Tempest Rising - Diane Mckinney-whetstone [82]
Ramona stopped transferring the dusters from the wheeled cart to the bar and looked directly at Cass as if she hadn’t heard right.
“I did, Ramona. I says to him, ‘Listen now, Ramona is one beautiful, conscientious lady. She’s not your ordinary run-of-the-mill Negro.’”
Ramona just stared at Cass, at the half-moon hazel brown eyebrows drawn against her forehead that sometimes made it hard for Ramona to read her because the eyebrows stayed still even as the rest of her face moved. She could tell even without the eyebrows, though, that Cass wasn’t just joking around, and now she was embarrassed for them both. She turned her back and headed deeper into the stockroom, mumbling, “Excuse me, something just occurred to me that I need to check on back here.”
“Really, Ramona.” Cass followed Ramona just inside the stockroom door. “You really do your race proud. You’re never late, never take off a Friday or a Monday, you don’t steal, you know what I mean, Ramona. I told that apartment guy too. Listen, I says to him, when he was hemming and hawing about the effect renting to a Negro would have on the other tenants, ‘You should be proud to have the likes of a fine Negro girl like Ramona wanting to rent from you,’ I says.”
Ramona wanted to sink to the floor, cover her face in the dusters, close her ears. She wanted to turn Cass’s voice off. She wanted to explode. It was enough that Mae had thwarted her move; she didn’t need to know that powers much larger than Mae were thwarting her too. And what could she do? This wasn’t even Selma, where they were getting ready for the march. She could sit at the counter at Woolworth’s, drink from the same fountain as her boss, and Mae had in fact driven her credit into the ground, so she couldn’t even prove in a court of law that the apartment was denied her for other than legitimate reasons. Her eyes were burning. “Cass, I’m going to be a minute in here,” she called out to the doorway. “And then I think I will take that hour. I’ll see you in the morning. I’ll get those dusters on the floor first thing.”
Her nose was running when she got back to her desk, but she wouldn’t let herself cry. She went to her bottom drawer and pulled out her purse, took out a token for the el ride home, swallowed hard. She didn’t want to go home. She thought about where could she go. Out for a drink maybe, a light dinner. But with whom. Not Tyrone; he kept the shop open late during the week, more eye burning at the thought of Tyrone. She went for her address book. Whom could she call for a last-minute dinner date? Ran her finger up and down the pages, turning the pages. Not him. Married. Please, not him. Ugh, can’t believe I spent time with him. She was almost through the book; she had to sit down at the realization that there was no one she could call at this moment. How limited her world had become, how limited, really, it had always been. How sad, my God, how very sad. The names and addresses were blurring on the page; she still wouldn’t let herself cry.
Then she came upon Beanie’s name. She stopped her finger at Beanie’s name. It never occurred to her to call up the likes of Beanie, even though she was always promising Beanie that they were going to keep in touch between choir rehearsals. She dialed the number, dialed it quickly before she could talk herself out of it, and got suddenly shy when Beanie said, “Hello.”
“Hi, Beanie, it’s Ramona.” Ramona forced the words out on her pent-up breaths.
“Hey, Ramona, girl, what you know good?”
“Nothing good, girl,” Ramona said, and then wished she could call the words back.
“Uh-oh, what’s wrong? Spill it, girl. That cute country boy starting to show his butt? Huh? The cute ones always do sooner or later, that’s why I keeps me an ugly man. Toupee and all.” She laughed a raucous laugh, and Ramona almost laughed too. Ramona wanted to laugh, then wanted to tell Beanie all about Tyrone’s mouth, and how it had changed, wanted to tell her about the apartment falling through, and how much she hated Mae. She wanted to tell her to put a pot of coffee on, pull down