Blanche Passes Go

by Barbara Neely

  “Hello everyone, hello!” The white woman who entered the kitchen just as Blanche was setting the second bowl of muscat sauce to cool was tall and busty. She had the kind of wide-open eyes that looked like they could read minds. Her satin dress caught the light and became the hard pearly-blue casing of the help-eating mantis. Everyone turned to face her. The wait staff instinctively stood with their rubber-gloved hands behind their backs, blocking her view of the table where the salads were being probed.

  “Mrs. Clifford, how may I help you?” Ardell stepped toward the woman.

  “Just checking up,” she said with a toothy smile. She stretched her neck to see beyond Ardell, but there was only the row of grinning staff to be seen.

  “Why, everything’s just fine, Mrs. Clifford. Right on schedule. Are your guests enjoying the hors d’oeuvres?”

  “Oh yes, they are quite wonderful. Quite.” Mrs. Clifford looked at Ardell, and Ardell looked back.

  “Well, I’ll just leave you to it,” Mrs. Clifford said when it was clear no one was moving until she did.

  Once Mrs. Clifford had gone, Ardell turned to the staff. “And there you have the key to good catering.” She struck a pose. “Never let them see you strip-search the lettuce! Thanks, y’all.”

  Once the salads were de-toothpicked, dinner got to the table without a ripple. While the guests ate mushroom soup, mixed green salad, and roast sea bass with corn and leeks in red wine sauce, Blanche joined in the breaking down—that constant cleaning up—by checking the bathrooms, the sitting room, the den, and other rooms for stray glasses or napkins, half-eaten canapés. Since she knew everyone was at dinner, she didn’t knock on the closed door of what turned out to be the library.

  Blanche’s mouth formed a wide but silent O. The young white woman leapt up from her chair as though Blanche had caught her trying to steal it. Everything about her said she was not a regular visitor—from her home-permed, frowsy blond hair to her clunky-heeled, wannabe leather shoes. She was a good-sized girl with wide hips and the kind of muscular calves old folks called piano legs. Her yellow, ruffled dress ended just above two oddly wrinkled knees, like large pink cabbages. It was not a big-woman-friendly dress, and Blanche wondered what could have possessed her to buy it, let alone to wear it.

  “Excuse me. I thought everyone was at…”

  “I got here too early, see. I thought I was s’posed to be here at…” She took a step toward Blanche. “They ready for me now, ma’am?”

  Blanche liked the way she said “ma’am.” Somebody raised her right.

  “Ready for…?”

  “The naming ceremony, I guess that’s what you call it. For the shelter. Poor dead Maybelle’s daddy—her mama’s passed, you see—asked me to…Her brothers, they didn’t want to come because they…”

  The girl’s half-sentences were like pieces of a puzzle with parts broken off. Blanche moved them around in her mind, imagining various versions of the unsaid bits, trying to make sense of why this young woman was sitting in the library while all the other guests were having dinner. And hadn’t every place at the table been taken when she’d peeked into the dining room? She remembered Ardell telling her that there was going to be an announcement about a new women’s program tonight, but what did that have to do with dead Maybelle?

  “I’m Blanche White, with the catering service. Are you a relative of Maybelle’s?”

  “No, ma’am, Miz Blanche. I’m Daisy Green. Maybelle was my best friend since the first grade. It’s nice, them naming the new women’s place after her, ain’t it? Maybelle’d like that, havin’ something named for her, I mean.”

  Blanche figured Daisy was standing in for Maybelle’s brothers, who weren’t willing to come be grateful to the gentry for using their dead sister’s name. Since Maybelle’s murder was taking attention away from the bicentennial celebration, it looked like the folks in charge had decided to put their show in Maybelle’s spotlight. Which didn’t include having the likes of Maybelle’s friend at table.

  “We was like that, me and Maybelle.” Daisy made the usual two-crossed-fingers gesture. “Here.” She opened her plastic handbag. “Here’s a picture of the two of us on my birthday.” She handed Blanche a dog-eared snapshot of Daisy beside a delicate, shapely honey-blonde with big eyes, a turned-up nose, and a rosebud mouth. They were dressed alike, in the very dress Daisy had on now. It looked fine on Maybelle, showing off her petite figure, but it made Daisy look like a white whale playing dress-up. Blanche wondered whose idea it had been for them to dress alike.

  She handed back the photo. “I’m real sorry about your friend.”

  Daisy looked as though she might cry. Blanche hurried on.

  “It looks to me like it’s going to be a while before anything gets cranked up. You want something to eat?”

  Daisy bobbed her head. “I sure wouldn’t mind. I was too nervous to eat ’fore I left home.” She pressed her hand to her stomach. “I’m right peckish now, ma’am.”

  “Be right back.”

  “These folks is lower than snake shit,” Blanche told Ardell, then explained about Daisy. She fixed the girl a tray of assorted canapés and added half a bottle of Tattinger.

  “Real champagne?” Daisy asked when she’d read the label, her eyes widened until the hazel was totally surrounded by milky white.

  “Maybelle was always goin on about how she had champagne a lot and…” Daisy stopped talking and took a sip from her glass. Her eyes widened again. “It feels like it’s dancin’ in your mouth!”

  Blanche remembered the first time she’d tasted good champagne and her promise to buy herself at least one bottle a year. She hadn’t kept that promise lately. It was only alcoholic grape juice in the end, so she hadn’t missed much, but it was a promise tied to her old and growing desire to poke her head out into a world wider than the one she’d known so far.

  She didn’t see Daisy again until the girl was standing by the fireplace in the drawing room. She stood between the hostess, Mrs. Clifford, and a green-gowned young woman with curly brown hair and glasses who looked like a younger Mrs. Clifford. Blanche assisted the other help in passing glasses of champagne and ginger ale to the guests for a toast. Mrs. Clifford gently requested everyone’s attention. Daisy’s face was now as rosy as her knees. Maybe a glass of champagne would have been better than half a bottle.

  Miss Green Gown was speaking: “…very, very proud to be able to tell you that, thanks to an extremely generous gift from Mr. and Mrs. Jason Morris, the long-dreamed-of battered-women’s shelter for this area is about to become a reality.” She smiled and held up her hand to quiet the applause, then beckoned Daisy closer. “As you know, we have all suffered the tragedy of Maybelle Jenkins’s untimely death. Therefore, we have unanimously agreed to name our new shelter the Maybelle Jenkins Women’s Shelter!” The woman grinned as her crowd applauded themselves for their good deeds.

  “This is Daisy Green, Maybelle Jenkins’s best friend,” Miss Green Gown said. “She would like to say a few words on behalf of Maybelle’s grieving family, who, understandably, could not be with us tonight.”

  And a damn good thing, too, Blanche thought, unless they brought along their own dinner!

  Daisy looked slowly around, as though searching for one particular person to talk to. Blanche thought maybe the champagne had rinsed away Daisy’s speech, but she needn’t have worried. If anything, food and alcohol seemed to have slowed Daisy down so that she appeared more graceful and gracious. Her remarks were brief: “Thank y’all on behalf of my best friend, Maybelle Jenkins. She’d be proud to have her name on that shelter. I’ll miss her all my life.”

  “Thank you, Daisy,” Miss Green Gown dismissed her and turned to her friends. Daisy hesitated, then made her way to the side of the room.

  “Now I would like to introduce the first director of the Maybelle Jenkins Women’s Shelter, our own…”

  Bla
nche went back to the kitchen. Watching folks congratulate themselves gave her heartburn. And wasn’t it a bit weird to make a martyr out of the girl without knowing just how she died?

  “I still can’t get over those people not inviting that girl to dinner,” Blanche said.

  The job was finished, and she and Ardell were settled on the love seat in the Miz Alice, drinks in hand and chips nearby.

  “Some people just don’t know what it means to have class. But I don’t intend to let that stop me from squeezing a decent living out of these suckers!” Ardell chomped on a chip.

  Blanche looked at the half-circles of shadow beneath Ardell’s eyes and the little frown that never seemed to leave her forehead these days. “I see you working your tail off. Is that all you’re doing? I know you ain’t exercising or getting enough rest. I bet you ain’t even taking the time to read, are you? And whatever happened to Douglas, from over Chapel Hill?”

  Ardell shrugged. “Just didn’t work out. Maurice says I’m too bossy.”

  “Well, he would, wouldn’t he?”

  Maurice was Ardell’s grown son, a backup singer down in Atlanta who was now into poetry slams. Since he’d first learned to make sentences, Maurice and Ardell had been battling over which of them was going to get the last word.

  “Maybe I ain’t the only one who’s too picky,” Blanche teased.

  Ardell shook her head. “No, it’s not that. It’s time. I just don’t have the time. When I’m not working, I’m thinking about work and…”

  “And you don’t want to be distracted. Right?”

  Ardell leaned forward and set down her glass. “It’s like this. I don’t plan to mind another white woman’s child, solder another wire on another board, clean another office building, or help another old party onto a toilet.” Ardell ticked the jobs off on the fingers of her right hand. “I ain’t planning to work that hard for that little no more in life, and I expect this catering business to be my means of doing better, whatever it takes to make that happen.”

  Blanche looked at her old friend and marveled at how much there was still to learn about someone she thought she could read like the morning paper. There were obviously some inside pages that she hadn’t gotten to, even after all these years. Or maybe they were new pages just being added.

  “Never seen you like this before.” She passed Ardell the chips.

  “Ain’t never been like this before.” Ardell leaned toward Blanche. “I like being the boss. Not just knowing I’m in charge the way you do when you work somebody’s kitchen or house. But being the boss in ways that these people I’m working for can’t miss. They can’t not see me, not speak to me, not treat me like a professional. They have to talk to me, consult me, listen to my advice. For the first time in my life, I’m the out-and-out expert. And I like it.”

  “I could care less what they think,” Blanche said. “It’s how they act that’s important. Including how they pay. They can think I’m the world’s biggest fool as long as they act like they know they need me and pay me what I tell ’em.”

  “Humm, but don’t you get sick of always being in the background? I mean, yeah, being a caterer is background, too, but they call you in ’cause they know they can’t do the party, or dance, or wedding by themselves. They need a caterer. People who hire you to clean for them, well, most of them could do it themselves if they wanted to, so…”

  “So what? Need means different things to different folks. People I work for need me whether they can or can’t clean their own place. Some ain’t got the time, some need me ’cause it ain’t cool for them to do their own housework, or they just don’t want to. There’s a whole lot of reasons why people need me.”

  They were both quiet for a minute in which Blanche could almost see them settling into their old groove. Since the second or third grade they’d been pronouncing each other’s ideas and opinions as brilliant or bullshit and speaking their minds. But recently they’d mostly lived in different parts of the country. They still talked on the phone regularly, but phone calls were no substitute for being able to look into her friend’s eyes, to see the expression on Ardell’s face that said what her words didn’t.

  “Humm, but what you’re doing for people you work for ain’t important like a wedding or a fancy dinner party.”

  “You’re talking about prestige,” Blanche said, both surprised and irritated to realize Ardell’s sense of herself was still so closely tied to her line of work. “You think being a caterer has more prestige, and that’s what you want.”

  Ardell gave her an unreadable look. Finally, she shrugged. “Ain’t nothing wrong with that,” she said as though she expected to be challenged.

  But she was right. There wasn’t anything wrong with wanting status. It was what a person was prepared to do to get it that was the problem. And she had a feeling Ardell was ready to go to some places she herself wasn’t. Or maybe she just envied Ardell’s clear-sightedness about what she wanted and her determination to get it.

  “Hey, your light’s blinking.” Ardell pointed to the answering machine. “Maybe it’s your main squeeze.”

  Blanche pushed the play button: “I don’t need to call nobody on the telephone to talk to no machine. I got a plenty machines right here in my own house—toaster, TV, radio, refrigerator—I can talk to ’em anytime I want. I ain’t got to call nobody up to talk to no machine. This is your mama. You call me.”

  Ardell laughed halfway off the sofa. “Miz Cora near ’bout crazy as you!”

  “All right, now, be careful. That’s my moms you talking about.”

  “Don’t you mean telling the truth about?”

  “I wonder what she wants. She usually just hangs up without saying anything and lays me out about the machine when I call her. Must be important. But not enough to wake her up, or she’d have said so.”

  It was nearly dawn when Ardell left and they’d covered the conversational globe from prestige to the pros and cons of younger lovers. Blanche went to bed feeling very glad to be down home.

  ELEVEN

  THE HUNT AND THE CULPRIT

  “Good thing you ain’t stayin’ here,” Miz Cora said when Blanche got her on the phone the next morning. “Your cousin’s comin’ to stay awhile.”

  “Cousin who?”

  “Sauda, from the islands.”

  “Who? From where?”

  “From the islands, you know, my mother’s people.”

  Blanche remembered the Christmas cards from somewhere in the Caribbean that her mother sent and got every year. And weren’t there regular letters, too? But, like much of the rest of Miz Cora’s life, she’d never really told Blanche much about these relatives from…“Where they live again?”

  “Angelica, and one of your cousins’s comin’ here.”

  “On vacation?”

  “Unh-unh. Goin to that art school over there by Chapel Hill. Got a scholarship, her mama say. Ain’t that somethin’? She was gon stay in one of them dormitories, but I wrote back to her mama and told her, ‘Send that girl right on here to stay with me, since my own child’s too hincty to…’”

  “How she related to us exactly?” Blanche hoped Miz Cora was excited enough to drop her guard.

  “My grandmama was from Angelica. She had a sister, Rose, who stayed on the island to take care of the old people. There was a brother, too, but he died of the consumption in the army. Now, Great-Auntie Rose had a daughter ’bout the same age as my mama, and she had a bunch a kids, including Rosalie, who was born same day as me. She who your sister was named for. Me and Rosalie been writin’ each other off and on since grade school and never seen each other. Now one of her granddaughters is comin’ to stay with me. Ain’t that somethin’?”

  She’s lonely! Blanche thought. Mama was always so busy, so involved in her church, cooking, working in her garden, it hadn’t occurred to Blanche that her mother was wanting for human
company. Was this why Mama had been so disappointed Blanche wasn’t staying with her? If this woman were anyone but Mama, would I have realized she’s lonely sooner? Guilt worried Blanche like a pack of fleas. Maybe she should have stayed with her mother. It would only have been for the summer. But if she stayed in her mother’s house for a couple months, she’d have to spend half the winter trying to undo the ankle-socks mentality that came from living under Mama’s roof and rules.

  “What’s her name again, this cousin?” Blanche asked.

  “Sauda. Sauda Leon. Pretty name, ain’t it?”

  “Sure is. When she coming?”

  “End of next week. Give me plenty time to make some new curtains for the back room.”

  Didn’t think it was necessary to make no new curtains when she thought I was coming to stay, Blanche thought.

  “Maybe git rid of some of that old junk your grandma left you and…”

  “Mama! Don’t go messing with my things, now. I’ll come over and…” The words were hardly out of her mouth before Blanche realized that Mama had set her up to say them. As soon as Blanche hung up, she vowed that when Taifa and Malik were grown she would treat them like people she wanted to know, and not like marks she needed to con into doing things for her. The best way to get Mama off the brain was to get on with her own business. She called Mary Lee, the young woman who worked at Farleigh National Bank. This time Mary Lee was at home.