Mama Day

by Gloria Naylor

  But it would have taken a bigger man than I would ever be not to curse Bruce that particular morning: the phone literally never stopped ringing, giving me no time to decide how I was going to be in two places at once during lunchtime and still have only half a Saturday to myself. It wasn’t fair, the trout ran up in the damn Catskills all year round, but the Patriots only had sixteen lousy weeks to get a shot at the Super Bowl. The small envelope was stuck between a batch of project proposals and I split it open without a glance at the return address. Too bad, lady, the job is taken, but you’ll survive—we all will. And it would have stayed in my trash basket if I hadn’t noticed the film of yellow powder on my hands. It was the consistency of talc and very sparse—as if I’d touched a goldenrod.

  I frowned and retrieved the crumpled letter and envelope—it had been mailed from Willow Springs. Now, where had she said that place was again? South Carolina? Georgia? No, she had said it was in no state, and there were no state initials on the postmark, just Willow Springs and a zip code. Strange. Had she put sachet on the letter? I brought it to my nose, but there was no scent. And the only trace of extra powder was on my fingers. It didn’t rub off easily, and for some reason I felt uncomfortable about brushing it off on my pants. I left the phone ringing and went to wash my hands in the bathroom. As the water ran and the powder finally dissolved from my fingers, it all came back, a movie being played in reverse frame to frame: the defiant set of your back and my overwhelming relief when you walked out of my office, your spunk, the story of your cousin’s death, your grandmother, Willow Springs, the suppressed accent, the hand rising to move stray hairs from your neck. Your neck. There was now the faintest scent of lavender on my wet fingers although I had washed with the rough Oxydol soap that we used to remove blueprint ink. Had she smelled of lavender that day? I couldn’t depend upon my senses to remember something like that about a woman I had already forgotten, could I? And it would have been the end of it, Ophelia, truly the end, if Hopewell hadn’t insisted upon eating in a Chinese restaurant.

  I had never trusted foods that are mixed together—soups, stews, fancy sauces. I wanted a potato to be a potato, a slice of meat just that. So in those places I’m confined to clear soup, boiled rice, and barbecued spareribs, which worked hell on the cholesterol level I was forced to watch like a hawk. Having to sit there and pick at food that I hated for a totally unnecessary meeting didn’t help my disposition that day. I felt put upon by Hopewell’s wealth and doubly resentful of Bruce’s vacation, although even if he were in town, he wouldn’t have gone. Besides being the production end of the company, I was also public relations. On my better days I wouldn’t have minded, because we’d both still be glorified draftsmen at the city’s Building Department if we had to depend upon Bruce to communicate our ideas to clients. Ten minutes into the meal he would have called Hopewell an overbearing asshole for wasting half an afternoon having a design explained to him that was as simple as it was brilliant. But I knew that an account like Hopewell’s would move us toward that elevated stage where we would be dealing with companies that send their staff engineers to work out details with contractors.

  But for now it was businessmen who had to be sold on cost efficiency because their millions were too recent and personal to be relinquished without our holding their hands every step of the way. Without Bruce’s artistic temperament, I had the patience to explain that nothing saved him more money than the extra money we wanted for copper piping. You buy the material at 1980 prices and waiver 1990 plumbing bills—and there weren’t even any joints in the system for potential leakage. But with all those right angles in this diagram, wouldn’t the thing simply break? Of course, it would break, it had to break. All moving parts or parts with motion flowing through them—in his case, water—wore out even if the pipes were straight as an arrow. But the point was that his great-grandson or -daughter would have to worry about it, not him. I had to draw the line at why we insisted that a pipe angling right would send the water flowing left. There’s a point when you say trust us or give the job to someone else. But, yes, we could guarantee that the dame’s dishwasher on the tenth floor could run at the same time as the fag’s Jacuzzi on the first. Dame. Fag. That’s how the man talked. He was an overbearing asshole, and if he had jabbed me in the side once more with his “Ya know what I mean, soul brother,” I was going to tell him what he should have read in my eyes—he didn’t have much of a soul and he was hardly my brother. Sure, like him, I felt that the private sector held the solutions to our current recession, not more government spending. But why did he think I’d appreciate the sentiment that he was going to help vote out Jimmy Carter because he had ruined the economy and no self-respecting black man would let a southern cracker cut his profit margins for the sake of those welfare cheats? Meeting his type always made me ashamed to be a Republican.

  Thank God, the fortune cookies came. You always pick the one with the ends pointing toward you, he told me. And incredible as it might seem, my refusal could have affected the three-million-dollar contract I’d reassured him into leaving with us. His strip of paper said, “You always rise to the occasion,” and we spent another few minutes on his tasteless jokes before he actually ate that concoction of cardboard, sugar, and water. Mine crumbled in my hand and the powdery slip of paper read, “All chickens come home to roost.” Total nonsense, but after dusting the yellowish powder off my fingers, I looked up and told him I had the perfect person to replace his accounts manager. There was no need to pay an agency to do a search next week—there was someone we had wanted badly to hire ourselves, but she had walked in the moment after we had made a commitment to someone else. Her work experience and references were impeccable. Yeah, but how were her legs? he wanted to know. Not bad, I lied again. And if she didn’t work out—fire her. He hadn’t lost a thing, not even a finder’s fee. So what was in it for me—or better, what was in her for me? A gargoyle, that’s what he looked like when he leered. Not a thing, but if she worked out, then he owed me—his promise that she’d never know where the recommendation came from.

  I went back to the office, got your filed application, and had it messengered over to him. I was throwing a lamb to the wolves—but Hopewell would survive. I worked especially late that night, never allowing myself to think about the rationale for any of this. There wasn’t any. I hadn’t done you a favor. I hadn’t felt sorry for a black woman out there up against it looking for a job. I hadn’t thought you the best person for the position. I hadn’t thought at all, not even two weeks later when I sent the roses.

  My first week on the new job wasn’t bad. From our first meeting I had Hopewell figured out as a rump roast. I had come highly recommended by a guy he knew who worked at my old company, so just show him my stuff. And sure, he’d call me Cocoa, because he loved hot chocolate. Your class-A sleaze, but I knew just how to handle that. A couple of coffee breaks with the office gossip and then everyone knew about my breaking up with a man who I found out had been committed twice for homicidal rages and who now took to slinking around my apartment building. Then the second week I come in without make-up except for a little maroon blush under my eyes and ask Hopewell to have a drink after work, because he looked like the kind of man to help me with a personal problem I was having. You would have thought I had invited him to sip a glass of cholera. You’re doing fine so far, Miss Day, but your personal problems should be left entirely out of this office. Cowardly bastard. I went to the bathroom and howled. I didn’t even have to worry about him using my first name, no less using the front of my blouse to shine his wedding ring on. You see, when you can get that crap out of the way good and early, you can get on with your job.

  And you don’t know the satisfaction when I found out that Andrews & Stein was one of our engineering contractors. Well, so much for you, buddy, and your call-me-George. Now, I’m managing the accounts of the man you’re working for. Life goes ’round, doesn’t it? I couldn’t wait to tell Grandma and Mama Day that I was finally working again, so
I called them both up. One would have been sufficient—those two didn’t breathe without telling the other what it felt like. But I wanted to let Mama Day know how wrong she was about my sending you the note—they did give the position to someone else. I know these big cities, while her whole impression of what’s happening up here comes from the Phil Donahue Show.

  “You’re working, ain’t you? So now you can stop calling collect.”

  And she actually hung up on me. Sitting down there on a good five thousand acres of prime land, a lot of it waterfront and timber, a lousy call off hours wouldn’t have dented her. But the great-aunt—God love her—hated to be wrong about anything. She always had a way of seeing right through people and their motives, but sometimes it wasn’t quite the whole picture. She and I fought a lot about my boyfriends and the way I wanted to spend my time. And she always seemed to know when I was planning something behind their backs. As a kid, I often wondered if it was just the dope grown-ups had on you because they’d pulled the same tricks themselves, or if it was because Mama Day was special. And it wasn’t good to run up against her too much. Unlike Grandma, she’d take a peach switch to me. Mama Day just didn’t believe in cuddling. But if Grandma had raised me alone, I would have been ruined for any fit company. It seemed I could do no wrong with her, while with Mama Day I could do no right. I guess, in a funny kind of a way, together they were the perfect mother. But they had each taught me that living without manners in this world is not living at all. And so when the flowers came, I owed it to myself to thank you. I admit a simple note would have done it, but I called.

  I’d been warned that gifts were the norm with my job—silver-plated bolts for paperweights, crates of Indian River grapefruit, monogramed address books from contractors who wanted to stay on the good side of the accounts manager. I might forget a late budget, overlook an inflated estimate. So seeing the yellow roses I thought, Trying to suck up to me already—he remembers what a bastard he was. And the note really bowled me over. “There are only eleven yellow roses here. The twelfth is waiting on a table at Il Ponte Vecchio if you’d like to retrieve it one evening.” Now, what kind of fudge stick asked a woman out like this—who’s this guy used to dating, Mary Tyler Moore? My call was to say thank you but no to dinner. I had plenty of legitimate reasons, mind you. Professional ties are best left professional—objectivity and all that. Conflict of interest, mixing business with pleasure, etcetera, etcetera. Although, at the bottom line I couldn’t imagine how an evening alone with you and that twelfth rose could be anything but a total downer. I was never in that camp of a night out with someone is better than a night alone. I was someone, and there was always something to do with me. I actually enjoyed polishing my nails or washing my hair and sitting in front of the mirror to admire the effect—for myself. Anything that gave me pleasure wasn’t a waste of time. You were going to be a two-minute debt paid to my upbringing and a two-second dismissal with a “No, I’ll call you for a rain check.”

  The damn phone rang eight times before I got your cherry-vanilla receptionist, another few minutes waiting while she read her instruction manual on switching a call, and then four times before you picked up. In all the delay I could hear my heart pounding through the cupped space on the receiver. I was getting angry at myself for being nervous and even angrier at you for putting me in that position in the first place. And then finally hoping that my rejection would cut you to the quick and even things up. The point is that when I finally heard your voice I had started caring about the effect of what I was going to say to you and I couldn’t have cared less when I began dialing.

  And after we had gone through the thank you for the flowers, blah, blah, blah … It was nothing and glad you got the job, blah, blah, blah … “And about dinner, George …” It was just half a breath: my lungs had simply to bring up enough wind from the diaphragm to push out the “I” of “I can’t do it any time soon, but …” In just that half a breath, the caring in your silence stunned me. And it wasn’t directed toward me personally. It was like when a kid labors over a package—the wrapping paper is poorly glued, the ribbon is half tied—and all of his attention is directed toward that space between the hands that offer and the hands poised to receive. It’s the gesture that holds the heart of the child. And you cared deeply about what I thought of the gesture—not you. So I couldn’t have scored any points for myself by refusing, and I certainly couldn’t have hurt you. The only damage would have been done to a kindness. And God knows, there was little enough of that in New York to kill it off with cheap shots. And so there I was, trying to keep that alive in my bumbling way. And I ended up trapped at a corner table, staring over your shoulder at a potted fern, having one of the most boring evenings in recent memory.

  I had read about other disasters—the sinking of the Titanic, the last days of Pompeii—and just that evening I had left King Lear naked and wandering on a stormy heath before coming to meet you and finding myself longing to be in any of the above situations. We had absolutely nothing to say to each other, and it was partly my fault. I knew beforehand that any conversation about your job with Hopewell had to be ruled out because I didn’t want you to think that I was there to pump you for information or to curry favors. And since I had never been good with small talk, we got the weather, the menu, and the restaurant’s decor taken care of before we’d ordered the antipasto. The wine list could have taken up a few more minutes but neither of us drank. I was left with my silver tie clip, which I’d worn purposely for the inevitable “Tell me, what exactly does a mechanical engineer do?” I took off the tie clip and showed you that it was actually a miniature butter knife with circular indentations along the blade. Do you remember the nursery rhyme, I eat my peas with honey. I’ve done it all my life. It may make them taste funny, but it keeps them on my knife? Well, my job is to redesign the structures that take care of our basic needs: water supply, heating, air conditioning, transportation. So if that poor man had only come to Bruce and me, we would have shown him how to use what tools he had on hand to get those peas into his mouth without risking diabetes from all that honey. This little knife was our logo—we each had a letter opener shaped like it, and we had created an actual model that worked at the table.

  And here it becomes your fault: instead of laughing or even smiling, you raised an eyebrow and said, Oh, and they make you go to college for that? I snatched my tie clip from you and put it back on. And to think that I had actually changed shirts twice before leaving the house. I wasn’t expecting total appreciation from a layman for the brilliance of that design, but a simple murmur of admiration could have saved the evening. I would have gone into the planning it took to gauge the size and curve of those indentations: allowance for the natural horizontal- and vertical-degree swings of the wrist—right- or left-handed—the arc involved from the forearm to the mouth, compensation for variance in the shape of the peas—someone actually could eat peas from our knife gracefully. And then that could have brought us to the type of person who would commission such a design, because I had loads of entertaining stories about clients and what my job had taught me about human nature. And since we were both human, at least, we could have sailed through the meal exchanging ideas and observations about that.

  But your indifference to my tie clip and my bruised ego closed the door to that avenue of commonality, and as we made our way through an incredibly large antipasto, it was becoming increasingly clear that being human beings was about the only thing we had in common. You were Harold Robbins in general and James Michener when you wanted to get deep. I hadn’t read any fiction more recent than Ernest Hemingway and Ralph Ellison, remembering with a sinking heart the worn copy of King Lear I could have been spending my evening with. I told you about the old movies at the Regency and you countered with surprise that anyone would pay to see things they could watch on television after midnight. It would have been too much to hope that you were a football fan—and it was. You hated all sports except for aerobics, which I silently dismissed
as middle-class female hysteria about their appearance. You don’t have to jog and stomp yourself to death in order to stay healthy. I should know—I’d had a heart condition from a child, and taking long walks was all that was necessary to keep the cardiovascular system fit.

  But since you enjoyed aerobics, I made the mistake of asking you if you liked to walk. For God’s sake, no—it was too boring. And besides, no one walked in New York, you said with such smug certainty. And you could easily understand that—it was after all one of the most exciting places in the world. And as you went on and on, telling me all about my city, I could see that you understood nothing. You and those just like you who had gone there following a myth: you’ve got to be fast, and you’ve got to be fierce, because isn’t everybody running? You all made the same mistake. We were running—but toward home or toward jobs, rushing through the streets, because we knew what you couldn’t possibly, with your cloistered arrogance: New York wasn’t on those Manhattan sidewalks, just the New Yorkers.