Now suddenly, with my quaint beliefs lost in eddies of boredom and despair, what stood between me and collapse was a maid. She, this person I didn’t even know yet, was my lifeline, my life. I called the New York State Employment Agency and they sent Mattie Lou Colton to be interviewed. The children and I liked her and she appeared to like us. I telephoned her previous employer, one Mrs. Zimmerman, who sounded a bit high-handed but gave an excellent reference. As we came to an agreement, Mattie noted that I needed to pay social security and unemployment benefits, something the maids of my childhood had either not demanded or not known about, nor had their employers enlightened them. The bargain was struck and she was hired.
I had a cleaning woman. That was the term I used in my mind, where it was fraught with the discomfort and unease soon to be diagnosed as liberal guilt, a widespread affliction in the sixties: the civil rights movement, over and above its specific achievements, was forcing whites for the first time to take the existence of black people seriously. In my childhood, women who were paid to do housework and who were invariably black—as was Mattie—were called “girls,” which had struck me as absurd even then and was now scandalously incorrect. (As a matter of fact Mrs. Zimmerman had sounded like the sort of woman who might call her cleaning woman a girl.) “Maid” felt upper-crust and demeaning, while “Nanny,” with its Anglo and aristocratic associations, was out of the question. (Nowadays the word “Nanny” has become democratized but is still, I think, used self-consciously by the middle class.) “Babysitter” overlooked the household chores and had girlish overtones. “Housekeeper” seemed pretentious—the employer of a housekeeper should be a more grown-up and established member of society than I felt myself to be. In the end, cleaning woman seemed the most straightforward and dignified, though it omitted the crucial task of child care. As time went on, Mattie, in referring to her position, used the term “maid.”
Mattie was about thirty-three, a couple of years older than I, and was tall and heavy, with straight glossy black hair, huge liquidy dark eyes, dark skin, full cheeks and lips. She would arrive at work dressed as if for a casual lunch date or a shopping expedition, usually in a pants suit or slacks and a sweater, and then change into a white uniform—a short-sleeved polyester dress that suggested a nurse’s costume. The uniform made me uncomfortable, advertising that I was undeniably the employer of a maid, but I felt it hardly my business to dictate what she wore.
She lived in the Bronx with her husband, Charles, who worked downtown in the garment center. They had been childhood sweethearts in rural Alabama, where her family had farmed, and Mattie kept a strong Southern accent—a true drawl—which I had to strain to understand, the first few weeks. Her body language was a drawl as well: large, soft, and bulky, she moved with a sense of consciously transporting her weight, yet at the same time managed to appear calmly dexterous; her movements had a luxuriance which I came to see concealed an inner turbulence very familiar to me, very much like my own.
Mattie had diabetes, childhood diabetes, the more serious kind—this she told me when she began work. She said I needed to have orange juice around the house in case she ever started slipping into a diabetic coma. Only a couple of times in the four years she worked for me did she ever need the orange juice. I was ignorant, then, of how serious diabetes could be, and thought her something of a hypochondriac for dwelling on it as she did. She was meticulously careful about her diet. In the course of time, as we sat around talking, I once or twice offered her a drink, but she said she couldn’t touch it; it would kill her. This categorical refusal set off ironic reverberations, for in the local lore of my childhood, black or “colored” “girls” were reputed to rifle the liquor cabinets when the lady of the house was out. “See, she doesn’t!” I wanted to hurl out to the ladies on my old block, now mostly dispersed to the outer boroughs in the wake of black neighbors. “They don’t all do it!” Then my own voice retorted indignantly, “What do you mean, they? Who are ‘they’? You sound just like them,” “them” in this case being the ladies. I hated my own smugness: caught between fixed, generic “theys” on either side, I alone seemed to occupy the mediating ground of reality, made unsteady by bad faith.
The plan was that I would work temporarily in my husband’s office, editing and writing reports, and use the phones and typewriter there to find a teaching job: at home I could hardly make a business call or type a resume without interruption. I postponed starting until I was certain Mattie had learned the routine and the children were used to her. For several days I stayed at home along with her and the girls, who were one and a half and five, doing the usual chores—lunches, diapers, shopping, trips to the park. There was an awkward excess of authority, two grown women tending two small girls, but I needed to feel sure. Maybe I was reluctant to take up my new independence, such as it was. Mattie evidently thought so. After the third day she turned monumentally to face me in the kitchen, hands on her hips, a Maillol in nurse’s garb, and asked in an ironic tone I would come to know intimately, “Well, are you going to keep hanging around here forever?” I was mortified. The children seemed to be getting along fine, possibly even better than with me. I left.
During those first few months, Mattie alluded often to Mrs. Zimmerman, her East Side apartment, her personal habits. Though I knew it was foolish, I felt jealous. It seemed Mattie’s loyalty and engagement remained over on the East Side with Mrs. Zimmerman while I, as the new employer, could never claim such attachment. I didn’t know if there was a Mr. Zimmerman and was too proud to ask; clearly there were no little Zimmermans. From Mattie’s allusions, Mrs. Zimmerman appeared to lead a leisurely, privileged life, staying in bed late into the morning, then going out to shop or play cards. I imagined Mattie was very fond of the indolent Mrs. Zimmerman and missed her, and that I could never hold an equal place in her affections. It seemed inconceivable that she would ever reminisce about me with the same zeal. Of course I didn’t want that blighted attachment, I reminded myself, but the reminders did little to change my feelings.
After a few months I found a teaching job for the fall, which meant that on two nights a week I wouldn’t get home until seven o’clock. I wondered if I might ask Mattie to cook dinner. So newly and unexpectedly an employer, I didn’t know the rules of the ruling class, wasn’t even sure what I was permitted to ask Mattie to do. Besides, she was moody, sometimes unperturbed in the face of domestic chaos, other times irritated by trifles. Her moodiness made me uneasy because it was so like my own. Knowing the vagaries of moods, I also knew that Mattie’s might have nothing to do with me or my household, but they intimidated me nonetheless, and then irritated me, for I knew at the very least that a member of the ruling class shouldn’t be timid in the face of an employee. I could tell when she walked in the door what kind of mood she was in, depending on whether she said a brief hello and went off to change into the distressing white uniform, or started talking right away about some curious scene she had observed on the bus, or what was in store for the day, or what she had cooked for Charles’s dinner the night before. Cooking Charles’s dinner, or “fixing his plate,” as she called it, seemed the key event in her day, a ritual of near-sacred proportions in which she was the high, the only, priestess and he the boy-god. After I got to know her better she would say, in the bad moods, what was on her mind: something to do with her health or Charles or her family, some real or imagined slight from a friend or a stranger—for she saw slights everywhere. Whatever it was, it was a relief to know. I wondered if people had to pussyfoot around me in the same way.
With trepidation, I raised the question of her cooking on the nights I taught. Mattie took my humble request in her imperturbable mood. She said she was a good cook, which was soon borne out by Southern-style dinners of hush puppies, greens, fried chicken. My older daughter, just past six then, commented that Mattie’s chicken was better than mine. Crisper. Or “crispier,” she probably said. I felt a faint pang, but mostly I was glad, secure in my new dignity as a college teacher. Here
was one more thing I didn’t have to do. The same thing happened with laundry. Gradually I realized Mattie would do most reasonable household tasks, and I thought how silly I had been to hesitate with the cooking and laundry. I got bolder: one night when friends stayed very late, I left the dirty dinner dishes. When Mattie found them heaped in the sink the next morning she was angry, and when she was angry she not only sulked but also spoke her mind, which seemed oddly redundant: in my case, one usually precluded the other.
“How you expect me to do all this and get them out to the park and everything else?” She had never bargained for dirty dishes from the night before, she said. I said I didn’t see, under the circumstances, how dirty dishes were different from other chores. But I never left them again. Thinking it over now, I suppose dishes from the previous night’s dinner party are different from the ordinary demands of daily life—they are the leavings of a sort of indulgence, and Mattie defined her work as dealing with necessities. The issue was not dishes, really, but who was doing the defining.
Insofar as Mattie or I had any formal ideas about raising children, on the other hand, they were identical, except mine were edged with anxiety mounting to a kind of panic over whether I could do it properly. While Mattie was anxious about a number of things—primarily health and money—she was serene with the children. She would stop any kind of housework to play games or read books or listen to them read to her; this was as I would have wished, but never thought to say. After she began cooking twice a week, I would come home from work to find her at the stove, the children dancing around her and chattering as they did with me; unlike me, she could both cook and be thoroughly engaged in their whimsy. Other days she would be sitting on the floor playing Chinese Checkers or coloring pictures or building fantastical structures with blocks, nor did she look abashed to be found at these pursuits, as I might have done in her place. She simply glanced up, said hello, and continued playing. I envied her certainty that whatever she was doing at the moment was the right thing to be doing. She never jumped up to rush home either, even though there was Charles’s plate to fix and, more important, Charles himself.
For she talked about Charles all the time, never saying what he was like exactly, just weaving his name in and out of conversation, making him an abiding, immanent presence. He was good, she said. “Charles is good,” she would say emphatically. “He’s good!” which might have meant all sorts of things but meant, I think, the simplest. I nursed an enormous curiosity to see this good man.
Just as I was prepared—or so I thought—to show Mattie the respect of not claiming or expecting to be her friend, I was prepared for her to regard my children as no more than a job, to be handled with care and sympathy, but a job nonetheless. Still, every mother secretly hopes the person watching over her children will love them. Mattie did. She came to regard them as hers to such a degree that had I been a different sort of person, I would have been jealous. But while I was jealous of her presumed affection for Mrs. Zimmerman, I was not jealous of her possessive love for my children, nor of theirs for her. On the contrary, it was a kind of relief. I didn’t have to be a mother all alone any more. My children knew quite well that I was their mother; meanwhile I was glad they had someone they could love as another mother in my absence, the capacity for love not being finite, like energy or patience. And since Mattie was so like me in the way she treated them, I felt it was not very different for them, whether they had her or me around. In a sense she was more like me than I was, for often I became too anxious to act on my enlightened attitudes and generous feelings, and reverted to old jittery ways.
It may seem unconvincing, and very likely politically incorrect, to say she loved them almost as a mother—as dubious as my old neighbors’ “just like one of the family” line. Nevertheless, she recognized exactly who they were, and recognition is the yeast of love. Each day she would report in detail on their doings and the fluctuations of their spirits in the same proud, sagacious tone my husband and I or their grandmothers used, thoroughly aware of and intrigued by every illustration of character and habit, every like, dislike and inclination, every virtue and flaw. And miraculously, she found all of this as noteworthy as I did. I had an ally of the most intimate sort, someone to share not merely the work but the secret, succulent pleasures of motherhood, and this alliance was my private and delectable comfort, like my older daughter’s blanket or the younger one’s thumb.
As I came to know Mattie, I found our likeness uncanny. I was hardly a drawler, but I too moved calmly and gave off an aura of ease, I had been told: only I knew the turbulence beneath. Yet in both of us, beneath the turbulence lay another, deeper calm, a sanity dependable as bread, which helped hold it in check. (I wouldn’t have gone to Kings County, only suffered and fretted and grown embittered.) The turbulence was sandwiched between the surface and the more sustaining calm; it swelled or lay dormant depending on our moods or situations, but the bread remained.
Since the children were not one of Mattie’s anxieties, her turbulence never invaded her feelings for them. When I was exasperated at my younger daughter’s stubbornness and burst out, “What are we going to do with her?” Mattie said, “I guess we just going to have to let her be.” This jolted me, not because the words were wise but because they were self-evident. I should have known that. I did know it, but my painful and tortuous anxiety about being a mother screened it from view.
Perhaps Mattie saw so clearly about letting things be because she had borne a child once, a boy named John, who died at birth as a result of complications from diabetes. She talked about John often, almost as if she had seen him grow and develop, gotten to know him. In her visions she did know him—he lived as a complete person, arrested forever at a few hours old. She noted his birthday and referred to him from time to time, dating events by his birth—before John was born, after John was born. I found this odd at first, even a little eerie, but once I got to know her it didn’t seem odd at all, and there was nothing eerie or mystical about it. John was important, that was the point; he was not to be dismissed or forgotten because he had not lived as long as other children. It came to seem natural to refer to him and I did too, asking whether certain events in her life had happened before or after John was born. And as my family got to know Charles, first in legend and then in the flesh, as we grew a connection as two families, John was part of the connection.
She often talked about the rest of her family too: her older sister Thelma, serious and steady, who worked in an office and lived in Mattie’s apartment building, and younger sister Lila Jean, barely twenty, who had recently come up from the South to live with Thelma. Mattie considered Lila Jean potentially wild and, now that she had hit the big city, in need of constant supervision. Lila Jean took the Broadway bus to her job downtown, and according to Mattie, indulged a regrettable tendency to make friends with bus drivers. Every few days Mattie would report ruefully, yet with a kind of pride, on Lila Jean’s escapades. Not far from my house was a diner where the Broadway bus terminated and the drivers congregated, and one day while we were taking a walk, Mattie pointed out this diner. “That’s where Lila Jean found out about life,” she said. Her younger brother, George, whom she described as handsome and irresistible, got married, and when the couple had a baby a year later, Mattie paid doting visits to Boston and brought home Polaroid snapshots to show me.
Over the years I met the family one by one, always with that curious stirring of anticipation you feel when people have been described in such detail that you know them already—their physical presence will merely touch up the picture. Thelma was indeed a homebody, huge and phlegmatic, Lila Jean was attractive in a snappy sort of way, George was smooth and charming. There was another brother down South whom I never met. Mattie’s sisters and brothers called her Sister, and they called their mother Miss Lucy. They portrayed Miss Lucy, still living in Alabama, as difficult, egotistical, and exacting, though when I met her years later she seemed a mild, harmless old lady. Mattie told me that was her p
ublic manner, I shouldn’t be fooled.
Mrs. Zimmerman’s name hardly ever came up now, which was highly gratifying; on the rare occasions when it did, I realized Mattie had not liked Mrs. Zimmerman at all. The zeal expressed in her reminiscences was the zeal of disapproval. She had found Mrs. Zimmerman lazy, demanding, inconsiderate, and generally disagreeable. I was very pleased. Since we felt the same about many people we knew in common—neighbors, children in the nursery school and their parents—I felt sure I would have shared her feelings about Mrs. Zimmerman.
By this time, Mattie always tacitly defined her own role, which beyond the routine housework included dealing firmly with repairmen as well as with the social life at nursery school. Rather than being “like part of the family,” she wished to take us as part of her family. She kept urging me to bring the children over so she could “keep” them for the weekend and have Charles meet them, and we finally arranged this—I wanted to meet the famous Charles the Good myself. I was curious, too, to see where Mattie lived, and how. She spoke pridefully of her apartment and furniture, and I suspected everything would be alarmingly neat and orderly.
We brought the kids up there on a Saturday morning: not the notoriously ruined South Bronx as, with a native Brooklynite’s geographical ignorance of the Bronx, I had imagined, but the East Bronx, a poor, slightly shabby but not slummy neighborhood. The three-room carpeted apartment, filled with puffy furniture, knickknacks, and framed, glassed-in family photos, was even more orderly than I anticipated: it made me wonder what her secret judgments about our household must be, for she had firm judgments about everything and everyone she encountered. No doubt she would have been as skeptical as I am about the current injunction to be “nonjudgmental.” She would have considered it a sacrifice of her best qualities of discernment.
Mattie’s furniture was more like real furniture—heavy, solid, and enduring—and more carefully chosen than our haphazard graduate school items. The bedroom was dominated by an enormous king-sized bed piled with soft fluffy pastel-colored quilts matching the floral window drapes. I was startled to see her living room furniture covered in plastic, just as the furniture in my parents’ house had been shielded through most of my childhood. That felt familiar, to me if not to the children.
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