We Are Taking Only What We Need

by Stephanie Powell Watts

  “Let me come up with you?” Boles said, sounding like a young boy.

  “I’ll see you, Boles. Dinner was good. I appreciate it.”

  “Let me come up with you?” Boles rushed to her side of the car. “I’m not a bad man.”

  Jerri brushed past Boles, raised her hand in what was supposed to be a wave, but looked more like a halt. “I can see that,” Jerri said. “I’m sorry. I don’t care. I wish I did.”

  Inside the elevator, Jerri felt more alone than she had in years. Maybe Boles was on his way up to her room in the service elevator. Slow, old Boles waiting for her at her door or charging into her room with his narrow hunkered shoulder startling her in the night. Jerri reached for her phone, scrolled through the contact numbers. Who was going to help her in the world? Her mother had called twice, but no call from Doug since the day she’d left and even then all he’d wanted to know was what she was going to tell people. His indifference was an insult that she couldn’t have expected. All these years later and Doug wasn’t even her friend.

  There were only four floors in the building, and Jerri’s room was on the third. Jerri pressed the button for the fourth. The fourth floor looked exactly the same as the third floor with an iron hall table with a glass top and above a gilded mirror, looking like it would be at home either at Versailles or the elevator stops at the first through fourth floors at the Birmingham Best Western. The message couldn’t be more obvious. But sweet Jesus, if nothing truly changed in your world, not even the scenery, then why did it matter so much?

  When the elevator door opened, she waited and watched as the door closed again. She rode down, a minute, less, to the lobby, waited, watched the door open, then close and rode back up to the fourth floor, again, and then twice more. The last time the front-desk man, a young black man with a pouting stomach, was waiting when the door opened. Jerri gasped and startled both of them.

  “You all right?”

  Jerri shook her head, first no, then yes.

  “I don’t know what you mean, ma’am?”

  “Yes,” Jerri said and pretended to search through her purse for something she could wrap in her hand.

  “Did you lose your key card?”

  “I’m tired.” Jerri snapped her pocketbook shut and smiled at the man.

  “Can I help you? Can you tell me what you need?”

  She would go to Louisiana the next day. She would get to California. The rest she’d figure out. “I’m okay.”

  Black Power

  The lines were busy at the dog registry, ringing off the hook like in those old black-and-white movies where the business mogul has ten black phones glossy as beetles lined on his desk: Mr. Important here. Sell, sell! Shelia wore her headset like the sixteen other phone operators, telling dog owners from all across the country how to fill out dog-registry papers or where to mail papers or how to get the papers they were promised and never received or how to change the spelling of the names they’ve chosen (you have no idea how many My Little Angles are barking around out there). Eight hours a day of “Yes, ma’am, sign your name where it says new owner. Right. And the former owner has to sign where it says former owner,” over and over again.

  The lit-up switchboard excited the five-foot tyrant of a phone manager Angie. Shelia dreaded the sight of her twisted face over the short-walled cubicles, eager to catch any one of them with their phones switched to silent and staring off into space. Angie was not beloved. But none of the management staff were what you might call Sunday-dinner guests for the North Carolina locals. Southerners couldn’t get used to the loud, unsmiling women, hair dyed improbable red power colors, their haughty nasal accents as they mocked their North Carolina employees. Thaaank yew! They teased, drawing out the vowels like taffy. Shelia spent too much time wishing all those New Yorkers had never moved the dog registry from Manhattan at all. Of course she wouldn’t have a job, but she’d manage. People do. Though Shelia had started to wonder if she was actually managing or simply laying down decorative pavers on the path to crazy. There were only so many soul-stealing times you could listen to the moaning and ranting about dogs, of all things, before you were through—through, like past here, beyond that, and all the way to the other side. By Shelia’s calculations, she was less than a week’s worth of phone calls from her limit. She tried to explain to her fiancé Polo about it, but the wrongs she recreated sounded stupid even to her. Suck it up. Man up, she told herself every morning on the slow ride up to the second floor in the service elevator. National Kennel Club wasn’t anybody’s dream job.

  “Yes, ma’am, I’m listening,” Shelia said as she scooted as close to her neighbor’s cube as she could. Diane had cut dozens of magazine pictures of Patrick Swayze and pinned them all over her padded walls. Shelia laughed at her, like everybody else, a grown woman, a woman on the downhill side of middle-aged at that, but she secretly kind of liked the collection, the exhibit-A evidence that somebody loved something—even if that something was ridiculous.

  “He looks like a sheepdog terrier,” the woman said. “For God’s sake, how can you let people sell animals like this?”

  “I understand, ma’am. In order for us to open a case we must have some information. Do you have a pen handy?”

  Shelia heard the woman drop the phone, the squeak and pull of drawers opening.

  “Go ahead,” the woman snapped.

  “We need pictures of your dog, the names and current addresses of the owner of the sire and dam, pictures of the sire and dam, everything you witnessed or learned about the conditions of the mating,” Shelia paused for the woman to write the information down, though, of course, Shelia knew she wouldn’t. The dog owners don’t want legwork, extra phone calls, and questions. They want action and they want it now. Phone magic, a little presto-chango over the fiber optics and their trembling, knock-kneed creature becomes a champion, the star of the dog show, worthy of their registry name: Prince Valiant Emperor Angle the Third.

  “Conditions of the mating? Look, all I know is I’ve got a sheepdog body with a terrier face. I didn’t pay $500 for that.”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am,” Shelia began in a voice she hoped was sympathetic but sounded a little weary even to her. She couldn’t imagine a situation that would fill her with less grief. “We will be happy to investigate.”

  “Investigate! How can you let people do this? Nigger in the woodpile is all I know. Now I have to foot the bill for a nigger in the woodpile.”

  Shelia never hung up on callers, no matter how obnoxious or abrasive, but let them wear themselves out, struggle so hard on the chain of the telephone line that the fight finally left them. She prided herself on how much trouble she could let dog mommies and daddies lay at her doorstep without a word, without one nasty word. She once talked to a man for twenty-seven minutes, more like listened to his rant, about why his beautiful collie from the pound couldn’t be registered. A dog from the pound might be anybody, the bloodlines muddied with the genes of mutts and ordinary curs. You couldn’t know that the dog in the pound today was the pureblood you lost the day before. You couldn’t be sure. And blood should tell. For that caller Angie finally broke in on the line and in her New York way ended the madness. “I’m Angie the manager. Forget about Jiffy,” she said. “You got it?”

  Shelia had her own method for dealing with the foolish or ill-mannered. Her aunt had been part of the last class at the all-black high school in town and had taught Shelia the unofficial cheers the crowd used to yell from the sidelines. Their cheers were tough: We’re the blue imps, and we’re slick and fine, if you mess with us we will blow your mind. We are the blue imps, super cool. You mess with us, you’re a fool. My sign is Gemini. That’s no lie. You mess with me, I’ll black your eye. But the one Shelia loved most wasn’t a cheer at all, but a chant. Over and over again, Ungawa, ungawa (clap clap). Black power, black power (clap clap). But Shelia couldn’t taste the full-vowelled sound of ungawa ungawa that day, only the acid-meanness, the rancid vinegar of hurt and hate stinging
at the back of her throat.

  “Why do I have to find out conditions of the mating? I’m the one suffering. Me,” the caller sighed heavily into her phone. “Are you there?” she asked.

  Shelia did not respond but let the caller hear her breath, let her hear the other conversations in the background. She wouldn’t hang up, but she couldn’t speak. What could she possibly say that the woman shouldn’t have already learned?

  “Hello! Hello! Are you there? Goddammit, answer me.”

  The woman’s sheepdog was going crazy in the background. His pointy little face in motion from the heartbreak he sensed from his owner, showing more loyalty to her than she would ever have for him.

  “Where are you?” the woman screamed.

  Shelia let the caller yell, playing the odds that Angie wouldn’t notice the long call and break in on the line or rush around the corner. Shelia imagined the story the woman would tell her husband later, a saga gripping only to her of the terrible, rude telephone clerk. “She hung up on me,” the woman would insist, feeling the outrage all over again, while the husband would nod in understanding, not giving the first hot damn, interrupting, “But did you get the papers?”

  “What’s your name? Tell me. I’m going to have your pitiful little job. Do you hear me? Shit, shit, shit,” the woman yelled, punctuating every word with her pounding fist.

  And your little dog, too, Shelia thought and giggled into the phone.

  “You’re there!” The woman said, so angry she sounded like she might start sobbing. “I hate you,” the woman screamed as loud as she could. “I hate you so much,” she said, and the phone went dead.

  After exactly an hour and eleven more calls, Shelia could take no more, grabbed her paperback and headed to the break room. Shelia had made a game of how long she could hold out before she took her fifteen minutes. But not in the last hour of the day. If you held out that long, you might not get your minutes at all. And don’t even think about taking a break at your desk. Angie would bust you good for that. You had to take the trek, like a walk on a red carpet in hell, past the surly faces that glanced up at you as you crossed the airplane-hangar-sized room. Past the writers, called correspondents, who were the first response to the written complaints and set up cases against breeders and pet stores. Past the correspondents who dealt with claims of impure breeding and the two correspondents who responded to issues of divorce and custody of dogs—the love-gone-wrong cases. Past the women who typed the many letters the correspondents dictated into their recorders. Until finally, at the end of the building, you reached the blue door of the break room. Shelia never, ever started her fifteen minutes before she reached that door.

  Only one other person was there, the weird young man who moved all the way from New York City to work in the company’s loading dock.

  “Hey,” Shelia said. She would have been more enthusiastic, but she couldn’t ever gauge the New Yorkers. Either they ignored you or acted with indignation or surprise to your greeting. A body gets tired of trying after a while, but cornered, a Southerner will greet.

  “Yeah,” the man said and turned his back to Shelia to watch the fascinating progress of his Pop-Tart in the microwave.

  Shelia had no food. Never did. But she always carried a book. With a book you look busy, never had to wring your hands or thrust them hard in slim pockets, ashamed and idle. She would have loved a friend to talk to, but there was only Wendy, the other black woman at the registry, only two years older than Shelia and a member of her original training class. But Wendy and Shelia had been late back to their desks too many times to risk it. The last time Angie had screamed at them, her hands hard on her skinny hips, “No more!” she’d yelled like a pouty little kid.

  The man in the break room wore jeans today, but the North Carolinians lived for the days he broke out his skirts—not kilts, skirts, long A-line affairs that cut his hairy leg at the shin. A short guy like that didn’t need a skirt that long, Shelia wanted to tell him and even considered gesturing with a karate chop across her knee. Right here, she’d mouth. But who knows what the man might make of it. He might think the gesture was a gang sign. Though the only gangs Shelia knew were the old-people walkers who circled Crabtree Mall, all elbows and determined lips, looking like bulldogs with switchblades.

  Shelia sat near the window overlooking the enormous parking lot. Not since she was fifteen years old had she been without her own car. Now she got dropped off every morning, while Polo gunned the tinny engine, revved the car all the way up the hill to Cary Road. Fifteen minutes in the break room, ten minutes in the bathroom, five minutes adjusting her headphones, five minutes getting pamphlets to address to callers needing basic information, and, maybe if she was feeling bold, a second ten minutes in the bathroom. If she could manage these breaks she’d have only two hours and fifteen minutes to go.

  Betsy, the trainer for all the new-hires, flounced into the break room. She always looked the same, front-button flowing dresses, whisking around her still-skinny legs. Probably the same dresses she wore to dog shows, the very ones she wore to lead her prize cocker spaniels around the rings. Betsy’s office was full of pictures of her with one, then another sad-eyed, glossy dog with ribbons around their necks; they looked too demoralized to try to eat. Or maybe that’s just how they looked to Shelia.

  “Shelia!” Betsy exclaimed, the practiced look of delight on her face, “How are you?” Betsy stood in front of the refrigerator, waiting for applause. She probably was popular on the show circuit. An attractive woman in her midfifties, smiling like a debutante, her golden blonde hair, cropped in just-so layers, gleaming like wealth in the lights, her elastic face in another look of astonishment, now happiness, now great and abiding concern.

  “Okay,” Shelia said and tried not to look long at Betsy but concentrate on her book.

  “You won’t believe the story I heard,” Betsy took her carton of grapefruit juice from the fridge.

  Shelia could not imagine a world in which she would care about Betsy’s pity story, her attempt to bond with the help, let them know she was not one whit better, no sir, a regular Josephine, by God. What she succeeded in doing was proving she could force you to sit and listen to her talk.

  “This weimaraner breeder, I’ve known her for years, had the most beautiful dogs with coats so silver they were blue. Gorgeous. Coats like you wouldn’t believe.”

  Shelia was supposed to respond, express her disbelief at this idea of blue dogs, but she couldn’t think of any way to care.

  “This weekend, this rainy weekend, we all found out how they had those blue coats,” Betsy lowered her head conspiratorially. “Dye. Blue dye. Nobody would have guessed it.”

  But Shelia knew Betsy guessed it. Guessed it and predicted it to anybody who would listen.

  “People are nutty,” Betsy chuckled, waiting for Shelia to chime in with her laugh. “Just nutty.”

  Shelia knew that if she gave Betsy a courtesy laugh she would never get rid of her and her whole break would be squandered listening to one after another of Betsy’s stories. Don’t look up. Don’t look up. Courtesy dictated that Shelia look up.

  “What are you reading?” Betsy asked, turning up the cardboard carton to get every drop of juice.

  Shelia turned the worn paperback over in her hand and showed Betsy the fraying cover.

  “A romance, huh? Now that’s the way to pass the day,” Betsy grinned.

  Shelia couldn’t think of any way to explain to Betsy how completely right and wrong she was. How could she tell Betsy that no romance could leave her as weak with longing as this book had? What would Betsy care that whatever it was that passed as magic in the lives of the people of Macondo was missing from hers? How could Shelia even put into words how predictable everything in her day had become: the Peanuts cup with the cheap Bics, the ripped chair no one had bothered to move from beside the entrance to the elevator, the smiling sultry face of Patrick Swayze staring at her as she found the chair at her cubicle.

  “I�
�m not that far into it.”

  “Let me know how it is. I might try that myself,” Betsy grinned. Shelia would not look at Betsy now. She would not look up at Betsy’s face and scream with her expression that she knew that seconds after their conversation Betsy would not even remember talking to her.

  “Well, I better get back,” Betsy said, making a show of checking her watch, signaling to Shelia that surely her own break was over.

  The Pop-Tart guy swished his hands together in triumphant finale and walked out. Betsy stood up and pretended to be interested in the magazines abandoned on a table next to the door. Shelia’s only recourse was to stand up herself and follow Betsy to the door, her book nestled under her armpit.

  “Shelia!” Angie screamed from across the office. “We’ve got calls lined up. To your desk. Now.”

  In high school, everyone would have laughed at the rebuke. How funny it was to see a peer get called out in front of everyone. How superior and sure it felt to see one of your own as stranded and mute as a wobbly-legged colt in a wide-open field. It would do no good to explain to Angie that she was only taking the break she was entitled to. At least none of the other telephone operators laughed. Shelia wouldn’t have been able to stand that.

  Even in school, when she was a kid and could be excused for thinking big, she’d dreamed safe: a good car, the light bill paid on time, food huddled in stacks in the fridge. It didn’t matter that most of her classmates, especially the black ones, lived much the way she did. If pressed she could name all of the black girls in school on her fingers and toes. One of her classmates went briefly to Livingstone College. A few spent a semester or two at community college drawing out their high school days to their ridiculous limits, their old antics finally feeling too predictable even to them. The Lackey twins might be the only ones among them in good shape, but that was to be expected. Shelia had hated the twins, the way they stuck to each other like cockleburs, their rich crybaby faces always taking up all the special air in the room. The twins need a break, the twins are scared, the twins are sad or crying or annoyed. Again. Unfortunately for Shelia they always managed to be with her in the same homeroom classes. Shelia had not lacked for friends, white friends like Allison, an only child with a television in her daddy’s van, or Donna, dark haired and beautiful, with straight teeth and wavy hair, though her beauty peaked at thirteen. Even a few years after high school Donna sent Shelia a clipping about the death of one of the boys they’d admired. But the Lackey twins had the gift of each other, a constant and beloved witness and narrator to their experiences. It hadn’t occurred to Shelia at the time, but of course she was jealous. Who could stand that no matter what, the Lackey twins would always together be the queens of the colored-girl parade?