Algeria’s mother had consulted a map of Africa in the naming of her children, eight altogether. I had once overhead Algeria listing for Vonnie Lee the names of her siblings: Cairo, Sahara, Kwando, Nyasa, Karisimbi, Cameroon, and Gomera. Algeria’s mother had evidently used no system of selection, for the names she had chosen included names of countries, cities, a river, a mountain, a desert, and an island. Furthermore, it was impossible to identify the sex of the child by the name. For example, Sahara—a name with a decidedly feminine ending—was Algeria’s youngest brother, though Gomera was a sister, as was Kwando.
As I took a breath to continue, Birdie spoke up. “I’m so pleased to meet all three of you,” she said, “and I’d like to ask you all to call me Birdie instead of Bernadetta, if you don’t mind.” She looked at me and smiled sweetly, giving no indication that I had pointedly disregarded her earlier request to use her nickname.
“Birdie as in tweet-tweet?” asked Francine, raising her hands and flapping them.
Birdie nodded happily. “When I was just a girl, there was a little boy where I lived one time who couldn’t say Bernadetta, so he called me Birdie—and it stuck.” She laughed again, making no effort to conceal her oversized teeth. Algeria flashed her a suspicious look and grunted again.
“You ever worked in a lunchroom before?” asked Francine.
Birdie shook her head. “Not in a lunchroom, really,” she said, “but I did work in a restaurant kitchen in Tuscaloosa for seven years after I was first married.”
She looked down at her lap then, and I could hear her unsnapping and snapping her purse. It is my purpose in our opening meeting to keep our attention squarely focused on business rather than personal concerns and to discourage an atmosphere of time-wasting chitchat. I therefore could not understand, and still cannot, my hesitance at this point to direct our attention back to the agenda inside the open folder before me. In the silence that followed, I realized that Francine, Algeria, and I were staring at Birdie, who continued to snap and unsnap her purse. In retrospect, I know that it could not have been a lengthy pause, but it was a moment full of import as we sought to delineate this new player upon our stage.
Still I did not speak, though barely able to stifle the impulse to slap her hands away from her purse. Birdie looked up at last, swept her eyes around the table, and locked her gaze with mine.
“My husband’s out of work,” she said. “That’s why I applied for a job here.”
Still no one spoke. Then Algeria, without turning her head, said to Birdie, “Where’d he work at?” This was a historic occasion, for in the ten years during which Algeria had been at Emma Weldy Elementary School, I could not recall her making an intelligible utterance before ten o’clock in the morning.
“At the textile bleaching plant just outside Derby,” Birdie said, placing her purse on the table now and pushing it back away from her. “He’d worked there for twenty-one years, ever since we moved here from Tuscaloosa. But they got a new plant manager a few months ago and changed everything, cutting out lots of jobs. Mickey’s was one of them. ‘Corporate restructuring’ was what they called it—that and ‘downsizing.’” She clasped her small hands together tightly and set them on the shiny table in front of her. Her nails were neat, tiny ovals, I noted.
Algeria grunted again, but her inflection this time did not signify laughter.
“Maybe he can get on at the new BMW over in Greenville,” Francine said. “That place is something else. My cousin put in there, and he got him a job on the assembly line. Had to go through lots of tests and stuff, and it took forever, but he finally got hired. I say who cares if it’s German cars putting food on your table. Your kids sure can’t taste the difference. Everybody’s got to make a living somehow.”
Birdie smiled at Francine. “Why, thank you, Francine. BMW is one of the places where he’s applied, as a matter of fact, and we’re praying something will open up. I sure appreciate all of you caring. That’s real nice.” She leaned over and patted Algeria’s dark, gnarled hand as if Algeria had done something more than ask where her husband had worked, though Algeria had said or done nothing, as far as I could see, to communicate sympathy.
During Birdie’s patting of Algeria’s hand, I found my tongue. Fearing that the format of our opening meeting was degenerating into that of a talk show, I spoke vigorously. “I have received the menus for our first month and will be consulting our May inventory as I place my first orders for the new school year. I certainly hope the inventory count was performed accurately last spring.” I had no reason to say this, for I had meticulously recounted most of the foodstuffs in the storeroom and freezer the previous spring, verifying the numbers on the inventory sheet. In so doing I had found that Vonnie Lee, Algeria, and Francine had apparently submitted a precise count in spite of the continuous flow of chatter among them. However, I thought it beneficial from time to time to make indirect references to a mistake made three years earlier concerning a miscount of boxes of confectioners’ sugar.
I could sense Francine pulling a face and exchanging glances with Algeria again, but I had learned long ago to take no outward note of these puerile expressions. “As you know, one of our primary functions during the coming week,” I said, “will be to clean the kitchen thoroughly.” I paused so that the word thoroughly might linger in the minds of the three women.
Then I continued in the third-person mode that I had adopted many years ago in my role as moderator for staff meetings of this nature. “Over the past few years”—it was actually ten, and I knew it—“the supervisor has permitted Francine, Algeria, and Vonnie Lee the privilege of deciding upon a division of labor agreeable to all in the cleaning of the kitchen. She sees no reason to alter this arrangement now that Vonnie Lee has resigned. Francine and Algeria know the procedure well, and they will serve as mentors for …” Here I paused, not for effect but for guidance from my instincts. “For Birdie,” I concluded. I did not look at Birdie as I said her name, but I clearly heard her emit a soft, pleased murmur.
“Both Francine and Algeria no doubt recall the importance placed upon details,” I continued. “It is no accident that the cafeteria of Emma Weldy has been selected by the county superintendent as the blue-ribbon winner for the past twenty years. It has been accomplished through hard work and assiduous supervision. As in years past, the supervisor will conduct a white-glove inspection of the kitchen on Friday of this week, and it is her sincere hope that every square inch will meet with her approval. She would not want to discover on hidden surfaces of certain pieces of equipment, for instance, a residue of grease.” Five years earlier I had run my index finger along the underside of the receiving tray on our large Hobart slicer and found such a residue.
I looked up to find Francine staring at me wide-eyed, with a “face as broad and innocent as a cabbage,” to borrow Flannery O’Connor’s fine simile from her story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” and Algeria studying me mutinously with “little hard shoe-button eyes,” in the words of William Faulkner in Go Down, Moses. Turning my gaze to Birdie, I saw in her eyes something kind and gracious, something akin to mercy or devotion, something that spawned in my memory another quotation from my reading, this one from Tennyson: “Her eyes are homes of silent prayer.”
Momentarily discomfited and unable to recall the next item of business, I turned my attention back to my folder. After a lengthy pause, I continued my opening remarks, reviewing the dress regulations for cafeteria employees, the procedures for sanitary handling of food, and so forth. I then rose from my stool and said, “Well, I suppose we all know our duties. Let us commence. Francine, you may want to begin by sweeping the floor.” I let my eyes travel meaningfully to the tiles under her.
Francine looked swiftly at Algeria, then at me. Without a trace of ill will, she said, “Well, now, that’s a dandy idea, Margaret. I think I’ll just do that. Just get all that hairy trash outta here!” She looked down at the floor and wagged her finger. “Vamoose! You gonna be history, you little nasty bo
ogers, you!” Then she slid off her stool and pivoted toward the custodial closet, as much as a woman of her bulk could be said to pivot, and went marching off, chanting, “Left, right, left, right, left,” though stepping at each word with the opposite foot. There was the faintest of smiles in Algeria’s dark eyes.
Birdie’s face held an expression of pleasant neutrality. “Well, I can tell I’m going to like working here just fine,” she said to me. “Just fine.”
Though excessive emotional voltage can destroy a work of literature, I must inject here a word about my feelings at the time. I have long disdained the emphasis on emotions in modern society—in every area from advertising to politics—and though I have held my own emotions in check throughout my life, I cannot deny the fact that I was flooded at that moment with sensations that can be called by no other name, the most puzzling of which was shame. What cause have I to feel ashamed? I asked myself but heard no answer. All I knew for certain was that in the presence of Birdie Freeman I felt the unmistakable power of goodness, whereas when I turned away from her, I was painfully pricked by the knowledge of weak and beggarly elements within my own soul.
Birdie dismounted her stool with a little hop, and as I turned and walked toward my glass-enclosed cubicle, I heard her say to Algeria, “Well, if you’ll show me where to keep my pocketbook, Algeria, I’ll be ready to do whatever it is you want me to do first.”
3
A Continual Dropping
Although my aim throughout most of my adult life has been to operate with what Henry James called a “perfect presence of mind, unconfused, unhurried by emotion,” I know that my own emotions have been steadily thawing over the past months. While I feel in a sense more fully alive than ever before, I am finding that feelings complicate the ordinary business of life. Common, daily occurrences that I once observed impassively have begun to affect me in significant ways.
For example, as I was sitting in my rocking chair last night, my pen still poised above the last word I had written, there came a quiet knock at the front door. Thomas had been dozing in his recliner, rousing himself periodically to check the score of the baseball game on television and to scan the other twenty channels by means of the remote control. Upon hearing the knock, he started from his nap and went to open the door. It was Joan, Mayfield’s daughter, of whom I wrote earlier. I closed my notebook and laid it aside before she entered.
She was driving home from a business dinner in Greenville, she explained, and had bought strawberries at a roadside market. She offered us two pints, which Thomas quickly accepted and took to the kitchen. Joan left almost immediately afterward. This is one of Joan’s most attractive qualities, in my opinion: She does not tarry. As I stood at the door and watched her walk to her car, however, I felt a strong tug of emotion. I wanted to summon her back and prolong her visit. I suddenly yearned to talk and feel the warmth of her companionship. Without intending to, I called out her name. When she turned back, however, I fell back upon the old cliché, “How are you doing?” to which she gave a similarly mindless reply: “Fine.” I thanked her again for the strawberries, and she left.
I believe Joan would agree with me that we are fond of each other—we have never stated our feelings aloud, of course—and that our affection springs in part from the fact that each of us sees something of herself in the other. The reticence of some people is mellow and sweet. In the case of Joan and me, our reserve has been allowed to grow hard and bitter, like the pit of an unripened fruit. Though we have gradually begun to extend ourselves to each other over the past months, Joan and I are still working our way into the clearing, so to speak.
Before I return to my narrative, I believe that the time is right to supply a cursory autobiographical sketch. This was not in my original plan, for as I stated in chapter one, the main character of my story is Birdie Freeman, not myself. Moreover, I believe that background information in a story should be doled out sparingly, bit by bit, as the action of the base time continues so that the story line does not become impeded and ultimately flounder by excursions into the past. I am a great admirer of a shapely story, one that unfolds in an orderly fashion. In addition, my past is a source of great pain to me—an understatement of tremendous degree—and I would prefer to keep it hidden. These arguments aside, however, I realize that the reader must understand certain facts about my life in order to see Birdie in a proper light. These facts I will dispatch quickly in order that I may return to Birdie.
First, a word about my education. I did not officially graduate from high school, although I am well educated and widely read due to an unquenchable zeal for knowledge and a love of literature passed on to me by my mother, who died the summer of my thirteenth birthday. Before my mother died, I had never sat in a traditional classroom. My mother had been my teacher as we moved from city to city. To my knowledge, no truant officer ever accosted her concerning the matter of compulsory school attendance, and no landlord or neighbor ever raised questions. Our frequent moves and the fact that we kept to ourselves very likely protected us. I stayed indoors all day while my mother worked.
On a bus somewhere between Akron and Terre Haute I read a book by myself for the first time. I was not yet five years old. In Fort Wayne I began to write. My mother taught me both printing and cursive simultaneously. In Saginaw I spent happy hours adding and subtracting, setting my numbers down in neat columns, and in La Crosse I mastered the multiplication tables. In Peoria I concentrated on long division and the history of America, and I went through stacks of science books in Cedar Rapids, studying everything from asteroids to zooplankton. In Huntington Mother bought a used set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica Junior, which I read voraciously. I remember reading straight through most of the P volume on our next move to Muncie, losing myself during the long miles as I absorbed facts about partridges, Pearl Harbor, photoelectricity, polo, and so forth.
And always, always there was literature. Mother and I read together in the evenings—a great variety of works in all genres—and so cloistered was I that I truly believed that every child knew Hawthorne, Shakespeare, Melville, Tolstoy, and the King James Bible as intimately as I. I knew that other children attended schools, of course, and I merely assumed—indeed, my mother explained it thus to me—that I did not do so because she was a capable teacher herself, therefore eliminating the need to seek additional instruction from strangers. I took it as a sign of privilege. My learning was so important to my mother that she wanted to oversee the process herself.
Further, I assumed that all the other children of the world were ingesting knowledge in the same enormous doses as I. I was truly sheltered, for we had no television and did not subscribe to newspapers or magazines. We frequented public libraries, however, and listened to my mother’s box radio when we could tune in to stations that programmed classical music.
The summer that Mother died and my world changed forever, we were living in Dayton, Ohio, and I was computing algebraic logarithms and studying Latin. For my thirteenth birthday a few weeks earlier, we had ridden a bus to Cincinnati and attended the opera Tosca. My birthday gift had been a copy of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, which I had already finished by the time Mother died.
I think of my years in school after Mother’s death, from the ages of thirteen to seventeen, as a vast black hole into which I fell. It was a great shock to find such abysmal ignorance on every hand. Even my teachers were failures in my eyes. Yet I longed for morning to come so that I could leave my grandparents’ house and walk—more often I ran—the seven blocks to L. K. Drake Junior High School and later the twelve blocks to Latham County High School. My grandparents lived in a small town near Corning, New York, called Marshland. I feel a constriction in my throat at the very mention of the town. I left Latham County High School the fall of my senior year and never graduated, though much later I took the GED examination, parts of which I thought to be almost insultingly elementary, and passed it, thus earning a high school diploma. Circumstances did not allow me to attend col
lege, but more of this later.
Second, I will speak briefly of my marriage, which at times has astounded even me, for I am certain that a more unlikely match than that between Thomas Tuttle and me has never been legalized. One day eleven years ago, in the fall of 1984, Thomas appeared in the school cafeteria to borrow my house key, for he had locked himself out of our duplex. Francine, Vonnie Lee, and Algeria gaped openly at him, and after he left Vonnie Lee said, “Don’t tell us that man’s your husband.” I looked at her evenly and replied, “As it is none of your concern, I would prefer to tell you nothing at all about the man. However, lest your speculation distract you further from your work, I will tell you that he is indeed my husband.”
Francine threw up her hands and said, “Now, if that’s not something else! Here we been wondering all this time what in the world your husband’s like, and here he is just a plain man in overalls.” Algeria asked how long we had been married, a question I chose not to answer, though it had been almost six years at the time, and Francine asked if he repaired vacuum cleaners, a question no doubt inspired by the hand-painted words Tuttle’s Vacuum Cleaner Service on the side of his pickup truck, which he had parked directly outside the large rear windows of the cafeteria. Vonnie Lee remarked, “He sure looks a whole lot older than you,” an observation to which I did not reply.
Indeed, my three co-workers were in such an agitated state of curiosity that they whispered among themselves and cast sidelong glances at me the rest of the day. I might have been a carnival exhibit. From the pantry I overheard Vonnie Lee say later that day, “Don’t you just wonder if Margaret loves that man?”
The truth was that I had been clear with Thomas on this fact from the beginning. I had told him that I would not marry him for love, that I was not seeking a romantic liaison, that indeed I did not want such a relationship with any man. He had pinched his chin several times before inhaling deeply and releasing his breath slowly and audibly. At last he had responded, “Well, all right, then, Rosie, if you’ll just keep up with the main course of washin’ and cookin’, I reckon I can forgo some of the side dishes.” Thomas has a colorful style of speech. I have often wondered whether he thought that I really meant what I said or whether he was gambling on the notion popular among men that what a woman says and what she means are often strangers one to the other. Whatever he thought, he was soon to discover that my word was good.
Some Wildflower In My Heart Page 3