“He knows I love him,” she said, “that I couldn’t help it.”
Valerian shouted then, at the top of his throat, “Why does he love you?”
Margaret closed her blue-if-it’s-a-boy blue eyes. “I don’t know.”
Now the tears came. Not all at once. Not in the rush of blood he anticipated, longed for; rather a twilight glimmer, a little mercury in the eyes that grew brighter and brighter. That was the beginning and he knew there would be more of them. For now he would settle for this bright burning.
Margaret opened her eyes and looked into his. “Hit me,” she said softly. “Hit me, Valerian.”
His shuddering fingers went wild at the thought of touching her, making physical contact with that skin. His whole body recoiled. “No,” he said. “No.”
“Please. Please.”
“You have to. Please, you have to.”
Now he could see the lines, the ones the make-up had shielded brilliantly. A thread here and there and the roots of her hair were markedly different from the rest. She looked real. Not like a piece of Valerian candy, but like a person on a bus, already formed, fleshed, thick with a life which is not yours and not accessible to you.
“Tomorrow,” he said. “Perhaps tomorrow.”
Every day she asked him, every day he answered, “Tomorrow, perhaps tomorrow.” But he never did and she was hard-pressed to think of a way to ease their mutual sorrow.
ON THE FIRST DAY of the year, Margaret pushed open the kitchen door. Ondine was there as she always was; the braids Margaret had snatched were folded quietly now across her head. Margaret, having had the dream she ought to, felt clean, weightless as she walked through the doors and stood at the oak table. Ondine was napping, her head resting on the back of a chair, her feet resting on another. When she heard the grunt of the door hinges, she woke at once and stood up, alert.
“No, no. Sit back down, Ondine.”
Ondine shoved her feet into her moccasins and continued to stand. “Can I get you something?” she asked out of habit and out of a need to do what was wanted of her and get the woman out of the kitchen.
“No. No, thank you.” Margaret sat down and did not seem disturbed by the painful silence Ondine was keeping after the refusal. She looked past the black woman’s silhouette to a place in the shutters where the sky showed through.
“I knew you knew,” she said. “I always knew you knew.”
Ondine sat down without answering.
“You loved my son, didn’t you?” It was more a statement than a question.
“I love anything small that needs it,” said Ondine.
“I suppose I should thank you for not saying anything, but I have to tell you that it would have been better, Ondine, if you had. It’s terrible living in the same house with your own witness. But I think I understand it. You wanted me to hate you, didn’t you? That’s why you never said anything all those years. You wanted me to hate you.”
“No, I didn’t. You…you wasn’t a whole lot on my mind.”
“Oh, yes I was, and you felt good hating me, didn’t you? I could be the mean white lady and you could be the good colored one. Did that make it easier for you?”
Ondine did not answer.
“Anyway, I came in here to tell you that I’m sorry.”
Ondine sighed. “Me too.”
“We could have been friends, Ondine. Like at first when I used to come in your kitchen and eat your food and we laughed all the time. Didn’t we, Ondine? Didn’t we use to laugh and laugh. Didn’t we? I have it right, don’t I?”
“You got it right.”
“But you wanted to hate me, so you didn’t tell.”
“There was nobody to tell. It was woman stuff. I couldn’t tell your husband and I couldn’t tell mine.”
“Why didn’t you tell me? I mean why didn’t you scream at me, stop me, something. You knew and you never said a word.”
“I guess I thought you would let us go. If I told Sydney he might tell Mr. Street and then we’d be out of a job—a good job. I don’t know now what I thought, to tell the truth. But once I started keeping it—then it was like my secret too. Sometimes I thought if you all let me go there won’t be anyone around to take the edge off it. I didn’t want to leave him there, all by himself.”
“You should have stopped me.”
“You should have stopped yourself.”
“I did. I did stop myself after a while, but you could have stopped me right away, Ondine.”
Ondine put the heels of her hands on her eyelids. When she removed them, her eyes were red. She blew out a breath and she was old. “Is that my job too? To stop you?”
“No. It’s not your job, Ondine. But I wish it had been your duty. I wish you had liked me enough to help me. I was only nineteen. You were—what—thirty? Thirty-five?”
