Blanche Passes Go Read online

  Thelvin cleared his throat before suggesting, “Maybe I oughta hang up and call back.” His voice was as careful as a person trying to cross the highway during rush hour.

  Blanche wanted to explain, to tell him it wasn’t about him, but she wasn’t sure this was true. Maybe some other woman was catching hell from Thelvin; maybe he had similar plans for her. In the region of her mind where fear didn’t run things, she knew she was being unfair. But that section of her brain wasn’t currently in control.

  “I’m sorry, Thelvin. Mood I’m in, I shouldn’t have answered the phone.”

  “Anything I can do?”

  “No. I’ll be okay after a good night’s sleep.” She hesitated, then: “But why did you call if you didn’t think I was home?”

  “Oh. I thought maybe you might have an answering machine, too. I wanted to tell you I got to cover for a brother whose wife’s got sick. So I can’t keep our date.”

  “Oh. Okay.” She was both relieved and disappointed. She wanted to see him, but right now a date with a man she didn’t really know wasn’t something she could look forward to.

  Thelvin cleared his throat again. “Okay, then. I’ll call you when I get back.”

  “Okay.”

  “Blanche? Are you sure you’re all right?”

  “I’m fine, Thelvin, just fine. Have a good trip. Bye.”

  Of course she felt like a fool after she hung up. Man must think I’m some kind of nut case.

  The phone rang again before she’d walked away from it.

  “Hey, Ardell,” she said when she picked it up.

  “I been calling you.” Ardell’s voice swung between worry and irritation.

  “I was talking to Thelvin.”

  “Humm. How’d he know you were home?”

  Blanche was too accustomed to their thinking alike to be surprised. She told Ardell what Thelvin had said about an answering machine and added: “Sorry about taking off on you like that, Ardell, but I…”

  “Don’t worry about it. Like I said, we shoulda talked about it.”

  “Why didn’t we?”

  “I tried to, remember? But you kept changing the…”

  “I won’t run again,” Blanche told her. “He ain’t keeping me from nothing.”

  “Humm, well, better to run from him than kill him, I guess.”

  “Better for which one of us?” Blanche asked. He’d already killed the woman she’d been before he raped her. Would murdering him change her much more than he already had? When she hung up the phone, she went straight to bed—with all the lights on.

  She slept hardly at all. Every new night sound required a period of attention until it was identified as something other than David Palmer in search of seconds. Somewhere in the drifting place between waking and sleeping she understood that she needed a ritual, something that would let her drop all the baggage she was carrying from that awful day. She fell asleep wondering what that ritual would be.

  FIVE

  NUMBER FOUR, CAKE, AND THE LAY OF THE LAND

  “Alocal girl was found dead in Briarmount Woods, outside of Farleigh, last evening.”

  Blanche’s eyes flew open. She turned her head and stared at the clock radio. Her body clenched like a fist as the reporter somber-toned his way through a report of the murder of Maybelle Jenkins, age twenty-two, hit on the back of the head with a blunt instrument and dumped over an embankment. Number four, Blanche whispered, as though there were a straight line or chain connecting her, Clarice, the woman she’d heard cry out last night, and now this dead girl. Had this girl been raped as well as murdered? She’d read somewhere that seven hundred thousand women were raped every year in the United States. Had this girl been one of them? For once, the idea that she was not alone did not comfort her. She stared at the radio, then turned it off and rolled out of bed. She needed to talk to her Ancestors right now, but she hadn’t yet set up her Ancestor altar.

  She hadn’t brought all the items from her home altar, just enough to give this temporary one the same feel of being a part of the everyday world yet larger and deeper, and somehow connected to her, like a centuries-long umbilical cord tying her to all of her bloodline. She got a cardboard box and set it on its side so its flaps formed doors. She draped the box in a red scarf and spread a white one inside, tacking it to the sides and back so that it formed a little grotto in which she placed stones, a small bowl of water, and the pictures of her dead relatives from her home altar—she’d had a number of them copied onto one sheet of paper. She hung multicolored beads around the neck of the black, potbellied wooden figure that represented her oldest Ancestors, older than the first known mother—the one whose DNA scientists said most people shared. She set this figure in the center of the altar and placed two white candles in front of the box.

  She paused when she was through, trying to decide how to talk with her Ancestors about what she was going through without whining or asking for special favors. She knew she didn’t need to explain it to them. They knew about rape, they knew about fear, and they hadn’t been stopped by either. They’d found ways to fight back—from running away to killing as many slavers as they could, from aborting the slaver’s issue to hexing his penis so he’d never want to touch that particular woman again, to putting pepper in the slop pot and spit in the soup. They had not run from their enemies, except to rest up and find another way to fight. And there it was. It was as if the answer to last night’s question was being whispered in her ear: Find a way to fight back. She was suddenly sure that the ritual she needed to rid her life of David Palmer was to take action against him—not in a legal way, or even by getting in his face. All he’d have to do was deny it. She had no proof. No. She had to find a way to get to him so that he would really suffer. It was that or leave town right now, and she was no more about to let him scare her back to Boston than she was about to dye her hair purple and get green contact lenses. She had no idea how she was going to cause David Palmer grief, but she was sure her Ancestors had guided her to this decision. A way would present itself.

  She called Ardell to tell her about this Palmer revelation.

  “Humm. About time! But first I want to know how you’re feeling. You were in a pretty bad way last night,” Ardell said.

  Blanche saw herself running from the sight of Palmer, afraid to turn around for fear she might see his face. His eyes. Last night, she’d felt trapped, as though Palmer had allowed her a long lease on herself that he could end the moment he decided to kick in her door, put another knife to her throat, and take over her body again.

  “Blanche?”

  “I’m…I’m going to be okay. Seeing him like that…I was just caught off guard. I need to do something about him, is all. I see that now. When it first happened, I swore I’d get back at him some way. Then…I don’t know. After I left here, I thought…I didn’t expect the fear! I thought that was done and…But I ran. I ran.”

  “Humm, well, like you said, you were caught off guard. But you’ll be ready for him from now on.”

  From now on? Blanche recoiled from the phrase even though she knew Ardell was right. They were working for his social set. He’d be at more than just that one bicentennial event. She’d likely be seeing a lot of him.

  “And I’m damned proud of you,” Ardell said. “It’s past time for you to do something about him.” Ardell had never agreed with Blanche’s decision not to bring charges against Palmer.

  “Yeah, well, I still don’t know what I’m gonna do.”

  “You will. We’ll think of something,” Ardell said.

  Blanche took comfort from the sound of that “we.”

  “You hear about that girl they found dead in the woods?” Ardell asked.

  Blanche’s arms felt suddenly chilly. “A little. On the radio.”

  “Yeah. White girl. I feel sorry for any person dying like that,” Ardell said, “and you know it’s
gonna cause a whole heap of trouble.”

  Blanche knew what she meant. “Yeah, I guess, even in the New South, when a white woman’s killed lots of white folks still automatically think black.”

  “Damn! I sure hope none of the wait-staff boys get picked up! Or that shifty-eyed Zeke. I shoulda fired his behind before now. I can’t keep letting his sick and out-of-work wife be the reason I put up with him. Next bit of trouble and he’s out.”

  Blanche couldn’t think of a better reason for putting up with Zeke and said so.

  “I got a business to run, I can’t let…” Ardell sounded as defensive as a cheating husband caught with his paramour. “What’re you getting at, Blanche?”

  Blanche hesitated. She didn’t want to get Ardell’s back up any higher, but she couldn’t help but think about that woman who’d been the talk of Harlem when Blanche lived there. The woman, while on welfare, had always been in the government’s face agitating for more help for the poor. She’d organized tenants in the projects to demand better maintenance and demonstrated until the city put a child-care center in her neighborhood health clinic. Then she’d won the lottery for three million dollars, become a Republican, spoke out against the lazy poor, and moved to a gated community. “Some differences between being the boss and being the worker are bad for everybody.”

  “Humm, well, we’ll see how you feel about that when you’re a partner. I gotta go. My other line is clicking. I’m expecting a call from a client.”

  Blanche hung up the phone and added what it meant to be the boss to the list of things she and Ardell would likely be talking about for years to come.

  Blanche did some stretches and push-ups, showered, dressed, and ate some toast and yogurt. She had time for a second cup of tea before Ardell picked her up. They were going to visit the cooks.

  Blanche wondered if Ardell would bring up their telephone conversation, but she obviously had other things on her mind when she arrived.

  “You gotta help me with these old girls, Blanche.”

  Ardell drove them toward the outskirts of Farleigh.

  “Half the time they’re too evil or ornery to even speak, and when they’re not, they’re…well, I don’t know, odd, I guess.”

  “Odd how?”

  “Humm, there’s their names, for one thing.”

  “Well, I know their last name’s Hasting and they were always called Miz Monday and Miz Tuesday. What else is there to know?”

  Ardell nodded. “Those are their real names. But that ain’t…Wait. Just wait. You’ll see.”

  Blanche wondered if Ardell was exaggerating to make Blanche feel needed enough to say yes to a partnership in Carolina Catering.

  Ardell turned off the highway onto a road with fields on both sides covered with the bright green fuzz of some crop just coming up. The air was so fresh it seemed to sparkle.

  “They still cook just fine,” Ardell went on, “but something ain’t right. Maybe it’s knowing I can’t cook that makes ’em treat me like a child or…I don’t know. Something just don’t feel right. You know what I mean?”

  Of course, Blanche understood. Just because you didn’t see or feel a mosquito didn’t stop its bite from being real. Blanche was now sure there was something about the elderly sisters that was making Ardell uneasy. She was curious about what it might be. Blanche hadn’t seen them for more years than she could recall. Like most people, she’d never been able to tell them apart, except on those days when they wore different hairstyles. Both sisters were members of a breed of mostly dead famous black women cooks in big plantation houses around the region. When Blanche was a girl, the society and food columns in newspapers across the state had often gushed over the feasts the Hasting sisters had prepared for their employers and their guests. Nowadays, young black women with those kinds of skills took themselves out of Farleigh and other such towns to Atlanta and Winston-Salem, where they opened their own restaurants, or ruled the kitchens of other people’s. Blanche remembered hearing that the twins were once pressured by the Governor’s wife to give up one of their secret recipes to be included in a high-toned charity cookbook being done by an upper-crust ladies’ group. The twins had refused but had given the very same recipe to a bunch of black parents putting out a cookbook to raise money for a new playground.

  Now, standing in front of them, Blanche wondered if it were really possible for the Hasting twins to have the exact same deep wrinkles coursing down and across their round, pudgy faces. It wasn’t only their wrinkles that were the same. Everything matched—button-round eyes and pillowy hips and bosoms, long, strong-looking fingers, rosy-brown complexions—everything except their hair. One of them wore an old-fashioned pageboy. The other had her hair pulled back in a tight little bun. Although their eyebrows and the wisps of facial hair above their upper lips were silver-white, the hair on their heads was blacker than pitch.

  “Well, look who’s here, Eighteen, and she…” the one with the pageboy began.

  “Got somebody with her, Seventeen,” said the one with the bun. They turned to Ardell:

  “Who is…” Seventeen-pageboy began.

  “Your friend?” Eighteen-bun added.

  Ardell gave Blanche a see-I-told-you-so look before introducing Blanche to the two women.

  “We know your mama and knew…” Seventeen said.

  “Your daddy when you and your sister, God rest her soul…” her sister added.

  “Was just bitty girls,” Seventeen said.

  They both looked Blanche over as though they were quality-control inspectors. When they’d finished, they nodded to each other.

  “Y’all,” said one.

  “Sit,” said the other, as she and her sister lowered themselves to the purple horsehair sofa.

  “Is you home,” Seventeen said.

  “Visitin’ your mama?” Eighteen asked.

  “Yes, ma’am—I mean, ma’ams,” Blanche said. “And helping Ardell out with the catering business.”

  The sisters looked at each other for a few moments, then back at Blanche. “Help her out,” the one with the pageboy said.

  “How?” said the one with the bun.

  “Oh, just kinda pitch in,” Ardell said before Blanche could answer. “You know, keep things moving, make sure your fine food’s served right, check on the clearing-ups and so forth. I need somebody ’cause it’s so busy now, you know, with the bicentennial and all the parties and the…”

  Blanche didn’t know why Ardell didn’t want the twins to know Blanche was also a cook, but it was clear she didn’t.

  The sisters gave each other another nod, then turned to Blanche with identical sweet half-smiles on their faces. They rose from the sofa in unison.

  “We gonna make y’all…” said one.

  “A nice cup of tea,” said the other.

  Both women went off toward the back of the house.

  Blanche could hardly wait for them to leave the room. “What’s up with this number calling?” she whispered.

  “See? I told you they were odd. They’re twins, right? But one was born on the thirty-first of December, 1917, just before midnight. The other one was born on the first of January, 1918, just after the new year began. So, they call each other Seventeen and Eighteen. It was Miz Minnie who told me how it works. I didn’t know what the hell was going on first time I came out here. On top of that, Miz Minnie said sometimes they tell people they’re cousins. Now, what’s that about?”

  Seventeen poked her head into the living room. “Y’all come on through,” she said.

  “And have a sit-down,” Eighteen added over her shoulder.

  Blanche followed Ardell down a short, dark hallway to a room crowded around a huge claw-footed dining-room table, six chairs, a sideboard, and a china closet. Everyone, except lean Ardell, had to squeeze by the furniture to get into the chairs.

  “Well, now,” Eig
hteen began after she and her sister had arranged tea, cups, and cookies on the table. She opened the small spiral notebook beside her plate. “Let me…”

  “See what all we need,” Seventeen said, and eased the notebook closer to her own place.

  Eighteen reached for the notebook. “Last time you…”

  Seventeen snatched the notebook and put it on the other side of her teacup, out of Eighteen’s reach.

  “But last time you…” Eighteen began again.

  “Now, Eighteen, I am the oldest, so I’ll handle this. You pour the tea.”

  “I poured the tea last time and the time before that,” Eighteen complained. “You said that…”

  Seventeen angled out of her chair. “Excuse us, please.” She smiled at Blanche and Ardell and turned toward the kitchen, holding the notebook tight against her bosom. Her sister followed her.

  Ardell and Blanche could hear the sound of loud, emphatic whispering from the next room, but couldn’t make out any actual words. Blanche wanted to move closer to the kitchen to listen, but she was afraid of being caught. When the twins returned, Seventeen still had the notebook and a triumphant gleam in her eye.

  “Now. Like I was saying”—she gave her sister a sidelong look—“we done made a list of what we need to fill this here order you had that gal drop off t’other day.” While her sister poured tea, Seventeen pulled a stubby pencil from her apron pocket and wet its tip with a flick of her tongue. “Five pounds of chocolate, two quarts of cream, a box of salt, two boxes of baking powder and powdered sugar, twenty-five pounds of butter…”

  Twenty-five pounds of butter?! Blanche cut her eyes at Ardell, who was too busy writing down what she was being told to notice. Ardell had told Blanche earlier that the sisters were to make five yellow cakes, some yeast rolls, and petits fours. But twenty-five pounds of butter?