Babylon Sisters (2 page)

“Yes,” I said, picking up my coffee cup and heading for the door. “I guess that was it.”

She didn’t call me back to apologize, but she didn’t get up and slam the door behind me either, which would have meant the insanity was more than temporary and would require immediate intervention. I’m a modern mother, but I ain’t no fool.

2

By the time I got downstairs to my office, the phone was ringing off the hook. It was almost ten o’clock, but I’m used to people calling me at all hours. A lot of the people I work with don’t conduct their business from nine to five. I snatched up the phone before the voice mail clicked on, since some folks are reluctant to leave a message. Their accents make them too self-conscious.

“Babylon Sisters,” I said quickly. “Catherine Sanderson speaking. Can I help you?”

I named my business after that Bible verse the Melodians overlaid with a reggae beat a couple of years ago, which made it an unlikely international hit: “By the rivers of Babylon / There we sat down / And there we wept / When we remembered Zion.” Most of my clients still felt like “strangers in a strange land,” so I added “Sisters” to let them know I was family.

But the voice on the other end didn’t have an accent. It was offering an apology.

“Ms. Sanderson? Sam Hall here, and let me start right off with a sincere apology for calling you so late into the evening. I just couldn’t let another day go by without trying to at least touch base.”

Sam Hall?
The name didn’t ring a bell, but he had a great voice. Deep and rich and too sexy for a business call, even one that came this late.

“No problem, Mr. Hall. What can I do for you?”

“The question is, Ms. Sanderson, what I’d like to do for you.”

Too bad that voice was wasted on somebody with such a lame opening line. The voice was pure Teddy Pendergrass, but the rap sounded like a used-car salesman. “Do I know you?”

“We met briefly at the Child Prostitution Task Force luncheon last week, but I wouldn’t expect you to remember me. You were surrounded by people who had been deeply moved by your remarks. I was one of many.”

He had seen me doing my most recent dog-and-pony show. I do a lot of public speaking, mostly about issues affecting women and girls in the international community. These days I consider each speech almost an audition, since I’m job hunting in sort of a semi-official way. The day of that luncheon speech, there was a terrible story in the paper about the death of a four-year-old whose immigrant parents were living on the street. I was righteously indignant, and even though I was definitely preaching to the choir, when I sat down they gave me a standing ovation. Afterward, so many people pressed their cards into my hands, I hadn’t had time to sort them out yet.

“That was an extraordinary day,” I said, sliding in behind my desk. “The spirit ran high.”

“You made it extraordinary,” he said. “That’s why I’m very anxious to talk to you, and my boss is, too.”

“Who’s your boss?”

“I am proud to say that I am vice president of operations and development for Miss Ezola Mandeville. You may be familiar with her work.”

Of course I was familiar with her work, although I had never met her. Ezola Mandeville was an Atlanta legend, a former domestic worker who got sick and tired of being sick and tired and started organizing other maids and cleaning women to demand better wages and more humane treatment. She worked for an old white woman who depended on her completely, and actually had a lot of respect and even some affection for her, but who did not appreciate her increasing visibility in what was becoming a full-fledged movement. When the old woman’s friends began to complain that Ezola was stirring up their maids, several of whom had suddenly demanded advance notice and extra money for overtime, it was the last straw.

Her mistress reluctantly fired her the next morning, confident of finding a suitable replacement without much trouble and certain that, deprived of their leader, the other maids would return to their former state of docility and life would go on as it always had. She knew she would miss Ezola, but the world she knew didn’t have a place for friendship between white women and black women, so she ignored her feelings and put an ad in the paper for a new maid.

The only problem was that Ezola was not prepared to go quietly. She was a fiercely independent woman, alone in the world by choice. Her job made it possible for her to pay her own way, and she did not intend, as she said to herself, to spend the next five years learning the ways of a whole new set of white folks just because these women didn’t want to pay cab fare when their maids left those mansions at midnight to catch the last crosstown bus home.

So on Monday morning, instead of looking for another job, Ezola showed up at her employer’s house, where she stationed herself at the foot of the long, winding driveway to inform any of the other colored women who answered her mistress’s ad that the job was already taken and that their best bet was to move right along.

It took only one day for the word to get around that Ezola fully intended to keep her old job, and three more days for her mistress to realize she couldn’t make it without her. The legend has it that the white woman finally took that long walk down to the street, and after several minutes of intense negotiations, they arrived at a compromise that guaranteed Ezola overtime pay for evenings, cab fare home after parties, and weekends off unless she wanted to work. None of the other maids got as complete a package as Ezola, but all of them got something, including a new sense of their own power and their mistresses’ vulnerability.

When the old lady died a few years later, she surprised everybody by leaving Ezola a hundred thousand dollars, which her former maid used to open a training and job-placement agency for women involved in janitorial services. In ten years, it had grown into a multimillion-dollar enterprise with contracts from some of the biggest hotels and office complexes in Atlanta as well as select private homes in the same Buckhead community where she used to work. She was the regular recipient of awards for her innovative approach to preparing the women for work before sending them out to any job site. Employers praised her unique ability to motivate workers and pointed to the low drop-off rate in a field with notoriously high turnover. For her part, Ezola guaranteed any woman who wasn’t afraid of hard work a job whenever she wanted one.

“I’m flattered that Ms. Mandeville knows my work,” I said. “Was she at the luncheon, too?”

“
Miss
Mandeville,” he corrected me smoothly. “She doesn’t like to be called
Ms.
, but no, she wasn’t there. She depends on me to be her eyes and ears, and I’ll tell you, Ms. Sanderson,” he caressed that
Ms.
like he wanted me to know
he
had no objection to it. “I gave her a
big
earful of you after I heard that speech. You’re the answer to our prayers.”

He was laying it on pretty thick, but that voice made it sound like the gospel truth.

“I don’t know quite what to say, Mr. Hall. Can you be a little more specific?”

His laugh was even better than his voice. “My apologies again. I fully expected to leave another voice-mail message, and when you actually picked up, it sort of threw me.”

I hadn’t even gotten the first one. How long had I been sitting upstairs commiserating with Phoebe, anyway? Three days or three weeks?

“What was the message?”

“The message was an invitation to you to come and break bread with me and Miss Mandeville at your earliest convenience in order to explore the possibility of your coming to work with us on a project that is right up your alley. Are you interested?”

His timing was perfect. It’s never too late to call if you’ve got good news.

“I’m very interested,” I said, reaching for my calendar. “Monday looks good for me.”

“Then Monday it is,” he said. “Miss Mandeville likes to use her personal chef. Can you join us at noon at our headquarters?”

“Of course.” I knew exactly where their building was. It was hard to miss it. Mandeville Maid Services was housed in a newly renovated five-story building in the historic, but perennially depressed Auburn Avenue area. Ezola was reputed to have paid cash for her property, and her decision had single-handedly revitalized an entire block and endeared her to city hall.

Every black mayor since Maynard Jackson had tried in vain to come up with a plan to bring back the glory of what had been preintegration black Atlanta’s main commercial strip, but the lure of huge, upscale malls like Lenox Square and Phipps Plaza had made the small storefronts of Auburn Avenue seem quaint reminders of a time that was as gone with the wind as Scarlett O’Hara’s plantation. Ezola bought the building for next to nothing and put the money she saved back into her business. When her staff had expressed concern about location, she said people who were looking for maids still expected to come to the black community to find them, and Auburn Avenue was about as black as you could get.

“Well, you’ve made me a very happy man, Ms. Sanderson. I’ll look forward to seeing you on Monday.”

“I’ll be there,” I said. “Please give my best to
Miss
Mandeville.”

“I’ll do that,” he said, pleased that I had remembered about that
Ms.
“Good night.”

“Good night.”

I hung up the phone and immediately grabbed a handful of cards to see if I could find one that would give me a little more information about Sam Hall and his boss. I wondered what kind of project they were talking about and how many of the stories I’d heard about the reclusive Miss Mandeville were true. She had a reputation for being strong and ruthless, which could probably be said of most successful businesspeople, but in a woman it still seemed extraordinary, and to some people, slightly inappropriate. That’s fine with me. I’ve never been a stickler for
appropriate.
What I need to know is, what’s the going rate for being an answer to somebody’s prayers?

I was so engrossed in my search and my speculation that I didn’t know Phoebe was standing in my office doorway until I looked up and saw her watching me intently. She still had the big blanket sort of gathered around her shoulders, and just looking at it made me feel sweaty.

“Hey, sweetie,” I said, pleased to see her up and about. “Feeling better?”

“Mom,” she said. “We have to talk.”

3

It was too late for more coffee, so I poured myself a glass of merlot and went to join my daughter in the living room. She had politely declined my offer of juice or another cup of Sleepytime tea. I settled into my favorite rocking chair, loving the gentle sway of it that was as familiar as my own heartbeat. I bought it the day I decided to keep Phoebe, because good mothers are supposed to nurse their babies in rocking chairs. Even then, before I had a clue about how hard it is to actually raise a sane and loving child in a brutally insane, often unlovely world, I knew that was my goal. I wanted to be a good hands-on mother. A rocker was the first step, and I sat in twelve chairs before I found the right one. It had a tall back, a cane bottom, and carved arms that encircled me like a hug. It was perfect. I couldn’t wait for Rich’s department store to deliver it, so I made them tie it to the top of my car and drove home with the radio up loud and my chair up top, and it was a moment of perfect certainty that I was doing the right thing.

When I look back at it, I am always amused that I thought everything would be as easy as finding the perfect rocker. What planet could I have been from to think being a good mother has anything to do with certainty? After seventeen years with Phoebe, I now understand that a strong hunch is usually the best you can hope for. That, and a poker face. An unintentionally bemused smile can derail an honest mother-daughter exchange faster than the ring of a cell phone. Just because you know she’ll laugh about it all someday doesn’t mean
this
is the day.

Phoebe curled up on the side of the couch where she always sits when we watch TV and tucked that damn blanket around her bare feet. Over our heads, the ceiling fan whirred softly. I took a sip of my wine and smiled at my miserable-looking child.

“What’s going on?”

Relieved of my earlier fears that I might be a grandmother before I turned forty, and having stated my position on the not-going-back-to-school question, I felt confident that I could handle whatever was knitting my baby’s brow in such consternation.

Phoebe took a deep breath. “Don’t take this the wrong way, Mom, but I think this whole thing is your fault.”

“What whole thing is that?”

“This whole thing with Bradley.”

She had told me she would never speak her faithless boyfriend’s name again and that she would appreciate it if I didn’t either. It was, she said,
just too painful.
I was tempted to point out that she must be feeling better, since his name rolled off her tongue with ease, but my curiosity got the better of me.

“My fault? How can it be my fault? I always liked Brad. I just didn’t like him for you.”

“That’s the whole point. You could tell he was wrong right away, and I never suspected a thing.” The thought made her so indignant that she shrugged off the blanket and leaned toward me. “Why do you think that is?”

I wondered if I should go alphabetically or chronologically. “I’m thirty-eight and you’re seventeen. I’ve had more experience with men than you have. I—”

She shook her head vigorously. “No, no, no! That’s not it at all.”

I took another sip of wine. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, sweetie. Start at the beginning, okay?”

“Okay.”
She paused dramatically, closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and then opened them with a look of renewed determination.

“There is a theory,” she said, slowly, “that women’s romantic relationships with men are totally shaped by their fathers. If it’s a bad relationship, those women will seek out men who are like the father over and over in order to see if they can resolve issues that began in early childhood.”

“I’ve heard that theory,” I said.

“Do you believe it?”

My own father flickered across my mind. Smart, funny, passionate, dangerous, free. I adored my father, but I don’t know how good our relationship was. He was not a man who had much interest in anything other than his work and his wife, including his only daughter. He was always kind to me in a distant, distracted sort of way, but I never felt like he’d miss me if I weren’t around. Or even notice.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “There’s probably some truth to it.”

“Do you think your relationship with Granddaddy is what drew you to my father?”

For the last couple of years, Phoebe has been badgering me for information about her father. When she was little, I told her he had died in an accident before she was born. She accepted that for a while, but when she got older, she wanted more details. Didn’t I have a picture? Didn’t he have a family? Weren’t they her family, too? Didn’t they want to meet her?

Her questions were outrunning my ability to lie. One day I found myself looking through a magazine for a photograph of some unknown young brother whom I could pass off as Phoebe’s father, and I realized I couldn’t sustain this level of subterfuge. I didn’t even want to. I hated lying to my own child. The problem was, I wasn’t prepared to tell her who her father was. How could I? He didn’t even know she existed. That had been my decision when I had her alone, and I wasn’t about to risk her showing up at his door one day, searching for her roots and exposing my decision for his scrutiny after all these years. He had made his choices and I had made mine, starting when I got pregnant during my senior year at Spelman. I loved him, but even then I knew a child wasn’t in his plans.

Already an award-winning student journalist, he had just snared the job of a lifetime as West African bureau chief for a respected black newsmagazine, and that was all he talked about. It was his dream come true, and he was ecstatic. I was on my way to graduate school at Howard in international affairs, hoping for a diplomatic career, and we were already making plans for me to come over and visit once he got settled and as soon as I saved enough money for a round-trip ticket. I was also keeping busy by pretending to be fine with our impending separation because I knew I had no choice. That was always part of our deal. We considered ourselves citizens of the world, and we had fallen in love first because of a shared passion for understanding world events and wanting to, as he said, “play a role in the major stories of our time.” We spent almost a year engaging in those long, lovely, late-night conversations that start with politics and end with an escalating series of intimate exchanges and self-revelations that resonate so deeply you feel like you must fall into each other’s arms or die.

It was wonderful and overwhelming. For a shy nineteen-year-old virgin, it was a lovely introduction to sexual pleasure without guilt, and we discovered each other together as if we were brand-new beings in a world all our own. Sex with him was an explosion of new feelings, physical and emotional, and I couldn’t get enough of either one. I told him that I loved him and he said he loved me, too, but he never made any secret of his plans to leave for Africa the week after graduation. He never made promises he didn’t intend to keep about marriage or family or a conventional existence with a fixed address and a predictable future. I pretended that was fine with me because I knew his freedom was as important to him as his work, and the idea that he would sacrifice or even modify either one because we happened to fall in love never entered his mind. For almost two years, everything was about as close to perfect as I could stand it. Then I got pregnant with Phoebe.

When I got the test results, I thought for a long time about whether or not to tell him. Of course I was going to have an abortion, so what was the point of interjecting all the drama? But that
of course
wasn’t as firmly entrenched as I hoped it would be. In fact, there was another argument being made by some other part of my brain that ran more toward fantasizing how lovely it would be if he threw his arms around me and told me not to even consider an abortion because he was going to marry me immediately. We would start our family in West Africa so he could still do his work, I could go back to school in a year or two, and our child would be nurtured within the circle of love that had created that life in the first place.

But I always knew that was a fantasy. He was a great boyfriend, but that didn’t mean he was prepared to be a great father. So I pushed that hopeful thought as far back in my mind—and my heart—as I could and I called the Feminist Women’s Health Center to schedule the procedure as soon as they could take me.

I waited until the week before he was leaving to tell my lover I was carrying our child, and his face told me my fantasy was just that. He didn’t look happy. He just looked scared, disappointed, maybe a little pissed. So I hurried to tell him that he didn’t need to worry because I was going to get rid of it. I cringe now when I think of using those actual words.
Don’t worry. I’m going to get rid of it.
Like she was a cockroach or something.

To his credit, he winced when I said it and reached out to pull me close. “Are you sure?” His voice was gentle, nonjudgmental. We were playing the parts we had learned. It was a woman’s right to choose and the progressive man’s role to be supportive.

There are probably more terrible questions, but at that moment I couldn’t think of one. Of course I wasn’t sure! I loved him and I wanted him, and something in me really wanted to have this baby, but I didn’t know how to tell him that. I couldn’t even admit it to myself yet. My generation is still struggling to find the balance between love and freedom, sex and romance, family and career. Sometimes we get it right, but more often, we don’t. That struggle is the legacy of the women’s movement and our mothers’ efforts to incorporate the theories of middle-class, white feminism into their highly
untheoretical
black female lives.

As my mother told me once when I was quoting Gloria Steinem as the ultimate authority on all things feminist, “What you have to understand is that colored women weren’t
involved
in the women’s movement. We were the women who moved!” She was right, of course, but moved
where?

“I’m sure. I’ve already made the appointment for next week.”

“Oh, baby,” he said. “I’m so sorry.” And he sat down with me on his lap and rocked me back and forth until I had worked up enough nerve to ask the question.

“Will you go with me?” I whispered.

“Of course I will,” he said, and tightened his arms around me.
“Of course I will.”

After that, we didn’t talk about it anymore. We made love one more time, but everything was so different, we might as well have been total strangers. The next day I went back to my apartment, and he kissed me at the door like it was the last time. And it was.

I called him that night, and when he answered the phone he was so drunk he wasn’t making any sense. He just kept telling me how sorry he was until I told him I’d talk to him tomorrow and hung up. But I didn’t talk to him in the morning, or that afternoon, or late that night, or ever again. When I finally went by his place, frantic, and let myself in, all his clothes were gone and there was an envelope for me on the coffee table with three hundred-dollar bills and a note that said,
I’m so sorry, baby. I can’t do this with you. Be strong. B.J.

I think it was the
be strong
that pushed me over the edge. I sat down on that bed we’d rolled around on together so many times and I cried as hard as I ever cried for anything or anybody. I felt a part of me that loving him had opened up closing like a steel door as the hip, undemanding, unconventional woman I was pretending to be dissolved in those tears. Because he had done the worst thing a lover can do. He had committed the unpardonable, unforgivable sin. He had left before I had a chance to stop loving him.

Phoebe was watching me, and I realized she was still waiting for me to answer her question. “I think my relationship with my father made me a more independent woman.”

“But did it lead you to my father?”

She was pressing me, so I tried another sidestep. “It probably influenced all the men I was close to in different ways.”

“But did it influence you when you picked my father?”

“Your father was one of the men I was close to, so I guess it did.”

Phoebe stood up then, dragging her blanket with her so she looked a little like one of the old Hollywood depictions of Native Americans gathered outside their tepees with winter rolling in. She walked over to the window and pulled the drape aside to look out into the dark street, then turned back to me.

“If you don’t tell me who my father is, I’ll never be able to figure out men. You’re dooming me to a lifetime of heartache and you don’t even seem to care!”

I let that slide and tried to remain calm. “We talked about this before. It wasn’t a period of my life I’m particularly proud of, but I can’t sanitize it now just to make you happy. Your father could be one of several men I was sleeping with at the time. They were nice guys, but nobody I wanted to invite into the rest of our lives. So after graduation, we went our separate ways. They have their lives and I have you.”

This lie evolved out of my desire to be absolutely sure she’d never be able to narrow down the possibilities and stumble upon her real father because he was standing around in my past all alone. I even went so far as to construct fake diaries to cover my college years, which listed four or five boyfriends, as young girls’ diaries often do, but never once mentioned her father. I left the diaries around where she could find them to bolster my story, so I figured she had believed what I had told her. I was wrong.

“I don’t believe you. You’re not that kind of woman.”

Her tone irked me. A broken heart gives you a little leeway, but it doesn’t give you license. “What kind of woman is that? Nonmonogamous?”

“Indiscriminate!” She spit the word in my direction defiantly.

Uh-oh.
I thought.
She’s pushing it.
Then she walked back over to the couch, sat back down, and crossed the line.

“How many are we talking about anyway, Mom? Can you narrow it down a little? Two or three? Five or six?
Ten?
”

This is what I get for sending her to private school with a bunch of rich white girls. From what Phoebe says, they talk to their mothers any kind of way, and their mamas let them, but this conversation was over. I stood up.