All of a sudden she was laughing. She was happy. And she was envious. She could not help watching the clothes Dots was wearing. Boysie himself was dressed differently. He was wearing a sports shirt with the colours of the tropics, the rainbow and the exuberance of the West Indies all worked into it. There were sandals (new ones, brown and creaky and noisy and shiny from the first polish or stain put on them in the factory) on his feet. In all the months she had known Boysie, she had never seen his feet; she had never seen the colour of Boysie’s feet, although she knew what colour they had to be. And because she had never visited the home of a real black man, a real coloured man, a real negro man, but only the homes of a few “farts” as Dots called them, she did not even notice that Boysie was now wearing a moe-joe on his head — not before Dots mentioned it. Boysie’s moe-joe was the top of a woman’s nylon stocking. It helped to press down his hair close to his scalp. At first, Bernice was laughing scornfully at it, until she realized that this stocking-top was not a bit different from the skullcap which Mr. Burrmann sometimes wore, even when he was eating.
“But wait,” she said, pointing at Boysie’s head. “Boysie turn into a Jew?” Dots recognized the source of her curiosity; and they all three started to laugh.
“How you like Boysie’s moe-joe? Child, every self-respecting black man who calls himself a black man won’t be seen living without his moe-joe, honey. That is ours. Be-Christ, the Jews have their skullcaps, but this is ours! Our-own. And they can’t take it from we, can they, Boysie, boy?”
“I must get Dots to make you one o’ these, Bernice.”
“Look, man, I have my own stockings! When I was wearing moe-joes or stocking-tops, as a little girl in Barbados, where the hell you was?” And there and then, Boysie and Dots knew that at last Bernice had relaxed. That at least, for the time being, she had stopped thinking of her dismissal from Mrs. Burrmann’s kitchen as a great setback in her life.
“But how it happen, Bernice?” Dots asked, much later. “How it happen, all of a sudden, that that princess could dismiss you, a woman who have slaved for her, and in ways that had nothing to do with the regulations o’ your job?” Bernice noticed that there was even a change in the way Dots was thinking and expressing her thoughts. She was really using less curse words, and her language was almost grammatically spotless. She also had a kind of distinguishable accent, which was neither Barbadian nor quite Canadian. “Did Mistress Burrmann find out something?”
“I think so.”
“Estelle, I suppose.”
“I suppose.”
“And how is Estelle these days? You don’t say nothing about your sister, here of late.”
“Child, I heard from Estelle today! This afternoon. One thing came just as the other struck me!” Boysie and Dots exchanged glances. “Estelle living here all this time, gal! I have the phone number. Right here in Toronto with we! But she don’t want anybody to know.”
“I can understand that,” Boysie said, picking something from between his teeth. “When a man is down, he don’t want nobody, particularly his family or his friends, to witness his downfall. Isn’t that right, Dots?”
“Where? Where exactly Estelle staying?”
“She don’t want anybody to know …”
“How you mean she doesn’t want anybody to know? We are one, Bernice! The time for playing the fool is finished! She is your sister. And we are her friends. And she is the same flesh and blood as me. And one black woman in the gutter, one black woman out on the street picking fares and hustling men, whoring, is a reflection on you and on me, Bernice. I can’t really be Mistress Cumberbatch if all the rest o’ black women are madams! Even although everybody else knows that we, you and me, never brought ourselves to that degradation. You don’t see it through this sperspective?”
“Read this letter and see for yourself, then,” Bernice said, feeling a trifle guilty.
“ ‘My dear Bernice, I don’t know what to say … so much happened … I couldn’t face you … (She ought to be blasted ashamed, indeed!) … but I am fine now … (That’s good to hear) … I would like to see you … (Of course! Just what I was telling you. A sister is a sister. And sometimes, you have given me the impression that Mistress Burrmann was more your sister than your real sister, Estelle) … I would like to see you when you have a chance, I do not want anybody else, Dots or Boysie …’ Boysie boy, she’s naming you and me as the people she don’t want to see, boy!” Dots read that line again, and then said, “But I see that she didn’t mention Brigitte as one of the persons she doesn’t want to see! I see that, and I wonder why? I wonder why?”
Nobody answered. Nobody apparently knew what to say.
“And Agaffa coming here tonight, gal! With Henry, to talk over plans for holding their wedding reception in my apartment! Oh God, heh-heh-heh! Life!” This was another embarrassment to Bernice. Boysie merely sniggered. Dots put the letter in her pants pocket, absentmindedly, and said, “Come, come! Boysie go down and warm up the station wagon. Come, Bernice, drink-up the little wine and get ready!” It was after Boysie had left for the underground garage and Bernice and Dots were standing in the corridor, waiting for the illuminated numbers on the elevator panel above their heads to change from M to 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 5, 5, 5, and to 7 — all that time
