Blanche Passes Go

by Barbara Neely

  “Like hell!” Ardell pulled out onto the road.

  Blanche laughed, then told Ardell everything as they drove the short distance to Farleigh.

  “Girl, moving back down here might be the right thing for you in more ways than one!”

  Blanche was about to remind Ardell that she was just there for the summer when Ardell made an unexpected turn down the small dirt street, not much wider than an alley, that ran behind Washington Street.

  “The Miz Alice!” Blanche jumped out of the car and walked around to the front of the small bungalow. “I’d almost forgotten about this place.”

  Ardell walked up the stoop and unlocked the door.

  The last time Blanche had seen the little two-room bungalow they called the Miz Alice it had been full of chairs with broken legs, chests with missing drawers, and tables with cracked tops—furniture Ardell’s Uncle Russell had planned to mend someday. He was a fine carpenter, but a busy one. Blanche looked around the Miz Alice: The wooden headboard was carved with bunches of grapes on a twisting vine. The mission-style chairs and small sofa were both covered in deepest purple with throw pillows in blue and green.

  Blanche waved her hand at the furniture. “Mr. Russell’s repair projects?”

  Ardell nodded. “Surprised?”

  “It’s perfect!” Blanche had prepared herself for being a roomer at Miz Alexander’s boarding house, keeping someone else’s rules and hours. It was that or live with Ardell or with her own mother. While Blanche and Ardell were closer than some blood sisters, they had very different ways of doing things: Once a tube of toothpaste was opened, Ardell didn’t think it was necessary to put the top back on it. “Saves me the time of having to take it off again,” she’d once told Blanche. And although Blanche agreed it was important not to waste water, she doubted she’d ever be convinced only to flush the toilet every third time she peed. Of course, there was really no possibility Blanche would have stayed with her mother—unless she was trying to end her relationship with the woman. So having the Miz Alice for the summer was a truly lovely surprise.

  The Miz Alice was named after the woman who’d first rented the place, some months after Ardell’s Uncle Russell had dug up his backyard, laid the foundation, and built what he’d called “part of my old-age pension.” The neighbors had sniggered and signified. Who was going to rent a little bitty place like that? Wasn’t a single family around that didn’t have at least a couple of kids. This place was hardly big enough for one. But Miz Alice had shown up in Farleigh from somewhere North as if she’d been sent for, having left wherever she’d been with one suitcase and no inclination to talk about her past. She’d lived in the snug little house—one big room with living/sleeping quarters at one end, a kitchen alcove at the other, and a tiny bathroom tucked on the side—until she’d died a couple years after Ardell’s uncle. The place had stayed in the family.

  After Ardell had gone, Blanche walked around, opening cabinets and peeking in the bathroom. Ardell had thought of everything from dishes to a back brush. There was even half a roasted chicken, pasta salad, milk, juice, eggs, butter, and bacon in the refrigerator, and she’d arranged to have the phone turned on tomorrow morning. Blanche reminded herself to call Thelvin—as if she were likely to forget.

  She ran her hand along the grain in the oak bureau and looked at herself in the mirror. She saw fifty looking back at her. Fifty. She tried to find its meaning in her different yet same-as-always face. She knew it had changed over the years. Some days she could see her twenty-year-old self peeking out, all damp-eyed hope and eagerness. Other days she saw only Mama’s face where her own should be. Fifty. She smoothed the gray hair at her temples. Fifty and free. She tried to picture herself alone in their house in Boston but couldn’t, probably because she had no intention of staying there. She’d already begun to prepare Taifa and Malik for her giving up the house once they were in college.

  “But where will we stay during the holidays?” Taifa had asked.

  “Wherever I’m living,” Blanche had told her.

  “But where’ll that be?” Malik wanted to know.

  “And what if we don’t like it?” Taifa added.

  Blanche had been unwilling to say what was on her tongue, that Malik and Taifa would only be visiting her, so whether they liked it or not was immaterial. Though she hadn’t said it, the thought had thrilled her. She didn’t feel quite the same when it came to their freedom. She probably wouldn’t have let Taifa go off to Amber Cove alone if the three of them hadn’t stayed there with the Crowleys a few summers ago. The Crowley kids were friends of Taifa’s and Malik’s from the year they’d gone to private school. Their parents had a cottage at Amber Cove and their mother, Christine, was there this summer, too. She’d agreed to keep an eye on Taifa. One of Malik’s favorite teachers was a part of his whole camping thing, so she was less concerned about him. And, she admitted, Malik was a lot more like her than Taifa was.

  Blanche put her clothes away, then took a shower followed by a soak in the tub. She used a bucket of the water she’d soaked in to wipe the floors, careful to get into every corner as she put her mark on the bungalow. Madame Rosa, her old spiritualist up in Harlem, said the proper way to mark and protect a house was with your urine. Blanche had tried it. Once. For days afterward, she’d found herself constantly sniffing to make sure her house didn’t smell pissy. So she’d made up her own ritual, just as she’d put together her own spiritual practice, including reverence for her Ancestors and the planet, and seeking energy from trees and healing from the sea. Some things she’d learned from African, Afro-Caribbean, Native American, and Asian ways of having a spiritual life, but she always added her personal twist. Until she’d come up with her own rituals she’d been hungry for ways to demonstrate her belief that there was more to life than she could see—ways that didn’t require her being a member of the Christian or the Muslim or any other religion that had played a part in African slavery. She also had no time for any religions that said she needed a priest or priestess to act as a go-between or worshipped a god called He. She was her own priest and goddess.

  As her last act of the evening, she pressed her gray dress with the black stripe. She planned to wear it tomorrow evening, to her first gig with Ardell, or, rather, with Carolina Catering—a first gig that could launch her new career.

  THREE

  MAMA

  As promised, a man came and hooked up the phone the next morning. Blanche’s first call was to leave the new number for Taifa at the front desk of Amber Cove Inn. She didn’t try to call Malik, since she knew he was still on his Outward Bound trip.

  Blanche had allowed Taifa and Malik to convince her not to call them unexpectedly, setting up dates to talk to them instead. But she’d also given them each ten postcards, already stamped and addressed to her at Ardell’s. After she left her number on Christine Crowley’s machine at Amber Cove, Blanche called Thelvin. She got his answering machine and smiled at the sound of his voice. She left her number and confirmed their date. Now it was time for Mama. It had been too late to wake her up last night.

  Opening her mother’s front door was like stepping back in time. There was the old slip-covered sofa, the balding blue armchair, the brass floor lamp with its fringed shade. As always, an army of doilies and antimacassars covered every surface except the floor and made the room look like it was frothing at the mouth. But it was Miz Cora’s nearly nonstop tirade that made her feel as though she’d lost forty years. It was the same tongue-whipping Blanche had been getting since she was old enough to make her own decisions. Only this time it wasn’t about what she was doing but where she was staying.

  “It’s just like you, Blanche,” Miz Cora said when Blanche told her about the Miz Alice.

  Blanche watched her mother slap a hot iron down on a cotton slip. As usual when she was angry, Miz Cora seemed about two feet taller than her actual four-foot-eleven-inch height.

  �
�You always did have to be different!” Miz Cora turned the slip over and attacked it again.

  “Even when you was a child, you went your own way irregardless of other people’s feelins. It ain’t a nice thing in a woman, Blanche.” Miz Cora folded the slip. Her nut-brown eyes snapped at Blanche like angry turtles. They were almost the exact color of her skin.

  Blanche sighed and wondered how it would be if just once her mother started a conversation with something other than a put-down. She looked good, though. Mama’s face had obviously aged as much as it intended to, since her looks hadn’t changed in ten years. She seemed a little lighter-skinned. Was she losing her color along with her hair? She’d also picked up a pound or two, but was still thin as a feather compared with Blanche. Her plumper hips and arms gave Miz Cora a softer look, but there wasn’t anything cuddly about Mama.

  “…friend or family ain’t good enough for Miss High and Mighty Blanche to stay with!” Miz Cora was saying when Blanche tuned back in. “I can understand why you might not want to stay with Ardell. You know what people’s like round here. What they gon’ say? Two women sleepin’ in the same bed when they don’t have to. It ain’t natural.” Miz Cora spread another slip across the ironing board.

  Blanche rolled her eyes to the ceiling and sighed but warned herself not to say anything. When Mama was this wound up, any interruption was like throwing dry kindling on an open fire. Better to wait till the flames died from lack of oxygen—when Mama needed to stop and take a breath.

  “Mama, I didn’t want to cause you one extra lick of work. And you know how you are, always wanting to fix my favorite food and not letting me lift a finger,” Blanche said, remembering how her mother had worked her like a slave the last time she’d stayed in this house.

  Blanche could almost see her mother shrinking down from her angry height to her normal size.

  “Humph. Well, humph. You coulda stayed with Ardell,” Mama said, reversing herself. “Prob’ly hurt the child’s feelins, her bein’ your best friend, she…”

  Wait a minute. Had Mama taken her sarcasm as sincere? Might as well play out the possibility—if she could do it without choking. “But, Mama,” she cut in, “Ardell knows what you’re like. Didn’t she spend as much time at our house as she did her own? She knows what a fine table you set and how you keep your house. She’d run herself ragged trying to do for me like you would. That’s why I can’t stay with either one of y’all.”

  “Humph, well, humph.” Miz Cora folded the last slip and moved on to a pillowcase. “You sure don’t want to be livin’ on that child’s greens! Much as I love Ardell, every time I eat her greens I git gas somethin’ fierce. They ain’t cooked long enough, for one thing, and she probably don’t put enough…”

  Blanche relaxed her shoulders and nodded as though she were paying attention. If only it was always this easy. Maybe she needed to keep thinking up little pieces of flattery to chill Mama out, like throwing red meat to a lion. Still, by the time her mother was through with her, all Blanche was fit for was a long nap. Welcome home!

  FOUR

  FIRST GIG, FIRST SIGHTING

  Blanche watched Ardell directing the three waitpeople as they set up the buffet table, lit chafing-dish candles, and laid out plates and silverware, glasses and napkins.

  “Clarice, I asked you to fan these out like this.” Ardell quickly rearranged the napkins, then patted the slightly crestfallen Clarice on her shoulder. “Don’t fret. You’ll get it right next time.” Ardell moved on to inspect the bar.

  All business, Blanche thought in a proud, “Go, girl!” way. It looked as though Ardell had found both the work she wanted to do, and a deep well of know-how to go with it. Ardell couldn’t cook a lick but she’d hired some of the best cooks around to work for her on contract. She supplied ingredients, developed menus with their help, and paid them either by the hour or the product. Blanche had listened with awe as Ardell had explained the bidding-and-billing processes, menu tastings for potential customers, then launched into the pros and cons and trials of working with the part-time staff—students from North Carolina Central and Shaw University—the funny ways of her cooks, and the lowdown on the two people she employed full-time as wait-and-cleanup crew—Clarice and Zeke.

  Clarice was in charge of overseeing the heating and presentation of the food—on instructions from the cooks. Clarice was a woman in her mid-thirties. She reminded Blanche of a plump, rich-brown mink, quick and wide-eyed with a quivery nose. Ardell had said that Clarice grew up on a farm with parents who had told Clarice she was slow-witted. Ardell thought this was her parents’ way of keeping their only child at their side, since Clarice had turned out to be a quick study and a hard, steady worker. “She may look and sound kind of dithery, but she’s not,” Ardell had said. “She don’t lose it when things don’t go right. But she’s just as country as she can be! Soon’s her parents died, Clarice decides to live her dream and move to the city. So, check this, she comes here to Farleigh! But being country don’t add up to being slow,” Ardell had said. “Girl wasn’t here three months before she’d hooked up with Jimmy Henry. You remember him, Jeanette’s baby brother.”

  Zeke, with his drill-sergeant walk and scraggly mustache, tended bar, waited table, and was in charge of breakdown, in which everyone, including Ardell, participated. Zeke had left Farleigh over thirty years ago and had recently moved back with his wife. Their kids were grown and gone. Whatever had happened to Zeke outside of Farleigh had turned him into a man who didn’t like to look people in the eye. Blanche could tell from the tightness in Ardell’s voice when she talked about him that Zeke was not her favorite person. “He’s smart and he’s real good when he’s good,” was all she’d say when Blanche asked her how she felt about him.

  Right now, Ardell honchoed setup but was training Clarice to take this over. Catering was uniform work. Zeke and the two boys from the college were in black pants, white shirts and gloves, red bow ties, and bolero jackets. The boys would be circulating with glasses of champagne and Zeke would handle drinks at the makeshift bar. Clarice and the three girls who’d be serving trays of canapés wore shiny black uniforms with small white aprons. Ardell had told Blanche to wear her own clothes.

  “Tonight, you just watch and get a feel for how things work,” Ardell had told her. “And maybe pitch in if we need you.”

  So that’s what Blanche was doing, beginning with noting the care with which the van was loaded so that when it was unloaded at the job site, the tablecloths came out first and were immediately put in place. The chafing dishes came out next and were set up and heated without delay.

  The food—scallops wrapped in bacon, mini Brie tarts, crab-stuffed mushrooms, shrimp dumplings, and various fruits and cheeses—was being served at one of the many balls being held this summer to celebrate Farleigh’s two hundredth birthday.

  Tonight’s affair was at the home of Jason Morris and his wife, Nancy. They lived in the Morris clan’s ancestral mansion, which, along with most of its furniture, had been built by slaves. Everybody in Farleigh knew of the Morris family, it being one of the state’s oldest and including such pillars of the South as slavers, Indian-killers, Confederate generals, and diehard segregationists. But Ardell said this generation saw itself as the leader of the New South. Of course, they still occasionally named their sons Braxton and Zebulon, in honor of their Confederate, slaver ancestors, and they still didn’t invite their string of mulatto relatives with the same looks and last name to sit down at the family table.

  “New South,” Ardell had told Blanche, “means sending their kids to integrated schools—long as ain’t no more than one or two colored children present—instead of sending them to all-white Christian academies like they used to do. New South is celebrating Martin Luther King Day without mentioning that their daddies wanted to kill him, and hiring outfits like us for a lot less than they pay the big white caterers. New South ain’t about getting up off none of that
power or big bucks, and it sure don’t mean doing a damned thing for the real poor. The New South is where they capitalize Nigger.”

  Blanche would have been surprised if it were otherwise. This was still America, after all.

  Jason and Nancy were also co-chairs of the Farleigh Bicentennial Committee. Jason wasn’t around at the moment, but his lady wife was dogging Ardell’s steps—asking questions that said she was nervous about Ardell’s ability to do her job. Blanche wondered how long Ardell would put up with it. Less than a minute later, Ardell gave Blanche a pleading look.

  Blanche headed Nancy off and corralled her toward one of the delicate-looking gold-and-white chairs just off the dance floor. “Ma’am, why don’t you have a seat here? You must be bushed, what with all you’ve had to do.” Like getting your hair done and getting on Ardell’s nerves, Blanche added to herself. “I’ll make you a nice cup of tea.” She took another look at the woman. Nancy’s eyes glowed feverishly; she was breathing a little fast. “Maybe a nice glass of sherry would be more fortifying?”

  “Oh yes, please! That would be lovely,” the woman said as though the governess had unexpectedly offered her a cookie. Blanche watched her almost wiggle with pleasure. She wasn’t so much a plain woman as a plain-seeming one. Something about the way she ducked her head when she spoke. The happiness she showed at the simple offer of a glass of her own wine reminded Blanche of a dog more accustomed to being kicked than stroked.

  Nancy Morris pushed a stray tendril of wispy hair behind her ear. She gazed up at Blanche with a smile as she took the glass of sherry from the tray Blanche held out to her. She took a sip, sighed, and leaned back in her chair.

  “It’s my first ball, you see. We’ve had parties, of course, but my mother-in-law always…” She looked around the gold-and-white mirrored room bigger than the parking lot in Blanche’s housing development back in Boston.