“A native girl?”
“Yes, an educated native girl, of course.” Every time I spoke my voice came out with more humility. I felt I stood there like a beggar.
“But where would she sleep?” my mother brought out at last, as if she had found what she wanted in the pause: the unanswerable.
I had it ready: “In the cooler. It’d be quite all right. I’ll fix it up for her.”
I began to make light of it, sensing that if I spoke of Mary as an inferior my mother might be edged to a position where it would seem that she herself and I stood together. “She’s as clean as a white person and she’d do her own room and so on. It’s just to give her somewhere to work.”
“Yes …,” said my mother. “Where will she wash? And where’s she going to have her meals? That’s something. I don’t fancy her using my bath.”
“Oh, she’ll wash outside. She’ll eat in her room. Or she and I’ll eat together.”
“You’ll eat …”
I made a gesture of quick dismissal. “She won’t care where she eats.”
Anna came in from the kitchen with the tablecloth over her arm and a faggot of knives and forks in her hand. “I’m sorry, missus,” she said determinedly. “All right, all right, I’m off,” said my mother, scooping up her things. She put them on the sideboard. “Look, Anna, don’t use those mats Miss Julie gave me. The old ones are good enough for under the meat dishes.”
I did not say anything but stood and watched her. She could not ignore me as she left the room. “Well, I don’t know,” she said. “I’ll have to speak to your father.”
That was what she always said when she did not know whether or not she wanted to do something. I had heard her say it in shops hundreds of times, when she suspected that she might get what she wanted elsewhere, or that she was being overcharged: “I’ll have to speak to my husband.” Yet I knew that she had never sought my father’s advice in her whole life, and he had never cared to have any authority over her, or questioned any decision of hers. It was her way of playing for time to go into consultation with herself.
Now I accepted the lie with a show of respect. I sat on the veranda letting the insipid music of the radio flow over me, and soon my father came home and let himself down into one of the creaking chairs to read the paper. As he grew older the sprightliness of small, thin men was intensified in him and his face grew smaller behind his glasses. Fits of dizziness and weakness had been diagnosed as anemia, and he was no longer allowed to discipline himself with the dietary fads that he had adopted from time to time. So he had gone from the stomach to the psyche. Now he had a little shelf of books of popular psychiatry, and adopted the theory of psychosomasis as wholly as he had once believed in the doctrine of Christian Science or the Hay Diet. He was also one of the many people who confuse eccentricity with culture, and he saw my modest and hopeful attempts to expand myself as on a level with his blind belief in the elixir of the moment or, rather, the latest book of the month for hypochondriacs. “This’ll interest you, Helen!” He held up a new one. The Subconscious You. A popular, concise explanation for laymen written by an eminent American psychiatrist. Two million copies sold. “It seems it’s all up here,” he said, putting a finger to his forehead. “No matter where you feel it, it’s all up here. Look somewhere toward the middle, there — there’s a chapter on how to study, that’s something for you now, eh?”
I paged through the book and caught one chapter head as it flipped by: “How you think with your blood: The problem of prejudice.” I smiled.
I went back to my room to look over my work, but spent one of those timelessly vague half-hours that young women fall into now and then, combing and recombing my hair, looking at my figure in the mirror, moving about among the clothes in my wardrobe. Anna came to call me to dinner and my mother was already carving the leg of lamb. As soon as she saw me she said, carelessly and finally, like the inevitable dismissal of something quite ridiculous. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to have that native girl here. Best cut it out.” Obviously she had made up her mind, and simply told my father that I had made the suggestion and she had repudiated it.
I don’t know whether it was the result of the kind of self-hypnosis induced by my passionate absorption with myself in my room just before, but an intense arrogant irritation shot into me. “I knew it. I knew it.” I gave her a look of summing up, smiling, unpleasant.
“How do you mean you knew it?” she said, rising to it. Nothing angered her more than suspected patronage because she believed that in some obscure way I had some advantage from which to patronize her. The knife squeaked through the thin slices of meat; she carved excellently.
“I just knew it.”
She countered her fear of patronage with a kind of smugness. Calmly helping my father and me to cauliflower, she said with a little warning laugh, “When you’ve got a home of your own, you can do what you like. But while you live in my house… I don’t see why your father and I should pander to one of your fads. It’s just another idea you’ve got into your head, like all the others.”
I cannot explain how her tone affected me. Perhaps it was because I was so uncertain of the validity of much that attracted me and that I believed in, and this small help that I wanted to give was one of the few things that had come so spontaneously and simply to me that there was no possibility that it was part of a pose or an attitude, something within the context of what I wanted to be rather than what I really was. To question it, to lump it with all the rest was like doubting my own reality. That the questioning should come from my mother was painful and frightening. It was as if she had said: Have I really got a child? Is she there? And in the end, no authority could speak above hers.
She had no idea of the enormous power to hurt that she retained. I could not have told her, I could not have explained. She would only have laughed again, missing the point: Of course, my opinion matters so much to you!
I felt sick with the impossibility of getting her, anyone, to understand what she did to me. I sat there trembling with a frustration like suppressed desire. And my voice went on, irrelevant and out of control. “You let Anna have her cousin here while she was looking for work.”
“Look, I’ve said no and that’s the finish of it.”
“You haven’t really thought about it at all,” I said, sitting back slowly from my plate. “You’re simply terrified of anything I ask you, no matter what it is, if it’s something I ask, you must say no on principle. Because it’s bound to be wicked, crackpot, not respectable. You wouldn’t really mind having the girl here at all. But I ask it, so, no, no — it must be suspect.”
My mother said, noticing my agitation: “That’s right, you were always good at turning on the drama.”
“Look,” said my father, “must we argue at the table?” Of course, he was thinking of one of the tenets of his latest theory: Digestion is impaired by emotion.
My mother climbed slowly and mightily into her anger like a knight putting on his vestments before mounting for battle. “Of course, you let her do as she likes. And grumble to me afterward. Well I won’t have it. I’ve had enough. I don’t know her friends and their ways and I don’t want to. Nobody’s good enough for my daughter here. How do you think it looks, her keeping herself aloof from the Mine, never wanting to do the things other young people do? I’m ashamed, always making excuses—” She stopped, breathing hard at us. But once it was released, all that she had not said for months, all the preserve of her cold silences, her purposeful ignoring, could not be checked.