Gather Together in My Name - Maya Angelou [9]
“But surely you don't mean to make cooking Creole food your life's work.”
I hadn't thought about it. “I have a nice room here. Don't you think it's nice?”
He looked at me squarely forcing me to face my fears. “Now, My if you're happy being miserable, enjoy it, but don't ask me to feel sorry for you. Just get all down in it and wallow around. Take your time to savor all its subtleties, but don't come to me expecting sympathy.”
He knew me too well. It was true. I was loving the role of jilted lover. Deserted, yet carrying on. I saw myself as the heroine, solitary, standing under a streetlight's soft yellow glow. Waiting. Waiting. As the fog comes in, a gentle rain falls but doesn't drench her. It is just enough to make her shiver in her white raincoat (collar turned up). Oh, he knew me too well.
“If you want to stay around here looking like death eating a soda cracker, that's your business. There are some rights no one has the right to take from you. That's one. Now, what do you want to do?”
That evening I decided to go to Los Angeles. At first I thought I'd work another month, saving every possible penny. But Bailey said, “When you make up your mind to make a change you have to follow through on the wave of decision.” He promised me two hundred dollars when his ship paid off and suggested that I tell my boss that I'd be leaving in a week.
I had never had two hundred dollars of my own. It sounded like enough to live on for a year.
The prospect of a trip to Los Angeles returned my youth to me.
My mother heard my plans without surprise. “You're a woman. You can make up your own mind.” She hadn't the slightest idea that not only was I not a woman, but what passed for my mind was animal instinct. Like a tree or a river, I merely responded to the winds and the tides.
She might have seen that, but her own mind was misted with the knowledge of a failing marriage, and the slipping away of the huge sums of money which she had enjoyed and thought her due. Her fingers still glittered with diamonds and she was a weekly customer at the most expensive shoe store in town, but her pretty face had lost its carefree adornment and her smile no longer made me think of day breaking.
“Be the best of anything you get into. If you want to be a whore, it's your life. Be a damn good one. Don't chippy at anything. Anything worth having is worth working for.”
It was her version of Polonius' speech to Laertes. With that wisdom in my pouch, I was to go out and buy my future.
CHAPTER 8
The Los Angeles Union Railway Terminal was a marvel of Moorish, Spanish glamour. The main waiting room was vast and the ceiling domed its way up to the clouds. Long curved benches sat in dark wooden splendor, and outside its arched doors, palm trees waved in lovely walks. Inlaid blue and yellow tiles were to be found on every wall, arranged in gay and exotic design.
It was easy to distinguish San Franciscans detraining amid the crowd. San Franciscan women always, but always, wore gloves. Short white snappy ones in the day, and long black or white kid leather ones at night. The Southern Californians and other tourists were much more casual. Men sported flowered shirts, and women ambled around or lounged on the imposing seats in cotton dresses which could have passed for brunch coats in San Francisco.
Being from The City, I had dressed for the trip. A black crepe number which pulled and pleated, tucked and shirred, in a wrap all its own. It was expensive by my standards and dressy enough for a wedding reception. My short white gloves had lost their early-morning crispness during the ten-hour coach trip, and Guy, whose immensity matched his energy, had mashed and creased and bungled the dress into a very new symmetry. Less than a year old, he had opinions. He definitely wanted to get down and go to that smiling stranger across the aisle, and immediately wanted to be in my lap pulling on the rhinestone brooch which captured and brought light to the collar of my dress.
In spite of the wrinkled dress and in spite of the cosmetic case full to reeking