Blanche Cleans Up Read online

  By the time the lunch dishes were in the dishwasher, both Brindles and Sadowski had left the house. They’d been gone about an hour when one of the three phone lines rang. Allister and Felicia each had their own lines with voice mail. Miz Inez had said the house line was the only one Blanche was responsible for answering. She checked to see if it was the one ringing. It was.

  “Brindle residence.”

  “Inez?”

  “No. Who’s calling?”

  “This is Marc, Marc Brindle.”

  “Oh. I’m Blanche White. Inez isn’t here. I’m working for her this week. Your parents are both out. Do you want to leave a message?”

  Silence, except for breathing.

  “Hello?”

  “You…you wouldn’t happen to know where I can reach Inez’s son, Ray-Ray, would you? He left a message on my machine, but he didn’t say…I called Inez’s house but there was no answer, so…”

  Blanche opened her mouth to say she’d just seen Ray-Ray yesterday, but changed her mind.

  “Sorry, I don’t have a number for him.”

  Another silence.

  “Your parents are both out. Would you like to leave a message for—”

  “Uh, no, never mind. Thanks.”

  The line went dead.

  “And good-bye to you, too,” she said to the dial tone. Mick said Marc and Felicia were on good terms, but what kind of relationship did you have with a son who called your housekeeper and didn’t even leave you a “hi”?

  Greedy-eyed Sadowski wasn’t with the Brindles when they came home. Felicia and Allister both had that stretched skin and squinty-eyed, dazed look Blanche had seen on other employers who’d had to glad-hand with the public for long hours. They drank their drinks in total silence—not the kind of silence that comes after a fight, or the kind of comfortable silence that happens between people close enough not to need to talk much, but the kind of screaming silence where there’s so much that hasn’t been said for so long, neither party would know where to begin if they dared.

  Blanche thought it best not to mention Marc’s call to Felicia. He hadn’t left a message for Felicia—so why call herself to the woman’s attention, given their morning run-in? But, as often happened, Blanche’s curiosity got the better of her.

  “Your son called, ma’am.”

  “When? What did he say?”

  “He was looking for Inez.”

  “What did he want with Inez?”

  “He said he was looking for Ray-Ray. He didn’t leave a message.”

  Allister had been ignoring them until he heard Ray-Ray’s name.

  “Ray-Ray? Marc dared to call here looking for that—”

  “Please, Allister, haven’t you caused enough grief already?”

  Felicia took her drink and went quickly up the stairs. To the phone, Blanche guessed.

  The bus ride home was like being on a mental merry-go-round—one thought leaping up as another one dipped to the bottom of her brain. How were things going to work out between her and Felicia after this morning? She liked Mick. She reminded Blanche of an iceberg or an underwater mountain with only the tip of herself showing. And Carrie wasn’t nearly as tough a nut as Blanche had thought—softened by sandwiches, she chuckled to herself. Shit! She’d forgotten about the note Ray-Ray gave her for Allister. She’d have to do something about that tomorrow.

  She got home just in time to listen to Taifa and Malik squabbling over which of them had knocked over her Swedish ivy and broken the pot. All thoughts of the Brindle household quickly disappeared.

  “Moms, Miss Downing said we gotta have the money in tomorrow for the museum trip.” Taifa smacked gum in Blanche’s face on the way to kissing her.

  “Waste of time paying for that ignorant child to go to a museum.” Malik remarked in his new voice.

  “Child? Child? Who you callin’ a child? I’m older than your baby butt! Your big sister, that’s who I am and always will be, whether you like it or not.”

  “Maybe I’ll always be your brother, that’s up to you. But you may not always be my sister,” Malik told her. “I could change my name, move to the other side of the planet, and forget I ever knew you.” He picked up his book and walked out of the room.

  Taifa gave Blanche a startled look. “He couldn’t really do that, could he?” Taifa’s voice was a whisper.

  Blanche knew what Taifa wanted to hear. She also knew that Malik had taken a giant step away from Taifa and from her, just by raising the possibility of disappearing from the family. His words had put a hairline crack in her heart, too. Once again, she was faced with the major contradiction of her parenthood: wanting both to be shed of these kids and to be as much mother as they needed for as long as they needed her—within reason, of course. It was like wanting to be a rock and an eagle at the same time. She gave Taifa a hard hug but didn’t answer the girl’s question.

  Shaquita broiled a decent pork chop, Taifa’s sautéed spinach with fresh garlic was delicious, and Malik had baked the sweet potatoes till they were done but still moist. Blanche wasn’t really hungry—fallout from handling food all day. Still, she tried to show some gusto as she moved her food around.

  Taifa talked nonstop through dinner—about the school play, what girlfriend A said to girlfriend B about boy C, and her latest favorite song. Despite Taifa’s chatter, Blanche was more aware of Shaquita, who was altogether different from the perky future archaeologist of last night’s dinner. Both her shoulders and her mouth looked like they had invisible weights pulling them down. She was red-eyed, too.

  “You okay?” Blanche asked Shaquita when Taifa let her get a word in.

  “I bet her and her boy—”

  “Butt out, Taifa,” Shaquita said in a voice that meant business.

  Boyfriend trouble, Blanche thought. If she asked Shaquita about it, she’d not only have to listen to the girl’s account of puppy love gone wrong but take it as seriously, at least on the surface, as Shaquita did. Was she ready for that?

  Blanche was almost grateful when Malik reminded her of the environmental meeting he wanted to go to that evening. Almost. She’d much rather take a hot bath and go to bed early, but she knew this meeting was important to Malik, and she had no intention of letting him go alone. She wasn’t one of those parents silly enough to think their child wasn’t the type to get into trouble. There was no type.

  Neither one of them would be going to the meeting if it weren’t for Miss Wagner, Malik’s social studies teacher. When he told her he wanted to write his environmental paper on Roxbury, Miss Wagner insisted the environment wasn’t important to black people in inner-city neighborhoods. Malik had come home from school determined to find black people in Roxbury working on some pollution problem. This would make the third environmental meeting she’d taken him to. He’d turned his nose up at both of the other organizations. One of them had been run by white people who did all the talking while the black residents listened; the other meeting had started nearly an hour late, and while the talkers had been black men, they hadn’t had much to say. Malik had seen the notice for tonight’s meeting in Dudley Square. Neither of them had heard of the organization before. Blanche had meant to ask Miz Barker about it, but it had slipped her mind.

  They took the number 28 bus over to Blue Hill Avenue, past the Nation of Islam mosque and Ma Dixon’s restaurant. They got off the bus at Columbia Road, then began looking for the address on the flyer. Malik did what Blanche had come to call the not-with-you walk where he strolled either three steps behind or three steps ahead of her. He and Taifa had adopted this method of walking with and without her over the last year. Blanche had resented it until she remembered ducking out the side door of her junior high school to avoid Mama, who was waiting out front to walk home with her.

  They almost missed the place. They’d been looking for an office-type building or a storefront, but the office of the Community Reawakening Project was up a narrow stairway to a third-floor apartment across the street from the check-cashing
place. A hand-lettered sign invited them to walk right in.

  There were fourteen people already there. Six of them were white—the largest group of whites Blanche ever had seen in Roxbury, except cops. They were all sitting together with tight little smiles on their faces, their hands folded in their laps like schoolchildren under a mean teacher. If they were so uncomfortable, why had they come? She took the flyer from Malik and read the answer down at the bottom in very small letters: “Also sponsored by the Multicultural Environmental Coalition.”

  Blanche and Malik sat in the last row of metal folding chairs set up in what was probably once a living room. Malik took out his notebook. The seats were filling up, except for a ring of empties surrounding the island of whites. Blanche wondered if they had the minority jitters: Did they think everyone was looking at them? Did they think they felt an unwelcoming vibe from some people in the audience? Were they worried about getting home safely? Were they getting a hint of the stress of being black in a mostly white and often evil-acting country?

  She watched a young dread sister gather her hair in one hand and dig in her shoulder bag with the other. She pulled out a pair of chopsticks and used them to pin her hair on top of her head. When a couple of stray dreads fell in her face, she flipped them back with a toss of her head that made Blanche smile.

  She used to think the Hair Ballet that white girls did was all theirs until she’d noticed dread sisters flipping their hair over their shoulders, lifting it from their necks to catch a breeze, flinging it back from their faces in ways that women with false or processed hair rarely seemed to do. And wasn’t it funny that after all these years of horsehair, other people’s hair, Dacron weaves, wigs, and extensions, it was our own naturally nappy hair that was making black women’s blow-hair dream come true? Like Lady Day sang, God bless the child that’s got her own.

  Blanche closed her eyes and took a deep breath—cocoa butter, perfume, a razor-sharp cologne, chewing gum, greens. She tuned in on the talk.

  “Yeah, but he’s fifteen years younger than her. She must be outta her mind!”

  “Maybe she’s just looking for staying power,” came the laughing response.

  “…and my foot swole up big as a cantaloupe…” came from another quarter.

  She listened to the jazz and gospel, rhythm and blues, and rap in the voices around her. Something loosened deep down in her belly. She relaxed into the melody of voices like a child curled up in her mother’s lap.

  “Hi, Blanche.”

  Joanie, Blanche’s next-door neighbor, angled her hips into the seat on the other side of Malik.

  “Hey, Malik, whatsup?” She asked the question like the answer was important to her, which was one of the reasons Blanche liked her. She took young people seriously.

  “I gotta do this paper. On the environment. I want it to be about the Bury, too,” he said, and told her about his difference of opinion with his teacher.

  “Good for you!” Joanie told him. “Everybody in this city got something bad to say about Roxbury and most of ’em don’t even know how to get here from downtown. I’m glad you stickin’ up for us.”

  A woman took the chair in front of Malik and turned to speak to Joanie.

  “These are my next-door neighbors, Blanche and Malik.” Joanie told her.

  The woman turned her narrow, sharp-featured face first to Blanche. “Hi,” she said, reaching an arm over the back of her seat. “I’m Lacey Monroe, sex worker.”

  “Blanche White, temporary celibate.”

  Malik’s eyes widened, but he minded his manners enough to say hello to Lacey when she spoke to him.

  Lacey turned toward the front of the room.

  A pecan-brown woman with a short, angular natural was looking the crowd over. Maurice Samuelson was with her, and so were two white men and one of the black men Blanche had seen at Brindle’s lunch but couldn’t identify.

  The woman stepped toward the audience and clapped her hands. “Our panel members are all here, so we’ll get started.” She looked around the room as she spoke. She didn’t smile. Shadows played around her deep-set eyes and under her full bottom lip.

  “I’m Aminata Dawson of the Community Reawakening Project. Tonight is one in our series of events to make sure the community knows how our lives, and our children’s lives, are being affected by pollution, toxic waste, and other environmental hazards, especially lead poisoning.

  “I started this organization almost a year ago, when my only son was sent to Walpole for shooting his best friend. My boy, who I raised to respect life, to love life, this boy who was so gentle and sweet when he was little that he could have been an angel. Ask anybody who knew him. But he changed after he was poisoned by the lead in our apartment. Even his teachers noticed the difference. Asking me if everything was all right at home, like it was my fault the boy got into fights and wouldn’t listen. Didn’t nobody care whether the medicine they gave him was going to fix what that lead had done to his mind. Nobody cared then and nobody cares now. Doctors try to tell me lead poisoning don’t make our kids kill each other. But I know different. I know that medicine wasn’t enough to stop my boy from turning into somebody who could kill his best friend, my boy who was so gentle and sweet when he was little that he could have been an angel. Ask anybody who knew him. I raised him to respect life, to love life. But he changed after he was poisoned by the lead in our place. Even his teachers noticed the difference. Asking me…”

  A hum vibrated through the room as Aminata began retelling her son’s story. People shuffled their feet and squirmed in their chairs. From the side of the room, a big black man with security printed on his orange armband took half a step toward Aminata. Aminata looked at the man and blinked like she was waking from a trance. Or a nightmare.

  Blanche reached for Malik’s hand. He let her hold it for half a second—long enough for her to know she wasn’t the only one moved by Aminata’s story.

  Aminata began again: “A lot of our kids are still getting sick from lead poisoning. How do we know all these kids out here killing each other ain’t just like my boy? My boy who was so gentle and…”

  The man with the security armband coughed.

  Aminata continued: “We got to do something, y’all. This is genocide. This racist system has found perfect ways to get rid of us: give guns and drugs to our children who don’t go to school; give legal drugs, like Ritalin, to our kids who do go to school just so they’ll sit still for teachers who don’t care if they learn as long as they keep quiet; and poison our babies with lead in their own homes. Roxbury is the most lead-polluted community in Boston. We got to do something, and we got to do it now. I’m asking every one of you to have your kids tested for lead. One of our speakers will tell you how easy it is to get your children tested. And it’s free. But you got to do it now. By the time the poison gives your child stomachaches, or makes your child be tired or mean and irritable all the time, it’ll be too late to stop what happened to my son.” Aminata paused.

  Blanche looked around the room. There was no hum and shuffle now.

  “Take your time, sister,” someone said.

  Aminata went on: “Tonight we’re going to hear from people who can tell us what we need to do to protect our families from lead poisoning.”

  The first speaker was a white man in a shirt and pants as rumpled as used pajamas. He was from the also-sponsored-by group mentioned on the flyer. Pajamas looked puzzled by people’s laughter when he told them they had to fill out an application and apply to be in an organization with someone who didn’t even respect them enough to press his clothes. But there was no laughter as he talked about the amount of lead in old paint and water pipes, and the harm that just breathing in lead dust could do to a young child, even one still in the womb.

  The black man Blanche didn’t know turned out to be second in command at the Roxbury Outpatient Care Center, where kids could be tested for lead free of charge.

  The second white man stared at the audience with eyes so pale t
hey looked blank. He was from the state agency that was responsible for lead removal, and talked about the laws and regulations to make landlords and realtors responsible for lead cleanup. But by the time he had used the phrase “what you people need to do” three times, the room was alive with people talking to one another as if he weren’t even present.

  Then it was Samuelson’s turn.

  “Now you know,” he said. “Can’t none of y’all say, ‘I didn’t know.’ You been told and you know what’s got to be done. We got to do what we always got to do here in devil land: take control, take control, take control!

  “The Temple of Divine Enlightenment is in the forefront, the forefront of the attack on these racist dogs who would defile our community with their evil…”

  It was a good performance, if you went in for what Blanche called minister speak. She always felt like the person using it was trying to put something over on her, so she hardly listened. She was more concerned with the damage Samuelson was doing to the ozone level with all that hot air he was blowing. When she tuned back in, Samuelson was ticking off the ways in which the Temple was working on environmental problems.

  “…keep the mayor’s and the governor’s feet to the fire and remind those white folks in the legislature that we are here, we are powerful, we are great! That’s why you got to not only get your children tested for lead but register yourself to vote and join the Temple’s Community Cleanup Campaign!”

  Blanche waited for him to tell Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben they should vote for Brindle, but he didn’t. People clapped when he sat down. Blanche didn’t.

  The man who’d helped Aminata get off her gentle-son speech came up to speak. He moved with that kind of big-man grace that always reminded Blanche of her ex-lover, Leo.

  “My name’s Othello Flood. Most of y’all know me. I grew up around here. Probably stole something from half the people in this room.”