Mrs. Macmillan came back into the living room with a red, diminutive apron round her waist. It was the kind of apron waitresses in exclusive restaurants wore. It was delicate in its weaving, and it transformed her shabby appearance. She looked like a very real housewife. She came in, looked at Estelle, with no consistent expression on her face or in her eyes, and then she went back into the kitchen. Estelle had time to look around. There was a pile of magazines on the coffee table. She walked over and saw they were copies of the Watchtower. She thought of Bernice. Bernice and this woman would make good friends over these magazines, she thought. Estelle leafed through some of the Watchtowers. At the bottom of the pile were two old editions of True Confessions. She remembered that as a schoolgirl at St. Michael’s Girls’ School in Barbados, which she attended for three terms before Mammy’s ambition for her higher education and Bernice’s slight salary ran out, she and a few other girls used to read all about the sex and film-star lives in America from these same magazines. It was strange, exciting, to see one of those magazines right here in Canada. And she was here now. She made a mental note to buy one when she got back to Toronto.
She could not bring herself to live anywhere else. Certainly not in the north, not in North Bay. The north she found too unreal: like a picture postcard of a town which looked more beautiful and brighter in the picture than in the reality of visiting. And she had already experienced this deceit of communication: she had seen colour photographs of coconut trees, and of the Mauby-woman who sold that refreshing drink in the hot streets of Bridgetown; she had seen these colour photographs in Agatha’s apartment (Henry had given them to her), and she could not recognize that what the camera and the photographers saw and what was said, and printed on the cards, was the same thing, the same people, the same colours even, as that with which she had grown up seeing around her.
“Lots of pepper?” The question pulled Estelle out of her reverie. “You people from the south always like pepper and hot things. I never been south of Toronto.”
“Not much pepper, thanks.”
The television was the most expensive and the newest piece of furniture in the living room. The stuffed chairs were old and dirty. The arms, or where the human arms rested on the arms of the chair, were coated with the dispositions of many visitors. The couch was dirty. You could see forms of movements on it; you could see the remembrances of emotions in the middle of the seat; you could smell some of the attitudes that had been present on it. On the coffee table was a carton of cigarettes, Macdonalds. The carton was opened, and three packs of cigarettes were already removed from it. The ashtray on the coffee table was full of butts, halves of cigarettes that had been left there for many days now. The other ashtrays in the room were crammed.
“Hope you like what I’m fixing for ya!”
Estelle wondered how to take that. She wondered what Mrs. Macmillan was fixing, and whether she should eat it. People, here of late, were bringing gifts of food and drink to her; and they were accompanying these kindnesses with the strangest unkindest requests. Perhaps, Mrs. Macmillan was now spitting in the frying pan, even as she was talking to her. Perhaps she is coughing over the pan. Or perhaps she is doing what Boysie told her that they always did when they served us: “fuck we up!” by breaking the plate.
But Mrs. Macmillan would have to bring the food on the plate first, and then afterwards, break it, if she was like them. Then she thought how ridiculous an idea it was! How stupid to think these things of someone like Mrs. Macmillan who had been so kind to her in the hospital. And at that moment, she brought in a plate breathing steam, and when the steam blew away, there was a mound of beans and sliding down the debris of the beans-mountain was a piece of pork, the size of a pair of dice, divided by two. She brought also a cup of coffee. There was a bottom lip from the mouth that had used the cup before, a lip from a mouth of lipstick still visible on the white pyrex cup. At least she had used the same cup once!
“Ya like beans?” She said it as if she was telling Estelle it was good to like beans, or as if she was saying, “Ya better like these beans!”
“Oh, beans!” Estelle beamed, because she could think of nothing else to say.
“Good. Cheapest food with the richest things in them. Good for the bowels, too.”
Estelle started to eat. It was one way of stopping Mrs. Macmillan’s questions. Mrs. Macmillan sat down for a while, watching her eat, moving her lips as if she wanted to ask another question, but never saying a word. Then as if a second thought had come to her from outside in the kitchen, she got up and left. Estelle never liked beans. But the operatic tension and quality of the situation and of the atmosphere told her that these beans must be eaten be they Boston beans or jail beans. They must be eaten. And she set about doing that. She was thinking of what it would have been like had she gone along with the desires of the strange white man who bought her the two gin-and-tonics in the club car of the train; what it would have been like had she allowed the porter-student to have his way with her; whatever the aftertastes
