“She’s coming round all right. She soon come out.”
“That’s good to hear.” (But he had already found out from his family doctor, who was attending to Estelle.) “Have you been to visit her, lately?”
“Two or three days ago. And I’m going again this afternoon, sir. This afternoon she’s coming out. She soon will be home again.” It occurred to her, after she had said it, that perhaps he might not permit Estelle to come back to live with her. And she had used the word “home”! She had better find out now if it would be all right for Estelle to come back. “I would like to ask you a question,” she began. “If it wouldn’t be too much, could Estelle stay here a little longer, please, till I find a decent place for her to live?” She was not quite sure she had read the puzzled expression on his face correctly: was it concern for Estelle, or indecision about granting permission. She hastily added, “It won’t be for too long, Mister Burrmann, ’cause I already started searching for some place …”
“That’s all right, that’s all right, Leach. If it is fine with her, it’s fine with me, but I don’t think she would like it here anymore … of course …” Bernice couldn’t understand what he was saying. She knew it was wrong for Estelle to come back into this house, but there was nowhere else to go.
There seemed to be always a game being played by the two of them. Mr. Burrmann did not really hate Bernice, either as a woman or as his maid. He could not honour her existence with such importance and thought. She did not exist for him beyond the image and the labour of a domestic. Bernice didn’t know whether she hated him more than she hated Mrs. Burrmann. Here of late, she had actually made a tally of all the people she hated. It was her conflict. Her confusion. Her basis for blanket distrust of everybody white, and her mistrust of almost everybody who was black. But she felt secure living within the battlements of a friendless circle of “friends.” It kept her always on her toes, always making decisions, similar to the decision she was thinking of making now, concerning bringing up her old boyfriend, Lonnie, with a proposal of marriage.
“Well, Leach, take care of everything.” He gave his nervous little laugh, as if he was clearing his throat of a small precarious fish bone. And then he left.
She was now queen of this vast vacant Burrmann kingdom, sole ruler of an empty citizenless dominion, for at least ten days. Her new power overpowered her, and rendered her powerless. There was nothing to do. There was no one to give orders to. No one to give advice to. There was no one to give her orders or advice; and there was no one to witness her efficient caretakership. She could only write Lonnie and tell him what a large house she “lived” in; and she could do like her other Barbadian friend, Millie, had done: stand in front of the house in which she was a domestic, like a pillar of granite and assumed ownership, in front of the double garage with the Cadillac and the Mercedes-Benz, in full view of the view-finding, lying camera lens, posing as if she was the black mistress, the black Jew, as if she was Mistress Bernice Burrmann, and send the photograph misrepresentingly on its way across the equivocal miles of blurred ocean and seas back to the little waterless, lightless, sewerless village among the hills and luscious breadfruit trees in Horse Hill, St. Joseph. And she knew (so far as Millie’s mother had behaved when the photograph arrived, airmailed and registered in the red-white-and-blue envelope), she knew that her own mother would show the photograph throughout the entire village, circulating with dog-ears of comments, like a “hot” book from the public library. And they would say, “Look-look, man! This is we Bernice! We Bernice! Here she is! here is where Bernice living nowadays in that big country called Canada! What a pretty-pretty big house, though! Bernice really making it big up in Canada!” And her mother, who knew the truth, and who would hide the truth from the other villagers, would wave her head in pride like the Union Jack above their heads, above the elementary school, twenty yards of dust and road and flies and exposed rotting garbage away from the small house where she lived, as she lied.
Putting these dreams aside, Bernice began to address herself to the problem of the reunion with her sister. Up until now, she had not really thought seriously of reentering the topsy-turvy life in the small apartment with Estelle. For two healthy women, the apartment was really unhealthily small. Bernice could not forget the first torment of living with a sister (or with another person for that matter) whom she had outgrown and whose personal hygiene and ways she had hated twenty years ago when they shared the same small bedroom, as girls, back home. Bernice could not forget the first offense Estelle had committed: she had turned off the church service from the Andes Mountains on the large walnut-painted radio for a rock-’n’-roll station, CHUM. And Bernice never lived down the shock and the anger when she found out that Estelle had used her toothbrush to brush her teeth. These were a few of the physical inconveniences that resulted from their living together. Now, Estelle was coming back. She was coming back a different woman: a convalescent.
Bernice was to go now. She came down the stairs with the valise, and she rested it on the first landing. Always mindful of her responsibilities as a domestic, she went into each of the three bedrooms on the second floor (Mr. Burrmann’s, which was really the guest room until his wife stopped sleeping with him; Mrs. Burrmann’s, and the children’s), and she checked to see that everything was in
