A Place at the Table (40 page)

Nanny Rose has a way of making you feel that you are always late. You wouldn’t think such a little woman could be so intimidating.

Her hair is so black it looks almost blue in the midday sun. She must have colored it last night. I have asked her a million times to let Chevre do it, to give it a softer, more natural look, but she refuses, even though Chevre is the absolute best, able to transform my dull brown hair—embedded with lots of gray—into the glossy, rich color of polished mahogany. Nanny Rose says that hiring someone to fix her hair would be an unnecessary indulgence.

As much of it as she has, she’s really quite frugal with her money.

I drive up next to her, stop the car, lean over the passenger seat, and push her door open from the inside. She stands stiffly beside it. I sigh, turn off the ignition, and get out. Oh Lord. Here we go.

After officially opening the car door for her, I hold Gunther, her blond Pomeranian, who is apparently going with us to the funeral, while she lowers herself sideways into the seat.

“Come on back to Mother,” she says, holding out her hands for the dog.

Once Gunther is safely in her lap, she rotates her bottom until she is facing forward. I close her door and walk back around to the driver’s side. Once in my seat, I notice that Nanny Rose’s smell, a mix of floral perfume and Aqua Net, has already permeated the air.

“Hello, Louise,” she says. She tilts her cheek, almost imperceptibly, toward me and I lean over to kiss it. Her cheek feels dry and powdery beneath my lips. She has applied her rouge in a red circle, much as a clown would, although on Nanny Rose it doesn’t look clownish, just old-fashioned.

“Nanny Rose, I like your suit,” I say.

I do. She wears a pink-and-white-checked suit—ancient Chanel, I’m sure—nude pantyhose, and pink flats. As always she wears a thin gold chain around her neck with her diamond engagement ring and her wedding band hanging from it. Her fingers, which are bony and long, swell from arthritis. She runs her right hand roughly over Gunther’s spine. He emits a low growl.

“Where are the children?” she asks, peering around to look in the back of the car as if Caroline and Charles might be hiding below the seats. “Where is John Henry?”

“John Henry has a deposition in Birmingham, and Caroline—well—she got cast in the school play,
Steel Magnolias
, and she really didn’t feel that she could miss practice.”

Nanny Rose looks at me as if she just swallowed something that tastes terrible. “She can’t miss play practice for a funeral?”

“Apparently it was a huge deal that she got a lead part as a sophomore, and she’s just nervous about it. She doesn’t want to upset the director.”

“Do you think it’s appropriate for her to put so much time and energy into extracurricular activities when her grades are so dismal?”

I shrug my shoulders. Frankly, I have no idea what I should do about Caroline and her terrible attitude toward school, but I’d no sooner take acting away from her than I would throw her out on the street. That girl lives to perform.

“John Henry never had any scholastic difficulties,” says Nanny Rose. “He was an excellent student.”

“I know, Nanny Rose,” I say, flashing her a smile before focusing again on the road. “He and I met at Chapel Hill, remember?”

“Oh yes. Of course. Which house were you in?”

“Chi Omega,” I say. We have been over this a hundred times.

“Chi Omega is a good old house. Of course, Pi Beta Phi is best, isn’t it, Gunther?” She scratches the dog under his chin.

“Chi O was a top house,” I say, turning onto the entrance ramp of I-75 south.

“We’re taking the expressway?” asks Nanny Rose, her voice alarmed. Nanny Rose never drives on the expressway.

“Yes, ma’am,” I say. “Don’t worry, this will pop us right over to the church.”

“Thirty-three years Sandy worked for me and I never knew she was a Baptist.”

“Sandy didn’t talk much about her personal life,” I say.

Nanny Rose nods solemnly. “I know. That was one of the things I liked best about her. She always showed up on time and never called to say she was sick and couldn’t make it. I had this other girl working for me—Josephine. She’d come on the day Sandy was at your house, except she hardly ever came. There was always something the matter with either her child or her car. Not Sandy. Sandy was as reliable as the postman. More so!”

I glance at Nanny Rose and see that her eyes are pooling with tears. She reaches into her quilted clutch, pulls out a linen handkerchief, and dabs her eyes with it.

“I’ve slowed down,” she says. “I can’t do everything for myself the way I used to. Sandy, she used to help me in and out of the bath; she used to help me into my clothes. Why, it got so I’d even let her help me into my girdle! Now she’s up and left me and I’m not going to have anyone to help me get around anymore. You can’t help me, can you, Gunther?” she asks, lifting Gunther’s chin with her hand.

“I’m not going to be able to go to circle or to play bridge or to go have lunch at the Club now that my Sandy is gone. No one will be there to help me get myself together.”

Nanny Rose is crying in earnest now. She looks so small in the passenger seat. She looks like a child.

“You got yourself together today, didn’t you?” I ask. “Look at how nice you’re dressed.”

Nanny Rose blows her nose into the corner of her handkerchief and then folds it over.

“We’ll find you someone else,” I say. “Sandy might have a granddaughter or a niece who would like to come and work for you.”

I consider suggesting that Faye might be available, but I refrain. Though I’m sorry that Sandy died, I am not sorry to be done with sharing “help” with Nanny Rose. The less tangled my day-to-day life is with my mother-in-law, the better.

“No one will be able to replace her, Louise. You ought to know that.”

I have never heard Nanny Rose talk about Sandy this way. They were always so formal with each other. Nanny Rose still had Sandy wear a maid’s uniform, for goodness’ sake, a little starched black dress with a white apron. Nanny Rose was always “Mrs. Parker” to Sandy. Nanny Rose even had a little silver bell she would ring when she needed her.

Our exit should be coming up, but I’m not exactly sure which one it is. I ask Nanny Rose if she will look in the glove compartment for the directions. She starts pulling out all the folded maps that John Henry makes me keep in there.

“No, it’s just the directions John Henry wrote out for me. Look for a yellow sheet of legal paper.”

Nanny Rose fumbles around in there some more, pulling out several of Caroline’s CDs. One shows a close-up of a girl’s tiny pink shorts, the V of her crotch evident. Nanny Rose snorts.

“They let any hussy put her picture up nowadays, don’t they?” she says.

All I can think to say is “Yes, ma’am.”

I spot the directions in the corner of the glove compartment, and I reach across Nanny Rose to yank them out.

“You drive,” she says. “I’ll look at these.”

She straightens the directions with her hand. “Turn left on Peachtree Circle,” she says.

“Yes, ma’am,” I say, as patiently as I can. “I already did that. We’re all the way to where we exit off I-Twenty. Does it say which exit we want to take?”

Nanny Rose runs her eyes down the page. She rests the directions on top of Gunther’s head, making it look as if he is wearing a paper hat. “All right now. Get on I-Seventy-five south.”

“Yes, ma’am. We’ve done that.”

“Get onto I-Twenty west,” she says.

I have to hold myself back from snatching the directions out of her hands.

Gunther barks, knocking the directions off his head and onto the floor. Nanny Rose bops him on his wet nose. “Bad boy!” she says.

As she bends down to fish the directions off the floor, I pass the exit. That was it. That was where I was supposed to get off. Damn. John Henry warned me to follow his directions carefully. Otherwise, he said, it might be
Bonfire of the Vanities
all over again. I pull off at the next exit, hoping I will see an entrance ramp as soon as I do, so I can get back on I-20 heading east and backtrack to where I am supposed to be.

Once off the expressway, I notice right away that the billboards are smaller on this side of town and that they feature black people instead of white. On the side of the road, just in front of a strip mall with a Dollar General and a check-cashing business, is a man selling socks. His sign reads “100 pair for $5.” He sits behind a cardboard table, bags and bags of socks stacked on top of it.

If I bought everyone in my family a hundred pairs of socks, I wouldn’t have to do laundry for weeks.

“I believe John Henry Senior once owned some property over here,” says Nanny Rose. “A sign. He rented it for twenty dollars a month.”

It seems John Henry’s daddy owned some piece of every neighborhood in Atlanta.

“John Henry Senior and I used to drive by his properties after church,” says Nanny Rose. “Sometimes he would need to collect rent. Afterwards we’d stop for a Frosty Orange at the Varsity on our way back home. He called this area Colored Town, though I guess people don’t say that anymore.”

Where is that entrance ramp? Did I get so distracted by those damn socks that I drove right past it?

“I don’t think I’d use that expression at the funeral if I was you,” I say, looking for a good place to turn around.

Nanny Rose and I may well be the only white people there. I glance down at my brown Armani pants that I wear with a black silk shirt that ties in little bows around the cuffs. My outfit would pass muster at an Episcopalian funeral, but I start to worry I’m not dressed up enough for the Baptists.

I turn down a side street that appears residential. Nanny Rose holds Gunther up to the window, looking to see if they can spot any dogs on the sidewalk.

“Good heavens, Louise,” says Nanny Rose. “Why are you driving us through the slums?”

We pass a house stripped entirely of its siding. We pass a boarded-up apartment marked with “No Trespassing” signs. We pass unadorned lawns, an old Cadillac, and a sleepy-eyed man in overalls whose gaze follows our car until we have passed him.

“Are the doors locked?” Nanny Rose asks.

I wish I hadn’t already thought the same thing. I wish I didn’t get nervous driving through poor black neighborhoods. I wish I wasn’t relieved that the Lexus locks automatically, which is such an improvement over when you had to lock the door yourself, drawing attention to the act both by moving your hand to the lock and by the loud clicking noise that accompanied the action.

Up ahead by a stop sign is a group of black boys who must be around Caroline’s age. All of them wear long white T-shirts, which look as if they have been bleached and ironed, on top of jeans pulled down so low the seats cover their knees instead of their rears. All but one wears bright white sneakers. The other has on black sneakers with Velcro straps instead of laces, the straps flailing to the sides, intentionally left undone. A couple of the boys wear their hair braided into thick cornrows; one has an Afro with a comb stuck in it. It is he who looks down the street and notices our car coming their way.

I grip the steering wheel even tighter while telling myself to calm down. These are only boys, only children Caroline’s age, and there is no reason, just because they are black, that I should be afraid of them. We studied the perception versus the reality of actual danger once in Sunday school and how it is our internalized racism that makes us scared of those who are—in fact—quite often the most vulnerable and disadvantaged. Still, it’s not as if Nanny Rose and I blend into the neighborhood. It’s not as if we are driving a rusty old car. No, we are driving the new silver Lexus that John Henry gave me for my birthday.

“I would just drive on through that stop sign if I were you,” says Nanny Rose. “A group of boys is never up to any good.”

The boys spread out, watching us come toward them. I tap the brakes. As we roll toward the group I lock eyes with the one who has the comb stuck in his hair. He raises his hand as if he’s waving me on by, then just before I drive past him, he steps in front of the car. I swerve, barely avoiding contact, and drive through the intersection without stopping. From my rearview mirror I watch him laugh and slap the hands of his friends.

•  •  •

T
HE SERVICE WAS
scheduled to begin at two. It’s almost two thirty by the time we finally find the church. The small parking lot is full, but we find a space across the street. Nanny Rose takes her compact out of her purse and reapplies lipstick while I wait for her outside the car. It is so hot I am beginning to sweat. I hope there are no rings of perspiration seeping through my silk top. When Nanny Rose has finished reapplying her lipstick she looks up at me through the window, indicating that I may open her door. When I do, she rotates her bottom once again so that her legs are sticking out. She holds Gunther in one arm and grabs my hand with the other. I pull her to her feet. It always surprises me when I stand next to Nanny Rose that she is a half foot shorter than I am.

Nanny Rose fishes Gunther’s leash out of her purse, attaches it to his collar, and puts him down on the hot sidewalk. His toe-nails make a fast little clicking noise as we cross the street.

The church is a plain white brick building, a perfect rectangle with a pitched roof supporting a metal cross. The cross looks like a lightning rod. Nanny Rose, Gunther, and I walk to the front door. Above it “Jesus Is the Answer” is painted in red, blocky letters. A short black woman, wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat and white gloves, holds the door open for us.

“Welcome,” she says. “I’m Miss Ella Watson, Mr. Brown’s next-door neighbor. I’m also on the Mother Board here at Mount Zion.”

“How wonderful,” says Nanny Rose. “I’m Mrs. John Henry Parker Senior, and this is my daughter-in-law, Mrs. John Henry Parker Junior. Sandy worked for our family for over thirty years.”

“Call me Louise,” I say.

“Well, it sure is good of y’all to come,” says Miss Watson. “And Sandy looks just as peaceful as can be, praise God. The undertaker did a fine job, a fine job indeed. Pastor’s not here yet, so there’s still time to look at the body.”