Babylon Sisters (4 page)

6

When I opened the back door, at first I thought I had gone to the wrong house. The kitchen table was set with two places and a vase full of sunflowers I recognized from Louis’s front yard. Phoebe was at the counter cracking eggs in a bowl, and while Sade’s
Lovers Rock
is not exactly upbeat, it was music, and the vibe in the room was definitely not hostile.

“What’s all this for?”

“For you.” She shrugged her shoulders and managed a crooked smile. “For us.”

“It’s beautiful,” I said, and walked over to hug her and kiss her newly nontearstained cheeks. “I was coming in to cook something for you.”

“I’m making an omelet. Is that enough?”

“If you throw some cheese in there it is,” I said, opening the refrigerator and reaching for the block of sharp cheddar I knew was in the cheese drawer.

I got the grater and stood next to her at the counter, enjoying the familiarity of the routine. We had been cooking together since she was old enough to handle a whisk, and we knew each other’s kitchen rhythms the way longtime partners in a ballroom dance competition know when to glide and when to dip. At five-eight, Phoebe has a good three inches on me, although she’d like to be taller so she could slam-dunk a basketball. She doesn’t want to actually play the game. She just wants to be able to leap into the air and slam the ball through the net, alone and unopposed.

When she told me that was one of her recurring dreams, I couldn’t have been more surprised. I never had any kind of sports dream. The idea that Phoebe produced her own fantasies, apart from any we might share, was a revelation to me. It seemed such a completely separate act, kind of like the first time your kid tells you no, and means it. It’s a moment of such unequivocal
otherness
that it sends a shiver down the spine of an overprotective mother such as I know myself to be.
You mean this is not attached to me like my arm?
you think, amazed.
This is not just an extension of me?

“Mom?” Phoebe said, keeping her eyes on the eggs starting to foam under her expert strokes.

“Yeah?”

“I’m sorry.”

“For what?” I said, still grating. “Wearing that blanket around for three days?”

She poked me in the side with her elbow. “Don’t make fun of me!”

I put down the cheese. “I’m not making fun of you. I’m just glad we’re going to have a nice meal together.”

“That’s just what Louis said.” She smiled a little. Not one hundred percent, but a smile.

“He did?”

She nodded and condensed their conversation into Louis’s gentle suggestions as to how we could make peace.

“He said you would probably appreciate having dinner with me tonight. Especially if I cooked it.”

I laughed and hugged her again, being careful not to tip the bowl. “Your godfather is a living saint.”

“Yes, I know,” she said, turning back to the eggs, adding a pinch of salt and a dash of pepper. “He said that, too.”

She poured the eggs into the pan with a buttery little sizzle. I had grated more than enough cheese, so I popped in two pieces of whole wheat bread for toast and watched her tend her omelet with the practiced eye of a cook who’s comfortable in the kitchen. Either the storm had passed or we were dancing around in the eye of it. At this point I didn’t really care. I was just happy to have her back. When people say
tough love,
they’re usually talking about the kid, but I think it’s harder on the mother. It’s infinitely easier to
defy
authority than to
be
authority.

When we sat down, Sade was still crooning about how somebody had already broken her heart, but across the table from me, Phoebe was serving up a perfect omelet as her peace offering in the same way I had offered up those fashion magazines. We still knew each other better than anybody else did, and maybe the things we didn’t know just weren’t worth knowing.

“To us,” I said, raising my orange juice in a toast.

“To us,” Phoebe said, and we clinked our glasses and agreed to disagree on who owed who what explanation of things that cannot always be explained. At least for the moment, a peaceful meal was all we required.

7

Sunday passed too fast. Phoebe packed up, cleaned up, and chose a pair of low-slung jeans, a tiny little top, and a brand-new bright pink jacket to return to campus looking rested, gorgeous, and unconcerned, no matter what story was making the rounds. I spent the day poking my head in to offer suggestions and answering e-mail to get a jump on Monday morning. There was no way to prepare for the meeting with Sam Hall and
Miss
Mandeville. They had sent for me. All I had to do was show up and let them make me an offer.

Phoebe and I shared a dinner of lemon roast chicken, a tossed salad, and fresh strawberries with Louis; then we all went over to Amelia’s for a good-bye toast of sparkling apple juice and headed for the airport. It was sunset. The sky over the freeway was as beautiful as a beach postcard, and suddenly I started feeling sentimental. The summer had spoiled me. I wasn’t going to see my baby again until Thanksgiving, and that was three months from now. Who knew what adventures Baby Doll would have between now and then, or how much time she’d have to share them?

“Mom?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m going to miss you.”

“I’m going to miss you, too,” I said. “You’re going to have a great year. I can feel it.”

“You know I’d never do anything to hurt you, don’t you, Mom?”

“Of course I do,” I said, watching a big Delta jumbo jet coming in for a landing above our heads as we neared the airport. “What made you say that?”

“Nothing,” she said. “I don’t know. Nothing.”

Interesting answer, but the passenger drop-off lanes at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson airport are no place to pursue such complicated questions, so I didn’t try. A big SUV swung out and I swooped in behind it and pulled up next to the curb. Phoebe was gathering her things.

“You okay?”

She leaned over and kissed me good-bye, waving at the skycap nearby for assistance. “I’m fine! I’ll call you when I get there!”

“You’d better! I love you!”

“Love you, too!”

And she was gone. Checking her bags, stamping her ticket, boarding the airplane, ready to confront her demons, romantic and otherwise, and handling her business the way a third-generation free woman is supposed to do. My baby was growing up. Now all I had to do was figure out how to pay for the next four years and she was on her own. If I do my job right, she’ll be ready, and so will I.

8

When I pulled up in front of Mandeville Maid Services per Sam’s instructions, at just before noon, a young woman in dark blue pants and a white shirt with
Valet
stitched above the left breast pocket took my keys, handed me a ticket, and directed me inside. I was wearing my corporate clothes: gray suit, white blouse, black pumps. If there was a job to be had, I intended to leave here with it. When I identified myself to the female security guard, she told me politely that Miss Mandeville’s office was on the fifth floor and pointed me to the elevator on the far side of a bright, plant-filled atrium that ran from the hardwood floor of the lobby to the stained-glass windows in the ceiling. A small sign pointed to a clinic on the building’s lower level, and another arrow directed visitors to the office of the social services coordinator with a question and an answer:
Got a problem? We’ve got an answer!

Ezola’s inclusion of a well-woman clinic on-site had garnered a flurry of news coverage, all well deserved. The jobs she was filling rarely included health benefits, although healthy employees are always better for business. So Ezola hired two women doctors, and gave any woman she placed access to the clinic as long as she was employed. She hadn’t been generous enough to spring for hospitalization or maternity benefits, but she was definitely on the right track. The lobby floors were spotless, and the plants were so green I couldn’t believe they were real until I got closer and saw a young woman watering and pruning nearby. It was an impressive setup, and it seemed to be humming right along just fine. What could they possibly want with me?

Before I had a chance to speculate further, the elevator’s mirrored doors opened and a short, bald man in a beautiful pin-striped suit was standing there smiling like he was so happy to see me, he could barely contain the joy.

“Ms. Sanderson,” he said, coming forward and holding out his hand in greeting. “It is a pleasure. I’m Sam Hall.”

The voice was the one I had heard on the phone, all right, but none of my mental speculation had led me to picture Sam as a short, slightly round, clean-shaven guy with a very expensive suit and a very firm handshake.

“Welcome to Mandeville Maid Services,” he said. “You just passed your first test.”

“And what test was that?”

“You arrived on time,” he said. “You’d be amazed at how many people are careless about it. Five minutes here. Ten minutes there. It adds up, and that’s not how we do business.”

This woman must be a real terror.

“The renovation is lovely,” I said.

“Thank you. Now will you follow me? Miss Mandeville is really looking forward to talking with you.”

He led me down a short, heavily carpeted hallway that ended at two oversize oak doors. He knocked softly, and a buzzer deactivated the lock with a click. Her level of security surprised me, but I guess it shouldn’t have. These are dangerous times. Sam pushed open one of the big doors and moved aside to let me pass.

I stepped into a large, very formal-looking room that had an imposing cherrywood desk at one end, and at the other a dining table elaborately set for two that could easily seat six. In between was an area made for more casual conversation, with two love seats facing each other, a couple of wing-back chairs, and an oversize throne-looking thing that was sprayed antique gold and upholstered with tufted red velvet. It looked like a child’s idea of a chair fit for a queen, and Ezola Mandeville was sitting in it as I stepped into her office.

She stood up and smiled pleasantly, although she didn’t come forward to greet us. Sam closed the door and walked with me over to where she was standing. She looked as intimidating as her photographs. Maybe more so.
Fierce
might be a better word to describe her. She probably wasn’t much taller than I was, but it wasn’t about height. There was a real presence, an almost palpable strength, rolling off her in waves. I couldn’t imagine trying to tell her no.

As she stood there majestically, in front of her unapologetic throne, I was aware of her strong arms and hands that ended in short, thick fingers and nails shaped square for efficiency, not fashion. She was rangy, but not thin. Her broad, dark brown face was clean of makeup and dominated by her small but expressive eyes and high, sharp cheekbones. Her mouth was full-lipped and firm, and her hair was twisted into a bun, pinned tightly at the back of her head. A plain dark blue linen dress with a single strand of pearls and a pair of low-heeled pumps completed her outfit by doing nothing to draw attention to themselves. When you saw Ezola Mandeville, you remembered her, not her clothes.

“Miss Mandeville,” Sam said. “I would like to present Ms. Catherine Sanderson.”

“Thank you for coming,” Ezola said, shaking my hand with a grip as firm as Sam’s, although her voice was surprisingly light, almost girlish. Neither one of them looked at all the way they sounded. It was like meeting a popular radio deejay and realizing that he was a lot closer in appearance to Biz Markie than Wesley Snipes.

“It’s an honor to meet you,” I said. “I’m a great admirer of your work.”

“I’m so happy to hear it. That’ll make my job that much easier. Please sit down.” She indicated the chair closest to the throne and I took it. It wasn’t until I sat down that I realized how much lower my chair was than Ezola’s. She was giving Sam instructions in the crisp way of someone who is used to saying things one time and one time only. Sam was watching her and nodding attentively. I decided he wasn’t really unattractive. It was just that, based strictly on his voice, I had been expecting someone else. In my mind, Sam Hall was a cross between Denzel Washington and Sam Jackson. When he turned out not to be anything like either one of them, I felt like he had cheated.

He assured Ezola that he would communicate her wishes to the kitchen and then turned back to me.

“So good to have you here, Ms. Sanderson,” he said, extending his hand. “I look forward to seeing you again.”

I had assumed he would be staying for the meeting, but he was gone before I had a chance to say good-bye, pulling the big door closed behind him.

Ezola Mandeville turned to me in my little sawed-off chair with a question.

“You eat meat, don’t you?”

“Yes,” I said, wondering if that was another test.

“Good, good.” She lowered herself onto her throne as she nodded her approval. I guess I passed again. “I’ve had some people up here recently who acted like I was putting their lives in danger by serving up a nice porterhouse steak. Asked me hadn’t I heard about mad cow disease!”

She rolled her eyes in disgust. “What kind of question is that? Of course I know about mad cow disease. I remember when Oprah got tried for even talking about mad cow disease. But what does that have to do with a nice lunch of steak and potatoes? Nothing!”

I had to agree with her on that one. Mad cow disease was so far down on my worry list that I rarely considered it at all. When I want to freak myself out about an illness, I just look at the AIDS statistics and that’s enough for me. But this woman didn’t invite me up here to talk about cows. We were here to talk turkey.

“Here’s the way I like to do business,” she said. “We talk first, and eat after. That way we can both enjoy the meal without trying to figure out what the other one’s thinking. I’m a busy woman and I know you are, too. We could waste a lot of time trying to be mind readers.”

“That sounds good to me,” I said. “Sam didn’t really tell me very much when we talked on the phone.”

She smiled and nodded, as though that were as it should be. “He’s very high on you. I need to be able to tap into the community of women you know like the back of your hand, and Sam says you can make that happen.”

“I’m flattered,” I said.

“Don’t be,” she said. “I want to help women stand on their own two feet, Miss Sanderson, but I’m not in the missionary business. I intend to make a profit and I intend to make this business grow, but there’s one thing standing in my way. Do you know what that something is?”

I shook my head.

“Sorry black bitches,” she said as easily as she might have said,
Would you care for a cup of tea?

“Excuse me?”

“Let me tell you what I mean. I’m in the maid business. If
you
don’t want to clean it up, I can send you a woman who will. It’s hard work, but it’s steady, there’s no shame in it, and it pays enough to keep a roof over your head and clothes on your back, but I got more jobs than I can fill. Why? Because no black woman wants to be a maid anymore. Nobody wants to clean up after everybody’s gone home or change a hundred beds a day or scrub the toilets out. These girls will do it for a week, a month, maybe three months, if they really need the money, and then they disappear. They don’t quit. They don’t call in. They just don’t show up one day, so the job gets half-done or not done at all. Then the white man who hired me to get it done right calls to say he’s not paying for the mess he got and what am I going to do about it?”

I understood exactly what she was talking about, but her characterization of these women as
sorry black bitches,
however shaky their work habits might be, didn’t sit well with me, and I couldn’t let it stand.

“I don’t think calling them bitches helps the situation.”

“It doesn’t,” she said. “Nothing does. I’ve tried everything. They think they’re too good for this work. That’s why I call them sorry. They don’t see the value of an honest living.”

“Why do you call them bitches?”

She let the question sit there for a minute. “To see if you’re paying attention,” she said finally. “And to see whether or not you’d agree with me.”

“I always pay attention,” I said, “and I never call women bitches. I don’t care how sorry they are.”

She just looked at me and I looked right back. I wasn’t working for her yet so I had nothing to lose.

“Good,” she said. “I don’t either. I hate that word.”

She got up slowly and walked over to the floor-to-ceiling window that let her gaze out at her employees going about their assignments. She turned back to me. “Can I tell you a story?”

“Certainly,” I said, wondering how many more tests I’d have to pass before she fed me.

“Most people,” Ezola said slowly, “have heard the story of how I once got fired for organizing maids.”

I nodded.

“What they haven’t heard is
why
I started doing it.”

All the stories focused on shorter hours, higher pay, more humane treatment. Classic labor-movement goals. Seemed pretty clear to me.

“I don’t mean the obvious reasons.” In spite of her earlier statement about not having time to read my mind, Ezola was doing a pretty good job of it. “I mean why would I, a poor, colored woman working as a Buckhead maid, suddenly think about doing something like that? What made me do it?”

The history of black female activism is littered with tired feet, sore backs, one too many demands from the mistress or master of the house, one too many off days canceled at the last minute, one too many boxes of old clothes instead of a raise in pay.

“It was a book,” she said, and her tone was almost reverent. “One book that changed everything for me. And do you know what book that was?”

I shook my head. I couldn’t imagine.

“It was
Native Son
by Richard Wright.”

My surprise was total. Wright’s tragic novel from 1940 chronicles the fate of Bigger Thomas, a hapless black kid born into the most wretched poverty who accidentally smothers the drunken daughter of his wealthy white employers and then, in a panic, burns her body in the furnace. His arrest and conviction become a cause cél'ebre, galvanizing or polarizing the book’s white characters, depending on their political persuasions.

“I don’t understand,” I said, honestly confused by what she had found in the grim pages of the novel that sparked her own activism.

“You’ve read the book?”

I nodded. “In college.”

“You remember it?”

“Pretty well.”

“Well enough to answer a question for me?”

Ezola needed to change her name to SAT.

“I’ll do my best,” I said. “It’s been a while.”

“It’s an easy question,” she said. “Why did Bigger kill that woman?”

If you remember the book at all, you remember that. “He was afraid of being discovered in a white girl’s bedroom,” I said, trying to remember the character’s name.

“Mary,” said Ezola, still effortlessly reading my mind.

“Yes, Mary. She was drunk and he had carried her upstairs. . . .”

The scene came back to me, piece by piece. Mary’s drunken staggering. Bigger’s rising panic.

“He was afraid of being discovered.”

“But why did you assume I was talking about Mary?”

Slowly, another scene swirled out of my memory, but dimly. Not nearly as clear as Mary’s death scene. There was a woman in this one, too, but who was she? What was her name?

“There was another woman,” I said, wishing I could call up more details, but try as I might, she remained a mystery.

“Bessie,” Ezola said softly. “That other woman’s name was Bessie, and she was a colored woman, just like us, who helped Bigger out of the goodness of her heart and got bashed in the head for her trouble.”

Now I remembered. After he killed Bessie for no reason except misdirected rage, the hero added insult to injury by stuffing her body down an air shaft, rendering her
invisible.
Ezola’s point was beginning to dawn on me.

“That white woman I worked for had that book in her library for some reason. Maybe one of her kids brought it home from college. I don’t know. She didn’t have any other black books I ever saw, but she had that one, and one day it was out on the table, and before I dusted it off and put it back up where it belonged, I opened it up and read a little of the first page. I had never read a book written by a Negro before. I knew there were some, but I quit school after the tenth grade, so I never actually saw one. But that
Native Son
book just grabbed hold of me and wouldn’t let go. I sat right there all afternoon and read almost that whole book. When it was time to go, I put it in my purse and I read it all the way home on the bus, ate my dinner, and kept reading until I was done.