. The sound of flopping paper reached Louisa’s ears with annoyance, though she was fanning herself as well (with a magazine of town gossip, no less), and a little clip-on electric fan buzzed from the dash. The tourists seemed to be in a fine state that day, whether from raucous partying or griping from heat exhaustion. The respectful, mildly curious types we not in attendance.
Louisa pulled the door lever open to reveal a clump of girls who looked like they might be on Spring Break if it weren’t mid-July, their heads bent over their phones and a daiquiri in the opposite hand.
“Ma’am,” Louisa said. “You can’t have food or drink on here.” One girl, who also seemed to have a bag of beignets, made an effort to hide it behind her.
“I thought these were legal everywhere here,” one said, lifting the pink plastic daiquiri container.
“I’m sorry, you can’t have them on here — Next!” She waved a man forward behind the girls, who gladly stepped around as though he’d already said as much and had just been proven right all along.
“What are we supposed to do then to get across town?” One of the girls said, nearly pouting.
“That ain’t my problem. You can’t bring them on here.”
The last person dropped their change in the machine and Louisa closed the door resolutely. Air flew through the open windows of the trolley again.
Louisa felt a slight relief leaving those girls on the sidewalk. She hated babysitting, and drunk kids always caused childlike problems. Last week some day-drunks got on and shouted at passerby as the streetcar rolled past. Louisa missed the finer details, but the words “fucking” and “cunts” rang out clear. She’d had to stop the streetcar and kick the three drunks out. She hated dealing with the types, but it gave her a dash of pleasure to deny them. Even as she was pulling away from the stop, she heard one of the girls yell, “Bitch!” Louisa smiled serenely to herself.
The sun finally found its way above the roof of the streetcar but the heat was worse yet. Louisa kept a small cooler of water and a few protein bars at her feet. She didn’t want to drink much yet because her break was still a while off. She would go into The Bean Gallery and order a sandwich, maybe a cold coffee, for lunch, reading a steamy romance novel to get her mind off things. No one usually bothered her on the patio and she loved the quiet comfort of solitude.
She found herself longing for lunch to come around sooner than later. The streetcar filled to the brim with tourists by 11 a.m. and she had to ignore her stop at the Garden District because there just wasn’t room.
“You have to wait for the next car,” she yelled. “We at capacity.”
They passed the people waiting at the stop, but not soon enough to miss the faces. Anger, disgust, frustration. There was a particular murmur in the car behind her and she knew they were disgruntled as well. As though she could just squeeze in as many people who wanted in, with no regard to safety or comfort. From her view, she could only see one open seat, and people were standing, even in the back —
“Hey! You in the back! You ain’t supposed to be back there!”
Someone had pulled the curtain back and sat in the opposite conductor’s seat. He looked confused — a young balding man in khaki shorts and loafers.
“Yes, you!” she said to the mirror. The man looked alarmed. “You ain’t supposed to be back there! That’s why there’s a curtain there.”
He started to stand, a shy smile on his face as though he thought she was being unfair, but Louisa brought the carriage to a halt and was already bustling back to him, muttering not-so-quietly to herself.
“There’s a reason that curtain is there. No one supposed to be back there.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t know —”
“Please don’t mess with the curtains, people.”
She received some snide looks, but she didn’t particularly care. She was done being sweet today. They weren’t acting like more than children. This was further proven by the chuckles and low voices that followed her on the way back to the front. If only she could get through the next hour she’d be nose-deep in the tawdry novel she had almost finished. She could resume a better mood like the one she had this morning.
Louisa couldn’t find herself for the rest of the hour. She was short with the people coming on who didn’t have the sense to hasten their boarding. She gave a quick recap of the curtain and asked another man to step away from it for good measure. He quickly stepped aside and put his hands in his pockets. Good, she thought. Now she was getting somewhere.
She pulled the car into her last stop before lunch hour but didn’t see Danni, who would take over. The car waited in the shade next to the magnolia tree on the corner. Louisa told the riders it might be a minute before her replacement can take over and gathered her belongings so she could ride to the next stop.
A couple of minutes passed and Danni was nowhere to be found. Louisa texted her. Danni replied that her pickup broke down. She wasn’t coming.
Louisa groaned and hauled herself back into the driver’s seat. She texted her boss to ask if they had anyone on call. Three stops went by with no response. Then, her boss responded that they had no one to relieve her and to “Hang tight.”
“Hang tight my ass,” she muttered, slowing the streetcar around a roundabout.
The Louisiana heat was intensifying and Louisa was rue to think about the shaded patio of Bean Gallery cafe, and better yet, their air conditioning inside. She considered putting one foot in her melting cooler. How the cold would flash over her swelling skin and creep up her ankle just a bit — even maybe a little too cold, and she would relish that sort of discomfort just for a little bit, holding her skin underwater as long as she could bear, and maybe a little longer. She started to wonder if she should peek in the cooler to see just how much water and ice was in there. Maybe the ice wasn’t melted at all and she could just grab a bit and run it over her face and arms.
She was so distracted that she was startled by a “Stop!” and realized she was blowing right past the stop at St. Charles and Poydras where half the passengers seemed to want to exit. She stopped a little past an intersection stop sign, too flustered to make any better decision. Muttering passengers pushed out the back door while a car crossing the intersection honked rudely.
Louisa grabbed an ice cube (they were hardly melted at all) and ran it roughly over her arms and neck. A few passengers finally caught up from where they had waited at the missed stop. They shuffled with their change on the steps and Louisa was getting impatient, stopped partially in an intersection.
“Come on, get in, then you can pay. Hurry up, we gotta keep it moving.”
Someone gestured exasperatedly to their traveling partner as if to say, “Can you believe this woman?” A few exchanged raised eyebrows.
For them, this trolley is an attraction, she thought. They visit the trolley like they visit the aquarium or the boat tour and they expect to be treated that way: Cherished tourists. But for Louisa, she knows the same mothers who use the streetcar to get to work at 7 a.m. She sees the poor man who takes it to Gentilly Terrace to the food bank during the week. She sees the locals going on a family outing in their hometown. These tourists — they had no such respect nor notice for anyone like her. The ones that called NOLA home, and when the tourists went home and hurricane seasons come, it’s people like her who keep this city going.
The tourists clumped at the front, waiting to pay their fare one by one while Louisa moved the streetcar forward. Some looked distressed. Others looked absurd and drunk. Some just looked exhausted like her.
“Please sit down,” she called to the back and repeated the bit about the curtain, which had stayed shut since the balding man.
As the day dragged forward, with no reprieve in sight, Louisa broke down and told the car passengers she was taking 15. She pulled to a stop and got out at the Gentilly PJ’s, followed by a cry from some drunk boy: “Come on!”
Grinding her teeth, she went into PJ’s and ordered a Granita and a blueberry muffin. She went to the restroom and came back to find one of the drunk kids from the car seemingly waiting for her.
“Yes?” She was not about to be patient.
“We paid for trolley service, lady, and you’re making stops when and if you feel like it? I have places to be.”
She held his eye contact, her expression unchanging.
“Come on — get back on the train!”
He threw his hands up and slunk off, pushing the door open with force.
Louisa’s hands had found her hips without her realizing. She looked at the barista, who looked back at her and grimaced. They both shook their heads in agreement. She pulled a couple of bills out of her pocket and gave him a knowing look as she put them in the tip jar. Louisa walked back out of the shop, frozen coffee in hand.
“Thank you for your patience, everyone. I got my coffee and we ready to go.”
Someone clapped and she heard a half-hearted “woo!” close to the front.
“Woo! Here we go,” she said, and the heat suddenly didn’t seem so stifling.
Louisa finished her shift at 8 p.m. with no word from her bosses about a replacement. She got out, stiff from sitting all day, the next conductor patting her on the shoulder as he passed.
The streetcar was empty, but he pulled out of the station looking for the next passengers in the falling dark.
