Some Wildflower In My Heart (6 page)

As I said earlier, Thomas has an extensive network of relatives, most of whom live in North Carolina. He had been married before, and his first wife had died in 1970. When I met him, Thomas had lived alone for almost nine years. When we married, all that I knew of his first wife was that her name was Rita and that she had borne him one daughter, who had lived only two days. To Thomas,
family
is a word of many pleasant associations, though I know now that some are darkened with grief. In spite of small tiffs and even a significant rift or two, as among Mayfield and his children, enough loyalty and goodwill exist to make the annual family reunion a robustly convivial affair.

To my mind,
family
is a word of small dimensions and ambivalent connotations. My mother, of course, was a genius and an angel. The only other blood relatives I have known were my grandparents: my grandmother, weak and fearful, puppetlike and willfully blind to things that she chose not to see; and my step-grandfather, fiendish arch-hypocrite and upstanding elder of the First Unified Bible Missionary Church in Marshland, New York. I never knew my father's parents. I do not believe that my mother ever established contact with them.

The journey backward has become quite lengthy, one fact being linked as it is to so many others. I must therefore close this chapter and begin anew tomorrow. I find myself waking early each morning, for my story is like a continual dropping on a rainy day, and I must rise in haste and set pails to catch it.

From the moment I first saw her at the funeral, Birdie had the look of an earlier era about her, an anachronistic countenance and bearing. Each time my eyes came to rest on her, I felt a slight jolt, as if I were passing a 1950 Studebaker on the freeway. She had the kind of face to fit a name such as Lavinia, Adelaide, or perhaps Hepzibah. During that first week in the cafeteria kitchen, I set about measuring her character and intellect, a project that was to continue over the following months.

Vonnie Lee, Francine, Algeria, and I had worked together for ten years, a long time for a school lunchroom crew to remain intact. I myself had served in the cafeteria at Emma Weldy for twenty-two years but had been the supervisor for only fifteen. Through our cafeteria doors, I had seen many women come and go, and once a man named Dexter Bright was employed in the kitchen for five months. Another employee at the time—Sally Sue Slater—openly called him “Not-very.” Sally Sue had a wicked tongue to which she gave free rein. She left after a year to marry a race car driver, and I was not sorry to see her go.

Before the fall of 1984, our school district boundaries were hastily enlarged due to a fire that summer which destroyed the elementary school in Berea. As a result, the enrollment at Emma Weldy, a large school that had been built in 1941, almost doubled. The empty classrooms upstairs were reopened and aired out, and new teachers were hired or transferred from the Berea school. The cafeteria underwent staffing changes also, the result being that my two part-time workers moved to the high school in Derby, and Vonnie Lee, Francine, and Algeria came to Emma Weldy as my new crew.

I soon discovered that each of the women had her own gifts. Vonnie Lee, in spite of her incessant chatter, was quick-witted and resourceful. She could prepare 235 serving portions of any menu item with negligible excess and could accurately gauge the multiplying of ingredients if we were adapting recipes intended for small groups. She added salt by hand, tossing it into the pot as if it were grass seed. Vonnie Lee, in her early thirties when she first arrived at Emma Weldy, took pride in knowing all the words to every popular song from the years 1964 to 1973.

Francine was several years younger than Vonnie Lee. Though annoyingly silly, she was nevertheless industrious and consistently good-natured. Not overly keen of intellect, she was certainly smarter than she acted. Francine often retorted with remarks irrelevant to the situation. Considerably overweight, she frequently made self-deprecating comments about her size, although she had, and still has, a soft, lovely face. Only twenty-six years old, she already had four children but no husband when she first began working in the cafeteria ten years ago. Her oldest child, a daughter named Gala, graduated from Derby High School this past year. As a lover of talk, Francine distinguished herself from the outset by her excitability, exclaiming extravagantly over the most trivial of circumstances, and even now she freely and cheerfully discusses embarrassing or inappropriate topics, such as surgical procedures, bodily functions, and gruesome crimes, savoring and repeating each detail.

Compared to Francine's general bonhomie, Algeria's temperament fell at the opposite end of the spectrum. In spite of her smoldering surliness, however, and her distrust of the white population in general, she and Francine developed a peculiar friendship, exchanging conspiratorial glances and sotto voce comments when I had to reprimand one or the other of them. These I pretended not to notice, then even as now. Algeria was forty-one when she came to Emma Weldy, she and I being only a few months apart in age. Tall, lanky, and powerful, she observed the world through heavy-lidded eyes and generally curled her lip at what she saw. These characteristics still apply to Algeria ten years later. She never married and to my knowledge has never participated in a romantic partnership, although she is unfailingly interested in those of others.

Far brighter than Francine, Algeria has displayed upon many occasions an uncanny ability to perceive attitudes behind spoken words or facial expressions. She can quickly dissect a situation, lay it open, and label causes and effects. She foretold the termination of our principal's marriage six months before it took place and cited as a contributing factor a romantic involvement between Mr. Solomon and the special education aide at the high school. No one else, including Mr. Solomon's longtime secretary, had any inkling of the relationship.

Unstintingly outspoken when she chooses to unleash her opinions, Algeria displays relentless argumentative talents, though she lacks the grace of speech and breadth of vocabulary to promote her views winsomely and therefore convincingly. She and Vonnie Lee often debated warmly, generally concerning the issues of civil rights and the welfare system, and many times the two of them left the cafeteria in the afternoons hurling last words at each other.

Their wrangling aside, I saw numerous evidences that Vonnie Lee and Algeria regarded each other with a degree of affection. Once when I intervened and demanded that they stop their arguing and concentrate on their work, Vonnie Lee said, “Arguing? What's that you're calling arguing, Margaret? We call it
discussing
.” To which Algeria added, “And looks like to me we gettin' our work done just fine.” At this point Francine contributed the following: “Did I tell y'all our dog's gone into heat? You ought to see the crowd of boy dogs hanging around our trailer!” I suppose Vonnie Lee and Algeria were more like men than women in their ability to disagree one minute and stand together as a team the next.

These brief portraits of my co-workers represent only a small fraction of what I know about them. One can discover many things by listening. If I were to be quizzed on such minutiae as Francine's average monthly electric bill, the name of Algeria's junior high track coach, or the color and model of the first car Vonnie Lee ever drove, I could answer them all. Of their personal lives, I never inquired, nor did they share with me their family concerns. When they broke off in the middle of sentences upon my approach, I was grateful, for I shunned the airing of private troubles.

All three women had proved over the ten years to be dependable workers with only occasional minor lapses in efficiency—lapses that, I admit, I greatly exaggerated so as to make a lasting impression. I believe I can fairly assert that they all respected me as their superior, though our relationship never evolved into anything resembling friendship. Whereas the three of them talked freely among themselves throughout the day, I maintained a wall around myself that none of them ever attempted to scale. They never included me in their conversation, and I never offered to join.

This, then, is the background of the group to which Birdie Freeman found herself a newcomer nine months ago. Having lost Vonnie Lee from our crew, I was somewhat anxious about Birdie's capabilities and performance.

A substitute had been foisted upon us a few years earlier when Francine had taken a leave to assist her mother following surgery, and it had been a most horrendous month for the other three of us. The woman, named Larkin Depp, had possessed not the smallest spark of initiative and could not remember the simplest procedure once she had performed it. For example, Vonnie Lee had demonstrated the preparation of rice five times before Larkin could do it alone, and one morning the dull-witted woman had dropped and broken an eight-pound jar of mayonnaise on the floor of the pantry, then stepped in it and left greasy white tracks all over the kitchen as she slowly plodded after me to report the accident. I was in the rest room off the kitchen at the time, but rather than wait until I emerged, she pounded on the door and called to me, “We got us a mess to clean up!” Algeria had made Larkin remove her sneakers and run them through the dishwasher.

Happily, I discovered early that I had no cause to worry, for Birdie stepped into her new position with ease and competence. When I emerged from my cubicle two hours after our brief meeting that first morning, I saw Birdie at one of the large sinks with a bottle of Clorox, scrubbing between the white tiles of the backsplash with a toothbrush. She had tied a vivid purple scarf over her hair and had donned a white plastic apron. She smiled at me brightly as I walked past her into the pantry.

“Now, doesn't that look just a whole lot better?” she asked, waving the toothbrush toward the area that she had finished scrubbing.

I stopped and studied the backsplash, noting the stark contrast between the scrubbed and unscrubbed tiles. “Whose toothbrush are you dipping into bleach?” I asked.

“Oh, it was under the sink in the bathroom,” Birdie replied. “Francine said it was Vonnie Lee's.”

Algeria appeared at Birdie's side and scowled at me. “No way Vonnie Lee gonna be comin' back askin' after her toothbrush,” she said.

I turned sharply and continued on my way into the pantry. I heard Algeria say, and I am certain that she intended for me to hear, “You be findin' out real soon that don't none of us here sit around waitin' for Margaret to brag on us. If she don't say nothin', then it's prob'ly good. If it's just medium, she make you feel like it's bad, and if it's bad, she jump on you hard.”

And I heard Birdie laugh lightly and say, “Oh well, we're all old enough not to need a lot of praise the way little children do.” I had to stand in the center of the pantry a moment in order to recall my mission. During this moment I admit to feeling peeved over two matters: first, Algeria's frank and uncomplimentary summary of my supervisory manner, and second, the fact that the condition of the tile grout had escaped my notice, for I was certain that the discoloration had not occurred just over the past summer.

Remembering why I had come to the pantry, I opened the large sealed tin of flour from the previous school year and began checking carefully for meal bugs. As I did so, I heard Birdie humming. I stopped and listened, and within a few moments she began singing softly, her voice light and high, with a trembling vibrato. I could barely discern the words, but I knew them from many years ago. “So precious is Jesus, my Savior, my King,” the song began.

Had it been Vonnie Lee singing “You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'”—one of her favorites, always performed while holding as her microphone a large beater from the Sunbeam mixer—I would have put a speedy end to it. Looking back on Birdie's first song, I have often wondered whether I could have prevented many of the subsequent changes in our kitchen milieu had I responded decisively at that single moment. Had I charged forth and pronounced a ban on all singing, or at least on all singing of religious songs, maybe I could have held Birdie at bay indefinitely. But perhaps I am only deluding myself. Birdie's singing was, in truth, only a small accessory of her person. Upon reflection, however, I am quite convinced of the incomprehensible fact that something within me that day perversely craved a reminder of some aspect of my earlier life. It was as if a small seed planted long ago had begun to stir.

At lunchtime that first day, Francine, Algeria, and Birdie sat down together at the large stainless steel worktable around which we had met that morning. I could see them from my cubicle, but because of the combined din of the two large window fans and the dishwasher, which Algeria had loaded with all the pots, pans, and utensils that hung from large hooks above the worktable, I could not hear them.

My own lunch that day, which I ate at my desk, consisted of a pimento cheese sandwich, a pear (which unfortunately was too hard and green to be satisfying), a small bag of pretzels, and a thermos of iced tea. As I ate, I pretended to read a sheaf of papers in a large envelope labeled
Current Regulations for School Cafeteria Employees
that had been in the stack of mail on my desk. I found it difficult to concentrate, however.

Birdie had removed her apron for her lunch break, but she still wore the purple scarf. It was tied with a small bow on top after the fashion of housewives in the forties—very much, in fact, as Rosie the Riveter had worn her bandanna. As I studied a page from my packet titled
Percentage of Fat in New Dietary Standards
, I looked over the top of the sheet to see Birdie remove a few wrapped items from a small brown paper sack, lay them in a neat row before her, and then bow her head.

Francine and Algeria glanced at each other, but when Birdie finished and raised her eyes, they were staring at their sandwiches, eating mutely. The dietary notification I was reading was a duplicate of one that I had received in the spring, stating that over the course of the next three years our menus would be reexamined and revised to eliminate approximately twelve percent of the fat. I skimmed through the page, assured that the changes would not affect our operation this year, and set it aside to be filed.