A Cast of Characters Keeps “Stone Motel” Up and Running https://ift.tt/hkzw68C
Do you know how to clean a motel room, cher? Zanny Ardoin will tell you: Towels. Soap. Sheet. Toilet paper. You’ll also need the fortitude and joie de vivre of the Ardoin kids, conscripted into the family business, The Stone Motel.
In his memoir, Stone Motel: Memoirs of a Cajun Boy, Morris Ardoin chronicles his Cajun boyhood, playing canasta, hauling trash bins, and hunting squirrels, simultaneously avoiding his father’s unpredictable temper. While the adults often set the tone in this book, consisting of chapters which could be stand alone essays, the main characters are the family’s middle children, Andy, twins Gilda and Glenda, Morris himself, and Dickie. These five are the heart of long Louisiana summers and the core workforce, keeping Stone Motel up and running.
While much of this book is told in the narrator’s voice, Ardoin skillfully voices his parents and grandmother in several chapters. The effect is endearing and humanizing. In these chapters, a reader gets insight into Ardoin’s brutal childhood, in which he and his siblings are left to labor on a neighbor’s farm, living in the barn, because his mother has died and there are too many mouths to feed. Additionally, we hear from Ortense (Or-TANSE), Morris’ beloved Mémère, who loved her grandchildren fiercely, as she saw the need to protect them from their father’s brutality as well as support her daughter Eliza Mae (Mae-Mae) who is overburdened by raising nine children, running her own beauty shop, and helping at the Stone Motel. Ortense’s speech is a delicious Franglais, although those who never took French in high school can parse her meaning. She never learned to read, but she is insightful and loyal. The most unnerving but effective perspective shift is when Ardoin depicts Eliza Mae on her last day of life. She was killed in a car accident just a moment from home as she was rushing to replace her drivers’ license. A reader will identify with both her deep unhappiness with her season of life, as well as her profound distractedness.
The author’s liberal use of his family’s Cajun French conveys the mood and tone of his boyhood days spent at his grandparents’ home. Ardoin tantalizes us with the smells from Mémère’s kitchen, roasted ponce chaudin and “countless links of Saturday morning boudin.” He depicts his faith healing Pépère trying to soothe his aches and pains, “Take a big, slow deep breath and let that out, cher petit Morris,” and goes on to correct him, “Non, cher. More big than that. Comme-ca.” The warmth of this home language is a counterpoint for some of the more brutal moments of Ardoin’s childhood.
Ardoin does not spare the reader from his father’s brutality, most notably in the scene depicted repeatedly, but most intimately, in “Our Father,” in which Zanny beats Morris with an electrical wire whip for an infraction rooted in sentimentality and curiosity. Morris wanted a souvenir from the motel fire, and he had not realized that he took a piece of the building that his father had intended to reuse. The scene is horrific, as a disembodied Morris sees “spit, sweat, and blood droplets hand in midair” and hears a moaning sound that he eventually realizes “that the sound–horrible, impossible, inhuman” has been his own voice. Yet, Ardoin intentionally includes moments with his father that show Zanny’s humanity and love. For instance, in “A Perfect Day,” he takes the kids crabbing; in “Zanny: The Souvenir,” Zanny reflects on his parenting and the beating; and in “Someone Else,” we hear the story of Zanny and Eliza Mae’s courtship. Ardoin does not shy from the details that make his father a whole person, flawed and broken as he may be. In later chapters, we see a reckoning before Zanny passes.
While family life is the focus, several chapters address the varied guests who spend time at Stone Motel, including Ayla Jane, who peed on Dicky’s head, regulars “Bob Hope,” and “Fats Cadillac,” and sweet Benjamin Landrineau, who brings out the worst in Morris. These vignettes add texture to the already vibrantly detailed motel, with its faux stone detail, uniquely decorated rooms, and endless loads of sheets and towels.
One can categorize this memoir as a Queer coming-of-age story; however, to limit your understanding of this book to just that theme short-changes the scope of Ardoin’s story. This is a book about work, family, grieving, and finding yourself, and your freedom, that will resonate with a broad range of readers. If you’re looking for something good to read, cher, try this one.
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