Gather Together in My Name - Maya Angelou [32]
Mother was unhappy that my job made me unhappy. She always knew her “daughter had great potential” and was determined that if she had anything to do with it, I was going to realize it.
Weeks later she and I sat in the dining room and picked and poked through the classifieds for my future.
I was nearly nineteen, had a baby, responsibilities and no real profession. I could cook Creole and was a fast, friendly cocktail waitress. Also I was qualified as an absentee madam, but I somehow felt that I simply had not yet “found out my niche” (I had just discovered that phrase and yo-yo'ed it around with frequent and gay abandon).
“Private secretary. If you could type fast enough and do shorthand.” Mother was serious. Her pretty face was lined with concentration. “Telephone operator, pays pretty good.”
I reminded her that we'd already been through that.
“Key punch. Stenographer. You need training, baby.”
She looked at me spot on and added, “Anything worth doing is worth doing well.”
I didn't dare remind her that everything I had done had been well done.
“What is Alice doing? What about Jean Mae, and the twins? What are they all doing? Going to college?” Her voice and round black eyes worried me for answers.
Jean Mae, the neighborhood's sepia Betty Grable, had a job hopping cars at a popular drive-in. I hardly had the face, figure or sexuality to be taken in at that restaurant. Alice could be seen nightly whistling down Post Street and up Sutter, her young walk exaggerated, her thin voice insinuating the lone sailor into following three paces behind her to the nearest transient hotel.
The twins married twins, which seemed as appalling to me as streetwalking I felt there was a closet incest about the whole thing.
The small percentage of classmates who went on to college had become unbearably stuck-up and boring. So I found no inspiration among my peers.
“Companion, Chauffeurette.” That I could do. I immediately set a film to flickering on my mind screen. In a snappy uniform, no cap, gray serge and British walker shoes, I drove a man around who was the spitting image of Lionel Barrymore. He always addressed me as “Johnson” and while we liked and respected each other, we took pains never to show it. Late nights, he would call me into the drawing room and I would stand at attention, easily.
“Johnson. Tomorrow's a beaut.”
“Yes, sir?”
“We go up to the city, then back to the country club, then the city, then the farm. A little hard on you, I fear.”
“It's my job, sir.”
“I could count on you to say that, Johnson.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good night.”
“Good night, sir.”
Mother's gaze followed her ringed fingers up and down the page.
“You'd have to live in and it doesn't really pay enough for you to afford a full-time baby-sitter.” She flipped the paper closed.
“Take anything that looks like something. You can always quit. Or there's a chance that you won't rise to the challenge and you'll be fired. But the only thing to remember is that ‘you were looking for a job when you found that one.’ So whoever fires you ain't getting no cherry.” She got up and went into the kitchen.
“How about a Dubonnet”—ice already clucked against the sides of glasses—“with a twist of lemon? I'm going to fix myself a Scotch.”
When I was around ten in Arkansas, I saw a glamorous actress play