The Women of Brewster Place

  “Well, perhaps we could all go out for coffee.”

  “Thank you, but I’ll have to decline, Reverend,” Mattie volunteered before Etta did it for her. “The services have me all tired out, but if Etta wants to, she’s welcome.”

  “That’ll be just fine,” Etta said.

  “Good, good.” And now it was his turn to give her the benefit of a mouth full of strong gold-capped teeth. “Just let me say good-bye to a few folks here, and I’ll meet you outside.”

  “Girl, you oughta patent that speed and sell it to the airplane companies,” Mattie said outside. “‘After that sermon, Reverend, I’m thinking of coming back’—indeed!”

  “Aw, hush your fussing.”

  “I declare if you had batted them lashes just a little faster, we’d of had a dust storm in there.”

  “You said you wanted me to meet some nice men. Well, I met one.”

  “Etta, I meant a man who’d be serious about settling down with you.” Mattie was exasperated. “Why, you’re going on like a schoolgirl. Can’t you see what he’s got in mind?”

  Etta turned an indignant face toward Mattie. “The only thing I see is that you’re telling me I’m not good enough for a man like that. Oh, no, not Etta Johnson. No upstanding decent man could ever see anything in her but a quick good time. Well, I’ll tell you something, Mattie Michael. I’ve always traveled first class, maybe not in the way you’d approve with all your fine Christian principles, but it’s done all right by me. And I’m gonna keep going top drawer till I leave this earth. Don’t you think I got a mirror? Each year there’s a new line to cover. I lay down with this body and get up with it every morning, and each morning it cries for just a little more rest than it did the day before. Well, I’m finally gonna get that rest, and it’s going to be with a man like Reverend Woods. And you and the rest of those slack-mouthed gossips on Brewster be damned!” Tears frosted the edges of her last words. “They’ll be humming a different tune when I show up there the wife of a big preacher. I’ve always known what they say about me behind my back, but I never thought you were right in there with them.”

  Mattie was stunned by Etta’s tirade. How could Etta have so totally misunderstood her words? What had happened back there to stuff up her senses to the point that she had missed the obvious? Surely she could not believe that the vibrations coming from that unholy game of charades in the church aisle would lead to something as permanent as marriage? Why, it had been nothing but the opening gestures to a mating dance. Mattie had gone through the same motions at least once in her life, and Etta must have known a dozen variations to it that were a mystery to her. And yet, somehow, back there it had been played to a music that had totally distorted the steps for her friend. Mattie suddenly felt the helplessness of a person who is forced to explain that for which there are no words.

  She quietly turned her back and started down the steps. There was no need to defend herself against Etta’s accusations. They shared at least a hundred memories that could belie those cruel words. Let them speak for her.

  Sometimes being a friend means mastering the art of timing. There is a time for silence. A time to let go and allow people to hurl themselves into their own destiny. And a time to prepare to pick up the pieces when it’s all over. Mattie realized that this moment called for all three.

  “I’ll see ya when you get home, Etta,” she threw gently over her shoulder.

  Etta watched the bulky figure become slowly enveloped by the shadows. Her angry words had formed a thick mucus in her throat, and she couldn’t swallow them down. She started to run into the darkness where she’d seen Mattie disappear, but at that instant Moreland Woods came out of the lighted church, beaming.

  He took her arm and helped her into the front seat of his car. Her back sank into the deep upholstered leather, and the smell of the freshly vacuumed carpet was mellow in her nostrils. All of the natural night sounds of the city were blocked by the thick tinted windows and the hum of the air conditioner, but they trailed persistently behind the polished back of the vehicle as it turned and headed down the long gray boulevard.

  Smooth road

  Clear day

  But why am I the only one

  Traveling this way

  How strange the road to love

  Can be so easy

  Can there be a detour ahead?

  Moreland Woods was captivated by the beautiful woman at his side. Her firm brown flesh and bright eyes carried the essence of nectar from some untamed exotic flower, and the fragrance was causing a pleasant disturbance at the pit of his stomach. He marveled at how excellently she played the game. A less alert observer might have been taken in, but his survival depended upon knowing people, knowing exactly how much to give and how little to take. It was this razor-thin instinct that had catapulted him to the head of his profession and that would keep him there.

  And although she cut her cards with a reckless confidence, pushed her chips into the middle of the table as though the supply was unlimited, and could sit out the game until dawn, he knew. Oh, yes. Let her win a few, and then he would win just a few more, and she would be bankrupt long before the sun was up. And then there would be only one thing left to place on the table—and she would, because the stakes they were playing for were very high. But she was going to lose that last deal. She would lose because when she first sat down in that car she had everything riding on the fact that he didn’t know the game existed.

  And so it went. All evening Etta had been in another world, weaving his tailored suit and the smell of his expensive cologne into a custom-made future for herself. It took his last floundering thrusts into her body to bring her back to reality. She arrived in enough time to feel him beating against her like a dying walrus, until he shuddered and was still.

  She kept her eyes closed because she knew when she opened them there would be the old familiar sights around her. To her right would be the plastic-coated nightstand that matched the cheaply carved headboard of the bed she lay in. She felt the bleached coarseness of the sheet under her sweaty back and predicted the roughness of the worn carpet path that led from the bed to the white-tiled bathroom with bright fluorescent lights, sterilized towels, and tissue-wrapped water glasses. There would be two or three small thin rectangles of soap wrapped in bright waxy covers that bore the name of the hotel.

  She didn’t try to visualize what the name would be. It didn’t matter. They were all the same, all meshed together into one lump that rested like an iron ball on her chest. And the expression on the face of this breathing mass to her left would be the same as all the others. She could turn now and go through the rituals that would tie up the evening for them both, but she wanted just one more second of this soothing darkness before she had to face the echoes of the locking doors she knew would be in his eyes.

  Etta got out of the car unassisted and didn’t bother to turn and watch the taillights as it pulled off down the deserted avenue adjacent to Brewster Place. She had asked him to leave her at the corner because there was no point in his having to make a U-turn in the dead-end street, and it was less than a hundred yards to her door. Moreland was relieved that she had made it easy for him, because it had been a long day and he was anxious to get home and go to sleep. But then, the whole business had gone pretty smoothly after they left the hotel. He hadn’t even been called upon to use any of the excuses he had prepared for why it would be a while before he’d see her again. A slight frown crossed his forehead as he realized that she had seemed as eager to get away from him as he had been to leave. Well, he shrugged his shoulders and placated his dented ego, that’s the nice part about these wordly women. They understand the temporary weakness of the flesh and don’t make it out to be something bigger than it is. They can have a good time without pawing and hanging all onto a man. Maybe I should drop around sometime. He glanced into his rearview mirror and saw that Etta was still standing on the corner, looking straight ahead into Brewster. There was something about the slumped profile of her b
ody, silhouetted against the dim street light, that caused him to press down on the accelerator.

  Etta stood looking at the wall that closed off Brewster from the avenues farther north and found it hard to believe that it had been just this afternoon when she had seen it. It had looked so different then, with the August sun highlighting the browns and reds of the bricks and the young children bouncing their rubber balls against its side. Now it crouched there in the thin predawn light, like a pulsating mouth awaiting her arrival. She shook her head sharply to rid herself of the illusion, but an uncanny fear gripped her, and her legs felt like lead. If I walk into this street, she thought, I’ll never come back. I’ll never get out. Oh, dear God, I am so tired—so very tired.

  Etta removed her hat and massaged her tight forehead. Then, giving a resigned sigh, she started slowly down the street. Had her neighbors been out on their front stoops, she could have passed through their milling clusters as anonymously as the night wind. They had seen her come down that street once in a broken Chevy that had about five hundred dollars’ worth of contraband liquor in its trunk, and there was even the time she’d come home with a broken nose she’d gotten in some hair-raising escapade in St. Louis, but never had she walked among them with a broken spirit. This middle-aged woman in the wrinkled dress and wilted straw hat would have been a stranger to them.

  When Etta got to the stoop, she noticed there was a light under the shade at Mattie’s window, and she strained to hear what actually sounded like music coming from behind the screen. Mattie was playing her records! Etta stood very still, trying to decipher the broken air waves into intelligible sound, but she couldn’t make out the words. She stopped straining when it suddenly came to her that it wasn’t important what song it was—someone was waiting up for her. Someone who would deny fiercely that there had been any concern—just a little indigestion from them fried onions that kept me from sleeping. Thought I’d pass the time by figuring out what you see in all this loose-life music.

  Etta laughed softly to herself as she climbed the steps toward the light and the love and the comfort that awaited her.

  KISWANA

  BROWNE

  From the window of her sixth-floor studio apartment, Kiswana could see over the wall at the end of the street to the busy avenue that lay just north of Brewster Place. The late-afternoon shoppers looked like brightly clad marionettes as they moved between the congested traffic, clutching their packages against their bodies to guard them from sudden bursts of the cold autumn wind. A portly mailman had abandoned his cart and was bumping into indignant window-shoppers as he puffed behind the cap that the wind had snatched from his head. Kiswana leaned over to see if he was going to be successful, but the edge of the building cut him off from her view.

  A pigeon swept across her window, and she marveled at its liquid movements in the air waves. She placed her dreams on the back of the bird and fantasized that it would glide forever in transparent silver circles until it ascended to the center of the universe and was swallowed up. But the wind died down, and she watched with a sigh as the bird beat its wings in awkward, frantic movements to land on the corroded top of a fire escape on the opposite building. This brought her back to earth.

  Humph, it’s probably sitting over there crapping on those folks’ fire escape, she thought. Now, that’s a safety hazard…. And her mind was busy again, creating flames and smoke and frustrated tenants whose escape was being hindered because they were slipping and sliding in pigeon shit. She watched their cussing, haphazard descent on the fire escapes until they had all reached the bottom. They were milling around, oblivious to their burning apartments, angrily planning to march on the mayor’s office about the pigeons. She materialized placards and banners for them, and they had just reached the corner, boldly sidestepping fire hoses and broken glass, when they all vanished.

  A tall copper-skinned woman had met this phantom parade at the corner, and they had dissolved in front of her long, confident strides. She plowed through the remains of their faded mists, unconscious of the lingering wisps of their presence on her leather bag and black fur-trimmed coat. It took a few seconds for this transfer from one realm to another to reach Kiswana, but then suddenly she recognized the woman.

  “Oh, God, it’s Mama!” She looked down guiltily at the forgotten newspaper in her lap and hurriedly circled random job advertisements.

  By this time Mrs. Browne had reached the front of Kiswana’s building and was checking the house number against a piece of paper in her hand. Before she went into the building she stood at the bottom of the stoop and carefully inspected the condition of the street and the adjoining property. Kiswana watched this meticulous inventory with growing annoyance but she involunarily followed her mother’s slowly rotating head, forcing herself to see her new neighborhood through the older woman’s eyes. The brightness of the unclouded sky seemed to join forces with her mother as it highlighted every broken stoop railing and missing brick. The afternoon sun glittered and cascaded across even the tiniest fragments of broken bottle, and at that very moment the wind chose to rise up again, sending unswept grime flying into the air, as a stray tin can left by careless garbage collectors went rolling noisily down the center of the street.

  Kiswana noticed with relief that at least Ben wasn’t sitting in his usual place on the old garbage can pushed against the far wall. He was just a harmless old wino, but Kiswana knew her mother only needed one wino or one teenager with a reefer within a twenty-block radius to decide that her daughter was living in a building seething with dope factories and hang-outs for derelicts. If she had seen Ben, nothing would have made her believe that practically every apartment contained a family, a Bible, and a dream that one day enough could be scraped from those meager Friday night paychecks to make Brewster Place a distant memory.

  As she watched her mother’s head disappear into the building, Kiswana gave silent thanks that the elevator was broken. That would give her at least five minutes’ grace to straighten up the apartment. She rushed to the sofa bed and hastily closed it without smoothing the rumpled sheets and blanket or removing her nightgown. She felt that somehow the tangled bedcovers would give away the fact that she had not slept alone last night. She silently apologized to Abshu’s memory as she heartlessly crushed his spirit between the steel springs of the couch. Lord, that man was sweet. Her toes curled involuntarily at the passing thought of his full lips moving slowly over her instep. Abshu was a foot man, and he always started his lovemaking from the bottom up. For that reason Kiswana changed the color of the polish on her toenails every week. During the course of their relationship she had gone from shades of red to brown and was now into the purples. I’m gonna have to start mixing them soon, she thought aloud as she turned from the couch and raced into the bathroom to remove any traces of Abshu from there. She took up his shaving cream and razor and threw them into the bottom drawer of her dresser beside her diaphragm. Mama wouldn’t dare pry into my drawers right in front of me, she thought as she slammed the drawer shut. Well, at least not the bottom drawer. She may come up with some sham excuse for opening the top drawer, but never the bottom one.

  When she heard the first two short raps on the door, her eyes took a final flight over the small apartment, desperately seeking out any slight misdemeanor that might have to be defended. Well, there was nothing she could do about the crack in the wall over that table. She had been after the landlord to fix it for two months now. And there had been no time to sweep the rug, and everyone knew that off-gray always looked dirtier than it really was. And it was just too damn bad about the kitchen. How was she expected to be out job-hunting every day and still have time to keep a kitched that looked like her mother’s, who didn’t even work and still had someone come in twice a month for general cleaning. And besides…

  Her imaginary argument was abruptly interrupted by a second series of knocks, accompanied by a penetrating, “Melanie, Melanie, are you there?”

  Kiswana strode toward the door. She’s sta
rting before she even gets in here. She knows that’s not my name anymore.

  She swung the door open to face her slightly flushed mother. “Oh, hi, Mama. You know, I thought I heard a knock, but I figured it was for the people next door, since no one hardly ever calls me Melanie.” Score one for me, she thought.

  “Well, it’s awfully strange you can forget a name you answered to for twenty-three years,” Mrs. Browne said, as she moved past Kiswana into the apartment. “My, that was a long climb. How long has your elevator been out? Honey, how do you manage with your laundry and groceries up all those steps? But I guess you’re young, and it wouldn’t bother you as much as it does me.” This long string of questions told Kiswana that her mother had no intentions of beginning her visit with another argument about her new African name.

  “You know I would have called before I came, but you don’t have a phone yet. I didn’t want you to feel that I was snooping. As a matter of fact, I didn’t expect to find you home at all. I thought you’d be out looking for a job.” Mrs. Browne had mentally covered the entire apartment while she was talking and taking off her coat.

  “Well, I got up late this morning. I thought I’d buy the afternoon paper and start early tomorrow.”

  “That sounds like a good idea.” Her mother moved toward the window and picked up the discarded paper and glanced over the hurriedly circled ads. “Since when do you have experience as a fork-lift operator?”

  Kiswana caught her breath and silently cursed herself for her stupidity. “Oh, my hand slipped—I meant to circle file clerk.” She quickly took the paper before her mother could see that she had also marked cutlery salesman and chauffeur.

  “You’re sure you weren’t sitting here moping and day-dreaming again?” Amber specks of laughter flashed in the corner of Mrs. Browne’s eyes.

  Kiswana threw her shoulders back and unsuccessfully tried to disguise her embarrassment with indignation.