Blanche Cleans Up

by Barbara Neely

Tongues saw her face, spun around, and: “Oohgalta majinica sambalala dicoty…”

  Blanche had never heard of anyone scaring Tongues into talking his talk with just a look. He was still doing his number when she let herself in the house.

  Taifa was coming down the stairs. Blanche had hoped to be able to run up to her room and pull herself together before she saw the kids. If she tried to talk to them now, she wouldn’t be able to keep fear out of her voice.

  “Hey, Moms, whatsup? You okay?” Taifa lay her hand on Blanche’s forehead. Blanche pulled Taifa close and hugged her hard. To her surprise, Taifa leaned into her and returned her hug with equal force. We don’t do this enough, Blanche thought.

  “I needed that,” Taifa said as she pulled away. “My gym teacher made me feel so bad today!”

  With half her mind, Blanche listened to the story of how Taifa had tried to weasel out of gym class, got caught, was loud-talked by her teacher in front of the class, and made to do extra exercises to boot. With the other half, she wondered if she might be wrong about the break-in being related to Brindle’s tape. The neighborhood was a pretty high crime area, after all.

  “That’s what you get for trying to get outta class,” Blanche told her. “You didn’t—”

  Taifa sighed with relief when the phone rang, and leapt for it.

  “Hi, Grandma. How you doin’? Yes, I’m fine. Yeah, I mean yes, school’s fine. We were just talking about it.” She looked at Blanche and rolled her eyes. “Yes, Grandma. She’s right here.” She held the phone out to Blanche and escaped upstairs.

  “Hey, Mama.”

  “Blanche? Is you all right? You acted kinda funny last time I talked to you. I wasn’t even done talkin’ and you—”

  “And I will again, Mama, if you don’t let me get a word in edgewise every once in a while. Now, how you doin’?” Blanche waited for her mother to get over her shock enough to answer.

  “Well, I’m fine, I guess. How’re you?”

  Blanche smiled. So much for old dogs and new tricks. She gave her mother a short, clean version of how she was, how the kids were doing in school, and what a handful they both were.

  “Ship them wild things down here. I’ll straighten ’em out. Course, the Lord’s just paying you back for all the grief you caused me when you was coming along.”

  Grief! What grief? She’d had too many chores to be a handful, but she didn’t get a chance to disagree. Her mother was still talking, new tricks notwithstanding.

  “…a shame about Inez’s boy, poor woman. I know how hard it is to lose a child. Charlotte says that granddaughter of hers is a right smart young lady.”

  You couldn’t tell it from the way she’s acting now, Blanche thought, but told Mama what good grades Shaquita got and about her plans to become an archaeologist, as if saying it might help make it happen.

  “Well, I don’t want to run my phone bill up too high. I just wanted to holler at y’all.”

  “Thanks, Mama. I’ll call you soon,” Blanche said, as pleased with this conversation with her mother as she ever expected to be.

  Blanche waited until they were nearly done with dinner to tell the children about the near break-in. They were full of silent attention when she showed them the bent window frame.

  “That’s why I want you to let the security guard go through the house before you come inside from school.”

  “That weird old man! Why we got to let him go in the house first, Moms?”

  Blanche heard the little squeak of worry in Taifa’s voice.

  “I just want him to make sure everything’s okay. If the thieves come back, I don’t want you to meet ’em. Tongues scared them off this time, but…”

  “Tongues? That fool? He probably made the whole thing up.” Taifa said.

  Blanche almost chastised her for talking about Tongues as though he weren’t still her elder, despite the state of his mind, but thinking Tongues was too foolish to be telling the truth had lessened that squeak in Taifa’s voice.

  “I don’t need that old dude to protect me!” Malik wolfed. “I can take care of myself. If some…”

  Blanche waited him out. There was nothing she could do with that testosterone thing.

  Shaquita was the only one who didn’t seem to have a problem. She promised to be waiting on the stoop when Blanche’s two got home.

  That’s done, Blanche thought, and went in the living room to listen to the news on the radio and to give the kids a chance to mumble and grit in private. She caught the end of All Things Considered on National Public Radio. Her friend Carmen in Harlem had introduced her to NPR. Being able to listen to it in Boston made her feel connected to folks in the other places she’d lived, all listening to the same thing.

  She waited until the children settled down for the night before she took over the bathroom: candles, incense, her jam-box and earphones, and Ida Cox reminding her that “Wild Women Don’t Get No Blues.” She tried to slip into the space between sleep and wakefulness where her body was practically weightless and her mind was free, but she’d had too much of a day for that. She could depend on the security guard for a couple days because she’d just gotten on his butt, but the effect of that wouldn’t last. She needed to find that tape—or whatever Brindle had on Samuelson—something to stop the heat she felt rising around her. But protecting the children couldn’t wait for that. She remembered that at the lead poisoning meeting Othello Flood had said the Ex-Cons provided security. Maybe he could help her. She stretched out in the tub and closed her eyes.

  Ray-Ray’s ghost walked through the bathroom door and sat on the lid of the toilet seat. She’d noticed that the older she got, the more time the dead spent with her. Ray-Ray crossed his legs and arms and gave her another “well, girlfriend” look.

  “Don’t look at me like I’m supposed to do something unless you came in here to tell me where you hid that damned tape. You gave it to Miz Barker, didn’t you? At least tell me what’s on it and whether I’m right about what made this Brindle-bashing year?”

  Although she left plenty of space between questions, Ray-Ray only grinned at her through the rising steam. And when she rose from the tub, he left.

  Before she went to bed, she thanked her ancestors for protecting her house. After all, the thieves didn’t get in.

  In her dreams, the detective Felicia Brindle had hired was peeping through Donnie’s keyhole, which was also in the doorway to the YMCA, except inside, instead of the Y, there was Allister Brindle’s bedroom, where Ray-Ray and Pookie were having a pillow fight, and Wanda was playing the mouth organ in the city pool.

  NINE

  DAY EIGHT—THURSDAY

  The corn on her left baby toe drummed out a rhythmic pain before Blanche was fully awake. A bad sign. She reminded herself she didn’t have to have an attitude all day just because her foot hurt, even though her evilness and her throbbing corn always seemed to hang together.

  This is a new day, she told herself. I can do anything I want. If that were really true, she’d call the Brindles and tell them to cook their own damn meals, then take herself to a podiatrist and have this corn removed. She’d shop for comfortable shoes, have a nice lunch: soup, a mesclun salad, a nice plump piece of cornmeal-battered catfish, and the richest dessert on the menu. She’d read and nap the rest of the day away. If she could really do anything she wanted.

  Instead, she looked back along the path of her life for a point where she had been free of work. She couldn’t find one. Her earliest memories were of baking bread with her mother, her own child nose just clearing their old pine table while her little sister played in the corner under the window. She remembered pulling herself up as tall as she could, imitating her mother’s proud stance. She could still smell that dry, chalky raw wood tabletop and feel the tickle of flour dust coating the inside of her nostrils. Her mother’s loaves had glistened on the table, looking light enough to float to the oven. Little Blanche’s bit of dough, stamped with pudgy fingerprints and heavy and limp with handling, went i
nto the oven right alongside Mama’s loaves. “This is how you learn,” Mama would always say when little Blanche complained about the difference between Mama’s loaves and her own. “Keep trying. Yours’ll look like mine, someday.”

  Child Blanche also loved to climb beneath that hand-me-down table and pretend it was the roof of her snug and pretty little house. She’d mimic her mother’s cleaning behavior—washing and drying her make-believe dishes, polishing her pretend windows until they shone, washing her imaginary clothes, and filling her playhouse with the smell of heated starch as she pressed them. By the time she was ten, her play-baking and –cleaning had become the real thing. Her father was gone before Blanche could form a lasting memory of him.

  With two children to feed, Mama left for work early and came home late. Blanche could still taste anger—bitter and salty—at always having to drag baby Rosalie everywhere she went, of having to end her game of jacks because she had to peel the potatoes or stop jumping double Dutch to scrub the kitchen floor. She knew better than to sass, and she didn’t really want her mother to have to do all the work, but in her mind, she’d often railed against her mother for making her work so hard so much of the time. By high school she’d stopped thinking of herself as an overworked child and understood that she was simply paying for what she got in the way of food and clothes and a home. A fair trade.

  But no longer. She had done more work than she’d been paid for in her life. She was tired: tired of other people’s houses, other people’s meals; tired of keeping other people’s worlds beautiful and peaceful while risking her own children growing wild as a stand of bamboo. She stomped into the bathroom and slammed the door in a way that told everyone else in the house to back off. For once, the children showed their good judgment by staying out of her way.

  The sight of Jamaica Pond and the sound of a mockingbird running through her repertoire lightened Blanche’s mood enough for her to step back and look at what was bothering her.

  Part of her attitude was worry. She’d given up the dream that she could protect Malik and Taifa from the worst of life, but today, she wished she could follow them around all day to make sure nothing and no one touched them that shouldn’t.

  The rest of her attitude was about the Brindle house: She didn’t want to go anywhere near it. She knew Allister was behind Ray-Ray’s death, but she was positive he hadn’t done his own dirty work. She couldn’t say the same for Felicia. She didn’t feel the kind of disgust toward Felicia that she felt toward Allister because Saxe’s death didn’t touch her the way Miz Barker’s and Ray-Ray’s did. Still, how was she supposed to go to work and act as though she didn’t know that Felicia was a woman who’d killed a man with her own hands? The answer came in a parade of faces of past employers whom she’d seen coked up, giving the chauffeur some head, neglecting to bathe for a week, exchanging tongue with their schnauzer, pilfering money from a guest’s handbag, and engaging in various other acts she’d pretended not to see or know about. Just keep your mouth shut and your eyes straight ahead, she warned herself.

  The first thing Blanche did when she got to the Brindles’ was call home.

  “You over being evil already?” Taifa asked her.

  “It’s okay,” Taifa told her when Blanche apologized. “Like you always say, Mama Blanche, everybody’s got a right to have a bad day. Did you want something special?”

  “Just to remind y’all to let the security guard go through the house when you come home from school.”

  “Ah, Moms!”

  “I mean it, Taifa. None of you can go in the house until he looks around. You understand?”

  “Whatever.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Yeah, I understand.”

  “That’s better, and don’t forget to tell Malik and Shaquita what I said. I’m depending on you. Don’t disappoint me,” she added before she hung up, knowing that Taifa understood the consequences of being an undependable disappointment.

  Blanche’s next call was to Bea Richards. Again, no answer. Was there someone else who might have the dope on Samuelson? Maybe she’d ask Joanie.

  Blanche gathered ingredients for eggs Benedict. Cooking something that needed attention always settled her nerves. After breakfast, she checked the household schedule to see how it meshed with her plans for the day: Felicia would be off to the hairdresser’s shortly. Allister was probably already gone, and neither one of them was in for lunch or dinner. Perfect. They would be home for drinks, but she’d be finished by then. She called Miz Barker’s house.

  “Hey, Pam. It’s Blanche. You okay?”

  “As I can be. You know how it is.”

  “It’s gonna take a while, honey, but the pain will ease. It will.”

  Pam sighed. “I know. But that doesn’t seem to help much right now. I’ve been trying to keep busy.”

  “Well, I may be able to help with that,” Blanche said. “I talked to Miz Inez last night. She reminded me how close Ray-Ray and Miz Barker were.”

  “Yeah. I used to be jealous of him when I was a kid.”

  Blanche crossed her fingers. “Miz Inez thought maybe Ray-Ray might have given Miz Barker a box to hold for him. A kind of souvenir box. His first pair of baby shoes are in there, and his high school diploma. Now he’s gone, Miz Inez’d really like to have them.”

  “But why would he give it to Gran?”

  “Well, Miz Inez didn’t exactly say. But she did seem to know a lot about what was in Ray-Ray’s private box. Maybe that’s why he wanted it out of the house.”

  “Could be,” Pam said, “but I never saw it.”

  “Well, is there someplace special Miz Barker might have put it, if he did give it to her?”

  “I already started going through her things,” Pam said. “And I haven’t seen any box like that.” She paused for a minute. “There’s the attic. Gran probably hadn’t been up there in years. I sure haven’t.”

  “Could we look?”

  When Pam agreed, Blanche made a date to come by later that morning. She hung up and tried to convince herself her lies were justified. When this mess was all straightened out, she’d tell Pam the truth.

  She took the piece of envelope with Donnie’s number on it from her bag and called him. This time she wouldn’t have to lie; she just didn’t intend to tell the whole truth. There was no sense adding to Donnie’s grief by telling him somebody had killed Ray-Ray—and that she thought she knew who’d done it.

  “International Autos, Sales Department,” a crisp-voiced woman told her. Blanche asked for Donnie and waited.

  “Donald McFadden, how can I help you today?” His voice was louder, deeper, and more pushy than she’d heard it before.

  “Donnie? It’s Blanche White. You got a minute? It’s about Ray-Ray.”

  “Hi, Blanche. Did you find my letters and the picture?”

  “They’re not at his mom’s place,” she told him.

  “Maybe he has some stuff in storage, or a friend I don’t know might have them. You could ask his mother, maybe she—”

  “Listen, Donnie,” Blanche interrupted. “You remember I asked if he ever mentioned the Brindles, the people Miz Inez works for? Well, he may not have mentioned them, but they, at least one of them, have been doing a whole lotta talking about Ray-Ray. Allister Brindle—”

  “Don’t tell me! I don’t know anything about Ray-Ray and those people, and I don’t want to know, especially anything that…I told you! We wanted to start fresh. We didn’t talk about old…” Donnie’s voice quivered.

  “Donnie, I’m sorry. I know you’re having a hard time right now, but somebody tried to break into my house yesterday. I think they were looking for—”

  “Don’t. I told you, I don’t…Look, I gotta go.”

  The phone was dead before Blanche could open her mouth. “Chickenshit!” she said to the dead line. He’d have likely pooped in his drawers if she’d told him the whole story.

  “Hello, darlin’. ” Wanda eyed the teapot.

  “I�
�ll make a fresh pot of tea if you’ve got a minute. There’s some biscuits and ham.”

  Wanda unwound her layers and sat down. She looked around the room, then turned to Blanche.

  “Somethin’different about this place. Feels like sad times coming.”

  “You feel it, too.” Blanche poured tea.

  “What’s been goin’ on?”

  What hasn’t? Blanche thought.

  “Course, it’s what’s comin’ that’s the thing. I had an old auntie who could tell you at what o’ clock death would be knocking at a neighbor’s door. I can’t tell the comin’ of death from the comin’ of a broken arm. All I know’s when something bad’s headin’ this way.” She stopped to bite into her ham biscuit. “Christ! You can cook, darlin’! I never quite got the knack of it meself.”

  Blanche was glad Wanda had drifted away from talk of the Brindle house. She liked what she’d seen of Wanda. Blanche smiled to herself when the phrase “even though she’s a white woman” tried to work its way into her thinking. Wanda was definitely not who she meant by “a white woman.” But liking Wanda was not the same as confiding in her. That kind of trust took longer than the two weeks they’d have together. They sipped their tea and ate their biscuits in companionable silence.

  Wanda went off to her work. Blanche checked the time and gathered her bag and jacket so she’d be ready.

  As soon as Felicia left for the hairdresser’s, Blanche assured Carrie that she’d be back long before Felicia was finished trying to turn back time. She called a cab and went upstairs to tell Wanda she had to leave for a while.

  “Mind how you go, darlin’. I’ll be rootin’ for ya,” Wanda said, as if she knew something Blanche hadn’t told her.

  Blanche climbed the slim, fold-down ladder to Miz Barker’s crawl space and gritted her teeth against the mental exertion of forcing herself to thrust her head into the small opening above her. She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and stepped up another two rungs so that her head and shoulders were in the crawl space. It smelled of dust and mildew and looked like a rest home for cardboard boxes and dilapidated valises, their leather peeling away like shedding skin. Pam was already on the other side of the space. A layer of fine undisturbed grit covered the floor, except where Pam had walked. The dust that covered everything else in the room like an afghan was also undisturbed. Pam was right. No one had been up here for years. Blanche was delighted to back down the ladder and out of the tiny place before it got too hard for her to breathe. She checked her watch—still fine on time.