“Nothing. But she…Oh, you’ll see. Come on.” So I turned back into the hall, where Bethrah was standing patiently. When Mother came, I noticed she was a bit startled too, but she handled it much better than I did.
“I’m Missus Willson. Let’s go back into the kitchen and have a cup of coffee and talk.” She reached out her hand; Bethrah removed a pair of white gloves and they shook hands.
“I’m Bethrah Scott, Missus Willson. Very nice to meet you.” And she smiled again. It was such a wonderful smile.
“Bertha?”
“No, ma’am. Beth-rah.” And she spelled it.
“Bethrah. All right. I have it. Well, come along, dear. Let’s have some coffee.”
I went right after them and stared at her. I’m sort of a schemer, and I was thinking some very selfish thoughts. First of all, I wanted to ask her where she bought her shoes, because they didn’t look like any I’d ever seen in New Marsails. I would’ve known because I go and shop just about every week. The other thing I was thinking was even more selfish: there aren’t too many girls around here, at least that I can talk to; they’re all farm girls. And most of my girl friends are in New Marsails. But here was this nice-looking girl who couldn’t have been more than three years older than me, and it seemed like it would be very nice to know her. And a good thing about having her for a friend was that she was colored and there wouldn’t be any competition between us as far as boys were concerned, because that kind of thing always makes girls enemies even if they’re very close.
Anyway, Mother sat at the kitchen table. Missus Caliban stood behind her, and I could see she liked Bethrah very much too. Bethrah was sitting across from Mother and I sat down on a stool by the door so I could see her face and the shoes too, all at once.
“Well, Beth…rah,” Mother said, “why don’t you tell me something about yourself. Do you have any experience?” She was trying to be businesslike, which she isn’t. That question would have frightened me. You know how it is when someone says: Why don’t you tell me about yourself. You don’t know where to start and you get all nervous and your hands sweat. But Bethrah didn’t seem nervous at all. She could cope with anything.
“No, Missus Willson, I haven’t. But I know how to do the job. My mother was a maid and I watched and helped her a great deal.”
I guess if just anyone came and said they had no experience Mother would have told her right away she couldn’t have the job. But Mother told me later she wanted to hire Bethrah the minute she saw her, and now she had to find a good reason why to hire her.
“Tell me this, dear, why does a girl like yourself want to work as a maid? I’d guess you’ve had an education.”
“Yes, Missus Willson, I have. That’s why I need the job. I went to college for two years and need the money to finish. I’ll be honest and tell you I can only work for two years. Then, I think I’ll have enough to go on back to school.”
That was exactly what Mother wanted. “Well, then, I’d say you have the job.” She was very happy with her ingenuity. “We’d like to help get you through college. We pay well, and two years is a long time. By then we can find another maid, don’t you think?”
Bethrah smiled. I looked at Missus Caliban and she was really glowing and proud to see a colored girl going to college and willing to work as a maid to do it.
“You can save some money too.” Mother was really very pleased. “You can stay here with us, and still get a good salary.”
“That would be nice, thank you,” Bethrah said.
So we hired her right then. We sat around in the kitchen (I didn’t go out) and felt happy and liked each other very much.
Bethrah moved in and started to work, and I just talked to her all the time. In fact, I don’t know what I would’ve done without her, and now I’m not speaking about shoes and silly things. She really taught me a lot about life. Like the time I went to a party in New Marsails with Dewey and I met this boy there, whose name was Paul. We danced all night together, and so I told Dewey I wanted Paul to take me home.
Well, of course we parked on the Ridge, which was all right because I wanted to park with him. I was sitting there in the car looking at the stars. They looked like lightning bugs pipping around. I was blinking in a way to make them look like they were hanging on silver threads. It was very romantic.
Paul slid over and yawned and then let his arm fall around my shoulder. Boys are so funny; they always stretch or yawn to get an arm around your shoulder. I leaned against him. “Isn’t it a beautiful night though?” I said. I thought he was shy and I wanted to get him in the mood.
So he took me under the chin with his hand and turned my face up and kissed me, and I kissed him back. We did that for a little while.
Then all of a sudden I felt like I was surrounded by hands. There was a hand on my breast. That was all right, I suppose. Can’t very much happen with a hand on your breast, at least not to me—I’m not very sexy there. All it does is relax me.
Then I felt a hand on my knee. At first I forgave him because I thought maybe it had slipped. After all, I didn’t know him very well and I was giving him the benefit of the doubt. But then the hand wasn’t on my knee any more. It was way up under my dress. I didn’t want to destroy the mood, so I sort of pulled away from him and whispered in his ear, “Don’t do that.” After all, it’s not really bad if a boy wants to put his hands on you. It means you’re attractive anyway. So I just whispered, “Don’t do that.”
But he didn’t hear me or maybe he’d heard me but didn’t want to destroy the mood by moving away like he’d been shot. Anyway, his hand was still there, so just for good measure, I said again, “Don’t do that.” But this time I made it a little more definite.
“Shhhh, be quiet,” he said. “Don’t destroy the mood.”
Don’t destroy the mood! Golly! All of a sudden I felt my garter undone. Now I knew he’d heard me, so I had to do something else. I decided to get mad. I pulled away from him altogether and said, “That isn’t very nice!”
I wasn’t really angry, but you have to pretend sometimes to keep boys in line. I glared at him and he just sat there smiling, almost like he thought I wasn’t serious about him stopping. So to make certain I repeated myself. “That isn’t very nice!” I tried to make it sound really fierce.
“What isn’t?” He just sat there smiling at me.
“You know. What you were doing. That isn’t very nice.” I was getting really scared, so I added, “Listen, if you want to get in trouble, you can. Tomorrow, I’ll get my father to have you arrested. And he can do it too!” Later, I thought that was a sneaky way to get out of there, but at the time I couldn’t think of anything else.
He grabbed the wheel very tightly. “Boy! boy! You girls! you want to come out here and then you scream papa as soon as something happens. Boy!”
“You just take me home this minute,” I said. So he started the car, took me home and let me out. And to show you what kind of GENTLEMAN he was, he wouldn’t even walk me to the door.
I ran inside and closed the door and locked it. I was relieved, but then I just started to shake all over, and then I started to cry. I must have been scared as anything because I just stood there leaning against the door, shaking and crying.
That was when I heard footsteps in the kitchen and thought it was Mother and started to run up the stairs, because you know mothers don’t at all understand things like that.
I ran into my room and closed the door and stood there breathing really hard. I couldn’t stop crying or keep quiet. So I went to the bed and put my head in the pillow to muffle the noise. The door opened and closed and I turned around and started to think up a lie to tell Mother, but it was Bethrah standing there in a bathrobe. She looked at me and got really alarmed when she saw my face, and came over, sat next to me, put her arm around my shoulder, and asked me what happened.
At first I was going to
lie to her. After all, you don’t like to tell anyone you got trapped in a car because everybody knows you really got there because you wanted to. But then I just couldn’t think of a good enough lie, so I told her the truth. “You don’t think that’s bad, do you, Bethrah?” It sounded really strange asking her opinion when she was colored.
“No. Why should I?” She hugged me. It was like she was my big sister and I felt a little better. “No. That’s happened to me, too.”
“Really?” I looked at her and she nodded.
“When I was a freshman, honey, I went out with this basketball player. I always had to go out with basketball players because I’m so tall.” (You see how she was, how she could talk that way about being tall. Most tall girls are ashamed of it and slouch. But Bethrah used to stand very straight. I once asked her whether she was ashamed of being tall and why she stood so straight and she said: “How else can I let a boy know I have breasts if I don’t stand up straight.”) “I went out with this basketball player and we parked in his car, and I thought he must be a magician, his hands moved so fast. You know what I did?”
“Tell me. Nothing I did worked. He just laughed at me.”
“Well, this’ll work all right! I just balled up my fist and hit him right in the—” She clicked her tongue. Then she laughed sort of embarrassed.
“You did? Really?”
“Yes, I did!” She was leaning toward me now, whispering. “And he yelled! I thought he was going to die right there, and I’d have to drive home. I couldn’t drive a car then and would’ve killed myself too.” She laughed again. And I started to laugh and felt a great deal better.
“But could I do that? I mean, suppose he told?”
“He wouldn’t tell that. How could he? He’d be too embarrassed. And if he did, it would probably make you the most popular girl ever. You’d be a challenge to boys.” She stood up. “Why don’t you take a bath. It’ll make you feel better.” She started to the door.
“You won’t tell Mother, will you?” I was worried about that.
“Tell your mother what?” She smiled again. “You take that bath. I’m glad you had such a good time at the party.”
At first I didn’t understand her; I wasn’t very subtle then. Finally I got what she meant. “Thank you, Bethrah.”
“One girl to another. Good night, Miss Dymphna.” That sounded strange after we’d been so close.
“Bethrah, don’t you call me that. You call me Dee or Dymphnie like everyone else.”
“All right, but just when we’re alone. Your mother might not like it.”
I said okay and she went out. I guess she was right, although Mother is very good about this race business and got along very well with Missus Caliban, just like I did with Bethrah, although I don’t think Missus Caliban ever called Mother by her first name.
So you can see how nice Bethrah was and how smart. She knew how to handle anything. That was before she fell in love with Tucker.
This is how I found out about that. I went into the kitchen one day to get some orange juice and she was looking out of the back window into the garden. I went over beside her and looked too. One of the cars was in front of the garage with two legs sticking out from under it and she was staring at the legs. I couldn’t believe it. She was going back to school and all that. Tucker may have been able to fix anything—he was very handy—but I couldn’t imagine them together. She was smart, not just clever but really intelligent. She and Dewey used to talk about things I couldn’t even understand. And besides, Tucker was even shorter than I am. But there she was staring at his legs.
She turned and saw I didn’t believe she could be interested in him. She looked very serious. “What does he think of me?” she asked. “Does he ever say anything about me?”
“Gee, I don’t know. What’s wrong?” You see, I couldn’t believe it. “Is he mean to you?”
“No. He isn’t ANYTHING to me. I don’t think he’s ever looked at me.”
“Well, he doesn’t say very much to anybody.” I tried to make her feel better.
“Dee, will you do me a favor? If it ever comes up, if you ever get a chance to talk to him, see if you can find out what he…thinks…about me.” She felt embarrassed and looked down at her hands. “That sounds silly, doesn’t it? But I’d really like to know.”
“Okay, Bethrah. But Tucker’s so…” I stopped. You can’t just tell a girl the boy she likes is nondescript.
After that, I used to watch the way she looked at him when he came into the kitchen. Sometimes he’d talk to her in that really high voice he had, but he’d never look at her. He always pretended to be doing something else like bending down under the sink looking for leaks.
She’d stand by the stove and just look at him like he was simply beautiful, so upset by him she’d stutter. “Tucker, would you take out the garbage, please?” She’d sound like she was apologizing for something.
He’d look at her then, but like he was angry at her. Then he’d pick up the garbage pail or whatever it was and go outside.
When he was gone, she’d sigh like she was relieved to get him out of the room, like the strain of having him around was too much for her. I guess that’s what it was, and I could understand that. She’d look at me and even though I was only fifteen, I’d understand. Then she’d turn back to the stove.
I don’t know how much later it was, but Tucker took me into New Marsails to get a tooth pulled. When he came to get me, I hopped in beside him instead of getting in the back.
I wanted him to say something first, so I groaned. Actually the tooth didn’t hurt. It was so rotten it just about fell out by itself. But I groaned anyway. He didn’t say anything at all.
Tucker used to drive like you think a race driver does, bent over the steering wheel, staring at the road, his eyes squinty, his shoulders hunched. He looked silly, because he was so tiny. He looked like a too-serious little boy.
I groaned again. But still he didn’t say anything. Maybe he didn’t hear me over the motor. So finally I just said, “Isn’t Bethrah nice, Tucker?”
He didn’t move. You would imagine that if a man was thinking about marrying a girl, when someone mentioned her name, he would at least twitch. He didn’t.
I wanted to know for myself now. I suppose it wasn’t actually any of my business; Bethrah just wanted to know if he ever thought about her. “I mean, do you like her at all?”
He sounded like it hurt him to say it. “Yes, Miss Dymphna.”
That was all I could get out of him, and that wasn’t very much. It wasn’t that I expected him to go overboard and tell me everything, but I couldn’t even tell whether he REALLY liked her, or whether he was just trying to keep me quiet.
But he did like her after all because they got married in September. And it seemed like no time at all before she was plodding around the house pregnant. Even after they were married, he didn’t say much to her. It might be he didn’t want to be mushy with everybody watching. But I think it’s nice to have someone tell you he loves you in front of everybody. He didn’t though; he didn’t say anything.
So then I went back to MISS BINFORD’S and I guess that was about the time my parents started to get along really badly. Not that they argued in front of us. In fact, I doubt if they argued at all. It was much beyond that. It was that gradually, going back as far as I can remember, they kept saying less and less to each other until the time came—this is the time I’m talking about—that they didn’t say anything at all to each other…except maybe at night when I guess married people feel most alone, when they realize how little they have in common, and how much they’ve lost.
I don’t think trouble came to them out of nowhere. I think it was there all along, but they didn’t have time to think about it because they were raising Dewey and me. But now that we were mostly grown up, they didn’t have so much to do to hide the trouble behind and it started to
show, to come out.
I’d hear them sometimes at night. I’d be going by to the bathroom and hear them, and I’d stop at the door and listen. I guess that’s nosy, but when your parents are having trouble, you can’t go by and put on your cold cream like nothing at all was the matter.
First I’d hear Mother say: “But why, David?” She’d sound very teary and maybe was already crying.
“I don’t know. There’s nothing you could understand.” He never raised his voice.
“But I used to understand. Didn’t I, David?”
There’d be a silence, and you could hear them shifting around. It wasn’t the sound of them making love. They were just trying to get to sleep. Then all at once Mother would say: “David? I love you.”
And he wouldn’t say anything.
I guess that was the first time I felt really close to Mother. I get along with her about as well as a daughter can, but they say girls always get along better with their fathers, and boys with their mothers. And that’s true in this family because Daddy never really got along with my brother. I used to watch him look at Dewey sometimes. He’d look at him for a long time, and shake his head and turn away. It wasn’t like he was disgusted with him—like Dewey thinks—more like he wanted to say something to him and didn’t know how. It must sound like TV, but that’s the way he would look. I think lots of times he wanted to say something to Dewey, but said it to me instead. I get along with Daddy about as well as anybody in the world, and that’s not really saying much.
After my parents stopped talking to each other, Dewey and my father couldn’t talk without arguing. It was like Dewey was arguing in place of Mother. Daddy would say something, anything, and Dewey always hopped in on it. I stayed out of it. I used to try to break it up by doing something silly or cracking a joke, but it never worked, so I just started to leave the room.
When all this was going on, Bethrah was the only person who saved me from being miserable all the time. She’d talk to me and cheer me up. But she had things to worry about too—after all, she was expecting a baby soon—and couldn’t afford to get all messed with my problems.
A Different Drummer Page 10