Henry decided to keep this experience to himself. He turned and headed for home.
The following day, Saturday, in the morning, Boysie got up early. He did not clean any offices on Friday nights. He gave himself this night off for taking his wife to the Club Tropics or to the WIF Club. And when they didn’t go there, they would go to the Park Plaza Hotel lounge to hear Jackie Davis, the blues organist, who came to town often, and who was a crowd-pleaser, a crowd-drawing performer; or it would be Junior Mance, the pianist, and his trio. Boysie had decided to go to these “damn white people places,” as Dots called them, because he was conscious of going up in the world.
Saturday mornings he reserved for home. He would get up early and drive Dots and Estelle and Bernice (if she was off from her living-out domestic job with the Breighington-Kellys of Rosedale) to the St. Lawrence Market. He stopped shopping in the Jewish Market because there were too many immigrant people from the Wessindies going there these days. “I can’t take on so much black people round me, these days!” he would say. The pork chops in the St. Lawrence Market were large and cheap; and the pigs’ feet and the parts of the pig’s head were also fresh and cheaper than in the Jewish Market. There were lots of fresh vegetables and fruits — tomatoes, lettuce, beets, carrots, sweet potatoes — as if still growing in the kitchen-gardens of the countryside, with the dew falling off them like perspiration of vitality. Bernice said the dew was really water from a hose to make the vegetables look as if they were fresh.
Boysie liked to walk through the laneways of greens and smells, and he liked to smell the fruits and sometimes he would steal a grape from a bunch on a tray, and the vendor-owner would smile and say, “Buy some grapes now, sir! You taste how good my grapes taste, sir. Buy some for the lady.”
And Boysie would push his hand into his right-hand trousers pocket and take out a wad of bills, and deliberately and slowly, peel off the largest bill, a twenty-dollar note, and pay for the twenty-cents purchase of grapes. He would spend more time counting his change; and when it was correct, he would raise his head and smile with the vendor-owner; and he would place the dollar bills in ascending order of denominations, and then place the wad back into his right-hand trousers pocket before moving off, and smiling and telling the man, who also would be smiling, “Damn good grapes you got there, man!”
But especially he liked to drive the women out, and fuss and wrap the steering wheel round and round and display his marksmanship with parking in the narrowest stop available, which not even a driving instructor would do to impress his student. The station wagon would be gleaming like the stones of a dog in the moonlight. Boysie would have gone up to the car wash on Spadina at six in the morning, while the women were fussing and forcing their jellied overeating, overweight avoirdupois into skin-fitting skin-teething ski pants, although the season was autumn.
This Saturday morning Bernice was present. She had got paid the day before. She was going to cook a real meal for Dots and Boysie, and Estelle was going to help her. She was going to be Dots’s “domestic for today, girl. I am playing domestic for you, to you, and you is my mistress, but for today only, hear?” And then she laughed and said, “Who do you want to be? Mistress Dotsstein or Mistress Dotsmann? Heh-heh-haaaa!”
“Gal, you see me complaining?”
And they bought dried increase peas and lots of wild rice. They bought five avocado pears, lettuce, small spring tomatoes — “man-these-is-the-very-same-ones-we-have-back-home!” — pickled pig’s parts, including the snout, “which is the sweetest part of a pig, except maybe the fowl-pooch of a chicken!” And when they left, laden down with three straw baskets which had JAMAICA, NASSAU and BARBADOS stitched in straw on them in bright colours, Boysie was singing a James Brown number, “I Feel Good!”; and Dots and Estelle were smoking Benson and Hedges cigarettes in the back seat with the groceries, while Bernice, in the front seat beside Boysie, chewed Wrigley’s chewing gum, making it snap and make other noises in her rebellious mouth.
“Liquor store next, man! Liquor store! There is one down here, ’pon Wellington.”
When Boysie went into the liquor store, Bernice held over the seat, touched Dots’s knee, and said, “Child you would kill yourself to see the things them people I working for does carry-on with, at night, especially Friday nights. Have you ever heard of a paint-in?”
“Course! gal, you don’t see that I have some hanging up in my place? A painting? Estelle haven’t you ever seen the painting I bought recently from Coles?”
“A painting is a …”
“No! not one o’ them, man. I mean a paint-in. Pee-aye-eye-enn-tee … that’s one word. Now … eye-enn. Paint! In! Two words. Paint and in. A paint-in.”
“Oh! like a sit-in. Or pray-in,” Dots said.
“Zactly! That is what them people up there in my house do all night long, last night. It would make a sinner ashamed.”
“Well, Christ! what is the next thing these white people will copy from we black people? They copy the marching, they copy the picketing, they copy the dancing … I don’t mean dance-in, gal. I mean plain, simple coloured folks dancing …”
“Well, let me tell you ’bout this thing they call a paint-in. Now, I told you that my mistress is a young woman, pretty as hell and with a nice figure and gait. Well, her husband is a young man too. And most of their friends, at least the ones I see coming to their parties on Friday nights and Saturday nights and Sunday nights, the Lord’s day, they is all
