The Heart of a Woman - Maya Angelou [92]
I said, “I'm married to an African, who is out there dancing the slow grind with some broad. And nobody's talked to me. So …”
She put her hands on her hips and shook her head. She said, “Honey, mens, they ain't gone change. You need a little sip.” A drink was the last thing I needed, but she reached down alongside the refrigerator and pulled out a bottle of gin from her purse. She poured lavishly into a coffee cup. I took it while she sloshed a little gin into her cup and raised it to me.
“Honey, we women got to stick together. I mean.” She swallowed the gin, made a face and growled and I followed her example.
“Sit down and take it easy.” She turned and stirred a pot of bubbling sauce, still talking to me over her shoulder.
“What you going to do about it? You welcome to sit in here, but sooner or later, you're going to have to go out there and face him. But help yourself to the gin.”
I did.
The cook was ladling chili into a large Chinese bowl when Vus came through the kitchen door. The steam and the booze unfocused my eyes. When I saw him loom through the mist, I started laughing. He reminded me of Aladdin's Djinn, only bigger.
Maybe the cook's gin bottle was a lamp, and I had certainly been rubbing it.
Vus stood over me, asking what I was laughing about. But each time I inhaled so that I could explain, Vus seem to grow larger, as if he were somehow connected to my breathing, and laughter would contract my chest and I couldn't say a word.
Vus walked out of the room, and the cook came to me.
“That was your husband?” I nodded, still laughing.
“Well, child, you better get to stepping. He's fat. When a fat man gets mad, huh. I don't care if he's African or not. Ain't no fat man in the world wants to be laughed at.” She handed me my purse. The sound of her voice had a small sobering effect, but when I tried to tell her why I had been laughing, I began to giggle again.
“You better go out of here, child, before that man comes back. I saw his face and it wasn't funny.”
Finally, her advice reached my active brain. I got up, thanked her and walked from the kitchen through the living room door out into the hall. I pressed the elevator button and as the doors opened Vus burst out of the apartment, saw me and came running down the hall, shouting, telling me to wait. We both stepped into the half-filled elevator.
Vus began to talk. I was his wife, the wife of an African leader. I had embarrassed him. Sitting in the kitchen, getting drunk with the cook. When he tried to talk to me, I had laughed in his face. No African lady would bring such disgrace on her husband. I looked at the other people in the elevator, but they averted their white faces. As neither Vus nor I existed in their real world, they simply had to wait until we reached the ground floor and then our sounds and shadows would disappear.
Vus kept up his tirade as the elevator stopped on our descent, picking up people from other floors. When we reached the lobby, the other passengers scattered like snow flakes. I walked, with my head high, toward the front entrance. Vus was following me, talking, ranting, saying what shame I had brought onto his head, to his name, to his family. What a disappointment I was. How disrespectful I was to a son of Africa.
Deciding not to go out into the street, I turned sharply from the revolving doors and headed back to the elevators. Vus's voice, which had been a rumbling monotone, suddenly lifted.
“Where are you going? Not back to the party. I forbid you. You are my wife. We are going home.” At the elevator, I made a quick pivot and walked in the direction of the registration desk, Vus following in my wake, still talking.
The desk clerks, dressed as formally as expensive morticians, thrust long mournful faces at me. I walked past them haughtily. Vus grabbed for my arm but only brushed my sleeve. I snatched away from him and lengthened my stride. When I reached the front doors the second time I looked over my shoulder and saw that his face was bathed in sweat. With