Gather Together in My Name - Maya Angelou [2]
In earlier, freer days I might have simply noted and recorded her grumpiness, but now my guilt, which I carried around like a raw egg, fed my paranoia, and I became sure that I was a nuisance. When my baby cried I rushed to change him, feed him, coddle him, to in fact shut him up. My youth and shuddering self-doubt made me unfair to that vital woman.
She took great joy in her beautiful grandchild, and as with most egocentric people, saw his every virtue as a mirror for her own. He had pretty hands … “Well, look at mine.” His feet were absolutely straight with high insteps; so were hers. She was not annoyed with me; she was playing the hand life had dealt her as she had always done. And she played it masterfully.
The mixture of arrogance and insecurity is as volatile as the much-touted alcohol and gasoline. The difference is that with the former there is a long internal burning usually terminating in self-destroying implosion.
I would quit the house, take a job and show the whole world (my son's father) that I was equal to my pride and greater than my pretensions.
CHAPTER 1
I was mortified. A silly white woman who probably counted on her toes looked me in the face and said I had not passed. The examination had been constructed by morons for idiots. Of course I breezed through without thinking much about it.
REARRANGE THESE LETTERS: ACT-ART-AST
Okay CAT. RAT. SAT. Now what?
She stood behind her make-up and coiffed hair and manicured nails and dresser-drawers of scented angora sweaters and years of white ignorance and said that I had not passed.
“The telephone company spends thousands of dollars training operators. We simply cannot risk employing anyone who made the marks you made. I'm sorry.”
She was sorry? I was stunned. In a stupor I considered that maybe my outsized intellectual conceit had led me to take the test for granted. And maybe I deserved this highhanded witch's remarks.
“May I take it again?” That was painful to ask.
“No, I'm sorry.” If she said she was sorry one more time, I was going to take her by her sorry shoulders and shake a job out of her.
“There is an opening, though”—she might have sensed my unspoken threat—“for a bus girl in the cafeteria.”
“What does a bus girl do?” I wasn't sure I could do it.
“The boy in the kitchen will tell you.”
After I filled out forms and was found uninfected by a doctor, I reported to the cafeteria. There the boy, who was a grandfather, informed me, “Collect the dishes, wipe the tables, make sure the salt and pepper shakers are clean, and here's your uniform.”
The coarse white dress and apron had been starched with concrete and was too long. I stood at the side of the room, the dress hem scratching my calves, waiting for the tables to clear. Many of the trainee operators had been my classmates. Now they stood over laden tables waiting for me or one of the other dumb bus girls to remove the used dishes so that they could set down their trays.
I lasted at the job a week, and so hated the salary that I spent it all the afternoon I quit.
CHAPTER 2
“Can you cook Creole?”
I looked at the woman and gave her a lie as soft as melting butter. “Yes, of course. That's all I know how to cook.”
The Creole Café had a cardboard sign in the window which bragged: COOK WANTED. SEVENTY-FIVE DOLLARS A WEEK. As soon as I saw it I knew I could cook Creole, whatever that was.
Desperation to find help must have blinded the proprietress to my age or perhaps it was