“As a matter of fact, Bernice, dear,” she had begun, “that is exactly what I had on my mind. Now, you know, that in the four years you’ve been helping us …”
It had taken the guts out of Bernice’s stomach. Bernice was lost. “As from now,” Mrs. Burrmann had said, as if she was asking for a drink, or commenting on the weather, or asking Bernice to run a bath for her, or raise the thermostat.
Just like that? just like that? Bernice was saying to herself and to the taxicab driver, and to the people on the street; and to God. Just like that? So cold-blooded, like a machine or something? A person who you have served for months upon months could take up her hand and in a whiff of time, in a twinkling of an eye, you are nothing to them, at all, at all? Just like that, as if she playing she is God? “And you know something, you know something funny about this whole thing?” (Here the taxicab driver turned his head because Bernice was talking loud enough for him to hear, and felt he had to answer. Bernice disregarded him, just as he ignored a couple of amber lights.) “You know something? I don’t even hate her.”
The taxicab stopped at 700 Ontario Street. The minute Bernice entered the lobby, she felt hate, a deep hate for Mrs. Burrmann. Entering the lobby of this apartment building brought her mind to the reality of her position: she would have to start looking for an apartment herself.
She entered the main door just as someone was coming out, and therefore forgot to ring Dots on the intercom. The elevator was going up and up and Bernice wondered how best to break this sad news to Dots. Perhaps, at this moment, Dots was having her own problems with Boysie; perhaps Dots, from her new height, was looking through one of her four windows which gave her four “sperspectives” of Toronto; perhaps Dots was busy cooking Boysie his meal before he got home from his new job as contract cleaner and janitor in the offices of Macintosh and Company, Stock Brokers on Bay Street; perhaps Dots didn’t want to hear anybody’s troubles; perhaps Dots, now no longer a domestic, was fed up with all this black and white business. The elevator stopped. Bernice remained inside, checking the number she had pressed, and checking her wisdom of intruding upon Dots. And as she stepped out, the door, already with its mind made up for it, by the pressing of a button on a different floor, came at her like a large black slap, with the side of the hand. Bernice got out just in time before the door struck her body. Her handbag strap was caught in the door. But she pulled it out before the elevator left without too much difficulty.
She walked to Dots’s apartment door (she had memorized the number from the panel of names and numbers in the lobby), and she knocked. Immediately, the noise of the television inside went down. Then water stopped running. Bernice was still knocking at the door. Someone had been laughing as if he owned the building just before her second knock, but when he heard the knock, the laughing stopped. There was a shuffling, and then silence. Bernice knocked the third time. No one came to answer the door. In a rage, she went back to the elevator. And just as she was entering it, and the flat hand was coming at her to tell her, get out of the damn way and keep inside the elevator, she heard the noise of guns roaring and people laughing — both in the television and in the apartment she had just left. She thought she heard dishes talking as if food was being put in them. (“That bitch thinks somebody’s coming to beg her for food, or what?” Bernice said to the closed elevator.)
In the lobby once more, she checked the number of Dots’s apartment against the number she had carried in her head. And she found it was the identical one. She pressed the buzzer beneath Dots’s name: DOTS AND BOYSIE CUMBERBATCH. A voice unaccustomed to the mechanism bellowed through the speaker, at the top of the panel of names and buzzers and numbers, “Who is it?”
Dots home, Bernice thought with deep relief and satisfaction. Bernice bellowed back, “Me!”
“Come up, man, come up!” And buzzers were pressed, and buzzers were answered, some of them the wrong ones, and they sounded like small farting boys. And in the midst of this new noise, Bernice took some time before she could organize herself, and open the door when the right buzzer was pressed, before all the farting buzzers stopped.
When she reached the door of the apartment, she noticed it was the same door with the western noises at which she had knocked a minute before. There were still western noises. The door was open now. The noises were coming out. The plates were being laden with the beautiful smell and sight of West Indian cooking: pork chops, black-eye peas and rice, salad with hard-boiled eggs and avocado pear cut up in it. They were on a heavy breathing table at which Boysie sat sweating with the steamed rice, his jaws moving in a delightful rhythm.
“Come in, come in,” Dots said, laughing,
