About Face (28 page)

CHAPTER 32

Joy

 

 

IT HAD BEEN TEN MONTHS since she'd left Mimosa and they were working on Changing Patterns' second fall line. The first one had been small, because they'd had to rush, but it had been slightly more successful than their conservative projections for it. The Spring line was all designed and in the hands of the manufacturers, with every indication that it would do well enough to fund their first charitable contributions. For this second Fall line, they'd added cloth purses to their skirts, pants, and tops.

“Let's be the ones to finally invent the perfect purse,” Ruth said, “big on the inside and small on the outside.”

Even better than their moderate financial success was that, every time Ruth dared peer inside herself on a search-and-destroy mission for regret or anguish about the move from corporate executive to entrepreneur, she was relieved to find none. She'd left just the way she'd always wanted, on a high. In fact, leaving had been relatively easy once she'd done the hard part,
deciding
to leave.

As Ruth looked up from the laptop on which she was creating the Marketing Plan for the new line, she thought she saw a bowl of fish and rice in the middle of the table, just like the ones she used to have once a week in Senegal.

 

IBRAHIM N'DIAYE CAME to pick Ruth and Vivian up for their regular Thursday lunch at his house in the next town. About six months before, on one of his weekly trips to Djembering to sell bottled water, tomato paste and other staples to the kiosk that passed for a grocery store, he'd invited them for the first time. They never knew if it was courtesy, curiosity, or just to boost his prestige with his friends and neighbors. During that first lunch, he'd invited them for the next week, and, at some point, they'd agreed to swap English lessons for lunch. It meant Ibrahim had to make an extra round trip to Djembering to pick them up and then take them home again, but time was not a precious commodity and English was.

Like many Senegalese men, he was tall and thin, loose-limbed and athletic at the same time. He wore old blue jeans and a green tee shirt that was less faded than most. He looked completely natural in Western clothes, with no hint of how exotic he looked in his traditional powder blue full-length robe with dark blue embroidery.

He arrived in his “new” car, also his delivery truck, with a smile that would have taken over his face if he didn't try to rein it in. “Welcome into my automobile, my American friend ladies,” he said as he opened the door for them. When the two girls got in, they saw that every dashboard button was missing, leaving the allotted spaces looking like empty eyeball sockets. The handles in the back doors had long ago been replaced with pieces of twine, themselves now on their last legs, and the seats were cracked and belching foam. Red dust covered every horizontal surface. None of these defects, though, seemed to detract from Ibrahim's pride in being the commander of this vehicle. Ruth and Vivian looked at each other and raised their eyebrows.

During the ten-kilometer trip over back roads that were little more than ruts in the sand, he swerved or slowed down at every hole, rock, and slow-moving herd, eager to extend whatever meager lifespan the car had remaining. The ride was bone-jarring nonetheless, even for 20-something bones. Ruth was finally getting the knack of releasing just enough of her hold on certain muscles so her body was flexible, absorbing some of the shock and making the bumps less violent. It had been a hard lesson to learn, that less control was softer in the long run. The trick was to find the balance point and not relax so much that she fell over.

The sky, a dusty blue with occasional wispy clouds, seemed bigger and more maternal than the sky at home. The landscape was in its muted dry-season palette. A pervasive brownness blanketed the faded colors of the sparse grasses and the scrawny goats and long-horned cattle. The exception to the brownness was the Senegalese women's clothing. Their exuberant splashes of color would have been brilliant anywhere, but against the subdued backdrop of the dry-season landscape, they were a riotous display. Their dresses and matching headscarves—blue, pink, fuchsia, yellow, green, and every other imaginable color—seemed to shout of a joy in color, indeed, in life. Ruth loved watching the women they passed on the road. They walked as gracefully and confidently as if they were on a models' runway, even with the loads they balanced on their heads.

At Ibrahim and Fatou's house, they walked past the pigeon coop on the left, under the laundry on the line, then picked their way between the chickens, roosters, and sheep. Fatou greeted them. Thin, with glasses too big for her face, she wore a red-orange cloth wrapped around the bottom half of her body, with a ruffled blouse of the same cloth. Like the cherry on the sundae, some of that cloth was also wrapped around her head.

Everyone greeted each other in the traditional way, beginning with “Nanga def?” Today's lunch crowd was smaller than usual, only Ibrahim and Fatou, their maid Aminata, and their three children—the two daughters, Ayisha and Maguette, and the son Abdou.

Aminata carried a wide shallow bowl, white with gaily painted flowers around the outside, covered by an inverted one just like it, like a giant white clam shell. In the middle of the yard, where two tall trees created an oasis of shade and gentle breezes, a large green and white woven mat had been laid on the ground. Aminata had a blue cloth under her arm, which Fatou removed and spread on top of the mat. Aminata set the bowl down.

Ruth, Vivian, and Ibrahim walked to the edge of the mat, took off their shoes, then joined Fatou and Aminata around the bowl. The children squeezed in wherever they could, on the mat or on a lap.

Fatou gave spoons to Ruth and Ibrahim, the only ones who wanted them, then uncovered the bowl of
thiebou dien—
fish and rice. To the Senegalese in this relatively prosperous village, it was just an ordinary lunch, something they had four or five times a week, but to Ruth and Vivian, it was a treat: a mound of rice cooked in a savory tomato-based sauce, topped by chunks of herb-stuffed fish. And there were vegetables on the mound, too: carrots, cabbage, even eggplant. The air in the circle was filled with smells of the food, the hair pomade used by the African women, the animals, and the children's sweetness. Julietta, a neighbor and friend, arrived just as they started eating. She offered and received an abbreviated greeting, took a spoon and sat down in the space everyone made for her in the circle.

Conversation became spirited, with elaborate teasing about whether it was better to be the first wife of the household, as Fatou was for Ibrahim, or a second wife, as Aminata was for her husband Babacar. Fatou and Aminata broke off pieces of the fish and vegetables with their right hand and distributed them around the edge of the bowl in front of each person. Those who ate with their hands took some rice, fish, and vegetables with their right hand, squeezed the liquid out, then stuck out their tongue as they brought their hand up to their mouth. They put the egg-shaped lump on their outstretched tongue, looking as if they were licking their hand. Fish bones and other rejected matter dropped unceremoniously from mouth to ground.

Three-year old Maguette got up from Aminata's lap, went outside the circle of eaters, removed her shoe, then threw it at the bowl, pleased with her feat. Her smile faded, though, at Julietta's reaction, a trumpet-blast of Wolof. Was the scolding for spoiling the food or the shoe? Maguette cried briefly, then looked around for another lap. Julietta went back to her lunch.

A little later, Abdou, the chubby two-year old, slapped his older sister Ayisha. At four years old, she was barely bigger than him, and returned the blow only half-heartedly before tearfully seeking shelter in her father's lap. Ibrahim comforted her absent-mindedly while talking to Julietta. No one reprimanded Abdou, nor cared who started the fight. The eating and talking continued, with everyone taking care of the kids as if they were their own, whether providing a lap, a handful of food, or a scolding. Anything except a breast, which Abdou knew exactly where to find. No one seemed particularly concerned about the fish-bones or the sand Ruth was horrified to see the kids occasionally scooping up and eating.

Many years later, when Ruth heard the expression “It takes a village to raise a child,” she thought of lunches with Ibrahim, Fatou and the kids and the way everyone took care of all of them.

Abdou came over to Ruth tentatively, and, after much consideration, sat in her lap for the first time. He was the last hold-out of the kids, who had all been terrified of the white girls at first but eventually came around. He pulled on her earring and giggled. When he saw her smile, he tried the other earring. Another smile. He investigated the rest of her face, the tip of her nose, her lips, touching and pinching and stretching. Finally, he got bored and just sat in her lap peacefully. Ruth's Wolof wasn't quite as good as Vivian's, but she followed enough of the musical-sounding conversation around the lunch bowl to laugh at the right times and even contribute a thought now and then. She hugged Abdou and relaxed.

 

UNFURLING THE CRAMPED LEG she'd folded under her at the start of her extended daydream, she surveyed the scene in the Design and Sample Room of Changing Patterns' offices. Six women were sitting in a friendly circle around the oversized distressed-oak table in the middle of the high-ceilinged room. What she'd daydreamed into a bowl of fish and rice was a colorful jumble of fabrics, threads, ribbons, laces, buttons, and other assorted notions, mingled with colored papers, markers and tape. At various times, one or another of them would reach into the pile to get one of the items. She'd hold it up to her work and decide to use it. Or decide not to, and throw it back on the pile. Ordered chaos. Or was it chaotic order?

Along one wall, jutting into the central space like Rockettes' legs, sewing machines and ironing boards alternated. A woman was in each space between a sewing machine and an ironing board, turning from one to the other as she worked. The air was filled with conversations, Carole King singing “Tapestry,” and the steady hum of needles penetrating fabric to create seams.

Ruth often preferred working here in the room they called the Student Union to her own office in one of the surrounding cubicles. Even though there was no carpeting or photographs of her family, there was a wall-size collage of the staff's photographs and there were child-painted murals of their products.

She realized it wasn't just the pile of notions in the center of the table that reminded her of the fish and rice. It was the fellowship. It was the community, the wholeness.

Vivian was cutting pieces of fabric she pulled from the middle of the table and gluing or stitching them, adding flourishes with ribbons and even markers, to design new garments, which the others were producing as samples for the new line to be sent to their manufacturing plant. The women at the sewing machines and irons were blocking the clothes together, while those at the table were adding the signature Changing Patterns embellishments, the flowers and birds that looked like embroidery and sometimes were. Vivian and Ruth knew it was an unorthodox approach to clothing design, but it worked for this unusual village of entrepreneurs.

They were all working against a tight deadline, which they had to make because any delays in getting the samples to the factory cost money their tight budget could not afford. Everywhere was activity: cutting, stitching, embroidering, folding, wrapping, labeling.

“Jeannie, hand me that clump of greenish embroidery thread, would ya?” Martha asked. She was a heavy-set 40-ish woman with hair that had once been salt and pepper but whose salt, in an unfortunate henna accident, had been replaced by a garish orange so she now looked like an orange and brown tabby cat. A tabby cat whose orange roots were growing out white.

“Okay, but … green? On that pink denim? Are you sure that's what you want?” Jeannie asked.

“Hey, I'm having my own private little brainstorming session over here—”

“Is that sort of like playing with yourself?”

“Not so exciting.” She frowned. “I'm just trying a little of this and a little of that. And then I'll see what works,” Martha said.

“Okay, whatever.” Jeannie threw the thread to the other end of the table. “But I thought Vivian was the designer.”

“That's okay,” Vivian said. “I design it the way I like it, and then if you can make it better, that's fine by me. As long as you make it better by….”

She looked up at the wall calendar above the row of sewing machines. “Hey, would someone please turn the page of the calendar so we're looking at this month?”

One of the sewers obliged. “That's better. As I was saying, you just need to do what you need to do by next Tuesday.”

“I hear ya,” Martha said.

A baby cried. Joan looked at her watch, then went over to the port-a-crib in the corner, saying “Milk and cookies time, right on schedule.” She was a large woman, in her thirties, with an athlete's gait and a soothing voice. She picked up her five-month-old and brought her over to the table. She unbuttoned her polka dot blouse, put Celeste in nursing position, and continued working.