“You damn right!” Boysie said, with food in his mouth.
“A minute ago, Boysie and I had to say that you didn’ look as if you was still friends with me. Ain’t it, Boysie, boy? But you come, at last. And we glad we have you now.”
“You damn right! The prodigal girl come home!” Boysie said, his jaws moving in a constant rhythm. “Want some wine, Bernice? We eat wine with our meals every evening.”
“Man, get up! Stop asking the girl if she want some wine, and give the girl some wine, do!”
“I had to find out first, Dots. Perhaps, Bernice might want to have some whiskey, or rum, or stout, or beer. Take your pick, Bernice. We have everything. Come, sit down, man! This plate is yours. Dots put another pork chop on Bernice plate, and some more o’ them black-eye things for me, man, and give Bernice piece o’ pig tail …”
Dots was dressed in an apron, not one from her days of domestication and service with the Hunters, but a red lace one which looked like a large heart. Her hair had recently been done by Azan (she told Bernice), the hairdresser of Beauty World. And she was wearing pinkish cream-coloured tights that fitted her so closely, that had Dots’s own colour not been pure black, Bernice would have thought she was naked from the waist down. And she was wearing Indian sandals, sandals from India of the East. Something that looked like a black sky with small silver stars was glistening on her body. This was her armless bodice. Bernice could not help staring at her. All this transformation in such a short time! Perhaps, there was something good about not being a domestic. Boysie now seemed her master, Bernice observed. Boysie was now Dots’s employer, and Dots, the dutiful, happy maid. Although dinner was on the table, Dots held a filter-tipped cigarette in her hand. And her fingernails were bright, vulgar, whoringly red.
A great insecurity came over Bernice. Envy warned her she could not be happy in this company. But she was hungry, and so she sat down at the table; and she accepted the wine, Canadian sauterne, which Boysie poured correctly in a wine glass. Bernice noticed this, because it was her profession. Glancing up from the wine, and from the second heaping plate of food which Dots had just placed before her, she saw, on the counter in the kitchen, a long line of bottles of different denominations, different influences, different hangovers and different prices — all liquor.
“So, how’s Mistress Burrmann?” Dots asked. And for no reason, she added, “Tell Mistress Burrmann that Mistress Cumberbatch send her best regards, heh-hah-haaaaa …”
“And how old Burrmann himself?” Boysie asked. “I want to talk to that man. I have some business to throw his way, something legal I want him to do for me.” Was there some conspiracy, Bernice wondered. This was not the time, and it hardly appeared to be the place to confess to them that Mrs. Burrmann had just fired her.
“Eat, girl. Eat,” Dots encouraged her. “And drink the wine. Boysie spend a hell of a lot o’ money on this wine, so drink it up, gal.” Bernice stopped thinking of their new life because of their invitation to eat and drink. She did not know she was so hungry, but she could not put her whole mind on eating, not when the present fact of eating, and eating such good food, reminded her that tomorrow either she wouldn’t eat at all or she would have to eat out of her own pocket for the first time in over three years. It was too much for her. She put down the wine glass. She put her hands on the edge of the table and pushed herself from the table. Boysie’s head was mixed in the steam coming from his plate; but Dots had been watching Bernice all the time, scrutinizing her carefully. Bernice moved away from the table, and it was only then that Boysie looked up. She was standing at the window looking west; the only window through which Dots hadn’t given her, over the ’phone, a “sperspective” of the Toronto skyline. Dots was about to say something about the view and the “sperspective,” and the window itself, at which was hanging an expensive piece of material that was made of Indian silk, when Bernice began sobbing.
“I loss my job.”
It was some time before either Boysie, who had stopped eating meanwhile, or Dots fully realized what was meant. And what it meant to Bernice. They never thought Bernice could lose a job. They never thought Mrs. Burrmann could do without Bernice. They did not understand even the superficial meaning of Bernice’s words. But it took them a much shorter time after that, once the superficial meaning was clear, to comprehend the deeper psychological implications of Bernice’s firing.
“Jesus Christ, and winter coming!” Boysie said.
“Look, gal! come here, do! Sit down and finish eating. Eat your guts full. Drink till you drunk. And forget the bitch!” Dots wasn’t even mad. She was smiling all the time she said this, and this manner greatly helped Bernice over the embarrassment that firing from a job meant to her sensibilities. It did not console her about her loss of income. She had always held on to a job; she was not to be fired from a job, ever. “I suppose that she would be hiring a servant-girl from Mexico, now! A Mexican domestic.” Nobody noticed Dots’s sarcasm.
“It could be about Estelle, though,” Boysie suggested. Nobody commented upon this. Everybody knew it was possible. “But I always used to tell you women,
