It rankled Dots. She felt she had been caught doing a very personal thing, like picking stuff out of her nose and then eating it. “You bitch!” she called at him, in a voice she knew would never reach him; but she had to say it anyhow. “Heh-heh-heh!” she commented to Bernice, walking beside her but miles away in her thoughts. “Why does men always have to holler after women in this savage place? They don’t even do with any decentness at all! They don’t have no damn breeding, neither, heh-heh-haaaa!”
“You look good, that’s why.” It was a strange thing for Bernice to say. It was the first time she had ever said it. Dots took it exactly that way. She knew she looked good. “Really. You looking good as hell these days, woman. If I was a man now …”
“Haul your arse, Bernice!”
“Wait,” Bernice said, and Dots waited aside while Bernice went up to the small glass-walled office on the sixth-floor hospital ward in which a nurse was writing things in a book that had charts in it. The nurse looked back and saw her. The nurse went back to her charting. The nurse did not ask her what she wanted. Bernice, always uneasy in hospitals as in banks, continued standing just outside the door, but within range of the charting-nurse’s sight. Two other nurses came rushing into the office. They said something in a language that had to do with the world of medicine, which Bernice did not understand.
The nurse who was charting left off her charting to look back and attend to the cards the two nurses held. She said something about “Mrs. Carmichael is to have ten see-sees”; and to the other nurse, she said, “Thank you, Miss Worrell.” Miss Worrell put her card on the charted table.
“Pssst! Psssssssst!”
Bernice looked round. It was Dots motioning, encouraging her to go inside the office. Bernice found no support in this encouragement. She rapped lightly on the door post and said, “Excuse me, lady. Miss?”
“What do you want?” the nurse said, still writing, still sitting, still not looking.
“I come to see my sister, Estelle Shepherd who …”
“Are you a relative?”
“But I just told you I come to see my sister …”
“Not visiting hour yet. Come back in fifteen minutes.”
“But, Miss …”
“Visiting hour starts in fifteen minutes. Now, we’re very busy.”
Dots didn’t like the nurse’s manner; she couldn’t hear what was being said but she could sense something was wrong. “What she say?”
Bernice walked closer to her, and said, “She say visiting hour hasn’t begin yet. I must come back in fifteen minutes.”
“Look, you wait here! Let me get at her arse! right now!” Dots swelled herself out, took a deep hostile breath, pushed past Bernice and walked straight up to the charting nurse. The nurse was still charting. She did not give the impression she had heard Dots enter. Dots waited one second to prepare herself, and to allow the nurse to acknowledge her presence.
“You did not hear what I told your friend? Fifteen minutes.” The nurse, accustomed to giving the orders on this ward, because she was the Head Nurse, assumed that the woman standing in front of her would obey; and she assumed that her orders would affect Dots. So she went back to her charting in her concentration. Two more seconds passed.
Then Dots said, “Liss-ten to me!” Her voice was high. Her voice was loud. Her voice was indignant. “Lisss-tennn to me! We have come down here to look for a patient. That patient is getting discharge today. We intends to see her. Now, you hads better get up offa your backside right now, you hear me? and be decent to the guests in this horsepital if you want to know what’s good for you! After all, you is only a nurse, yuh know!” She shook these words out of her head. Her voice had risen even higher. She was thinking of her new freedom. She was thinking of Mistress Hunter. She was thinking of Boysie. The feeling of freedom she had was based on a feeling that she was right.
The nurse did not move, however. Perhaps Dots’s voice had transfixed her to her chair; perhaps she was deliberately ignoring Dots. Dots went up farther. Dots pounded her hand on the tabletop and shouted, “Get up, get up, man, and attend to we! Be-Christ, we ain’t waiting. We tired waiting!”
This completely shocked the nurse. The nurse changed colour. The nurse’s ears looked very pale. Her lips were trembling. Something like a burning uncontrollable, impossible-to-be-expressed hate burned her cheeks and made them bloodless. Three other nurses (one of whom was black) assembled at the door of the office. The black nurse was trying to look serious, sympathetic to her profession and her colleague: but there was a smile beneath her straight face. She was not Priscilla. The Head Nurse became angry after being shocked. But it was Dots in front of her like an awful threatening black persistent presence. And she became flustered. And something strange, something that was not deliberately done, happened: all the white nurses were suddenly standing beside the Head Nurse. The one remaining nurse, the black nurse, was standing in the neutral frame of the door.
“I waiting!” Dots said. She had not noticed the miraculous alignment of the nurses. And this time, she did not have long to wait. The Head Nurse, who could think of no other way to defeat Dots, moved away from her and went outside to speak to Bernice. She was still flustered. The other aligned nurses drifted away muttering comments.
The black nurse, before she too left, pretended she had to get something from a cupboard in the office, and on her way out, she brushed close to Dots, and when Dots looked at her, she said out of the corner of
