Bound South

by Susan Rebecca White

  Daniella said that she didn’t know if her father really respected her mother, that when he spoke about politics or other matters of importance at the dinner table it was her and her brother he addressed, and not his wife, even though she had, in fact, been a stalwart volunteer for JFK’s presidential campaign. But it seemed as if Daniella’s father just couldn’t stop seeing his wife as the pretty college girl he had once seduced.

  “At least your dad talks to you,” said Eve. “My dad would never even consider that I might have an opinion about that stuff.” She raised her legs and crossed them beneath her, intending to sit Indian-style on her bed, but just as she did she passed gas, loudly. Daniella wasn’t sure what to do—it had been drilled into her to ignore such things—but Eve started laughing so hard she snorted. And so Daniella started laughing, too, and then Eve passed gas again and it made Daniella laugh even harder, and Eve pointed out that when Daniella laughed her nostrils vibrated.

  • • •

  A maids lived in the basement of each residence house. The maids were there to straighten the common areas, to assist with afternoon tea, to clean the girls’ bedrooms, to do their laundry, even to do their ironing. A sophomore informed them, “If you need a dress or a blouse pressed, just leave it hanging on your door and it will be returned the next morning, wrinkle-free, presto change-o!”

  Miss Eugenia lived in the basement of Monty House. She was an older woman, though Daniella could not say how old. Like all of the maids at Belmont, she wore a knee-length black uniform with a white apron tied around her waist, thick white hose covering her brown legs. Any time Eve saw Miss Eugenia she would grin and say, “Hey!” as if she were encountering a favorite cousin at a family reunion. Miss Eugenia always smiled politely and answered with a formal greeting, and she always called Eve ma’am. Eve told Daniella that she couldn’t see a maid without thinking of Ada, who had practically raised her back in Atlanta, spending five days a week at the Whalen house, letting Eve watch soap operas with her while she ironed the family’s clothes, fixing chicken and dumplings for dinner—Eve and Charlie’s favorite—on nights when their parents were out.

  Eve and Daniella started bringing cookies down to the basement any time Eve’s mother sent some of Ada’s from home, in an attempt to “Only Connect,” the E. M. Forster edict that the dreamy youth group leader from Daniella’s church back home had adopted as his motto, and that Eve had latched on to as well under Daniella’s influence. In early October, Eve’s father sent a half bushel of Winesap apples from Ellijay, Georgia, where he had spent the week hunting. The apples were a perfect balance of sweet and tart, and so fresh the juice ran down their chins whenever they took a bite. Eve put most of the apples out in the common room for the other girls to enjoy, but she and Daniella decided to bring half a dozen down to Miss Eugenia.

  It was midafternoon, the calmest stretch of the day. They found Miss Eugenia sitting in her lounge chair watching Central Hospital on the little black-and-white television that she kept on her dresser. “My baby,” she called it. Her feet, encased in thick brown support hose, were propped on a padded stool. Her door was open, but Eve knocked anyway.

  Eugenia jumped and quickly stood. “Lord, I’m sorry,” she said. “Did I not hear the bell? What you girls need?”

  Every room at Monty House had an interior doorbell. If a girl needed something she just pressed the doorbell and Miss Eugenia would arrive.

  “Not a thing, Miss Eugenia,” said Eve. “We just wanted to bring you some apples.”

  “No thank you, honey,” said Eugenia, sitting back down and returning her attention to the TV screen.

  “But they’re so good! My daddy sent them fresh from Ellijay.”

  “I ain’t got nothing but fake teeth in here,” said Eugenia, tapping at her top tooth. “Cain’t bite an apple.”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry,” said Daniella.

  “Wait, is that Dr. Lance Patterson?” asked Eve, pointing to the handsome man on the TV screen.

  “It sure is, honey, and he supposed to be dead.”

  “I know!” said Eve, making her way into the room and sitting down on the end of the narrow bed. “I watched all last summer.”

  “Well, what happened is his cousin buried him alive in that cave, but what his cousin didn’t know was there was an old hobo already living in there, and that hobo fixed it up so they could get water from a little drip that came in through the rock, and he had all kinds of canned goods for them to eat. Dr. Patterson lived in that cave for six months, honey, six months! Till one day there was an avalanche and he just tumbled right out.”

  “Oh my Lord,” said Eve, covering her mouth with her hand, the opal and diamond ring her mother had given her in honor of her sixteenth birthday twinkling in the television’s soft glow.

  • • •

  After that, Eve would go to Miss Eugenia’s room to watch Central Hospital any afternoon she wasn’t in class. Miss Eugenia didn’t exactly invite her, but she didn’t seem to mind the company, either, even offering Eve some of her Kraft caramels, which she sucked on like hard candies since she wasn’t supposed to chew them with her false teeth. Sometimes Daniella would go down, too, to try to talk with Miss Eugenia during the commercials. Daniella wanted to know where she was from, and did she have a husband, and did the two of them have children, and how much did she get paid for cleaning up after the Belmont girls?

  Miss Eugenia spoke easily about her four children and three grandchildren, all of whom lived nearby in Roanoke, except for her oldest grandson, who had enrolled in the Army, but she would never give Daniella a straight answer about her salary. “I get by,” she would say.

  Later Eve told Daniella it was bad manners to pry, to which Daniella responded that southern manners helped keep segregation in place. “My dad says it’s all part of an elaborate code to keep the racial lines firmly drawn.”

  “That’s not true,” said Eve. “Manners are about making other people feel at ease.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure Miss Eugenia feels really at ease with what she gets paid,” Daniella retorted. But then she wanted to take back her words, because Eve looked as if she might start to cry.

  • • •

  “Lord, I miss Ada,” Eve said the first week after Thanksgiving break. She told Daniella that besides a brief stay at her family’s farm in South Georgia, where she caught up with her brother and her cousins and even went hunting with the men, she had spent most of her time in Atlanta following Ada around like a dog, just going from room to room with her, getting in the way. She even offered to help clean, but Ada told her to quit being foolish.

  “You’ve influenced me, you know,” Eve said. “I asked Ada how much she gets paid.”

  “What did she say?” asked Daniella.

  “That it was none of my business.”

  “You could ask your dad.”

  “I did. He said she probably doesn’t get paid enough, but that Mother can’t pay her more because then the other maids would start demanding more from their employers and Mother would be in trouble with all of her friends. So they try to make up for it in other ways. Like Daddy puts money in a savings account for her, and Mother often gives her old clothes that are still in really good condition, stuff she would normally take to the Nearly New.”

  “Kind masters,” said Daniella.

  Eve frowned. “They are kind. Don’t be mean.”

  “Sorry,” Daniella said, feeling a little stung. They always talked honestly about their families, about what they did and did not like about them. Eve had never accused her of being mean before.

  “Ada tickled my arm just like she used to when I was little. It was heaven. Did you ever play that game? Where you close your eyes and the person runs her finger up your arm and you’re supposed to say when she hits the vein at the crook?”

  Daniella shook her head no.

  “Lord, what did you Unitar
ians do at spend-the-nights?” said Eve. “Here, sit down. Let me show you.”

  Daniella sat on her bed and Eve sat beside her. “Now close your eyes,” said Eve. Daniella obeyed, and Eve ran her fingers up the underside of Dani­ella’s forearm, starting at her wrist and working her way toward the elbow. “Tell me when I get there,” Eve said. Daniella felt a light, tickling sensation in the middle of her arm and told Eve to stop. She looked down and was surprised to see that Eve’s fingers were a good two inches below where she thought they would be.

  “You moved them!” said Daniella.

  “I didn’t. It’s some weird nerve-ending thing. If you practice, you’ll get better. Ada let me practice again and again, and it felt so good. And then she scratched my head like she used to do when I was a little girl. I asked her if she wanted me to rub her feet and she said I was too old to be doing that, that it wouldn’t be right.”

  Eve looked so sad after talking about Ada that Daniella suggested she write her a letter to let her know how much Ada meant to her. Eve pulled out her box of monogrammed Crane stationery and threw herself into the task, while Daniella went down the hall to see if there was a game of bridge in session. She had never really played before coming to Belmont, but it turned out she was a natural.

  Later, when Daniella returned to their room, she could tell from Eve’s wet lashes and ruddy cheeks that she had been crying.

  “What’s wrong?” Daniella asked, sitting on the edge of the bed beside her friend. Eve reached for a tissue and blew her nose, then told Daniella, in a shaking voice, that she realized she still didn’t have Ada’s address. She had meant to ask Ada for it in Atlanta but had forgotten. So she decided to address the letter to Ada in care of her mother. She started addressing the letter: “Miss Ada . . . ,” and then she realized she couldn’t remember Ada’s last name. She knew she had learned it before, but she could not think of what it was. And suddenly the lopsidedness of it all struck her in a way that it never had before.

  “She used to rub my tummy while I sat on the toilet and cried, because I was constipated, and I don’t even know her last name.”

  • • •

  After that, Eve joined Daniella in her efforts to try to find out more about the lives of the Belmont maids. How many worked at the school? Did they all know one another? How many hours a week did they work? Were they given lunch breaks? What happened if someone got sick? What happened if someone got pregnant? What happened if someone needed to take time off to care for a sick family member—would her job be waiting for her when she returned?

  They tried to talk with the maids who worked in the other dorms, but Eugenia was the only one who told them anything at all, and that was only during Central Hospital’s commercial breaks. Eve had asked Eugenia if she would show them pictures of her family. The only pictures hanging on the wall of Miss Eugenia’s room were of Jesus, Dr. Martin Luther King, and the president. Miss Eugenia opened the top drawer of her dresser and brought out a portrait taken at her church. There stood a younger Miss Eugenia in a large hat, flanked by her three daughters, all with somber faces. Below the women was an older man, presumably Miss Eugenia’s husband, who was in a wheelchair. Daniella knew Miss Eugenia had a son, but he was not in the picture.

  “What happened?” asked Eve, pointing to the wheelchair. Miss Eugenia explained that Franklin had been shot in a hunting accident years ago. The wound had gotten infected, and he ended up having to have his leg amputated, just a week shy of his twenty-third birthday. “He got a wood leg, but he says it’s real uncomfortable, so mostly he sticks with the chair.”

  “Has he had trouble finding work because of his leg?” asked Daniella.

  “He tried to go back to work at the factory, but he couldn’t ’cause of the stairs. He had a little shoeshine business downtown, but then that diner came in—Lester’s—and they run him off, even though he had paid good money to rent that corner. He thought about finding somewhere else to set up his polish, but his arthritis started acting up real bad. So we both real grateful I got this job, honey; we surely are.”

  “But when do you see him?” asked Eve.

  “Every Sunday. And my daughter Gwinn, she looks after him during the week.”

  “But couldn’t you go home each night and come back every morning?” asked Eve. “That way you’d get to see him more.”

  “What if one of y’all got sick in the middle of the night?”

  “We would go to the infirmary,” said Eve.

  “What if one of y’all rips a hem just before one of your formals over at Hampden-Sydney?”

  “We’d go to the dance with a ripped hem,” said Eve. “Big deal.”

  “All I know is my job is to take care of you-all, and that means round-the-clock.”

  The show had come back on, so Eugenia quit talking. By this point Daniella had become interested in the story, too, in what Dr. Lance Patterson was going to do to extract revenge on the cousin who tried to bury him alive. She noticed that Eve wasn’t really paying attention.

  • • •

  At dinner Eve brought up the plight of the maids with some of the other girls from Monty House, as it was a Thursday, when everyone was required to sit at a table with their dorm mates. The Monty House girls made up four tables in total, but Mrs. Shuler sat at Eve and Daniella’s, leading the girls in grace before the casual meal of chicken salad, fruit cocktail, corn muffins, and chocolate chip cookies.

  “Seriously, y’all. If we banded together and said that we don’t need them to stay overnight they might be able to go home and see their families,” said Eve. She was animated as she spoke, wearing her dad’s old plaid flannel shirt—which she rarely took off—with a blue-and-white-striped skirt zipped over her jeans to comply with the school’s dress code for dinner.

  “I agree,” said Daniella. She was buttering a corn muffin, served savory, not sweet like her mother made at home. When Daniella first commented on the lack of sugar in the Belmont corn muffins, Eve told her that no self-respecting southerner would eat a corn muffin that was sweet. For a moment Daniella had felt wounded, the seed of insecurity her mother had planted long ago sprouting. (Countless times during her life her mother had said some version of, “I worry that it will always be a struggle for you to feel as if you belong, because you are half-Jewish.”) But then she looked at Eve and realized she was being affectionate and laughed, allowing herself to be delighted once again by her friend.

  “But Eve,” said Lane Carmichael, “what if I’m getting ready for a formal and the zipper on my dress breaks? If the maids have all gone home, who’s going to fix it?”

  “Yes, and I love how Miss Eugenia puts out milk and graham crackers before we go to bed,” said Eleanor Morgan, who had removed every piece of celery from her scoop of chicken salad.

  “You can’t pour yourself a glass of milk and get some graham crackers out of the box?” asked Eve.

  Eleanor rolled her eyes. She was a prim girl, someone who always sat ramrod straight. “I simply don’t think it’s wise to do anything controversial before rush.”

  “Are you serious?” said Eve. “First of all, rush isn’t until next semester, so who cares, and second, I would think the best of Belmont would want to do all they could to help the women who help us so much.”

  Daniella knew that when Eve said “the best of Belmont” she was alluding to Fleur, the local sorority that Eve’s mother and grandmother had been members of during their Belmont days.

  “It’s December, Eve. Next semester is just around the corner,” said Eleanor. “And we’re not all double legacies. Some of us can’t afford to be as blithe as you.”

  “What does that have to do with trying to be decent and kind to Miss Eugenia?” implored Eve.

  “Girls,” said Mrs. Shuler. “Let’s move on.”

  Eve stopped talking, but Daniella knew that she wasn’t going to move on, indignation burning
her cheeks.

  After dinner Daniella asked Eve if she wanted to go to the library with her to study, but Eve demurred, saying she had things to do in her room. When Daniella returned a few hours later, her face flushed from the brisk mountain air, Eve held up a piece of her heavy stationery, upon which she had written a letter to Dr. Dupree, the headmaster of Belmont. Eve read the letter to Daniella. In it she stated that the policy of twenty-four-hour maid service was outdated and unnecessary and that the maids themselves had to find people to take care of their own families in their absence. Mrs. Eugenia Williams, for example, had a crippled husband who was left home alone while she served 10:00 p.m. snacks of milk and graham crackers to the girls of Monty House. Eve suggested an alternative, that the maids work from 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. and then anyone who wanted to earn overtime could stay for an evening shift.

  When Eve finished reading, she looked at Daniella expectantly. Daniella didn’t say anything.

  “What?”

  “It’s great, Eve. It really is. I’m just not sure if you should send it.”

  “Why on earth not? You just said it was great.”

  “Well, if you do send it, don’t use Eugenia’s name. Or check with her first—make sure she’s okay with it.”

  “I’m a concerned student! I have every right to send it! And none of those other girls give a damn. That idiot Eleanor Morgan just wants to make sure someone is there to pour her milk and serve her graham crackers and probably burp her before she goes to bed at night. We need to be the voice for Eugenia and all the other cleaning ladies. Aren’t you the one always telling me, ‘Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions’?”

  Thanks to the Unitarian Church, Daniella had memorized lines and lines of Emerson, which Eve was now parroting back to her.

  “I just think you need to make sure your ducks are all in a row before you start shooting.”