Mama Day

by Gloria Naylor

  You said, Call me George. And I thought, Oh God, this is going to be one of those let’s-get-chummy-fast masquerades. Nine times out of ten, some clown giving you his first name is a sure bet he’s not giving you the job. And they can comfort themselves because, after all, they went out of their way to be “nice.” And in this case, you were stealing my thunder when the moment came for pulling out my toothpicks and reminding Mr. Andrews where I’d seen him before. But if we were George and Ophelia—chat, chat, chat—my mint toothpicks would just be added fuel to the fire that was sending this job up in smoke. These fudge-on-fudge interviews were always tricky anyway. You have the power freaks who wanted you to grovel at their importance. They figure if they don’t get it from the other bonbons, it’s sure not coming from anywhere else. Or there were the disciples of a free market with a Christ complex: they went to the Cross and rose without affirmative action, so you can too. But our interview wasn’t anything I could put my finger on. You just seemed downright scared of me and anxious to get me out of that office. And I knew the fastest way was this call-me-George business. I decided to fight fire with fire.

  “And I’m used to answering to Cocoa. I guess we might as well start now because if I get the position and anyone here calls me Ophelia, I’ll be so busy concentrating on my work, it won’t register. I truly doubt I could have moved up as fast as I did at my last job—with a fifty percent increase in salary—if those twelve secretaries, thirty-five salesmen, and six adjusters in the office I was managing almost single-handedly had called me Ophelia. The way I see it, over half of the overtime I put in would have been spent trying to figure out who they were talking to.”

  There, I stuck that one to you. And you knew it, too, because you were finally smiling. And this time you took a real good look at my application.

  “So you picked up this nickname at your last job—Omega Home Insurance?”

  “No, I’ve had it from a child—in the South it’s called a pet name. My grandmother and great-aunt gave it to me, the same women who put me through business school in Atlanta where I ended up graduating at the top of my class—A’s in statistics, typing, bookkeeping. B plusses in—”

  “That’s fascinating. How do they decide on the pet name?”

  “They just try to figure out what fits.”

  “So a child with skin the color of buttered cream gets called Cocoa. I can see how that fits.”

  I wanted to slap that smirk off your face. “It does if you understood my family and where I come from.”

  “Willow Springs, is it? That’s in Georgia?”

  “No, it’s actually in no state. But that’s a long story. And not to be rude, Mr. Andrews, but I really would like to talk about my credentials for working here. Where I was born and what name I was given were both beyond my control. But what I could do about my life, I’ve done well. And I’d like to spend the few minutes I have left of your time being judged on that.”

  Something happened to your face then. I had hit a raw nerve somewhere, and I cursed myself because I was sure I had succeeded in destroying the whole thing. It was little consolation knowing that I was going to be on your mind long after you kicked me out of your office.

  “That’s the only way I’d ever dream of judging anyone, Miss Day. And I meant it when I said call me George.”

  Great, I’d been demoted up to Miss Day. This man was really angry, and that George business again just clinched it, I guess. But then he did say I meant it, which means he knows about the whole charade and he’s trying to reassure me that he’s not angry about what I said. Ah, who can figure this shit out.

  “And you can call me …” I was suddenly very tired—of you, of the whole game. “Just call me when you decide. I do need this job, and if you check out my references, you’ll find that I’ll be more than able to perform well.”

  “Fine. And this is the number where you can be reached?”

  “Yes, but I’ll be away for the next two weeks. If you don’t mind, you could drop me a card, or I’ll call when I get back since the job doesn’t start until the first.”

  You frowned, but it came out the way it came out. Sure, he’s thinking, how badly does someone need a job who’s taking a vacation?

  “But we’ll be making our final decision after tomorrow. The person starts Monday.”

  “Your ad said the first.”

  “It did, but our current office manager told us this morning that she has to leave earlier than she had planned. And she’ll have to break in her successor. This is a deceptively busy place and to have someone come in here cold—well, it wouldn’t be fair to the new employee or to us. And we thought whoever got the position would probably appreciate starting work before September. I know how tight things are out there right now—most people have been looking for a long time.”

  Jesus, all we needed was the organ music and a slow fade to my receding back as the swirling sand of the rocky coastline began to spell out The End. Oh, yeah, if you aren’t ready to start yesterday, there are a dozen who will be.

  “I understand, and I wouldn’t have wasted your time if I knew it was necessary to begin right away. I have to go home every August. It’s never been a problem before because I had the same job for seven years. You see, my grandmother is eighty-three and since we lost my cousin and her family last year, I’m the only grandchild left.”

  If you thought it was a cheap shot, sorry. At that point I was beyond caring.

  “The whole family? That’s really terrible—what happened?”

  “Did you read about the fire in Linden Hills this past Christmas? Well, that was my cousin Willa and her husband and son. It upset us all a lot.”

  “I did read about it. It was an awful, awful thing—and on Christmas of all days.”

  My God, the look in your eyes. You actually meant that. This would go down in Guinness as the strangest interview I’d ever been on.

  “So you understand why I’m going back to Willow Springs.”

  “Of course I do. And you must understand why any qualified applicant would need to start Monday.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  We had sure become one understanding pair of folks by the time the lights in the theater came up and they pulled the curtain across the screen. We got up out of our seats and shook hands. Was it my imagination—did his fingers linger just a bit? Was it possible that since I was more than qualified, no one else would come along and they’d save … My heart sank when I got back to the reception area. I had to wade through a whole Baskin-Robbins on my way to the outside hall.

  You had spunk, Ophelia, and that’s what I admired in a woman. You were justified to come right out and tell me I was prying, and I hated myself all the while I was doing it. I had always valued my own privacy, and just because you were in a position where you had to answer questions that bordered on an invasion on yours made what I did all the more unfair. If it’s any consolation, I didn’t enjoy the sour aftertaste of abused power. But I was searching for some connection, some rational explanation. The only way I could sit through that interview was by lying to myself about what had really happened in that coffee shop: when I passed your bent neck, I stopped because I had seen you somewhere before, and I couldn’t remember—that’s all.

  I had definitely seen your type before, and had even slept with some of them—those too bright, too jaded colored girls. There were a few at Columbia, but many more would come across the street from Barnard. They made no bones about their plans to hook into a man who—what was the expression then?—who was going somewhere. Well, after classes I went to work as a room-service waiter in the Hilton. It wasn’t as glamorous as the work-study jobs in the library or dean’s office, but it paid a lot better when you counted tips. During the slack periods my boss let me read, and I had Sundays off. But you see, that wasn’t the right day. All the guys who were going somewhere had been able to take girls to the fraternity dances on Friday and Saturday nights where they could show off their brand-name clothes. They onl
y needed a pair of jeans to go to the park with me, or to sit in my room and study. I was too serious, too dull. George doesn’t know how to have fun, they’d say, he’s so quiet. I suppose I was, but what could I honestly talk to them about? They would have thought I was crazy if I had told them that seeing them flow around me like dark jewels on campus was one of the most beautiful sights on earth.

  Yes, I was one of the quiet ones who thought them beautiful, even with the polished iron webbing around their hearts. I understood exactly what they were protecting themselves against, and I was willing to help them shine that armor all the more, to be the shoulder they could cry on when it got too heavy—if they had only let me in. But they didn’t want me then. And I was to meet them years later, at parties and dinners, when the iron had served them a bit too well. They were successful and they were alone: those guys who were going somewhere had by either inclination or lack of numbers left a good deal of them behind. They had stopped being frivolous, but they were hurt and suspicious. And maturity made me much more hesitant to take a chance on finding an opening into hearts like those. Often, I had wanted to go over and shake some silk-clad shoulder who thought she was righteously justified in spreading the tired old gospel about not being able to meet good black men. She had met me. But I would have been too proud to remind her where.

  Yeah, I knew your type well. And you sat there with your mind racing, trying to double-think me, so sure you had me and the game down pat. Give him what he wants. I fooled you, didn’t I. All I wanted was for you to be yourself. And I wondered if it was too late, if seven years in New York had been just enough for you to lose that, like you were trying to lose your southern accent. It amused me the way your tongue and lips were determined to clip along and then your accent would find you in the spaces between two words—“talking about,” “graduating at.” In spite of yourself, the music would squeeze through at the ending of those verbs to tilt the following vowels up just half a key. That’s why I wanted you to call me George. There isn’t a southerner alive who could bring that name in under two syllables. And for those brief seconds it allowed me to imagine you as you must have been: softer, slower—open. It conjured up images of jasmine-scented nights, warm biscuits and honey being brought to me on flowered china plates as you sat at my feet and rubbed your cheek against my knee. Go ahead and laugh, you have a perfect right. I had never been south, and you couldn’t count the times I had spent in Miami at the Super Bowl—that city was a humid and pastel New York. So I had the same myths about southern women that you did about northern men. But it was a fact that when you said my name, you became yourself.

  And it was also a fact that there was no way I was going to give you that job. And your firm plans about returning to Willow Springs helped to alleviate my guilt about that. We were going to turn other qualified people down—and it’s never a matter of the most qualified, there’s no such animal. It’s either do they or don’t they “fit.” And where could I possibly place you? My life was already made at thirty-one. My engineering degree, the accelerating success of Andrews & Stein, proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that you got nothing from believing in crossed fingers, broken mirrors, spilled salt—a twist in your gut in the middle of a Third Avenue coffee shop. You either do or you don’t. And you, Ophelia, were the don’t. Don’t get near a woman who has the power to turn your existence upside-down by simply running a hand up the back of her neck.

  Miranda’s tea kettle jets out boiling steam with a low rumble; that old whistle’s been lost for years. She reaches for the handle and suddenly stops. Bringing her tongue up over her toothless gums, pushing out her top lip, she concentrates awful hard as the column of steam disappears along the back of the gas range into the bottom of her pine wood cabinets. Her daddy had made those with his very hands, using nothing but a flat chisel and mallet. John-Paul worked each apricot cluster and trailing vine into them panels so lifelike you’d think they was still growing. A little drop of vapor beads up on the tip of an apricot leaf and shines there in the morning sun. Miranda smiles as the bead of water turns golden in color—my, what a pleasant surprise. She must ring up Abigail and tell her Baby Girl is coming in today, a little earlier than expected—and on the airplane to boot.

  She pours the hot water over a handful of loose tea leaves and allows ’em to steep as she pushes open the back door of that silver trailer and takes a lungful of fresh air. Dew comes splattering from the top of the screen, landing on her forearm. Her arthritis had told her it was gonna be a dampish kind of day long before she shades her eyes and spots the camel-backed clouds forming on the horizon. The chickens she leaves out to scratch around the yard hear the screen door creak open and come scattering over, setting up a racket. An old black hen, the boldest of the lot, hops up on the brick steps.

  “Miserable beggars.” She picks up her broom and shoos them off. “And you, Clarissa, oughta know better—nobody eats before me.” The hen flies out the way of the swinging broom to land and start pecking on the doorsill again. “Keep it up, hear? A little stewed fricassee with my grits wouldn’t taste half bad this morning.” Miranda throws them a handful of fresh bread crumbs she keeps in the bag that hangs on a peg just inside her door. “Now, that’s all the charity you getting today—go grub up some worms. And mess on my doorstep, there’ll be the devil to pay.”

  She returns to the kitchen to strain her tea. Searching through the cabinets, she finds that her last bit of honey done formed white crystals at the bottom of its Mason jar. “I told Buzzard to bring me six new jars of honey—now, where they at, huh? Miserable, miserable.” She puts a little hot tea into the jar and swirls it around to dissolve the crystals before pouring it back into her favorite cup. It’s a chipped ceramic mug with a blond woman’s smiling face over the red lettering: #1 AUNT. Baby Girl brought that to her from Atlanta, her first summer vacation from business school. She’d told the silly yellow thing that she wasn’t a number one Aunt, but a great-aunt, and the only great-aunt at that.

  “But they don’t make them with ‘Great-Aunt’ and I knew better than to even start looking for one that said ‘Mama Day.’ Next time I’ll get one made up special for you.”

  “Why they ain’t got no Great-Aunt cups? There is great-aunts, ya know—even in Atlanta.”

  “Look, now don’t start blaming those folks in Atlanta just because you’re living longer than you should.”

  “Getting kinda quick at the mouth, Miss C, since you come back from the city smelling like gasoline fumes.”

  “I do not. I smell like the lavender water you sent me—by the boxloads.”

  “Use more of it, then. And when you get my cup made up special, have it say Great-Great-Aunt. I plan to keep on living till I can rock one of yours on my knee.”

  “We’re talking the turn of the century, Mama Day?”

  “We’re talking as long as it takes.”

  And it is taking a long time, Miranda thinks as she carries her tea into the living room and picks up the phone. It was another year at that school in Atlanta, and near seven up in New York—and no man worth speaking of. Why, Baby Girl must be … She concentrates.… three years lacking thirty. They were gonna have a good talk when she brought her tail in this afternoon. And she could sit there with her fresh self and pout all she want. Ain’t no kinda sense, you living in a place with more men than the whole of Georgia and South Carolina combined, and can’t take care of business. There are ways, and there are ways—and she’d just have to explain a few of ’em to her. The phone rings only twice before Miranda hears that melting hello which can only be Abigail’s.

  “You there, Sister?” Miranda says.

  “Uh, huh.”

  There ain’t no other way for Miranda to greet her, or for Abigail to respond—not after eighty years. It don’t matter when and it don’t matter where: Abigail bringing a fresh bunch of collards from across the main road, Miranda sliding into the pew beside her at church, them running into each other at the post office.

  “
You there, Sister?”

  “Uh, huh.”

  The five-year-old moves quiet-like away from the darkened room where the bundle of soft flannel lays amidst flowers and the smell of melted candle wax. Moonlight floods in through the window, making bars across the tiny casket that is carved with rosebuds and the trailing circles of water lilies. The wavery shadows of the horsehair divan and the marble fireplace against the hardwood floors are a betrayal: Peace was not supposed to die in their home. Her mama’s wail and the angry thud of her daddy’s hobnail boots spiral above her head, louder and louder. The sound will fill the house while one and then the other grows mad, mad. There was Miranda, Abigail, and now there is no Peace. Creeping into the bedroom, she sees the three-year-old curled up tight with her thumb in her mouth. The counterpane rises steadily with each breath, but that ain’t to be trusted. She will see Peace breathing too, at the bottom of the open well, long after her daddy carves the box and they wrap her in white flannel. Long after her mama will spend her days rocking and twisting thread, twisting thread, while her daddy spends his nights digging, digging into blocks of wood. But there will be no Peace. She begins to learn even at this age: there is more to be known behind what the eyes can see. So climbing up on the bed, she shakes the younger child awake. “You there, Sister?” The answer is coated with phlegm, on the edge of tears. “Uh, huh.” Miranda’s small fingers place themselves around the rhythm of Abigail’s breathing. Nested under the quilt, they are four arms and legs, two heads, one heartbeat.

  “Baby Girl is coming in today.”

  “Well, Lord. It’s gonna be good to see my child. I better get her room dusted out and ready. And she thought she was catching the train up there tomorrow night—even wrote and said to meet her at the station Tuesday morning.”

  “It’s the airplane though, at that field beyond the bridge.”