* * *
—
That afternoon, Gailya completes an application and hands it to the white woman with the rose-tinted glasses. The woman flips through the pages, licking her thumb for ease of flip. She stops flipping and looks up. Gailya hopes she doesn’t decide to call Jake at the catering company for a reference. She was only fired last night, but that job already feels far in her past, like a streetcar sliding in the opposite direction.
“You’ll do,” the woman says.
“That’s it?” Gailya says before she can stop herself.
“This isn’t chemistry. You’ll make beds, clean tubs, and show up at seven every morning on the dot. Everything is high turnover in this part of town. If I waited for the best and brightest, I’d be up to my earrings in dirty linens. No offense.” The woman laughs in a clipped way. “But I know you’re not bothered. There’s Derrica to show you how to do what’s required.” Gailya looks over to see a woman sweeping the hallway outside the administration suite. The woman nods to her.
Derrica is slim, taller than Gailya, with dark eyes that seem to look through Gailya’s eyes to some point in the back of Gailya’s skull. She is younger than Gailya. Too young.
Gailya spends the morning following Derrica around the bowels of the hotel. They join other women stocking the cleaning carts with essentials like face rags, shower caps, and little square chocolates for the deluxe suites. Gailya pockets a handful. Derrica is not talkative. It’s afternoon, and they’re on the thirteenth floor making a bed before Derrica says something not bed-making related.
“You need to put your back into everything.” Derrica carries an armful of dirty sheets to the cart in the hall.
“Huh?”
Derrica continues when she returns. “I can tell wherever you come from this isn’t your usual kind of work. But if you don’t use your body right, you won’t last long.” She points at Gailya’s shoulder. “This girl threw her shoulder out yesterday. That’s why there was a job today.”
“Thanks.”
“I like your hair.”
“Oh. Thank you.” Gailya touches one of her own short braids, her neck flushing. And that’s how their first day together goes.
When Gailya gets back home, a red poster is stuck on the window in her front door. The window is divided by frames, so the poster is rumpled by the frames, but she can read it. The city is notifying everyone that her house is on the bubble. Tax sale imminent. It’s like pouring syrup on an ant pile. The buyers will go crazy crawling over themselves to get their feelers on her house. Gailya sticks her fingers in the gap behind the poster and pulls. Most of the poster is still there. She picks away a few more big pieces, but that just leaves the door window covered in bloody fragments.
The next morning, she returns to the casino hotel dressed in the gray-and-white maid’s uniform that’s too tight up top and too loose in the middle. She’s not assigned to work with Derrica, but they’re on the same floor together again. They start from opposite ends of the same hallway. Because Derrica is faster, her cart hopscotches from doorway to doorway until eventually it’s pushed right next to Gailya’s, almost touching. While Gailya wipes a mirror specked with bits of whatever the guests flossed from their teeth, she hears Derrica’s vacuum through the wall. The vacuum sounds like a jumbo jet coming in for a landing. Gailya smiles at herself as her hands cross the mirror like the hands of a flagman.
Gailya moves to make the bed when she smells something funky. She pulls the sheets back from a bed and discovers a black furry thing. She screams.
“Yeah?” Derrica says, entering the room. Gailya is in the corner. She’s standing halfway behind the drapes. She points to the bed. Derrica goes to the bed. She laughs. “You got Doolittle’s room.”
“Doolittle?”
“He stays here year-round.” Derrica picks the thing up from the bed. “See, it’s a gorilla mask.”
Gailya exhales completely for the first time in minutes. “But why?”
“Don’t know. He’s some kind of poet or something, but he’s okay. Always leaves a good tip. Most don’t leave anything except more to clean up.”
Gailya hadn’t noticed a slip of paper on the nightstand. It’s a thank-you note with ten dollars under it.
“What did you do to this mirror? It’s all smudged.” Derrica is in the bathroom, her voice echoing off the cream-colored tiles.
The bathroom still has some steam from when Gailya cleaned the tub and shower with hot water. But even with the mist, she can see the mirror is dirty looking. Derrica walks out and returns with a bottle.
“I’m not your boss, but if you want to keep people off your ass, use this. No streaks.”
When Derrica gives Gailya the bottle of furniture polish, their hands graze, and the hairs on Gailya’s arm stand up.
Over the next few days, Gailya does her picking-up-people-in-the-middle-of-the-night-job, mostly in a daze, as she waits for each new morning to go to the casino hotel. She tries not to be obvious with questions, but she learns that Derrica is not as young as she looks, only a few years younger than Gailya’s forty-two. She grew up in the Lower Ninth Ward. Did short time in the Army, too, traveling to the Middle East, but hated being away from New Orleans. Is good with stringed instruments, most especially guitar. Derrica says she plays down on Frenchmen Street sometimes.
That Friday evening, Gailya drives her hatchback down Canal, makes an illegal left into the French Quarter. A clutch of state troopers watch her from their SUVs, but don’t swarm. She works her way through oodles of nighttime tourists buzzing between Jackson Square and the tourist trap beignet spot. She does love those beignets, though.
The app pings her to go pick up someone, a five-star rider looking for a ride way out to the airport—good money—but she ignores it. She turns off the app.
Inside the jazz club on Frenchmen, Gailya smells booze and the sad sweat of people trying to feel something real before they leave town. Drum and bass sounds vibrate from the stage like heat from pavement. Each note of the guitar sounds like honey drops off a dipper. Gailya can’t see anything past a couple rows of swaying shoulders in polo shirts and pastel blouses. She stands on a rung at the bar and finds Derrica is onstage, wearing a snug blazer and fedora. That’s her guitar sinning, Gailya thinks, noting the slip in her mind. She corrects herself. That’s her guitar singing.
Derrica has control over the crowd like a snake charmer. When she speeds up, the room comes alive. When she slows down, they rock back and forth. It’s during one of the dreamy sections, Gailya looks up to see Derrica staring right at her, even as Derrica’s fingers continue to work the fret.
After the set, Gailya bides her time at the bar, sipping a beer. Waiting for what, she wonders. She’s trying to get the bartender’s attention to close out her tab when someone says her name. Gailya turns and sees that it’s Derrica.
“So you came,” Derrica says, biting her lip.
“I was around,” Gailya says, trying to stay still on her seat.
“That’s cool.” Derrica makes a hand signal to the bartender. A moment later, a fresh cup of beer is in front of Gailya. Gailya says thank you. Derrica grabs her hand and gently turns Gailya toward her. Gailya’s mind is swirling as if she were leaning over the side of a skyscraper. She’s caught by the beauty of Derrica’s face, the ridge of her lips, the tiny scar under her eye.
“I’m sitting in with the next band,” Derrica says. “Maybe you can come by my place tomorrow night, I’m cooking.”
“Like a date date?” Gailya asks.
“Like a date date,” Derrica says.
Derrica’s apartment is Uptown right next to the levee wall, across the street from a warehouse. It is one of only three houses on the block. Inside, Gailya and Derrica eat gumbo that Derrica spent the day making. It’s good gumbo. The apartment is small. Could fit in the living room of Gaily
a’s house. But it’s clean smelling. They drink several glasses of wine, the flavor of which reminds her of sitting in a steaming bubble bath eating peaches.
“This whole thing with my house got me up at night,” Gailya says. “Good-paying work is hard to find.”
“So you don’t think you’ll ever go back to doing hair for a living?” Derrica asks.
“It just wasn’t the same feeling after the storm. I don’t know if the situation was all that different or if I was.”
“I feel that. But you think you can help me with this?” Derrica points at her head.
Gailya hadn’t said anything because she didn’t want to be rude, but Derrica’s edges are thin, and her long, box braids a puredee mess.
“I might be able to tighten you up.” Gailya tips her almost-empty glass at Derrica.
Derrica raises an eyebrow. “Show me.”
Gailya walks around the table and stands behind Derrica. She caresses several of her vanilla-scented braids, considering possibilities. She feels the warmth of Derrica’s skin under her fingers.
“I’d need time for a redo. But right now, I could wrap it in a bun or put some down the side for that over-the-eye look.” Gailya reaches forward to take a sip of Derrica’s wine. But Derrica grabs Gailya’s arm and pulls her into her body. Derrica wraps her arms around Gailya.
Gailya feels self-conscious about the fat of her belly and the way her thighs rub together, but the way Derrica strokes her tells Gailya that these are things Derrica likes about her body.
With warm breath on the back of her neck, Gailya relaxes into the curve of Derrica. It’s been a while for Gailya. She and Coleen haven’t hooked up in years, and the one or two stupid dates Gailya has been on since were a bust. But Gailya is ready when Derrica undoes the zipper on the back of the dress Gailya is wearing. Gailya unbuttons Derrica’s button-down shirt and tosses it to the side. When they kiss, Gailya feels energized, and more than once that night, deep into the night, she will feel like she’s grabbed one of the power lines the streetcars use.
* * *
—
“You sound, I don’t know,” Lea says over the phone the next night, “lighter, Mama.”
“I just had a good few days, baby,” Gailya says.
On a Tuesday, when Gailya is off, she goes to city hall to scream at, beg, or bribe whoever’s holding the knife to her throat. She knows option three isn’t a good option since she’s still broke. But one of the old mayors went to prison for accepting a payoff of bricks, so anything is possible. She could give up the car to save her house.
She received a notice to come down for a hearing but is willing to bet it’s all for show. So they can say they at least gave her a chance. Gailya sits in the back of the city council chamber. A man in a suit tells the people on the raised platform that his client’s house is worth so many millions, but they can’t expect him to pay all the many thousands they’re asking for. One of the council members says they agree, a green light flashes on a desk. The lawyer turns around, does a little fist pump, and goes about his business.
Gailya is called. Actually, they don’t say her name but say her home address, as if she is her house. After she hurries down the aisle and stops at the podium—she drops a bottle of allergy medicine from her purse and has to stop and pick it up—a councilwoman in pearls tells her to say her piece. Gailya feels tiny, the size of a mouse, tail pinched between the thumb and big finger of Councilwoman Pearls. Gailya plans to tell them about her house, mother, and grandmother, about her struggle to rebuild after the waters, about how people like her are what make New Orleans a place worth being.
“I’ve lived there my whole life—” she says, but Councilwoman Pearls holds up her hand.
“Wait one second, miss,” a young male council member says, while a few of the other members whisper to each other behind hand-covered microphones.
“Our ruling would be—”
“Hold on, Ms. Council Lady,” Gailya says.
“Oh, we’re not the council,” Councilwoman Pearls says.
Gailya glances around at the seven people staring at her. “Who are you people?”
“We’re the housing taxation and blight subcommittee.”
“My house ain’t blighted. I just had it painted a couple years ago.”
Councilwoman Pearls jots something on a pad Gailya can’t see. “Miss, we’re going to continue this hearing so that you can get some assistance.”
* * *
—
“So they let you off the hook?” Derrica says. They’re shaking their booties in a second line parade under the Claiborne Avenue overpass, just a few blocks from Gailya’s house. The brass band is a block away and hundreds of people fill the space between the two of them and the band. A bunch of women dressed like baby dolls are going wild in the middle of the street.
“Just till I get a lawyer or somebody. I looked like a puredee fool.” Gailya puts a hand on her hip and shakes it. She hates second lines. Well, hate is too strong a way to say it. But she dislikes all the noise and chaos. The people bumping into your face with their elbows, stepping on your feet. But the brass band is strong, and Gailya is feeling it today.
It was Derrica who convinced her to come. Gailya feels like she’s getting some kind of proof about what kind of girl Derrica is. Derrica who has a daiquiri in one hand and a gold handkerchief in the other. A real New Orleans woman. Can’t nobody fake that.
Gailya is no slouch. She has a frilly, white umbrella. She can dance, really dance. It’s in the bones of her hips and feet, her mother used to say, handed down to her by all their ancestors. Derrica dances herself, her whole body going from soft to ridged and back again. Her feet jittering almost too fast to see. She looks like a spider on the hunt. Her head bobbing, her shoulders flexing, makes Gailya feel like a fly in a web, silk around her throat, welcoming the sting of those fangs.
“That’s what you are,” Derrica says, “my fool.”
The day after the second line, Gailya and Derrica arrive in Gailya’s car at the casino hotel employee garage. The gate won’t rise. They park a couple of blocks away by a meter Gailya can’t afford to pay, but the city won’t tow it, even if the ticket wipes out a chunk of a day’s pay.
At the side door of the hotel, they come up on a group of their co-workers, some other maids, kitchen staff and fixers, too.
“What’s up with this?” Derrica says.
Big Lev, the morning crew grill man who always saves them a cut of breakfast steak or diced sausages, shrugs. “Don’t know, but I ain’t liking this. Door locked on payday ain’t no kind of good.”
The white lady in the rose-colored glasses pulls up in a compact on the same level as Gailya’s car. Gailya assumed she was rich, that she drives a slick luxury ride, but not so. She climbs out of the dusty-gray car; her stringy brown hair is messy, all over her head. She pulls down the hem of her skirt and tries to make her hair look normal. Walking to the door, she says nothing to the workers, but faintly nods. She types a code into the pad by the door, and nothing happens. She takes off her glasses and rubs her face. The woman’s eyes are small and beady.
“It’s true then,” she says. “The company is in receivership. We’ve been shut down.”
“Receiver-what?” Derrica says.
“They ain’t pay they bills,” Gailya says.
“Does that mean we don’t get paid?” Derrica says. “Hello? Boss lady?” Derrica swears. Gailya touches Derrica’s arm.
* * *
—
The next afternoon, Gailya sits in a fine room in a big house on State Street. A yellow-haired lady with pedicured toenails sits across from her on a long velvet bench. Gailya is there to answer a call for an au pair. But she’s no fool. She knows that title doesn’t apply to her. Au pairs are little foreign white girls with names like Anne and Sophie. Women like her who have
done this work for centuries are mammies.
“So you’d need me to cook and clean and stuff?” Gailya says. She’s distracted by the lady’s blue-green toenails. The exact same color as the baby bath she used to wash Lea in.
“No, not at all.” The yellow-haired lady flicks her fingers as she talks. Like she’s tugging strings connected to rooms all over the house and all over the city. “Sara comes each morning and handles the general cleaning. You know, the main bedrooms upstairs and the den and Paul’s study, although he typically uses his downtown office by Lafayette Square anyway. We use a service for most of the meals unless I choose to make dinner. You would just get the kids ready for school, walk them over and back afterward, tidy their rooms, prepare healthy snacks—I have a binder of approved snacks—take them to the park. That sort of thing.”
“Well, I can handle that.” Gailya adjusts her body on the soft sofa. There’s too much give; it’ll swallow her if she relaxes.
“Good,” the lady says. “When that poor Sudanese girl’s visa was denied, I was floored. What’s happening to the world, I just don’t know!” The lady grabs her own knee and shakes her head. “It’s a real shame. But never mind all that. I’m so glad Reverend Smith recommended you. You know, ever since he’s been on the board of the art foundation, he’s been such a darling. I just love him. And I just know you’ll love Molly and Charlie. They’re little darlings, you know.”
Gailya is given a tour of the house—it’s large and beautiful, but nothing she hadn’t seen in her years of catering work. She is relieved to learn that there’s no uniform strictly speaking, but there is a dress code. She’s to wear the kinds of clothes caretakers in hospitals, nursing homes, and nurseries wear. Loose, plain tops. Dark pants or long skirts. Nothing flashy, clingy, or flesh presenting. Her new boss, Aimee, wants her to start that same day. What Gailya is wearing, a scoop-neck blouse, is seemingly too flashy for Aimee’s guidelines. Aimee tells Gailya to help herself to whatever she likes from a box of clothes that she’s been meaning to donate to the shelter by the expressway.
The Ones Who Don't Say They Love You Page 11
