The Dry Grass of August(72)

Mrs. Harold offered tea, and Mama said she would love some.We sat on the sofa together while Maggie went with her mother to the kitchen.

“Here.” I shoved the note at Mama. “From Mary. It was on the bulletin board.”

Mama read it. “This isn’t from Mary.”

“She signed it.”

“This is not her handwriting. It must be from Young Mary.” Mama stared at the note.





CHAPTER 28

Mama and I were fixing lunch when I heard the garage door going up and down. Mama put her hand on my shoulder. “Open the can of tuna for me.”

Daddy came into the kitchen. He set a beer on the table with a sharp clack. “What have you got to say for yourself?”

Mama said, “June did what we should have done.”

Daddy’s eyes went to slits. “She stole your goddamn car!”

Mama turned back to the counter. “I’ve had enough of your temper.” She began chopping onions.

Daddy stared at me across the bar.

Mama said, “Jubie, get the sweet pickle relish from the fridge.”

Daddy left the kitchen. Their bedroom door slammed shut.





Mama tried to find a new maid. She talked with her friends, put ads in The Charlotte Observer and The Charlotte News:



DOMESTIC NEEDED to clean, iron, cook. South Charlotte, No. 3 bus, 8 AM to 6 PM, weekdays. Occasional Saturdays. Lunch provided. Must be healthy. $25 a week. Call Mrs.Watts at 3-5652.





Daddy thought it was excessive to run the ad in both papers, claiming that coloreds only read the News. Mama said most of her friends preferred the Observer, and they were the likely source for finding a new maid.

Mama had objections to all the maids who answered the ads. One had a lot of experience and several references, but she wanted thirty dollars a week and Mama said that was highway robbery. “Besides, she sounds uppity.”

She posted a notice on the bulletin board at Watts Concrete Fabrications, hoping one of the men there would have a wife or daughter who needed a job. Nothing came of that, and Mama thought it was because we had a bad name in the colored community after Mary’s death.





Clothes began to pile up on the den sofa, where Mama took them to fold while she watched TV or listened to her programs. The mound of clothes often outlasted the programs and she just left them there. She stopped ironing the sheets and pillowcases, and we had to change our own beds.

One day I found her sitting at the dining room table, crying, holding her damask tablecloth. There was a brown iron-shaped mark in the middle. “I’ve ruined it,” Mama said. “I was on the phone. . . .” Her tears spotted the fabric, and the smell of scorched linen hung in the air. I wanted to comfort her but couldn’t think how. She blew her nose on the ruined damask. “There’s just so much to do.”

The next morning, Mama got Stell and me to help her move the kitchen table and chairs into the dining room. She put on faded denim Bermudas and tennis shoes, tied a bandana around her hair, and spent the day on her hands and knees with a scrub brush and pails of soapy water, scraping the yellow wax buildup off the linoleum. At supper she showed us her ruined manicure. “I wore rubber gloves, for all the good they did. I’m going to have a nervous breakdown if I don’t find help.”

A colored woman named Virginia, who was Susan Feaster’s maid, helped us for a week while Mrs. Feaster was out of town. After Virginia had been with us a couple of days, Mama said to her, “I don’t know what Susie pays you, but I can offer you twenty-eight dollars a week, with lunches.”

Virginia turned her down, saying she’d been with Mrs. Feaster for eleven years. Mrs. Feaster was one of Mama’s oldest friends, and I wondered if she ever found out about Mama going behind her back.

Mama told Aunt Rita, “I’m just looking for a good Negro, like Mary.”

“You’ll find someone. There are lots of strong girls who’d make fine domestics.” Aunt Rita sliced a ham she and Mama were splitting.

“I’ve got high standards.” Mama took a roll of freezer paper from the pantry. “Mary was smart, a hard worker. I trusted her completely. And the way some of these girls talk makes my skin crawl.”

“Mary had decent grammar.”

“And she didn’t infect the kids with ‘ain’t’ and ‘fin uh go’ and—”

“Fin uh go?”

“Fixing to go, as in ‘Ah’m fin uh go de stoh.’ ”

“I’d swear you were colored.”

Daddy didn’t understand why Mama was having such a hard time finding a new maid, so she told him he could look for somebody. He didn’t nag her anymore.

I didn’t avoid him, but we had little to say to each other when the family sat down to supper or in the den to watch TV. I was uneasy around him and I wished things could get back to the way they’d been before Mary’s death. When Daddy walked into a room, I was careful, the way I used to be on the fishing pier at Shumont, where the weathered gray planks looked solid enough until a rotting board gave beneath my feet.

Without Mary, the heart of our home was broken, and hiring a new maid wasn’t going to mend it.





CHAPTER 29

Carter called to tell us about the accident. I remembered seeing Richard Daniels on the high dive as we passed Municipal Pool on our way out of town when we left for Pensacola. I imagined him diving, tucking and flipping, the board pulling out of the base, Richard rising from the water, the board falling, Richard’s head cracking open like a watermelon.