Her Own Place (15 page)

On the Saturday of the dinner party, Mae Lee woke long before daylight. She couldn't go back to sleep, but she stayed in bed for a while anyway. For the rest of the day she was so busy pulling out dresses and shoes, trying to decide what to wear, that she didn't even think about how nervous she was becoming.

In the evening, Ellabelle drove Mae Lee to Margaret Wade's house. “Have a good time,” Ellabelle said, “and don't worry too much over missing the Atlanta Braves game tonight.”

Mae Lee made a weak smile. “Be sure to let me know if the Braves win.”

As soon as she walked inside the house, Bethel Petty loudly
announced, “Mae Lee's here!” Mae Lee glanced about the room, her thoughts confirmed. Just as she'd suspected, there was only one black person there, at least in that room—herself. At first she felt a bit uneasy, but it passed when Deborah Collins rushed to her side. “Oh, Mae Lee,” she began excitedly, “let me tell you what happened down at the hospital yesterday. Remember the patient in Room 103?”

Mae Lee smiled. “Good old Mr. Rayburn?”

“Yes, here's what happened. He decided he was going home, and guess what? He made it all the way to the front door with nothing on but his hospital gown and his medical bracelet before anyone noticed that he had left his room. The poor dear man stood there at the door—” Deborah blushed, “—with his gown wide open in the back.” She shook her head, “I would have died, Mae Lee, if I'd been working on the first floor and let that happen.”

Mae Lee hadn't been the least bit hungry when she left home, but when she tasted the fork-tender roast beef and the angel biscuits, her appetite returned.

“No wonder they call them angel biscuits; they are heavenly,” Linda Salter said.

Margaret Wade smiled, “Theldocia Sampson made them. She makes the best biscuits in the world.”

I should have known one of us was in the kitchen, Mae Lee thought. Otherwise the food would have never tasted this good. Mae Lee knew Theldocia, but didn't know that she cooked for the Wades. At least Margaret Wade had called her by her last name as well as her first.

Mae Lee also thought that if Margaret Wade didn't put away
the big, porcelain, kerchief-clad, red-lipped black mammy doll in her kitchen cupboard, Theldocia would be sure to just happen to break it into a million pieces one day, then moan ever so pitifully, “Oh, Lord have mercy, Miss Wade, I sure didn't aim to break it. Maybe we can glue her back together.” Mae Lee had spotted the doll right in front of the dishes when Margaret Wade opened the cabinet for a small plate. She had then glanced at Mae Lee standing there and closed the door so quickly she didn't even take the time to remove a plate. Later Mae Lee wished she could have thought to say “Gotcha.”

Mae Lee stayed on for quite some time with her hospital friends.

“I wonder how old Mr. Jonas is doing today?” Mabel Griffin remarked. “He was having trouble after all that surgery on his knee.”

“He's got to learn to use his walker,” Ellen Smith said. “He's awfully impatient, you know.”

“He was walking fine yesterday afternoon,” Mae Lee told them. “He went all the way down the hall and back.”

“Did you have to help him?” Ellen Smith asked.

“Just a little. He couldn't turn himself around too good. But once he got himself lined up he was all right.”

“I wish,” Helen Davis declared, “that Dr. Jervey could be a little more patient sometimes when he tells them how to use the walker. He doesn't realize how hard it is for some people to adapt to using one. Especially if they've had hip surgery.”

“You're right,” Mae Lee agreed. “Sometimes I feel like telling that man, you just slow up now, and make sure they really understand what you're telling them. You might think there's
nothing to it, but they've never done it before, or even thought about doing it until now!”

“Of course we mustn't
dare
criticize the medical staff, you know,” Mabel Griffin said. “Never, no never!”

Everybody laughed. “Well, I'd certainly like to criticize them sometimes,” Helen Davis agreed.

They talked about the different staff doctors, and other things, the same things they usually talked about at work. Helen Davis remarked that she and her husband were driving to Atlanta for the weekend to see the Braves play. It turned out that Bethel Petty was an expert on that subject, too. “They're playing the Cubs this weekend,” she declared, “so maybe they can win two games in a row for a change. If they can only score lots of runs, that is. They lose all the close games.”

“That's what my son says, too,” Mae Lee said. “He says whenever they have to go to the bullpen it's all over.”

“Your son's absolutely right,” agreed Bethel Petty.

It was July. Outside beyond the cool corridors of the hospital the weather was blazing hot. Jeanne Nelson asked Mae Lee to work in the gift shop while she went for a cup of tea. “It's that English part of me,” she explained once.

It was alien to Mae Lee how anyone could even think of hot tea on a hot summer day.

Then she thought about the lemon sweets her mama had made for her “silver teas.” She'd called them lemon biscuits and Mae Lee remembered after all that her mama would serve them with hot tea and homemade ice cream in the summer months, after the farm women finished picking wild blackberries. She would have her home-canned berries, jams, and jellies all in plain sight for the ladies to see. Mae Lee grew up thinking that showing off her efforts was the only reason for the silver tea.

It got Mae Lee to thinking. Since the ladies at the hospital seemed to be so curious about the silver teas, Mae Lee decided to invite them to one. She'd been going to their parties
as they gave them, but she had hesitated to give a party of her own. It wasn't that she was afraid of giving a party; she knew she could throw a good one. It was rather that she felt that the hospital ladies would feel obliged to come, whether they wanted to or not, for fear of insulting her. But as she thought about it some more, it seemed to her that it was the same old thing holding her back as before, as if someone somewhere was telling her what
she,
Mae Lee Barnes, ought and ought not to do. If she were not the only black member of the group, wouldn't she have long since given a party for her friends, just as they had invited her to their parties? If so, then why should she allow that to prevent her from taking her turn?

She talked to Taylor about it. “Mama, you're right,” he said. “Look at it this way. The only way it's ever going to come to be so that those ladies won't feel they have to come to a party when you give it, is for you to start giving parties just like they do. The first time or two it might be a little awkward, but after that nobody will think twice about it. Including you,” he added.

Even so, when the day came for the silver tea, she was nervous. It was a blazing hot afternoon, it seemed as if she'd made a deliberate effort to pick the hottest day in the year for it. She'd asked Taylor and his wife, Bettina, and her daughter Annie Ruth to come down and give her a hand.

“I'd ask one of the other girls,” she'd said, “but they all live so far away.” Still, Annie Ruth asked her sister Amberlee to come anyway. They all hurried about in the midafternoon heat, getting the food ready and tables set up. Mae Lee was nervous, very nervous. She kept biting her lower lip.

“Annie Ruth,” she called out, “where is Amberlee? The glass bowls for the ice cream are still in the cupboard.”

“Helping Taylor with the ice cream, Mama.”

She opened the back screen door. “Amberlee, help Taylor to hurry up and get another churn of ice cream cranked up and going. If I wasn't going to use all those ice-cream churns, I wouldn't have borrowed them. Don't lag behind, children. Taylor, repack that last churn with ice. You didn't allow enough time for it to ripen to suit my taste.”

“We're clean out of ice, Mama. Better have somebody run and get some,” Taylor called back.

“Somebody help Taylor,” she urged her daughters. “Help me get this little silver tea together. When I do something I want it done right. I sure wish I'd made my same strawberry and lemon tarts. I couldn't let myself do what I know how to do best. No, I had to up and show off when I was invited to Their little dinners and parties. I had to say I just
luhhved
to bake, and was even fool enough to claim I always used the same old recipe handed down from my mama for my delicious lemon biscuits. And bragged how my mama used to serve them on summer afternoons with hot tea and homemade ice cream. The truth is, Mama did make the things, but I've never made a lemon biscuit in my life. If I hadn't found that recipe Mama used, I think I would have died.”

Annie Ruth shook her head. “Poor Mama.”

Mae Lee was near tears. She stood wringing her hands, “How I got myself into a mess like this I'll never know. Only the Lord knows. But if the good Lord pulls me out of this crack, I'll never get into another one, that's for certain.”

She remembered her lemon biscuits in the hot oven. She rushed to the stove. They hadn't burned.

“Slow down, Mama,” Amberlee urged. “You're gonna mess around and have a stroke. You are putting yourself under too much pressure . . .”

“And us, too,” Annie Ruth cut in.

“Mama,” Amberlee continued, “you don't need to stress yourself out for that hospital volunteer group. I don't care if they are white women.”

“Yes,” Annie Ruth agreed, “you never did knock yourself out with anything this fancy for us.” She turned to look at Mae Lee. “I hope you told the fancy ladies how to get here, Mama. Take Center Street all the way through town, just short of ‘where the dirt road begins' in ‘colored town.'”

Amberlee and Bettina laughed.

Mae Lee didn't think it was particularly funny. She turned to Bettina and Annie Ruth struggling to center a cloth on a table. “Annie Ruth, tell your mama that you are not going to put that wrinkled tablecloth on a table. Tell me that you are going to iron it first.”

Taylor entered the house and answered a ringing phone. He cupped his hand over the receiver, “Mama, it's Miss Reid. I don't think she's coming. She says she's not feeling well.”

Mae Lee wiped her hands and took the phone. “I understand,” she repeated, “I understand. Now, if you take a turn for the better, please feel free to come on over at any time, you know you are more than welcome.”

She hung up the phone and returned to her cooking. “Bettina,” she said, “make some sort of sandwich for Nora Reid.
She'll be here shortly claiming she'll die of hunger if she doesn't put a little something or other in her stomach right away.”

“But, Mama Barnes,” Bettina protested, “I thought Taylor said Nora Reid was sick.”

“Sick, my foot,” Mae Lee grunted. “Nora Reid wouldn't miss this silver tea unless she was dead.” She smiled, adding, “and you know something, I wouldn't be surprised if even then she'd come. All Nora wanted was for me to beg her. And did you hear me beg? Mae Lee Barnes doesn't beg anyone, for anything!”

Mae Lee put her right hand on her hip and with a folded newspaper softly fanned her face. “If black women are going to mingle socially with white women, you
know
Nora Reid, our proper retired black schoolteacher, will be here trying way too hard to impress, making sure she finds a reason to use every big word she knows. She thinks she's needed because black people won't be properly represented unless she is present.”

“African-American, Mama,” Annie Ruth corrected.

Mae Lee glared at her daughter and shook her head, “Listen, I'm just barely getting used to black, Annie Ruth.”

When Amberlee walked into the kitchen her mother looked over the eyeglasses on her nose and studied her dress. It was the kind of cotton dress that would have been starched, ironed, and worn over a cotton underskirt when she was that age. Now it hung on her daughter's body soft and unironed, topped by hair combed to look a little uncombed.

Mae Lee didn't have to speak her opinion for Amberlee to hear it. “Yes, Mama,” she intoned, “things have changed. What
you wouldn't have been caught dead in is now downright fashionable.”

“You should have at least put on a pair of pantyhose, Amber-lee,” said Mae Lee.

She glanced out the window at Annie Ruth and Bettina in the yard. They were both bare-legged, with smooth, shaved, hairless legs, like the legs of older women that no longer required shaving.

Amberlee rushed from the kitchen and then back. She pointed to a young man dressed in black, unloading folding chairs from a black hearse. “Mama,” she gasped, “he's bringing funeral home chairs to our house!”

Mae Lee gave her youngest child a “so what?” look. “Who else would have that many chairs that matched? Now go round up Annie Ruth and Bettina and tell them to finish setting up before Ellabelle gets here. I don't want her to have to help. Today she's company. Tell them to come into the kitchen as soon as they finish. I have a little gift for each of my girls.”

When the daughters were done, Mae Lee proudly handed each one of them a clear plastic bag with the five-dollar “First Lady Pearls” she'd ordered inside. Her daughters exchanged quick glances.

“Well, put them on,” Mae Lee urged. “That's why I ordered them. There was a limit—four per address, but since I ordered early, they allowed me to go over the limit. So I ordered one for Bettina. I also ordered me one, too. I still can't get over how much that money order cost.”

“Mama, you have a checking account,” Annie Ruth asked. “Why didn't you send a check?”

“I forgot where I put my checks. I couldn't find them anyplace.” She stopped short. “Lordy, Lordy. I forgot all about Ellabelle. I don't always remember her. If Ellabelle asks where you all got your matching three-strand pearls, don't lie—but don't tell her where you got them.”