anything but hello. So it was me who sprang toward her, to say that a man had come, a handsome man in a suit, and that he had a job for her, that she wouldn’t have to be a cleaning lady anymore.
Delia put her hand on my shoulder and I felt the weight of it, like she was tired from work and needed support to stand. She looked across the living room at Da.
“Who was it, then, this man?”
“Mr. Benedict,” I said, proud to have remembered the name.
She said something about it being good news, but she’d sounded more excited about the rain.
I knew how Delia had prayed for things to get better. Hadn’t I seen her just last night, kneeling by her bed, her long red-gold hair braided, her white hands pressed together, her lips moving in her march of Hail Marys?
“It’s a job!” I sang. “A job, a job, a job!” As if saying it like that would get her to pay attention.
“I didn’t say I would take it,” Delia said, but she wasn’t talking to me. She was looking right at Da, and there was defensiveness in her tone and fear in her eyes.
Of course Delia took the job. She got out her gray dresses and pressed them, washed out her sweaters, brushed her hair and twisted it back in a hard knot like a two-day-old roll you had to dunk in your tea to soften. She worked for two businessmen who shared her, Mr. Loge and Mr. Rosemont, and their names were almost as sacred as Jesus in our house, for we all knew how close we’d come to the kind of poverty that meant empty bellies and no heat.
The next summer, we were on our own, because Da now had a job at the American Screw factory. He worked out a deal with our neighbor Mrs. Duffy — in return for his working in the garden on weekends, she’d feed us lunch and keep an eye on us. But Mrs. Duffy wasn’t much for keeping an eye on anyone except her husband, who was up to no good, she assured us, and had to be watched every minute.
We met Elena because we hated the Duffys and we were up to our necks in waxed paper. Da had finagled a radio ad in which we sang, “We love Howland’s because it’s three times as good!” and instead of payment, Howland sent over two cartons of waxed paper, which Da kicked across the room because that lousy chiseler had promised cash.
So when Jamie suggested we take the waxed paper and hold it across the Duffys’ back window at eight thirty a.m., the time Mr. Duffy reliably relieved himself of the pints he’d had the night before at Murphy’s Bar on Wickenden Street, Muddie and I thought it a swell idea. It was only when Duffy slowly realized that the arc that should be hitting the grass outside was instead splattering on his bare feet that we considered that we had neglected to plan our route of escape.
We ran as Duffy hit the back stairs and landed on Muddie’s jacks with his bare feet. We hooted with laughter as he screamed and chased us across the yard, though we got a little nervous when he threw Mrs. Duffy’s prized Virgin Mary statue at us as we scaled the wall in three seconds flat. Now Mrs. Duffy was screaming, too, and we were on foreign soil — the Baptiste driveway. Mrs. Duffy hated the Baptistes, too, because they were from Cape Verde and “black as the ace of spades,” she’d say, which wasn’t true — first of all, they were dark brown, and second of all, it was puzzling, because every other house in Fox Point belonged to a Portuguese family. (“That doesn’t mean I have to like it,” she said, slicing a sandwich in half with a large knife, her meanness lending the slice an extra, deadly precision.) When we told Da about this, he had sighed and said that people climbing a ladder had a tendency to piss downward.
The windows were open and we could hear the radio playing “The Dipsy Doodle.” Someone was singing along.
The window was raised higher. Elena beckoned to us with her hairbrush. We didn’t know her well, hardly enough even to say hello to, but she was called “the pretty sister” out of the three, and we all agreed with that. “What are you waiting for?” she whispered. “Get in here.”
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