Ellen Gilchrist, page 14
Nora Jane had driven right by the sign pointing to the Oakland Bridge. The little car hummed beneath her fingers. She straightened her shoulders. She kept on going. “All right,” she said. “I’ll try it. I’ll give it a try.”
“I wish to hell the Brundage was open. You’ve got to see this Buddha. It’s unbelievable. It’s only ten inches high. You can see every wrinkle. You can see every rib. The jade’s the color of celadon. Oh, lighter than that. It’s translucent. It just floats there.”
“Don’t talk so much until I get through the gate,” she said. She almost sideswiped a black Mazda station wagon. There was a little boy in the back seat wearing a crown. He put his face to the window and waved.
“Did you see that?” Nora Jane said. “Did you see what he’s wearing?” She drove through the toll gate and out onto the bridge. She was into it now. She was doing it.
“Loosen up,” Freddy said. “Loosen up on the wheel. This Buddha I was telling you about, N.J. It’s more the color of seafoam. You’ve never seen jade like this. It’s indescribable. It’s got a light of its own. Well, we’ll never make it today. I know what, we’ll stop in Chinatown and have dinner. I want you to have some Dim Sum. And tomorrow, tomorrow we’re going to Mendocino. The hills there are like yellow velvet this time of year. You’ll want to put them on and wear them.”
I haven’t been to confession in two years, Nora Jane was thinking. What am I doing in this car?
The Mazda passed them again. The boy with the crown was at the back window now. Looking out the open window of the tailgate, eating a package of Nacho Cheese Flavored Doritos and drinking a Coke. He held up a Dorito to Nora Jane. He waved it out the window in the air. The Mazda moved on. A metallic green Buick took its place. In the front seat was a young Chinese businessman wearing a suit. In the back seat, a Chinese gentleman wearing a pigtail.
A plane flew over, trailing a banner. HAPPY 40TH, ED AND DEB, the banner said. Things were happening too fast. “I just saw an airplane fly by trailing breadcrumbs,” she said.
“What did you say?” he said. “What did you just say?”
“I said… oh, never mind. I was thinking too many things at once. I’m going over there, Freddy, in the lane by the water.” She put the turn signal on and moved over into the right-hand lane. “Now don’t talk to me anymore,” she said, squeezing the steering wheel, leaning into it, trying to concentrate on the girders and forget the water. “Don’t say any more until I get this car across this bridge.”
MISS CRYSTAL’S MAID NAME TRACELEEN, SHE ’S TALKING, SHE’S TELLING EVERY THING SHE KNOWS
ANOTHER TIME, Miss Crystal did a real bad thing at a wedding. It was her brother-in-law’s wedding. He was marrying this girl, her daddy was said to be the richest man in Memphis. The Weisses were real excited about it. As much money as they got I guess they figure they can always use some more. So the whole family was going up to Memphis to the wedding, all dressed up and ready to show off what nice people they were. Then Miss Crystal got to get in all that trouble and have it end with the accident.
What they want to call the accident. I was along to nurse the baby, Crystal Anne, age three. I was right there for everything that happened. So don’t tell me she fall down the stairs. Miss Crystal hasn’t ever fall down in her life, drunk or sober, or have the smallest kind of an accident.
No, she didn’t fall down any stairs. She’s sleeping now. I got time to talk. Doctor Wilkins be by in a while. Maybe he’ll have better news today. Maybe we can take her home by Monday. If I ever get her out of here I’ll get her off those pills they give her. Get her thinking straight.
How it started was. We were going off to Memphis to this wedding, Miss Crystal and Mr. Manny and her brother-in-law, Joey, that was the groom, and Mr. Lenny, that runs the store, and Mr. and Mrs. Weiss, senior, the old folks, and me and Crystal Anne and some of Joey’s friends. We took up half the plane. Everybody started drinking Bloody Marys the minute the plane left New Orleans. They even made me have one. “Drink up, Traceleen,” Mr. Weiss said. “Joey’s marrying the richest girl in Memphis.”
Miss Crystal started flirting with Owen as soon as the plane left the ground. This big Spanish-looking boy that was Joey’s roommate up at Harvard. She’d already seen him up at Joey’s graduation in the spring, set her eye on him up there. Well, first thing she does is fix it so she can sit by him on the plane. Me sitting across from them with the baby. Mr. Manny up front, talking business with his daddy.
Owen’s telling Miss Crystal all about how he goes scuba diving down in Mexico. Her hanging on to every word. “I’m going to start a dive school down there as soon as I get the cash,” he said. “I’m quitting all that other stuff. It’s no good to work your ass off all your life. No, I want a life in the water.” He poured himself another Bloody Mary. Miss Crystal had her hand on his leg by then. Like she was this nice older lady that was a friend of his. He pretend like he don’t notice it was there. Baby climbing all over me, messing up my uniform.
“To hell with graduate school at my age,” Owen was saying. “I’m too big for the desks. I’m going back to Guadalajara the minute this wedding’s over. Get me a wicker swing and sit down to enjoy life. You come on down and see me. You and Manny fly on down. I’ll teach you to dive. You just say the word.” Miss Crystal was lapping it up. I could see her fitting herself into his plans. It had been a bad spring around our place. It was time for something to happen.
“Go to sleep now,” I’m saying to Crystal Anne. “Get you a little sleep. Lots of excitement coming up. You cuddle up by Traceleen.”
The minute the plane landed there was this bus to take us to the hotel. I’ll say one thing for people in Memphis. They know how to throw a wedding. The bus took us right to the Peabody Hotel. They had two floors reserved. Hospitality rooms set up on each floor, stayed open twenty-four hours. You could get anything you wanted from sunup to sundown. Mixed drinks, Cokes, baby food, Band-Aids, sweet rolls, homemade brownies. I’ve never seen such a spread.
The young people took over one hospitality room and the old people took up the other. Me and Crystal Anne sort of moving from one to the other, picking up compliments on her hair, getting Cokes, watching TV. I was getting sixty dollars a day for being there. I would have done it free. Every now and then I’d put on Crystal Anne’s little suit and take her up to the pool. That’s where Miss Crystal was hanging out. With Owen. He was loaded when he got off the plane and he was staying loaded. He was lounging around the pool telling stories about going scuba diving. Finally he sent out for some scuba diving equipment to put on a demonstration. That’s the type wedding this was. Any of the guests that wanted anything they just called up and someone brought it to them.
It was getting dark by then. The sun almost down. Someone comes up with the scuba diving equipment and Owen puts it on and starts scuba diving all around the pool. He’s trying to get Miss Crystal to go in with him but she won’t do it. “Come on, chicken,” he saying. “It’s not going to hurt your hair. You’ll be hooked for life the minute you go down. It’s like flying in water.”
“I can’t, Owee,” she says. That’s what she’s calling him now. “I’m in the wedding party. I can’t get wet now.” Well, in the end he coaxed her into the pool, everyone hanging around the edge watching and cheering them on. All these bubbles coming up from the bottom where I guess she is. Mr. Manny standing with his back to the wall smoking cigarette after cigarette and not saying anything. Miss Crystal and Owen stayed underwater a long time. Crystal Anne, she’s screaming, “Momma, Momma, Momma,” because she can’t see her in the water so I take her to the lobby to see the ducks to calm her down.
The ducks in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel are famous all over the world. There’s even a book about them you can buy. What they do is they keep about thirty or forty ducks up on the roof and they bring them down four or five at a time and let them swim around this pool in the lobby. I was talking to this man who takes care of them and brings them up and down in the morning and the afternoon. We were on the elevator with him. He told Crystal Anne she shouldn’t chase them or put her hands on them like some bad children did. “You have to stay back and just look at them,” he said. “Just be satisfied to watch them swim around.” So we go with him to take the old ducks out and put the new ducks in and that satisfies her and she forgets all about her momma up in the pool drowning herself to show off for Owen.
I kept seeing Mr. Manny standing against that wall with a drink in his hand. Not letting anything show. None of the Weisses let anything show. They like to act like nothing’s going on. They been that way forever. My auntee worked for the old folks. She says they were the same way then.
Then it’s dark and everyone go to their rooms to get ready for the rehearsal dinner. Miss Crystal’s in the bathroom trying to do something with her hair. She can’t get it to suit herself. She’s wearing this black lace dress with no back in it and no brassiere. And some little three-inch platform shoes with that blond hair curling all over her head like it do when she can’t get it to behave. Like I said, it’d been a long spring. All that bad time with Mr. Alan breaking her heart. Now Owen.
So she finishes dressing and then she orders a martini from room service. She’s in such a good mood. I haven’t seen her like that in a long time. We’re in two rooms hooked together with a living room. I had on my black gabardine uniform with a white lace apron and Crystal Anne’s in white with lace hairbows. We should have had our picture taken.
“Don’t start in on martinis now,” Mr. Manny said. “Let’s just remember this is Joey’s wedding and try to act right.” I feel sorry for him sometimes. He’s always having to police everything. Come from being a lawyer, I guess. Always down at the law courts and the jail and the coroner’s office and all.
“I’m acting right,” she says. “I’m acting just fine.”
“Don’t start it, Crystal.” I move in the other room at that.
“I’m not starting a thing,” she said. “You started this conversation. And you really shouldn’t smoke so much, Manny. The human lungs will only take so much abuse.”
Owen was waiting for us at the door of the dining room. He was really loaded now, laughing and joking at everything that happened. He was wearing this wrinkled-looking white tuxedo, big old shoulders like a football player about to bust out of it. He had half the young people at the wedding following him everywhere he’d go. Like he was a comet or something. That’s the kind of man Miss Crystal goes for. I don’t know why she ever married Mr. Manny to begin with. They not each other’s type. It’s a mismatch. Anybody could see that.
Well, this night was bound for disaster. It didn’t take a fortune-teller to see that. I found Crystal Anne some crackers to chew on and in a little while everyone found their places and sat down. A roomful of people. I guess half of Memphis must have been there. They were all eating and making speeches about how happy Joey and his bride was going to be. She was a wispy little thing. But it was true about the money. Her daddy owns the Trumble Oil Company that makes mayonnaise. All her old boyfriends read poems they wrote about being married and Joey’s friends all got up and talked about what a great guy he was. All except Owen, he got up and recited this poem about getting drunk coming home from a fair and not being able to find his necktie the next day. It got a lot of applause and Miss Crystal was beaming with pride. I’m sitting by Crystal Anne feeding her. The bride had insisted Crystal Anne must come to everything.
Then the band came and the dancing started. Mr. Manny, he’s sitting way down the table talking to the bride’s father about business, just like he’s an old man, making jokes about how much the wedding must have cost. I felt sorry for him again. His jokes couldn’t take a patch on that poem Owen recited.
Everybody ended up in the hospitality room about one o’clock in the morning. All except Miss Crystal and Owen. They’re in his hotel room talking about scuba diving and listening to the radio. They’ve got this late night station on playing dixieland and I’m in there to put a better look on it. Crystal Anne’s asleep beside me. Still in her dress. “Night diving’s the best,” Owen is telling us. “That’s where you separate the men from the boys.” He’s lying on the bed with his hands behind his head. Miss Crystal’s sprawled all over a chair with her legs hooked over the side.
So Mr. Manny comes in. He’s tired of pretending he isn’t mad. “Get up, Crystal,” he says. “Come on, you’re going to our room.”
“I’m talking to Owen,” she says. “He’s going to take us diving in Belize.”
“Crystal, you’re coming to our room.”
“No, I’m not. I’m staying here. Go get me a drink if you haven’t got anything to do.” She look at him like he’s some kind of servant. So he moves into the room and takes hold of her legs and starts dragging her. Owen, he stands up and says, stop dragging her like that, but Mr. Manny, he keeps on doing it. Miss Crystal, she’s too surprised to do a thing. All I’m thinking about is the dress. Brussels lace. He’s going to ruin the dress.
Then Mr. Manny he drag her all the way out into the hall and to the top of the stairs and they start yelling at each other. You’re coming with me, he’s saying, and she’s saying, oh, no, I am not because I can not stand you. Then I heard this scream and I come running out into the hall and Miss Crystal is tumbling down those stairs. I heard her head hit on every one. Mr. Manny, he’s just standing there watching her. You should have seen the expression on his face.
They don’t put lawyers in jail for nothing they do. Otherwise, why isn’t Mr. Manny in jail for that night? It’s been two months since I ran down those stairs after Miss Crystal and hold her head in my lap while I waited for the ambulance to come. I’ve still got my apron, stained with her blood. And she’s still in this hospital, crazy as a bat and they’re feeding her pills all day and she don’t recognize me sometimes when I go to visit. Other times she does and seem all right but you can’t make any sense talking to her. All she want to do when she’s awake is talk about how her head is hurting or wait for some more pills or make long-distance calls to her brother, Phelan, begging him to forgive her for turning his antelopes loose and come and bring her a gun to shoot herself with. And Mr. Manny. He’s got her where he wants her now, hasn’t he? Any day when he gets off work he can just drive down to Touro and there she is, right where he left her, laying in bed, waiting for him to get there. And my auntee Mae, that worked for the old people, the Weisses that are dead now. She says that’s just how it started with LaureLee Weiss that ended up in Mandeville forever because she wouldn’t be a proper wife to old Stanley Weiss. They ended up putting electricity in her head to calm her down. My auntee has been around these people a long time. She knows the past of them.
And there she is, Miss Crystal, that has been as good to me as my own sister. Lying on that bed. I’ll get her out of there.
Someday. Somehow. Meantime, she say, Traceleen, write it down. You got to write it down. I can’t see to read and write. So you got to do it for me.
How to write it down? Number 1. Start at the beginning. That’s what Mark advise me to do. So here goes. I remember when Miss Crystal first came to New Orleans as a bride. It was her second time around. There was this call from Mrs. Weiss, senior, and she say, Traceleen, Mr. Manny has taken himself a bride and I would like you to go around and see if you can be the maid. She has a boy she’s bringing with her. She’s going to need some help.
It’s a day in November and I dress up in my best beige walking dress and go on around to Story Street which is where they have their new house. She’s waiting on the porch and takes me inside and we sit down in the living room and have a talk and she tells me all about her love affair with Mr. Manny and how her son has been against the marriage but she decided to go on and do it because where they was living in Mississippi he was going to school with a boy that had a Ku Klux Klan suit hanging in his closet and they had meetings in the yard of the school and no one even told them not to. Rankin County, Mississippi.
Then I tell her all about myself and where I am from and she says are you sure you want to go on being a maid, you seem too smart for this work and I says yes, that’s all I know how to do. She says, well, I can be the maid for a while but I’ll have to get some education part time and let her pay for it because she doesn’t believe in people being maids. I’ve got a lot of machines, she says. You can run the machines. When would you like to start?
I’ll start in the morning, I said. I’ll be over around nine.
The next day was Saturday but Miss Crystal hadn’t even unpacked all the boxes yet and I wanted to help with that so I’d know where things were in the kitchen. I got off the streetcar about a quarter to nine and come walking up Story Street and the first person I run into is King Mallison, junior, Miss Crystal’s son by her first marriage. My auntee Mae had already told me what he done at the wedding so I was prepared. Anyway, there he was, looking like a boy in a magazine, he’s so beautiful, look just like an angel. He’s out on the sidewalk taking his bicycle apart. He’s got it laid out all over the front yard. It’s this new bicycle Mr. Manny gave him for a present for coming to live in New Orleans.
“I’m Traceleen,” I said. “I’m going to be the maid.”
“I’m King,” he said. “I’m going to be the stepchild.”
So that is how that is and a week later the bicycle is still all over the front yard and there’s about ten more taken apart in the garage and King says he’s started a bicycle repair shop but it turns out it’s a bicycle stealing ring and Mr. Manny’s going crazy, he thinks he’s got a criminal on his hands and Miss Crystal’s second marriage is on the rocks. One catch. By then she is pregnant with Crystal Anne.
