It's All Love

by Marita Golden

  Herman didn't just treat her to honey. He taught her how to survive.

  “Here, Lena, tie this cotton kerchief ‘round yo’ mouth when we out walkin’ in the woods,” he instructed her, “so yo’ breath don't draw those ‘squitas and bitin’ flies.”

  And it worked too. Some days Lena and Herman looked like happy bandits loping through the woods or the dirt trails or riding the horses flat out over the rough terrain off the bridle path.

  James Petersen back at the house gazing out the kitchen window over the sink would see her head off happily into the woods and chuckle to himself at the sight of Lena outside talking to thin air. “That girl knows she can talk to herself. She got so much on her mind.”

  Mostly what Lena had on her mind was ways to spend more time with Herman.

  One morning Herman woke Lena even earlier than usual. Brushing her face with the breeze of his kisses, he gently roused her.

  “Come on, Lena,” he urged when she dreamily opened her eyes. “Put on some long pants and boots. Ticks are bad this year. I got som'um t’ show you.”

  Lena sat on the deacon's bench by the door in the Glass Hall and laced up her boots over her pants legs. She was laughing to herself at the many pairs of work boots and outdoor shoes she had acquired since Herman came into her life when he blew in and grabbed her hand. He didn't even bother to ask what she was laughing at.

  “Found som'um you might be interested in,” he said with a smile playing in his voice, pleased with Lena's cozy joy.

  He pulled her down the path to the stables, where he had saddled Goldie and Baby for them to ride. Lena always tried to ride behind Herman so she could watch his shoulders and the small of his back as he rode. Herman—with his near-midnight self—astride Goldie—with her near-sunrise self—was a sight to behold, one that Lena never tired of seeing.

  They set off across her property heading south and didn't stop riding fairly hard until they had circled a stand of impenetrable woods and reached a meadow on the other side that looked like something from a fairy tale.

  The field was encircled with trailing bramble. Small vines had formed a wall around the dale that was covered with rich juicy-looking spots of amaranth.

  Lena could no longer see the river, but she could hear the music of it rushing close by. Pulling Goldie's reins up, Herman sat back proudly in his saddle as Lena took in the expanse of early-bearing blackberries.

  Without a word, Herman dismounted, tied his steed to a bush, and, reaching into his saddlebag, pulled out two croaker sacks. He handed one to Lena. “We gon’ pick berries.

  “Lena, uh-uh, baby, don't pick that berry. It ain't ripe. Come here. Uh-uh-uh, you mean to tell me I gotta teach her how t’ pick blackberries too.” He mocked her with a little tug on her hand, making the underripe berries in her tin bucket rattle against the sides.

  “See this here berry? Now, this un ripe,” he said softly, acting as if he were stalking some living, moving, breathing prey. “See how when you look at it, especially in the sun, it almost glisten? And see how plump it is? Plump, plump even before ya touch it. And when you do. OOooo. See, ‘bout ready to bust. And when you take it, with these three fingers, and gently tug—lightly now, so you don't break the skin. It's real tender—it oughta come away from the stem easy, real easy like it want to come.

  “There,” he said happily, sated, holding the glistening berry aloft by the bushes. “And ya got yo’ berry.”

  Then he reached over and popped the lone fruit into Lena's gaping mouth.

  Lena bit down on the juicy nugget, sighed, and smiled.

  Sister was right, she thought. I do have an abundance of blessings.

  The History of the World

  VERONICA CHAMBERS

  IT'S THREE-FIFTEEN on a Wednesday afternoon, and I take my place in the playground at Ninety-sixth and Fifth with the nannies whose dark skin mirrors my own. It's a caste system—Latins to the right, Black Caribbeans to the left, Eastern Europeans where they think they belong, at the north tip of the park.

  I could sit with the Latins; it's where my mother would have me. I'm Panamanian, united with my Central and South American sisters by language and heritage. If they're honest, most Latinas are well aware that some Latins are as dark as me; the ever-popular plantation-era telenovela, be my witness. But New York is a tough town, and people grab advantage where they can. You sit on the right side of the park and it's “Mira, esta negra” this and “Ay, los negros” that. I put them in their place by letting them know that “Oye, te entiendo bien,” but in the ever-revolving cast that is the nanny world, there's always a new light-skinned Latina to school. A few years ago I gave it up. My job is raising children. I don't have the time or energy to raise grown folks too.

  I live in Brooklyn with my sister and her three kids. Now that movie stars are moving to the borough, Brooklyn Heights and even Park Slope have become acceptable annexes to Manhattan. Everyone says “Brooklyn” in a different tone of voice. But I live in a part of Brooklyn that is so much like home you could set it adrift in the Atlantic and it would not sink.

  My Brooklyn—a ninety-minute subway ride from my job on the Upper, Upper East Side, followed by a twenty-minute ride on the bus or a ten-minute gypsy cab ride—is bordered by stores that sell sugarcane stalks taller than any man I've seen. It's a place where beef patty stands outnumber pizza parlors and a double scoop from the ice-cream man means guava and mango unless otherwise stated. It is not all food, but food is the foundation, and the foundation is firm.

  The manicurists are all from the old places—Colon, Bocas del Toro, Darien—and they know how to do all the old styles. The hairstylists are Dominican because they make the strongest relaxers, removing any memory of Africa from your hair. The music of course brings all the Africa back. It's how we do it in Panama and in our Brooklyn outpost—bone-straight hair, meticulous makeup and nails, eighteen-karat jewelry in our ears, and nothing but jungle in our hips.

  I met my boyfriend, Felix, in a Panamanian club down on Eastern Parkway. He told me he drove a gypsy cab, a fifteen-year-old red Chrysler LeBaron with white leather interior. I liked the way he was proud of his work, proud of his car, with no silly story about how one day he would own a fleet of taxis and be to the livery industry what Donald Trump is to real estate. He was wearing a mango-colored polo shirt tucked in with a leather belt, the way the men out here do. Two things sold me on Felix from the moment he asked me to dance. One, he is a wonderful dancer, lighter on his feet than you would expect a man of his size to be. Two, he smelled like soap—not just any soap, but the kind of soap my grandmother made and carved just so with the knife she kept in her back pocket. She sold that soap in the market, and when I was little, I would sit with her, rubbing my small fingers along the curve in the soap. When I got older, I heard rumors that my grandmother had killed her first husband, a man who dared to raise his hand to her, with that knife. With the aid of a good banana tree lawyer, the charges against my grandmother were washed clean. The banana tree lawyer became my grandmother's second husband, although by the time I was born, he was dead and gone.

  I asked my grandmother once, on a day when I woke up with an abundance of courage and an unusually small amount of fear, whether it was true she had killed a man with the very same knife she used to carve soap. She was neither angry nor offended, as I expected. She simply said, “Live long, see much,” which I took to mean my grandmother had experienced her own adventures, it was up for me to go out into the world and experience my own.

  I learned, months into our courtship, that Felix did not bathe with a bar of homemade soap, curved on top like a pint of ice cream missing the first delicious spoonful. He did not bathe with bar soap at all. He washed his hair and body with a brown liquid soap that he bought at a health food store near the Brooklyn Bridge. It was a disappointment, the first time I visited his apartment and asked to use the bathroom with the express purpose of seeing a soap that reminded me of home. But by then I had already fallen in love with hi
m. His smell, although different in origin from what I imagined, was always pleasing, which is no small thing.

  I MET EVELYN PORTER through Felix. His cousin knew the Porters’ previous nanny—they sat together on the brown side of the park. The girl, a dark-skinned Dominican, was leaving the family to pursue a degree in nursing. Evelyn was searching for a replacement, someone to teach the children Spanish, and although she would never overtly say it, Evelyn wanted someone Black. The Porters had two children—Nick, who was just about to turn three, and Zoe, who was seven. Styling the girl's hair was a big part of the job, hence the desire for a nanny whose hair was nappy Evelyn liked Zoe's hair combed and greased every morning before she left for school and then tidied again before dinner. A once-a-week wash and condition, hot-oil treatment, and then blow dry is how Zoe and the nanny spent their Friday afternoons. The blow dry helps to straighten the hair and, in and of itself, takes upwards of an hour.

  Upon our introduction, it was evident that Evelyn expected me to be intimidated by their wealth. It's true, it's not often that you meet a young Black couple on Park Avenue living in a stadium-sized apartment with the same marble floors and well-appointed furniture you might find in a bank or an old-money hotel. But there is nothing like working in somebody's home to cure you of the misconception that you would like to step into a rich woman's shoes. Every marriage has its cracks and fissures. Every child causes you grief; even a perfect child will drive you to despair with worry over her well-being. Everyone has problems at their job; no one ever has enough hours in their day. Even on Park Avenue, the working rich dream of getting away from it all. Yet it's sadder somehow. When you are poor, you have the fantasy, the blissful illusion that money will solve all of your problems. You get to know rich people, and you realize that it is never really enough. Summer weekends at the beach, winter holidays on the slopes, an annual February jaunt somewhere sunny and warm—yet they can't keep the bags from underneath their eyes or the rubber band snap out of their voices when they talk to their spouses and their children, the people they supposedly love. Evelyn and Hart were no different.

  It became clear, within weeks of my employment, that her marriage was a disappointment to Evelyn. She believed that she had married well; Hart was from a prominent Virginia family, Black folks whose onion skins extended way back before the end of slavery. But while he had followed in their tradition by attending the top schools, Hart had landed no further than senior attorney at a downtown not-for-profit. It seemed obvious to me that Evelyn had made an error universal to women of the gold-digging variety the world over, mistaking good breeding for raw ambition. Even in Panama, where the families with “big money” had very little compared to the U.S., you saw the same thing. Girls who married hoping for a waterfront condo in Panama City and ending up with a brand-new washer and dryer in Colon. A man's last name and relations meant only as much as he valued it, never as much as you valued it. But like my grandmother used to say, common sense is not common.

  Evelyn was vice president—the first woman, the first Black—at a Madison Avenue investment firm. Hart's parents helped them buy the apartment on Park Avenue, but it was Evelyn who paid the mortgage. She informed me of this at our very first meeting, and she complained about it frequently. There were many complaints about money at the dinner table, but they had the kind of distant reasoning of people in warm places complaining about the snow. When I first began to work for the Porters, I feared for my job whenever I heard Evelyn talk about things being tight and how she was “sick and tired of trying to make a dollar out of fifteen cents.” I even began, discreetly, to put the word out in my old park that I was open to a new position. But then Evelyn would ask me to work late, because she and Hart had tickets to a benefit to raise money for the Costume Institute at the Met or Alvin Ailey or the Studio Museum in Harlem. These tickets, I saw, never cost less than a thousand dollars each. Nothing in Evelyn's social life cost less than a thousand dollars—not her dinners, not her dresses, not the expensive treatments she had on her face and her legs. Her shoes, always Louboutin with their flash of red sole, were the only discounted thing on her body. The price tags on the boxes inched toward a thousand but never superseded it. I stopped looking for a new job.

  Zoe and Nick were easy children to take care of, no more spoiled than any other children whose parents could afford full-time help. At three, Nick had his father's easy affability, which I suspected might someday turn into a streak of laziness, but his future was Evelyn's problem, not my own. Zoe had been given the impression from far too young an age that she was a great beauty, and you know what they say, pretty is as pretty does, which in the end isn't very pretty at all. Zoe liked to call me by my Christian name and seemed to be allergic to the words please and thank you. I suspected that it was the constant hair combing that led her to believe I was not her child care provider, but rather more like a lady-in-waiting. Her mother expected me to attend to her toilette like she was a teenage queen of England, not a seven-year-old little girl. But this was where Zoe being Black and my being Black worked to my advantage. The little girl may live on Park Avenue, but her hair was as thick as any little girl in the projects. Zoe soon learned that my combing hair could be easy or it could be very, very painful, and soon enough, she began to behave accordingly. In the end, the children were just that, children. It was Hart and Evelyn whom I found endlessly fascinating. Perhaps because, while Felix and I could not be more different from Evelyn and Hart, we were ourselves on the road to marriage. I was curious about marriage during the time I worked for Evelyn and Hart and anxious to learn from their mistakes.

  “He's all Black,” Evelyn whispered to me one day, as her husband stood ironing a shirt for work. “But there's an awful lot of milk in his coffee.” I think she thought I had been admiring Hart physically. He had the kind of fair skin and Roman profile that women tend to admire. This, however, was not what had caught my attention. It still surprised me to see a man doing his own ironing. It was not how I had been raised nor had it been the practice of my previous employers. Evelyn had let me know that while they had a housekeeper who came twice a week, she expected me to pitch in and help with the children's laundry whenever necessary. She would, on occasion, ask me to iron a blouse for her if she was running late for work and behind on her dry cleaning. But Hart's clothes were off-limits to me. “You're here for the children, not for us,” she said whenever I offered to do something for her husband. So we stood together, on many occasions, watching him iron a shirt, or a pair of pants, or a handkerchief for his jacket pocket. As we watched him, I knew we were feeling very different things. Evelyn thought of Hart's ironing as punishment. If he made more money, he would not have to iron his own clothes. But I thought of his ironing as a kind of love letter. In my eyes, a man who ironed his own shirts, who did not expect you to do it, was better, stronger, kinder than a man who bought you flowers and chocolate on Valentine's Day but expected you to act like his scullery maid the other 364.

  One day, when Hart was working late, Evelyn told me about the day she had fallen out of love with her husband. Those were her exact words: “I am going to tell you about the day I fell out of love with my husband.” I was anxious to leave. It was nearly seven o'clock, and I had been in the Porter household since 7:00 A.M. The children had already eaten and were watching a movie in the den. Evelyn invited me to have dinner with her. It was a request without the expectation of a reply, as she did not expect that I might have other plans. I was not meeting Felix that night, so I called my sister and let her know that I was going to be home late.

  I sat at the kitchen table as Evelyn made dinner. To watch her cook was to have some small glimpse of how she was in the workplace. She did not change out of her silk blouse or pencil skirt for the task. She seemed as comfortable in her work clothes as the other women her age in the building seemed in their cashmere sweat suits. While I did not envy Evelyn her apartment, her designer shoes, her black tie evening gowns, I did envy her body. She had a body like a tr
ack star; you could see the muscles ripple under her skin like a river carved out of stone. Every once in a while when I found myself feeling haughty, as if I were the mother and Evelyn were the hired help, I looked at Evelyn's muscles, and I reminded myself that she might be petty, but she was not a woman to be trifled with.

  Evelyn informed me that she was making us a mushroom risotto for dinner. Again, this was not a question but a statement. She did not ask me if I was allergic to mushrooms, and I did not want to give her the satisfaction of letting her know that I had no idea what risotto was. I was relieved when she took out a box of Arborio, and I could see that this dish consisted mainly of rice. She cooked the rice, slowly, methodically in a big copper pot that was itself a thing of beauty. I thought then of Felix, and of our future, and hoped that a pot like that might someday grace our kitchen.

  The story that Evelyn told me went back some fifteen years. She was still in business school; Hart was a year out of law school. They did not yet live together, as that would ruin all prospects for a marriage Hart's family would approve of. Hart lived in Gramercy Park, in a sublet arranged for him by a friend of the family. Evelyn lived in Columbia University student housing with three other girls she could not stand.

  One Saturday afternoon she and Hart had arranged to go to the movies. But Hart was at the office, preparing a brief. Evelyn arranged to meet him there. She was shocked to find that his office was a pigsty. “I do not exaggerate,” she said, chopping exotic-looking mushrooms and tossing them, as she chopped, into the rice. “There were papers everywhere, unopened mail, old magazines, dirty pizza boxes, empty Chinese takeout containers full of mold.” Hart noticed her horrified expression and laughed. “There's a method to my madness,” he said, trying to reassure her. “But the office cleaning woman won't even empty my wastepaper basket anymore. It's a trip.”